The Recognized Authority and AI-Powered Business Leadership, with Alastair McDermott
As an expert, specialization is a key ingredient for becoming a recognized authority in your niche. But that’s only the beginning. Regularly publishing about your area of expertise is what propels you along the journey.
This article features an interview with Alastair McDermott—author, podcaster, and entrepreneur— about how he helps experts become a recognized authority, and the various business podcasts he uses to market his services. Listen to the full interview here:
Podcasting Builds Trust and Develops Key Relationships
Alastair was already interviewing clients to tease out their subject matter experitse when he came to the natural conclusion that a podcast was the best way to drive faster business results.
“I started to offer as a service to my clients to interview them,” said Alastair. “At this point I was a veteran podcaster and interviewer. So I was very comfortable with interviewing and coming up with good questions to help to tease out and share their knowledge. So I started offering this as a service to interview them.”
For his clients, Alastair would repurpose these recordings into short clips, long-form videos, and blog content. But then he realized there may be a way to generate a faster business impact.
“You don't tend to get quick results when you start creating content,” said Alastair. “But we could address that problem if we turned what we were doing into a podcast. And so I experimented with doing this for a client where we took an old podcast they had let go on hiatus, and we rebooted it.
The Power of Interviewing Your Ideal Clients
“It was positioned in such a way that it made sense for them to invite their ideal client onto. And there's a few things that you need to do in terms of setup and in terms of how you position the podcast in order for it to make sense as a platform to invite a potential client onto it. But when you do that, it gives you a platform.
“Now, their outreach was, ‘Hey, I'd love to have you come on and chat about your stories and your business on my podcast.’ And so you're platforming this person who you'd like to build a relationship with.
However, you have to nail the positioning if you want to invite your ideal clients on as guests. “You've got to be very careful that you're not trying to pitch to them directly,” cautioned Alastair. “It's more about building relationships with people who are potential ideal clients rather than trying to bring them on your podcast so you can pitch them immediately.”
The Winding Road to Launching The Recognized Authority
Alastair started planning his business podcast around 2014. However, going through that process exposed a lack of specialization in his business. From there, he narrowed down his business from a generic web development agency to a niche practice helping "best kept secret" consultants grow authority & visibility among target clients.
“In the end, it took me about five or six years to actually get my podcast off the ground.” Alastair finally launched The Recognized Authority podcast in April 2021. Since then he’s published 175 episodes. An outspoken fan of longer podcast episodes, these ~45-minute conversations feature in-depth interviews with top consultants, coaches, and thought leaders who share practical, actionable insights on building a thriving independent business.
“I launched it with the first 20 episodes. It was called Marketing For Consultants. And the reason for that is because that's I'm a software engineer by trade and when an engineer does branding you get something like this.”
After having conversations and publishing more episodes, Alastair was able to narrow down his niche and positioning. Eventually, he re-named the podcast to be The Recognized Authority. Today, this podcast helps experts & consultants to rapidly build authority so they can command premium fees, cherry-pick the best projects, get off the gilded-hamster wheel of hourly-rate work, and never have to suffer a bad-fit client again.
But that’s not Alastair’s only podcast…
The AI-Powered Business Leader
Recently, Alastair has been learning more and more about new technological developments. At any moment, we could be blindsided by a powerful force that is poised to reshape every industry—and even the very core of our society: artificial intelligence (AI).
Going all-in on understanding how this new powerful force can be applied to experts in professional services, Alastair has decided to conclude Season 2 of The Recognized Authority to focus on The AI-Powered Business Leader. Read more from Alastiar in this LinkedIn post.
“I have done several episodes on AI sporadically over the last year or so. And it's been a topic I've wanted to address a lot more, but I kind of feel that that would be unfair to the regular listeners [of The Recognized Authority] because it’s not really the premise of the show.”
“I wanted to create a show where I talked about AI more, but I wasn't really sure what the angle was,” said Alastair. “I've written a book about launching a business podcast, uh, which is called 33 Ways Not to Screw up Your Business Podcast. And so I had taken that book and put all of the text of that book, plus a workbook into a private custom GPT that I'd created.”
From there, Alastair asked the custom GPT to help plan a new podcast based on the frameworks and advice in the book. “I planned it over a weekend,” said Alastair. “On Monday morning, I said, okay, I'm going to record a voiceover for the intro, which I used AI for. And then I created a little video intro, completely using AI.”
Next, Alastair recorded the intro and sent a demo reel out to people to get feedback. “I sent it out to about 30 or 40 people,” said Alastair. “And the feedback I got was mostly positive. One person just sent me back the word provocative [with an] exclamation mark, and some people were a bit negative about it, which I figured would happen because either people have AI fatigue because there's too much talk about AI…or they think there's too much about AI already, which I think is also nuts because it's such a big concept that I think that we need to be talking more about it.”
Personally, I tend to agree with Alastair that this technology is so new that we need to continue to have conversations about artificial intelligence and the role it can (and should) play in business functions.
The Specialization Podcast: A Standalone Evergreen Asset
The Recognized Authority and the AI-Powered Business Leader aren’t the only podcasts hosted by Alastair McDermott. In fact, Alastair released a “fire-and-forget” show called The Specialization Podcast as a way to educate his target audience to the point where they were ready to work with Alastair.
“I was working on creating like a framework for building authority. I called it the authority maturity model,” said Alastair. “It's assesses what stage of maturity an individual or professional services firm might be at in terms of how they're seen. Eventually I took that framework and I mapped it onto a journey called a journey to authority.”
“Everybody starts as a novice and you go down a winding path and you get lots of experience and you eventually get to the stage where you're an expert and you're typically a generalist expert, but at that point, not many people outside of your immediate network will know who you are.
“If you want to gain broader visibility and recognition for your expertise, you'll need to go and specialize and niche down more. A lot of people won't ever do that. They stay as a generalist and they do word of mouth and referral based networking.
“And you can have a very, very successful business doing that. In fact, that's what most professional services do. And I would say probably about 95 percent of businesses stay there. But for those where they decide to go down the route of becoming a specialist and niching down, you've got to go through the specialization process, and that can be fraught with peril. There's a lot of fears around specialization because you're afraid you're going to pick the wrong thing. You're afraid that it's not going to work. And it's a terrifying process to go through if you don't have any support and help.
“I realized the people who are at the generalist stage, who are these invisible experts. They're not an ideal fit client for me. The ideal fit client for me is somebody who's already a specialist, but is having problems with the publishing part. So I wanted to create a resource where I could guide them through the mountains of specialization so that they can get to the next stage where they're ready to work with somebody like me.
“I created [The Specialization Podcast] almost like a free audio course based on a lot of the work that I'd already done. I put it up and I haven't touched it since.”
Now Is The Best Time To Launch A Business Podcast
Today, there are an estimated 3.1 million podcasts available, but that pales in comparison to the 600 million blogs on the Internet. Not only that, but only about 17% of podcasts are active. This presents a blue ocean opportunity for experts and firms to launch a business podcast.
The barrier to becoming a top podcast in your niche? Consistent publication over 6-12 months.
That happens with the right strategy, team, and workflows. When you work with me, you’re not just getting a podcast producer, but a marketing strategist with more than a decade of industry experience working with professional services firms. Contact me or send me a message on LinkedIn to learn more.
