There are a lot of different ways that you can get support with your podcast.
You can hire or train a team member to do the editing admin and promotion, hire out specific areas like production or promotion, or work with a third-party service provider who can do any of the above.
Sometimes even that, however, is too much on your plate, and in those cases, then an OBM, or Online Business Manager can help fill any gaps.
Today I’m chatting with Ashley Connell, the founder of Prowess Project which is an Online Business Manager resource and training academy. She’s also the host of the Prowess Hour, a weekly livestream and podcast giving OBMs the skills and insights they need to grow their businesses.
We’re talking about what an OBM is, how they can help ease the lift of a podcast in your company, and how to know if and when bringing on this kind of support is the right move to grow your business… and take over the podcast.
Listen to the episode below or continue reading the blog post:
Tune in to the full episode to learn about:
- What an online business manager is
- OBMs vs COOs vs VAs
- How to hand off the reins to your OBM
- What OBMs can do for your business & operations
- The OBM Opportunity Podcast
- Signs that you need an online business manager
- Ashley Connell’s awesome AI tool
My book, Podcasting for Business is now available on Amazon — learn more about it here.
The Online Business Manager
Ashley: “The way that we define it, and I say the way we do because I went out and talked to hundreds of CEOs on exactly what they needed. So based on what they needed, this is what we have designed:
An online business manager is that cross between A COO — so they have the strategy of A COO and the execution of a VA for services, business, coaches, and consultants who are doing around a hundred grand to three to 5 million. That is their sweet spot.
So it’s their ops-minded thought partner as well as the person who makes their vision happen.”
Chief Operating Officers
Ashley: “Every business looks a little bit different. But let’s say that you are in that high six figures, low seven figures.
Oftentimes you don’t need a full-time COO, yet that is the person who is really thinking about your operations strategy and the person who is optimizing your current processes. When you’re below that, oftentimes you just need someone to help you turn what you have been already doing because you started this business because you love your craft, not because you love building businesses.
And so they help you design your first level of processes. They help you design, Hey, what technology exists out there that can automate the heck out of your business? How do we look at all of your financials and say, Hey, if your goal is to increase profit by 30%, how do we get there? By either stopping things, adding things, or implementing technology?
So think of it as the person who is going to run your business, build out the processes, implement the technology, and be the glue to make sure everything gets done and all of the people are happy and working together.”
Megan: “I love that. Sounds fairly valuable and sounds like a good middle-range step for someone who’s not quite ready to say, share total leadership control. Would I be correct in saying: goes into chaos and establishes order?”
Ashley: “Spot on. Chaos Killer. That’s one of the many, many things that we call online business managers.”
Online Business Managers vs. Virtual Assistants
Ashley: “One of my coaches actually said this perfectly.
You give a VA a task and they execute. You give an online business manager your vision and they strategize. So it really depends on how much of the mental load you want to continue to keep on.
If you are happy to give a task list to whomever every single day on exactly what they need to get done, and they are checking things off of a list, you need a virtual assistant and they are amazing and they will get it done.
If you wanna give someone a problem, hey, we need to increase profit. Hey, we need to be more efficient with our client communications, and just give them the problem and you want them to solve it, come back with three different potential solutions, their suggestions, and then get it done — that’s an OBM.”
Jack of All Trades
Ashley: “[OBMs,] they can specialize. Most of them start as generalists — let me even just talk about the mission first and this will make more sense.
So we started Prowess Project because I wanted to help caregivers have a flexible work professional career as well as time for their loved ones and the butts in seats, nine to five just was not working for them. In the US, 43% of women leave the workforce to raise their children. And when they return, after just three years, they lose 40% of their compensation power forever.
And the kicker, the light bulb moment for me was 97% of them would return to the workforce if they had access to flexible jobs. And I was like, holy smokes, that’s what we have to do.
So after testing for a couple of years, what we realized was the vast majority of women who were coming to us who needed help finding their next career or getting placed into flexible work, they said that they had a varied background, which we then coined a patchwork quilt-like background.
They have some bookkeeping, they have some operations, they have some tech, some marketing, some sales. And so you look at their background and it’s not that linear path that a recruiter loves, that is just an obvious fit for your next accounting role — it’s much more of a generalist role.
So I started talking to several CEOs who were in the coaching consultant, e-commerce space, and they’re like, I got into this because of my passion for podcasting, my passion for accounting, my passion for marketing, and here I am running a business and I have no idea how.
So it was this perfect, I say storm, but it really was between all of this untapped talent who know how to run businesses and all of these visionary CEOs who loved their craft but needed someone to help them scale — and that’s prowess.”
Handing Off the Reins to Your OBM
Megan: “Most of the people listening to this episode, they run businesses and they also have podcasts. And the podcast, of course, is something that we help our clients. We take over the business area for that.
But often sometimes we’re working with a member of the team who, from what you described, could be an OBM.
Can you paint a picture, and tell a story of how a business owner might say, we need a company podcast. New OBM, this is now your problem. How might they go about making that happen?”
Ashley: “Oh, I love this because this is one of the masterclasses in our training.
I’m sure it’s going to overlap with a lot of the questions that you have in the sense of, why do you want to start this podcast? What is the goal for this? Who is the audience? How is it going to be different? And really establishing where you want to go and how it fits in the key performance indicators for that business versus — which I am very guilty of; A CEO, having the bright, shiny object, Hey, my friend has a podcast. It’s going well. I’m gonna start one.
No, no, no, no. Let’s take a step back and really create that strategy of why once you have convinced the OBM, yes, this makes sense. They absolutely can help run it from the recording of the technology, the building out of the snippets to helping you build the descriptions, helping you get guests.
Whatever that really looks like and the way that they’re going to be thinking about it is, I’m going to do this manually for the first three times and then figure out how to automate the heck out of it so that it’s as easy as possible for everyone.”
Megan: “Okay, so building the systems alongside doing the work, and of course with podcasting, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, figuring out the many things that cannot be automated.”
Ashley: “Right, it can’t be. So much of it. You want that personal touch too. It’s absolutely always that balance.”
Megan: “We’ve tried for ages, especially around show notes and written content. You just can’t automate it. There is no AI that doesn’t make the smallest, hard-to-catch mistakes.
It costs more in quality assurance than it does to just have a human write the darn things.”
Ashley: “I cannot wait to show you our AI agent that we had an OBM design that helps us with that.”
Megan: “If you’ve got an AI tool that can differentiate truth from falsehood, I’m all about it.”
Ashley: “Oh, girl, let’s talk.”
Megan: “Yeah, because I’ve tried all of the podcast show notes writers, and they all make little mistakes. In job title or in the spelling of a name. We just can’t have that go out. Absolutely cannot.”
How OBMs Maintain High Standards in Your Business
Ashley: “You need the person; oversight. You need to have the eagle eyes. You need to have the heart behind it and the brain behind it, or else you’re exactly right. You just fall and make these silly mistakes.
A lot of us are working with very high dollar clients that when they see a silly typo, they’re like, oh, clearly that this person doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the outcome. And that’s what I think is so wonderful about our OBMs.
We talk about this a lot. Sure, they have the hands to get stuff done and they have the brains to think it through, but you wanna talk about the people who have the heart, that really treat your business as if it were their own. That’s an OBM.”
Megan: “That’s quite an interesting thing because when you’re hiring a staff or team member on the assistant level, and often on many levels, it’s not reasonable to expect that someone’s going to care about your business as their own.
But if someone is an OBM, presumably they have multiple clients and so it’s their own business basically that is at stake. And that makes a really big kind of mental shift in terms of the detail — just the ability to maintain attention to detail. Because it’s a slog.”
Ashley: “This is what I thought too. Yeah, it’s a slog. I can’t handle it. It’s overwhelming.
And then I created our community of a thousand OBMs and they love detail. The amount of times I get emails back, they’re like, Ashley, this is a typo. This is a typo — Thank you! Just as we were talking about how important it’s not to have typos and they’re sitting there correcting mine, I’m like, oh, you guys are the best.”
Megan: “Oh yeah. I’ve got someone with that really good eagle eye and also the willingness to bring it up because sometimes it’s really easy to get into the habit of, oh, it’s not worth it.
But it’s the not letting it slide that keeps things going over time.”
Ashley: “Yes, it keeps the standard tie, and that’s what we’re all about.”
A glimpse of what OBMs can do for your business
Ashley: “One thing that I saw that was really amazing — what they realized is that the OBMs clients’ clients, the prospects, they sure worked remote, but they always had to be in the car.
So they created a funnel, a nurture funnel that was a private podcast. It was probably 15 minutes an episode that was extremely engaging, had lots of case studies, they were showing off the host’s wide personality; she’s funny.
That converted like crazy because they understood exactly who the prospect was, and who their listener was, they understood the day-to-day of this listener and how they’re always in the car or always have their air pods in.
And it worked really well again, because the OBM looked at all of the data, realized that their podcasts were listened to all the time, and the emails not as much, and realized, okay, let’s give them the information in the medium that they want.”
Megan: “Amazing. And so the private podcast, it was an opt-in podcast basically. I think that is a massively underutilized area of podcasting is the private podcast.”
Ashley: “Could not agree more. It is on our to-do for 2025.”
How an Online Business Manager Streamlines Your Operations
Ashley: “There are two massive keys to this. I’m gonna start with the first.
The first is emotional intelligence.
Our OBMs as they’re going through our training, we have developed an online platform that gathers hundreds of data points, and of course, their skills and their expertise, but also communication style, work style, and emotional intelligence.
So think of it as LinkedIn meets match.com. We use all the data that we’re gathering from the OBM. We gather similar data from the CEO, and that’s how we make the matches to match our CEO clients with their perfect OBM
Because we realized that for an online business manager, being able to flex communication styles was so important to manage and liaison with all of those different people, which means all of the different work styles, all the different communication channels — that is so key.
You need to make sure that your OBM has incredible EQ: emotional intelligence.
Second, you need a project management tool.
And not just the tool, but you need to have the OBM backing it up with, hey, social media person, how do you like your information delivered to you?
Is it via Slack? Okay, great. I can create a Slack automation. Is it email? Great. We’ll send you email reminders, text, what have you — and slightly customize it to each person because then the information goes out in an easy way every time.”
Megan: “That sounds incredibly valuable for the specific podcasting use case, especially if you work with a third-party producer or provider, you have to work within their systems, rather than being able to get them into yours.
That’s just the nature of the beast. So, someone to take that on.”
Ashley: “And again, for our own podcast, our OBM went from doing it manually, all the nitty gritty. And it probably took her four to five hours a week and she got it down to one.”
The OBM Opportunity Podcast
Ashley: “As I mentioned, we’re a two-sided marketplace. We obviously want to attract online business managers to go through our training and to be a part of our draw pool, and we want to attract the CEOs who want to hire the OBMs.
So our podcast is specifically for the online business managers or people who want to become one. And what we realized is because these women who become our OBMs have such a patchwork quilt-like background, what they want is access to brilliant minds within business. That’s what they want.
And so we find different guests, who can either be resources for the OBMs in some sort of business standpoint — whether it’s podcast experts, whether it is marketing experts, leadership coaches, what have you, to not only help the OBMs but also to recommend to their clients.
I would say 75% guests and 25% role-playing between me, the Visionary, CEO, and our COO who started as an OBM, so they can hear how we communicate, how we think about problems, how we are digesting, any hiccups in our business, any successes in our business, how we talk, tackle big projects.
And I think by showing versus telling, it really opens up their eyes to, oh, okay, this is what it could look like, or this would be a healthy communication style, or hey, this is a mistake, Ashley and Leah, our COO made.
I wanna be aware of this. So it’s that type of thing.”
Megan: “And there’s a metric for you.
How much time have you saved delivering that training personally, and how many mistakes have you eliminated? Compare before and afters.”
Ashley: “Oh, I would love to know that.”
Signs That You Need an Online Business Manager
Ashley: “If you are overwhelmed in your day-to-day, and you look up at the time and you’re like, I’ve been spending all this time doing things that I hate. Running the business and I have no time to grow it — that is your glaring sign.
If you are sitting there and you are managing the heck out of five contractors, that is your sign. If you are stuck at a certain revenue ceiling and you’re like, man, I know I need the systems or the tech but that’s just not my brain.
My brain is, hey, how do I go meet new people and come up with crazy ideas and marketing — that is what I love to do. You asked me to get into Excel. You asked me to set up a new technology. Not a chance. Not gonna happen.
From my own experience, I know how valuable an OBM is.”
Megan: “If I ever, ever shut the door on One Stone Creative, I think I need to run away to the mountains and become an OBM. Because that is so my jam, doing all of that stuff.”
Ashley: “Tell me, does your brain think like a spreadsheet?”
Megan: “Yeah, I’ve got my work spreadsheets, I’ve got my garden spreadsheet. I’ve got my canning spreadsheet. My fridge inventory spreadsheet. I could go on.”
Ashley: “I love that. That’s what we talk about all the time.
So my COO, her brain thinks in spreadsheets. My brain as the visionary thinks in spiderwebs. The idea happens and it’s almost like a starburst, and then it connects to a different idea and then to a different idea.
And so when you ask me to put things together in a long-form, that’s already combined into four different spiderwebs. There is no way I can make it.”
Megan: “If I’ve had a long week and it’s Friday afternoon and I don’t have any calls, I treat myself to a couple of hours of project management.
I’ll say, okay, I’ve got three hours free. I’m going to test out this new project management tool and see if I can build some fun templates. And that’s like how I relax on a Friday afternoon.”
Ashley: “Megan, are you joking? That is amazing. What I wouldn’t give for just a touch of that.”
Megan: “Without having that little touch, you managed to build a whole business and company full of experts to do it for you. So you’re doing fine.”
Ashley: “Preach. That is true.”
Ashley Connell’s Revolutionary AI Tool
Ashley: “AI is an online business manager’s new best friend. We have seen that OBMs with AI can get you about 70% there on any project that you get given them.
So we have gone deep into training on the latest AI — not only what it is, because that’s fine, but how it’s going to help their clients’ businesses. That’s the kicker. One of our values at Prowess Project is show versus tell. I already mentioned that once.
And so what I realized is when a client or a CEO isn’t quite sure what an OBM could do for them, hadn’t really heard of an OBM before, or thinks they may need a VA but that doesn’t quite fit right — they need to be able to see what that could look like.
So we designed an AI agent. Think of it as a customized AI widget where A CEO can put in some easy information. What industry are they in? What do they do? What’s their next goal and what do they hate doing? And it will within three to five minutes, send them a customized report on:
- exactly what an online business manager could do for them to solve those pain points
- day in the life of having an online business manager; what that could look like for you
- what to go look for in an online business manager
- and so much more that is absolutely personalized to them.
We’ve already had our beta group run through it, but because AI is so new, we’re constantly diving into it and making it better and more accurate. But I think what the real kicker is, this type of tool is exactly what we train our OBMs to do for their clients.
So if you love the experience that you go through checking out this tool, that is definitely something that our OBMs could help you build for your use case and for your prospects and for what you are looking to do when it comes to the show versus tell your solution.”
Final Thoughts
I love that there are so many “in the middle” options to help support your business these days — fractional everything, and managers specializing in specific business areas. Definitely something to keep in mind.
Check out Ashley’s awesome new Personal OBM Success Plan and let us know what you think!
Next week, I’ve got another podcasting expert conversation to share with you and we’re going to be talking about something I’m pretty sure you’ve thought of at least once – Podcast Merch. It’s going to be a good one.
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Key Quotes
“You give a VA a task and they execute. You give an online business manager your vision and they strategize.” – Ashley Connell
Resources
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Learn about what other business podcasters are doing:
Ashely Connell | Website | LinkedIn | YouTube