(FORTUNE Small Business) – Last month StartupNation, a radio talk show aimed at small business, reached an industry landmark when it entered its 50th broadcast market. StartupNation's founders, Jeff and Rich Sloan, are no ordinary radio jocks. The brothers, who live in Birmingham, Mich., are serial entrepreneurs who have invented a device to keep car batteries from dying and begun an Arabian-horse farm and a high-tech venture capital firm. In their program, a kind of Car Talk for the entrepreneurial set, the sparring brothers give advice on raising money, protecting your inventions, marketing your product, and more. Please tune in to the Sloan brothers:

Which of you is smarter?

Jeff: You know what? That brings up an interesting answer: Rich. The answer truly is that we're each smarter at different things.

Rich: After a martini, some cabernet, and a little port, Jeff has the edge on me. Jeff does the big ideas and has market savvy. I'm the operations guy, who likes to make Jeff's ideas work.

Why do a radio show about small business?

Jeff: The radio show is just one part of what we do. We develop companies on our own through a VC firm we have. This gives us the background to comment on entrepreneurship, because we've been in the trenches doing it for a long time. What we saw as VCs is that a lot of companies didn't know where to go for advice. It became apparent that there was a huge need to deliver content, inspiration, hand-holding out there in the marketplace. Rich: You can scrap everything he said and just listen to me. Radio is an incredibly powerful medium for interaction. What really turns us on is sharing every pearl of wisdom we've learned with people and doing it in a way where they feel they are being entertained.

Is it more that you want to be teachers or movie stars?

Jeff: I'm not sure it's either of those things. For me, it's more about the inspiring than the teaching. Rich: Yeah.

What's the most common question you get on your radio show from callers?

Jeff: One is the money. How do you get a new business funded? During the new-economy era, starting a company and raising venture capital money were synonymous. That's not really the way it works today. Venture capital typically invests much later, closer to the exit. Friends and families are a much more common place to get money. A business plan should be based on organic growth, growth on revenue generation, rather than relying on outsiders to fund the business.

Let's go back to the moment you decided to start a radio show. What were you thinking?

Rich: It was 2000, we had an office in Birmingham, outside Detroit, and we wanted to develop tech companies through venture development. Jeff had the idea of creating something new, a nonprofit agency to encourage entrepreneurship, and that was called Digital Detroit. As part of that we created a major conference. At one of these, there was in the audience a representative of WJR, which is the big ABC/Disney station in Detroit. And he came up to us afterward and said, "Did you guys ever think of taking your message to radio?" What emerged from that was a regional radio show called The Digital Hour. That's when we first saw the power of giving a community a voice, which was a huge turn-on for us.

So it started from a philanthropic urge?

Jeff: It was philanthropic. Then, from there, once we got our radio chops, we were really inspired by it, so we decided to do a show that had national appeal.

What was your first entrepreneurial endeavor?

Jeff: During the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I bought a HUD house, renovated it, and flipped it.

You were actually just 17 and bought a house?

Jeff: Yeah, it was the proverbial summer job thing, where the choices were mowing lawns, painting houses ... Rich: Or buying and selling HUD houses. Jeff: It was a natural. I went into business with a friend. We learned about buying at auction broken-down HUD houses that had been repossessed. My friend and I got loans from our parents of $1,500 each, and we put in $1,500 each of our own money, and we put a $6,000 bid in on a house for sale in downtown Flint, Mich.

Ouch. That's Michael Moore territory.

Jeff: Right. For better or for worse we won the bid, and we spent the summer fixing it up. Rich: I helped nail shingles on the roof. Jeff: In the fall we put the house up for sale and sold it for $23,400. After that I went to college. Rich: Jeff was an English major; I was an Asian history major. Jeff: I heard the story of the Beach Boys and how a manager basically created them. So I got into the business of assembling and managing rock bands. That was my freshman year in college, 1980. Rich: Man, you're old. Jeff: Yeah, I know, it's incredible. So I had three or four bands touring, and I got my checks every month while still in college, which was really cool. And from there, inspired by my love of the book The Black Stallion and my love of horses, I bought my first horse. I remember saying to the instructor, "I'm doing this only for pleasure. This is just a hobby." Within two years I had 50 or so horses, some Arabian stallions. We won some shows and owned a farm supported by revenues from the business.

In 1988, while I was selling the Michigan farm, I came up with an idea for a device that would prevent dead batteries on cars, called Battery Buddy. It came to me at a fast-food restaurant on a rainy, sleety night when I saw someone not able to start his car in the parking lot because he had left his lights on. It was a miserable experience. So the old light bulb went off, and I said, There has to be a solution. We eventually licensed Battery Buddy, which takes a voltage reading when the engine is off, can sense if, say, the headlights are on, and disconnects the battery. We licensed it to Masco, an auto-parts company in Michigan.

Launching Battery Buddy gave us insights into everything from trademarks to teamwork to patents to marketing to licensing. It was an unbelievable experience. With the money we made from Battery Buddy and from other ventures, we set up an incubator company to help launch small businesses in 1995. So we looked for tech companies based on research coming out of universities, and we would write the business plan, find the team, launch the company, and find the funding. From 1995 to the present we've launched about 15 companies.

What areas do you think are hot for small business?

Jeff: While the new economy may not have delivered as hoped, we still have a revolution out there, and it is the Internet. And the Internet has led to a sub-revolution, which is eBay. The Internet and eBay have really allowed people to build their own business, to do it on their own schedule, to do it virtually, to reach a worldwide market. Rich: You have a situation today where big companies need to report better numbers to Wall Street. And so they're forced to be the most efficient beast they can be. Many are shedding noncritical activities. In some cases they are outsourcing to small businesses. More and more, we will see small businesses being the source of innovation for big businesses. Rich: Oh, yeah, and by the way, is this going on the cover of FSB? Jeff: That's what you've got to love about the Sloan brothers: We never give up."