The Pricing Masterclass: How To Charge More, Add More Value, and Win More Projects

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 84

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

six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my amazing cohost, none other.

Then the Christopher. What's your middle name? I always forget your Jay Graham from Chris Graham, mastering.com how are you doing today, Chris? Yeah, what's up? People hurt. Yeah. Ugh, not my vibe. How are you doing man? I'm good, man. I'm really good. I'm super good. I was really excited to say this on the podcast this morning. I don't want to say who it is yet, but I have this client who is a repeat customer who came back to me, who's my favorite single client on earth. You've probably never heard of them. They're from far, far, far away, and they don't speak English. Well, you just gave it away. Now everyone knows who you're talking about. No, that's literally everyone that's not American. But I had this like magical moment last night. I was mastering late at night and I pulled this song up and started to work on it and it was so beautiful. It was like one of the best moments of my career. It was so beautiful that as I listened to for the first time, I completely forgot that I was mastering. I was so sucked into the song that I totally was, oh, oh yeah, I'm working. I saw your Facebook post about this and I'm like,

I don't know if that's ever happened to me. And then I realized, oh, it's because I'm mixed heavy metal. I don't get lost in a song's beauty in this type of music. I just get angry out of nowhere. Why am I so angry?

This is going to sound funny. I find heavy metal, very relaxing.

I actually do that on my spare time and I'm like working. If I'm working on something for like the six figure, I'm studio for file paths. I want music playing this like instrumental. So I have a playlist of metal instrumental songs of either bands I produced or bands that I just like and it's like, it's awesome to just chill out and like zone out to heavy music, like low tuned bands.

There's a band that I'm obsessed with called covet. I've heard you shouldn't do that. Yeah, a Little Bible joke for Ya. Hardcore bands with sin names. Yeah. What are you going to do? But yeah, they're great. They're like an instrumental band. And the lead guitarist is this Asian chick and she's incredible. It's heavier. They tour with like periphery and stuff like that. Like they're legit. But my gosh, they're so good. I love them.

Good man. So what's new in your life and for the listeners now just say, you know, Chris and I are trying today, we've done very little pre show discussion so we genuinely have no idea what each other had been doing. Usually what we'd have happened is Chris and I talked for like 30 minutes before the podcast and then we try to come up with like conversation about like what we're working on or what we're doing and we're like, well, we just talked about this for 30 minutes, so we're just gonna make up bullshit. So genuinely, Chris, I don't know what you've been up to, what you've been up to.

Well, what I've been up to is I've been finishing the bounce butler Beta. By the time this episode drops, the Beta will most likely be available and it's hot. I'm super pumped about that. That's going to be super fun. Bounced Butler, if you haven't heard about it yet, is going to be this piece of software where you're like, hey, I have a hundred sessions I need to bounce and bounce. Butler's like, Hey, I'll do it for you and text you when I'm done and then you leave and go home. They were reminds me of like the windows like 95 yeah. Paperclip prickly I, yeah, and it makes me really angry. That'll be my voice. Hi, welcome to parents. Berler I just think of your stupid Butler logo guy saying that to me and it makes me so mad. Oh yeah. So that's been exciting, but I am ridiculously excited for Monday, Monday we've mentioned like how much I love reading biographies and history books on the podcast.

In the past I read Mark Cuban's autobiography and the take home from that was read biographies. Really, really, really successful people have one thing in common and as they read biographies, I don't read biographies, I don't believe in them. They're so good. Here's why I'm nerding out on Monday, Mr. David McCullough is going to be in Columbus, Ohio. He wrote John Adams, he wrote 1776 he wrote the Wright brothers. He wrote all these freaking unbelievably beautiful and informative books and I'm going to resist the urge to squeal when I get to meet him. So he's like one of my favorite people on Earth. If you've thought about like getting in biographies or history books, David McCollough is absolutely the easiest person to begin with because everything he writes is gorgeous.

Well, that's nice, man. I recently got back into the gym again. I was out of the gym for awhile because honeymoon and married life, you know that anyone that's gone in a while without working out, you know what I'm talking about when I talk about the tax you have to pay when you finally go back again. And it is brutal because leg day doing squats like I'm doing real lifts you and it is awful. And I tweaked my back today because I tried to do too much. So that's where I'm at right now, man. How much happy weight have you gained, Brian? Four pounds, including honeymoon time. That's nothing. Yeah, I'm fine. I gained four pounds eating a cheeseburger. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. In a day. It's not a big deal. No. Thankfully I retained like I can maintain weight pretty well. Like I've never really had a massive weight problem before except in my like early twenties maybe. But even then it wasn't too bad. Anything else you went up to get me on buddy?

No, just David McCollough. I'm so excited. I tried to look him up. I couldn't find them. I just don't care. It's hard to spell. I'm taking my mother. We bought tickets and we get signed copies of his new book. The pioneers are really pumped. That'd be really, Gosh, there's the nerdiest thing I've ever said.

Yeah. I was about to say like, this is something obscure writer I've never heard of. He's probably like world famous. I just don't know who he is.

He has the presidential medal of freedom, Brian. Okay. He's kind of a big deal. Well, you would like them. Everybody would like David McCullough. There's no way anyone still listening to the podcast at this point. Yeah. Sorry for the three of you that haven't tuned out because of my nerd ramblings, there's a really good episode for today. I know that. Yeah, it's going to be great. Brian, what are we talking about today?

Yeah, so today we're actually going to, I don't know how to explain this, but we're going to talk through a book, but this is way more exciting. If you've been a part of the six figure homes CEO Community, and maybe I'll even say this to the mailing list. We assigned a book for you to read as a free ebook that is put out there by a software company called freshbooks. If you are looking for accounting software, it's kind of like Godaddy bookkeeping, which is what I use. It's kind of like quickbooks, which is what you use Chris. It's just another alternative.

Yeah, and the premise of this ebook is essentially should you charge by the hour or should you charge by the project? And this is a conversation that happens a lot in our industry. A lot of people are really into the I charge by the hour and there are upsides to that and a lot of other often, however, no offense if you charge by the hour, I'm more modern approaches to charge by the project. This book essentially argues why you should charge by the project and it's awesome. I've read a lot of business books and this is funny cause it's a little freaking pdf on the internet. Yeah. It will take you about an hour to read. Yeah. And It presents such a compelling argument why you should, as a freelancer, do your best to move to per project pricing. But what freshbooks does is, let's say that you invoice after the fact when you work with somebody, freshbooks hooks into your bank account and you're like, hey, send them an invoice and then it looks at your bank account and if you haven't received a payment from them yet, then it automatically emails them. I was like, Hey, please send me my money and then waits a little bit longer and then emails them again automatically. Okay, yeah, it's great.

That's why file past exists. We created file paths so that you don't have to go chase down money. They just can't get their files until you pay. That solves that problem. So you don't need fresh books, guys, just sign up for file bass.

Let me be really clear. I do not advocate that you run your business on a, I'll invoice you and you can pay when you feel like it. I'm struggling to keep that part of the show and advice buffet, but I am adamant in my life I will not invoice people because then a huge portion of your job is like being stressed that someone has stood you up.

That's just a side note. We've talked about this in the podcast in excess. I think most people understand that, but the topic of this book is very interesting because it's relevant to really any freelancer, totally. Especially recording studio owners. If you're a freelance studio person, whether you're doing mixing or mastering or editing for freelance work or you're doing full production or recording, it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you're looking for artists and it's on you to find those artists and figure out what you're going to charge for the work that you're doing. This ebook is extremely relevant and I might try to rewrite it in a way this exactly for recording CEO's, but this is, it's kind of a parable, isn't it? It's a parable about a designer who's starting their career. What happens when they hit the ground running and fail and then what they learn as they're going.

And there's this a lot to unpack in here and so I've should have at some point sent a link to you in the Facebook community or in an email to download and read this book. So hopefully by now they've already read this ebook so they're kind of following along. But even if you haven't, this will be a very valuable episode for you. And if you haven't read that ebook yet, if you go to our show notes@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash 84 that's slash eight four there will be a link to open up the pdf for this. And I would just say pause the podcast, go open up that pdf, spend the next hour reading it and then come back to the podcast later. I just think it's gonna be better for you if you can read the ebook before we get to this. I would agree. Yeah. Either way though.

I think this is going to be helpful for you. If you just refuse to read the ebook and you just like give me information. I don't want to have to work for it. That's fine too. That's what we're here for. So let's just start the beginning of this book here. I've made some notes as I was reading it and we're going to just chat section by section on what this person's going through cause it's a story and I think it's something that a lot of people have probably either gone through or are going through now or will eventually go through depending on where you are in your career. So let's set the stage here. Chris, this person is a graphic designer or a web designer and they are trying to figure out how to go full time in this world. I think they have a day job in this book and they're trying to figure out how to go full time.

So a lot of people already in that position where their studios, they are part time where their studios and there have a full time day job that they are using to support their life while they build their passion project on the side. Is that a fair assessment, Chris, of this person where they're at? Oh absolutely. Yeah. This guy goes to the only freelance designer that he knows, this guy named John and ask for John's advice on what he should do to figure out why you should charge and just how to get started in general, and this is the first case in the book where there's a really big lesson to be told or a lesson to be learned and that is be careful who you ask advice from because there are a lot of people that are very eager to give you advice and a lot of people that give you advice or giving good trash advice. Chris, has there ever been an instance where someone has given you advice has just been the exact opposite of what you should have actually done? Oh my.

It's harder to think of examples where that didn't happen. And I think the big issue there, and this is something that I think is really important for us to take home, most of the guys listen to this podcast are younger guys that are coming up and we as younger people, I'm 37 I'm the oldest you can possibly be and be still be a millennial. And us as the millennial generation are at a really strange crossroads in history because an almost every generation throughout human history, you grow up in your parents' world, you grow up in the generation that proceeded use world. And that generation can tell you this is how things work. We do not live in our parents' world as millennials anymore. We live in our world. So much has changed. So like what work in the 80s is not

what works anymore. We're worked in the early two thousands doesn't work anymore.

Case in point. Yeah. What worked in the early two thousands there's a sane, there's actually a book title called what got you here, won't get you there. And there's this idea, I'm kind of misapplying that, but there's this idea of like when you talked to somebody who might have earned their success 20 years ago, they might give you a great advice. Had you had that advice 20 years ago and that's I think a lot of the problems. Sometimes you get really bad advice just because people aren't aware of how much has changed.

Yeah. So the hero of his story goes to this guy named John asking how we should come up with is pricing for his new web design services and John gives him the standard advice that you'll really find anywhere on the Internet. And it's something called cost plus pricing. So it's cost dash plus pricing. Chris, can you kind of give us a rundown of what cost plus pricing is?

Yeah, I mean it's fairly simple. You figure out how much it costs you to operate per hour and then you figure out how much profit you want to make and that's what you charge. You add those two things together. And what's interesting here is John's a little farther ahead than most audio engineers. This guy has thought through how much he needs per hour to stay in business. Most studios that I've encountered that don't listen to this podcast don't do that. They have completely no idea what their costs for operation is.

Yeah, and so just going back, the hero's name is Steve. It's slipped my mind, but I went back and just looked it up just now. Steve is the hero of this journey. John is the bad advice man. It really, it doesn't sound like bad advice it sounds like. Oh yeah, I'll just help. It's just my overhead. What am I living expenses, how much do I need to make in order to just basically scrape by and then I'll add somebody on top of that, which is like my profit, my fun money, my extra money on top of that. So the studio world, we see a lot of people charging per hour, and this is the way I did it when I first started and I was just trying to scrape by and then I moved to a day rate, but they rates a similar thing to whatever you charge per day.

You divide by the amount of hours you work and that's your alley rate. And then some people charge, even on a per project pricing, they charge a flat fee based on estimated hours. So it all really narrows down to this hourly income that you're trying to make. And we will come to find out later in the story, this is not necessarily the best way to price yourself. And there's a number of reasons why in the book he starts realizing that prices a race to the bottom when you're focused on price and he's struggling to compete with other designers, he's struggling to win these projects so he has to lower his rate in order to win some of these projects. So he goes back to John, he's like, John, listen man, I'm struggling to get any of these clients to hire me. I'm having to lower my rates.

It seems like a race to the bottom. What should I do at this point? And this is where John gives him some more bad advice because this is bad advice. John and John and essentially tells him, Steve, listen man, you're early in your career. You just got to pay your dues, suck it up, take the project that you can take on and you'll eventually claw your way out of this. Hey, your pay your dues. This is a topic in and of itself that I think we may end up wanting to talk on for a minute, Chris, and that is the idea of paying your dues. I do not necessarily love this idea. I get it to an extent, but what this leads to is the mindset that I will just take on any project because I'm paying my dues right now. And I was doing a group coaching call for my PPC students this morning and one of the questions was from a guy who is stuck in this endless cycle of working with bands that are not serious about what they do, but they don't have any ambitions to be successful.

They don't have any knowhow into how to get their songs listened to by a large audience. And so these people that are hiring him don't have a lot of money to pay for their work. Well, what happens inevitably is he finishes these projects, he takes whatever he can get for these projects, and then these clients are happy with what they got, but they're just referring more clients that aren't serious about what they are working on. Because here's the thing, birds of a feather flock together, right? Most people are similar to the people that are around them. So if you are working with all of these, for lack of a better term, trash clients, or you could just say for a nicer way, more politically correct way, clients who are not interested in their own success, if that's the type of client you're working with predominantly, then you're going to get trashed clients because they're gonna refer you, their friends who are trashed clients. And so this is an endless cycle. If you get stuck in this mindset of I need to pay my dues, I need to pay my dues, it's going to take a miracle to get yourself out of this trap.

Yeah, and I think one of the things that's interesting to hear, as I'm sure some of you are like, these guys don't think there's any such thing as paying their dues. They're morons. These young flibs. That's how it used to be though.

Yeah. Back in the seventies eighties nineties that was how it was. You had to pay your dues, you had to eat shit in order to make it in the career.

Now, here's the thing. There are parts of our industry where you do need to pay your dues and those are parts of the industry where you are trying to have the exact same career that somebody else already has. When you want to go and play in someone else's sandbox, you have to pay your dues. Here's the thing though, in our industry and pretty much every industry on the face of the planet right now, the people who are successful are the ones who made their own sandbox. They created their own niche and they made their own rules. Those people don't have to pay their dues and we're, what we're seeing is that more and more people in every industry under the sun are making their own sandbox so they don't have to pay your dues. So it's not whether you have to pay your dues or not.

If you want the exact same career as x, Y, z famous mix engineer and you want to be just like him, yes, you will have to pay your dues. However, that's probably silly because the most money you can make, the most satisfaction you can have and the most freedom you can have involves building your own sandbox so that your business perfectly reflects who you are and what you are into. So that's why I think the pay your dues thing is just bananas. This isn't like the 17 hundreds anymore. We're not trying to like, what would it be? Just like Miller John who makes the shoes and I will go and do the exact same things that he does and learn how to make the exact same types of shoes that he does and thereby not have any

artistic expression whatsoever. Yeah. Back then it was you had an apprenticeship and then you became a journeyman. They had levels to these careers and that was about paying your dues. It's just not like that anymore unless you're in certain industries. If you're in the film industry and you're doing sound design and film or video games, it's a different world. But again, you're trying to get someone else's exact career that already exists. Yup. A defined career and in our world if you're a freelance audio engineer or home studio owner, which is most of our listeners, there is no template for you to follow. So paying your dues is a loser's game. Yup. Amen Brian. So let's move on. Fast forward a little bit. Steve finally finds a client that gained some success in this instance. It's like a startup that he did a website for and put an ecommerce platform on and this company went on to do extraordinarily well making tons and tons of money off this website and Steve got paid a measly measly sum for this and he felt like, man, I should have charged more for this project.

And this relates to the studio owners because if you are lucky, you will have a project that does really, really well. And honestly, this is more of a lesson learned in a book than what will actually happen because if you are working with these nickel and dime clients, you will be so lucky to get a client that just blows up or that gets a grammy or some other big thing happens that validates you. This just doesn't happen in this book. It does happen and he's like, man, I should have charged more. I really left a lot of money on the table because he got so much value out of what I did for them. And so he goes back to his friend John and asks the device, he says, Hey John, I just work with this client. They did really, really well. So you can just say like, Hey, this client just got a grammy.

How do I capitalize on this? Right? And John Tells Mr Steve, Steve, man, all you gotta do is raise your rates. Now charge more. We keep that voice going for the rest of the show. Actually, this is the end of sketchy John, because this is the last bad advice that John gives. So Steve goes back and starts to racist rate. So in this scenario, let's just imagine you're a mixing engineer and you get a grammy all of a sudden, and now you're a grammy winning mixing engineer, which just sounds great. You're like, now I need to capitalize. They need to ride the coattails as far as possible. I'm going to double my rates, which is great if you can double your rates, I'd say go for it. But here's what Steve found out. As he started looking for higher paying clients, most of his work coming in was still these nickel and dime clients that could not afford him in the first place.

Much less has doubled higher rates now. And so it's just the same exact thing. It's this race to the bottom. 99% of his clients can't afford them, and occasionally he'll get a high paying client, but it really isn't enough to keep the doors open. So he's back to where he was at the very beginning. These new rates just don't work for the majority of the clientele that he's built up over the years. And I think this goes back to a really good point that chase Jarvis made on Article Chase Jarvis is for those of you who don't know, he's the founder of creative life and he was a very successful photographer and there's just so many parallels between the business of photography in the business of recording. But he had a really good article that is just talking about your $500 client will never be your $5,000 client. And I think this is the case here, when he had this client that blew up Aka they got their grammy. Most of your past clients are these $500 clients. They're not going to become your $5,000 clients. So just raising your rates because you had one validating moment is never going to work for you.

Yeah. And I think the thing that's interesting here, correct me if I'm wrong at Brian here, but I think what happened was John, no, Steve went to this client that he made this amazing website for that made them millions of dollars and he made a classic mistake. He said, I think I deserve more after the fact. So what he built worked, made a bunch of money, but he didn't charge in a way where he was entitled to anything. And he pulled the I deserve card after the success had happened. It's not real. It's not a thing. It's a complete fantasy. And exactly what you would think would happen happen is that this big client was like, uh, no, we will not pay you any more than what was agreed upon when we hired you. And I think people lean often on this idea of like, well, if it blows up and they don't pay me, I'll just tell them I deserve to more doesn't work. It's not a thing. And I feel for Steve, I feel for that mentality, but I even myself have to continually explain to my, to my heart, no, Chris, that's not the way the world works. You're not going to get more money by saying I deserve more after the fact.

Well said, Chris, just so you know, that didn't happen in the book, but that's still a really good point. So should have, and it can happen in your version of the book, Brian, when you write this for audio engineers. That's true. All right, let's move on to the story. Steve is just not having success. He's very frustrated. He finds out that John had to take on a day job because his freelance career was failing. Burn. Ooh. Yeah. So now you realize how bad of advice this was because John was not even a position to give advice because his career was failing.

Well, and let's pause there and talk about that. A lot of times what will happen, at least in my experience as somebody whose career is not going well but has been doing it for a long time, feels terrible about themselves and ends up giving advice to younger people to make themselves feel better.

Yep. And I've seen this on the Internet, man.

Yeah. You see this like you go in a forum and you ask a question and a bunch of people who want to feel better about themselves chime in with like, wow, yo can never argue with that type of dither all your halftime of a transformer on that type of microphone or it doesn't sound voice. All these opinions in the hopes that someone will take their advice and say, oh thank you. Oh wise one and then they feel better about themselves when it's just a procrastination technique, when they should be doing stuff that will move the needle in their own business rather than talking on some stupid forum about stuff that doesn't matter.

Well, as we progressed in the story, Steve is in a dark place. He took bad advice from someone that should have never given him an advice. His freelance career is failing and he's struggling to get clients that are paying him to actually make ends meet. He's doing projects for 10 15 $20 an hour when he needs 50 $60 an hour just to survive and he starts looking through his list of contacts and he finds out he has a mutual connection with this woman named Karen and Karen is the most successful designer in the city. How convenient is that for the story, Chris? Pretty convenient. It's not convenient. They're name is Karen because Karen is now a meme. A Karen is like a, yeah, they need to speak to the manager. Haircut lady. Yeah, exactly. Sorry if your name is Karen went on judge you at all by the way.

Yeah. Thanks Kyle. Appreciate that. No offense to my name. Kyle. Also meme. I love the Kyle means to, our friend's name is Kyle. Have you seen that? What happens in a Kyle wedding or whatever? When Kyle gets married it's like literally him and like Fox shirt and a fox hat backwards and signed glasses with his wife in a wedding dress and is on tire grooms parties in like Foxboro clothes. Oh my gosh, I love it. Yeah. So let's talk about Karen now. Karen is the biggest designer in her city and he has a conversation with her and she agrees to meet up with him for lunch and in our world, this could be a studio owner that you really admire. This could be in person, this could be online. It's just finding a mutual connection of someone that could actually help you. It could be hiring, coaching from Chris Graham, Hey, it can be one of these things, but it's someone who does actually have the experience that can help you.

And so Karen sits down and gets the lay of the land for where his business is at currently as she's a preposition at the end of the sentence. So I apologize. And she introduced is something called value based pricing. This is how she prices her projects. This is really where we get the meat of the story early on. If we had background music in our podcast, which we probably should because we're a music podcast. No, we're not going to do that. That's too much work. That's where it would have come in right there. Like value based pricing. Broadstream project. Come on Brian. That was kind of funny. No, I didn't lie.

So Karen proceeds to drop some nuggets of wisdom, some wisdom bombs onto Steve here and she's just talking about how she prices her projects and she's asking John John, whenever you are hired to record a band, rephrasing things here for the sake of our podcast listeners, when someone hires you to record a song, do they hire you for the sake of recording a song? Probably not. They actually hire you for the sake of petitioner growing their music careers. And this is something worth exploring because we talked about this on the podcast before. Think about what they're actually hiring you for. Are they hiring you for your gear? Are they hiring you for your facilities? Are they hiring you for your good looks good looks no, they're not really hiring you for any of these things. These are all pluses in the story, but at the end of the day they're looking for an end product that is going to move hearts.

It's going to resonate with people, it's going to be art that is accepted by a wide audience, hopefully profitably. And this is really where we get the meat of discovering how to charge for projects. It's not, I deserve this because of x, y, Z. It's not. I have all of this gear and beautiful facilities and spent millions of dollars and a half tons of debt and went to full sail and have tons of debt there too and therefore I deserve $200 an hour. It's none of that. It is trying to figure out what is the goal of your client and how can you help them reach that goal and what is the value of that client reaching that goal?

Well, this is huge. It gets to something that I love to talk about. It's one of my favorite topics. It's objective versus subjective and I think many people in our industry look at their services as objective meaning object, you know, like it's hard. It's something that you can quantify very, very easily. We don't work in an objective industry. Even as a mastering engineer. I don't make objective work. I make subjective work and we all make subjective work because subjectivity is whether the art is good or not, whether it gives you goosebumps, whether it is going to leave a legacy and whether it's going to be one of these songs where people listen to it and want to be closer to this artist as a result of hearing a three minute song. Music is magic. It's the most magical thing on earth and it doesn't make any sense that an artist can make one song in their bedroom, release it and be ridiculously rich and famous and not just rich and famous but loved like people are obsessed with them.

That's what happens in a studio and that's why some studios are worth a lot more than others. When you approach it from a purely objective standpoint of like, wow, you could go with him, but uh, we have real la two a compressors and yeah, we have an array. When you start to argue like that of like, well, we're objectively better than there. It doesn't make any sense. We don't know why humans like music, we don't know why we get weepy. I don't know why. The song I was mastering last night wrecked me. I went and got my wife, brought her down into the studio and we stood here and listened to the two songs that this artist sent me and just like, we're floored, like super emotional, like hearts, a flutter, and that doesn't make any sense. It's not even in English. I have no idea what she's saying. Why am I affected emotionally by this? It's bonkers. And that's the difference between when you approach your pricing objectively, when you should realize that you're selling is subjective service and that's a good thing because something that has subjective value can be priceless.

I think the real lesson that Karen has here is most people when they're looking to get hired for a project, they focus on what they are selling and they stopped there. I am selling mixing services for heavy music. Chris is selling mastering services for all styles of music in all languages and if we stopped right there on what we were selling, we would get fraction

of what we are able to charge for what we do. And what Karen is saying to do is don't just stop at what you're selling, move on to why they are looking to work with the, what is the goal, the end goal, what is their why behind their music? Are they trying to just self actualize and put out music that they've been working on for a long time or are they trying to get signed and tour the world and get an agent or released to their fans. That is massive audience of fans if they already have. When you start getting the full picture of what they're trying to accomplish and what is success look like for them, it gives you a much, much broader picture of what the true value is for the services. Then that does a whole lot. And we're gonna talk about what some of these things, some of these questions will actually lead to why this is so powerful.

But this just opens the doors for really understanding the value of what you bring to the table as a producer or mixing engineer, a mastering engineer or songwriter or whatever your services. And I would dive a little deeper down this rabbit hole and say that I believe what every artist on earth wants, what every musician on earth wants is to be known. That's why they're making art. They want to be known, they want to be heard, they want to be understood. And when you walk in and your position as well, I have a 47 Mike's and my mic locker. Yeah. But can it help me be known while our compressors are from the 1960s yeah. But, and it helped me be known. Ah, wow. Ah, our, our bass traps have been calibrated by of our best Bob Mcmullan, but can it help me be known? That's what the artist is hiring for in us as engineers often take the technician bent here and start talking about objective things when what we need to be doing is help the artists feel known. And the first way to do that is to begin to ask questions.

The more questions you can ask, the better off you're going to be. For those of us who've been doing this for awhile, I'm on year 10 right now in my career, Chris, you've been doing it longer than that. You start to see really the impact that you're able to put on people's lives and careers and a lot of the work that you do. Not all of it, but a lot of the work you do is life changing for those artists. They get signed, they start touring, they blow up, and when you really start to see that happen, you understand the value that you bring to the table. It's not just the hours that I put into it. It's not just my skill that I put into it. It is what that achieves for the people that I'm working with long term. It's almost in a measurable number, but it does really start to paint a picture for what the true value of what you bring to the table is as a creator and I think that's really what we're trying to get at here is understanding your true value, not the time, not all your expenses and overhead.

None of these things really matter. It's the value that you bring to the table for your clients.

Just for a moment, let's think about the magic, not take it for granted, but let's think about the magic that recording technology is. If you record an artist and you do a good job and you don't get in the way and you present it well and it's mixed in a way that's not distracting and you've captured that moment, a small piece of that artists essence now exists outside of their physical body who has some deep shit. Chris, that is some super deep shit. Case in point, I love Nat King Cole. He was a singer from way back in the day forties and 50s and stuff. There's a song he does unforgettable that is cheesy, but I love it. And here in the mastering studio, one of my favorite things to do is to pull that song up because it does something called a phantom center better than most recordings.

So Nat King Cole seems to float in between my speakers. And it is so realistic that it's disconcerting because he's dead. When I listened to that song, when someone comes to my studio, I love to pull that song up because it sounds like nat king Cole is six inches in front of your face. There's an invisible person singing there and you know him. You get this vibe for who he was as a person, but he's long gone. That's creepy. But that is the alchemy that we do as audio engineers. It's magic. And to see it as anything but magic. Of course your people aren't gonna want to buy from you.

Yeah. I think a lot of the conversation today is helping everyone understand the true value you bring and not just on the literal sense but almost on the emotional value you bring to a project. But let's go back to that cost plus pricing because I feel like this is worth bringing back up here. Yes, absolutely. This is what old grizzly John who was the worst person to take advice from grizzly John. Yeah, Grizzly John and cost plus does not work in this scenario. When we start talking about value based pricing versus just an arbitrary number you pulled out based on your own profit desires and your own expenses and all that stuff, here's where it starts to fall apart because hourly based pricing causes a conflict of interest. The more hours you take, the more you make, and that's regardless of whether those hours added value to the project or if it was just you trying to milk the hours.

And I'm not saying that's what everyone does, but that does cause a conflict of interest. Cost plus is also stupid because your clients don't really care what your expenses are. Think about two different studio. Studio a is a home studio got low expenses, no debt, really low overhead. Their cost plus analysis that they ran says that they should be charging 30 bucks an hour. Meanwhile, you've got studio B who would scoff at that number. That's awful. No studio should ever charge 30 bucks an hour because they've got a large commercial space, lots of debt, high overhead. Their cost plus analysis says they need to charge $300 an hour. So if both studios can offer a similar value, do you think the client wants to pay for the overhead of studio B for the same value they're getting for studio a, your client does not care. It does not add to the value of the project.

The project hinges on you helping the client get from point a to point B. Where they are now is point a and if you ask enough questions in the right order and you get to the bottom of it, you can find out what point B for them. And it's gonna be different for everybody, but studio a and studio B can both get that client from point a to point B if they ask the right questions. But at the end of the day, the overhead of studio B is their problem, not their client's problem. Therefore, that $300 an hour has nothing to do with the value they bring to the table.

Well, and a good example of that that we've seen over the years is in really expensive markets like Hollywood and Manhattan, it used to offer a sort of intrinsic value to be able to record or get your music, you know, mixed or mastered or whatever. It happens to be in an area where the rent is 10 x what it is and somewhere else. Another part of the country. And the problem there is that as the Internet has gotten better, that more and more people have done remote session work. If all of your session work, if all of the work that you're getting is remote, who cares if you have like this ridiculous nine oh two one oh Beverly hills zip code. It doesn't matter. It's no longer offering value and that's been a lot of the transition that we've seen in our industry is that back in the day, oh, it made a lot of sense to record on, you know, what's it called? Recording studio in Nashville, but it doesn't offer the same value that it once did, but there's all this additional overhead.

All the studios are getting now torn down to put condos there. Side note destroying the culture of our city, changing towns. My Dude. All right, so Steve's convinced at this point he thinks, okay, I like what you're saying Karen. I kind of understand the value based pricing. I get how you do it with your clients. What is the goal of the client and how can I help them get there and what is the value of that goal to that client and I'm going to price accordingly. Here's a simple example and this is an example of these in the book. It doesn't really translate to what we're doing because it's not such a business focus decision in the studio world as it is in the design world, but Karen might talk to a business. She finds out they want a website created. She's got to dig in to see why they want that site.

She's going to figure out what their business goals are related to that site. She's going to find out maybe how much a client is worth to them. How many clients can you get through the site? She can run some basic analysis and find out what does a success look for you for this website. Is it getting a hundred clients a month? Is it an extra thousand clients a month or whatever, and then she can figure out if I am successful with this site, creating the site that converts at the right numbers and I know I can because I'm the best at this. I'm Karen Right now. I'm not going to try to do a female voice. Then I know that this will be valued at an extra million dollars a year for this client, or let's just use small nerves, extra hundred thousand dollars per year for this client. And so I can charge them $25,000 that's a quarter of the first year and they're not going to even blink at it.

And so that's what she's talking about. She knows what the number is for the client as far as value and she will charge based on that and she will make sure everything that she communicates that this client is communicating to them, that she understands their goals, she knows what exact steps she needs to take to reach the goals for that business. And that $25,000 is a tiny price to pay because what business is not going to spend 25 grand to make a hundred grand a year every year from now on. And that's kind of the gist of it. But one of the big points that she makes to Steve here at this point when she's talking about value based pricing, is do not talk about price at first. The client wants to find out about price. You don't know what they want yet. If they're looking for some sort of ballpark figure from you, it's really hard to give numbers on anything that you do not know the value of yet.

And that's why she's talking about asking the right questions and how honestly, how can you give someone Chris a price for something on a project if you don't really understand what they need, what does it mean for them? Like what does success mean to them because that's going to be different for every single client. And so how can you price, what do you need to achieve that? Because I'm just gonna give you a loose example in the studio world now cause I went way down that rabbit hole of the business type thing. If you're working with a client, Chris, and you're doing full production work, which you don't do anymore, but let's just pretend right now because a lot of our listeners are doing full production and you talk to that client and you find out success for them is getting their acoustic demo that they sent you and flushing it out into a full band production.

And I don't necessarily do that, but I know a lot of musicians around Nashville that could probably help put that together. And so if their main goal is to have a full band production with drums and Bass Guitar, keyboards, Oregon, maybe they want to fiddle in there too. Now I know that I need to build a team around this project and that's going to be a lot more expensive. But if I didn't know that, I would misquote this at such a low level because I wouldn't fully understand what they need. So to give them a price before I understand the full scope of what the work is, is honestly doing a disservice because it's almost a bait and switch. It's like, oh, it's going to be 1000 bucks for this, and then you realize, oh no, this is going to be four or five grand because I have to do all these extra elements and all these other studios that are telling you a grand are, are really, really shooting themselves in the foot because they're either gonna have to eat the cost or they're gonna have to ask for more money later. Neither of which are good plans there.

There's a book called made to stick by chip and Dan Heath and I'm obsessed with them. One of the things they talk about here is the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is that once you know something, it's impossible to imagine what it would be like to not know it, which makes it really hard to apply the golden rule. If you want others to treat you the way you want to be treated, you need to treat them the way you think they would want to be treated. But if you can't imagine what it would be like to not understand all the stupid technical stuff in the studio and you just, you know, assume that they know all these things and you just throw out this number out too early, it might go something like this. Like, oh, hello, my name's John, or you don't want to record it, your studio. Okay. Yeah, we're a $40 an hour. Okay, cool. Though we'd look to book, uh, you know, four hours, you know, tomorrow afternoon. Oh, all right. We'll see you then until this guy shows up and it's like, we're going to record 15 songs. We need them all mixed and mastered. I was about to say, I've had those conversations before. It's like, yeah, they tell me everything they want.

Tell me what they need as far as like time booked in the studio all in the first email. And I'm like, nope, move on. Thank you. Like I will explain to them like, Hey, like that's not how I work. It's going to be, you know, x amount of time. It's going to be this amount of money, like to even come close to what you're looking to do and that might not even cover it. So I just think we're not even the same ballpark. I'm not your guy. I'm so sorry.

Yeah, so the take home here and a lot of ways is knowing more about what your customer wants equals good. That will help you with your business. So ask a lot of questions. Another great book on the topic is how to win friends and influence people. That book blew my mind. I've talked about this before in the podcast. It sounds like it's a book for assholes. It's not. It's a book about how to not be an asshole, how to care for people well and how to figure out what's a win for them by asking him a bunch of questions and making them feel heard.

That's a book that's interesting. I, for fun fact, I have the first edition copy from like the 20s or 30s or forties sitting on my bookshelf in there. There was a lot of money on Ebay, but that's awesome. I just loved that book. Books that stick around for that long though they're still like a household name in the business world, like that's a really good sign that it's a good book so I do highly recommend it. But there's this interesting thing that Karen says at this point when Steve Asks are you know, what do you do if they insist on getting a price for me before you really can have a conversation and she says this, clients who insist on talking about price first without giving any project details, they just want a price. Those people turn out to be generally the worst clients. And I would say I would have to agree with this. People that are focused only on the price, they don't want to give you any details. They just want to know her rate for five songs or rate for 10 songs. They don't want to give you any additional details. They don't want to talk to you. They're just throwing out numbers. They're throwing out quotes to a bunch of people and trying to get back the lowest rate. That's going to be a nightmare client. And I don't know if that's the same for you, Chris, but that's always been the case for me. Oh yeah.

It's happening to a lot less lately, but I'll get people that'll reach out and will, their first email is asking for a discount. You know, like sometimes it'll be something weird like I'm 17, um, could I have a discount? Or, you know, my father's mother's brother's cousin fought in the battle of, you know, whatever. You know, when people immediately go for, I just want to discount. A lot of times these people are bad, not just they're going to be pain in the butt to work with, but they see it as a win for themselves when they get that discount. And I relate with that because mean I've been that way many times in my life is that I just want to feel good about myself by knowing like, okay, cool, I'm getting a discount. Yay. And these types of people, you don't want to work with them because if they ask for a discount, if they're trying to figure out price on the beginning, they're definitely gonna follow up with more nitpicking. In a [inaudible] you were five or seven minutes late to the social to do, you know, we'd like to, we'd like to still record, but we'd also like a full refund. Like you're going to get people like that.

We'll start doing the math to see what seven minutes costs and they want that taken out of their final payment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awful. So going back to Karen's advice here about probing people, she goes on to say, don't just talk about the technical as audio engineers as kind of really what we get bogged down in, find out what their dreams are. What are the dreams of the project? If this were a massive success, what would that look like? What are the goals for the artists? So once you put this out, what are you doing? What is the goals for this? And then what are your ambitions? What do you hope this can achieve? A lot of those are very similar things, but you kind of get the jest and again, what is their idea of success for the project? Here's the thing, when you start digging into this, when you start having the conversation with these people, you're helping them clarify things that they probably haven't thought about yet.

You are like unlocking in their brain things that no one else has asked about. No one else has thought about. No one else has even brought up and things that they probably haven't even thought about yet. And this creates a sense of trust with your clients because you're helping them get to point B better than anyone else that they're talking to, even including themselves. So I don't know if you've really gone down this rabbit hole, Chris. Oh yeah, I've really talking through projects. But if you can be more of a consultant then a salesman, it almost always works out better for you because you're really helping them build that layer of trust. And I think this is where kind of the consultant side of things comes out is where you're trying to really help them. Like, have you thought about this? Are you doing this? Are you doing that or this? Who are you going to release this with? What are you gonna be doing as far as your tour plans? Are this going to be released on these platforms? Like what are you, if you really, we've talked about this on a past episode, I can't remember the episode, but you have a checklist that you go down for every project where you're asking them specific details. You're going to help out a lot when it comes to building that trust.

One of the things I love to do with that, I do this all the time when I'm on a coaching call because honestly, this method I'm getting ready to share is how I built my business and I was sitting around one day, let's see, it would've been like 2007 and I said, hmm, let's imagine it's five years from now, and I, my successful mastering engineer, how did I do it? I worked backwards and I said, well, most people don't really understand what mastering is. I guess I'd have to have some kind of website that will explain it. Maybe that would have a before and after a player that you could use that in real time. Oh my gosh. I'm going to build that. Boom. When I was off to the races, I had that idea cause I worked backwards from let's assume I'm successful, it's five years from now.

How did I make that happen? So asking these types of questions to an artist can be really powerful. Okay, you launched a song, it went totally viral, you've a million plays on Spotify. How did that happen? And make them, you know, go through this creativity exercise like well I did this and I did. I probably reached out to my friend Susie, she makes playlist that Spotify, oh my gosh I'm going to make Susie as song. All the sudden like this starts to make a lot of sense. And when someone has that epiphany with you when it's like, oh I see the path in front of me more clearly, you're getting the project every single time much more than, oh we have 37 inputs at our studio unlike

oh man, gear sluts around the world are tuning out of the podcast. So Steve now brings up a very valid question and I think is a question worth pondering for audience. What if there is little value in the project, maybe other than self actualization. So easier way of putting it is what if the band just isn't serious? What if this is just a hobbyist side project they're doing? And this is a question a lot of our listeners can probably resonate with because they're not working with serious clients. So if you start digging into these things, inherently there's not a lot of value, at least literal value in it for the clients. Yeah. The clients like, oh, just wanted to record this for myself. I wasn't going to release it at all. Just the rant, rant, rant, red flag, you know? Yeah. And here's the thing is like is this the kind of client you really want to work with or not?

Do you want to be stuck working with hobbyist for the rest of your life? I don't know many studios that are still successful today that are just focusing on hobbyist musicians. I just don't know that many. I think most studios now, they're at working at a high level full time and making, you know more than 50 grand a year. At least those are all studios that are working with people who at least have ambitions to be serious about their music career. They're out there hustling and working hard trying to make it. They're not just hobbyists that are just doing this on the side for fun because they have some extra money from their paycheck or their tax return this week.

Totally and there's a couple of different levels of this I've experienced when a client reaches out and is like too focused on fame, I need to release this record tomorrow cause when it released is going to go viral. I want to be famous bottle. That's a red flag for me. That's a massive red flag for me that they see like, oh fame is just a one step process that scares the crap out of me. On the other hand, if somebody comes to me and says, you know, I have to make this record, I have to, it is like a burden that I'm carrying in my soul. I have to make this record. That's very different. That's a very, very good thing and there's a lot of value that you can provide there. Or if it's a, you know, we want to release a song every month and we want to build our youtube subscribers, we want to build our Instagram subscribers or whatever it happens to be when they have this sort of clear vision of where they want to go.

That's a lot different than just recording this for myself. So I think you can build a successful career, not just on people who want to build a career in music, but if it's the right type of person where there is almost like a metamorphosis, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, which making a record can completely be for an artist where there's this process where they just feel compelled to have a metamorphosis through making art. These are people that will spend whatever it takes because it's an irresistible lure for them. They have to do it. It's part of who they are.

And just to kind of go back to those hobbyist clients and if that's the career you're trying to build is working mainly with those. There's two types of word of mouth work out there right now. There's passive word of mouth and there's active word of mouth. Active word of mouth is just to me is where client a is saying to potential client be, Hey, I love working with Chris Graham. He was amazing. You should hire him and that just comes with a lot of past work. You get a lot of clients under your belt, you're going to get a lot of referrals like that and the problem with hobbyists is, like I talked about earlier in the podcast, they hang out with other hobbyists. They're not hanging out with serious musicians, so all of the act of referrals you're getting from them are going to be other non serious musicians and so you're in this endless spiral of hobbyists that is, like I said earlier, extraordinarily to get out of that cycle.

Passive word of mouth is when your music is heard by thousands or tens of thousands or millions of people and naturally that leads clients to you. Oh, I love this band. I love this mix. My favorite artists, we just finished touring with them. I'm going to look up the credits of who makes this album, I'm going to get them to work with me. It's just passively getting you clients because every single song you have out there as a billboard, as long as you're getting credited for it properly, which I have a blog article about this, it's harder than it sounds. If you're working with only hobbyist artists, you're getting really bad active word of mouth referrals and you're getting zero to none passive word of mouth referrals and so you're not going to help your career out at all. Whereas if you're working with serious clients, even if they're fewer and further between, you're going to get a lot higher quality active word of mouth referrals and you're going to get many, many, many multiples of the passive word of mouth referrals due to your client list and the all the streams are getting in the Youtube user getting and your name being all over the credits for the stuff that they're working on.

So that's just something to really consider when it comes to this type of client you're targeting. Awesome stuff, man. So as you're talking to your clients, now we're back on the don't give your price. Just to remind you, going back on this, don't give your price out when you first start the conversation and she actually, Karen here, it doesn't give a price out. Even when they're done with the conversation. Instead she says, I'm going to get you back a price and a proposal, and so she builds out a proposal, which again, I use better proposals, which is better proposals.studio. That is the link that you can go to to sign up for this service that will put a referral template in your account. The one that I use for my mixing services, so there's a lot of different sections on what's included, what's not included.

Basically all the conversation you have with the client about what they can afford, what do they need, what does success look for them, what is going to be included with the project? What are all the aspects of the project that need to be taken care of? You're putting every single detail that you talk to them about into this proposal in writing so they feel understood and this is a really good time for you to shine as a freelancer because nobody is doing this. If you can be the person who is really explaining and articulating all the stuff you just talked about with the artist and you're painting the picture of what is going to happen when you take them from point a to point B in a visual representation once they get to that page but they talks about the price is not even the top three of their concerns in the grand scheme of things. Whereas if you are not understanding of their needs and all of their desires and all of their dreams and hopes and ambitions, if you're just pricing based what they want instead of why they want it, that's the first thing they care about is price and that's the battle. You have lost the battle to someone like Karen who is putting all of this into a beautiful proposal that impresses them and only once they truly understand the value of what you're giving them. Only once they understand all of this, do they even see the price?

Totally, man. I love the phrase you use painting the picture. That's awesome. Chris, have you ever used proposals? Yeah, well it's interesting. So from a mastering standpoint, no, when I'm doing coaching Sorta, but when we're offering like stem mixing as part of mastering than we do proposals that way. So we do as far as mastering goes, and I generally tend to push people away from doing stem mastering, but if someone is in a position where they're mixed is not 100% before mastering and then Easton help, then typically what we'll do is we'll say, hey, send us your session files and then we'll write a proposal for them that here's a couple of different prices. We could do a mixed from the ground up that would cost this do five stems that would cost this, or we could just address the vocal. That's where your biggest problems are and then moved to mastering that would cost this.

So I think we're to get a starting point right now because we're going to continue this story. I was afraid we'd get to the point where we would run out of time and we've kind of hit that point. There's a lot more to this book. We're probably halfway through it right now and some of the points being made. But again, if you haven't read this book, I highly encourage you to go download it. The interesting thing about this is the creator of freshbooks was doing freelance design on the side before he launched fresh books. That's why he launched fresh books and he built his design business to earn 200 k a year, $200,000 a year while he was only working 16 days a year. And this ebook is basically how he achieved that. So yeah, it's really interesting cause then you use that money to actually be funneled all that money into freshbooks, which is now has 1000 employees or something.

It's got millions of customers like they are massive, unbelievable amounts of money. Yeah. So talk about a stair step. So it's a really interesting ebook. Go to our show notes page and six figure home studio.com/ 84 and that link will be there to download the ebook and go ahead and skip ahead, get all into the end of this ebook so you know what we're going to be doing next week where we talk about the second half of this book. I'm hoping we'll have a par three of this, but if you have a part three, so be it. But it's just a lot of really good tidbits that are really relevant to what we're doing right now.

Well, I think this conversation is great man, and I'm really loving this because one of the biggest questions I think people do have when they are trying to grow their business or when they're trying to get started is trying to figure out this, should I charge hourly versus should I charge per project? When you charge hourly, it's easy, right? You just pull a number out of your butt and that's what you charge and the advantage there is that if the project goes away way, way over, then you're protected. You still get paid. You're not doing all this free work. However, when you get good at this and you do a per project amount, if it takes a lot less time than you anticipated and you make a lot more money.

The thing about this is he brings these points up in the, we skipped a lot of stuff just because for brevity sake, but he brings up like what happens when you have a project that just goes way past two because you're charging a flat rate per project based on the value you're bringing them and she just says, I don't concern myself with that. At the end of the day, it's going to even itself out and I think the reason she has the confidence to say that is because she is working with a higher caliber of client because she puts all of this front work in when she's talking to somebody, she doesn't want every single client that comes her way. She wants the right client. I think that's the big mindset shift here is you don't want every single person that comes your way. I don't want every single person that comes in my way.

I only want to work with the right clients for me and the people that I do work with, I want to blow their minds with how much value I've added to them. And if you can dig in and really like find what it takes to get them the most value so they reach the goals that they're trying to reach. If you do that time and time again for every single project, it doesn't matter if one or two projects goes way out of scope and you make 15 bucks an hour on those projects. At the end of the day you're working with higher and higher caliber projects so that you can just take it in stride because it doesn't mean anything to you. You're doing so well on all the other projects. So it's something that's definitely gonna happen. But I think this value based pricing approach is better for everyone.

I completely agree, and we've mentioned this in the podcast before, there are alternatives that are somewhere in between. You know where you can have a flat rate but that you can have stipulations. This is what I used to do when I produce is I would say, hey, you know, it looks like based on what we've discussed, this would take 10 days of work. If we go over 10 days because you didn't rehearse your vocals, then it would cost this much per day and I would make sure the day rate was a lot more than the 10 day package rate intentionally to discourage them from having to go over to try and get them to practice and to come prepared and and not be like, oh, didn't but just wrote these lyrics. I don't even know them. Let me, yeah, there's a lot of things you can do to protect yourself and your clients from destroying their own project. You can have your cake and eat it too with this is what we're saying.

Yeah. There was another little interesting tidbit in there where she's talking through how he would price a project and how she would price that same project for 10 times more than what he would charge and she was like, and I was still in the project over you, even though you're 10 times less than me because not only do I know how to sell myself because I'm doing all the things that we just talked about, but I know how to get the client better results because I've dug in so hard into finding out what they want. This is my favorite thing from the story and we'll probably talk about it more next week and I don't know if I have it in my notes here, but when you are getting paid for a project, you're getting paid because you're bringing value into the world and there was a post by the CEO of sound stripe that I saw him talk about that was super interesting and we're not going to go into depth of this, but he talks about how value is not a pie.

It's not just like this one size fits all. I read this. Yeah. Value is something that you create. So when you look in soundscapes entrance, there are massive multimillion dollar company now and they created that value basically from scratch. It is now something that exists that didn't exist before and you start looking at the projects you're working on. The reason Karen can charge 10 times more than Steve for the exact same project is because she's able to create 10 times more value for her clients. Then Steve is, and the reason she's able to create 10 times more value for her clients is because she digs in to find all of the things necessary so that she can build 10 times the amount of value. And if you can create 10 times amount of value for your clients, compare to your competitors, you will win the project almost every time if you want to.

Yeah, this is huge and it's, my advice here would be this book is so powerful and these concepts are so powerful. They are not to be underestimated. I am fully aware that I only understand a small percentage of this, that this idea of digging in, figuring out what's a win and using your creativity to craft a wind far beyond what the client imagined that there is just an unbelievable amount of opportunity behind that door. So yeah, I hope that you guys are enjoying these kinds of series. Yeah,

we've been doing, I'm really liking this episode. I'm pumped about it.

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I know you got something out of this episode because this is something that everyone struggles with. If you're a freelancer, having the confidence to charge what your true value is. This is a struggle that's so many people have. They do not have belief in their own abilities. They do not see the value that they bring to the world. And so they constantly under cut themselves. And I'm hoping this episode is sort of the antidote, the steps to recovery towards getting past that. So if you haven't already go read the ebook that we a re we're referring to in this episode. You just go to the six figure homes, studio.com/ 84 and there'll be a link to that ebook. It'll just take about an hour to read. It's a free pdf. So there's really no excuse for you not to have read that ebook.

It is an absolute masterpiece for such a short piece of work. Next week's episode is actually not the followup to this episode. We're going to have a different topic next week and then the week after that we'll be getting to the second half of this episode. Let's just, because Chris was gone, he had food poisoning for awhile. He was out of the, uh, out of, out of commission for about a week and a half. And when he came back we just weren't prepared to record the second half of this episode. So, uh, next week we actually going to be talking about one of my favorite topics and that is delayed gratification, uh, or being your future self's best friend and basically how to do things, how to set up your life so that you have less regrets, you're planting more seeds that will sprout into great things in the future. And ultimately you're just being your future self's best friend.

It is a struggle that so many entrepreneurs have and this is what separates the serious business owners, the ones who were successful from the ones who are not successful. This is also what separates people financially. This is a lot to do with what creates wealth and what creates debt. So that's next week, right, and early Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM and then hopefully the week after that. We'll follow up on this series again, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, anything. We talk about this sort of stuff all the time in the six figure home studio community, which is our free Facebook community to search for the six figure homes, studio community on Facebook. Or you can just go to the six figure home, studio.com/community and that will take you straight to our Facebook page, the citizen request, and as long as you fill out the questions we ask, we will let you in. Again, thanks so much for listening this week. Until next time, happy hustling.