Personal Update & Plans For 2026

0:00Callum:What's up, guys? Hope you're good. Hope you're having an incredible start to 2026. I wanted to do a bit of a personal business life update because I feel like I haven't done one in a little while and the start of the year is a good time to do it. So I'm going to do a bit of a reflection, all the numbers, what went well, what didn't go well behind the podcast, behind my businesses. And I'm also hiring right now. So there's details on, yeah, like how you can work with me in 2026. because a lot of the best people I've hired have all come from my audience. And so I'd love to work with more of you this year.

0:36Callum:So yeah, if you're into it, I'm going to run through kind of what went well, like what worked, what didn't, some of the numbers and yeah, let's dive in. So the podcast creator playbooks that you're listening to, we actually did 14 episodes in

0:58Callum:is just that I use spare capacity from my podcast agency, 7x Content. Yeah, it doesn't really have like a dedicated resource. So I'd like to have done more episodes, but I'm pretty happy with the ones that we put out. And performance-wise, it did 220K long-form views. Average view duration was about 10 minutes, 46 seconds. Click-through rate about 4.7%. And on Spotify, we did 71K plays. so pretty good numbers it can definitely do way better this year i'm going to put a dedicated team on it this year so that we up the consistency of output and just make it weekly as a show in terms of like top episodes the best performing episode was with caleb ralston who is the former director of brand alex hormosi and yeah i can see why like it did uh 60 000 plays um a few hundred thousand on short form and yeah it was just like super practical guide to building a personal brand and we shot it in an incredible location so no surprise that that was the top episode perhaps like the most interesting insight from the podcast was actually the episode that generated the most leads which was exposing big podcast marketing secrets and this episode it only did 2 000 plays so on the face of it is one of the worst performing episodes um but when we drove repurposed it um to linkedin it did 150 000 impressions on that platform and it drove 2 000 comments 500 signups to the email list and in terms of leads generated we generate we closed like not generated we actually closed 250k in business from that one video so that was pretty insane and um yeah I've always been kind of like quite skeptical of online gurus who say you know one video uh generated this amount of money um and you know people say oh uh you know it's not about getting lots of views it's about getting the right views but yeah it actually happened for us.

3:19Callum:So I think one of the key learnings for next year is we're going to do like the bigger, broader episodes, but probably for every kind of three of those, we might do one that's more focused on specific conversion to one of our products or services. In terms of other experiments that we ran with the podcast, we did two vlogs behind the scenes on YouTube. and it was great to just have a bit of play with that and see what the production resources needed to make that and kind of as a bit of a showcase for some of our clients. And I kind of love this format because it blends education with entertainment.

4:01They're really easy to watch. You can kind of watch these things in the evening and on weekends rather than need to kind of like explicitly be listening for educational content, as you might with some of our podcast episodes. so we tested this and um the engagement was kind of like i don't know thousand to two thousand views

4:20Callum:on on those uh formats um and i think they work so well if you can do one per week just as a way to prove that you actually do what you say you do and to build trust uh so i'm going to be recommending that format to clients where they've got the right uh resource to do that i think for me um we first just need to get consistency with the podcast but that was a fun experiment that we ran the other um experiment that we ran was we kind of see or i see you know youtube is the number one streaming app on televisions and i think in 2026 you're going to see more content created specifically for that video type formats that were almost like tv shows so we did an episode with Ben Branson where we went behind the scenes of his product lab and his estate that he lives on and it was a really dynamic episode yeah loved creating it and we think it's a great piece of content I think the main lesson from it is is that just because with podcasts you can be go quite long and they're often kind of like passively consumed while someone's exercising or walking or doing something else with the video I think because you're active they're actively engaging with it and watching it maybe like the big lesson would just be that we should have speeded up a bit and tightened up a bit more but yeah we'll be excited to run a couple more of those type experiment episodes in 2026 across social the podcast did 6 million views on instagram 2.7 million on youtube shorts 600k on linkedin 500k on tiktok and kind of overall big lessons here is just LinkedIn is a really valuable platform despite the lower reach it drives a lot of value we get a lot of leads from it I get a lot of collaborations on it new hires messaging so it's a really valuable platform and want to do a lot more there YouTube shorts like we don't really see that much meaningful conversion there I don't think and I'm not sure our audience are really discovering us on that so I kind of feel like that's a bit of a noisy um platform to be using um and I'm quite skeptical of what it does to the channel in terms of you know adding lots of subscribers um but then are they actually subscribers who are watching the long form is it kind of muddying the channel a bit um I suspect it probably is so I'm pretty tempted to to stop doing the YouTube shorts.

6:53Callum:And TikTok is just like a repurposing platform for us. So we don't really put any thought into it. But even that I'm kind of a bit skeptical of now. I kind of wonder if we should just stop it because it creates noise. And it's a bit of a debate that I'll have with the team when we do planning for the year. Instagram can be a really good platform for us when we get it right. And when the guest has a good profile there. And I think we can do a lot more on that platform with the right resourcing. So plan to do more there in 2026. Podcast plans for 2026 overall, like the three roles it plays for me.

7:26Callum:One is just personal growth, fun and learning. I really enjoy doing it, meeting exceptional people, learning from them and hopefully creating some value for the audience. Its secondary function is as a marketing channel for the business. It drives a lot of leads and I just want to, yeah, get it to drive more leads more consistently and we get yeah amazing kind of um global companies um huge creators netflix hosts reaching out from listening to episodes and wanting to uh work with um my podcast agency or collaborate in some way so um yeah it's it's it's been a success last year doing that kind of very inconsistently so this year just want to up that consistency and the third reason I do it is that it's a testing lab so we use the same systems the same team and the same processes as our clients use in my podcast agency and so I basically get to be a client and I can see if the product is delivering for me and for my goals and I can also use it as a bit of a testing lab so if I think there's a new thing that we should be doing or a new product process that we can introduce and test then we can test it on this podcast and then roll it out for clients so it's amazing kind of like testing lab for me to just make sure our product is delivering and our service is delivering because our clients get exactly the same service so yeah goal is just to go weekly and just to narrow the focus so a bit more of a tighter focus either on YouTube or Spotify at any one time and then yeah again on social just drilling in on are we focused on LinkedIn or are we focused on Instagram at any one time for driving conversion over to the podcast from social and maximizing the value of the episodes yeah last year the business complete completed a bit of a transition So in 2024, we were kind of seeing ourselves as the world's best agency for social first growth for podcasts.

9:36Callum:And we were growing shows predominantly with short form and social. And then last year we made this transition where we added in end to end podcast production. Yeah, had an incredible year doing that. So we, yeah, that enabled us to do just shy of a million pounds in revenue. I think we did about 956 grand in revenue and we launched five new podcasts. We landed two of them in the top 10 health charts. In fact, last week, one just hit number one in the UK health chart, which is incredible. And when we hit top 10 positions in like personal development, comedy and business across both the US and the UK, and we generated over 100 million podcast views across client content.

10:26So it was a pretty crazy year and we just added a lot of expertise. So we started doing in-person shooting, sets, production, guest booking. We added meta, Facebook, thumbnail testing and a paid growth lab. So ways that you can pay for growth. and we added a Spotify growth playbook and yeah we're having a lot of success and really enjoying working on that platform and with that platform I would say like away from that like the biggest

10:58Callum:lesson for me personally was just raising standards and trusting my gut so I got a lot better at making decisions faster performance management acting when something felt off and every time I hesitated or waited on something I knew wasn't right, we burnt time and money. That was probably the main breakthrough last year was, yeah, starting to raise my standards and just trusting my gut more. So 2026, I think there's clear path to get to 1.5 to 2 million. And it's probably just about doing more of our existing clients, maybe adding one or two more and just tightening up the operations and adding more like exceptional people which brings me to hiring and one of my biggest insights last year again was that the best people I hired actually came from my audience and it's a bit of a cheat code for attracting like minds and extremely talented people so we're now a team of about 16 and yeah if you'd like to work with us this year um and work kind of in an ambitious team who are pushing what's possible with content and podcasting i'd love to hear from you we work with some of the world's best creators founders and brands we're hiring across kind of marketing production producing editing social uh operations um so if that sounds interesting just send me free ideas to Callum at 7xcontent.com and I'll put the details in the description.

12:38Callum:Yeah. And just send me free ideas that prove that I should hire you or free pieces of work that you're really proud of that you think I'll want to hire you from looking at. Lastly, just on the personal side, it was, it was a pretty good year. I got married, which was awesome. It was amazing. We traveled, we went to Portugal and Sri Lanka with particular highlights I would recommend particularly if you're into like beaches surfing that kind of thing saw some great gigs like actually made an effort to go to more gigs so we saw Coldplay, Ed Sheeran a bunch of other really cool gigs and shows which was a lot of fun spent more quality time with my family I'm definitely more cognizant that my parents are a little bit older now and yeah, spent some more quality time with them.

13:27Callum:I actually made reading a habit and this has been a big breakthrough, particularly the fact that you can listen to books on Audible is a real cheat code. So combining actually reading with listening, it's really interesting. I can remember all the best books I read last year, but I can't really remember so many like films, TV shows, that kind of thing. So yeah, definitely a big unlock and I'm actually excited about books and stuff at the moment, which is really cool. Got a business coach, which I really recommend. Someone who kind of holds me to account on things, just gives me new, fresh energy, fresh ideas.

14:02On the same front, like I got a PT and we trained twice a week. And again, just that accountability and I guess in any area of your life, like where you can just get an expert to leverage like their 20 years or 30 years or 40 years of knowledge in a space yeah leverage that plus accountability it's so powerful we cooked a bit more on Sundays

14:24Callum:which was a really enjoyable thing I surfed a bit more played lots of football probably maybe the last year that I'll play 11 aside because I think it's yeah maybe getting I'm maybe getting a bit too old for it now and then also spent a lot of time in in saunas and really enjoyed that so goal this year is definitely to to get my own sauna yeah 2026 just want more of the above and I think the other kind of personal things I'll be working on is just leveling up our home environment and our area being more intentional with planning so there's this guy Jesse Itzler you need to look him up if you're planning your year and want to be more intentional with making sure life happens around your work and doesn't kind of get lost to your work and I also want to host I went to quite a lot of other people's dinners last year and really enjoyed them but this year I'd like to start hosting some of my own dinners so if you're a creator kind of brand entrepreneur or just like a really interesting, cool person in marketing or content, and you'd like to come to some dinners in London or Bristol or New York or wherever we're based, just send me a message.

15:39And that's another big thing on my list this year is to create a bit more of a community around dinners and stuff. So, yeah, overall, last year was an insane year, a lot of fun, a lot of personal growth, a lot of amazing outcomes for myself and for my clients and for my team really excited about this year i hope you have an amazing year and if you'd like to work with me this year as i say just drop me a note we'd love to hear from you and excited to see some ideas and messages from you guys all right all the best callum