How Chris Graham Grew His Mastering Studio To Six Figures Using Google Ads And Apple Scripts

Brian: Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to the second episode of “The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast.” If you have binged from the first to the second episode and you have plans to binge to the third episode today, kudos to you, they're all available right now. Today we are interviewing my co-host, Chris Graham, so that you kind of get a bit of his back story. But before we get into his interview, I want you to envision this. What if you had a special magical device that you could just turn on and off whenever you wanted that would just bring customers to your studio? Just a magical device you just code on, “I need more customers this month, I'm gonna cut it on.” And then whenever you don't need it anymore, you just cut it off again. Well, that's essentially, what my co-host/guest today, Chris Graham, has created through paid advertising. So we're gonna get into his entire back story from when him and his wife were dirt poor, when they were first married and they're living in what he called “the hood,” all the way to his first big break, what his catalyst was for growing his business. I don't wanna drag this out any further, you're gonna learn all about Chris in this interview. So without further delay, here is my interview with Chris Graham from Chris Graham Mastering.

So I'm excited to bring you my co-host as the interview guest today because he's accomplished a lot in his life, he's done a lot of things, there's a lot we can learn from him. I want you guys to see what he has been able to do and how he's gotten to where he is now. Because his story isn't one that's really out there, he's not someone with a big platform, he's not someone that talks about his accomplishments. In a lot of places you may can find. If you've looked them up before you might can see one or two interviews he's done in other podcasts, or you may have also seen one of his ads on YouTube, which we'll get into in a second. But Christopher, welcome to “The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast.”

Chris: Thank you, Brian. I'm very glad to be here.

Brian: So Chris, just get me started. Let's talk about a little bit of your early days in recording and we're gonna let that flow into something that's bigger.

Chris: Yeah, for sure. I feel like, if you're listening to this podcast, the big thing you're wondering about is you got some audio skills or some musical skills, you're trying to make them into a business, and it's tough, man. My story is I was just absolutely terrible at business stuff and I sort of accidentally figured out how to figure it out. So, you know, my story starts when I was in my teens, I was in high school. I had been in band in high school and there was a really terrible guitar store up the road. And they told me if I traded in my own my old trumpet from band that for 200 additional dollars, I could get a Tascam cassette multitrack recorder, which was a terrible deal. They just absolutely ripped me off. But I got my first multitrack recorder and I started recording my own songs. I was a songwriter, and playing guitar, and singing, and doing the full key thing. And, you know, for me what happened was I recorded a song. My brother made it into a digital file, I put it on mp3.com, I woke up the next day, and 163 of my friends had listened to it the night before. And I was hooked. Man, audio is the coolest thing in the entire world. While I slept, people listened to my music. This is freaking awesome.

Brian: So how old are you at this time?

Chris: I think I was like 17.

Brian: So at 17-year-old, what, first of all, made you even want to trade in your trumpet for a Tascam multitrack recorder?

Chris: mp3.com, I wanted to put a song on mp3.com, and to do that I needed to have some recording gear.

Brian: So you wake up, you're 17 years old, you've got 163, 173 plays on the song, which, in the world of a teenager, if I can remember back that far.

Chris: It's huge. I was world famous. But that hooked me on audio and I decided right then and there that I didn't really care about anything else other than doing more of this. It was really, really cool. So my story kind of moves pretty quick from there. I went to college a couple years later, started playing out in a lot of coffee shops, me and a guitar, playing songs I had written, and immediately got a job at a really cool studio down in Athens, Ohio, at Ohio University where I lived. And it was crazy, like I showed up, I met a guy, and a week after I showed up at college I had a job at a studio. So I started working there.
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The first record I ever recorded there for a friend of mine was the worst signing record I've ever heard, not because he was bad, just because I didn't know what a compressor was and stuff like that.

Brian: So let's stop real quick here, though. Straight out of college you got a job, or was it an internship or a job at the…

Chris: Straight into college. I'm like freshman, not living with mom for the first time.

Brian: How did you land this job? How did you get it?

Chris: This is so weird. They just like heard that I liked recording, and the guy was like, “Hey, you want a job at my studio?” And I was like, “Yeah.” That was it.

Brian: That's a fluke.

Chris: It was a fluke, yes. So this guy ended up…fast forward, he ended up mentoring me, he ended up…when me and my wife started dating, him and his wife did our pre-marital counseling. Still super close with them. This guy is named Chris Pyle, Athens, Ohio.

Brian: Real quick, I wanna ask you, how did you get connected with this guy in the first place? I know it was kind of a fluke, but a lot of times, and this is a saying that I've heard that I like a lot, is the harder I work, the luckier I get. So how did you meet this guy in the first place?

Chris: Well, this is one of the few instances in my life where that didn't matter. I went to this Christian ministry thing called Navigators, and it was basically like a Bible study. So I showed up, the guy…Chris was in charge of it, and I think like him trying to do outreach to me or something. He was like, “Hey, you wanna work at my studio?” And he didn't realize how seriously I was gonna take that and I, you know…basically, that was like my second home. I would just go and hang out there, even when we didn't have clients, and play with stuff. It was awesome.

Brian: That is awesome. I just think it is important to have interests outside of recording that can sometimes lead to other things inside of the studio or inside your business. It's interesting to see that kind of stuff, especially early on when you can take something that is seemingly, completely unrelated to audio and just the fact that you're interested in it got you a job at the best video in Ohio, which…

Chris: Well, not in Ohio, in Athens. It was probably the best studio in Athens. It was awesome, it was very small at the time, but, I mean, it was like you can imagine you're 19, you just decided to major in audio and, “Hey, you want a job at a studio?” “Yeah.” And there were no home studios back then. This is before really home studios took off. There was no such thing as a Firewire or USB audio interface at the time. Like this was…so, man, we used ADATs for you, young kids. It's basically VHS tapes. I guess if you're young, you don't even know what that is either. It's basically like a VHS tape that you stick in a giant VCR and you can record eight tracks of audio on it. The studio was a nightmare, but that was what we had, and I learned a whole lot using that stuff.

Brian: So this guy mentored you throughout the early days of your recording, you learned a lot through him while you were in college for audio as well, right?

Chris: Yeah. You know, honestly, I learned way more at Three Elliot Studio, the place that I worked than I did in my major. It was great, that job was transformative for me.

Brian: So did you get your first paid recording gig inside that studio or was it in your home studio?

Chris: Oh, no, first paid gig was in that studio. And basically, what I figured out really fast was, “Wow, this is awesome, but I still have to charge the clients full rate to mix, even if they're not there.” So I'll be like at the studio mixing on a Yamaha O2R, but still charging the clients full rate. So I said to myself, “Boy, if I could come up with some money, I could buy a MacBook and some software, and some monitors, and I could start mixing in my dorm room and I could work a lot more. I wouldn't have to struggle the book hours so that I could mix in the studio.” So what I did was I was, you know, I was playing professionally at that time. So I would go and play these shows, I would sell CDs, I'd sell tickets to the shows, and lucky for me it was right in the back end of when people would buy a whole CD from you if they liked one song. So I had one good song and people would show up and be like, “Yeah, sure, here's 10 or 15 bucks for your CD.” And so I was making money hand over fist as, you know, sophomore in college at this point. And I took all that money, sank it back into gear. I bought Digital Performer, a Mac book, some Alesis MKII monitors, and a MOTU 828, and started mixing. And from there I said, “Wow, I could probably get some people to hire me and record them remotely.” So I started doing that and talked some people into letting me record them and, you know, from there just sort of grew, and grew, and grew, and grew. Started recording my own records eventually and releasing them.

Brian: When you were talking to those people, those early people on, the early in your life, who were those people? How did you have contact with them, how did you…when you just say you convinced some people early on at the beginning to let them record you, how do those conversations go about?

Chris: Well, people thought I was a good performer, you know, that I could take a guitar and a mic and go to a coffee shop or a concert venue and make some pretty noise. So they assumed I could probably help them sound better in the studio too. Total lie. That's not true. But I was like, “Yeah, sure. All right. If you think I'm good at this based on the fact that I have no resume, but I'm a decent performer, sure you can absolutely hire me.” And I basically I would get a project, I would get paid, and I would take the money and buy more gear, and eventually, got to the point where I had a pretty decent, fairly respectable portable home studio rig. And at the time nobody had portable home studio rigs. It was just a really weird thing back then. There were only a few interfaces you could use to do multitrack recording remotely.

So basically, I would set up in someone's guest bedroom and come to their house, set up in their guest bedroom, set up a control room in another guest bedroom, and we'd start recording records. And we made some pretty cool records for what I knew back then and I kept doing that. I ended up basically turning in records for independent study credit in college and ended up graduating with like 36 hours of credit towards graduating, which was a big deal. It's two-thirds of a year at the school I went to, so I got to skip a bunch of classes to get paid to produce records. So by the time I graduated I had a phenomenal resume compared to the other people I graduated with. I had done something like 60 or 70 songs that I had produced and engineered, and mixed, and…

Brian: Do you remember your rates back then, what you were charging bands back then for that kind of stuff?

Chris: Well, it was all single rate, so I would negotiate one rate for a specific type of project. But I mean, like most other people starting out, I wasn't making a ton per hour, but I loved it. It was super fun. And then from there, you know, I started coming into situations where my clients couldn't afford a mastering engineer. So I would get suckered into having to master their record. It was either you pretend to master this or they're gonna release it without it being mastered at all, and that's a terrible idea. So I had to learn mastering as a necessity and it was awful. It's miserable to master on mixes, especially when you don't know what you're doing. So it was a school of hard knocks and, you know, long story short I ended up getting married, met the girl of my dreams, she's smoking hot, and we got married and I kept doing this for a living for a couple years after we got married. But the mastering thing started to take off. Same guy that mentored me initially, you know, I started to develop just this real interest in mastering and I said to him, “Hey, would you give me a record that you've mixed that's already been mastered and released, and let me try to master it for you again?” And I did it and he loved it and started hiring me for projects, and then he told his other friends, they're audio engineers, “Hey, this kid's pretty good at mastering,” and projects started coming in. So, you know, basically I continued to do that, not making much money, I'm dirt poor, you know. I think I mentioned on the last episode me and my wife made $18,000 our first year of marriage, combined. It was our actual take home. I mean, we were just totally way below the poverty line, but loving life, it was great.

And then one day I had a revelation, and this stemmed back to the same guy, Chris Pyle, mentor of mine had told me, “Boy, you're really good at mastering, you can do this for a living.” And I just was like, “Yeah, right, that's crazy. How would I book enough projects to possibly make a living as a mastering engineer?” And I totally wrote him off, then doing nothing with it for two years. Two years later, I had this idea for the before and after player that's on my website now. And basically, before and after player at the time, nobody had this, was you would choose a song, you'd press play, and you could flip back and forth between before and after mastering, and you could hear my work, you know, and what seemed like real time. And that really made mastering less mysterious, you could hear, “Oh my goodness, that sounds substantially better and is substantially louder.” And so I came up with the idea for this website, hired a developer to build the player, it was the first in the world. It's since been stolen by basically every mastering website in the world. And, you know, from there I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I have an idea. I totally could get people…strangers to hire me if I could show them this thing on my website.”

Brian: Real quick, let's unpack a little bit of that.

Chris: Yeah.

Brian: You said you had this idea, the before and after player, which we've all seen versions of that at some point since then, but you were one of the first if not the first person to ever have this on their website.

Chris: As far as I know, the first, yeah.

Brian: You said you found a developer, how did you find this developer? How much did they charge you to do this and what year was this, by the way?

Chris: This would have been '07, I wanna say, maybe '06.

Brian: How did you find a developer?

Chris: I happen to know a guy who specialize in UI graphic design. So he would build stuff in flash that, you know, you can play with. Flash is since basically obsolete, but he built this whole thing in Flash, I put it on the website, and it was great. It cost me 500 bucks, which was a crazy good deal, and I think I also gave him like an organ, like a keyboard organ, I had to. But yeah, I mean, it was a long process to develop this because there was no code for us to like copy or, you know, in the case of some other websites, steal, and we just had to figure it out. So he hired another developer to help him with this and it turned out great. I put some of my work on there before and afters, and then it got real. I said I need traffic on my web page.

Brian: What were you getting at that time as far as traffic? Were you getting any?

Chris: None, absolutely none. So what I did was I asked around and I had a friend that was, you know, really entrepreneurial and I said, ” I need to learn about online marketing and running ads on Google.” And he said, “Have you heard of Perry Marshall?” And I said, “Absolutely,not. Who's this?” He said, “Well, you should get Perry Marshall's book on AdWords. AdWords is essentially, you know, when you see the sponsored results in Google search. At the time, and still to this day, Perry Marshall was the freaking dude. So I got on Perry Marshall's website, I think I spent like 50 or 75 bucks for the PDF of his book, I sent it to Kinko's, they printed it out and collated it for me, you know, put the little twisty deal in it, so it turned into a real book. Got a highlighter out and I tore that sucker up, man. I just, you know, read it, and reread it, and highlighted, and taught myself how to use Google AdWords. And my shtick was, “Hey, check out my before and after samples, and if you like I'll give you a free sample of one song. Send me one song, I'll master a portion of it,” actually at the time it was a whole, I would do a whole song for free, “and I'll send it back to you.” And I was quite successful at getting people to send me songs and I had no idea how to run a small business, or how to be efficient, or how to work quickly, or how to organize…

Brian: So talk about your first ads you started to run. What are the first ads you started to run on Google AdWords?

Chris: Basically, like the stupidest ad you can. Like if you search for the word mastering, then my little ad would pop up and it'll say, you know, “Try my mastering here before and after results. I'll master sample of one song for free,” or something like that. And so I said to one of those ads and it was terrifying because I was spending a crap load of money and I had no money on these ads but, you know, I think my first ad marketing budget was like 300 bucks a month, which was just a fortune for us. So it was like me and my wife really talked a lot about it before we tried doing it. And pretty quickly I had so many people that wanted a free sample that I couldn't master them fast enough. And I'll never forget it there was a guy named Gary from Pennsylvania. My phone rang and Gary said, “You know, I think I wanna hire you to master my record.” I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” And I think I asked him like, “Oh, you know, who do you know me through,” thinking it was like a friend of a friend. He was like, “I saw your ad on Google,” and my brain exploded. It was like, “Oh, my gosh, a complete stranger wants to hire me because he saw my ad on Google, this is awesome.”

Brian: Okay, let me stop you there. Before people listening to this go off and try to start putting stupid ads on Google…

Chris: Hold off on that, yeah. Give us a few more episodes to explain some more of that. You can learn from my mistakes, trust me.

Brian: Yeah, talk about what happened from that first ad and actually, let's talk about how much research went into the entire ad process, and the education process before you even put your first dollar into ads. How long did you spend learning about this?

Chris: I don't even know. Maybe 50 hours before I started running my first ad, 40 hours or something like that. Like I read the book cover to cover and I still have it, even though it's totally obsolete. You know, it's worthless now because AdWords looks totally looks different than it did in '07. But it was sort of the wild west back then. Not many mastering engineers were advertising on Google AdWords. It was crazy, you know, all these people interested in getting a free sample and finally Gary hired me, and I had this epiphany that, “Oh, my gosh, this stranger from Pennsylvania wants to hire me, there must be other strangers who would want to hire me as well.”

Brian: Do you remember what Gary paid you?

Chris: $350.

Brian: All right. So enough to cover a month's worth of ads.

Chris: Yeah, and I did that math immediately and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this will cover a month worth of ads,” and, “Oh, my gosh, I didn't lose any money on these ads.”

Brian How long did it take for that lead to come in?

Chris: About a week or two. It was crazy. So like I knew absolutely nothing about running a business, I knew absolutely nothing about marketing other than what I had read in Perry Marshall's book, and wham bam, a total stranger hired me and I hadn't lost money in my first month on marketing. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is just crazy.”

Brian: So did you just keep the ad spend the same after that first initial wave of people that came in or you just let it keep piling in? Or what it looked like as you said, you said, hand over fist, people were coming in the door.

Chris; Yeah, people were coming in like crazy, and I think, you know, a couple more guys booked projects, and I think I made like $1,200 in a month. I mean, like the first time I broke like a $1,000 in strangers' money to master music and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is sweet. Honey, maybe we should spend $400 next month.” And so we were like, “Okay, let's go for it.” So, you know, we kept doing that and raising the budget a little bit, little bit, little bit, little bit, and got to the point, you know, where this is…my story starts to… This was awesome, it was incredible, I don't want to discount that at all. But what happened was there were so many people sending me samples and I had no systems in my business. My business essentially, was “Hey, if you want a free sample you send it to me.” yousendit.com was like the best way to send files back then, so I would get a “You Send It” in my inbox, I would download the file, I would master it, and then I would like upload it to You Send It, and when it was done uploading then I would like to send the e-mail to the client. And so I would spend hours mastering, hours uploading, and then I would have to then go back in and make sure I had, you know, that I was sending the right links to the right people.

So in a day, you know, I might do 6 or 10 samples, you know, and it was exhausting. And so I eventually, got to the point…I think I had like 24 samples that I had to get back to people. And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this is awful.” And keep in mind, I know nothing about business at this point, so you guys are probably thinking he's an idiot. You're right, I was totally an idiot. And so I finally just sort of had this breakdown and my…I'm just like recognizing that I couldn't keep up with this. And a good friend of mine, Matt Crumpton, a guy here in town, he's the CEO of DP Dough, the calzone company that's in college towns if you guys know DP Dough. DP Dough is delicious by the way. Based in Athens, Ohio originally. Anyways, Matt was like, “Hey, you should check out this book called ‘Four Hour Work Week.'” And I was like, “‘Four Hour Work Week'? That's ridiculous.” So I mentioned it to my wife and my wife picked it up for me at the library and it sat on my couch behind me for three or four months racking up late fees before I even touched it. So I got to this point back to, you know, the samples, I got to the point where I had like 24 samples I had to do and I just lost it. I was like, “Dude, screw this. I can't do this, this is too hard. I'm not making any money, I'm spending a lot, and I'm like getting reimbursed for it, but I'm not like…I'm still super poor. Screw this.” So I just kind of grabbed the book…

Brian: How much were you making a month at this point from your business while running ads?

Chris: I don't know, maybe $400 a month. Like, just something pitiful. But like we're still in launch mode, that's pretty normal when you first start a business. But I didn't know that I just, you know, figured, “Hey, I'm greedy, I'm just gonna keep going and hopefully grow this.” So I grabbed “Four Hour Work Week” off the couch that had been sitting there for…at this point the book had cost like $30 in late fees. I didn't even own it yet. And so I took it and I read chapter five at a local Starbucks, which was talking about the 80:20 principle, which we will talk about constantly in the near future.

Brian: I have an article about it on the website, it's called “What Audio Engineers Can Learn From Two Dead Men.”

Chris: That's a great title. Well, anyways, I read that and it basically talked about this idea that 80% of my results were coming from 20% of the things I was doing, and 80% of my headaches were coming from 20% of the things I was doing. And basically, what Tim Ferriss says in “Four Hour Work Week” is figure out what 20% is making your life miserable and fire it, and figure out what 20% of your life is making 80% results and try to duplicate it.

Brian: So we're gonna get into that with you in a second, but I will touch on a little bit of my story here, which we'll get into on the next talk which was…or the next episode which is, I did this 80/20 analysis in 2014 for my studio. I actually detail this in an article on the blog called…it was just basically how I gave…I just gave out all my income and expense numbers. I broke it down on the blog which you can find the article somewhere on there, just go look on the blog, there's not that many articles on there. And I realized that I was making about 70% of my income from mixing and mastering bands, and I was spending about 20% of my time doing that, and I was making, what, 30%, 35% of my income tracking and recording bands at my studio physically and having them housed in my recording studio. And that was taking up 70%, 80% of my time and a lot of the bullshit in my life. So after I realized that, after I did all the numbers, it began in 2015 I recorded my last band. I've never recorded a single band in over two years, two and a half years now. It's been the best two and a half years of my life by performing the 80/20 analysis on my own business. And so you can do this on very small levels, like in your marketing sales copy or on your website. What 80% is giving you the most results as far as traffic, or conversions, or whatever that happens to be. We're gonna…a lot of this is just business jargon for you guys that do not follow this type of talk. We're gonna kind of cover what each of these terms are and how it applies to you in the future. But you can do it on a small of like that, but there's also the 80/20 analysis of the 80/20 analysis. There's big picture stuff. What is the 80% on the big picture that you can look at instead of this small picture 80/20 analysis. So for me the macro, not the micro, the macro analysis was stop recording bands, stop tracking and editing bands, stop having bands in my studio physically, and just focus all my time and effort on mixing and mastering. So my income dropped significantly because I lost 30%, 35% of my income. You would think it, I lost that much income, but I actually end up making more the next year because I could focus that extra time on other business endeavors and on mixing and mastering. So now, let's go back to your business, Chris. You did the 80/20 analysis on your ads or on your business, what were some of the first things you did to change it?

Chris: Well, you know, after I, you know, sort of had this revelation, like I'll never forget it. I came home I only had time to read chapter five. I only read chapter five because it sounded interesting. I was like, “I don't have time to read the whole book, I don't read books. Books are for high school kids and stuff.” I didn't even read books in college. Seriously, like never…I finished one book in college. So I read that, I came home and I had this revelation of like my 80/20, the 20% of my life that causes 80% of my misery is the fact that I have no systems for uploading files back to clients and then automatically emailing them. And I sat down and was like, “All right. Well, to fix this I need to learn how to use OS X Automator or AppleScript. I need to find a way to automate this so that I can batch.” Like have a system where when I send files, the emails are already sent out and I don't have to wait around for everything to upload and then sort which, you know, URL needs to be sent to which client. Because the big thing for me is I would work all day and then I'd go eat dinner, and then I would come back downstairs, and instead of hanging out with my wife, you know, we've been married for a year or two at this point, I would upload files and email clients. And that would take another two or three hours to get all of that organized and make sure I wasn't accidentally sending the wrong music to the wrong client, which I did many times back then.

Brian: Yeah. So what you did was you looked at your business and you said, “What is the biggest single bottleneck in what I'm doing right now?”

Chris: And for me it was sending files back to clients. So I figured out systems where I could hit one button, and if I had done five samples or, you know, five projects, whatever it was, that all those files would upload and emails would go. And it took me like 150 hours to figure this out. It just, you know, it was awful. But once I finished it, that work paid a dividend every single day that I worked from there on out.

Brian: How many hours do you think you have saved since that 150 you put into it? By spending 150 hours learning this craft of AppleScripts, which I'll admit I do not understand, how much time has that returned to you since then?

Chris: I couldn't even put an estimate on it because I'm not physically capable of doing the amount of work that I do now without those scripts.

Brian: Could you ballpark it?

Chris: It's thousands and thousands of hours of time. It's more time than I…it's not that I save that time, I created that time. So the big thing there that's fascinating about the 80/20 principle is let's say it's right. Let's say there's 20% of the things that you're doing that are causing 80% of your results. So you've got the other 80% of the stuff that you do that's not bearing fruit, so to speak. If you fire all of that stuff and can find a way to take that 20% that was creating 80% of your results, you can multiply that by five before you hit 100% again. So you're talking about a 300% improvement in your productivity. And this is all, you know, everyone's situation is different, but that's basically what I did, was I figured out what 20% of my projects are making 80% of my results, and I've continued to pare down and focus on that 20%. And, you know, I'm a big fan of…there's an organization called Young Life that I've been involved with for years, and years, and years, and one of their mottos is, “Major in your majors, minor in your minors.” And that's a really simplified version of 80/20 principle. Don't major in your minors. And for me as an audio engineer I was like obsessive about wanting to major in my minors. And some of that, you know, was indicative of, you know, the education that I had, that's what they always taught us in school. You need to focus on what you're bad at and get better at it as opposed to become awesome at what you're already good at.

And so for me, like I zoom back in, so I read the first, you know, the the fifth chapter of “Four Hour Work Week,” learned about the 80/20 principle, went back in, and started to address the issues in my business that were bottlenecks, that were making me miserable, remove those, did the work that needed to be done to remove those, made less initially because I had to do all this extra work, and then all of a sudden I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I'm way, way faster than I was before,” and, “Oh, my gosh, I am way, way, way more efficient, and holy crap, I can do twice as many paid projects per day as I used to be able to.” And all of a sudden, I started making a lot more money. And here's the fascinating part, was when I started getting rid of this crap in my life that I had to do uploading files, and labeling files, and putting them in folders and all this stuff, I started to be able to love my customers more. I started to be more relational and able to talk on the phone longer with customers and build stronger relationships which, incidentally, also turned into more business. And I loved doing that, that's like my favorite part of what I do for a living, is talking to people. And all of a sudden like in the first year after I started doing this, my income doubled, and it was absolutely bonkers, and conveniently right about the same time I had my first child, Joshua was born. And that was just…it was unbelievable to be like, “Oh, my gosh, I'm not working 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. I have time to hold my son, this is awesome.”

And I tell you, for me, like when we had our first child, that lit a fire under my buns, that was incomparable to any motivation to actually run my business well that I'd had before. It was no longer about me and about me being the man and me being awesome in other people's eyes, it was about, hey, you need to actually like make this work, you need happy customers that will become return customers so that you can make money, so that you can afford to feed your baby. And I turned into a grown up when my son Joshua was born, and it was freaking awesome.

Brian: Is this the time that you started the self-education journey that we talked about in the last episode?

Chris: Yes. So, you know, I read that piece of “Four Hour Work Week,” I began to apply it, and a couple months later I said, “Okay, I'm still racking up late fees on this book, it's still sitting on my couch, this one chapter in the middle the book changed my life. Maybe I'll read the whole thing.” So I sat down and read the whole book and it was unbelievable. And the best part of that book was that it started to teach me about what it meant to run a business well, and then at the end of the book was a list of recommended reading. There were other books that Tim Ferris recommended, and one of those was “The E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber, essentially, the bestselling how to run a small business book ever written, and I got that and it talked, you know, about a lot of the stuff that “Four Hour Work Week” did in more detail. Systems, you know, and major in your majors and that…I'll never forget sort of like finishing that book and be like, “Huh, wouldn't you know it? There's like really good stuff in books.” Like they can help you in your laugh. Weird, they never told me that in high school, or college, or…it was always just like, “Hey, read this book about a dog that gets rabies.” “Why? ‘Old Yellow' is a terrible book, I don't need to read this.' Like if they had given me books about like this sort of stuff, stuff that actually could affect me, I would have read a whole lot more. So I kind of got on this mission of like, “Oh, my gosh, I'm gonna self-educate, I'm gonna make my own small business degree, and I'm gonna read books.” And boy, did I? So I've got like…I've probably read more books about running a business. If you stack them up, they would be taller than me at this point. And I'm tallish, I'm six, one.

Anyways, so I started to educate myself and what was amazing, and I think this is what I really want people to hear, what was amazing is every time I would read a book, I would begin to make more money and be happier and provide better services to my customers because I came more and more in touch with… It's not about charging what I'm worth, it's about providing an amazing service and going above and beyond, and helping my customers. And when I do, this they book me again, and again, and again, and they tell all of their friends. That's how I've grown the business, and I always thought that like being good at business meant like swindling people in more like sinister ways. That's not business at all. People that do that go out of business real quick because they get found out. Movies like to have the businessman be the bad guy a lot of times and it's, you know, it is what it is. It's easy to do that. But some of the most successful businessmen I've ever met in my life have the most helpful attitudes of any of the people I know, they are the most giving spirits of any people I know, and you can still be successful and not be an asshole.

Brian: Yeah. Well, in case in point.

Chris: Let's just, you know, kinda hypothetical here. You know, if one of our listeners owns one of the 10 studios that are in, let's say, Austin, Texas, and they're trying to compete, you know, they're sort of towards the bottom of that list of 10 studios. I'm sure there's more than 10 studios in Austin. When somebody wants to go to a studio, what do they do? They do two things. They ask their friends, “Where should I go?” And they Google it. They get on their freaking phone or their computer and they type in a recording studio. And do you know who they call? They call the studio with good reviews. They call the studio that's got, oh, my gosh, you know, we got 10 studios, each of them have 2 reviews and they're like 3 stars, but this one studio at the top has like 57 five-star reviews. Which studio are you gonna go to? So if you want to grow your business, and there's so much more to this, you have to provide value. Because you can't get 57 five-star reviews without blowing people's mind and giving them a better deal than they bargained for.

Brian: So let's talk about…this is a good place to go into the different business models that you and I have. Because I don't need reviews on Google, and I'm not gonna get 57 reviews because I don't think I work with 57 clients per year. I don't think I work at a fraction of that per year. I do bigger jobs averaging around $2,000 to $2,500 per job and I do less of them than new, a lot less than you as far as volume. You do a lot more. Many, many multiples of what I do, but at a smaller scale, a smaller price per project. Talk about that a little bit.

Chris: Yeah, so that's another interesting thing, I think, for people that are starting out and trying to start a small business, and what I got totally wrong. When I first started my small business I would look for the biggest possible fish I could find, I'd work for him nonstop for months on end and then it would be over. And if I wanted to get a review from him, so what? It's one review. So I think when you're starting out one of the best things to do is to do the smallest projects that you can. Start with small, small projects, do vocal editing, or do, you know, a little bit drum editing, or do just vocal mixing or, you know, record voiceover. So stuff that you can be in an out and done, and that you can go so far above and beyond that when the client gets done and they say, “Oh, my gosh, you're so great. You're the best engineer I've ever worked with, you're so friendly. I can't believe you bought me dinner after the recording session, blah, blah, blah, blah.” “Wow man, that's so cool. Would you mind just putting that in a Facebook review for me? Just give me five stars on my business page.” You can do a few of those a day and you can build up your reviews really fast. And that's something…you know, everybody's business is different, but for me to focus on the big fish first, that's something you need to be a more mature business owner, I think, to build a business on.

Brian: So let's talk about something that I talk about a lot, which is niching down. And so my 80/20 was cutting out my tracking services. Let's talk about when you first started out in a broad area, you actually niched down by service. So you are offering many services and you are basically stagnant in your income. What were you doing to niche down at that point?

Chris: Yeah, so for me, what I was doing wrong in the way that I was running my business is first and foremost, I wanted people to think I was awesome, not for the money, but just because I just wanted people to think I was awesome. So, to do that, I looked at this producer, his name is Ed Cash, and Ed Cash is a stud. And Ed was what you would call an all singing, all dancing producer. He would produce, he would engineer, he would mix, he would help write songs, the guy's a genius. And I saw Ed, I saw him play a show, and I, you know, met him and I said, “Oh, my gosh, I wanna be Ed Cash.” So I just started trying to be Ed Cash, and that was silly because I didn't have any of those skills at the time. And so my business was essentially, I will do absolutely everything that you need to make a record, and I'll do none of it well. And I didn't say that, but I didn't know I was so terrible at all those things because I had never focused on one thing to be really good at it.

Brian: So you were doing everything in the process, you were trying to…name all the things that you were trying to do with any given band?

Chris: Yeah. So I would meet the band and say, “Hey, I will help you preproduce your songs, I will help you write your songs, I will help you arrange your songs, I will be your studio musician, I'll be your tracking engineer, I'll be your mix engineer, I'll be your producer, and day gone [SP], I'll even be your mastering engineer if you can't afford a mastering engineer.” And I'll even, you know, make the phone call and work directly with your CD manufacturer, back then we were doing CDs. And so I was doing all the things. And because I didn't practice any one of those things multiple times per day, I wasn't very good at any of them.

Brian: So this is something that I try to tell people is they end up trying to appeal to everyone, and they end up appealing to absolutely no one. They try to end up doing everything and they end up being bad at everything.

Chris: Yeah, I was bad at everything, and the big thing I didn't grasp was I didn't even name this, but the most important part of making records with somebody else is interpersonal skills. Can you bring out the best in a performer? And I was the worst at this, I was worse than anybody I know. And it was just like my idea of like being a good producer was like they would get done doing a vocal take, they pour their heart out, and I'd hit the talk back button and say, “That kind of sucked, but you could do better than that. Let's try it again.”

Brian: Chris, I was the same way, man. I didn't know better back then.

Chris: Yeah. And the client will likely look at me like, “I'm gonna kill you.” And I'll never forget like when me and my wife got engaged, I took her to the recording studio for the first time. My wife has this incredible voice and we started recording the song and she went in and sang the vocal part for the first time, and it was super emotional, it's about her love, it's all mushy, and she gets done and, you know, and I was like, “All right, let's try that one more time.” And she just burst into tears and…like it was just like it crystallized. You're so bad at this, you're terrible, you know, like you make people cry. That's not the producer's job, at least not in like folk singer, songwriter genres.

Brian: So what did you do to change this?

Chris: I stopped doing it, I stopped producing. So the big thing that happened for me was I developed a reputation for being good at mastering, and then I came up with an idea of how I could market that thing that I really liked way more than anything I did, and I also was getting paid more to do that. And just one day I decided, you know what? I am gonna stop accepting producing projects. The thing I had going for me at the time was me and my wife had gotten married, she had a good job teaching at a local school, and she was making enough to provide for both of us. We had just bought a house at, like, the bottom of the market in 2007, so like we were the only people that wanted to buy a house in our neighborhood, so we got a great deal. And I just said, you know, I'm gonna stop accepting producing projects, and engineering projects, and mixing projects. I'm only gonna accept mastering projects, and it was terrifying. And, you know, I bit that off, I went for it, and immediately the absolute most successful musician in the area, like his engineer invited me over while they were getting their masters back from mastering engineer, and the masters weren't very good. And they were talking about how frustrated they were and I piped up and said, “Hey, I'm a mastering engineer. Why don't you let me take a crack at it?” And they did and they loved it. And I, you know, put that song on my before and after player and booked a lot of projects from showing people, “Hey, this is a before and after.”

Brian: Did you have a relationship with the artist or the engineer prior to that? How did that…

Chris: The engineer is, like, his name is Seth Ernest. And Seth, he lives in Nashville, not too far from you. He's just like one of the sweetest, most awesome guys in the entire world. I freaking love Seth. And the musician was this guy named John Ruben, he at one point in time was the most largest selling Christian rapper in the world. This guy is a stud. He's awesome, I freaking love John. And yeah, I just was in the right place at the right time with John, and they, you know, released the record and, you know, got some attention and I was able to leverage that they trusted me into getting a lot more projects with other people in the future.

Brian: So again, that was one of the situations that I like to say the harder I work, the luckier I get.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like I was at that point had made a commitment I am only gonna accept mastering projects from here on out. I wanna major in my majors and minor in my minors, and the beautiful thing about that, I know it's terrifying, like if any of you guys that are listening and thinking like, “What can I cut out of what I try to do for a living, or what I'm trying to do for a living, and only focus on one thing and doing it super, super, super well?” Yes, it's terrifying, but something happens when you only do one thing again, and again, and again. There's a great book by Malcolm Gladwell, I love Malcolm Gladwell and he talked about outliers. And outliers he talks about, you know, that people that have a ton of experience develop almost superhuman abilities if they only do one thing day in and day out. And when you don't specialize, you never develop the opportunity to focus on one thing day in and day out, and become super human at it. So like at this point as a mastering engineer, I am so much better than little weenie Chris Graham was in 2007 because I've mastered over 10,000 songs at this point. So when I hear a song, there's no emotional battle in me about wanting to be awesome anymore, I just do what needs to be done and I know immediately where I want to go with the project, and that also came from specialization.

Brian: And so you also…the fact that you've done same thing over, and over, and over, and over again, and the fact that you have specialized solely in mastering, you've been able to build every single thing around what you do to make that as efficient of a process as possible, and you have essentially taken out every single step that is non-creative and you've either automated or delegated it. That means you've either got it to do it automatically, which is by AppleScripts or by Zappy, which we'll maybe cover at some point, or through some other sort of automation that keeps it from you having to touch it. Or you've delegated it, which means you've gotten someone else to do it, and through those two things alone you've been able to just jack up the volume of projects you do compared to anyone else. What are you willing to share as far as how your business is doing nowadays?

Chris: It's doing great, you know, we are well into six figures in revenue each year. Most importantly, I live the life I want. We've got three kids and an awesome wife, and I can't believe how awesome my life is because, yes, the business is successful, but because it's successful I have freedom. And to me I feel like there's two reasons that you listen to this podcast, you either want freedom from your studio or you wanna be known as the man because of your studio. And I'm not gonna judge you on either one of those things, but for me when I had my first child freedom becomes more valuable as you get older. You know, you meet the right person and you get married, you want freedom to spend time with them. And when you're the bachelor audio engineer you don't get that opportunity very much, all you do is live in the studio for 19 hours per day.

Brian: I can attest to the fact that as the bachelor studio engineer, or mixing engineer, I have spent many countless hours in the studio without showering. I'm sure some of you can relate to me. I've gone many days, I'm not gonna give a specific number there. But since 2014, 2015, because I stopped recording bands and I would definitely say I have a lot more freedom in my life. It's allowed me to do things, like in 2015 in the summertime, I spent five weeks in Europe and Iceland. And in the beginning of this year I spent six weeks in Thailand and Cambodia. I've done some things like that that I would never been able to do had I not taken my business seriously.

Chris: Yeah, and I think the big thing to say here if…I don't want someone to walk away. My thing when I first started learning about business was I'd hear stuff like this, so I'd read in a book and be like, “They're lazy. They just wanna rip people off.” No, totally the opposite. I wanna work on as many art projects as I possibly can and I wanna serve my customers as best as I possibly can for two reasons. One, it feels good. It feels good to have to know I have integrity, and I'm treating people well, and I'm being a good man. Two, by doing that and by being efficient and by running my business well, I get the opportunity to work on tons fun projects, but it's only because I'm so efficient. You know, back in the day when it was one one client over a three-month period, it wasn't sustainable, you know, and it you have to find a way to do…to be efficient so that you can get to the cool projects.

Brian: So when I'm talking to a lot of the newer guys that are getting started and they are always coming to me with these kinds of problems where, “This client is doing this, what should I do? They're trying to get a discount, what should I do? They're trying to haggle, what should I do?” I make parallel relationship so if you're in the dating scene and the person you're trying to go after is playing all sorts of games, but say she's the only person that you have any sort of interest in or that has any sort of interest in you. You're gonna do whatever you can to get that person. But if you have perhaps three, four, or five options to work with, you don't have to put up with any bullshit from any of those one. If one turns out to be a train wreck, you can drop that person very quickly. And so that sounds very heartless, but at the same time the last thing you wanna do is get stuck in a relationship with someone who is a train wreck unless you're also a train wreck and then you're perfect for each other.

But in the studio world, if you have so few clients to work with and you have to just take whatever you can get, it is a nightmare, it is such a pain to do this. You are just working for whatever you can get, working with whoever you can find, and you have to take on some of the worst types of projects you can imagine. When you get to the level, where you're able to be selective who you work with, it is amazing. You can work on such fun projects that way and it's so much more fulfilling than just doing what I would call the bill-paying work, the work you're taking just to pay your bills because you have to. That's the kind of work that almost every studio has to do it, occasionally, I still do that kind of work, but overwhelmingly the type of work I do now are the type of artist that I want to work on not the ones that I have to work on. Would you say that is similar for you, Chris?

Chris: Actually no, I don't think I would say that. So…

Brian: Devil's advocate here.

Chris: …there's another flip side of the coin there. It's the size of the project. If you…like a train wreck that lasts six months of like we're in the studio everyday making a record, or, you know, we're back and forth, I'm sending them revisions, and then they're requesting more revisions and so on and so forth. If it goes on, and on, and on, that's terrible. When you do all the things for a client, when what you're trying to do is, “Oh, I wanna make a little more money in this project, so I'll master it myself. I wanna make a little money on this project so I'll edit the drums myself, and try to build a more. When you do that stuff it prolongs the relationship and all of the unhealthy aspects of it get amplified. When you niche down and do something that's a little smaller and a little quicker, one, you work with more people and if you do a great job and over deliver for them they will refer more people to you. And, two, you can…I love everyone that I work with, but not everyone that I work with sends me the greatest record of all time. But it's mastering, it's quick. I'm in and out in a week, sometimes less than that.

Brian: So this actually goes back to our two business models. So in my world, yeah, when I work on a band, it's a long relationship, it's a long process. It can be a month, two months, three months sometimes from each project depending on how many moving pieces there are, how long it takes the band to get back to me, and there are so many more ways that that band can make my life an absolute nightmare. Chris's world, in other hand, is the projects are so quick. I will actually say that there are bands that I'll take on mastering projects for that I would never mix. That's not always the case, but the threshold for who I work with, the bar is much lower on mastering than mixing, and I think most people will honestly agree with that. So yeah, it's not always the case, but I'll just say that yeah, in Chris's business model, it works better for him to take on as many as you can regardless of the train wreck.

Chris: Well, I think that there's a caveat there, because I think that, you know, if you're a mix engineer and you're listening to this, it's really easy to say, “Oh, he's a mastering engineer he's always talking about, his life is different.” And there's some truth there, for sure, but I think the more important thing is if you're miserable and you feel like you get treated poorly by clients, and the projects go on, and on, and on, and on, there's still plenty you can do that's not mastering that can help you niche down. There's some 15-year old kid out there that in 10 years is going to be the vocal editing guy, and everybody in the world, every pop star is gonna send all their vocal tracks to him to have him comp it together and he's gonna do it on a laptop in his bedroom, and he's gonna make the greatest vocal tracks ever. He's gonna send it back. That kid's gonna do really, really well. I think the important thing to pause here and think about is where do you wanna go? What do you think your business model is? What do you think it is that you're doing to make money and not just being obsessed with continuing to do exactly the same thing in the future? There's a lot to be said to saying, “Well, I'm going to focus on…” You've done this, Brian. “I'm gonna focus on really angry mixes. I only want heavy clients. I only want clients where it's, you know, huge guitars and huge drums.” And, you know, if you're trying to mix and you're mixing a folk song one day, and a classical song the next day, and a death metallic song the day after that, that requires a pretty high level of skill.

Brian: Yeah, there's no one I know that can mix those three genres specifically.

Chris: It's tough. So to scale back and say, “I just wanna focus on this one thing,” you start to develop crazy aptitude in that one thing. And when you start to develop crazy aptitude, you get better work and it's also faster. So how much you're making per hour goes up when you niche down. Well, if you are frustrated that you're not making much as an audio person, I'll bet you anything that one of the components of that is you haven't niched down.

Brian: And it's not only just the skills involved, it's the relationships involved. When Chris went to mastering, that means that if he focuses his relationship building on audio engineers, people that will send him mastering projects, he has multiplied the amount of projects that he can have sent to him. In my world when mixing and mastering heavy music, which I've actually niched down in services, mixing and mastering, which in my world it's much more common for the mixing engineer to master as well, not so much, but in my genre it works. But also I've niched down in the services, mixing and mastering, and then the genre, which is heavy music, and there's a bunch of subgenres within that. You can niche down even further within that if you want to. I don't, not typically, and that involves a lot. But the point being, the relationships that I build out in my world all in itself to the genre I'm in and what services I'm trying to offer them. So if you can focus on one specific niche, especially a niche and a service, then when you go and network or when you meet people or when you build relationships, you're doing that in one area. I use this horrible illustration here for people, if this makes more sense to you.

If I tell Chris to dig one hole and I'm digging three holes and we have one hour to dig, who's going to have the deepest hole? And so, it's clearly gonna be Chris because he can focus on that one hole, he can put all his effort on that one hole and he can go much, much deeper than if I'm just spreading my time between three different holes in the ground. And so it's the same exact thing in a genre. When you're niching down to one specific genre, or one specific service, or one niche, whatever you want that to be, whether it's songwriting, or video game music, or if it's producing rap artist, whatever it is, if you put all your time and effort into that one area, you can make a living from it in most situations, not all genres and niches are gonna be the same, but you're gonna be much better off than trying to do everything. Because if you try to appeal to everyone you appeal to absolutely no one.

Chris: Yeah, I think I can hear myself from 10 years ago what I would be thinking listening to this podcast right now. And I would say, “That's crazy, I'm dirt poor. I can't afford to sacrifice any clients. These guys are nuts. Maybe it worked for them, but it will never work for me.” Here's the thing, dude, dudette. The advice that we're saying to niche down, we didn't come up with it. If you pick up any business book, any book on how to run a small business better, every single one of them will say this. This is really, really, really, basic stuff that nobody tells audio engineers. Just Google niching down the phrase niching down. Just Google it and you'll see, this is basic stuff, and we're not business professionals…or we are, I guess, technical professionals who get paid for that. We're not the best in business in the world, we are not even close, we're not even in the same league as most of the big business owners and people that run Fortune 100 companies. We are small, but what we do know is that in the world of pro audio or recording studios, there are so many of us that lack basic knowledge, that if we can bring anyone that basic knowledge, we wanna do it.

Brian: Amen, that's what this podcast is about. And for me, you know, I think making art for a living, man, society needs people like us. It's like what makes life worth living. One of the things anyways, art, great art. And when creators get dumped on and can't make a living doing it, that's a problem, that's a societal issue, and it gets me excited when I see people that are able to take the skills they have in making art and make that sustainable, and as a result make way, way, way more, and way, way, way better art. So that's my passion here with this podcast.

All right, it's time for our fab five. This is five questions, maybe four…this is new. So this is gonna be a series of questions that we ask our guests from now on, and these will probably change because some are better than others, and maybe we'll narrow them down to four or maybe we just cut the segment out altogether, who knows? But this is what we're gonna try at the beginning. The first of the five questions that we have on the Fab Five, or soon to be Fab Four, we don't know yet. What are you happy about right now in your studio and what are you not so happy about right now?

Chris: My happy, I got the new top of the line MacBook Pro with the touch bar, and I've been working on that for the first time this week and me like, yeah. The new touch bar has really changed the way I work, it gives me quick access to all the things I want, so it sped me up and I freaking love it. Crappy, kids and fam have been sick this week with the cold. So I have yet to get it, but I'm sure I'll have a chore at least, so that's been our crappy.

Brian: All right, next question is, what is your worst studio purchase ever or at least that you can remember right now?

Chris: Without throwing too much shade, I bought my first pair of studio headphones with a pair of Sennheisers, and I think they were like HD280s or something. They were just huge, enclosed, and like it was $180 when I was like 19. It was so much money. I have just never really liked them. It was just so sad that like my first pair of headphones weren't that great. In retrospect, I wish I had bought a pair of great Os for my first pair of headphones.

Brian: I will say that that is probably not going to the worst answer we get. I'm sure $180 pair of headphones…

Chris: It's terrible.

Brian: Yeah, I'm sure they'll be some worse ones than that in the future. Okay, let's talk about your best studio purchase under $100.

Chris: That's a great question, I didn't think about this that much. My best studio purchase for under $100, I'm gonna slightly modify that, was…people don't love them as much as they used to, but back in the day I spent 150 bucks on my first Waves Bundle, and back in the day stock plug-ins were not what they are now. And when I first started using the Renaissance compressor, it was life changing. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, this actually doesn't make my music sound worse. It sounds better when I use this compressor.” So I would say the…I think it was like the Waves Renaissance Bundle, it was like $150. That was fairly life changing for me as a, you know, this is like 15 years ago, it was awesome.

Brian: As much as Waves, but there are plug-ins are on sale, I'm sure that's gone way less than that since then.

Chris: Oh yeah. I mean, they were so expensive back then.

Brian: Next question, Billy wants to start a studio, should Billy go to audio school?

Chris: Well, caveat there. If Billy has to go into student debt to go to audio school, I would have to say no. If Billy has a full ride scholarship and has nothing better to do, absolutely. If Billy's parents are awesome like mine were and saved up money, maybe. But I think the caveat there, and I'm sure we'll get into this more is only so long…let me sum up my whole answer in this. Should Billy go to audio school? Only so long as Billy understands that being a good audio engineer is less than half of being a successful studio owner.

Brian: Okay, so the final question of the Fab Five, at least that's how it stands right now, is, what ask do you have of our listeners whoever stuck around this far? What ask do you have of them?

Chris: Yeah. My ask, you know, when you're recording a podcast it's weird, it's a little bit of a one-way conversation. We're talking, you're listening, and that's weird and lonely. And we would love feedback from you, guys. We would love for you to email us if, you know, this is the sort of podcast where you're thinking, “Oh, my gosh, why didn't they teach me any of this stuff in audio school?” Which is what me, 10 years ago, would have been thinking. Let us know. Where can they reach us at Brian?

Brian: podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com. We're definitely looking for feedback right now because we're so early into this podcast and we want to not only…we don't wanna just create this in an echo chamber by ourselves. We wanna make sure that we have input from everyone, we wanna see the direction of the show, what you're really looking for, and if you're even enjoying it or even if you want this. Just email us, we read every single email. We'll be trying to reply to all of them if possible, but you can just email podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com, that is podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com And when we check into that, we'll be reading through it and we'll be seeing what you guys say.

Chris: Brian is six spelled out like a word or is it a number?

Brian: You know, so just like my website thesixfigurehomestudio.com, it's spelled out, S-I-X, six. And why do we want feedback, Chris?

Chris: We wanna know what we could be doing better.

Brian: That's true.

Chris: I would say, you know, if you are listening to the podcast, I think there's a couple things we'd love to hear from you, depending on how you feel. One, “Oh, my gosh, this is awesome please, keep this up, more episodes as soon as possible.” Two, “Mmm, Chris's subtle lisp is driving me crazy,” or something like that. Something constructive feedback, or you know, Chris talks too slow. Or, three, “You guys are idiots and I can't believe just with everything you said.” Either way, let us know, we are receptive.

Brian: Contact us, that is podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com. That is it for this episode.