18 Quick Tips For Running (And Growing) A Successful Studio

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 67

the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode,

the six figure home studio podcast. I slowed the intro down that time. It was pretty good. I liked it. I'm your host, Brian [inaudible] and I'm here with my cohost, Chris Graham. Chris how ya doing today. Man,

I'm good. I'm excited to talk to you, but I'm feeling a little weird. I think our audience should know this. I have a three year old daughter has the hots for Brian.

There's probably a better way of phrasing that.

Hm. Maybe some less accurate ways. What is your evidence for this, Chris? Okay, here's my evidence. We're getting ready to leave for NAM a couple of weeks ago and I told Nora is her name. I was looking, I'm going to go spend a couple of days of Brian out in California. She says this all the time. She's like, I want to see pictures of Brian. I was like, okay. So we pull out Instagram and we're looking through and, and she says, I want to see pictures of him in the cubbies, which means like in bed and she's three. And I was like, oh my God. Oh my gosh. And then today I told her again, I was like, yeah, I'm talking to Brian today recording the podcast. And she said, I want to talk to Brian. And my wife said, well, what do you want to talk to him about? And she said, hearts all

she knows, Valentine's Day is just around the corner. She's the door. But what you have the cutest daughter. It's only a little weird that she has a crush on me. I am a taken man. I'm getting married in less than a month. Oh my God. Then I'm going to be going away and there may be the first gap in the podcast ever coming up, uh, around mid to late March. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see if we can get enough episodes in the bank before I leave. Indeed. All right, well let's get into today's topic. What are we doing today, Chris?

What we're doing today is we're going to have a list of small actionable tips, things that you can do to move your business forward immediately. Some of you will know some of these. Some of you will know. None of these. All of you will not know all of these.

That is an interesting way of putting it, but extremely accurate.

The our goal is that all of you walk away with at least one tip that's actionable that can help you grow your recording studio business. And you know, one of the cool things, Brian, I've had a lot of people reach out to me recently that are like, oh, I don't have a recording studio, but I listen to your podcast religiously. Why?

My fiance's listens to the podcast and she's never touched a preamp in her life

or compressor. What's interesting about that is that business advice applies pretty much universally. And so many of the tips, you know, we're going to give you guys today would work in many other businesses. But one of the cool take homes with that is that there are people outside of our industry with business expertise that can help us in our industry for whatever reason were resistant as a whole industry to just like quote unquote best practice. So anyways, let's dive right into it. We've got a bunch

of tips. We're going to move pretty quick and hopefully you hear at least one, maybe two, maybe three, that you're able to be like, ah, I'm gonna Start doing that today. Yes, business. We want at least a couple of Aha moments for each of our listeners today. So first one, and this is honestly a huge one, and if you can do this specific tip, I would venture to say that almost all of you will earn more money over the next 12 months if you can do this, maybe even the next month. I'm excited about this section of tips because Brian is an expert at this stuff. We're talking about follow up. Brian knows more about followup than anybody I've ever met in my life. It's interesting because I'll give you a little stat and in my business about 40 to 50% of my income, depending on which section of time you're looking at, probably around 45% overall throughout my career, 40 to 50% of my income comes from followup five or more.

And there's a number of reasons for this. I'm not going to dive into them right now. Hold on. Let's dial that back a little bit and explain to people when you say follow up five or more, tell us more about that when you're following up, how, what does that look like? Yeah, so we're going to talk about that right now, but what I mean is I'm trying to be a good podcast house. I know what I mean is I'll send an email, get no reply, and there will be five follow ups at some point in our conversation and then I will land them as a client. 40 to 50% of my one projects as a studio or a mixer come from artists who I have had to follow up with five times or more throughout our relationship. So let that sink in for a minute. For you, longtime listeners of the podcast, this isn't a shock or Brian talks about this quite a bit, thank God, but think about the intensity of band reaches out to you and the norm would be you kind of wait around to the band thinks they're ready.

Brian's methodology is he continually follows up on regular intervals. What's the phrase you used until you get a yes or until they tell me to fuck off or I get a yes, one of the two. I'll tell you right now, I've never had anyone tell me to fuck off. That's amazing. That leads to tip number one. That wasn't the tip. I mean follow up is a tip, but this one is specific. Always have a next action related to follow ups. Let me just break that out for you real quick and we'll move on to the next step. If you get a quote from somebody or court request from somebody or an email asking you rates or showing some sort of interest, obviously you'll reply to that. All of us will reply to that. We will almost always reply to someone if they ask rates from us, but what most people do is they just assume though either remember to follow up or they will maybe send one follow up and then they'll stop.

But no matter what happens, you always have a next action and that action is almost always a followup. And even if the person ghosts on you after like five or six or seven followups, you're not getting any replies. Even six months from now, you should have a next action on that lead and next action and next step, two follow up six months from now or a year from now. Just to stay top of mind because if you are not doing this full time, especially if you do not have a ton of leads coming in the door, you have to make the most

of every single lead. Even in my business where I do have plenty of leads coming in the door, a lead may be worth on average $2,000 so if I just let one of those slip to the crack throughout the course of a year, that's two grand I'm missing out on because I didn't take five seconds to email somebody that one extra time. God, I'm getting way off the beaten path. But there's a story of this gold prospector who was mining for gold and he bought the rights to a mine and he kept going and kept going, trying to mind deeper and deeper. And he gave up after a year or two years of trying to find this gold and he sold his rights to the mine and turns out he was like a foot from this vein of gold that was worth like millions of dollars. And this is back in the 18 hundreds and I'm probably butchering this story, but the moral of the story is you never know when you're just a foot away from that gold vein. So always have a next step. And that goes doubly for those of you who don't have this endless supply of leads, which is honestly most people.

Well, I love what you preach about follow up and you know, I definitely, I have a lot to learn and this, our followup game is like c plus level at Chris Graham mastering, but it's getting better always and I'm definitely, I'm using the CRM that you told me about close.io. Love it.

I've now switched to pipe drive Dr Studio for that

Url. I guess I'll switch to, I did not pay up front for my entire year of service, so I do have some flexibility there. Anyways, this gets into our next tip here, Brian. Why would you say that most people don't follow up?

Yeah, that leads to tip number two and that is embrace your fear of rejection. We all have this innate fear of rejection in, this goes back to our caveman days where if you're rejected, then you're ostracized from your community and then you're going to die because of pack of wolves is going to attack you or something like that. But we all have this fear of rejection and it's extraordinarily hard to overcome. Don't act like, I'm like trying to downplay the fear of rejection. I have the fear of rejection too. I don't like it anymore than anyone else. I just am able to get past that because I know enough about what's on the other side of that rejection. And so just embrace that fear of rejection. Understand that again, I've sent out thousands of followup emails to people or follow up texts or follow up Facebook messages, and I have never once in my life gotten an angry reply.

I will actually, I take that back in the six figure home studio where it's all automated and there's like literally tens of thousands of people that have been through autoresponder sequences. There's always that one guy who doesn't know where the unsubscribe button is and like sends me a fuck you email. But that is outside of the scope of the recording studio business. I've never gotten an angry email from someone that I manually typed up a follow up email or a template of the email to somebody. It doesn't happen. So the worst you're going to get is, sorry, we're not interested or we picked someone else. That's the extent of the rejection you're going to receive and that is a super easy pill to swallow. People somehow just can't get past that. They can't get into the mindset of like, I need to follow up how many times?

Well, and here's a tip we didn't put in our notes for this. When you do get a rejection, that's all we ended up going with somebody else. I get those on my followup emails, you know, all we ended up hiring another mastering engineer or whatever. I think it's a good idea to ask and say, Oh, I'm sorry to hear

that. Do you mind if I ask who you went with? And they'll almost always respond and say, oh, we went with, oh dude, I do that all the time. And that's good stuff to know and actually we're just going to throw in quick tips that pop in her head as we're talking to these quick tips because there's just so many good ones out there. I always find the name of the person and I always reach out to that person and strike up a conversation because you never know where those relationships lead. You think it's a competitor, it's not a competitor. It's going to become a friend and you never know when they're going to send projects your way. Ooh, I love that. Yeah. Always follow up and say, I heard you're working with so and so. Can't wait to hear how the project turns out and it can just be a quick Facebook message, but going back to quick tip number one, when you get rejected, when they say they're going to the other person, always have a next action.

You should be following up in six to eight months again, or you should even have a follow up two months from now or a week after the Dome of the studio to ask them how their experience went with that person because for all you know, they hated the experience and then when to come back to you next time. So always have a next action. Yeah, that's a great point. In our industry. It's really not uncommon for artists to be unhappy with the audio engineers that they worked with, especially in my world and mastering, you know, like it's every single person I talked to as a nightmare story about like a mastering engineer being really rude to them. And so yeah, that followup and just wishing them well and just be in a general good dude of like, hey, really hope it goes well. Please keep me in the loop with how that record turns out goes along way and it creates a lot of good vibes.

They can always come back to you and it feels great. I wish I had some good data or you'd be better person with data on this, on what's the percentage of people who work with a competitor or quote and quote competitor and then come back to you. I really want to know what that number is because that would be interesting to know. Well, I find, and this is funny, when I send that kind of response team of like, oh, sorry to hear that, really hope it turns out well. Do you mind if I ask him? You ended up going with, they almost always, and this is creepy reply with anyone was selling, so Yada Yada, Yada Yada, but we'd love to work with you in the future. They crack the door open. I've gotten that many times. I mean it's like 70 80% of the time if we have that interaction.

It's really weird, but let me kind of move on to our next tip because this is a tip you gave me that I've applied, we mentioned it earlier. It's been great for my business and it's using the CRM. A CRM is customer relationship management software and it sounds terrifying. It sounds really complicated. It's really not. It's essentially an email program that tells you what stage in the process of doing business with you. Someone is and it also tells you how long it's been since you've spoken with that person, so it helps you be a real grown up and remember that like, oh shoot, that really potentially amazing client. I haven't talked to them in a month. Email and really like there's some other stuff related to serums. We're going to talk about later, we have an entire episode about what a CRM is, how to use it, why you should be using one episode seven of the podcast. So way back the seventh episode. Go listen to that. And we talk about CRMs in great detail, but the key here is just the tip of using a CRM. So

you don't have to remember this stuff. You're not gonna remember to follow up with that band in six months. You're not gonna remember to follow up that fifth time or that six time, especially when you have 10 20 leads are more coming to you per month. What in a course of a year, that's two to 300 people that you're trying to juggle every single week or month. You're having to send a dozen or more emails out. You can't remember that. So CRM will help with that a lot.

Well, and let me speak to those of you that are like, I don't need dad. That sounds dumb. I am fine, blah, blah, blah. Maybe you are today, but if you are successful in growing your business, the more successful you are, the harder it is to remember all this stuff. Yes. Back when I was working with like, I don't know, 50 clients a year wasn't very hard to keep things straight, but now that I'm like somewhere around 10 times that maybe you need some help to make sure that people don't fall into the cracks.

I mean a CRM is extremely important at pretty much any stage, but the core reason you need one changes, like when you're just starting out, you need to make the most of every single lead you have because you don't have that many in a CRM helps with that. As you grow in progressing your career, you dropping the ball, you know, as a beginner, there's not a big consequence for that. You may piss someone off, they may never come back to you, but it's not a big deal. You drop the ball at the high level, you can completely ruin your career, your chances to work with a label for the rest of your life. So CRM is like mandatory at that level and crucial at a lower level. All right, so let's move on to our next quick tip, kind of switching categories from the followup now to talk about the category of revisions and is it really, these are just kind of quick tips that will help save you time specifically in the revision process. Chris, what is our first quick tip here with this section?

First, quick tip here, this is something I've only recently rolled out maybe the last year or two, but when someone wants a revision from me, I asked them to fill out a revision form and I know initially some of you are like, Ugh, I feel so impersonal forms. What I found is inevitably during the revision process, I'll forget to ask an important question. One of those important questions might be, oh, are you listening to the files I sent or did you convert them yourself to MP3 or what speakers are you listening to the masters on? Oh, just on your iPhone speaker. Ah, I see. So there are all these questions when you work with a high volume of clients where if you forget one of them, you can go down this deep rabbit hole with the client of back and forth.

Miscue you're saying one missed question could lead to a series of 20 to 30 emails back and forth. Yeah, and when you're Chris Graham and you have a hundred or more customers a month, that is an impossibility. You cannot, it's not quite a hundred it's less than that. Thousands of customers a month.

It's not anywhere close to a hundred it's less than a hundred okay. So case in point, really good friend of mine hired me to master a record. I didn't have a revision form at that time and he kept like saying their masters or distorted the masters are distorted and it was like a real sort of noise rock. Like there was a lot of distortion in the music. Your guitars are distorted. That is correct. That and keyboards and synths and drums, everything. And so finally it came out that like he had never actually listened to the final mix files. He had just like had them forwarded onto me and he had never listened to the final mixes and it was an all the final mixes. So I'm embarrassed to say this, I got frustrated with him and I raised my voice with him on the phone. And eventually only after that do we figure out like you didn't listen to the original mixes dude.

And so that sort of thing of like having a form that makes sure or at a minimum just a checklist on your end to be like, let me ask you these questions to make sure that you don't go down this crazy rabbit hole of unnecessary revisions. So quickly do you just have like in your revision forums and just to clarify in people's minds what Chris is talking about here on this quick tip and it's, I don't like making quick tips too long, but it's worth diving in here cause this is not something I do in my business and it might be worth something exploring. Okay. So when in the process are you as sending them to this revision form? So basically what happens is all master project for somebody. And about 10% of the time I'll get an email back that says, hey, I wanted to make these changes.

And then all of a sudden an email back and say, yeah, no problem. And then I have an email template with like a stock response. It's like, hey, you know, in the interest of getting your revisions then as quickly as possible, you know, use this form the Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah Dah. This will bump you to the front of the line. I'll be able to get revisions back to you much faster. This way I'm not setting any tip is make this revision requests form benefit driven. What's in it for them to go through this? Yes, exactly. It's all benefit driven and the benefit is when I rolled out my revision form, my average revision time went from two days to one day because all the information I need and none of the information I don't need and no unnecessary like crazy revisions come through because it shows up in my inbox.

And the nice thing about the form is like the most important part of the form is when somebody asks for revision, there's a question, hey, if you listen to these masters on at least five sets of speakers of both high and low volume and they have to say yes in order to get to the next part of the form. If they haven't done that, that eliminates most of the dumb dumb is the wrong word. Most of the unnecessary revision process I'll have second the dumb, I've gotten some really dumb revisions in my life. Okay, so that saves time. That's quick tip number one related to reducing or saving time on revisions. What is quick tip number two for revisions? Yeah, so the next thing that I found that's really helpful as far as the revision process is to not only use references from other artists that are the same or very similar instrumentation, but also to reference the band's rough mixes.

If the band did rough mixes on their own and then hired a professional mixed engineer and then you know, hired a professional mastering engineer. Having all along that process available to me is really, really helpful because if you're in a situation where the band is unhappy, it's almost always related to some level of demo. Itis, they at one had a really rough version of the song done. They listen to it 200 times and in their mind they're having a hard time letting go of that demo and so being able to reference those as really, really helpful and there's a temptation in our industry to just be like references be damned and I don't need to hear the rough mix and I don't need to hear the mix engineers master that they did. All I need is myself and my material that in my experience can get weird and dicey and it's just sort of a dick move.

I think it's much more healthy to have the bands rough demo. This is just a mastering thing, but if the mix engineer did like a test master for the band, which is really, really common to have that available as well. And just to make sure it's like, oh well on the mix engineers, rough master, he really aggressively, he cued things, but then they disabled at and send it to mastering. Ah, that's some of I. Okay, Gotcha. So there's just a lot of stuff where you want to catch the band's whole vision and that can really help you from going down into revision hell. And a lot of young guys that are newer in our industry, that's what happens. They get to the point where they think they're done and then they get into this crazy cycle of like, well, 24 why am I doing multiples of 12 here where they get into these like huge multiples of revisions back and forth. It gets heated and it gets really awkward. You obviously want to avoid that and there's a lot of things that you can do by having a revision form, by asking your client to check on multiple speakers by referencing the band's rough mixes, rough masters, et cetera. All these things can really help streamline that process, which every moment you saving the revision process is more money per hour that you're making. Unless you're charging by the hour for revisions.

Yeah, I think everyone can agree that like why you don't want to cut corners at any point anytime you saved doing revisions is a win win. That means the band is happy. It's exactly what they want it to be, and that's time that you don't have to spend going back and forth trying to figure out what it is that they're actually looking for as a band. All right, let's move on to the next section of our quick tips and this is the, we just label this section drama.

Should we simultaneously say drama? No, we couldn't get them. I could count to three and then we could say drama. Why our next section is what you said it really soft. That was creepy.

I don't even know where we're talking about here. We're talking about reducing or eliminating drama when it comes to working with artists, especially for those of you who have artists that are coming into the studio with you. But even for those who don't have artists coming into the studio with you, there can be a lot of drama that can especially come from Ms Communications and other issues that arise during the project. So let's talk about quick tip number one and that is setting your expectations in advance. Chris, what do we mean by this? What are some ways that we can set expectations in advance? When we're working with artists,

this is huge. If you're married, this is huge. If you have an laws, this is huge. If you have a girlfriend, she'll dron pets, you name it. Expectations in advance, the secret of real grownups everywhere. So the real expectations and advanced is huge because all drama, all fights are almost all related to unspoken expectations that aren't met. Brian's getting married soon. He's going to learn this really fast. This is, it's enormous. Like 12 years of marriage, three kids, and you know a whole bunch of mastering projects later. The expectations in advance is huge. And what I often find is, this goes back to the fear of rejection that we talked about earlier on in this episode, is that most people don't communicate their expectations in advance simply out of fear. And one of the ways that you can begin to communicate expectations in advance is to frame them in a way that's a win for the person that you are talking to.

So you could say something like, Hey, you know, I really want to hit this out of the park for you. So I want to make sure I totally understand everything that you've expressed and want to make sure that this project goes well. So here's kind of what I'm thinking that you know, we should define point a, point B, point c, you know, make sure we're on time to a sessions, make sure that you show up well hydrated, make sure you slept well that night, et cetera. There's all sorts of things you can do if you frame it from the standpoint of a win as opposed to look mad. I know you're recording tomorrow and I don't want any, I don't want any crap from you. Okay, so here's my expectations in advance. That's not going to work well.

I want to push back a little bit on that. Setting expectations in a kind of a douchey manner like that is still better than not setting expectations at all. And I say this because that's how I was for years when I had bands coming into my studio. Thank God I don't anymore because that was toxic for both parties. I will say that my whole attitude when sitting expectations for bands coming into my studio in Bisco, living with me for weeks at a time, coming from the like, I am not your mother, I am not your maid type conversation. And that was kind of my phrasing and attitude and wording in there and I would never do that. Now that's an awful way to like position and frame everything. But one thing that it did do and it did do well was it set expectations that I did not put up with bullshit my studio, especially with the things that I talked about in that email template.

And so again, I could have worded that infinitely better. I could done that so much more kindly and I could have done that in a way that made friends for life. But I didn't and that's why I don't record bands anymore. But at the end of the day people did listen to and follow what I said and there wasn't no real issues in the studio negatively that arose from that because I was still generally pretty friendly to them in the long run for most artists at least. And I said part of that is just setting some sort of expectation in advance is still better than nothing at all.

I'm going to have to totally agree with you there. I think the worst thing you could do is not set expectations. It's better to poorly set expectations than to not expectations at all. Ideally you want to set expectations and it really when some way.

Yeah. And I will say that if you were to set the expectation that you were really and like really like kind and then you are a douche whenever they got there, that's actually not setting expectations. But I will say my attitude in my setting of expectations was followed through once they got there because I didn't put up with bullshit when they were in the studio and that's how my email kind of came across. So just make sure you're consistent in your actions because when you set expectations, and I want to go back, I use airbnb all the time cause I do airbnb and I love airbnb. I just want to use this as an example. They Airbnb, I have, I'll sleep 10 people in it, but there's only one shower. And if you don't tell people that there's a problem, but if you communicate ahead of time, there's only one shower. You will never get a single complaint from anyone because they know that ahead of time because you communicated that to them ahead of time. So going back to the city of stuff, just communicate, just set expectations and that will save you from a lot of drama down the road.

This is the part of the podcast where I say the my bit about, I'm preaching to myself from like 10 15 years ago. Oh Man, I was so bad at the expectations in advance and man, talk about immaturity. I think real maturity is figuring out how to navigate the expectations and advanced things. So don't underestimate the power of that tip on your studio and the rest of your life.

All right, so let's just say you failed to set expectations. Some shit hit the fan. You're just so agitated about the laundry list of revisions you got back from the artist and all the things they're asking for and the fact that they still haven't paid you yet. And all of this bullshit just hitting the fan and you're so angry right now. What do you do, Chris? You just type a long email to them, telling them, you know, piss off. I got better things to do and then just unleash your anger to them in an email. What do you do in this situation, Chris?

Well, what I do, and again this is an advice buffet, but this is one of the few things on the advice buffet that I would be like, dude, just always take this advice. Don't send emotional emails or text. If there is any level of emotion or snideness or bitterness or snarkiness, you got to do it at least over the phone. Maybe over facetime. Ideally face to face.

Give yourself time to cool off. I'm the worst at this. I get so angry. Especially like I get triggered when I get along list of revisions and it's inevitable. You can do every a little trick in the book but you're still going to get artists who come at you with like this 12 pages of Google docs of revision requests that you turn the fourth vocal harmony up 0.01 debates on the third chorus. Exactly. And so you're sweating and your face is red and you just want to, what I do, and this is probably not healthy either, is I just type out that email that I want to send them so bad and this is back when I was using close.io, the CRM. And because if you accidentally send that email, you have 10 seconds to hit the undo button before it actually goes out. If there's any chance of this email ever leaving your inbox, just type it in Evernote or Google docs or somewhere just to get it out of your system to so you'll feel better, but don't do anything with it if you can't delete it. So no one ever sees it and just put the worst possible stuff that you want to say to that person in there. Again, this is probably mentally not healthy, but this is a quick and easy way to get over what you want to say and just never say it. So this is huge, especially I would say

you audience members who are male and in your early twenties especially you guys. And again, preaching to myself hardcore here. Chris Graham, obviously a male. When he was in his early twenties no one had told him this advice. Much to the Chagrin of all my friends,

and I'm going to say I'm in my early thirties and I still send emails emotionally when I shouldn't sometimes. So there's, I'm not even good at this yet, but I will say sometimes my quick tip, and this is, it gets buried and all the conversation, my quick tip to the audiences type the email and never send the email. That's the quick tip because still to this day I struggle with it. What is the next tip on this list, Chris?

So when you're making music, you can't systemize the whole thing. Music is unique. You're going to run into unique scenarios. When you do, sometimes it will be necessary to do a little bit of free work to do something that exceeds the scope of what you've agreed on. That's outside of the expectations that were set. And in a situation like that, I think it's really important to tell the client, hey, this is kind of a unique situation. You know, I don't normally do this type of stuff for free, but this one time I'm just going to hook you up. I'm going to do this thing. We didn't talk about any vocal editing or auto tuning in your project for this project. I'm going to go out and do it. We didn't, you know, catch this weird note at the time, whatever it happens to be. That's not really a great example.

But if you're doing something that's above and beyond, it's usually a good idea to communicate in a cool way. Hey, this is beyond what you paid for. Because if you don't, what can happen is then there's one more freebie after that and then one more freebie after that and then one more for me after that. And you get down everybody that ever, you know, did any sort of music production work, you know when they were young men knows that. What happens is you get down to $5 an hour. Inevitably the scope of the project just grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. So you have to clarify, hey, this isn't normal, but I'm going to do just this thing. Just this once for free.

Here's my quick tip and all that. Send an invoice for the work for the total that they owe you and input discount one time buddy, buddy discount and then that's an entire total and the total is zero. So if $200 for vocal editing, negative $200 buddy buddy discount owed $0 million and then you send that email explaining, no, I don't normally do this afraid, but I did this because I like working with you guys. Here you go. Enjoy. That's a great tip. All right, let's move on to our next section. We just got a couple of these left, some quick tips around negotiation. This is a big subject that we talked in great detail about on episode number 30 where we talked about highly effective negotiation tactics that any audio professional can use. This first quick tip is something we talked about in that episode, but it's worth, and that is to, if you can never name the first price if you can.

This is why I advocate trying to get the budget from the artist when it makes sense. Trying to get some sort of ballpark figure around what the number should be to make sure that you're even in the same universe before you start talking numbers. Because that starting point is where the negotiations start. And if you undercut yourself by throwing a number that's under that by 10 x what they are willing to pay versus what you think you can charge for that, you're undercutting yourself and you're starting from a position of vastly in superior negotiation power when you name the number first. So that's the quick tip is if you can at all avoid it. Avoid naming that number first and negotiations. It's a what's next, Chris, you've got one here. This is yours.

This is huge again to the tips that will help you in your recording studio, business life as well as your marriage, children, pets, etc. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. This is in the Bible and it's just good advice, man. It applies to our businesses for sure. Because when you're yes, does not mean yes and your no does not mean no. You don't have any boundaries. What does this mean in the negotiation terms here? Well, if you say, Hey, well, oh, you know, $1,000 a song, that's my bottom dollar, but that's the lowest I could go. Well I suppose I could do 900 a song, but that's my bottom dollar. Couldn't go any lower than that. Okay, okay, you got me, you got me $400 a song. That's my bottom dollar. When you communicate and that way you are telling the other person, I'm a loser, you can push me around, you can kick me in the face. You can walk all over me. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. And this works great as a dad. My kids know that my yeses, yes am I no is no. And for them to turn one of my nose and do a yes is almost impossible. It only happens like once a year and for a really special surprising occasion like ice cream or something like that.

Yeah. So this is really a quick tip that goes from literally all of Your Business, all of your life, not just negotiation.

Yeah, it's huge. Like it really is. I think one of the secrets to having a happy adult life is letting your yes be yes and your no me. No. So think about that. If you are running your business in a way where you say yes to your client and then you say no, that could be, hey, I'll have this for you on Friday but then you delivered on Monday. I'm guilty of this sometimes myself.

That's over promising under delivering. That's the opposite of what you need to do in any business. The last tip here and the negotiation section is it has something to do with something called the discount curse or the curse of offering a discount. What does that mean, Chris? Chris,

as soon as you offer a discount, that's this. If you give a mouse a cookie, they'll ask for a glass of milk thing. So what I have found, and this is like creeps me out anytime I have, especially if they ask for a discount and I've agreed to it and a mastering project, it will not be the last thing they asked for and the discount curse

is soon as you let them know that you're flexible on price, they're going to continue to try to get you to do more and more and more and more work. I've seen this so many times, every single project I've ever done in my entire career without fail, if I budge on pricing because I want to give him a buddy discount or I do something because I'm trying to accommodate a budget, it is always the worst project. It always drags along forever. It always is like the most annoying thing I would say. I don't understand why, but it's the discount curse. It's like a curse. I mean it's literally like a project will be cursed and I hope I'm not being too mystical here, but like I'll find in a situation like that that my computer will mess up. Like I'll have a hard drive arrow.

It'll crash in the middle of a project to do. Yeah. Like I had a project that a day where I sorta Kinda did this. I didn't give him a discount. I just gave them much faster turnaround time than I normally would without charging more. And the computer was like, what about Bookbub Paul? Like it just like sort of shut down. It like sensed you've cursed this project. I've even seen this in my fiance's business. She does social media management for a number of brands, her lowest paying clients, and she'll probably shoot me for saying this publicly, but her lowest paying clients or her highest maintenance clients. And so this goes across the board and all industries. Yeah. So the quick tip is think twice before you give a discount on a project. Or if you do, if you really want to give a discount because you're trying to lend them as a client, lead with it and say, I really want this project, I would be willing to cut my rate to 70% of what I normally charge and then do not budge on that.

Do not go any lower than that. And here's the thing, and this isn't like a normal thing in our culture, but as soon as you budge on that, your yes is no longer yes or no is no longer know. Yep. So this kind of is a double. It goes along with that last quick tip. There's a crack in your integrity and people will try to turn that crack into a chasm. There's a dirty joke in there somewhere. Next section is quick tips on getting paid. First, quick tip, and this is how I run my businesses, how I tell people to run their businesses when at all possible, but get paid up front. This isn't really like any surprise to people, but if you get paid up front you will get paid 100% of the time because you won't do work that you haven't been paid to do.

And that is the quick tip. Try to build your business in a way where you're getting paid upfront, not after you done all the work, not after you've done half the work before you've done any work. You're getting paid up front. Yeah. And this is not just like makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint almost all the time. It makes a lot of sense from an emotional energy standpoint, nothing, at least in my opinion, at least for me, is more exhausting than when someone owes you money after you have poured your blood, your heart, sweat and tears and blood, sweat and tears, you're blood, sweat and tears into a project. And Man, I had situations like that when I was producing for a living or it was just maddening where I'm chasing the client down and like, you know everyone's friends with everybody else's friends. So it's

this weird situation of like, Hey, this guy owes me money and we're at a party together and he still hasn't paid me. Just avoid that. There's nothing that I think that will grind you out of this business faster than getting stiffed. All of our tips revolve around not having to spend time chasing your money and not getting stiffed.

Okay, so what if you just either for limitations on your business model or because of the clients you work with or whatever the case may be? What if you can't get paid up front? What are some quick tips for people like that?

Well, there's something I've been thinking about doing in my business. I have not rolled it out yet, but there is the possibility, there's all kinds of software you can use to set up auto payments so you can negotiate and say, yeah, we're going to start on your record, but you need a credit card and the credit card is going to be build x number of dollars for x amount of time. It's a limited length subscription, have you know, six months. So it's going to, you know, charge your credit card 500 bucks, six times, six months in a row. So something like that is interesting from the standpoint of unless their credit card gets jacked up, you're going to get paid. And number two, it allows them to start small. They don't have to work for six months to be able to afford you. They can work for one month now and afford to work with you and then keep that going over the long term.

The other interesting thing is when you do a payment plan, you can honestly charge more. You could charge a larger overall feet because you're financing the record. You should charge an overall fee. You shouldn't just take the normal fee and split it up. You should charge a little bit of interest there because you're giving them a loan, so that's something to think about. I don't have a whole lot of experience here, but it is interesting to me that the technology is there to set up auto payments where you're not chasing a payment. Your bank account just gets an automatic payment into it.

Give some pushback on this. I'm not even playing the devil's advocate. I'm playing the angel's advocate here. Please do. I do have experience with payment plans and I will say that the technology is 100% they're like any one of us could do that today if we wanted. Should you do that? I don't think in an audio industry or a service based industry where you've done the work up front, in my opinion, I don't think you should ever take a payment plan from someone because it does two things. First and foremost, it puts a strain on your relationship. They now owe you money and anytime someone owes you money that can damage a relationship through no fault of your own. The second thing is you are now hoping that they are able to continue to fulfill their payments and if the person can't afford you in the first place, they likely are not good with saving money and having money in the bank in the first place.

So they're going to get drafted every single month. And so now every single time they see that draft from your bank account, they may be resentful, it may cost cashflow issues in their own lives, it may overdraw their bank account. There's so many scenarios where that can come up and be negative and your business and in your relationship. And so I do offer them with a six figure studio. I don't love it. And you're going to see a certain percentage, those that will fail. I account for that and I have to charge more for offering a payment plan. There's a lot of baggage that comes with that. I'm willing to offer the six figure home studio because if someone ends up not paying, it's not for a service is for a product and if you're offering a service, you've put so much time, effort and energy as an individual, giving one on one attention to someone to then get stiffed. After all that's done, it hurts way more than like a digital product for those reasons alone. I just don't, I can't get behind the payment plan thing in the audio service industry

that is intense food for thought. I'm like visualizing close friends of mine that work with me and what that would be like in our relationship and that scares the crap out of me. So yeah, I think I would tend to agree with you 100% on that. I think that there are probably some scenarios where a payment plan might make sense, but over the long run sort of might take them from what you just said is that's probably just a cheap cashflow play for you. You're trying to get clients that you shouldn't be getting in the first place and it would make more sense to invest your time into marketing, into raising the value of the service you provide

or like go back to the episode we did with Chris Greenwood where we talked about Kickstarter marketing and networking, how to help your clients succeed. If you can learn how Kickstarter works, how to get a project funded through Kickstarter and you can work with your potential clients on getting their projects funded, you have now added immense value to them, but you've also helped them raise the money that they're now going to pay you. And that to me is a win win. That's the way to finance a record, not by you being the creditor in those scenarios. So let's move on to the next tip here. And that is probably the best middle ground if you can't get paid up front for some reason you don't want to accept payment plans for obvious reasons, in my opinion. And for some reason you can't get the Kickstarter thing to work or there's some delay with payment for Kickstarter.

Again, I don't know all the ins and outs of how the payment dispersions work with that system. The other thing you can do is to hold release material hostage. And I know that sounds kind of negative, like you're holding the music hostage, but if you don't have any leverage whatsoever, you may never see a payment from that client. The second you take that leverage away, the second you give them what they want, even though they haven't given you what you want or what's your own, the second that transaction takes place, it's a crap shoot whether you're ever going to get paid in the first place. So if you can, if at all possible, hold on to the master's or hold on to the final mixes or hold on to something where they don't get it until they pay you. And that's probably in my mind, the best you can hope for if you can't get paid upfront.

I've been doing that for so long that I take for granted that that's a tip back to our sort of, it's an advice buffet thing. I cannot imagine. I cannot conceive of a studio being successful that does business with a huge number of clients and that accepts payments after releasable material has been delivered.

I've seen people do it. That's the thing. That's all you have to make these sorts of quick tips. This is what we have to talk about this because people still do it and it's usually due to a lack confidence, but they still

do it, so we have to talk about it. Yeah, I mean if you're working with a label it makes a little bit more sense. Yeah. I mean I take an egg. Labels are a little different animal altogether, but there are still boundaries you can put in place with labels. Like all my stuff. I always say I had to final masters delivered once the final payments made. So I've had master sit on my desk for two months. While I'm waiting for my final check from a label before. But again, that may not be a major label. Those are all smaller independent like heavy metal labels. So again, that's going to probably differ, depends on who you're working with. Again, that's a different conversation for a different time. It is. It's complicated because the labels are going to employ professional ball busters is sort of stuff. I mean I dealt with lawyers at Disney for it and paid one time and it was just like, it was insane.

It takes forever. I've never not been paid by a label. That's why like I'll do things that I won't do with other people. They're just really slow. And so you just have to assume with that. And here's what your little like final quick tip for this section, that if you're working with a label, expect that money six months from now and if you get it any sooner or you're looking good and if you plan for it, you'll be okay. If you expect that money this month, you're going to be hurting man. So you've got to, you've got to plan around label projects. Yeah. And that's probably transitioning a little bit. Like I've worked on major label projects where I've been able to get paid upfront occasionally, but even that's a hard sell, like you have to convince them. There's a pause there. I've always gotten deposits up front when I tell people I have to get a 50% deposit, so at least I've gotten half the money up front and that's usually enough to float my bills and stuff and the profits made on the back end when I get that final payment.

So I'm not having to fund my entire month of work with no pay. But again, let's move on here to our last section of our quick tips. I got it out that time, Chris. I didn't mess up energy, quick tips, things to improve our energy or to give us more energy or to multiply or energy. And that leads us to our first quick tip in this section. Chris Graham, what is that young man? Let me speak to you. Oh, I thought that was a quick tip. Young men drink the blood of young men. No God no. Have a blood boy. Boy, Chris, I've seen silicone valley silicon. Oh my God, you screwed that out. You're literally going there and like two weeks and you still can't say, and it's true. So Yep. Young man, little dude, you know God say, what are you even saying right now? I'm trying to speak to myself from 10 years ago because he's listening to this.

You could just say little Chris, l l, Chris Little Chris, let me tell you like it is. Long hours are dumb. I get it. Your mom doesn't approve of your career choice. Your Dad thinks you're a loser. You're trying to overcome that by saying, but yeah, I've got great work ethic. I work 12 hours in a row or I worked 15 hours in a row. Don't do that. The 15 hour days are silly because, and it's really simple. Your job is not to complete a huge amount of work. Your job is to make the right decision the first time. You can't do that on your 15th hour. That ever tell you about my 24 hour shift I did once. Chris, I don't believe you did well. Let's just say that long hours are dumb and it's not a badge of honor. That's our quick tip. Yes, so permission from us as like old men to younger men and women, you have permission from us and I think from every high functioning successful individual with very few exceptions is going to say your goal is maximum peak performance.

The moment when you are the smartest, when you are the most creative not I can grind it out for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on that. Don't do that. Get away from that. Put into your contract, man. I used to do this years ago, thank God when I was a young man producing as I would put in my contract, eight hours, that's the day, eight hours plus a lunch and never put a contract. But I always tell people it was x amount per day for eight hour days. I've just told him upfront, setting expectations again, huge. And I would clock out. I'd be like, I'm done. I'm sorry guys. I'm no longer an effective human being. Yup. And your records of a better and in the long run, when your records get better, you get more clients. The long hours thing, I get it every now and again I'll put in long hours. It's so rare, especially nowadays, I don't think I've done it in the last year have I put in like more than a 12 hour day and that was like even 12 hour days are super rare.

I don't think I've gone over 10 hours more than twice anyways. It's a long game. The less hours you work, the more effective you're forced to be in, the more effective you are, the better off you are longterm and the more quality clients you're going to get because you're an effective individual. Yeah, so this is a compounding effect. Let's go on to our next tip in energy or next quick tip to save energy. And this is something we've talked about many times in this episode alone and in past episodes in and our CRM episode, episode seven of the podcast, creating email response templates and a CRM is a easy way to store these, but CRMs aren't the only way to do this. You can save them in a Google doc, you can see them in an Evernote file, you can save them on a note pad file on your phone.

It doesn't really matter how you do this. Just having common questions or common situations where you have a pre created email template that you can copy paste, alter where needed and then sinned and that way you're not having to send the same damn email out 10 times a day. I will never forget, it was about 11 years ago, maybe 10 years ago, my business had started to pick up quite a bit and I remember complaining to my wife and saying, man, you know Allie, this is rough. Like I'm having to like retype the same emails again and again of like, how do I convert these MP three year? Do you do DDP CD mastery in or how do I get these to iTunes or there's so many random things, questions that I have to answer it again and again. So what I started doing is I put those in my Faq and then I copied each of those responses and my wife, she said, why don't you just take the signature section and the Osx mail app, you know the Macintosh mail app, you can save different signatures.

What if you just put that text in different signatures and you use different signatures to reply to those sorts of emails. So you're like gaming the system. Back in the day before CRMs, before you had any ways to save templates. Yeah, you were using Ios signatures to save your template responses? It was on desktop, but yeah, essentially got it. And it was wild because I was like, oh my gosh. And I immediately went downstairs and I wrote 20 templates. So it'd be like somebody would ask me question of like, Hey, do I need to get separate masters for vinyl that I do for digital? And I'd be like, Oh, I'm glad you asked. And then it would always start with in bold, here's more information on mastering and vital. And then there'd be a paragraph that was copied and pasted right for my Faq. So I'd be like, yeah, no problem.

I can totally do that for ya. And then I would add that template, send the email off, and instead of typing a hundred words, I would type like 10 words. It's still totally personal, but you're referencing stock information and all of a sudden when you do that, you save a massive amount of time once you're working with a couple clients a week or a couple of clients a day. Yeah, everyone knows like return on investment or Roi. When you put money into the stock market or real estate, what's your return on that money you've put in? This is something called a return of investment on time. You invest a little bit of time upfront or even a lot of time up front sometimes to get a shit load of time in return later on. And this is like every little email that Chris saves as a template is something he never has to type again.

And that is Hugh Mungus. So Chris, what are some, I'll go until you people listening. Right now I don't have a ton of templates because I don't have the same volume of clients. The same total number of clients is Chris. I mostly have followup templates. I have a number of different followup templates for different scenarios and I have a template for revisions where I'm going over like how to arrange revisions, what I need to revisions to be formatted light so I can look at them easily and mark them off easily. And then I have like an email, they're like welcomes in when they booked up project with me and it goes over all this stuff they need to know and how to send files. There's like my main templates. But Chris you have a ton. You were showing me your template list. It's like mind boggling how large your template list is.

What are some common ones that you use Chris? Yeah, so I am real big on having a real conversation with people. That's like one of my favorite things about work, but it also makes my job a lot easier. So I try to set up lots of phone calls with potential clients and even like I'll often want to have a conversation about a project after I've sent the first batch of masters. So like one of the templates I use the most is called schedule 10 minute call. And it basically says to schedule a call with me, just click here and select the time that works for you. Thanks so much. Looking forward to speaking with you. So I just grabbed that, it puts that in the email and there's a link to Calendly which lets them pick a time that I've set aside is available in my calendar.

So I use that one a lot, which is great. And it's interesting cause it's a little impersonal to use an email template, but I'm using the email template to set up a time to talk with them and to have a real relationship. So that's really useful. What's another good one here? Yeah, just give us a couple that you just name off a list of like different scenarios. There's so many of you use, I've got one called gapless transitions. So if the client asks about like, Hey, can we have one song flown to the next, got some stock information that I send them back there,

MP3 conversion, I'll get clients that are like, hey, how do I convert these to MP three so I'll like send them instructions on how to do that. Another one that I haven't been using it as much lately. I have one called English, which is, I'll get emails occasionally from clients overseas but not in English. It's like a, Hey, I'm so sorry I only speak English. Could you please translate and send it again? There's one that's for our podcast that'll be, that basically is like, hey, you know, if I'm in a conversation with a client and I want to explain what the podcast is, that takes a couple of sentences and so I've got like a stock reply of like, oh check out our podcast, Dah Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. It's for, you know, audio engineer's trying to grow their business. So there's a ton of them. I've got about 50 some templates that they use and it's nice because if, well I guess it's been the case for a couple of years now, I'll have an assistant often go through my inbox and see if there's anything urgent when I'm in mastering sessions and they can use those templates to create a draft email and say, hey, you know, here's what you probably need to respond to this person.

So the templates opened up a lot of doors as far as still being able to interact with your customers directly, but it takes a whole lot less time and frankly the responses are a lot better. My templates are much better than what I would write in real life.

Yeah. My rule of thumb is basically if I have to answer the same email more than like once or twice a week or once or twice a month, honestly, it's worth creating a template and saving it. And yet they can add up fast and they can clutter. But you just need to have a good system for creating these, for storing these and for bringing it up whenever it needed. Let's move on to our next quick tip for energy. Next quick tip for energy. My personal favorite. Power naps. Power naps. This one's funny. I've tried this. I still like them when I can get them in. I'm not as religious about this as you, but when I can get these power naps, which sounds so stupid. It does. They do improve my day. So Chris, what is a power nap and explain it in 20 seconds or less. Let's go power nap.

For me it's a 12 minute nap. After lunch. I've experimented with different times. I've tried 30 minutes of tried 20 minutes. I've tried 10 12 was like the sweet spot for my body. You got to figure out what the sweet spot is for years. If I eat lunch and then immediately go take a 12 minute power nap. I come at my app,

they're new. Micah tiger. Yeah. Afternoons. One of my longest lag times where I just don't have energy. I feel like shit. So that's when I tried it from a power nap in. It's hard on Tuesdays and Thursdays cause we record the podcast directly after lunch for me. So I don't always have time to do this and so it throws my day off. But if you can fit it in, it's just best to start after lunch. If you're in a place where you can get a little power nap in somewhere and then experiment from there. Don't stick with that forever. You can experiment. Try Different Times like I do 20 minutes and you can try different times during the day that you do them, but just find what works for you. But that's the quick tip is experiment. Dabble in power naps. Yeah,

that you'll find your energy goes way up and your creativity and ability to solve problems. For me, like my Iq is like a good 10 15 points higher in the afternoon after power nap. It's like that's an essential skill for me. I really think humans are designed for an afternoon nap. There are lots of cultures where that's the norm. Everyone it a siesta.

So worth experimenting with. All right, so let's move on to our last quick tip and honestly this is the best quick tip, the most important quick tip. We saved the best thing here for last, the most important one for last and the thing that's going to really push your business forward to six figures and beyond. And if you're in pesos, we're talking 10 20 figures and beyond. And then if you are, you talk about, and then if you're an Australian dollars, we're talking multiple six figures. We learned that different currencies, six figures is not as important as it is in America, so it's not a huge thing if you're in a currency with a completely different set of numbers. Anyways, this is the most important quick tip and that is enjoy high quality coffee because life is too short for shitty coffee. That is the number one quick tip that we have for our audience.

Stop Drinking Shit. Coffee. This episode is brought to you by Folgers. Oh my God, no, no, no amount of money and the, as those spots are, oh my God, and that's $10,000 each per month. It's one of that for those who don't listen to the podcast, first of all, Chris is a gear slut. He'll admit that through and through. He has a gear so you weren't gear so you've gotten the most gear slot alerts. If anyone listening to this podcast for those who don't know this is the gear sled alert when you hear this noise is because we were being too slutty. I get them occasionally. I am not a gear slide but what I will identify as and I know Chris will identify as a coffee slut. We are such coffee sluts. We roast our own beans. We've experimented with our own brew methods.

With the aero press we have like different time, different temperatures. We brew APP. If we get nothing else across for this podcast other than people stop drinking shitty Folgers and Shitty Maxwell House and people stop using Keurig's. I threw my Keurig out the other day and I should have made a story about it. I should have made a whole ceremonial thing about it. I've had my Keurig under my counter for like the past year and a half. You make me so proud. I know and I was reluctant to throw it away cause it's still worked and it was like a hundred and something dollars when I bought it, but everyone throw your cure goes away by an Arrow press by some high quality coffee beans. There's plenty out there and do yourself a favor and you can thank us later. Amen. Yeah. When you wake up in the morning and you are jacked excited because you know your coffee is going to be delicious if you're a coffee drinker, it's my favorite part of my entire day every single day.

And incidentally if you have a client and you make them really, really, really good coffee, that's not going to hurt your bottom line. That's going to help. Actually we've seen some people in the community invest in like thousand dollars plus Espresso machines, like we've kind of fostered this little like coffee slut community within the six figure homes, Cvo community and I'm okay with that. Like it's true. There are favorites. Post your coffee stuff in the six figures to your community by going to the six figure home, studio.com/community and you can learn all about business and marketing and coffee, quality of life, quality of life.

So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Hopefully there's a couple of tips you can take away from this and apply to your business today and for the rest of your life and start seeing some improvements in different areas that we talked about today. As of the time that I'm recording this, I'll be leaving bright and early tomorrow morning to head out to my own bachelor party. And uh, Chris, our podcast cohost will also be in attendance. So we're going out to Yosemite national park and there's a massive winter storm coming in right now actually. And we have no idea if we're going to actually make it to our airbnb or not. We're get to do anything that we had planned. So I will definitely update you on our adventures this weekend when we get back. Either way, we'll find some way to have fun because there's nine of us and uh, it's hard to not have fun when you're with your best friends.

So next week's episode, we actually have a special guest on the podcast is a friend of mine that I've had for years and years and years. His name is Mark Eckert and fun fact, this guy was actually, uh, one of the first people I considered it as a co host for this podcast and I think you'll hear next week that there's a reason for that is a very good reason for that. I'm very happy with my co host right now, Chris though. So tune in next week when I'll be interviewing mark Eckert about his business model. And just to give you a little preview, he has about 20 or 30 clients on a monthly retainer. So he's getting recurring revenue, thousands of dollars a month that he can basically count on every single month for his studio for production services. And he gets all of those clients through Instagram. So if that sounds interesting to you, which I, I, there's no way that doesn't sound interesting to you. If that's interesting to you, that'll be coming out next week, Brian, early 6:00 AM Tuesday morning. Now I've got to go pack, get ready for my frigid cold snowy temperature trip. I feel like it's going to be like the beginning levels of, uh, like the first three hours of red dead redemption two. That's kind of what I have in mind for this bachelor party weekend of mine. Until next time, thanks so much for listening. Happy Aslan.