Aug. 18, 2026

Joshua Gould: Building a Professional and Personal Brand through Authenticity

Joshua Gould: Building a Professional and Personal Brand through Authenticity

Welcome to The Jeff Bradbury Show, featuring conversations with the creators who are shaping the future of learning. In this episode, Josh Gould shares insights on building a personal brand, leveraging AI in content creation, and effective social media strategies for entrepreneurs and leaders.

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  • Effective Instructional Coaching:Master the art of coaching people rather than technology, building relationships that drive success, and measuring impact through student engagement rather than just technology usage.

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Key Takeaways

1) Executive brand & thought leadership

  • Why personal branding is becoming a core leadership skill
  • The difference betweenbuilding attentionvs.building trust

2) AI as a leverage tool (not a gimmick)

  • How AI can streamline content creation, training, and internal workflows
  • Why AI “democratizes software” by helping non-technical people build systems faster

3) Authenticity vs. persona

  • Where authenticity matters most
  • When a “persona” (or slight caricature) can help early on—and how to evolve it into something real

4) Audience growth is compounding

  • Why consistency matters more than virality
  • What patience and persistence look like in practice over months/years

5) Relationship-driven growth

  • The role of in-person networking and speaking engagements in expanding reach and credibility

6) YouTube as an executive credibility engine

  • Building (and monetizing) a channel through consistent output
  • What long-form video enables that text alone can’t

Bottom line: Consistent, useful content + real relationships compound into trust, opportunity, and long-term audience growth.

Chapters:

  • 00:00 Introduction and episode overview
  • 01:09 Josh Gould's background and entrepreneurial journey
  • 04:54 The role of personal branding for CEOs and leaders
  • 08:27 Authenticity versus persona in content creation
  • 13:39 The impact of AI on content creation and leadership
  • 20:47 Building a tribe and audience growth strategies
  • 24:24 Effective thumbnail strategies and content tips
  • 30:43 Getting started with content creation and networking
  • 33:36 Practical advice for aspiring content creators

About our Guest: Joshua Gould

Joshua Gould is a CEO, investor, and operator known for scaling businesses through disciplined execution across private equity-style value creation, M&A, and modern go-to-market. He is the CEO of thebigword, a global language technology and services company serving enterprise and government clients, where he helped grow the business from $6M to over $100M in revenue; building the operating system, commercial engine, and leadership cadence required to scale. In 2021 Josh sold the business to a large US based PE firm and continued as a CEO where has has led a $20m technology investment into AI and automation and the acquisition of the UK's largest Sign Language provider Clarion. Josh has also invested and sits on the board of Falafel Love a CPG business, and has made a strategic investment in Alwoodley Capital a healthcare fund. Joshua is a straight-talking guest for business podcasts that go beyond startup clichés and into what actually works: how to buy and integrate companies, how to build predictable revenue, how to protect margin while scaling delivery, and how to deploy technology and AI in a way that improves quality and speed rather than creating chaos. He’s equally comfortable discussing the mechanics of deals (sourcing, diligence, LOIs, integration) and the realities of leadership (boards, investors, culture, and execution under pressure). He also has a growing audience with 31,000 followers on LinkedIn where he shares practical insights on PE, M&A, business strategy, sales and marketing, operations, technology, and AI.

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Jeffrey Bradbury (00:00)

Today I'm joined by Joshua Gould, CEO, investor, operator, and creator of Execcraft. Josh has spent years scaling companies, leading teams, navigating MA, and helping organizations think strategically about growth, technology, and execution. In today's conversation, we're going to explore what it means to lead in the age of AI, how executives can build trust through social media and YouTube, and why a personal brand is quickly becoming one of the most important leadership skills of the day. It is a pleasure to welcome on Josh Gould. Josh, how are you today? Welcome to the show.

Josh Gould (00:30)

Jeff, thank you very much. It's great to be here with you and I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. It is a real feel here in Miami, by the way, of forty two C, which is like a hundred and ten Fahrenheit.

Jeffrey Bradbury (00:44)

It is great to have you on, been following your work. We're gonna talk all about your past and and with things that you've been doing in Miami and New York and talk to us a little bit about who Josh Gould is, where did you come from? How'd you get started and what got you to where you are?

Josh Gould (01:02)

So I would say what got me started was my parents. And I don't say that in a very literal sense, of course that's true. what I mean by that is my parents were great supporters of my failures. So I and and this is probably gonna alienate a lot of your customer base here, but I hated school. I was horrible at school. I was

Very ADHD before they had that title. And and I used to get drugged up with all these things and fall asleep in class. I was either wild or I fell asleep in class. And I was pretty much a straight C, D, and F student, except for sport, because you could run around. It's not, you can probably tell, I'm not very athletic b athletically built, but I could move and I could run around. And my parents just always had this great belief in me.

And they used to say, Don't worry, you'll be an adult soon and it life will be much easier. And I believed them. So I'm very, very lucky. I'm privileged. And I think everyone who is born in America in any socioeconomic group is privileged compared to the majority of people I see when I travel around the world. But I'm extra privileged because I have parents that supported me. And I think that that was the key. And

that gave me the confidence to leave the comfort of my city and travel the world and start businesses and grow businesses. And my father was an entrepreneur and he wanted to deliver value and to grow businesses. And we never had that much money growing up. And it's only now that I'm older that I look back and like, my God, my dad had businesses worth a lot of money. You know, in nineteen ninety-eight he had a business.

Doing in today's money $35 million of revenue. It didn't make any money, Jeff. And when he sold it, he got pennies for it on the dollar. He made a lot of money on it, but he still got pennies for it on the dollar. but I owe I took that ethos that build, do something that's interesting, be helpful. And that's really my background. It's what I've done for a long time.

And and I've pivoted, I would say, when I hit my forties and I have kids and I like you and we've got bills to pay. And I've had to go through this horrific process of learning of how to ask for money. Having to ask for the value I bring. And it's really difficult for the people I'm asking my investors, because they're not used to that. And I've trained them to get everything for low value or near free.

Jeffrey Bradbury (03:48)

At some point, you found yourself in Manhattan. At some point, you found yourself building businesses and becoming a CEO. Take us through this process. I think that a lot of people are looking to build a business, looking to make some money for themselves, but you were able to do this and at the same time build a brand for yourself. And that's something that I'm interested in hearing from you today how does that CEO step out in front of their company? How does that CEO step apart?

From their company. We've had conversations here on the show of are you your own company? And that's even something that I've been guilty of. Is teacher cast me or am I and then teacher cast? How do you

Josh Gould (04:28)

Well let me just

Jeffrey Bradbury (04:29)

build that brand? How do you build a company, but then also keep yourself in front of it?

Josh Gould (04:33)

Okay. My in my opinion, I think everyone is their own company and their own brand, whether they believe it or they don't believe it. And I can prove it. Let's take Elon Musk. He is his own brand. No one can say that he isn't a brand on its own. And whatever business he starts, he raises money for it. And it doesn't matter how terrible of a business it is, because he has some really terrible

Businesses, including Tesla. Tesla makes almost no money. It's an absolute tiny business compared to most car companies, yet it's worth 10 times the average American car company. It makes about as many cars as Build Your Dreams, BYD, which is one of the biggest car manufacturers in China of electric vehicles. It makes a fraction.

Of what BYD makes, except it's worth five times more. Why? Because people are investing in Elon, not in his businesses. My company that I run, The Big Word, kills Elon Musk's SpaceX company in terms of how much revenue, sorry, in terms of how much profit I make. I make thousands of times more profit than SpaceX, but I'm worth a fraction of SpaceX.

Why? Because people are investing in Elon Musk. And he is just pushing that boundary further and further and further. And there are many people like Elon Musk on a smaller scale. Teachers, for example. There are teachers that can get paid a million dollars to go and give a speech. A single speech. Those teachers aren't actually career teachers.

You know, they are people that have gone and done other stuff. I've got a friend and he goes round universities and they pay him a lot of money, not millions, but about ten thousand dollars to speak, which is insane. In four speeches, he's making what an average speaker makes as sorry, what an average teacher is making here in Miami. And he's only doing about four hours actual work and let's say a couple of days travelling.

So this is the thing, right? He's written a book, he's branded himself, he's got a website, he talks about money, he has a YouTube channel with a million views, and he's teaching. He's really a teacher. And he's teaching people that aren't even paying him most of the time because he's making his money through AdSense and and yes, sometimes they pay him. A small percentage of people who listen to him pay him.

But he's making money. So I think it's really important to be a brand. And then you can use that brand to supercharge your real businesses where you add real value. But there is one big health warning here. Do not believe your own brand. It's not that your brand is false and not true. It's just an exaggeration of who you are. It's not really who you are.

Now, the more authentic you can be once you already have a brand, the better it is for your brand. But if you're authentic from day one, you probably will fail to build the brand. And I know that that goes against all the advice you hear on every other podcast be authentic. Well, you know, think about who you really are. You don't like to get up early on a Saturday, you don't drink because you gave up drinking, you're vegan. I'm describing myself, by the way, Jeff. Here

Jeffrey Bradbury (08:15)

Okay.

Josh Gould (08:16)

it's not gonna sell.

No one's gonna watch that. So you have to be a caricature of your real self. And then as your brand grows, you can then retract back into kind of a more authentic posture, but also do it meaningfully. I I'm building a brand for myself around exec craft and being able to help individuals who have businesses maximize their exit value.

I'm building a brand for myself around the companies that I own. For example, the Big Word, which is one of the largest language technology and service businesses in the world. And we help about 80 million people every single year communicate with government and healthcare departments. So I'm doing it meaningfully, where I can actually then distribute my brand to help my businesses. It's not about being an influencer or getting a lot of likes.

It is nice when I tell my kids someone just offered me five hundred dollars and your daddy's an influencer, for two seconds they're impressed and then they're like, you're not as big as Mr. Beast.

Jeffrey Bradbury (09:25)

How do you decide when you're working in this sphere? How do you decide what parts are you going to be sharing publicly and what not? I mean, what you're saying makes total sense and you see it all over the place on the TikToks and the YouTubes and stuff like that. And and I kind of want to go back into like I I do a lot of wrestling comparisons, like the people that make it well in the WWE basically take their personality and then up it by 10.

And that's what people are buying into because they can see the character, they can see the exaggerations as opposed to walking in with a persona of a, you know, you name the the stereotype business person, right? How do you know where to go when you turn that camera on? How do we know what's you, Josh? And how do we know what's the persona? And then how do you use that to build out your audience?

Josh Gould (10:15)

So the data will show you that the more you share of your real life, like the hard moments, not the good ones, but the hard ones, the easier it is to build a brand. But it's like anything, it's a shortcut and it doesn't bode well long term. Unless you're Kim Kardashian, of course, where a sex tape, you know, was her defining moment of her life probably. But

Let's use myself as the real example. What do your listeners know from me from the ten minutes we've been recording? You know I have kids because I've mentioned them. You know where I live. You know, I had two loving parents that were supportive of me. You know, I have a number of businesses. So you know a lot about me. I've let people know and I've let people in, but I haven't shared the drama that I had last night and why I was up at one in the morning.

And I won't share that because I value my privacy still. Now I know if I did and I took the camera with me, I would get a lot of lights, I get a lot of views, and people would be like, okay, this guy has all the same problems as me. I can relate to him more. But I'm not prepared to do that. So I think the answer, Jeff, is you have to make that decision personally.

I have found a way to cleverly interwi interweave my real life into a simple interview like this where I mention my kids because half of the people watching you probably have kids. So I've immediately connected with them. I had two loving parents, I've acknowledged privilege. So I've now connected with everyone because whether you had two loving parents that were supportive or not, or you didn't, the fact that I've acknowledged that, now you can see that part of me and you can see the importance.

of it. And I've created aspiration because now you can be those parents. You can be, and even if you don't have kids, you can still be a parent like that to someone else's child. So I try and do this very carefully and mindfully. The answer to your question quite simply is the more personal you can get, actually the easier it is to build an audience quicker. But it's not always good for you.

Jeffrey Bradbury (12:31)

You're talking about being authentic, and we're talking about building that brand where people know a little bit about you. And honestly, that's the stuff that we talk about here. People know I've got triplets, people know I'm a teacher, people see all these different things. Clearly, when you look behind me, you see some of the interest and influences that have happened here in the studio. I I want to pivot a little bit to the world of AI. It comes up every single show. And on one hand, AI can be used as a tool to help, it can be used as a tool to save its time.

But to what we're discussing here, it also can be a way to take the authenticness out of us because something else is doing it for us. Where do you see AI in the world of content creation? Where should we be leaning on it? And if you want to mention any of the tools that you're using, that'd be great. But where do you see AI as a leadership tool, not just a trend these days?

Josh Gould (13:24)

Sure. I just before I was on this podcast had a meeting with our head of learning and development in The Big Word. And we have a workforce of about 15,000 people. About 500 work for us in our offices. The rest are 1099 workers. But we still have to message them, right? We still have to train the 500 people that work in our offices around the world. So

One of the things that we were talking about is how do you train people in AI? And I said, stop training people what AI is. Everyone knows what AI is to a varying degree. I can speak very technically about the fact it's machine learning and we've had it for 20 years and neural machine learning is really the current crop of AI. It's just rebranded because it's large language model, not corporate. I'm not gonna bore your listeners in all of that.

But what I will say is that we are missing the point here. So I said to my head of lunch, let's build an app right now. And I said, You know that SharePoint file that you have in our servers that manages everyone's appraisal that you never eat. Let's go to it. Let's build an app. And that app is going to give you the

gap analysis for every single person in there. It's going to show you who your top 10 superstars are. Because we do it every single month at the Big Word. It's going to show you who's progressing the most. And we went on to the Big Words we we use Microsoft Copilot, but you can you you can actually choose Claude or ChatGPT. We happen to use ChatGPT's version in there. And we built an app and it was a bunch of code and a zip file and he says

What am I supposed to do with this? So I taught him very quickly to go on to, I think they call it, pronounce it Supper Base or Super Base, vessel. And within an hour, we built this whole app that did what he did. And he was blown away. And I said to him, Chris, how do you feel? He said, For the first time, I feel optimistic about AI. He said,

Jeffrey Bradbury (15:42)

Really.

Josh Gould (15:42)

I was so worried that it was going to destroy our business.

And destroy what I do and take the human element. You say, but this is creative. All that time I had to, you know, dream of what it'd be like to be able to code and and had all these great ideas that I could bring to the world. And and I feel like I've gained control back. I've taken control, I'm creative, and I can do this.

And I can do it without your support. you know, he actually told me, you know, the budget I'd asked for, keep it. Just give me tokens. Give me the tokens. Give me half of whatever you were gonna give me in budget. So I said, Well, we aren't gonna sign off your budget anyway, but we'll give you we'll give you ten grands worth of tokens to play with. And I guarantee you by tonight, because I know what it's like the first time you do it, you will have built like five or six agents.

This is what teaching is about for me. It's showing someone, opening their eyes and then saying, go and do it. Go make it happen. Don't sit in a classroom. You need the classroom bit to teach the theory, because he didn't know what suburb base was, he didn't know what Vassel was, he didn't know what to do with that zip file. He didn't know how to spec out the software. But very quickly, within one hour, we taught him that. And he already said to me, even the receptionist could be doing this.

You know, the recep the receptionist reports in to him because we didn't know what to do with the receptionist. So

Jeffrey Bradbury (17:16)

Okay.

Josh Gould (17:16)

he's like, the receptionist keeps asking me for these pieces of software. I'm gonna teach the receptionist how to do this. And then he's gonna build his own software to check people in and track where they are in the building. Because we do a lot of top secret and secret clid and anti-terror cleared stuff. So we have to track everyone in the building and where they are and where they check in. So they wanted software to do, and it's very expensive.

This is what it's about, Jeff. This is why I'm passionate about teaching and education. It's also why I'm passionate about AI because it democratizes software and automation, but it also helps people like me who aren't very bright. They're not very you know, I can't retain information like an average person. But what I can do is see what to do with that information. So, you know, we're on Riverside right now. I hope you don't mind me sharing that.

I use Riverside all the time. If I want to put out content in the past, 10 years ago, I had a podcast. It would take me about a month to edit every single podcast. And after seven months of doing it, I gave up. It takes me an hour to do a much better version of that today. Because Riverside has these buttons that you press, it gets rid of the ums and ahs, it gets rid of the fluff.

It gives studio quality sound, so I don't even need to have a good mic. In fact, the mic I'm using right now cost me $30 on Amazon. And at the end of the day, I can put that content out. Now, if the content's a load of rubbish, no one's gonna listen to it. If it's really, really good, one or two people are gonna listen to it. But the next week, one or two turns into three or four. If it's really good, that three or four turns into five or six. And after about a year,

You've got like 200 people listening to it. Now you're not making money, but you're growing. And if you follow that compounding audience size, it doesn't take long to get to 10, 20, 30,000 people listening to it. And at that point, yes, you can monetize it.

Jeffrey Bradbury (19:21)

Let's dive into that a little bit because we've had guests on this show that are starting to build their build businesses, but they haven't yet found that tribe. They haven't figured it out. And you know, when you're looking through the YouTube landscape, most people are really killing it on YouTube by teaching the thing that they're currently doing. Like they're not showing how to do stuff, they're teaching you how to do this and then saying, join me, or by the way, here's the template for X number of dollars or something like that.

What social media strategy do you recommend for entrepreneurs, for content creators that are out there? Is there the overnight success? Or as you mentioned, just keep showing up every day and eventually you're gonna see onefold, twofold, fivefold, tenfold coming out?

Josh Gould (20:08)

Yeah. My wife always says, Why can't you create a piece of technology like this guy who's just sold it for a billion dollars? And I say, Well, because the guy won the lottery. Not literally. He created a piece of software. She was talking about the guy that sold to Wix, I think that AI

Jeffrey Bradbury (20:25)

Mm-hmm.

Josh Gould (20:25)

website builder. He sold it for eighty million dollars, like three months after building it. And she wants to know why I can't do that. And I said, Well

You've got to understand there are more people winning the lottery than doing what he did. But winning but playing the lottery isn't a good tactic. So is there overnight successes? Of course there is. But you've got more chance of winning the lottery than being an overnight success. Building a tribe is a compounding effect. So you're going to end up putting out videos or shorts or, you know, things on X.

And you're gonna do that, in my opinion, for a long time before you even get one or two people that aren't your mom, your gran and your nan, you know, you know, that really are your target audience. And then you're going to probably speed that up a little bit if you can go to your friends and your family and they are your target audience. But if you've ever listened to Warren Buffett, or if you haven't, you should.

about the compounding effects of investments. That's where you take money and you put it in a 401k or in a teacher's pension and it grows by five, six percent every single year. And if you put a tho a hundred dollars a a week into that, I believe that you become a millionaire by sixty five. It may even be a hundred dollars a month, sorry. You have to Google it. There are people that have done it. Audiences work the same way.

It takes forever to get to like 20 people that are regularly watching you. And then it takes slightly less than forever to get to a hundred. And then it takes another long period of time to get to 400, but it starts to compound and it starts to double. But then going from 400 to 10,000 is pretty quick. And then going from 10,000 to 20,000 is even quicker. That's the compounding effect of an audience.

And what people think is if I put a lot of content out, then I'll grow my audience quicker. There is some truth to that, because mathematically you can speed up the compounding effect, because it's not measured in days, it's measured in in in output of content. But Google and YouTube, much to people's, you know, opinion and view, it doesn't do better because you put a lot of videos out.

It does better because a lot of videos have a better chance of getting your early audience. So understand audiences, genuine audiences, true audiences, take time to build. And yes, there are always people that get lucky. And then there's also long form and short form. So I think that long form content, just from what I'm seeing anecdotally, builds an audience much quicker than short form. Short form gives you the appearance.

That you're building an audience. But they're not religious. They're not tribal. That's why, and YouTube know this, and they even tell you this, because in order to monetize on YouTube, I can't remember, but it's like 20 million views of shorts versus

Jeffrey Bradbury (23:45)

Yes.

Josh Gould (23:46)

like, is it 3,000 hours of long form? Which which can easily

Jeffrey Bradbury (23:50)

Well, they they

just changed the rule. I think I'm gonna say this right. 8,000 hours before the monetize now. I mean, it's some

they're changing

Josh Gould (23:57)

From next year, yeah.

Jeffrey Bradbury (23:58)

things around right now. Luckily, that doesn't affect my channel here because we're grandfathered into all this stuff, but it's there needs to be that strategy, right? Now, one of the strategies that you've used on your YouTube channel here, which is at exec understore craft, we're gonna make sure that we have all the links here. You are utilizing really nice and catchy.

Thumbnails, which is I think something that a lot of execs, a lot of companies aren't getting. What's your just so we can all top this conversation? What's your thumbnail strategy? How do you put it together? And really, what is the goal when you're sitting down to put these thumbnails together? Are you, I don't know if you're doing it or if your team's doing it, but like they're all.

Josh Gould (24:40)

It's about the only thing I do when I edit my own stuff. I use AI primarily. I have my I have an editing assistant that puts some nice videos on now. I didn't do that in the first place. And by the way, I don't think it really makes a difference in audience. I think it makes a difference in how people perceive you. So it is a branding advantage. But the thumbnail itself, I go onto Chat GPT.

I take a picture like this, or you know, or whatever. I hit the snapshot and I say, here's the title. And that's all I do. And it's so easy to do. But I put in a few prompts and I'll say, I want it to be viral. I want it to be simple. I want a clean background so it's easy to see. Now I'm a machine learning guy, so I'm a data guy. I love data. And I look at

data and patterns. And there's all these videos online about thumbnails and about doing A B testing. And let me just tell you, as a data guy, most of those videos are absolute BS. They're not BSing you to create content. They're not trying to BS you. They just don't understand the fallacy of small of small data samples. And that's the reality as well. There's also so many other inputs.

How do you know it wasn't your title? The y the relationship between your title and your thumbnail versus just the thumbnail change that you did in the A B. How do you know that you didn't put that video out on a bad day? Cause like people tell me Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for my content's better. But I can tell you if I put something out in the middle of August on the best day, it's not gonna do anywhere near as well on the middle of September on the worst day. So there's just

Too many inputs. So the strategy should be this. First of all, don't build your own thumbnails. Go into ChatGPT, Grock, or whatever. Tell them you want a viral thumbnail. It'll use data that it's pulling and research that it's pulling anyway. Put yourself in your thumbnail is my advice, because that's branding for a start. And second of all, people want to connect with a human, even if it's AI generated. And then my next piece of advice is.

Don't overthink it. That's not where the value is. Think about what you're actually going to say. That's where your real value is. Think about how you're going to say it succinctly and position it and make sure, and I'm trying to do this, Jeff, for your audience here, that they can actually take away something. And it's not just a nice chat, that they can actually take this away and then put that content out. And here's the bit that's going to shock your audience. And I'm not hearing it from anyone else on the internet.

Don't do this all online. Do it in person. If you want to go and compete with a million other people in your segment putting videos out, be my guest and go and do it. But I go in person as well. And I'll go to a conference, I'll give a speech, I'm giving one in London next month. And it's not a big conference, 120 people. And I'm gonna advertise execcraft.

I'm gonna tell people go to YouTube, put execcraft Joshua Gold in the search and find me. And I might only get five to ten people doing that, but those five to ten people, Google likes a lot more than the people that they give me, and it helps with the algorithms. That's what I've noticed. But there's almost no competition because when I go and give those speeches and I give, you know, probably 50 face to face speeches a year.

'Cause every time I go away for a meeting, I look for a conference or something that I can speak at. You know, so it's like one a week almost. U usually it's two or three a week and then I have a break. But be offline in the real world because then people can get to know you, they can communicate with you, they come up to you and ask questions. and I encourage like difficult questions and I say things that I really believe in. So I get, you know, I got called a capitalist pig the other day by an audience member.

And what it did was it made people like me who wouldn't normally like me 'cause I was being attacked publicly and I handled it with respect. Now you can't do that hidden behind a screen.

Jeffrey Bradbury (29:17)

That is such good advice and why, you know, if you are building out your business, as you mentioned, get out there, go to conferences, meet people. If you can't get on stage at a particular still go. Shake that hand, put a name to a face, start networking, start making, you know, those connections out there because you never know where the relationships are going. You never you know, you you never know what the next door is going to open.

As we're looking into the later half of the year, as we're starting, you know, at least in my world here, we're starting up with school. You've got other things going on in the fourth quarter of the year. What advice do you have for people that are looking to get started? What advice do you have for looking for to people who want to get started, but they say, I just don't have the time and andor might be struggling to get started here? What do you say to those beginning creators?

Josh Gould (30:05)

Okay, I have so many friends that watch my podcast, my YouTube channel, and they're like, Can you help me do it? And I would say, sure, come. I'm I've got this little booth here that I'm sat in right now. I say, Come, turn up, use the booth, let's get one done. We'll do five and you'll get it out. They never ever come. So a lot of people watch the YouTubes, they buy the equipment. I mean, this guy, my friend, he lives around the corner, I won't name names, but he knows exactly who he is.

He's bought the mic, he's bought the headset, he's watched the YouTubes. He's never gonna do it because getting started is a mindset and and a and something that some people are good at and some people are terrible at. So if you are thinking about starting it, do it wherever you are. Don't buy a mic. I have a a phone here, a Samsung. That's all you need. You go and you create a

I'm I use Riverside, I like Riverside, but there are free apps you can use. I suggest you don't because Riverside is probably going to help you distribute it, it's gonna help you edit it and that thirty bucks a month or whatever it costs i is is worth it. But go onto Riverside, get your phone, stand there like this, and just start speaking. And you will be terrible probably at the beginning. It doesn't matter. Just get it out.

Don't overthink it. Don't watch 20 hours of YouTube on how to create a good YouTube channel. It's fine to watch a few good hours, listen to this podcast, take on some of it, but start it. Now, once you've started, that's when you really you really want to start learning because you want to get better. That's when you really watch your 20 hours of YouTube. Because you started it, you're doing it every week, you're motivated. But the hardest part of starting is starting.

Jeffrey Bradbury (31:58)

It's the same concepts that we use in education. I've gotten over the years, you know, how do I do student podcasting? How do I do the? I'm like every Chromebook has a record button. Done. Every iPhone, every iPad has iMovie. It's all free. Just put it in there. And if you look at some of the most up-and-coming channels right now, it's just somebody taking a phone, sticking it on like a MagSafe tripod or something like that, walking outside and

Just talking to it. You don't need to have a ton of equipment. You don't and and really the other people, the other thing people always say is, Well, what if it's bad? And I always respond with, You don't have to publish it, but you gotta practice. And as a musician, that's go in the practice room and do some wood shedding. You gotta stand in front of it. I also recommend people join their local Toastmasters union or something like that. Like get find some of these public speaking groups to kind of get your chops up and then just go.

Do it and and have some fun with it. Josh, where can we find more information about the great stuff that you guys are doing in your neck of the woods?

Josh Gould (33:05)

So you can go and like I say, go to YouTube, search Josh Gould, execcraft, I'll come up there and I pretty much happy to interact through there. You know what to do on LinkedIn, you can put Josh Gould, put the big word in there, because that's my primary business, that I am the CEO of. And always happy to interact there. I do this, I think like you, Jeff, as a hobby. I love business, I love helping people.

I'm very much in, you know, that sense of give people a fishing net rather than a fish. That way they can help themselves. So, you know, I'm not trying to I've got nothing to sell. I know people who sell stuff always say I've got nothing to sell, but I genuinely don't. I love doing this. I love helping people and I hope the people that I help one day will help others.

Jeffrey Bradbury (33:57)

And that is what this show is all about. Coming together, talking about content creation, talking about building a brand, entrepreneurship. Josh, thank you so much for coming on the show. All the links are gonna be over in our show notes. You can find out more over at teachercast.net forward slash podcast. And of course, we're gonna make sure that everything is in the description. If you found this episode helpful, hit that like and subscribe button. We would love to have you guys join our our team. And please leave a comment below with any questions that you have. We'll certainly make sure that Josh sees it and he'll

Get back to you as soon as he can. And that wraps up this episode of the Jeff Bradbury show on behalf of everybody here. My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with each other. Good night, everybody.

Jeffrey Bradbury (34:42)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Jeff Bradbury Show, a podcast for entrepreneurs, content creators, and anybody out there looking to make an impact. Welcome to our show. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about how you can build a brand in front of your business. That's right, we're going to talk about not only how to be that CEO of your company, but how to get yourself out there, start that YouTube channel, be authentic, and start to grow a tribe of your own.

And

if you're somebody out there who's already been building that tribe of your own, we would love to hear from you guys. Head on over to Jeff Bradbury.com, fill out my contact form. Would love to have you guys as a member of our group and would love to have you guys featured on the next episode of the Jeff Bradbury show.