In this episode, Chris breaks down the four marketing funnels every business needs — social media, content, referrals, and paid ads — and shows how each one is really a different conversation with a different person. For every funnel, he answers four questions: Who are you actually talking to? How do you start the conversation? Where is it supposed to go? And how do you move it along?

Using the social media funnel as the deep-dive example, Chris explains why stopping the scroll isn't enough, why starting an argument is a shortcut to nowhere, and why the real goal of social media is getting people off social media. Then he applies the same framework to content, referrals, and paid ads — showing why treating a warm referral like a cold lead, or nurturing paid traffic like a stranger on Instagram, kills conversations that should already be moving.

If your marketing feels like it's going nowhere, this episode gives you the four questions to find out why.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

"If I'm the best, I'll get everyone else's customers." It's one of the most comforting myths in small business — and one of the most dangerous. Being excellent at your craft is what gets you started. It's not what keeps your business alive.

In this episode, Chris breaks down why skill and business survival are two different games, drawing on Michael Gerber's E-Myth concept of the "technician's trap" — the trained professional who assumes that being great at the work qualifies them to run a company that does the work. Statistics Canada's own research backs this up: the leading cause of small business failure isn't a weak product, it's inexperienced management.

Chris walks through what "good at business" actually means in practice — marketing, hiring, selling deeper to your best clients, and managing people — then shows exactly how business skill has beaten better products throughout history. Betamax had the sharper picture and lost to VHS's open licensing strategy. WordPerfect was the better word processor and lost to Microsoft's bundling. Gillette had the superior blade technology and lost market share to Dollar Shave Club's marketing and subscription model. And Kodak invented the digital camera — then chose not to build a business around it, and went bankrupt as a result.

If you're excellent at what you do but wondering why the business side still feels shaky, this episode explains exactly where the gap is — and what closes it.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Every business owner has seen the Instagram "collab" — two brands mashing up their audiences and hoping some of it sticks. What most people miss is that this idea is a hundred years old, and the best version of it doesn't happen on a platform at all.

In this episode, Chris breaks down real-world collaboration through the lens of peer leadership — a concept he first wrote about in his book Help First. Find people who could benefit from exposure to your audience, help them first, and only then ask them to reciprocate.

Chris introduces a two-part framework for making this work without locking yourself into a limiting exclusive partnership: open multiple pathways to your business, then actively lead people down them, because referrals don't happen on their own.

Four real examples, pulled straight from Help First and Chris's own gym, show exactly how this plays out: bringing in outside speakers who cross-promote to their own list, co-promoting events with complementary businesses, selling the ad space you're not using, and building a formal referral system instead of hoping word-of-mouth shows up on its own.

Each example comes with a specific action to take this week — no algorithm required.

If you've been waiting for the right platform to run a "collab," this episode makes the case that the opportunity has been sitting in your own community the whole time.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/