Conquer the Chaos

Rajesh Bhatia, CTO of Keap, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about the relationship between AI and automation and how they make entrepreneurs' lives easier. While conquering the chaos of a small business, entrepreneurs have so many things to worry about, mainly, their sales and marketing, which can be easily automated. For example, if somebody comes to your website and they populate a "contact me" for...

Nate Shaw, who is the CEO of Brooklyn Music Factory, joins Small Biz Buzz in our Big Grit docuseries to talk about his company's vision to create a community online that provides the same kind of opportunities and deep connections as teaching music in person. "The whole world can be a community," said Nate. "At Brooklyn Music Factory, one of our real opportunities in 2021 is figuring out how to gr...

Valerie Aprahamian, who is the founder of Advocates for Angels, joins Small Biz Buzz in our Big Grit docuseries to talk about how her company supports and protects parents of children with special needs and developmental disorders through their Individual Education Programs (IEPs). Valerie's daughter, Chanel, was diagnosed with autism and a very life-threatening seizure disorder, at the age of thr...

Natasha Davis, who is the founder and CEO of Impact Branding Consulting, joins Small Biz Buzz in our Big Grit docuseries to talk about her journey from being a nurse to realizing her real passion of becoming an entrepreneur and all the obstacles she had to overcome to be successful.       "It takes time. Shifting from a mindset of being an employee is a big shift to being an entrepreneur, but then...

Clate Mask, Keap's CEO, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about the mindset of entrepreneurs versus small business owners and how having grit can get you through the hard times. Clate expresses the fact that the entrepreneurial journey is hard enough, let alone with the curve balls like we've had this year. COVID-19 really clarified the difference between the typical small business owner and the entrep...

Paige Clark, Keap's Corporate Communications Specialist, joins Small Biz Buzz to talk about utilizing the small business aspect in local marketing when it comes to social media. "If you're really working on growing [your] small business, you want to focus on the people who are your market," said Paige. "And that's why you want to start with this local bubble on social media." Per Paige, the first...

Kristen Boss, a business coach geared toward women entrepreneurs, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss the challenges business owners face to make their first $100K, how to sell confidently and know when it's time to pivot.   "Why not get there faster by learning from an expert, hiring mentors, getting involved in masterminds? Go get educated!" said Boss when it comes to selling. "It's always going to...

Jason Komosa, chief business officer at BlackCart and mental coach, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss the importance of maintaining a work-life balance mentality when things hit the fan, especially while we're all working through COVID-19.    Let's face it, we are living in a world where overwork is overvalued–this idea of we're working so much to get onto the next task, then onto the next, and the...

Ramon Ray, the founder of SmartHustle.com, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how to build a community around your small business in which you can actively engage with customers and see more growth.     Ray emphasizes how important it is to bring people together and serve them value as well as provide solutions to your customers' problems after they have come to know, like, and trust you. "This is wh...

Amber Anderson, owner of Tote + Pears, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how to market to an underserved audience with the appropriate ads, in this case, women and their families. Amber Anderson's agency, Tote + Pears, focuses on supporting startups with product management and branding. About two and a half years after launching, she made the decision to focus 100% on women–women being consumers, wo...

Pam Slim, owner of Main Street Learning Lab, once again joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how little marketing actions make it easier to take action in your small business. Slim recommends that small business owners leverage ecosystem development and partner development to look at ways in which they can understand their bigger systems. "I call [it] tiny marketing actions, which can definitely be mar...

Jeremy Ryan Slate, who's the founder of Create Your Own Life podcast, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how your small business can compete with big brands without breaking your budget. When it comes to building your marketing strategy, Slate recommends thinking of your journey as climbing a flight of stairs. You have to figure out what the bottom stair is so you can start climbing up. You want to f...

Foodfight! is the animated feature that is the center of discussion in this episode of Worst Business Ideas in History. The hosts break down what went wrong with the release of the 2012 film produced by Threshold Entertainment and directed by Lawrence Kasanoff that received very low ratings and nothing but negative reviews. They also tie in how important it is to listen to your business partners w...

Melody Lewis and Turquoise Devereaux of the IndigenousCC join Small Biz Buzz to discuss the importance of having diversity in your small business.    "Diversity has to be the foundation of your business, that's just it, because naturally, it will impact all these other areas of work–your customer relations, your marketing, all of that," said Melody Lewis. "Diversity, the understanding of it, what...

In this episode of Worst Business Ideas in History, the hosts break down what went wrong with the release of the Atari Jaguar and what a disappointment it was to its target audience, mainly teenagers. This product essentially killed Atari as a corporation, as it leveraged its console to bait and switch the audience with false claims that the product was better than those of its competitive counter...

Ronnie and Lamar Tyler of Tyler New Media join Small Biz Buzz to discuss the role of diversity in entrepreneurship and how small business owners can support each other through allyship in their respective communities. "There's a huge wealth gap, and it's not getting smaller between different groups in this country," said Lamar Tyler. "And right now, African Americans are pulling up the rear, and w...

Don Capparella, the CEO of Quality Travel Solutions, joins Small Biz Buzz to discuss how he adapted his travel agency through the hardships of COVID-19 when the travel industry took a major hit.   "We're going to save this industry. We're going to save our business and we created five pivots that we had to do to make sure that we were going to survive," said Capparella. "We had to pivot our market...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Josh Collins, who works for an agency called Streetsense, is a TEDx alum, a speaker, and an expert in experience architecture. He will be discussing how he helps businesses design and create by leveraging experience as a strategy. "Essentially what we're talking about is serving our audience from awareness to advocacy, and everyw...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Derek Harju are joined by Kristin Rowan, the director of marketing and public relations and sales for Square Egg Entertainment, the parent company for Phoenix Fan Fusion, who discusses how to pivot and adjust when a large-scale event suddenly faces an emergency.   In this case, the coronavirus pandemic. When it started getting bad, everything changed when eve...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Chris Ducker, a personal branding expert, serial entrepreneur, and successful podcast host, who helps people monetize their expertise and their personal brand through the work he does at his company, Youpreneur. Ducker stands by the mantra of when you build the business of you, it's future-proof. It can't be copied, plain and sim...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Frank Gerola, a real estate agent in the Phoenix Metro Area, who discusses how he's adapted his business during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gerola's business represents both buyers and sellers. One area of concern that came up for his clients was safety while looking at houses during the coronavirus. "A lot of it is comfort level, how...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by AJ Wilcox, who works for an ad agency that helps with the account management side of LinkedIn Ads as well as teaching, training, consulting, auditing, and anything else individual teams need to attract leads. Wilcox expressed that the big limiting factor for LinkedIn Ads is their cost. The average cost per click, when you're usin...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Scott Martineau are joined by Brett Curry, who discusses how to leverage YouTube Ads to grow your business with a focus on ecommerce. For those small businesses that don't have a video crew or can't invest enough money in video production, Curry breaks down how to create a compelling YouTube ad on a budget that will still see sufficient viewership. He explain...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Michael Van Dusen are joined by Jason Komosa, a mental coach who helps leaders achieve their goals by creating a better balance in all areas of their lives.   A mental coach is a person who supports you, champions you, is your sidekick, your accountability partner, being very open, very authentic, very vulnerable. The idea is to just make you better while tra...

Small Biz Buzz hosts Crystal Heuft and Michael Van Dusen are joined by Freestar's Co-founder David Freedman and President and CEO Kurt Donnell, who discuss how being advocates for publishers has maximized their revenue.     Freestar maximizes publishers' programmatic ad revenue specifically. Basically, every time you see an ad that appears on the internet, there's an entire auction that's happenin...