How To Turn a $1,000 Project Into A $10,000 Project

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 86

you're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource to running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of the [inaudible]

figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my purple shirted Bald and beautiful headphone slut cohost. Chris Graham. Feels so known mostly because of the headphones thing. I really do like headphones. That is legit. Your thing Chris, like if I don't know what my thing is, but your thing is absolutely your love for headphones and it's actually hilarious listening to you talk about different headphone models and like lusting over them. I remember Nam a couple of years ago. Oh you were at every headphone stand you wanted to try them on and you bought like some $300 pair of headphones like any years or something on the spot. Ah, yes, the ED emotive.

I didn't have any need to tell you this at the time cause it was the first

tell me I never met you but I thought they sounded like shit.

They're not forever

pretty one those particular headphones. But yeah dude, it's been funny. I've been getting a lot of messages from people on Facebook or not Facebook, Instagram, Chris Underscore Graham, g r a. H a m my fam and it's funny I get people that reach out all the time for headphone advice on there.

Really it's a known thing like if you've listened to our podcast for more than 30 seconds, you know Chris Graham has a headphone slot.

Yeah, I like him. It's probably good that I'm not like filthy rich cause I would just buy headphones. There's seriously off the top of my head I could name six pairs of headphones and a bullet include endears on that, that I was like I buy those right now. There's totally a good reason for me to own those.

It's weird. I'm the same way about like coffee stuff. I don't know if you saw this, but the fresh rose sr

five 50 I think is out now. Did you see that? Yes, I did

see that. I reached out to them because you know, we didn't really do this sponsorship thing. At least we haven't a whole lot yet. We would 1000% would trade some sponsorship for new coffee roasters. Yes, 100% Oh, we'll sell out. Yeah. All Day long for a new fresh roast. Oh yeah, yeah. I'll be like, what do you need? What do you need? You're going to give me a free coffee roaster. Yes. Yeah. I definitely have sent a few emails with that, so we'll see.

If that keeps going, let me know. I'll pimp a new coffee roaster and if there's another brand out there like that just happens. Listen to our podcast for whatever dumb reason. I don't know why a coffee roasting company would listen to our podcast, but if that's you, let us know because we will gladly take a sponsorship.

I did get some very nice coffee in the mail from one of our listeners this week. It's from Red Barn Studio. Jason at Red Barn Studio and it's a frigate

names.

It's really, really, really, really good though. Dude. Someone sent me a box with like two pounds of coffee in it a while back and I forgot to mention it. I need to go look it back at who it was that sent that to me. It's been like my wife and i's coffee, like when I forget to roast coffee or something. We've been using this other dude's coffee as our like backup brands, so I need to find this because I love when I get free coffee.

That's amazing. Crap. What was it called? It's like Ozark or Omega Church as an o like right upstairs.

Well you keep thinking about that. Anyone that doesn't know what the hell we're talking about. Chris and I are huge, huge coffee nerds. We roast our own beans. We like are all about the aero press life. My favorite quote for air presses on the package, if I were a robot, my arm would be a error press or something like that. Like that's how I feel. If you're a longtime listener, you know what we're talking about.

Onyx, I found it. Onyx coffee, onyx coffee lab. It's really good. I'm looking it up. Oh, in an I x. Yeah, I had a couple of people, I posted it on my Instagram story and a couple of people reached out and like that's my favorite coffee. It's delicious. Oh,

coffee hung. Their Google thing is interesting. Coffee roasters and cafe in Barista training. There's a place here in Nashville called Crema and they do actually like coffee classes for like cupping and latte art and all sorts of stuff. They actually have. Interesting. Anyways, I didn't mean to go off on the coffee tangent today, but you can't help it. The only thing else you want to add while we're just completely off the subject of the podcast and probably boring people to death, give me an update on Chris Graham mastering.

Oh Dude. Okay, so I owe you a thank you. You've been encouraging me and we've talked about this over the past couple of months. By encouraging you mean like really mean tough love? Yeah, really mean tough love, which is my favorite kind and I've always at least in the past done a model with the mastering business where it's like, hey, you pay a set price and then you get a set turnaround time and sometimes my schedule was super crazy and sometimes it wasn't as crazy and so I would just sorta change my turnaround time based on how crazy my schedule was. You were like, dude, you're a moron, go to a Kobe system, don't publish your rates. And the past three months, every single month has been the best month Chris Graham mastering has ever had. So it's been crazy. There's a lot of reasons for that, but I think the biggest reason is going to quote based system and raising my rates and it has been mind blowing that I've been talking to a lot of the guys I do coaching with about for anyone that's been doing this that's been doing a business for a long time, you get kind of stuck in a Rut.

You get used to doing things a certain way. I got used to charging a certain thing for a certain delivery time and I got blind to the fact that that was silly and that like I should have changed that five years ago and it's been amazing over the past couple months to just be like, Whoa, okay, this is going really well.

This is stuff that we've talked about in the podcast on episode 80 we talked about how to get more customers through your website. This was like when you first started getting results from this. This is something that I've totally been telling you for years to do, like since I've known you, you started doing it like I want to say probably towards the beginning of the year, something like that. Yeah. Is when you went to the court based system, you had some growing pains, but like your income is up a substantial amount. You're about to have the best month of your life for your studio this month and a lot of that is to do with the fact that you've been getting a lot higher quality projects through the website. Now, not only that, this year is already better than last year and we're not even six months in. Whoa. That is huge. It's crazy.

Yeah. So it's been really, really weird to kind of process this. So you're saying your income is up six months in the year it's higher than it was after 12 months last year. Quite a bit higher actually. Wow. It's been a weird thing. I went to a quote based system on the plane on the way to Yosemite for your bachelor party. Yeah. So for those who don't listen to the podcast regularly, I got married in March and in February I think we went to a bachelor party for me in Yosemite State Park in one of the biggest state park. Yosemite ain't no state park. Sorry. National Park. The biggest snow storm and like since the 60s we had a whole lot of fun there. But you did it on the plane. I feel like this is almost like an infomercial like, and I got results to Chris. Tell me the results you got.

You know like, well that crossed my mind. Like, as I've been processing all this, I'm like, wow, because here's the thing, let me back up. Let me say this guys, I don't think you can master business. I still absolutely consider myself a student of business. And that's the nature I think of business is that you are always a student. You are always learning new things. And it was interesting, you know, you've taught me a lot of things that I've been using with my business and I definitely thought I was like, man, people really should go take his courses. This has been great. And try to convince them to cohost the podcast with you. So that would help to even more probably than the course. But anyways, yeah, it's been crazy man. Like I've learned an awful lot and I'd be remiss not to mention some of that has to do, a huge portion of that has to do with the fact that there's like 5,000 audio engineers that listen like every week to this show.

So that definitely helps find new clients. But yeah, it's been a crazy, crazy, crazy year. Well, I am for one, so stoked that you have seen success with this. You mentioned taking all of my courses. I don't ever push this ever like I don't think I've ever pushed this in the history of the podcast, but I do have a free course to anyone listening to the podcast right now can take for free. It's in the six figure home studio academy. It's called the simple business roadmap and that's like a really, really good primer for anyone who is early to mid stage of their careers. Some stuff in there that we talked about the podcast that's more of a visual guidance of just the audio guide. I don't have a URL for that. Just go to academy dot the six figure home studio.com and you'll find that course in there for free.

That's awesome. Well you guys should definitely do that. Brian is brilliant at this stuff. It's almost like you have, I don't know, it's like there's something not quite right with you. How natural this stuff seems to come to you. Well, Gosh, you're just making me blush now. That's a weird compliment. Yeah. Let's move into the topic of the episode this week. If you followed along, I don't think it was last week, I think it was the week before episode, episode number four, we had an episode called the pricing master class. It was how to charge more, add more value and win more projects. Super, super valuable episode in and of itself. But we kinda cut it short cause we were just ran out of time and I was only like, you know a third of the way through the content and that episode and we're going to pick it up today whether or not you listen to that episode, whether or not you read the pdf that we're going to, there's an ebook that goes along with this sort of series that we're kind of doing here.

None of that matters. This episode is a stand alone in and of itself and there's some really cool stuff in it and it's going to piggyback off episode number 84 but it is not a hundred percent requirement. So do with that information what you will, but we've got a good episode in store for you today. The some stuff that this stuff is like some of the most game changing stuff. Like my wife implemented what we talked about in episode 84 for a new project she did and she won the project first and foremost. She's making more from the project than she ever did cause she does social media management for people. So it's a freelance gigs similar to what we do. So a lot of what we talk about, a lot of what we teach is applicable to her and her business. And after implementing what we talked about that episode in episode 84 it changed the way she talks to her clients. And so this week, this is part two of this pricing masterclass. I don't know what the title is going to be, but we've got some really interesting ways to think about pricing projects.

Yeah. And so this whole episode and that previous episode we did, you know, it's based on this amazing free pdf that the founder of freshbooks put out. There's going to be a link to that in the description. Obviously it's free, it takes it, you know, 30 to 60 minutes to read. It's really fun.

Fantastic. It's called breaking the time barrier. Yeah. And it's basically like should you charge per hour or should you charge per project? The answer is per project. That ebook is essentially him talking about how he made $200,000 in one year working 17 days out of that year. And this was has, he was transitioning from a freelance career similar to what we're doing audio. He transferred from a freelance career and he used that money to start fresh books, which is now like a multi-multi Deca millionaire business and he makes tons of money doing that. But the principles are the same in this ebook. Getting away from being tied to the time you work cause that's the biggest negative part of working in a home studio is in most situations we tie our income to our time. And this ebook is all about getting away from that. The feedback I've gotten from people reading this ebook is absolutely fantastic and even myself, I find myself learning so much in this little short ebook that takes like an hour to read.

Yeah, it's a weird thing. If there's a certain, to get like mystical here, there's like hidden wisdom about business and a lot of that wisdom is related to helping people as much as you possibly can. I know that this is a lot of music people so I don't want to like offend anyone by bringing something slightly political into this year. But the way capitalism works is whoever serves the most people the most wins, assuming they can capture some of that value for themselves. You know, if you help somebody like completely, you know, grow their business from zero to a million dollars, you're going to make a lot of money off of that. And so this book is about some of that wisdom around how to help people more, how to find out what they need. And what's so cool about that is it really flips like this idea of like capitalism on its head.

Most people think capitalism is whoever steals the most wins. It's completely the opposite of that. If you want a ton of customers, you have to have a reputation for helping people a lot. That's the only way anyone will ever hire you. And I've got some experience with the marketing piece here. It's way too damn hard to convince someone to hire you, steal their money and then try to convince somebody else to hire you. It doesn't work that way, especially in 2019 this is way more true now than it has ever been. And it'll be even more true next year as there's more and more transparency that social media and the internet and Google and all that just kind of brings to our feet. So yeah, this is great stuff. And it's ironic that they don't teach this stuff in schools because it is so much more important than pretty much everything except literacy. If I could have known what this book teaches and had almost no math skill when I graduated high school and didn't know anything about, you know, this is offensive. I'm sorry if it offends you, but I would trade most of what I learned in high school, College, Middle School to know more about like creating value in helping people and doing that in a way that grew my business.

So just to kind of pick up where we left off last week, we were talking about the story of Steve, this ebook. This is a free ebook. It's in our show notes to the six figure home studio.com/ 86 you don't necessarily have to read it to follow along here, but as a story of a guy named Steve, he runs a freelance design agency. There's a ton of parallels. Don't worry about the design thing. It's so similar. The business of it is so similar to running a recording studio. Any freelance career, honestly as similar and we're really just, we took the entire episode and episode 84 to really just dissect all of these little points in the story because there's so much to unpack here and that leads us to Steve. Steve talks to this person, he gets horrible advice from this person who's really a bad mentor in his life on gear, floods.com I'm just kidding.

That's actually the point. Yeah. Be careful who you take advice from. And this guy who taken advice from ends up having to get a day job because his freelance career was falling apart as well. And so Steve goes to a girl named Karen who's like the most successful freelancer in his city and starts to get advice from her and she starts to mentor him and we talk about a lot of the things she teaches them on last week's episode. But I want to start this episode out with an example that Karen gifts when she's talking to a client, and this is example of how she can charge 10 times more for a project than someone like Steve. She has the experience, she has the no house, she has the ability to turn a $10,000 project into $100,000 project. That doesn't really work in the audio world.

There's very few people that will get $100,000 from a project nowadays. Maybe back in the 70s 80s and 90s that might've been more common. But today, think about it more like instead of $1,000 project, maybe you'll get 10,000 instead of $100 project, maybe we'll get a thousand but you can still find a way to Tenex the value. And I think this story from this ebook is a really, really good way to kind of see what she's talking about. The specific example he fall along with me so far, Chris. Totally man. And one of the things I want to add here is, you know, you hear that, well it's not apple gold cause I can't turn a $10,000 project into 100,000 it's not about turning a $10,000 and a hundred thousand dollars project. It's about exing the value that you provide and the value that you capture. If you 10 x 10 projects, it's the same as 10 x in one project, right?

All things being equal. So like it's really about, and again, for anyone that's got some hesitation that sounds like they're going to teach me how to cheat people. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's the opposite. It's figuring out how to add value. How to figure out what the customer really wants and find ways to serve them more. To give them this like, oh my gosh, this is dreamy. This person gave us the most amazing proposal and that's exactly what we need. Oh my gosh, we didn't even know this was possible. Maybe you will pay 10 times when we were planning on paying that. That's what happens here. We're going to have it for self here. So let me start with this story here. I'm getting excited. Sorry. Yeah, so Karen, again, just to go back, Karen is the most successful freelancer in Steve's city and Steve says, Hey, can you give me an example of what you're talking about when you sit down with a client, how are you able to charge 10 times more than me on the same project?

And so Karen gives an example. She is talking to a clothing ecommerce company that wants an update to the look of their website, I guess a brand refresh or they want a more modern look. And this is the way most designers would quote the project. They would say, Oh, you want to redesign your website? Well, here's the price, and they would charge maybe five or $10,000 for a revamp of that website. That's typically what you would see, maybe 10 maybe $20,000 for like a very expensive designer because how do you put a value on something? This is vague as just updating a website's look. If you go back to what we talked about in episode 84 we talk about diving in, trying to figure out what is the value of that client's project to then what is their point B. They're at point a right now in the future.

They released the songs, it's successful. What does [inaudible] look like to them? What is success to them, and then you're trying to look at what the value of that success is so you can better assess how you can charge for the project. In this case we can really relate to this question Steve has is how do you put a price on something that's as vague as a design or how do we put a price on some of this as vague as music, something that's a lot more, what's the term, Chris, where it's abstract, I guess subjective. Subjective. Yeah. Somebody that's more subjective, and this is what most studios do or most freelancers, they just look at the project and they will quote a price based on what that person is asking for. But here's where Karen is setting yourself apart as the expert. Karen starts to dig in and ask why?

Why do they want to update their websites? Look, remember this is an ecommerce company. They want a brand refresh. They want to uptick the look of their site and she wants to know why. There's obviously a reason they're asking for this. So she's digging deeper and we talked about this a lot on episode 84 and they said they felt like their website was outdated and that their website was turning away potential sales. So in this case, people come to the site. It looks like web 1.0 it looks like what Amazon looked like in 1999 people probably aren't going to trust that site so you start to get the bigger picture of okay this website update is actually going to bring in more sales. So now this is a little less vague, right Chris? Like there's a little bit more of an idea. The lack of a professional design creates a lack of trust and so people are not going to be probably trusting enough to pull their credit card out and put it on this website. It just doesn't look right.

I would add this, if they were really savvy, they would have said, well we looked at Google analytics and we have 70% bounce rate. Bounce rate means someone lands on your website and leaves without clicking anything. If you have Google analytics on your website, and we said this a million times, you should, there's no excuse not to have Google analytics on your website cause it's free. If they had some our bounce rates, 70% people are being turned off clearly by our website and they're running for the hills. As soon as they land on the page, we need to make a better first impression.

Yeah, and so to Cara though, this is not specific enough for her, she doesn't know the true value of what lost sales actually means. So she starts to dig in more and more to this ecommerce company. What are their business objectives specifically where their website and so she finds out this company had some specific revenue targets. So she actually gets some numbers from that. And because of this, because she sees these specific examples from this ecommerce client, she's able to give some actual specific details of a results that she's gotten from similar clients who she's done work for in the past.

What's kind of cool here is Karen's revving up to take the proposal. So let's put this in studio terms. Someone comes to you and says, I want to make a record and here's what I want the record to be like. You ask a bunch of questions, why do you want to make that record? Why do you want that record? What do you think that record's going to do for you? Through asking these questions and finding out about like, wow, I grew up on this style of music, but also this all music is combination, the two of them and there's this message I want to communicate about, you know, this type of social justice or whatever. All the sudden the producer or and Karen in this case can come back and be like, hmm, that's not the record that you want, the record that you want looks like this.

And then they begin to pitch, well we get this studio drummer and we would go to this studio where your favorite record as a kid was recorded and I can rent that place out for $700 a day. And then we're going to go and we're going to have this mix engineer who mixed your second favorite record, who I happen to know is going to work on it and that would cost this and did it. So all of a sudden you're basically saying you think you want that, but wouldn't it be cooler if he got this instead? And for a client that has money to spend of a client, they can afford it. All of a sudden you've justified a significantly higher price. And that's one of the ways, that's where this book starts to get really interesting for people in our industry.

Yup. Basically at this point, she's figured out enough about this project to realize what they're asking for isn't what they need. Yes. They want a brand refresh. She's like, oh no, no, no, no. You want these specific monetary results from your website and I can show you three or four of my clients who are in the exact same position as you and here's what I did and here's their exact results. They got x specific revenue, x amount of revenue or x, uh, lifting conversion rates or whatever from their site and now she's completely pitching a different service at this point. A service that is going to actually match that client's goals. Now what they asked for, but what they really, really want. And you give a really good example there Chris, but this is just to give another example. This is essentially like finding out that a client's goal isn't just to record with you, which is they come to you like, hey, we want to record our songs with you, but then you really start digging into, you find out they actually just want to get TV and movie placements for their music and that completely changes how you would approach the project and it opens up a lot of opportunity for adding value to that project.

Just because you found out that their goal isn't to release this music to Spotify, it isn't to tour around the world. Their goal with this music is to get TV and movie placements and you start to see, whenever I give that example, now that you understand the goal of your client, you understand different ways you can add value. You may not have all the skills for that yet and we'll talk about that in a second, but you at least have a better idea of what they're trying to do so that you can position the quote and the whole project for what they truly need. And this is where we get to the meat of this thing here. Karen is doing this, she now knows all of this big long list of things that she needs to do for this client and she is going to pitch this project to her customer instead of just a website redesign.

So instead of a website redesign, here's what she's going to offer to this client. She's going to do customer research for this client. She's going to offer a complete website audit. All of the website, every single page, every sub page, and their blog, their landing pages, all of their marketing pages, all of their checkout pages, everything. She's going to do a complete website audit. She's going to do market analysis. This is a clothing ecommerce store, so you can understand how important that would be. She's going to install a completely new ecommerce platform from scratch. So this would be like moving away from wix or squarespace's shopping platform to something more robust like Shopify or woocommerce. She's going to do that complete redesign, that one thing they ask for and she's going to set up and execute various split tests or Ab tests, which we've talked about in the podcast before.

So at this point you start to get a scope of all the things she's doing. This is a completely different type of project on the table. Now, Karen is no longer competing with other designers. She's essentially offering to rebuild a website from the ground up, and so she has no competition at this point. Yeah, that's amazing. What Karen did is she used the request for a proposal as an opportunity not to give them a proposal to do what they wanted, but to pitch them on. Well, if I was your CEO, here's what I would do, and here's the thing, isn't that what a producer does? And our industry isn't a producer's job to be like, cool, all right, I

can level this up. Isn't this what someone who makes a record for a living is and is that their job? It's to use creativity to be like, well, that would be cool, but you know, it'd be even cooler, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Karen basically paints them a dream here. Like, yes, I now know what your goals are and here's all the steps required to actually achieve your goal and I can promise you the value of what she's pitching here is 10 x what those other people are going to be quoting about their design projects. So now she's able to quote for this project a hundred to $125,000 for this project.

Well, and I would guess for a lot of us, a lot of you are thinking like, I could never get a client to pay $100,000 yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's about 10 x thing and it's about the creative exercise here. The creative exercise might also include you financing the project for them to be like, well, it'd be $10,000 for this dream project, or it would be $1,000 a month for a year. That's a totally different scenario, you know, which isn't necessarily for everybody, but it's super interesting.

Yeah. If you go back to episode 68 where we talk about using Instagram marketing to build a recurring income business as a music producer, it was our interview with Mark Eckert. He essentially does this where he has people come on with him and he does a lot more than just record and produce the bands. He's doing things like artist development and he's spreading it out over the course of a year on a month to month contract because it's more affordable to these clients. So there's a lot of ways you can slice this. I love that guy. Yeah, I love mark. At the end of the day, this is why Karen's able to charge 10 x more and she's going to win the project every single time. So now those designers that had the $10,000 quote for redesigned the website, they're even considering that because they now see all these things that they need to be putting into place in order to reach their revenue goals. Now she's the only one they're talking to that is offering this unique and complete solution to their problems. Let's bring this back now. How does this relate to home studios? Chris? I think we can all agree this is hard to compare these sorts of numbers when we're looking at $100,000 project. Just cause that doesn't exist in our industry, especially in the home studio industry and not as much in the commercial industry either, but the core of what is happening is honestly the same in this situation.

Yeah. Well, I mean there's an interesting idea there of like, you know, I'm even thinking like, well $100,000 in the home studio world, could you do $100,000 with a client? The answer is yes. Obviously those clients are extremely rare. They're obviously going to be extremely wealthy, but on the flip side of the coin, if you're in a position where you are able to, like mark does get somebody who's like, I want to make a song every month with you for the foreseeable future. If you're in a situation like that where you have longevity to the project that you get paid again and again and again and again and again so that they have a regular deliverable to their fans and that helps them grow a fan base, all of a sudden, a hundred thousand dollar lifetime value. It's still a lot, but it's a lot more achievable with this idea of like, well, it's going to be $500 a month and what is it? 20 months later you've made $100,000 did I do that math right?

Not, but it's, it's fine. It's fine. People get what you're saying. I put a quote down what Karen said in this book at this point that I think is really relevant to people. People that are doubting themselves are not just seeing the bigger picture here and she says this, you'll get there someday, but you have to pave your own path and you have to do things your own unique way. And I think that's every single person that was listening to this podcast right now has a different skillset. They have a different way they approach things. They have different types of clients they're talking to, and those clients have different types of goals. So instead of trying to compare yourself to Karen or compare yourself to the guy down the road who is charging 10% more than you or even undercutting you, you still have to pave your own path and translate this into what works in your business.

But at the end of the day, you can win way more projects and you can earn more money just by implementing this approach that Karen uses when she's talking to her clients. And sometimes that means you have to develop skills and abilities that you do not currently possess. But this is the key to creating new value for your projects. In a situation where she's charging $100,000 is because she has so many more skills and abilities than these other designers, but that didn't come out of nowhere. She had to learn those skills or find people that have those skills that she can partner with to implement those things and if you want to add more value to the projects, you have to either learn those skills or partnered with somebody that has those skills for your clients.

That is some juicy meat or in my case, Tofu. Oh my gosh. In this episode of the podcast, I want to really point out something you just said right there. New Value. For some reason that really stuck in my heart, this idea add value is a little mysterious to refer to like, well, I'm going to find additional ways to help this customer, but to create new value. That's interesting. That's exciting to see your job as a producer. As you know, whatever you're doing in the music industry, it's easier to create new value in the music industry than any other industry because it's just creativity. There's no blueprint. It's the wild west right now and there are so many ways that people are doing this, whether they're helping them make music videos, whether they're been helping with them Kickstarter or whether they're helping them make music in a way where they can release it consistently and afford to do that. There's so many ways to create new value. And here's my thought. Those of you listening to this podcast are those of you not listening to this podcast that are in our industry, the ones who find the way to make new value are the ones who will be the most successful.

Let me try to paint the picture here because I like, I just like giving concrete examples. But if someone comes to Chris Graham, mastering.com and requests a quote because that's how your system works now and you look at this client, you get on the phone with them cause you like to get on the phone with your clients before you work with them to try to dive in and find out what their goals are for the project. And you find out that their goal is to try to get placed on some Spotify playlists. Well most mastering engineers are going to say, oh that's great. I can make it sound as good as possible for Spotify. And then you're gonna give them your quote from master and then you're gonna move on. What Chris is clever here, maybe Chris Graham knows a few secrets on how to get placed on some specific Spotify playlists for that genre and he can connect that client with those specific gatekeepers to those playlists so that when those songs are launched, they're getting hundreds of thousands of streams instantly.

That one connection that only Chris Graham has is now this additional value that only he has and I can tell you that no other master use meters that those clients are talking to has the ability to have that connection or it's probably a very rare connection to have so that's just one pulled out of my ass example of how to add new value to a project that didn't exist before. It could be a connection like that. It could be some other thing that I'm not thinking of right now. Like if you were trying to get your songs placed, maybe you have connections with a music supervisor, maybe you have connections with sound stripe.com and you know how to get those songs on their platform. There's a bunch of number of ways of doing this, but you get the gist of this is you are finding interesting unique ways or through skills or connections or abilities to add new value to the project. Anything else that I am not clear on there, Chris?

I think this brings up, there is one essential skill that we have not talked about when it comes to creating new value in that is the ability, the vision to find ways to create new value. This in itself is its own skill for you to say, let me zoom out, let me try to see the bigger picture. Let me ask the right questions and let me see where I'm blind, where I have been worshiping sacred cows that are like, well, the way the industry has always been this way, it's always been done this way. It's the wild west. There is no blueprint right now. You get to make it up yourself and so the people that are creative enough and that have, I'm trying to think of a good way to explain this, but that have fewer blind spots where they can be like, hmm, I've always done it this way, but that's not in my best interest or in my client's best interest. I'm going to do it in a new way. That vision to spot ways that you can provide new value is a skill in itself. And if you can master that scale, oh my gosh, you're, you're going to be fine. You'll be absolutely fine.

Even if you're just barely able to comprehend that skill. I went my entire career without really grasping the skill of creating new value, not just adding value but creating new value. And if I think if I would've had that in the back of my head my entire career, I'd be on a different playing field at this point in my life.

It's a wild man. Well we need to do something we've never done before. We need to pause for a midroll sponsorship ad. What the hell for what? Well, logic just crashed on my computer. Oh my gosh. Huh.

This is a really good pitch here. Here you go. Here we go.

It really is a good pitch. So our friend Matt Boudreaux from the working class audio podcast told me about the sound devices, mics, pre series of SD card recorders. It's essentially, it's kind of like the zoom h five that everyone's familiar with or the h six or h four whatever you use except it's really and sounds better and works better. Yeah. And costs a lot more as well. But um, I've been recording our podcast into this thing and it records to an SD card and then I record from this as an interface and to logic logic just crashed, which would have ruined our podcast. But my SD card is still recording so

I s thank you. Mixed pre three for saving this week's episode.

Yes, we salute you sound devices. Thanks again for sending us these mixed breeds. They're incredible.

Go ahead and start up a logic one more time just in case the mixed pre three crashes, which it has never crashed before. I did and it just crashed. Logic just crashed again. Just stop.

The rewrites time is not fast enough on this hard disk right now for some reason. Lame. Thanks. Mixed pre. Anyways, let's keep going.

Yep. So there's something I'm going to mention here. This is not in the book that we're referring to right now and I think is a really important concept to grab. Everything we're talking about today is about how to increase your earnings per project and before I go into depth of that, I want to explain a few different business models here. There is the high volume low price model that Chris Graham has is a mastering engineer and pretty much every mastering engineer has this model. It's a lot less work so they charge a little less than someone like me as a mixing engineer with charge, but they get a lot more leads in the door because there's a lot of clients that need mastering and there's really not a lot of great mastering engineers out there. There's only so many Chris grams in the world. That's one business model, high volume, low price.

There are other business model. The one I adhere to is high price cause I'm doing mixing services, which is a little more high touch but it's lower volume. Meaning I don't work with as many projects and either one of these business models is fine depending on what you're trying to do. But where you don't want to be is the death zone. That's low price, low volume. You cannot survive as their business with low price, low volume. And so if you were there, you need to find a way to increase that average price per project. And a lot of what we've talked about today is going to help you get there and ideally you'd get to the Golden Zone, which is high volume, high price. Very few people are there. But if you can get there, that's where the big, big, big money is made.

Well, here's something I've been thinking about a lot over the past day or two. I think what happens to a lot of people in our industry is that like I love the golden rule, this do unto others as you, the others do unto you. I think it's one of the secrets of the universe. However, for a lot of people, they struggle in business because they are obsessed with low price. They are always trying to save money. They're always trying to spend less. And what they failed to understand is that many people aren't like that. A huge portion of society is not obsessed with price. They're obsessed with value. When you're obsessed with price, and I got to confess, I'm obsessed with price. I love getting a deal much more than the normal person to it concerning degree. And that's part of like my lineage. The Graham family on my dad's side is obsessed the good deal. And I guess then my mom's side too. And so here's the thing is it was very difficult for me to make that transition to begin raising my prices because I assumed wall who would hire me if I ever raised my price. They're obsessed with the low price and the golden rule start to break down a little bit in this area. And I think in some cases it can hold you back if you're obsessed with this idea that people only hire you because you're cheap.

Yes. I think if you've done nothing to differentiate yourself, you've done nothing to add new value to a project, then the only thing you have left to compete on is price. And that's how you end up in the death zone where you're getting low rates for a small amount of projects and it's not enough to sustain you. And then you have to go back to a day job. So let me talk about why this is so important, why it's so important to increase your average earnings per project outside of the obvious. And that is because of this lead generation. We've talked about that on episode every episode, every episode, we're talking about it on episode 82 on episode 80 we've talked about it on previous episodes besides that. But it's hard no matter how you slice it, it's hard if you're trying to do advertising, it's expensive to generate leads.

So the more you earn per project, the less leads you need in order to survive. And the second reason is this. Every single project you do has a baseline of work, meaning no matter what, no matter how cheap you go, no matter how small the project is, you still have client communications back and forth and emails or texts or phone calls or in person conversations or in person meetings. You still have administrative work like taxes, like filing away paperwork, like moving files around on your computer. You still have file exchanging to do on the internet or through an SD card or hard drive. You still have to bounce the songs down. Here's where I pitched bounce butler, so that part's easier for you, but there's a whole lot of things that you have to do on every single project. So no matter what you have a baseline of work, the more you can earn on each project, the healthier your business is going to be.

And I've got one more story here, Chris, to wrap this podcast up through it. I like stories. We're probably like half of the podcast right now. I'm not going to lie, but this is the story of the dog Walker. This is the dog walker example, and this is one of my favorite stories in this Ebook, at least that I've read so far. I'm only two thirds of the way through the ebook. I think this is going to open up a lot of people's eyes if they haven't read the ebook or even if you have, I think we're going to dissect a lot of good stuff in this story, but there was this dog walker that Karen has hired. Her name is Tara or Tara. How do you say it, Chris? I'm going to have to say Tara because I can't tear Tara. I just can't.

I can't do that. Yeah, as far as, Yup. Yup. So Tara is Karen's dog Walker. Again, just for names for people that are following. Karen is the most successful freelancer in Steve's city. Steve's the hero of the story, but Karen has a dog walker. Her name is Tara, and Tara was charging $15 for a half hour walk, which is 30 bucks an hour and that 30 bucks an hour. Let's talk about the baseline amount of work for that. Tara has to drive to Karen's house. She has to get the dog, put the leash on it, walk it, pick up the poop of the dog. If you take the dog home, drive to the next place, and then repeat the process, all of that for $15 for a 30 minute walk, and that's adding to the wear and tear on the vehicle. So there's a certain price of owning a vehicle that you have to pay for for every mile you drive, there's gas, there's drive time.

All of these things add up and so you can see the baseline of work for this at $15 for that half hour all of a sudden gets really, really unattractive. And unsurprisingly, because of all the things I just mentioned, Tara decides that after a few weeks that this business wasn't working for her. Are you surprised at this, Chris? No, not at all. You might say that this business is for the dogs. Oh my God. Sorry guys. So I'm sure a lot of our audio people can relate to this. You are trying to break into the industry and so you're like, I'm going to do it for 15 bucks an hour. We're going to do it for 50 bucks a song or I'm gonna do it for $100 a day or whatever. You end up saying, and then you realize like this business model does not work. You're stuck in that low price.

You barking up the wrong tree. Yup, Yup. You're in the death zone. Oh my goodness. Give me some credit for that. No, no, no, no, no bad dad jokes. Bad Dad joke. So we're not surprised. Terrorists business is not working. So Karen, Mrs Freelance Queen here, she sits her down to help her and she starts teaching her some of the stuff we talked about on this episode and on episode number 84 and basically challenges Tara to think about things this way instead of just being a damn dog walker, which no offense to the dog walkers who are in their audience. If you walked dogs for living as your side hustle, no offense, and maybe you'll get something out of this to change that business model so you have more money from your side hustle. She says, instead of just being a dog walker, start thinking about the clients and their problems, not just how much time you spend walking the dog.

Just sit on that for a second. Think about your clients and think about all of the problems they have, not just the problems they have on what they're hiring you to do and terrorists case it's walking a dog. If that's the only problem you're focused on solving, there's only so much you can make on that job. And so here's what Tara figures out after really diving in and sitting down and thinking about what are all the problems that my clients have? So she talks to Karen Terra and Karen talk and terrifies out the, here is Karen's goals for her dog. She wants her dog to have the healthiest, happiest life possible, and he is basically a member of their family and he's extremely important to them. And anyone with a dog at this point, I'm sure if you're listening, you got a dog that you probably feel the same way.

Chris has cats. He probably feels the same way. But cats, our soul is meaningless creatures and they're going to eat you when you die. They literally eat you if you die in your house. So this doesn't count for cats, but anyone that has a dog, they understand the loyalty and the love that a dog brings to the family. And so you can relate if you're a dog owner. So let's compare these two issues. The old goal for Tara was to walk your dog. You're going to walk your dog 30 minutes a week. We're gonna clean up the poop and you're gonna make an average of 30 bucks an hour. Now let's compare this to the new goal. Make your dog the happiest and healthiest dog possible. Now this opens up a whole new area of services that Tara can do here. She has a whole new world of opportunities with the skull.

She can advise customers on proper dog nutrition. She can set up grooming and training for the dogs. She can give recommendations on dog accessories, like little winter booties to protect the pause. Oh Gosh, the best shoe toys to ensure a dental health for those dogs. And now if you think about this, if I'm Karen, if I have this dog that I love and is part of my family, there has been new value created by tear the dog Walker. Now this is no longer as simple dog walking service, which is low value. It's solving a very minor problem. It's an inconvenience if anything, but anybody can do it and it's created a high value complete dog pampering service. Are you seeing the difference in value here, Chris? Oh yeah, completely. It's amazing. Yeah. If you can imagine like instead of just a dog walking service that literally anyone can do so the prices, the only differentiator in this situation now you have this unique product offering and this is something that I've talked about before, but it's called pricing confusion.

If you are offering dog walking services, then you're just like every other dog walker and so I'm just going to look at all the prices of all the dog walkers and pick the one that I think is cheapest for the value in this situation. As a dog pampering service. I don't know what she calls it now, but that's why I call it a complete dog pampering service. There's no other company like that advertising. No one else has any baseline of what that should be charged for those services. And so now terror is able to charge a premium for what she does and it's not a race to the bottom for pricing. She's the only one offering this in her city. So she creates three distinct pricing packages. And of course Karen, since she's a successful freelancer, she makes tons of money. She picks the top package and this top package includes several walking sessions per week.

Some of them are private and some are with other dogs and that other dogs encourages socialization for the dogs because that's a good healthy thing to have. So dogs are socializing, but it's also more scalable because you're walking 10 dogs at once, maybe not 10, maybe five and you're getting paid for all those dog walks. It includes dog training, it includes healthy dog food, includes dog treats and includes a monthly dog gift, dog grooming, arranging vet appointments and dog boarding. And then travel in to and from these places. Yeah. She's starting to make some real money. This is starting to look like a business and no longer just like a pet project. Yup. And so Karen now pay substantially more to Tara pet project. Come on Brian. Okay, I don't, I'm in like teaching mode. I love your puns bite it. Just like through, don't even register for me.

They don't even register for me because I'm trying to teach our listeners and you're just over here and your dad joke mode. You're right. I'm just trying to keep them engaged with funny quips. So Karen's paying more for this service and all the care and cares about, she doesn't care about price. All she cares about is the value that Tara delivers to their family dog. And there's a quote that Karen gives here, Mrs Freelance Queen that I love and she says this, when you look inward like Tara did, and you push yourself to come up with ways to serve your clients, you end up redefining what you do and you end up expanding your services. The funny thing is the other dog walkers in my neighborhood who keep losing business to Tara incorrectly, think of her as just the most expensive dog walker. A lot of them try to win back their clients by offering discounted prices, but they're playing the wrong game. Terrorists services are not commodities, and that's really the crux of it all. There is a lot of potential that all of us are not tapping into as studio owners. So much value we could be created.

Yeah, well, it's amazing. I think this is a good illustration because you get to see in simple terms how terra was able to fetch a higher price for her services. Last one. That's, that's probably the tail end. God, I'm so embarrassed. Let's say southern Brian. Don't let me stew in my own embarrassment. Ah, I want you to remember how this feels.

All right, but back to being serious, there's just a lot of value that we're not tapping into. We have skills that can be brought over to the studio or there's are skills that we could acquire. There are connections that we could make. There's just a lot of value that we could create for our clients out of thin air if we were just looking for it actively, and I think this is how you dominate a niche. It goes back to that customer Avatar we talked about in episode number 82 when you really get to know your customer and you create an Avatar about that customer, it gets a lot easier to start thinking of unique and fun and interesting ways that you can add value to that Avatar so that you can dominate that niche and you're not becoming a commodity. Anything to add that's not upon Chris?

Well, this isn't a pun, but I have a lot of hope for our education system. I think that we're in the midst of some of the most massive change in any period of time in our education system ever, and it's stuff like this that will soon be taught in every school. I think this sort of idea of instead of teaching children to be imitators, to teach them, to be innovators, to teach them to find ways to add new value. That is really exciting to me. Really, really exciting to me because if our schools get on teaching this sort of stuff, what is the future look like? Crazy. It's going to be amazing.

So my challenge for our listeners today on this episode, and if we do another one of these, if we continue this series on this ebook that we're talking about here, is to continuously look at how you can add value to a project so you can stop being a commodity. And I think that's the problem a lot of our listeners have as they have nothing that differentiates themselves all they are as a recording service or mixing service. There's nothing unique about what they do. And I think until you figure out ways to add new value to a project, to distinguish yourself, you're going to continue to struggle. And a lot of this means you have to learn a new skill,

which is nice because here's the thing, almost every single person in our industry, almost every single person listening to this podcast knows how to acquire a new skill. You're doing audio for a living because you acquire that skill. Probably not because you were taught by and large, you figured it out. You did what Brian Hood did and you spent 40 hours straight experimented with pro tools. The first time you downloaded it until you fell asleep and you woke up and you worked 40 more hours. Straight learning, protools obsessive. Yeah, it's obsessive. Our industry is a magnet for that type of person. We are probably as equipped or more equipped than any industry to do this sort of stuff and to find new value and here's the pool thing, man. We're in the music industry. If we're finding ways to add new value, the world gets better songs if thousands and thousands of you are finding ways to create new value for musicians, that means better music and that's a world I want to live in. That's really, really exciting and there's a huge, huge benefit to society there.

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so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Let me give you a quick tip. It's going to help a lot with everything we talked about on this episode and that is this. Once you've put all the work end to what we just talked about, digging into the value, finding out what sort of skillset you can develop in order to add more value to the project and thus charge more. Once you've accomplished this, once you've put all this work in, you can't just throw a price out there and expect to win the project. If you go back to episode 83 the title of that episode is how to double your income by aggressively following up. In that episode, I talk about my followup routine that I typically do for pretty much every project that I sent a quote or proposal for.

Once you put all this work in and you give them a price for the project, you have to be willing to follow up consistently and dare I say aggressively over the next year or two even sometimes it takes two years to close projects. That's very rare, but it has happened to me and I think that episode will help a lot. If you've already listened to the episode, I want to actually give you a resource that's going to be very helpful for implementing episode 83 and I didn't actually have this created at the time. I now have a created so I can give you the link to this. I created a pdf, it's like 15 pages or so. It's not quite an ebook but it's definitely not a two or three page thing, but it's a guide that basically puts everything in episode 83 into one nice, neat little package.

It also gives you my 60 day follow up sequence word for word. So if you're not sure what to say, whenever you send a quote out to somebody or give them a proposal, you're not sure what to say in your followup sequences. I give you my word for word email templates in that if you want it, just go to follow up.guide. That is literally the URL and if that doesn't work, try adding www to that. So www.followup.guide. And if all else fails, just go to our show notes page or the six figure home studio.com/eight six slash 86 and there'll be a link to this pdf there as well. If you do not already have a good follow up routine in place with all of your quotes that you send out or all of your proposals you send out. Um, and then you download this guide and follow along with this free guide.

By the way, it's free. I didn't mention that it is 100% free. If you do this, I would be very surprised if you did not double your income in the next 12 months. I'm not saying I guarantee that's what's going to happen, but I'd be very surprised if that did not happen. If you're already getting a quote requests, you're already sending quotes out. If you're not aggressively following up already, then download this guide, follow along with it and then see what happens with your income. Next week's episode is all about lead magnets, creating a lead magnet for your business. If you're not sure what a lead magnet is, guess what that followup guide I just gave you a link to is a lead magnet. A lead magnet is basically something that you can create as a resource you can create or a video or a guide, something you can create that attracts your ideal customer to you and you're probably familiar with this.

If you follow the six figure home studio I have there, the Ebook, I have a rate sheet, I have free courses, I have now this a follow up guide, but most people do not have a lead magnet for their studio. So next week we talk about the process behind creating a lead magnet for your recording studio, what you can do, what sort of options you have, and we also give you some examples of what not to do. So that episode will be live Brighton early next Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM same time as all of our episodes go live for the past 86 weeks. Do you have any questions, any concerns, any comments on this episode or next week's episode or the followup guide that I gave you a link to? Um, if you have any questions about that, just search for the six figure home studio community on Facebook. This is a group of like, I want to say we have 5,000 or more members now. I haven't even checked lately, but we have a lot of members in there that are very, very active posting questions, giving each other advice, and it's just a hell of a community. So go join that. Until next time. Thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.