Most established service providers don't do a full accounting of what the podcast is actually costing them. Not in subscription fees and equipment, but in time, and specifically in what that time is worth against everything else it could be doing.
This is worth doing properly once, because the number tends to be surprising. 💸
The actual time breakdown
A rough average for a self-managed 45-minute episode, across the people I've talked to:
Episode prep and outline: 45 minutes to an hour
Recording: 45 to 60 minutes including setup
Basic editing or waiting for it to come back from a junior editor: 30 to 90 minutes
Show notes: 10 to 20 minutes if done properly, less if done badly
Writing the social posts and captions for launch week: 30 to 60 minutes
Publishing, uploading, scheduling: 20 to 30 minutes
Following up with anything that didn't get done at launch: variable, often another hour spread across the week
Conservative total: four to five hours per episode. For someone recording weekly, that's four to five hours a week, every week, on the podcast production layer alone, not including the actual recording.
Now put your hourly rate against that number.
If your time is worth $300 an hour - a conservative figure for someone running a high-revenue coaching or consulting practice, four hours a week on podcast production is $1,200 a week. $4,800 a month. Not money leaving your account, but value being spent in the wrong direction. Time that could be in client work, in sales conversations, in anything that returns against your actual rate. 🤯
The time cost is the visible one, but the less visible cost is what happens to the quality of the podcast when it's being managed by someone already at capacity.
Show notes get written in five minutes because that's all there is. The clip that would have stopped someone mid-scroll doesn't get made because there's no capacity to make it. The newsletter gets skipped because Wednesday was full. The LinkedIn post that was sitting right there in episode 16 never gets written, because writing it would require two hours that don't exist.
The podcast that gets managed in the margins of everything else is a version of itself. Not bad, necessarily. But not what it would be if someone whose entire job it is were handling it properly. The difference between a maintained podcast and a properly worked one compounds over time in the same way that any quality gap compounds.
The comparison that matters
A proper podcast management retainer, at any reasonable market rate, is almost certainly a fraction of what the time costs you to manage it yourself. For someone billing at $300 an hour, spending four hours a week on podcast production costs more per month than outsourcing would. The math is usually obvious once it's laid out directly.
The objection that comes up most often: "but I need to stay involved to keep my voice." That's a valid concern and a reasonable one. The answer is that staying involved in the recording is different from staying involved in the production. Your voice is in the recording. The newsletter, the captions, the show notes, those are built from your recording, so your voice is already in there before anyone writes a word. The production layer doesn't need your involvement. It needs good execution.
What would you do with four hours a week back? That's probably the right place to start the calculation. 📊