Meet Allison and Kasey Learned of Hold On, We Got This – Podcast

Today we’d like to introduce you to Allison and Kasey Learned.

Allison and Kasey, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We are native Coloradans who moved away from Home for 16 years to live in New York and Los Angeles. We moved back home in 2014 and we are business owners of 15 national franchise locations of an Interactive, Improvised, Immersive Murder Mystery Dinner Show. Allison was a performer in the show in LA and ten years ago, and we we had the opportunity to purchased our first franchise, funny enough Colorado franchise territories had been purched by one of Allison’s cast members so we decided on opening in San Diego, CA, close to our home at the time in Long Beach, CA. We quickly grew and now proudly have over 500 actors across all our markets who have paid weekly work, doing what they love.

In March of 2020, our business, in all of our cities across the country were shut down due to Coronavirus. We had always wanted to do a podcast but our workload always made that difficult. Enter COVID19 no more work but a whole lot of stress! We launched our podcast, “Hold On, We Got This” because we were struggling quite a bit with the stress and uncertainty of our business being shut down and ten years of work completely stopped; all our momentum, our market share, and our livelihood were halted, and we just aren’t good at sitting and waiting. For any business owner who is used to the constant and unrelenting hustle that is entrepreneurship the stillness of waiting is terrible! In discussing and processing, we realized that we were no stranger to hardship, and we were no strangers to getting through it! We thought of centering the podcast around talking about the good & bad in life and finding the joy and purpose for all of it. The podcast allows us to share our stories, share our experience and hopefully help folks through assimilation. As of early June we’ve begun a series spotlighting small business so others’ can tell their story to further bring home our point that none of us are alone and to hold on becasue, WE GOT THIS!!!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Business ownership is not linear, nor it is easy. We enjoy looking at the bumps in the road as a welcome reminder that we are in control and have agency over ourselves and our lives. Additionally, the bumps in the road are your education, it’s your workout to become stronger and smarter with every year you grow with your business. We started our San Diego location in 2010, in the “Great Recession” we had low expectations but we had to strike while the timing was right for our lives logistically, so we did it, and we did really well for our first few years, nothing huge and nothing to live off of but we made enough to stay in business and eventually grow.

In those first years with only one and increasing soon to two locations, we struggled with making a bad deal with a voucher company that ended up losing us money, and we struggled with a second location in what we thought would be a good market in North County San Diego but that fell flat and eventually was moved to became our Louisville, KY location. We’ve made bad partnerships that lead to really amicable ones. We’ve made bad venue agreements, only to learn how to make better ones. All the bumps made us better and showed us that we can make it through. As we have been starting up “Hold on, We Got This!”, we’ve had to study and quickly learn how to podcast: what is good content, what is useful information, what will offer the best SEO for our site, what will increase listenership, etc. It’s been fun being new at something and watching ourselves and our followers grow!

Please tell us more about your work. What do you guys do? What do you specialize in? What sets you apart from competition?
Being a podcast we knew it would be hard to stand out. Our goal is to talk about things that matter to everyone, things that people feel too ashamed, shy, cliche, or silly to talk about. We address things many may think about but don’t really ever have a place or reason to discuss. In a recent episode about worry, “Worrywarts Unite,” we talk about why we worry and how normal it is. We discuss how to move out of worry and into the exciting blank canvas of the unknown. We really enjoy learning from others, and something we noticed is there are many expert lead Podcasts out there that are really great, but we know those podcasts can often feel inaccessible to someone who is maybe a little too deep in the weeds to feel comfortable listening to a standard “self-help” podcast. We really wanted to make it personal, real, and accessible. The podcast and our topics are natural human experiences from another regular-joe who isn’t afraid to say what they’ve tried, what worked, and what left us feeling even more lost. We hope it will magnify for our listeners how un-alone they are and how “normal” what they think and to feel really is.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
We met in Middle School, we attended Morey Middle School here in Denver. Kasey remembers with endearing-embarrassment the first thing he said to Allison; “Shut-up, Allison”, wait! This was in 7th grade when girls and boys were mortal enemies and neither did anything to help the other spending most days trying to embarrass or upset each other, rather than every admit they liked a person. Allison’s feelings for Kasey are equally as embarrassing and maybe not as endearing; in her 7th-grade yearbook, she crossed out Kasey’s picture and wrote “die” over it… young love. Fast forward to Senior year at East High School, we went on a “road trip” to The Garden of the Gods – this is a very big drive when you’re 17/18 – for our friends birthday, on the drive home, we found ourselves alone in the “way-back” of a Suburban (VERY UNSAFE by today’s standards) where we had our first kiss. We can both safely say that that moment was it for us, we continued to date and about 18 months later we both discussed that we knew at that first kiss, we’d found each other. At 19, we were engaged, waited until 22 to get married and 23 to have our son… we were babies, our story with one-another is probably our favorite childhood memory!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.holdonwegotthis.com/
• Phone: 7209214525
• Email: allisonlearned@gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wegotthispod/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/holdonwegotthispod/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/holdonwegotthis

Image Credit:
Kasey & Allison in White – Douglass William Taft.

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