Randy Molland is a total dynamo in the world of business and philanthropy! He’s the brain behind the Go Big to Give Big movement, which is all about helping entrepreneurs build businesses with heart.

Buckle up, because this episode dives into Randy's journey from a regular electrician to a real estate mogul who discovered that making money isn't just about stacking cash but about making a difference! After facing some pretty heavy life challenges, including the tragic loss of his mentor, Randy found his purpose by giving back to those in need, especially kids affected by tough situations like trafficking.

This episode is packed with inspiring stories and practical tips for anyone looking to blend purpose with profit. Plus, Randy spills the beans on his podcasting journey, sharing how he uses his platform to spread the word about impact-driven entrepreneurship.

If you're curious about how you can turn your business into a force for good, this is the episode for you!

Links referenced in this episode:

• gobigtogivebig.com
• impactcircle.net
• podcast.gobigtogiveig.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Go Big to Give Big

What if the secret to growing a wildly successful business wasn't just about making more money, but about giving more away?

Randy Molland believes it is, and he's proving it through his work with Go Big to Give Big a movement helping entrepreneurs build purpose driven businesses.

I'm Sadaf Beynon and this is Podjunction where we explore how entrepreneurs, CEOs and business leaders use podcasting to grow their brands, build authority, and connect with their audience. Randy Molland is the founder of Go Big to Give Big and the host of the Go Big to Give Big podcast.

After facing personal tragedy and burnout, Randy transformed his life and business by embracing the power of impact driven entrepreneurship. Through his podcast, he's inspiring business owners to scale not just their profits, but also their purpose. Randy, it's so great to have you here.

I'm so excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.

No, it's our pleasure. Randy, you've built quite an incredible movement around giving in businesses. What inspired that? What inspired that?

What role does your podcast have in that? I'd love to know.

Yeah, so the quick Cliff notes is that I was 25 years old, I just bought my first house.

I was an electrician by trade, and my mentor said to me, Randy, in 25 years, when you pay your house off, you're going to be 50, living the dream life, you know, having no mortgage and everything's going to be amazing. And unfortunately, that same guy passed away in a job site accident when he was 42 years old.

Two weeks after, he just told me that after I bought my house. And so I was sitting there watching my best friend die at 42, which is the same guy that said how great life was going to be at 50.

And so I did what any good entrepreneur does and I just googled how to make a ton of money and never work again. I found real estate investing and I went and built a pretty, pretty successful real estate investment company.

But on the back end of that, I was, I was driven by this, this modality of how much money can I make so that I can be completely free from the world. And I had no, no idea of impact or purpose or anything on the other side of it.

And it was when I went and did a trip down to Mexico to go see one of my friends orphanages down there. He runs an orphanage around child sex trafficking. And I went and served there and we hung out.

And one of the things I asked him was like, these kids have been through some of the worst experiences in the world. How can I help them the most. And he was like, they love ice cream, bro. Can we get them some ice cream? And I was like, absolutely.

So he spent $50, and I bought these kids ice cream.

And watching them eliminate their pain and act like it was Christmas, just eating ice cream did something to me that I'd never felt before, never experienced before. And I realized that by serving them, it made me feel happy and content and joy and things that my businesses weren't giving me.

And I realized it was only $50 was the ability to allow me to make that kind of impact on myself and them. I said, why can't I do this all the time? So I came back and we started donating $10 per door per month from our real estate portfolio.

So our 10 plex donated a hundred bucks a month, our 20 plex donated 200 bucks a month, and so on and so on. So that's how we built our real estate business with purpose and impact behind it.

The more doors we bought, the more kids we got to help go through organized sport. That was our mission and allowed us to kind of parallel build a business with impact.

So that's my quick cliff notes on who I am and what got me into it and why the podcast came to actually was that so many people were asking me questions around, well, how do I use my business to make impact? What does it mean? Because it's still kind of a new topic. It's becoming a lot more popular. Statistically, a lot more consumers want this.

89% of consumers want to see or hear from businesses on how they make impact, but nobody's really talking about it. And so the point of the podcast for me was the ability that I could start expressing that ability to partner businesses and impact together.

And along the way, it really came from our tagline. As we were talking to people, we said, so many people are focused on becoming a seven figure earner, right?

Business owners want to become seven figure earners. It's kind of like the threshold in the business world where it's like, oh, my God, you're a seven figure earner or you're not.

There's six figure in there. But I think that's becoming a little bit more achievable these days with some of the business tactics that are out there.

Everyone's come seven, and I was sitting like, I don't even care about making seven figures. I care about donating seven figures. Like, that is a. That is a threshold to me, that would be like, this is it. This is what I know I've made It.

So I started saying, you know what? I'm sick of teaching people how to become six figure earners. Why don't we start focusing on becoming seven figure givers?

I love that.

And that's when I was like, this is beautiful. How do I start teaching people this?

And so we started the podcast and we started doing some solo episodes and then we bring in some people to interview and I started showcasing and highlighting businesses that never talked about the good they did because it's taboo and you're not supposed to talk about the giving you do and all these kinds of things.

We start bringing successful business owners in and giving them a platform to share about the impact they're making, share some stories of, you know, things they've done in the past and opening them up to questions they've never been asked before on podcasts. And that's what really took off for us and allowed us to get in front of some really cool people and share some really cool stories.

That's incredible.

You know when you were talking about when you went to help out at the orphanage and you got this, this amazing feeling of having given something so small but gotten so much back from that $50.

And what stuck out to me was that there's so many people that go away on missions trips or these kinds of, you know, trips where they're helping out, but that experience and those feelings just kind of get left there and as good as they are, but then you come back and it's like real life and you forget all of those things and you kind of think, well, that's just for out there, not here in my day to day. So I find that really impressive what you, what the seed that was planted and how you've grown it. I think that's very, I appreciate that.

That'S led to, you know, one of my biggest missions is explaining to people that it doesn't matter how much you give, it matters that you give. And so many people think they need to donate tens and twenties and thirties of thousands of dollars to feel like they're making an impact.

But for $50, I changed some kids lives and I made them not feel pain for a little while. And that leads me to, you know, part of my podcast and what I try and teach.

And I shared a little bit about this before, but it was like, how do I start helping my guests understand the impact that they can have for a small amount?

So we came up with this idea of like, how do we get more people to give us five star reviews and comment and like, and And I looked at everything that was out there and it's all the exact same, like, oh, go give me a five star review. I'd appreciate it. It'd mean a lot to me, but it doesn't really push me to want to go do it.

It's like, I want to be a nice guy, but it doesn't wanna do it. But what I realized that if I started asking my friends and said, hey, would you go give me a five star review?

And every review you give me, I'll make a donation to charity. And my goal is to help raise $500 for this charity and we can give these kids ice cream 10 times, you know, and.

And all of a sudden all my friends are like, absolutely, I'll go do that right now. And so we started this campaign of like, do you want to do something that takes you less than a minute but helps impact a child's life?

Go give us a five star review. Every review equates to a five to $10 donation to charity.

And we highlighted the charity and what it meant and we saw some of the best response from what people were coming into. And it was just incredible to get people messaging me like, oh my God, that was so nice. I can't believe I got to do this. This is so cool.

And then we DM'd everyone after being like, hey, this is the donation we made. This is the help you had. Your few minutes literally helped change some kids lives.

And it was a cool moment where we realized we could use our podcast in a way that we are already going to donate the money anyways to this organization.

But now we brought along our viewers with us and we brought along our listeners and we brought along the people that were, you know, supporting our movement and they got to feel like they were a part of the mission.

And that really helped build a lot of long term listeners and connectivity in our podcast because now they felt vested in it and all they did was give us a five star review. It wasn't like they bought anything or did anything. So it's a really cool way to just build a different approach to growing our viewership.

Yeah, that's fantastic. It's quite incredible, actually. Might steal that.

Yeah, I recommend everybody steal it.

But I think as you said, it's not just, it's not just giving the review. It's being part of something so much bigger, isn't it?

And the loyalty that comes with it as a listener and as an audience for you, as the host, that's. That's quite incredible too. There's so many, so many facets to that.

And so many people will sit there and say, well, my podcast is about how to scale your LinkedIn. Like, how does that even work? Well, what it does that makes you human, right?

Everyone, everyone, when was the last time you went and saw, you know, an Instagram story of somebody giving some homeless people some money or a shirt, or you saw somebody doing it or you served and you're like, this just isn't for me. You know, everyone has a connection to it in some capacity, like philanthropy ties. A lot of us together, we just don't talk a lot about it.

And so what I would encourage people to do is, like, if your podcast has nothing to do with giving anyways, when you start sharing about a cause you believe in and you're genuine about it, you can actually inspire your audience to learn a lot more about you. Podcasts are pretty intimate. And so I'm into supporting children in sports. That's what I love to do.

What I can do is I can take my listeners on a journey with me around, my passion around wanting to help people and I can say, hey, you know what? One of the things you guys might not know about me is that I love supporting children to get into organized sports.

And I'm using my platform now to help bring awareness to that. And for every five star review that I get, I'll donate $10 to this charity. And we're looking for get 100 reviews in the next few days.

If you want to be a part of our mission and help us get more kids into organized sports, just give us a five star review. Takes one minute of your time, cost you nothing. And I'll make sure I share about that impact with you.

And that's why I'm excited to have this platform so you can completely bring it into your story, into who you are. On your podcast intros, you can do a little bit of it.

And then in your podcast in general, if you talk about impact, it's true across everywhere we go, marketing and sales and everything. When you talk about serving humanity, people will open up more. They want to be a part of your mission. We call it raving fans.

But how do you go from just selling a product to getting raving fans is you bring human to human experiences and the easiest way to do that is bring them along on an impact journey with you that you're creating.

So I know it's not directly what we're going to talk about, but as part of it is like you can, you can take your podcast Talk about impact that you want to make. Even if you're talking about LinkedIn sales, do a little heartwarm story about it and get your audience, as you drip it out, to buy in.

And now they're going to want to follow your journey and be involved in the impact you're making, as well as learning about the stuff. But it's how you can turn your audience into becoming. Becoming more of a. We call it a mom factory.

Like, you know, your mom's really excited about, like, everything you do. I just. Some people don't like that analogy, but it's like. We call it a mom factory. It's like, my mom loves what I do.

And so it's like how we get our podcast guests to be a part of our mom factory, where it's like, anytime we post something, they're, like, so excited about it.

I love it. Thank you. Randy, how has your podcast helped you then reach and connect with business owners who align with your mission?

Yeah, what it really did is in. When I was raising funds for real estate, it gave us a really soft approach to get in the door to investors that wanted to invest in our properties.

So instead of going in and saying, hey, Steph, we would love for you to invest in our real estate. Here's all the information. This is what it is. We'd say, hey, Steph, look, we love what you're up to. We'd love to partner with you. Here's our podcast.

Give us a few episodes to listen. It's just going to learn. You'll learn a little bit about us. You'll get involved. And it was kind of this soft intro to a lot of people.

They could hear our personalities. We're talking about impact, which is part of our brand. And so they're like, oh, yeah, we got to learn about you. We get involved in the impact.

We get to, actually. So then. And then they started listening to more episodes.

And it's kind of like reality TV in a way, where people get so vested in your life that we were getting investors reaching out, being like, oh, my God, I just listened to your episode with so and so. It's so amazing. Like, we feel like. And so as we ran meetups and we did more stuff, people were so connected to us.

So what it really did for our business was it built the. It took away the barrier. Barrier of us being strangers to a lot of people and created that warm connection to who we are.

And we tried to have some fun and personality on it because we knew that's the industry we were going into where we wanted people to look at us like a reality show in a way.

Yeah.

It was like they. They can't wait for the next episode to come out because they want to see who we're hanging out with and what we're chatting with.

And I think that's something that really separated us in the industry to a lot of people that were doing the same thing at the time.

Yeah, that sounds. That's incredible. So have you then seen.

Well, you've seen business growth, but like either revenue or partnership through your podcast, have people come alongside as well?

Yeah, In. In our world, we never monetized our podcast directly. Yeah, we monetized on the back end of the investors that were coming in.

Right.

And so. So for our world, raising, you know, $13 million in 12 months, was.

Came on the back end of having the podcast because that was what got in the door with. Sold our meetup. And it did a bunch of stuff that we did and allowed us to have more of a national presence of where we are. You know, it's.

It's hard to get across an entire nation when you live in one area, but having a podcast allowed us to. So we never directly did that, but the one thing it did do is. Is indirectly. We launched a mastermind from it. We launched a bunch of other stuff.

We launched a whole brand called Go Big to Give Big behind it. And we started with the podcast. It's the cheapest and easiest way to get branding and awareness out there.

And then it flowed into a bunch of other areas. So different style.

As opposed to monetizing the actual podcast, we just monetized everything we were doing on the back end of it for other products and services.

Yeah, that's. That's cool. That's cool. Randy. Podcasting is powerful, but it's not always easy.

So what challenges would you say you faced in either launching or growing?

Yeah, one of the funniest ones. As you start getting larger guests, it's actually so hard to book them. They.

They book out months in advance, they book out on tour launches, and they're so busy, they change their schedule so much.

And it became one of the most frustrating things for me as we started getting into larger guests, was having to be able to be flexible and pivot our schedule that all of a sudden, this guest that you're dying to get on your show, you're so excited for it. They message you a few hours before, and they're like, hey, we actually need to pivot. And you're like, ah. They're like, can you do tomorrow at 3?

And you have meetings tomorrow at 3. And you're like, how do I. You expect me just to drop everything. But they're a large guest that's going to be really big on your. On your podcast.

And one of the things I didn't realize was how much you have to be flexible and adaptable as you get into larger guests because they're the value for your podcast for the direction we were going. And so that was probably one of the biggest challenges I faced.

Having to adapt and as a very A type personality is like you just changed my whole schedule and it doesn't feel very good. That was one of them.

Yeah.

And this. The second thing was marketing it is it is not easy to market a podcast. It's easy to create.

I found, you know, getting in and talking to people is very natural for me. But marketing it is.

Is quite hard in the sense of like having to just reach out to a lot of people to start growing your listeners because it's so slow. It's like hey, we've got five listeners to hey, we've got 500 listeners to hey, we've got a thousand. It's very hockey stick curve.

And we were just in a lot of Facebook groups at the time and we're getting people to go in and share a podcast into Facebook groups. And that really started to get us a lot of the growth along the way.

But I found it's not like you're selling a product and we're not putting a lot of dollars behind marketing it. So how do you self grow the podcast without just putting it onto ads somewhere and do it? I found to be one of the most challenging things.

But that's part of what building a mom factory is all about is as people get excited about it, how do we get them to share it? How do we get them to do it as opposed to just listen to it?

Yeah. So how long do you think it was before it started taking off?

Probably two years. Yeah, it was. And we had some help. We hired an agency to get us off the ground with some big guests.

So we started with some large guests, which was amazing. But you see your listens go super high when you launch with an agency and you have big guests, and then all of a sudden it spikes back down because.

And then you have to start back up. And so while we had some great success, it was. It was good for. What it really did was allowed us to get in the door with other people.

As soon as we said, hey, we have David Meltzer on our podcast, it validated that we had people, and so we were able to scale a little bit quicker with some other guests on the back end. But the problem is just marketing. How do you get the guest to go and share it? No offense, but it's like, we have this podcast.

How do you get me to go share it to my audience?

If I've done seven podcasts this month, I'm not posting to my email list every single week being like, oh, I just did this podcast and I just did this one. So it's like, how do you separate yourself? How do you get their audiences listening?

It's a lot of tactical strategical work compared to just like, cool, I'm just gonna hop on a podcast and record a show with someone.

Yeah. So did you ever feel like giving up in any of that time?

Oh, yeah, there's. There's transparently, there's a few times where you're getting on these interviews and you're like, what is this even for?

I don't have time for this. Business is, you know, crazy and chaotic and we're trying to adjust with times and people moving calls and all this stuff.

Like, what is this even worth? And then, and then. And especially. Cause we didn't have direct monetization. If you have direct monetization, you're like, cool.

This podcast brings me $500 every time I do a podcast. Or a few thousand dollars. Ours was back end monetization. And so it's like one of those things. You're like.

All of a sudden it's like, oh, well, we just got these investors. And also like, oh, yeah, we heard you on a podcast.

And you're like, wait, we just got a few hundred thousand dollars worth of investments because of the podcast. So it's not directly related. So that was very challenging there.

Yeah, yeah, I can imagine looking back. Do you. And if you were to do it all over again, what's something you wish you had known?

If I were to do it again, I would. Oh, man, there's so many things, but there's also not a lot of things because, like, it's beautiful in its own way.

You know, I would, I would try and build a bitter, a bit bigger of an audience before we originally launched. So trying to do a proper launch with having a few hundred or a few thousand people waiting for your podcast. We launched with virtually nobody.

We had great guests, but we didn't really have a lot of like, people waiting to hear our podcast. And so we didn't hype it up for months before. We didn't drip anything out. We just launched.

And so that's probably the biggest thing that I would do is try and build up a little bit of an audience that was very excited about it beforehand so that you weren't trying to do it on episode 20 where you're already somewhat established and it's hard to be like, hey, we're going to build this huge group around our podcast that's already 20 episodes out.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So you built something amazing with Go Big to Give Big and the Impact Circle. How do you see your podcast evolving as your businesses grow?

So, ironically enough, I was just chatting with one of my business partners the other day about this, and I am less excited these days around doing interviews for people and more excited around doing solo episodes. I think, you know, obviously having guests come on helps your vanity metrics. It helps you get out there and, and leverages their audience and stuff.

But the more I do the podcast, the more I actually, it's self serving for me.

It's like I can use this to talk to people, share stories, and especially in the, in the impact space, sharing more about the principles that I know work really well as opposed to having somebody come on and share their story.

I think we got 85 episodes in before we paused and we're making the transition right now of, of interviews that were great, but it starts to get monotonous for me. I'm like, I actually want to teach people stuff. I actually want to inspire them.

And my guests just aren't hitting the topics that I wanted them to hit.

Yeah.

And so my business partner and I are talking about doing solo shows or joint shows where it's more like a, like a talk show where him and I put a conversation in the middle and we talk about it as opposed to. And then dripping in a few guests as opposed to being mostly guest driven.

Yeah, I can see how that would be. Like, you could be more deliberate in the types, the type of content you want to get out there. Yeah.

So, Randy, if someone listening is thinking about launching a podcast to support their business, but isn't quite sure where to start, what would be your biggest piece of advice?

Biggest piece of advice that I got from my mentor was we started with interviews, was just literally go record an interview. Don't worry about your intro, don't worry about your extro.

Just get somebody on the podcast that you can get in and say, hey, we're launching the podcast. We're looking for five guests to come on. And when you get on the show, you don't say, okay, I have to do this intro and all that kind of stuff.

You can build your intros and add them in beforehand. It's super easy. We did it all ourselves. Just get on the show and say, hey, what's up, Sadaf? We'd love to have you on the show.

And then you get on the show and you just start recording. Like, okay, we're going to record in 3, 2, 1. And you just start.

And that's the biggest thing was that it got over a lot of the fears of having to be perfect. We're like, well, what if our intro isn't good and how are we going to market? And what if our logo doesn't look good?

You don't need any of that to start recording an episode. Our first episodes sucked, and then they got better as we went on, but we would have never started if we didn't get there.

And it's very cliche, but it's very true in this industry, sometimes you just have to hit record and go. And then what we actually did is we took some of our middle.

Our bad interviews and we sprinkled them in as we, you know, it's like two or three good ones. And then we go back to grabbing one of the first original ones and then dropping it in so that it wasn't like five bad interviews in a row.

We kind of moved some of them around to find like, hey, that one was really good. Let's move that one here. This one wasn't as good. And we saw, like, some of our. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, well, that's not very good. And we'll just.

We'll just put that one in the middle over here. So that's what I would say is it's just hitting record and starting and worrying less about actually needing to have the full production.

You get a microphone like I have. It's literally $30 off Amazon. And that's all you need.

Yeah, no, that's. That's great advice. I, And I totally agree. I think actually that the approach that you're talking about as well, it kind of puts all of it into.

Into a learning exercise. And so that that idea of wanting to be perfect and nailing it right from the get go kind of goes out the window, which is. Which is nice.

Yeah.

I think my best partner and I think the biggest thing was, like, we stalled on it for probably a year of creating it, and then eventually one day I was like, what's the one thing we can do today? And I was like, I can set up an interview. And we just interviewed somebody. We knew that episode probably wouldn't even air because it was so bad.

And so we didn't pick, like, we didn't go after David Meltzer as our first interview. It was like we did four or five pre interviews with our friends, and we're like, hey, we don't know when this is going to air.

We don't even know if it's going to air. Yeah, but it's 30 minutes of your time. We'd love to have you come on. And we just got. We just played around with three or four.

Once we got three or four under our belts, then you start to realize, like, cool, like, what questions are we going to ask? And how do they flow? Because it's a big thing. You're doing a very good job of it today of like, what is the flow and how do they. Conversations.

And instead of just, you know, going into one space and then just being like they're. They finish their answer and you're like, okay, next question. You're like, you actually have a conversation and you feel a little bit of it out.

I think that was the biggest thing we learned in doing the first few episodes that allowed us to feel a little more confident going into the back half of the episodes where we interviewed some larger, larger guests.

Awesome. Love it.

So, Randy, before we wrap up, where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about Go Big to Give Big and tune into your podcast as well?

Yeah, if they go to go big to give big.com that's where we do a lot of our. Our business stuff. If they want to go to impactcircle.net that's where we do a lot of our nonprofit support. And then our.

Our podcast is podcast.gobigtogiveig.com Perfect.

And all these. And for all those tuning in, we'll. You'll find all the links and details in the description. Randy, this has been such fun for me. Thanks for joining.

It's been a real pleasure to have you.

Thank you so much for having me on. Give me a platform to share about the impact we're making with our podcast.

Oh, it's our pleasure. And to everyone listening, I appreciate you tuning in.

If today's episode got you thinking about podcasting for your business, let's connect and see how it could work for you. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next.