CYLS 195: Africa X Podcasting - Keeping It In The Family, Keys To Managing Relationships For Podcast Business Growth with Gavin Kennedy

2023-07-31

Episode Summary In this week’s episode of the Africa X series, Kevin is joined by Gavin Kennedy, a pioneer of podcasting in South Africa whose company, Solid Gold Podcasts, was one of the first podcasting studios on the Continent. Solid Gold is a family company that produces podcasts for over 100 clients from hobbyists to corporations to the United Nations, communicating serious messages to women and young girls in Africa and the challenges they face. He shares his wisdom on starting out in a newly developing industry and the challenges and risks that come with e...

Episode Summary

In this week’s episode of the Africa X series, Kevin is joined by Gavin Kennedy, a pioneer of podcasting in South Africa whose company, Solid Gold Podcasts, was one of the first podcasting studios on the Continent. Solid Gold is a family company that produces podcasts for over 100 clients from hobbyists to corporations to the United Nations, communicating serious messages to women and young girls in Africa and the challenges they face. He shares his wisdom on starting out in a newly developing industry and the challenges and risks that come with experimentation, how life coaching has helped him in running a successful business and working with his family, and the importance of always having something in the pipeline that you can wake up and feel excited about. Listen in to learn more about how as a leader you can help foster creativity and motivation and create your own best life.

Kevin Y. Brown

Kevin is a seasoned multi-media executive who is passionate about Africa’s digital future. As an award winning entrepreneur, podcast producer (over 1,000 episodes across different genres with over 30 million downloads across clients) and tech veteran, Kevin is the Chief Content officer and Head of Strategy at Afripods leading their multi-country strategy and product vision.

Kevin is the host of the Create Your Life Series podcast and has been featured or spoken in Forbes, Black Enterprise, Essence, Podcast Movement, Podcast Sessions, Ted X, Sirius XM, Inc. magazine and many more…

Gavin Kennedy

Gavin Kennedy is the founder of Solid Gold Podcasts, a podcast and audiobook production company that has 11 studios, a team of professional creators, and produces over 100 podcasts and growing. Gavin comes from a family of entrepreneurs and has always worked in one of his family’s businesses before branching off and starting his own, including video and audio post-production (The Wave Factory Facilities), running radio stations (Solid Gold FM), and television broadcasting (SABC, MNET, Soweto TV). Along the way he was certified as a Life Coach which has helped clarify thinking and strategy for himself and his clients when he launched the Solid Gold Podcasts production company. Gavin is dedicated to helping people Be Heard and share their stories, and his love for the industry is evident across the work he does everyday. "It doesn't matter how many people you reach, but that you reach the people who matter." - Gavin Kennedy

Insights From the Episode

The challenges and the benefits of being the first in a space, taking on the risk but also having room to experiment
Recognizing where your strengths lie and when it makes sense to delegate tasks to others who have those strengths
How to keep business and personal relationships separate when you’re working in a family business
Fostering a creative and supportive work environment
How to navigate challenges when dealing with difficult clients
The key to staying motivated when you’re starting out in a new venture
Tips for focusing on how you can be happy even when everything isn’t perfect

Quotes From the Show

“There’s a niche for everybody. No matter what you talk about, there’s going to be somebody. They say that if you’re one in a million, there’s 7000 of you on the planet. That’s quite a number, so you should be able to find your tribe.“ - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“We are trying very hard not to sell a commodity; for us it’s about a relationship. In technical terms, anybody can make a podcast. The barriers to entry are so ridiculously low that if you get into a commodity/price war it’s just a race to the bottom. We’re trying to make it easy for clients to make a podcast.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“You should be doing your thing three hours a day, whatever you’re curious about or interested in. If you do something for three hours a day for a month, that’s 90 hours. If you do that for a year, it’s 1000 hours.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“When you’re hiring people, you’re really hiring for how they are going to be in the operation of the business, not what did they do. The interview is about clues to who they might be, but you really want to watch them in operation. You want to see them thriving; you want to see them happy; you want to see them enjoying stuff. How can you do what needs to be done while feeling and looking and being excited that way? I don’t want to make anybody come to work who doesn’t want to be there. You have tough days, but it’s realizing that you’re working with somebody to create something. You’re an integral part of capturing what somebody is trying to say and share, and that’s the most fundamental thing.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
On working with difficult people: “Sometimes it’s about managing the relationship more than the work. People come to you because you’re an expert; you don’t need to demonstrate and beat them with your expertise, you just need to do good work.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“I think the most important thing that creative people forget is that if you try and protect and constrain and limit people using your creativity, you stop growing and being creative. The more you are creative, the more creativity will bubble out of you. You’re not going to use it all up. So if you do something and somebody copies you, it’s pointless being resentful–be creative again. It will come again. Creativity breeds creativity–you’re never going to use it all up, so don’t get stuck by holding on to your past best work.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“The art of mentoring is about shutting up more and asking good questions. You might know the answer to the question, and you might be surprised by the answer or part of the answer that you didn’t know that the mentee does know because of their age or experiences. If someone comes and asks, ‘where should I host my podcast?’, I’m not just going to say you should host it there; it’s going to be a series of questions–tell me more about the podcast, where are you going, what are you trying to do, what’s your budget–a range of questions that lead to the revelation of an answer as opposed to ‘well I’ve been doing this for longer than you, I’m going to prescribe what the answer is.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“You have to have a goal. If you aren’t heading towards something, you’re just ambling around. The clearer the goal is, the easier it is to move in that direction. But even if the goal isn’t crystal clear, at least you should be pointing in the direction.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“Describe things as you want them, not as you don’t want them… If you’re thinking about what you don’t want to do, you’re cluttering your path with things that are obstructing you.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“Reading and writing is about taking the spoken word and not losing it. If 50,000 years ago we were able to record the spoken word, would we have evolved language as much as we did? We learned to read and write so that we could capture what we were saying and not lose it, and now we are actually able to record what we’re saying and not lose it. I think we’re going to revert to the mean, which is spoken word, and there are going to be a lot more creative manifestations of it.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“You get ‘and’ and ‘or’ views to the world. If I ask you what makes you sad, what you’ll tend to do is list a couple of things and say ‘this makes me sad or this makes me sad or this makes me sad’, and if I ask you what makes you happy, you’ll say ‘this makes me happy and this makes me happy and this makes me happy.’ By making something an and, you make it cumulative–they all have to be in place for you to be happy, and you’re making it harder for you to be happy than to be sad. If my dog dies, I’m sad. If I get a new puppy and if I’ve got a job and if I see my friends, I’m happy. You have to put all three of those things together to be happy, and we do this subconsciously. We should just take the win–I got a new puppy, I’m happy. And vs. or. The and is going to make your life challenging.” - Gavin Kennedy, Create Your Life Series, #195
“I’m really into people’s work ethic and the way that their mind works. I get fascinated with the people around me and the way that they think. I’m really interested in people’s work ethics and their processes.” - Kevin Y. Brown, Create Your Life Series, #195