If you’re a small business owner, I hope to heck that you’ve heard of John Jantsch, the man behind Duct Tape Marketing.

With Duct Tape Marketing, John has created a system for marketing your small business, so you can forget about the hype and guesswork, and counting on consultants to decode the mysteries of marketing. John’s system will get your business beyond the clutter and into the limelight.

John is insatiably curious, admits to getting bored easily and is a voracious reader of 100 blogs and 4 books a week. During our conversation he shares his wisdom about:

• How social media years are like dog years
• His “light bulb” moment about the secret to marketing small businesses
• The 2 biggest mistakes that John sees over and over, and make him smack himself on the head every time
• How to turn your biz into a “Referral Engine” that people love talking about
• Creating a brand that’s as cool as Apple (don’t worry.. you don’t need their budget or iPads)

You can read John’s award-winning blog Duct Tape Marketing here (it’s a Forbes fave and Harvard Business School featured marketing site) and follow him on Twitter at @ducttape.

Listen to my interview with John Jantsch

I’m a big fan of Matt May’s book, In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing. It speaks to my belief that design is an increasingly critical element of everything we do. Not just for those of us in the “creative” industries, but for all of us in all we do. With so much stuff everywhere – content is free – it is through design and elegance we find solutions and create value…and do Great Work.

Matt’s first award-winning book was called The Elegant Solution, and was written after many years advising Toyota on business design and helping build Toyota University. He now spends much of his time advising corporations on how to build in elegance and design into the work that they do.

In our conversation we talk about:

• The important difference between basic vanilla simplicity and elegant simplicity
• Why you need a “To Not Do” list
• How to find the sweet spot between your skills and the challenge at hand
• And what drives Tiger Woods to succeed. (Yes, we did this interview Before The Scandal)

You can follow Matt on Twitter at @MatthewEMay and at his website www.InPursuitOfElegance.com.

Listen to my interview with Matt May

Honest Tea is not your typical beverage company. Yes, they’re the biggest seller of organic tea drinks in the US. But more interesting for me is how they got there. This is one of those “blue ocean” stories where the founders asked themselves, “What do we need to do that’s different to stand out and flourish?” I’m lucky to be speaking to one of those founders today. Seth Goldman founded Honest Tea back in 1998 with Professor Barry Nalebuff of the Yale School of Management. And in the last ten years they’ve had nothing but success. They’ve had about a 66% annual compound growth, and in 2008, Coca Cola purchased a minority interest in the company so that they’re able to get better distribution around the country.

Seth graduated Harvard in ’87, the Yale School of Management in ’95, he won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year for the Mid-Atlantic region, and was also running his company. He  founded Bethesda Green which is a local sustainability initiative helping convert grease waste from restaurants into biodiesel.

We talk about:

• Seth’s surprise to find himself an entrepreneur and a champion of sustainable business
• The basic calculation that allowed him to take the leap to begin Honest Tea
• The dynamic of his partnership with his co-founder – and why being so different is so important
• The impact on their reputation of selling part of the company to Coca-Cola as a feisty independant.

You can read more about the company at www.HonestTea.com and on Twitter at @honesttea

Listen to my interview with Seth Goldman

Gray geese populate
Concave pockets of ice, a
Platoon of honkers.

Early morning walkers join the avian conversation, narrating each shaky step on a slippery path.
A musical fan belt tra-la-las a fanfare over the chorus, a true operatic soprano.

Fish, frozen solid
Locked deep in the lake, beg for
Library voices.

- a Haibun by Allison Peters
Friend and YA Librarian Extraordinare

Brian is the Chief Philosopher of Philosophers Notes, a website and business I discovered about a year ago and think is absolutely terrific. Brian’s role as Chief Philosopher is to study and share the the world’s greatest wisdom. He has picked the hundred best, wisest, smartest books, he has articulated the thousand best ideas in those books and from those he has extracted the ten core principles behind the real works of wisdom that guide us and shape is in our 21st century.

What makes this sweeter still is that Brian is also a brilliant entrepreneur. He founded an organization called E-Teams that grew, was massively successful and sold it in 2000 to The Active Network then came back and founded another brilliant online company called Zaadz which is now known as Gaia.com and which is also terrific – it’s like a Facebook or LinkedIn for people who want to save the world and change the world.

This is a really juicy call, full of ideas and in it we talk about:

• How you know if you’re ‘following your bliss” (and what Carlos Castaneda has to say on the point)
• One of the deepest choices of life: do you step forward into growth or back into safety
• A brilliant mapping system to help you keep track of your path
• And what Brian learned from Jim Loehr about projecting his shadow
• The importance of ritual

And of course, a whole lot more.

You can find Brian at www.PhilosophersNotes.com and follow him on Twitter at @_Brian_Johnson. (And if you do so, you’ll see he’s just announced he’s getting married. Woo hoo!)

Listen to my interview with Brian Johnson