Podcasting has been around for a decade but I believe only recently has really become something that the general public has started to take notice of. Podcasts hosts come from all walks of life and topics cover almost everything imaginable. For business owners there is a wealth of great shows that provide inspirational and actionable information. It can be tough to find shows that aren’t in the top ten lists in iTunes so here are some of my favorite.
All of these podcasts, with the exception of one, have been around for many years.
EconTalk
EconTalk was one of the first podcasts I listened to and, with my education background in economics, fell in love with. It takes many topics and looks at them through an economics lense. Many great and distinguished guests.
While politics can often enter discussions about economics I believe the host, Russ Roberts, does a great job in asking questions without any agenda and simplifying complex topics into terms that the listener can understand.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
Stanford seems to be the epicenter for the technological disruption that has changed industry after industry. Many great companies have been founded by their alumni. Luckily for those of us that didn’t attend they provide some of the classes online for free. Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders is my favorite.
Because of the location in Silicon Valley they have amazing speakers from the tech industry (though the speakers aren’t exclusively from the tech industry) that give talks that I’ve found informative as well as very inspirational.
Here is a link to my eight favorite talks and you can find notes I have taken about each of the over two hundred talks here.
HBR IdeaCast
The Harvard Business Review is a great, though expensive, magazine that I’ll often get at the airport for flights. The podcast provides a lot of the same content in audio format. I don’t know if it is as actionable for small businesses as other podcasts on the list but should be a must listen for anybody in corporate America.
Manager Tools
I used to listen to this podcast religiously but that has fallen off since I no longer having any direct reports. Still I often find the podcast to have information that is useful to me now when I outsource tasks or will be later when I am able to hire somebody full or part-time.
The New Business Podcast
The primary focus on this podcast is marketing a business on the Internet. Shows cover topics such as blogs, mailing lists, webinars, social media, podcasting and other ways to reach an audience. The host, Chris Ducker moved to the Philippines and started an outsourcing company that provides virtual assistants to many entrepreneurs.
The Smart Passive Income Podcast
By definition this podcast is about creating passive income streams (though in practice it is a lot of work to create something that is passive) which the host, Pat Flynn, has done multiple times. Really though this podcast has a wide variety of guests that discuss an equally wide variety of topics from business topics to personal topics such as success and family.
StartUp Podcast
This is the newest podcast on this list and the format is a bit different than the others. This is a podcast about the host building a podcasting business. That isn’t too dissimilar than some of the others but the host, who previously worked on This American Life and Planet Money, records many of his conversations with investors, coworkers, and, most entertainingly, his wife. He uses those along with his narration to tell a compelling story about the journey of an entrepreneur and his startup.
Startups For the Rest of Us
This was the first podcast about smaller startups (or lifestyle businesses) that I listened to and it actually introduced me to the next one when they swapped shows as an April fool’s joke. The two hosts are actively creating SaaS businesses so a lot of the advice provided is applicable to me as I build StartOpz as both a product and a business.
One of the hosts, Rob Walling, also wrote a great book titled Start Small Stay Small for developers looking to do their own startups without trying to raise outside capital.
You can read my notes from this podcast here.
Tropical MBA
This is a show about creating a location independent business, where freedom and time are as valuable as money, the challenges involved with that, and, most interestingly, what day to day life is like on the road.
I’ve listened to hundreds of shows that these guys have done and, while some things they cover are relevant to me and some things aren’t, what they are doing is very inspirational for me though it doesn’t help when I can’t currently scratch the travel itch. I find comfort in hearing their intro music every week.
You can read my notes from this podcast here.