Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Paige Velasquez Budde, Co-Founding Partner and CEO of Zilker Media

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

Paige Velasquez Budde is a veteran marketer, entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker.She is a co-founding partner and the CEO of Zilker Media, an Austin-based agency that builds trusted companies and leaders. During her tenure as CEO, the Austin Business Journal has named Zilker Media one of the city’s fastest-growing companies as well as one of its best places to work, two years in a row. It has also been listed on Austin Inno’s list of “Coolest Companies.”Paige is the author of the forthcoming book The Strategic Business Influencer: How to Build a Big Brand with a Small Budget (launching November 2025), which offers a research-backed framework to help business leaders create scalable, trust-based influence, even without big budgets. The book includes case studies from entrepreneurs across multiple industries and introduces Paige’s signature concept: the Influence ID.She speaks to leaders about strategic business influence and people-driven marketing at many conferences and corporate events, including organizations such as Ernst & Young, JPMorgan Chase, Harvard Medical School, The University of Texas, Camp Gladiator, Entrepreneurs Organization, and the Women Presidents Organization. She delivered a TEDx Talk at the University of Texas Business School in March 2023. Her approach to people-driven marketing has been featured in media outlets such as Inc., Thrive Global, KevinMD, Texas CEO Magazine, Authority Magazine, Business News Daily, and Business.com.She has led marketing campaigns and strategies for some of the world’s most recognized authorities. She has been named a finalist for the Austin Business Journal’s Women in Business and Austin Under 40.Paige is passionate about community involvement and volunteers her time with several organizations. One is Texas Tower, a collegiate publicity organization for her alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, where Paige teaches students about the PR and marketing industry. Paige loves spending time mentoring aspiring women entrepreneurs and leaders through programs like Kendra Scott’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute at The University of Texas at Austin and ABBA’s Emerging Leaders Initiative. She is also a member of Entrepreneurs Organization, Women Presidents Organization, C12, and the Austin Business Journal BizWomen Leadership Council. She resides west of Austin in Dripping Springs with her husband, Jordan and son, Landry.To learn more about her book and resources, visit www.paigevelasquezbudde.comhttps://zilkermedia.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-paige-velasquez-budde-co-founding-partner-and-ceo-of-zilker-media

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us, Paige Velasquez Buddy, who's the co-founding partner and CEO of Zilker Media. Paige, welcome to the program. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me on today.

I'm excited. You're welcome. And I want to hear all about what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and who you do it for. But let's get started with, what's your story, what's your background? How did you get into the media industry? Sure. It's an interesting story because I didn't actually seek to get into media. I actually went to the University of Texas.

And I was on track to. you know, study pre-law and go that track. And, you know, during my time there, I just realized, hey, this isn't, this isn't the course for me. And one summer, I decided to look around and try some different internships. And one really resonated me, which was kind of the, the catalyst to everything I'm doing now. I found a book marketing PR firm here in Austin, Texas, called Shelton Interactive at the time and decided to try my, try my hand at, you know, PR for nonfiction books. So primarily we worked on business books and healthcare books. And we also did some Christian kind of Christian business books at that time, that genre. And I just fell in love. I fell in love with PR. I fell in

love with marketing. And at that time, if you can think back to when Facebook advertising was starting to emerge and all those different types of online advertising were really back when it actually worked you mean that's right the golden days i like to call it when we could target really well and you know have an incredible cost per cost per acquisition there and um you know i just i started falling in love with the digital side as well and learning and just trying to immerse myself in that i ended up you know staying in book marketing at that firm for for several years full time and just absolutely love the agency life. That firm was sold in 2016. So from there, I went on to represent what I call, you know, people, brands in the political

space for a little bit. And then we started Zilker Media in 2017. And we were able to bring together. It was actually some of the team members from that book marketing firm who started this firm. And, you know, we were able to say, hey, what did we do really well? Well, we realized, you know, we represented authors really well. And most of these authors led businesses. And so our goal was not to only work with them on a project, but help them scale their businesses and work alongside them long term. We also got rid of the things we didn't do well. So. Yeah. And that was just such a beautiful, just kind of entrepreneurial journey, being able to create something new. And that, That's really kind of been my journey throughout all of this. And we've done incredible work here at Zilker Media for the past eight years. We just celebrated eight years. And, you know, we get to do a lot of work with CEOs, you know, founders and just some incredible companies all over the world.

That's awesome. And one of the things that you said that I kind of triggered on was we got rid of the things that didn't work. And what that connotates is you actually had to notice something that was working or not working. And I think that in business leaders or influencers or CEOs, all of these people tend to be type A plus plus squared times 10. And you're just blitzing down the road and you don't take time to notice what's working or not working. And then if you do, having the courage to take action on that, do you find that same thing? Yes, that's exactly right.

You know, we really looked at what were the challenges of that previous business, you know, what prevented the type of scalability that we wanted and how could we, you know, do our best to, you know, overcome that with a new business model. And that's where we just had to really lay everything on the table and decide, you know, what, you know, most importantly, what do we want to focus on and do more of? And then what are the things that we can leave behind? And we've, we've kind of done that exercise, I would say at least once a year with our business because the business that we work in, you know, media, you know, online digital assets, all of this shifts so quickly. And we're in an age right now where it's shifting even more rapidly than what I had seen, you know, the past decade of

my career. And we constantly are having to say, you know, what, what's not working anymore? What do we need to leave behind and what do we need a zero in on moving forward? And sometimes I think the focus on what where we need a kind of pinpoint moving forward is is sometimes a really challenging part when there are so many shiny objects. A hundred percent. We can go down a rabbit hole on that one, you know, shiny object syndrome and people tend to pop, pop, pop, jump, jump, jump, and never give enough time for something to actually work when it probably would.

But let's let's not go down there because that's, you know, a little bit of a, you know, telling trait that a lot of people have. They don't want to admit that they've got it, but I think we all do. Let's dive into your book, the strategic business influencer. I love the title because influencers these days really do influence. And a lot of people think like, oh, well, I'm not on TikTok doing the big videos with the big following. But in business, you can be a business influencer to the niche or segment you work in. But I love the strategic business influencer connotation because that means you are taking time to know strategic.

what it is your audience must understand about what you do so that you can provide educational content to teach them to solve that. And then if you need me, let me know and we can, you know, work on that together. But talk a little bit about the genesis of the book. That's exactly right, Mike. You know, you nailed it. I've seen, you know, influencers, of course, have completely transformed how we look at media, you know, how we consume content. And I, I, I'd been seeing the past several years, you know, business leaders who were doing this just incredibly strategically in their niche. And when I define a strategic business influencer, it's kind of counterintuitive, like you said, to what we think an influencer is. It's not

about the number of followers. Strategic business influencers are leaders who are bringing strategic visibility to the activities. A lot of times that they're already doing behind the scenes that are going to drive results in order to scale their impact. And I think that's what a lot of leaders don't realize is it's not about becoming viral. It's not about being everywhere. It's getting in front of the right people. So I'd rather you have the right 500 followers than the right 5 million. And really looking at what activities do you do as a founder or a CEO or a leader that drive results for your business? And how can we just bring the right visibility to those things to scale? your impact in a strategic way.

And so that's really the premise of the book is getting leaders to start thinking about it in that way and thinking about, you know, what does their brand look like alongside the business? I talk with so many CEOs or founders who go, you know what, online is just not for me. It doesn't make sense. My business is driven entirely by referrals. And a few things I will tell them is that's great that it's driven by referrals. But how many opportunities have we missed out on? Because once somebody goes and does their research on what their friend has referred them,

they don't find anything that encourages them to move forward. So they don't move forward on contacting you. And a lot of times with referral driven businesses, you're referred by name. A lot of times they don't refer the business name or you look commoditized. And so what I encourage leaders to think about is, you know, it's no longer an option. If you are in a leadership position or you're a CEO or a founder, you're online, whether you like it or not. The question is, is are you controlling as much as you can to inform that first impression that people see? Because a lot of people mistake, you know, that first impression, oh, it's when I, you know, meet them in person or when I hop on a Zoom or when I hop on a phone call.

And really, it's when somebody Googles you before they go and meet you in person. before they take your phone call. We could talk for a week and a half on that one statement. I live by that mantra. And I think that too many people don't pay attention to that. And I will say this. One of the things that I kind of live by is, you know, in your world, you might need SEO and for the brands and the websites and all that.

But I work with individual financial advisors typically in my work. And what I say is this, and it goes across any industry for the most part. are people really Googling best attorney in whatever area, best financial advisor in, best CPA in? Probably not because they know they're just going to get a bunch of ads. What they are doing, they're Googling that person's name and company. So to your point, if someone gets referred, they're going to go, oh, I'm going to Google that person's name a company and see what I shall see. And do we see good, bad, ugly? And if all you see is the website and the social media and the directory listings for that person,

that's boring. And I always say in a presentations that I do, and this, I love treating these interviews as mastermind conversations, because, you know, when we can bring out, you know, things that people can listen to later and go, ooh, they brought us some great points. So this is all about your work and what you do. I'm just resonating with what you're saying, but there's an old person, author, philosopher, whatever you want to think of him as. I've heard of, his name is Marshall McLuhan. And he wrote a book called The Medium, is the message. And one of the points in communicating messages is that he brought out is where your content is

seen gives as much value as the actual content. So those leaders, those influencers you're mentioning, they might have the wonderful solution to whatever they do. And it's on their website. It's on in a white paper. It's on and it gets buried and people ya on and go, yeah, whatever. But as soon as that is in authoritative platforms like, oh, I did a TEDx talk on this thing. Oh, I was featured in this TV interview briefly about this thing.

Now people sit up and take notice and you're sitting there going, it's the same stuff I put on my website, but people ignore that. That's right. That's right. And, you know, you work in a heavily commoditized space. And so it is really hard to differentiate, you know, one financial advisor from another, right? You know, typically with what they, how they present online. And so you have to think about, you know, what makes you different. what is going to credential you.

And you have to, you know, before anybody gets to that incredible content, just like you're saying, you have to make that impression that creates that authority, you know, using your terms. And so I, you know, it's just so incredibly important that leaders get that first impression right. And then from there, they're really thinking, you know, strategically about where they're spending their time so that it's highest and best used to driving results for their business. And from an educational standpoint, I would suspect as well, you found because when people start selling, selling and you know, you need to buy this and fear and, you know, yeah, there's an element of fear that you need to just bring to someone's attention like, hey, if you don't handle blah, blah, blah.

But if you, you know, focus too much on fear, people like, I don't like that messaging. So it's got to be, hey, you've got to be an educational advocate for your target audience as they struggle with whatever it is that you're working in. And when they can understand all the nuances of that and then you're positioned as the person, that has those solutions, it opens that door to make it easy to come to you. That's right. And that's the beauty of leading with thought leadership alongside a corporate brand. So, for example, if you're with Merrill Lynch, and I love Merrill Lynch. I'm just going to use them as an example.

There's so much credibility there. But when people see that corporate logo, they're going to be expected that they're being marketed to and they're being sold to because that's what a company does. But when they see, you know, an advisor next to that, a person, the idea is when you have your brand right alongside your company, you're able to start leading with thought leadership, which is somebody with something to teach and educate and entertain versus, you know, somebody with something to sell. And there's so much magic that can happen. I love Edelman's Trust Barometer. They just put out 2025. I've looked at it every year and this stat has continued to increase. But what they found was, you know, people perceive, you know, authority with people that are like them. So, so peers. So it's just incredible to see that, you know, they see a peer as credible as they see traditional authority figures, such as, you know, doctors and physicians and lawyers, you know, politicians, anybody holding public office.

And that's pretty powerful in terms of a statement. And just seeing what people, the power of people, even up against, you know, the traditional media outlets is quite incredible. Yep. Talk a little bit about the relationship driven influence and how that relates to strategic business influence. Because I feel like too many executives leaders in the C-suite, whatever, will go, oh, yeah, okay, I'm going to do that, you know, branding thing you talked about. in influence thing, but it's more of the 60,000 foot view, not even the 30,000 foot view. Right, right. You know, the relationship-driven aspect is so incredibly important.

When we think of, you know, most CEOs, founders, or leaders, you know, one of their top priorities is building relationships on behalf of their business, typically behind the scenes. You know, they're either doing it with top-tier talent that they're trying to attract, prospects that they're trying to bring into the company, investors, if that's a stakeholder audience, partners and vendors, you know, that's absolutely, you know, highest and best use of a senior leader's time. And so the concept that I like to think about is using content as an excuse to go out and build those relationships. So I encourage leaders to think about content and business development, one in the same.

So finding an excuse to include others in what you're creating. So this can be as simple as starting an interview series. Maybe it's even just on your LinkedIn. But thinking about who are the top 25 relationships that you need to build on your, you know, on your business's behalf over the next year. And I guarantee you leaders listening to this podcast can tell us very quickly who those 25 people are.

And what I want to encourage them to do is find reasons to reach out and include them in content. So it could be, hey, you know, I'm starting an interview series on, you know, I don't know, it might be something a little bit more generic. Just to give you an example, we did this with a regional bank here in town, fastest growing community bank in Texas. And they started a full-blown podcast, which you don't have to do it to this level. but they had every, you know, top entrepreneur in town come on this podcast and sit with the chairman and CEO for, you know, 45 minutes and have an interview discussion. And this podcast wasn't about banking, which no one was going to listen to. This podcast is all about, you know, creating the community and what, you know, entrepreneurs have done to impact the community, how they see the future of the community, things that.

This market would be very interested in people they would be very interested in hearing from. But it was also as a way for this bank to grow and deepen relationships with key entrepreneurs that they want, you know, part of their customer base and part of their investor base. And so that's what I encourage you to do is not just the, you know, obvious in your industry podcast, but think about who are you trying to build relationships with and do an interview. it. What it does is it flips the sales to prospect interaction that you would typically have into more of a peer-to-peer interaction, which completely changes the game. I have been preaching that for years as well because I feel like a lot of people go, I need to do marketing,

digital marketing, let's do Facebook ads and they just, you know, buy clicks that go to a plain website, you know, their homepage and get no result. We can go down that rabbit trail all about, you know, different things too. But the point is I've said, hey, here's the deal. You need to do things where it's educating people, check, podcast. But too many times people go, oh, I'm going to do a podcast about, you know, how to get the best investment from your bank or how to get, you know, mortgage rates. No.

But I like to look at it as this, you know, with the concept of selling the futures, not the features, meaning when you're talking to your target audience, get them emotionally involved and down the road where they want to be where they can attain to. And then you can go, oh, man, wouldn't it be great if you had that? I can help you get there. Well, the same thing with what you just said in the podcast. If you were interviewing it, using that bank as the example, if they were interviewing people, other business owners, CEOs, leaders in the community, not about why you should come to use

our bank, but about what they did to grow their business, how they give back to the community. maybe it's called, you know, hometown leaders or, or, you know, change makers or whatever the case is. Now, all of a sudden, when your team is reaching out to that CEO to say, come set up your accounts here and they get ghosted, now they're reaching out going, hey, we recognize your impact in the community. We've got a wonderful podcast where our CEO talks to CEOs, just kind of chatting about what you guys are doing, how you've done it and how you make a difference in the world. Would you like to come on for a quick interview? Now all of a sudden, it's like, yeah. Well, now that opens the door.

to who knows what. And it's way better than the blast email, the LinkedIn message or the Facebook. So I just wanted to affirm and resonate with that. And people, you know, they, they check off like, oh, well, podcasting doesn't work because I did two interviews before. But it's how you use it, how you apply it. That's right. That's exactly right. And what this bank did so well, too, is they made it, they could. They made it an in-person experience. You know, they came into the bank. And there's a podcast studio in the middle of the bank. And they go around. better all of the executives and then they they sit down with the head decision maker for 45 minutes and as a business owner you know that that's incredible to have that time gold exactly and so it just

became this experience which became this ripple effect for their business and I always encourage even you know people who start a podcast I say you know if you don't have an audience built in and you're just doing monologues on your area of expertise it's going to be a lot slower and it's going to feel like you're shouting it into an empty room until you start involving other people strategically. 100%. But, you know, the thing is people can hear that and go, oh, that's awesome. But I don't know where to start or it takes effort. It takes expense. And then they default back to the things that they've tried. So it just gets down to, listen, you've got to, you know, get rid of that shiny object

syndrome, which is bouncing from all over the place and trying to make something that'll work, but, you know, not giving it enough time. And even if you do it the right way, like what we're describing with launching your podcast. You can't look at the first four episodes and go, we didn't bring in a gazillion clients. It's got to be, just do it. Just do it. Have the faith that it's going to work and crank it out.

Make a difference. And I feel like if you, you know, start that podcast or whatever effort. And I know you would resonate with this too. If you started going, what am I going to get out of that? You know, the old WIIFM, what's in it for me? But if you go, how can I serve? What's in it? I want to have a serving call, not a sales call.

How can I serve that business? business owner, that community, that CEO, that's going to come forth. And just like my good friend, and I've interviewed Bob Berg several times, if you've not read the book, Go Giver, you need to go read the book, the go giver. But it's that concept. How could you give and serve and provide value? Because what goes around does come around. That's absolutely right. And it's, you, you conduct an interview the same way you would conduct, you know, a discovery call with the potential prospect. your seat is to be curious and get to know as much as you can really understand the problem and then start looking at, you know, how you can support that and how you can speak to that

for them. And so I think that that's absolutely the mindset to have. You know, I would even say, if you can't do a full-blown podcast, that's okay, starting with a written interview series where you send over via email five to seven questions for them to answer and send back to you, or you hop on a call and record it and transcribe it, you know, those are simple ways just to have, you know, a lift that is just more strategically looking at that relationship building than what you're already doing. Yep. I love it.

Well, Paige, this has been so neat and fun and energizing. I love the work you do and how you do it. And if someone is listening to this thinking, hey, let me reach out and connect, what's the best way that they can learn more about your work and then reach out and connect with you? Sure. If you go to page Velascus Buddy, B-U-D-D-D-E dot com, or Zilker Media, Z-I-L-K-E-R-Media.com, those are some really great places to start. My book, the Strategic Business Influencer, is on both websites. You can look at that there. And then on my website, I wanted to share, I have a few free tools that have just been helpful from questions that I get asked time and time again. And like you said, Mike, I'm in the mindset.

You know, how can I just deliver value and support as much as possible business leaders who are asking a lot of these questions? And so I have a free quiz. Just to, you know, we talked about that first impression for leaders and CEOs. And it's just a quick brand on it, kind of where's your brand right now and maybe where are some areas you need to focus? And then I have what's called an influence ID workbook. And this is where, you know, leaders are wanting to take that step and really look at how do they define their brand as an executive alongside the business.

And so it's a free 18 page workbook that you can download there. Nothing is required to do that other than your emails so that we can send you that workbook. But I really hope that this is just a good resource for leaders who are thinking about this. That is awesome. Well, thank you so much for that as well as for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much, Mike. I appreciate it. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes,

visit www. www.influentialentrepreneursradio.com.