How You Can Build And Maintain Relationships With Clients (100% Online)

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 144.

Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here finally with my bald beautiful cohost Christopher Jay Graham. How are you doing my friend?

Chris: [00:00:31] Oh, Hey, I'm doing great. How are you, Brian?

Brian: [00:00:34] I'm doing very well, trying to still get over my burnout, but we'll see where we go with this.

Chris: [00:00:38] How's the, uh, COVID recovery. Are you a hundred percent?

Brian: [00:00:41] Did I've been at, where have you been? I've been a hundred percent since like the last three episodes. You and I have recorded together.

Chris: [00:00:48] Well, I mean, but I've heard there can be like lingering stuff.

Brian: [00:00:52] Yeah, no. I've I mentioned this like two weeks ago on the podcast. So this episode we're doing right now was recorded hours before the two episode series you heard the last two weeks. So this is a little weird timing wise, but I'm going through like a burnout period right now. I think. The burnout is a lingering effect of COVID like, my brain is just kind of dead by halfway through the workdays.

So like, I'm trying to get over that. And maybe by the time this episode actually airs weeks from now, I'll be well over it. And can talk about going through burnout. Like one of the worst burnouts I've had since 2017. But other than that, I think I'm fine.

Chris: [00:01:22] That's intense, man.

Brian: [00:01:23] It's not like anything crazy. Like this is still doing well.

Everything's fine. And just burn out.

Chris: [00:01:28] You know, like having panic attacks and you weren't like recently diagnosed with PTSD or anything

Brian: [00:01:32] No, no, no, nothing like that. That would be. Only a weaker man with the company. I'm just joking. You can't talk about that,

Chris: [00:01:39] Well, yeah, I just got back from vacation.

Brian: [00:01:41] which let me stop you. There had no idea you were going on vacation. You just stopped showing up

Chris: [00:01:46] Oh, I told you.

Brian: [00:01:47] you. Just stopped showing up for podcasts. I'm scrambling. And like, I guess Chris, isn't doing a podcast. I guess I have to come up with an episode. It's the, like the last three weeks, four weeks you haven't been on anything.

Chris: [00:01:59] I'm sorry. I went to Western Michigan, a little town called saga tuck.

Brian: [00:02:03] Never heard of it, but I looked it up whenever he told me about it earlier. I think I never really fully understand how large the great lakes are, but this is on one of the great lakes across, across the great Lake from Chicago. It's an ocean. It's like the beaches look like you're at the beach except you don't have massive waves.

So it's actually way nicer.

Chris: [00:02:19] Sometimes you do get massive waves?

Brian: [00:02:21] Really. Okay, cool. Not enough to like surf on you and surf in the great lakes. Would you.

Chris: [00:02:25] No, no, he would not. But I had this amazing experience. My middle son, Jeremiah really wanted to go fishing and we'd been fishing before, but we'd never caught anything.

Brian: [00:02:33] It sounds like me and my dad did. We went on a weekend fishing adventure when I was like nine and caught nothing the entire weekend.

Chris: [00:02:41] I know how your dad feels. It's rough. So I took Jeremiah right to downtown Saugatuck and we're like fishing in the channel there.

Brian: [00:02:48] You didn't like Google, like you don't have an excuse. Now you can Google how to catch fish and like specific areas. What

Chris: [00:02:53] Oh, I did. I did.

We were going for bluegill. So we're in the channel. The bobber starts going nuts and Jeremiah hadn't really figured out how to set the hook yet. So like I set the hook real quick, handed him the rod, he starts reeling it in, gets his first fish out of the water. And this lady that was like sitting behind us, it was like a lot of people around.

It's like a park. And this lady starts clapping for him and I'm like, Oh, that's cute. And then her whole table full of people starts clapping. And then like this gazebo full of people stands up and starts clapping. And then a giant like paddle wheel ferry is driving by us full of people. They all stand up and begin applauding my son.

And it was just like the best

Brian: [00:03:32] That's like an amazing moment for a child. How old is he?

Chris: [00:03:34] he's seven.

Brian: [00:03:35] Oh, that's an amazing age for that. And he'll remember that for the rest of his life. That's so cool.

Chris: [00:03:39] No would probably think it's normal to get like a standing ovation when you catch a fish. But,

Brian: [00:03:43] No, it's not

Chris: [00:03:43] Oh dude, it was so I wish I had it on video because it would have been like a YouTube sensation. It was so adorable. And then we threw that fish back would be caught another one that was the biggest Boogaloo I've ever seen.

And I fried it up for him back at the house and it tasted good. It was delicious.

Brian: [00:03:58] dude. My wife and I watched this documentary called given, have you seen this? It's literally just travel porn.

Chris: [00:04:04] I've seen a movie called taken. Is it related?

Brian: [00:04:06] No, no it's given it's the opposite of that. It's just a family who's together through like 10 different countries of travel. And it's like kind of a narrative documentary, but it's through the child's eyes.

So he, this little four year old kid narrates the whole thing. It's really cool. It's just really well shot. The story's not anything crazy. Anyways, the dad continuously throughout the whole thing, just catches fish and like guts them and fries them up and stuff. And so I'm like, now I've gotta learn to do that skill.

Except he catches him with a spear. He doesn't do a

Chris: [00:04:29] That I've always wanted to go spear fishing. That would be so awesome.

Brian: [00:04:34] Let's talk about, we're going to talk about today, Chris. Right now, you may have heard of this thing called. COVID-19 and this episode is aired a few weeks later, but right now we have over 4 million cases in the U S so it's like a cesspool here.

It's disgusting. We are incapable of socially distancing ourselves. As a matter of fact, I drove down Broadway just for fun on Friday night, which Broadway's are super busy street here, four blocks from my house. And there are signs out that flash masks required by law. You must wear a mask and yet about one out of every five people.

That were shoulder to shoulder piled on the Broadway downtown Nashville right now about one out of five had masks on. So we had a meat market, downtown Nashville, and no, none of those people are from Nashville by the way, every single one of those people are tourists, but it just shows you the state of our country.

It's a train wreck. So I don't see COVID-19 going anywhere anytime soon. We are stuck in this for at least the rest of this year, where we cannot leave our own country. We're basically like, I think the last I checked there was about 20 countries. You could go to with an American passport and that's quickly dwindling.

And the countries that you can go to are mostly Bihama countries and some central America and some that you can't even get to because you have to have layovers and countries that we're not allowed into. So we're stuck here in America. And most of us have been stuck at home. The biggest problem that gets to is other than our own mental health, we're not really seeing our friends.

We're not seeing, we're definitely not seeing our clients. So our relationships for them tend to be dwindling. And I know, you know this. Sure, Chris, but this is a relationship business. And so if you're incapable of building and maintaining relationships, so getting new relationships, fostering the old relationships, it's going to be a tough road ahead of you, especially for those of you who are trying to transition to something.

So most people have to do their work online. Now they're not doing in-person stuff. And those that are doing in person who knows when the laws change or when the city rolls back to an earlier phase where you can't even have people in your business again. So again, we have to find ways to. Build and maintain relationships online.

So how do we do that in the covert era? That's really the basis of this episode. How can we build relationships with people in today's where COVID is the new normal? How do we do, and we have a few thoughts today. This is not going to be probably a super long end of the episode, but we're hopefully that you come away with this with some ideas and some inspiration that yes, you can build relationships.

Yes. You can still maintain relationships in college era, despite the fact that you really can't see face to face, at least in person anymore.

Chris: [00:06:53] I think one of the beautiful things about this concept as well is we have to consider what is a post COVID world gonna look like? What things have we changed?

Brian: [00:07:02] That's an entire other episode that might be fun to do and be extremely speculative, but maybe we'll do that next week.

Chris: [00:07:09] well, but here's the point is the ability to build and maintain relationships during COVID is going to pay off after COVID. I think I've mentioned this before, but you know, this remote producing thing, this remote mixing thing, working with remote studio musicians used to be, you know, people did it, but it wasn't like the most popular thing ever.

Brian: [00:07:27] Yeah, we had a remote producing or remote songwriting kind of, that was like an adolescent field idea we had for like business models. Like last year we had that episode come out and it was like,

Chris: [00:07:37] Yeah. All of a sudden it makes a lot of sense.

Brian: [00:07:38] Yeah, it was like, back then. I was like, I don't know if I want to add this to the outline and you're like, no, we're going to do it.

And now it's like, you don't have another option, but to do that. So now it's like the things that were weird last year are essential this year. So who knows what it'll be next year, but.

Chris: [00:07:52] Well, and my point here is I don't think that a lot of people are going to be like, Oh man, I remember back when everyone did remote session work and then everyone stopped after COVID-19. I don't see that being a thing. It's normalizing certain behaviors that are going to open up new business opportunities.

Let me say that again. Cause it's important. COVID-19 is normalizing new behaviors. I forget what I was going to say.

it creates new opportunities. It creates new opportunities. So learning how to adapt now is going to be beneficial in the long run. And that's really exciting.

Brian: [00:08:25] So the reason this episode is what we're talking about today is Chris and I were talking pre episode. We were planning this about his coaching thing, and I was just talking about how it's, it is really hard right now to build and maintain relationships. And Chris is like, I have no problem right now. I'm doing these free coaching calls for people.

And that is like building great relationships with potential clients. And I was like, okay, that really does work well for your coaching business, but how does this really pertain to our audience? And I was thinking about it and the genius of the free coaching call is this. It is both lead magnet and relationship builder.

Really cool idea. So I was thinking through how does this translate to the studio world? And one of the things to think about is when you've built a relationship with someone. Price is much less of a factor. That's one of the biggest benefits of actually focusing on building relationships. So if you actually spend the time to build these relationships with people, you're gonna be able to command a lot higher price than you normally could.

So this is an episode that is absolutely going to be relevant to you for more than one reason, more than just your mental health, more than just finding more clients. You'll also be able to charge more. If you take the time to build these relationships with people, a lot of this is theory radical, right?

Meaning I have not done this with my studio.

Yeah, you have. And so we're going to talk about it, those things, but we were thinking through like, what is the lead magnet and relationship builder for the studio world? And we were thinking through typical use cases. So mixing engineer, mastering engineer, a lot of people are doing those services right now.

How can we both attract people to our business via AKA lead magnet while also building a relationship with people? And it always comes back to a phone call or a zoom call of some sort. Chris you were talking about how, when you looked last year or a few years ago, really before the podcast was a huge source of leads for you, you were looking at your time on phone.

How much time you spend on the phone was directly correlating to your income for that month. The more minutes you spent on the phone, the higher income for the month,

Chris: [00:10:12] Oh, yeah. Yeah. I used to have a really intense advanced metric system that like took all the numbers from my business and put it in this crazy spreadsheet.

Brian: [00:10:21] leave it to you to overcomplicate something.

Chris: [00:10:23] Yeah, it was way over complicated, but one of the main things, just like, you know, in this little spreadsheet, how many minutes have you been on the phone over the past 30 days?

You know, there's a caveat here. If I spent 2000 minutes with one person on the phone, that's not good. I would generally cap out at about 10 minutes per phone call, as far as mastering clients goes. And I would find the more minutes I spent per month, the more I would make. And it's tricky because it would challenge me to think PRIs c'mon this isn't, you're not being efficient here.

You need to focus on mastering faster.

Brian: [00:10:51] Yeah. If you listen to this podcast, we talk about working on your business. We talk about like finding ways to create efficiencies. And so the technician brain. Thanks. I don't need to get on the phone, especially for a masters where you're doing high volume, you're doing dozens of projects a week or per month.

You're doing a lot of work. You can't afford it in your technician brain where you're thinking about efficiencies and systems. And you're not thinking like phone is being an efficient form of, and your time on something. Cause you're spending time on one client so much time on one client, but the reality is the opposite.

This is one of those times where the relationship building aspect mattered more than the time savings you would have gotten out of avoiding getting on the phone with a client.

Chris: [00:11:25] Yeah, it was really simple because the more phone calls I had, the more people hired me. So what I eventually started doing I've pulled back from it slightly, but I might re-engage. This is that the call to action has been fill out a quote form, but right at the top of that quote form,

Brian: [00:11:42] Do you want to talk on the phone? You literally put a yes, no. On

Chris: [00:11:45] Do you want to talk on the phone?

Exactly. Yeah. So what I'm trying to pitch to people is like, Hey, I'm available. I'll talk to you. I want your opinion. I want a relationship with you.

Brian: [00:11:53] If you want to, that's the big key, because not everyone wants to get on the phone. Some people are very like socially awkward and never want to get on the phone with you. So the beauty of your system is you give them the option of getting on the phone with you in this situation.

Chris: [00:12:04] Well, and it's scheduled a call. So for those of you that haven't heard us talk at length about this. I use a piece of software it's really inexpensive called acuity acuity syncs up to my Google calendar and I can block out times and say, Hey, here's when people can book a 10 minute phone call with me.

And when they're filling with the quote form, it gives them options. Especially if it's more than one song, it gives them options to schedule a time. Let me talk to me and it's nice. Cause I can pick one I'm available and I'm not like sitting in the, I asked you in studio, like the phone rings. I press stop.

I pick up the phone. I talk.

Brian: [00:12:36] That doesn't work. So what you're doing is you're using your technician brain and the systemization side of you to turn that inefficient process of talking on the phone into an efficient process so that you get the best of both worlds. You get the relationship building aspect of it. On the phone or on zoom or whatever it is that people prefer to.

Do you like the phone? I think I prefer zoom. I like the face to face, but you're creating efficiencies around that so that it's not an inefficient process. So that any minute you spend on the phone is high leverage.

Chris: [00:13:01] Yep. Exactly. And so, you know, one of the key ideas there is. Diminishing return. The longer you talk on the phone, you know, one of the most famous kind of SANEs in sales is make the sale and then shut up and what a lot of people did. And what I used to do was like, you'd make the sale, then you'd keep talking and then you'd lose the sale.

And so I would try to focus on like build relationship, build relationship, build relationship, and then for a very small amount of time, talk about logistics and then try to close the sale and move on. And, you know, if it was a situation where there were revisions or, you know, miscommunications, that phone's way better, way, way, way better than email.

Brian: [00:13:38] Yeah. I feel like once you've been on the phone a few times with people, you start to spot those redundant conversations that suck time, like how to prep, files, how to, how to send files. Like all of these things should be just in some email template you have, or a PDF you send their way or some sort of automated thing that you give them after the phone call that you just say, okay, I think we're good to go.

I'm just going to send you an email after this and follow up with the way things need to be done from this point on. And if you have any questions, you're always welcome to reach out that kind of thing. You could wrap up these phone calls. Much more efficiently, but this just to step back for a second here, this episode is not about how to make these phone calls efficient.

It's so even about getting on the phone as a master engineer, for people who are already interested in your services to me, this episode is about how do we get people interested in your services and build those relationships? And so my brain went back to an episode. I did a few weeks ago, how free work fits into a healthy audio business that's episode one 41.

And we talked about using free work as a source of a lead magnet. So as Chris Graham uses here, he uses his free test masters as a source of getting clients. We talked about mixing engineers, doing free test mixes for people as a lead generation source. But we thought about this, how can we get people on the phone in this process left us with some ideas when we were kind of brainstorming this episode, Chris, where we talked about instead of getting a free test mix.

Perhaps you're doing a free pre-mix review with somebody you're going over this session with them and getting on the phone, looking over their session files. If they self produced it, or if someone else produced it, you're just having them send you a mix and you're giving them feedback. Even if it's just you doing a loom video or something where you're just talking through feedback, just the act of you spending time and talking through something to someone and sending it to them.

Even if it's not, that helps build a relationship. That is a very highly leveraged way to build a relationship with someone where you're talking through your thought process on how they can improve something or the mixing or the recording engineer or whoever you're working with. They can actually further make these files better before they send them your way for mixing or for mastering.

Chris: [00:15:30] Funny, you should mention that. I just changed the way that I've been doing that with mastering. What I used to do is I used to outsource mixed feedback to one of my mix engineers, and he'd make a video before mastering and walk them through changes. What I decided to start doing that I literally just last week started doing this is I took loom looms, a free little app.

There's like a $10 version that you can get, which I subscribed to. It's a fabulous product. And it lives in your little menu bar up in your Macintosh computer. It makes it really quick to make a screen recording.

Brian: [00:15:58] Wait, are you using a desktop version of that app? Like you installed it on your computer. Okay. So I've never, I didn't even know they had that. I use loom, but I use it as a Chrome extension. So it's not actually installed on my computer. It's just turn it just into Chrome so I can just pull up Chrome and screen-share from there.

Chris: [00:16:13] version's dope. Cause it just lives in the menu bar.

Brian: [00:16:15] Oh, I love that. I didn't know. They even had that. So I just learned something to say.

Chris: [00:16:18] Yeah, you click it. And so what I started doing is I was like, you know, I think it makes more sense. I'm still toying with this idea, but I think it makes more sense for me to get mixes from somebody do the masters. And if I have any suggestions on things they could have done better in the mixes, then I'll use loom and I can take loom and I can select just the wave form part of the audio.

And I use another program called loop back from, I believe it's a company called audio file engineering. Shout out to them. If you don't know what loop back is, it's incredible. It's like a router matrix for your computer

Brian: [00:16:49] It just makes it easy to get the software from one program to another. It's kind of

Chris: [00:16:53] audio. Yeah.

Brian: [00:16:53] on the side, sorry. I'm thinking zap. It's like the Zapier of audio. It gets audio from one place to another, whereas you would really struggle to get the audio to move around your computer the way you want.

Chris: [00:17:03] 100%. So what makes loom really amazing and what makes Lupe equity amazing? Is I set up this essentially like an aggregate audio device that's got, Hey, take the output of my mastering software. And the output of my microphone and then route those to loom so that when I'm making a video for somebody that I can talk and play the actual master, and then I can send them back the video and it's, it Lumas makes it so easy.

Cause there's no uploading downloading. You're just copying the link.

Brian: [00:17:32] You can copy and paste that link to somebody it's super easy.

Chris: [00:17:35] Yeah, it's incredible.

Brian: [00:17:36] I literally send probably 10 a week.

Chris: [00:17:39] Yeah, I do too. So it's really, really, really amazing. And you know, one of the things that I'm super jacked about with this is it lets me give real feedback. It lets me interact with the customer, which I think is just so much easier and so much more antithetical.

Brian: [00:17:55] When you do it this way, they get the tonality of her voice. There's like there's emotion in it. And there's like, you can emphasize certain aspects of certain things you're saying, and it doesn't come across the wrong way. So like, if you were to just type up feedback in an email, you could come across as a super douche and they will never work with you again, but this allows your personality to shine through.

So I love this idea and I don't want to stick on this for too much longer, but this is a great way to help build relationships with people that have not hired you yet. So if you're doing mixed feedback or you're doing anything earlier in the process to have a face to face or a voice to ear kind of relationship, that's a great way to do it.

Chris: [00:18:30] So another idea along these lines that I've been toying with as I've been coaching people, is this idea of, you know, your call to action on most websites is a quote form, and that's a great move.

Brian: [00:18:42] I've been pushing people stay away from the quote form. Just have a easy low-friction contact form. Most people don't get enough court requests to their site to have a fully fleshed out quote request form

less than 10 a month is kind of the bench. I say, eight to 10 a month. Of people filling out your low friction form is just name, email message, that kind of thing.

Then stay with a low friction. If you don't have more than that.

Chris: [00:19:01] Yeah, go with the low friction or, you know, one of the cool things about acuity that I love. We're not sponsored by them or don't have an affiliate. I don't think.

Brian: [00:19:09] Yeah. I use Calendly. If you want an alternative to that, just to spike Chris.

Chris: [00:19:13] Yes, basically the same software, but you set this thing up and you could at the bottom of your webpage, say, Hey, schedule a call. And there's a calendar. They pick a date. There's times listed it, converts it to their time zone. And then it puts the event on their calendar. It sends them a text reminder, and then you do a phone call that way.

And there have been times, you know, when I was really pushing the low price option, as far as mastering the high volume, low price thing, there'd be times where I'd be like, okay, from one o'clock to two o'clock, I'm going to have six phone calls and they would all be scheduled for me. I didn't have to do any emails.

And I used to just put the link right on my webpage schedule, call with me, schedule, call with me at this point when keeping up with the podcast, that's not usable anymore, but for a lot of people, this idea of what's the reason that your website exists, what's the point. And for some people it's to get them to fill out the quote form for other people, it's to get them to fill out the contact form for other people.

Well, it's to call them on the phone so that they'll pick up right then. But I think it makes a lot more sense, sense to think of your website as the first step towards a relationship. That's the principle. And by putting a call to action, Hey, schedule a phone call or Hey, schedule, video chat. And this is where I really wanted to go with this, I think.

Yeah. So cool. Hey, I'm a mix engineer in order for me to get a quote from you, you need to send me your files, which are huge, and it's a pain in the butt. That's a challenge. That's a point of high friction for mixed engineers. I think it'd be so interesting. If a lot more mix engineers are like, Hey, to get a quote.

Make sure you have your session files. We're going to schedule a zoom call and then you can give me a tour of the session files that you do have over video. And I can ask questions and we can build a relationship in that way.

Brian: [00:20:50] I'm gonna push back on that simple, because the majority of cases, when I'm mixing stuff, the person who's paying me is not the person who has the session files. That's rarely the case. And so if all your clients are self recording, that makes sense. But if that's not the case, what I do like, and something you said that really sparked a thought in my brain is meet your customers where they are.

So most websites have one call to action. It's like fill out the form, fill out the form. Whereas not everyone wants to communicate through email. Not everyone thinks that's the best way to do it. I actually like, I've never seen anyone do this and I haven't done it myself on my studio's website, but it's worth doing, if you want to take the advice that just popped into my head right now, meet them where they are.

So having. It's like get in touch is the call to action in getting in touch. There's like three or four different options. It is fill out our contact form and I'll get back to you ASAP. That's one option. The other option is schedule a call with me. So you that's the option. Number two is to actually schedule a call.

Third option is chatting with us so you can literally put a little chat bubble under site that goes straight to social media. So you can actually have a social media conversation with them because most people have an Instagram. Or most people have a Facebook or some sort of way to communicate in real time.

Or you can just put a chat widget on your site. But I like the social media thing in the context of meeting them where they are, because the good thing about that is if they leave the site, you still have that conversation going in social media. So it's a really good place to start a conversation. I wouldn't finish the sales process there, but I would definitely.

Uh, keep the conversation alive there to, to get to know them and move it to the next step. Cause when you talk about the website, the first step in building a longterm relationship, meeting them where they are at currently makes the most sense social media person. There are other chat via direct message.

Make that an option. If they're an email type person where they live out of their inbox, give that option to them. If they're a person that needs the relationship that face to face case for video or the ear to ear for phone, make that an option, but meet them where they are multiple options. It seems like a great way to maximize.

The chances that someone's going to start that relationship in the first place.

Chris: [00:22:41] I agree. My only pushback on that is I think the beauty of schedule a call or a video chat is not many people will do that unless there's built in intent to buy.

Brian: [00:22:51] Yeah. But I also could say that there's going to be a lot of people that would have built an intent to buy, but they are the type of person that dreads going to get their hair cut because they're afraid they have to talk to their barber. There are like tons of conversations online about how much people hate to go to their barber because they feel.

Chris: [00:23:06] I'll just give them a virtual haircut.

Brian: [00:23:08] That's your vibrator.

Chris: [00:23:10] It's a haircut. Your cutter buzzard thingy.

Brian: [00:23:14] Back to my point. So many people are afraid to go to their barber because there's too socially awkward to carry a conversation. Like that's a real fear people have. So by forcing someone to schedule a call with you is like the worst thing you could do. It's taking someone that would love to hand you their hard earned dollars, but because of their social anxiety, they can't pick Chris Graham.

Cause they, the only way they can do it is to book a call. So give them a reason, give them an option to do DNS.

Chris: [00:23:36] That's true. Well, I think what's interesting about this is we are on some level talking about niching for me, I'm a talker. Love to talk.

Brian: [00:23:44] But do you're making it too much about you. They don't give a shit about you or what you love.

Chris: [00:23:48] No, I, well, I put, Oh, I have to push back on that. If my strength, if your strength lies in a conversation, I would focus on trying to win people who want conversations. If your strengths lie in amazing emails or DMS.

Brian: [00:24:02] No, because here's the thing is like you are saying. I will only date girls that are six feet tall. If they're below that, I'll never give them a chance, no matter what, you're taking something about someone that is a character that they can't change, or they don't want to change and saying you exclude anyone like that.

Whereas there are some incredible people that are socially awkward, that if you would just start the conversation via social media or text message or email, you can eventually move it to the next level of a phone call. Because they feel more comfortable, but to make that the first barrier to it entry to me is like, no boy, no, no, thank you.

That is like too selfish from the perspective of not thinking about the other person first.

Chris: [00:24:39] In that situation, if you were going to go that route, I would probably want to include on the website, you know, send us a, you know, a message. And if you'd like from there, we can schedule a phone

Brian: [00:24:49] You can do a thing with things like ManyChat, M a N Y C H a T. You can put a chat bot on your site. That's like, as soon as they send that first social media message, you can have it automatically be like, Hey. You wanna jump on the phone yet? If not, I'll get back to you ASAP. Like you can get them to a million things you can do again with a phone, but if someone doesn't want to get on the phone, don't make them get on the damn phone, but, okay.

We're kind of missing the point of this point because our whole point of this is how do you build and maintain relationships online in the new normal, the COVID era. And so we've talked about some of these things, and I think a lot of great stuff has been said so far, but a lot of these are one-to-one.

We haven't really delved into the one-on-many side of things that I think is worth talking about. And we were talking about this podcast. Chris was like, yeah, you you're doing this, I guess. So you're building relationships with people and that's so true. Like when we went to Nam this year, so many people bull knew a lot about us when we knew nothing about them, very well, side of relationship, but people still listening to us right now.

We are building a relationship with them. They get to know our thought process. They get to know the way that you and I argue with each other about things. They get to know us. So that is building a relationship, although it is one way, it's not a true relationship, it is building a relationship with our ideal customers.

And so eventually someone listening will hire you for coaching or hire you for mastering or they'll buy one of my courses or they'll just be a valuable part of our community on Facebook and like chat in and help other people out. But at the end of the day, we're still building relationships with these people.

And so I've seen in my own community, in our Facebook group, In my chat community with profitable producer, core students, people they're launching podcasts for their ideal customers, people that are launching band related podcasts or artists related podcast, one podcast about how to market your music.

One podcast about touring, which is really tough right now, because no one's touring right now. And so they're able to create content around what to do. If you're a star touring musician that isn't able to tour right now, they're able to do all these things that are building relationships with our ideal customers.

Even though they're not getting a two way. Conversation is still introducing people well to them, they would have never otherwise found them.

Chris: [00:26:45] Yeah, well, and to kind of go into deeper with that, you know, since I started talking about my own mental health journey with PTSD, I've had a couple things with the podcast that have blown my mind as far as podcasting to ability to build relationships. You know, I described what my symptoms for PTSD were a couple episodes ago.

And the basic idea with PTSD is you have flashbacks and they remind you of either things that happened to you or in the case of complex PTSD, which is what I have. If it's something. That happened to you when you were a child, especially if it's a number of things that happened to you. When you were a child, you don't remember events, you just suddenly are overwhelmed with the emotions you felt back then.

And that can manifest in a lot of really crazy ways. I had a guy reach out to me. I don't want to say his name cause it's private stuff, but I got to reach out to me. That was like, Oh my gosh, I didn't know. That was a thing. That's what you described where all the symptoms I've had, which blew my mind. We had a video chat couple of nights ago, and it was wild to just hear his story.

And to connect over like, Oh, you know me pretty well because of the podcast and you're sharing this intense part of your story. I had another thing where a guy, I'm not going to say his name either, but he booked a free coaching call with me and he knew me so well from the podcast and has a lot of similar history related to why I have complex PTSD.

We started talking and we both started tearing up. It was, this was like, he's on my freaking favorites on my just met. And it was wild. It is to go from hi, I'm Chris, what's your name too? Oh my gosh. This guy is like a close friend because there was only one side of getting to know you. It's just me getting to know him a little bit.

He already knew so much about me and it made connecting with him so much easier.

Brian: [00:28:30] So a lot of this stuff goes hand in hand with this stuff. We talked about getting on the phone or doing other things to go deeper in relationship, but the podcast is a great way to start building that one relationship. So they get to know you. To like you get to trust you so that you can talk about feature things on phone calls, whether it's business or personal, you're still building relationship with them either way.

Chris: [00:28:48] Yeah, well, and we ran into this at Nam with Jesse Ray, and we had him on the show. He knew us really well from the podcast. And we like immediately became good friends with him. I texted him all the time now, but it was because that friendship began from him listening to the podcast. And there is such an amazing power behind podcasting as far as like building relationships with people.

So I know we've talked about this a million times, but there really is a unique opportunity to build relationships with your potential customers and your future potential friends by making content that your ideal customer would want to listen to.

Brian: [00:29:23] Yeah. And if you missed it, go back to episode 116 with Jesse Ray Ernster that episode we did, it was titled how to, stair-step your way from local bands to elitist artists. He's worked with some, some big stuff like Tonya and. Other stuff. We're going to get into his story on that episode. So we've talked about podcasts in the past.

We actually have an entire episode on this on episode 102, why you should start a podcast for your business before it's too late. So we've been saying this since October of last year, and it hasn't changed if anything, it's more relevant today than it was back in October, but not everyone has the gift for podcasting.

Some people are too monotone. Some people are not the type of personality that will be consistent. On podcasts. They're just incapable of doing that. I honestly would be like that if I didn't have a cohost to keep me accountable, even though when he's gone for four weeks at a time, whatever for vacation.

So what about those situations? We thought about another way of building and maintaining relationships online in today's era. And that is Facebook communities. There have been a lot of Facebook groups launched during COVID and I had a, a interesting thought when we were going through the pre episode planning and that is with every challenge that.

Is introduced into a niche. That's an opportunity for a new Facebook group or support group for that challenge for that specific challenge. So if you think through all of the artists that are stranded, that would normally be touring, look at any city that doesn't have a support group for those artists to connect and share with each other and help each other out and just be the person that creates that group.

I don't know if that exists in Nashville yet, but I know, I mean, 95% of Nashville's musicians. Are basically stranded right now with no tours to do no industry, to do anything. No, no social connections to do it. And so if that doesn't exist here in Nashville, someone needs to be on the forefront of creating that community.

But every single major city should have some sort of group like this. If they don't be the one to create it. And it doesn't have to be just this sort of thing. This is just an example, but there's been a lot of people in our own community that have launched. Multiple thousand person, Facebook groups, Facebook groups that are actually larger than our own Facebook group now in their own communities to support their local music scenes.

So this is a fantastic way to be the catalyst for a large group in your community. And you are the owner of that group, and that's essentially an asset for you longterm. It's like a mailing list. It's like a podcast. You kind of own an audience and you can equal parts, help that, but also benefit from that community as well.

Chris: [00:31:40] Yeah. You know, I think it's a fascinating time to be alive right now. COVID is awful. And I just cannot wait until there's a vaccine, but COVID is forcing us to be creative. It's forcing us to grow. And that's a good thing, especially because the things that change in our society as a result of COVID, a lot of them are going to stick around.

There are gonna be a lot of positive changes after COVID that are going to be fantastic. And that means there's going to be a lot of new niches, a lot of new businesses and new business opportunities and ways to make your business more friendly.

Brian: [00:32:13] There's gonna be positive changes are going to be negative changes. Like there's going to be industries and sectors that are devastated, but with all new destruction, there's new life. And we talked about this. I feel like no matter what we talk about now, we have a past episode about it.

But back on episode 135, we talked about why covert is the final nail in the coffin for most old school recording studios.

And then what that means for home city owners. So as we wrap this episode up, Again, our whole thought process here is just to help you kind of get out of this funk of you're maybe sitting at home all day. You're not connecting with friends. You're not connecting with family. You're not connecting with peers.

You're not connecting with potential clients. You're basically socially isolated, but physically and mentally. And I feel like this episode is a good way to kind of spur people into taking action towards connecting with not just clients, but friends too. And there's a lot you could do there, but this is, I mean, we're a business podcast, so we're always going to focus on the client side of things, but there's a lot of potential things.

And if we miss something, feel free to point it out in our Facebook community and tell us all the things we could have said in the episode that we didn't. But anything else you want to add, Chris, before we wrap this episode up?

Chris: [00:33:15] So we talked earlier about, you know, you've got different personalities as a business owner. You're getting an entrepreneur inside of you, a manager, a technician, and an artist. Your technician does not want to talk on the phone. You should get your inner entrepreneur and your inner artist in on this conversation to talk about how much more effective it can be to just calming down and spending some time talking to other individuals about possibly working with you.

Like one of my biggest pet peeves is like somebody that's running a business, picks up the phone. I was like, hello, thank you for calling. Well, what can I do for you? Don't use your stupid business voice.

Brian: [00:33:47] Chris you use that voice so much. I don't think you realize it.

Chris: [00:33:52] I really, it's one of my favorite fun voices to do, but don't use your stupid business voice on the phone.

Brian: [00:33:57] You don't sound like that, but you have the super business voice, like the sales voice.

Chris: [00:34:01] I've got a great stupid business voice.

Brian: [00:34:04] It's like, if you want to hear Chris's stupid business voice, go watch one of his YouTube ads. Like that's his stupid business voice. Hi, I'm Chris Graham.

Chris: [00:34:15] it's not what it sounds like. Anyways, just give this some thought guys. Is it more efficient for you to build relationships and to use your website as a portal to get people, to schedule a time, to build a relationship with you? I think in many cases, yes. But again, advice buffet. It's not for everybody, but it's something you should consider.

Don't just look at what everyone else is doing and copy their stupid quote form. Not the quote forms are stupid. They're fantastic. But this might be something that plays to your strengths. Give it a try.

Brian: [00:34:47] That is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Appreciate it. Anyone who sticks around to these outros? You never know what I'm going to say on these things. Am I going to talk about a course? Am I going to talk about a future episode? Am I going to be talking about what's happening in my personal life?

Am I going to talk about file pass again? Get another file pass. Add. Well, here's what I'm going to talk about on this outro here. Our podcasts mainly targets recording studios, mixing engineer, typical audio people, duh, but you might be surprised that we have a lot of listeners that are videographers.

Graphic designers, illustrators photographers. And that's just because they're not that many people, even in these other industries that talk about the business of freelancing. Period. And that's all they talk about. There's a couple people out there, those other industries, but there's not many. So a lot of the other freelance creative worlds, listen to this podcast on a weekly basis because a lot of what we talk about is universal to their businesses translates one-to-one.

So that being said, I'm looking to connect with any of our graphic designers who listen to this podcast, especially if graphic design is your main income. Or at least a significant part time income. And the reason I am looking for graphic designers is because file pass is moving into the graphic design market.

Now don't worry if you're, if your file past user and audio. Yes, we are sticking the audio. That's like our bread and butter right now, but we are opening up things to the graphic design market and we need some people to beta test. Some features. If you're not familiar with what file passes, it just allows you to send files to clients.

Collaborate, get feedback, go back and forth on revisions all while protecting your files behind a paywall. And as soon as your client is happy, they can pay and then instantly download their files to work great. And audio so far, we're still growing in that market. Things are better than I would have expected a year end, and now we want to move into the graphic design and illustration market.

And we've, we've just unlocked some new features. If you're already in file pass as a file pass user for audio, you can actually start using our graphic design features, just upload some sort of image file. And you can start leaving pinpoint comments directly on the image and allows you to collaborate with clients.

So just say, for example, say you're a logo designer. That's your specialty, that's your niche. You want to send an early draft, like a first draft of a logo to a client. It's an initial feedback, instead of just getting a block of feedback and an email, your client can leave little pinpoint comments that can circle things.

They can put little dots on things with comments attached to them. And all of this is behind a secure paywall. So your client cannot just run off with your files. We'll also have a watermark feature, so you can just literally stick a watermark over something. So you don't have to worry about them, even just taking screenshots of the file.

So, if you want to get in on the beta for our graphic design plan, just email me Brian at  dot com. And I would love to set you up with an account. And if possible, if you're up for it, just jump on a call and go back and forth on some ideas with you, because we want to do exactly what we're doing with audio in the graphic design market, because so many of the features just carry over exactly from audio.

So that's all I got for you on this episode next week, Chris and I will be back for another episode and early at 6:00 AM where we'll be giving you what we're calling our COVID pep talk. If COVID has you down, quarantine has you down your business's hurting. You want some practical steps on things you can do right now to pep up a little bit.

Next week's episode is going to be for you brighten early 6:00 AM until next time. Thank you so much for listening and happy hustling.