The Kinda Girl You Bring Home With Podetize CEO, Tracy Hazzard From Better Call Daddy With Reena Friedman Watts

Our parents have an undeniable influence on how we live our life. In this episode, Tracy Hazzard chats with Reena Friedman Watts from Better Call Daddy to share how her relationship with her father poised her to succeed in her career. She shares important lessons from her father that helped her navigate life and business. Tracy also opens up about how she met her husband and their journey to becoming co-founders of several businesses. From making moves in the design space to being one of the leaders in the podcasting arena, Tracy has a lot of insight and wisdom to share when it comes to doing business. Tune in to learn more about Tracy and get tips in business and podcasting along the way.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Our guest, Tracy Hazzard, is a podcasting pro and she wants to make sure her guests feel just as good about the episodes as she does. That’s a lesson that I need to learn. She is hosting and co-hosting five different shows. She’s got over 2,600 episodes and she’s the kind of girl you want to bring home to daddy.

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Tracy, welcome.

How are you?

I’m good. How are you?

I’m good. I’m so excited to talk with you. We keep LinkedIn messaging back and forth. I love that we’re finally talking again.

I love that I have another daddy’s girl on the line.

I was thinking about this. I was intimidated by coming on your show.

I’m intimidated by having you. With your list of accolades, I’m like, “Where do I even start?”

I was like, “Am I the kind of girl you talk to your dad about?” That’s what I was questioning in my head. I guess I’m good. I was always the kind of girl that everybody wanted to bring home to their parents to show that they had nice friends. That was me. I was too nice.

Do you know what is so funny? I’ve had male guests that say something like that. They’re like, “I’m a little worried about what daddy’s going to think.” They’re like, “I don’t have a question for daddy. I’ll just say, ‘Yes, sir.’”

My dad was always the nicest guy. You wanted him at your parties. Listening to his story is so much fun, but afterward, if you were on the side of being the boyfriend, he’s scared you. You are scared of him. I don’t know how he flips that switch. I don’t know how he does it because you don’t see it, but it happens.

When did you bring the first guy home?

I’m sure it was probably one of my high school boyfriends. He was never nice to them. When I brought my husband home or to meet them for the first time because we were at college together, they came to us to meet us. I think that it was one of those things where my dad turned to me and he goes, “Don’t date, Tom,” because we were going to be moving in all together like a big group of us. Six of us were moving into an apartment together. I was like, “Do I tell him it’s already too late or do I wait?”

How did Tom handle that?

I didn’t tell him until a lot later because it would have totally intimidated me, but many years later, he’s still hanging around.

You guys have been together a long time, and you have three daughters. Do you have some daddy’s girls?

My girls are daddy’s girls. There’s no way around it. They would rather have dad do stuff. It’s their thing. They want dad to go play and do this with them and take them into the pool, but bedtime is my time. They want me to tuck them in. They don’t want dad because he’s cranky at night, so they want me because I’ll let them drag it out like kids like to do at night. That’s the only thing they complain about, like, “Mom needs to do this.”

I’m also curious too. Having a strong relationship with your dad, do you think that played into who you picked?

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I said this before to other people. It’s like, “I am so grateful and lucky because I was loved from before I was born.” My dad wanted to have a girl, so he was so happy to have me. From the day I was born, I was totally loved. He drops me off at college, and he cries as he’s leaving me. I met Tom that very day on my first day of college. He did insult me, though. He called me a Valley girl because I’m from California, and that’s a big insult in the ‘80s, and then we became friends. I met him right away.

From that moment on, I’ve also been loved. I have been loved my entire life. That is rare and I’m so grateful for it. I think that knowing what it felt like to be that loved, I needed that again. I don’t think it was finding someone because Tom is not that much like my dad. They’re pretty different in personality and definitely in the way that they look in everything. I didn’t marry my dad, but I married someone who loves me like my dad does, in that unconditional kind of way. That’s powerful.

Also, I heard you say that your dad was the devil’s advocate.

He would argue with us at dinner over dumb stuff. In the back of your mind, you think you’re a kid, but you think, “My dad can’t possibly believe that like girls can’t do this,” or whatever that might be. He was giving me the anti-argument, but he was provoking me to argue and debate with him. We would have debates over dinner over stuff that I thought, “That can’t possibly be as a viewpoint on the world in hindsight,” but at that time, I was fired up about it. I was going to give him a piece of my mind. He taught me how to hold my own.

How has that helped you in business?

I think it’s helped me tremendously. It’s one thing to be argumentative, and it’s another thing to be persuasive. That’s what I learned how to do. I learned over that time that if I got argumentative, angry, and emotional about it, it didn’t work, but if I got persuasive, it would be different. Because he probably didn’t believe the position that he was taking, he was teaching me a lesson. If I’d known he was doing it, I’d be pissed.

Did you ever call his bluff?

At times as I got a little older, I’d be like, “Dad, you don’t think that. You don’t believe women don’t deserve that.” It was always something like that where it was a position on society in some way, shape, or form that he wanted me to be prepared for.

I was going to ask you that too. What did your dad want for you, or did he let you choose?

He did let me choose. We have this story that we tell. We live in a community where basically you go to the school that’s the closest, and there are so many schools. You could drop a pin anywhere and you’d be at somebody else’s school. You cross the street and those people go to a different school. That’s how many schools are around here in Orange County, California.

There is a ton of them. They had built this new middle school and because of the new communities that were coming over there, it wasn’t overpopulated yet. They gave us this choice so that we could go to this new middle school that was being built. We got to go visit it, take a look at it, see what we thought of it, came back, and we got to make a choice.

Do we go to the one that everybody else who was in sixth grade was going to go to, or do we head off to seventh grade and go the distance? There were about five of us in our little community area that ended up choosing the new school. When I came to my dad, I said, “I like to go to this new middle school. I’ve made my decision.” My dad says, “That’s great. We’re going to go. It’s all set.”

I thought they might have a hard time because he had to drive there where I could walk to the other school. I thought they might complain a little. We only had one car, so it was an inconvenience. When he didn’t argue with me, I said, “Dad, if I had chosen to go to the other school, were you going to let me?” He said, “No. You were going to the new school, but I wanted you to feel like you had a choice.” I think that’s probably how most of my life went. He did let me have a choice, but if I had chosen wrong, he would have let me know.

It was a little bit of manipulation.

It was, but I did feel like I had choices. I guess that was good in the end.

Mothers have to figure that out too. I have a really big move coming up. My husband got a new job this week. We’ve been in the same house for almost a decade.

That’s a lot to move.

 

Have you ever designed for something like that?

I am the queen of moving, but that is because we’ve moved frequently enough. We did move to this place that we’re in in the middle of the pandemic. We moved in September 2020 to this place because we needed extra room for the girls to be in school. They ended up only in school for one more month virtually and they went live to school after that.

We then had to cart them and drive them to the school because the other school they were going to was now two miles away. It wasn’t far or anything, but we now had to figure out the logistics of driving, which we thought we wouldn’t. We need extra space because we couldn’t be on Zoom all the time and then have the kids on Zoom too in the same open space that we had.

We had to figure this out. We’ve got a new place that had more segregated rooms where we could have a home office, and the kids could have a classroom, but we did that. We moved in 5 days and I had us unpacked in 7. We’ve done a lot of those where we moved a lot over time. I have a system for it. All I can say is that the system is to purge on the other side. The problem that we get into is that we don’t know what’s going to fit where or where it’s going to go in the new place.

People think, “I should clean house so that I move less stuff.” There is a school of thought if you’re going to decrease by a whole room of stuff, then you save money in packing and moving and all of that. You’re not going to save money on movers cleaning out some kitchen drawers. It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to do enough in your closet and drawers to decrease the cost of moving. Instead, pack everything, and as you’re putting it away, toss, recycle, and do it on that side, you’re going to save yourself a lot of time and energy because you also don’t know where it’s going to go. You’re going to find stuff and go, “That doesn’t fit, so I guess I don’t need it as bad as I thought.”

I could do that in my closet.

The second thing that I do is I always do the kitchen first because it makes me feel more settled in. You can have meals. You don’t feel like you’re living out of a box and I let the girls do their own rooms. That’s also something. I let them do the first part of their own rooms, and I’ll come in and finish up the closet and stuff. Kitchen and bathrooms first, then you’ve got your essentials covered, and then you work on it. My bedroom is usually the last one.

Who did all of that?

It was always me. I organize it. I do it. Tom takes care of the logistics. He gets the guys there and the truck moving. You deal with that part of it, but I will make that they know what they’re moving, where they’re moving it, and how it’s going to go. The organization of that is something that I’ll take care of. We’ve done it so many times that it does feel you’re capable of it.

A part of it is you have this overwhelming, “Can I handle this?” You can handle it when you’ve done it again and again. We’ve done a lot in our marriage already. We’re in South Carolina, Michigan, Rhode Island, New York State, and Upstate California up in the Bay Area, and then down here. We’ve lived in five houses, but three areas in the Southern California area.

What has prompted all of those moves?

Usually, it was work or new babies. I had a whole second set of babies. My oldest is 27 and my younger 2 are turning 13 and 8 in 2022. There’s a big age gap in there, so our life changed all of a sudden in the middle of everything.

I respect that so much and can relate to that as well. My oldest is 13 and my youngest is 3 in 2022. I have one entering high school, one entering middle school, one in elementary school, and one in preschool.

You’re going to find now that your high schooler and your toddler, you’re going to have the same conversation. That’s what I discovered. My older daughter was fourteen when I had the baby. They started 16 and 2 at the same time. You would have this argument over the shoes that they’re wearing. Are those appropriate for the weather? I had the conversation literally on the same day with the 16-year-old and a 2-year-old. I remember thinking to myself, “I had no idea their brains were like this.”

Sometimes their behavior is similar. I do feel like you can learn a lot from beginnings. What have you learned from all of those moves besides how to move?

We moved a bit when I was younger, too, as a kid. My dad was on job assignments. We lived in South Africa at the height of Apartheid from 1978 to ‘80. We were right in there at that time period, and then we would come back, go to a different school, and things like that. What it did was inherently make me flexible but also make me less concerned about needing people to like me. I didn’t need it. I was good on my own, being the new girl, self-sufficient, and making my way. You know how when your kids want to smother the cats and dogs, and the cats and dogs want nothing to do with it. They leave and they’re like, “No way.”

You were like, “If you just sit there, the one person who doesn’t love cats, the cats are all over.” That’s how I was as a kid. I was that kid who would be like, “It’s okay. You don’t have to love me, but I’m good with that.” I would end up with tons of friends. It was in that mode of, “I don’t have to have everybody like me make me more likable in the end.” I learned that it was a great way. It was like, “I can be confident and self-sufficient.” That’s going to be attractive at the end of the day. It’s going to make it so easier to make friends. There’s a power in that.

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What I learned at this beginning stage of everything is nothing new daunts me either because new or the beginning is just a stage. You got to go through that. Everybody has to go through that. Everybody’s new at something at some point. I try to teach my girls that. It’s like, “Everyone is new at learning to do something. Whether or not you want to give it all that it needs to become an expert or you’re going to get through that beginning stage and go, ‘I got a little competence in this. It was fun. I didn’t love it.’” That’s okay too.

What are some things that you’ve tried that weren’t for you?

Skiing. My husband’s family grew up on skis. I come into it as 18 or 20 years old, and I’m on skis. The family is off on major slopes and I’m taking lessons at some bunny slopes. It was never fun for me and I said, “I could get good at this over the years,” but we ski once or twice a year. It’s not enough to get expertise in it, but I’m not having any fun being all alone over here. I just stopped it. I said, “I’m not going to do this. I rather sit in the lodge and read a book.” My daughters have been on skis since they were potty-trained too. They would ski circles around me and I’m not up for it.

I have to say that now that my mother-in-law and some of the people are getting a little bit older, they’re slowing down in the skiing. I might have caught up and been fun, but I would have spent twenty years with no one to ski with. That was a perfect example of something like, “I tried it. It was fun but it was not something I’m ever going to get good enough to enjoy with everybody else.”

That makes sense. I also am curious, how did you meet Tom?

Besides him insulting me on the first day of school, his roommate, the man who eventually became the best man at our wedding, we’re standing next to each other at a concert the first week of school. They were together, so I met him again in person there. His roommate, Tom, and I have all been friends and there’s a group of us that have been friends for many years.

We hit it off and enjoyed it. We started standing next to each other and we started having a conversation. We became friends. I had another boyfriend and he had another girlfriend. He would drive two and a half hours to go home to New York State to meet up with his girlfriend on weekends. It was in April of our freshman year that I broke up with my boyfriend.

He broke up with his girlfriend and came back to school from spring break. He said, “Do you want to go to the RISD Farm?” It’s not a farm. It’s more like a grassy area. There is a farmhouse on it, but it’s not a farm. You’re really at Narragansett Beach in Rhode Island. He took me there and he brought his guitar. He said, “I think we should start seeing each other.”

I said, “We’re friends and this would be a really bad idea because then we wouldn’t be friends anymore when this ends.” He goes, “What makes you think it’s going to end?” I go, “What makes you think it’s not going to end?” He’s like, “I’m sure.” That’s how confident he was. We started dating in secret. We didn’t want our friends to know because we thought it would make everybody uncomfortable until we were sure this thing was going to go. Finally, by the end of our freshman year, we told everybody.

It’s like a workplace relationship.

It was like that because when you’re living in a dorm altogether, it’s a big deal. We did need that very first day. He called me a Valley girl and insulted me and that kind of thing.

You guys have grown up together. Did you study the same things? You have so much in common. You’ve designed products together. You’ve done business together. You now do Podetize together.

We didn’t study the same thing. I studied Textile Design and he studied Industrial Design, which is product and furniture combined together, but textiles and furniture go hand in hand. It’s like colors, materials, and finishes go hand in hand with product design. We were always working with industrial designers in some capacity. It got to the point where I thought I was going to go down this career path. I did for a while where I worked for Herman Miller, who invented the Aeron chair and all the cubicles that we know and love in office spaces. I worked with them and it was an amazing company. I worked with Milliken and they designed probably the most textiles you’ve ever bought in the world.

I had those great experiences, but we had a chance to do our first business together. I realized that I could do something that I felt I could be good at, which was the business side of things. It was going to give me the opportunity to do that, and Tom was like, “I don’t want to do the business side. I’d like to be an entrepreneur. I’d like to have a business and the autonomy of that for my creative side, but I don’t want to run a business.” It worked out great that in the end, I run the business, handle that vision, finance, and all of those pieces of everything we do. He handles the tech and the creative side of it. We do the creative and innovation together. That’s a co-creation standpoint.

When did you realize that you have that ability?

I always knew I did. I never thought that I wanted to go and be a designer forever. I went out into the design world and I enjoyed the presentations to clients. I enjoyed the selling aspect and figuring out, is this going to be cost-effective and can this be sustainable? What’s the green message that goes along with this and can we make it so that it has less environmental impact? Thinking about the big picture things was something that I loved about it and so much of the job was not getting to do that.

I found it when we both went out on our own and consulted because we had a consulting business for almost fifteen years. We would consult and design products for other people. We would have an expanded set of services that most people didn’t provide because if we stayed in this narrow creative only designing what you’re going to see, then it wasn’t going to succeed. We found that the more holistic and more business view of things was a benefit to our clients and us. We had more successful products that way.

 

We got to do what we both love to do and do it together, so it became this great vibe together. Also, the other thing is you have a great shorthand. That’s what I think. When you trust someone implicitly and you have a partnership together, you’re on the same page with the path in life. You’re married to your business partner, whether you like it or not because your fates are tied together. When you’re married and you’re on the same path, it’s better.

We found that to be the case. We didn’t have to argue about the path of the company or what was going to happen because we both knew that in the end, the whole goal was to make sure that our lives benefited. We both get what we want out of it because that’s where we’re all going together. That worked out well for us. It made an easy choice to work together, but for those people who are like, “How do you work with your spouse?” It wasn’t always easy. There were arguments in the early days, but now, sometimes we don’t see each other all day long. I took a break before this interview to go check in with him and see how he was doing or what was going on.

Our kids are on spring break, and I’m like, “Where are they?” It’s because I’ve been in my office doing my thing for the whole time and I didn’t even know they were gone. They were off at play dates. He took care of all of that. We have this nice like, “Whoever is available is going to take care of the business or the house.” Whatever needs to be done, we can dovetail perfectly together, but we don’t have to work together and don’t do the same job. It’s not like we’re job-splitting. I live in my element and he works in his element, and it’s great.

Did you have any grandparents that did that or parents? Is it in your blood?

Not really in mine. Maybe more in Tom’s than in mine. My mom and my grandma, all of them were stay at home. My mom is creative. My mom has an art business now. She, in fact, has a big gallery opening in Laguna Beach. She’s an artist. She’s got her stuff on Instagram all the time and things like that. She’s amazing, but she’s been doing that our whole life. The creativity has always been there and the creative spirit, but on the business side of it, both my grandfathers had their own businesses.

One of them had owned bars and repaired jukeboxes in New England. The other one built brick walls and chimneys and worked for the Parks and Rec. He did all of these big builds and construction projects. That’s where my dad got his start in engineering construction and that side of things. They had their businesses, but it was certainly not something that was shared with me in the way that I would be. I would even know that they were running a business and how to run it. I didn’t get any mentorship there. Tom’s family, I think there’s been a little bit more creativity, autonomy, and this entrepreneurial spirit. He probably had a little more exposure to it than I did.

You did learn how to conduct a meeting with your dad.

I mostly learned from watching my dad. My dad was moving up here, and he worked for a large engineering construction company called Fluor Corporation and Fluor Daniel eventually. They build the Alaska pipeline. They built a pipeline in South Africa. That’s why we were there. He’s worked for these major companies that do these things, and he was always championing women in his company.

He started a project management group that would train women to be part of project management. If you weren’t in project manager, you couldn’t move up into leadership within the company because you wouldn’t have managed a big enough project. He created this path for training education, mentoring, and the whole thing. Nobody knew he did it or what was going on. None of us understood it until he retired.

There were all these women at his retirement party and they were saying, “I have my career, thanks to your dad because your dad started this program. This is what happened.” I think he was very disappointed because none of his daughters wanted to become engineers, but he figured that he was the dad of girls. Maybe he should champion women within his organization, and he did that.

All along, I think he was teaching me that. He used to say things like, “When you hold a meeting or anything, you have to have three things.” I’d be like, “Three things, like what?” He’s like, “You’re going to have three takeaways at any meeting. That’s what you’re going to do.” I use that all the time. When I do an interview, I’ll have three things I want to cover or the three things on my recap.

If anybody asked me to recap what I said, I’ll be like, “I’ll pick the three things.” I didn’t know why and I never asked, but this is the kind of wisdom he leaves me with and I’m like, “I’ll use it.” I told this story at an event and someone came up to me, and he said, “I used to run all of the global expansion for Denny’s. The reason why leaders only give three things is that those three things might end up 3,000 things on the to-do list of the person at the bottom.” You can’t go through and give out too many things to focus on because they can’t get all the rest of it accomplished. It’s a big organizational move, but it’s also a good memory move.

Most people can’t remember more than three things. It works out anyway but those kinds of things and stuff like you can’t pack more than you can carry are the wisdom that my dad used to drop at the dinner table. I thought it was a rule in our house that if we wanted to go on a trip, we had to carry our own stuff. I realized later in life, as I’m traveling on business, watching some of the guys who I’m traveling with struggling to get their suitcases into the overhead compartment. I’m like, “Mine is ready because I can carry less than you, so I can get it in there.” It’s a handy thing to have learned.

That’s cool that he was a proponent of women. I also heard that you have something called a Covert Feminine Design that you’ve coined.

We were working with this great publicist at one point and that’s what she said. She loved the way that we called it that. What we would do is we would design products that women would like, but the problem was that no one wanted to. Unless you wanted to talk about doing October Breast Cancer Awareness Month and everything is pink, you didn’t talk about designing for women, which is such a mistake. 86% or more products bought and sold are influenced by women in every product category. If we think about that, it’s like, “Why weren’t we designing to what women wanted?”

They’re going to make the decision anyway. Even if the product is not for them, they’re still making a choice. If we design it to appeal to them, it makes more sense. That’s the majority, so why wouldn’t we do it? This came across when we were designing office chairs. We designed over 800 office chair designs for Costco, Walmart, Target, Staples, and Office Depot OfficeMax. You name it.

When we were designing these chairs, the default was 6-foot male. That’s the default ergonomic profile of an office chair, but women buy more office chairs out of Staples, Costco, or places like that than men do. We couldn’t tell the buyers over there that you’re wrong. It shouldn’t be designed like this. We would design these features and say that these are the covertly feminine design in there, meaning that we hid them in. We put those features in there and wouldn’t talk about them unless somebody asked us specifically about them.

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What happened was when we designed something that appeals to women, it fits more men because all of a sudden, not every man is 6-foot. It’s not going to work for them. What we designed were things like gasless that go lower than they would normally go, but that means they also go higher than they normally go. That meant that they had a broader range and could fit larger men and smaller women. We would do stuff and feature little things like that. The choices that get made are usually made by the person doing the design work.

When our products are designed over at an Asian factory, that’s why they don’t fit us in the US. We complain all the time. We’re like, “The sizing’s all off to things.” They don’t fit us because we are not the profile of the people designing anymore. They’re not being designed here in the US. Taking that back and also having a woman involved in the process allowed us to see things that weren’t being seen by others. In doing so, our chairs and products sold better. Men loved them because they would work for them, too, in a better way.

Do you think that manufacturing is going to come back to America?

I don’t think it’s going to come back in an old-school way. It’s not the way we progressed here, but I think there’s so much that can. We started podcasting on 3D printing because we believe that an on-demand manufacturing model or mass-customized model is a great way to go. It’s going to be fantastic for the future of manufacturing.

I think that there are places and things that could happen. I would love to see furniture manufacturing come back to the US. We have the most trees in various wood types. Now, it’s a specific wood type, but we have them here. We ship them to other countries to make furniture. Why do that? Let’s lower our environmental footprint and make products that are smart for the regions, but we do have to think about this.

Look at what’s going on in Ukraine and other areas. They are rich in nickel and now we’re having all kinds of nickel product problems. Nickels as a source and in all kinds of weaponry. They’re having a shortage of weapons in Russia because Ukraine provides the nickel that goes into these things. When thinking about the way things are sourced and where they go, it has to have a big global outlook to it. I’ve always been a proponent of that. We have worked a long time in Asia and other manufacturing areas like Canada, Europe, and all kinds of places because there are areas of expertise and materials that belong there.

Have you visited abroad?

Yeah. When I worked for Herman Miller, we used to travel to all the factories, and then before that I worked in the automotive industry. We would go and visit the automotive manufacturers in Germany and other places like that. There have been all kinds of places that I’ve gotten to go. Most of the time that I was designing furniture, most of those pieces of furniture were made over in Asia in various places. They might be in Malaysia or China.

I want to know about that. You’ve got to tell me what that was like.

It’s amazingly enriching to your life to see how they work, how these factories run, to see what their drivers are, and let them ask you questions. I was traveling there at the height of the Obama administration. He had just gotten elected at the time that I was doing most of my travel over there. They would be like, “What is that like to have a president like that?” They wanted to know because they were getting no information. It was that tipping point where in China, their affluence was coming up in terms of their middle-class building. If you had a phone or a car, there were more and more of them that had that. You were starting to see this emergence of outside influences that hadn’t been there before.

It changed a lot of what happened over the decade that I did intensive travel there, but they want to please their clients, be a part of the world economy and do right by everyone. Can they always do that? No. Are there cultural things that you just don’t understand? I had it explained to me by someone in China once saying that China deals in circles. The core circle in China is China because it’s communist. China comes first before your family, but then it’s your family outside of that and then your extension to your city. It has an extension of how that works in terms of its priority. We’re not that different here.

I would say we don’t maybe put the US at our primary. Not that we aren’t Patriots in general, but our core family is our core. That’s the independence of Americans, but that’s not that different. What they said was that when choices have to get made and you’re on the outside circles, they will sacrifice you because they have to protect the core. It’s their mission, their job, and what they need to do. How you get into the core is by being a part of the family. I used to show up. By the mere fact that I showed up and visited the factory, I was better than their other clients, who would just email purchase orders or email in their requests.

When things went wrong, I was not in the core family, but I was in enough of the outer circle to be able to be one could work with them. When material prices were going up, we needed to do price increases. We had the ability to negotiate with the factories and the people we worked with because they were like, “If Tracy is saying that this is the price we need to hit, then this is what we need to do. She’s not trying to screw us. She’s trying to make sure that I keep the business. I need to play ball.”

How we would go about doing it is we would build this relationship, and then you start to understand, “How can we make this win for everybody?” Driving prices down is not a win for anyone. We’re seeing that right now. There are things that are so rock bottom pricing that they will never be able to be made here in the US without a tremendous price increase, and that’s okay. That’s what we may have to accept as consumers, but try telling the consumers that. We flip out when prices go up on anything.

We all have to participate in that global economy shift if we want it to recentralize. I don’t think we’re going to be that accommodating. I am thinking about some things we will and it will make more economic sense, like shipping a bunch of wood is expensive. It’s big, expensive, and we don’t need to be doing that. It’s not environmentally friendly, so the actual cost of everything is higher than the dollar value of what we’re making. That’s when it’s going to make sense.

How did you incorporate 3D printing into podcasting?

It seems illogical because 3D printing is a visual thing. There’s a picture of Tom and me together. There’s a tie that he 3D printed and it looks cool and textual, but when you touch it, it’s plastic. People would come up to it, and it makes this cool sound and everything. We designed a bunch of products, and it was so hard to design for 3D printing. We’ve been designing for twenty years prior to that. We said, “If we’re having trouble designing for this, then other people are going to have trouble. How can we be of best of service?”

 

The reality is that when we started podcasting, live streaming wasn’t a thing. Barely anybody did it. We could YouTube, but we didn’t want to take the time to start a full-on YouTube channel. Instead, what we would do is we would talk about our process. We’d interview people. We give ideas out. We talk about designing theory sometimes and about the business of design. It got me an Inc. column. By having the business of design as a topic area, I got to write a column on innovation and design and talk about nitty-gritty things like how you priced creative services.

That all came about from what we did and the show was easier to do. We would do these short little video clips that would show how something is printing on our printer or what the Instagram photos of what it turned out before and after and things like that. That’s how we did it in the beginning because it was easier and podcasting was simpler to edit and cheaper. Everything about it was great because we designed for these large companies like Martha Stewart Living and other people who were in these retailers.

We didn’t have a list of clients or a list of followers. Nobody knew who we were. We were ghost designers whose names were not even on the book. That’s where we lived and worked. Everyone was hidden from us. We said, “What can we do? Could we build an audience over here and then maybe with 3D print products, they will come to us for designs in the future?” That was our idea that we would have a 3D print design business. I’m so glad we didn’t start the business and see if people would come because they didn’t want it. Nobody wanted 3D print products like that.

They wanted to learn how to do it themselves. That was the side. It was too early in that stage. Now, we make 3D print products that you don’t even know are 3D printed. I have my mic block or mic flag, which has my logo on it. It is 3D printed. We don’t make these in bulk. We make a few hundred of them at a time. We print them on our printer here, we send them to clients, and we use them for ourselves.

There are products out there that you’re seeing in that way, but you’re not seeing it full-on. If we’d gone into business instead of going into information services, we would have probably lost a lot of money. Instead, we found a whole new business and that’s what happened because we went from having zero on that email list to having 100,000 followers a month on the 3D Printing Podcast and having Hewlett-Packard as a sponsor. It cascaded into a great run. We did 655 episodes or something like that of the show and then we stopped. I’m like, “I can’t talk about 3D printing anymore. I think I’m successful,” but I have new shows.

How many shows do you have now? Four and you’ve also launched over 350 podcasts for other people.

We’ve launched over 1,000 for everybody else, but we usually have 350 active at any given time. They’re still producing and doing stuff. We launched eight shows total between the two of us. I’ve launched 7 of those 8. There’s only one that I wasn’t on. We launched a new show every single year to see how hard it is for our clients. That’s our model of doing business.

With Podetize, we wanted to make sure that the clients were getting the best information like what’s working, what’s not working, and how we can advise them. We don’t keep the shows on consistently. Right now, I do have four that are ongoing. I have The Binge Factor, Feed Your Brand, and I have a new one that is for our investors because we’re working on an investment campaign. The investors have a private one, and that’s been interesting because I’m testing out how you do a private podcast and make sure that everybody shows up to it and downloads it.

How do you make sure that your community actually accesses it and gets it? It’s more challenging than you think. You’re like, “I’m going to put it out there and they’re going to consume it,” and then they don’t. You’re like, “I think we have 200 investors and we’d only even have 50 of them listening to the podcast. How do we increase that?” That’s going to be our challenge. I love taking on a new challenge with the show. The other one that we have is Product Launch Hazzards, which we still do like an occasional update episode on, but we don’t do it every day.

I don’t even know how you do that on top of being a mom and a wife.

It is my day job. My job is podcasting, so if I didn’t podcast as a part of that job, then we would be the shoemaker’s children. We have to put ourselves out there and use our own product. When we don’t, I think that’s where things go wrong in the long run. When you get out of touch with your brand, with your services, with what you’re doing, and you’re not willing to use them yourself or you’re no longer finding them useful, that’s where your company’s going to fail.

When companies get big, that’s when the problem happens. We have over 108 employees around the world, and we have a dozen of them that are working on podcasts right now. I love that we have that. They’re not all getting them out there. They’re not getting launched as quickly as they want them to, but we have about five of them that are launched at this point out of the dozen, but we made it a part of their employee benefits.

They get a podcast as a part of that. They’re able to come in and consume our services from the viewpoint of having been on the other side. It’s interesting because they’re seeing ways to improve things, innovate, and make other people’s areas that touch theirs work better. I love that we’re finally starting to make that happen.

Have they given you feedback from that experience? What do they say?

Some of them are like, “I feel like the process is too slow. It should be faster.” I’ve been saying all along, “I think we should set up shows faster. Why aren’t we?” Now they’re starting to see like, “Where could we shave off time? Where can we improve things?” My teenage daughter and a friend are starting a show. I told them I wanted them to go through the whole onboarding process just like a regular client or adult and tell me what they don’t understand. I’m going to create an onboarding process just for kids because we set in a kid’s price point or a student price point for our products for our hosting services.

She’s coming in with this viewpoint that she’s going to help us finesse the onboarding and process. She was like, “What’s a URL and why do we need one?” I was like, “You’re an internet child and you don’t know what a URL is?” She was like, “I know the term, but I don’t understand why you’re asking me my URL. I don’t have a URL. I have an Instagram.”

I was like, “Because we’re so business-podcast focused, we didn’t think about the fact that they may not want a business site. They may not have a website for their podcasts.” How can we help them understand the power of that? How can we make it simple for them? Also, how can we tell them that you don’t need that? If you don’t want it, you can use your Instagram. That was great learning. I do love that. Those are the little details of things that you’re getting clarification on.

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I love that your daughter is inspired by your work. I think you had another daughter, too, that was into 3D printing, right?

It’s the same one. She’s done 3D printing.

She likes everything you do.

The thing is that she’s very creative. She likes to try and make things. She’s big in Minecraft and that geeky side of things. She’s going to be like, “Mom, if you called me geeky on air, my friends are going to find out.” I’m like, “Really? I don’t think they listen to Better Call Daddy. I hope they don’t. They might be a little young for it.” She’s creative and she loves to do things, but I was surprised she wanted to do the podcast. I thought that it wasn’t her thing, but she had had a YouTube channel for a while.

What’s her podcast going to be on?

Her podcast is called Art School Insiders because they go to the School of Arts here in Orange County. They wanted to talk about how different art school is. I think those of us of this older generation had the picture of fame, and there is a lot of that. It’s a lot like that.

I went to a youth performing arts school.

Did you? You know it’s different, right?

It was such an amazing experience and it’s what led me to work in a creative field.

It’s intense. When you go to art college, you go to school all day long. That’s what she has. They have conservatories that are into the afternoons and evenings, and then they have rehearsals. She’s only in seventh grade so, in the last year of school here, she has gotten so many skills in organization and all kinds of things in order to fit in all these extracurricular activities that they’ve got as a part of the school. She’s got time for friends. All of that is going on. I do think there’s something really interesting there, but that’s what they decided to call it, Art School Insiders. It’s probably going to take until summer to launch because they’re still in school, but it’ll get out there.

What do you think about that SEO-wise?

I like it. Because it’s a localized thing, some of those local podcasts do a lot better than you think and that is because Google rewards that. If we are saying Orange County, California constantly, it’s going to start serving it up to all people who are local to Irvine or Orange County, California. It’s something that’s going to happen regularly. I think it’s so interesting to watch the models of those podcasts succeed. We have chiropractors who do well in their region because of that.

I’m glad that we transitioned to podcasts because that is your jam, and I have a lot of questions from my audience, which I’m sure you get all the time. I heard you on Marion Abrams’ podcast asking all of these things. Since you’re into the rule of threes, I’ll let you pick three. As a podcast agency owner, and somebody who has launched thousands of podcasts, the questions that I, as a small agency and I’m always asked are, what’s the way to grow and monetize? How do you find quality guests with the recording software? All of the materials involved, topics for shows, and here’s a creative one. I like this. If you have a stale podcast, should you go through a rebrand? Any ideas around that? I think that might be a good one for you.

I’m going to give us a talk at the Outlier Podcast Festival in Austin on money-ball podcasting because I think that is the way we have to approach podcasting. It is with this money ball mindset that understanding where the real stats and what matters. Also, the fact that it might be different based on positions. A pitcher has to have a particular statistics area that they watch to see if they’re going to be a sustainable good investment.

Podcasts are the same way in different niches. They have different areas and things that are going to make them sing. That’s what I was starting to understand where that is for you make sense rather than saying globally for everybody. This is where people make money because less than 2% of all the 2.5 million shows make any money on their show from advertisements. It’s not going to be where the money is, so let’s look at where it can be for you. That’s where I like to dial that in.

As far as rebranding goes, I love that topic. I change my show and every year, I take a look at it. In fact, I was talking about this with my clients. We were talking about having a review point for things that you do. I’d like a 6-month review point because if we can review at 6 months, it gives you enough time. If you’ll be about 25 episodes in if you’re doing a weekly show, it gives you enough time to say, “What’s working and what’s not working,” but make a little tweak and go another six months. Now, take a look and say, “If the show is not right for me or for the audience that I’ve drawn in, it’s time for a rebrand.”

If it’s wrong on all fronts, I don’t like the audience that I’ve attracted for some reason. I don’t want to talk to this audience anymore and I don’t love the show, so I don’t want to keep doing the show anymore. Let’s start a new show. That’s the time to scrap it and start all over again. If your audience is still something that you want to connect with or love, change the show.

 

I changed the show for clients. We do it on the fly all the time. They come in and I’ll look at it. I’ll be like, “I think you should change your cover art,” and they’re like, “I can do that.” “Of course, you can.” That’s the great thing about RSS feeds and dynamic podcasting. It’s flexible. Go ahead and change it. This is not written in stone.

If anyone thinks that your website is mistaken as well, your website is dynamic. It will shift and change over time. It’s going to rank differently now than it will tomorrow if you make changes to it, so you should always be updating it or changing it. Why should your podcast be any different than all of those things? We desire change nowadays.

People are resistant to change, but we desire newness in our feeds, and a podcast is part of that. We want newness in our Instagram. We don’t want to see the same thing all the time. If we see the same thing, we’re like out of there. We’ve seen it and done it. It’s old. We want that newness happening. If you’re not fresh anymore and you’re not feeling it, your audience isn’t either and you’re not being attractive to new people.

I want to know what newness you’re bringing in that.

I always try to bring new things. Right now, my hot thing is and I took a photo of it. I’d show it here, except that this camera that I have only focused on my eyes. Every time I hold an object in there, I haven’t figured out how to get it to focus on the object. I can’t hold my phone up here, but I will send Reena this image so that she can do it.

I took a picture in the car. Now, if you’ve noticed lately if you have SiriusXM or some kind of radio station that shows album covers and other things, they’re starting to create creative art images that are not the original single album cover that belongs to it. They’re creating individual episode ones. We’ve got episode art. Why not use it?

You’re allowed to put a different image in for every single episode that you do. We create them for our clients already, and we’re not using them. We decided that we would do that and what it does is create this dynamic of, “Which episode am I on if I’m binge-listening to a podcast in the car?” You’re like, “I’m on the next one because the image is slightly different. I can see some graphic that is reinforcing the topic.”

It’s making it more engaging and exciting, both on social media when I’m sharing it, but it’s also doing it in how it’s being played and used as well. My next thing is to start to change our standard operating procedure on everybody’s show but I always start with mine first and like, “Make it work and figure out what’s going to go wrong. If it is not going to work this way, then go from there.”

Customizing the shows and getting them to that place, there was so much more available than when we started our shows way back when. I’d say if you’re getting to that point where your show is stale, there are probably new things you didn’t even know could happen. The next thing is also to get an audit. Get some outside eyes and ears on your show. Reena, you’ve been doing this a long time. You have some expertise in this area.

When you listen to a show and you check someone out, you look at that and you go, “They could be doing this better and differently,” but there are also tech things that we do all the time when we do audits of shows. We do probably 10 to 12 audits a week easily for people. We’ll audit a show and tell them, “You have 4,000 characters you could be used for description. You’re keeping more people from finding you because you’re not using enough keywords.” They’re like, “I got to write 4,000 characters.” That’s not easy, but I can make that easy for you. Using that is going to change overnight how much you get served up. It’s technical things like that. When we first started, it was 400 characters. It wasn’t 4,000.

You should know the right keywords. I know there are different sites that you can go to see which words rank higher. Do you have any recommendations there or not really?

I don’t like to use them for podcasting. We use them for episodes and topic planning. That’s different for the topic planning side, but for a podcast show itself, it needs to be authentic to you and to how you’re doing it. What we would have our clients do is record it. If you’re recording it, you’re more likely to use words that are mainstream. You’re less likely to use too much lingo that’s your own lingo unless that’s what you’re going for.

We called our 3D print podcast WTFFF?! and the FFF stood for Fused Filament Fabrication. We spelled that out in our description and we called it 3D printing in our description. We did stuff like that but using that FFF was a geeky attractor. We want to have those things that you would use, have it be friendly and cool. Have those things happen and have associations. Better Call Daddy has great associations because there are lots of other shows with daddy in them and they’re very popular.

WTF was popular. Marc Maron had just had Obama on when we started our show. That was popular as well. It helped us show up in search. There were some strategies there that you wouldn’t get if you were going in straight for that keyword strategy. We’d keep it too boring and simple. By recording it, transcribing it, and then rewriting it to get it to 4,000 and to get it to look right, we’re encouraging those mainstream terms and you will get to what’s better to use. What we don’t want to do is also keyword cram, but we do want to mix things up.

If I said 3D printing again and again throughout the thing, it would be too much. I only need it once in that description. If I use 3D print or 3D printing, use it with a 3 and do different things like that, then I’m helping to accommodate the way that it might happen. Sometimes on occasion, we use the misspelling. Every so often, Tom and I will misspell our own last names in the description. It’s very rare that someone will find it. If they find it, when I tell them why we did it, then they’ll be like, “That’s cool.” Hazzard with two Z’s, people spell it with one all the time. We want them to find us even though that’s the case.

That’s such a good trick, and with hashtags on Instagram, I do daddy’s girl, father-daughter dance, daddy-daughter dance. There are a lot of father plays.

That’s what you would want to do. You want to use father, daddy, or dad. You want all of that in there. You would do that naturally when you speak because you don’t want to be that repetitive. We naturally do it. That’s why I think recording your description is one of the best ways to get at what you need.

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Is there anything that you’d like to ask my daddy?

I’m so glad you said that. I want to know what your dad thinks of the podcasting community as a whole because now he’s been doing this for a while. If I remember right from some of your early episodes, he wasn’t y so sure about this podcasting thing, but I want to know what he thinks about podcasting in general. Has he decided to listen to other shows? Is he getting a little bit of the podcasting bug yet?

That is such a good question. Do you know what’s funny? Daddy is getting a little bit better at his reactions. He’s getting a lot more comfortable on the mic.

When I interviewed you on The Binge Factor and I had you on my show, I went and asked my dad. I was like, “Dad, if I had come to you with this concept of having you on my show. Would you have done it?” I can hear my mom in the background going, “I wouldn’t. Not me. Don’t ask me.” My dad was like, “I’m retired. I don’t know that I want to show up all the time for that, but I would do it on occasion.”

Have you ever interviewed your dad? What questions or subjects would you like to talk to him about that might be pushing the envelope?

I haven’t interviewed my dad like that, but I did do it with my youngest daughter. She did one of those reports where you had to interview someone from a different generation. I remember thinking, “This reporter was so funny.” He would talk about the fact how they would have dinners as a family when they were young and how his grandmother wasn’t able to sit down at the table because she was always fetching things and everything. She practically ate standing up. That thing was just so old Italian. I was like, “I’ve never heard some of these stories before. I’m so glad she asked you these things because that’s where we get these insights into stuff that we missed.”

The biggest benefit from doing this that I never would’ve expected is capturing my dad’s thoughts on all of these stories that I’ve now come into. Even though my kids can’t appreciate that now, it’s a time capsule for questions they may have that he won’t be able to answer down the road.

My dad’s a big reader, and I always was hoping he’d write a book, but I didn’t think he had it in his plan. He’s enjoying reading it in his retirement, reading, golf, and grandkids.

It’s like your description thing. Maybe he could just talk into the phone. Truthfully, I interviewed my dad’s mother a year into doing the podcast and now she can’t even tell the same stories. I put these little headphones on her and recorded her on my phone. I got her to tell me the stories that I’ve heard 100 times and it is so special that I captured that. That is what is amazing about podcasting and technology. People shouldn’t be held back by technology piece. They should do what they’re inspired to do.

That’s why on your list, I would never have picked the one about recording equipment. Marion and I both agree on this one. I was like, “That’s the last thing people should be asking about,” but I get it at every event. Someone will always ask me, what about the recording equipment? You could use your phone and it would still be okay. I don’t recommend that, but you could. I don’t want it to be difficult. This is the part that should be so easy.

I have been teaching the class to people who are starting or have their own agency for podcast coaching and other things like that. In doing it, one of the things that I said was, “I’m going to do this module for you and you’re going to say you don’t need it. I’m going to tell you that you will realize that you do. That is, I’m going to teach you how to teach your clients the low-budget, simplest way to record. I’m going to give you the whole tutorial on the equipment, what to do, how to use this, and how to make this plug-and-play. You may have a whole model, but this is the one that’s going to work.”

This has been something that I would never have expected in podcasting. I know this is part of your expertise as well. You are into having contracts in place and making sure legally you’re covered all of those things. I’m not so great at that, and I think a lot of podcasters aren’t. I’ve had 5 or 6 out of about 215 interviews or so. I feel like they overshared or wanted me to make certain edits after. If it’s one sentence, it’s okay. I’m not looking to ruin people’s lives, but if it’s chunks of the interview, I’ve chosen not to air a couple of them because of that. How do you feel about that?

I try to be clear with people about how it works. I’m not there to do a “gotcha.” That’s not the point of the way that I podcast and most of the people that I’ve advised podcast. We did have one where a client’s ex-wife was mentioned, but not by name or anything in it because they were in a business together. They were still in that business together, so he mentioned, “My ex-wife and I own this business.” She didn’t want any association with him, and she flipped out about it. He called in a panic. “We’re going to remove that for you.” You want to remove something like that which is making people’s lives more difficult.

They don’t need the hassle of all of that because they misspoke or said something like that. When you’re talking about it like, “I regret everything that I said and I need to cut this whole thing.” “Nope. Done. I don’t edit it. I’ll just pull it.” I don’t pull a lot of episodes, but I would do that in that particular case because I don’t want them out there feeling this uncomfortable place, but I also don’t want to feel uncomfortable about it either. If you thought the topic was worth having, then go find someone who is willing to talk about it at that point. It’s going to make it better for you at the end of the day.

Let’s promote all you’ve got going on so much and who should come your way.

Anyone who has a podcast already and who’s done 25 episodes or more, I want you to have enough under your belt that you feel good about it. At that point, you got to be making sure that you’re actively doing it. What’s important is we’re consistent and constant. We’re actively posting. If you’re posting a weekly show, it better be weekly. You better be doing that because I’m going to check it out. If you’ve got a big old gap in there, you’re not going to make it.

That’s my only requirement. You don’t have to be like, “I’ve got these amazing numbers.” I don’t want to put a metric on it because you might have 100 listeners a month, but maybe making $10,000 off of that. I want you to have something that you feel successful about your show that you can talk about and you’re welcome on mine.

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Tracy, this has been an absolute honor, and I cannot wait to hear what my dad has to say. He’s going to love this episode.

—

I thought it was really funny that Tracy said, “Am I the kind of girl you bring home to daddy?”

That was cute. She definitely encouraged and inspired the men and her family, especially her father. She had grandfathers and uncles that were all entrepreneurs and hands-on business people. The irony is that she was encouraged to make choices. Her father streamlined it a little bit, where if she chose wrong, he would put his foot down and certainly protect her.

Also, make sure that she was doing the right things, but the fact is that she was involved in what she wanted out of life, the decisions of her life where she had the encouragement and the backing of her father and mother. The key element here is that they encouraged her to be creative. Isn’t that what she’s doing now? She thinks outside the box and she’s done it for herself and for her own business with her husband.

She’s helping other people think outside the box and continually adapt to change, earn things up, and continue to put spice in your life. That is also the secret to success in life, it is to be able to spice it up and to be able to try new things, yet at the same time, she’s conservative. She knows what business highs and lows can be. She made a very important thing about the podcasting business. We keep talking about advertising, and yet only about 2% of all the podcasts can survive efficiently or cash-positive advertising that most podcasts are not used for making money.

What is a podcast? She even asked me the question, “What am I getting out of it and do I value it more?” Because I have such a busy schedule, I’m not really listening too many times to other people’s podcasts. I have listened to a few and seen some of the clips of some of these things on YouTube. There are so many sites that are showing podcasts. It’s unbelievable that she’s talking about there are thousands of them out there.

It’s a way of communicating and also being able to, as Reena is doing with her show, promote herself. It’s a way of advertising yourself. It also gives you an enormous benefit of self-confidence of being able to speak out and communicate without being filtered by other people. It is truly a beautiful new way to communicate with people and not have to be under some type of guidelines and rules of other people, which makes it very difficult to have a breakthrough on your ideas.

You’re able to be more creative by sharing ideas with so many more people that you’re able to get to. It’s an unbelievable street or avenue that amplifies a way of getting your message out and other people’s messages out to people all over the world. It’s unbelievable. The breakthrough of this communication tool is.

I would think that you’ve learned from many of the guests who have been on our show. You’ve taken away a lot of messages from them. Everybody needs a podcast because you can’t express how you feel about all of these things in the workplace.

You also learn the words of humility, wisdom, kindness, understanding, and compassion. All these words have a greater effect when you’re around interacting with more people. This also happened in our own factory, dealing with all kinds of different levels and communications of all types of professional people, hands-on people, the responsibility of running a company, and working with workers. It also opens up your mind. If you listen to other people, you have an opportunity to learn so much more. By giving and communicating your ideas and helping other people, the feedback that you get in return is extremely rewarding. It makes you a better person.

What do you think about some of the work that she’s done in her career? It’s truly amazing too.

She is able to pivot, but by getting involved in podcasting, she’s used it as a communication tool of the future and she gets everyone involved in it. She’s doing hundreds of shows. She’s even got her daughter thinking that way and making a show. It was a project for school but the point is that she’s using it. As I stated, it’s being used as a communication tool. It’s not there to make you money necessarily. Indirectly, as you know it does, but it’s a way to communicate better. It’s like taking a course at school where you’re learning a subject and being able to express yourself much better. It’s truly an incredible new tool that everyone should learn how to do.

 

Important Links

• Tracy Hazzard
• WTFFF?! 3D Printing Podcast
• The Binge Factor
• Feed Your Brand
• Product Launch Hazzards
• Art School Insiders – Apple Podcasts
• Outlier Podcast Festival

 

About Reena Friedman Watts

Reena loves a story, and she‘s fascinated by the people behind them. In fact, she loves to bring stories to life. Her appetite for storytelling has taken her from the Jerry Springer Show to the legal drama of the courtroom. From influential players to reality stars, nothing is censored here. Reena interviews people whose stories haven‘t been told, at least not through her unique lens, and then gets daddy‘s advice afterward.

Whether you have daddy issues or a father who‘s inspired your path, you will be able to tap into my daddy‘s wisdom, wit, and humor at the end of every episode. My daddy has been a guiding light my whole life and there‘s not much he doesn‘t know, as an entrepreneur for forty-plus years, a husband, a loyal son, and my number one supporter. He has learned lots of life lessons along the way and is here to share them with you. It‘s time to reminisce and reflect on the conversations you‘d like to have with your daddy and learn from mine. Come share in some good old fashioned family bonding. There is wisdom from four generations and I’m addressing what happens from childhood to adulthood!

 

Watch the episode here

 

Better Call Daddy With Reena Friedman Watts