How To Double Your Income By “Aggressively” Following Up

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 83

[inaudible] sixth finger own studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian and Chris Graham. Welcome back

to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my amazing bald and beautiful purple shirted glasses, glasses. I can't even say it. Glasses, glasses. Say that glasses, glasses, glasses. Podcast cohost Chris Graham. Heidi, they man,

I'm good. I got special glasses. These have a flat frequency response on like normal glasses, which can cause comb filtering. I'm kidding.

I was about to say, I almost believe per se. The only thing I noticed you were cleaning your glasses a second ago and they're like, they're so wobbly. Like the screws. So lucid. I would tighten that up. My friend. It's like they're really loose. And I was like, maybe it's because they're special glasses. I don't, maybe, I just don't know.

Well, you might consider taking the vocals and both thing, uh, you know, 0.1 db at 10 k, you know,

I hate everything that's happening right now. It's all good,

dude. What's new with you man? What's new with me? Let me interrupt. We should probably not talk about our lives while we're prepping these episodes so that there's more excitement. That's true. We always talk first. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I already know most of what's going on in your life, but for the sake of quality podcast, we've got to leave some mystery. You got to save something new to tell me for our podcast intro.

I would agree with you, Chris, will you talk too much before the episodes so I don't have anything new to talk about and you know what our listeners are like, thank God we don't have to listen to them banter for 30 minutes. This episode.

There's one thing we do need to talk about though. Here's what's going on guys. I don't know if we're ever going to do, are real sponsor just sounds like a pain in the buns like every week to have to say something. Hey, this product's really good. Maybe we will someday. But one of the things Brian and I been trying to navigate is that I'm addicted to free gear. I somehow feel validated when someone gives me free gear. It's true and I'm navigating that maturity issue. But if it's gear that will help us record the podcast better and have a better time while we're doing it helps us be more relaxed, help the podcast sound better, then we're all for it. So here's the thing, when Brian and I recorded an episode I record in Westerville, Ohio in logic, we have a video chat and at the same time Brian Records in pro tools. So we have two doors running for an hour to two hours on the hope that neither will crash when recording, which is a lot to ask of pro tools. This is, it's an awful lot to ask and lately it's been a lot to ask a logic lately of logic. So let me tell you guys a story. Our good friend Matt Boudreaux of the Working Class Audio podcast recently purchased something called a sound devices mix pre six. Are we allowed to

put the gear solid alert on our sponsors? No we can't. Yeah we are. We're totally doing it. We can gear set our sponsor.

Okay. So Matt was like, Dude, I've been recording

podcasts with this thing. It's a sort of like a portable SD recorder kind of like of the zoom units that are out there, the h five's and all that stuff except it sounds amazing. And the pre amps are incredible. And the stats like the total harmonic distortion and noise floor and all that stuff, they're like science fiction. There's so off the charts crazy. So Matt was like, this thing's awesome and I don't use a dog to record the podcast anymore. I record right into this STD recording sounds amazing. And I was like, really? Oh we could record our podcast and not have to think about anything.

And here's the reason I'm okay with this on this podcast. I'm very anti gear as everyone is very aware of by this point. If you've been listening to the podcast. So we are a podcast in the recording world. Probably the only recording podcast that doesn't talk about gear on the Internet right now.

Probably the only form of recording media.

Yeah, to the point where we have a gear slot alert. Anytime someone mentions a specific piece of gear because we do not support gear as a whole. But the reason we're making an exception here is because anything that allows us to get out of technician mind set, where we get out of the creative mode, out of the flow of what we're trying to do. I am all about that. And that's kind of what this thing is done.

Yeah, it's crazy. So a couple of weeks ago I bought one and I had it sitting here at my desk and I was recording right into it and logic crashed three times or I'll be recording an episode. It's true. Normally I would be like, oh, I ruined everything. Even though logic ruined everything, our flow is off and it was scary. And I glanced down and I bought the mix

free free. It's got like three preamps and stuff in it. And I looked down, I was like,

oh, it's still recording and it will continue to record flawlessly for like three days and it's been this kind of cool relief. It was fun to kind of talk about you're in the show finally, but it's been this kind of core leaf to be like, ah, I can trust this piece of gear, which lets me focus on the important thing, which is saying interesting things on the podcast

and so I actually haven't started using it yet. I unboxed it and it's sitting on my desk and I'll set it up. So I'll let you all know maybe next week how I feel about it. I like the idea of it and then maybe next week when we talk about it again, I'll let you know if I like it.

Yeah, so far I'm excessively impressed with all things. I recorded an episode with Andy Pizza that's not out yet on it recently. Whoa, Whoa, whoa.

Andy Jay Panty j pizza. We don't say it. Just Andy Pizza.

This is true. Any J pizza, including Andy Jay Pizza, both of us. We plug the headphones in and we're like, oh my God,

that sounds so much better than the zoom h five in he had previously been using. There's no addressable one. So that's enough gears. Let alerts for intro. Let's actually move into this shows

I today. Chris, what are we talking about today?

We are talking about, see I got so distracted. New Gear

that I totally forgot. This is like when you were like in the movies and you're watching like preview after preview after review of a moody. We by the time you get to the actual feature like wait, what am I, what am I here to see you again? So I'll refresh your memory. Chris. Today we're talking about the power of following up and you made a really good point right there and forgetting what we're talking about of why follow ups are so important. But we'll get to that. We'll get to that. So Chris, let me ask you a question before we get into the topic today. I'm going to be really picking on you today because followups or something that I love and something that I've like done religiously. You on the other hand are something that you are experimenting more with and something that you've admittedly said your business is too complex and follow ups can slip through the cracks. So I'm going to pick on you a little bit, but I want to ask you a question. How many times on average would you say you

followed up with your leads over the past year? Well, over the past year, not nearly as many as normal. I used to do it 100% of the time but because I've been transitioning my business into a quote based system rather than having my rates published, my systems are a little bit of a mess right now. The transitions taken a while,

so just to clarify, for those of you who are not sure what he's talking about, a quote they system, go back to episode number 76 where we talked about how to raise your rates, improve your work life balance and increase your profit margins. Chris talks about his shift to a quote based system there and why it's so important to not have your rates on your website. But Chris, you said that previously you were falling up with 100% of your leads. That means you just follow up one time with all those leads. Or would you say you followed up multiple times or how did it work for you?

Oh, it was usually two times. So usually like somebody would request the sample if I didn't hear back after doing the sample, I'd follow up. I didn't hear back again. I'd follow up again. But I would only follow up. I didn't hear back, which I know you're going to chastise me for. And I love it when you that Lou, this sounds weird. I like being told when I'm doing something wrong and then I can improve and that's part of the reason I said yes to coast and his podcast was so you could kick my ass.

Well, okay, so if you've been listening to podcasts for a long time, you've probably heard us talk about follow ups and this is something that I religiously preach over and over and over again to our listeners, to the Facebook community, to students of mine. Like this is something that I talk about all the time and I feel like I still haven't talked about it enough because this is something that I still don't see people doing at the level that they should be doing it including you Chris and the reason is I was looking at my numbers and I've talked about my numbers in the past but I didn't realize there's two stats I want to share and this is going to be relevant to you Chris and most of our listeners and that is more than 50% of my income comes from following up at least one time.

That means if I didn't follow up at all, I would make less than half of what I make per year right now and that's like a crazy stat that thinking like we're talking over the lifetime of my career. If I just never sent a follow up with someone who was interested in working with me and requested a quote or someone that was asking rates in me online somewhere. If I just followed up nothing and I sent them a price one time and never followed up, I would have lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of income over my career. But that's just one followup. One crazier stat, and this is something that I wanted to let you know about Chris because this is relevant to you, especially in this season you're moving into now with your quote based system. About 20% of my income comes from followup six or more. So 20% of my yearly income comes from following up with someone six or more times and that's kind of the whole gist of today's episode is how many times is too many times to follow up?

Seven Times 77 that's too much.

[inaudible] 77 times. I don't know actually like I'm going to try to convince you, Chris, in this episode that you should be following up with your clients. The quotes that you get, you should be following up with them until one of two things happen. Either a, they pay you or B, they tell you they don't want to work with you. One of those two things, nothing else warrants a reason to not continually follow up. So there are people that I followed up 20 plus times over a multiyear period before I got the paid project. And I'm going to talk about my followup sequence later in this episode, but I just want that to be something that people have to start wrapping their brains around. Now

let me ask you a question Brian. Okay, yeah. What's up? So you are a well known mixed engineer in the heavier genres of music. You don't have to say which band it is, but are there bands that are listeners who are fans of heavy music have heard of that you won as a project because you followed up a bajillion times?

Yes, absolutely. Oh that's wild. And here's the thing is like when I look back on my stats, hopefully you kind of get the gist of why this is so important just on the sheer dollar amount of my income. But that's not even counting the money I earned from those clients that I got. And let me kind of explain this better cause I'm not explaining it well. When I follow up with someone multiple times over very long period of time and I win that client, I'm counting that 50% extra that I make, you know, 50% my income comes from followups. But what I'm not counting is all of the clients and leads I got from that client that I got from following up. When you start to see how this thing snowballs, you know, one client may turn into 10 or 15 or 20 other clients over the lifetime of my career. So if I wouldn't have fallen up and got that one client, I wouldn't have got those 10 1520 other clients throughout the rest of my career, which can be a substantial amount of money when my average income per project is around the $2,000 range. So you can do the math on that. 20 Projects Times $2,000 is a lot of money. So do with that what you will Chris, that's

very interesting and I joke about this a lot, that either there are pieces of your brain that are broken much to your benefit and I think the ability to not be embarrassed or to be nervous that you're going to offend somebody. It's a very American thing to be okay with that. Here's what I want to talk about. I think initially some people hear this, I guess they're probably wondering what types of follow ups are they. There's a reasons people don't

follow up this aggressively, and I use the word aggressively in a non aggressive tone here. It's like I'm not like me. I'm not like aggressively typing in all caps and these people enough follow up. There's a few reasons that people don't follow up to this level and it could be a combination of these three reasons. One of the reasons is people feel like they're bothering people when they followed this often. The second reason is they just don't know what to say when they follow up this often. And the third reason is they are technical logically incapable of consistently following up. Meaning, there's just don't know how to follow up with that many leads because I'm juggling hundreds of leads. So it's without a CRM, which we'll talk about. It's impossible. And even with a CRM in your case, Chris, it's really hard to keep up with the amount of leads that you have. So those are the three main reasons is a technology reason. It's a mindset, reason of just not being able to get past the fact that you are bothering them. And then the third is just a knowledge reason, a ignorance reason. You just don't know what to say in this scenario. So what would you say your biggest reason for not following up until they give you a yes or a no?

It's technological, hands down. I mean maybe it would be unwise to reveal this, but like there's 50,000 people that have reached out over the years. Curious about working with me. You know, obviously a much smaller percentage of those ended up hiring me. But it's just so many people. There's just so much to sort through of like, well, this particular client didn't speak English and that was problematic. And made their project take a long time so maybe I shouldn't follow up with them, but then this other client was awesome and was my favorite client ever and maybe I should be following up with them. I have committed the normal Chris grandson of making it too complicated, which is what I almost always do.

I want to talk on that. This is just as free flow in here, like ways that I would have combat at that issue, but I will say this is probably not the issue of most of our audience simply because most of our audience does not have 50,000 leads flowing through their system. There might be a few listeners who will get a lot of value out of this, but I'd say most people are, this is not the main issue. I would say regardless, one of the best things you can do is try to segment those audiences into broad categories and you can do this in close.io with those. We're actually, we should probably cut the section James, but I'm going to tell you Chris, because I think this is valuable to you. Creating those smart views in clothes that segment them on criteria and then being able to send them broadcasts based on that criteria. So totally. Yeah, I've worked on that. So like somebody you worked with a year later you follow up and see if they're ready to do the next project. That kind of stuff. Like big broad strokes. So yeah, it's complicated but that's basically what I would do is just try to segment into a few different categories and I feel like it's too complicated for like trying to flesh out to a large audience.

Yeah. Well one of the things I struggle with when I'm doing followups is trying to figure out what to say. You don't want to be like, hi, this is Chris Graham. Just wanted to follow up on the project you had inquired about with me. Like you don't want to be too robotic about it. And like that drives me nuts. I am sensitive to that stuff. I really want people to feel heard and valued. And and know that I want to work with them and I want a relationship with them. Yeah, but it gets tough when there's so many leads where it's like, oh, is a 15 year old kid from Jacksonville, Florida that reached out? That's never going to hire me. But once you know, whatever free advice or something like that.

Real quick, before we get into the actual like tactical sending these specific emails at these specific intervals, you have a lead qualification problem. Yes, I do. You either have a qualified leader, an unqualified lead, and there's ways, especially with all the forms you use in the quote forms, there's ways to, if you get too many leads, and this is kind of a good learning moment for our listeners, if you get any amount of leads, especially a large volume of leads, you don't want to waste your time necessarily on what's called an unqualified lead and then qualified lead is just someone like you just said, a 15 year old who doesn't speak English, who is never going to hire you at the rates that you charge. Any correspondence you give to that person is a waste of time. It's a waste of his time and it's a waste of your time. So the better you get at weeding those out, the better you are. And that's where you get into segmentation. That's a really advanced topic and there's things you can do to try to find ways to qualify people before they contact you.

Segmentation would be like if somebody signed up to your email list and you sold men's belts and you were like, well, uh, this part of my list is men in this part is women. So I'm going to segment them and send them different emails or you know, whatever. Like you would take a trait and have it as this part of my list has this trait, which means I'm going to send them this information and this part of my list doesn't have that trait.

Yeah. But just to simplify things, even if you never segmented and qualified or unqualified your leads, if you just put him into a drip email sequence of some sort or an manual email sequence in most people's cases because they're not going to have the volume that you have of people, you're sending them emails that are just dripped out. If they're unqualified, they're going to just go through the funnel and go out the other side and not going to pay you. If they are qualified, they will naturally either respond or pay you in some way, shape or form, but the amount of money you're leaving on the table, Chris, by not having a long followup sequence is actually mind boggling. But let's talk about how I follow up and you can give me your input on how you would change that because again, our business models are so different.

It's probably good for our audience to hear two different angles on how they would follow up. But my first email and the way I work is this. I get a quote request. I will send them a reply back with my rates in it along with a link to a proposal and that proposals and better proposals. That's the proposal software I use and if you want my proposal template and just go to better proposals.studio and it actually has my proposal template that I use for all my projects and this is amazing because it maps out everything that's included. Everything that's not included. It's like got very pretty graphics and visuals and it's like even gives them a place to sign and you can even take the deposit right in there and this just makes you look way more professional. If I have someone like Chris Graham who's just sending out a text base quote and it's just texted like here's what it includes, here's what it doesn't include and not to throw you into bus grace, but this is like when 99% of audio engineers use is just an email block of text going over like the quote of what the project concludes.

If even that, sometimes you just send a price and that's it. If they're going against that versus my proposal, my high class proposal, then I'm almost always going to win the project over that. Or at least I can justify my price tag versus someone else because I have this beautiful proposal. So that's just one little quick tip, but what I do is my first followup on day one is I will send the email one day later I will follow up and just make sure that they got my proposal and we'll just send an email, say, hey, following up, just make sure you got the proposal and wanting to know if you had any questions about it. That's literally just one day after I send them a proposal and send them the quote. The thing is I don't really care. I know if they opened the proposal or not.

I just need a reason. I'm trying to get them to spur some sort of reply at that point. So that's one day after the initial quote. Any questions about that? Chris? What do you do if they replied back, like how to use the, I can do this in close to some degree, but let's say there's a logic tree that happens here and this for the people listening right now, close.com now actually not.io close.com is a CRM that I used to use. And then I recently switched to pipe drive and Chris Steele uses close, but it's a little more expensive for audience. So unless you're doing this full time close, it's probably not the best option for you. But just so people are wondering what the heck that is, go to [inaudible] dot com you can kind of see that. Yeah, so the problem that I have is that there's logic trees.

So you send them a quote and then they either reply or don't reply. Yes. So you're thinking through an automation standpoint? I am not. I do everything manually. So what I do is when I send a quote to somebody in my CRM, I manually reply with a quote. I use a template and then I manually send or have my assistant send. It depends on which system I have set up, send up better proposals template, and then I put a reminder in pipe drive to follow up in one day. And so the next day or however many days I set that reminder for that lead goes to the top of my queue and I will reply to them if they haven't replied back, if they reply anytime before my followup reminder comes up, they will come into the top of my queue because they are in my inbox.

So that's how I work is very manually. Other reminders. Okay. Yeah, yeah, Yep. That's how I segment things. So after the initial followup, assuming they haven't replied yet because we're talking about and aggressive reply on people that have ghosted you. That's the biggest thing is people cannot physically make themselves follow up with someone eight 10 1520 times from someone that hasn't really replied to anything. In most cases, you're going to get some sort of reply and you can kind of gauge the interest of that person and kind of go from there. But I'm just going over what I would do if I got no replies back from someone. So day three is when I send the next follow up and this is where I'm just offering to jump on a call to answer any questions. So this is where I give my phone number. I'm trying to get them on a phone call because if I can get him a phone call just like you, Chris, I can close them.

And this is just another excuse to send another touch point. And just for everyone that is listening right now, one of the biggest reasons to have this many followups is it keeps you top of mind. Even if they don't reply to your email, hey eat. If they don't open your email, just seeing your name in their inbox, the thing, oh I need to get back to that dude, you're just staying top of mind. Because if you are not top of mind when they are ready to put out money on a project, if you're not one of the top people in their mind at that time, you will never get the paid project. And so this reminds me, I mentioned my friend Mike, the powers last episode. He's the guy, I always think when we record episodes starting out like what Micah like this and that. That was

kinda how I structured everything I was saying. I was talking to myself from 15 years ago and Micah and Micah blew my mind. This is about a year and a half ago. He said, yeah, there's this guy Billy Decker, and Billy Decker says that people hire for two reasons. They like you and you're the last person they thought of the does the thing that you do. Yeah. And that like blew my mind. It was like, oh my gosh, that's so true. People really do. We've kind of got a little mini series going on of like wars that we talk about in our industry. You know, there's the loudness war, there's the sustainability war, and I would add to this, there's a top of mind war. If you and five guys are sort of battling and out for a client, the client's probably going to go with the person. That's the most top of mind. Yes,

I agree. So let's move on day 10 this is my next follow up and this is where at this point it's been 10 days since I sent the initial proposal and I'm just trying to find out if they have any sort of updates on the project. And I'm not going to read my entire template here, but it's all I'm trying to do is is there any updates on the project that I needed to know about and are they still looking for somebody to mix the project or whatever service you offer. So just basically two things I'm trying to find out about. And at this point I'll offer guidance or help or any sort of offer to answer questions. This is just a good point to add something to the email to where you are showing that you are willing to help.

Gotcha. So let's say, I think I know the answer to this question. So let's say you send out a proposal and this band is really on top of it and they're like, oh, thank you so much for your proposal. We'll consider it. We're going to make a decision in two months. So in a CRM you can put a task and basically say, Hey, remind me in two months to do this. Would you just put a reminder in there and say, Hey, remind me to follow up with them on Xyz date, and they would skip all the emails that you've talked about or how would you do that?

Yes and no. I sure as shit wouldn't wait the two months.

That's what losers do. I love you, man.

Do is at the halfway point between now and then. I would, at the very least, I would check in with them and see how the project's coming along because most likely they're in some sort of, they're either writing the music or they're recording right now or they're, you know, getting mixes back. If you're a mastering engineer, they're doing something so you're just checking in to see how the project goes. That's at a bare minimum. If I really want the project, I'll also have some resources that I've saved. We actually in the profitable producer course and the community, we actually have a document that just a bunch of resources that are relevant to artists at different stages in the process. So depending on what they're doing, whether they're writing right now or between albums even and they're touring right now, there's just different resources that are relevant at that time, so I'll try to send them some helpful stuff.

It's not stuff I wrote or anything or any of my community wrote. It's just helpful articles that are out there like CD baby, you know all these logs that are out there that are doing content marketing for good reason. There's a lot of good content out there, so I would just share that with my lead and just say, Hey, I know you guys are in the mixing process right now and I thought this might be helpful so you can do x, y, and Z and hope they'll project's going well, you know, that kind of stuff. There's a lot because no one else is doing it. No one else is offering to add any amount of value during that waiting period. You're the only one doing it, so that gives you a massive advantage when it comes time to actually this to go give her thing, we go back to the book, they'll go give her.

Everyone else is just waiting that two month period to hear back and hope that they got the project. Meanwhile, you're out there trying to actually add value to the people, no strings attached and when it comes time to hire, you've got, for lack of a better term, you got some Brownie points. I love that man, and so I'll change the amount of days between these or the order of these emails. I'll change these up drastically depending on my replies back in the situation they're in and maybe what date they put on their desired mixing dates. All of this is flexible and fluid and that's what makes it so powerful is I don't have to do this one size fits all thing where I'm having to automate every potential scenario. So let's move on to day 17 my next followup, this is followup for, I think if I'm counting, and this is where I'm just seeing if they're still looking for someone to mix their project now, I usually don't get to this email this soon.

If they put their mixing project like six months down the road, they're looking at it mixing. Obviously I wouldn't send this on day 17. I might space it out a little further than that, but I will always send in this order. I'll put somewhere in there. Are you still looking for someone that makes this project? All of us. I'll put more flowery language on that, but uh, this is a good chance where you're just trying to see if they've picked somebody at this point because if they pick someone that's a no and then you can stop following up. They don't have to directly tell you no, but they can tell you that they found someone else and that's as good as a no. And so you're good to go there.

I would say in those situations, what I always do is if a band is on the ball or an artist on the ball and sends me that email that says, hey, just want to let you know, we ended up going with somebody else. What always do is back. Oh, thank you so much for letting me know. Do you mind if I ask who it was? I asked that every time. Oh yeah. Always asked that. Yeah. And so that's a really interesting piece of information. One, because it's what a good person would do. Not to like get judgey here, but like showing that amount of care even after you have nothing to gain, still allows you to win respect with them because they know like, hey, like this person actually cared about our record being cool and they have nothing to gain at this point. I like that.

It makes me feel a lot better. It's easy to get in like transactional mode when you're running a business like this and it's like, give me money for my thing. Tell me I'm good at my thing. Like it's really easy to just get obsessed with that. And I think when you do something like be kind to them instead of like not even replying, you could just completely ignore the email if you lost it. But you've got to keep in mind like they're probably going to do another record if it's a band band members are probably gonna need to do other records.

Only one up you on what you're saying there is, there's a good reason to ask who is mixing the record or who's mastering the record and that is because a lot of times you can reach directly out to those guys and start the conversation about the record with that person and that's just a contact you have in the industry. So what tends to happen, and this has happened to me, is I reach out to another mixing engineer and say, Hey, I was talking to this band. They said you're mixing the project stuck to hear how it turns out and that a dialogue. And a lot of times that dialogue leads to some sort of friendship or professional relationship into where you're referring work to each other. Because sometimes your work, your calendar gets full and you need to send your lead somewhere and sometimes they're counting, it gets full and they need just in their lead somewhere and that's a good synergistic relationship.

Another thing you can do and if you really want that client, the potential client, even if they say no to you and they're working with someone else, just set another followup reminder after the release is done. After the mixing project, the mastering projects done and just asked them how did it all turn out? I'd love to hear it whenever it's done and that just shows that you're genuinely interested in the band if in fact you are, and that keeps the conversation going because again, six, eight, 12 months down the road, if they're not happy with how it turned out and they want to work with someone else, you want to be the person that's still talking to them at the end of that rope. There's different places these follow up sequences can spin off to like if at this point they tell me they're working with someone else, I'm going to find out who that person was.

I want to reach out to that person, I'm going to find out when the release date is or I can kind of come up with a release state based on where they are in the process and I will follow up with them and then I'll follow up six months, eight months later when I think they're ready to start working on their next project. And I want to be in the conversation when that next project comes up. I want to be part of the people that they're considering to hire on the next project. And you know what? Sometimes they get those projects. So there's a lot of ways this can go and it's not just this rigid followup sequence. This is just what I'm talking about when no one's replying at all.

Well, I think there's a heartbreaking reality to this and it's that I would say that most bands are haunted by feelings of inadequacy. Most artists, that record was never good enough. It never sounded the way they really wished it had. And the band is always going to be thinking about what they can do to elevate next time around. And it might just be as simple as finding someone they had better chemistry with, but there is an element of just acknowledging that artists, you're never going to be what you wish you were and in that scenario, if you're continuing to follow up, they're going to do another project. Most artists don't pick one engineer and stick within the rest of their lives. It can be this weird thing. I know for us as engineers when like you see a band you've worked with in the past release the new record, but you didn't hear anything about it.

It's because that person was listening to the podcast and they were following up and keeping the relationship alive.

There you go, but it can be this like gut wrenching thing I want to address with us of it's not something we should take personally. There's so many issues at play there. In my world. It could be like, well, they worked with this producer who always uses the same mastering engineer or I was out of their budget on this go around, or Oh, this was something that they for some reason wanted to do 100% themselves and they did it themselves. There's so many different reasons and I think it's important for us to separate taking it personally when they hire somebody else or taking it personally when they don't respond or taking it personally. This happens to me all the time. I'll send the record to a band and I won't hear back at all like I'll finish. It's paid, everything's done. And they got the record and immediately flipped into release mode.

Yup. And totally forgot like, oh, I never even thanked Chris or I never even like technically approved it. Like I'll just be like, oh, they released the record. Oh I hope hope is a masters. I said, and like you don't know. And it's the weirdest thing because there's a couple issues going on there. One. It could be they just got into release mode or two, they could be really uncomfortable with confrontation. This I think applies. I do follow up all the time after I've done a project. If I don't hear back from an artist, I definitely follow up with them and I use my CRM to help remind me to do that and every once in a while I'll find a client. It was like, oh well we really didn't like that song that you mastered for us. We didn't like what you did. Oh I wish you would've told me what 100% would have been over backwards to fix it.

And sometimes it'll be like, oh well you know you, there was something off in the mix or there was something off, you know, in the editing of the song and they were too embarrassed or whatever. To keep that dialogue going I think is so important to just be like, Hey, I worked with you, the record's done and I got nothing to do with you anymore. Like just sort of moving on with your life is not, I think the wake, if you look behind a speed boat wake is the waves behind the boat and in our careers we all leave awake and awake that I want to leave is not this like there's your record poos amount. Like you want to maintain a relationship because it's the right thing to do and it's also gonna help your business grow and it's gonna help you win future clients as well.

Well said. I do want to add that this whole followup conversation is not just for following up with leads. Following up with clients is a very important part of the process too and that's too in depth for me to really go down like a specific followup strategy for your clients as well. But I do want to save that. If you don't follow up with your clients, they may not come back to you. And a huge part of any professional audio engineers income is going to be repeat clients.

Yes. Amen to that.

Yeah. So don't just get distracted with the following up of these leads that you've never worked with. Also be following up with your clients, making sure you're taking care of them, making sure you're staying in touch and if anything else, at least be following up with them six to eight to 12 months down the road when they're ready to work on that next record because that's what you need to be top of mind again. So let's move on. I've got a couple more followups here. Day 45 this, so this is 45 days after I've sent the proposal. They haven't applied to anything. This is just the email that I say is just my final followup before marking the project as lost in my CRM. I phrased a little differently now, but I basically try to put some sort of scarcity into the email so that it's either a, I'm moving on on this project as a studio and I'm not going to give it any more attention and I don't say that, but I'm basically saying that or they can reply and let me know if they're interested or not interested.

I'm just not going to keep this open on my books right now. I don't have my stats with me because I don't have close.io anymore, but the last I checked, it was like 40% reply rate on this email. So these are people that haven't replied at all to this point and then 40% of them are applying on this email and great, not all of them are saying yes. Some of them are saying, hey, we're still working on certain things, or hey, we need a little more time on this. Or Hey, we already found somebody, but you never know where you're going to get. If you add some sort of scarcity, some sort of like I'm marking it as lost, or this quote is no longer valid after this many days or something to get some sort of reply back. A lot of times you will not get a reply back until you put your line in the sand and say, this is when it ends or this is when something is over.

And if you do not reply, then we are done here. And please don't word it like that. My Gosh. That's essentially what it is. So Day 45 is my scarcity follow up. That's where I usually get most of my replies from people that have ghosted me to this point. And then day 60 I need to do that. Yeah, you need to have a scarcity play. They're always have a timeline on your quotes. By the way, any proposal or quote you send out, put it. This is valid for 60 days because they sixties when I send the final follow up and it's not really a follow up, but as a follow up, so put a 60 day time limit on it. Okay. I'm going to do that. Yeah, because the last thing you want is someone to come back to you two years later with a quote from two years ago at your old rates and say, Hey, I'm ready now.

It's just not how it works. So let me get two 60 this is like the sixth I think follow up. I don't remember what number we're at now but this isn't really an quote official followup but I'm still being top of mind and I'm just letting them know that I marked their project is lost or I closed the proposal and so that if they need to get another quote from me let me know and I'm happy to send another quote. But this school is no longer valid. Basically telling them that the window is closed. That's I think six followups in 60 days. Just a really easy thing to implement based on this framework and from that point on I still follow up once every six months on people that have completely ghosted and I would just touch base with them just to follow up, see how things are going.

I have a few like maybe a year, year and a half's worth of follow up templates, study, use in different scenarios, different situations, but you can keep that thing going pretty longterm and you would be surprised how many people finally follow up like a year, a year and a half later ready to book with you. That never replied to any email. This is where we get to the meat of that third thing that we talked about. We talked about the technical issues that you are having. That's one reason people don't follow up this aggressively. We've talked about not knowing what to say in the emails, which is what I just talked about, but the third thing is not wanting to bother people. This is one of the biggest misconceptions that I see when it comes to follow ups that people feel like they're bothering them when they follow up this aggressively and I have never in my life gotten a single anger reapply from people after 20 plus followups with one specific person.

20 plus follows. I've never gotten an angry reply. I've only gotten thank yous from people and if you think about the process that people are going through, there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of things that people have to do. There's a lot of stuff that has to get done before they are ready to hire you and life can happen. Life can get in the way and it's keeping them from doing the thing that they're trying to do. It's keeping them from reaching their goal. And your emails are a little kick in the ass for them, a little polite kick in the ass to keep pushing them towards their goal. And so when they see that email, it's like, oh crap, now I got to finally fall for that graphic designer. We can get these things ready and I gotta get the mixing engineer done.

So I'll get these things ready for mastering and I need to fall for that guy because this is not ready yet. And Man, these songs aren't finished yet, so we're going to keep writing these. And you're just pushing them along with every little email, every month, every two months, every three months, every six months. And eventually they're going to hit a point, life's back on track, not to get dark, but maybe the divorce is finalized and maybe they're not sick anymore. They're over their medical issue they had. And maybe the band finally found that member they were looking for, or the band reformed into another group and they're ready to book now. You just have no idea. Or maybe they got married in their back from the honeymoon. You have no idea what's going on in their lives and for you to keep showing up in their inbox month after month or every few months is just that polite little kick in the ass to finally get them to move forward on that thing that they want to get done. And when they finally move forward, they will always thank you for being there and, and here's the biggest thing, Chris, I'm the only one emailing him

at this point.

No one else that they contacted six, eight, 12 months ago is still talking to them. I'm the only one. So when they're ready to

book, I'm going to get the job every single time. I like you questions Chris? A couple of comments. There's a maturity to that. I keep thinking about Chris Graham 15 years ago,

1616 years ago, man, we changed that. You had a birthday recently. We no longer say 15 years ago, it's now 16 people have to deal with that. You have to remember that.

So this idea of selfishness and just being obsessed with like my story. My business, my growth, my projects, and I think what happens is a lot of people fixate on that. I know I have. I know I struggle with that and that's one of the biggest reasons I think that I don't follow up as much as I should. I think most people don't follow up is that they're nervous that they might not be the hero in the story and that somebody else will. Well, uh, thanks for your followup, but we ended up hiring your friend Steve instead.

Again, I love those emails because if you reframe the issue, you now have a reason to contact this other guy. I've met so many awesome engineers who I still talk to today by reaching out when I lost the project to them is awesome and a number of those have turned into additional paid projects due to referrals.

Incredible. Man, I need to chew on this stuff a little bit more. I think actionables for me, and I know that's not the point of the podcast, right? This is for you guys? Not For me, but for me I think I need to be better about segmenting my customers into different groups that I'm following up with and making sure that I am getting over my fomo here and you know, if it's something that I haven't talked to in five years, I should probably move on. Having so many people that have signed up over the years has overwhelmed me in a sense where I haven't done this stuff as well as I could and I think if I just went in and was like, I'm going to remove 30,000 people that reached out long a long, long time ago.

I don't know if I do that. I'll tell you right now, if you wanted to make $10,000 right now, I would send an email to any client that you haven't contacted in over 12 months and ask them if they're working on any new music right now. That's all I would do. It'd be a short email and you'll get thousands of replies back or at least hundreds of replies back from people who are working on new music and that's now a conversation you started with a potential lead that you already have worked with in the past.

That's true man. The great idea, man, I think is kind of comes back to this idea that you know we've talked about in the past, this golden rule thing doing to others that others doing to you. If you were going to hire someone to work on a record, if I was going to hire someone, I would hope they would treat me like Brian treats people with the followup in the interest because I know for a lot of these musicians, a lot of these artist, a lot of these bands, there's not a lot of support. It's not a lot of like

you're doing a great job belly, just keep on working on that record. There's a lot of like go get a real job

and just someone that's like interested in the final product. I have had people that I've followed up with before in the past be like, man, I'm going to finish this. Thank you so much for following up. This inspired me to finish the song.

What? Yeah, especially if a lot of your clients are self produced or self recorded artists, if that's a lot of the type of people you work with. This is especially an important thing because those people need the motivation to keep going with the project. That's true. And if it's a DIY project, that means that no one has a fire under their butts, making sure stuff's getting done. So we're not sending hateful emails to these people saying get it done. Or else you're just saying, hey, are there any updates on this project? I'd love to hear what you've got so far or whatever. Like any friendly email like that is just another reminder like, oh man, I need to get this done so I don't let Chris town.

It's true, man. I love it. This is cool. Definitely stuff that challenges me and makes me think about my own fear regarding run my business. I'm saying all these things and I'm being so open because I know so many of you guys feel the same way, that you're recognizing like there's a fear issue that's keeping you from moving forward and that that's the ultimate issue. When Brian is talking about followup, I think some of it is just like you get enough arguments about why this is such a good idea that it helps you overcome this stupid fear issue is maturity issue,

and we've talked about this on the podcast before and a lot of stuff that I've talked about today has been on the podcast before, but I would ask you if you're like, damn, these guys are repeating themselves yet again on the podcast. I would just want to make sure if you have that attitude, are you following up until you get a yes or a no and if you're not, there's a good reason we talk about stuff multiple times on the podcast because you're not doing it, so go do it. Every single person, every single lead you get, any person that asks for a price or a rate or any information that's them expressing interest in working with you, you shouldn't let them slip through the cracks. Follow up until you get a yes or a no period. That is it,

yes or no. So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. If you follow what we talked about in this episode and you're not already following up right now, I would be surprised if your income didn't double in the next 12

months, wherever you're at right now. So if you're at like a thousand dollars a year, you might get to 2000 there's probably a lot more things you could do in your business right now. Uh, like in the episodes we talk about how to get more clients for your studio, but if you're at like 10 1520 $25,000 or more per year in your studio already, this has to be something you implement right now because you are losing so much money by not following up. So end of my rant here with mission to this on the podcast before, but I am launching a new product called file pass. It's a tool that will help you collaborate with your clients. It is essentially just file sharing for recording studios and in a nutshell it lets you send high quality wave files to your clients if they can stream with no one coding.

What you upload is exactly what they stream. They can add timestamp revision requests right on the file, right in the browser or on their phones and then you optionally can either disable download so if they owe you money they can download it or you can just put a paywall up to where they have to pay before they can download and as soon as they pay, the automatically are able to download at that point. If this sounds interesting to you, we just launched a new landingPage@file.com and we have the ability right now, you can just go straight there and sign up for free trial. We're still technically an early access and we're only allowing 50 more people in right now. And in this early access stage, we actually have already filled up half those spots as at the time that I record this. But if you go right now, you can go sign up for a free trial, test it out, let me know what you think.

And this is hopefully going to be a good replacement for Dropbox or Google drive if you're using one of those two things to send files to your clients right now. And again, that's at bio pass.com that's f I, l e p a s s.com. So that's it for this episode. Tune in next week, Brighton early 6:00 AM for the next episode, the topic of which I'm not sure about yet, so you'll have to just see again, that's every Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM a new episode goes live. We do not Ms. Weeks. Thanks so much for listening to this week. And until next time, happy hustling!