Episodes

  • How I get my best ideas (my creative routine)

    How I get my best ideas (my creative routine)
    Jul 28 2026
    The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version. This is the good bits, organised by taking the transcript and having an AI tool clean it up. HEY!I was supposed to fly back to Berlin yesterday.Instead I’m sitting on the ground in a forest in Sweden, recording this week’s episode on AirPods and a laptop camera. Changing my flight was quoted at €15, then the Eurowings website broke, so booking a whole new one cost €100. I paid it, because I didn’t feel like leaving yet.I wasn’t going to record at all this week. The show is called Unscheduled, I can do it whenever the hell I want, and nobody would have noticed a skipped Tuesday. But I was sitting there rereading The War of Art, and I caught myself asking: why the f**k am I recording this episode anyway?The answer turned into the episode. And I think it applies to your business as much as it does to my podcast.The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)* Ideas behave like fish: you can’t summon them, you can only be out on the water when they show up. This is Rick Rubin’s framing and I’m stealing it openly. The fisherman casts lines for a chance to catch something. The fish might be there either way, but if you’re not out there, you catch nothing.* A dedicated practice matters just as much for making money as it does for making art. You have to be creative to figure out how to generate revenue. It’s the same muscle, and it responds to the same routine.* If talking is how you think, build your outlet around talking. This show is one unbroken, improvised take because talking is my way of getting ideas out. Your version might be writing or walking. Find it, then give it a slot.* Your workspace trains your brain. A band walks into a studio and creating becomes natural, because the studio is where they create. My office is set up as a place where I go to check our numbers. Worth noticing what your space tells you to do.* The content you make for other people doubles as infrastructure for yourself. This podcast is my brain dump, my idea generator, and my way of staying in touch with people without networking. Last week’s video handed me the idea for a whole new workshop.* If you’re loving a trip, check what staying actually costs before assuming you have to leave. Mine cost €100. Most people never even look.Okay. The story.The fisherman ideaI have a few books with me in Sweden but the 2 that I kept rechecking were my classics: The War of Art, and Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. If you listen to this show you’ll know I bang on about both of them. They circle the same concept, which is that ideas come from somewhere else, and if you’re in the right headspace you become a kind of antenna that can receive them.Whether you believe that or not doesn’t matter, and I don’t even know if I believe it myself. It’s a useful metaphor because you can experience it. Paul McCartney says the entire melody of Yesterday appeared in his mind in one go. Chris Martin says the same kind of thing all the time. Writers say it, filmmakers say it: I was just driving, and boom, the idea arrived.Rick Rubin has my favourite version of it. You’re a fisherman out at sea, casting lines into the water for a chance to catch something. That’s why writers sit at the desk from 10am until 1pm every day no matter what. They’re keeping the lines in the water.And that’s why I turned the camera on today. I’ve been doing this show for almost a year now, since September, and most episodes have no specific topic when I start. Sitting down on a Monday and pressing record is me casting the lines.I’ve felt this myself. When I was in a band and in the practice of songwriting, the songs just came. When I was writing scripts regularly in college, the film ideas flowed. Your antenna becomes more sensitive to the thing you keep showing up for.The mustard jumper problemLast week I told you about spending 2 days with my mentor Blake, so here’s the short version if you missed it. I went in with the goal of getting the company to 10 million a year. We were at six. By the end of the 2 days I realised I didn’t want that at all.What Blake actually did was watch me. In San Diego I was in a great mood, excited about buying a mustard coloured jumper in a tourist surf shop, telling him how much I loved every coffee shop we walked into. Then we’d sit down to talk about the business and he’d say: whoa, your entire vibe just changed. More serious, more closed off, kind of practised and strange. He kept saying GERMAN.When I talked about my relationship with my now fiancée, he said that’s the real version of you speaking. When I talked about the 10 million, it was the other one.We dug into it and found the uncomfortable bit: to make AJ&Smart and Facilitator work as well as they did, I’d more or less stopped using my creativity. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was a creative first. I was in a band. I moved to...
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    32 mins
  • Why Do Rich People Keep Making Content?

    Why Do Rich People Keep Making Content?
    Jul 21 2026
    The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, chaotic version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about, cleaned up from the transcript with an AI tool. [Spotify / Apple / YouTube]Hey,This week it’s me and Eli in the studio, plus my daughter hanging out in the background because it’s summer holidays, plus a fire alarm inspection, plus plumbers on the way. Classic Unscheduled recording conditions.It’s a hangout episode, but two proper threads came out of it: why wealthy people keep making content when they obviously don’t need to, and why adding a few thousand a month with a simple service business is easier than people think.Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:We react to last week’s broken audio: Someone in the comments pointed out that I constantly complained about Laura and Eli making chair noises, and then I went and played background music so loud that it drowned out several minutes of us reviewing a drink. We replay the damage on this episode. Eli’s defence is that the music was so loud in his headphones he assumed I was just vibing extremely hard. This is what completely unedited gets you.Why rich people keep making content: It’s under every Alex Hormozi video: “why is this guy still making YouTube videos if he’s basically a billionaire?” The standard answer, “I want to help people”, mostly hides the truth. The real reasons: promoting the business is part of a CEO’s actual job, a lot of people (especially Americans, where the appetite for wealth is basically infinite) just want more, and past a certain point you’re doing it to feel useful and stay relevant rather than fade out. I’d respect people more if they just said that.An audience buys you optionality: This is the part I care about most for Unscheduled. If we keep bringing together like-minded entrepreneurs every week, we’re never locked into one business: we could run a creative retreat one year, open a video game arcade the next. A side effect I didn’t plan for: the more I do this show, the more interesting rooms I get invited into, like the two hours I spent on Greg Isenberg’s livestream on Thursday. Greg is the perfect example of all of this, he was already very successful when I met him, started the Startup Ideas podcast anyway, and it’s now one of the biggest AI shows on YouTube.The six-week hypothetical I’m never filming: Give me 30 freelancers for six weeks and I reckon I could get them making an extra $3,500 a month in profit with dead simple service businesses. Examples from the episode: helping local businesses like the Tyre King (a guy who comes to your building and swaps your tyres, we hire him all the time) show up in Google and the AI tools, for 150 a month, half of what he makes on one job. Designing and running company offsites, because an HR person is googling exactly that every minute and mostly finding crap. Building a lead-gen quiz like the facilitator.com one for a €500 one-time fee. It is NOT rocket science.Your competition is f*****g lazy: Someone pitched me this week in German, when every trace of me on the internet is in English. Someone else opened with obvious AI slop, and in my mind that person is blacklisted, because lazy outreach means lazy work. My split: use AI for the research, the strategy, the list of who to contact and what their problems are, then write the email yourself, click their website, watch their videos, maybe record a quick Loom. Ten extra minutes of effort puts you ahead of basically everyone, because the people you’re competing against will not do it.Revisiting the coaches video: We replay a piece of “I spent $600k on coaches so you don’t have to”, the Blake La Grange part. We paid Blake $100K to map the journey to $10 million, and by the end of day one he was telling me I didn’t seem like the person who even wanted a $6.3 million company, that I seemed more like an artist. I’d been waiting for someone to give me permission to say that. If your business works fine but you secretly don’t like it much, go watch that one.Where the show is at: Honest goal check: 10,000 weekly listeners by mid-September doesn’t feel realistic if we’re only counting the podcast. YouTube’s last 28 days: 11K views, almost 7K more than usual, and last week’s episode is at around 2,000 listens across YouTube and Spotify so far. Maybe the better goal is a minimum per episode instead of chasing an average. It’s good to have goals.If you only listen to one stretch of the episode, make it the simple-business-ideas one in the middle.Cheers, JonathanP.S. If you know one business owner who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode. (On the recording I said probably don’t send anyone this one. Ignore me.) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unscheduledceo.com
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Being Weird is Your Only Unfair Advantage

    Being Weird is Your Only Unfair Advantage
    Jul 14 2026
    The written version of this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version, this is just the rundown of what we talked about. Listen: [Spotify / Apple / YouTube]***BEFORE WE START I NEED TO TELL YOU ABOUT A VERY HILLARIOUS AUDIO ISSUE IN THIS EPISODE: Look guys, I dont listen to or watch these episodes before I hit publish so sometimes stuff is just… broken. This time around theres about 4 minutes where all you can hear is loud music and nothing else… im sorry :) **Hey,This week’s episode is more of a hangout vibe and less of a “learn something” one. Myself, Laura (who runs Facilitator.com) and Eli (our video guy) are hanging out in our new, overly complicated multicam studio setup at the AJ&Smart office, just talking about stuff. It’s classic Unscheduled.We did talk about some things that could be considered practical though, like we talked about how we’re currently using AI tools, we talked about how we deal with high monthly expenses AND we talked about how to sort of harness your weirdness as a competitive advantage.Anyway, here’s what we talked about in the episode:The new studio setup: What started as “let’s get Laura and Eli on camera” turned into a full multicam production with wires everywhere within about a week. Someone in the comments already asked if the background is AI generated, which I’m choosing to take as a compliment. If you normally just listen to the audio, this is one of the rare episodes where it’s worth having a look at the YouTube version.Laura, one month into being CEO of Facilitator: Her day to day is almost identical to before, the difference is that she owns the numbers now. It turns out owning the numbers is basically the whole job, in Germany it’s literally your legal obligation as the head of a company to keep the thing liquid, which is also why we won’t stop talking about money on a show with CEO in the name.The minus €450,000 months: There was a version of AJ&Smart where some months started at minus €450K, as in we had to make €450,000 that month just to get back to zero. It was a pressure cooker, but weirdly it was also some of the most fun and most cohesive the team has ever been. It forced us to get good, find mentors and build all the infrastructure we still run on today. Now that our costs are a fraction of that, it feels like we leveled up our video game characters so much that we’re back in the starter area. Small slow things like our Guides mastermind or this podcast, things the old “every product has to make €1M a year” rule would have killed on day one, actually get to exist now.A sparkling water review: Lacroix Razz Cranberry, Mango and Orange enter the ranking, and Orange takes third place behind Tangerine. Eli, who grew up in Colombia with actual mango trees at his school, confirms that the mango one tastes like almost nothing.How we’re actually using AI tools: Laura built one central context brain that pulls together everything she’s ever worked on with Claude and now uses the expensive model as the senior strategist and the cheaper models to execute. I use it to turn these unedited episodes into what you’re reading right now, plus research, lead magnets and a Monday morning growth report. Eli uses it for chapters, shorts and thumbnail ideas but still makes everything manually because the AI image output looks like s**t. The common pattern between the three of us is that the AI runs the machinery in the background and never touches the thing the customer actually sees.Harnessing your weirdness as a competitive advantage: The more AI standardizes everything, the more people seem to crave things that are obviously made by real humans. Clients are booking our trainings partly because we don’t pre-plan the agenda, and conference organizers are excited that the talk can never be repeated. Every listener who’s ever talked to Laura about this podcast praises exactly the things a growth consultant would tell us to cut: the mess, the tangents, the water reviews. It’s why this show will stay 100% unedited. Laura’s advice if you want to apply this in your own business is to stop taking the edges off yourself. The polish is the problem.If you only listen to one section of the episode, make it that last one.Cheers, JonathanP.S. My goal this year is to grow this show. If you know one business owner who’d enjoy having this on in the background, send them this episode. That’s the best way to help. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unscheduledceo.com
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    1 hr and 40 mins
  • I Hated My Company So Much I Tried To Give It Away

    I Hated My Company So Much I Tried To Give It Away
    Jul 7 2026
    This is the written version of this week's episode. As always, the podcast is the full, unedited, occasionally unhinged version — this is the good bits, organised. Listen on [Spotify / Apple / YouTube].Hey,So this is a crazy one:Between roughly 2018 and 2022, at the exact moment AJ&Smart hit its peak revenue (around $6 million revenue, with a 47% profit margin), I wanted to give the company away.Not sell it. Give it. To anyone who’d take it. Or shut it down. I was talking to people about both options. My co-founder wanted to be bought out, and honestly, part of me wanted to be bought out too. There is a very real alternate timeline where I am not running this company today.If you’ve never owned a business, that sentence sounds insane. Peak revenue! Great margins! What’s the problem?If you have owned a business, you might already know exactly what the problem was. So let me give you the short version first, and then the whole story.The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)* The “held hostage in your own company” feeling is real, common, and almost nobody talks about it publicly. I now speak to founders constantly who describe the same thing: you walk into your own office and feel like you’re not wanted there. Like it’s not your company anymore. Like you’d have to ask permission to change anything.* It’s almost never a revenue problem. It’s a hiring problem. Not “hiring is bad.” Hiring badly, for years, in ways that compound.* Perks don’t buy goodwill. They buy expectations. We had a chef on Fridays, yoga twice a week, retreats, a basically unlimited tech budget. The result was not gratitude. It was “why don’t we have a chef every day?”* “Hire when you need someone” is a spending instruction. The second I removed myself from hiring and told the team to hire whenever they felt they needed to, people hired the moment they felt slightly busy. At our peak of dysfunction, we had four employees managing one small office. My friend Sam Ovens was running a $12M company with nine people and a cleaner who came once a week.* The way out was not “small team good, big team bad.” I want to be really clear on this, because it’s the lazy takeaway. Hiring is one of the only real forms of leverage a business owner has. The lesson is that there’s a right size and a right culture for you, and you probably can’t know it until you get it wrong.* If you feel this way right now: it’s fixable. But it takes years, not quarters. And almost everyone I know who took the eject seat and sold tells me the same thing today: I wish I hadn’t done it.Okay. The story. (You can also just watch the video if you don’t feel like reading)My own personal utopia (and how I wrecked it)I started AJ&Smart to build my own little utopia. A place where I could work on interesting things with people I actually wanted to be around. And for years, it was exactly that.Then it worked too well. There was so much demand for what we did that I decided to see how far we could push it, and we scaled aggressively: from a couple of people adding one or two hires a year to 36 people. My co-founder went on a six-month sabbatical and came back to a different company. I want to be honest about the responsibility here. The negative vibes that followed were mine. I built them.Here’s what daily life looked like at the “peak”:Every single day, someone knocked on my office door with an irritation. A political fight with another employee. A complaint about a perk. Someone would come in, maybe pissed off, maybe sad, or flustered, tell me something going on in their family, and ask for a raise. I was in my late twenties. I had no idea how to handle that, so I just... gave people ad hoc raises. Then they’d tell their colleagues, and the colleagues would come knock on the door.Friends hired friends. Sometimes that worked (it’s how we got Laura, who now runs Facilitator). Often it created factions. We occasionally hired someone who turned out to be, let’s say, creatively honest, or who’d just vanish for days.And the perks. My theory at the time was: maybe people are unhappy because there aren’t enough perks. So: chef, yoga, retreats, gear, very little spending oversight, because we were making so much money anyway. And every perk generated a new complaint about the perk. The yoga time doesn’t suit me. Why only Fridays for the chef?We hired coaches who told us we needed systems: weekly check-ins, quarterly career talks, one-on-ones. We did all of it. Then we ran the anonymous employee survey and the results were worse than the year before.I walked into my own office feeling like the least welcome person in the building. Around that time I had coffee with the CEO of a much bigger Berlin company and asked her how it felt when she walked into her office. She said: “I feel like nobody wants me there.” She got out. Derek Sivers, one of my favorite people on the planet, got out too, and was so ...
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • What nobody tells you about having kids as a CEO

    What nobody tells you about having kids as a CEO
    Jun 30 2026

    Hey what’s up!

    In this week’s episode of Unscheduled I talk about what it’s like to run a business while being a fairly involved father.

    It’s a very complicated and nuanced topic that gets a lot of people VERY angry on the internet. My hope for this episode is to speak to the reality of what it’s like raising kids as an entrepreneur from both my perspective and my entrepreneur-friends perspectives.

    One thing that’s very clear is that it’s a completely different story depending on which country you’re from, and there’s a massive gulf between how entrepreneurs raise kids in the US vs the EU.Lots to talk about! Enjoy!

    Cheers,Jonathan



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unscheduledceo.com
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    46 mins
  • Selling Was Hard Until I Understood This Concept

    Selling Was Hard Until I Understood This Concept
    Jun 23 2026

    Guys… i’m BOILING over here.

    It’s the second heat wave of the summer here in Germany, 36°C in a country where almost nothing has air conditioning, so this is a short episode. But it’s a good one!

    Last week I talked about the ideal business model for a consultant. This week I want to talk about a concept that changed how I sell.

    For years I made selling harder than it needed to be, and then I understood one thing that made everything click. It’s a little unfair advantage hack that I rarely hear anyone mention. I use it all the time, and when it’s used on me, it makes me more likely to buy.

    Btw last week’s episode looks like it’'ll be the first “non guest episode” to hit 10K listens, wohoo!

    Anyway… sales…

    It comes down to two things: speed and convenience.

    The thing I didn’t get

    I’m on both sides of this all day. As a CEO I’m constantly buying services. As the CEO of an agency I’m constantly selling them. And the thing that actually decides whether I hire someone is almost never that they were the best. It’s that they made it easy to start while I was still excited.

    In January I was looking for help with the SEO of facilitator.com. I ended up on one call with one company. Not because they were the best, I didn’t do any research. Because they were the first to reach out and they could jump on a call straight away. Then they said they’d go away and make a proposal. By the time they came back, I’d figured out how to do it myself. They didn’t get the job.

    Momentum is the whole game

    Here’s the truth about CEOs. If you give them too much time to think, they’ve already moved on. The SEO thing was exciting to me for about a week. Then I was done.

    So when someone gets on a call with me at AJ&Smart, it’s never about a big proposal. It’s about the soonest possible starting point. Someone wants help with a funnel, I don’t say I’ll prepare a proposal and we’ll have another call. I say: when can we start? This thing starts with a two-day kickoff, and at the end you might not even need us. No retainer to decide, no contract to sign. We just start.

    That gives the other person the feeling that this can start now. Because I know they’ve got a million things going on. Right now this is a high priority. In two weeks it’s nothing.

    Be the Michelin chef

    A friend started a business this week and had a deal slipping. I told him: if you lose it, it won’t be the price or the service. It’ll be that the other CEO lost momentum. We’re so used to doing everything ourselves that if it takes you too long, we’ll just say f**k it and do it ourselves.

    Too many of you get on a call, list everything you can do, then go away to make a proposal, then come back, then make the client choose a package. You’re handing the client the job of figuring out what they want from you. You’re the service provider. Be the Michelin chef. Say: this is what I think you need, let’s just start here and see where we get to.

    Stop giving people homework

    A CEO asks me, “Do you know someone for SEO?” I say yes. Two weeks later: “Oh, they sent me a proposal, I haven’t looked at it yet.” That person gave them homework. A lot of entrepreneurial people have that now-or-never thing, and a long proposal is a task they’ll never get to.

    The best proposal anyone ever did for me closed a 100K deal in a Google doc, live, on the call. By the time we hung up, that was the deal. We started, I flew out, the paperwork happened in the background, and neither of us cared because we’d already begun.

    Stay disconnected from the money

    The move is to say: I’m excited, I can do this, let’s start. This is roughly my price. If it works out, my finance person will sort the contract. I want the client talking about the project and the dates, not the contract. If you’re a one-person show, your partner or a family member handles that part so you can stay on full speed.

    And talk the price on the call. No jump scare in an email three days later. “Ballpark, around 15 to 20.” If you can’t say that on the fly, get better at running your business.

    That’s the concept. Speed and convenience. Once I understood it, selling stopped being the hard part. You don’t need a better script or better marketing. You need to stop making it a job for people to say yes to you.

    Cheers, Jonathan



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unscheduledceo.com
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    36 mins
  • If I Knew This At 20 I'd Have Retired By 30

    If I Knew This At 20 I'd Have Retired By 30
    Jun 16 2026
    Hey,this week I want to try something a little different with the pod: i’m adding an enhanced summary of the “main takeaway” of the episode for those of you who prefer to just get to the good stuff and skip the rest.Of course I still think you should listen to the full episode to get the context, or at least put it on in the background while you scan through this. But whatever way you like to consume my content, enjoy!So!Here it is:The problem I hadMost consultants sell exactly one thing, and it happens to be the most expensive, hardest-to-buy thing on the menu.It’s the lowest leverage thing too, meaning you have to put in a lot of time to get paid to do this… which takes away from being able to actually run your business. For me it was selling design work to clients. Meaning the more design work I did, the more I would get paid. It was a 1:1 relationship with time and money.Around 6 years in to my design career I learned that there was a completely differently way to approach running an agency, a completely different set of business models that I had no idea about… and honestly I wish I had known about them from the start because GODDAMN they changed everything for me.Let me show you the other things you could be selling.The three rungsEvery consulting business can be split into three offers.Done For You. You do the work. The client pays top dollar and gets your hands on their problem. This is where almost every consultant lives, and most of them never leave.Done With You. You don’t do the work. You teach their team to do it. Workshops, training, group coaching. Cheaper for the client, way more leveraged for you.Do It Yourself. Courses, books, content. The client never interacts with you at all. Cheapest rung, fully scalable.When AJ&Smart was a UX agency, Done For You was us running design sprints for clients. Done With You was teaching their teams to run sprints themselves. Do It Yourself became the Design Sprint Masterclass.The part nobody expectsDone With You ended up being the most lucrative tier for us.Here’s why. You train ten people at a company. Another team hears about it and wants the same thing. Then another. The training spreads inside the company in a way a one-off project never does. And the rungs feed each other: trainings generate sprint requests, sprints generate training requests.There’s also a second thing that happens once you have three rungs instead of one. On a huge number of our sales calls, when the price for the top tier is too high, we don’t lose the client. We move them down a rung. If you only sell Done For You, every call is all-or-nothing. With three rungs, “no” to one offer is “maybe” to another.“But my work is too custom to teach”I said this exact sentence for years. I was certain there was no Done With You version of UX design. Too subjective, too dependent on me being in the room.I was wrong, and if you’re thinking it right now, so are you.The goal is not to turn the client’s team into you. It’s to find one fragment of what you do that can be taught. Maybe it’s just how you run a kickoff. Maybe it’s one part of your process. That fragment is a product.And if you’re experienced, there’s a move most consultants never consider. You don’t only have to sell to clients. You can sell to you, ten years ago. There are people who would do anything to be where you are now, and teaching them is a whole second business. That’s where Facilitator.com came from.Stop selling your timeThe last piece. Once you have your rungs, price them as packages, not hours. No day rates, no itemized lists of what’s included. The moment you itemize, you invite people to negotiate you down line by line.A rule of thumb I picked up that’s stuck with me: one month in your group program should cost about the same as one hour alone with you. That gap is what makes the cheaper rungs feel like a deal and the expensive rung feel exclusive.Do this this week* Write your three rungs. One sentence each: what’s your Done For You, what could your Done With You be, what could your Do It Yourself be? Don’t build anything yet. Just name them.* Find the teachable fragment. Ask yourself what you do that feels boringly easy to you but looks like magic to clients. That’s your Done With You seed.* Add a down-sell to your next sales call. When someone balks at the price, instead of “no problem, bye,” try: “There’s another way to work with me. I can teach your team to do this themselves.”* Price by the rung. Top expensive, bottom cheap, and stop itemizing.You don’t have to build a course this month. You just have to stop being a business with one product, where that product is the single hardest thing on the menu to say yes to.Cheers, JonathanP.S. The book that flipped this switch for me on packaging and pricing is Built to Sell by John Warrillow. It’s a short read. Worth doing this week. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this ...
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • I pushed myself too hard this time...

    I pushed myself too hard this time...
    Jun 9 2026

    My friends, I’m tired!

    After a long weekend camping with the family combined with a hospital visit… how do I still find the time to record a show? In this episode I talk about how I still get content out there even when I really don’t feel like it.

    Cheers,Jonathan



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unscheduledceo.com
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    1 hr and 3 mins