Photo by Robert Berlin
Eric Rice (left) and Brett Heppner started the Let’s Be Blount podcast officially in 2023; however, its origins began before that with simple social media posts. For them it has become a community building project.
Blount County is growing fast, and with this growth comes struggles.
Realtors Brett Heppner and Eric Rice didn’t just understand that growth requires understanding — they launched a multiyear podcast project to help connect newcomers to the rich history and deep sense of community that many people cherish.
Since launching the Let’s Be Blount Podcast in 2023, Heppner and Rice have introduced more than 60 local entrepreneurs and community leaders to their audience in a way they hope reveals the heart of what makes Blount County great.
Origins of the Podcast
There was no grand plan, only evolution, the podcasters admit.
“Well, we have done little things along the way,” Heppner said. “We started with a Monday Market Minute that we would post on social media — just a snapshot of what happened” in the real estate market that week.
Although they are both realtors who were trying to leverage social media to promote their personal brands, they wanted to do something different than everyone else.
“We added Wednesday Friends Day,” Heppner said. “We would talk to people in the community and we just really liked doing it.”
Both came up with the idea to do a podcast around the same time. But the idea was the easy part. Neither has a media background, so figuring out the technology and production process was far more challenging.
They also had to find the personality of the podcast — that part comes from interview style and editing.
“We’ve screwed some things up and just left (the mistakes) in,” Heppner said.
Rice believes this is what makes the podcast successful.
“It keeps things light and fun,” he said. “It just feels more natural to do it how we’re doing it now.”
But as they interviewed more people, a new sense of purpose evolved.
“We had so many people moving into this area,” Rice said. “They’re bringing lots of great things from other places and other experiences, all of which I think only enhances and enriches our community.”
Mixing the old with the new, however, can create tension. Heppner and Rice believe they can help both sides understand each other by having a candid conversation about what makes Blount County great.
“They’re not moving here to change Blount County,” Heppner said. “They’re moving here because they know what Blount County is and they want to be part of that. And so that’s a good thing.”
Rice recalled an interview with Brian Daniels at Blount Partnership in which Daniels spoke about newcomers to the county.
“He said ‘Come be part of what’s going on here. Bring your experiences from outside, but don’t try to change it so that it’s something different,'” Rice recalled.
Strategic Partnerships
Creating and publishing a podcast is only part of the challenge. If nobody hears it, the podcasters feared, the project would fall short of their hopes.
Coincidentally, Jeremy LaDuke, founder of Epic Nine Marketing, was also working on a plan that happened to share the same name and a similar mission.
LaDuke’s vision was to create a website highlighting everything that makes Blount County great — events, people, culture, heritage and businesses.
For him, the title carries more than one meaning: candid conversations about what is happening in the community, but also an invitation to come together and form a unified Blount County. It looked like the perfect partnership.
“We were both kind of doing this thing without being on each other’s radars,” LaDuke said on a 2024 podcast episode. “What could have become a contentious thing became a very collaborative, cool thing.”
Impact on the Community
With LaDuke’s help promoting the podcast, Heppner and Rice needed only to keep producing content.
“It started very much as this desire to be real estate experts in the community,” Rice said. “Now it’s just about being a service to Blount County.”
Both men shared stories of listeners who said they were not aware of a podcast guest despite having lived in the county their entire lives.
“And I just think those stories have become more important than the small real estate piece that we started with,” Rice said.
Ideal guests are not just longtime residents — Heppner and Rice say it is equally important to interview newcomers who are making a meaningful impact.
“They’re bringing the best of themselves and making Blount County better,” Rice said. “Change is hard for people, and I think new people kind of need to understand that as well, because (growth has) changed schools, it’s changed traffic, it’s changed opportunities. It’s changed a lot of things, and anytime you get change, it’s going to be difficult for some people.”
Rice said he was a newcomer himself when he and his family moved to Blount County from Kansas in 2005, so he understands both perspectives.
“It took us a little while to get into the community,” he recalled, “but I think it became easier once we started pouring ourselves into the community.”
Future of the Podcast
Heppner and Rice estimate more than 5,000 people have downloaded the 63 published episodes since the podcast launched in 2023. Both metrics give them confidence to keep going.
Their biggest challenges now are growing the subscriber base and continuing to find interesting people to interview — though Rice said the latter has never been a problem.
“We’d like more listeners just because we’d like to have more people know about Blount County,” he said.