Planning the first six episodes of a business podcast

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · 28 September 2026

Plan six. Record them in as few sittings as you can. Publish them on a schedule you could keep in your busiest month. That's the method, and everything below is how to do each part.

One listener, one promise

Before you think about guests, write down the person the show is for. One person, specific enough to picture: the operations director at a regional housebuilder, say, or a practice manager running three vet surgeries. Then write the promise in one line by finishing the sentence "After each episode, they will know...". If the promise needs two sentences, you have two shows.

Once those two lines exist, every guest, question and title can be checked against them, and most planning arguments settle themselves.

Pick a format you can repeat six times

Our podcast room has four setups: interview, panel, solo and production. The first three are the real choice for a new show, and each asks something different of you.

• Interview. One host, one guest. The easiest to listen to and the hardest to keep going, because every episode needs somebody new.
• Panel. Two to four regulars. No guest booking, but several diaries to line up.
• Solo. One voice. The easiest to schedule and the hardest to keep interesting past twenty minutes, so it suits shorter, tighter episodes.

Choose the one you could book six times without heroics. The format that sounds best in a planning meeting is often the one that runs out of guests first.

Why six

Six is a season, and a season is a commitment you can keep. It's long enough for a listener to find you and form a habit, and short enough that you can see the end from the start. At fortnightly release, six episodes is twelve weeks, about a quarter. At the end you stop, look at what worked, and plan the next six knowing far more than you did.

Alastair Greener's Generationally Speaking is recorded in our podcast studio and goes out fortnightly. Pick a rhythm like that, one a listener can predict, and hold it.

Write six titles before you record anything

Six episode titles, each one a question your listener already asks. If you can't fill six, the promise is too narrow. If you have forty, pick the six with the strongest guests attached and keep the rest for season two.

Put the broadest, most useful subject first. Episode one should be the one you'd happily send to a stranger.

A running order you can reuse

A repeatable shape saves you inventing a structure every time, and it gives listeners something to settle into. This one works for most interview shows:

1. Cold open. The best 20 to 40 seconds of the conversation, chosen in the edit and put at the top.
2. The promise. Who the show is for and what this episode answers, in under a minute.
3. The guest, in one line. Why they're the person to answer it. The CV can go in the show notes.
4. The conversation. Three or four questions, each built to draw out a story rather than an opinion.
5. One thing to do. A practical point the listener can use this week.
6. The close. Where to find the guest, and what the next episode covers.

On a produced episode our producer keeps that running order on the day, so the host can listen to the answers instead of watching the clock.

Record in blocks: one day beats four evenings

The biggest planning decision is when you record. Four evenings after work means setting up four times, and four chances for someone to cancel. A day in the studio means your voice is fresh, the set and sound match across episodes, and a whole run of the season exists before the first episode goes out.

For a first season, two recording days could cover all six. After that, our Series Quarterly is built on the same shape: one recording day a quarter that produces two episodes.

Guests: book six, line up eight

Every interview season needs two spares, because someone will be ill or called into a meeting the week before. Book six, ask two more to hold a date loosely, and confirm each one in writing with the time, the address and what to wear. Send them how to be a good podcast guest while you're at it.

Guests who can't travel can join remotely. That works well when it's set up with a recording at both ends, which is covered in recording a remote guest properly.

Record the trailer last

A trailer is easier once the show exists. Record it at the end of your first recording day, when you know what the show sounds like, and use a line or two from the episodes you've just made. When to publish it, and the rest of the launch, is in launching a podcast in January.

Think about the clips while you talk

Every episode should leave behind moments that stand on their own. On a produced episode our producer notes the timecode of each one as it happens, which is how thirty short cuts come out of one recording. What makes a moment worth noting is in one podcast episode, a month of clips.

What a season costs

Six Classic episodes at £395+VAT each come to £2,370+VAT, each with three-camera video, the audio and video edit and thirty short cuts. What that includes is set out in what is in a produced episode. The Launch, at £2,495+VAT, is our end-to-end package for a show starting from nothing. Market ranges and the full price list are in how much a video podcast costs, and the packages are on podcast production.

Send us your six titles and we'll tell you honestly which ones will carry an episode.

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The picture at the top of this article is an illustration generated to show the set-up. It is not a photograph of a client or of a real job.