Raising Your Rates, Paying For Marketing/SEO/Soundbetter, When To Find Your Niche, How To Block Out Your Time For Maximum Efficiency, And Way More

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 120

[00:00:19] welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I am unfortunately not here with my bald, beautiful, amazing cohost, Chris Graham.  probably asleep right now because it's like 5:30 AM in Ohio, and this is my second  last night in Southeast Asia. Sadly enough, I'm watching the sunset over downtown Bangkok.

[00:00:45] They're beautiful. Smoggy skies. And it's a bittersweet feeling. I'm really looking forward to coming home, getting back on my normal routine, uh, actually being able to do co-hosted episodes with Chris Graham. I know it's been a little bit weird having episodes with just Chris or just me, and a little bit of a format change, but Oh, we're going to get back to our normal routine, hopefully starting next week, if not the week after.

[00:01:06] That depends on how I settle in with a jet lag when I get home on Monday as the time this episode airs, I'm actually back home, hopefully sleeping in my bed. Unless some crazy stuff happens. If I get like quarantined for coronavirus at the border whenever I fly back into lax, who knows, man, some crazy stuff happening out here in Southeast Asia.

[00:01:24] For those who are just now listening to this podcast for the first time, apologies if you're not sure what I'm talking about. I have been in Asia for the last four or five weeks with my wife on a workcation. We've been to North and South Thailand. We've been to Cambodia, Northern Vietnam, Southern Vietnam.

[00:01:40] And in a small, small Island on the outskirts of Vietnam. And, uh, we flew back to Bangkok today from Pokemon city, Vietnam. So things have definitely been a lot of different without Chris and I on the episode at the same time. So you, you happen to pick up on this podcast at a weird time. If you listen to our past episode backlog, you'll get a much better idea of what this podcast normally is.

[00:01:59] This episode is an especially weird episode because we're trying a truly advice buffet episode. This is something we talk about in the podcast all the time. The podcast in and of itself is an advice buffet. You can take bits and pieces that you like, the things that are appealing to you right now, where you are in your life right now.

[00:02:16] Throw away the stuff you don't like. And this episode is a very much advice buffet episode because I'm actually taking parts of coaching calls, group coaching calls from the profitable producer course coaching calls. So if you are a student of the profitable producer course, we have as often as weekly.

[00:02:32] Usually once a month. We haven't had one when I've been in while I've been in Southeast Asia because of the time difference, but usually at least one a month where I will get on a call with the students and answer questions that are either pre-submitted or asked live on the coaching call. And so for this episode, I just remembered there's like dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of group coaching calls where I go and talk about some really interesting stuff that'll be helpful to a lot of people.

[00:02:55] And, uh, we stripped out any details that might personally identify somebody in these calls. Cause these are, again, these are private calls only for PPC students. But I wanted to take this content and reuse it for the podcast because it is so valuable. And so we cover topics in this episode ranging from marketing to personal finance to investing to whether you should charge per project or per hour.

[00:03:15] We talk about finding your customer avatar, we talk about differentiation, raising your rates, sales funnels, marketing funnels. And then. Even we talk about what to do if you started your career charging too little and now your reputation is damaged, and if you hear me talk about a link mentioned or some sort of resource mentioned in this group coaching call, just go back to the show notes@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash one two zero that's the six figure home studio.com/one two zero and all of the links that I mentioned in this podcast episode will be on that.

[00:03:47] A show notes page and one other small thing, apologies in advance for the audio. Whenever I do group group coaching calls, I keep the Mike further away from me. So you're gonna pick up more room noise and we're all audio people. Will you know what that's going to sound like? So it's not going to sound as good as this Mike straight up against my mouth right now.

[00:04:01] I basically eat the Mike usually on the podcast episodes, but for videos that keep it further away cause it'd be kind of awkward with my mouth basically on a microphone while trying to do video as well. So. Sit back, relax, and get ready to enjoy a very much an advice buffet episode of the six figure home studio podcast while I sit back and relax and enjoy my final sunset in Southeast Asia.

[00:04:24] First question submitted in the ask Brian, anything channel Josh asks, he says, Hey, Brian, I have a question regarding niching down or specializing. I've heard from guys like streaky, I don't know who streak he is, but he's heard from streaky that offering both mixing and mastering is the wrong thing to do.

[00:04:41] If you ever want to be an expert in either one of those things and make lots of money doing it, which I can understand. What's your advice on offering both mixing and mastering services? So straight off the bat, I offer both mixing and matching services. I get hired. However, for mixing, mastering is like, like you think about it, if you go to McDonald's and you order a meal of some sort, which I don't ever because I don't eat fast food, but let's just pretend like for I live in a universe where I do eat fast food.

[00:05:05] If I go to McDonald's and order a value meal. I want the burger. That's what I'm there for. The fries are a bonus. If I'm trying to be healthy now I'll get fruit and stead and then I don't drink Coke. So that's just out of the equation. So the fries are the nicest half thing. The burger is what I'm there for, and in my mixing and mastering services.

[00:05:22] No one's hiring me just for the fries. They're hiring me for mixing. The fries are a nice to have, and the reason I offer mastering services is to keep from losing budget, two mastering engineers. So if I can offer a comparable or better service for mastering to my main service, which is mixing, then I can capture more value.

[00:05:39] It's all about just adding value to me. So I just offer both. I'm not trying to get hired for mastering projects. I'm not out there actively advertising them. A mastering engineer. I just offer mixing services. That includes free mastering. That's how it always positioned it. I don't charge extra for mastering.

[00:05:52] I don't add it as a line item because I don't want them to hire someone else. From mastering a, it typically sounds worse because in metal, which is the genre that I mix, it's hard to get right. And if you do it wrong, you can really, really screw things up. So I don't like when other people master my songs.

[00:06:05] I've only really had one release that someone else mastered, and it sounds like turd, but that's fine. And the second reason is if I look at it as a line item, they'll want to do it themselves or whatever. So I just say like my price includes. Mixing and free mastering and three rounds of revisions. So keep in mind that my niching is not by service like Chris Graham.

[00:06:25] If you listen to the podcast, Chris Graham from Chris gray mastering, he does all genres, but he niches down by service, so it makes sense for him to offer mixing services are mastering services. He doesn't advertise mixing services. If someone comes to him needing mixing services. However, he does offer that he doesn't do it.

[00:06:39] He has an engineer that does it for him. A guy named Brian is great at it, but he offers that service if needed. That's his fries. The burger for him is the mastering services. If you do all genres for Mexican mastering, it makes more sense to really focus on one or the other because that's two different things and you're going to get different clientele.

[00:06:55] Depends on what you're trying to target for. Josh goes on to clarify, just to be clear, I would like to offer both services to my clients. For now. I just feel like it'd be more beneficial to me at the moment as I'm starting out, whereas maybe down the line when I'm hopefully getting more clients and respect, I could specialize in say, just mixing and offer only that.

[00:07:12] Is this a good or shitty approach? I don't think that changes anything that I just said. I think especially early on, we talked about in episode 17 the five phases of a successful recording career and that we go through the five different phases. If you're just starting out early on door button niches, like having the back of your mind like I need to at some point, niche down.

[00:07:29] Who'd you hear that? Oh, that compression on the pop fingers. Don't worry about niching down. Keep in the back of your mind when you're like phase one and even phase two, especially phase one of the successful audio career. You are going to be saying yes. Everything you can get your hands on, you're going to be taking any work he can possibly get.

[00:07:44] Only until you start having a lot of work in one or two niches or one or two genres or services or whatever. You'll start to see where the patterns are and where your talents lie, where the market's showing you. So you seem to be in phase one, maybe phase two right now of your career. So if that's the case, just say yes to everything.

[00:08:01] Offer both mixing and mastering. Don't worry too much about the niche thing because you can do damage to your business by niching down too soon. It kind of goes against some of the stuff I've said in the past, but I still believe niching is extremely important longterm. But if you're early in your career, don't niche down too soon.

[00:08:14] Quite yet. Bryan with a Y has a question here and he says, do you think it's possible to niche down to mix only, but do it in all genres? Can you talk about some pain points on that? I don't think you can. I think if you specialize in mixing, you can do multiple genres, but I think there are just like opposing John Arras that will never work and I think there are only a few genres that you could be great at doing, mixing in exclusively.

[00:08:40] I think if you're going to focus on niching as a service, it's going to greatly reduce the amount of genres you can work with. Think about this, like to mix like a brutal death core track and like drop a. If you even know what that means, it means something to me. You're not going to have to mix that as well as me.

[00:08:54] And if you're trying to mix that and country music and contemporary Christian music, those are all three different sounding things. And so like someone who specializes in CCM, contemporary Christian music, they're going to be way better at mixing that to me, like a market should be big enough to support a start.

[00:09:09] I do mixing mostly mixing services in the metal genre, and that's a large enough market to support me. If I can do that, you can do country or you can do pop or you can do EDM or you can do rap or hip hop. You can do R. and. B. You can find some genres, sub genres that work well for you in mixing services, but trying to do like.

[00:09:28] All genres. I just think the more specialized you can be to an extent, the better off you're going to be longterm because you can really narrow down what that genre needs. So again, go back to the episode of that podcast, episode 17 we're talking about the five phases. That'll give you some clarity on kind of how you can start like really wide and not really appeal to anybody specifically, and start to narrow that down to where you are laser focused.

[00:09:50] Like going back to that avatar worksheet I covered where that audio guys working with videographers that is a laser focused niche and it's a bigger niche than you would think, but it is definitely like that's the equivalent of like one specific sub genre in the music industry. Videographers who are working with like middle management to do audio for videography or whatever.

[00:10:09] Like. That's a very specific niche, but if you can nail down the desires, the challenges, the pain points, you learn how to speak to those people, you learn how to market to those people on your website. You learn how to target those people on ads. You start getting entrenched in that industry where you're getting recommendations.

[00:10:24] You're the GoTo guy for providing audio services to videographers. If that is you, you're gonna have a much better time of getting clients because those circles run in tight knit groups. Again, it is just an iterative process. You're not like starting day one and saying. Boom flag in the ground. This is what I work with videographers.

[00:10:42] Now they're all going to hire me. No. He's like, you have to build your reputation in that world. You're going to learn that you're either bad or good at it. You're going to learn that they either like or don't like your services. You're going to learn the truth or don't like working with them, or you love working with them and then you're going to learn what, what helps them convert.

[00:10:55] You're going to learn what gets more money for the project. You're going to learn how to get past the objections in the sale. The more specialized you are, the easier it gets to get past those things, but every little niche or every little area has its nuances. And if you try to do all these different areas, it gets really hard to pinpoint those little nuances and get past those little nuances in each niche.

[00:11:12] So that's all I have to say about niches right now. Brian Bryan with a Y. Next question is from Seth. Seth had a question in the aspirin, anything channel that says, I wonder if you've heard of a site called sounded better sound, better.com not sound butter. Sound better. 60 bucks a month for 10 leads to a job.

[00:11:29] Yeah, I've heard of the site. I've had a few people that's gotten some jobs off that site. I'd say it depends, man. I'm like 60 bucks a month. If it gets you a client that's worth 600 bucks done. Like do it. If it's 60 bucks a month and you don't get any clients the first month. Try it again. It's 60 bucks.

[00:11:45] Do you have 60 bucks a loose? Here's the deal. Like when you start doing marketing, which this is a form of marketing, you're paying a site for leads. Essentially, when you do any form of marketing, you can't just throw 20 bucks at the problem and say it didn't work cause you didn't get any money. You can't just throw 60 bucks at it and say, Oh, it didn't work cause I didn't need clients.

[00:11:59] You have to be willing to lose at least as much as a project is worth. I say up to three times the amount of the worth of a project. If you're testing a new marketing channel, so if a project is worth $1,000 to you and you're not willing to spend up to a thousand dollars to test a marketing channel, then don't even bother with it.

[00:12:17] 60 bucks, like try it out. But again, if you don't have leads coming in the door. It's probably because of a bigger issue. It could be that your website sucks. It can be your quality of work socks. It could be that you an abrasive person and you're not likable. It could be that you are, I'm not saying you specifically stuff.

[00:12:30] I'm saying anyone who has the problem of not getting leads from their site, there is a multitude of potential issues that could come up to be causing this, and it could be something top of funnel. It can be something middle funnel, it could be something bottom of funnel. I don't know, without knowing the ins and outs of your business.

[00:12:44] Follow up question from Seth is, I'm wondering if this is the best route or if I should do ads. This is the simple route. 60 bucks a month, try it out for a few months, see if it works. But don't be willing to put any money into marketing. They're just not willing to just completely lose it. It's a tax write off, so that's nice.

[00:12:59] Softens the blow a little bit, 20 30% but if you need that 60 bucks, don't even bother with it. Go focus on other stuff. If you can't get clients through warm free referral sources or your natural warm market or your past clients. Or any of those other things. If you can't get clients that way, there is a deeper issue that needs to be addressed before you ever throw money at the problem with marketing.

[00:13:21] Go read the article. Jim's gonna link it right here in the chat and if you're watching the replay, the link is in the chat log. You have the download the chat log under this video and there's a chat log, and then you'll look for this link in there. Jim's going to post the link  why most studios fail. Hint, it has nothing to do with marketing.

[00:13:37] Go read that article. It's a long ass article. It's talking about the home studio business hierarchy. It is like 4,000 word behemoth. It'll take you way too long to read, but it will go further into detail than I could ever go in this group coaching call. That'll help you diagnose what the core issue here is.

[00:13:54] And if it's just a lack of top of funnel, to me, marketing is something that enhances something that's already working. It's not going to fix something that's broken. All it's going to do is amplify your problems in your funnel, and again, I'm going to put out a guide soon for marketing funnels. I'm working on it now where we talk about all of the things in top of funnel.

[00:14:13] And then to create awareness and then all of the things, middle of funnel, to turn that awareness and to interest, getting people interested in you. And again, if people are interested in working with you, it's because you are not interesting enough. And then we'll talk about bottom of funnel, getting people that are interested in working with you to hand over their dollars.

[00:14:29] Those are the three areas. And there's problems with all three of those areas. And I can't diagnose those for you, but I can create a guide that can help you self-diagnose. And that article. We'll also pull out even further away from the funnel conversation, which is just one part of your business and talk holistically about you and your business as a whole.

[00:14:46] And that article is honestly the best thing I can do to help you with that sort of thing. All right. Let's go on to the next question. Now. This is from buddy, and the question is, can you chat a little bit more about how you block out your time each day? I recently heard about a study that identified what sort of tasks to do at specific times of the day.

[00:15:05] To maximize efficiency, but I can't remember what it was called. So as far as that study you're referring to, I have no idea if you find it or if anyone knows what he's referring to. Here is a study that identifies what sort of tasks to do at specific times of the day in order to maximize efficiency. If someone can find that, post it in the chat here, or post it in the PPC Slack community so everyone can kind of read up with what that is.

[00:15:25] I don't know what the study is, but I just know how my body works and how my brain works. Your brain and your body probably works differently than mine. So in my brain, my body still to this day, I do exactly what I teach. In PPC, I block out what are called my sacred work hours, and that's where I work out on those a, B, and sometimes C level tasks.

[00:15:44] Honestly, mostly my B and C level tasks are usually in the afternoon because that's when my brain just stops working. I have found that my sacred work hours between nine and noon are where I get most of. If not all of my most productive work done. And I've seen studies where they say the average, this is actually a study in England.

[00:16:03] I've seen similar studies in other countries or all across the world. The average English office worker only has 2.9 productive hours per day. Out of an eight hour Workday. They had a study where these companies went to a four day work week and they had Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, and they only worked Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and they saw no decrease in productivity.

[00:16:23] I'm a firm believer that if you can't get it done in your like sacred work hours, those four hours in the morning, if you can't get it done in those hours, then you're probably not going to get it done at any point. So those are honestly where I get almost everything done. And then I separate into different days.

[00:16:37] I think I have talked about this in some PPC content. I've talked about this. And AAB before. I've talked about in group coaching calls before, but I like a, there's a interview with the founder of Twitter or the CEO of Twitter. I think they're different now. I don't think the founders, the CEO anymore, but I think it's the current CEO of Twitter who talked about, he has different days that are themed.

[00:16:59] And I don't fully theme my days, but Mondays are for marketing. Any questions related to marketing within Twitter are directed to the CEO on that day any other day. None of those questions get brought to the CEO. So the CEO is focusing only on marketing tasks and marketing questions and marketing problems in marketing planning on Mondays.

[00:17:17] Tuesday is for operations. They're focused on building processes, streamlining processes, working with the CEO, like all the questions related to operations. Are done on Tuesdays. Wednesdays are another thing, Thursdays and so on. You get the kind of the point here and that allows them to focus on a soul core issue on a specific day, and probably there's a specific set of hours that are the most powerful hours for that CEO at during that day.

[00:17:41] If you can, and this is what Chris Graham does as well. Mike podcast cohost, if you can segment specific times and specific days of the week for specific actions. So in my business it's going to look a lot different than yours because I have a mixed between my studio stuff I haven't mixed between. The six figure on studio stuff, PPC stuff, a B stuff.

[00:17:58] I have a mix between a new software startup. Then I'm launching, I'm almost about to actually, I'm using the beta product right now, so we'll be getting some other people into there to try it out soon as well. There's time between, Oh yeah, real estate. My attention's like in 30 different directions, so my work week is not going to be anywhere close to what y'alls work week is as far as like.

[00:18:16] A segmentation, but you all have your own things. Some of you have day jobs, some of you have families. So many of you have other responsibilities and you have to plan around all those things. Similar to how I have to plan around all the things that I'm doing. So if you can find, I'll give you a really easy example.

[00:18:29] In Chris Graham's business. Chris Graham, he has Tuesdays and Thursdays afternoon set aside to work on the podcast with me. And those are our podcast days, the Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons, and that's like our sacred work hours for the podcast itself, and he sets aside times in his day to do that. He also sets a time, I want to say it's a Friday, Friday mornings or something like that to be his system's days.

[00:18:51] That's where he's working on his business, not in his business, and that's the day he starts working on all the processes and on tying all these things together, building an automation. Streamlining processes, doing all those things so that in the future he's getting a return on his investment of time, all the time he spent on that Friday.

[00:19:06] Actually, he doesn't do Fridays anymore. I'll tell you why in a second. All the time he spent on his process time, save some time in the future. So he has more time to work in his business, which is doing mastering work. So the reason he stopped doing process work on Fridays because he would change something around on a Friday.

[00:19:20] It would break over the weekend and it would inevitably ruin his weekend, like a form or something. He adjusted or tweaked and then his entire website would break cause he messed something up. So I think he moved it to Monday so he wouldn't have like fires to put out over the weekend. Back to the core of buddy's question, can you chat a lot more about how you block your time each day?

[00:19:36] If I could get nothing else across to you. The specifics of how I split up my day aren't as important as just understanding that between nine and noon every day, every week day at least, I do not do anything except the core task that I set aside. Oh, one other big tip is before I go to bed every night, I have one of these guys right here and I just write down.

[00:19:56] Today's plan of attack. I write that the night before and those are the tasks that I tackle first thing in the morning, nine to noon. Those are like my power hour tasks and that has been huge. It helps me free up my mind. So like before I go to bed and it gets everything that's in my brain, all the shit that I would normally think about and stay up in bed all night about thinking about it, gets it on a paper out of my mind.

[00:20:13] I can sleep easier when I wake up the next morning, I already have my plan of attack ready to go and I don't have to do anything. You can actually get to these little posted no guys off Amazon for like 10 bucks for like a 90 pack or something. So. Just put in today's plan of attack or knock knock LLC, I don't know.

[00:20:29] Look those up. They're really, really handy. You can also just do a fucking normal piece of paper. Now, write that down the night before and the tackle in the morning, and then I block out a set amount of hours or my phone's on do not disturb. My computer's on do not disturb. I do not go to Facebook. I do not go to Instagram.

[00:20:42] I do not do anything other than those tasks. And honestly, like this past year, it was my best year ever. And everything I've done as far as income and quality of life and enjoyment and everything, but it was also the least amount of time I've ever worked in a year. So those two things go hand in hand. It sounds so counter productive.

[00:21:02] I'm working more hours so you can make more money. I understand it. I get a completely, especially when you're working in a business where your time is directly related to how much you earn, but there is something to be said, especially if can get to project based pricing. There was a lot to be said.

[00:21:14] About going into a mindset of keeping a good balance between working on your business in your business and then having time off to enjoy so you can retain your creativity, you can keep from burning out, and you have more time to have those aha moments that end up making you a lot more money in the future.

[00:21:30] So a lot of things that you on right there. Would that one question from buddy, but an awesome question and hopefully there's a couple of little aha moments you guys have had during that one question. So I'm gonna go on to the next question now. What is the key to marketing to the right clients instead of just getting overall a lot of clients, or is it just something you have to filter out with more inquiries you receive?

[00:21:49] I've never worked with tons of clients in my lifetime that were not the right kinds of clients. There's going to be, if your studio is your sole source of income and you want to keep it that way, you're going to have to take stuff that's called bill paying work. It's like an inevitable part of doing this full time until you get to like where you're the 1% and you're just getting so many projects you have to turn down.

[00:22:07] And you can be so selective of it. I'm at the position now where my sole source of income isn't my studio. I have multiple sources of income, so I can be way more selective of who I will work with for my studio now. And the only reason I can do that now is because my studio is not my sole source of income.

[00:22:21] I have the six figure home studio stuff, as you guys have probably are well aware of. I have real estate stuff, which is actually my biggest source of income for the past three years. I have investments outside of real estate that are generating income. I think that's it. I have to look. I feel like I'm missing something.

[00:22:36] But all that to say I'm diversified in my income. So it doesn't really necessarily matter what my studio income is. And so I can be a lot more flexible about what I take. It's not about maximizing my income, it's about maximizing my enjoyment. And then I'm working with the right people now. And until you reached that point, either through being the top 1% of your niche, or you start diversifying your income and other assets.

[00:22:57] And one of the big things that allows me to earn so much in real estate is that. I live off of 50% of my earnings for my studio. Everything else I make, I can just go into investments. I put 80% of my income into investments. 80% of everything I earn goes into other things. That generate money from me.

[00:23:16] And every one of those dollars out there are like little soldiers working in fighting for me instead of living paycheck to paycheck, like most studio owners. So if you ever want to get out of that, you have to look forward to the future and start making plans for that. So for right now, it's just about taking whatever work you can to keep your studio open.

[00:23:32] And trying to stair-step that up. And one other thing to talk about that before I leave off here, and that is if you want to step out of that role as quickly as possible, listen to our podcast episode. We just released this, was it this week or was it was last week. Were we talking about Kickstarter and developing artists and all these other things?

[00:23:48] I think if you can develop that sort of skill where not only are you helping artists fund the records, you're helping them develop and grow as artists, that's going to be something that can help a lot of you, especially you spike if you already have. A good base of clients are making five to eight K a month and you're trying to stair step that up.

[00:24:04] That might be the best course of action for you to get out of the bill paying work as fast as possible. Next question. This is from spike. I haven't had a strong financial education, which is where I'm now spending a lot of my time and money into my own self education. Where did you learn where to invest your money in terms of worthwhile investments?

[00:24:23] I'm assuming you invested in real estate once you got past the survival and security phase of your business. So just to stop there, he's got more of the question, but just to stop there. Yes. Like before you ever start like really investing, you want to make sure a, you're at a debt. Unless it's like really cheap, good debt, like a mortgage or even student loans.

[00:24:41] Those are usually a pretty low payment. What I've heard is if the interest rate is below five 6%. You're better off investing before paying that debt off. If that interest rates over that amount, you're better off paying off that debt versus investing your money, get past the survival security gets your emergency fund in place.

[00:25:00] This is just like basic Dave Ramsey stuff. I really encourage all of you to read Dave Ramsey's total money makeover. It's such a good book for just like basic financial foundation and honestly like. This is stuff I had no idea about when I was like my early twenties and I could have probably been way further ahead than I am now had I known this stuff earlier in my life.

[00:25:18] So there is no problems starting later in your life. Like I talked about, I think on that group coaching call everyone like. Talks about the difference of starting early versus starting late and all this stuff. But the good part usually is later in your life. Hopefully you're going to end up earning more money so you can make up for that lost time in the future.

[00:25:36] As long as you're always pushing forward to set yourself up to be thankful for your pass off. So like real quick, let me tell you what I'm talking about. Going into debt is basically borrowing from your future self. You're saying feed yourself. Fuck you. I'm going to borrow money from you and you're gonna have to pay it back, but I get to use it now.

[00:25:51] That's not the way you want to live your life. The way you want to live your life is say, I'm willing to sacrifice now so that my future self, we'll be better off. And that is the best way to live a life in all regards, sacrificing now in a positive way to help yourself in the future. That will always pay off in a better way than taking now and enjoying now and self-gratification now and then just paying for it later.

[00:26:11] You never want to do that. And then as far as like reinvesting in real estate, this is something I have a big interest in. I just enjoy real assets. Something that actually provides cash flow, something that has intrinsic value. Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies. Just to give a random example, there is no intrinsic value in those.

[00:26:28] You're just, it's a speculation. It's just betting that people are going to value it as a way to store value. Similar to gold, gold, another one. There's really no intrinsic value in gold. There's a little bit of use in it for certain things, but gold itself is more of a storage of value. That people trust that they can recover their value in the future.

[00:26:45] When they sell it, they get no cashflow off of it. Worst case scenario like gold just becomes not valuable because no one really needs it. They just have faith in what people are willing to pay for it. But real estate, like everyone needs a place to live in some way, shape, or form, whether it's an apartment or a home luxury home, whether it's a tiny home.

[00:27:03] Or a RV somewhere. Somehow people need a place to live. And so I have a lot more faith in that system than I do others. So that's just kind of my philosophy. Everyone else can kind of build their own investment philosophy, but find what you have a lot of passion for what you believe in and what has good financial principles attached to it.

[00:27:19] And then that's where you can start putting your money and to follow up with spikes at here, he says, I built 90% of my business, which is around five to $8,000 a monthly right now. He built that through marketing on Facebook. All self taught. And by the way, let me go ahead and pause here and say as far as investing, if you can find a way to make Facebook work, that is a great way to invest money.

[00:27:39] That's where I put a large amount of my money each month into Facebook marketing my business. Another way is to invest into your education, which you guys have all done and which is why you're here right now. It's so hard. Two. Look at the price of some things that I've paid for and be confident that I'm going to get my money back on.

[00:27:56] That, especially somebody that is not directly tied to income, something that is maybe more creative or something that is maybe more a longterm play or especially coaching. I spent $35,000 on a personal business coach over the period of a year last year and all of those things do. You have a lot of doubts about it, but at the end of the day.

[00:28:14] Every single year I'm investing a significant portion of money into my education, and every single year my income goes up and up and up. And those two things are very, very, very correlated. It's just really hard to track a direct ROI, you know, versus looking at a stock portfolio and saying, Oh, I'm up 6%.

[00:28:29] It's just easier to look at something like that. So people tend to gravitate towards things that can measure immensely. So I always say like, get your debt paid off. Get comfortable as far as financial. Invest into yourself, invest into your business. And then if you have money leftover, start investing into other things like honestly, retirement's important.

[00:28:46] I don't want to get too far in the details of that cause this is not, my platform is not teaching you guys about retirement, investing in real estate and all that other stuff. Those are plenty of other platforms out there for that. One other thing that spike says in this very long question, but I'm going to tackle all these today.

[00:28:59] He's actually hired someone to do his cold marketing outreach. He's created a written template to send and gave them a brief on what sort of artists to find. And it saved him a lot of hours. He's paying them a dollar a lead. So if you guys hear that spike is taking what he's learned in a webinar inside the course, he's created a system, a checklist.

[00:29:20] He's passed it off to an assistant, and so he can go focus on working on other parts of his business while the assistant is out there generating leads for him on a studio. So that's very good way to do it. If you guys can replicate that, especially if you're paying per lead, you're not necessarily having to pay per hour.

[00:29:35] You're giving them performance based pay, so for every qualified lead that they send you, they're getting paid X amount of dollars. That's a good way to pay an assistant for that sort of stuff. All right, let's go on to the next question here. Thomas asks, I do radio commercials for local credit union, mostly straight voice over work, sometimes with a sound bed or sound bites that they provide.

[00:29:53] It's super easy, quick work. They always come in prepared with scripts learned and concept completely arranged and timed. So often they are in and out in under an hour with product in hand. That's great. Those are fun projects. When I started working with them a couple of years ago, I was strictly on an hourly rate with clients, so this would end up with them walking out with a completed commercial for 50 bucks.

[00:30:12] They even felt like this is too low. That's Thomas. This is a good sign when you're not charging enough, as if your client ever comments on how cheap it is. That is like a dead giveaway that you're like at 10% of the value you should be charging. If you're like anywhere close to what a fair rate is, your client will never complain about it being too cheap.

[00:30:30] But if they're ever talking about how cheap it is or that you're too cheap, you are well under what you should be charging. So he says, even the clients feel like that's too low. So instead of, we instated a two hour minimum. So I guess a. $100 minimum. This perhaps feels a bit too light. I'm in the process of switching my rates to piece rate, so I guess me like a price per commercial or a per project rate.

[00:30:51] How do I determine what's an appropriate and acceptable rate for something like this? That takes a very little time and effort from me and then doesn't eat up the schedule blocks, but is a highly commercially valuable thing to them. All right, Thomas, you're in a good position because you have clients that probably have higher budgets.

[00:31:06] Then you even realize if it's for commercials and it's something that's really easy for you to do, and this is like the gold mine for any studio owner because this is something that's a highly systemizable type thing. This is something you could easily, probably, I would say, likely easily train an assistant to even take over for you.

[00:31:21] To where you don't have to do the work yourself if you're running the rig. Either way, it doesn't really matter. My whole thing behind this is going to a price per project thing is going to be the way to go on this because you have experience with this because you have a track record with us because you have contact with us because you know how long these projects should last.

[00:31:36] You are in a great position to charge per project or per commercial instead of the per hour thing. Because one big takeaway is it doesn't really matter how much time you bring to the project. What matters is how much value you bring to the project. So if you do a great job on these commercials, they love working with you, you have great connections, you bring much, much more value to this than the amount of time that you bring.

[00:31:59] So just understand. You can charge. I don't know what the rates are for this. I don't know what you could get away with getting for this, but you could charge two, three, four, 500 bucks per commercial for this sort of thing that just be your flat rate. And then you let them know this includes everything from start to finish.

[00:32:12] Here's all the deliverables that I give you. And so when you send a proposal to someone that's looking to do a commercial, they say, Oh, this is all I get, and it's 500 bucks. And then boom, you have a one hour, $500 gig that you get to do, and if you can pick up a lot of those, that's a very sustainable model for.

[00:32:27] Pretty much anybody that is doing that sort of work. So that would be my 100% my thing is start at a flat rate. Do a hundred 150 per commercial or whatever the rate needs to be. See if people are biting and if you're converting it, you know more than 25% of the proposals you send out. Then you probably need to up your rates even more than that.

[00:32:46] You could probably get like at least $200 per project if this is the type of thing that you're regularly getting. But again, you know this better than I do. So just see what a good starting rate is. Something that they're not going to be scared away from and like damage relationships. You don't want to throw like a thousand dollar commercial at them.

[00:33:01] And then they were like, Whoa, what the fuck? This dude used to be $50. But you want to be at a rate that is sustainable, scalable, and doesn't really matter what your time is. You obviously want to make sure you're getting at least paid for your time, but aside from you getting paid for your time, you're getting paid for the value that you bring with your expertise, with this little niche here.

[00:33:17] And that's the beauty of being in a niche, is that you have all the connections, you have all of the relationships, you have the experience, you have the portfolio, and you can become the GoTo guy in your area for this sort of thing. And when you're in that area, you can charge. A really good rate, a fair rate, but you can do it in a very systemizable way.

[00:33:33] That takes very little time, and that's a huge profitable niche you could be in if you're doing that. So good position, be in, keep us updated with how that works out for you. Ma'am. Uh, if you have any additional questions that just type them in and I will, uh, and I'm happy to answer it. If you have anything that's at length, just say, unmute me and then I can unmute you there.

[00:33:50] Next question. So I've been revisiting the customer avatar concept as I prep for my official business. Announcement and launch. He says, I have a laundry list of previous clients who've been waiting for me to get my ish together. And here's my question. He's talking about the customer avatar worksheet.

[00:34:08] This inside of PPC, you know what this worksheet is? If you've been through PPC, if you haven't, it's in the downloads area and there's a full video where I covered the whole worksheet. Here's my question. Could I theoretically come up with a form on my site that answers the questions on my ideal customer avatar form?

[00:34:22] So basically he's thinking, well, I put a form or some sort of questionnaire. Did I send to people? That helps me find the answers to those questions in the customer avatar form, I'm having a hard time dialing down all the attributes of my ideal customer and I know I can have more than one. I think I may need help brainstorming a way to streamline that process somehow.

[00:34:41] Ultimately, how do I find out this info about them? Maybe a form that's attached to Google spreadsheet. The short answer is no, don't do that. God, no. There's way too many like personal questions in there to just send it out to people that don't have you, don't have a good relationship with. If you have a really good relationship with some of your past clients, maybe you could get away with that, but the point is.

[00:35:01] Two either guests right now, if you're so early in your career that you don't have a good idea of what that is, you can probably start to make assumptions on what they want and what they need and what their goals and desires are and what their challenges and pain points are, and all the things that are on that worksheet.

[00:35:16] But if you have past clients, would you said you do, you said, I have a laundry list of previous clients. Who have been waiting for me to get my shit together. Just look at those previous clients and come up with an average of what those people are. This doesn't have to be some scientific approach where you have to build an algorithm out based on all the responses.

[00:35:32] This person said that they were interested in this thing 0.2% more than this person over here. Like that's not the goal of it. The goal of it is to get the big picture of all your clients average down into one person, but you can just have a conversation with and the better you can understand that one average person that is your ideal client.

[00:35:49] The better off you are when you are creating all of the things on your website. When you are creating emails that you're sending out, when you're doing client outreach, when you are creating ads on Facebook or ads on Google, all of these things go back to that customer avatar worksheet because whenever you start writing ad copy or website copy, which copy by the way, just texts, anything that you're writing.

[00:36:08] When you're trying to write something persuasive, you have to understand what the goals and desires are of that person in order to persuade them. So the customer avatar so that you can continue to go back to now to get the answers to that. It just comes with experience. None of us know. Our ideal customer when we first start, a lot of us is trial and error.

[00:36:24] You're going to find people that you're going to start finding out what you don't want. You even look at this like dating. Lot of people get married early on in their lives and it's before they've really had time to develop there. Wife avatar, what they want and what they don't want out of a relationship.

[00:36:38] And I'm at the age now where I'm starting to see a lot of divorces in my circle because it's people that got married in their early twenties and then seven or eight or nine years later, they're no longer the same person they were in the early twenties they've developed and they've grown apart, and then they get divorced and it's sad.

[00:36:52] But the reality is a lot of times you just need time to figure out what you want and what you don't want out of a partner or in this case out of a customer. And it comes with experience. So you're going to find out that you think you want this type of customer, or you think this type of customer is your ideal customer, but turns out those clients are horrible to work with, or you just don't have the same vision in mind, or you just can't work with them well, or they can't work with you well, or you just, your skill set doesn't work well with that type of client and so you need to adjust and move on.

[00:37:19] It's not just some like put everything into a silo. This is a human being that I will get into my studio and everything fits into, it's a little place. It's not like that at all. It is a fluid, dynamic, ever-changing thing. My customer avatar from two years ago is not my customer avatar today. So don't pull your audience.

[00:37:35] Don't send surveys out. Just talk to them and have conversations with them and be friends with them and work with them. And then you will learn the things you need to know in order to come up with a rough idea of what your ideal customer avatar is. All right. Next question is from max. He says, Hey, Brian, if the most viable business for me is remote mixing, meaning people are sending them files to mix while he's not actually physically with those clients, if the most viable business for me is Ramon mixing, what are ways you would recommend to differentiate and more so positioned myself as someone who only mixes.

[00:38:11] All right? If this is your most viable business, and let's just be honest, like this is most people's ideal viable business. If they do mixing, they would love to do remote mixing because they don't have to interact with humans. We all hate interacting with humans, right? We're all audio engineers and we like to sit in our cave and tweak shit and not talk to people.

[00:38:27] The reality is that not everyone's cut out for this. I don't know your work max. I don't know your quality of work. I don't know if mixing is your strong suit. I don't know if clients hire you for mixing, but I didn't shift over to mixing until most of my income was from mixing, and I just slowly shifted where 80% of my income is tracking and recording and editing and producing, and 20% was mixing, and then that number slowly grew.

[00:38:48] And then eventually I said, Holy shit, I should just cut out tracking all together so I can do more mixing work. And so the demand I had already built up over time. That's honestly the most viable way to do that. Is to build your reputation, build your client list, build your word of mouth, snowball, build the demand for your services, develop your own unique sound, and then make the switch too remote mixing.

[00:39:09] But again, if you're going to do mixing work, your unique differentiator has to be the quality of your work. There's no way around this. You can't differentiate yourself with gear. Usually in the mixing field, you can't differentiate yourself necessarily with clever marketing. You can't necessarily differentiate yourself.

[00:39:26] Even with like editing and with tracking, there's like all these little things you can do to make the environment more comfortable and like maybe go above and beyond and over deliver in certain areas. Mixing is one that's really difficult because at the end of the day, the only thing clients give a shit about.

[00:39:39] Is how do your mixes sound, and if they're not better than what they could achieve elsewhere, they're going to go elsewhere. If you say that remote mixing is almost a viable business for you, I would question that, and I would say it's only your most viable business if it's already your main business or you already have demand for it.

[00:39:56] The question again was, what are some ways you would recommend to differentiate yourself as a mixer and again, unless you're advertising yourself as mixing services only. Unless people want to hire you for your mixing services because they love your mixes. It's going to be extraordinarily difficult for that to be your main business model, not impossible.

[00:40:12] And again, I don't know if your work might be awesome, but usually if you have a couple of services are offering and mixing is the most profitable for you, and people love your mixes and people recommend you, and it's only a matter of putting all your eggs in that basket. If that's the case, go for it. If not, you may want to reconsider.

[00:40:27] You may want to come on this call and actually have a conversation with me so I can get a little more information from you because this is, I don't have enough information to give you really tailor made advice here. All right, next question. Here's this question from Nikki. I'm going to say that  Nike.

[00:40:41] Yeah. Guy. Who knows? Are there some special steps that someone who has previously devalued themselves should consider? So I think this person has previously devalued themselves in the past and they're trying to recover from that in the future. My early years, I was the low cost studio and now I'm trying to transition myself to be more serious and I've raised my prices quite aggressively to be taken more seriously.

[00:41:01] Also, I have hidden my prices from my website and started to brand myself as more of a premium service. I think the rushing to do more advanced things early on in my career have hurt my career and has burned some bridges. Luckily, I have not gained that much of a traffic and amount of clients were pretty low back then is the best way to just stick with the new route and respect will come and recover over time.

[00:41:24] There's a really, really good, I want to say it's a video or an article or a section of an interview where chase Jarvis, he's the founder of creative live and he's a photographer. He's talking about pricing cheap versus premium, and he just talks about pretty early in his career, he made the jump. Just to going premium  obviously he had some like lower cost clients in his past, but his quote that I want to bring up here was your $500 client will never be a $5,000 client.

[00:41:53] So any of these people you work with in the past that were just out there getting the cheapest price, the lowest possible thing that they could get at the time, they're not going to work with you for your higher prices. You just got to go out and find new customers. You said, luckily, and I use that term loosely here, you didn't have that many clients back then, so it doesn't really matter that much.

[00:42:09] But as far as recovering, there's not anything to do. Like obviously you have to have a service and an offering and quality that supports your price range, but other than that, again, you're not going to get those old clients to come at you if you've like tripled or quadrupled or your price. Just something to consider.

[00:42:26] And here you go. Your 500 client won't be your $5,000 client. Move on. That sums it up perfectly. So just Google $500 client, chase Jarvis, and you can find it. Has raising prices over time helped you? Seth asks. Yes. I've always been strategic with my price changes. So like you have to balance this constant ebb and flow of keeping your calendar full and commanding a premium price, but not having so many open dates that you can't survive.

[00:42:51] And so I'm not willing to work for $100 a song right now in order to get my calendar full. I have a minimum that I'm willing to work for, but that doesn't mean I won't take some discount if I want to fill my calendar up. So like my base price to say it's 600 a song, but if I have a couple of weeks open a month from now and someone comes to me with enough work to fill that void in my calendar, but they don't have the budget to support that, I'll probably lower my price even half sometimes in order to fill that gap in my schedule.

[00:43:18] Likewise, if I'm booked up for the next six months. Especially back when I was doing recording and I really scheduled out my time with those bands when I had bands in the studio with me. And then you physically can't work in multiple ares at the same time. And the capacity of the, I was doing it back in 2009 to 15 I would have them back to back.

[00:43:32] What I would do is if I was booked up three to six months in advance, or even three months in advance, and someone sent me a quote for a six or eight months out, I would put them a much higher price. And that's what allowed me to continually raise my prices over time. And what would happen is I would raise my prices a little bit.

[00:43:45] I raise my price a little bit. I would get stuff booked out. And then I have a gap in my schedule and I might have to lower my prices a little bit to get that gap filled out. But overall, my prices are trending upwards. If you are like super low cost, you might want to just double or triple your prices immediately starting like right now because you're just at an unsustainable model.

[00:44:01] But I was already sustainable. I was already doing well, and it was just a matter of navigating the prices and having the confidence to raise those over time as I built my client base on my reputation. So yes, it has helped me over time. Seth. All right. Next question from spike. Here's the backstories as he just completed modules one, two and three in PPC and he had a few questions.

[00:44:19] There's a lot of talk about website traffic. We all know that website traffic doesn't just happen. I'm guessing I might be jumping the gun when asking, but you need a shitload of people coming to the site. I'm now paying for an SEO company to help rank me up there because there are 1300 searches per month in my state for the world.

[00:44:38] Recording studio Melbourne, so he's from Australia. Aside from that, the other keywords are quite low, anywhere from a few to a few hundred. How are you building the following and growing your brand? I'm going to be guessed that this might be covered in the following marketing modules. He says, I built my business to about five to $8,000 per month, but I'm trying to find new clients that are happy to pay $2,000 for a produce track, and it's quite challenging.

[00:45:02] The loyalty of clients is amazing. But finding new, serious, high paying clients and getting rid of all the difficult and cheap customers is hard to filter. So to answer your first question about website traffic, that's just one indicator. Not everyone's business model is going to be strictly based on website traffic.

[00:45:15] And I kind of revised that in the home studio startup where I talk about seeds, the processes, seeds to lead to pay projects. And in my business, my seeds. Are my website traffic and for me, the website traffic is an indicator and for a lot of studios, your website traffic is the indicator of how strong your word of mouth snowball has grown.

[00:45:36] If you don't have any website traffic, because you probably haven't worked with anybody and no one's talking about you, no one's searching for your own Google for the longest time as far back as. I even knew how to work Google analytics. My number one way that people find my studio is direct blinking, so they just go directly to my site and my number two way has been Google and they're not searching, recording studio Nashville, a recording studio, Alabama, where I started.

[00:46:01] We're not doing any sort of SEO or any of that bullshit. The number one term people are finding my studio through on Google is. Brian Hood studio or Brian Hood producer or four or five, six recordings, my studio's name. That's how people are finding me. And so if people are not searching for you on Google, if people are not going directly to your site and you're getting no traffic, it's because no one is talking about you.

[00:46:21] But my guess is you probably do have some amount of traffic to your site. If you are making five to $8,000 a month, and you do have past clients who are coming back to you, they're also referring people to you and you're probably coming to check out your website. But if that's not part of your model, and honestly, things are shifting away from websites.

[00:46:35] And more towards social media, specifically Instagram for a lot of studios, if that's the way things are shifting, just embrace that. One thing to look at is it's not all about website views. It's also about Instagram profile views. Convert your Instagram page to a business profile and you can see all the analytics and insights that they provide.

[00:46:51] Now it's also about profile views on your Facebook page. Anyone that comes to your Facebook page to view your profile is probably someone that searched for you and found you either on Google or search for you on Facebook, your studio specifically, and if they are, if no one's searching that stuff, again, that's more of a problem of you don't have any word of mouth snowball going, and that's where you need to rely on either.

[00:47:11] Good old fashioned elbow grease, which is in the form of cold outreach or having lunches with people one on one interactions because that can provide a lot of leads and seats and the, I mentioned advertising, advertising, Facebook ads, you can try to pay for that keyword. Melbourne, if you are paying an SEO company to help rank you for that recording studio in Melbourne.

[00:47:32] Melbourne, how do you guys say it? If you're paying an SEO company to do that for you, how much would it cost to just advertise for that keyword on Google? Just go through the Google ads workshop and see what the cost will be to just advertise for that. You might find out that people searching for that are not going to work with you anyways and you're spending all this money on this SEO company.

[00:47:49] I don't know how much you're paying. You're spending all this money on this SEO company to help rank you for a keyword, but. It wouldn't convert for you anyways. So you better off spinning 5,000 bucks on Google ads and testing it and see if people that come to that keyword that click your ad ever actually spend money with you.

[00:48:04] Because again, it's not about how many website visitors you get, it's about how many of those people end up buying from you. There's multiple keys to this equation. The first is website traffic or just overall awareness for your brand, and the second is conversion rate. How many of those people are actually taking the next step for you, whether that's a studio tour or whether that's a book, a conversation with you, whether that's to start a conversation on Instagram or Facebook, or to book a court request form.

[00:48:26] Be open to all of these possibilities and find out what your market wants to do and don't try to pigeonhole yourself based on what the course taught you to do. Take what I teach and adapt it for your situation. If that means you're doing everything through Instagram, which there was a guy. We need to give him the podcast.

[00:48:39] I forget his name. He's actually, I've got them apart on a Evernote file here. His name was Brad wood, is a producer. I forget where he's based out of. He's been around for like 20 years. He says he gets to 80 to 90% of his. Work through Instagram. Now he's, he's got like a couple thousand followers. He doesn't have a huge Instagram following, but that's where he gets most of his work and he's got a studio in LA, full time studio in LA, and it's doing quite well.

[00:49:02] That's his model. He does the same, similar thing. He's going to have total profile views on Instagram. Then he's going to have total conversion rate on Instagram, which is his messages he's getting from people. And that he's going to have, how many of those messages turn into paid projects? It's exact same thing as the website stuff I teach, but it's just on a different platform.

[00:49:18] So be open to the idea of all of these things moving over to a different platform and making it work in there instead of trying to force everyone to go where they're not wanting to go. Seth asks a question, do you have to be in a certain place in the course to do the accountability program or the accountability accelerator bootcamp?

[00:49:34] No, you don't. The earlier you start it, the better off you are, so I would absolutely go ahead and do it no matter where you are in the course. We've had people join after six months of being in the course after going through the course multiple times and then doing the boot camp, and we've had people that join it the day they joined the course.

[00:49:48] And both people have fun with it. So the only advantage you have by joining later on is that you'll have time to do some of the things beforehand. And it also kind of takes some of the fun away from it too. If you've already done a lot of things where you're talking about doing, the whole goal is to get you to do the shit you need to do.

[00:50:02] That's literally the goal of the boot camp. And so all of the things you would need to do in the course, you just do with a group of people and you have us there, like making you do stuff and we have deliverables that you have to show us that you've done the work and all those sorts of things. If you rather have people.

[00:50:17] Helping you and watching over your shoulder and keeping you accountable before you go through the course. Do it. He's the kind of person where you want to go to the course all by yourself and then come back and do this things that you most likely skipped because you didn't feel like doing it or you didn't have anyone pushing you.

[00:50:29] Then that works as well, but there's no reason not to join the bootcamp other than like if you are going to be gone for an extended amount of time and can't do any work, but also keep in mind that everything we tell you to do. Is something you can do with a laptop anywhere in the world. So it's not like you have to be in your studio to do any of this stuff.

[00:50:46] We really talk about, as far as I remember, I know we've had people traveling while doing a B. We've had people have children and they're in the hospital doing a B with their kid in the, in their arms or whatever. Actually, that doesn't really make sense.

[00:51:03] So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. And there you have it clips from our group coaching calls from the profitable producer course. If you like what you heard, or you want to be part of one of these group coaching calls and have your questions answered, live in a group setting or just have the ability of being able to submit a question at any point in your journey.

[00:51:23] While you're either going through the course material or you're doing something marketing-related in your studio, or you just hit a road bump, did you inevitably are going to run up against when you're trying to build your career? If that sounds helpful to you, you can just go to the profitable producer.com and join the profitable producer course.

[00:51:38] That's the only way right now at least to join the group coaching program. I've thought about offering it as a standalone thing for people who don't want to join the profitable producer course about do want group coaching if you're interested in that. You're welcome to reach out, brian@thesixfigurehomestudio.com via email or on Instagram, Brian H zero zero D that's Brian , all one word there.

[00:52:00] And I will, uh, if I get enough of those, I'll, I'll consider moving forward with that. I don't really have interest right now at least to offer a one on one coaching. So group coaching is the only way I do this, but I would highly, highly encourage you to join the profitable producer course. Sign up for the next eight week accountability accelerator bootcamp where you get put into a team of about eight to 10 other audio engineers and get set a weekly assignment or actually a set of weekly assignments, each with points attached to them.

[00:52:30] every single week, every team member is going to turn and hopefully turn in their assignments for that week. And at the end of the eight weeks, the teams with the highest score all win prizes. Any anything from gift cards to free software to books, trophies. We do a an entire word ceremony for the accountability accelerator bootcamp, so I would love to see you go join that by going to the profitable producer.com signing up for the course and then you can see further instructions inside of there.

[00:52:56] If you've already signed up for this next accountability accelerator bootcamp, if you sign up for it already, we will be announcing a date for that soon. The way it works is as soon as we have about 70 or so registrants for that bootcamp, we will set a specific starting date in which you have plenty of time.

[00:53:10] To back out if those dates do not work for you, so don't feel locked in right now. If you, if you join and you can't end up doing it because the dates don't work, don't worry about it. You can always do the next one. When you join the profitable producer course, you were eligible for one accountability bootcamp and you can do that at any point after you joined the course.

[00:53:25] Next week's episode. We don't have quite planned or recorded yet, however. Since I'm planned to get home on Monday, so that'd be yesterday. If all goes to plan as the time you're listening to this episode is coming on Tuesday. If I am home, I'm not quarantined and I am able to because of the jet lag and everything.

[00:53:45] Hopefully Chris and I will get an episode knocked out on Thursday so we can finally reunite as bros and from there that will come out bright and early next Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM as always. Until next time. Thank you so much for listening and happy hustling.