Our Best Podcast Episodes of 2023

We had a great year and I kind of wanted to celebrate that great year, by kind of pointing out some of the highlights from our podcast interviews. Now, business is one thing. I’ll just go on record as saying that since escaping California and moving to Kansas, we have experienced a little bit of growth. That’s been fantastic. So we have lowered expenses. We’ve increased revenue on a spreadsheet. Those things look great. And that is something to celebrate.

But in this post, I wanted to go ahead and celebrate the other folks who helped us look good this year.

And so when I think about some of the different interviews that we had done and some of the different people that had spent their time with us, on one hand, it’s great because we’re able to give them Exposure. We’re able to give them the ability to, you know, kind of jump into the fray and say, “here’s me.” “This is what I do. This is how I do.” And that’s what the Manana No Mas! podcast is all about.

It’s not a Kurt show. It’s not a pat Kurt on the back and talk about Manana No Mas! moment. It’s about recognizing other leaders and entrepreneurs in the space. And then helping them put the spotlight on them. Their passion piece or their project or whatever that is.

Now some folks are authors. Some folks are entrepreneurs. Some folks are leaders and kind of like the fitness and wellness space. Stick with me, and we’ll go over some of the highlights of 2023 and some of the folks that really went out of the way and added value to what we do here at Manana No Mas!.

The first one that’s popping up is Michelle Kimbrough. Michelle was phenomenal. Michelle is also someone that was able to escape California. She’s currently in Montana. She’s living with family, which is fantastic. That’s I love these stories. I love when people can do those kinds of things.

Michelle is a black belt. I believe… I believe she’s a black belt in the Six Sigma stuff. All that, lean Six Sigma… all that business… get better at what you do stuff. And she’s super passionate about it. What I liked talking to her about was not just the six Sigma and the idea that she can, help consult companies to a pathway of continuous development, but the story behind the move and the growing up in California and the moving to Montana and all of that stuff that went with it.

I thought it was a really good personal piece, and it’s something that I am really, really proud of.

Now, if we move on to the next one, Raffaele D’Apolito. So if you know me at all. I got a passion for Italy. I love that country. I love the food. I love the people. I love the culture. I love, love, love Italy. I’ve been there like 15 times. I just love the place. Now, Raffaele D’Apolito has a partner and they’re in a company called Fine Advisors and they are also in the continuous development pathway.

What’s really interesting about Raphael and his partner was, A – they’re open to us. , B – they’re kind of like positioning in their country and in Europe in that area. But then also when I interviewed them, they were looking to make inroads into the audience that is America, and they had put things to a good process. They had a really good website for doing that kind of stuff.

Our next one that I want to talk about was, now this is interesting. This is my first and only guest that I brought in from a, I don’t want to call it an agency, but it’s like a guest sourcing for podcasters. I reached out to this organization. I was like, I’d be interested in a podcast. I sent her a request. “Would you be interested in our Podcast?” She said, yes. Let’s do the discovery call. And here’s where the magic happens.

Joan Posivy is an amazing person. We did the discovery call and we took an extra, I think 10 or 15 minutes on the discovery call. There was such an alignment; the way that we thought about our audiences, the way that she wanted to grow her business. She’s published a book. She is just a phenomenal person and her message is so on point about business.

We are talking to somebody here who owned their first house by the age of 19 and was a manager at a bank, I think by the age of either 22 or 24, trying to recount all this stuff out of memory from the last year is a little bit of a task. But keep in mind who we’re talking to, right? What their history is and then what they bring to the table. Now you take her knowledge and then you take her energy. And then you take her passion for paying it forward and you’ve got a package in a person that is amazing.

She was a wonderful fit on the money on the Mañana No Mas! show. And I really encourage you to go ahead and find that episode on our podcast link, And, just go ahead and really enjoy a moment with Joan.

She was a fantastic individual.

Now the next one I’m going to share with you is interesting. I met this individual through LinkedIn. So, I’m very aggressive on LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn a lot. It’s kind of my friendly space. We met on LinkedIn through another networking group. So it was, during COVID while everybody was getting together on zoom calls and doing these, you know, kind of like networking zoom calls, like speed dating.

You go into different rooms and stuff like that. Well, James ran one of those – Jaymes O’Pheron. So he ran one of those, him and I took a moment to get acquainted after one of those sessions. And again, it was one of those just like instant alignment situations. And I was like, man, this guy is brilliant.

He knew that I wanted to escape California. He tried to lure me to North Dakota, up in North Dakota. Jaymes does some stuff that, you know, after talking to him a little bit, I was like, I got to have you on the show.

He runs an organization that does back in time, chivalrous communication. So they have sword fighting, they fight for the honor of the lady, they have dinner parties. It’s super old school. I’m not talking like beatboxing in the seventies. I’m talking going back to the Rennaissance, maybe even before that, like medieval. I don’t know.

What’s so cool about this is he has taken both that and his inspiration to help people relieve stress and to feel better in their skin kind of thing. That’s a phrase. He thinks that you should be comfortable as yourself. And he does a good job of expressing himself as himself. And I really enjoyed having him on the podcast.

Now, an interesting thing about this particular podcast. This episode, right here, episode 90. Is our most shared podcast ever.

That is pretty enlightening to me when I say, “does an episode hit home with somebody?” What is it about a message in an episode that makes somebody want to share that with somebody else? Whatever that magic is, Jaymes has it. So if you haven’t yet heard or watched the episode with Jaymes O Pheron, I would recommend doing so because somewhere along the way, that podcast, that particular episode, became our most commonly shared episode — not only for the year, in the totality of the five years that Mañana No Mas has been doing this podcast. It’s the one that’s been shared the most.

Now, the next one I’m going to bring to you is a gentleman that I met. Through Tim Morgan at the, , Giver Marketing Network. I met Jamie Jay as an introduction through Tim Morgan. Tim Morgan runs Giver Marketing, just to give you an idea of how these circles all work together and why it’s so important to be plugged in and active in whatever organization you decide to be a member in.

Jamie is like a brother from another mother. This cat is, he’s a published author. I’m an author. You know, he’s into outdoor stuff. I’m into outdoor stuff. He’s in Missouri. I was in the middle of preparing my plan to move to either Arizona or Kansas when we did this show. So this is episode 92, you’ll notice that this is only two episodes after the one with Jaymes O’Pheron. So Jaymes tried to convince me to move to North Dakota. That argument did not work. I ended up deciding to move to Kansas. And part of that decision, is maybe because of the conversations I had with Jamie.

Now in this particular episode, we do talk a little bit about bottleneck. Bottleneck is a company of his that deals with virtual assistance and helping businesses get tasks done without having to hire full-time employees and pay benefits. That’s one, one very small part of the conversation. The other side of the conversation is a passion point for Jamie and that is a digital detox camp, a digital detox retreat center that he is building on 70 acres in Missouri.

So to be able to have that conversation both on the show and off the show, him and I connected both, you know, on the show and off. He’s just a tremendous person, very gregarious, very friendly, very open in how he shares his information and very passionate about this project that they’re doing. Imagine riding UTVs, dirt bikes, mountain bikes, archery, gun range, you know, cooking outside, not being connected to a screen, but enjoying it. The nature that is around you now, I don’t know if you’re in business and you’ve done any studies on stress or not, but you’ll see coming up and soon. We’ll cover David Valentine. David Valentine actually changed his whole business model because his doctor said you ain’t going to live another 10 years. If your numbers don’t change your stress levels.

Well, Jamie Jay is also aware of what business can do to people in regards to stress, and that’s why this retreat thing is such a powerful idea, because if we can get people out of the office, out of the cubicle and into the woods to enjoy nature for just a spell, it doesn’t have to be a long time, but for just a spell, it’s going to do a lot to help restore their natural energy and get them going again.

Okay. Now this next one is the most viewed podcast that we had of the year. So Jaymes O’Pheron was the most shared… Edward Babaian, was episode 87. He was the first interview of 2023… the most viewed episode of 2023. And the timing bringing Edward on was phenomenal. One, he was launching his own training series to be a copywriter. So it was perfect timing to help him kind of promote and do and go in the direction he needed to go in professionally. The other side of the coin was, if you remember at the beginning of 23, people were still frantic about chat, GPT and AI.

And, even though it’s just a year later and people are much more commonplace about AI. It was still a very new buzzword to a lot of people. At the beginning of 2023, him and I had a very focused conversation about what does AI look like, in the copywriting space, what’s going to happen to people and their jobs in that space if AI is so stinking good? It was a fun conversation because he was, at the end of the day, “if you’re an award winning copywriter, Your business is going to grow because someone has to review and approve all of this crap that AI is spilling out because a lot of it’s really not that good. Now, if you’re a mediocre copywriter, this is your opportunity to improve, use AI to improve. And you know what? If you’re not a very good copywriter, go figure out how to code somewhere because maybe you weren’t meant to be a copywriter.” And it was just a very cool discussion to be very upfront about stuff.

It was very timely. Sometimes you get lucky, and you have something that just resonates on timing, delivery, person.

Next is one of my favorites, and I’ve already mentioned them once. During this presentation, I actually met this gentleman when I was co-hosting on the WP Tonic show. As soon as I met him, as soon as I saw him on screen, as soon as he started to talk… it was like a, a kind of a draw in, I don’t know specifically what it was. Maybe it was his friendly nature. Maybe it was his casualness, on camera? There were things in the background, you know, that were kind of up on a shelf, like I think a pair of sneakers or something like that and stuff like that caught my eye. I was like “this cat’s laid back now for someone that supposedly owns seven or eight seven figure businesses” He made his mark on lead sourcing, lead management, using cold email for leads, has a whole course on what the outrageous offer is.

So how do you grow your mail list? You make an outrageous offer. How do you design an outrageous offer? Let me walk you through the steps. And he just goes through this whole thing. What he teaches is so paramount and so foundational to how some people find their success online, that it’s like, I don’t want to say it’s earth shattering, but it can be a world changing conversation for some people in business.

So I find a tremendous amount of value in speaking to David Valentine, but there’s the other side of it. That was him as a person. He was a very genuine upfront, gregarious, transparent person to talk to. He shared his story with me, and he answered questions with no hesitation. He was a really fun person to interview. And I’ll say one more thing about David and that is after the interview. Now, remember he owes me nothing. People come on this podcast. I don’t charge people. There’s no fee to be on it. People owe me nothing. I’m thrilled that they come on.

I had done a promotional post, for his episode. And I said, Hey, if you’d like to be on the show, let me know. Blah, blah, blah. And he responded by tagging other executives in his space that he thought would be good guests for the show. That is completely unneeded. I’m not gonna say unneeded. I love all the referrals I can get, but it’s above and beyond.

That showed me right there that this is a genuinely generous person and someone that I want to support and endorse whenever I can.

He just did some kind of a summit, like I think three months ago. And you might’ve noticed in my feed, I was, I was helping him promote that all over because I know that he’s a genuine person. And if he’s got something like an event like that kicking off, I know that there’s value behind it. It’s not just a, it’s not just a money grab, but there’s value in it.

So the next one that I want to share with you, and we’re getting near the end of the list is, this was a referral from Adam Weeks. Adam Weeks is going to come up here in a little bit. So I’ll talk about Adam in a bit. So you understand how I’m sourcing some of these guests, but this particular person, he was referred to me, right? And so it’s third party referral.

We do the phone call. We do a discovery call. And it’s one of those calls. I talk about this a lot where there’s just alignment. It’s like, this is it. This is the person I have to have on the show. And Anil Gupta is one of those. Now Anil runs an agency just like Mañana No Mas! is an agency. Now this is where people get weirded out. Anil is not competition for me, and I am not competition for him. I even joked on the show, I said, you know, we could have a conversation about little fish, big pond, big fish, little pond, but his agency is not even in the pond. He is, he’s throwing heavy duty line right out in the ocean and bringing in big clients like, like Pepsi. So we’re not in the same world at all, but he’s an aspiration.

How do I grow into those audiences? How do I grow into an agency that can serve companies at that level? I will be, I guess I’ll be transparent and bold here in this moment. After doing this podcast with Anil Gupta, I reached out to a couple of power players or people that I know, and I’ve just put out, you know, a proposal that’s over $300,000.00. Now as a WordPress agency to put out a proposal, that’s over $300,000. 00…That’s a big deal. It’s the association, and the close proximity to experts and wonderful people like this that lead you to that inspiration and say, this is possible. This can happen. And that’s why I think it’s so important to kind of just take a moment and recount some of the interviews and what are the highlights and high points and inspirations that come from these conversations.

This is one of them. Now, Anil doesn’t just have Multidots, which is his agency. He also has a product, a product called Multicollab. What it does is in the WordPress space, is allow writers and content creators inside of WordPress to collaborate in a similar way to what Google Docs can do. Now this is important in the writing space, thinking about a writer. Okay, for a writer that makes digital content. Some of that workflow is using Microsoft Word or using Google Docs to create your content and then put it into some kind of final file share system. That’s why I keep mentioning Google Docs. There’s Google Docs, there’s OneDrive, there are some other collaborative writing programs out there. And that’s because multiple stakeholders might need to access that content before it gets published.

Now, what’s cool about working in WordPress is once the block Editor came out and Gutenberg gained popularity. There’s a full window. So there’s a full window editing mode when you’re writing content so now instead of having that little classic editor window where you would write but not know what it’s gonna look like you can now write and create your content on a Full screen.

You can do that and you can save a draft, right? But then the question is, okay, so are we just going to share this draft back and forth and sign in and sign out and do that? That is cumbersome.

So Multicollab allows people to collaborate in real time on written product in the WordPress space. So it’s a really cool tool. One more thing about Anil. As you can tell, this was a power-packed episode. We talked about agency life. We talked about growing an agency at the enterprise scale. We talked about his product Multicollab, but we also talked about something that’s near and dear to me personally, and it’s where him and I really found our alignment.

He has a Substack blog. It’s amazing. He has a very similar take that our fiscal success is very dependent upon our physical success. So he honstely believes in health and wellness from an overarching perspective, very similar to how I feel about it. Our approaches are completely different. I’m into hiking. Mountain biking, going to the lake for the weekend, things like that. He’s into yoga, meditation, and some other things.

Okay? But what’s really cool about it is we’re both coming to people. We’re both coming to an audience from the perspective of, do you want to experience more success in life? And so I really love Anil’s messaging here. I think there’s a lot of value in it and I can’t encourage people enough to go and check out.

The next Couple that I want to introduce to you is a phenomenal couple. This is a fun story because this is the way podcasting has the ability to work. When I met Alex Morin, he was a LinkedIn connection.

I have a process on LinkedIn. I have a free course on how to grow your LinkedIn on kurtvonahnen.com. I think it’s also on Mañana No Mas!. It’s my own take on how you leverage LinkedIn to grow your network. You know, a few short years ago I was at 1200 connections and now I’m at almost 10, 000 connections and I’ve got really good guests coming to my podcast. So that tells you something is working and I’m showing you the proof in the pudding.

So Alex Morin… him and I meet. I find out that he helps authors publish their first books. That’s a fantastic message for me. Fantastic, fantastic calling. So he introduces me to Marcy, his business partner, and. We put them, all three of us get together and do a podcast. It was a episode 89 and I thought the episode was wonderful.

Alex’s energy that he brings and Marcy’s sheer positivity and happiness that she brings to the screen lifts me. It’s a great feeling episode. So it’s one of those, your heart bubbles. It’s just a great episode from that perspective. But let me tell you how LinkedIn and podcasting can work after the show.

They were like, “so what does your agency do? And how can we work together more? Cause we really like working with each other.” And we started working on a new web launch for Working Writers. co. So Working Writers. co just released their new website in September.

We had a couple of stumbling blocks, not going to lie. I put them on a new program in my hosting package. There were a couple of stumbling blocks, but they were super patient. And… when I got things fixed, they were super thankful and it just all worked out. Working Writers. co now has, instead of a landing page, a full website, blogging, connected to social, build their list, automates their list back to their HubSpot because they wanted to use their HubSpot instead of my preferred CRM. Then they’ve got a learning management system in there and they’ve got a baked-in membership system that allows them to automate, you know, their income, their e-commerce streams for the different levels of memberships and the different levels.

It’s a wonderful cause. It’s a wonderful program. The whole land and expand model that Chris Badgett talks about with Lifter LMS land and expand. So we did the podcast. We put together a killer website for them, their style guide, their headshots, their photos, all of that stuff was amazing. So it was kind of easy to build their project. There were some tweaks along the way, but, but all in all, it wasn’t a struggle with content that had good content. And then now we have a package.

We built an affiliate program for them where they can recommend Mañana No Mas! to their published writers to have a ready-built, templated site launched for them to help them promote their new book. All they need to do is go in and change the text and pictures and they can start selling their book right through the website.

I’ve got one left that is a friend, but also referred through. Adam Weeks. Adam Weeks has a company called Cirrus Influence. Cirrus Influence helps people in the WordPress space get exposure. So Anil Gupta was referred. through Cirrus Influence and Adrian Toby was referred through Cirrus Influence. So this is an example where hiring out for PR is working. Now the odd part of this is I’ve known Adrian for years. I’ve been a customer of Adrian’s for years. He founded Groundhogg, which is a really great CRM product in the WordPress space. It does more than just emails and names.

It does, sales pipeline. It does deal management. It does a scheduling. It’s got an appointment scheduler built in. It’s got a way to send people a link for payment, really simple payments. I can just send right through the website, using my Groundhogg. It’s got a calendaring. , automation, flagging. Someone signs up for one thing… I can automatically enroll them in something else. I can do sales funnels. It’s just an amazing product.

What was cool about having Adrian on the show was we talked a little bit about what an amazing product Groundhogg is because part of the show is to help people promote their products and services. But Adrian was really generous and cool in the concept that he was understands some people “Buy all these tools and they still don’t know how to generate a list”. So he was very transparent and talked about what worked and what didn’t work when he was growing Groundhogg and his advice on how a new business could start to grow its list.

This was a really good podcast for people interested in that kind of content. And Adrian’s young. He’s successful. He’s fun to talk to. He’s, you know, all of that. He’s that whole package that is working.

And then the other person that I wanted to talk about, Adam Weeks. Adam Weeks is A phenomenal person that I actually met in person the first time I met him hanging out with a person named Spencer Foreman. People that know Spencer, know that Spencer can be pretty animated. He can be fairly dominant in conversations. These aren’t bad things. He knows all about that. I’m not saying anything that he hasn’t heard before. So I met two powerhouse people at the same time. I’m sitting with Spencer and I’m sitting with Adam Weeks. And then there’s me. All three of us are, I would say, “a level communicators”.

We’re all people that communicate for a living. And so we had a great conversation, a lengthy conversation in which Adam was telling me about Cirrus Influence and how he went from being a school teacher to running this… a PR firm that helps people in the WordPress space get better exposure for the products, their services and personal branding. And we talked a little bit about how Cirrus Influence will actually coach people on how to interview better or how to field questions better, or, you know, take a look at their social.

All that to say, uh, I put Adam on episode 94. So I wanted to give him the opportunity to expose the project, expose what he’s doing. And then very strategically after having Adam on the show, I went ahead and did the shows with Anil and Adrian and I’m looking forward to seeing who Adam sends to me next.

I have since seen him talk on other podcasts. , I know that he did something with Michelle Frechette most recently. He is someone that not just in the money on an almost space, but, in general, I think if you’re in the WordPress space, you want to follow Adam. You want to connect with Adam and you kind of want to watch what he’s doing because whether or not you can afford to get into his circle and get the benefit of being, in his sphere, you can see what he’s doing and you can kind of learn from osmosis and duplication a little bit.

He’s a really. straightforward, gregarious, fun communicator. And he’s got a way of likening situations to other things. So if you are lost on a subject, he’s got a really good way of giving you a practical example of how to put all that together. And with that, it’s time for me to go. I’ll see you soon. Bye bye.