How You Can Work ON Your Business Instead of IN Your Business (Part 1)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 93

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You're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your hosts, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast.

I am your host Brian Hood and this weird looking bald dude that smiling me awkward for the power of the Internet is my purple shirted bald and beautiful cohost, Christopher J. Graham. They can't see me, Brian, it's a podcast. How are you doing today, my friend? And I'm actually gonna interrupt you. I'm gonna let you answer that because I know you're doing great because as of Friday, less than four or five days ago, you are officially

debt free. Am I correct? Yeah. Yes I am. So we mentioned this back on, what was the episode 54

episode 57 how recording studios can get in, stay out of debt. This is right when you started your debt journey.

Yeah, this is right when I started at. And so the big story here is I used debt to buy things, to buy services, to buy marketing, to speed up the growth in my business. It worked. It definitely worked. However, in retrospect, I wouldn't have done that. Knowing what I know now, I would have chosen to not take on that debt. And here's the thing, here's what's going to blow your mind. I think I would've grown faster without the debt. Interesting. And the reason for that is that when you carry debt with your business, you also carry stress. And when you carry stress, you're stupid. Or

this is the super word, by the way. I don't think it is. That was a joke. Oh good. Good. That was a good, it was like you could literally hear the sound of that joke wishing over my head there wishing over. So either way, I'm stoked that you're out of debt now. Like thanks man. It's a good followup to that podcast. It was out what, six, seven months ago. And so there's some closure for our audience. Yeah, we've got more stuff planned about debt and strategic debt versus bad debt versus good. Did we have a lot of stuff planned for this in the future. So this is not the end of the debt conversation, but it is the end of your debt at least right now.

Yeah. Well and the kind of the interesting thing, like we'll talk a lot more about this in the future, but around the house, my wife and my kids have begin to refer to me as no debt daddy and no debt. Daddy is a way better dad than debt Daddy,

Dad, Daddy. It sounds like a cheesy porn.

Yeah it does. It sounds disgusting. But the big take home for that, and we mentioned this a couple episodes ago in the podcast that sometimes people will say, oh well you know guys, how do you balance family and business? And my response to that is typically, well if you're asking that question, probably most people mean how do I balance work, family and debt? And my experience has been it's way easier to balance family and business if the debt's not part of the equation. So that's good stuff man. Super pumped.

Congratulated since on that my friend. Thanks man. I'm popping like some little confetti strimmer so you can't see it right now. Let me throw one more piece into this

because we're going to talk more about this in the future. There's two ways to run a business. There's to run the business with debt. There's to take on, you know, whatever type of small business loan or credit card or whatever. You're using that debt to run the business. And the other way is to cashflow your business, which is you don't use debt, but you use money leftover each month to reinvest that next month. A lot of people hear that.

No, no, no Dutch, the only word. That's the only way. It's not tons of businesses throughout history work on a cash flow system. Hardly

Davidson works on a cash flow system. We're not doing that episode today. We're saving this whole long freaking awesome episode for the future cause we get a lot more stuff to talk about. But I'm just like super jazzed on this cashflow method. It's how I launched my business originally. I was cashflow for probably five years.

That just means that you always had money in the bank to pull from, instead of continuously pulling money from the bank being in debt, this is a different way to run your business altogether. So I agree as someone who has been debt free for six, five, five, six years now, like it is, it is a game changer when you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Especially as a married man. It's a psychological game changer. Yep. More than anything else. And that's been my experience. So we'll talk more about that in the future side note. On a less serious note, uh, you went to some sort of meetup last night in Columbus, Ohio. I didn't know this. Apparently Columbus actually fosters some sort of recording studio community in Columbus. Ironically, I didn't know that either until very recently. I'm surprised Nashville doesn't do this. First of all, explaining what they do, and maybe they do do this in Nashville, I just don't know about it. But what does Columbus do? What is it that they sponsor?

Well, what they do is there is something called the Columbus Music Commission and it's run by our city government and they basically bring in speakers to talk about music business. They call it music business Mondays. It was super fun. They brought in Fab Dupont and Brian Lucy, who's a really good mastering engineer from La but originally from Columbus and fab dupont is the pure mix.net guy. They were both great. They had a lot of cool things to say and it was awesome to have a bunch of people in the room talking about this sort of intersection of music and business because that's my jam. That's, I love that stuff obviously. Yeah, it was really, really cool. I think I'm going to be going to those events a lot more often and it was a blast.

Sounds like a good opportunity to like meet people and network with your community and make friends. Cause here's the thing is like which side note did you know? Pure mix.net owns the pure mix.com URL. I don't know why they don't just, yeah. Anyways, as audio engineers, people that live in our caves, you know, tweaking knobs for living. It can be really easy to be a loner. And so forcing yourself to get over the social anxiety cause we all have it to go out and meet people in your community who are kind of trying to work towards the same goal. I think that's something that we all need a little bit more of.

Yeah, it's kind of cool, like just that there's some effort to build a community around helping the arts through teaching them business, which is obviously that's our passion, you know, so very cool stuff. Well let's move on to today's topic for the podcast, the meat of the episode. Hmm. I don't eat meat anymore Brian. I'm offended by that statement. You know, my wife is back on the vegetarian or the fish diet, whatever it is. We're shall only eat the fishes and, and that kind of by proxy makes me part-time Vegetarian. I believe that's called the paleontologist diet. I don't even know what it's called and correct. It's a WHO fucking knows? I don't know. I want to say a pescatarian. I think is the word every single time I hear it, I want to see that a religion. Yeah, the religion or the domination. Uh, Episcopalian.

Gotcha. So it's really confusing. That's why I never say it cause I always say the wrong one. So it's one of those two. Anyways, this week we're talking about something cool. What are we talking about? I do you remember? I do remember. And let me share with you guys what we're talking about. Okay. We talk a lot about this idea that you need to schedule time every week to work on your business, not for your business. Generally speaking, our podcast is an advice buffet and what that means is that we're going to have a lot of ideas. You can pick and choose which ones you want. Scheduling time to work on your business, not for. It is something Brian and I are very passionate about and I don't think there's any way to build a successful business without specific time set aside to work on it, not for it.

However, when I first heard about this idea, it was through the book, The e myth revisited by Michael Gerber. Crazy good book, one of the best selling, you know, small business books of all time, perhaps the best selling small business book of all time. And he talks about that in there. And one of the interesting components about that is when I, we share this idea or I'm talking to somebody that I'm coaching or whatever, there's usually this reaction of like, well what, what, what do you do when you're spending time working on that for this? I can't believe we haven't really directly answered that question yet. On this podcast we talk about all the time and we've had like little bits and pieces throughout past episodes where we talk about certain things that you do when you're working on your business. But we've never really just said, okay, when you work on your business, what do you do during that time?

So this is a good episode for you, if that's the question you have in your head right now. Totally. And here's one of the things you get to keep in mind when you're working on your business, not for your business. There's going to be certain things that are important to work on and other things that aren't important to work on. You know, if you're like, well, I need to go to the store from my recording studio and he need to get some of those fancy covers for the Kleenex boxes. That's what I'm doing this afternoon, so the Kleenex game has been elevated. That doesn't matter. That's don't do that. Take five seconds. Look on Amazon order one. If that's something you think you need. I wouldn't even do that. I wouldn't even go that far. Just it's good enough. Leave the box as it is. It's got a nice design on it.

Yeah. Anyways, I digress. There's certain types of work that you can do when you're working on your business, not for your business, where you put an hour into this type of work and that's what we're talking about today. You put an hour into this type of work and the value that you receive for that hour goes up. The longer you stay in business. There are many hours that I put into my business years and years ago that when I was working on my business, not for my business, where I am continually making more money as a result of things I did 10 years ago. I chose some good things to work on, not four, and I keep getting more money as a result of it. We're going to talk about a list of these things and when you're thinking about I want to work on my business, not for it, you got to make a list of priorities.

What are the things that you can do that can immediately create some room to breathe, but they can also make you more money over the long term. I would say to start out with, we're not going to talk about this a whole lot, but I would say the first thing you should do when you're working on your business, not for it, is find something that you can work on that will give you more free time so that you have more time to work on your business, not for it. For most people that are, you know, really kicking butt. They've got a successful business, they don't have any free time, they are like barely treading water and they're completely overwhelmed. One of the most important things to do first and foremost is to address that and to create a little bit more space to breathe.

Yeah. So if you go back and listen to episode number two of the podcast, it's the second episode we ever did is like almost two years old now. And it's where I interviewed Chris and this is a really good introduction to this concept of setting aside what little time you have to work on your business so that you can free up an extraordinary amount of time so that you can invest more time working on your business, but on things that don't just give you more time, things that give you money instead. And it gets really difficult to work on those things that give you longterm financial gains if you don't have the free time to work on your business. So this is kind of two phases wouldn't really is, but there's kind of two phases to this. Phase one is freeing up your time by taking whatever tiny amount of time that you have free right now and investing into some of the things we're talking about today to free up more time.

So every hour you work this week it might free up an hour a month for the rest of your life and every time you can do something like this you have now increased the amount of time you can spend next month to work on your business so that you can free up another hour per month for the rest of your life. And that it can snowball very quickly because at the end of the year you've now cleared out 12 hours a month to work on the things in your business that are going to start bringing in more income. And so we have a list here. Chris is currently rearranging it cause I just threw a curve ball at them but we're going to talk about first the things that you can do to work on your business to free up more time so that you can then start doing some of the other things on this list. Cause like you said somebody, people are balls to the wall where their schedule, where they have no free time. I've always been walls to the balls. Ah Sorry. Hey, sorry I don't, I've ever said balls in the podcast

before. It's probably the last time.

I don't even know where I am anymore. So there's going to be a sad trombone somewhere in that. So many people are barely treading water when it comes with the time and money. Like I see people that are in both, they're like have no time. They have no money, they don't know what to do. This is the answer for you. If that's your situation, you need to find what tiny amount of time you can get and invest this into things that are working on your business in order to save more time. So let's talk about the first thing, and this is honestly it sounds so stupid and obvious, but people I see to this day do not do this and that is creating session templates. Chris, can you talk about session templates?

Well, I'm actually more excited to hear you talk about it because your session template game is on fleek as the kids say. Um, yeah, I mean the session template thing, there's a lot of ins and outs of if you're doing the type of work that's repetitive. So this is specifically for like mix engineers, but the same would apply to a tracking engineer that you know that like, Hey, I'm going to open up my template and I always know that the base guitar is purple, right? You've color coded the tracks so that you can glance at it and immediately your eye pops over the bass guitar when you want to. Coming up with systems like this, it sounds boring. It sounds overly simplified. So this idea of when you've got a template, you start to develop muscle memory, you start to be able to use parts of your brain to know, oh well I'm just going to reach for this track when I'm going to adjust it. But Brian, tell us about what you do.

Yeah, so session templates are a really obvious way. Again, I, I don't see many people doing this well, but this is an obvious way to save time on basic stuff. And I've talked about this in the past when it comes to, I actually hire a guy to set up all my sessions for me because that is a far more efficient way to save me a disproportionate amount of time. But that's advanced stuff. If you are barely treading above water financially and with time you don't have the money to afford to hire somebody to do your session prep work for you. So instead the thing you can do is set up session templates so that every single time you start to set up a session, you know, like you just said, the kick drum is purple, the Bass Guitar is green, the vocals are pink. Every single track that is associated with something is a certain color so that you know exactly where you're going to go in the session when you're looking for something specific.

That's one example, but there's also certain plugins you always have on a basic guitar, certain plugins you always have on a lead guitar and a Acoustic Guitar. And a snare drum. There's certain things you always have and yes, we're going to adjust things based on what you're given. Whenever you mix a session or what the drums sound like. If you're recording a session or depending on your situation is always going to be different. But the goal is to streamline as much of it as possible so that you have as little guesswork as possible every single time you do a session and if you invest an hour or two hours setting aside specific sessions for different types of work. So like in my business I'll have really low tuned metal tracks and I'll have like sometimes I'll more of a melodic metal track with a lot of singing in it. Sometimes I even have like clean vocals, no as distorted guitars. I'm not known for that, but I'll get those sorts of sessions. So I have multiple templates set aside for different overarching genres of types of bands that I work with.

So when it comes to like a low tune metal song, you've got a specific template for your [inaudible].

Aw, I saw the look in your face and I knew you were going to make some pun, but that was literally the worst one I've ever heard. I don't care if they're bad.

It's still funny to me if it's bad that I don't, I don't really care. I just think it's so dumb that it's hilarious.

Shame on you, sir. Shame on you. Anyways, I have certain session templates set aside for different genres and different sub genres that make it easier for me to set up things. I have sessions for if there's two different vocalists and so all of these are arranged in a way that's easy for me to find, easy for me to duplicate. If I am setting up a session or if my assistant's going to set up a session now so that I can easily drag and drop the files into the session for mixing work or if I'm going to start recording, which I don't do anymore. I stopped. My last band I recorded was in 2015 if I was to record a band, I would have things set up ahead of time because I knew that they were going to use my drums so I knew exactly exactly what to use on my drum set and my symbols if they're using my symbols, I knew exactly what sort of template to use.

If they're using one of my tones on my Kemper or one of my amps and one of my caps, the more streamlined you have this, the more repeatable you have it, the easier it's going to be on you and the more time you're going to save time and time again. So again, spend a day and just set up sessions for bands you've had more than one of in the last year. And once you've done that, save it, set it aside, clean out all the files, label it, organize it, do all these things. This is a little bit of time you can spend now to save a shit load of time in the future.

And the big idea here is let's say that you spend five hours setting up templates and those templates end up saving you. Let's say you know what, two hours a month. It could be a lot more than that.

It really depends, man. I haven't set up a mixing session forever, so don't even remember how much time it takes anymore,

right? But let's just conservatively say that you save an hour a week. Let's just a nice round number. Each time you save an hour per week, the time that you originally invested in making those templates has now made you more money. Those five hours that you spent working on your business, not for your business initially made you $0 million. Yup. But now it saved you a little bit of time next week. Okay, cool. Well your time is worth, you know, a nice round number. Let's say $50 an hour. Now those five hours you made $10 an hour for each of those pieces of work that you did, each of those five hours of work that you did the next week you save another hour. Okay? Now you are looking at twice that now you made $20 an hour,

you've saved two hours at work, which is 100 bucks. At the end of the year, you've saved up to $2,800 so one of the big things to keep in mind here is if this takes you five hours to do this week and just say it saves you an hour a week for the rest of your mixing career or your recording career, it saves you one hour a week, which I think is a generous assumption. Just the amount of time it saves you to think about where something is in your session or the way something's labeled or the way something's named or having to go through and rename stuff or re add plugins every time. If it saves you an hour a week or five hours of work you did, you just spent five hours one week to save 50 plus hours over the next year and that is a huge, huge amount of time that you just got back on that initial five hours of work. It's about an ROI on your time. You invest five hours, now you reap 50 plus hours over the next year. And if you can do that for just a few things, you'll start to recapture some of the time. Then spend on some of the other things we're going to talk about on this episode. So let's move on to the next part of our list. Here are things you can do to spend time on your business, not in your business. What does this next thing on the list, Chris?

Payment Systems. How does it save us time? Well, here's the thing. I can't tell you the number of people I've talked to that if you dig into their business, what it turns out is that it probably 50% of their stress is related to, they're waiting on a payment from a band. Oh my gosh, at least 50% it might be 80 did they listen to this podcast? Or they might not, or they just started. So one of the things that you can do to work on your business, not for it, where you can get this huge return on investment on your time, is to find a way where you don't have to chase payments anymore. Yep. Create a system and stick to it and either say, Hey, I want to get paid up front. Or Hey, you're going to use file pass and they can pay to download the mixes once you're done.

You know, whatever. Or freshbooks we've, you know, Sung their praises on the podcast before they wrote that breaking the time barrier pdf that we had on the show recently using something like freshbooks that automatically reminds clients, hey, you owe me money. Hey, you owe money. Hey money. And then freshbooks is connected your bank account and says, all they paid, I'll stop emailing them. So some kind of system like that where you don't have to spend time each week chasing payments, you're an artist, you're a creative. You shouldn't have to spend your time calling people like, Hey, sorry to bother you. Could you please pay me? You jerk. We shouldn't have to do that. Yeah, I would say not just payment systems.

If I were to do this, I would also say your payment terms because if you are chasing down money, yeah, you can use something like file pass. Yeah, you can use something like freshbooks to try to ease the amount of time you have to spend chasing down payments, but at the end of the day if you just change your terms to where you're getting paid upfront for the work, you don't have to go chasing down payments ever again. Now, not everyone's at the level where they feel comfortable or they're able to do this, so I understand if people are hesitant, but I would try it totally. If people aren't willing to at least pay half upfront, then to me they're not a serious candidate for services, so try to at least get a parcel deposit up front. Even if the remaining balance is due after you're done with the work, do not send any files. You always have to have some amount of leverage on those files. Yes, and that's not even a system. That's more of just terms that you set up ahead of time. If you spend 10 minutes thinking through this and looking that, oh my gosh, I've been chasing down 10 different people for payments, I'm owed 1200 bucks from all these people. That stuff adds up fast to try to chase down all these people for money. So just changing your payment terms can be a huge way to save time and to make sure you're getting paid

well. And it can also save you a lot of emotional stress, which when you've got some kind of like issue where you know a few people owe you money and you've already done the work, you can't help but feel like they're devaluing you and what you bring to the table when they haven't paid you yet. There's always this nagging voice in the back of your head and it's like, Huh, but am I bad at what I do? Did they not value my services? They might not good. Just being able to shed that and move on, the maximum amount you could make in a year dramatically goes up because now you're not exhausted. Now you're not playing the victim and now you're not wasting time chasing payments. And you can use that time to work on your business, not for your business or to take on more projects. Right? So my big advice and quick story on me is to just find a way to not have to worry about this. When I got into mastering full time, you know, decade or so ago, I made the decision where I was like, if this is going to work, I'm not going to chase payments. So you're going to pay me up front and fold the end. Sorry.

As a mastering engineer, you're working with a lot of projects that are a relatively small amount of money. You're working basically with 10 x. The amount of clients that I work on with the average income per client, like 10 times less than my type of work. So you literally can't afford to go chase down clients because there's so many to chase down and it's such small amounts of money overall in the mastering world. Whereas in like my type of business, it's higher income per person, but I'm working with way, way less projects than you. So it's a little easier to have to chase down. So depending on your business model, this may not be as big of a problem, but for you this would have been a massive problem had you not made the decision from day one.

Oh yeah, I would've gone out of business. And the big thing that can get tricky with this too, not to go too far down the rabbit hole, is that many businesses that fail fail because their cashflow alignment got messed up. They owed money and were owed money at the same time.

Ooh, that's a bad place to be. So you owed somebody money, you owe the bank something for your mortgage maybe or a car payment or whatever, and you are owed thousands of dollars from somebody else. Well, the problem is the bank and the government, if you owe on taxes, those two people have a lot more ways to make you pay. Then you can make someone else pay for your mastering services. So yeah, you again, we are in the mastering or mixing and recording studio business. We are not in the debt collection business. So that is a huge thing to keep in mind is set things up. So you are not a debt collector.

Yeah. Retire from debt collection would be my best advice. Okay. So this next thing we're going to talk about was huge. This was the first thing I automated my business. It changed my life and it wasn't even my, it was my wife's idea. I was telling my wife one day, this is probably the 2009 or something like that. I was like, man honey, you know, I feel like I write the same email again and again and people will ask me a question via email and it's like I got to type out the same response again. And she said, well honey, why don't you just like come up with a response and save it as a signature in your email app? And then if someone asks that question, you just select that signature and you've got a pre composed response. And I was like, Whoa, you're awesome.

I did that. I came up with like 20 email signatures. You know, one of the questions would be like, uh, you know, who do you recommend for releasing our music online? And I'd be like, Oh yeah, here's the paragraph. Or what about that? And all of a sudden I wasn't spending all this time writing emails again and again and again, and I'd write the same email a couple of times a week. Once I did that, I had massively more time to work on my business, not for it to take on more projects. And here's the thing, you've got to understand in any business model, there's a cap. There's a maximum amount of money that you're going to be able to make in a year. And when you start to work on your business, not for it, that cap starts to creep up because you've got more time on your hands. You know, people you know, talk about like, oh well, just don't have enough time. I just don't have enough time. No, you don't have enough systems. You haven't worked on your business, not for your business enough. That's the problem, not your time.

This is a big one for me as well. I do want to make a side note. You don't have to do the signature thing anymore. That was like a weird hack you had to do way back in the day in order to save email templates. Was that on your phone or was it on a computer? This was in Mac. OSX is mail application. Yeah. So now, I mean Gmail has a setting. If you go deepen their settings, they actually have emailed templates. Canned responses. Yeah. Canned responses is what they called. If you Google canned responses for Gmail, it'll pull it right up. Yep. So, and most email clients have this now, so you can save a ton of replies and you're good to go. Or if you use a CRM, which we'll talk about in a minute, but email templates are massive because once you start doing this full time and you start to get busy, you're going to spend a lot of time in your inbox.

You're getting a lot of emails for the exact same thing every single day, especially in your kind of work. Chris, with mastering work. And if you do not have email templates, you are wasting a massive amount of time every single week typing up the exact same emails. Also, I used to have templates that were just saved in a notepad and so I had templates, but that meant every time I had to reply to an email with one of my templates, I had to go find that reply in this long notepad of all these different templates and then I had to copy it and then paste it and then adjust it. That is not the case anymore. Again, spend 10 minutes one day googling Gmail canned responses and all of a sudden you can now load up a template, a response, and I don't know if Gmail does this, but I know your CRM will do this. It'll pre-populate the person's name. It can also pre-populate certain parameters like a price or something that you don't have to even adjust yourself or a date. So all of these things can be created if you just spend a little bit of time up front to build the system out to go along with their templates. So it's kind of a two parter edge, the template and the system to deliver that email template.

Totally. The next thing we want to talk about is the FAQ section on your website. This is related to the templates that brother and sister, so to speak. If you are getting the same questions again and again and again, make a page on your website, call it FAQ and just write the question and then write the answer. When you're working on your email templates. What I love to do is, you know somebody will email me, I'll write out by hand a response like, Oh man, that's awesome. Thank you so much. And then so they ask a question about like MP3 conversion or something like that. I get that question a lot. Then it'll say in bold, here's more info on that from my FAQ. And then there's the actual paragraph from the FAQ that was saved as an email template. So I'm doing an a mixture of like, it's totally organic. I'm actually writing the email back to the customer, but then I'm, you know, there's clearly a new section in that email that's in bold for more information on this. Here's blah, Blah Blah for my FAQ. And then there's the paragraph and then I don't have to type that stuff out again. And I'm also lightly training my customers. Hey, if you have [inaudible]

question, maybe check out the FAQ first. That's great. So there's one tool I wanna recommend here that I love and my assistant got me onto, I've had it for years. He got the premium version, so it has a little bit of money. It's called Alfred and he'll put it in the show notes I'm sure. But the premium version of Alfred has this feature where you can have templates saved to where all you do is type like exclamation point and then whatever you type after that, we'll load the template with that keyword on it. So no matter where you are, you can load up template or responses, whether you're on Facebook or you're in forum or you're on slack or urine leaving comments on a blog or you're replying to an email, whether it's in Gmail or your CRM, you can pre-populate with just a quick keyword specific templates. So that is super helpful if you're typing up things in an area that doesn't have templates. Yeah, this is super

powerful stuff and it helps you to not make mistakes. Yeah, I got so much better at being polite and kind and courteous and exercise in the golden rule in my inbox because it wasn't like, Ugh, I've got to write three paragraphs to this guy Jake on it. It's going to take me forever. You know, the templates really helped with customer service because it lowers your stress level.

All right, so let's move on to the final thing in our list here for saving time in the studio. We're going to get to the money stuff in a second, but spending time now to save time later. Automation. Chris, we've talked about this on your interview. We've talked about this honestly multiple times. I think back in episode 11 where we talked about how to earn more from your studio without raising your rates. That was kind of our first big foray into automation and some of the other stuff we've talked about this episode, but automation is huge. Chris is probably the master of this game because just via his business model he has to automate a lot of stuff. And again, we go more to depth with his story and how far this automation

rabbit hole goes in episode two of the podcast. But I'm happy to chime in on some of this stuff cause I do do a lot of automation, but I'd love to get your take first Chris, let's talk about automation. Yes. So automation is this idea of if you have a repetitive task, something you do again and again and again and you don't automate it, Henry Ford would say that you are charged an inefficiency tax each time you do that. Task Automation could be something as simple as opening up. If you're a Mac user, there's an app called automator that comes with every Macintosh computer. It's free and if you're like, hey, um, I want to make sure that when I get an email from so and so that it creates a new note in my notes app and also makes a new folder on my desktop. Wow.

I've never opened this app in my life and I'm just now opening for the first time. It's dope. It's extremely powerful. The next automation tool that you can use on a Mac, I'm Mac only and I'll only be Mac only for the rest of my life. Their automation tools are spectacular. There's something called apple script, which is basically automator on something that makes it better and cocaine. Apple script is can. Okay. Okay. Okay. Apple script is considerably more powerful, but considerably harder to learn how to use. Yeah. But again, when we start talking about investing time, you spent a considerable amount of time investing in learning how to use automator and apple scripts, and so if you want to talk about the return on that investment of time though, I mean, I can even put a price on how much return you've gotten on that.

No, I cannot. The only reason I'm talking to you guys right now is cause I figured how to master well, how to market well and how to automate well that was it. Those are the three things. We're never doing a podcast again. That's the only three things you need to know. Goodbye y'all. Yeah, I'm on timeless. Wish I hadn't said that. I gave away an awful lot of the farm just now. Yeah. And so automator was the first automation tool that I used. I'm going to have an email list by the way guys, if you're interested in this type of stuff, efficiencies, systems automation, how to make your recording studio more efficient. Check out Chris grand mastering.com/systems and you can sign up for that email list. I'll email you like every few weeks or so. But yeah, check that out. Chris. Grand masters.com/systems James, don't let me forget to set that up.

I haven't done it yet. Um, but yeah, I mean there's just a ton of stuff I've learned over the years. Automator is a great first step. A good example of automated could be a, you can make what's called a contextual menu. So you would select, let's see here, you would select an email and right click on it and when you right clicked on it, that would automatically make a new session folder and copy your pro tools template session into it in your sessions. I don't want people to be daunted by this stuff because here's the deal. You will learn to automate one little thing and that little thing will save a ton of time and then you'll learn how to build on that. Maybe that right click now does 10 things instead of one, but it's not like you sat down and built this all at once. You first learn how it works. So you learn how to crawl.

I really use a lot, but there's probably very few situations I would say just sit down and implement email systems immediately. Email templates immediately because most of us, you know, you type up that one reply. That's the thing you want to save. So maybe you go back and look at some of your past replies to common things, but don't sit down and try to map out all of these potential replies at once. Just next time you sit down and you type out a really good reply to somebody for a question you think you will get. Again, save that as a template because email templates are one of the things you're gonna have to build slowly over time. And then FAQ is the same way. Chris, you talked about setting up an FAQ. I don't have one, but you have one. How long did it take you to get that FAQ together?

20 minutes. I mean, the hardest thing is that you have to think back like what are all the questions I get all the time? Yeah, and that can be a little challenging. Really, the way you build an FAQ is you make it, you make a webpage and you say FAQ and you put like three questions on there and then you wait until you get to another question. I'm like, oh my gosh, I get this question all the time. And then you make yourself go to the FAQ, write the question, write the response, and then make the email template.

Yeah, and one thing to note about FAQ is is you can always make one. If you don't have frequently asked questions, a lot of times you might want to pose a question that they don't have in their head that you want them to have true. So sometimes you can be strategic with your FAQ. That's like if it's an objection you think they might have. Like what happens if I pay for 10 days and we finish in eight days? You know, like if there's a question that people have in their heads that they should have but don't have in their heads, this is a good time to place this in an FAQ.

It's also a great place to chock your website full of keywords for search engine optimization.

I Dunno how that stuff works. That's a foreign thing to me. We need to get an expert on the podcast to talk about SEO at some point we do and that'd be great. And then finally we talked about automation. Chris, you had that URL again that you were going to send people to recording studio systems.com yeah, so go there if you want a little more from Chris on this. Again, I have a baseline knowledge of automation because I have two for the six figure home studio. I don't have a whole lot automated for my actual recording studio for five, six recordings because I just don't work with more than four or five projects a month ever. So it's one of those things where like I don't have to automate much. I just have people working for me to do that sort of stuff. There might be situations where I could probably automate some of the things they're doing in order to save money that I'm spending on that. Bingo. We're going to talk about that next week though. Let's not get into that because that's kind of some of the stuff we're going to talk about next week.

Yeah. Well,

what's this? Just a little bit of a tiny bit. Well, let me just say this. Okay, so Tim Ferris and for our work with him, we're talking like ants, but it's true. It's kind of weird. Tim Ferris and forward weak

says automate and then delegate, don't delegate and then automate. One of the things that's great about creating systems is when you're working on your business, not for it, is that you can create a system that somebody else can use. That's a great system. A not as great system is a system that makes you more efficient but that nobody but you can use, I didn't know that when I started building systems I build all my systems just to make me more efficient and then when I started to, you know, hire an assistant to help me with email or you know, have somebody help me with, you know there's any number of different things other than mastering. Unfortunately as I started to build that out it was like, oh crap my tools, nobody could use this but me. Cause it's too complicated and too weird.

Yeah. You literally try to explain one of your systems to me and I, my eyes glazed over. I was like this is the most convoluted, complex shit I've ever seen in my life. It would only work for you, that specific part of your business that you were showing me. Yeah, exactly.

So finding a way to create systems that allows you to bring someone else in to help. A good example of this is if you're going to create a template, it might make sense to limit yourself. I know this is gonna sound like heresy. It might make sense to limit yourself if you're a mixed engineer to only one specific plugin company or two specific plugin companies, you know say that both have a subscription program so that the potential person that you hire to help you prep your sessions has access to all the plugins that you have.

Yeah. For example, like if you have the entire like waves mercury bundle that you paid for, that's not a cheap bundle to have if that's all the things you use in your business or you use UAD plugins which requires a piece of hardware to run it. That's the problem we ran across on the podcast was my assistant James doesn't have a UAD and he couldn't process the audio. Like I process on my end when I was on my honeymoon. So the podcast sounded a lot different while I was gone. Sorry. But if you were to use only slate plugins with the $15 a month slate, everything bundle or whatever it costs now, that's a lot easier thing to pay for for your system to have their own slate bundle if they're paying monthly for it. So if you're keeping those sorts of things in mind for future hires, it does make the transition easier. Yeah. One of the things that I would

say as we kind of close up shop is I know that many of you, when we just said limit yourself to one plugin bundle that you're just like, I hate you. Like I know there was this like an emotional reaction. We're not doing our job if you don't get a little uncomfortable every once in awhile when you listen to the podcast, that's how you grow.

I mixed a song, I don't know where it is. There's probably a video of it somewhere online where I mixed an entire song using only the stock protos plugins and it sounds fantastic. So it's just one of those things. People put a lot of stock into hardware. People put a lot of stock into plugins as well, so I think there's a lot you can learn from limiting yourself with what you're using in your studio. I love that, but again, that's kind of a conversation for a different day.

That's actually kind of an interesting point as far as working on your business, not for it. One of the things you could do is offer yourself a challenge. You finished a record for this band, enough time has passed that you willing to reopen the sessions without, you know, throwing up in your mouth and you try to remix one of the songs using only stock plugins. You challenge yourself in that way and you create these false restraints. False restraints when you create them can lead to a lot of creativity a lot. And so in a situation like that where you're forcing yourself to work in a way that you don't normally work, you're usually going to grow in some way and be like, Oh wow, I didn't really know that that worked well. You know, one of the things when we first met, we were hanging out at advanced pals studio and he pulled up a Chris Stapleton session and was showing us his mix and a Chris Stapleton song and I was like one of my favorite songs. I was like, oh, this is so cool. And he was like, Hey, you know, you guys see what Plugin I use in the snare and we like looked at it as like freaking Deaver dude, I love de verb and I use it all the time. Fricking stock hundred year old d verb like Yup. Came out in the 90s and I was like, what? That's crazy. But yeah, mean forcing yourself to learn and grow and work with limited tools can sometimes create cool art.

This goes in line with something I heard somewhat recently in the last year and that that was without limitations in our life. I don't think there would be any fulfillment in what we do. If you could just do anything in the world at any time, whenever you wanted, whatever you want to have or you wanted. I don't think there'd be any satisfaction in those things. And I think the, I think the limitations we have as humans and, and it's different people, like every human might have different limitations. I think those limitations we have at a lot of fulfillment and satisfaction to the work we do. And so I think some self imposed limitations, like challenging yourself to only use stock plugins or to limit to five plugins that aren't stock plugins or something stupid like that can bring a lot of simplicity to what you're doing, but also a lot of satisfaction. And there's other things like in my own life, we're going on a deep rabbit hole here, but the limitation right now, I'm not eating any sugar whatsoever. That's the limitation that has its cons. But when I'm over the top eating way too much sugar, there's no satisfaction in that. Like I hate myself when I'm like bingeing Krispy Kreme donuts or something. But you know, this is, again, we're getting off the rabbit hole here, but I think limitations are a really, really, really good thing that people do not do enough of.

Totally. And I think you could look at that from the perspective of human history and be like, what is a human? A human is a unique animal. That problem solves fish swim. You know, like fricking, I don't know, birds fly, humans problem solve. It's true. That's the vehicle that we operate on. And when there's no limitations, there's no problems to solve. And it's not weird to feel like a fish out of water to be like, ah, it's just something not right here. And so I think, yeah, this idea of creating false limitations can lead to a ton of creativity. Whereas the flip side of the coin in our industry that gets really toxic is this, I've got syndrome.

And the way to get over the imposter syndrome is to get all the toys, is to get everything I possibly can. So I am unlimited in my creative endeavors. You know what that brings though, that brings on a massive amount of debt. Self-Loathing. Yeah. When you do a finally acquire all those things, granted with a lot of debt, and then you realize that it didn't solve any problem [inaudible] oof. Ouch. I think it's a good depressing place to leave. Actually. It shouldn't be depressing. It should be actually encouraging because you don't, people don't realize they don't need those things in order to get where they want to be. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think this is a completely different topic for a different day. Uh, but it's a good way to wrap this up.

Soda [inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Again, congratulations to Chris Graham Aka debt for he daddy. Such a bad name. Congrats Chris. Again for paying off all that debt being completely debt free. We're going to have an episode on that whole period of aggressively paying down a pretty substantial amount of debt. So hopefully I can get him to talk specific numbers if I twist his arm enough. But next week we're going to pick back up on the topic we discussed today about working on your business, but instead of ways to work on your business to save time, we're going to talk about ways to spend that time to then work more on your business to then earn more. So that's next week's episode, brighten early 6:00 AM same as every week. Until next time, thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.

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