How To Build A Kickass Portfolio (And Get The Most Out Of It)

This is The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, episode 60

figure studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your hosts, Chris Graham and Brian Hood

Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood. I'm here with my amazing purple shirted podcast cohost, Chris Graham. How you doing? Hey Buddy. Hey, I'm fantastic. Bryan, how are you? How goes wedding preparations? It's going great. We have a good wedding planner. She's making it as stress free as possible. We've had a few meetings with her. We've got the big stuff nailed down, ready to get started into the new year as we ramp up into the wedding. It's going to be stressful, probably still as we get into it, but like so far it's been fine. That's awesome man. How about you man? What about you? What's going on with you? I'm in a good mood, so we mentioned on a previous episode that I'm working on a new business called home studio lessons.com. Ooh, there's a plug, there's a plug plug, plug away, sir.

I'm all about it. For those of you that didn't catch that before, home studio lessons.com is the place to get one on one lessons from professional audio engineers. That's been great. We've got a 36 audio engineers that we have in the system right now and we're kind of getting them all acclimated and trained stuff has been going well with that, but in addition to that, I got an office outside of my studio to specifically work on home studio lesson stuff. Oh yeah, that's right. I remember you. Tell me about that. Yeah, and it's been amazing because I'm sharing it with a husband and wife team. They have one office. I have another and the husband, his name is Andy Jay Pizza. What a name, a name stage name. His real name is Annie Jane Miller, but anyj pizza has a podcast called creative pep talk and it is like the sister podcast of six figure home studio because it's designed for creatives and to just give them a pep talk to help them navigate where creativity and business intersect and we have just hit it off in a big way.

We were like brainstorming for his podcast the other day and I was like, you should reach out to seth Godin. He's got a book. Maybe he'd come on your show any freaking did and it was really fun. So he video chatted into our office the other day and I said Andy up with a bunch of audio gear and I got to see Seth Goden on a computer screen live. Nice. That's awesome man. Yeah, so for those of you don't know, Seth Goden is like the number one marketing thinker. Yeah, he's just been around since the nineties. He's like the Oji online digital marketing, like guru of the universe and everyone looks up to him. Yeah. And he's massively creative. He's massively outside of the box. He is not like he's the guy that zig when everyone else zags basically. Yeah, he's Ziglar's when everyone else's eggs. Oh God, that hurt.

That probably went over. Almost everyone says so bad that we have to leave it in because one person listening right now that got that awful reference is laughing. Everyone else is like lentils at Zig Ziglar was a famous motivational speaker and like sales expert in the sixties and seventies and he was Seth Godins Mentor. Anyways, I'm great. So yeah, working on home studio lesson stuff in an office out of the house that's in a different headspace and where I'm mastering records and that's great and everything else has been really, really good. And I get free private creative pep talks for Mr Andy j pizza. He's got like 2 million downloads on his podcast. Yeah, I saw he's got over 200 episodes. He is us in hopefully a couple of years. Two years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's an incredible dude. So yeah, we've been having a lot of fun. Nice. And all of a sudden in the mood for some pizza.

Okay. So let's move into our topic for the day. Get away from pizza pep talk and into the topic and that is building a kick ass portfolio. This is going to be something that's gonna be so important. It's something I can't believe we haven't talked about. Is episode 60 now. We're just now talking about this, but in 2019, happy new year, by the way, 2019. This is going to be the thing that either makes or breaks your business. You will not have a successful studio without a kick ass portfolio and if you have a kickass portfolio, it's going to be much easier to succeed this year. So let's talk about this today. Absolutely. So I would say you can be successful in a lot of interesting ways. There are many roads to a successful career and a big part of that is leveraging your creativity to find a road no one else is using.

That's a pretty good quote right there. Better, better than I normally give. James is going to now put that in quotes. He's like, oh, thank God I don't have to pick it today. It's literally just picked it for me for sure. So I cannot conceive of a road to success that does not involve a kickass portfolio. So let's break it down. What is a portfolio? Brian? Your portfolio is the music or audio. If you're a sound editor or sound designer or maybe a podcast editor, whatever it is that you do, it's your proof that you're good at what you do. Essentially it is your business card, but instead of it being a thing that everyone throws away, it's something that they go to see. If you're good at what you do, case and point, would you rather have a degree in audio or a portfolio of amazing bands that you've worked with and then you can press play on your website and listen to work that you've done.

What's going to get you more clients? What's going to help you have a career number two by far. Number two. Now some people go through number one and then they get to number two. Yeah, that's totally fine. If I'm just picking between a degree and a kickass portfolio, I'm picking the kickass portfolio. This advice, the importance of the portfolio cannot be discounted. Yeah. You cannot underestimate the power of a portfolio. I can't think of a single situation where you can have a wildly successful business without any sort of portfolio short of you just being a name. That's been around for so long, but even then the reason you have a name is your past work as your portfolio, so let's talk about real quick. Let's just give some reasons why you need a kick ass portfolio. Well, I would say first and foremost, the beauty of a kickass portfolio in 2019.

That's right. 20 19 is that you can put that on a website and as people are finding that website or you're posting about it online and facebook, twitter, instagram, whatever, you're asleep or you're eating or you're using the restroom and somebody on your website listening to your work and they're deciding, wow, he or she is really good at this. I might hire them. So back in the day when you're running a business pre internet, you had to like go around and promote yourself. You had to be such a self promoter to be like, oh, can you listen to my demo tape? You know, like you had to do all this stuff to get your name out there. Now your website sits there and people can listen to all your work. It could be as simple as having a spotify playlist that you post on facebook, say, hey guys, here's a bunch of songs I produced and slash or recorded and slash or mixed and slash or mastered, you know, whatever.

In 2019 you have the ability to put your work out there in front of ears and eyeballs and it can work for you so you need a kickass portfolio because if someone just goes to your website and sees gear, pictures May, if they go to your website and see like you're even nearby, like you're a convenient drive for them to go work with you. They don't care, man. They want to know that you're going to do great work and I kind of answered it earlier in the intro, but honestly, without your portfolio, there is no proof that you can actually do what you say you can do. There is no proof that you can fulfill on your promise that you were a mastering engineer. You're a talented mixing engineer. You're a great producer. If you don't have a portfolio, there is no proof, so no one will pay you.

No one is going to hand over their songs of their money to someone that has not proved that they are good at what they do. So let's use an illustration from that. Let's say you're a painter and you want to sell paintings and someone comes to your website and none of your paintings are on it. What are they going to think about? You know, if your website says Chris Graham painting.com, master painter, yeah, buy my paintings. Is anyone ever going to hire me? Never. Or if somebody walks into the gallery and says, Oh yeah, I like this. Maybe interested in buying a painting for some. This is crazy. This is insane. Like, oh, okay, cool. There are a thousand dollars each. Cool. Give me the thousand dollars and then I'll give you the painting before you see it. It's not going to work. You have to see the painting. It's like if you went to Amazon to buy artwork for your home and there's a thousand dollar painting on Amazon Dot Com with no photos attached of the painting.

How stupid is that? Are you going to buy that painting? No, no one's gonna buy that painting the proof, the portfolio is the picture and without that picture, without that picture that they can look at or listen to an rn, since they're not going to pay money, they're not going to hand over their hard earned dollars and their creative work that they put their heart and soul into. So we've kind of talked about like what happens if you don't have any portfolio at all? I think that's obvious for a lot of people. Maybe not for some, but most people understand you have to have a kickass portfolio of some sort, but what if. How do you know if your portfolio is bad, Chris? Like if you have songs already, you do have music on your website, how do you know if that portfolio is kick ass or not?

Well, that's a great question. I think the first and most important thing is knowing the type of friends that you have. Some types of people will be your best friend, but they'll never tell you. The truth will just be like, yeah man, you're awesome. Oh, that sounds awesome, dude. Oh, where'd it go there? Just the constant constant pats on the back and they're not going to give you the tough love that you need. A real friend is gonna. Look at that and be like, I love you brother, but song sounds Kinda bad, man. You know, like those are the types of friends I want in my life. Someone willing to kick me when I'm up and I shouldn't be up. Well, I do think that's a super important part of any successful business is just having people around you who are willing to be honest with you.

I think the number one way to tell if your portfolio is bad is no one hires you, period. If no one is hiring you, your portfolio is probably bad. This means that you have done the work to get your name out there. You have talked to people, you've reached out to people, you've had conversations with people, but people are going to listen to your portfolio in some way, shape, or form. They're listening to that portfolio and they're actively choosing no every single time. That is a good sign that your portfolio is bad. So I think I misunderstood your question here. I think that you need to know if your portfolio is good or bad before you put it out there. Don't build a website, don't start pushing your stuff out until you know that your portfolio is good, in my opinion, the way that you know your portfolio is good.

As I would call this the eyebrow test, go out in your car or with your buddy and press play and say, yeah, this is a song I recorded or this song I mixed. Sure this song I mastered and watch their eyebrows, press play, and don't pay attention to anything else. And if their eyebrows move, your portfolio is good. They go up, you're in good shape. I love that. That's very clever. But I will say there's a point where it's so bad that their eyebrows will go up. Like that's so bad. It startled me. My eyebrows shooting up. Yeah. So that's going to sit at mixed message to people to use that technique with someone you trust to give you a real opinion. That's really the big thing is just have friends you can trust. Exactly. So make sure you've got a good portfolio and then get it out there.

This is the first mission. So I would say to somebody if they came to me and said, hey, thank God it's not happened very often recently, but I used to all the time people will be like, Hey, you know, me and my cousin wants to go to audio school, or hey my son, I had a lady call me one time. I was like, he wants to go to audio school in and I was trying to get him an intern and chip at your studio. God, I remember you talking about that. That's the number one way to never get an internship is to have your mom calling around for you. Exactly. So my big thing, my advice to people is I was like, okay, that's fine. You know, if that's what you want to do, especially if there's no student debt involved, that's fine. Go for it.

But record stuff, build your. All right, so let's move on and talk about how to actually build a kick ass portfolio because you know, if your portfolio is bad, you're probably not getting hired. If you don't have a portfolio at all, you know that's bad now because we've spent the last five, 10 minutes talking about why that's so bad. You now know you need a kick ass portfolio and you are trying to build one, whether a yours is currently bad and not kick ass or whether you don't have one at all right now. So now let's talk about how to actually get a kick ass portfolio. We have a few pointers here on different ways you can potentially build your portfolio. The first one being into me the most obvious way and that is to create your own portfolio. That's how I got my start.

That's how you got your start as well, Chris, right? Yeah. I had a song called not alone record it. Uh, it was a good singer, song writer and I showed that to people and they hired me after the fact and that was kinda how I got my first good projects and there's a great story about how this can impact your life in a massive way. So I think one of the greatest actors of our time is Matt Damon. Matt Damon, I got that. I'm just as one of the greatest actors of our time and his story has a lot of application for us. So Matt Damon got his start. He was getting little parts here and there, nothing crazy. And then the movie goodwill hunting dropped and he was like a mainstay of Hollywood after that. And the story behind goodwill hunting is very interesting. Matt knew that there was a certain type of character that he was just really equipped to play and that type of character was somebody from the Boston area who went to Harvard, who was reading from around that area.

And here's the thing, Matt Damon went to Harvard. So what Matt Damon did is he created his perfect portfolio piece. He wrote the script with some other people as well for goodwill hunting and he starred in goodwill hunting because it was perfect for him, so he wrote it around his own strengths. Let me say that again because it's important. He wrote the movie around his own strengths as an actor and that movie was a massive success because of that. Yeah, it was all downhill from there. Like he has just been movie after movie after movie because it showed off the best of the best of the best of what he could do. So I'm sure you guys are getting what I'm saying here. If you don't have a great portfolio, your best option might be to make your own. That fits your skills and gifts perfectly. Yep.

So my first portfolio contained three tracks. I recorded them myself and I had been in a heavy metal band up to that point for four or five years. And so my first portfolio consisted of three songs. One was a heavy music, like heavy metal, one was hard rock and then one was like kind of like a more acoustic chill rock. And I will say that that third piece did nothing for me, but the first two or wetlands, my first gigs. So I played to my strengths. I created music that was best suited for what my talents, skills, abilities and passions were. And this Matt Damon's story is actually a perfect example of what happens when you do that. Well, because many people, you need to understand many people that are looking to hire someone are trying to record themselves and when you walk in, if this is just for your brand new in this industry, and if you've said, hey look, I recorded myself and I did a really good job, people will want to hire you.

Yep. So that's the first way. That's honestly the easiest way. If you have the ability and capability to create your own portfolio, that's honestly the best way to do it by far. Especially if you're brand new, if you don't have the ability to do it yourself, maybe you're not a musician or maybe the style of music you really want to work on is not the style of music you play. For example, like I love jazz music, but I could never play that to create a portfolio that's not the kind of music I'm ever going to go into, but just saying if that's you, maybe the second point is more suited for you and that is go to the people in your life who already know you already like you and already trusts you. Go back to that Matt Damon's story. Who was it that Matt Damon went to that was already a friend?

His life to help him with that movie? Ben Affleck and look what happened with just the synergy between those two guys earlier in their careers when they were both pretty much nobody's when they were reading that together and working on that together. Look at them now. They are both a list actors 20 years later, which is crazy. Yeah, well, and their big thing was like, well, we're from Boston, so let's make a movie about people from Boston. Their competition was people not from Boston pretending to be from Boston, so they're both really convincing in Boston roles. They've been in a number of movies that are very Boston. He and they're really believable. Is that a word Boston than it is now? Copyright 20. Nineteen. It sounds like working on plants and botany, botany. There we go. Botany, so look in your life, look at some musicians you might know, people that you already have prior relationships to that also lend itself to your strengths.

Like again, in my situation, if I was trying to build a jazz portfolio, I don't have the capability of doing that. I know a few guys that are in jazz that I could potentially tap into and work with me for free to build my portfolio. Yeah, so let's talk about that. So the people that you work with for free that already know, like, and trust you. Many, many musicians have side projects, you know they might be in a really good successful band but they've got some kind of side project that they've been working on and those are perfect when you are trying to find portfolio pieces because often the side project has no budget. It's purely a passion project. Doesn't mean it's bad, doesn't mean it won't be the main thing someday for that artist, but those side projects are huge and for me that was a big spot where I got my start as a master engineers.

I went around and ask friends, you know, hey, I'm trying to build my mastering portfolio. Are you working on anything or do you know anyone that's working in anything that I could master for free? It could be something you've even like never released or you know, something that you put on the shelf and haven't been working on for a long time. And one of my friends, seth earnest, love that guy. He's freaking awesome. Lives down in Nashville near you. Was like, hey yeah, I'm making a record for my wife for our wedding day. It's just something I'm making for her. You can master that if you want. And I did and did a good job and I put one of those songs on my player, on my mastermind website on Chris Graham, mastering.com and let people listen to that to get an idea of like, oh wow. Yeah, that does sound bigger and warmer and punchier and the base hits hard and yeah, so that sort of thing.

There's just a wealth of people who are working on side projects by themselves much more now than there were when I got my start. Everybody's got a home studio. Everybody could use help and there's so many opportunities to say, I'm gonna work with this person, but for those of you that might feel like, oh, this doesn't apply to me, my career's already sort of going pretty well. I'm already, you know, well on my way. Not necessarily. There's still an opportunity if in your network you have people that are working at a higher level than you are to reach out and say, Hey, you know, I'd love to work with you on something, or hey, can I do a free sample for you in some way? Big Opportunity there to level up. This is a mistake that I see people make is they're getting paid well and so they don't worry about updating their portfolio.

They may have already had a few great artists on their portfolio. They haven't updated in a while and they're getting good business, but the business they're getting isn't like that. Top tier artists, it's nothing that's moving the needle. It's just something that's paying the bills and because they're getting so much money from this, when I called bill paying work, it's not really pushing their career forward and they pass up on opportunities to work with really, really talented artists who probably can't afford them or they're unwilling to do free or cheap work in order to update and build a portfolio and start really stair stepping thing. So I think that's really a very, very pertinent point to talk about. Even if you're at a high level, your portfolio can always be more kick ass. Yeah. It can always be more kick ass and you need to be constantly updating that as much as possible, especially in certain genders like pop where it changes so often.

Yeah. So let me take a risk here. There are definitely videos you can find on youtube of big wig people in our industry. That'll be like never ever, ever do free work under any circumstances. Now I would say a couple things there. No disrespect to anybody here, but I would say first and foremost, anytime someone tells me this is always the case, this is always true or this is always false, especially in business, there's an opportunity to pause there and say, well, that might have always been true, but things are changing in our world really fast. There was no such thing as an iphone when I was growing up. There was no such thing as the Internet when I was growing up. There was no such thing as vcrs. You couldn't even record your television until I was like five or six years old, so our world's changing a lot and what might have been great advice all the time is not always going to be great advice today.

So the free thing. I'm not willing to say you should always be willing to do free work or you should never be willing to do free work. There might be a situation where it really makes sense and there might be a certain career path where it never makes sense, but you have to be willing to evaluate a changing marketplace to determine what's a sacred cow, what's something that we say, Oh, you just have to do that and that's something that we need to get rid of. So as the industry changes, and I don't think anyone would debate that, it's changing really, really fast. You have to be open to creative solutions in order to move your career forward in what works for one guy might not work at all for somebody else. This is true. This is why we constantly talk about that advice buffet that I don't know why we stuck with that, but that's just been our theme for our podcast.

Yeah. We should just call our podcast the advice buffet podcast. It's called the buffet because everyone's going to take something a little different from every episode, so might take big portion. Some may take nothing from each episode and we rarely ever say that this advice is 100 percent true. One hundred percent of the time. We said it a couple times, but you should always pause and think about that when someone says that, because it may not be the case forever. Yeah. Well, and let me talk about why that is just real quick because this is important. I'm sure many of you are like, Ooh, free rant, rant, rant, warning, lights. So here's the thing. If you want to rip someone else's career off, if you want someone else's exact career and you want to unseat them on the throne, then yeah, you should do almost all the things that they did.

But here's the thing. In business, all successful businesses with very, very, very, very, very few exceptions did something nobody else was doing. They had what's called a unique selling proposition. This is a big business term USP. Sometimes they hear a unique value proposition to similar thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Similar thing, exact same thing and unique value proposition. In order for someone to buy anything from you, you have to offer something that nobody else is offering, and so the reason we do an advice buffet is for you to have a unique selling proposition, you have to select your own tools. You have to do it in a way nobody else is doing. This is not a podcast about here's how every single person that's successful got successful and the 10 steps that you can follow to do exactly what they've done, and then their clients will come, your clients and they will die.

That's not a thing. Not In this industry or any other industry, at least not since the industrial revolution. Has that ever been a thing. So this is about creating a unique selling proposition. That's how you build a six figure business. That's how you build a six figure studio, is that you have to find something unique that you offer that nobody else does. I love all of that that you said. There's still one more way to look into building your portfolio into a kick ass portfolio, either from scratch or whether you're not trying to update your stuff and that is looking for stems. Now before I get into this, let's talk about what stems are Chris. Yeah. It's like the part of the plant that's like below the flop. Okay. We're done here. Thank you for listening. The studio podcast. Happy Hustle stems are the individual parts of mix, so I'll never forget when I was first getting into audio.

I got on a torrent website and I have broke admitted right here on the sixth finger home studio podcast. Chris Graham broke the law. I downloaded the stems to Marvin Gaye's, what's going on? And I think it's one of the greatest songs of all time, but it's like all the individual tracks that they had. So like you can solo out the vocals. Bohemian rhapsody is floating around out there. Well, this all like from the. What was the video game that had all the music on it? This was before way before all that. I know a lot of those stems got released so you can have like, there's so many top 40 top, you know, top 100 song tracks where you can get the multitracks for nowadays, Guitar Hero, even Beatles stuff. You can get the stems and it's the, you know, on some of the older Beatles stuff.

It's for audio files and it's the four tracks on there, four track machine. Those are kind of hard to work with, but you know, you can find like eight track and 16 track, you know, of your favorite songs from back in the day. You can find modern songs where the artists have willingly released like, oh, we've got our kick drum track and our snare track and our vocal track. When you find stems like that, you can do remixes, um, where you're actually changing the music you can, you can try to do the exact same mix to see if you can get somewhere in the ballpark, but there's all sorts of stuff you can do and it's really fun. Now, granted, this only works in certain services, so if you're doing full tracking editing recordings, true. These stems aren't really going to do you any good, so you can kind of skip this section, but for those of you who are trying to do mixing, mastering, producing where you might want to rearrange the song or maybe you're doing electronic remixes or something, whatever that happens to be, if that is you, you could look for stems on the Internet and really they're everywhere.

If you just look for them. There's also a lot opportunities to. If you're like my advice, if you're like, well, I want to be a session based player. I want people to hire me on my, you know, Joe Plays [inaudible] dot com or whatever. Get a bunch of stems and be like, Hey, this is Marvin Gaye's, what's going on? But I'm playing bass on it. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do. That's a great resource for those of you who are doing remote instruments, so if you're a remote drummer, remote Bass player, remote guitar player, taking those stem tracks and then rerecording your own versions of it, like your own drum. Take for a classic song recording a video of that. Putting on the Internet and that's a piece of content that will help bring you work because you are putting a new spin on an old song, so there's a lot of different ways this can go, but just look for stems that you can use to build your portfolio and a lot of these are going to be much higher quality than you could ever do on your own at your level.

It's true. Some of this is advice for myself as well. I have built a very healthy mastering business, but there definitely is stuff I could be doing to be more aggressive. They're reaching out to hiring producers to say, hey, let me. Do you have a song you've previously released that I could master a sample for? Well, that's the one that we didn't really talk about is actually going and talking to other studios, other producers to getting stems from them. Back in my day I couldn't use this for my portfolio, but just for practice I would trade stems of active projects with a few producers. That's cool, and this is probably against a lot of laws and rules, but we would actually see what we were each of us were doing in our sessions because we were just like an open book. I would say I'm a fully mixed session in protools.

He'd open it up and see every cue thing. I did everything I was doing to the drums and he would do the same for me because you like each other's mixes and that was a good way to help build skills, but you can also go to experience guys like myself or any other studios and see if you can get something in the already mixed are already mastered and try to work on that yourself. That's another way to build a portfolio. Yeah, that's a really cool thing, man. I really wish that I had had a relationship with other people that were what I was mixing songs to be able to swap stuff back and forth when I was doing it. Nobody else. I was so nichey like I was using weird plugins and weird software. You're trying so hard to be unique. Yeah. Too hard. Yeah.

Yeah, I understand that everyone, I think everyone does that at least one point in their careers. I will shift gears here. Let's talk about, let's just say you do manage to get a portfolio built. What do you do now? How do you use this portfolio? How do you actually utilize this kickass portfolio to your advantage? Yeah, so that's a really, really, really important next step here. So having a portfolio is great, but it's also worthless unless you then go out and promote your portfolio. So this is really, really important. I think we talked about this a lot in the podcast on many episodes, but one of the lies that we believe is the most toxic in our industry is this idea that if you build it, they will come. That all you have to do is be passionate, make some beautiful art and just put it on the Internet and you'll wake up the next morning and millions of people will have listened to it.

That does happen sometimes, but not very often and even when it does, just because you made one viral piece of content doesn't mean the next piece of content you make is going to go viral to. Yup. In episode one of the podcast talks about this in great detail. If you remember that, Chris, that was a long time ago. It was long time ago. Yeah, yeah, I do remember that, and so once you have your portfolio, you have to get it out there. Whether that's sending it to friends, whether that's making posts, whether that's sharing it and forums and asking for feedback. I see that a lot in a lot of the facebook groups is that people, and this is kind of cool, it's self promotion, but it's the most softball style of self promotion, which I love is people will say, hey, you know, just release my website.

I see people do this in our community. Hey, I'd love some feedback. That's great. They're going to get feedback, which is awesome, but they're also going to get people that are like, I might want to work with this guy someday, and that's great. They're not being like a tool about it, they're being constructive in the community. One of the biggest things to understand when you're trying to get your portfolio out there, and one of the biggest mistakes I see time and time and time and time again of people is trying to work with are trying to get their name in front of people that are out of their league and try to say this in the nicest way possible. It'd be like Chris Graham when he just started out trying to reach out to Paul Mccartney to master his tracks. There's just this massive mismatch between skill and experience and clout between the two of those people and so I just think there is an art to stair stepping your portfolio in a way that makes sense because if you were trying to reach out to people, they're well above your weight class way above your level.

You're gonna completely flop. Most Times now there is something that comes with having the gall to go out there and take steps towards getting people to work with you that are, you know, maybe above your level, but I'd say nine times out of 10 people mess this up in a massive way. So I think there's a story here or an illustration here to talk about here. Absolutely. So this moves into our next section, which is the pitfalls to building a kickass portfolio and there's going to be a link in the description. So I'm going to talk about a youtube video that I want you guys to go and watch. It's very short, less than a minute. This video is a video of something called geometric dominoes. Couple of weeks ago in the podcast, Brian recommended that I read. Actually, no, that was after we recorded, but Brian recommended a book called the one thing that is absolutely wrecking my life right now.

I love it. And it's one of these books. I talked about this in the podcast a lot too, but it's one of these books that I'm reading it. I'm like, Dag gone it. Chris, why didn't you read this when it came out? However many years ago when you fool, the opportunity? Cost of not reading that book has been huge, right? Huge. Yeah. I would be in a much. My business would be bigger now than it is if I had read that book when it came out, which I'm not sure when that was, but definitely years ago. So in the book, I forget the author's name, sorry, who the author talks about something called Geometric dominoes, so we've got a link to that in the description of what geometric dominoes looked like. Geometric dominoes aren't just all the same size. Geometric dominoes get bigger. Each domino is a 150 percent the size of the previous domino and the illustration goes if you set up a teeny tiny, like one centimeter tall domino, and the next domino is a centimeter and a half.

The next domino is I can do the math, but bottom line, each domino gets bigger and bigger and bigger until all of a sudden the last domino is the size of the empire state building. You can knock over that first domino. That's a centimeter tall and you can imagine what happens eventually a domino of the size of the empire state building falls over and smashes something and that's how successful careers are built and when you're building your portfolio, it's very similar to that. You're trying to get what's the first portfolio piece I can get that will leverage me into a project that will be a better portfolio piece that will leverage me into another project. There'll be an even better portfolio piece and so on and so forth. That's how successful careers are built. If you are Chris Graham, day one, his early in his career trying to reach out to Paul Mccartney, that's essentially like a one centimeter domino trying to knock over an empire state building size domino.

Yeah. Here's the thing, when you're in a situation, when you're trying to build a partnership or get a yes from somebody that happens in a very quick instant, just like those dominoes falling, but they need to glance at your portfolio and say, Oh yeah, this kid's for real. Wow, he's good. Okay, let's give him a shot. Even if it's just, yeah, we'll give them one of the. In my case, we'll give them an unmastered mixes of the next whatever, Ariana Grande's song and we'll see what he can do. It's no risk to us, but we're at least willing to give him the time of day. Every single studio in every band I've ever been a part of. The reason we chose the studio we chose is because of the portfolio of that studio. That has been the case every single time. It's so damn important. It's so important, so important, so take some time after this episode's over, click the link in the show description and you can see this video.

It's less than a minute, but when you visualize and see what it would look like if you started with a one centimeter domino and you worked your way up to empire state size, it's insane and it really helps this sort of domino, this stair stepping thing to really click. It blew my mind and I showed my kids when I saw one of these youtube videos the first time I've watched it, like 10 of them. There's like all sorts of different geometric domino videos on the internet, so when we're talking about pitfalls, things that get in the way of you building a kickass portfolio, I think it's worth mentioning. One mistake I see is when we started talking about earlier, when you're building your portfolio to go to the people in your life who already know you already like you already trust you. When we're talking about that, it's easy to start taking advantage of people with one sided relationships.

It's all take, take, take, take, take. Never any gift. There's been no reciprocity belt. There's been no social currency built up between you and that other person. You're just the person that's always asking to take something from that person, and if that is you, it's gonna. Be Very difficult for you to build a portfolio with anyone that already knows you, likes you, and trusts you because they don't really like you and trust you. They just know you, and if that's the case, that's going to be really, really hard to do. Yeah, well, and here's the thing. This is intense. The flip side of that is also true. If the people that you have built your portfolio from, if you've communicated to them, I'm the guy who does free work, they will never be good clients, there'll be awful clients, so you have to communicate when you're doing this sort of thing of, hey, you know, I really believe in what you're doing.

I'd love to do a free sample for you don't normally do this sort of thing, or I do it in this context. For me, I do free mastery and samples every day. I set aside time every day at the end of the day did free mastery and samples, but my policy is to only do one per artist. So if somebody comes back and he's like, Yo, well we have a song, can you do our second song as the sample? No 100 percent of the time. It was a hard no on that. I've got boundaries there so the free work is a great tool, but only so long as you have boundaries and you've communicated them like a grownup at the onset and said, hey, I can only do this one time. This is a special situation and I would think in many cases it's even a good idea to send them an invoice with the number zero on the bottom to say like, this was a thousand dollars.

I gave you a thousand dollars off. You owe me nothing, but here's the invoice. Just so you know, like the difference here was that gave you this discount. I'm not saying I'll give you the discount in the future, but if you try to do the portfolio thing based on free work, it might work really, really well, but if you set the expectation that your the free guy, that's going to be very uncomfortable for you, and I know many of you listening are like, oh, that's why my friend Bob is a dick. Now. It's because you've communicated. You've marketed yourself as I'm a guy who records for free and that doesn't go well. You have to set those boundaries upfront. You have to be willing to be an adult and look them in the eye and say, hey man, I can't wait to work on the song with you, but just Fyi, this is the only song I'll be able to do for free.

I think that really goes into our next pitfall really well and that is the opposite of that, which is trying to charge money too soon, so if you're someone that's just starting out or someone that is trying to get their portfolio built, if you try to go straight for the kill, straight for the dollar, that early on before you've proven yourself before you've had a good portfolio in place, it's going to be really difficult to really get any traction going and traction and momentum is really the key to making this all work. If you're just going straight for $2 right now, I'm not willing to put in the work. I'm not willing to do some free stuff to get my career started, to get my portfolio built. If that's you, this is going to be also difficult. Just as hard as it is for the person who always test free work.

Yeah. So when we see people in the community that posts like, hey, you know, I haven't been able to get any customers. I would bet that 90 percent of the time or more it's because their portfolio isn't very good. I would say like that would be my first instinct of like, oh, your portfolio probably isn't very good. You say 90. I think it's probably more like 95. Ninety eight percent is a really high number. I was being conservative. Yeah. In all truth, I would completely, yeah. It's like 98, 99 percent of the time. If your portfolio is awesome, you're going to be able to find some people that are gonna want to work with you. If you've chosen a niche that's not like super esoteric, like, well, I only do Spanish death, metal poetry, electronica. If you're. John was more than five words and your portfolio is amazing.

Yeah. You might have to have a hard time making it in a niche where the entire size of the niche is like $10,000 worth of work is done globally. So what? Who wants to be the king of the hill? That small. So yeah, I mean you've got to consider those things, but yeah. Portfolio is the solution to many, many business problems in this industry. Yes. So just to wrap this thing up, I think that this is one of the most common problems I see. I can't believe that it took us 60 episodes to get to this, but honestly this is gonna be one of the biggest game changers in your business once you figure out how to build a kick ass portfolio and until you do that, good luck. Yeah. So one other side piece, Brian, I have been so surprised at how many people listened to our podcast. It's blown my mind. Yeah. So the podcast has grown every single month and if you look at a growth chart, it's like a silicon valley startup.

Get that Nice Golden Valley. It's pronounced silicone. Yeah. For those of you who listen to this podcast regularly, you will remember the time that Chris said wholeheartedly with silicone, with full confidence silicone valley. Yep. Referring to Silicon Valley. Actually, my fiance said that tier is throw her. She's great. She's great. Well, so I guess my reason for saying that is just thank you guys. We are at this point, by the time you're listening, we're probably what? Like 175,000 downloads. So that's bananas. The fun part is I randomly get people reaching out to me on like mostly instagram. I get like a thank you note, like pretty much every day. I got one today actually. Yeah. So if you want to reach out to us on instagram and connect, especially if you're tweeting really gears floody tweeting. I'm so old if you. Especially if if your instagram is primarily like audio stuff, twitter, twitter is dead.

Yeah. Don't follow me on twitter. Follow me on instagram. Chris Underscore Graham, chrs underscore Grh am Brian. What's your instagram? Andall Brian h zero. Zero d. So Brian Hood, but those are zeroes. Amazing. But don't see me any gear. Slutty stuff because I'll block you, I'll follow you, but only if you have enough gear, sluts, pictures. We couldn't be any more different in that department. Chris, it's true and if you have headphone reviews on your instagrams, I will. I'll man, just for our listeners right now, if you want to know the way to Chris grands heart, send him some sort of headphones. He'll have any sort of headphones, but especially if they're like expensive, nice high end headphones or some sort of obscure brand that no one else has yet. That is like if I wanted to get mentioned on the podcast, send me some headphones or headphone amp or a digital to analog converter, which I can use with headphones and I'll mention you on the podcast.

You're like those people who get instagram famous and then they have a link to their Amazon wishlist in their instagram profile. Is that a thing? That's a thing. Yeah. Oh, that's my new dream. So people just send you free stuff. Funny Story and we've never done post episode banter before. So this is a new, a whole, a whole new world. Don't you close your eyes isn't a whole new world here. I'm going, what were we talking about just now? Mail time, instagram, Amazon, wishlist in China. Apparently 54 percent of children between the ages of eight and 15. What they want to be when they grow up is an influencer. They went to be an influencer. Fifty four percent of Chinese children and teenagers. I think that even mean influence or someone on instagram who like plus travel photos and has millions of followers. Oh my God.

That's a real thing. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. That's a real thing and now everyone wants to be an influence or no one wants to be a police officer or a fireman or like my childhood. I wanted it to be a garbage man until I learned what a fireman was and that I write on the back of the fire truck instead of the back of the garbage truck. Really moving on up there. Graham Cochran mentioned that when he was on the show about how he never imagined he would be as successful as he is, he's an influencer. That's essentially what Graham does for a living. To great success and yeah, that's amazing. Well anyways, it's been interesting for Brian and I, we've started to get free stuff as a result of the podcast too. So if you get free stuff and you want us to uh, see it, we're officially whoring ourselves out now. Yeah man. Oh, all I ever wanted ever was free stuff that made noise. So if you want to send us something software, mastering software plugins, you know, whatever, please reach out. And if we think it's awesome, I will definitely mention it in the show.

So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Quick side note, for those of you who are going to be at Winter Nam in a few weeks, hit us up. Me and Chris are going to both be there. The 24th through the 28th of this month will be in the Anaheim la area. So if you are a studio owner or you run marketing for a brand or something and you just want to get in touch with us or meet up with us or anything, or if you just want to hang out to be our friend email podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com, or just hit up Chris and I on instagram and let us know that you'll be there and we're going to try to figure out some sort of meetup for the six figure home studio people we don't know when or where it's going to be. We don't have any official stuff for that yet, but keep an eye or an ear out for that on the podcast or our mailing list and we'll have more info on that as we get it.

Next week's episode is all about fear and what that does to hold us back. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're from, doesn't matter what you've done. Fear has a 100 percent held you back at some point and it's probably holding you back from doing something that you know you need to do right now, but you cannot make yourself do so. Chris and I dive deep into this and we talked about some really helpful things on what you can do to help overcome that and get past that. This is probably one of our most impactful episodes. It may not be one of our most popular episodes, but it'll definitely be one of our most impactful, so if you can stomach it, tune in next week, Brian, early Tuesday morning, 6:00 AM and that episode will be live. As always, thanks for listening. Until next time, happy hustling.