From Impact to Acquisition: Wonder Media Network Co-Founder and ACast SVP of Development Shira Atkins

Jeff Umbro: This week on Podcast Perspectives.

What's the most exciting thing about being acquired?

Shira Atkins: Starting a new chapter.

Jeff Umbro: Wonder Media Network was just acquired by Acast. We have Shira Atkins, co founder of Wonder Media Network, here to tell us what that means.

Welcome, Shira.

Shira Atkins: Thank you so much, Jeff. Good to be here.

Jeff Umbro: Big news, which we'll get into in a little bit. But before we do, can you give me a walkthrough of Wonder Media Network?

Shira Atkins: Of course. So we started Wonder Media Network about six and a half years ago. I co founded it with a dear friend of mine from college, Jenny Kaplan, former Bluebird News journalist. And we set out initially to develop podcasts primarily focused on women's voices and underrepresented voices.

We felt at the time that there was a real dearth of content that centered those voices within the audio space and that lots of the sort of ills of digital media were being recreated in audio and that we could be one of the good forces to adjust that. As we got started, we realized that there were also all sorts of issues around monetization and distribution.

And so we started to think about alternate revenue streams and ended up developing a brand studio on top of our original content work and thinking about infusing our original content with really high touch premium sponsorships as a way to monetize them and also align with brands that could help us spread the good word.

So we bootstrapped the business and it was just me and Jenny for the first year. And once we started making some money, we started hiring people. And six and a half years later, we've got a team of about 25 amazing women. And, and now we're embarking on this new chapter with Acast.

Jeff Umbro: Congratulations. It's an incredible journey.

You are a mission driven company. You also have brands that come to you and, and, you know, they have goals that they want to hit that maybe don't always align with that mission. What's that balancing act look like?

Shira Atkins: We like working with great people and I have found that, you know, when we started this business, we didn't necessarily think that pharma communications would be one of our strong suits for a whole bunch of reasons, but our clients at Pfizer are some of our dearest people and completely mission aligned. And so we have stayed true to the tenets of our business and especially given that so many of the people who work for us are here because of our mission, that we're not ever taking in business that is antithetical.

That said, We all contain multitudes. And so I think, and I hope that the producers on the team would agree that it's actually quite good for sharpening the mind to, you know, work on the Brown Girls Guide to Politics in one breath, or, you know, our podcast about abortion access in the other, and then also be doing internal communications for GE.

I think the breadth and the diversity of content is also a reflection of some of our values around diversity. And of course, these are different pieces, but we want to be well rounded both in, as us as individuals and also as a business.

Jeff Umbro: Do you have any examples or like favorite moments of where your work has really made an impact?

Shira Atkins: The biggest piece of impact that I can speak of is just like thinking about my team. Gathering together like such talented women from all parts of the media and advertising and journalistic ecosystem has felt really, really impactful and particularly sort of weathering the storms of podcasting.

You know, Jenny and I, during COVID, we put our heads together and we were like, what is the best thing that we could do for the world right now? Keep our team employed. And so we just like did everything we could to provide that impact.

So, you know, the people piece is definitely one. I would say, you know, we've certainly had shows that have topped the charts and that has felt like another kind of impact. Like, you know, we launched this true crime podcast, I Was Never There, a couple of years ago and we spent a whole lot of money on it that we never got back. Still, I still believe the IP is valuable. And I'm sure you can relate to this too, like recognition feels really good and people writing in to say that the content was impactful to them felt really good.

And then I would say like, you know, we've developed some partnerships with like world class brands that have also pushed the brands to invest in content that they maybe don't traditionally. So like the work that we did with Mercedes Benz on Womanica, maybe not something that one might imagine could happen, but they were also incredible partners and really, you know, they funded a huge chunk of Womanica for a full year, which is a show that lifts up women's voices from history. So that felt pretty impactful too.

Jeff Umbro: I like to think I have the same, you know, thought process and ideals on that. But, but one thing in particular is the recognition is really what kind of drove you.

I got an email about 10 years ago now when I was making my own show before Podglomerate. It was a show about writing and, you know, I didn't know who was listening. I got an email from a woman in Ireland who let me know that she listens while she milks her cows on the farm. And like, I never really understood like how much of an impact that made on me, but like, you know, here we are a decade later and I'm like, I bring it up.

These things that we do every day, like really can make an impact. So, you know, put a smile on someone's face. So I would love to understand a little bit more about, you know, your current business model and maybe we should, I don't know if this is changing with Acast, so like, you know, up until this moment, are you a podcast production company, a network, a studio, like how do you define that?

Shira Atkins: It's such a good question. And as you know, our name is Wonder Media Network. And I think when we started the business, network also meant something slightly different. And also our aspiration, our aspiration was to predominantly produce original content.

I don't think, as I said, we didn't set out to be like an external comms firm. We are a network in the sense that we have a network of shows that cross promote on one another, that are synergistic with one another, with one another, we sell packages and sponsorships across our network for the most part over the course of our business.

All of our shows in network have also been produced by our team. There have been a few exceptions here or there. At this point, we are much more of a creative studio. That's how I define us. Yes, we do podcast production services, but I would say increasingly, and I think this will continue while we're at Acast, we do a lot of strategic and advisory work, we do media planning, we have an incredible art director on staff, we do design projects for our partners.

We have also developed storytelling initiatives that are not purely audio. We've done experiential, live event, digital. So, we are a creative agency, a creative studio, where podcasting and audio storytelling is certainly our bread and butter. And we find that original content keeps us, keeps us intellectually sharp and keeps us aware of the headwinds of podcasting writ large, and that makes us a better partner to our clients who are trying to develop original content of their own.

Jeff Umbro: Do you consider yourself also like, you know, kind of an incubator of talent or anything? You work with a lot of known entities.

Shira Atkins: Yeah, I do think we're an incubator of talent. We've also worked with, I mean, of course, like our people here?

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. In this I'm referencing like the hosts and that kind of thing.

Shira Atkins: We have worked with some extremely well known talent like Candace Parker or Van Jones or, you know, people like that. And then, you know, the whole mission of WMN is to amplify underrepresented voices. And so when we first started the business, like the whole point was to not work with celebrities. And we stayed true to that and have continued to stay true to that for better or worse from a commercial perspective, because as you know, the, the wave has shifted within podcasting, you can still find occasional breakout stars, but unless you're attached to sort of pre existing celebrity or pre existing network, it's just really hard, and of course there are many, many indie podcasters that are developing beautiful content and have really amazing niche audiences and that's fantastic.

But even doing that is extremely challenging. So the majority of our hosts with whom we work and, you know, creators who are perhaps like incubating the concepts and helping to write scripts and that sort of thing are like unknown. I'm using air quotes. But in that way we're incubating, but I think we're also partnering.

Like we, we are, we need incubation too on the original side. We're also still learning.

Jeff Umbro: So what does like the show development process look like? We talked to Emily Rudder on your team.

Shira Atkins: Oh nice.

Jeff Umbro: Who does a lot of that work on the show, you know, six months ago, a year ago. And so we have a little bit of an understanding of that, but like from your point of view, because, because you're coming at this most of the time from brands who are like saying like we want to get in the space, but we don't necessarily know how, right?

Shira Atkins: Yeah. So Emily, who's phenomenal and has been with us for over five years now. I love her. She is developing our original content, and also developing, developing concepts with our team and our producers, and one of the things that has sort of differentiated us and been a real point of pride over the years is that the majority of our original shows, we actually develop the concepts in house and our producers are coming up with the concept and in some cases even hosting them.

So like As She Rises, Teaching Texas, Winning Wisconsin, like Backlash, which we just launched with Audible, like these are shows that our producers just, you know, they come up with the ideas, Emily helps them hone the pitch. We, we find distributors or we just decide like, this is a great idea. We're going to green light it and produce it ourselves.

So that's on the sort of original side of things. On the brand side, you know, sometimes we have clients who come to us with a fully baked concept. This is the talent. This is the goal. This is the format, broadly, help us make it. We still like to start with the sort of initial sort of discovery period to make sure that all of those pieces align truly with their goals and that we can help them accomplish those.

But in other cases, and this happened, you know, I spoke about Pfizer before, like when they came to us in the early days, they were like, We just don't, we've never done anything in audio. What should we be doing? And this was one of the most fun development processes we, we went through because we, we just came up with like 10 different ideas, including one that I still think we should do, which is like the history of Viagra.

Jeff Umbro: Oh, that would be great.

Shira Atkins: It's an amazing story.

Jeff Umbro: There didn't, didn't someone do like the history of aspirin or something recently, the Tylenol something or other?

Shira Atkins: Oh yeah, that to me is like what podcasting is for, is like those kinds of, you know, take this very well known thing, but then like distill it to its, you know, most pure and give you the behind the scenes, but you know, they didn't, that wasn't their first foray.

Jeff Umbro: Yeah. Someone, someone put a nix, a nix on that.

Shira Atkins: They were probably also like, why are all these women like coming in here like wanting to do this Viagra show? But no, I mean, it's the same thing. Like our producers, as I referenced before, like everyone here works on every part of the business. So our producers are working on like three to five shows at any given time, obviously at different phases of development. And so as a result, we're bringing like our. We don't treat our branded shows differently than we treat our original shows. It's the same people who are making them. So the creativity and the thinking is the same.

So yeah, we'll go through that process with our partners and we'll usually come to the table with like five or six directions. Some of them are more format oriented. Some of them are more story oriented and then we sort of define what's going to be the right approach and then we'll move them into pre production and then we go.

Jeff Umbro: And how do you think about marketing? Is there any difference with like your branded properties versus your originals?

Shira Atkins: There is certainly no one size fits all, as you know. I think for a long time we in this space relied on the podcast marketing playbook and it used to really work. Or I would say for the first year or two, you know, 2019, 2020, there were a whole bunch of things that like, if you did them and the show was good, you could get to like 10, 20,000 downloads per episode pretty easily.

That is no longer the case. You could have the best art, the best cross promos, the best PR plan, platform relationships, check, check, check those boxes, and still not find audience. And that's because it's just so damn crowded. And as a result, like, we have to be thinking outside the box. Of course, those are all the low hanging fruit, fruit elements.

But particularly with brand clients and like, let's say we're doing a B2B podcast, you know, LinkedIn is going to be much more part of the strategy than if we're doing something with like a, a brand that's more D2C and it's like, it's reaching Gen Z and we're like using TikTok more as a, as a channel.

So with out of home, I mentioned we've done some experiential work, like we, we really have to push ourselves constantly to be creative on the marketing side, and I have been very concerted about hiring people to manage our marketing who don't necessarily have marketing backgrounds because I find that that pushes them to bring a new lens.

And a lot of the playbook can just be learned. It's really, it's not rocket science or, you know, you could outsource the elements that require very specific expertise, but yeah, if you want to make an impact, you gotta be thinking out of the box.

Jeff Umbro: And do you have any examples of, of where that's like been really effective?

Shira Atkins: We worked with this company called Greenhouse Software, which is a sort of HR platform. It's a, it's like Lever if you know them also, and their audience, their user, their primary client is HR professionals, like the head of HR at any sort of growth size company that's able to afford using Greenhouse. So we made a couple of seasons of a show with them.

You know, it was all thought leadership. In some cases, they were also using it as a sales enablement tool to bring in either existing clients or potential clients to speak about their challenges, their successes within sort of HR, hiring, that sort of thing.

And when it came to marketing, it was a really niche audience. So like, you know, putting it, doing audio ads on SiriusXM or Span was not going to be the move. There are lots of niche, I had to learn all about this, like HR newsletters, you know, finding those sub stackers, finding those influencers and doing little collaborations with them. Fine. That's all sort of off the shelf.

But the thing that we did that was so fun is I was thinking about, okay, what are the, what are the kinds of like barter or cross promos that we've done that have been really effective? And how can we like translate that into this world? So Greenhouse has business partnerships with a whole suite of other offerings that are used within sort of onboarding and HR.

So like Checker, the background check company, or, you know, Bamboo HR, it's like another HR software. You know, they have all of these relationships and in some cases they actually have APIs that support these integrations so that you can have sort of like a one stop shop for your team.

So we basically did fake ads for these integrations on the show and we produced these like really beautiful ads and in exchange we asked these companies to push this on their newsletters, on their social, like amongst their team because they have the same exact target audience and to the extent that somebody who's using Checker who doesn't yet know about Greenhouse or could benefit from like these really beautiful episodes that we were doing, it felt to me like, this is good for their business relationship. This is the exact right audience. And it's using the tools that we're already using, like making integrated branded content, but in a way that like, we're not exchanging any money and we're just getting the value of the marketing. So that was a fun one.

Jeff Umbro: With a lot of branded shows, like it's great when and if people listen, but like, that's not always the goal. The goal is often just to build these relationships and like the show is a tool to help do that. Same as like, you know, a CEO publishing a book. Like, it is a way to get in the door, to get interviewed, to, you know, call somebody up on the phone and say, I want to interview you for this thing that I'm doing.

And it builds the relationship. So, I really like that example.

Shira Atkins: Yeah. I'll give you one other example that I love, which is, you know, we also do internally facing podcasts for brands, and we did this amazing, really, it's like one of my favorite projects and it makes me so sad that we can't share it publicly.

But we did a project with GE a couple years ago, like ahead of their big sort of reorg. We wanted to find a way to like get the 90, 000 GE employees to listen. We put a calendar invite on every single employee's calendar with the link to listen and it worked.

Jeff Umbro: Did you use a tracking link?

Shira Atkins: We used a tracking link and it came, the invite came from the CEO.

So everybody was like, what is this? And then clicked on it and it was the podcast.

Jeff Umbro: How many people are we talking about?

Shira Atkins: I think that we saw a conversion of like 26, 000 or something. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it was like really, I mean, talk about impact, like, you know, I, because we were using some internal platform, we actually weren't so clear on listen through rates, but you know, this is like a, it continues to be a very big pain point for internally gazing podcasts.

Jeff Umbro: That's incredible. You should write up a case study, anonymize it if you can't share the info, but like, that's a really, really fun idea.

You do work with a lot of different companies in podcasting, a lot of branded folks. You work with Acast obviously, you work with iHeart, you work with many others. Like, how do, how do those collaborations work?

Like, what does that look like when it comes across your desk?

Shira Atkins: One of the things that I love about this space is it actually really does feel small still. Even though there are so many podcasts, I would say like perhaps the inner sanctum or the sort of stalwarts amongst us, like what are there, like maybe a hundred people who are like executives at podcasting companies from like our size to iHeart, and we really all are friends.

And, you know, when the Acast news came, like I got phone calls from like competitors of mine that were like, this meant more to me than anything. Like, I just, I really do feel like it's, it's friendship, it's real community. So in terms of like how those deals work, we've just, people know what we're good at at this point.

And so, you know, we of course are doing proactive selling all the time and making sure that like, you know, Wondery is aware of what we're doing and, you know, staying top of mind for people like as new shiny objects enter the chat. But I think because of this like sense of community and, and friend, friendliness, like people just know what's going to be good for us.

So you know, we do a ton of work with iHeart. There's so many great people there and we're just in constant communication and they know which shows we're like really eager to get our hands on. And so when those open up, they, they walk them our way. You know, you have to like, it's a two way street. Like we have to be delivering good work for them.

Like no one's doing us any favors, that's for sure. But we, you know, we just have, there's only a handful of buyers as you know, and therefore like you can get pretty deep with each of them.

Jeff Umbro: I can tell you that I've spoken with some of the folks that you've worked with at iHeart, and they have like the most brilliant things to say about you.

Shira Atkins: Oh, that's so nice. It's really, I really love them. It's been really great. And I have to say, like, it was important to me. And also, of course, important to Acast, because we have a lot of revenue coming from iHeart. Like it, it was, it was important for all of us to know that that could continue, like once the acquisition happened.

Jeff Umbro: So that is continuing.

Shira Atkins: That is continuing. And I really appreciate that both companies, like, understand where the competition ends and where the collaboration can start. And you know, iHeart and Acast already work with each other in a whole number of ways, because different sales teams have different skill sets and they're, you know, in terms of international sales and programmatics, like there's a lot of ways that, I don't know how much I'm allowed to disclose or not, but like there is an existing relationship there and we can help sort of support and buttress that.

Jeff Umbro: Can you walk me through, if you remember your first interaction with Acast and like how that engagement began and developed over time?

Shira Atkins: We have done the least amount of work with Acast compared to some of the other platforms and, and buyers. So we knew them the least, but like we had relationships with Veronica and Grace Ross and a couple of others.

But in terms of like the deal process, I, you know, they had just hired this guy, Greg Glenday, who's the new chief business officer. And I knew that we were ready to figure out what the next chapter might look like. And also like, we were always sort of engaged with sort of big business partnership conversations.

I reached out to him. I wanted to just get to know him. And we just started talking and really hit it off. And, you know.

Jeff Umbro: And at this point you were like in a limited fashion, like actually doing work with them already, right? Like producing things for them?

Shira Atkins: We had never produced anything for Acast. We had one show that we were hosting on Acast and monetizing a little bit with them is actually the show that we did in collaboration with The 19th News called The Amendment. And, but that was like a pretty small partnership.

So yeah, I mean, one might have assumed that like the iHeart work could have evolved into some sort of larger strategic partnership, just given how like the scale and scope of what we were doing with them. But, you know, for, for a whole bunch of reasons, that was not the right, like ultimate home for us.

And Acast really was. And part of it is that like, you know, obviously Acast has a creative team that has been really leaning into our, I'm using our as, as Acast now, like our new thesis, which is that it's podcast first, but not only, and that has been WMN's thesis for some time as well. And you know, this, this creative team has been selling in these activations to brands that are true omni channel, which as you know, is a departure from Acast's bread and butter, which is, you know, scale.

It's all like just massive scale. It's actually 135, 000 plus shows.

Jeff Umbro: Wow. Okay.

Shira Atkins: I think there's something like 400 million or 500 million monthly uniques, massive global scale. And so this creative team has been teaching also Acast's partners how to, maybe not necessarily how to think differently, but like how to understand Acast's capabilities in a newfound manner as the space evolves.

And so we will be coming in to help sort of buttress that existing work and also add production capability, which they don't have any at the moment. So like, you know, we, we're bringing 20 producers over and all of the strategy work and the, like, really the white glove sort of custom service that I know you guys do as well, that is, that's all new capability.

And so when we talk about like iHeart before, they already, you know, they do that and they do that beautifully. So any media company, any tech platform that's like in this space needs to have like the 360 approach and the touch points so that you can nurture clients and give them everything they need in a single locale.

Jeff Umbro: We had Amber Smith from Ruby on recently and Will Pearson from iHeart, and.

Shira Atkins: I love, those are two of the greatest people in the world.

Jeff Umbro: But the way that they had explained like their model at Ruby was big brand comes in, they say, we want to put a million dollars into the podcast space. Like how should we best do that?

And Ruby will actually produce a show that helps them. You know, strengthen the message that they want to get out. And then the advertising is in part to promote the product or the brand or the call to action and in part to promote the podcast. Do you view that as kind of some version of, of what the future of Acast creative suite will be or studio?

Shira Atkins: I have always wished that Ruby sold podcast creative as a standalone line item instead of it being part and parcel of a media spend. I think that, and you can probably relate to this, Jeff, like it should not, podcast custom development should never be added value. It should be the centerpiece.

Jeff Umbro: It's a nice luxury to be able to have that as added value.

Shira Atkins: And again, I'm not throwing shade at all because I think they really do do beautiful work. And again, there's such a massive, there's some massive company that they're able, they're obviously able to make this work, but like, I think that clients appreciate the content and the process more when that's the lead.

Like the lead is the storytelling and then the halo is the media spend. And, you know, like for us, and this will continue. When we do media spend for clients, we're not only executing that in podcasting. So like for iHeart, for Ruby, like, you know, it's the media spend is like across iHeart's network.

Jeff Umbro: Radio and broadcast and podcast.

Shira Atkins: Exactly. So for us, we're not just going to like funnel the entire budget over to Acast, to, to like the Acast platform. Like certainly some of it should go there. And we, we have like, you know, preferred insights and like understanding of where exactly it will fit and we can get, you know, preferential treatment and all that, like, amazing.

But like sometimes as we were talking about before, like sometimes the budget should actually really be spent on LinkedIn or it should really be spent on YouTube or it should really be spent on an awesome dinner party. Like there's, there's lots of other ways to slice this, to get the ultimate impact that a brand needs.

And I think that will be our differentiator is that also this studio is audio first, broadcast first, but not only.

Jeff Umbro: I have a theory about Acast. And I don't, I don't know if this is like anything special or if it's juicy or whatever, but I think Acast launched in order to get bought by Spotify. I think Spotify decided to go in a different direction.

And I think Acast has spent the last few years trying to kind of like re find its direction. And that, you know, is you guys, is Podchaser, is like the massive expansion, is the global work. And, and I'm obviously like reducing this a little bit, like Acast has done amazing work forever. They were one of the first organizations I spoke to that did programmatic spend.

They were able to give you this amazing hosting platform that you could not get anywhere else at that point in time when they first launched it. I love everything that Acast was and is doing. But that's my vision of like kind of their journey. And, and I just am really excited because it feels to me like Acast is finding its footing or has found its footing several years ago and is like really like, they have a direction and they're going in it and you guys are a part of that. And it makes me really happy.

What do you think the vision is for the future of Acast?

Shira Atkins: I know that the vision and part of the vision in acquiring us was thinking about U. S. expansion. Acast is so well respected and has such incredible scale and impact on, on the global stage. And in the U. S. has always been trailing sort of purposefully, you know, it's a Swedish company and the huge presence in the UK and part of hiring Greg and part of, you know, Ricardo, who had come over from Spotify like building out the US team is, is really important. The US is still, I mean, obviously I'm US first thinking, but that's a really important piece of the puzzle. And then the other thing that I would say is like Acast is a tech platform and it's also a creator company.

And there's so much exciting stuff happening in the creator economy right now. And I think Acast is five steps ahead of some of our competitors in thinking about how to service those creators. So in terms of the vision, I think it's all about growth and doing work for, for clients and advertisers that's best in class.

And then the rest will come. We'll see what happens.

Jeff Umbro: So do you guys have any like productions lined up for the next year? Or is it kind of your existing slate moving over to Acast? Or is there, are they putting a lot of stuff in your basket now?

Shira Atkins: All of our existing work is coming with us. We're keeping all of our original content, which is really exciting.

And for the brand side of things, we have a couple of new clients that are coming up that I will not reveal on this podcast, but some, a really like incredible range from names that you would know to maybe names that you would not know, because they're like, you know, B2B financial services brands. So we'll continue to have that breadth.

And then, you know, the other thing that I'm really excited to explore with Veronica and Tim and the Creator Network is previously, Acast has not been able to provide Acast shows with production support, and now they might be able to, like if the economics are right, you know, we now have this incredible in house team, so we'd love to be able to support creators with production help, and we'll see.

But at the moment, nothing has yet, like, landed in our basket. We're being, like, really thoughtful about this integration and taking our time with it. You know, I never worked at a big company before, so this is all new to me too. So day by day.

Jeff Umbro: Did Acast do original productions before?

Shira Atkins: So they did one. It was produced by Ben Adair at Western Sound. It was like the Bank Robber Diaries or something like that. It was so good. This was like maybe 2021 or 2022 and, you know, the deficit financed it and then sold it across the network. And that was when, as you know, distributors were launching far more sort of limited run series. That is really not Acast's primary, you know, it's an, it's an ad network, right?

So like, it's really about supporting the creators that have preexisting shows and they're acquiring new shows and bringing in new networks. Like they, they, we just signed this amazing new partnership with TED. So I believe that original content will always be a part of what we do, and by extension what Acast does, but in the same way that we at WMN have been very thoughtful, concerted about what shows we launch to ensure that there's commercial viability, the same will hold true as part of Acast.

Jeff Umbro: Do you think that in the same way that Acast is trying to expand in the U. S., like, will your work expand internationally?

Shira Atkins: Yes. I'm glad you asked. So we are technically global, so we will be based in the US, but we will technically have global function, which means that I hope that we'll be able to travel globally and hire people globally and expand this work really globally.

And Jenny and I will be sitting sort of, you know, we work for Greg now and that's also a global function.

Jeff Umbro: What do you think this says about kind of the rest of the production landscape? You think we'll see more of these partnerships and acquisitions in the future?

Shira Atkins: I certainly hope so for my friends that want that for themselves.

I do think that consolidation and acquisition is not over. I also really believe 2025 is going to be a great year for podcasting. And what I know to be true is that good content always wins. And this capability will always be necessary. And yes, I think there's incredible strides in AI, and I'm so excited to see how we can also use AI to like improve what we do, but custom, creative, white glove approach, really understanding brands, like getting into their DNA and supporting them through this world of podcasting that is still unfolding before our eyes is so, so necessary.

So I think money continues to pour into the space and when money pours in, acquisition follows. And so, yeah, if, if that's what production companies want, I think that there are still outcomes to be had. And also there's still so much space and so much potential for like, just running a really good small business.

Like, you know, we were profitable. We're, we're, everything was, it's all good. Like, this just presented a really incredible opportunity to have impact beyond what we possibly could have done as an independent. And so that was really appealing to me and Jenny.

Jeff Umbro: What are you most looking forward to this year?

Shira Atkins: Hopefully we'll go to Sweden at some point. I've never been.

Jeff Umbro: Well, thank you, Shira. This was really fun. I'm glad that we got to connect.

Shira Atkins: Yeah, likewise. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much to Shira Atkins for chatting with us today. You can find her at LinkedIn at Shira Atkins or at wondermedianetwork.com.

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on LinkedIn at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of The Podglomerate.

If you're looking for help producing, marketing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at Podglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com, or follow us on all socials at @podglomeratepods. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello, and myself, Jeff Umbro. This episode was edited and mixed by Jose Roman. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Perri Gross. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. 

Thank you for listening and I'll catch you all in a few weeks.