Scale Like a CEO

From Attorney to Media Entrepreneur: Building a Franchise News Empire | Michael Shapiro

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 46

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Tired of watching your town’s news vanish into rumor threads and paywalled dead ends? We sat down with Michael Shapiro, founder and CEO of Tap Into, to explore how a revenue-first franchise model is rebuilding local journalism while giving small businesses a powerful digital voice. What started with a personal wake-up call became a network nearing 100 sites across New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida—each delivering free, objective reporting and a daily newsletter that neighbors actually read.

Michael shares the origin story that pushed him from law into community news, then breaks down the engine behind sustainable growth: a diversified advertising stack, a lean but focused corporate team, and a product roadmap driven by franchisees, readers, and advertisers. We unpack the “virtuous circle” at the heart of the model—trusted coverage brings readers, readers support local advertisers, and that revenue funds more reporting—creating a feedback loop strong enough to chip away at news deserts nationwide.

We also get candid about the human side of scaling. Michael admits he delegated customer support too late and paid for it with burnout and slower growth. The fix came with process, people, and a personal touch: a dedicated support team, monthly collaboration calls, and open calendar time to stay close to franchisees. To protect objectivity, Tap Into uses franchisee advisory and approval councils that screen for mission fit and filter out political agendas—a crucial safeguard for credibility in local news.

Where does it go from here? We weigh the trade-offs between steady bootstrapped expansion and partnering to reach hundreds more communities faster. Plus, Michael introduces Hyperlocal News Network, which licenses their platform to existing newspapers and magazines, helping legacy publishers modernize and monetize digital. Want to bring trustworthy reporting back to your town or level up your publication’s tech? Subscribe, share this episode with a neighbor who cares about local news, and leave a review with the one question you want every local newsroom to answer.

Speaker:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. In today's episode, host Justin sits down with Michael Shapiro, founder and CEO of Tap Into, a franchise local news and digital marketing platform. They'll explore Michael's journey of scaling his business from a single community news site to nearly a hundred franchises across four states.

Justin:

Well, thank you so much for joining me on Scale like the CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a 90-second intro to you and your business.

Michael:

And we found out that my son, who was one at the time, today he's 18 and he's a freshman in college and he's fine. But when he was one, we found out he needed open heart surgery. And that's what caused me to do what I do today. Yeah. Because I wanted to do something where I could see my wife and son, do something I'd really like to do, and I could help the community at the same time. So I started a local news site in New Providence, New Jersey. And it took off from there. And we started to get more and more requests from people who wanted to tap into, which is the name of the company, to expand to their community and cover local news in their community. And eventually I came up with this idea of applying a franchise business model to local news. And we started franchising at the end of 2013. And today we have just under a hundred franchise tap into local news and digital marketing platforms in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. And it's one of the only sustainable, scalable local journalism models in the country. So it's pretty exciting.

Justin:

That's great. Well, as a son of a journalist, I love hearing that. I'm curious, what specific problem does your company solve and why does it matter in the industry?

Michael:

Yeah, we actually solve two different problems. So one problem is there are uh more than 1,800 towns in the country that have no local newspaper, no local news site. A lot of people and people in those communities are getting their quote unquote news from Facebook forums, if they exist, where there's a lot of misinformation, disinformation, rumors, et cetera, or they don't even have that and they have no idea what's going on in their community because there is no local news site or local newspaper. So at TapInto, one of our main tenants is to help fill news deserts throughout the country with original local news reporting. The second problem that we help solve is regarding local businesses, because most local businesses, they're not they're not only competing against big box retailers, today they're also competing against internet retailers. And we help them to be able to not only survive, but to thrive through innovative digital marketing that they can do for their business to help promote it in the community. And the way that I look at it is in every town that there's a tap into site, we're basically creating a virtuous circle where readers are coming to Tap Into to get their local news, which by the way is free. There's no paywall. And so it's free for them to get their local news, free for them to get their the daily newsletter. At the same time, local businesses are marketing on those tap into sites. And then those local readers are patronizing those local businesses. And so it creates this virtuous circle in basically every community that we serve and helps to really help build community and bring people together, which I think is particularly important in this day and age.

Justin:

It's incredible. I love the story because so my mom was actually editor and publisher of a number of different small town newspapers in Iowa and Minnesota. So a totally evolution of how those small town newspapers and news sources are dying, filling the gap. And unfortunately, too much it's online social media, and we're not getting good local news. So that's really great.

Michael:

Well, thank you.

Justin:

I'm curious, as you as you've grown over the past 17 years, what's the biggest shift that you've had to make personally as you shifted from kind of being founder team of one to building and growing your team?

Michael:

Yeah. So I mean, I think one of the things is we've done everything with revenue. So that's been the most difficult thing because as we as we continue to grow, we grow with the revenue that we're making. We like a lot of in in media today, there's a lot of media companies that are getting all kinds of grants and uh outside funding and things like that. We've kind of made it our mission since day one to try to do everything based on revenue and to prove that a revenue-based local news model can work. We're 100% advertising based, and that takes various forms from your traditional banner advertising to video advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing. Every single penny that comes in, we're using it to improve our services, our user experience, et cetera. So I think one challenge that we've had is being able to scale the company further, which is I know a topic that we're going to be talking about. Because what we've been doing is when we have additional revenue, we've been bringing on either support for our franchisees, that's the number one thing, bringing on more developers to improve the technology and have new features and things like that. But I think in terms of our growth, I think the biggest struggle is figuring out, okay, if we do have X amount of profit, how do we best utilize it to best serve our franchisees, our readers, and our advertisers? Also do it in such a way that's sustainable. For example, it wouldn't make sense for us to at this point hire on, for example, person solely dedicated to business development, because while we might have the revenue this year to support that, if the revenue goes down, for example, even a little bit the following year, it wouldn't support their salary. And so you never want to bring somebody on and then have to let them go because your revenue is not enough to sustain them financially. So when we do something like that, when we're doing a new hire, we want to make sure that we have not only enough revenue for this year, but that the projections are solid enough that we can bring on that new person and not have to worry about, okay, will we have enough funding to be able to keep them on salary a year from now or two years from now?

Justin:

Yeah, I know. And how big is the team today?

Michael:

Yeah, we're still not very big. There's myself. We have a full-time CFO, we have a full-time director of content who provides feedback to the franchisees about their writing. They're there to brainstorm story ideas if they want them, the franchisee wants them to look at a story before it goes live. We have three customer service specialists who are there for the franchisees for anything that they might need. Like, I need help doing this, or I can't remember how to do something. Can you help me? And then we have a team of eight full-time developers. So they're constantly working on new features. And also, obviously, there's about half of one developer that's dedicated to fixing bugs and doing maintenance so that if a franchisee has a bug, someone can fix it very quickly. But seven and a half of the developers are working on new features because we're always getting in feature requests from our franchisees, from our users, from our advertisers. And so we need a pretty big team to be able to continually put out new features on an ongoing basis.

Justin:

That's great. And as you look back, what was the hardest role to let go of as we scaled and started delegating things? What was the hardest to let go of and what made it difficult to delegate?

Michael:

Yeah, the customer service for the franchisees. That was even today, I still franchise reach out to me and I will help them, obviously, with anything that they need, even though we have a three-member customer service team. But that was the hardest because I want uh our franchisees to get helped right away and to get really good help. And so that was the hardest thing was bringing on customer service specialists. We started with one and now we have a team of three full-time customer service specialists. But that was the hardest thing to let go of because one, I really love to have that one-on-one relationship with all the franchisees and to be able to be a resource for them. Second was that what I was realizing was I was spending so much of my time doing that that I wasn't able to do a lot of my other roles that I really needed to do. And so it made sense that that was the role that I should offload to customer service specialists to take care of. And thankfully, even today, I'm still working with the franchisees, every single one of them throughout the year. And we've created a lot of ways for me to also do more interaction with them. So, for example, we have a monthly CO collaboration meeting where it's just the franchisees and me. So that's like a designated time where they can talk about anything that they want with me, et cetera. I also always leave my calendar open for franchisees to jump on if they want to have a one-on-one with me or anything like that. But on the customer service side, today we have three full-time customer service specialists to deal with all the nitty-gritty of the things that they need help on that the customer service staff can take care of for them.

Justin:

And have you ever delegated too early or too late? And what did you learn from that experience?

Michael:

Yeah, well, I mean, I think definitely delegating to creating a customer service delegated too late. And the reason being it hampered our growth, particularly, and part of my role is to do regional advertising sales, part of my role is to speak with prospective franchisees, and then obviously I'm running the whole company. I'm also managing that team of people, including I'm the leader of the development team as well. But I think that those years when I was doing all the customer service for the able to save that time and use it more productively in terms of bringing in additional revenue, bringing in more franchisees, etc., that would have grown the business more quickly. So I think that one of the things that I learned was that in hindsight, I should have done that more quickly.

Justin:

Yeah. And this may be related, but as the company grew, what were the signs that your team structure needed to change?

Michael:

Yeah, well, I mean, I think one of them was that I mean, I was getting customer service questions not only throughout the day, but at night on the weekends. And I mean, it was it was really getting to the point where I was just working all the time. I mean, I would go to bed at one, two o'clock in the morning and be up at five every day. And it was that was starting to take a toll. And even on the weekends. And my wife, at a certain point, said to me, Hey, look, you started your own business, and part of it is to spend more time. That was the main thrust, was to spend more time with your family, and we don't see you because you're in your office all the time dealing with customer service. So that was kind of a good, a good wake-up call to me to be like, hey, she's right. This whole the whole point of me starting this was one to help fill the local news desert and do all this great stuff on the journalism side, but it was also to have time to see my wife and son. And that wasn't happening because I was handling all the customer service in addition to doing everything else I was doing.

Justin:

Yeah, I can recall a conversation I was having with someone and just talking about why you would go into business for yourself. And one individual said, I want to work for myself so that I have more control over my time and have more free time. And there was another founder who was sitting there and said, Well, then don't go into business for yourself because you're not gonna have more free time necessarily, especially in the beginning and getting things up and growing. I think the long-term goal is that you can have more flexibility. But yeah, I'm curious if you found maybe more flexibility as time has gone on.

Michael:

Well, yeah. I mean, so I don't have a set schedule. So one of the great things about owning your own business, at least for me, was I never missed my kids' games. My daughter is only 13, so she still has games to go. But with my son being in college now, I never missed any of his games growing up, which was great. I never missed any of their events that they had at school or anything like that. I always took time out. One of the things that I do now is one day a month on a weekday, I take most of the day off and I spend it with my wife and we do something fun, which when I was working as a lawyer in New York, that wasn't something that I could do. It's also a great situation, too. Like, for example, obviously this doesn't happen as often now because my son's in college, but he would come in and to my office and be like, it was when he got home from school at three o'clock, and is like, hey dad, can you shoot some hoops with me? And I'd be like, Okay, look, I don't have any Zoom meetings coming up. I'm gonna take an hour and go shoot hoops with him, which I can never do as an attorney in New York, commuting commuting back and forth from New Jersey.

Justin:

Yeah, well, that's incredible. You have that flexibility to spend time with your family. I'm curious, can you share a time when you've maybe felt overwhelmed by decision making and what helped you break through?

Michael:

Yeah, so I think there are times when there's big decisions to make about different things. And so one of the things that we did, and we did this fairly early on, probably like eight years ago now. We created committees, volunteer committees here of franchisees. And one of them is a franchisee advisory council. And so any major decision actually goes before that council and I and I meet with them and I can get their feedback about the what they see as the pros and cons, whether they're in favor of it, not in favor of it, et cetera, and hear their feedback. And that's been very valuable because it basically adds to our company kind of positions that we, you know, revenue-wise, we can't afford to have those positions. And instead, we have, you know, franchisees who really are invested in the business because they own their franchise, giving us feedback about these important things that we need to decide upon. The second thing that I think was a really good vehicle that we put in place, we have a prospective franchisee committee. So when I meet with a somebody who's interested in franchising, once I meet with them and they apply, they meet with our prospective franchisee committee, composed of franchisees. And that committee asks them questions and they recommend to me whether they should get approved to franchise or not. And that's been really valuable because as much as I try as the franchise to always bring in the right people, it's also it takes away kind of any incentive that I would have, not that I do, but that I would potentially have, oh, to bring in as many franchisees as possible. Because a lot of franchise organizations, they want to bring in basically as many franchisees as possible because they make more money that way. So by having this committee, they recommend to me whether someone should get approved to franchise or not. If they don't recommend them, they don't get approved to franchise. And obviously what they're looking for is is this franchisee going, you know, all the things that that I should be looking for and I do look for, but things like, for example, are they going to do a good job on the content side? Do they have a team in place on the advertising side to do a good job? So that's been very helpful because that helps keep any kind of motivation that I or anyone else here at corporate might have to expand too quickly from happening. So we expand the right way with the right franchisees in place versus sure, if everyone who has spoken with me about franchising were to get approved to franchise, we'd be in a thousand towns, but we're not because we want the right people doing this in a given community. Particularly when it comes to local news, it's even more important because you want people doing this for the right reasons. The right reasons are they want to help fill the news desert, they want to provide objective local news reporting, and they want to make money. Those are the three reasons to do this. And what I find often part of the time that we live in is a lot of people that I speak with, they don't even make it to the respective franchisee committee because just in my conversation with them, they it's clear to me that they have a political motivation to do this, that they have an agenda that they want to exercise through their local news site, which it's not what we do. If you want to start a local news site that's right or left or whatever, you can do that, but you can't do it with us. It has to be objective. But and and the committee has been really good too because they also have the bandwidth to really dig into the backgrounds of the people who apply to franchise. Whereas obviously myself as the CEO, I speak with you, I'll answer your questions, I'll ask you some questions, but I don't have the time to spend two, three hours digging into your background. They do. And so they'll be able to uncover things that they can bring up during their interview that I wouldn't even know about. For example, oh, I saw two, two years ago that your brother was the campaign manager for X and we're and dig into stuff like that because a lot of times the people that approach us about franchising are doing it not for the reasons that we outlined, they're doing it to influence their their town politically. And we want to make sure that that never happens here.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love the the that you're remaining or keeping that objectivity, as well as having that collective to help you make those decisions, I'm sure is really helpful. So what does the future look like at Tap Into?

Michael:

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that one of the things that at this point we are interested in scaling larger because we've worked out the model. The model works and we have great franchisees, we have the systems in place and things like that. So now it's like, all right, how do we take it from where we are and take it to the next level? Because we have tap into sites in uh New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, but there's such a need for it all over the country. And so the thing that I've started to think about is okay, should we start looking for a strategic partner that can help scale us? Can we scale this internally and do it that way? And how and scale it further? Because obviously we've scaled it to almost 100 tap-in-to-sites at this point, but typically we're growing at a rate of about five to 10 new tap-in-to-sites a year, which is pretty good. But yeah, if you do the math on that, if we have 1800 towns in the country that have no local news site, I'll be 500 years old by the time we get to even half of them. So while some people say I look young, I'm gonna be 50 in a year, and so I don't have 500 years ahead of me to be able to do this.

Justin:

Well, that's great. Well, best of luck on your growth and and really picking up the pace with the number of sites you're bringing on. If folks want to get in touch with you, maybe start up their own site. Well, what's the best way to reach out?

Michael:

Yeah, well, there's a number of ways to reach out. Our our website for more information is starttap.net and uh s-t-ar-t-t-h.net. And there they can not only find out more information about tap into, they can sign up for an informational webinar. They can even get on my calendar to speak with me. So that's a really good way to uh to get in touch. Another way is there, I'm on LinkedIn, so they can connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from them that way. And uh, and I should also mention we also have Hyperlocal News Network, which is our sister company. So if somebody out there has a local news site or even a local newspaper, like I know your mom used to work for, and they want to take their technology to the next level, we can actually license our technology platform for existing publishers. And that's called hyper that you can get there at hyperlocalnewsnetwork.com. But it's a way for us to help, you know, particularly print newspapers that are really struggling with their online presence, as well as niche publications, community magazines, et cetera, who are struggling with their digital presence and how to make more money from digital advertising. And we can help them that way because the last thing we want to do is replace a newspaper. I'd much rather help a newspaper survive rather than to replace a newspaper that has died.

Justin:

Great, great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Michael. I've enjoyed the conversation.

Michael:

Well, thank you, Justin, for having me, and I really appreciate the opportunity.