Solving The #1 Struggle In Your Business

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 89

whoa.

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

figure, a home studio podcast brought to you by sponsorship coming. Here it is. Are you ready for this Chris? Here's a sponsorship. Oh, this is crazy. Filepass.com

wait a minute. Is that our only sponsor today? No. We have to also brought to you by bounce butler.com wait a minute. Is this even legal? Can we sponsor?

We're doing it as our podcast. We can do what we want. So file pass.com as the sponsor for today's episode and what is file past.com. Long story short, it's file sharing for recording studios. Just send your tracks to your clients. They can leave timestamp provisions directly on the file. They can stream high quality wave files and you can protect it all behind a paywall so they cannot download until they pay the remaining balance. That's my pitch in pitch for file past.com go request access at [inaudible] dot com today. Amazing. Chris, would you like to tell us about our other sponsor today? Bounce Butler.

Bounce Butler is an app that is one app to rule the Dawes.

Isn't that the best slogan of all time? I'm so stoked for that.

So what bounce brother does, if you haven't heard it, heard bounce butler. Let's say you're like, ah, I finished these 10 mixes on this album and now I'm going to sit here and bounce them one at a time and wait four minutes in between each bounce. Instead of going to hang out with my family or significant other bounce Butler's an app. Or you tell him, Hey, I've got sessions from five different Dawes. There's like, you know, whatever you want. 50 sessions, a hundred sessions, and you press bounce and then you leave and bounce. Butler manages your bouncing processes and texts or emails you when it's done.

Yeah, so next time I have to bounce like 30 stems. I'm just going to use this cause it's nice

indeed. It feels weird to sponsor on podcasts.

Hi. No, I love it. I'm like, I don't even care. I'm a sell out. I'm a sell out for my own products. So onto the podcast, I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful purple shirted. Amazing cohost. You Chris,

you j grill. How you doing today buddy? I'm fantastic. How are you?

I'm good man. I feel like we'll get better at pitching file pass and bounce ball there in the future.

Yeah, stay tuned for more improved sponsorship messages from the owners have said companies and said podcast.

Yeah. So if this is your first time listening to the podcast, this podcast is brought to you so that you can learn to be a better business owner. Chris, Chris and I, uh, we have side projects because we're entrepreneurs at heart. So Chris has a software product called bounce Butler and I have a software product called file pass and we still do audio for a living too.

[inaudible] or day. What have you been up to lately, Chris? Well, I've been working on bounce. Butler been hanging out with the fam. My cats had fleas.

Oh, I thought you were going to say your cats died and I was going to celebrate. Oh, you party over here?

No, they're, they're great. They just had fleas. They get them at the vet. So it's been a little dramatic getting that all sorted. Dogs Roll Bro. Dogs role. But yeah, things have been really kind of interesting. I think I mentioned this in the podcast before, but thanks to your advice. I've switched the way Chris Grant mastering runs, run a little bit on the quote system, checked by that a lot in previous episodes. Three out of the past four months have been the best months I've ever had. So it's been wild to be on a business podcast and learn about improving my own business.

So I think it was two big things you did. One of them was you put those logos on your website. That was like, we did that at NAM, like back in January. That helped. Yeah. And that was a, I say NAM or nom. I said Nam. You said Nam. Okay, good. That's good. That's the per Nupur. Yeah. I always like ever since like another backstory, we were at summer jam last year or two years ago and we were advanced Palo studio and like one of the kids that was in the studio said nom and Vance just lit into him and made fun of him. So now I'm like self conscious about it. Do I say Nam or non what? I'm like, dude, I don't want Vance Powell to be mad at me as if he listened to this podcast. Yeah, I don't think he needs his bog guests. Yeah. He doesn't need more customers, I don't think. No, no he doesn't. So it started with you adding those logos to your site is social proof and that helped I think a little bit. But I think the big change was you taking off your rates from your website and putting a court request form up there. And that was like the big breakthrough moment for your studio. That probably the biggest one you've had. And like I want to say, yeah, since you maybe foot started doing ads in general.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely one of the biggest changes I see. The biggest changes I've had in my business were one, having a cool website that makes people want to check it out with that before and after. Player two would be starting to run ads, three would be starting to do email marketing and four would be switching to a quote based system. All really big changes. And the weird thing about the quote based system, I was really nervous about that. I've had to raise my rates a couple of times, at least in small amounts since I started doing that to keep up with demand. It's been a really interesting experience to be like, Huh, I didn't ruin everything. This is great. So yeah, it's been really good man and I really appreciate you weighing in on that stuff and encouraging me to do those things I was terrified to do to grow my business. So yeah, it's been great.

I'm glad things are going well for you, man. Just to give you an update on my life since I know you want to ask and you never do Chris, this is like a running joke for the podcast. It's like I ask you every episode how you've been, what you've been up to and then you just kind of trail off and then it's a character flaw. You leave it to me to update the audience and my own life. Well I went

golfing this week and I'm sorry. Please credit that to my head and not to my heart because I love you Bruh.

I have not been golfing this week nor have I been in the last year. I am really sad about that. I have just been planning vacation for me. My wife we're trying to go to like for my honeymoon in March we, we spent a month in Europe, like one way flights out to Europe. We just like figured it out as we went. It was amazing. Like very adventurous. I would say very few parts of that were relaxing. So this time we're going to just go to an all inclusive resort enlite Cancun or something. There's one resort down in Cancun and it has like 11 restaurants in it. There's like all your foods included alcohol that I don't drink so I feel like I'm being overcharged for this anyways. Yeah. And we're just going to have like the most basic vacation in October possible where like we don't have to think about a single thing.

Super Dope Man. Super Dope.

That got me thinking booking this vacation. This is fine. I love booking trips and so like this is something that me and Chris kind of, I guess you and I was starting to talk about on the side and this is not an announcement so no one take this as an announcement but Chris and I are moving in together. No, no. We thought about just renting a big ass cabin somewhere like Jackson Hole, like a national park or Yosemite, which is probably not a good idea cause it's really hard to get there or somewhere in America probably get a big ass cabin and just get a bunch of studio dudes out there to just hang out, have fun talk business, have business breakthroughs. We don't know when we're going to do it. We don't know how we're going to do it. We don't know what's going to be, I don't know anything about it, but we're going to do this. I'm like committing to doing this, Chris. I just don't know when yet, so I'm just tossing this out there and just see if anyone is excited to do this with Chris and I because I think this will be fun.

Yeah, it'd be a six figure home studio podcast retreat.

Yeah. This is basically like summer or winter camp for the six figure sexes. I have to give John Nickel Lucas credit for that phrase.

That sounds like a John McLucas phrase right there. I love it.

He's one of our community members on Facebook and he coined the term six figures sex. He's as our audience. We've never had an audience name. Do you think that'll stick, Chris? It's stuck in my head. I don't know. If you listen to this podcast, you're a six figure sexy according to John McLucas. We'll see if we get a bunch of angry replies in accordance to that or if people embrace it. It's up to our audience. Our audience is to pick whether they want to be called six figure sexes or not. It's not up to us. So you all tell us what you want.

Any who. Yeah. Brian and I were talking about this idea of like, wouldn't it be fun to have like a giant cabin or several of them? There's a lot of guys, urm does a summit, you know, there's a lot of people that do like hangouts, you know, like with people, you know, ours would definitely be business oriented

but much smaller. Like we're not going to do 100% thing. I don't have any interest in kitting into the conference world.

Yeah. Mostly I think Brian and I just wanted an excuse to hang out with some fun people. Yeah. And go hiking and talk about business nerd stuff. If I'm being totally honest, it would be so fun to just be like, hey, we went hiking on this really bodacious, really awesome trail. And I talked to a couple different guys about their business and a lot of them had breakthroughs and they went home and implemented these things and began to grow their businesses. And it would be so fun.

Yeah. And I think both of us can attest to like some of our biggest breakthroughs are in those in between moments. Not like when you're working and hustling everyday, but like when you actually have time to relax and like go on a hike and get outdoors and just get your mind off of like the day to day stuff. But obviously we're gonna be talking about business. That's all we talk about grit. It's like we do on our own when we're not on the podcast, we're on the air, we're just talking business with each other.

Side note, we often will have a podcast recording session scheduled

and never for record it,

but we talked about business the whole time, but it's like, oh, you should do this. Yeah, I'm trying this. Maybe you should try that too. It's awesome. It's super cool.

Yeah. So again, this is not an announcement of when or how or what, but this is just us kind of thrown that idea out there expressing a desire. I would love to do it. I don't know if anyone else would love to do it, but I feel like we could probably get 10 people together to come out and enjoy a cabin in the mountains with the somewhere.

Yeah, so it'd be us in 10 people or whatever. Yeah. That to me sounds like so much fun and I love what you said about, I think inspiration is this combination of doing the work, dive in deep, you know, so we'd have like, you know, breakout sessions and discussions about different things. One on one stuff, one on one discussions, coaching stuff, and then to be like, and now we're going to go on a hike and process in the grand juror of nature. Some of this stuff, and what I've found, at least for me is it's in those moments where it's like I'm going to disengage businessy stuff or work stuff and do something else that's fun. Where my subconscious mind continues to process and all of a sudden it's like, oh, that suddenly just makes sense. That's 90% of why I joined a yoga gym and do yoga.

Oh, here we go. He's going to insert this hippy agenda and our podcast, everybody. That's right guys. We're doing this six figure home studio podcast, Yoga retreat in my basement next week. You know what? You could do it. You can guide some meditative yoga or something to the group. No, I have zero interest in doing that. I will do it. If you lead the group, Chris, I will participate. I'll bring my wife's yoga mat and wear her yoga pants too. Ugh, that scares me more than making youtube videos. So yeah, let's stop talking about this because this is not a planned thing. We can talk about this more and like dream about it more when it's actually like a book thing that we're trying to get people to come hang out with us on. So today's episode, Chris, let's talk about the number one struggle in your business right now. Not Yours specifically, Chris, but we asked this to our Facebook community. I pose this question a couple of weeks back. We can half or so back and we had a lot like 87 comments and so we wanted to just go through some of these comments and Facebook and talk specifically some we'll go in more depth than others, but we'll talk specifically about our communities. Number one problem in their business right now.

And side note, if you haven't joined the six figure home studio, uh sorry about that. If you haven't joined the six figure home studio group on Facebook, I think Facebook is a trash heap,

such a trash heap man. Facebook groups are amazing. They're so good. According to screentime app on my phone, I average 18 minutes a day of Facebook, which is I feel like way below average for the average person. But I could promise you about 15 of those 18 minutes a day are on

our Facebook group. Totally. Yeah, so it's a really fun place. There's about 5,000 people over there. It's a place where we talk about some of the questions that get raised in this podcast all the time. People post questions or like, hey guys, I'm struggling with this. Any ideas? And I'm like, and 50 people just commented with what they thought about your problem. It's amazing. It's my favorite place on the Internet, so there's a link in the show notes, description and all that stuff to check it out. But yeah, Brian posted this question, what is the number one struggle in your business right now? We thought it would be fun to read through some of the answers and to just sort of spontaneously respond to them via this podcast. We will pronounce everyone's name wrong. Well, that's a prerequisite. We literally like it is our duty as podcast cohosts to not pronounce anyone's name correctly.

See will equally butcher everyone's name. It is our duty. And to kick that off, our first comment is from Blair duty. Blair duty mispronounced as promised. Yeah, probably Daddy, I dunno. No, it's duty. You just won't spell it right if you try to spell it out loud. Blair, Mr Doody says in fear of being told off as I haven't listened to the podcast in months. Gaining clients is his number one problem. Chris, have we ever talked on the podcast about gaining clients before? That sounds like a good topic idea, Huh? We should probably talk about that on an episode. Yeah. If we wouldn't have only talked about this on like six past episodes, Chris, I think we've probably had the most response on our most recent episodes on the value based pricing, like that whole thing. People have gone nuts for that. They haven't been quite as excited as they've been about puns.

Apparently. I didn't know that I was allowed to make puns on this show. I feel some pressure now. There was a vote. Should I stop making puns or not? And it was like, I don't know, 20 times more people that were pun positive. Ah, that is atrocious. And I do not respect it, nor do I support it. But let's talk about his number one problem. Let's see. Can you give Blair a quick win real quick? I mean, besides obviously listening to this podcast, which she probably is not listening to this episode anyways. Yeah. Well I would say, you know, if your biggest issue is gaining clients, your biggest issue is probably not gaining clients. There's probably another biggest issue that's like Mike drop right there. That's almost always the thing that's our culture here in America is it's like, well my problem is I have a runny nose.

No it's not. It's that you have a cold because you've gotten public and you touch doorknobs and then you like wipe your eye boogers out and then you get sick. Germaphobe. Chris, here we go. Oh my gosh. Your problem is that you are touching things in public and then touching the holes in your face. That's your problem. The symptom is you're sick coming from the guy who got sick, deadly sick in La last time I was there. That was something I ate. Okay. I didn't touch my face holes. I know, I know, but I will say this. I'm going to destroy you in a second on the Germaphobe, the same button. You have a point when it comes to the lack of clients not being the number one problem, like that's the number one symptom. The number one problem isn't that you don't have clients. The number one problem is likely something to do.

Either you haven't been doing this long enough to have a long past client list so you can get repeat customers or it could be a situation where you're just not clear on your website what it is that you do. There was a guy that joined file pass recently and I went to his website, his headline, I kid, you not said this, we do hip hop. That's it. I was like, that is amazing headline. It's like there is no question as to what audience you serve and that's like the crystal clear clarity that this guy had was he does hip hop. That said, if you are not hip hop, you are not for me, and that level of exclusion is such a good way to get clients. Counter-Intuitively

you're right. That is one of the biggest issues that I've encountered when I've been doing this coaching thing occasionally is that you go to someone's website and anyone that went to their website would not say, hell yes or hell no. They'd say,

yeah, that's so true. There's so many places I've eaten in Nashville where it's like an expensive place that's like a nice place to eat and we eat that and at the time I'm like, this is pretty good. And then me and my wife were like, that was pretty good. And then we never go back again because that was the motion we had. So it could also be a quality of your work as well is the true number one problem leading to the symptom of not having enough clients.

And let's be really clear, their quality of work doesn't necessarily mean quality of everything you've done. It could mean just the quality of your portfolio. I was working with a guy, um, who had an amazing portfolio, 12 incredible songs, super well put together, super mixed. He's in such a stronger position than a guy who's got like three songs that are all over the place. You know, you've got like one metal song, one rap song, one classical song. Like wait a minute, that's how my website works.

Oh, right. It's deaf. Right? I niche down on service. Not on genre. That's true. But your point is still there. It's this trying to appeal to everyone in this opinion to no one. Let's move on in this, but I do want to leave you guys with some podcast episodes to listen to if your number one problem is getting clients right now. I'm going to give you a list here and so I'm making my editor James who does the show notes, earn his keep right now episode 42 and 43 is a two parter on how to get more clients for your studio. That's the most obvious place to start on our podcast history. If you listen to this podcast, go back to those episodes, episode 75 why you're scaring away your clients with an inconsistent story and how you can clarify your brand by learning to say no. That's episode 75 episode 80 81 and 82 are all going to be incredible for getting to the root of the problem, the true cause of you not having clients. I'm not even going to list those actual titles, but that was a series we did that's going to help a lot. So those are recent episodes that are going to be very important to this.

Well, the next comment here, this is from Adam Buckley. Adam Buckley said something really, really interesting. He struggled with getting new clients as well, but he brought up a good point how to deal with bands that stick working with their friends instead of branching out a bit. So this is

just to clarify, he's talking to bands trying to get them to record with him and instead they're working with their friends.

Well, here's the thing. If you're in a band and you were looking for a recording engineer, would you hire your friend? Of course you would. Yeah. Somebody you know, like, and trust already. Yes, of course you would. You can't compete with that. Now what I see that people do all the time, they have this like efficiency focus and they're like, well, I need to get in and get out with these guys. You know, I'm gonna reach out to them and we'll say, hey, hey, guess what? I produce records live work with guys. All right, and you'll come on down. You can fill up a quote form Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. I don't want a relationship with you, but I do want your money and I do want to make a record that doesn't work unless you're like, I got 17 grammys, I got, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You have to have some pretty significant momentum in the marketplace for that to work in the first place. I think what a lot of people do is they want to get out. They're trying to be too efficient and they're not being relational enough with people.

This is actually a massive issue that I see with a lot of people that I've talked to and it is exactly what you just said. I've seen people that have zero clients and they're already trying to automate 10 different things in their business. That doesn't matter in it's procrastination by automation. If you want to say that I don't look at it is a, you have to have a good relationship with these people. In order for me to work with you, I've worked with plenty of strangers in my life. Chris, you've worked with plenty of strangers in your life. What it is is it's a bit of friction added to the entire process and the more friction you add to the process, the less like you are to win the Gig. And so if you don't have a lot of good things going for you right now, if your positioning is bad, if your website is bad, if your branding is bad, if it's not clear what sort of market you serve.

Some of things we've talked about already on this episode and things we've definitely talked about in past episodes. If you don't have all of your ducks in a row, then when it comes time to choose you versus a trusted friend, that's just another bit of friction that's going to guarantee you lose out on the Gig. So you have a few options, which is you can either friend the band. So actually go out and build a relationship. You can't improve your audio skills. You can improve your website, you can improve your portfolio, which is a byproduct of improving your audio skills. So there's a number of things you can do that decreases the friction, but it's going to be different for everyone. But you can guarantee the more friction you add to that decision of should, the higher you are not, the more friction you add, the less likely you will be to win that project.

Yeah, I'm gonna give you some tough love here at him. One of the things you could rephrase this question to say, which is how can I get bands to work with me without having to be their friend first, right? In some cases, that's the way a lot of guys approach this. That's the actual question that a lot of people have. And one of the things I think that we have as a problem in this podcast is that since we're a business podcast, a lot of people think that anything business related, any knowledge, any wisdom, anything you can learn about business is a better way to cheat people. That is the epitome of ignorance. There is no such thing as that in 2019 in developed world, you have to be trustworthy or you don't get any more customers because then someone's just going to Google you and find some occasion where you fleeced somebody. So my advice is to genuinely want more friends and to genuinely have a relationship with these guys and to let that turn into better art. You're going to make better art with people that are your friends.

Yeah, Bucky? I would just say like, do exactly what Chris just said. Go back and listen to that section like 10 more times. Thanks boo. Yeah. Can you imagine how bad this podcast would be if we weren't friends? It'd be pretty bad. It'd be awful. I mean, ours is a bad podcast, but it's funny. They don't know that. Brian, don't tell them. Okay, so this next question is from Matt Goings or Matt. I'm trying to figure out how I could mispronounce the name horribly just for the heck of it. Matt Goliath things he says, knowing when to say no to clients and how to properly allot time for them. I tend to overbook myself. That's a really good problem to have actually. Yeah, that overbooking yourself. I think if multiple listeners, if they had that problem, they'd be like, Oh, I love my life, but this is a real issue and I've done this myself.

When to say no to clients. Chris, this is actually, this is on our podcast idealists. We're probably not going to go into depth with this, but this is a good time to bring that point up is when to say no to clients and to me it's if you are the type of person like Matt where you are overbooking yourself, this is the perfect time to start assessing all of the potential people you could work with and answer this question, will this bring me more work or not? Meaning the band I work with where they refer more people to me or will people seek me out because this band is a big band and a lot of people are listening to that music, making that decision of is this just a bill paying band or is this a band that will expand my career? That's the big differentiator. That to me is when you start getting too busy to function. This is when you start to have to weed out bands based on like are they going to read me more work or not? Yeah, 100% I mean this is your podcast idea, Chris, so you should have a lot to add to this. I would.

Gotcha. Well, I mean this is one of the hardest things I think to overcome. I would say that there's a little voice inside of you and when you shouldn't say yes to a potential customer, this little voice will say, don't do that, man. No, no, don't do that. And you have to listen. Right? You will know if you weren't supposed to say yes. At least in my experience it's always been like, mm. I sense a little red flag in me. If you get a 10 of client and you're trying to balance all this stuff, just listen to that little voice and that's probably all you need to do.

Oh, and by the way, Daniel Bush had the same question. He says, I'm struggling and taking on new clients because I don't have enough time to serve my existing clients. So this is the exact same thing. This is another good time to start raising your rates if this is your issue.

I was just gonna say that. Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that you can possibly do, that's the most effective thing is just to raise your rates. You only have a limited amount of time. And here's what I would say in a situation like that. Tell a new potential client, hey, I'd love to work with you, but man, there's so much demand. My services right now, I don't have any choice but to raise my rates because I'm having a hard time keeping up, super pumped about this. But you know, unfortunately, I might've told you, you know, I cost 300 a song a few months ago now I cost 400 song or now I cost 500 a song. I might bring my prices back down once I've caught up, but I have so much on my plate right now that I have to charge more that way.

You're not the bad guy. The market is the bad guy. It's true. That's a really good way to word it. Anytime you can make the market the bad guy, you're going to win. And it's a lot easier to do that. So make the market, the bad guys say, hey man, you know, I'd love to work with you, but there's all kinds of terms you could do here beyond just raising your prices. You could say, Hey, I'd love to work with you. You know, let's say you're normally $300 a song, but I'm three 50 a song and I couldn't work in for two months and I would need a down payment by next Friday in order to do this.

This is where you can start asking for more. Even if you're not charging more or you can increase your terms. Like I want a 50% nonrefundable deposit that'll naturally repel a certain type of person, which is actually a good thing. So there's more to do than just turning down bands or not. Sometimes you can filter out those bands by raising your rates or asking for a higher deposit or pushing them to a later date. There's all sorts of things you can do to where you can still get these clients if they want to book you, they just have to wait six months down the road before they can actually do it. Yes,

so, and one of the things to keep in mind there is that when you say maybe you don't raise your rates, but you do ask for payment in full upfront nonrefundable, you know, something that really intense like that you don't necessarily do nonrefundable, but whatever, whatever you're comfortable with in a situation like that, you have to keep in mind that the number one reason recording studios go out of business is lack of cashflow. They don't have money coming in, but they do have money going out. And they're in a situation like, crap, we can't pay rent. Oh, we have to close. Oh crap. A repo man came and took my Fairchild that I thought it was a good investment. Instead of using the plug in version, oh crap, I'm out of business. You know, whatever it happens to be, it's probably going to be cashflow that's going to take you out of this. Not that like, oh, you weren't talented enough, or Oh, you went deaf. Statistically speaking, and this is the same for all businesses, not just recording studios. You didn't have cash flow when you needed it. So when you say, yeah, I'd love to work with you but I can't take you on for four months and you have to pay upfront

gives you more cashflow. That's called being cashflow positive, which means you got paid way before as opposed to what most people struggle with the most, which is I did the work and I'm still trying to get paid. I will say, I want to caution people with this though. If you're bad at managing money, which is what people who are struggling with cashflow tend to be. You start getting paid in advance and now you're spending money for three months from now his work. So it can be a really vicious cycle if you're using that and you're still living paycheck to paycheck even with those advances and cashflow. So be very careful with that cause you can end up screwing yourself over. I want to point something out. So Matt Goings, his question was he was overbooking himself with clients. Everything we talked about is relevant to him, but Daniel Bush actually gives us some additional context here.

He says, my problems not being too doing audio, it's being busy with my day job. And it says, considering the value that I'm currently bringing to my clients, I don't feel like raising my rates would translate to client satisfaction. This is the eternal struggle law. So what would you say to someone like this, Chris? Like your day job is keeping you from taking on more clients. You can't raise rates, you can't take on more clients. Simple go read four hour work week. Yeah, next go read four hour work. That is a good point cause four hour work really does talk to you about how to handle your day job when you're trying to build your passion project on the side, your passion project being an audio Daniel your day job being the thing that gets in the way of that. That's the American struggle for anyone trying to start a side business whether it's audio or not

and here's the cliff notes. Tim Ferris is going to say get ridiculously good at your day job and then negotiate when it comes time for a raise for flexibility and then use that flexibility to build into your side hustle your business that you're working on.

Yup. Okay. Next question is from Jack. See Daniels and fun story about Jack Daniels. Here I was actually in the gym listening to a metal playlist like I like to listen to in the mornings at the gym and I was listening to a mix that I liked. It was war of ages as a band we've toured with, I think Jack's actually in this band as far as I remember and I was looking at the song credits because I want to say it's like a pet peeve of mine, like 50% or more of song credits on metal playlists or metal songs do not have the producer actually credited on it. Every other genre credits the producer as they should, not metal bands and as the labels fault. So that's off my thing. Anyways, Jack Daniels is on there and I like googled his studio trying to find a studio and then all the things that come up is just Jack Daniels.

They actual like liquor. There's like an SEO as you try to actually find your studio's website. So side note there. Anyways, he says scheduling for the studio around my own bands tours. His number one problem is he tours a lot in a band. Some of us can relate to this. This is not a big struggle that everyone has. He says my best years are the ones at the end of an album cycle or we're not touring as much. And I can build a good momentum for my studio. It's so hard to keep that momentum up when you have to shut down for a month or two to stay on the road. Much like you notice how low points on your productivity after long vacation. You know, I can definitely attest to that. The vacation part,

well this is interesting. I've got a couple guys I'm not comfortable with the name drops, but I've got a couple guys I'm doing coaching with that are an exact same position. You know, they're in really well known bands. They're famous and they're trying to balance that Gig with having production work or mixing work or whatever it happens to be. And I think one of the things that's important to bring up there is touring is tricky because it also can kind of like be poisonous, I think for your soul. Not In the way that you might think, I'm going to say, but it can be poisonous because you get on stage and you're making like thousands of dollars per hour and then you get off stage and you're losing money. You know? That's really, really tricky. And so for a lot of people, I think it's building in ways to make money on the road that worked for you.

So that could be remote mixing. One time when I was producing, I hired this guy, really, really, really great organ player and he was in the back of a tour bus with a mini controller doing tracks for the record we were working on while the vehicle was moving super dope. So he was making pretty good money while he was in the van. And so I would say for people like Jack, you have to figure out a type of revenue stream, a type of work that you can do that's portable, that you can take with you. That could be lessons, remote lessons that could be coaching people that could be a certain type of remote audio work, be that, you know, a bass player could get away with this pretty easily. I'm like, well, I've got an Apollo twin and my bass and I plug it in when the car is moving and I'm, you know, I don't know.

It can be tricky. This is going to be a different answer for every single person, but you need to use the creativity that got you into the Gig that you currently have, which is famous musician and use that creativity to build a side business that's portable that you can ramp up and ramp down quickly. Now this ramp up and ramp down quickly thing is really, really important because most people are like, oh, I'm in a band touring and I'm trying to produce records. The problem with the producing records thing is it takes a long time to ramp that up. Again, it's kind of back to the cash flow issue of like you have to flirt with this band and flirt with this band and talk and talk and talk, and then you finally get something on the books and then you make it happen. One of my favorite bands is suspend, covet, super cool kind of like math Raki type band and the lead guitarist is this super cool Asian chick and what she does is she'll go into her and she's got a few hours between soundcheck and when they play and as far as what I have seen from the outside looking in, she'll book a few extremely expensive guitar lessons between soundcheck and the show and so for her, like her mega fans are like, oh yeah, I'll pay whatever to have.

She happens to charge and if she's super clever, she's charging a fortune because she's great, she's a genius and she now can supplement her income while she's on the road with something that's very easy for her to be like, Hey, I'm going to be in Columbus, Ohio on my social media. Anyone in Columbus, Ohio want a guitar lesson? Or if she's super smart, she's got some kind of like email list that segmented based on location and she can contact everyone that's maybe bought a ticket or that's a fan and say, hey, I'm going to be in Columbus. I've only emailed people in Columbus. If you want a lesson, click here to book using like acuity or something like that. If you have a side hustle that you can ramp up really quickly and then turn off really easily without killing all your momentum, that I think is your best bet and it helps even out the cashflow issues that you're going to have, which will make it easy for you to charge more for production or mixing or whatever else it is in the future. Yeah, I will add, he does have a very nice studio setup. Did he? Basically, he's just abandoning for a long amount of time when I was on tour, so that's kind of the context there. Ah, I'll up what I said on

the Facebook post, which is basically someone got my experience from touring as a musician, at least in a metal band and maybe different in the bands that you're talking about, Chris, where it's like actually a list touring artists, but in my world, the only people that don't make money in the music industry are the ones actually in the bands. Literally. Anything else, you'll make money stuff. Your manager, a booking agent, label publisher, producer, mixing, mastering, merge. Even the Birch guy makes more than the band members and a lot of bands. So to me it's like what do you want to do? Do you still enjoy touring? Do you want to keep doing it? If not, leave the band and just build a studio up. You've already got a good career going with it. Yeah, that's what happened to me and I love this studio way more than I love touring. If my age, being able to be home all the time and not be on the road all the time.

Well and a part of this I think is at least to the things I was talking about before, is recognizing that there is no music industry anymore. There is no, I'm abandoned. That's my job. You are now in the audience monetization industry. You have an audience and your job is to figure out how to monetize that audience in a way that works for you. That could be like the girlfriend covet does guitar lessons or it could be I do co-writes by the hour and people hire me on a website and for $150 an hour I'll help you write a song and I'm monetizing my key audience to pay me to do that. There's any number of things you can do where you're monetizing your audience. That's where you need to focus.

Again, I don't think he's worried about the money thing. I think he's worried about building his studio career. Oh, while he's on the road. That's the thing. Trying to keep that momentum up. It's not trying to just keep monetization up.

I would say same thing. Then you need to find a side business that you can ramp up and ramp down that might be preproduction remotely or songwriting remotely. Something that plays into that big to both of those bigger pictures because the big thing for someone that's got a big following as a musician is that you can monetize that as a producer or mix engineering or whatever by letting your audience know, hey, guess what? How'd you like to have one of your favorite musicians work on your record, whatever that happens to be. There's a lot of ways to get cross pollination.

All right. Next thing is from Mike de Martinez. He says, gaining more clients for remote guitar session work. It's tough. That's his number one business problem right now, so I know we do have a lot of remote session people in our audience. People who do remote drums. I actually, if you go back to episode number 22 I love that episode where we talk to Emily Dolan Davis as I like to say her name. Pretty sure you just pronounced it wrong, Davies. There it is. Equally opportunity mispronouncing it's pronouncing things. We're also missing announcing mispronunciations podcast, episode 22 how Emily got hundreds of clients by combining two passions to create her niche. She's dope. Check that out. Yeah, she's dope. She's got a good story, but I would say that every single thing we talk about on this podcast is almost a one to one direct translation to your a remote session work business where the website stuff, quoting gigs, the pricing masterclass episode. I don't know what else to add here, Chris, other than

I'm trying to make up a joke about getting like a longer cable to help you get more remote work. I got longer guitar cable but it's not funny. So I wasn't going to make this the joke.

Ferris you should get a wireless system for your guitar so you can get [inaudible].

Oh yeah, that's the joke. Remote. Sorry. Maybe we cut this whole section out. No. Yeah that's tricky man. So you know the remarketing thing we've talked about is going to help with that cause you don't want people that are like, oh that's interesting and then they forget about you and never come back. Um, you know, one of the other things to do there as well is to toy around with offering a free sample. Whether that's 15 seconds. And back to our previous point about people getting too efficient too soon is to think about, you know, are you having them fill out a form and are you keeping them at arms length as they explore having you play on the record. If that's you, you might just think about freaking habit. Have video chat with them, you know, to be like, Hey, I'm going to press play on your song.

I'm going to play along with it while you're there. That to me sounds pretty interesting. I would be much more interested in like, oh cool. Yeah, let's hear what it sounds like. And you could use something like zoom was stereo audio where you press play and you know stream their song and then you play over top of it or remote session software. There's a million things that you could do to make it more personal and I think most people's mistake is they're like, well it's a business so it should be efficient and as few relationships as possible, which doesn't really work that well in 2019 that's not what people are looking for. They're looking for a real connection.

Oh it's moving to the next person here, Joe Han Jorgensen. I've butchered that. It's fine. He says I've got a full time side hustle and this is very closely related to the other question we answered, but I want to touch on something that he says here. I've got a full time side hustle and it's killing me. It's hard to find time to develop my business and work the full time job, my business and my family. I've got almost no time to find a part time job instead of a full time job. So basically he's trying to do a studio on the side. He's got a family, he's got a raise, he's got his full time job, doesn't even have time to find a part time side hustle in this case. Chris, what do you tell someone who is literally pushed to the limit? Like you don't have even a second despair to like browse a job listing somewhere or what?

Well I'll tell you what, I was talking to a new friend of mine the other day on the phone and he asked me a question about the podcast that kind of caught me off guard and I'd like to use that question to kind of springboard into this answer. And he has sort of the same thing of like, how do you balance having, you know, the mastering business, the podcast and new businesses and a family. And I was really surprised to hear myself say this, but it really made a big difference in my own heart as I kind of grasped this stuff. And I said, well, having businesses is one thing. Having a family is another thing. Having debt is a third thing. So having businesses and a family that's very different than having businesses as a family and debt. And I think that kind of gets to the root most of the time for a lot of people that are struggling with this is that they have a ton of debt.

And I'm like on a huge Dave Ramsey kick right now, Dave Ramsey's like the anti debt guy. He's incredible reading one of his books and he makes a joke about what does it not the three little pigs, Snow White, this joke that most people with debt kind of sing this song on their way to work and it's io, io. So off to work, I go. So a lot of times if you have debt, it's this idea that you're making decisions about work that are different than the decisions you would make if you didn't have debt. And if you are also trying to self actualize by making music for a living and you're balancing that screaming voice in the back of your head like we're going to check everything Mike, man, I pay off the bells. The sort of like you're going to lose your house.

You're making all decisions based on the fear instead of the self actualization.

Yes. So my advice to Johan here and I'm just making a guess, I'm not even making a guess. I would just say for most people in Johanns position, the issue isn't balancing family and work. The issue is balancing family work and debt

and if it's not debt for Joe Han here, Johann Joe Ha, I'm American and I'm going to mispronounce his name the way I want to. If it's not debt than it's also having an emergency fund. If you are to the point where you can't even like leave your day job to have a week or two of bandwidth while you find a new part time thing while you're building your studio, if you don't have the capital to do that, you're stuck. So get ahead. Pay off debt. If you have it, I hope you don't have any debt, but then get an emergency fund to where you could go three, six, 12 months without working if it came to that. I don't know where you're located, but in I think the u s right now it's like a 3.5% unemployment rate. It's like the lowest we've had in decades, if ever it might be the lowest of all time. So it's not hard to find a job right now.

Denmark, one of the things [inaudible] has got going for him as well as he lives in a part of the world where there's a lot of safety nets to catch people in situations like this.

Alright, so next person is Joel Paul. He says, my number one problem is feeling like a website and putting together is good enough. And then something about his own skills. But I wanted to touch on feeling like your website is good enough. This is something that I see a lot of people struggle with. It's this perfectionism around your website specifically and it could really be any other thing, but it's always something that delays you from taking the next step in your business. People will agonize over every little minute detail of their website instead of just putting you on the damn internet and just moving on. Does it work? Like is it 80% of the way there for now? Put it live. You can always change and iterate, but people will absolutely agonized over every little detail and it may not be your website, it could be your actual studio setup, getting all the decorations right before you actually doing the hard part, and this is a form of procrastination and it comes from a lack of self confidence in what you're doing.

You're procrastinating, actually pushing your business forward. In doing something like lead generation or doing something like actually going and meeting people or doing those steps you know you need to take. Instead you're letting fear get in away and procrastinate you from doing the things that actually matter in your business, your website, it does matter, but there are so many other things that matter before. A good website that most people, the people that agonize over a perfect website, these are the people that have completely stepped over the other things and gone past the other things that are more important than a website. And now they're focused on this one stupid, insignificant thing that's not going to make or break their business at this time in their life. And instead of just moving forward and making a decision and hitting publish, they let it continually delay them.

And here's why it's called fear man. That's it. Your website is public facing and at any given moment of any given day, somebody on there thinking that you're an idiot

right now. That's the fear, man. If you're lucky, if you're lucky, you're lucky that will happen.

And so here's the thing, we are not cut out for that. Human beings are not designed for criticism. We're designed to avoid criticism so that we can live in a community and ensure that we'll be able to like eat food and sleep and safety and maybe have some children someday. So the problem here is it you're afraid of what people will think of you. It's got nothing to do with your website, but man, join a club. This is the Gig is having an internet presence and just being okay that some people think you're a dick. Right? That was one of the scariest things for me of like getting into this podcast and the youtube videos that I've not caught up on, but the, all these things, it's being comfortable that you are making more friends than enemies

and I want to add that you have this fear of failure, fear of rejection. You have all these things like people looking at your website and say, look at this idiot. Those are the fears that go through your head. But the reality is for most people that are in this position, they won't have a single person come to that site. They won't have a single person even notice their site is the people who are self conscious about being in a room and they think everyone's going to look at them and judge them, but the reality is no one is even noticed you because everyone else is so focused on themselves. They're not even noticing you. So it's this unsubstantiated fear. I totally get it. It gets in my way all the time, but I also have this little logic in the back of my head. It's like it doesn't matter. Nobody even thinks about you, dude. Yeah.

Well, and here's the big thing. I would say most people in this situation think that it is their mission to avoid being criticized or thought you know that you suck or that you stay ink or whatever. You know that you're done. Whatever that the mission is defense. Your mission is not defense. If you're playing defense, that's a big reason. Your business is not doing crap. Businesses in the defense game, getting a business started as an office game. The mission is help as many people as you possibly can. That's it. Not keep everyone from throwing shade my way.

If you get to the point where you have trolls who are like making fun of you on the Internet or filling out your quote for them, calling you an idiot or commenting on youtube videos that your are so stupid and whatever. I'm going, I could say worse things cause we all know how bad youtube comments get, but I'm trying to keep this PG here. But if you get to that point, that's actually an accomplishment. If someone has gone out of their way to insult you like it's probably because you've gotten to the point where you actually have generated some amount of following on the Internet and rarely do I ever see the type of person who gets to that point agonize over every little detail of a website that hasn't launched yet. Anyone that's agonizing over a website that's at that level already has one version of website up.

They're just agonizing over the next version that will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. So keep that in mind, Joel. Paul, feeling like your website is good enough. Whatever you have right now is good enough. Put It on the Internet. Put an our Facebook community, people will give you input. You'll quickly find what the weakest links are. Then you can go back and fix those after you've already published it and then you can always iterate and move forward from there, but don't let that sort of stuff hold you back from doing the actual important stuff in your business that's going to actually help you.

I would say just kind of one other piece on that one on one help with website stuff. Website stuff is one of them. I think the more important and best use cases of, I'm going to sit down with like a business coach or an expert or a conversion optimization person and get some real feedback about how to make a website that makes money. Usually what people do in a situation like this is they sit down with a graphic designer, graphic designers, no offense, most of my best friends are graphic designers. Don't know anything about how to make a website that makes money. They know to make a website that's pretty, these are two very different things, so don't sit down with like a web developer or a graphic designer. Sit Down with an entrepreneur

or just watch my website creation course that to@recordingstudiowebsite.com that's the URL for that course.

That's amazing. I love that. Earlier on in our podcast, you used to make fun of me for my obsession with literal business names.

Yeah. You know what? I've graduated from those, Chris. I have now moved on from that. That said super old URL, so I've had that URL for years now, but recording studio website.com will actually help you get a website that looks good enough. It looked like everyone else's website that went through that course, but you know what? You have different clients than everyone else, so it's fine. Next number one question is from Josh met Matt, a tech motto, Tech Motto Tech. There we go. I know him now. Good. He says I'm finally getting more clients and charging a lot more than before. Congratulations Josh. I think my biggest struggle right now is just getting only writing slash production clients. I think that's what he's trying to get, but he's not getting those. I can't really say no to other projects. However, a few are turning into full production projects so it's not really a bad right now.

Only reason I want to cover this one problem here Chris, is because I want to point out one thing. If you're charging more than ever, you're getting a lot of clients. You're in a really good spot. You found the part of the market that is attracted to you and to try to force the market to give you something else. The market just being like your local scene or your regional music scene or whatever, like there is naturally going to be a type of client that will start to come to you and you can try to influence that, but at the end of the day you don't get to really pick who comes to your studio based on your past work, based on your past relationships, based on your current skillset, based on your website's messaging. You're just going to naturally attract a certain type of person and if you hate that type of person, it can get really, really tough. If you don't hate it, just keep nurturing that. But if you try to force a type of client or type of work that you're not naturally getting, you're taking away from the time you could put into something that's already working and just doubling down on that. So don't get distracted by a type of client that you wish you could have. There's always the grass is greener on the other side. Focus on what you're getting now and just become the best at that.

I've been doing coaching with him and one of the businesses he's working on is dope. The concept is that he's a producer, but he's also a writer and someone comes to him and says, I have an idea for a song but it's not a song yet, or I have something I want to write about. And then he helps facilitate writing the song with them and then eventually turn that into a full production. So it's more than just like a producer, which is like, Hey, I have these songs. Can you help them be cooler? It's this, hey, I want songs. Um, I need someone to help guide me through the writing process and make them into like a deliverable product. I think Josh is onto something there and I think a lot more people are going to be doing that in the future in various genres. I think there's going to be specific people. Here's the thing I want to back up and just kind of Pat Josh in the back of your, for having the vision to see this. The percentage of people that have songs that want to make a record of everyone on earth is pretty small. What two 3% tops. The percentage of people who want to record but who don't have the songs is insanely big.

It's a really good point. It's kind of like if you just look at any market in the world, whether it's people who are authors or writers, people who want to write a book, the amount of people who actually ever write a book is a tiny, tiny portion. So if you're trying to build a business that is, let's just say educating people. If you're making like an online course for people that are currently authors, your pull of potential customers is tiny compared to trying to service people who are aspiring authors, which is like almost everyone in the world. Like it's some high, high percentage of people that express interest that one day I want to write a book. So back to the songwriting thing. If you're able to service people at the beginning of that dream, you're going to have a much, much larger potential client pool. That being said, I still have to stick with what I said about trying to force your way into a niche that's not to you.

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. There's a lot of listening to the market and given the market, but I want case in point. Bounced, Butler, man, I had no intention of making that into a business until I mentioned it on this podcast and people were like that to me. I was like, Oh crap. All right, here we go. All right, we got one more here, Chris, and that is from Brian Lash and he just has one word as his number one problem here. What does that one word that is Brian lashes number one problem. Malaria. I'm just kidding. There's a, there's a shot for that. Is there a shot for malaria? I don't even know anymore. Yes, I've had it. Oh, expensive. Gosh. Well I didn't have malaria. If you get immunized before you go to like certain parts of the world so you don't get malaria.

Fun Fact Malaria has killed well malaria and it's like cousins. All the other diseases spread by mosquitoes have killed half of humans ever. Are you serious? Ever? So there's that. How many people is that? I want to call bullshit on that stat. I think I got that from Bill Gates man cause that's like his mission. His mission is like anti-malarial and stuff like that. Anyways, let's get back to Brian Lash. He commented scaling, what is scaling? Scaling is your business is running and now you're trying to grow it, right? Man. There could be so many potential problems here that are holding you back from scaling. But in our industry, we're in the service industry and there's essentially two ways to scale. There's well there's three. You can raise your prices and work with less people for more money. You can delegate, you can hire people and teach them how to do pieces of your job or three.

And this is kind of the one that's my expertise. You can become more efficient and I think for most people the efficiency thing is often some of the lowest hanging fruit and the thing you want to address first because if you try to charge more you're still doing it inefficiently. If you try to hire people, this is even worse because now you've hired people to use your inefficient system and when you do that, anytime I love Henry Ford says this in his autobiography, he says anytime there's a task that is done again and again and again, that is less efficient than it could be. You will pay an inefficiency tax in time, money or both. I read that in his book and was like, Oh my gosh, written in 1922 still relevant to this day and so I would say efficiency. If you're in a position where you're like, okay, the business is running, this is going really, really well.

I'm struggling to keep up with all the work. Efficiency is almost always the lowest hanging fruit. And when I say efficiency, usually there are systems that you can put in place that will save you five minutes a day or another system that'll save you 15 minutes a day or another system that will save you 10 seconds every time you finish a song. When you can find a system like that and put it in place, I think you guys can probably see where I'm going with this. When you can find a system and put that in place, you avoid paying that inefficiency tax. And when you avoid paying the inefficiency tax, your dollars per hour goes up as well as the number of potential hours that you can work. So this is a little bit, I don't know how I feel about this cause we're only just now deciding that we're going to sponsor our own podcast with our two businesses, but I have to bring this up.

I owe it to you guys to bring it up. Your revision process is less efficient than it could be. Perhaps you need a system like file pass, Dotcom and or at the end of the day you're like, okay, I've got five mixes, crap. They just asked me for vocal up versions of those songs as well. Crap. They also asked for vocal down what's going on. Now I have 15 bounces to do and I'm going to sit here for a good hour, I'm going to do a bounce, I'm going to wait four minutes and then do another balance. I'm going to wait for a minute.

Assuming it's all real time bounce, but even if it's not real time bounce. Yeah, it's still going to take a reasonably high amount of time to do that.

Yeah. In a situation like that on app like Bounce Butler can save the day because you can leave your studio and let the studio continue to export, render, bounce, whatever your dog happens to call that process and then you can show up the next day or pull out your phone, get out Dropbox or Google drive or whatever. You had bounced, Butler bounce your stuff too and check all the mixes remotely. So there's a big opportunity with something like that where it's a no brainer to have a revision system and your revision system probably is not as good as file paths.

You know, we need to do, we need to set it to where bounce Butler just bounces directly into file paths. So you have your songs directly in file.

Yes, girl. Yeah, let's do that. Forthcoming. Yeah. So check out file pass.com check out basketballer.com bounce Butler is an early access so you have to apply to join his file pass in early access still? Or is it open now?

Hm.

And we're kind of moving in and out of it right now. I hear you. We're like slowly letting in more people. And so at the time that we record this, we're letting in more people at the time that this airs, maybe we won't me, who knows? But you can get on our waiting list either way.

Yeah. So definitely these are things to think about. I'm not saying these are the only ways to become more efficient. The obviously aren't. There's plenty of things you can do like hiring an assistant. If you're a mix engineer and you hire an assistant to prep your mixes because you're more efficient and now you can mix more songs and make more money and that's scaling. So these are important things to ask. If you're in a position where you're miserable because you're working so much, the lowest hanging fruit is to become more efficient first, then to begin delegating because now you are super efficient and when you hire someone to help with these systems, you're not paying them for your own inefficiency. And then the other option from there is also obviously raise your prices, which could come at any point throughout that process.

I want to touch on a couple things here. This is not related to sponsorship stuff. Raising your rates is such an undervalued way of scaling because the biggest roadblock you run into when you're scaling is you run out of time and when you start to raise your rates, you will naturally have clients, but a lot of times it's a dish proportion. It's a disproportionate drop off. Meaning, can we stick with dish proportion that disproportionate, disproportionate, it could be a point where you, let's just say for an easy example, you double your rates. Well, even if you have exactly half the clients that you had before, you're still actually making the same amount of money. You're just working half as much now and that opens you up to so many more opportunities to grow your business, launch another side, hustle, do something completely off the wall that you've never thought about trying before, brushing up on another skill.

There's just so much that's distant, super underrated. One is raising your rates. People have this crazy fear behind it, but in a service based business, I mean if you go back and listen to episode 82 and 84 I think when we talk about that breaking the time barrier ebook that we went through, those are good ones, man. There's so much to learn and so much to glean out of that. I want to also tell you to go back and listen to episode two of the podcast, our second episode ever where I interviewed Chris Graham. That's basically his story of like when he hit that wall, trying to scale his business and what he had to do to start automating things. And maybe even, I don't know if we talk about my episode, where we talk about when I start talking about delegation, hiring people, I don't remember if we get into that for my episode or not.

You did and it's awesome. I was referencing that when I talked about hiring an assistant. That was really cool when you talked about that in that episode. So those two episodes alone are actually a good place to get started with scaling. And if you are at the point where like time is your biggest roadblock in your studio, then it's a no brainer to sign up from bounced Butler and file paths because it's gonna help save you time. It's a return on investment of time. Any amount of time you get back, you can put back into your business to earn more than you would have paid for our software. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's one of these things like there's a lot of software solutions like this in every industry in the world. And I will always pay for them. I pay, I want to say for a six figure on the studio for four, five, six recordings for file paths.

All combined, there's multiple thousands of dollars per month. We're paying for software that saves us time and ultimately earns more than what we're paying for it. The best way to think about software is like little employees. You're paying 20, 30, 40, 50 bucks a month and they are taking care of a task. They will never take a day off. They will never ask for a raise. If they're good, they will never, uh, some, some software might, they will never ask for vacation time. It is like the perfect little employee and they handle that one task or few tasks better than any one human could. So that's why I love software and side note, they're far more consistent than a human being can possibly be. I'm not saying that robots are going to replace all of us, but they're going to replace the annoying crappy parts of our job so that we can focus on what we do better than any creature ever, which is be creative. And make awesome art. So double down on what you do well and that's why we took on lander.com as a sponsor.

No, no, no, no.

Oh Man. I'm going to end on that. Anything else you want to add before we get out of here? Chris? Um, I just want to thank James for his liberal use of compression on my rant just now while I seem to know also, uh, James, do not put them in our show notes as a link. I do not want to support them as a back link. Yeah. For SEO purposes. Don't do that.

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Quick announcement for anyone who is looking to join the profitable producer forests or anyone who is currently a member of the profitable producer course. We are starting up our next accountability accelerator bootcamp. That's AAB 5.0 is our fifth one. We start that on Monday, August 5th. So if you are interested in joining that, this is where we get a group of about a hundred people together. We put them into teams of anywhere from five to 10 people. We assign a team leader or team captain to each team. We put everybody inside of slack, which is like our live chat community and then we put you through your paces for like eight weeks and this is, this is one of my favorite things to do because we get to give you weekly assignments, things that are going to actually push your business forward.

We actually force you to implement a lot of the things we teach in the course and things we've taught on this podcast and we give you actual deliverables that you have to turn in. You have to submit via a form on our site every single week. By Sunday night you've got your team to help you. You've got your team captain to help you. We do group coaching calls every week where I'm helping you if you get stuck on any of these tasks, but if you do not turn your work in every single week, you get a strike for every single action item that you miss. And this is the fun part because it, it lights a fire under your ass and uh, if you get three strikes, you are kicked out of the program. Sounds harsh. I know statistically speaking we actually have a very small strikeout rate and that's because of two things.

One is the accountability of all the people surrounding you, encouraging you, helping you put these things into place, helping you get past these uh, tasks that we're making you do. That helps immensely. But we also, we give you points for every single task you do. We give you points every single week. And the teams at the end of AAB with the most points I think is the top three, uh, split us, I think in something like five or $10,000 worth of prizes. It's freaking awesome. And for those of you who are traveling or going to be out of town for a week or two, I'm going to be on vacation during one of these weeks. We give everybody the chance to do extra credit tests. These are things that are a little above and beyond the week to week tasks. And these are things that will help negate strikes. Meaning if you get two or three extra credit assignments in the bank, then when it comes time for you to have your week off or something comes up or you're on vacation or you just don't have good internet or something comes up where you have to miss a missing assignment or turn in something late, then that will erase those strikes so that you don't strike out of the program.

So this thing, I mean, this is the fifth one we've done. We've got this thing well dialed in. It's a machine at this point and this is by far the best part of joining the profitable producer course. If you're not a member, go to the profitable producer.com and sign up today. You have until the day before. So you have until August 4th to sign up for PPC and register for this accountability accelerator bootcamp. If you are already a student, you have until that Sunday night, that's August 4th. That's your final night to register for this. And this will also be the, the last one we do for the year. Uh, this one starting in August puts us to August, September, October, mid October. When is when we would finish it up or early to mid October. We have a whole word ceremony usually the week after the thing's over. That's uh, so it's, it'll take us about nine or 10 weeks to get through the whole thing, but we won't have time to start another one before we start butting up into the Christmas season.

And that's really not a good time to try to do one of these. So it'll likely be early next year until we actually get another one of these, uh, started up. So if you're interested again, go to the profitable producer.com or if you're already a member of PPC, uh, look for an email from, you should've gotten multiple emails from me by now for how to sign up for this new accountability accelerator bootcamp. Can't wait to see you inside of there. As always, thanks so much for listening this podcast. We absolutely appreciate all of the kind words we get in emails and Instagram messages and in person. It's NAM here this week. Right now in Nashville. We've got summer nam going on, and I've just run into a ton of people who have gotten, I've said so many kind words about the podcast, so we truly, truly appreciate you're listening to us. Until next time, happy [inaudible].