We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lee Schneider. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lee below.

Lee, appreciate you joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

In a boutique agency, it’s challenging to scale up. When Red Cup Agency was brand new, I was used to doing everything myself, from attending recording sessions, writing scripts, and editing and mixing all episodes. (And balancing the books.) As the agency grew, that all-me-all-the-time workflow didn’t flow. For a founder, scaling up means letting go. I had to learn how to build a team.

I started with the end of our process: post-production. The first thing we do after a recording session for an interview-driven podcast is to run a transcript of the session. This becomes the basis of what I call an edit roadmap, which is just what it sounds like: a set of instructions that I can give to a client, to get an early sense of the episode. After client approval, the roadmap goes to an assembly editor to make a rough draft of the episode.

After we have that rough draft, I, or one of our story producers, can have a listen to this assembly and catch any problems right away. Is the episode too long? Are there issues with the audio? Did we forget a story beat? These issues can be fixed before we go on to the next step, which is handing off the project to a mixer for fine tuning and finishing. Opening up the creative process of post-production, allowing more people in, has been the best way I’ve found to scale. Projects become “de-siloed” that way.

There can be another valuable player in this process. In podcasts that are driven by narrative, one of our writers will create a script. Writers add context, in the form of additional narration and structure.

I also looked our recording process to see if it could be scaled. Some of the podcast hosts we work with are experienced and others are new at it. An experienced host knows how to structure the interview, when to ask questions again, and when to dig deeper. I was able to hire a few talented recording producers, people who know the ins and outs of our recording platforms who could troubleshoot recording issues as they came up, and also guide an experienced host through the recording process.

For newer hosts, I always sign on to the recording sessions. I also created a [personal development program for podcast hosts](https://www.redcupagency.com/podcast-host-professional-development) who want to improve their hosting skills.

Lee, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Red Cup Agency produces audio and video podcasts for enterprise-level and medium-sized companies about leadership development, health and wellness, education, and tech. Our work is informative, fun, story-driven, and gets listed on Apple’s New and Notable Podcasts. We make trailers, ad spots, and promos for podcasts. We mentor podcast hosts with a fast-track professional development program.

We’re interested in developing media about climate education, electrification, and decarbonization.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When Red Cup Agency started, I was a solo consultant helping people set up something that was new to most of them: social media. I researched the needs of each client, learned what kind of media they needed and on which platforms. I started many accounts from “zero followers” and built large followings by posting clever copywriting every day.

This was a lot of fun, because it was new, but I saw the limitations of simply posting content. It was super-competitive and lots of other vendors were willing to do it cheaper.

I wanted to diversify the agency’s services, so I started to manage ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. I wrote press releases and got client blogs posted on high-traffic websites. I was tuning up SEO on clients’ sites also.

I quickly learned that this approach was effective for some clients but not for all. For instance, if a client had a sizable budget for advertising, it was easy to get their brand known. But when we stopped pumping money into an ad campaign, the clicks went away. That was frustrating.

I needed to find a different way to help clients over the long term.

You may have heard of Pivotal Labs. They optimize business practices with software and consulting. I had an opportunity to spend a day with their consultants and ask them what Red Cup should do next. They suggested that we try podcasting. Great suggestion! With my production background, this was the perfect pivot. Since I had produced television segments, specials, shows, and series for Good Morning America, DatelineNBC, E! Entertainment, Discovery Health, Travel Channel, Court TV, Learning Channel, and History, I could take what I’d learned about the production process and apply it to podcasting.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

With so many teams working remotely, a whole new set of behaviors has emerged. Being remote means staying in touch more often than before, when we all worked in offices.

I usually check in with the team on Slack at the beginning of the week to set goals and expectations. No one on the team, including me, should be expected to solve every problem by themselves.

It’s also smart to allow everyone to see the whole scope of a project to set timeline expectations. (Clients like this also.) So everyone needs access to timelines and calendars. Apps like ClickUp.com work well for this but Google Calendar will also do the job.

When you manage an online team, you may be tempted to believe that everyone will be available 24/7, just a click away. But working all the time, as we all know, will lead to burnout. I made it a company policy that our business hours were only on weekdays with no “all-nighters” necessary.

There are emergency deadlines now and again, but we try to stay away from crazy hours on all of our projects.

Contact Info:

• Website: redcupagency.com
• Instagram: @docuguy
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/docuguy
• Other: Bluesky: docuguy.bsky.social

Image Credits
Images courtesy Lee Schneider.