How You Can Work ON Your Business Instead of IN Your Business (Part 3)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 95

You're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recordings duty. You now your host Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back

to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian D. Hood. I'm here with my amazing bald, a beautiful purple shirted glass glasses, four eyed stupid big dog headed Chris Kresser for Jay Grim. I feel like Mr. Graham, I feel like I've gotten meaner and meaner over the like last 10 episodes on your intro and I'm going to, I'm going to dial that back. What we have to switch it up in some way. If meanness is what the direction that it needs to go, then so be it. I know, I mean sometimes you just need to let it out. You know, if you've had a rough day, you know, if you just got that one support email that you just want to like stab, stab your eyes out, you know, you get those emails, you have to type up a really mean reply and then just never send it. Just so you can get out of your system. Yeah. Instead of doing that, I can just insult you in front of thousands of people. You can't make myself feel better. One of the funny things that I remember when we went to Yosemite, Yosef might, there was a small child when we got lunch right before we were getting ready to do the valley walk and there was a small child who face planted right in front of us and human can laughing really loud and mocking the child and the mom looked up at you like, what?

And I was like, Oh yeah. Not Pretend to be a grown adult at any point in my life. I will always find that funny and I will be unapologetically laughing. Any challenge face face plants into the snow. Just just for the record. It was into the snow. No, no, it was on summit. Okay, let's try it. I was like, Oh yeah, he didn't have kids yet. He'll, he'll learn the ways soon enough. You know what? If my kid face plants, I'm going to be laughing at him too. So it's okay in the world. I'll admit you have not experienced dad anxiety or as I like to call it Dad's Zion. I knew you were going to put those two words together, man. Well you're such a dad with your dad jokes. That's what you do, man. Hey Man, I tell my dad jokes and sometimes he laughs.

Oh that's the only dad joke clown. We're telling this podcast by the way, is brought to you by Lacroix. Back to what you said a minute ago about you knew I was going to combine those two words because simplification is better. It's good, and that is the time is the worst segue we've ever had into a podcast episode ever. But to simple segue, no, it's not cause now we have to explain how bad your segue wise and then explain what we're going to actually talk about. Today's episode is all about simplification. In the last few episodes in this series, we talked about ways to work on your business, not

in your business, ways to work on your business in order to give you more time and to help make you more money. The third and probably final part of this series is ways to work on your business in order to simplify things because a lot of what we gave you these last couple episodes, you'll be working on those things and they can get out of hand really fast. They can get Uber complicated and I'm going to use a quote here. I'm going to steal from you Chris. What gets fancy gets broken. We're going to talk about that today, but before we get into today's episode, let's talk about our two sponsors we have today, which are really just mining Crysis companies. I forgot about that. Yeah. First sponsor for today is Chris has company bounce. Butler. Chris.

Yeah. Bounce Butler is like if you have too many basketballs and you're tired of cleaning them up, bounce Butler will pick up your basketballs and put them away for you. And if you have a lot of like files that you need to render, like export, like bounce from pro tools, logic, cubase, whatever. He'll also do that. So check it out@bouncebutler.com early access is now, so apply if you would like early access to bounce butler. Yeah, worst pitch ever. There you go. That was the best commercial we've never had.

The thing is great. It actually will let you bounce down like every session that you select automatically and if your doll fails, it'll open it back up and try to balance it again. That way you don't have to actually actively be at your computer when stuff is bouncing down, so you can go play basketball. He can go play basketball and it'll go add it to a nice little folder for you. A Dropbox folder. It'll text you when you're done. We'll let actually, can it text you the Dropbox link? That would be awesome. Can I do that Chris?

Well, that's funny you asked. It might do that someday, but we're trying to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn't create any security risks.

I see what you're saying. Well, well you know when we built out the file pass bounce, Butler integration, maybe we can come up with something there. We'll figure it out then. Now that brings up our second sponsor for this episode and that is my company with Mr Trevor Hinds. Lee, my co founder. We have a company called file pass. I can't do the lame attempted pitch that Chris just did because I have a cofounder who would slay me if he heard such a weak pitch file passes. Essentially Dropbox or God forbid, Google drive on steroids. It's file sharing for recording studios. You create a project in file pass, you add files to that project, you send the files to your client and all of a sudden instead of opening up a big ugly black screen with a player in it, like Google drive or a slow downgraded MP3 of your beautiful wave file like Dropbox, it'll load a quick beautiful music player. It will stream the actual wave file known coding done, and your clients can timestamp the revisions directly on the song similar to soundcloud. Furthermore, you can add a paywall to the file so that if your client owes you money, they cannot download the file until they pay you through file paths. So if you want to request early access to that, we are wrapping that up. We're about to launch new pricing plans, price going to go up.

Our podcast listeners can get in before we do that. So if you got a file pass.com that will be available there and you can request early access and if you get in early enough, it'll be before our price goes up. Yay. So let's get into today's topic, Chris. Now that we're done pitching our audience on two very awesome tools. Actually I, even though they weren't our own, I would still want to advertise these on the podcast. Well, both of those tools have the possibility of helping you simplify your business. That's true. That's a better segue than the half-assed attempt that you had earlier. What are you going to do? That was a simpler pitch, but yeah, so let me tell you guys a story about my life in West Philadelphia. Born and raised on the playground is where he's spending most of the days our sink is off.

As you guys know, I'm a systems guy. I love systems and I love them because they let me focus on the two things that I love more than systems making art and relationships. And for me, having good systems in my business has allowed me to focus on being much more customer focused and to focus on making more art. Um, let me see if I can work in the word focused several more times. Anyways, systems are great, but as you begin to build out systems in your business or as you don't begin to build out systems in your business, it gets too complicated. A lot of the time that I spend working on my business, not for it, is simplifying my business so that it's as simple and as easy to work on and as dependable as possible. And Brian, like you mentioned before, when you're building out systems for your business, what gets fancy gets broken.

That's not my quote. I stole it from somebody who stole it from somebody else. But it's so true. I think Abraham Lincoln first said that, I believe it was Abraham Lincoln. That's a joke. He gets attributed to everything and fall asleep. He didn't, he didn't say that. Get out of here ape hilarious. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was actually, I was gonna make a funny joke there, but I was thinking I'd come up with the joke as I started saying it and nothing, nothing happened. It's called a dead end job. A dead end joke. Yeah. Oh, wait that out Chris. That was a dad in joke, so, oh God. There we go. All right. [inaudible]. All right, let's talk about why does stuff get over complicated? There's a big difference real quick between complicated cause that can happen inevitably, but over complications. Really what we're trying to avoid here.

How can stuff get over complicated? Did you just say over complication? Yeah, I just made up a word. Don't worry about it. I love it. Okay. Over complication is, I really want to know if I said that Alison them. That definitely did. I'm going to punch myself in saying over complication and the world will not know that I did that and you can't do anything about it. No, you should leave it in authenticity. I'm telling you. You did say it. I'm a mastering engineer. He got golden years, baby off lieutenant. Fantastic authenticity. Anyways, back to the episode. Why does stuff get over complicated? So there's a couple of reasons here. One is that when you're trying to grow a business, you're always building. You're always making something that you can offer more services or more options or raise your prices, whatever it happens to be. You're always building

or you're trying to up your quality. We can't escape this as audio engineers. We're constantly trying to find ways to up our game. That's why you're listening to this podcast. You're trying to up or up your game. The other more insidious reason that businesses get over complicated is that people, myself especially love to procrastinate doing important work by doing unimportant work.

Before we get into that, I want to mention that over complication is not a word, as you might've guessed, over simplification is a word, so I somehow mangled those two words, but back to this, then you're talking about using procrastination as a tool to keep making something more complicated. This goes back, we've talked about this in multiple times of the podcast. Every time you use something to procrastinate, it's because of a fear that's a fear of this holding you back from releasing that thing. And I see this all the time when people build their websites, they refuse to release their websites. And I'm a throw my wife under the bus a little bit here, but she built the website a while back. That's amazing. But due to fear, she just keeps tweaking it and won't actually release the website. And I see this all the time with my students too.

They build websites out, they keep tweaking things, they keep trying to make it quote perfect, but then they just never release it. So I'm gonna bring up another quote that's from the end of this episode that I'm just gonna pull up right now, which is from Facebook's marketing team. I think perfect is the enemy of done. And I think this goes perfectly here. When you're using procrastination in your life in order to avoid something, it's because you're trying to be perfect at something and you'll never actually get it done. There is no such thing as a perfect website. I'm sorry. And the core of it comes back to fear.

Well and this really hits home for anything to us in the audio industry. Also, by the way, it's come to my attention. A lot of people listen to the show that don't record music in any way.

Yeah, I've got some Facebook message from someone who's like not even in the music industry or not Facebook and Instagram. I don't use Facebook. Her and her husband are under this or something I think. I think she sent you a message too cause she said she,

I think she did. I've been getting more and more messages from people that are saying like, wow, what you say applies to all businesses. Like Yup, that sort of business business.

Maybe episode 100 we'll just announce that we're going to completely sell out and shift out of the audio podcast world into the general business world and then sell our souls to the man.

Well, one of the last reasons that I make my businesses over complicated all the time is that at the end of the day I want to be able to, like my elementary school teachers would say pat myself on the back. I want to be able to be like, I did a good job today, pat, Pat, pat, and often all invent ways, excuses to pat myself on the back be like, oh, I built this new system that I'm not going to use, but I built it. Yay. Today was productive. And I think we do this all the time as audio engineers, we're constantly tweaking a mix. When it's done, we're constantly doing extra stuff when we should have, well there's a quote in our industry that you never finish a mix. You give up it

and that is super applicable for what we're talking about today. You know? So just to kind of touch on that,

some personality types are really attracted to like physically checking something off. What did you do list? And when it comes to just patting yourself on the back, you're building out systems, making things more complicated. Just to pat yourself on the back. That is the downfall of that type of personality. Not everyone's like this, I'm not like this, but I know people in my life that are like this, that will do certain things just so they can check it off the list or just so they feel like they've been productive for that day.

Those types of people really need to check themselves. I feel like you've got maybe 15 more of those jokes before I just quit this podcast forever. You can like 15 loud. Okay. Okay. I'm done.

Again, the the checking things off the list just to pat yourself on the back. A lot of that goes back to the procrastination and the fear thing. A lot of that goes back to this core of I'm going to keep doing these behind the scenes things in order to feel like I'm getting things done, Aka pat myself on the back. But what I'm really doing is procrastinating the inevitable, releasing my website or putting a new sales funnel up or putting new Facebook ads out or doing something like reaching out to clients and potential clients following up with leads. Like all these things that I really need to do. I'm procrastinating the work that needs to be done in order to do work that makes me feel better and allows me to pat myself on the back. So these are all different things that can cause complicated, complicated complication.

There is a good complication in your business. This is funny cause I'm usually not the one that does this. You're the one that does this well, I love that you've added an f into that word. I don't know where the F can't complication. I don't know where that came from but I love it but complicated. It's complicated simplification, Chris. Just let it be. There we go. Well, one of the things I think about when we talk about this stuff is when I was in middle school, we all had no, this is like fifth grade, one of the most popular things you could possibly own. There was this particular Adam Sandler comedy CD and I think it was called, they're all going to laugh at you. And there was this skit and in the skit I like, I barely remember it cause it's fifth grade. But the punchline was they're all gonna laugh at you, they're all going to laugh at you.

And it was like Adam Sandler playing at this thing where his mom was warning him that everyone was going to laugh at him. And I think that that fear that they're all gonna laugh at you that, you know, we talked about this with imposter syndrome. I think that fear that people are gonna Laugh at you drives a lot of this like dumb work where you're only working to feel good about yourself and not taking any risk of putting something out in the real world where people might laugh at you. I love that term. You just used dumb work. That's like the perfect

to encapsulate this type of work where you're just patting yourself on the back. Procrastination by doing work. If you are the one that struggles with this, we're not going to go into depth of this right now, but episode 72 Chris does a nice little, a shorter episode while I was on my honeymoon called how to imposter syndrome,

your friend again this episode 72 release back in March 26th it was towards the end of my honeymoon actually. I was really afraid when we put that out there though. They were all going to laugh at me. You kinda did cause that was your first episode of do Solo. You've never done one but that was the only solo episode we've ever had on this podcast. Actually. This is true. I would like to do more stuff like that. Occasional. I'll never leaving this country again. Good. Thank God. That means I don't have to mix anything. We're going to like Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Bali for like a month, sometime early next year. So maybe you'll have your chance. Can you bring me back some noodles and now freaking one of my favorite things on Earth Pad Thai, which is like the widest thing you could like from Southeast Asia. Well, but my favorite pad Thai is made by a Thai lady.

Her name is farm and she lives on the street from me and she's fabulous. But the thing is she makes it because the same reason Indian people make no, no, no. What she makes this very different, very, very different. What is the thing that you think people make the to actually British curry chicken Tikka Masala. Oh, that's British. That's not even Indian. So, but in Indian personal makeup for you, Chris. Interesting fun fact that you guys might not know. And our audience, my wife Alison, who is lovely, beautiful, fantastic. Born in India, I didn't know that her parents were in charge of the dormitories at a school and the foothills of the Himalayas. And uh, she was born in the dentist office in India. Crazies. Does she have dual citizenship or no, not yet. We've been exploring that and that would be pretty dope to have two passports.

So at some point we probably will get on that, but we haven't done like the international travel thing with three kids quite yet. I'm sure we will. Somebody. Yeah. You're getting there though. Your, your youngest is getting to the age where she can travel internationally. [inaudible] all right. Let's move on to ways you can work on your business to simplify things. Chris. First things first, context switching. This isn't really something you can do right now, but this is something you can stop doing in order to simplify your business context switching for those who don't know, it's when you are constantly changing between things that are completely different contexts. An example might be you're working on your website and then every five minutes you're going back and you're adjusting something in a mix that is two completely different parts of your brain, completely different contexts and every time you switch between two completely different things like that, you are losing a massive amount of momentum and productivity and it's adding a lot of compost.

Compost. That's just a word. Now. That's a word we're using from now on. You're adding complicated cocktail bluff occasions. Complication. I'm trying to overcomplicate the word. It's not even that many syllables. You're over complicating things. Well, one of the things you know we talked about this task switching or context switching thing. This is something that neuroscientists have looked into. This isn't just like our opinion. This is science baby and the idea here is that when you get in a flow state and then you try to switch to a completely different flow state that neither flow state benefits from that. And one of the most important things, one of the that you build

systems, one of the reasons that you simplify is you want to maximize flow state. We are creatives, we are artists and we're trying to get into flow state where we do our best creative work. And the way to do that is to get into flow state and not to leave.

So let me actually explain for those who don't know, he's talking about something called flow state. Just explain that. I'll give you a quick story. When I first ordered all my gear for my studio, I was living in my parents' basement. I had a bunch of boxes come in and then I spent like literally 40 hours straight uninterrupted except for like pee breaks and like food and water uninterrupted 40 hours straight, setting up stuff like learning how pro work, installing things like I was in what you would call a flow state. This is a state where if time absolutely flies, you have no sense of what time it is. You sometimes forget to eat and like that is a fantastic place to be and then slept for 12 hours was up for 40 more hours straight, slept for 12 hours for 40 more hours straight working in the studio.

I've never achieved a flow state like that. I probably never will again, but that is like an extreme example. A flow state is when you just get so into your work that you lose all sense of time and when you do context switching, it is a really hard to get into any sort of flow state. If you try to multitask, that is one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. There's no such thing as a good multitasker. That is an oxymoron. People get better at being inefficient. There are less Shitty, I guess you'd say, but no one is a good multitasker. The best way we can all work is to focus at one thing at a time and to give it ample time for that one thing and not switch between contexts.

As I'm thinking about like younger me, more dumber me, I would get so antsy about like, am I really, am I really an engineer? Am I really this person? Am I one of them? And Imposter Syndrome would tick in and impostor syndrome would drive me to hop around from task to task to get as many pats on the back as I possibly could to just be like, I'm doing a good job. See, oh, I just did something else. Oh, I did some more stuff. And it was imposter syndrome that drove me to be really distracted and to multitask like that. It wasn't this idea of like, I think this is the best way to do it. It was, I think this is the best way to feel good about myself.

Yeah. And so as we're talking through the rest of these things we're going to talk about in this episode, keep this context switching thing in the back of your mind that if nothing else, if you just take that to heart and stop switching from task to task to task all day is going to be much, much easier for you to simplify your business. So let's move into something we talked about in past episodes but software. We talked about this, I want to say two episodes ago, but simplifying your software for some reason we just like to over complicate things and let's just talk about first of all plugins. We talked about some of the past episode. What are some ways we can simplify our plugins and honestly better yet, why should we simplify our plugins? Well, this is a controversial

topic in audio and it's controversial because people don't want to admit that there's even a chance that it might be a good idea to simplify your plugins because to do that would be to admit that they had spent a lot of money needlessly on plugins. We can use the same for gear too. So this is interchangeable with hardware and software here we could, however you can sell gear, oo true and plugins are particularly tricky because if you decide like, oh, I don't want to use that, I'm not going to use this plug in anymore. Oh I'm going to limit myself to just waves.

Plugins are gonna limit myself to just slate or whatever it happens to be. As soon as you do that,

the investment that you made in the plugins that you have decided to not use has now disappeared because for the most part you're going to have a pretty hard time selling it to somebody else. And the big issue there that psychologists talk about is sunk costs, sunk costs as this idea of that you spent time or you spent money on something and it didn't work out. And what most people will keep doing is they'll keep on trying to redeem the thing that they lost or the time that they lost to justify it so that they don't have to do this mental accounting trick, which is to admit that they lost to admit that something didn't work out great. And I think the better move there is to think about what your life would look like if you were more simple with the way that you do plugins and didn't own plugins from 18 different companies. A couple things would happen. One, if you needed to reinstall all your plugins, it wouldn't take you all day. That's so true. Like my laptop, hard drive just died. And so whether I get a new laptop or I replace that broken hard-drive, either way, I'm going to have to re-install pretty much everything. So there's a lot of software. I have three installed, so if I were to be using, let's just say all UAD

cool, I'll sleep everything, but it would be a lot so

blur for me to get back up and running in this circumstance. But alas, I have not really, I don't use a lot of plugins to be honest, but I haven't simplified as much as I could. Well and I would say this mixing, so I'm going to get some gear slot alerts here, but

mixing with Ns tans, it's a skill you learn how to mix with Ns tense mixing with say Gen x. Also a skill mixing with headphones is the skill mixing with beats by Dre. That is a skill mixed in with beats by Dre is a miracle. You are

very talented audio engineer if you can do that and so the thing that you've got to keep in mind here is that mixing with stock plugins is also a skill. There are plenty of people who have made records with less than what you currently own that are still like hit records and just to clarify, we're not advocating that you'd throw out your plugins zone, use stock plugins. That's absurd. What we are saying is that there are some great companies out there that have everything you need in a one size fits all package or whatever. That allows you to simplify things in a way that 30 different plugin companies will not allow you to do because here's the deal is when you have too many options, that creates in decisiveness which creates compost complementing complication, which creates all sorts of headaches and not even talking about whenever you go back to open old session up for a plugin that you deleted or that no longer supported or whatever.

The earlier you can simplify your plugins, the better off you're going to be longterm because now if you do this for the next six years, if you have to open up a session that you did this week, you'll have all the same plugins you haven't like expanded exponentially your plugin collection, which causes all sorts of headaches in the past. The more complicated you get with your plugins specifically or any other software, the more difficult you're making your life in the long run. Well, and let me share with you a story actually a story I've heard again and again and again as I've been doing business coaching on the side, which has been a blast. A lot of the guys I've been working with, our high volume mix engineers, these are guys who mix a lots and lots of songs and when they started out they bought lots and lots of plugins to get more and more options and be able to deliver different types of mixes and they didn't notice it.

But as their business began to slowly grow, it became very important for them to start looking at having an assistant to prep mixes for them. It gets problematic when you've built an entire mixing system around 17 different companies because all the sudden for you to hire an assistant means you need someone ideally with all the same plugins that you own, that really lowers the amount of people that you could potentially hire. I know when I was hiring my mixed assistant, it was difficult to find someone that had the plugins that I had and there was actually some that he had to purchase that I paid for just because I want him to have them so he could do my mixed prep. Yeah, and that's how my business works. I have two identical bundles of everything that I own, with the exception of UAD stuff. It's something worth thinking about that if you continue to grow, you're gonna eventually need help and when you need help, you either need to buy all the plugins that you already have for someone else to use to prep your work.

Whether that's mixing, mastering, whatever, which can get to the tens of thousands of dollars depending on your software sled collection. Exactly. Also, what gets tricky is if you don't want to do that, then they have to be local. They have to come into your studio and help you do prep work. If on the other hand, you have developed the skill to be just as good as you would be with a smaller selection of plugins, the number of people that you can get to be your assistant dramatically increases. So this simplification thing, I love what you said, Brian, about it gives you less decisions to make. So if you're in a position where you can move a little quicker because you're not overwhelmed with like, oh gosh, which one of the 75 compressor plugins I have should I use on this song? Like that gets intense and you can get paralyzed by having all those options or you can just keep using the same one and you've wasted money on like 30 other plugins you never use, in which case it's hard to get rid of it because like you said, it's really hard to sell plugins. I haven't seen really anyone do that. I know you can technically, but it's a nightmare for everyone involved,

so that's something that can be mine. If you're brand new, keep this lesson at heart as you're growing your business because the more successful you are, the more attempted you're going to be to spend your money on more gear and more plugins. Those of you who are already successful though, this is more difficult for you because now you have to pair down and simplify things and that takes a lot of discipline to do so. Let's move on to the second part here on this will be a lot shorter, but simplifying your daws. This is something I haven't really seen many people do, but Chris has, I've heard of this, but this is crazy to me, is using multiple daws for different scenarios. Chris, can you talk about this for a second? Just just for the, like the three people out there that are doing this and we'll stop.

Yeah. This isn't going to be for all of you guys. I think many of you will be surprised to hear this, but as a mastering engineer, I get to work with a whole lot of different types of artists and types of engineers and I've a number of times encounter people that are like, yeah, you know, I make beats in fl studio and then I record vocals and logic over those beats after importing stems and then I mix everything in. Pro Tools don't do that. Just don't do that.

You can make the argument that one dog is better than the other for editing versus mixing versus mastering versus tracking or whatever, but at the end of the day, it's a context switching conversation. Every single time you switch Dawes, you have a lot of opportunity loss between transferring things between sessions and making them compatible and setting them up and making sure they look right. Like this shouldn't be a surprise to most of you, but if you are the type of person where you are using multiple Dawes, that is way more complicated than it needs to be. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Yeah. It's at least complicated now until bounce Butler helps you with your stem imports coming soon to a bounce Butler near you.

Ooh. Is that a new feature we need to know about? [inaudible] maybe. We'll see. We'll see. So let's talk about hardware now. Simplifying your hardware. Here on the podcast we have something called a gear slut alert. That is this sound.

Anytime someone mentions a specific piece of gear, we don't allow gear talk on the podcast or we don't like to have it on the podcast because at the end of the day we don't think gear is going to make or break your studio. We think you are you, your individual self, your skills, your relationships, your ability to get shit done. Hardware does not come into the picture when it comes to running. A successful business is as a part if you choose it for it to be. But I don't think it's a necessary part, especially nowadays. So to me the easiest way to simplify are your hardware. Sell as much of it as possible or to just not acquire it in the first place. But Chris, you wanted to add this and so I will, and it's worth talking about for those people that have a complicated selection of gear or too much gear, let's talk about the first thing on this hardware list. Chris, simplifying your mic blocker.

Well your Mike Locker, we're not going to call out any particular Mike's that we think are great cause that's not what this podcast is about. But there is a dream brewing out there and it is the dream of owning one Mike that can do the job of many mikes.

I own many sm 57

that's true. Yes. 57 can do anything.

Gear, slut alert. That's like the least slutty piece of gear though. Let's be it is. And you can

use it as a hammer. Like you could do anything with that. As a drummer, I have hit many sm 50 sevens as hard as possible with thick ass drumsticks and I've never broken one. So it's a testament to the durability. Brian, can we go camping someday and use sm 50 sevens as the stakes to hold our tent into the ground and then record a record with it? It would. Alright, let's, let's move on. Let's talk about your way. Simplifying your mic locker. Let's go. So there's this idea, there's a couple of companies selling modeling mikes. That's an interesting idea. I don't know if it's viable yet. I don't know that it would work for everyone. But this idea of having one type of Mike in your studio and being able to emulate lots of other kinds of mix is really interesting from a systems perspective because it lets you minimize what you have and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a bunch of vintage mikes.

I'm interested in that. I'm not going to say it's a great idea just yet. Yeah, we talked about this when we, when we came back from Winter Nam last this year, earlier this year, and we saw a couple of companies doing the Mike Emulation thing. Love the idea. I don't know if the technology's there yet, but as far as it replacing entire Mike Locker one day, it will be able to do that. Absolutely. And that will be a glorious day. And then you can sell your mix, which brings up another interesting point that's a little bit off topic here. If that day does come or has come and one microphone can rule them all, if you've invested in super expensive mics, the value of those mikes is likely going to go down. And that's terrifying. And I'm wondering, I know that [inaudible]

profiler has not really reached mass adoption yet. I'm sure it has

some sort of dent in the guitar amp resell market simply because I'm like, I have all my amps profiled on my camper profiler. Crap. We didn't even put camper in our outline. That's a perfect example of this amp emulation. Yeah, that's true. Like that simplifies my hardware. I don't ever use my heart anymore. I need to sell it to be honest with you. But I guess one day if I get another cab or if we just needed a different type tone that I just can't quite capture, maybe I'll need to use it again. But I haven't, I haven't turned my amps on in like probably a year, year and a half. All that to say you better believe that when they plug in version of that comes out, whoever makes it, it's going to, I think wreck the amp market. I think that happened last week to some degree with that whole neural DSP thing.

Just the amount with Molly impressed. But we're not gonna get into that right now.

That's a different conversation. But I just want to say that's going to wreck the amp market and I can guarantee you when you can emulate any Mike with no audible difference, it's going to do the same for your Mike. So I would try to get out before you would say there's a Mike bubble and an amp bubble. I mean I don't know if it's a bubble cause there was no like massive increase like you would see with bitcoin or with a stock or something. I disagree with vintage jams. Praise Jesus. I have a 1966 fender Princeton reverb.

Yeah, that's the biggest scare solar possible.

The finest amps that's ever been made and when I it it was not worth that much. Now it's worth a fortune and it probably won't be worth a fortune in 10 years.

I'm not going to speculate because I don't know about classic stuff where there's a limited quantity and you know there's a story behind it, that kind of stuff. It's like prices are, but I think when it comes to like mass produced stuff, there's going to be a massive downturn in resale prices whenever emulation is in full effect. So again, just simplify things. That's what we're trying to say here. We're not trying to give you business advice whether you should sell something now to get a better price than you will in 10 years. Like that's, we are getting to speculation land. That's, I'm not trying to get into that. The whole point is if you are able to simplify your gear at the end of the day, that's going to help your business run more smoothly. It's going to help your sessions run more smoothly. It's going to help your brain unclutter. It's going to give you more clarity. It's going to give you less context switching. And again, simplify, simplify, simplify. So let's move on to the next point here, Chris. Well,

I'm a little bit anal retentive. Um, I'm disgusting. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds good. I'm kind of weird. Like I'm not the cleanest guy in the world. I'm comfortable with mess, but in certain contexts of my life, I am really specific about organization. I think for a lot of people in recording studio world, I, I'd say there's like two types of recording engineers. There's those who are meticulously organized and those who are meticulously messy.

Yeah. If you're meticulously organized, this is not your section of the podcast.

No it's not. But if your studio is a wreck, if it's super messy and it's like a rat's nest of cables and the whole nine yards, I would guess that you are probably losing efficiency based on the craziness of your studio environment. And I would say that you probably are losing customers who walk in and are like, you don't want to be in this world. And so I think getting a label maker, coming up with some systems, coming up with some really easy rules so that your studio stays organized and that when you're done with something, you know, whether that's a patch cable or microphone or whatever, that it goes back in the same spot every time. And that there's a label of where it goes so that you're never like, where's the school again, it should go back in the same spot and there should be a label,

and this goes back to that book we've recommended probably a million times the e myth revisited written by Michael Gerber. That book will make you think through your studio in a way that you probably haven't thought about before, and it comes down to really creating systems, repeatable checklists. So if you think about like when you're done with the session, you should have a list of next steps every single time that you follow. It could be that you're going to put your cables back in this place. You're going to do this with the drums, you're going to do this with your guitars, you're going to do this with all of your session files. You're going to relabel things, you're going to change the college and things. You're going to disabled plugins and save a different version of in your door of that session. You're going to delete hidden files.

You're going to do all this stuff to get your sessions ready for archiving. And this all comes down to part of organizing your studio and I think if you are that type of person that does this naturally, you probably have a clean studio, but if you're not this type of person, it's not just a clean studio. It's a well set up and well organized studio, so there's a difference between just having an unorganized studio that's clean. That's kind of how most studios tend to be. It's another thing to have a clean studio that is also well organized. These are two different things. I think one is better for productivity, one is good for the customers, but you need both really at the end of the day to simplify your studio.

Well, and I think a good example of that is you don't see a lot of professional musicians whose pedal boards or drum arrangement, like musicians are meticulous about their systems on stage. They know that at a moment's notice they might need to reach for and grab an effect where a new drum stick or whatever. Your studio should be the same.

Yeah. Like with my drum set back in the day, you would have the specific angles. The Tom needed to be angled at the specific point in which the snare needed to be in height and angle. The symbols had to be angled down a specific amount. The China's symbol had to be raised up to the right amount. Like anything that was slightly off would throw off my muscle memory. And it's the same for you. You have muscle memory with every single piece of gear in your studio, every single cable in your studio. And if you don't, you've missed out on a large productivity boost that you could have. So thinking through it in terms of muscle memory, you don't need to think about where your cables are. You don't need to think about where that adapter is. You just need to think that you need one and your body exactly knows where to go immediately without thinking about, it's like pro tools, shortcuts, or any doll shortcuts. Oh, I love that. I don't think about what I'm doing. I just think about what I need to do and my body does it. So when I need to do something in protools, I'm not thinking what keys I'm pressing, I just do it. And it's the same with their studio organizer Studio to the point where you don't think about anything, you just think about what you need to do and your body tells you what to do from that point on.

Yeah, and I think a lot of musicians are attracted to that when they walk into a studio where they opened up the mic locker and there's like labels on the shelves of like what Mike's go where and also there's price tags on there because you're selling all of your mix. Yeah, exactly. I think most people walk into a business like that and say, wow, I know they're going to do a good job because they clearly have systems so that they can have repeatable performances. So moving on from that, I'm a big fan of label makers. Just get a label maker and start. The easiest way to create these types of systems is to just print off labels and just start sticking them places and feel if that's where that piece of gear should go or where that, you know, whatever. So yeah, get a label maker.

Yeah, good advice. And you've mentioned that before but it takes some trial and error to be honest. And if you look at like if you watch the movie the founder where it's the story of like McDonald's beginnings, they really have to work through several different ways that all of the grills and the fry hopper and like all the different aspects of a restaurant are set up. They like drew it on the concrete in shock so that they could run through the process of how things flow together and they mess up. They had to keep trying different things because people would run into each other here and this wasn't a good flow. And then you had to move too far across the restaurant to put this thing there. And when they finally got the flow that that made sense to them, that's when they settled on like building out a location. And how that, so just think through it like that. It's really like the, it's there's so much in common with systems in a restaurant or another business.

Totally. So mentioned the movie,

the founder, highly recommended. I'm not a fan of McDonald's, I don't eat at McDonald's. I'm like a hippie. But the story of how McDonald's was founded is incredible. And you talk about simplification. Do you know how many items were on the McDonald's menu when it was founded? Four. Five. Nice. Five items. Hamburger, French fries, coke, milkshake, and I think orange drink. That was it. And they were so simple, they had niched down so much of like, oh, we do this hamburger and fries runs really, really fast. They've got thousands of items on their menu now. Well anyways, let's move on and not talking about McDonald's anymore. All right, so let's talk about ways to simplify your own day to day workflow. We've talked about a little bit of this throughout this episode, uh, but there are ways that you can simplify your own day to day workflow in order to become more efficient and also to have happier clients. And also honestly to make yourself happier. I've talked about in the past how limitations can increase your happiness. I still believe that. I still think self imposed limitations can lead to increased happiness because you are making do with what you have instead of constantly trying to get the bigger and better thing. Again, that's kind of beyond the scope of this episode, but let's talk through this. Ways to improve your day to day workflow. Let's start just quickly like recording studios. If you track and edit and record bands in the studio,

so I'm not an expert on this. I'm not a tracking engineer.

I used to be so I can talk on this a little bit too.

Yeah. There is something to be said for guys who mix with effects to tape. Guys that have compression, guys that are using like colorful preamps, Andy Q and they're making a commitment while tracking to what's gonna make it to tape. I think for most of the time, at least from my experience when I was a tracking engineer a long, long time ago, there was a fear,

the war on what if I'm, I need options in the future

and that fear was what drove me to not make commitments in the first place when I was recording a band and the direction I have gone on. That is it. Philosophically I think it's much better to make commitments and try to get magic to happen so that when you listen back to the rough mix that there's critical mass, there's critical mass that's like, okay, yeah, I feel what the final product of this is going to look like and I think the fear of not using those effects to tape is just rooted in wanting to have unlimited options in the future, which is really paralyzing.

Yeah. Again, this goes back to the process by analysis kind of thing where when you have too many options, you essentially have no options because you don't know where to start. And some people work at one extreme, which is they commit on the way like they record to Tate, they record the term is recorded to tape it and none of us really recorded the tape anymore with a few exceptions. What it means is you're processing the audio on the way into the door and there's no going back at that point. You have committed and there is an art to this. I wouldn't say every beginner needs to do this, but I will say that it simplifies things drastically if you can get to the point where you are doing this, so there's not really much more to add to this, but this is a great way to simplify your workflow.

The caveat though is if your clients aren't happy with it, what can you do about it? So that was always my fear when I was recording is I was the kind of guy that didn't record the tape. I was the guy who wanted those millions of millions of options. That was just my personality type is I just wanted the options. When you commit to tape, there's something liberating about that. There's something liberating about burning the ships. There's a story of that story. Yeah, there's a story about, I'm going to totally messed it up cause this is off the top of my head, but there's a story about, it's actually terrible story. These were evil, evil people who came to God. I hate to use this story, but you know, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to say, uh, I'm going to, I'm gonna make up a story that's a lot less terrible and evil.

There were some, um, fairy tale characters who took a boat across candy cane ocean, too dumb. I hate this. Let me tell the real story. That's all right. So there were some conquistadores back in the day and they came over from the old world to the new world and they wanted to be sure that their team, that their soldiers were fully committed. And to do that, they landed all the soldiers on the beach and then they burned the ships. And it was this idea of like, this is happening. We're doing this, and it's our only option. Just to note, apparently at least the story goes, they were outnumbered like by a large margin, so there are chances of winning this battle. We're not good or winning this war or whatever they're doing was not very high, so the commander burned all of the ships so that they knew they had no exit strategy so that they were literally fighting for their lives.

And long story short, according to legend, whoever's story this is, they ended up winning because they burned the ships. And so people like to use a story in a lot of different contexts that if you give yourself a backup plan, you're doing yourself a disservice that if you have to fight for your life essentially where you are burning the ships, you are going to force yourself to make better decisions and not give up halfway through just because things get hard. This is a great story that applies to a million different areas, but in the context of committing to tape, it's good to burn the ships sometimes. Yeah, it's unfortunate and that it was I think like attempted genocide or something ridiculous. I'm sure it was because we were all evil back in the day. So moving on from recording to mixing, this is probably a little more, I think more of our audience does mixing the recording these days, but mixing, simplifying, mixing.

We talked about templates. Christie, we want to mention anything else about templates. That was one of our things we talked about working on your business. Use Them. All right, moving on. Oh, actually, no, it, no, no, no. Let me talk about this for a second please. People can overcomplicate this all the time. I talked about how I have about three, maybe four different templates for different genres that I work on. The way you can overcomplicate this is if you try to create templates for every conceivable potential type of music you would ever work on like 30 40 50 different templates, and I've come across people that do this. What happens is you just end up wasting time creating these like fictional templates that you'll never use on sessions that you will never get. And again, it goes back to a form of procrastination by fear, just templates

that you are guaranteed you're going to use. And if you get three or four artists that are the same genre that you haven't worked with before, save your most recent one as a template and move on. Don't try to create potential templates for potential clients that you haven't gotten before. That's all I have to say on that. But yeah, don't overcomplicate the template thing. Ooh, those are wise words. I love that. Don't ever complicate that. And again, this is one of these things where you can like pretend to work on your business instead of for your business and that's a bad thing.

Let's move on to our next thing in mixing and let's talk about Parkinson's law. Chris, can you talk about that?

One of the things that I find that impacts me a lot. So this is kind of mixing and mastering here is when I was young, I would start working on a song and the song would begin to sound better and better and better and then I would get tired and then the song will begin to sound worse and worse and I would get dumber and dumber and dumber and worse and worse. And by the time I was done, the song was worse than before I had begun. Parkinson's law is this idea that however much time you have to complete a task is as much time as it's going to take you. And I think for most people, their fear that they're all gonna laugh at you, drives them to continue to beat a dead horse. Once that mix or that master is done, it is the single biggest mistake that I see people make.

I love what you just said there and this goes for so many different things. So I don't want this to be lost in the justice mixing conversation. Here's what happens inevitably, and this happens to me all the time, is I will start working on my business and something, it'll be like 1:00 PM which is kind of a downtime for me and I'll start working on something and then it'll be 2:00 PM 3:00 PM 4:00 PM I'm getting more and more complicated. I'm adding more and more things to this system or to this, whatever I'm working on this checklist or if I'm building out like a, I'm writing a blog article or I'm setting up Facebook ads, literally insert any part of working on your business in this conversation, but I start at 1:00 PM it keeps getting more and more complicated and I start making errors and messing things up because I'm getting more and more exhausted mentally.

And this is an inevitable part of over complicating things because we start building and building and building and building and building onto something. And this goes in the mixing conversation as well because you keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking this mix, adding all these different plugins and by the time you're the most mentally exhausted, you've a ruined the mix. But be your dos starts acting weird and crashing and you've hit this point where one of the plugins you added at some point is absolutely wrecking your door. Especially if you're in pro tools cause this is inevitably going to happen to you. You have a really heavy CPU hogs session. Did you put too many plugins in? One of them is bugging you, haven't updated it or something, who knows? And it's crashing protools. Well now you've spent the last four hours adding new things. You don't know what it is that's causing the crash and you're too brain dead to solve the problem and now you just give up. This is a really bad place to be.

Yeah. And one of the things you get to keep in mind here, going to get really nerdy here for just a minute. When you've got a problem and there's one variable, one thing that could change in that problem, there's only one possible solution, right? You know, either this thing works or it doesn't. When you add a second variable into that equation, now there's a little more than two possible scenarios. It could be variable. One is broken, that could be variable, two is broken. It could be that variable one and variable two are broken. When you start to add more complexity that potential things that are causing bugs, and I'm telling you guys this because I inadvertently become a software developer with this old bounce Butler thing. When you begin to make code more complicated, it's the same as a mix. The potential number of things that are broken exponentially increases as you add more things to it. And back to this kind of saying that we edit the beginning of the podcast, what gets fancy gets broken. So yeah, definitely something to think about. Yeah. I had

a friend of mine, we used to trade mixes with each other. We would just like send full mixes to each other so we could look inside each other's sessions. And I'll never forget. I used to like, I feel like everyone makes this mistake. You start adding like 30 different plugins to like your drum chain and like doing all these stupid things because it just makes you feel like you're actually changing the sound of something. And my friend just had way better mixes than me at the time and I opened up a session and he had like two plugins on every track and I'll never forget. I was just like, how the hell does this sound so good? And as yet so simple. And ever since then I have vastly simplified my plugin chains on every single track and it is made mixing so much easier. But let's move on to mastering now because this is your expertise, Chris. Let's talk about ways you can simplify your mastering.

I'll be pretty quick on mastering. So this is just me and I'm less confident talking about the thing I have the most experience in. But for me there are a couple things that I don't do when I mastering, I don't master from stems. I mastered from a stereo file all the time. Even if people ask for that. If they do, what I do is I send in my head mix engineer and I say he's gonna mix your stems and then you're going to approve the mix and we'll do revisions if necessary and once we have a final mix then I'll master that. When you get into stem mastering, oh my gosh, that feels like a way to fleece a customer because it can just go on and on and on and on and on and especially if you're charging for revisions it can get crazy.

One of the other things that I think might be kind of shocking is I don't do ms processing in mastering ms is like you can adjust the sides of the mix differently than the center. I despise ms processing also known as mid side, not a fan of mid side. To me it over complicates things when it's just like, dude, it's like everyone's got recall. Everyone's mixing in the box. Just call the mix engineer and be like, hey, could turn the vocal up on DB and it sounds way better when you use the phone instead of a mid side processor. I kinda like that. I'm going to use that phrase from now on. I prefer to use the phone rather than mid side.

That's actually, that's the best piece of gear for your mastering studio. That's true. Anything else with mastering you want to touch on before we move on?

You know, I would say

that third piece here, I feel like this goes to that same, but I know that it doesn't another mastering engineers who disagree with me on this, I am very reluctant to use more than a DB or two of gain reduction on any process I'm doing. Same goes with VQ. I'm very reluctant to push more than a DB or two of ECU in any direction, which isn't to say I don't sometimes do that, but I think generally just again, the phone is more powerful if you think that a mix needs to db of high end. You got to ask yourself why it was mixed without that to db of high in the first place and what they're going to do when they listen to it. Are they going to approve your master? I doubt it. They're not going, oh my gosh, why didn't I think to two DB of high end?

I think that most people are like that, so I think from a simplicity standpoint is doing your best to honor the mix engineer to honor the choices that they've made and to try and just bring out nuance rather than trying to come in and save the day. That's my personal philosophy. I know there are a lot of mastering engineers out there who like their specialty is making it pump. That's not what I do, so yeah, I think that's one of the ways that I approached trying to simplify mastering of not trying to create all these extra tasks that the mastering engineer does that are much better done by the mix engineer. All right, let's move on to simplifying your marketing. This is something we talk about constantly in the podcast. We are a business podcast for recording studios and so if you went back and tried to implement all the advice that we've ever given on marketing, you are in dire need of simplification.

It's very true. There's a lot out there. There's a lot of information.

I know we're pretty late in this podcast, but you know what? The last episode was long a shit, so let's just make the same thing here. Let's talk about simplifying your marketing and I'm going to start with paid advertising with the understanding that most of our audience doesn't do this. Most of our audience is interested in this but is scared of it and so I'm going to just breeze through this because this is not relevant to most people. I just want to say with paid advertising, I see a lot of people doing what we just talked about with mixes where you over-complicate just Facebook ads for example. They'll have 10 different campaigns going with 10 different ad sets in each campaign and a bunch of different dollar a day ads going just to try to tweak or hack the Facebook system if you will. Just simplify your Facebook ads to do exactly what Facebook wants you to do, you will have much better results.

It'll be much easier to manage and you'll waste a lot less money. So if you are going to run Facebook ads, you only need one to two campaigns, one to two, maybe three ad sets in each of those campaigns. And then you need really at the end of the day, after you've tested a bunch of different ads, you only need one to two ads running in each of those campaigns. If you can do that, you're gonna have a much easier time with the successful Facebook advertising with Google. I don't know enough about that. It's the same. It's exactly the same. It's the same. Okay, so don't get over complicated. Don't try to get fancy because at the end of the day you're just going to be working against Facebook instead of with

Facebook. And if you work against Facebook, you are going to lose. Well, and here's the catch with that. When you're doing paid advertising and you get fancy if it gets broken, broken doesn't mean it doesn't run broken means you keep getting billed for stuff for ads that you shouldn't have run in the first place. Broken is extremely expensive when it comes to paid advertising. Trust me, I know I've lived through that life and so yeah, you want to keep it simple and one of the big things, we haven't really addressed this, but when you keep it simple, your IQ goes up. When you complicate, you lose IQ points, you get stupider. Is that even a word stupid or is that a word? Stupider. It is. Now you get stupid. That's my best Dave Ramsey. Impression. Impersonation right there and presentation and so anyways, yeah, you want to keep it real simple on the paid advertising front and you want to do that first and foremost by setting a budget.

All right, let's move on to the next topic, which is what we talked about last week on episode 94 we had a lot of emphasis on marketing funnels, your studios funnels. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go back and listen to episode 94 which is part two in this series I'm getting, I'm just going to touch on this for a second, but this is very important. Here's really easy to overcomplicate things when it comes to modifying or changing or adding steps in your funnel. It's good to have one. If you have the funnel mindset from top, middle and bottom of your funnel and your studio, you're going to have a lot easier time just overall in your marketing approach. But when you start adding all sorts of crazy steps and splits and all sorts of things, like for example, I've seen people that do this, you land on somebody's website and they have a different website depending on if you came there for mixing or mastering.

So if you, it's like click here to enter for mastering, click here to enter for mixing and so they built in a completely different website out with completely different quote forms and while this may work for him, I don't know, this is way too complicated for a simple recording studio. All you need to do is have a check mark on your quote form. If you went to mixing or another check mark if you want mastering or check both if you need both. You don't need to overcomplicate this. So when it comes to like building out these things, especially what we talked about in the last episode, it is so easy to get carried away. Just simplify, simplify, simplify. What is the minimum viable amount of work I need to do to get these things into place and from there go work on other more important things in your business.

You just said something really interesting. You said minimum viable and one of the things that reminds me of is this phrase, minimum effective dose. Oh yeah, I hear Tim Ferriss talk about that all the time. Yeah. Oh he loves that. And it's a fascinating time. At minimum, effective dose is a term that is used in medicine. When you're prescribing someone a medication, you want to prescribe the minimum effective dose because anything beyond that dose will actually create problems. Great health problems. So if you take too much Advil, for example, you take beyond the minimum effective dose, you're going to get a stomachache and it's going to kill all the bacteria in your stomach. This idea of simplifying makes smarter, and the other thing to keep in mind is that when a customer lands on your website and it seems complicated to them, do you know what they do?

They leave, they leave every bit of complication. Every bit of complication you have in your funnel adds to the friction in the person's mind and makes it more difficult for them to answer the number one question they have in their head when they come to your website, which is this, can this person give me what I need or what I want? And if you can't answer that question or you make it difficult for them to find the answers to that question, you've lost that customer. And the more steps you add, the more complicated you make it, the less people are going to get to the bottom of your funnel and ultimately dollars in your bank account. So that's all I got to say about marketing funnels. There's a ton that I could say here. Let me throw something else in there because this is an interesting conversation.

When a customer comes to your website and sees that you offer more than one service. I think an interesting question to ask and we've talked about like you know what I eat at a restaurant that claims to have great Italian food and great Chinese food? No, I would not because I would assume, well they're Chinese food must not be good enough for them to do it full time. Same for their Italian. See what I'm saying there? He got to wander. There are certain types of customers who are going to see multiple offerings and say, oh well they must not be fulltime at any of these things, which means they must not be very good. You have talked about this in depth in past episodes, the specialization conversation, I don't know what episode we talked about it on, so just go binge every episode we've ever done.

Let's move on here. This is the final point in our simplification episode today and that is simplifying your offer. This kind of goes in line with what you were just talking about just now. And this is a place that people like to overcomplicate more than any other area in their marketing. Totally. So I'm gonna Start with a story here. I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. I did a lot of stupid things and the number of stupid things I have done in my life goes up. The younger I was when I was a young man though, I did do something totally kick ass one time and it was asking out my wife and what I did is I called her up and said, hey, I'd love to take you out to coffee before we dated. And she said yes. And then she called back about an hour later and she said no.

And so then I called her back and I was like, look, I don't know if it was clear if I was asking on the date or not. I understand that that might've been confusing. I did want to ask you on a date, but now it's a little awkward. So I'll tell you what, let's meet for coffee. I want to tell you why I wanted to ask you when a date that's even more awkward so I can't wait to see where this goes. It is. So long story short, you have a wife and three kids, so it obviously worked out, but spoiler. So we sat down and I had a really clear laid out proposal for her proposals. The wrong word, cause I did not propose at the time. I like you and I want a date. You will you marry me. That's the end. That was the pitch pitch.

The pitch was I sat down and I said, hey, you know, you know I asked you out for coffee. I know that in college that there's always this like, oh, let's get coffee and maybe this is the date or maybe it's not. I asked you out because I think you're beautiful, but as I got to know you and become your friend, I became more attracted to your character than I was to your beauty. And that grabbed my attention because that never happens. So here's what I would like to do about that. I would like to take you on a canoe trip this Saturday on the hocking river and I will pack a lunch. It's going to be just like Italian chicken and noodle dish that I make and I'm going to treat you with respect and I will be able to look your dad in the eye after we go on this date because I'm going to treat you well.

Would you like to go on a canoe trip on the hocking river and I will pack us lunch this Saturday and I'd pick you up at 10:00 AM yes or no. That is a fantastic offer and let me tell you a few things. First of all, just let me explain what an offer is. An offer is exactly what he just did. It is a package of goods that you're offering to your client. It's what you're offering and how you're offering. It's those two things and she was super into my package. Let me just say that, oh, we're married. It's not saying, okay, I was to say now that you're married, you can say that, but okay. Otherwise. That's like a super douchey bro thing to say. Yeah, but again, it's what you offer and how you offer it. And Chris did a great job to lay down exactly what he was offering and how he was going to offer that to her.

He was going to offer this package of lunch and a canoe trip as a whole experience and he was going to pick her up and then he, at the end of it all, this is the best part. He asked her to make a decision, which most people don't even think to do. They don't even ask for the yes or the no. So back to simplifying your offer as a city, I see people that are trying to be all things to all people. So if you want to Alison, you said, hey Alison, I like you because you're cool and I want to date you because you're cool. Actually, this is a terrible, terrible example. I'll try to think of a good example of like w well, this was pretty much what all the other guys, she was without a doubt, the most desirable girl at our college.

Many, many guys wanted to date her, but they all did the same thing. I was like, Hey, um, we're like, um, I dunno what, I'm all good a coffee sometime or something. It was a really unclear pitch. Or um, they didn't create a very appealing offer. They're like, I want to go get a coffee. Maybe we'll talk like it's not a very appealing offer. You came and you just stare in the face and you said, I would like this. I would want to do this. Are you down or not? I want to take you to the river. I'm going to take on a canoe trip. I'm going to build this whole experience out. So let's go back again. Let's go back to the studio thing now, simplifying your offer because this is a huge, huge, huge lesson that we should probably have an entire episode on simplifying your offer.

It comes down to a few things, what you offer and how you offer it. And if you go to the website conversation, cause there's a lot of where you are making this offer, do you communicate clearly on your website? What's your offering? How you're offering it and who it's for. That's actually another big one. Who is this for? And if you can't communicate these things via what services you are doing, what the pricing is going to be, if it's confusing, what sort of terms you have in that pricing, all of these things play into your offer and the more complicated you make this, the more difficult it's going to be for them to make a decision. Yeah, and when it's difficult to make a decision, the answer is going to be no. Oh. Also if you go back to episode 84 we start talking about the pricing masterclass, how to charge more, add more value and win more projects.

Really we're walking you through this whole ebook that we went through as a community breaking the time barrier and that whole ebook is really about creating a fantastic offer because what they do is instead of just saying, I offer mixing and mastering and it is this amount per song and you can fill up my quote for him to get a price, like that's what most people do and that's effective. If you're great at what you do, but what that book walks you through in that episode that we talk about, what we walk you through is really getting to the fundamental desire of the people you were wanting to work with and working backwards to figure out how you can add additional value. And when you learn all the different ways you can add value to that project, you create all sorts of unique services or unique offers for that client that are going to appeal to them more than any other studio because you took the time to investigate what their needs are.

So Chris, going back to you and Alison, you understood enough about her to know that she didn't want a guy who's going to play this game of like or think we're talking, you know, I'm going to play super mysterious. You know, you sat down, you stated your attentions, cause that's what you knew, she valued and it worked out for you because y'all are now married. [inaudible] anything to add to this so far? Well, I would say this, man, Brian, you are really good at clear proposals. I've seen the proposals that you send out to potential clients. I even remember when you invited me to do this podcast, it was really clear though. I was like, we're going to do a business podcast for recording studios. And it was just so clear like what you meant and what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go.

And I think again, back to this idea of fear, I think for most of us, we're afraid that they're all gonna laugh at you. And the way that we try to mitigate that fear is by not doubling down or leaning in on what we're doing because we feel like if we're not clear about it and we don't get a clear yes or a no, at least we won't get a clear know. Right. And Man, there was a guy, I'm not going to share his name, but there was a guy that I was pretty close with who kind of had some issues. This is a couple of years ago, and it was a small group. It's like a church small group than my wife were doing and he had a crush on this girl in our small group. Right. And he felt like he needed to ask her out, but he was terrified that she would reject him. So he did something really, really, really strange. I can't wait to hear this. And again, this, this guy had some issues. He shaved his head, including his eyebrow. Oh yeah. I remember your telling about this on a previous episode. Weeks or months and months ago. Yeah. Cause he knew he'd get a no. Yeah, he's self sabotage. And you know, this

guy was working through a lot of issues, which is why I'm not going to share his name, but I think a lot of us self-sabotage as well. You know, whether we're afraid they're going to laugh at us or whether we're just trying to get a pat on the back from ourself. Who did good work to do. I build something I'll never use ever again. We do these things to self sabotage so that we don't have to objective really look at our business in the eyes and say, Oh crap, this isn't working. I need to change. I need to improve. And I think one of the best things you can do to really turn your business around as we talk about simplification is to have courage, is to work on being okay with rejection, being okay with getting shutdown.

Yeah, and really if you take the time to think through what your target customer, your ideal target customer once, like what they really want, what would be valuable to them, whether it's creating more of an experiential type offer or creating additional services or things that no one else is offering in the studio. If you have the courage to try different things out and get rejected, you're going to quickly learn a lot more than any other studio who just has a prebuilt non unique package that everyone else is offering. You'll have the ability to learn what people value and don't value if you're willing to put yourself out there. So really think through what is it that I can offer my target customer, which again, if you don't already have this, go back to episode 82 where we guide you through how to create a customer Avatar that will skyrocket your marketing efforts once you create your customer Avatar.

Think through all the things that you could offer them that's unique. I would almost say novel, what you kind of offered Alison on that date. I know this is not a direct one to one door business, but there's a bit of novelty to it. That canoe ride back picnic, a canoe date was kind of weird. Yeah, it's unique enough to where like honestly, even if the girl is not that interested in you, she's going to give you a chance just because that's a fun weekend. So I feel like there's a lot in this offer conversation that we should probably really explore in future episodes. But I would say maybe I'm actually going against what I said cause that's definitely not simplifying your offer, but this is what happens when you over-complicate a set episode about simplification and you get dumber as the episode goes on. So we have, I'm going to let the audience decipher what the fuck we just talked about are nonsense that we just talked about for the last, uh, five minutes to myself. I can't believe people listening to this. This is the most nonsensical ending to any podcast episode ever. I think. I think the best way to end this is with some quotes from people that are way smarter than us.

Uh, yeah. So let's sum these up. Yeah. Okay. Brian, do you want to trade on and off on these? Yes. Yes. You go first. Okay, ladies first. Go first. What gets fancy gets broken. All right, next question. Perfect is the enemy of done. I love that quote. Hmm. So good. And we're sharing these quotes with you guys because a lot of people have built huge

businesses by adhering to these, you know, real simple quotes. Next quote. This one is for me. I made this one up. I'm sure you guys have heard of the keep it simple, stupid kiss. It's this sort of like idea, keep it simple, stupid. I grasped the keep it simple, stupid thing. However, I often lack the discipline to keep it simple, stupid. So I came up with a word that I use constantly in my own work called kiss a plan, and it is the discipline to keep it simple. Stupid. I also made up a word that I've used constantly in this episode is called complication amplification. All right, last quote here, and these are all saying basically the same thing, but hopefully one of these quotes sticks in your head. So the next time you try to overcomplicate something, one of these quotes says, Hey, stupid, don't do that.

Maybe it's the discipline one. But this last quote here is this. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Love that. That quote is so good. So there you have it. A very long and complicated episode about simplification. It's interesting though, man. Simplifications hard. There's another quote, I forget who said it, but I think it was John Adams. He wrote like a letter to his wife and I was like, I apologize for my letter being so long I didn't have time to write a short one. I love that quote and has this idea of like simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, but it takes a lot of work, takes a lot of work to be simple, but it's also the most dependable, and that's what we're looking for in our business. We don't want a business. It's like, oh my gosh, I did $10,000 this month and I lost $40,000 in a month after that. We want to make it simple when to make it dependable so that you can rely on your business to continue to grow so that you can stay in this for the long run. This isn't a podcast about how to get rich in audio. This is a podcast about how to make art consistently for the rest of your life. That's why we're into this stuff, right? Freedom Baby.

Yeah. [inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure, a home studio podcast. Next week's episode is going to be all about mindset. We're going to actually talk about four or five. I can't remember the number, four or five toxic mindsets that you absolutely must destroy if you want a successful business. I know that sounds like kind of one of those woo, weird, airy, hippy dippy type episodes and I definitely understand that, but a toxic mindset is one of those foundational parts of being an entrepreneur that you have to get right if you want to get the rest of your business right, everything is built on top of your mindset and if you don't have that right, if there's one or two or even all five of these mindsets that are poisoning the rest of your business, you will continue to struggle day in, day out, and even if you have a successful business, it's only a matter of time before it blows up due to self sabotage or you doing something wrong due to a toxic mindset. Just to give you an idea how big of a problem this is, we have nearly 6,000 people in our Facebook group. We have over 30 40,000 people on my mailing list. I have thousands of customers. For the six figure home studio in all my and the

number one problem I see amongst all people, the most common problem, the thing that is holding them back more than anything, is a toxic mindset, and it's usually one of these four or five mindsets that we're going to talk about in next week's episode. So bright and early 6:00 AM Tuesday morning as always, episode 96 will be coming out until next time. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week and happy hustling.

[inaudible]

welcome back to another episode of the Faker, Brian, your compressors to [inaudible] making your voice on podcast. You're that compressors all wrong. It's making your voice done with your host Brian Hood, your face alignment totally off. Podcast cohost Christopher J. Graham, align your face. Brian, Sir for Graham mastering. Hell, are you today, sir? Nevermind. I'm fantastic. I'm not letting that on the five guys. Get the shit out of here. [inaudible].