How To Raise Your Rates, Improve Your Work/Life Balance, And Increase Your Profit Margins (Replay)

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 112

[00:00:07] Announcer: [00:00:07] you're listening to the sixth finger own studio podcast, the number one resource for running a

[00:00:13] profitable home recordings duty.

[00:00:15] You now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Brant. \

[00:00:20] Brian: [00:00:20] Welcome back to another episode. So to the six figure home studio podcast, I am your host Brian Hood here with another solo intro because my cohost is taking the week off as am I.

[00:00:29] And that is why today is yet another replay episode from our backlog. This is one of my favorite episodes from 2019 and this is the final episode of this decade. Can you believe that the reason this is one of my favorite episodes of the year is because this is something that so many people struggle with raising their rates.

[00:00:46] When did they do it? How did they do it? How do they know if they should do it or shouldn't do it? How much did they raise their rates by? How do I go about doing it? When it comes to raising your rates, you are your biggest enemy. And in this episode we are going to uncover some facts, uncover some myths.

[00:01:00] We are going to help you get past your own self doubt and fears when it comes to raising your rates, and then give you some practical steps on how to actually do so. So enjoy this replay on how to raise your rates, improve your work life balance, and increase your profit margins.

[00:01:19] Chris: [00:01:19] what are we talking about today, Brian?

[00:01:20] Brian: [00:01:20] Chris, we are talking about something that you recently went through in your studio. It's something that I've been telling you to do for like as long as I've known you.

[00:01:28] Chris: [00:01:28] Yeah.

[00:01:29] Brian: [00:01:29] What is that thing?

[00:01:31] Chris: [00:01:31] Raising your rates,

[00:01:32] Brian: [00:01:32] raising your rates.

[00:01:33] Chris: [00:01:33] Here's a funny thing. We have a business podcast for recording studios is probably a topic we should have covered already.

[00:01:41] Yeah, seriously. You know why we didn't cover it. Was that cause then I would've had to raise my rates and I didn't want to.

[00:01:46] Brian: [00:01:46] Yeah, that's true.

[00:01:47] Chris: [00:01:47] Cause I was terrified of doing it.

[00:01:49] Brian: [00:01:49] Yeah. So let's actually talk about raising rates. And honestly, the first thing that comes to your mind, if you are in the position where you've probably thought about raising your rates, or maybe you've tried and you quote failed, or you think you failed, or maybe you just can't make yourself do it.

[00:02:03] And it's probably because of one of these fears associated with raising your rates. And just so you guys know, before we even get into this topic today, this is one of our most. Perfectly outlined episodes you've ever done. I have to say. Beautiful. We bought an amazing outline for this episode, and for like the past, probably like since before I left for my honeymoon, we haven't had a really meticulously outlined podcast episode.

[00:02:24] So today we're going to hopefully stay on topic and hit all the points we need to hit today without missing anything. So let's talk about the fears. They're associated with potentially raising your rates, and I know that anytime I've ever raised rates in my past, and I know that you've went through this recently yourself, when you think about raising your rates, usually there is a fear attached to that, and we're not going to try to solve those fears for you right now.

[00:02:46] We're going to kind of bring them up because we know they're in your head right now. But I think as we get further into this episode, you're going to start to see that each one of these fears are unfounded. To a degree as long as you're following along with some of the other things we talk about, these fears right here will not be a major issue when it comes to raising your rates.

[00:03:02] So what's the first fear on our list today, Chris, that keeps people from raising the rates?

[00:03:06] Chris: [00:03:06] The first fear ultimately is FOMO. It's that you'll lose clients as a result of raising your rates, and then you're going to miss out on opportunities. And there's three main opportunities you could miss out on here.

[00:03:17] One, obviously is money. Oh, I raised my rates. The span couldn't afford me. They didn't hire me. Then I lost out on a project. The second fear is I'm going to miss out working with a client that I love working with. It's totally a bummer to out price yourself and then your favorite client that you love collaborating with, making music can no longer afford you.

[00:03:39] And the third is this idea of an anchor client. If you have an opportunity to work with a client that solidifies your brand, someone that you can be like, Hey, you know what? I did work with that one band that you've heard of.

[00:03:53] Brian: [00:03:53] Please don't say it like that. However we will come find you and we'll kick you in the face.

[00:03:59] Chris: [00:03:59] Yeah, you want an opportunity to be able to name drop at least occasionally, and we could get into like the whole namedrop and how your business should not be built just on name dropping. I know that's a sacred cow,

[00:04:12] Brian: [00:04:12] but there is an element to social proof of saying, Hey, I've worked with these big labels, or I've worked with these big clients that you have heard of.

[00:04:20] That goes a long way and the fear associated with raising your rates, you don't wanna miss out on one of those clients. But again, we're going to talk about why this is simply unfounded later on in this episode, but I think it's worth mentioning that that major overarching fear of. Losing clients is a big deterrent from people raising their rates.

[00:04:37] Chris: [00:04:37] Yeah. It's the FOMO thing, and I think we talked about this all the time on the podcast, but it's that old Henry Ford quote that the issue that someone who's struggling with money is almost always, they're not willing to walk past a small pile of money to get to a bigger pile of money. It's that FOMO issue of like.

[00:04:56] It's the same reason that people don't niche down. It's the same reason we talked about on last week's episode, this idea of like, well, I have to offer drum editing, podcasting, songwriting, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have to offer all these things because I might lose out on an opportunity to make some money.

[00:05:11] And so FOMO comes back to raising your rates. It's the same thing.

[00:05:16] Brian: [00:05:16] So let's talk about the next fear that gets in the way of people raising their rates. What is that next fear, Chris? Rick chick. No, just say it.

[00:05:24] Chris: [00:05:24] Rejection. So rejection. It's real. And it's this idea that people can smell fear. And you know, I was not especially successful with the ladies throughout high school.

[00:05:39] Brian: [00:05:39] No way.

[00:05:40] Chris: [00:05:40] I was not great because I had so much fear of rejection. When I would go up to somebody and be like, I was wondering, um, ever available and don't already have a date. Maybe you would consider going to the prom with me. You're not going to get a yes there, dude. My wife, she is way out of my league.

[00:06:01] Back me up there, Brian, right? Hey, yeah, a hundred percent a hundred percent way out of my league. The only reason that she's my wife is for a small period of time. I got over my fear of rejection. And I showed up 100% when I asked her out.

[00:06:15] Brian: [00:06:15] And we don't have the time in the day right now to really dive into getting over the fear of rejection.

[00:06:20] And we have talked about this in the past on previous episodes, but I will say some of the things we talk about today, if you follow along with the rest of this episode, the rejection portion of this fear is unfounded. Totally. So what's the third and final fear. Worth mentioning here that keeps people from raising their rates.

[00:06:35] Chris: [00:06:35] This is a big one. This one is intense. James, I'm gonna need some reverb on my voice. Here we go. Imposter

[00:06:41] Brian: [00:06:41] syndrome. That's nice. So imposter syndrome, this is one you had an entire episode on in episode number 72 this was the first episode you did solo. Without me. I was on my honeymoon at the time. It was scary.

[00:06:54] It's a very poignant episode, so if you really want to deep dive and really deep dive, it's kind of a quick episode, but a really good episode that will make you think and help you get past imposter syndrome. Episode 72 is a good place to start, but let's talk about imposter syndrome real quick.

[00:07:08] Chris: [00:07:08] Yeah.

[00:07:09] Real quick. Imposter syndrome is basically this idea of you're like, I'm going to raise my rates, and then a little nasty piece of crap voice in the back of your head says like, you're not good enough. You're not smart enough, you're not talented, nothing dog on it. No one even likes you.

[00:07:23] Brian: [00:07:23] What makes you feel like you deserve to raise your rates?

[00:07:26] That's what that little voice says, and it's an evil little guy. Yeah, he's terrible. Imposter syndrome is basically one of the worst things that could ever happen to you as an entrepreneur, as a creative. So honestly, I don't know any quick way to get over this, Chris, your episodes is the closest thing I've seen to do a quick fix.

[00:07:43] Chris: [00:07:43] Yeah. So check out that episode. I think we really sum up. What Brian and I believe about imposter syndrome and about how you can get over it and how you can make it not just like a nagging presence in your life, but an asset that drives you forward. So check out episode 72

[00:07:59] Brian: [00:07:59] so I think we've talked about those three main fears that keep people from raising their rates.

[00:08:03] Next, let's talk about when it is time to raise your rates, because there are always signs in everyone's business that are completely ignored. I've seen this time and time and time and time again. I've seen this in your business, Chris. I've seen this in. Students businesses. I've seen this in people in the community who all have these telltale signs that it is time to raise your rates and they are simply ignored.

[00:08:23] So let's talk about, first of all, the first sign that it's time to raise your rates. And this is one of the most obvious, but let's talk about this now.

[00:08:30] Chris: [00:08:30] It's time to raise your rates when you are too busy, when you have too many paying gigs and you're having trouble balancing them. And illustrate this.

[00:08:39] Let's kind of rewind the clock in my story to 2014 it was a big year for me. The dollar, this is, this is weird and nerdy, but the U S dollar was not especially strong right around in this time of my life,

[00:08:52] Brian: [00:08:52] which was an awesome time in entrepreneur's businesses because you can get paid more in international dollars.

[00:08:58] Chris: [00:08:58] Totally. Yeah. So what was happening was because the dollar was not particularly strong, I was getting so many international projects. There's lots of. Clients from Italy and from France and from Scandinavian countries, from South Africa. It was fantastic. Brazil even, and what I thought was, Oh my gosh, I am so busy.

[00:09:18] I'm killing it. I am making more in a month than I made in my first year of marriage, and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, growth, growth, growth. At that point, I was growing at 50% per year. And was like, Oh, that's so exciting. I'm officially a gazelle of any business that grows up more than 50% a years term is a gazelle.

[00:09:37] So I was like super jacked about this. So I was like, okay, I'm going to keep my rates the same. I'm going to begin to offer more services. And we started offering a whole bunch more services in the efforts to kind of slow my work down, and it was the wrong move at the time. It was something where, you know, we were offering mixing services in addition to mastering, and we were offering mixing classes.

[00:09:58] And we're kind of just doing it all on the same page and I kind of violated a lot of the stuff that we talked about last week with branding. It became a little bit less clear what I was all about and it slowed the growth of the business down, but in a good way in that I didn't have so much work to do.

[00:10:13] I was doing less mastering projects. We were doing a little bit more mixing projects. What's so frustrating about this to me is I look back at that time in my life and I'm like, Chris, dude, just raise your rates. You don't need an assistant. You don't need to offer more services, just raise your rates.

[00:10:29] Brian: [00:10:29] Well, the funniest part about this story is this is you're talking about back in 2014 we met in 2017 and I was telling you then to raise your rates. Yep.

[00:10:40] Chris: [00:10:40] Slow learner

[00:10:41] Brian: [00:10:41] right here. Yep. And here it is in 2019. And Chris Graham has just now started raising his rates and we're going to talk about that more in a second.

[00:10:50] Your story around that, but let's move on to the second sign. When it is time to raise your rates, what does that second sign?

[00:10:57] Chris: [00:10:57] Well, this one's a little harder to identify, but you need to understand that a business. Makes revenue. That's how much you sell in a given period, let's call it a month, and then it has expenses.

[00:11:08] That's how much you spend and the difference between your expenses and your revenue is your net profit. That's how much you actually take home. If you're in a position where your net profit is too small, you can get trapped in a position where your rates are too low and you have to say yes to every single project that comes your way.

[00:11:29] But each project that you take doesn't propel your business far enough forward that you're stuck. You're in this weird Twilight zone of a business where your profit margins aren't big enough. You can get stuck in a spot where you have to say yes to every single project. And when you have to say yes to every project, you only get bad projects because your bad projects displace huge amounts of your time compared to awesome projects.

[00:11:56] Brian: [00:11:56] And I've seen this trap play out in a lot of people's lives, and you see this all the time. It's kind of, it's usually paired with being too busy, but it's even worse than being too busy because it's. You're too busy and you're broke. Yeah. That's really the difference here. If you are too busy and you're broke, that is a very, very, very, very dangerous place to be.

[00:12:14] Not only because it sucks being broke. I've been there. But you're also too busy to do anything about it. And then at the end of the day, when you do have a tiny sliver of time to maybe do something about it, the last thing you want to do is do anything about it because you're too damn tired at this point.

[00:12:28] So that is the trap that you can fall into, is if you don't raise your rates, you start getting busy, and you haven't raised your rates to the point of sustainability, then you're just trapped in this perpetual cycle of suck.

[00:12:39] Chris: [00:12:39] Yeah. And we've talked about this in the past. This idea of working on your business, not for your business.

[00:12:44] When you're trapped at a low rate, you have no time to work on your business, not for your business, and this isn't advice buffet. That's our podcast. There's very few things we're ever going to say. We were like, this is the truth.

[00:12:57] Brian: [00:12:57] You

[00:12:57] Chris: [00:12:57] have to do this, and if you don't do this,

[00:13:00] Brian: [00:13:00] you should have imposter syndrome.

[00:13:02] What are you selling the cookie monster right now?

[00:13:03] Chris: [00:13:03] I don't know. I like the cookie monster. You have to work on your business, not for your business. Some of the time you have to schedule that. We've talked about that a million times in the podcast. When you're trapped at a low rate, you can't do that and you have to find a way, even if that means taking on a part time job or whatever, to have the margin where you can afford to say no.

[00:13:25] And that's the next point when to raise your rates is when you can afford to say

[00:13:30] Brian: [00:13:30] no. And just to clarify what Chris is talking about when he's talking about working on your business instead of working in your business, do you have it? Listen, this podcast for a long time, you've probably haven't heard this one before and you probably don't know what the hell he's talking about, but what that basically means is when you were working in your business, you're simply reacting to whatever happens.

[00:13:48] It's just constantly reacting to things happening. I got a new project and I need to work on that. I got an email. I need to handle that. I got a revision request. I need to handle that. I got a payment. I need to send that file. Now. That's reaction mode. That's working in your business. Working on your business is where you're proactively working on things.

[00:14:04] I'm going to start building out a system in Zapier or in my email inbox so that when I get a payment, the files automatically send it or it's working proactively to build out. Templates so that when you get emails, you can quickly send a template into your client. It's just small little things that you have to take time to do that saves you time in the long run that is working on your business.

[00:14:27] And it's impossible to do that when you are trapped at a low rate. So back to the thing you're talking about now, when it's time to raise rates, when you can afford to say no, that is it. A combination of when you are. Too busy and you are charging good rates, that's when you are able to afford to say no.

[00:14:41] So it's essentially a lot of the same things here. A lot of these signs are very similar to each other, but just trying to drive that point into your head. If you're at a point now where you're getting enough projects to where you can say, I don't really want to work on that. I'm too busy right now. I'd rather have the time off than to have that money, which I've been at many times in my career.

[00:14:58] That is a great sign. That is time to start raising your rates.

[00:15:01] Chris: [00:15:01] Yeah, totally. And we've talked about this before on our episode about negotiation. And we should probably do another episode on that. That's been one of our most popular episodes, and frankly, we kind of pulled that one out of our, but we sort of showed up.

[00:15:14] And

[00:15:14] Brian: [00:15:14] did it have this podcast is just pulling stuff out of our butts.

[00:15:17] Chris: [00:15:17] That's true. That's true. I'm not gonna lie, but yeah. So this idea that we talk about in the negotiation episode is that your strongest move when you're negotiating with somebody is the ability to say no, it's to show them your back is the phrase we use.

[00:15:33] When you can say, no, that doesn't work for me. Wish it did. That's my bottom dollar. That's my final offer. If it works for you guys, that'd be great. If not, I wish, I wish I could flex, but I can't. And then you, you know, basically let them know like, it's this or we're not going to work together. If you can't do that, you cannot negotiate.

[00:15:51] You have to be able to have walk away power as my homeboy Andy J pizza over on the creative pep talk likes to say, so you have to be able to afford to say no. And when you can, you should be able to raise your rates.

[00:16:04] Brian: [00:16:04] Okay, so the fourth and final point, when it's possibly time to raise your rates, and again, this isn't going to be all across the board on this final point, we're gonna argue about a little bit, but that's when he's gotten some big credits under your belt.

[00:16:15] Once you've gotten a big label or a few big labels or some bigger clients, this is a point when it may be time to raise your rates.

[00:16:23] Chris: [00:16:23] Yeah, and this is a really tricky one because the myth that's floating around out there is that you'll be discovered. That's the American idol myth of like, Oh yeah, I went to this thing one time and I sang and then I was a rock star.

[00:16:36] And it's frustrating because we see this play out very occasionally in pop culture, but by and large, most people that are successful are doing it because they were grinding for years.

[00:16:48] Brian: [00:16:48] Most people's path to success is rarely ever nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Big bang, famous. That never happens.

[00:16:56] It's always a slow and gradual climb up. That graph. To where one day you wake up and realize like. I've been at this a really long time and I'm actually successful, but somehow I didn't arise. I got here. Yeah, so rarely will you ever just get a few big credits and all of a sudden you can just double your rates.

[00:17:12] That doesn't happen very often, although I've seen it happen to a few people. But what we mean to say here is if you have some big credits. And maybe you are too busy or you can afford to say no. Usually these things are all associated with each other. So big credits is a good sign that is maybe time to raise your rates because that does lend you some credibility that someone else down the road may not have.

[00:17:34] But if you want a Grammy, you can probably charge a good percentage higher than the guy down the road simply because you're a Grammy award winning producer or mixer or mastering engineer. So think about it on that thing when you have some big credits to your name. It may be time to start considering raising your rates.

[00:17:50] Chris: [00:17:50] Totally. And I think the cautionary tale there is we hear these sort of nightmare stories about people that wind producer of the year or they get a Graeme and they get album of the year. And what they do is they believe that if you build it, they will come lie. It's a slight tweak on that line. It's the, Oh, I've arrived and now the world owes me.

[00:18:08] Now there will just be deal flow and people are going to Google me and they're just going to come out of the woodwork.

[00:18:14] Brian: [00:18:14] And that might be true for a while, but eventually a lot of those types of people come back down to earth. Actually want to give a shout out to Seth Mosley here. He has an event that he puts on here in Nashville called music and money.

[00:18:26] And this is something I go to every month that I'm in town and it's simply a real estate investors meet up and it's all people in the music industry. And the reason Seth, when he tells the story of why he started this group, it's because he was working in the music industry. He himself, he's a very successful guy.

[00:18:41] He's got 20 something, number one single, his name, maybe 30 now, I don't know, as a songwriter and producer, and he had someone come to him that was producer of the year in it. Just a couple of years later it came to him wanting to work with them because he had just gone flat broke. And Seth saw this and said, I've got to do something as someone to protect my future, my family, myself.

[00:19:00] I need to be putting the money and making now into investments in smart ways. And so he created this group. If you're in Nashville, I highly recommend coming to it. I'm usually there. I'll see you there. She's the first Wednesday of every month. Unplanned. A little plug here, but there are a lot of national listeners here, and that's an awesome group.

[00:19:15] But just telling you that story. To tell you one big thing here, and if you are a songwriter of the year or a Grammy award winner, or you have the biggest name in music work with you. It may only be a couple of years before your flat broken and nobody again. So it is very, very good thing to stay hungry and to stay smart with your money all along the way and not let the big credits be the shiny thing that gets in the way of your business.

[00:19:36] So that's the caveat that comes with this big credits thing that we're talking about.

[00:19:40] Chris: [00:19:40] I think the danger there is a sense of entitlement. Yes, I did this thing. Now I am entitled. And when you have that sense of entitlement, that is. Ooh, that is a really toxic, dangerous, poisonous business killer right there.

[00:19:54] Your responsible for your deal flow, not like this force that owes you.

[00:20:00] Brian: [00:20:00] So let's talk about the next point in our outline, and that is reasons to raise rates. There's. Obviously you want to make more money. That's the goal. But there are several unexpected reasons and maybe something that you have thought about, but let's talk about some reasons that you may want to raise your rates.

[00:20:14] What's the first one, Chris?

[00:20:15] Chris: [00:20:15] The first one is to be taken seriously. And it's this idea that when you're cheap, you're affordable, and that's desirable for a lot of people. But the type of clients that you dream about will have a red flag if you're too affordable. So. Case in point. You know, if I'm walking down the street and I'm getting kind of hungry and I see a hot dog stand and I'm like, mm, that sounds kinda good.

[00:20:40] And I walk up and the hot dogs are one penny each and be like, Whoa, I don't, I don't care how many Yelp reviews this place has. I am not going to put a one penny hotdog. In a bond and then eat it. That sounds like I'll probably die.

[00:20:55] Brian: [00:20:55] That's a red flag. Yeah. When you have low rates, you typically are just going to get those types of clients that are looking for the cheapest deal.

[00:21:01] Totally. And so in order to be taken seriously, price is a very, very good deterrent for removing that type of client from your business pipeline. And it's going to give you a level of respect. Whether they say it or not, they will respect you a little bit more if you have at least a fair price for what you offer, not an exorbitantly high rate, but you're going to be taking more seriously with a respectable rate.

[00:21:25] Chris: [00:21:25] Yeah. So there was an engineer recently that I became aware of that was doing a lot of live recordings. It was like, you know, kind of living room recordings. He was doing unbelievable work, really, really high quality stuff, and he was charging $10 an hour for it, and it was this thing of like, Whoa, hold on.

[00:21:42] That's. Red flag, no matter how good his portfolio is. A lot of artists are going to be like, Whoa.

[00:21:48] Brian: [00:21:48] Not only that, you lose respect of your peers, other producers, other engineers, people that would maybe collaborate with you or refer work to you, but instead they see you as this. Bedroom producer, almost more of a threat than a collaborator when you were working for that cheap.

[00:22:03] It devalues the entire field when you're below a certain threshold. So honestly, like this is almost when to raise your rates when you're below the threshold. It is a great way to be taken seriously to have. A baseline price that is not far below your competitors. Again, we've talked about this in the past on other episodes, we mentioned price.

[00:22:21] If you're using price as your main differentiator, that is not the way to go in the long run. You've got to have some other major ways that people are choosing you over someone else. It's not just price, so that's reason number one to start raising your rates is to be taken seriously. What's reason number two to raise your rates, Chris?

[00:22:37] Chris: [00:22:37] This one's a little tricky. Profit margins and sustainability. So this kind of goes back to that trap that a low rate thing that we mentioned before, profit margin is essentially that you're making enough money,

[00:22:49] Brian: [00:22:49] profit, margins, sustainability. It's more about keeping more money at the end of the day.

[00:22:55] Chris: [00:22:55] Yeah, 100% so this idea of profit margins, sustainability is if you are in a position where you're like, all right, man, I'm doing $5,000 a month in sales, but my rent is 3,700.

[00:23:09] And I'm paying a 400 and different services for cleaning and website maintenance, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. It doesn't matter how successful you are or how many awesome bands you were working with, if you have no profit margin, if you guys want to check out our interview with Matt Boudreaux,

[00:23:27] Brian: [00:23:27] which is episode 27

[00:23:29] Chris: [00:23:29] yeah, if you go back and check out Matt Boudreau's interview with us.

[00:23:32] Matt is one of our favorite people on earth. His podcast working class audio

[00:23:35] Brian: [00:23:35] is amazing.

[00:23:37] Chris: [00:23:37] Matt's family. But Matt's issue years and years and years ago was that his rent was enormous. He had such an expensive space that he couldn't get his profit margins high enough to get above water on it. And so this idea of sustainability is directly related to your ability to charge enough to cover all of your expenses so that you aren't in debt.

[00:24:01] It's really, really important. And if you don't have the profit margins. To sustain your business over the long term. You're going to go to business, and here's the thing. You hear all these stories about all these studios going out of business and going under in every single case, it's an issue of profit margins.

[00:24:22] Didn't matter that they worked with all these famous bands. If they weren't making enough by working. With those bands, they couldn't afford to keep the doors open.

[00:24:31] Brian: [00:24:31] Yup. And someone might argue the fact that, well, maybe they had a good profit margins, but they couldn't get enough clients in the door.

[00:24:37] That's a big part of it. But I will say this, your profit margins are definitely tied to your ability to advertise. If you're not profitable enough without advertisement. You're not going to be able to afford to advertise so that you can get more clients. So profitability is directly tied to how much you can afford when you start advertising either on Facebook or through Google ads or through any local means.

[00:24:57] If you're spending money on advertising, you have to first have the profit margins in place to support the advertising that you are doing.

[00:25:04] Chris: [00:25:04] That's amazing. I think that was one of the best nuggets we've had in this episode so far. And it's interesting to think about, you know, okay, well, if I work a 40 hour week every week and then I'm able to cover all of my expenses, they're doing that and I make, you know, $2,000 a month after that.

[00:25:22] It doesn't make any sense to advertise because you don't have any extra supply. There's no point in increasing demand if you don't have a good profit margin.

[00:25:31] Brian: [00:25:31] What that can lead to is if you start advertising, you don't have the profit margins in place. You can put yourself into a mountain of debt if you're not careful.

[00:25:38] Chris: [00:25:38] Yeah, and that's the scary thing about business ownership. It's not just about whether you make enough to live. You can also get yourself in a position where you have so much debt that you could lose your house, or you could, you know, lose your car. Like you could destroy your credit and have to go bankrupt.

[00:25:53] There's all sorts of things that could happen and you have to make sure. That you stay above water on this stuff and raising your rates is one of the biggest levers that you have in this whole battle to stay above water and to do this for the long haul.

[00:26:05] Brian: [00:26:05] Yup. And again, back to the profit margins things.

[00:26:07] To me, the biggest reason to have great profit margins and rates will allow you to do this is to have. Cashflow or to have reserves in your business. So one of the biggest things that helped me with stress, we talked about stress on episode 74 just a few episodes ago, we talked about dealing with stress and preventing stress and anxiety.

[00:26:25] Honestly, a huge part of stress and anxiety for people is their money issues. And. A lot of people don't have emergency reserves or any cash reserves into place, and so if they have an unexpected expense come up, car brakes, air conditioner goes out in their house, something major happens that they have to foot the bill for that.

[00:26:43] They can't afford it. They simply cannot afford it. And then you have that. Really bad conversation with your spouse or with your self sometimes of how the hell am I supposed to afford this? I don't have the money for this. Especially if you have kids that can get extremely stressful and raising your rates to where your profitability is at a place where you can now actually save emergency funds for your life, for your family, or even your business.

[00:27:06] That takes an extraordinary amount of stress away. So that can't be understated how important good profit margins are.

[00:27:12] Chris: [00:27:12] Totally. This is super good stuff.

[00:27:14] Brian: [00:27:14] So what is the next reason to raise your rates, Chris? Cause I think we tackled the last one pretty in depth there.

[00:27:20] Chris: [00:27:20] Yeah, I would say one of the most important reasons to raise your rates is if you're struggling with work life balance.

[00:27:25] If you're in a position where you're just like, Oh my gosh, I have to work because I need this money. And there's a work life balance issue where your kids and your spouse and your friends are just like. Where are you? Haven't seen you in forever because all you do is work. That might be a good opportunity, a good, you know, kind of red light like, Hey man, you need to raise your rates so that you can work less.

[00:27:46] The tricky thing here is that some people, it doesn't matter how much they raise their rates, they're always going to have FOMO. They're always going to freak out about, Oh no, no, but I left money on the table. You have to get over that. If you're going to have a happy life and a successful business. You have to balance this FOMO thing and this work life balance thing, because if you don't, eventually you're either going to have a really crazy issue in your business that's going to totally mess up your personal life or a really crazy issue in your personal life.

[00:28:16] It's going to totally mess up your business. These two things are really interlinked in as much as we'd love to believe as audio engineers, that it's just like, Oh, put on the audio engineer hat, go to work, and that the only thing that exists is rock and roll, or whatever it is that you're working on.

[00:28:30] It's a really, really dangerous position, and a lot of the reason that a lot of audio engineers. Tend to develop personal issues later on in life.

[00:28:39] Brian: [00:28:39] We've probably talked about this in depth in past episodes, but I just think it's worth repeating. But what good is having a successful business if you jeopardize your personal life and your family life in the process, because any stuff that happens in your personal life is going be carried over to your professional life.

[00:28:53] Anything that happens in professional life is going to go into your personal life. So it's best to skip both things, right? Uh, and getting your rates to sustainable point is a good way to get a better work life balance. Wow.

[00:29:03] Chris: [00:29:03] I had a scary thought about this the other day, Brian. One of the most fun things about this podcast.

[00:29:08] Our goal, I think, was like a, maybe a few hundred people would listen to this someday, and I think 500 might've been our goal. We're definitely North of 5,000 people listen to this podcast at this point, and the thing that's scary about that is I get messages or phone calls or someone will book me to work in a mastering project and then at the end of the phone call, they'll work in.

[00:29:28] Oh, by the way, podcast just changed my life. Thank you so much. I'm like, Oh my gosh, this is so cool. This is totally not part of my life plan to have a really popular podcast for audio engineers, but one of the things that freaks me out is that one of these years we're going to be at like Nam or some event, and I'm going to meet somebody and they'd be like, yeah, man.

[00:29:49] Podcast was great. Took all your advice and business exploded. A family totally disintegrated. Don't talk to my kids or my wife anymore, but man, business is killing it. Dude, thanks to you. That would break my heart. This isn't a podcast about how to build a successful recording studio. What? This is a podcast about how to adult.

[00:30:12] It's about how to kick ass at life. And I'm not excited for someone that's not applying this stuff to how to become a better adult and how to balance their life better and to do what they want, not just like throw their entire personal life away in exchange for professional success.

[00:30:29] Brian: [00:30:29] Yeah. I have to agree with you there, man.

[00:30:31] I've seen this in other business verticals, like in real estate. I've seen this in software worlds where people are all about hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, grind, grind, get the work done, put the hours in, and they get that success. But their family life is an absolute wreck. And to me, like you can't put a price like I don't need millions of dollars in my life to make me happy.

[00:30:50] I just need to make a living and to have a good, healthy work life balance so that I can still support my wife and my future family and have all my relationships intact. At the same time. So you make a good point there.

[00:31:01] Chris: [00:31:01] Yeah, dude, I had a nightmare about this a couple nights ago. I don't know if you guys have seen, there's a politician named beta or Rourke from Texas.

[00:31:09] He's running for president, and I had a nightmare that my wife left me for beta O'Rourke and I was like sitting in beta or driveway and it was the first time I was going to visit her at his house and our kids were there and the theme of the dream was like, I had focused too much on growing my business and lost them.

[00:31:27] I woke up like in hot sweats,

[00:31:28] Brian: [00:31:28] like, Oh my gosh. I've never heard of this guy, but he's got the most punchable face I've ever seen, so I can see why you'd have hot sweats from that. He's not

[00:31:37] Chris: [00:31:37] terribly hateable when you hear him talk, not to get into dynamics, but

[00:31:40] Brian: [00:31:40] we're not going to get into politics.

[00:31:42] Chris: [00:31:42] He's got a positive vibe.

[00:31:43] I'll say that

[00:31:44] Brian: [00:31:44] in a punchable face. Here we go. So let's move on to the how to raise rates, because we've gone over. The fears related to raising rates, and we talked about winning. You should raise your rates, the reasons you should raise your rates, but let's actually talk about some things you can do to try to start raising your rates on your own.

[00:32:00] And I would really challenge you to stop and think about how you can personally take what we're talking about today and apply it to your own business. Because chances are, I'd say maybe 10% of our audience, 15% maybe 20 tops. Is that the point where it's time to raise the rates and they just haven't, they're at the point you were.

[00:32:16] You know, for the last year and a half, I've known you that you just refuse to raise your rates for really a lot of these fears. And maybe we should touch on the fears a little bit more later on and maybe go back over the fears after we've talked about this episode. So we can kind of refer back to the things we talked about in relation to these fears.

[00:32:31] But let's talk about how to raise your rates in a way that makes sense.

[00:32:37] Chris: [00:32:37] Well, and confession here, this is a little bit of a selfish episode. When Brian invited me to do this podcast with them. You know, a year and a half ago or so, my first reaction was, wow, that sounds fun. My second was, I'm going to learn so much from this dude, and this is one of those things where I just feel like I have a lot to learn about raising your rates.

[00:32:59] It's something I have recently began to. Dabble in my mastering business was really based on, I had a published rate and you had gone my website, select a number of songs, and there was a standardized turnaround time. You'd select that you'd book the project and some weeks I was crazy busy and other weeks not as busy, but I had a really transparent system.

[00:33:21] For you would select your own options. It would give you the rate right

[00:33:24] Brian: [00:33:24] there. It just to clarify, you had a published set rate on your website. That's the way your business has worked for years. Yup. That's how it was when I met you and that was like the first thing I wanted to go on your side. Whenever I was talking to you and I say this is a good kind of segue into this first way to raise your rates.

[00:33:39] Let's talk about, in your example, what were some of the things you did to raise your rates now.

[00:33:43] Chris: [00:33:43] Well, the first thing I did pretty recently was I pulled my rates off my website and I went to a quote based system. Some of my older customers are still grandfathered in. You know, people that have supported me over the years, they're still grandfathered into this older, you know, the lower rate.

[00:33:56] But one of the things that's so weird about raising my rates is one of the biggest reasons I did it was this podcast. There's, you know, thousands of audio engineers listen to this podcast, and I talk to at least three to five people per day. That, listen to this podcast that are interested in working with me.

[00:34:15] There have been so many people reaching out that it's been a little difficult to keep up, and the only option was hire more mastering engineers or raise my rate, and I would much rather be in a position of working a little bit less, having a little bit less project management going on and not having to worry about like training a mastering engineer from the ground up to know all of the things that I've learned over the years.

[00:34:39] So it's been kind of a really strange journey to just be like, Oh my gosh, it started a podcast about business for recording studios. Trying to help people and oops, now I have to raise my rate because of the podcast.

[00:34:52] Brian: [00:34:52] Yeah, so you reached a point of being too busy, which is a telltale sign, and you've honestly, you've been too busy since 2014 yeah.

[00:34:57] It's now like this surprising thing that just snuck up on you like this has been going on for forever. Really. What was the main thing that stopped you from raising your rates in the first place? You were so adamantly against it. When I first started talking to you about this,

[00:35:08] Chris: [00:35:08] it was FOMO, man. My favorite thing has always been helping new artists breakthrough.

[00:35:14] My dream client isn't Coldplay or you know, some super duper famous band. It's a band that someday will be famous. That is not yet. Those are always my favorite projects and I was just so afraid that I was going to lose opportunities and it wasn't great for my personal life. You know, like there've been times when, especially like seasons, like right now, sort of the beginning of spring can be really, really, really busy for me and it can be kinda tough to balance all of the things.

[00:35:43] Especially when your podcast cohost also gets married around the same time of the year and you have to  .

[00:35:50] Brian: [00:35:50] Well, let's talk about this because you moved from a set rate system, meaning you had your rates published on your website. People could book straight on your website at the set rate. Everyone paid the same rate, and that was the way you did it for years and years and years.

[00:36:02] I tried to push you for the longest time and you finally caved in. Finally caved in, what we call it, a quote based system. And this is something that I advocate heavily to all my students. I've been pushing this for years. I've been doing this since pretty much the very get go. I've never had published rates on my website.

[00:36:19] And it's essentially where instead of your published rates, you pull your rates from our website, they're nowhere publicly anywhere. And you do a quote based system. That means when someone wants to know how much huge cost they have to contact you and you give them a custom quote based on their needs and what are some of the benefits.

[00:36:35] Behind changing from a set rate system that you've done for years and years and years to going to a closed quote system or a quote based system for your mastering services.

[00:36:45] Chris: [00:36:45] So one of the things that's the most important about switching to a quote based system that I've been fascinated by switching my company over to a quote based system is one.

[00:36:55] You get a better idea of what customers actually want. Instead of making all these assumptions about like, well, you're going to want this, or you want that, it's going to take this long to get into an actual conversation with the customer and learn about, Hey, here's what would make me happy in this project.

[00:37:09] Here's the turnaround time I'm looking for, or I do need alternate mixes mastered as well, or I do need some help figuring out, you know, vinyl or whatever it happens to be. A place to have a conversation allows you to custom tailor the quote to the client as opposed to trying to like figure out all the weird isms and outs of like, Oh wait, you want the first two songs done in one day and you want the last, you know, eight songs done in a month.

[00:37:36] Like there's just an awful lot of differences between projects. And I really think that having my rates published and trying to standardize everything while it worked, you know, I built a six figure business out of it at this point in my business. The transition to a quote based system has been fantastic.

[00:37:52] Brian: [00:37:52] And what you're doing when you have a set rate for every single client is you're subsidizing the clients who require tons and tons of work and a lot of actors and bells and whistles, what you should be charging them more. You're taking it from those who are really low time, low maintenance, easy to work with, super fun to work with, an ease like those are the ones that.

[00:38:11] Should be charging less because you love working in, they take less time and they're a lot less stress. But what you're really doing is instead of charging those clients less and the more intense clients more, you're charging them all the same, which means you're going to get more of those clients that are high maintenance and less of those clients that are exactly what you want.

[00:38:28] The quote based system, however, lets you figure out exactly what they need, how much work it's going to be, how they are to communicate with, and then to give them a personalized price based on. That X factor, which I like to call the pain in the ass factor, and it's truly what it is that you can't get from a simple email or from publishing your rates online and then booking.

[00:38:47] There is no differentiator between those two things. And you get that in a quote based system because you get to actually find out what your customers want and honestly, more importantly, what they need. Because sometimes what they want is not in alignment with what they need, and by sending a court based system, you get both of those two things, but let's bring it back to actually raising your rates because we're talking about a court based system in accordance to raising your rates.

[00:39:14] Well, let's talk about that because when you have set rates, if you want to raise your rates, you have to simply bump your rates up on your website and hope and pray that it doesn't negatively hurt your income. With a quote based system, it allows you to experiment with pricing, and that's the biggest thing that I've used in my life.

[00:39:30] I get to experiment with pricing and see how people react to it. Not only experiment pricing, but I also get to. Make pricing more elastic based on my demand at the time, Chris was talking about how some seasons, he's super busy, some seasons he's a little less busy in the seasons when you are super busy, your rates should be going up in the seasons.

[00:39:50] When you're super lax and you have a lot of free time, that's when your rates should be going down and overall it lets you experiment with raising more prices and honestly, the fear of raising your prices, it takes a certain amount of confidence to go from charging. 200 300 a song up to 600 a song, and you don't get there just by doubling or tripling your rates.

[00:40:08] That's not how you do it. What you do is when you feel really comfortable, you've got your schedule booked out for the foreseeable future, one, two, three months in advance in a mixing service. Mastering service is probably a little different when you feel like you're in a comfortable place where you can start experimenting.

[00:40:22] When you get those quote requests for a project, three, four, five months down the road, you can throw them with that number. That's instead of 200 song, maybe go two 50 or 300 a song, something that's a little bit out of your comfort zone, and at that point, once you start getting more and more yeses at that price point, that's your new baseline.

[00:40:39] You don't go below that anymore. And that was how I got my prices from a hundred a day to 100 a song up to six 5,700 I've gotten up to a thousand dollars a song for mixing services, and I did just get there overnight. It was a slow and steady gradual change based on a quote based system.

[00:40:56] Chris: [00:40:56] Yeah. And so there's this illustration that comes to mind.

[00:40:59] I used to lift a lot of weights when I was in high school and college. And the goal when you're lifting weights. Is to have the weight be just a little bit too much. You wanna get to failure. You want to get to the point where you're, you know, you're doing bench press and you're trying to do, let's say five reps, three sets.

[00:41:16] So your first set, you do one, two, three, four, five. Then you rest a little bit and then you do one, two, three, four, five. Then you rest a little bit, and if you go one, two, three, four failure, then you did a great job in your workout. You know that you had the right amount of weight. When you were weightlifting, because at the point of failure is where you experienced the most growth.

[00:41:39] I think, and I'm so new to believing this, but I think you should always be a little uncomfortable with some of your quotes. You should say to yourself, Aw, gosh, that feels a little high. Uh, and I think it's at that point when you start getting nos from people that you start to figure out what you actually are worth.

[00:42:00] In the marketplace, not what you are worth as an individual, not in the, you know, metaphysical or, you know, philosophy,

[00:42:08] Brian: [00:42:08] philosophical,

[00:42:09] Chris: [00:42:09] philosophical. There it is. Thank you Brian. But you start to figure out like what your service is, what your company is worth. So I'm a big fan of this.

[00:42:19] Brian: [00:42:19] And so just to really talk about this a little further, quote based system lets you really find out what your worth in the market.

[00:42:25] Let me make a really important point here. We're not just talking about raising your rates for the sake of raising your rates. So you are the beneficiary here. All we're trying to do is help you establish what the fair market rate is for the services you offer at the quality that you offer it. And you don't get to pick this.

[00:42:42] You do set your own rates, but you are not the one who's determining whether or not they accept that rate. So you moving to a quote based system gives you the freedom and flexibility to experiment with. Is the market willing to accept this new rate or not? And if they don't, you know, now this is not the rate that I can charge at this time in this economy with this niche in this services.

[00:43:03] And if they do accept this new rate at the percentage of close rates that you're used to, or that you would like to see if they do accept it, that is now the market rate that you have found that works for you. On the flip side, you may start experimenting and find that by lowering your rates, you keep your calendar more full and overall you make more money.

[00:43:20] And if you do this within reason, you're not overworking yourself. You may make more money in the long run by charging less than what you're charging right now. So having this flexibility in mind as you do a quote based system, gives you a lot more freedom. To figure out how much work you want and what price you want it at.

[00:43:36] And if you need more work, you may need to lower your price. And if you want more money and a little less work, you can raise your price and you just cannot do that with a set rate system. If someone came to your site every month or every six months and saw wildly different rates, or like, you know, 30 40 50% differences in your rates.

[00:43:52] You know, twice a year they're going to start wondering what the hell is going on. But a quote based system gives you a little more flexibility to do that.

[00:43:59] Chris: [00:43:59] Yeah. I love the ability of the quote based system where you can give a quote to somebody. A lot of times what I've found is someone will reach out and say, Oh, we need this back within six days.

[00:44:08] We'll just kind of throw a number out there. It was just, they just made it up and I'll say, Oh, that would cost this at six days, you know? And they'll be like, Oh, okay. Six days is kind of fast. Yeah, a little bit. What would it be? Less if it was slower? Yeah, I could, but that would be easier for me. Like I could fit you in a different time.

[00:44:26] And there's that elasticy there of balancing supply and demand. And at that point like you can figure out, Oh, okay, yeah, I could negotiate a little bit with you there.

[00:44:33] Brian: [00:44:33] And that's finding what they really need versus what they think they want.

[00:44:37] Chris: [00:44:37] Yes. Bingo. So I love this. I really think that audio services, and I think that we as an industry should come together on this, that we should.

[00:44:46] Be a supply and demand price-based structure, kind of like gasoline. Price of gas isn't the same. Every day goes up and down. Many things in our world go up and down as there's more supply and less demand or more demand and less supply. Your time is the same. If you have less time available. If your profit margins are decent, then you have more walkaway power.

[00:45:11] So when you get a quote, you should experiment with, well, I could make what you're asking me to do happen. It would cause some discomfort. There would be a delivery time to quality of life trade off. So I'm going to charge a little bit more.

[00:45:26] Brian: [00:45:26] And if you look at the stock market, if you look at a stock, it's updating price.

[00:45:30] Every millisecond. Yeah. If you sat and stare at it like the Robin hood app or whatever other stock trading app you use and you watch a stock or God forbid Bitcoin, and you start looking at that number going up and down. Throughout the day. That's simply the result of what people value that stock at at this given moment, what the market sees that stock is worth.

[00:45:49] It's the same for you as a studio owner. Your rates are going to vary like that based on the demand from the market. You just don't get to see that update in real time every millisecond. Yours is going to be a much slower, much more gradual, similar to real estate where it's a lot slower fluctuations and.

[00:46:05] Until you start experimenting more. You just don't know what your services are worth until you start experimenting in there. Anything else you want to add to this, Chris, or can we move on to the next point?

[00:46:13] Chris: [00:46:13] Well, one of the things I've been the most excited about is you preach follow up. Oh yeah. And you are like the followup King and a quote based system is much more compatible with followup than a published rate system.

[00:46:26] If you just like put it out there, it goes to $100 a song for mixing or whatever it happens to be. Someone looks at that and it's either a yes, no, or maybe, but you have no idea who they are or what their thought was. In a quote based system, you can at least begin a conversation and then in the future you might have the ability to say, Hey, I have some time open.

[00:46:46] I would be willing to work for a little bit less. And then you can email them and say, Hey, you know, there's back to the email list thing that we've talked about in previous episodes. You have a chance to be able to sort of control your own supply and demand in your business rather than this totally opposite.

[00:47:03] If you build it, they will come like, just sit back, let your passion, like attract with magnetism, all the customers that are obligated to work with you because you've been true to the unknown self.

[00:47:14] Brian: [00:47:14] I don't want to act like the quote based system is the only way to go because we've had guests on the podcast that do completely different ways.

[00:47:20] I want to mention something else here. Another way you can raise your rates. It's a little out of the box, but something worth mentioning. And that is changing the way you package your services. If you go back to episode 68 with Mark Eckert, he packages his services in a very unique way instead of a quote based system.

[00:47:38] Actually, he does do a court based system, but this is a very clever variation of it. Instead of just simply a price for your services and that's it. Instead of putting your rates online and then just booking a project and that's it. He does. An interesting package where he has kind of artist development, producing, songwriting, all in a monthly recurring package.

[00:47:57] And this is extremely interesting because not only is he pairing it with the quote based system where he can experiment with what's the value of this service. He also has this recurring income element that brings what's called the LTV or the lifetime value of a customer up overall. If you think about every single one of your customers, your repeat customers are always going to be worth more than the one and done type customers.

[00:48:18] And in Mark's business, he's packages his services in a way that. Instantly makes every single one of his clients a recurring client because they are working with him multiple times throughout the year and he's getting paid every single month. So don't just take our advice blindly and run with it.

[00:48:33] Really think through what you can do to set yourself apart in the market, because there's something called pricing confusion. We've mentioned this on the podcast before in the past, but when you are shopping for a car and you want to buy a new car or a used car. First place you're probably gonna look is like kellybluebook.com and it shows you the price that you should be charged for that car based on other comparable cars.

[00:48:55] Because just about every one of these cars has made the same. If I bought a 2006 Honda pilot, which it was what I drive to this day, every one of those 2,600 pilots are going to be built basically the same. If I go out and buy a new Honda pilot this year, all are going to be similar, so there's no pricing confusion.

[00:49:10] It's pretty much uniform amongst every single one of those cars with the. Slight difference in feature set, but when you make something unique that there is nothing to compare yourself to, you don't have this comparison that people are doing. They're not looking at the studio down the road that offers exact same mastering services as you because you've packaged your stuff in this.

[00:49:32] Interesting way that they just don't know how to really value it. And that can go both ways. It can go negatively as well if you don't do it in a way that makes sense in that person's brain. I mentioned Mark's website in the last podcast episode, and I don't mean to push this guy too hard on you. He's just a friend of mine and I admire the stuff he does

[00:49:47] Chris: [00:49:47] and we love him.

[00:49:47] Brian: [00:49:47] Look at some of the things he does on his website to create pricing confusion because he's created a unique packaging of services that doesn't really have a comparison that you can just go out and blindly find somewhere else. So he's kind of got. Two good things going from the quote based system and the unique packaging, and I think if you just did one of those two things, you're going to do a lot for yourself, but just some extra things to keep in mind when it comes to raising your prices.

[00:50:12] You don't have to just blindly follow her advice. You can still do something unique or something that is better suited to your style and run with it.

[00:50:20] Chris: [00:50:20] I love that, man. Well, I would say last thing here, last thing on how to raise your rates is that the ability to raise your rates is really, really tied to one other number in your business, and that is the number of leads that you have coming in the door.

[00:50:38] If you have one lead coming in the door each month, one potential sale. It's not the right time to raise your rates,

[00:50:46] Brian: [00:50:46] and just to clarify, coming in the door, he just means like a quote request you get where someone DME you on Instagram saying, Hey, I would like to work with you. How much are your rates?

[00:50:55] That's one lead right there.

[00:50:56] Chris: [00:50:56] Yeah. If you're in a position where you have one lead per month, you're probably not in a good spot to raise your rates. You could really easily accidentally out price yourself from your customers. If you're in a different position and you have one lead per day or a couple leads per day, and there's a lot of potential projects to choose from.

[00:51:15] There's a lot of stuff to figure into this, but if you have enough deal flow where you have the ability to say no to some people and you can deal with, Hey, I sent out 31 quotes this month and 15 of them said, no, we can't afford you, and 16 of them said yes. If you're in a position like that. Much different conversation, but if you don't have enough leads coming in, you're going to be up up poop

[00:51:41] Brian: [00:51:41] Crick.

[00:51:42] Chris: [00:51:42] You're going to be in a position real fast where you don't actually know what your services are worth in the marketplace. So you've got to have these leads

[00:51:51] Brian: [00:51:51] now, real quick, if you're not sure how to get more leads for your studio, we have a two part episode, episode 42 in episode 43 on how to get more clients for your studio.

[00:51:59] Really, really good series to go back to for some refreshers on how to get more leads for your studio if you are at the struggle bus at this point. Sino do you say Crick or Creek?

[00:52:09] Chris: [00:52:09] I think I said Creek.

[00:52:10] Brian: [00:52:10] Okay. Just making sure. You said Crick earlier and I was just, I was concerned for you. Let's wrap this episode up cause now we're going off.

[00:52:17] Went off the deep end here.

[00:52:18] Chris: [00:52:18] We've got to leave that ed. Oh man, that's rich.

[00:52:21] Brian: [00:52:21] Well, what's something we can give somebody to walk away with here? Something that you want.

[00:52:24] Chris: [00:52:24] Oh, I got something for them to walk away with. Your number one way that you can raise your rates, the most important thing you got to have.

[00:52:33] And this is the thing you can walk away with from this episode is walk away power. You must have walk away power. That's the ability to say no. When someone is offering you a rate that's too low, you have to be able to be in a position to say, Hm, would love to help you. But there's just, I'm sorry. That's, that's less than what I charge.

[00:52:56] And the easiest way to do that. Is to communicate is to be totally honest and say, Hey, I'm so sorry. There are so many people that want to work with me at this rate that I can't go below it because it would be unfair to my other customers to give you this crazy deal that I don't give to them. I wish I could.

[00:53:15] I would love to work with you, but I'm more expensive than that.

[00:53:18] Brian: [00:53:18] I don't want to add something to this, and I forgot to mention earlier, is. A lot of times when a client gives you their budget, that's not the actual budget.

[00:53:26] Chris: [00:53:26] Yeah. Ignore that.

[00:53:27] Brian: [00:53:27] I can't tell you how many times I'll give a quote for a price that's nearly double their budget and I'll still get the project, so don't be swayed.

[00:53:35] Just because someone's budget doesn't match what you would like to charge. Charge what you want to charge or charge what you think is the market can afford for your rates or what's your worth, but don't be too swayed by the budget that the artist gives you if they give you a budget, because that's a lot of times their ideal budget, what they wish they could get.

[00:53:52] In a perfect world, it's not anywhere set in reality.

[00:53:54] Chris: [00:53:54] Yeah. It's honestly one of my pet peeves when somebody comes to me and says, this is our budget. And be like, by budget, do you mean a number that you pulled out of your butt?

[00:54:05] Brian: [00:54:05] Yeah, there's been times I'll also mentioned when it's talking about walkaway power, where a client, I ask for budget on my quote for him.

[00:54:11] That's one of the things I want to know. If they give a budget that's like a multiple of 10 under what I would charge. Like I might charge a thousand a song and they're like, our budget's a hundred a song. I wouldn't even give him a price. I'll just say, I'm so sorry guys. This isn't any work clothes. I'll say in a nice way.

[00:54:26] I have a template for this. It's way nicer than what I'm saying now. This isn't even close to what I would charge you. Here's some people that are closer to that budget and they're always worse than what I am because you're not going to get the exact same quality of what I am for $100 a song, but at least it's pointing them in the right direction of what they can expect at that budget.

[00:54:43] Chris: [00:54:43] This is good stuff. Brian, I appreciate you doing this episode with me. This is stuff that I have fear issues around raising my rates. I think all of us do, and for whatever reason, that part of your brain is broken and you don't have,

[00:54:58] Brian: [00:54:58] I don't have any fear around raising rates. I have these like I have this wonderful entrepreneur ignorance.

[00:55:05] That allows me to tackle things and do things that I should in no way ever do, because I simply don't know that I shouldn't. I'm not gonna act like I don't have fears. I obviously have fears, but just around pricing and raising rates and charging what I think I'm worth, the fears are not there, but I will say this, they're probably not there because I do things in a way that allows me to experiment.

[00:55:23] What's scary is doubling your rates online. That's scary because then anyone that comes to your site and you don't know what the reaction is, you have no idea. But when I get to experiment by sending one email to one artist and I get to try a new rate, if that way, that's a way that it's a much more manageable way to do it.

[00:55:40] So I just set it up in a way that I don't have to. Put myself out there to everyone. I get to experiment in a little ways, and that's just kind of how I run any business that I do is through experimentation in manageable bite-size things.

[00:55:56] so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. If you have problems implementing any of the stuff we talk about today on the podcast, or if you have questions. About whether you think you are ready to raise your rates or if you should raise your rates or if the quote based system is right for you.

[00:56:10] Or if you should do some sort of unique packaging, come join our Facebook community. It is free. It is on Facebook, the six figure home studio community. Or you can just go to the six figure home studio.com/community. And you can apply to join our free community on Facebook. All you have to do is answer a few questions so we don't get a bunch of spammers in there and we have a really healthy community.

[00:56:29] There's tons of posts every day there's over 5,000 people in there now. Everyone's sharing with each other, helping each other out, answering questions, posing questions, posting interesting things to think about. I'm in there interacting. Every single one of our podcast listeners should be in there, especially if you are trying to implement the stuff we'll talk about on this podcast, because you will inevitably hit roadblocks and when you hit those roadblocks, it's good to have a community that will surround you and help lift you up.

[00:56:51] So go do that right now. Like literally right now, unless you're driving or something stupid, go join our community and next week we will have another episode live at 6:00 AM bright and early Tuesday morning. As always, until next time, thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.