152: Year in Review: Podcast Journey Part 2

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and fifty two of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I begin a year in review. I'm a huge advocate of remote working, flexible working, and all other things other than sit in the office pretending to work. My own form of flexibility means that it's easy for me to bend and stretch my days and weeks to suit whatever client or customer or creative whim holds firm on my curiosity. And this flexibility of working patterns, both through location and hours, allows me to forge and form strong working relationships and friendships with clients and colleagues from around the globe. And so it follows with my podcast. I'm as likely to speak to someone in London as Lisbon or Windsor or Wellington or Berlin or Bangalore or Southampton as San Francisco. And so it goes with the interviewees on my podcast. They are globally disparate, they are worldly wise, they're universally industrious, and they are astronomically and unwaveringly generous with their wisdom and time. It's pretty amazing to get so many folks around the world across borders and time zones and industries, talking about the key trends and ideals and challenges facing the customer support industry right now. I couldn't do it if I didn't work remotely. I couldn't do it if I didn't work from my home base. I couldn't have that flexibility. I couldn't be that committed to this podcast. And it is a commitment. It takes time. In the early days it took me my first episode was now on two hours worth of editing and fiddling and faffing around with WordPress and with BuzzSprout. And it wasn't perfect. It's always going to be an evolution, but I it's evolved so much in the last year. From that first little mic I bought for my iPhone to my blue snowball. I've battled working in front of a huge reverberating window. Echo is the enemy of the podcast, as I was saying yesterday. I've played around with desk mounted booms and isolation shields and pop filters. And finally settled on a combination of a good pop filter and a shock mount, and simply being close to the microphone. I had no appreciation of the importance of proximity to a microphone. And then there was that jazzy theme to consider, the one that I've fallen in love with so much. I have to admit I've become that person who hums their own theme tune around the house. Music is really important to me, and while I'm not an audiophile to the extent of understanding and obsessing over speaker quality and vinyl versus MP3, I do know what music I like. My taste is somewhat eclectic, old school and very personal, and I wanted the theme of this podcast to speak to me. I scouted around and landed on a piece from Epidemic Sound called You Have the Answer, which just struck me as perfect in every way. I loved the style, I loved the name, and it spoke to me. And then finally, after I'd recorded some interviews, I committed to a go live date and I recorded a trailer. For inspiration, I listened to a bunch of pilots on Apple Podcasts' new and noteworthy section, found some key approaches and just went for it. And then I got editing. Figured out how to use garage band. The pronunciation of which I am well aware is hilarious to most Americans who might say who might be more inclined to say garage band, but I'm a Brit, I say garage, not garage. To me it's garage band and always will be. And with time, my first two-hour editing session to get a conversation down to seven minutes became half an hour. And as I got better at guiding my interviewees and making notes on the fly, and a better feel for the timing of an ending. My editing is now down to perhaps a little over ten minutes. And here we are 152 episodes in, and even now, I couldn't be more delighted when I find some slight efficiency, some keyboard shortcut that I wasn't aware of. After 152 episodes, a saved click makes a lot of difference. And that's it, that got me through to the end of last year and ready for launch. Tomorrow I'll tell you a little bit more about that first week.com forward slash one five two for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.