How To Fix Your Stagnant Income By Breaking Through These 5 Business Plateaus

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one Oh nine.

Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple certed. I'm going to announce him very calmly so it doesn't do that stupid radio announcer voice. Chris Graham. Chris, how you doing day two buddy?

Chris: [00:00:34] good, Brian. I'm very excited to be hanging out with you.

Brian: [00:00:37] I'm pleased with that sort of response versus your normal, like, Hey, I'm good. Is better than others.

Chris: [00:00:43] Yeah. I really shouldn't. I don't even like that, but I get uncomfortable when you call me. Beautiful

Brian: [00:00:49] Well, when I hype you up, I'm trying to like, you know, pump you up for the podcast and like get you go in and like get some energy and then

Chris: [00:00:55] too much.

Brian: [00:00:56] like you short circuited your

Chris: [00:00:58] It's too much. Yeah.

Brian: [00:00:59] You literally cannot handle the amount of energy that I'm putting out there. And so you, you short circuit.

Chris: [00:01:04] don't need uppers, man.

Brian: [00:01:05] Yeah. No, you don't need uppers at all. How have you been my friend?

Chris: [00:01:08] Man, it's been an intense month. Frankly, we're rolling out a new version of bounced Butler that'll probably be out at least, or at least in our like secret experimental beta phase.

By the time this episode drops, but it's got way, way more features. Basically everything everyone has requested is going to be a feature, so.

Brian: [00:01:26] That is amazing. If you don't know what bounce Butler is, it's Chris Graham's app that essentially allows you to queue up a bunch of sessions to bounce all at once, whether you're on ProTools, Cubase logic, whatever other doll you support.

I don't know. Chris doesn't matter.

Chris: [00:01:40] Pretty much all of them by the time it drops.

Brian: [00:01:41] And then you. Can queue up these things and that way you can bounce out hundreds of songs at one time, essentially, and then it puts it into Dropbox. It texts you when you're done and you can go off and wander around the world and play video games and eat good food.

Chris: [00:01:55] Yeah. I'm pumped

Brian: [00:01:57] the short and quick pitch for your thing. But I'm glad that you're putting this new version out and I know how big of a deal it is to put a new version of an app out because,

Chris: [00:02:02] so much work.

Brian: [00:02:03] yeah, it's a lot of work that goes into that stuff.

Chris: [00:02:05] Frankly, it's been kind of weird balancing that with like the dad game, the husband game and the mastering engineer thing.

Brian: [00:02:12] I want to pick your brain about that a little bit more, but I just want to say, we haven't talked about this. I can feel like in a couple episodes, but if you go to bounce follow.com right, it's free right now.

Chris: [00:02:19] Yup. It's free for now.

Brian: [00:02:21] Yeah. So you can actually start using it to bounce down all the stems and the vocal up version of the instrumental versions and all this stuff that you have to do every week.

That takes up a ton of time.

Chris: [00:02:29] Let me shout out. I'm getting tagged in so many Instagram stories of guys that are like, I'm a new dad. I went on a walk with my dog. I had dinner with my wife while bounced, Butler bounce, all my stems.

Brian: [00:02:40] I hope they don't sound like that cause that's, that's awful.

Chris: [00:02:43] Most of them do surprisingly.

Brian: [00:02:45] Oh, okay. I'd like to imagine they're sending you videos on their walk, like, Oh my God, I can't even talk that high. Like how do you talk that high? I have to do this weird thing with my throat to even like falsetto that.

Chris: [00:02:56] dunno. I have, um, I've always had a strong falsetto.

I've always been able to talk really,

Brian: [00:03:03] Oh my God. You like clip the preamp there.

Chris: [00:03:06] probably, but I've got a built in limiter on my lovely mixed Brie from sound devices.

Brian: [00:03:10] Oh, okay. All right, and that's a gears. Let alert. Okay, so moving on, you were talking about it's been rough doing all that and bouncing family and stuff.

We talked about this way back in the day on episode 73. The struggle of running a successful studio at home with your family. Not only are you trying to run a successful studio from your home with a family, you're also trying to run and build a completely different business called bounce Butler from home with a family on top of that.

So I can see why that would be stressful for you.

Chris: [00:03:35] Yeah. Okay, so I have a banter question for you.

Brian: [00:03:39] I love that we have banter questions now as if like, you know, we're about a four minutes or so into this podcast, and. And people were like, shit, we haven't had enough banter yet. I don't even care about this episode.

I just want to know what is, what is the banter question going to be? Chris, what is it?

Chris: [00:03:55] business-related. Okay.

Brian: [00:03:57] Okay, that's good.

Chris: [00:03:58] If you could own any musical instrument or audio company, what would it be and why?

Brian: [00:04:07] I would have to say universal audio.

Chris: [00:04:09] Oh. Tell me why Brian

Brian: [00:04:12] Because here's why.

They have the hardware and software game on lock. They still sell hardware, and I'm sure those sales are declining, but they've smartly pivoted into software and they make some damn good software that I think it's smart to tie it to their hardware, which essentially locks you into using their software.

And it's a thing that some people may not like. I think it works really well and I think it's a smart business decision. If you look at the way some of the bigger companies in the world are built, it's a similar kind of thing. And like if you look at the way Apple is and the way they do their iPhone and the way they do their app store and they built a whole platform, I think universal audio is probably one of the closer ones I've seen to build the entire platform out that ties hardware and software together and keeps it in one unified ecosystem.

And I think as far as a smart business, that will be profitable longterm. That would be the one I would go with.

Chris: [00:05:01] I think I would probably, I agree with you there. There's a lot of businesses, especially in our space and audio in the recording industry that I look at and I'm like, gosh, they're making a lot of mistakes.

Brian: [00:05:14] Oh my God. Okay, so we're about to go to Nam 2020 and that'll just be, literally when this episode comes out,

Chris: [00:05:20] A month.

Brian: [00:05:21] over a month away.

Chris: [00:05:22] Yeah, you go to Nam and you look at these companies and there's, you know, we don't take, you know, sponsorship dollars. You guys know that, but when you go to Nam, it is this sort of like, you walk around and we're going to play that game.

We play it Nam each year, which is

Brian: [00:05:33] Can you tell what the hell it is? They do.

Chris: [00:05:35] yes, you'll look at their booths and be like, just at a glance, can you tell what they sell? And there are so many companies at Nam where you're like, ah,

Brian: [00:05:43] Yeah. If you walk around for about 30 seconds, you'll start spotting so many companies that are terrible at positioning and differentiation and any sort of marketing.

So yeah. So what was the company you go with?

Chris: [00:05:54] UAD to certainly is at the top of the list for me, I would probably be more into like audio or slate.

Brian: [00:06:03] Slate's a good one. I don't know why Kush though. Why Kush audio

Chris: [00:06:06] Similar model. You know, they sell a lot of plugins. It's subscription-based. They'll make you know, great products.

Brian: [00:06:12] third website is the house of kush.com.

Chris: [00:06:14] Yeah. Well, there's a lightheartedness to cush them a big fan of, we've got like a podcast crush on you, BK happy, fun time hour, which is run by the Kush guys.

Brian: [00:06:23] Oh, I didn't know that was that pocket. That's cool.

Chris: [00:06:24] Yeah, they're real smart.

Brian: [00:06:26] Yeah, it's good website.

I like this man. Did they have hardware too, or no?

Chris: [00:06:29] They make hardware too, but yet to own a company like slate or Kush, where you've got. Uh, great products, but then you also have a really reasonable subscription fee and thousands of subscribers. It would be a fun business to run because there'd be a lot of predictability in hiring new people or doing new marketing campaigns.

Yeah, those would definitely be near the top of my list, but I look at like UAD you brought up a good point. UAD some people hate UAD because you have to have their hardware to run their plugins. Some people love UAD cause their plugins are really, really, really great. I sort of love the flexibility of UAD and the like for me as a guitar player, UAD is a really, really fun for me because you just plug the freaking guitar in and then you start making really cool noises.

And save it as presets, but it feels like you're using analog, so there's not like this glitchy ProTools crash type of thing. So anyways, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. I think this was kind of a fun conversation and I know we'll talk about it a lot more when we go to Nam.

Brian: [00:07:30] Oh yeah, for sure. You and I can talk about business all damn day.

How about any kind of business?

Chris: [00:07:36] That's

Brian: [00:07:38] All right, so let's move into our topic for today.

Chris: [00:07:41] good one. Very good episode today, guys.

Brian: [00:07:43] Yeah. This is one that has affected a lot of our audience and. This is a really frustrating one to experience, and that is when your business experience plateau, it's not if it's more of a win, every single one of us, I know you have, Chris and I definitely have, and most people I've ever met who has accessible business has at least a season of stagnation or hitting a plateau, and that is where your income has risen to a point and then it takes a long time before you have any progress from that.

We're going to try to dissect today how we can get past a plateau in our businesses. At the end of the day, this is a really frustrating thing to experience. Like, I don't know about you, Chris, but if I'm putting a lot of time and effort and heart and soul into something, and then there is a massive lack of progress, I feel like I'm trying to cross a thousand mile wide river and I'm in the dead center and I don't, I don't feel like I'm making any progress away from the shore or towards the shore.

I'm just. Paddling and making no progress. I think anyone who's experienced the plateaus knows exactly what we're talking about. If you're experiencing a plateau right this second, you know how frustrating it is to put all this time, effort, and energy into your business and see no results from that.

And it's even worse when you peak and then start to decline. And so now it's not a plateau. It's a deceleration in your business, and that's even more scary and can add all sorts of doubts to what you're doing.

Chris: [00:09:04] I think the most scary plats how you can have is one where you don't have enough revenue coming in.

You're not making enough to make ends meet. But you also cannot imagine being a larger company. And I think, you know, one of the most important things, I talk about this a lot with a lot of people, that's like my favorite topic is that the point of a business is to give you the life that you want, right?

You have this idea of what you want your life to look like, and then you build a business that helps you have that. If you go the opposite of that, you build a business and then you try to fit your life in the cracks in that business. That gets real scary and really unhealthy pretty quickly. But I think the scary thing for most people as far as having the business that plateaued, that has plateaued is when you just can't even imagine it being bigger.

And I would say like the goal here, you know, if you guys to listen to our podcast for any length of time, the goal is not that you have like $1 billion a year audio company.

Brian: [00:09:58] Good luck.

Chris: [00:09:59] and even if you did, like if it's not helping you achieve your dreams and making your life look the way you want it to, what's the point?

You don't need a whole lot more than $70,000 a year in profit to be about as happy as you're going to be. You're not going to get a whole lot happier with 90,000 or with 110,000 yeah, I would say, first of all, we have to say business growth is not always the end goal. Having a quality life, being happy.

That's the goal. That's the only reason you should be like, Oh, I don't want a job. I want to build a dream business, right? You have a life that you want and you're trying to build it and make your own world here. So I don't want anyone to hear this episode and think all they care about is making your business bigger.

No, that's not all we care about. But sometimes that really helps.

Brian: [00:10:45] There's a difference between. Having a self-imposed decline in your business in order to have a better work life balance. There does come a point where you do need to level out your income, focus on other priorities, whether it is a better quality of life or more time with your family, or I guess that's one of the same for most people.

But again, the goal isn't always just to earn more for the sake of earning more. There's very little satisfaction in that. So that's kind of our caveat for this episode, but at the end of the day, most of our listeners. Are still working to build their business to a sustainable level so they can get to that $70,000 Mark that we're, I think you and I are both kind of like hinting at that same survey we read years ago.

Probably this has 70,000 is kind of like the peak of happiness. Anything after that has diminishing returns on how much money to happiness that you get. You know, it's like 70,000 is kind of the Goldilocks zone and if you are. Busting your ass to make an extra 30 grand a year, but it's ruining your life.

There's nothing to be gained from that. So keep all that in mind, but I still think most of our listeners are not at that point where they need to worry about that. If that's your problem, send us an email and we'll talk about it outside of this because that's a completely different problem to have.

Chris: [00:11:51] One of the thing I would add to that is. Even if you're at a point, you know, let's say you're making $150,000 a year in sales, but you don't necessarily want to grow much larger than that because you want to have more free time. There is still the opportunity to grow the types of clients that you're getting, the types of projects that you're getting that are more compatible with the lifestyle that you want.

Brian: [00:12:14] Oh, I didn't even think about this. There's more than one way to stagnate in a business trying to hit a plateau. You can make more money every year and you can still feel like your business has plateaued if you're not upping maybe the quality of clients you're working with or you're not enjoying things as much as you used to.

There's different types of plateaus in your business. So that's just something worth noting. So let's move on to the meat of this episode. We're going to talk about the top reasons that you have potentially hit a plateau here. So not everyone's gonna match all of these. You'll probably hit one or two of these, or maybe all of them if that's you.

There's a lot of things to address in your business, but hopefully one or two of these is something that resonates with you, is a reason. You know you've probably hit your plateau and you can start making steps to men VAT so that you can get past that plateau. So we're going to start here with one of the most obvious and.

But something we can't ignore. And that is you have tapped out your potential market. This is probably one of the most common reasons people have hit a plateau, is that they've literally tapped out the market. There is no one else that they can really get to work with and get them to pay them money.

So I think one easy way of looking at this is. With your potential network. A lot of people, when they start a new audio business, they work with all their friends. They work with maybe family, they work with it, you know, a couple of friends of friends, and then things just kind of tap out and they don't know where to go next.

And so things kind of slowed down after that and you don't know what to do next.

Chris: [00:13:32] Yeah. I mean, that is, without a doubt, the number one reason that I see new audio businesses like new music businesses going out of business. Is that they're like, yeah, things are going pretty good. You know, I'm working on the fringe show, and then I'm working with his friend Steve, and then I'm working with other friend Bob, and then a year, year and a half, two years later, they've worked with literally everyone they know, and they have yet to work with a perfect stranger.

And so they think their business is really, really healthy, but really they've plateaued and they're quickly approaching a cliff. And then all of a sudden they're not going to have any more network anymore and they didn't learn how to get strangers to hire them. Crash and burn quit.

Brian: [00:14:10] Yeah. You see this all the time.

The called MLMs are multilevel marketing companies. Things like Cutco, Mary Kay, there is Herbalife, there's Amway. There's all the usual suspects in the MLM space. But the danger there is that most people join those cause they see money signs. And then. When they join those, they immediately go to their initial network in order to try to recruit them into their business.

And that turns every single friend in person in their social circle into a dollar sign. And it can really quickly taint relationships and basically completely ostracize you from your social circle. A lot of, you've probably experienced this, you get like someone sends you a DM to buy this cream or to sign up for this thing or to like,

Chris: [00:14:51] Oh dude, oils.

Brian: [00:14:53] oil essential oil. There's tons of essential oil MLMs, but every single person in their social circle turns into a dollar sign. The relationship basically dies because you're not focused on relationship anymore. You're focused on the dollar signs, and this is the danger. You get into it as an audio person with a studio or you're doing mixing work and mastering work.

When all you focused on is converting your friends to customers, you've essentially tainted that relationship because you've now turned it from a friendship. To something where there's money attached to it. And that can really taint your view of how you treat your friends if you're not careful. So it's really important that a, you don't let that happen.

And B, you learn to sell your services to strangers that don't know you because those are the people that a, it's the largest market.

Chris: [00:15:31] Yeah.

Brian: [00:15:33] most people don't know you. And B, if you burn bridges with your social circle, it makes everything else a case. Selling the strangers and getting out of this plateau, it makes everything else infinitely more difficult.

So this is a really important point to drive home, that if you've tapped out your network or you only relying on your network, your social circle, your close friends and family for work, that can get ugly really fast if you let it. So make sure you maintain relationship instead of going for the dollar signs, the quick, easy cash.

Chris: [00:15:58] Totally man. Going just after your network is not just a dead end road. It's a dead end road. That ends in a cliff. You end with no more customers and no more friends.

Brian: [00:16:08] that's a dark

Chris: [00:16:08] F that noise. If you are on that path, get off it. Get out of your comfort zone and learn how to talk to strangers.

Brian: [00:16:15] Another way of looking at this is maybe you are in a niche size that is not going to really scale past where you're at. A bad example would be like if I went into mixing polka music or yodeling music, is that a thing? Is that that's probably a niche somewhere. It's not a very big market size. I don't think you could really have a full time career and.

My area or really any area mixing polka songs for a living. Prove me wrong. Do you have an argument for that, Chris?

Chris: [00:16:42] No. Well, let, let, let me

Brian: [00:16:48] example,

Chris: [00:16:48] devil's advocate. If you live in, say. Poland aware. Apparently Polk is popular. I don't even know where is polka popular. It's funny. From what I noticed, I don't know anything about poker.

But it's popular in Poland and like South America. And it's funny, like my grandma, God bless her heart, Irene Graham, she's so great. She's 90 something. I think she's 96 and I keep losing count, but she's hilarious and super inappropriate and like, you know, fart jokes and stuff like that. And she's wonderful.

When she was a young woman, much to her parents' chagrin, she spent all the money she had saved. On an accordion, which she still has. It's like a top of the line. Amazing accordion. The story leads absolutely nowhere, but we have a lot of Polish heritage on my dad's side of the family. Yeah. If you're in a situation where there were a lot of local polka bands, it might work, but there's just, it's not a big niche.

Brian: [00:17:44] That's really the point. If you're going to choose a niche or try to specialize in a niche, you gotta make sure it is large enough for you to earn what you need to earn because eventually you're going to tap that out. I can't believe I've earned six figures a year. Mixing metal music. Like to me, that seems like a niche that is too small to sustain multiple mixing engineers at a high level, and yet somehow it works.

There's other genres that if you niche down to a sub genre, so you only do bro country, which actually, that's probably a huge niche, but you know what I'm saying? You start sub niching down too far. You're going to hit a market that is too small to sustain you, so make sure you're assessing what niche you're a part of and if you need to pivot out of that to something larger.

Chris: [00:18:27] There is like a Goldilocks element of niching down. You don't want one that's too big. You don't want one that's too small. You want one that's just right.

Brian: [00:18:35] Yeah, exactly. And then you kind of alluded to this a second ago, if you're in the right place, maybe that niches larger. And by the way, Polk was from Czech Republic, I just Googled it.

So it's a check origin

Chris: [00:18:45] Thanks for checking that for us. Brian.

Brian: [00:18:49] that. Okay, so let's move on to the third potential tapped out market is your local market. This is similar to the local network. are your friends and family thing. It's similar to than its size thing. If you are only focused on local bands or local artists in your area and you're in the wrong area, or you're focused on a specific niche and an area that doesn't have that, and it's one of those examples being, if you're trying to do.

Polka music and Reno, Nevada, probably not going to do well there if you're trying to do country music in Nashville, Tennessee, that's a good city. So your local stuff is good and it's a good niche. Great. And so again, your location does matter. I've seen people that are trying to make this work in a small city, and.

Not doing this online, they're just doing local bands in a small city. There's no way you're going to get it past a plateau. Your market size is not large enough. There's not enough people that could potentially even be at the top of your funnel to make a significant impact to the bottom of your funnel.

So this is like hard truth talk from Chris and Brian. It may be time to move or maybe time to go online if your location is bad.

Chris: [00:19:55] yeah. There is an element of like jumping the chasm here. You know, where you have to figure out. Okay. I've only been getting local clients. I've spent five minutes thinking about what next year's going to look like, and I know I've pretty much worked with almost every band except that one band that I don't really want to work with, but maybe I will often run into clients.

At some point you have to decide, I'm going to learn a new skill and I'm going to start marketing myself outside of this. Instead of just assuming like the, if you build it, they will come. Things going to happen. The oldest, keep working with local brands, and then eventually regional brands are harming their national bands and then international bands.

And that's what I'm gonna marry a supermodel. Like, that's not, you know, that's not a business plan.

Brian: [00:20:36] Yeah. All right, so move on to our next point here. That's one of the reasons right there. You've tapped out your potential market. The first reason why you have hit a plateau in your business. A second potential reason why you have hit a plateau in your business is that you stopped learning new stuff.

You're stuck in a rut. And I felt like I was kinda there over the summer or fall this year where I just felt like I wasn't making progress. And. I realized that I had stopped applying new things to my business. I was kind of like reading the same types of books, and so it's not necessarily that you just stopped all education.

That's the easy obvious answer here. What could be happening is that you aren't actually taking any new sort of information in. You're kind of like recycling information or listening to the same podcasts and not actually implementing anything.

Chris: [00:21:19] Love this rant time. Some of you are hearing Brian say this and you're thinking like, Lord, in new stuff, I graduated high school but cool a long time ago.

I don't need to learn anything. Let me just.

Brian: [00:21:32] Did you say high school?

Chris: [00:21:34] Yeah. I was trying to be funny. It might've worked. Some people might've left.

Brian: [00:21:37] was like, what? I tried for so long to figure out what it was you just said and realized, Oh, he was just saying a redneck high school word. Okay.

Chris: [00:21:44] Yeah. When I got, when I got my diploma. Huh?

Brian: [00:21:47] No, no, you're done. You're done.

Chris: [00:21:48] The big thing here, like there's a lie in our country, the lie is that you stop being educated at a certain point you're like, Oh, I know enough stuff. Successful people continue to self educate period in every industry throughout the entire history of the world.

This anti self education thing, that's one of the biggest reasons that you could plateau is that you've stopped learning new stuff, is that you haven't owned that you are responsible for your education, nobody else. And that's part of the problem with our school system, at least here in the United States, is that we are trained from a young age that our education is someone else's problem.

Brian: [00:22:24] In that it's a bad thing too, cause no one enjoys being educated at school.

Chris: [00:22:28] Right. And the reason they don't enjoy it, cause they're not teaching you the stuff you want to learn. But when you self-educate you can learn whatever the heck you want. You want to learn how to make traps in the woods with sticks and rope, which I have.

I highly recommend the book, the SAS survival manual. It's the number one selling survival manual of all time. And it is fascinating. You have that. Oh

Brian: [00:22:46] I have it.

Chris: [00:22:46] God. It's just so good.

Brian: [00:22:48] I had a weird moment where I was like, well, if the world ends and the Internet's gone and I can't Google shit, what books do I need?

And I ordered a bunch of

Chris: [00:22:57] SAS survival manual. Yes. There's a trap in there where they teach you how to build a bow and arrow that's like braced against a tree with a trip line and like if a deer walks by, the bow shoots the deer and I was like, Oh man, that's awesome. I want to build that so bad.

Brian: [00:23:13] Or the person.

Chris: [00:23:14] Or the person. Yeah,

Brian: [00:23:15] Yeah. And then you're charged for

Chris: [00:23:16] exactly. I wasn't there, I promise. I just built a system. It didn't for me.

Brian: [00:23:20] Again, back to this, you stop learning new stuff, so you're stuck in a rut. You hit a plateau, and if you are in this place, your audio skills have stagnated, your marketing skills has stagnated, and potentially your social skills have stagnated.

Chris: [00:23:34] Yeah. There is an arms race in our industry and almost every other one, and that arms race is self-education and he or she, who does it the best and applies it. We'll win the end period. Like aside from like winning the lottery, like some ridiculously random lucky break, whoever self educates the most wins.

We're beginning to see this now. We will only see more of it.

Brian: [00:24:00] This is all compounding. Everything you learn is going to build and build and build and bill, and so the longer you wait to take this seriously, the further behind you're going to be from the person next door who's taking this?

Absolutely. Seriously.

Chris: [00:24:11] Yeah, and this is really important for, you know, for guys like me, I'm 37.

Brian: [00:24:15] Oh, you're so old. Ugh.

Chris: [00:24:16] I'm so old, but if you are in sort of my age bracket or greater, guess what? The people younger than us have grown up in a self-education culture. They are by their very nature self educators.

My wife used to teach high school and she loves to tell the story about like she would overhear students saying like, Aw man, I didn't really understand today's math lesson. And then it could be like, Oh dude, just go on YouTube. There's like a five minute video. You'll understand it. I guarantee it.

It makes way more sense than mrs These are the kids that are coming up. They will learn so much more than you will because it's all they've ever known. You've got to start, man. There is an arms race and it's the self-education race man.

Brian: [00:24:55] I love how I didn't really grasp anything you just said because you use such a bizarre name that my brain stuck on.

Mrs Apple.

Chris: [00:25:03] It's from the Simpsons. Mrs. curb APO was Bart's. It's Burt's teacher.

Brian: [00:25:07] I'm more like a family guy. South park person. I never really enjoyed the Simpsons, but you can, you older P, you're almost a boomer. I know. So it's like you're,

Chris: [00:25:15] No, I'm not. I'm almost gen X. I think genX is like 39 and older.

Brian: [00:25:21] It's like a month after you or something. Anyways, let's move on to this. I'm stagnant in some other areas though. Back to the stagnation thing or the plateau, I've had a massive plateau in my fitness journey as far as weightlifting. This is the reason right here I stop learning new stuff about weightlifting, about fitness, about routines, like I stopped taking this part of my life seriously and.

I've looked back. Anytime I've hit a plateau in my fitness journey, it's because of this exact reason. And when I start reading about it or listening to podcast about health or whatever, that part of my area significantly improves and I get past that plateau. My business has not really hit one of these in a while.

I hit a little bit of one. It was more of like, I felt like I was stagnant more than I was actually in my business. And so I went out and bought a $2,000 course and that, that fixed that problem cause I had a ton of stuff now to implement from someone that I highly trusted and highly respect. And.

Learning to implement what I learned in that course helped me get out of that rut that I felt that I was in due to not really taking on any new major information in a long time. So stop learning new stuff. Try something crazy. Go buy a $2,000 course from somebody or a $10 book that's from someone that you really trust.

Chris: [00:26:27] Well, definitely in regards to buying things that help us improve. We walk the walk there, Brian, and I do. Uh, we both spend a lot of money on stuff to improve ourselves and unstuffed to make ourselves more efficient. I spend hundreds of dollars a month on software to make me be able to work a little bit faster.

Brian: [00:26:44] Seriously. I think the last time I did my subscription stuff, it was over a grand. And when you put into what we're paying for software for file pass, it is well past a thousand dollars a month for software subscriptions to make our businesses run better.

Chris: [00:26:56] Yeah. I mean, all that stuff is worth it because it is, if it makes you a little bit more efficient, that's a little bit more time and a little bit higher IQ that you have.

Brian: [00:27:03] this is actually a little, we jumped the gun here a little bit. This is not really aligned with learning new stuff. This is actually in line with our next point, which is the third reason you may have hit a plateau is you don't work on your business instead of for your business. And one of those things is.

Software, like we just talked about, building out systems in your business and improve things, even if it's marginally, there's a longterm impact of that. You want to talk about this, Chris, cause you're really the systems expert in this relationship here. And if you've hit a plateau in your business, which Chris you've talked about in episode two of the podcast, we talk about it where you hit a massive plateau in your business that was limited on you.

You are the bottleneck in your business and systems are really the solution to this.

Chris: [00:27:43] Yeah. So my story is, you know, I had been producing and I'm doing master on the side, and the demand for mastering had had dramatically spiked. Customer satisfaction was way higher when I mastered a project than anything else I did.

So I decided to go full time as a mastering engineer. Which went great. However, uh, about a year in two years in, I plateaued at about $40,000 I just couldn't break $40,000 a year, and the issue there was systems. There was just too much damn work to do for me to be able to make. $40,000 revenue, not profit at the time.

And so I started scheduling time to work on my business, not for it. It was Wednesday for two hours in the afternoon. It was like one o'clock to four o'clock I think, or something. There's no, it's three to five and I write about this in the book, the E myth revisited. Tim Ferris had kind of mentioned it in the four hour work week, and I started working on my business for a few hours each week.

And the biggest thing I started doing was working on systems. So that it wasn't like, Hey, you need to relabel all these files that people downloaded because you'll mess up whose files, who are all you need to figure out how to render AKA bounce a whole bunch of files at the end of the day, once you're done mastering, like there was just so much stuff that needed work.

When I started setting aside time to work on my business instead of for it, each one of those investments in either building out a marketing system. A sales system or a service system? Let me tell me. Say that again. I spent time working either on a marketing system, a sales system, or a service system, depending on what area of my business was struggling the most.

That's how I was able to grow my business. I started with service systems. I had too much demand for my services and I couldn't keep up and I was having like little mini panic attacks. And so I started building systems that allowed me to service more people at a higher level of quality that dramatically changed my life.

And it made me like my customers again. You know, this is like 10 years ago, I was sick of them. I was like, ah, gosh, they want me to do something. No, leave me alone, but still give me some money. And when I started building out these service systems, I was able to provide more services to more people for less time.

Brian: [00:29:52] And that broke through your plateau, your $40,000 a year plateau.

Chris: [00:29:55] Yeah. There's two other systems. Their sales and marketing, your sales systems. We talk about this all the time on the podcast. A CRM is probably the best single sales system that you can have,

Brian: [00:30:06] Pause real quick for our sponsor.

LaCroix

Chris: [00:30:09] is that freaking lemon flavor? What's wrong with you? Why even buy that swale?

Brian: [00:30:14] know what, we're lazy people and we have our groceries delivered and so we ordered mango, but they were out. So they got, we had it set to where they just pick an alternate for us without bothering us cause we were cooking.

Chris: [00:30:24] Complements till I die, man.

Brian: [00:30:25] I hate the grapefruit. I like the Waterloo grapefruit. Anyways, you were talking about sales and service systems, things that are more important to our listeners besides our not actual sponsor. LaCroix. Oh

Chris: [00:30:34] So sales systems are super important because it takes a real grownup and I am not one to be able to try to get a lot of people to hire you.

So having systems that help you keep everything in your head are really, really helpful and they will dramatically help you sell more. A CRM is something we talk about all the time. I don't care which CRM you use. Just pick one and start.

Brian: [00:30:55] seriously. They'll all do the job. They will all do the job.

Chris: [00:30:57] Yeah. Or at least we'll do enough of the job that you know you're going to have more time and more money to figure something else out.

Brian: [00:31:03] Anything's better than nothing.

Chris: [00:31:04] Yes. So it's funny, like a lot of people, they fix it like, well, I'll use a spreadsheet. Like, okay, cool. So that you can save $19 a month on some CRM.

That's a stupid idea.

Brian: [00:31:15] Yup. The one I recommend personally is pipe drive. That's the one I'm affiliated with. So if you've got a pipe drive.studio, you're gonna have a 30 day free trial, no credit card with that CRM. If you just want a specific one to go with.

Chris: [00:31:26] I almost jumped ship from clothes that I owe to pipe drive and then close that IO just rolled out.

Essentially they stole pipe drives interface and now there's a whole pipe drive thing for leads in there.

Brian: [00:31:36] Oh, that's sick.

Chris: [00:31:37] It's pretty dope.

Brian: [00:31:37] It's closed.com now they bought the.com.

Chris: [00:31:39] that's true. Um, I use clothes. It's probably the most expensive one, but I love it. Integration with my phone systems and stuff like that.

Brian: [00:31:46] They rolled out cheaper pricing too, and it's really a tragic thing because of the cheaper plan. It's like 29 bucks a month with clothes is almost perfect for studios, except they have the stupid arbitrary limit of only five email templates,

Chris: [00:31:58] Oh man.

Brian: [00:32:00] that's so dumb.

Chris: [00:32:01] Closed. If you're listening, what's the guy's name that runs it?

Brian: [00:32:04] Steli S S D or

Chris: [00:32:05] Steli. That guy's cool, man.

Brian: [00:32:08] I love seeing any talk he does on sales.

Chris: [00:32:10] He's an absolute badass when it comes to sales. So that being said, last system that you could be working on and not for is a marketing system. When you wake up in the morning, if your business is running well, you should have inquiries in your inbox.

Brian: [00:32:25] Yes. Chris, how much would it be to master my song? That's an inquiry.

Chris: [00:32:29] Exactly. Yeah. So basically every single day I wake up and somebody has emailed me. Yeah. Wondering about what I charge. That's the result of a lot of years of working on marketing systems. Fun fact like we're going to be honest with you guys and tell you the truth.

This podcast is a marketing system for us. Like it is nonstop. People from the podcast reaching out and it's great, and I love you guys and it's, this is a much better marketing system than my old Google AdWords systems.

Brian: [00:32:55] Well, it's like if you go back to listen to episode 102 where we talked about why you should start a podcast for your business.

We talked in depth about why that's important and this is a big part of our marketing systems because. Chris can just say, Hey, go to Chris Graham, mastering.com for a quote and thousands of audio engineers have just heard that Chris Graham mastering can master their track and to get a price, go to Chris mastering.com boom.

Chris: [00:33:15] Well, not just that, but there are thousands of more audio engineers who haven't heard about the podcast yet who are going to start listening next year.

Brian: [00:33:23] That's true. And they're going to hear Chris Graham's voice and they're going to bring work to him. I just mentioned. Pipedrive.studio. That URL, if you go to that, it is an affiliate link.

If you sign up for pipe drive through that link, you get a 30 day free trial instead of 14 and I get, I think it's 25% of you're recurring commissions, so if you sign up, I get part of the revenue from

Chris: [00:33:45] That's dope. I need more of those in my life. But yeah, I mean, these are all systems. There are things that you build one time and they keep running in the back.

So like, let's go back. This was a great example. So let's say there's a zombie apocalypse and Brian, it's my family and your family living in the Backwoods of Ohio.

Brian: [00:34:01] Okay. That sounds really sad. I don't know why we do Ohio, but whatever.

Chris: [00:34:04] Okay. We, we probably go a little farther South cause the winters.

But if we were in a situation like that, we would also start building systems. We'd find a Creek or Crick, depending on where you're from,

Brian: [00:34:16] Who says, crikey, what? What, what? What? People say, crikey.

Chris: [00:34:19] your people. Brian.

Brian: [00:34:21] don't. Not from where I'm from.

Chris: [00:34:23] My dad's side of the family probably says Crick, they're from Pikeville, Ohio

Brian: [00:34:27] It's probably the same people that say roof.

Chris: [00:34:29] roof and semen, but yeah. Anyways, if you and I were trying to help our families survive the zombie apocalypse, we'd find a stream that was a little ways away from like a spring of fresh water come out of the ground and we'd build a water wheel and that water wheel or a dam, you know, we would build these systems where it's like, okay, cool.

It's, this is going to consistently. Turn the water wheel, and then it's going to turn a little generator, and then we get a little bit electricity that we can use to heat our, you know, Hobbit holes, weed, Hobbit holes, right? That's what we would, we'd build

Brian: [00:34:59] Oh, for sure. It looked just like New Zealand, basically the Hobbit village.

Chris: [00:35:03] 100% we would great lengths to do this, and so now we'd have a system that would provide a little bit of heat to our Hobbit holes, which means we don't have to chop wood so often. And so this is a system we're now like our quality of life can go up because it's just going to keep running and running and running and running and running.

Same thing you want to do on a zombie apocalypse. You should do for your business. You need to have things that help your business whether you're working on them or not that day.

Brian: [00:35:29] So I think a good episode to follow up with at some point would be. You know, another listicle, five marketing systems, or maybe we have that already.

I don't actually know anymore. We have so many episodes now. I don't remember what we've done and what we haven't done. I don't know what to do anymore. We're just going to start doing the same damn man. We're going to go back to episode four and we're going to have an episode on how to get more reviews for your studio next week.

We're just going to rerecord that entire episode as if we had never done it before. All right, so let's move on now. This is the fourth potential reason that your business has stagnated, and this is a sad one actually. You lost your love for what you do.

Chris: [00:36:08] Oh boy.

Brian: [00:36:08] Oh boy.

Chris: [00:36:09] excited to talk about this.

I think that this is one of the most important items on the list, and I think we have to ask ourselves, why did we want to get into this industry in the first place?

Brian: [00:36:21] Yeah. This is a deep topic that we probably should have an entire episode about. What's the Simon something. Another. He has that famous Ted talk, which is now, yup.

Which is now a book, like a New York times bestselling book that just says, start with why. Why do you do at the end of the day, and I, and I did this in my email series where I was sending out, I sent out a lot of emails the last couple of months. I set up my email marketing game a little bit, but I'm, one of the emails I sent out was determining what your why is.

Why are you doing what you do? Because if you don't have a strong reason behind it, if you haven't really thought through this, when things get tough, when you hit that plateau, you will give up.

Chris: [00:36:57] Yeah. You have to go back to the source. You have to go back to your original first love. I think pretty often.

And so for me, what that has meant, um, I got into audio because I got into guitar. I love guitars. I love playing guitar. It's one of the most mentally healthy activities I do. You know, I can be like frustrated or not patient with my family or just grumpy in general. I could sit down and play the guitar for 20 minutes and I'm like, mr dad, after that I'm back to my true self.

And so I think for me, a lot of continuing to love what I do and continuing into love helping audio people, either as a mastering engineer or now software developer or business coach or whatever it happens to be, it comes back to guitar. For me, I'm like, Ooh, I got a little emotional there. Oh, weird.

Brian: [00:37:44] But you have emotions.

Chris: [00:37:45] I do have emotions, so for me to sit down with a guitar, ideally in an open tuning and to experiment. And to try to do new things with it. That is the source of an awful lot of what got me into this in the first place. So I think that there is a healthy amount of time that you should spend doing whatever it is that you love in the first Oh, Andy J pizza.

Thank you. He brought me some lunch.

Brian: [00:38:11] Well, we can't cut that out cause you so awkwardly cut.

Chris: [00:38:14] I

Brian: [00:38:15] And so there's no way to

Chris: [00:38:16] a man. He brought me some delicious vegetarian Israeli food from one of my favorite places here in town, brassica.

Brian: [00:38:24] if you want to know who the hell Andy J pizza is, go back to episode 78 which is one of my favorite interviews.

We did motivation, mindset and getting out of your own damn way. An interview with Andy J pizza, host of the creative pep talk podcasts. It's hard to say. Creative pep talk.

Chris: [00:38:39] We share an office here in Westerville, Ohio, and he is a source of inspiration and joy and. Vegetarian food for me. But anyways, yeah.

So going back to the source of what you love. So Brian, I got a Razzie a little bit here. We get a guy who listens to the podcast. His name is Curtis Lamberton. He is the owner of Lamberton pickups, some of the finest electric guitar pickups money can buy, and a guy that I've been coaching for a while and his business, this kind of blew my mind when we initially met him.

He is not an audio engineer, but he listens to our podcast all the time and it's really helped him explode his electric guitar pickup business. And he recently offered you a free pair of electric guitar pickups, and you said no to him.

Brian: [00:39:25] Oh yeah. For my birthday. So it was nice. It was very kind of him and y'all go go by his pickups.

Just cause he, I even offered, that's a good Go-Giver mentality he offered. I didn't accept, but I'm still telling our listeners to go check out his pickups, limber tones, pickups.com it'll be in our show notes. Anyways, the reason I turned his offer down is because I just don't play guitar anymore and it would just be a waste.

And I built my dream guitar already and, uh, I don't want to go through the process of changing those pickups out cause it's such a weird, complex thing with push, pull knobs and custom installation.

Chris: [00:39:53] Uh, Oh, yeah, I see.

Brian: [00:39:56] if he, if he would've sent it to me, it would've never been inserted into the guitar.

So I just didn't want him to waste. A good set of pickups on me. Someone else can go buy those and give him money.

Chris: [00:40:03] Fun fact building guitars is one of my favorite things in the entire world, and I am going to try to get us, at least me some guitar parts. I bought a Telecaster

Brian: [00:40:13] Okay, stop. Uh, how does this go with the, you lost your love for what you do.

What of all that? How do you actually tie this into this point?

Chris: [00:40:21] to me building a guitar. Playing the guitar, going into a guitar store makes me love being in the music industry. It makes me grateful for the blessing that is being able to be in the field that I want to be in and doing what I love.

If I get away from the guitar, my love for audio goes down. Like it all flows from guitar. And I think for a lot of us, we just don't invest enough in her first love. And so for you, like when you turn those pickups down. My initial reaction. I think it's incorrect now. I was like, Oh, Brian's not doing enough music on his own.

Brian: [00:40:57] Oh no, I don't do any music anymore.

Chris: [00:40:59] Oh, come on.

Brian: [00:41:00] No, not at all.

Chris: [00:41:00] Let's find like a spot at Nam to start a temporary annoying band.

Brian: [00:41:06] I'd be all about that. Well just go to the drum section. I'll play the drums. It won't add to any of the noise in there

Chris: [00:41:13] Okay.

Brian: [00:41:13] already at maximum noise.

Chris: [00:41:16] I love it. I love it.

Yeah. At some point we should at least for five minutes, have our own band.

Brian: [00:41:21] I do want to push back about this a little bit, but going back to this point, you lost your left for what you do, and, and this is a very real place a lot of people hit, they lose their passion for what they're doing, and so they basically, it's because of their lost love for what they do, that they don't work on their business anymore, that they don't learn new stuff, that they aren't willing to move to a new city to get to a bigger market or whatever it is, or put in the work to, to shift to another niche.

It's because of this. So this is a huge one. But I also want to state that a lot of people stick in the wrong niche, the wrong city, the wrong genre, or learn the wrong skills. Because they're passionate about something that they have no business making a business out of. So this is a tricky balance to strike between something finding the overlap between what you have, the capability of actually succeeding in mixed with having the passion to fight through the tough times that you will negatively hit in that business.

So I do think it takes a very, very. Hard objective. Look at yourself to determine what that is. If you are actually in that perfect center of both of those two things.

Chris: [00:42:24] Well, there's a guy named Jim Collins who's kind of one of the most respected business authors of our time, but mostly his books are for like corporate people.

It's for like building large corporations. So a lot of CEOs, a bigger companies read them. I'm a fan. I read one of his books before I was ready for it and tried to apply some of his techniques to my small business that should have only been used for a big business. So it kinda messed me up. But one of the things he talks about, which is exactly what you're saying, Brian, is visualized for me, if you will, a Venn diagram with three circles.

So we've got three circles that all overlap, one with each to each side, and then there's an area in the middle where all three circles overlap. What Jim would say as far as any company in this definitely applies to small business, is that you need to look at each of those circles. The first circle is what can you be the best at?

The second circle is what can you get paid to do? And the third circle is what do you love? What are you passionate about? So I would say circle one. It would be number one, circle two, it'd be dollar sign. Circle three would be a heart where all three of those intersect. That should be your niche.

Does that make sense?

Brian: [00:43:29] Yup. So for you, that's mastering. That's bounced Butler. For me, that is too many things to name. I dislike. I just like solving problems and building things. For Curtis lumber tone. That's Lambert tones, pickups, tones, pickups.com it's finding that intersection of things that can be monetized, things that you can be good.

You don't have to be the best. I'm going to be honest. You don't have to be the best at anything. Just saying that's a flawed mindset cause that'll limit you from ever actually taking steps towards being the best at something. The whole point is that you need to be good enough. And then the third thing is something you can, that you actually love.

Or maybe I said that wrong.

Chris: [00:44:03] No, you got it. You got it. Well, for a lot of people, as their business grows and begins to plateau, they'll move from the center. To only having two of those circles. There'll be like, I'm the best and I love it, but I'm not making money, or I'm the best and I'm making money, but I don't love it, or I love it and I'm making money, but I'm not that good at it, which means I won't make that much money for that much longer.

There's all these ways that you could break that down, that are plateau causing and making sure that you're aligned, that you're in the center of that Venn diagram. We'll cop the niche Venn diagram. That's the key. That's what we're trying to say about. If you lose love for what you do, that's going to undermine your ability to do this over the long term.

Brian: [00:44:45] It's so true. Yeah. You can be great at something and you can make a lot of money on something, but if you don't have love for it, and as soon as things get hard. You're not going to want to push forward. You're going to just let things stagnate because you don't have a passion to push through those hard times.

If you love something and you're passionate about it, but you're not good at, you will try your damnedest, but you will not succeed because of your lack of skill. If you are good at something and you love something, but you cannot monetize it, let's just say you're a basket Weaver, for example.

Maybe you can't make money in that. You can be the most amazing person in the world at it and you can love it so much, but she will never make enough money to actually push the needle. So those are the, you need all three of those things.

Chris: [00:45:21] The polka mastering engineer's a good example of that. You know, like mastering is a pretty small niche.

St well, I only master polka. Cool. Uh, you're going to get seven records a year tops, you know.

Brian: [00:45:34] say that's a lot of records, man. I don't know about that. All right, let's move on here. We got one more point here. This is our fifth and final point of what could be causing, you're a business plateau.

We've talked about this. Ad nauseum on this podcast, but it could be the result of a stagnant, shitty social circle. We've talked about it. I mean, how many times have you said this? You are the average of the five people you surround yourself with the most. If you're around anti-growth pro, unhealthy habited people who just drag you down.

Do not build you up, are not facilitating any self-improvement who you cannot go to when times are tough, who you cannot count on. When times are tough, who are not willing to lend a helping hand. When times are tough, you are not going to get past this plateau. There is no damn way you can do it by yourself.

We need people. We are a a species of people that requires community. And that community has to be healthy. If we want to have a healthy business, healthy life, healthy marriage, healthy heart, and if we are belying on a toxic bunch of people who were just going to tear us down, then the fact that you even listen to this podcast blows my mind because it's really hard to do anything healthy if you surround yourself with shitty, unhealthy people.

So just to kind of wrap things up here, Chris. Any other thoughts you have on getting past plateaus on maybe words of encouragement for people who are maybe a little bit down right now because they can't get past a plateau in their business or their income's declining. Worst of all, anything to say.

Chris: [00:47:07] If we only had one item on this episode, I would say it's not taking the time to work on your business instead of for it. You have to have time to look in the mirror. You have to sit there and think about what needs to change.

Brian: [00:47:22] Yeah. Not just your business, by the way, not just your business. A lot of this is personal shit.

Chris: [00:47:26] Yeah. You have to have time where, where you think about what's going to change and if you are not spending time only thinking about how do I make this better? It ain't going to get better the end. So take that time. Set. Time aside if you want to rip off my plan Wednesday afternoons from three to five o'clock, set that time aside to work on your business.

Not for, it can be whatever time that you want, but I, you know, to make it simple, Wednesdays, three to five, work on your business, not for it. Don't take any projects. Don't answer the phone. Turn the damn phone off. Don't answer texts. And just for two hours each week it starts spending time working on your marketing systems, your sales systems, your service systems, or your health.

Brian: [00:48:16] So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I've got some exciting news for anyone who is still listening to this episode right now. I just spent the weekend completely revamping the six figure home studio website. So all of the show notes pages look different. Now. All of the blog articles look different now.

Uh, like the blog post page that lists all the articles. Uh, I'm still working on a few pages. Like. The actual six figure home studio.com page. That really hasn't been updated much, but overall, the website looks so much better. Oh my God. Uh, all thanks to a nice little black Friday deal. I found it's not really on sale anymore, but there's a plugin called Elementor.

Elementor pro, ah, that was on sale for like, I want to say it was like 75 bucks for a full year of it, for up to three websites. So I bought that this weekend or a couple of weeks ago, actually, it was black Friday and uh, just got around to implementing that on my site. And a, you can see the results for yourself.

I literally did all of that while watching football on Sunday. So just chime in. Either in the Facebook community or you can email me, brian@thesixfigurehomestudio.com. Uh, let me know what you think. And if you spot anything broken, obviously let me know because there's still a ton of little tiny improvements I need to make to the site, but I'm glad to finally get that thing updated and, and eventually, uh, maybe by the time you actually check, I will have updated the six figure home studio.com to something brand new.

Next week's episode is not recorded. Chris and I are, man, Chris and I are struggling right now. We are like. We have so much to do and we are trying to get episodes out a week ahead of time. Um, we, we do not have a buffer in place. We're basically like, we're basically the week before, uh, getting these things done.

I'm finalizing this podcast episode on Monday, December 9th at 3:43 PM, which means we are. Little over 12 hours away from this episode airing. So this is not the way I like to do things, but this is the way it is right now. Chris and I believe we're actually going to be taking time off for the first time ever on this podcast.

We're taking a two weeks off, so we will not have an episode coming out Christmas Eve that Tuesday. We will not be, have an episode come out the week of new year's. So unfortunately that's going to be the reality. But we will have a kind of a best of episode. We'll play the best episode of 2018.

Christmas Eve, we'll play the best episode of 2019 on new year's Eve, so you'll at least have something to listen to and something worth going back to review again. So, uh, it's not all at a loss there. Anyways, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, happy hustling.