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Most business owners hire sales reps. This one launched a podcast. Nine months later, he's at 233,000 YouTube subscribers, and his business has more clients than it can handle.
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They give you this little engraved letter, and then you get your play button, but you also get a desk version of the play button that it's got your thing on the back.
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His name is Orlando Wood, and not only is he crushing it on YouTube, but he gets over 15,000 listeners a month on Spotify and regularly charts in the top 50 on Apple. And. And he achieved all of this with a simple podcast setup and while building his company full time. But here's the part that matters most. His podcast now does more for his business than any sales rep ever could. My name is Kev Michael, and this is Grow the Show, the podcast for business owners who want to turn their podcast into a business growth engine. In this episode, Orlando's gonna break down for you how his podcast became his best sales tool. And he'll walk you through how the ROI that he has gotten from his podcast far surpassed anything he could have hoped for. All that right now on Grow the Show. Orlando Wood, welcome to Grow the Show. I'm so excited to have you on today.
B
It's nice to be on. It's. It's nice to be on as a guest. I mean, you've. You've taught me so much about podcasting. Not all of it I put into practice, as you can see by my terrible setup.
A
But.
B
But, yeah, it's. It's nice to be on. It's nice to see you.
A
Yeah, we will get into the setup thing for sure, because so many podcasters and entrepreneurs that I'm talking today are worried about that. They're like, I'm on YouTube. I gotta have a crazy setup like you, Kev. And I'm like, no, no, we'll get there. We'll talk about it. But before we dig into that, can you just bring us back to before we met? Tell us a little bit about what your business is and why you decided to launch a podcast in the first place.
B
You know, my business is. We are an IT consultancy. It's really very simple. I mean, we. We work specifically for creative companies, so we're a Warner Brothers accelerator company. We work for clients like a24 and HBO. Then now we've branched into advertising and then also law. Strangely, I think because we work with ip, we and IP contracts, we sort of grew into law quite sensibly. So, yeah, it's been fantastic. You know, we're an IT And AI consultancy. I think that there's a lot of sensitivity in the creative industries about using these tools, but using them without subjecting yourself to even more copyright theft. I mean, as we know, all of these tools have the original sin of copyright theft at their heart. We got a lot of traction there. I basically, I started sort of looking around and, and seeing like there was some benefit in a podcast. And I actually listened to your podcast and I thought, actually there's a lot of sense in this and there's a lot of people who, luckily, because I've worked in the creative industries my whole life in advertising and film and television, I know a lot of people. But then as well, there were people who I wanted to meet and wanted to speak to or, or people that I had a good relationship with, but we had disconnected and I wanted to have a new relationship with. And that has been really helpful. It's, it's connecting with those people and not always in the very linear of like having him on the podcast and then going, so this is what we do. Can we work together? But much more kind of those people telling me about other people and saying, somebody just said that they were looking for exactly what you do. Let me put you two in touch. And I think for a lot of us who are starting a business and naturally pull back in terms of sales, I was a pretty good salesperson when I was out and about and meeting people at lunches and drinks and, and at the pub, you know, because I worked a lot in London. Now with so much being remote, I mean, even with us having an office, at least 50% of our time is remote and doing sales from a desk on LinkedIn and whatever else. It's very inhuman and it triggers all your worst anxieties about who you are being and how salesy you're being. And it just feels yucky. And some days you feel like it's okay and you're being a bit cheeky and you're feeling yourself, but you can't have a sales process that goes like this. And the podcast has been consistently good. I get to ask serious questions that I give a shit about, you know, and I think that's the other thing. I am naturally curious about what all these people do and how that their work is changing. I get to do something that's less sales, but more marketing, I suppose, but has a. Drives real value to the business and I get to lean on what I think are my better qualities. Not my, my salesmany thing and not my ability to get a hook in a Sales email, but on my actual natural curiosity and interest in their business and their problems.
A
Man, I mean, I couldn't have said it better. Now I'm like, wait a minute, I need to podcast more. And I'm a podcast guy. You sold me. Yeah. So couldn't agree more. And what we like to say here at Grow the show is that marketing and sales is more of a continuum than one or the other. And it's just podcasting just gets you so much farther down the continuum to that purchase point than anything else. Okay, so I remember I was looking back before we chatted at just like, where did we start? It was in April of 2025 that we first linked up.
B
Yeah.
A
And if I. I was.
B
And at that point I think I already had five or six episodes or something.
A
Right.
B
But yeah, so it had started, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't where it is today.
A
Yeah. So when I looked at your onboarding form, it said, how many YouTube subscribers do you have? And it said nine, not 9,009.
B
So, wow.
A
We've come. We've come quite a way since then. But can you just like paint the picture a little bit of. Because I'm just always super curious about what led you to book the call, what led you to take the leap and so bring us back to after those four. What convinced you to get help with it?
B
I think more than anything it's that I've worked in advertising. I got my start in advertising. I've made feature length documentaries. I've made, you know, television and feature films or developed feature films. I, you know, and I actually moved out to L. A because I was working on a feature film for Netflix and then the pandemic killed, unfortunately. But I fundamentally recognize that every piece of media has a purpose of some sort and it has a set of rules. And now you can go about breaking the rules. If you're Yorgos Lanthimos or you're, I mean, or Michel Gondry or whatever else, you can break the rules. And as long as you know them exceptionally well. And I think that what I didn't do is know the rules of this medium. And so I was doing it. I got some good guests. I knew that, like Kate Morrison from Google, Rafe Taylor, the head of contemporary art for Bonhams, like, these are incredible guests. And A, I wanted to live up to the promise of the blessing they were giving of me of their time, but B, I was kind of like, there must be rules to this. There must be rules to making this better and to Be honest. A lot of the things you taught me because I was running a company company at the same time as doing this, a lot of the things you taught me I hadn't even been able to put in practice until literally today. I think today is the first day. We have a 60 second pre roll that's fully edited in our episode that launched a special super bowl episode where we spoke to the chief creative officer of PepsiCo and the head of High Dive Advertising about their Lay's Super bowl spot and all of what happens behind the scenes and the prep for the super first super bowl spot and during the day. Today is the first day. Now that's something you taught me back then. But I didn't have the ability, I didn't have a full time editor. I didn't have, you know, a lot of the infrastructure that now that we're monetized a bit and you know, and the company's doing a lot better like, and we've seen the value of this, we're investing more into it. February 10, 2026 is the first day I was able to realistically implement what you had said would be a good idea back in April and last year.
A
So that's going to highlight what I think will be a theme. Here is the. Is something that you have always carried into this project, which is just get it out there, just get it going. It does not have to be perfect because, you know, you, I have shown some. You have had intros before. Like, it may not be a super crazy reel ahead of time, but you've had an intro where at least it started. And it said, hey, here's what we're talking about. This is what we're going to go into today. And I've shown it as an example to folks.
B
Yeah. Oh, great.
A
The other example that I've shown to folks is your setup. So we talked about this a little.
B
Bit before we started. Oh dear.
A
Tell me so. Yeah, just.
B
And is that when they hang up.
A
On you, they're just like, there's no way in heck I'm working with this guy? Yeah. No, it's. I use the example because I'm like, look, this show is about, this show is about Hollywood and it's about just the ultimate place with crazy production in the world, arguably. And yet this show that's about this topic, it does not require a crazy studio. It is all about the conversation. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about one of the first things that we jumped into when we worked together, which was the name of the Show.
B
Right.
A
So what was. Do you remember what your show was called originally?
B
The Kubrick Labs podcast.
A
Yes. So actually, what is Kubrick?
B
So Kubrick is my. The SaaS product I created with my. With my partner, Vijay Dhawan. Uh, and it's a screenplay management tool. So lots of different studios use it to database and manage their screenplays using AI. The consultancy came out of that. That company runs and is still operational. That software is. Is out there. But clients started asking us to do unique, different tools. We were some of the first AI people they knew. So we got the opportunity to build things for. For great companies. We didn't intend for the whole company to be called Kubrick. That Kubrick started out as a joke between. And then it turned into the company name. But, yes, it's in honor of my favorite director.
A
Why did you change the name and what did you change it to?
B
We changed it to Technically Creative. We workshopped it with you. We had lots of things flying around. I don't know what they were, but Technically Creative, you know, your instinct was, you know, it should do what it says on the tin. And so much of your advice boils down to that. Your intro should do what it says on the tin. Your content after the intro should do what it says on the tin. Both of those should relate to your title. It should do what it says on the tin is if you start futzing with it and go making a promise in your intro that you don't deliver on in the content, you know, your discussion veers too far away. You're sort of. You're not coming good on the promise you're making to your customers, your viewers. So Technically Creative was chosen because it was straightforward. It does what it says on the tin. And we. We went with that, and it's been terrific.
A
So what I'll call out here is that we started working together about nine months ago. You had nine YouTube subscribers. Today, nine months later, you're like, we just now are adding these trailers. We just now separated it out. And in the meantime, all you've done is gotten the show to top 30 on Apple Podcasts, 15 to 20,000 listens a month on Spotify, and over 230,000 subscribers on YouTube. Yeah, unbelievable work. But it's so a testament to you, but also a testament that we don't have to have everything perfect right away and we can later optimize it. So really great job, and congratulations on the success.
B
Thank you very much. It's been surprising, I think I told you just before we started recording it's gotten away from me a couple times and to be honest, it's gotten away from me. But it's also, I'm glad that I wasn't so focused on a lot of the technical elements because listen, there were times where, I mean, I'm running a company and we're growing the company and there are times where we've got to get multiple proposals out in a week and whatever else. And then I've got to do the podcast because we've, we've promised it and it leads to late nights and it leads to mistakes in the upload and whatever else. I mean I did a fuck ups episode. I think it was the last episode of the first season where I said, this is my fuck up, man. Like I'm fucking up in real time. You're seeing it. Audio drops out, mistakes happen. Like, I think that I really wrestled with that. I sort of had to make peace with that because I'm a producer. I recognize like, like, you know, look like right up here, there's glare up there. I can see everything that's wrong with it. But I also am interviewing producers. I mean I interviewed, you know, the guy who was, used to be the chairman of Sony Pictures. I interviewed the Ad Ages, you know, small agency producer of the year. You know, I've interviewed, you know, Jeff Jenkins who produced Keeping up with the Kardashians and Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the single the, the Simple Life. Like way back with, you know, they sort of kicked off the reality TV revolution. Wow. When I give them or when I release and finish a podcast and it's not perfect. As a producer giving it over to producers I deeply respect, that hurts a little bit. And so, but, but giving myself that grace to go, listen, I'm building a company. Like there's only so much I can do here. You know, I have to make peace. But it does mean that as I've moved forward and as we've grown and I have been motivated, highly motivated to get those things sorted out and, and start proving that, that we do know how to get to the next place. I mean like we're recently going to be moving. This is my home, you know, podcast set up. Because so much of the intros and stuff I have to do on like Sunday nights and whatever else. So we don't have this at the office, but we're about to move. I was gonna redo, literally get a production designer in and get, and get a new softbox and all that kind of stuff and literally pay for two days of some People's time to come in and completely redo, you know, my office and then do a build behind me.
A
Wait, is that a YouTube thing behind you that I saw when you moved off to the side?
B
This is our. Oh, yeah, I bought all the things. Yeah, I bought all three of them.
A
That's awesome.
B
So they give you. They give you this little engraved letter, you know, and then you get your play button, but you also get a desk version of the play button where that. It's got your. Your.
A
Yeah, I was gonna say I did not know about the desk version. That's awesome.
B
Oh, yeah, give them. You know, you can. You can sign right in and. And get it.
A
Just to really drive home the point. You are talking about investing heavily in a studio. And I see a lot of folks, and I've done it too, where you tell yourself, let me invest first and then figure out how to grow the show. You grew the show first, and then. And now you're only. Now you're investing in these pieces, which is so the right way to do it. And by the way, these producers that you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm publishing this stuff. That's imperfect. What they see is the play button. They see the followers, they see the reach. So you're good, man. Like, they're not worried about that.
B
Well, I think that the other thing is, if everything is perfect around you, you not being perfect becomes clearer. One of the things that we talked about when I first started this was I started this podcast about a month after I had a mini stroke, which left me unable to speak for about two and a bit hours. It was really terrifying. I was kind of locked in and unable to express myself at all. And then when it came back, words were gone. And so even throughout the interviews, I would have moments where I would stumble or I would be searching for a word, and I'd have to go.
A
You.
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Know, and I'd be kind of lost. Now, granted, I can edit around that, but even in times where I styled it out, it was not great sometimes. And I think that I probably would have beaten myself up more for that. I've hid behind the imperfections and kind of stated publicly that I know they could be better. And I'm a producer and I should know better, but here I am. I'm just trying to get it out. I'm thrilled that I'm still able to speak. I mean, that was the. I think that's why it happened right after that is I was like, well, shit, if I'm gonna lose my Ability to speak. This is something I should do. Really.
A
The big question that everyone is going to be asking when they're listening to this is how the heck did the show grow that fast? How the heck in nine months did we go from nine YouTube followers, nine YouTube subscribers, to 233,000? And on top of that, it's not just YouTube top 30 on Apple, 15 to 20,000 downloads a month on Spotify. That's, that's some true penetration of multiple platforms. So, yeah. What do you attribute to the spread.
B
After care of the guest? That has been huge. You know, we work with people who work at very senior companies dogged about making sure that they know when they're going to receive the rough cut. They approve it beforehand. We make sure that if they have a corporate comms team, it's going to them. We make sure that the guest is super happy and super comfortable with the output. And then we don't ask them to post. When we're coordinating day of or the days after, we say, how can we coordinate best when you are going to support this? Oh, and that is, that was a huge change when we, because we had a lot of people were like, yeah, thanks. And like, we didn't insist on relationships beyond them at their company. Now we do. So we will say, can you please put us in touch with your corporate comms team? And one of them was, especially when we deal with people who are at companies that are public. Kate Morrison, head of production for products and services for Google. Sue Anderson, vice president of creative at Roblox. These are companies that like, if they were to say the wrong thing, potentially it could impact the stock price if it went viral, which, which, you know, we do okay, but we don't go viral, but we do kind of say to people, and even with people like, you know, John Peters, who is very much retired but used to run Sony Pictures, we say to him, who can you be sending this to? Please pass this along. Probably one of the best moments of my life actually was he's friends with Tony Robbins, and Tony Robbins sends a very nice voice note back and a note saying, you know, the person who's doing this is so articulate and did a really great summary of your life and career and I really enjoyed it. And he made mention of a few things later in the episode. So even if he just got his assistant to watch it and write that, I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, Tony Robbins saw my episode or heard my episode. And that guy has been in my ear for so Many of the worst points of my life. The notion that I was in his ear for even a minute thrilled me to no end. But that's sort of what we do. We do push a little bit our guests, we are lucky to have them. And the only thing we really ask, other than their hour of time, is that they push us out a little bit on their socials or through their networks.
A
That had to be so exciting when you found out that it touched Tony Robbins world.
B
It was the coolest. It really was the coolest. And I think that, listen, that's not a testament to me. It's not a testament to anything I'm doing. It's a testament to the great guests we have. But I think that making sure you capitalize off that and. And listen, they're on the podcast, so they want to push it out as well. And who knows, they might be having the same approach avoidance thing that I'm having, where they're like, oh, I don't want to shout about it. But if they get. Sometimes the pressure from you is the thing they're grateful for, because they could say to their friends who are like, oh, you know, or whatever, they can say, oh, yes. Well, they really push me to post it. I usually don't post stuff that's about me, but, you know, they really laid it on thick. And we do lay it on thick, to be fair.
A
It's like the Kristen Wiig character on snl. You're making me sing. Nobody's making a mistake. Yeah, no, no, totally. That's amazing. Okay. That's cool. I was not. I wasn't sure what you were gonna say to that question, and I was definitely not. I didn't think it would be that, but it makes so much sense.
B
Yeah. Ride the coattails of your guests.
A
Right. And we're seeing that more so now since YouTube has introduced collabs. I don't know if you've leveraged that at all, but just last fall, they made it so that two YouTube channels can collab, and it's just led to so much growth for folks on YouTube, particularly in the interview space. So.
B
Great.
A
It's funny because.
B
Can you do that retroactively? I might try to do that with Lays and Pepsi and. And stuff for the. Well, we can. We can talk about that afterwards. We don't need to have a technical wrap about.
A
Well, I know that the listeners are going to go, no, no, no. How do you do it? So essentially, there is a button when you're in the YouTube studio where you can collab and then it gives you a link or. No, no, it has. You choose the channel that you want to collab with and then it sends that person via email a link that they have to click and then approve the collab. And then after that, it shows up on their channel, it shows up to their subscribers. I think think you want to try to do it as soon as publishing, as close to publishing as possible so that chronologically it shows up to subscribers. But even still, there's a lot of benefits that come from being linked to one of these massive channels.
B
Yeah.
A
And where I was going to go with that is like, there was a moment because I've been growing podcasts since 2018, so it's eight years now. There was a moment where like guests just did not share and there was almost no point to even asking them to share or trying to collab with them because it just became so saturated and difficult. But we're seeing a massive resurgence in guests sharing and, you know, it growing on YouTube and stuff. So super, super cool to hear that. That was a huge part. Is there anything else that you'd attribute that you think the audience might want to know to how you grew the show over the past year?
B
I don't know. I mean, I think put a lot of faith. For some reason, we all get very focused on YouTube. Maybe it's because it's our. Ourselves, it's. It's our own archetype of ourselves out there in the world physically and visibly. But to be honest, we put a lot of faith in that. I think that's why we kind of snowballed a little bit on YouTube. The growth on the audio platforms has been very remarkable and interesting because you get better watch time and people are slightly more. YouTube sort of has to be a spoonful of sugar the whole time if you want to keep people. You know, you're just constantly doing hooks and things like that to keep people engaged. Audio, you can give people the medicine a little bit more, which for me, I'm a little bit more cerebral. My intros usually tried to give context to the guest because we are quite broad editorially in the guests that we choose. We. We will have people from film, people from the art world, people from. From television, people from advertising. And because of that, I know that some of my listeners are going to be from the film world listening to something about advertising, like the super bowl in today's episode.
A
Right.
B
And vice versa. So what I like to do is I have a broad amount of subject matter expertise and I research going in to the interview with the guest. And so I like to bring out some of that industry research and give people an understanding of where the industry is. We've got on tomorrow, I'm recording with Ross Ritchie, who was the founder of Boom Studios, which is a incredible independent comic book producer. Helping people understand where comics, which is a publishing, you know, a publishing industry company in 2026.
A
Right.
B
They're under very tight pressure and margins. Helping people understand the context of that, that the digital revolution never really hit comics in the way that it's hit other business businesses. But AI is hitting comics in a very real way. Giving people that understanding of the economics and the reality of it is something I like doing. But it doesn't have a place on YouTube. I do that. Our watch times just didn't. It just didn't bear out that people wanted to watch me say that to camera on the audio. It goes down a tree and I get so many messages of people going, you know, I come into your episodes and I don't know anything about AI and advertising or whatever else. I stay because you give me enough information at the beginning to. So it was hard. It was hard knowing because I was watching it not work on YouTube, but watching it work on audio and then making that decision and going, well, shit, I've got to have a different workflow for each of these things, which on some level is, you know, is more work. You're. You're doing double duty. But the, the rewards that come with it are. Are worth it, I think.
A
Yeah. The way that we talk about that is we say it's like the folks on audio have so much more context and patience. So they have, they tend to have more context on you on what you're talking about. Whereas YouTube, you know, they're. They're half paying attention. It's most, most of the viewers are going to be people that have never heard of you before. So they don't have. Have much context around what we're talking about. And to your point, they really don't have a lot of patience. Was there some point where you intentionally started to try to drive growth on the audio side, or did that happen naturally as you published the show and.
B
Grew it on YouTube classically, I didn't pay attention till we were already doing well. We broke into the top 100 tech podcasts in America on Apple podcasts. Now, tech is a. Arguably, we had a leg up because tech is a lot of those podcasts are a little dry and we bring a little bit of creativity and pizzazz to that. Yeah, we then started paying attention and then looking at the finish rates and things like that. One of the things about YouTube as well, I'll say is with YouTube, I really had to get comfortable with the peaks and troughs of it. I mean, we would put out episodes that would only get 3,000, you know, listeners or watchers and other ones that would go like crazy. So I think that we haven't had a traditional path of like, slow incremental growth. We would have get like our John Papsadera episode. He's the casting director who cast Oppenheimer and Yellowstone and Landman and Superman and the Odyssey, all of Christopher Nolan's films. That episode came out right around the time that Superman was. Was going. It was in production, that's now got 200,000 views. We got a lot of subscribers, and then they kind of dropped off over successive things. So, like, you're having this real approach avoidance thing of being like, oh my God, we got a hit. We get all these subscribers. Isn't this great? And then all those subscribers go.
A
I.
B
Don'T know who your next guest is, but I don't give a shit. And yeah, so you're then watching people go drop off, and you're watching the next video get only 3,000 views, and you're like, oh my God, I'm a failure. A flash in the pan and whatever else.
A
Right.
B
And then at the end of, I think the first season or the second season, we had Rob Minkoff who directed the Lion King, and he was talking about AI and animation and that just hit again and again. We had this big bump. And listen, I don't know if people just forget to unsubscribe, but we had these moments and then some. Like, you know, the John Papsidera episode had another spike a month ago for some reason, and I don't know if it's because the trailer for the Odyssey came out. We changed some of the wording in the SEO where we were kind of like, we were talking about the Odyssey and how he works with Christopher Nolan, and then it got another spike. Audio listeners feel very methodical. It feels the way growth is supposed to feel. I just imagined you'd get this little group of people who actually listen and actually care, and then they'd snowball a little bit. And that. That feels like a much more linear, much more sustainable relationship with the audience.
A
Yeah, that. That checks out entirely. Audio listeners are much more routine. The hard part with an audio listener is getting onto their tiny grocery shelf of shows that they listen to on a Weekly basis. That's the hard part. It grows way slower, but it's so much more powerful. Like it, they're hard fought, but they are among the most loyal and valuable. Whereas on YouTube, it's much quicker to grow and get a show off the ground. But to your point, it's kind of like every single episode is a new attempt to get people to pay attention, which can be exhausting. But again, like, the way that you wound up doing it is exactly what we recommend. Where it's like, look, let's. YouTube has the strongest growth engine. Let's get good at that and start getting attention there and start getting subscribers there. And many times if you just focus 100% on YouTube, get growth there, then turn and look, your audio has grown. It just, it just works out that way. And then you get to a point where you can, okay, now let's flesh this out. Let's consider the two different audiences and how they listen. And that's exactly what you've done. And just once again, without gushing, I'm just so impressed. Congratulations.
B
Thanks, man.
A
Being able to do all that stuff, it's so cool to see.
B
Thank you. Yeah, it's. And then it does snowball as well with guests. I mean, so many of our original guests are people I've known or worked with and I'm very lucky that, you know, they've gone on to do incredible things since we worked together. And now I'm reaching out to new people and they get the metrics of the show. They can see that we are hovering around constantly between the 50 and 30 on the top tech podcasts in America on Apple podcasts. So they can see that that's something. They can check on their phones to see that it's real. They can see the, the follower count on YouTube. It all just validates. And I think that's really great.
A
Awesome. Orlando. Well, this is, this is the unfair essay question at the end of the sats that I totally didn't prepare you for. But if you were. So there are business owners who are listening to this who might have already invested in their podcast. Maybe they've tried some stuff. They haven't seen the growth yet. Having been on the other side of a tremendous year of growth with the show and what it's done for your business. Is there any piece of advice that you would have for them?
B
I don't know. I just think that that zero to one thing is the most important thing. Start, just start. You will not be good at so many parts of it. When I look Back on my first episodes, I had a tonal problem with my intros. I mean, not a problem. I thought they were great at the time. But now, looking back, I now have. When I do an intro, I'm at a certain level that's inviting, interesting, not too much whatever else, but still enthusiastic. I had one, in fact, the John Papsidera episode and Kim Winter, the casting directors of Superman. It sounded good on audio, but the video is me going, what does it mean to cast a performance and cast it beautifully and memorably? Today I sit down. I mean, it was like the real, like, BBC nature documentary version of an intro, you know, Now I look back and I cringe at that. But I thought it was fine at the time. So there are things that you're. You don't even know yet. The things you're gonna be embarrassed about. Right. You couldn't even possibly know.
A
Yeah. So I would actually take that and kind of flip it and say, like, immediately. I think of my first two episodes of my Philadelphia podcast in May of 2018, and how, like, after a year and a half of podcasting, went back and listened to it and was like, oh, my gosh, I sound so bored. Like, it. Like, it's like, how on earth did I think this was good? And I think, like, the message there is, get some feedback from somebody. Does not have to be me. But a lot of times business owners, podcasters are like, I just don't understand why this isn't working. And it's because you just don't understand which parts aren't there yet. Which, in retrospect, you'll look back and be like, oh, of course. But it's just about getting feedback. So, you know, whether it's a coach, whether it's just like, friends or something like that, feedback is everything.
B
I mean, the other advice I would give is get the absolute best guess you can. I know it sounds weird, but. Because obviously they would be right. But I think that you have probably worked with or went to high school with or whatever else, you know, especially in those early episodes. I actually feel bad for some of my early guests because I was so rubbish at it. But. But I do think that you're likely to know somebody, get some people in those early episodes that. But. But try really to get the most senior people you can get. Yet. Some of the people who also taught me how to do it is. Hypercube is a company that's our, you know, one of our parent companies, and they have an energy podcast, and they get the most senior People in the world of energy. And a lot of those people don't get the opportunity to talk on podcasts about what they're. What they do every day, you know, and that drives real business for them, the follower count and everything else. You can be a niche subject, success. And then you get to a place where I reached out to somebody being who I didn't know, being like, gosh, I hope they come on the podcast. And that person said, I'm already a subscriber. I would love to be on the podcast. That was one of my better moments in this whole thing because I was like, oh, my God. Like, I still have that thing of when reaching out to a new person, I'm not sure they're going to want to or going to care or whatever else. That was huge for me, you know, people going, oh, I'm already a subscriber. I already listened. You actually interviewed a friend of mine, so I subscribed back. Then you forget that you're. If you get good people, that network, and again, we make sure that they put it out on their socials. We make sure they tell everybody they know, because then if we accidentally hit one of them up or. What's also happened is that they've said, you know, who you should talk to is my friend over here. The network of people that you're talking to is. Is for me, my greatest asset.
A
Well, Orlando, we are right at time. You've been so generous.
B
Sure. I hope I didn't babble on too much. I hope I was useful.
A
No, no, it was so good, man. This so exceeded what I was hoping for. Really, really. Thank you so much for just. I can't thank you.
B
No, it's. I can't thank you you enough. You really like. And like I said, if you look at today's episode, you will see that I was listening. Back then, I didn't have the ability to, you know, I didn't have the ability to do anything at all just because of the time realities of it. But it stayed in the back of my mind. I kept thinking, we've got to do this. This is important. And as it became possible and as we grew as Kubrick Labs and started having more work than we know what to do with, and we grew and monetized the podcast, I now have the resources. And I also know, assuredly those resources are well spent on the podcast. That's the. That's the key shift thing is you can. You can always waste revenue building a podcast knowing that it's a. It's a funnel, and knowing that it's. It's delivering for the business is.
A
So it'll generate roi, and you can use that ROI to then fund the improvements to. To the show, but get the show growing first before we invest too much. Total. Couldn't agree. Awesome. Well, thank you.
B
Thank you very much. Really enjoy it. And, and, you know, I'm so appreciative of.
A
Of all the.
B
The work.
Host: Kev Michael
Guest: Orlando Wood, Founder of Kubrick Labs and host of the "Technically Creative" podcast
Date: February 17, 2026
Main Theme:
This episode dives into how Orlando Wood leveraged a simple, part-time podcast to drive extraordinary business growth, outpacing the results of traditional sales tactics. Orlando shares how his show grew from a handful of YouTube subscribers to over 230,000, while consistently attracting clients for his IT and AI consultancy — all alongside running his business full-time.
Orlando Wood, founder of Kubrick Labs and now host of the "Technically Creative" podcast, shares the strategy and mindset shifts that turned his side-project podcast into a business growth engine. Kev Michael digs deep into the decisions, mistakes, and learnings that led to explosive audience and business growth — offering a realistic, actionable road map for podcasters seeking real-world ROI.
Quote (Orlando, 03:30):
"I get to ask serious questions that I give a shit about ... It's connecting with people. Not always in the very linear way of 'have them on the podcast, then go, so, this is what we do, can we work together.'"
Quote (Orlando, 07:08):
"A lot of the things you taught me I hadn't even been able to put in practice until literally today... Now that we're monetized — we've seen the value of this — we're investing more into it."
Quote (Kev, 09:54):
"It should do what it says on the tin."
Clear, descriptive titles foster trust and audience retention.
Quote (Orlando, 15:37):
"I started this podcast about a month after I had a mini stroke ... when it came back, words were gone ... so even throughout the interviews, I would have moments where I would stumble ... but here I am, I'm just trying to get it out."
Quote (Orlando, 16:53):
"After care of the guest. That has been huge."
Quote (Orlando, 25:39):
"Audio, you can give people the medicine a little bit more ... My intros usually tried to give context to the guest ... on the audio it goes down a treat."
Quote (Orlando, 36:13):
"Knowing that it's a funnel, and knowing that it's delivering for the business ... you can use that ROI to then fund the improvements to the show."
On Reaching Out by Podcasting:
"For a lot of us who are starting a business and naturally pull back in terms of sales ... the podcast has been consistently good. I get to ask serious questions that I give a shit about ... drives real value to the business."
— Orlando Wood (03:30)
On Getting Started Imperfectly:
"Zero to one thing is the most important thing. Start, just start. You will not be good at so many parts ... Now, looking back, I have [improved] ... but I thought they were great at the time."
— Orlando Wood (30:59)
On Guest Leverage:
_"Ride the coattails of your guests." (20:50)
On Audio vs. Video Listeners:
"Audio listeners feel very methodical. It feels the way growth is supposed to feel ... more linear, more sustainable, more of a relationship."
— Orlando Wood (27:57)
Orlando’s journey proves that starting with authenticity — not perfection — and focusing relentlessly on guest relationships can make podcasting into a highly effective, enjoyable growth channel for your business. His approach dispels myths about needing a high-end setup and shows that real-world traction matters most.
"You can always waste revenue building a podcast. Knowing that it's delivering for the business — that's the key shift." — Orlando Wood (36:13)
Listen for the candid advice, relatable struggles, and evidence-backed growth strategies applicable to both new and seasoned business podcasters.