PODCAST · business
Unscripted Small Business
by Abbey Crane
Our Unscripted Collaborative hosts Keith Bresee, Zaneta Chuniq, Keiron Bailey & 17 year SEO industry expert Jeremy Rivera are having unscripted interviews small business owners, founders and creators across the United States, learning about their challenges, successes and insights into the world of SMBs.
Episodes
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Why Employees Resist AI - Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
Your gut is the wrong guide for rolling out AI to your team. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press), tells Jeremy Rivera why owners get excited about AI while their…
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Building an Organic Tequila Brand With a Mission - AgaveLuz
Pamela Maria De La Luz spent twenty years selling tequila before she got tired of watching big brands cut corners, so she built AgaveLuz, a certified organic tequila made with two ingredients. Her rule for anyone launching a product: "We don't wanna do things right now. We wanna do things right.…
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Rich M. Smith - Growth Is Not an Accident or a Black Box
Most buyers decide on emotion and justify it afterward. Rich M. Smith has been chief marketing officer of seven companies over 25 years, and at Rich M. Smith Growth Studio he helps founder-led businesses grow in a predictable, systematic way instead of by luck. On this episode of Unscripted Small...
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Your Name in Every Box - Neil Thubron on Leading and Selling Outcomes
Neil Thubron is an executive coach, the creator of the Whiteboard Value Selling methodology and the founder of XNRG. His last corporate role had 450 salespeople and a 1.6 billion target. Today he works with founders whose business can't run without them, and with sales teams stuck in product-led...
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Inventing a Product With Zero Experience - Melissa Denning of Mom Aid
Melissa Denning had zero experience inventing anything when she found a gap in the market while breastfeeding her third child. Melissa Denning is the founder of Mom Aid, a luxury postpartum and baby care line, and she took the Boob Aid Nursing Pads from an idea to a patent. Read the full episode...
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AI Speeds Up Broken Processes - David Levine on Customer Experience
Put AI on top of a broken process and all you get is the same problem, faster. David Levine of I am Your Virtual Professional ran a brick-and-mortar candy and chocolate store for almost 20 years. Now he helps small businesses get found and keep customers coming back. Read the full episode recap.…
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The Six-Part Flight Plan for Small Business - Bruce Ashford
Your business is an airplane, and most owners only watch the one or two parts that are on fire. Bruce Ashford of The Ashford Agency spent 19 years in the nonprofit sector, 14 of them in the C-suite, and now runs a certified Small Business Flight Plan practice for founder-led businesses. He walks...
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The Second Job Nobody Warned You About - Peter S. Bergeron
Peter S. Bergeron closed his family's business in 2020, a year after his father died, then went back for a doctorate at 50 to find out what went wrong. The author of The Trapped Operator joins Jeremy Rivera to name the second job every owner gets without warning: the business of running the...
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The Tail Can't Wag the Dog: Tom Malesic on Agency Culture
Tom Malesic started EZMarketing thirty-five seconds after quitting a boss who refused a client he disagreed with. Twenty-nine years later he runs the opposite kind of company. This one is about culture, client concentration and when to fire a customer. Read the full written recap. Key takeaways...
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Why Podcast Guesting Beats Chasing Oprah - Victoria Bennion
Victoria Bennion has been booking experts onto podcasts since 2019 through The Best Podcast Guest Booking Agency, and on Unscripted Small Business she explains why her clients stop chasing Oprah and Joe Rogan. A niche show puts you in front of "the people that need to hear from you," the host is...
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AI Can't Be an Author or an Inventor - IP for Small Business
Richard Gearhart founded Gearhart Law 20 years ago and is about to sign its 5,000th intellectual property client, and on Unscripted Small Business he explains what AI just broke. Copyright attaches the moment you create the work, "the best deal in intellectual property law ever," but registering…
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Why a 5% Close-Rate Lift Beats 20% More Leads | Alex Radetic, Nuvo Agency
Alex Radetic has spent a decade marketing waterproofers, sewer companies, plumbers and siding contractors, and he has stopped selling traffic. On this episode he makes the case that a five percent lift in close rate is worth more to a seasonal home services business than twenty percent more…
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Phil Crowley on the Operating Agreement That Wasn't
Phil Crowley spent 30 years in the Johnson & Johnson Law Department, about seven of them as chief FDA regulatory counsel for J&J's biotech and high-technology products, before he started Crowley Law for life sciences and technology founders. He was a research physicist first: Stevens Institute,...
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AI Isn't Taking Your Job. It's Taking Your Tasks.
Brett Schklar has asked eighteen hundred chief executives how AI adoption is actually going, and the honest answer is badly. He founded AI First Leadership, runs a fractional marketing firm with thirty-plus contractors and no employees, and wrote AI Without the BS after hearing the same failures…
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Your Business Isn't Stuck. It's In A Stage.
Matthew Pohl, founder of The ReWild Group in Denver, Colorado, joins host Jeremy Rivera on Unscripted Small Business to explain why a business that feels stuck usually is not broken. It is in a stage, and it is being run with the rulebook from the last one. Matthew and his wife ran a company...
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Selling a Pool Is Harder Than Selling Mascara | Sherri Langburt
Sherri Langburt bootstrapped BabbleBoxx into an Inc. 500 influencer marketing agency that productizes campaigns for every kind of business — not just the beauty brands everyone pictures. She argues small local brands actually hold the biggest opportunity, and that the first hurdle is fear, not...
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Fix the Workflow First: AI That Sticks in Small Business
Most companies buy AI backwards — they pick a platform before they have named what they are actually trying to fix. James Ernst of Core Order thinks that single inversion explains most of the disappointment small and mid-sized businesses feel about AI. James spent eighteen years in marketing and...
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Stop Lighting Marketing Money on Fire: Speed-to-Lead for Property Managers
Cameron Tope runs a several-hundred-door residential property management company in the Greater Houston area — and he operates it 100% remotely from San Diego. In his second visit to Unscripted Small Business, the founder of Emerson Property Management lays out why $20,000 a month in marketing is...
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Build Your Website for the AI, Not the Human — Richard Hickman, Piqued Consulting
Richard Hickman spent his first career hunting Russian hackers as a digital-forensics consultant. Then he became a stepdad to five kids overnight, walked away from the on-call life, and started helping his wife build her coaching business — which accidentally turned into Piqued Consulting, a...
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The $100/Hour Rule That Ends $10 Busywork | Louis Swart (benefit / outcome)
A broker once told a cocky 25-year-old plumbing-company owner five words that gutted him: "Louis, your business is worth nothing." Five years later Louis Swart sold his next business for $5M — and the only thing that changed was delegation. In this episode of Unscripted Small Business, Louis...
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Ali Raymer - Unscripted Small Business Interview
Ali Raymer launched her own agency the week this was recorded. Nine years in travel, a Title I high school English classroom before that, and a straight answer to the question her industry keeps ducking. No, you do not need a travel agent. Booking is solved. What she sells is the part that is…
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Your Marketing Metrics Are Lying to You — Do This Instead | Joshua Altman, Beltway Media
Every purchase is a trust purchase. So why do we obsess over clicks? Joshua Altman, Managing Director of Beltway Media and a fractional Chief Communications Officer (CCO), joins host Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast to explain why the metrics most small businesses chase are...
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The Status Quo Is Your Biggest Competitor — Jorge Chavez on Selling Without "Selling"
Ask a room of owners who their biggest competitor is and you will get a list of company names. Jorge Chavez, president and co-founder of Topaz Sales Consulting, thinks nine out of ten of those answers are wrong. The competitor that beats you most often is the customer deciding to do nothing at…
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Design Your Life on Purpose — Ameera Virani on Habits, Visibility & Wealth
Ameera Virani spent two decades producing the stages for Wayne Dyer, Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins and Robin Sharma before building her own coaching practice. She watched people build empires from the wings, and her conclusion is not the one the industry sells. Intentional living is not something you...
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Jessica Malnik: Hybrid Is the Hardest Model, and Copycat Content Just Went 1,000x
Jessica Malnik opens with the take that hybrid is not the safe compromise. It is the hardest model, because it stacks every hard part of in-office on every hard part of remote. Jessica does positioning, messaging and product marketing for tech companies (her about page) and has run The Remote…
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Get Found, Get Paid: How AI Agents Are Becoming Your Newest Customers with Mark Pearson
Agents already hold wallets, and it started at the enterprise end. Mark Pearson went from Tony Robbins life coaching to business coaching to AI consulting, and has narrowed to two things small businesses are about to need: getting found by AI, and getting paid by it. The second one is the part...
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Brad Poulos on Building SMBs That Run Without You
In this episode — Jeremy asks Brad Poulos what the next ten years look like for hands-on local service businesses: JEREMY RIVERA: I’m curious what your advice is right now for SMBs in manual services — tree trimming like McAllister Tree Service, installing concrete walls in Florida, doing home...
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Jared Harman: Running a Full-Service Agency in the AI Era
Jared Harman has spent eight years building One Group Agency in Vancouver and twenty-five years in marketing before that. His read on AI is contrarian in a useful direction. The value is in the back office, not the brand voice. Key takeaways Operations first, creative last. The logistics and...
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Founder Dads Have a Dependency Problem, Not a Time Problem | George Rivera, Founder Dad Tables
George Rivera spent 31 years building businesses, including a supplement company he took from zero to over $200 million in sales. Now he runs Founder Dad Tables, small structured gatherings where successful founder dads talk about what the business is costing them at home. His diagnosis: "Most...
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Txldian The Destroyer: Overcoming The Smoke & Mirrors of The Music Industry
Txldian The Destroyer is a musician, content creator and professional wrestler from central Pennsylvania. He started in a church choir at five, spent his early years as a Michael Jackson tribute dancer, and has just walked away from a major label deal to release the record himself. This is a…
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Paul Pape: Can an RPG could save your business?
Paul Pape is the barkeep and game master at Gamify Business, where he converts business strategy, marketing, and operational obstacles into role-playing game mechanics. He has run a successful freelance art and design practice for over 20 years, spent six years coaching creatives on Twitch, and...
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Julika Novkova on the Human Side of Small Business
Business psychologist Dr. Julika “Jules” Novkova joins host Jeremy Rivera to unpack the human side of running a small business — why founders freeze, what creativity actually means in a “boring” service business, and why authenticity is alignment rather than a public-facing mask. Jules’ PhD...
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Cameron Tope: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity
Cameron Tope tried to hire a property manager for his own rentals in 2013. Companies ignored him, and the ones that answered were not licensed and would not send statements. So he built the thing he could not buy. Emerson Property Management now serves several hundred owners across greater…
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Preview: Building a Property Management Company With Integrity (Cameron Tope)
Cameron Tope is the founder and president of Emerson Property Management, a full-service residential property management company serving the greater Houston area. He started investing in rental properties in 2013 after the oil crash threatened his petroleum engineering career at BP, grew his own...
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Keep Control of What You Built - Mark Burnett, MyBrainRestore
Mark Burnett is the founder of MyBrainRestore, a single-ingredient supplement company he built from scratch at 67 after a career as a database programmer. Host Jeremy Rivera talks with him about what it takes to bring a physical product to market: sourcing, manufacturing, Amazon, trademarks, and...
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Knight Lancaster: Navigating Finances, Marketing & Law in TN
Knight Lancaster holds both an attorney and a CPA licence, and runs a Nashville law firm and an accounting firm in parallel. His reason for doing both is not ambition. It is that the two professions routinely give a small business owner opposite advice and have no incentive to reconcile it. Key...
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Meaghan Wall Says Stop Flying Blind on Profit: The Hot Girl CFO on Offer Profitability, Commingled Funds & Cash Flow
Meaghan Wall founded The Hot Girl CFO, a boutique accounting agency for creator economy businesses, marketing agencies and online service providers. Fifteen years in finance, clients from half a million to multi-million in revenue, and one recurring complaint: almost none of them can tell you…
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Mason McCumber on AI Agents, Agentic Workflows & Building Smarter Business Systems
Mason McCumber on AI Agents, Agentic Workflows & Building Smarter Business Systems Guest: Mason McCumber, SEO and AI expert — buildwithmm.com Host: Jeremy Rivera About Mason McCumber Mason McCumber is an SEO and AI expert based in Houston, Texas. He has built hundreds of tools and resources to…
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Authentic Marketing in a Tech-Driven World
In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Kate Hendrickson of Strategy Lane to explore effective marketing, strategic planning, and leadership development for small businesses. If you're feeling overwhelmed by tools, social media, and growth challenges, this conversation offers practical…
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Why Most Business Owners Fail to Plan Their Exit—and What You Must Do Now: Brandon Moon
In this episode, Brandon Moon from TD Pine Advisors shares practical strategies for small business owners to plan their exit, grow intentionally, and create lasting company culture. Whether you're thinking about scaling, partnership dynamics, or succession planning, this discussion provides...
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Juliana Weiss-Roessler on Email, Process & the Marketing Mistakes Costing Small Businesses Money
Episode Summary In this episode, Jeremy Rivera sits down with Juliana Weiss-Roessler, co-founder of WR Digital Marketing, to talk about the marketing habits that separate thriving small businesses from those stuck in a perpetual feast-and-famine cycle. With 15 years of experience working directly...
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Marc Pitts on SEO, Regulations & Building a Vape E-Commerce Brand | Unscripted SMB Podcast
Marc Pitts is the founder and CEO of DiscountVapePen.com, a New Jersey online vape store that grew out of small eBay listings in 2014. When paid ads were shut off for his whole category, organic search became the only channel left, so he and his partner taught themselves SEO the hard way. The...
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Bruce Ashford: Why Marketing Efforts Often Fail to Persuade
Bruce Ashford helps the people telling good stories steal the microphone. His firm works with nonprofit and small business chief executives on two problems: the message does not land, or the moving parts do not fit together. Most of the messages that arrive on his desk carry two or three of the...
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Christopher C. Papin: The Same 168 Hours as the MVP
Christopher C. Papin runs a CPA firm and a law firm at the same time, and almost every conversation he has with a small business owner starts somewhere financial. A tax bill. Cash flow. Buying a partner in or out. Chris tells Zaneta Chuniq Inpower that it almost never stays there. It resolves to...
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Thiago Cordeiro: Zero to Seven Figures in Three Months With Direct Response
Thiago Cordeiro is a 27-year-old Brazilian marketer who did more than $10 million in revenue in twelve months selling supplements on cold traffic. He posts as @thiagobcord and runs OG Group. He walks Jeremy Rivera through the whole machine on Unscripted Small Business. The route there was not...
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From Botanicals to Business — Hemp, Mushrooms & the SEO Journey
Mark Gilliland spent about twenty years in corporate brand management before founding Kyoto Botanicals. Six years in, he sells THC-free hemp extract and a new functional mushroom blend, and he taught himself search from nothing in six months because no agency was going to do it for him in a...
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Autonomous Google Ads: What Full AI PPC Management Actually Looks Like
David Pourquery came out of private equity, started experimenting with ecommerce advertising late at night, and built Groas. It manages Google Ads campaigns end to end with no human in the loop, and it grew to thirty-five million dollars a month in managed spend without a marketing budget. Key...
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Justin Froeber & Jordan Egbert: Turning Business Expenses Into Six Figures of Free Travel
Justin Froeber and Jordan Egbert run Elite Travel Hackers, a concierge service that turns money business owners are already spending into business-class seats and five-star hotel stays. Justin runs it from Medellin, Colombia. Jordan has been to 141 countries and documents the trip as...
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Denise Dubois on Beauty, Wellness & Sustainable Business Growth
Join host Jeremy Rivera as he sits down with spa industry veteran Denise Dubois, who has been transforming lives through beauty and wellness since 1983. In this revealing conversation, Denise shares her 38-year journey from paper appointment books to a thriving multi-location spa empire with a...
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Luke Mickelson: The Garage That Became the World's Largest Bed Charity
Luke Mickelson is a farm kid from Idaho who heard, in a church meeting, that a family in his town had children sleeping on a hardwood floor. He had never heard of child bedlessness. He built one bunk bed. Sleep in Heavenly Peace has since built roughly 400,000. Host Zaneta Chuniq Inpower gets the...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Our Unscripted Collaborative hosts Keith Bresee, Zaneta Chuniq, Keiron Bailey & 17 year SEO industry expert Jeremy Rivera are having unscripted interviews small business owners, founders and creators across the United States, learning about their challenges, successes and insights into the world of SMBs.
HOSTED BY
Abbey Crane
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Unscripted Small Business have?
Unscripted Small Business currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Unscripted Small Business about?
Our Unscripted Collaborative hosts Keith Bresee, Zaneta Chuniq, Keiron Bailey & 17 year SEO industry expert Jeremy Rivera are having unscripted interviews small business owners, founders and creators across the United States, learning about their challenges, successes and insights into the world of...
How often does Unscripted Small Business release new episodes?
Unscripted Small Business has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Unscripted Small Business?
You can listen to Unscripted Small Business on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Unscripted Small Business?
Unscripted Small Business is created and hosted by Abbey Crane.
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