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My guest for Episode #328 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Emily Aborn, a small business copywriter, speaker, and host of the Small Business Casual podcast. Emily helps entrepreneurs bring clarity, creativity, and authenticity to their marketing. Before finding her true calling, she owned a brick-and-mortar organic mattress store—a business that looked great on paper but didn’t align with her passions or strengths.
Emily shares how this “perfect-on-paper” business became her favorite mistake. Though the store was profitable, she found herself feeling trapped, unfulfilled, and disconnected from the work she truly loved. Through closing that chapter, Emily discovered what she actually enjoyed most—writing, connection, and storytelling—and turned those insights into a business built around her natural skills.
Today, Emily works with entrepreneurs across industries to find their authentic voice and create meaningful marketing. In this episode, she and Mark explore lessons about self-awareness, alignment, and how mistakes can guide us toward a more fulfilling path. Emily also shares practical insights on copywriting, understanding your audience, and why genuine collaboration beats fear-based marketing every time.
Questions and Topics:
- What was your favorite mistake, and what did you learn from it?
- Why did that business seem like such a good idea on paper?
- What made you realize it wasn’t the right fit?
- How did running that store help you discover your passion for copywriting?
- What were some of the marketing lessons you learned from that experience?
- What are the most common copywriting or branding mistakes you see small businesses make?
- How can business owners find and express their authentic voice in their marketing?
- What are “problem-aware,” “solution-aware,” and “symptom-aware” customers—and why does that matter?
- How do you approach repurposing content the right way instead of just copying and pasting?
- What has hosting your own podcast taught you about communication and creativity?
- Have you ever made a memorable mistake as a podcaster yourself?
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- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban: Hi, welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Emily Aborn. She's a small business copywriter, speaker, and host of the podcast called Small Business Casual. Emily helps entrepreneurs bring clarity, creativity, and authenticity to their marketing, drawing on more than a decade of experience running both brick-and-mortar and online businesses. She's worked with thousands of people across more than a hundred industries, helping them find their voice and build stronger connections. And when she's not writing or podcasting, she enjoys reading, word games, and hiking with her husband, Jason. So Emily, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Emily Aborn: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Mark. I'm doing great.
Mark Graban: We'll talk about the podcast, we'll talk about copywriting. Do you have a favorite word game? Is it Wordle, is it something else?
Emily Aborn: Oh, yes. All of the above. Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections. I'm into Pips now, which is not words, it's numbers, but still I gotta get all my New York Times games.
Mark Graban: I've kind of gotten out of the habit of those. Connections, boy, that one sure is frustrating more than you think it might be, right?
Emily Aborn: I have strong pattern recognition, so I really love it.
Mark Graban: But I recognize the wrong pattern. That's where they trip you up, right?
Emily Aborn: They do trick you. Yes.
Mark Graban: Have you ever gotten the magic one-guess correct answer on Wordle?
Emily Aborn: Yes, one time and I screenshotted it and saved it. I think it was the word pearl, because I was thinking about olives.
Mark Graban: That's a good starting guess word. I've never done that, so that's good to know. Congratulations. So there's a lot we can talk about Emily, but as we always do here, we'll start with the key question. What's your favorite mistake?
Emily Aborn: Alright. I've been thinking long and hard about this. My favorite mistake was starting a business that made sense on paper.
Mark Graban: So tell us more about that. What was the business and why did it make sense? You wouldn't have started it if you didn't think it made sense.
Emily Aborn: Exactly. In your bio, you shared that I have owned a brick-and-mortar, and the reason that came to be was I went to school for health, education, and nutrition. My goal with doing that was that I wanted to be a community health educator. I was in the personal coaching sphere for health coaching before that was really a thing. It was just starting to happen, and I found my way into working for chiropractic offices and gyms and all sorts of different people in the health industry, but it was just a ramble road.
Eventually, I ended up living in North Carolina for a little period of time, and I found myself working for this organic mattress store. They sold bedding and mattresses that were non-toxic. So no formaldehydes, no off-gassing, things like that. I worked with them for about a year and a half, and I was their marketing person and general admin and did some of their sales. And it was in working for them I realized, “this is a great business model.” The revenue makes so much sense on paper. I liked selling the product because I believed in it. And I thought, “I could do this better. I could make the store cozier and better, decorate it more, and make it have these real customer service touches.”
So my husband and I relocated back up here to New Hampshire, where we're both from. We relocated and I found myself working for yet another chiropractor, and I realized, “I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur.” So I just needed that business idea that was going to work. I sat down with him and said, “I can show you all the numbers for how this business makes sense.” And he said, “Alright, let's do it.” So we decided we're going to open our own version of the store that I had worked in.
I didn't really love working in that mattress store in North Carolina. It was boring. People are not flocking to an organic mattress store like they would be a normal one. The market is slower and you spend a lot of time sitting in there bored and by yourself. So I already knew that I didn't like it, but it made so much sense on paper. I thought, “I have to use my health education degree, this makes sense, and this is how I'm going to get myself into the entrepreneurial space.” That was my mistake, so to speak. And I know that you asked what came out of it, so I'll let you take the ball from there.
Mark Graban: Okay. There's more to the story and we'll unpack that. But you said it made sense on paper. That store in North Carolina was successful?
Emily Aborn: Yes, they were profitable and so was ours, actually. We had all the numbers to present to the bank. We got a great bank loan and redid the whole entire building and things like that. We did it all correctly: business plan in hand, logo, website, all the things.
Mark Graban: So before we get back into the story though, I'm just going to comment, you've got me worried about my mattress.
Emily Aborn: Oh yeah. Don't google it. Do not Google it.
Mark Graban: I probably will. But I was going to ask, just around copywriting, it seems like that would be either a challenge or an opportunity. Do you focus on the advantages of organic mattresses or is there a bit of a fear factor to tap into? Do you go negative against Big Mattress?
Emily Aborn: I'll tell you what, knowing what I know now, I would've gone more to the advantages. But then I did use a lot of fear-based selling and pain point marketing. Because, to be fair, a lot of people have actual chemical sensitivities, so they were having some sort of reaction that led them to find the store in the first place. Some people were already there with the problem-solution, symptom awareness. And then some people I had to show them the problem.
Mark Graban: So what happened after opening? You said it was profitable, it got off to a decent start it seems.
Emily Aborn: Yeah, so we were in business for four and a half years, and neither of us were really in our sweet spot. We weren't really enjoying it. You find yourself saying the same exact thing every single day, day in and day out. And I spent a lot of time by myself. Now looking back on it, I wish I had taken a course online or I could have read a million books, but I didn't. I spent a lot of time writing and blogging for the business and doing marketing because I just liked that. That was my favorite part of owning the business. My husband did the deliveries. So I would do the logistics and the front-facing stuff, and then he would deliver the actual beds. And he wasn't over the moon about that either. We just weren't really happy with this whole thing we had built and created and put all of our time and energy into.
So four and a half years in, the market was changing a little bit. There was a lot of bed-in-a-box stuff coming up, so people were definitely going towards that more. I sat down with a mentor at the time, an advisor, and we looked at what it would look like to sell the business and what our options were. In that process, she said to me, “You need to get out of your store. Stop hiding behind Facebook and sending emails and go out and actually meet people and make connections.” That was a huge game-changing piece of advice, which is part of why this is my favorite mistake. So that was number one.
And then the second thing she asked me to do was sit down and really think—because I loved owning a business, I just didn't love owning this business, or being trapped in this business and having that place I had to go every single day. So I sat down and made a list of everything I really loved to do in my business. And then I just started putting it out there for other entrepreneurs and business owners that I would meet through finally getting out of my store and meeting people. I would say, “Hey, do you want help with your social media? Do you want help with your newsletter? Do you want help with your website copy? What do you need? Do you want help writing thank you cards to your clients?” I would help people with all of that kind of stuff. So that's how I accidentally started the business that I have now while we were liquidating and closing down the store. We didn't end up selling. We had a buyer on the line—we actually had two interested—and they fell through. So we were like, “Well, we're still going to go through with our plan of closing and we're just going to get rid of everything we have and call it a day.”
Mark Graban: I'm glad that opened doors for you into the next business, the next opportunities. Looking back, I hear two elements and maybe it was all combined: the repetitiveness—it sounds like you got bored—and maybe there's a lesson around it being better if you have a passion for the product you're selling. The same mattress discussion over and over might not be as boring if you have more of a passion.
Emily Aborn: Yeah, I think so. And I also think some people would find it invigorating to have to be somewhere every day. I just didn't like that. When you have a shop, you have to go, you have to be there, and sometimes you have to be there off-hours. People would make appointments. And also working with my husband, we both agree on this—I'm not talking behind his back—it was really challenging for our relationship. It was all we ever talked about and we didn't always see eye to eye on some of the decisions we had to make. It was really hard and I didn't like seeing him unhappy. He didn't like seeing me unhappy. And it's like, “Well, we're both in this together so we can actually choose a different path.”
Mark Graban: It's good that you worked that out, both in business and personally. I've had other guests on the podcast talking about the stress of having a business together with a spouse. That's not an uncommon challenge, and it doesn't always work out well for people. So, I'm glad that was a different outcome here. One other thing you're making me think about are the comments about starting the store and having to be there all the time. The first book I ever read about entrepreneurship, over 20 years ago, is called The E-Myth. Do you know it?
Emily Aborn: Oh yeah. Yes.
Mark Graban: And the difference between having a business that gives you freedom to step away versus a business that has you trapped in a full-time job where you can't go on vacation. It sounds like you maybe inadvertently learned that lesson of having something you can step away from or starting something that allows you to scale and hire other people so you can have freedom.
Emily Aborn: Yeah, I so agree. Now, literally all I need… I could go across the country with my whole entire business. All I need is my podcast mic and my laptop.
Mark Graban: It's certainly good to have that freedom, whether we call ourselves a digital nomad or somebody with flexibility. I'd love to talk about the work that you do and the lessons you've learned when it comes to copywriting and marketing. Is there something that rises to the top if I were to ask about common marketing mistakes, messaging mistakes, copywriting mistakes, branding mistakes? What's something common that people make or even repeat?
Emily Aborn: Okay, let me give you three. The first one is thinking that marketing is just social media and sending emails. That could not be further from the truth. I like to think of marketing as this whole pie; it's all these little pieces and different things that you're doing to fill out that pie. For example, you and I doing this podcast right now… I don't even need to talk about my business. That doesn't matter to me. But that's part of my marketing pie, just getting to connect with you and having a conversation. I think people discount that a lot. They discount conversations, they discount collaboration. When you share the assets from today's episode with me, I'm then going to reshare that. So I'm helping you amplify your message, you are helping me amplify my message. We're collaborating to create something…
Mark Graban: Or you might be able to help me improve my message.
Emily Aborn: Yes. We're collaborating. Exactly. You help me get clarity on the one I'm trying to share. We're collaborating to create something that doesn't exist yet, and we're making it better than we could have on our own. There is real power in that. Even rewinding to myself in the store, I just thought marketing was putting ads in the paper and getting the billboard I really wanted, putting my social media out there, and sending emails. There's so much more in the world of marketing, and it takes thinking a little bit out of the box on what other things you have at your disposal.
The second mistake is not really knowing who your clients are. I go back and forth on niching versus not niching, but you have to understand where they're at in the decision-making process. Like I said, sometimes people would come to the mattress store and have no idea what I was selling or why they needed this product. I have to know what stage of their purchasing journey they're at. They need to know the problem before I can offer them the solution. Then other people would come in, they're having symptoms, they know exactly what they want, and all I have to do is say, “Here's the solution.”
Mark Graban: They've Googled “New Hampshire organic bed mattress” and they found you.
Emily Aborn: Yes. And it's important to know what your clients look like at those different stages, because you're going to talk to them differently depending on where they're interacting with you.
And then the third one is just not caring or talking to them. I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen this too… podcast pitching is a great example of it, where they just send you information all about them and you're like, “Great. What about my show?”
Mark Graban: What about me? It's a super generic pitch, usually, that's just blasted out widely. And I tend to ignore most of those. Doing a mail merge of “insert name of show here” doesn't fool anybody, as opposed to saying, “Look, I've got a guest who would love to come on and talk about their favorite mistake…” That's more effective marketing.
Emily Aborn: My favorite is when they say they love my interview style, and I'm like, “That's funny because I don't have guests.” They'll say, “I love how you ask your guests such deep questions.” And I'm like, “Well, I don't have any, so yeah, I do ask myself some good questions, don't I?”
Mark Graban: How many of these firms think marketing their podcast guests is just about these email blasts? If our email address is exposed in the RSS feed of our podcast, which it usually is, it just gets scraped and put into this mega-database, and like any spam, it costs them virtually nothing to send out an additional message. I know they don't like to be called spam, but it's like spam.
Emily Aborn: And to that exact point, you and I use a collaborative tool called PodMatch. I think PodMatch itself just fosters a spirit of collaboration, the way they've set that up. It really creates an environment where you think, “Okay, I have to personalize this a bit. I'm going to take time and listen to Mark's podcast, make sure I like him, make sure I like what his show is about before I even send him a message.” And I'm sure you get spam through there too, but it's at least a little bit more collaborative in nature.
But yeah, I sadly see it on a lot of websites. They just want to make it about themselves and they're really missing the mark on talking to their actual clients. And I would say especially now with the rise of AI, more than ever before, you can be more human, more conversational. You can be whatever your personality is—silly, buttoned-up, a little quirky, real, dry—you want to be that in your website copy. You want to talk to somebody on your website like you're talking to a human being, because you are. There's one person you are speaking to when they come onto your website.
Now there are some rules of the road or best practices, of course. You're going to have a tagline and things like that. But I like to use my website as an example of what I could do for somebody else because I made it very conversational. I'm like, “If I'm going to have this thing, it's just going to be a conversation.”
Mark Graban: That's a fascinating point. It sounds like a real conundrum of being more human using AI tools, or being more yourself. With tools like ChatGPT, at least with the paid subscription, you can give it all kinds of instructions about the tone and personality to use. There are a lot of things you can do if you're using it to help create anything from podcast show notes or refreshing marketing messaging on a page. You don't have to get just the generic text that the tool thinks is right for the average person.
Emily Aborn: Right. Yeah, I have some strong thoughts on those tools. Because I still don't think they get it quite yet. I have yet to see it hit the mark perfectly, unless it's a bigger business or a bigger brand, or it's not a person. But when it comes to that personal voice, you do lose something when you outsource your voice to the tool.
Mark Graban: I think of AI tools as being something to collaborate and bounce things back and forth with, which is different than just outsourcing.
Emily Aborn: Yes, I agree. Altogether.
Mark Graban: There are some trivial tasks where it's okay to outsource, but for the things that are most important to the business, you probably don't want to ask it to “have the tone of the Wendy's social media account.” Somehow that works for Wendy's to be a little bit snide or funny, but it might be a mistake for a big, serious, buttoned-up company to try to copy that same tone. “Oh, it was successful for Wendy's, so our company's going to be sassy” was the word I was looking for.
Emily Aborn: And there's no wrong, as you said, it works for Wendy's. It's about what the brand voice of your company is, but also what your clients are looking for. You have to bridge those two things. There are places where I'm going to be more professional than I would be with my best friend because this is my business, so I have to put that business face forward. I'm going to talk to my niece differently than I'm going to talk to a client.
Mark Graban: One other question, going back to the mattress business. I wanted to explore an example of getting out from behind the computer. When you talk about getting out there and meeting people, one connection that seems to make sense is, “Who might be interested in learning about organic mattresses?” Something like people at the farmer's market. Was that something you did?
Emily Aborn: Yeah, we did that. We did health and wellness expos. When that mentor told me that, she was right. I didn't leave my store much. She specifically recommended, “Go meet people that are like-minded and in your field that you could collaborate with.” And I was like, “You know what? I will meet everyone.” So I did, I really made it my goal to connect with as many small local businesses as I possibly could. And doing that didn't just make me the mattress lady, it made me a resource that was able to connect other people. “Oh, you need a virtual assistant? I know one. You need this kind of service? I know this person.” So that was some of the best advice I ever got.
A good tip if you are looking to hone in on that networking or collaboration skill is to focus on people… website designers and copywriters make a great match. Podcasters and podcast producers, great match. There are some no-brainers. Think about what that looks like for your own industry. An interior designer would want to be talking to the hardware store, the paint company, the granite company. All of those different parts and pieces that you would be interacting with and or recommending to your customers, you want to be connecting with those people. You want to be the first person they think of when they're like, “Oh, you need new plumbing? I know a guy.”
Mark Graban: I love how you turned the lessons learned from that business into the way you help companies today. Back to your point about understanding not just who your clients are, but where they are in the buying process. That sounds like it would help a lot of other businesses. Do you have an example?
Emily Aborn: Sure. I focus a lot on problem-aware, solution-aware, symptom-aware. There's a big difference. That's something we break down when we're working on somebody's website. But a tangible example is, one of the first questions I'll ask people on a discovery call is, “How did you hear about me and what's going on?” I ask them for background about their business and then, “What prompted you to reach out to me?” That's where you get so much information about where they're at in that cycle. It takes a lot of those kinds of calls to start understanding the patterns, like the Connections game.
The other way you can get the actual words of your clients is when they write you reviews and testimonials. So often in those, they'll say how they were feeling before. Like, “My back was hurting, my neck was hurting, and then I saw this massage therapist and now I feel like I am 20 again.” They'll tell you whether it was a pain that caused them to reach out or they just wanted to feel good. You can watch how people use their language coming into your business to reflect it back to them in your marketing.
Mark Graban: So to me, problem awareness and solution awareness—that distinction makes sense. People might not recognize they have the problem, or they may know they have it but don't know there's a solution. But tell us more about symptom awareness. Is that similar to the language I use around continuous improvement, where we talk about symptoms and then a root cause?
Emily Aborn: Yes, exactly. Let's say I have a stomach pain. I have the symptoms, but I need to go to the doctor and they rule things out. Symptom awareness is one of the harder ones because I see a lot of business owners have symptoms and they see an ad on Instagram that says, “Download this quiz and freebie and enter to get coached by this $10,000 coach and your symptoms will go away,” but they're solving the wrong problem because they didn't do the process of elimination at the get-go.
As service providers, that's where you can really offer people something valuable. If somebody comes to me having symptoms, I might say, “Sure, I can help you with that, but you're not ready for it yet. You need to get to the root of the problem,” which might be that you need a new brand or a website before I can write anything for it. It really does people a service when you look at their symptoms and say, “I could be a solution for that, but they're not ready for that yet.” Sometimes we're not able to do that process of elimination on our own, and that's where business collaboration comes in. I might ask my friends, “This is my issue. What solution would you recommend I look for? Where can I start?” That was a great example of needing to get to the root cause. Because so often when we're having symptoms we're like, “I don't know, I'm just having headaches. I don't know what the problem is or what the solution is, I just know what I'm feeling.”
Mark Graban: And taking Tylenol might make the headache go away right now, but it might not be addressing the root cause of frequent headaches.
Emily Aborn: Yep. Exactly.
Mark Graban: Emily, one other question about marketing. I get a lot of pitches about repurposing content. I've got books, podcasts, sometimes one leads to another, then there's video, and different pitches about helping you repurpose content. What's one mistake you see people making when they try to do that?
Emily Aborn: One is that they don't do it often enough. But no, I'm going to give you two. One is that you have a lot more to repurpose than you even think. The website copy that you love and are so proud of can also be repurposed. It's just sitting on your website, living in one place. But the other one I've seen is where people literally just copy and paste verbatim. Let's say they wrote an email and they just copy and paste a piece of it. Sometimes it works fine, but sometimes it's super out of context and they don't take the time to give the context.
I used to follow a business owner who would just copy and paste everything. She would say she was repurposing it, but it did not make any sense broken up like that. She would cross-post it everywhere and call that repurposing. I'm like, “That's just cross-posting. That's not repurposing.” Repurposing really means to make it new, and sometimes that comes with a little massaging. I can't use the stories from my email in the exact same form in a social media post. It just doesn't work. Sometimes the story was perfect for my podcast and my email, and I try to bring it onto social and realize, “Okay, first of all, I need 90,000 characters to tell this.” But it just doesn't work. Or the point I want to make loses its context without the story. So you have to think about the platform you're repurposing for to make sure it contextually makes sense. After you've got that locked in, repurpose to your heart's content, because there's a lot more content you could be repurposing.
Mark Graban: It seems like there's a clear distinction between just reusing and repurposing. There might be some refurbishment or… I'm trying to force other re-words into that… renewal, renewing…
Emily Aborn: Rejuvenation.
Mark Graban: Blog rejuvenation of your service for somebody, maybe. So Emily, I'd love to hear about your podcast more than just the fact that you don't have guests. Tell us about Small Business Casual.
Emily Aborn: Yeah, so it started as Content with Character and I actually rebranded it because I said to myself, “I'm not here for content's sake. I really want to help people build small businesses that they love, that they're passionate about, that don't feel like something they dread waking up to go to every day.” So it's about how to make your small business feel really good to you, not just during your workday, but throughout your life. How can you keep it really sustainable? And I have had guests on some occasions, but they're usually my best friends who are also entrepreneurs. So that's why I say I don't take guests, I select guests.
Mark Graban: Right. And it's different than being pitched, “Here's so-and-so and they can talk about the economic development of agrarian economies.” And you're like, “Yeah, that professor might be brilliant, but I don't care about that and it doesn't fit my theme. No thank you.”
Emily Aborn: I get a lot of pitches for dog treats and I'm like, “No, that won't work.” But yeah, it has given me some nice legroom for the podcast to be able to expand into the 12 years of business experience I've had. There's a lot I want to share that just didn't fit the old format. And I'll share one little tip, or one way I make podcasting fun for myself: I will set up a monthly theme. For example, October was “October-it,” and November is “No-vember,” as in say “no” more often.
Mark Graban: That's a business strategy.
Emily Aborn: Yes. It's a big strategy. So I'll give myself a monthly theme. For some reason when I give myself guardrails like that, it actually opens up way more ideas for me. Then I can fill those buckets with the ideas I have for my show. That's something I do that makes it easy so I don't overthink, because there are a million things we could all talk about at any given time. It helps keep me on track and brings a nice level of cohesion to my podcast, so that when I am repurposing it, it's like, “Oh, she's made sense all month long.” I don't have to wonder, “What am I focusing on today?” I just focus on the same thing in different ways throughout the month.
Mark Graban: You're probably more disciplined than I've been when working on marketing-related things and having an intentional content calendar. To a fault, I tend to be more “what strikes me at the moment.” And you cringed and made a noise there. So tell me a little more. I realize that's a mistake, but I'd love to hear from you why.
Emily Aborn: I'm half cobbler's son. I used to manage people's content, not just the copywriting, but also pushing it out for them. I had such a good system for them, it was so beautiful and I had all their content planned all the time, and I never, ever did my own. Now I'm back and forth. Sometimes I'm really good and sometimes I'm really terrible. I'm like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead in that poem.
Mark Graban: What poem is that?
Emily Aborn: There's a poem that goes, “There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid.”
Mark Graban: One question about your podcast: are you hitting different platforms and formats when you repurpose? When you think about doing video, whether that's YouTube or clips on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. How do you repurpose or put that content out in different places?
Emily Aborn: I haven't taken to video yet. I mean, it's on YouTube, but I think it's just the audio. But I do love doing a newsletter that goes along with my podcast episode. So I'll have a side story that people in the podcast aren't usually getting. But you know what I've been loving is Substack. I sometimes go down these research rabbit holes, like I did one recently on the dark sides of AI. Actually, you are featured in one about decision-making—how sometimes we think we're making a good decision and it can end up as a bad decision, and sometimes we think we're making a bad decision and it can end up as a good one. So, what makes a good decision good and what makes a bad decision bad? And I mention your show.
I will take all the research that I've compiled for my episodes and put it in a new format on Substack, which allows me to have all this multimedia, like I can include pictures and clips of your show. It's really exciting. So that's one way I've been repurposing. Otherwise I just use quote graphics. But I'll say this, and I hear this from a lot of podcasters, getting people from social media to your podcast is pretty challenging. That's why I like to give the information in different formats. I love when people jump over from social, but it just doesn't happen as often as we would like. It really happens through you and I doing what we're doing, through giving the information out in different ways, people sharing your episodes, reviewing, all that kind of thing.
Mark Graban: And I think there's something to be said for finding podcast listeners by being a guest on other podcasts. So I will encourage the listener, if they have an interest in what Emily's been talking about and the Small Business Casual podcast… if you're not driving, open up the podcast app and go search and find it. There'll be a link in the show notes. So when it's safe to do so, go and check out Small Business Casual.
Emily Aborn: Well, thank you. And I say the same for you. I tell people when I recommend a show like yours, “You don't have to stop being my listener. You can also be Mark's listener. You can be Mark's listener and my listener. You get the best of both worlds.” That is the benefit of doing this. And if people are not into it, they don't have to stick around. We all can clean out our own podcast feed.
Mark Graban: So Emily, maybe one last question here. If I can get a bonus mistake story out of you, because I've made a lot of mistakes as a podcaster. I bet we all have. I see you nodding. Is there a podcasting, hosting, or production mistake that comes to mind?
Emily Aborn: Well, I've forgotten to hit record on many occasions, but…
Mark Graban: When you don't have a guest that's not quite as traumatic. I've done that before. Twice in about 20 years.
Emily Aborn: It's the worst. But no, I'll say this. When I first started, I wasn't very confident in having my own voice. So I deferred a lot to my guests. What that looked like was I would just read the questions formulaically, and then I would respond pretty generically with, “Oh, I love that. Oh, I love that.” I just didn't really feel confident having the conversation. That's one thing you're so good at, is you really insert your own piece of the conversation as well. I think that's the biggest mistake. I could go back and be like, “Oh, I could have had so much more fun if I had let the anxiety go a little and just opened up to, ‘This is just a conversation I'm having with this person.'”
Mark Graban: That's how I like going about it. I'll lean into the moments of awkwardness that sometimes happen, but that's better than being too formulaic or too robotic. I enjoy that more as a host and as a guest. Our guest today has been Emily Aborn. https://www.google.com/search?q=EmilyAborn.com is the website. And her podcast is Small Business Casual. So, this has been fun. Thank you. Thanks for joining us.
Emily Aborn: Thank you, Mark. Thanks for letting me share my favorite mistake.