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Many podcasters think that their show is not growing because they've got the wrong strategy. Maybe their audience is wrong, maybe they got the wrong niche, maybe they got the wrong positioning show title. But I've also seen it where the strategy behind a podcast is actually really good. They've got a clear audience, they've got a clear promise that the show makes, they've got a great name, and yet the show isn't growing. So what gives? Well, here's the thing. In today's online landscape, you are not competing with hobbyists anymore. You are competing with professionals, with teams, with editors, with designers, and with people who execute their individual skills at a professional level every single week. And so you might not have a strategy problem, you might have an execution problem. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kev Michael. I am your podcast growth coach. And in this audio only episode this week, I'm going to walk you through the difference between a strategy problem and an execution problem and how to tell which one you have with your podcast and why changing your podcast is sometimes the worst move that you can make. I'm going to break down the exact execution chain that determines whether you get clicks, whether you hold attention, whether you build an audience, or whether you stay in the friends and family zone. So let's dive into it now. This is coming up because over the past several months, I've been working a lot with entrepreneurs with podcasts, and several of them take on everything themselves. So they are doing their own titles, their own thumbnails, their own intros, their own episodes, their own tracking, their own editing, literally everything that has to get done in order to grow and monetize the podcast. And they are doing that because they want to save money or they don't have the money to invest in help, or they're just like, let me get this going on my own first, and then I will be able to hire somebody to make it happen. But the issue that I'm seeing with that is a lot of times I work with that entrepreneur, we come up with an amazing strategy for their show. Great name, clear audience definition, great podcast promise that people want and they put out episodes and it really doesn't grow and they're just completely stumped. They're like, I must be doing something wrong with the YouTube algorithm, or I don't know, what is it? And this is where it gets tough for me because oftentimes I'll pull up what they have and it's just not good. They made the thumbnail themselves. And it looks like somebody who does not know graphic design made a thumbnail in Canva. And I'm just like, how do I tell this person that this thumbnail looks bad? And usually I say, hey, this thumbnail looks bad. You should hire a thumbnail designer. And some of them do, but others are like, no, I'm not ready to do that yet. I want to do this on my own. And I'm like, okay, that's fine, but that's the problem that your show has. And so your show is just going to stay where it is until you solve this problem. And for that, the entrepreneur is going to either have to become an amazing graphic designer or get somebody to design their thumbnails. And it's not just the thumbnail thing. This is title copywriting, this is intro copywriting. This is the video editing. So I'm seeing lots of high level entrepreneurs who have money, who have businesses who are editing the show themselves in description. And they show me their finished product. And it's got a lot of wonky edits that just don't look good, they don't look smooth, they don't look professional. It looks like somebody who doesn't know anything about video editing edited it into script. And it is just really difficult to get strangers to take that sort of thing seriously. Now what I'm not saying is that you need to have crazy Mr. Beast edits, because that's the other side of the spectrum that everybody's on where they think that they need to have these crazy trailers like Dyer of a CEO with all these edits and effects and whiz bang and boom and ah, all this drama. That's not true either. It just needs to look smooth, it needs to look good. And honestly, look, if you've been following grow the show for a while, you know that I started taking YouTube seriously as the number one thing that we all need to do this past spring. And the thing is, while YouTube is providing many podcasters unbelievable growth, YouTube is also what's causing this execution problem. So for several years I talked almost exclusively on this podcast and publicly about strategy. Because what I found in the thousands of podcasters that I talk to every year, which, which is not an exaggeration by the way, I went back and I counted and I've spoken to one to 2,000 podcasters one on one every year since 2020. And for the first several years of doing this, for the first half of this decade, most podcasters had a strategy issue where their show was vague, it was just about themselves. It wasn't a good show. That made a good promise. Well, the podcasters that I talk to now tend to have listened to the stuff that I have put out over the last five years, and a lot of them do have really solid strategy. Not all of them. There are still a lot who think they have a good strategy but don't. But a lot of them do. And they come to me and they're like, what the heck, Kevin? I know who my audience is. I have a great name for the show. I make a clear promise, and then I look and I'm like, ah, man, this is hard to tell them, but their show just doesn't. It's not good. This is hard to tell them, but the execution of this isn't there. It is an amateur operation. It looks like one person who is average at all of the skills that are required to grow a podcast on YouTube is doing those skills. And because of that, it. It's not growing on YouTube. And this is a bummer for me, because five to 10 years ago, podcasting could be super lo fi. It was cute to just have a microphone and just rip audios like I was doing now. But the reality is, what I'm doing right now is way easier to do and way more lo fi. But this does not have an algorithm baked in. You discovered me through either ads or YouTube or you got on my email list or somebody told you about it. You didn't just randomly open up Apple podcasts and search for grow the show or search for podcast growth help. Something else got you here. Listening to my voice right now. And that is the problem with audio podcasting. Something else has to get people to discover you. So that's why I'm telling everyone to do YouTube right now. But previously that wasn't the case. You could just do this, put on a microphone, rip something good and put it out, and it would work. But nowadays, the word is out. We are competing with teams. We are competing with budgets. We are competing with professionals, editors, strategists, designers, celebrities. And there's only so much podcast attention to go around. So to bring this into something more tangible that you can take back and look at your show, number one, does your show have a strategy problem or an execution problem? Because if your show's not growing, it has one of the two. So let's talk about a strategy problem for the moment. If your show has a strategy problem, it has one of these problems. Number one, there is not a clear audience definition. You have not defined a point, a psychographic, where you say My show is for people who are in this situation, not their demographics. Not men, women, age, gender, where they live, generation. No. When you use demographics, you are using demographics as a proxy for psychographic. What does that mean? You are assuming that all men who are aged 30 to 40 feel the same way, but they don't. Your show is for people who feel and think a certain way and would rather feel or think another way. That is the point A and that is the point B. So the point A is your audience a psychographic people who are experiencing something and they listen to their show because they want to feel something else. It's the point B. The show makes a promise. So that's show level strategy. One level below that is episode level strategy. So the strategy of your episode is what is the topic? Is the topic related to the promise? Does the topic that you're covering this week hit a current pain point or desire that your specific audience has? Are you choosing to make topics about what people want to consume more so than what you want to talk about? What format are you doing on a regular basis? Are you doing solo episodes? Are you doing interviews? Are you interviewing good, interesting guests? Are you audio first? YouTube first? All these questions are strategy questions. Now, what you need to understand about strategy is that you never get strategy perfect on day one. It's not possible because every show, every creator, and every audience is super different. And so you have to start with something and then try and tweak different things until you really get the strategy locked in. What that looks like is you start with some proven variables. So if you talk to me, I will say based on what you want to do, you should start here and then let's see how that does and we'll adjust from there. Its strategy is iterative, but it doesn't change all of that much. So that's strategy. And again, if you've listened to me talk here on Grow the Show, you've heard a lot of strategy stuff over the years. But here's the shift that I'm seeing now. Most serious podcasters actually don't have much of a strategy problem anymore. They have poor execution. And this is now where I am spending most of my time for the first time in a while. So execution is the skill level at every step that is required for an episode to succeed. And what are those steps? Well, these are all the steps that it takes to get somebody to consume your podcast episode on YouTube. Once again, we are in the era of YouTube, so I'm going to talk as though you're on YouTube. So these are all the skills. The first skill is topic selection and execution. That is the skill of picking a topic that is interesting to your specific audience and tying that topic to this specific promise that your show makes. That is a skill. The ability to take an hour long conversation and say, this is the topic of the conversation and this is how I tie it into why people are listening to me is skill number one. That kind of bridges strategy with execution. But I do define it as execution because I've seen podcasters and entrepreneurs who have the right strategy but can't execute topic selection number two is then episode organization. Okay, does the episode make sense? Does it hold attention? Does it deliver value early based on the promise that the episode makes? What I mean by that is in the first five minutes of your podcast episode, are you talking about what you promoted? Are you talking about what you promised? I see it a lot where someone will say, this episode we're gonna talk about X. And then it's a wide ranging conversation where we don't get to X until 40 minutes in. And the truth is nobody gets to 40 minutes because they came for X and that you didn't give them X and they didn't trust that they were going to get X. So episode organization is another skill that is required. Either you as the creator or your editing team has to have that skill next. And what I see as the most important skill right now is your packaging. This is your title and your thumbnail. Your thumbnail must not only have good language that calls out and grabs the attention of your Target audience among 12 other thumbnails that YouTube has hand selected that they are going to be interested in. Yours has to win. And there's two elements of that. Number one, what is the strategy behind the thumbnail? What are the words on there? How is it related to the idea of the episode? And that's number one. Number two is the actual graphic design. Does it look good and smooth? It doesn't have to be complicated, but it's gotta look good and professional. If it looks like somebody who is not a graphic designer threw it together on Canva, that's going to signal that the episode is amateur and it's going to remove any credibility. Those episodes don't get views because YouTube doesn't want to show that stuff because nobody clicks on it. So that's the thumbnail execution. There are entire agencies that just do thumbnail. In fact, I have worked with a thumbnail agency. All they do is strategize and make thumbnails. It's A whole company. Then you pair that with the title. Crafting a good YouTube title from an entire 60 minute episode is another skill. The title must convey one clear idea. Not everything that's covered in the episode, but one clear, specific and interesting idea. There must be curiosity. It must open a loop where people are like, ooh, I want to know what that is. It can't give away the punchline, it can't give away the answer. The meat has to be at the beginning of the title. I see a lot of people who have really long titles and the actual nugget of what the episode is isn't until the second half of the title. So it gets cut off. There's a lot to talk about when it comes to how to get titles right. So titles and thumbnails combined is packaging. And that is a major skill. If you can't package your episodes up well, where it looks professional and the psychology of it is effective, nobody's going to click on your stuff. Then after they click, there is the intro execution, which is separate from the episode execution. In the intro, you must state the problem that the episode will solve. You must make a promise that the episode will keep. You must provide proof as to why this complete stranger of a viewer should listen to the people who are trying to tell them something. And ideally, you lay out a plan for the episode as well. Problem, proof, promise, plan. And guess what? You have to do all of that in 30 to 60 seconds. Not easy. And once again, there are entire agencies. All they do is intros. Literally. They video edit intros. They don't do whole episodes, they just do intros. Next, there's the video editing. Does it actually look good? I kind of touched on this earlier. But does the video look professionally edited? Again, it does not have to be movie theater quality. It doesn't have to be a crazy trailer like diary of a CEO. It doesn't have to be crazy Mr. Beast, dramatic whiz bang stuff. But when text comes on the screen, does it look good? Is it well timed? Are there zooms? Are there jump cuts that aren't super obviously done in Descript? And again, if your editing is not good, it's going to distract people and it removes all credibility. And then finally there's the call to action execution. Have you selected something to CTA that people actually want? Did you put the CTA in the right place? Did you write good CTA copy using a framework like Pain, vision or Solution? Is there a good landing page that has good copy that gets people to actually click the list Goes on and on. Okay, so what do you do? I just listed all these things that have to go right. And I'm just here to tell you the truth, man. Like, I've had people reach out to me and say, hey, man, you're sounding pretty discouraging on Grow the Show. And I'm like, I know, and I don't like that. And I want to be encouraging, but also, I need people to know what they're getting themselves into so they're not wasting their time and their money doing something that they don't want to do. So here's the thing. This is possible for you to do, but you have to look at this reality and understand what it is that you're signing up for. And it doesn't mean you're a bad person if you don't have these skills. It just means you don't have these skills. So what do you do? Well, if you are an entrepreneur who has the resources to get the right people to do these skills, hire somebody to do them. To that note, for the first time in seven years, I'm launching Complete Done for you where the people that I work with just record. And I am responsible for the rest. I am responsible for the titles, the thumbnails, the intros, the editing, everything that we mentioned here. And the reason I say that here is, number one, if you're an entrepreneur who might be interested in such a thing, let me know. Click the link in the show notes. But even if you're not done for you is not easy to do. And I am changing the nature of my business to done for you because we are now in a stage where execution is the problem, and that is what people need help with. I have not offered done for you at this capacity since 2019 and 2020, when I worked with major media companies like Comcast, NBCUniversal, Tom Brady's media company, Religion of Sports, Lululemon, iHeartRadio. Those were several of the clients that I used to have when I offered done full on done for you. And I haven't done that for, like, five or six years because what people needed was strategy and coaching. But that has changed. And so beginning in 2026, my company is shifting to an agency where you just record. We do the rest. I'm gonna be very selective. I'm only taking on one client per week. Again, if that sounds interesting to you, click the link in the show notes and you can learn more about it and be one of the first four clients that we launch with in January. But even if you're not. If you can't afford these things, then what you need to do is, number one, either get help. Good thumbnail designers on upwork charge like 10 bucks a thumbnail, 20 bucks a thumbnail. It's going to be better than what you're making in Canva. Same thing with video editors. You can find super cheap folks on upwork to do this stuff for you. Yes, it's going to cost some money, but you can take all of the time that you're currently spending in Descript and go close another client or two. If you can't hire anybody and you're doing everything yourself, then what you should do is you should publish less frequently. So if you have no resources to get help with your podcast on YouTube, publish twice a month. The first year and a half of the Grow the Show podcast, I only put out two episodes a month because at that point I did not have the resources to execute with the quality that I wanted to execute at on a weekly basis. So I did every other week. And the episodes were so good that they crushed. And it launched this company, it established Grow the Show as an industry expert in podcast growth way back in 2020. And that worked because I was able to have more time to execute at a high level while I was doing everything myself. So that is the message for today. There is a good chance that your show is not growing because of an execution issue. It is because there are a lot of skills that are required to get an episode and a show to take off, and you don't have all of them. And even if you do, you might not be executing those skills to the level that they need to be executed every single week. Because that's the other thing is that your show's only gonna grow if the show is being executed at a high level every single week. Not executed once really well for one week, and then three weeks, it's not so good. And that no, it has to be executed at a high level every single week in order for the show to grow and for you to get the benefits that you started a podcast in order to get. So if you're a solopreneur and you have no ability to get help either improve your skills, you have to get better at graphic design and editing and all that stuff, which I don't recommend, or publish less frequently so you can have more time to do all that stuff well, or so that you can afford to get help with it. If you publish two times a month, it's half the price than if you publish weekly. If you're not a solopreneur and you're an entrepreneur with resources, number one, if you're doing this stuff yourself, stop, get help. Number two, if you are paying team members or employees to do this work and the execution isn't there, then work with an agency who can execute at a high level. Get the show growing with the right execution to prove the strategy, and then hand the show over to your team, give the controls to them while the plane is at altitude, rather than having the newbies try to take the plane off. That's what I'm recommending for some of the folks that I'm talking with now with my new done for you offer. I'm saying, look, I understand that your team wants to do this. Let me and my team do it for 10 episodes. We will get the show launched, we will show you what proper execution looks like, and then we can pass it over to your team. Do you think it's gonna be easier for them to learn how to do this with a show that's not in flight? Or with a show that's already been proven and they're like, with a show that's already been proven, I'm like, yeah, let's rock and roll. Or if you don't wanna do that stuff, just hire me, have me do it, because that's where we're headed. All right, so this has gone way longer than I expected it to. My hope is that this was not discouraging to you. My hope was that this was a reality check so that you understand what you're gotten yourself into and what it takes in order to grow and monetize a podcast. Because I am your podcast growth coach, and that is my job. My name is Kev Michael. This is Grow the Show, and I will see you in the next one.