We’ve recorded a lot of conversations with business owners across Tennessee — contractors, farmers, shop owners, agency folks. The ones that turn out well and the ones that turn out flat almost never come down to how interesting the business is.
They come down to a handful of assumptions people bring into the room. Here are the ones worth unlearning before you sit down.
“I need to prepare talking points”
This is the big one, and it’s why the show is called Unscripted.
A guest who arrives with three bullet points they need to hit spends the whole conversation steering toward them. You can hear it. The answers get shorter and more general, because the guest is managing the interview instead of having it.
The best episodes we’ve recorded happened when somebody told a story they hadn’t planned to tell. A guy explaining why he almost shut down in 2019. A shop owner describing the customer who taught her to stop discounting. None of that shows up on a prepared list, because prepared lists are made of conclusions, and listeners connect to the thing that happened before the conclusion.
Come with your experience. Not a script.
“I should keep it professional”
Professional usually translates to vague. Owners get nervous about naming a number, naming a mistake, or naming the year things got hard, so they round everything off into safe generalities.
The problem is that safe generalities are indistinguishable from every other business owner’s safe generalities. “You’ve got to take care of your customers” is true and completely forgettable. “We lost our biggest account in March and I didn’t tell my wife for two weeks” is a person.
You don’t have to disclose anything you’re uncomfortable with. But the specific, ordinary details are the ones that land — not the polished ones.
“My business isn’t interesting enough”
We hear this constantly, usually from people in trades and services. Nobody wants to hear about septic work. Nobody cares about a small engine repair shop.
This is backwards. Everyone has a septic system and a mower and no idea how either one works. The reason those episodes do well is that the knowledge is genuinely unavailable to most listeners, and the person holding it has never been asked to explain it out loud.
The businesses that struggle to be interesting on a podcast are usually the ones doing something everyone already understands.
“This is a marketing opportunity”
It is, but not the way most people think.
Guests who treat the hour as an ad get a flat episode and very little out of it. Guests who treat it as a conversation get something more durable: a recording of them explaining what they know, in their own voice, that they can point people to for years.
That artifact does more work than a pitch. When somebody is deciding whether to hire you, forty minutes of you talking about your craft is more persuasive than anything on your website — because you can’t fake it for forty minutes.
The plug happens naturally at the end. It’s the least valuable part of the episode.
“I’ll sound dumb”
Nobody has ever sounded dumb on this show, and that’s not politeness — it’s structure. It’s a conversation, not an interrogation, and there’s no gotcha waiting.
What people actually mean when they say this is that they’re afraid of a pause. So here’s the thing to know: pauses are fine. Thinking before you answer sounds like thoughtfulness, not confusion. Nearly every guest who was nervous beforehand has said afterward that it went faster and easier than they expected.
What we actually want
Show up. Talk about the work you do and why you do it here. Tell us the part you’d normally leave out.
In an era where a lot of business content is generated rather than lived, an hour of a real person who actually knows their trade is a scarcer thing than it used to be. That’s the whole premise of the show.
If you run a business in Sparta, Cookeville, or anywhere in the Upper Cumberland and that sounds like a conversation you’d want to have, get in touch or learn more about being a guest.