Tulip Podcast Manager 🎙️ Bojana Lalic

Here’s what I do now.

Let me set the scene.

A guest has been booked. The recording went well. Now it’s my job to handle everything that comes next: the show notes, the graphics, the content, the guest bio.

The host hasn’t sent me a guest intake form. There isn’t one, so I do what you do in that situation: I search.

LinkedIn, the company website, and a few interviews they’ve given. I piece together a bio, find a headshot, and note their job title, area of expertise, and the company they work for.

I built the graphics. I write the show notes. I draft the social content. Everything looks right. Everything matches.

And then, during a final check before scheduling, something catches my eye.

A detail that doesn’t quite line up with something the guest mentioned during the recording. Small enough that I almost scrolled past it, and specific enough that it made me stop.

I looked again. More carefully this time.

It wasn’t the same person.

Same name. Same company. Completely different human being, with a different face, a different role, and a different professional story.

How this happens

It sounds improbable until you think about how many people work at large companies, how many professionals share common names, and how inconsistently people maintain their online presence.

The person I’d found was more visible online than the actual guest. More LinkedIn activity, more press coverage, more photos, and a cleaner digital footprint. So when I searched, they came up first. And because everything looked plausible (the right company, the right industry, roughly the right seniority), I didn’t question it.

The guest I was actually looking for had a quieter online presence. He was less findable, which, in the absence of a guest intake form, made them almost invisible.

This wasn’t a careless mistake. It was the predictable result of a gap in the process; searching for someone’s professional identity online, without any information directly from that person, is genuinely unreliable, and I’d been doing it because it seemed to work, right up until the moment it very much didn’t.

What was at stake

If it had gone live (the wrong headshot, the wrong bio, the wrong professional story attributed to a real person who’d given their time to a real recording), the consequences would have been real.

For the host: a public error that undermines their professionalism and requires a correction.

For the actual guest: the strange and uncomfortable experience of being represented incorrectly, having their episode associated with someone else’s identity.

For the other person (the one I’d mistakenly profiled): their image and bio were used without permission, in content they had no connection to.

Three separate problems, none of them small, but all of them entirely avoidable.

The close call is only a close call because of a last-minute check that almost didn’t happen. That’s not a system, that’s luck.

What I put in place after

A guest intake form. Non-negotiable, for every guest, on every show I manage.

It doesn’t need to be long or complicated. It just needs to come directly from the guest, because that’s the only source of information about a guest that is actually reliable.

Here’s what I ask for:

•     Full name  (as they want it to appear in the show notes and graphics)

•     Preferred headshot  (high resolution, recent, approved for use)

•     Professional bio  (short version and long version if they have one)

•     Job title and company  (exactly as they want it written)

•     Website URL

•     Social media handles  (the ones they actually use and want promoted)

•     Any links or resources mentioned during the recording  (or that they want included in show notes)

•     Anything they’d like the host to know before the episode goes live  (an open field; occasionally produces useful things)

That’s it – eight fields. Sent as part of the booking confirmation, made in Google Forms, so it arrives early enough to be filled in before the recording rather than chased down afterwards.

What this actually changes

The obvious change is that I no longer have to search for guest information. It arrives, directly from the source, in a format I can use immediately.

The less obvious thing: it shifts the quality of everything downstream.

The bio is written the way the guest wants to be described, not the way LinkedIn summarises them.

The headshot is the one they’ve chosen to represent themselves, not the one that happened to appear in a news article three years ago.

The links are current.

The social handles are the ones they actually check.

This matters because guests notice. They notice when their bio is slightly off. They notice when a headshot that they’ve long since replaced still shows up on someone else’s platform.

These are small things individually. Together, they shape how valued a guest feels, and how likely they are to share the episode, return for a second recording, or recommend the show to someone in their network.

An intake form isn’t admin. It’s the foundation of a professional guest experience.

The conversation I now have with every new client

When I start working with a host who doesn’t have a guest intake form in place, it’s one of the first things we implement. Not because I’m worried about another close call (though I am), but because it genuinely improves the show.

Hosts are often surprised by how much guests appreciate it. Being asked to fill in a short form before a recording signals professionalism. It says, “We’re prepared for you.” We want to represent you accurately. We’re going to take your episode seriously.

That impression, set before the recording even begins, carries through the whole guest experience.

One honest note

I’ve shared this story (the close call, the wrong headshot, the near miss) with other podcast managers and hosts. Almost everyone has a version of it. A guest bio that turned out to be outdated by two job changes. A headshot that the guest had specifically moved away from. A company name that had changed in the months since the booking.

None of these is the result of carelessness. They’re the result of a process that relies on public information instead of asking the person directly.

The intake form closes that gap. Completely! And once it’s part of the workflow, it’s one of those things you can’t imagine having operated without.

✉️  Get the Free Guest Communication Kit Includes the guest intake form template, ready to send with every booking confirmation.

If you’re managing your own podcast and guest communication is the part that takes the most time or causes the most uncertainty, it’s one of the core things I handle for my clients at Tulip Podcast Manager.

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Have you ever found incorrect information about a guest online and almost used it? Or has a guest ever pointed out that their bio was wrong after it was published?

I’d genuinely love to know; this problem is more common than anyone talks about.