Return on Reputation

A great restaurant can lose a customer before that person ever tastes the food. Aman Devgan, President and General Manager of Menufy by HungerRush, joins me to talk restaurant marketing, online reputation and the cost of being invisible. In Menufy's survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 59% said they'd decided not to order from a restaurant because they couldn't find basic information online. Among Gen...

When Matt Crane moved back to Boston after a decade in the San Francisco startup scene, he kept asking everyone one question: "What are the five best startups in Boston?" Nobody could name five. So he started a newsletter as a side project. Almost four years later, MGMT Boston is one of the fastest-growing local media companies for venture-backed startups, with a newsletter, a newsfeed, a podcast,...

John Hill hasn't applied for a job in 25 years. His reputation keeps opening the door. Recorded live on stage at Startup Boston Week, John (VP of Story at Whop) walks through a career built on relationships. A sports journalist handed a website in 1997. The Michigan State alumni director helping people find work in the 2009 recession. The face of LinkedIn's higher education push. A decade building...

Marie Burke Brown spent the first stretch of her career inside enterprise giants like NetApp and VMware, building programs for products she didn't build and didn't choose.    Then she did something most marketers don't: she jumped on purpose into a company with 22 people, then one with 30, because she wanted to be in the room before there was a room. Six months into her current role as VP of Marke...

Katie Radel grew up above a funeral home. Third generation family business. I love stories like that because it explains a lot about why she never questioned whether entrepreneurship was even on the table for her. She spent the next several years in the corporate world (banking, healthcare, finance) before she got close to 40, had just had her son, and realized the version of herself showing up to...

Vincent Pierri spent years writing a new forty-five-minute talk every week for a room of three hundred people. No teleprompter. No rehearsal. Cross four or five hundred people, he says, and loyalty stops being the reason anyone shows up. They come back only if the message actually gives them something. That weekly pressure to never repeat himself built the exact skill he sells today. After leaving...

Keith Cline joined LinkedIn on December 8, 2003. He's member number 55,829. Twenty-three years later he has 20,000 followers, and almost nothing he's posted is about him. He's interviewed the CEO of Klaviyo, the co-founder of Android, and roughly 435 other founders. He built VentureFizz, the front door to Boston tech, out of a Blogger page during a recession because his recruiting business had dri...

SHOW DESCRIPTION 📩 Join the Friday Briefing (free newsletter): https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner     Every company insists they're customer-obsessed. Almost none of them can point to proof beyond a slide that says so.   Ryan Barry has built two companies around closing that gap. As CEO of Appcues and former CEO of Zapp...

Subscribe to the weekly Authority Brief: https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter   The search landscape is undergoing a massive shift. While most businesses still focus on traditional Google rankings, your next customer is likely asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude who to trust. This new era of AI search demands a proactive approach to AI-driven reputation marketing to ensure your business is the on...

Most founders think branded merch is a waste of money. Chris Farris has spent 20-plus years proving the opposite. In this episode of Return on Reputation, host Justin Obey and Chris Farris, founder of Boost Promotions, break down how branded merchandise becomes physical proof of a company's reputation, why trusted brands rise while commodities get cut in a downturn, and how a $100 gift can open th...

Can you build a B2B pipeline on LinkedIn with no ad spend, no cold calls, and no cold emails? Michael Kurson did exactly that, and he tracked every step.   Michael is the co-founder of FirstTouch, a platform that turns LinkedIn into a measurable go-to-market channel by attributing every comment, connection, and DM back to HubSpot. Before tech he sold something harder to move: hard seltzer, one thr...

📩 Subscribe to our newsletter the Authority Brief: https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner   Most companies are trying to figure out what AI is going to change. Jon Dick thinks the better question is what AI won’t change. In this episode of Return on Reputation, Justin Obey talks with Jon Dick,  Chief Customer Officer at Hub...

📩 Subscribe to our newsletter the Authority Brief: https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner     Most early-stage founders think they have a marketing problem. But sometimes the real problem is simpler: the founder can sell the vision in a conversation, but the company cannot explain it clearly anywhere else. In this episode o...

📩 Subscribe to our newsletter the Authority Brief: https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner     David Brown has seen thousands of pitches. He funds very few of them. Not because the ideas are bad. Because the founders haven't done the work of being known, trusted, or differentiated before they walk into the room. David is the...

📩 Join the Friday Briefing (free newsletter): https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner   Every B2B company says they have a positioning strategy. Almost none of them can explain what they actually do in one sentence. Anthony Pierri has seen this up close, hundreds of times. As co-founder of Fletch PMM, he's spent the last thr...

📩 Join the Friday Briefing (free newsletter): https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner   Alexandra Crabb just became the owner of a 28-year-old PR agency.   She didn't start it. She grew it from the inside over 14 years — joined as VP when the team was five people, helped build it to ten, and six weeks ago acquired Castor Com...

📩 Join the Friday Briefing (free newsletter): https://get.obeycreative.com/newsletter 🎙️ Free Podcast Planner GPT: https://get.obeycreative.com/podcastplanner ⬇️ Download the Authority Blueprint: https://get.obeycreative.com/mediaengineblueprint Every company says they're using AI. Almost none of them can prove it's working. Mamoon Chowdry has a front-row seat to that gap. As Director of AI Trans...

What do you do when the New York Times labels you the face of failure — and your face is literally the first result when someone Googles the word? If you're Suneel Gupta, you use the article as your calling card, spend the next few years interviewing hundreds of the world's most successful people, and write the book that answers the question everyone's afraid to ask: why do some people get backed...

In 2007, a kid from Bentley University Googled "personal branding" after a boring corporate training class and decided to own the entire category. Today, Dan Schawbel has 170,000+ LinkedIn followers, a newsletter reaching 380,000 professionals, three bestselling books, and a research firm that has interviewed 3.18 million people across 26 countries for companies like Oracle, Deloitte, UKG, and Upw...

Thomas Edwards Jr. built one of the most recognizable personal brands of his generation. He was the real-life Hitch. Wall Street Journal. CNN. Steve Harvey. Tamron Hall. ABC Nightline. MTV. Axe. Maxim. Over 400 media appearances. He helped 400 people find love and get married. By every external measure, he was winning. He was also slowly disappearing. In this episode of Return on Reputation, Justi...

What does it really take to kill your own brand — and rebuild it into something better? In this episode of Return on Reputation, host Justin Obey sits down with Jon Mason, founder of Swing Juice, for a raw and honest founder story about entrepreneurship, brand building, and the pivot that changed everything.   Jon spent nearly a decade building Swing Juice as an all-natural hydration and energy dr...

Most founders chase the next ad format, the next platform, the next growth hack. But what if the thing that was actually closing deals was just you, posting honestly on LinkedIn every week, even when it felt cringe?   In this episode of Return on Reputation, my guest is Jessica Chase, Co-Founder of getabovethefold.com  , a programmatic advertising agency helping brands scale beyond Google Ads into...

What does it actually take to raise a venture fund when no one would have hired you to run one? And how do you build the kind of reputation that convinces 80 people to bet their money on you before you have ever written a single check?   I sat down with Justin Kang, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Visible Hands, a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in underrepresented founders across Bosto...

How do you build a personal brand that compounds over time? What does it actually take to go from invisible to authoritative, and what are the laws of brand storytelling that make it all work? Justin Obey sits down with Jessica Gioglio — bestselling author, keynote speaker, and founder of With Savvy Media & Marketing — to answer exactly that. Jess co-authored The Laws of Brand Storytelling and...

What separates founders who scale from the ones who stall? Andrew Nash has spent 40 years finding out. Serial founder, investor, and entrepreneur Andrew J. Nash has built and exited companies acquired by Apple, eBay, Deloitte, and Chowly. After selling Targetable in 2024, he moved back to Australia ready to step back - and then AI pulled him right back into the arena. Now he's building again: laun...