Why It’s Time For You To FINALLY Hire Someone

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 122

Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my bald, beautiful purple shirted cohost. Christopher J. Graham. Chris, hi day, my friend.

Chris: [00:00:31] I am great. Especially cause you're not dead.

Brian: [00:00:35] Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay, so if you're wondering what I'm talking about as of a week from today, this episode comes out, we are recording this on the day this happened. I woke up too. I flood of texts and Facebook messages and Instagram messages, and thank you for anyone who emailed me or anything asking if I was still alive, including my mom.

My mom was like texting me, freaking out if I was still alive because at like. 2:00 AM or something or 4:00 AM something really, really early in the morning. Tornado came down straight through downtown Nashville and anyone who knows where I live, I live  straight downtown Nashville. So fortunately it did not hit our building, but unfortunately it hit some of my friends, which I have friends over here right now actually working.

Their apartment got hit, their windows got blown out. Half the building was taken out. Fortunately their unit wasn't taken out by now. It's like old news cause it's a week old. But like. As of right now, the death counts like over 20 so many iconic buildings in Nashville are destroyed like music venues and the whole five points area in Nashville.

Some of our favorite restaurants, like one of the places that Meg and I like day two that a lot went to brunch. I had a lot when we were dating earlier in our relationship. So it's like, it's really sad, man. Another thing, one of our favorite burger joints, Jack Browns, completely leveled and that actually shares a lot next to Brandon.

My old roommate.

Chris: [00:01:55] I think you took me there.

Brian: [00:01:56] Yeah, I think I did.

Chris: [00:01:57] Yeah. The first time we hung out, we went

Brian: [00:01:59] Yup. Yup. And so my old roommate has a lot in German town where the tornado literally passed over his lot. And if he would have built his house on that lot that he was planning, he had a home plan to build on it years ago. If you'd have built that, it'd be gone right now.

So fortunately those plans are delayed. Man. It's crazy here right now. Cause this is again the same day that all this has happened and I'm still getting messages and emails flooding in about this stuff. My dad literally just texted me. Right the second as well with the tax saying he's glad I'm okay and stuff.

So all that to say, man, I'm glad.

Chris: [00:02:28] I'm going to say something.

tempted to make a dad joke right now. I'm going to abstain. It would not be appropriate.

Brian: [00:02:34] Thank you. I appreciate,

Chris: [00:02:36] Yeah, I woke up and I rolled over and was just sort of hanging out and I started reading through the news and like the third story was national. I didn't believe it at first. I was like, what?

No way.

And then I was like,

Brian: [00:02:49] yeah.

Chris: [00:02:49] and all our bro Semite

homeboys?

Brian: [00:02:53] Oh, the guys that I, we went in our, my bachelor party, we went to Yosemite, which was over a year ago now, because yesterday was my one year anniversary with my wife and also my first day of jury duty of my life, which was a fun day to share, which I can't talk about, obviously. That's all I'm going to say about that.

Chris: [00:03:09] It'd be funny if you made up fake things that were happening at jury duty just for content on our podcast.

Brian: [00:03:15] Ah, yeah. Crazy day, man.

Chris: [00:03:17] Well, I'm glad you're okay, man.

Brian: [00:03:18] Thank you.

Chris: [00:03:18] Give me a little scare. When I woke up this morning and

Brian: [00:03:21] Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know what we do from here. Like so many buildings are leveled, so we've got a long recovery process to go through in Nashville. I don't know, again, what all is happening out there, right the second. But my wife walked down and she said, it's like an apocalypse outside.

It's like people just kind of like wandering around. No one talking like super quiet power lines down everywhere, just like debris in the streets. All the streets are closed in East Nashville, like in the five points area. And.

Chris: [00:03:48] I'm kind of surprised we're even podcasting right now. I'm surprised you have power and energy.

Brian: [00:03:52] Many people in Nashville didn't have power right now. So that's why we have people over here. We kind of open up our home as a coworking space for our friends if they need internet, need to work and stuff. Cause my friend here, he has a massive launch coming out. I'll go and give him a shout out. Sunny true love from STL tones.

He has a huge new plugin coming out on Friday. This is not the week to have no internet or power in your house, you know? So

Chris: [00:04:13] Dude's awesome.

Brian: [00:04:13] yeah, he's a great man. Aussies are fun. So let's try to cheer things up a little bit, Chris, cause we've got an episode to do today.

Chris: [00:04:20] Hey, yeah, Brian, let's talk about hiring.

Brian: [00:04:26] That's the worst segue of all time.

Chris: [00:04:28] segue ever. I'm like, I don't know. I'm just like feeling bummed for everybody in Nashville. Nashville is a beautiful, amazing town.

Brian: [00:04:34] I was like, fine, cause he and I were just chatting and playing in the episode and then like now that I'm talking to, and I'm like, this really sucks man. I'm really bummed out right now.

Chris: [00:04:40] I bet that was particularly weird for people to listen to that banter into X speed on their podcast app.

Brian: [00:04:46] You're hearing really bummy stuff at twice speed, so that's you getting in twice the sadness.

Chris: [00:04:51] Well, let's pump up the energy. Let's try to, uh, focus on talking about some good stuff today.

Brian: [00:04:56] Here's the best thing to do. You ready for this? Welcome back to another episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple shirted cohost, Christopher J. Graham. Chris, what are we talking about today? My friend.

Chris: [00:05:09] We're talking about hiring.

Brian: [00:05:12] Oh.

Chris: [00:05:13] I know, right? But man, there are a lot of people in our industry,

they've built huge thriving businesses. And the path that they had to go down to make that happen

was they had to hire the right people.

You don't have to hire, you could do the one man thing for the rest of your life.

But the problem with the one man thing in the service industry.

Is what happens when you want to go on vacation

and your clients still want to get in touch with you. What happens when you're not feeling well?

What happens when one of your family members isn't feeling well? We recently had some health issues

at our house.

Everybody's fine, everybody's great,

but I had to take some time off to be with family and it was kind of this intense thing of like, Oh gosh, things aren't getting done,

and

a lot of people have built businesses by hiring and it's something you should at least consider.

I think a lot of people don't

they don't like spending.

There's just this sort of silly, illogical thing of like all spending is bad.

Brian: [00:06:07] Yeah, that's an absolute lie. And so the original topic for this episode today were Chris and I were planning out, was just like, what are some of the. Small piles of money people fell to walk past in order to get to the large piles of money. That's a stick phrase we use on this podcast all the time.

Being able to walk past a small pile of money to make it to the large pile of money on the other side. What are those things that people typically fail to walk past? And the thing we were stuck on and, and just kept talking on and on about was not just stepping past the small pile of money, but being willing to give up the small pound money.

In the form of hiring, you are paying someone a small pile of money in order to earn that large pile of money on the backend. And this is something that most people fail to grasp in their heads. They think about all this money you're spending. You're not thinking about the value of what that money is getting you and.

For us, the value that we were getting for that money is our time back. And when we get our time back, we can do something with it that is extraordinarily powerful and that is reinvesting that time back into our businesses into something that is much more profitable then whatever menial task that you hired out to someone else.

So Chris talked to our audience about peak hourly versus average hourly versus minimum hourly. Cause this is a concept that our entire audience needs to understand. Go for it.

Chris: [00:07:23] Okay. So I was having a conversation with somebody. I've been coaching recently.

And we were talking about this concept of your average hourly income. So whatever business you own

when you work for it, there's an average amount of money that you make for each hour of time that you work.

Now, it's really easy to want to simplify this and just be like, Oh yeah, I'm at $30 an hour.

That's not how it works in our industry.

Brian: [00:07:47] And that's the thing is like people think, Oh, I make 50 bucks an hour. No, no, no. There's a spectrum involved in that 50 bucks an hour. Yes.

Chris: [00:07:54] There are certain things you do where you make no money per hour.

There are certain things that you do where you make,

$50 an hour or whatever, and there are certain things that you do

where you make an enormous amount of money for like four minutes.

business is very much like this as a mastering engineer.

Somebody hires me to master record.

sit down and

I listened to the loudest parts of the song first. That's just sort of the process I've always used,

in

first couple seconds of listening to those songs, especially if it's a single,

I know about 90% of what I want to do and master that song

because of that, that judgment, the good judgment that I have to make those decisions,

I make a heck of a lot of money per hour.

For like four seconds

each song,

at the end of the process, I'm like, okay, we're going to use a logarithmic fadeout and it's going to go right from the last,

okay, right there too.

Right there in the fadeout is,

wait a minute, wait a minute.

Perfect.

I made no money

doing that.

I could have hired somebody

do that.

So essentially I could have paid someone minimum wage and taught them how to do fade outs pretty easily

every single person that knows how to use a doll

how to do a pretty decent fadeout, or at least can be taught.

plenty of hypocrisy in this subject for me.

some of this episode is for me

well.

There are things in my business

I

hold onto and refuse to delegate

my assistant,

and it's irrational and it's silly and it's stupid and I need to stop.

on the bright side, shout out to my dude, Kyle Whitaker.

I hired a new assistant and he is

He's so great.

They worked with me and for this past month,

and it was amazing.

He initially was somebody that I was doing coaching for,

and the more we get to know each other, the more we clicked. And now he's been helping with bounce Butler. He's been helping with Chris Graham mastering.

Brian: [00:09:51] You finally have your James.

Chris: [00:09:52] Oh, he's been so awesome. And we get along great

the Enneagram. I'm an eight and he's a one and one's an eighths.

Get along super duper. Well.

It's been a blast. So we're going to build a lot of cool stuff together. And it's been nice to me. My inbox is the most stressful thing about my business,

I'm like, if there could be an important email in there, Oh, I need to read all of them just to make sure none of them are super urgent.

not healthy for me. And to have something that can at least keep an eye on that and be like, yo, this is kind of urgent.

We should deal with this sooner rather than later has been really, really great. So

talk about peak hourly versus average versus minimum. Hourly.

So there's this idea, I'm going to reiterate everything I just said

some of the time that you spend, you make what you think you make per hour.

Some of the time that you work,

make nothing. Or you make minimum wage, cause that's what it would cost to hire someone to do it.

And then there are some magical moments

where you make an obnoxious amount of money per hour

making more money.

It's pretty simple.

need to up your average.

the way that you do that.

You got two levers.

spend more time doing the things that you make a lot of money doing and to

less time doing the things that you make no, or very little money.

And the easiest lever there

is hiring

Absolutely. You guys know I am a huge fan of automation. I'm obsessed with it. It's one of my favorite things.

However, to be totally honest,

it's hard.

Brian: [00:11:16] It's hard and it also puts you in a terrible place as a human being because you turn into this like. It had an engineer who like is antisocial and you just turn into a terrible human when you're in like automation mode. And it's not just you, but I'm the exact same way. I do the exact same thing when I get into like this weird technical, like, Oh, I got to get this, and if I do this, then I can do that.

And then when I set this to do this automation, it should send this algorithm, this web hook over to this part, and this webhook should take this data and pick the API from snappier into my CRM. And then when the CRM is done, the. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, so that, that's what happens though. It's like you just turn into this weird, and this is the word that I've just, I just use so much now as troglodyte.

I'm like this cave creature  just is living in the dark and needs no food or water, but I just live off the, okay, yeah. Sorry, sorry, Chris. Sorry.

Chris: [00:12:06] You got some issues here.

Brian: [00:12:08] Yeah. I'm trying to drive home how shitty this type of person is. When you get into automation mode, it's the antithesis of creativity.

Chris: [00:12:13] Right. We're not saying that you shouldn't automate. You definitely should. You should definitely want a little bit about automation, but it's really, really hard.

Brian: [00:12:20] And it can ruin your day creatively when you are in automation bouts. So it's good to plan for that. But this is not an automation episode. This is a delegation episode, and the whole point of being able to hire is to take this fog of war that's blinding you from all of the opportunities that are surrounding you right now and hire someone so that you can focus on all those things.

That are in the distance right now. The things that you can't reach quite yet because you do not have the time, energy, you don't have the mental bandwidth in order to actually tackle those things. So there's a couple of things probably blinding you in that fog of war. Some of it's time, some of his energy.

And some of it is that scarcity mindset that's holding you back from hiring in the first place. So Chris,

Chris: [00:12:58] That was an amazing rant. That was like,

Brian: [00:13:00] especially if James edited us down, cause I flubbed it for a second there.

Chris: [00:13:04] there's enough there for you to sound really smart.

Brian: [00:13:07] If I sound incredible there and you're like, damn, Brian just inspired me. You can thank James for that. Edit.

Chris: [00:13:14] Yeah, that was amazing. Well, I love the idea that you brought up about being willing to spend your small pile of money.

On hiring so that you can get to the larger pile of money. Guess what?

most businesses, most businesses, I would say 98 99% of businesses, maybe even more than that, is that there is some aspect of that.

This is something we've been relatively

quiet on on the podcast.

Brian: [00:13:37] Well, the hiring portion, we've talked about automation, delegation, systemization, all that stuff. In the past, many episodes we've talked about working on your business instead of in your business. None of these subjects are new. We just haven't specifically talked about hiring. Yeah. And this is a subject that gets brought up a lot in our community.

Chris: [00:13:50] Totally. And I think some of that is that you and I are hyper,

like the lone Wolf thing.

Brian: [00:13:56] Yes. I think most audio engineers are like that. Most of us want to sit in a cave and talk to no humans and be responsible for no humans, but unfortunately that's not realistic. At a higher level. If you want to break free of like the hourly pay, first of all, like that's the first big freedom leap is getting out of hourly pay and getting into project and bigger things like that, or recurring revenue, but past that, you need to have people on your team.

In order to get out of that, and this is something that I'm just now starting to learn and something that I'm going to be getting better at in the future is having a team that is surrounding me. Because look at back in episode number one Oh four where we had Seth Mosley on the podcast, that guy is better than anyone I've met at getting a team to surround him, and he is the picture perfect example of what delegating can do, not just delegating.

It's not like he's taking some menial tasks. One of his top people is a producer named X. He has X on his team as a producer. And he's a Grammy winning producer that he pays a salary to. I'm not sure what the arrangement is, so don't take my word for it or whatever, but he works for Seth Mosley and he's doing a high, high, high level task in the studio.

He was producing bands. He's doing a lot. He's making beats for people. He's doing like. A huge amount of the work and that is much more than most of us are willing to give up. So Seth is willing to give up huge chunks of his business to somebody and to say, Hey, you own this part of the business.  Seth's income as a whole is much better off by order of magnitude than if you were to just sit there and try to do it all himself.

Chris: [00:15:24] Well, and this comes down, it comes back to our probably, I think our favorite book on this.

Brian: [00:15:29] Everybody poops.

Chris: [00:15:30] If there's one book we've recommended that we think every one of you should read. It's Go-Giver

everybody poops. And the big idea there is with Go-Giver, you're trying to help the most people the most. You're trying to grow how many people you serve.

Until you start to hire. This is really, really challenging because you have to

in

a really narrow amount of work that you do that's really rare that you can help a lot of people with. And this is something I've been struggling with,

of like my transition to do in business coaching and now launching bounce Butler.

Has been learning that like, boy, I love mastering. You want to do it for the rest of my life,

but I can help a lot more people in other ways

just by mastering records for them. And I need to explore that. And I think that's part of,

I don't want to go so deep as to say like.

The purpose of life,

but there is some aspect where it just feels right.

When you dig into how can I help the most people the most? And in order to do that, you have to eliminate the hours where you're making virtually nothing.

hours where you're not really providing value to anybody. You're not serving anybody. It's like, well, anybody could do that.

would you do work

your clients that anybody could do that's not leaning into your purpose.

Brian: [00:16:42] I mean, an example, like, can you imagine if Elon Musk. It was like running the front desk at space X and like doing clerical work. Do you think, you know on Musk waste his time, like cleaning the bathrooms at space X headquarters?

Chris: [00:16:55] I've peed in those bathrooms.

Brian: [00:16:58] I'm jealous of your pee right now, but out of context, that's a fantastic quote.

I'm jealous of your pee.

Chris: [00:17:04] Well, actually, funny story with that. I went into the space X bathrooms,

there's two types of soap in the space, X bathrooms.

normal soap

and there's, Oh, you've got like rocketry, grease and grime on your hands and you need like pumice soap with crazy chemicals in

Brian: [00:17:20] Yeah.

Chris: [00:17:20] I like went by

put that on my hand and was like, that's not the right soap.

not like flowing down my hand. It's like, it's upright.

Brian: [00:17:31] three-dimensional stuff.

Chris: [00:17:33] And then I was like, I need more soap to wash this soap off my hand.

Brian: [00:17:37] Okay.

Chris: [00:17:38] it was crazy.

Brian: [00:17:39] It's a two stage soap system. Andy.

Chris: [00:17:40] two stage soap system.

Brian: [00:17:42] So. Okay, back to this. Do you think Elon Musk is cleaning the toilets? The toilets need to be cleaned at space X. That needs to be done, but Elon Musk has so much bigger and better shit to worry about if he's going to change the world in some way, shape, or form.

He's already changed the world. He's already changed the future of space travel and electric cars and all this other stuff, and soon to be underground travel, but he's not cleaning toilets. That's the key to this here is. What are those things in your studio? Toilets being one of them? Your toilets need to be clean.

You shouldn't be doing that, but what are those other things in your business that need to be delegated.

Chris: [00:18:12] Bingo and the bopper native term here.

Is opportunity cost for Elon Musk. What is the opportunity cost of cleaning toilets?

cost is that he might not be spending time balancing the budget or closing a deal to send satellites into space or hiring

more of the best engineers in the face of the planet.

that you do

that there are other stuff that you can't do because you were doing it. That's the nature of time. You can't be in two places at once.

But if you hire,

can sort of be in two places at once.

Brian: [00:18:44] Yup. This is not going to be a full episode on things that you should hire out. Maybe we can do that in the future, but my general advice to people is if you can build a checklist for it or if it is a repeatable task or something. Well, it's in-person, like toilet cleaning. Those are great things to hire out for.

And that covers a lot of things. That covers an inbox because you can train people to handle certain inquiries that you get commonly a certain way. It's like an if then sequence. If this happens, then do that session prep, getting Mike set up, getting the dos set up, getting tracks labeled. All this shit is just following a checklist.

Anybody that has half a brain can do that sort of stuff. These are the things that you should be outsourcing to someone else to help out in the studio so that you're freed up to do bigger and better tasks.

Chris: [00:19:28] Well. Brian,

I don't know. A, nobody can place drum Mike's better than I can. I can't outsource that. What would you say to me.

Brian: [00:19:37] Honest to God, you could probably find somebody that could do it better than you. That's the surprising thing is it's not just finding somebody that's just as good as you, or they can follow some like formula you give them to do it. A lot of times people will do shit better than you can, and I'll give you one example, James, my assistant, I will train him to do something a certain way.

And he'll do it that way. And then like a month later he's doing in a completely different way that's like 10 times better and faster than what I could do myself. And you just have to accept that people can do shit better than you can, especially if that's the thing they're focusing on the most. Like something that I give James, like a podcast edit or email or community management or something like, that's something that's like on the back of my mind, something that needs to get done, but I'm not thinking about it constantly.

It's something that my brain is not. Actively working on or even passively working on. It's just, it's acknowledging its existence. There are tons of things of that in your business that are happening, but when you put somebody on those tasks, all of a sudden you have someone who is devoted to making sure those things are done well and done smoothly and done efficiently, and a lot of times some of the best hires you can make are going to pay for themselves even more than you expected them to because they're going to at so many efficiencies to your business, they're going to add so much freedom to what you're doing.

To where you have so much peace of mind in your day to day. Like, I don't know, James has been with you maybe a year and a half now. Enlight I couldn't leave the country for my honeymoon without him for a month. I couldn't leave the country even though I was working while I was gone. I couldn't leave the country and go to Southeast Asia for five weeks for a workcation.

If I didn't have someone like James or let's just be honest, James himself, shout out to James Cross.

Chris: [00:21:05] Pretty amazing. We love you James.

Brian: [00:21:07] Doing shit for me behind the scenes. Like you can't do that without somebody there to do this stuff. So like this is a perfect episode for James because James is editing. This is like, fuck you, I'm awesome.

Like the on the shit like, but for good reason. And that's what I think everyone in your audience does that pass a certain level. Like maybe you're at that 2030 $40,000 Mark. You have more money than time. And a lot of our, like big listeners, like we have people like Grammy winning guys listening to this podcast that are like big name people.

These are the people more than anyone. You're sitting there with your Grammy on your desk. I know that you're listening to us right now. You're the one that needs this more than anyone because your time is so valuable at that level that you have to start delegating some of these things off, and maybe you already have someone, but there are some things you've been like, I should probably start to hire somebody for this, or I probably need somebody for this position.

This is the kick in the pants to do that.

Chris: [00:21:52] Well, there's a couple thoughts I have on that. Number one is going to be kind of all over the place. A smattering of ideas.

Number one, one of the things that makes your assistant James so awesome, and my assistant Kyle so awesome,

is that Kyle and James are both

problem solvers.

Brian: [00:22:07] Oh God, yeah.

Chris: [00:22:08] With James and Kyle.

You don't have to be like,

um, well, first you need to do this letter. You need to do that and they need to do this mixture. You do this symbol. I can just be like,

a problem.

Brian: [00:22:17] There's no handholding. Yes, and that's the thing is if you are handholding someone, let's just give them past the first month. Like obviously there's certain things you need to handhold through for the first month, maybe, but past that point, the right hire is someone that is going to constantly surprise you in a good way.

Chris: [00:22:32] Amen to that. Well, that's been my experience with Kyle is like, we'll have conversations and I'll be like, Oh my gosh. He read my mind. He knew I needed that done.

gosh, I was wrong when I explained how I wanted him to do it and he found the right way

just fixed it and didn't like.

Oh, is it? Okay, you flew to this, he asked for forgiveness, not for permission.

I'm continually blown away because he's a problem solver. So first of all, when you're looking at hiring somebody, I would only hire a problem solver. I don't care if you went to college. I don't care about anything at all. I don't care if you're from a rich family. I care if you can solve problems on your own

because I can scale that.

Brian: [00:23:07] My worst tire was someone who had a master's degree and then James, my best hire, I don't even know if he went to college. I honestly couldn't tell you right now. You can tell me if you did or not. I don't know, but. Feel free to punch in here, your answer, but I have no idea whether he did or not.

Chris: [00:23:31] One of the ideas here that I think is important is the idea of what's called commander's intent.

management style

and commander's intent. I think I've probably brought it up on the podcast before.

Brian: [00:23:42] I've never heard you bring this up, so this is new to me.

Chris: [00:23:44] What? Okay.

Brian: [00:23:45] I love when you bring new things up on the podcast because we're 122 episodes in now, so it's rare.

Chris: [00:23:50] true. So commander's intent is this idea of you could manage someone and say, look, I need you to do this and this and this and this and this and this in this order. Do not deviate, or you're fired. Or commander's intent is a military term. And what it basically means is, let's say,

Brian, you and I and

people that are listening to our podcast are in a platoon.

I don't know how many people are in a platoon, so let's just say 12

we need to pretend world war II and we need to like

takeover

little area.

Brian: [00:24:20] 44 Chris, 44 people in our platoon.

Chris: [00:24:22] Okay. So let's say we're in a platoon and there's 44 of us,

Brian: [00:24:25] 16 to 44 okay, nevermind. There you go.

Chris: [00:24:28] So let's say.

You and I are in a war. It's world war II and there's a beach that we need to take.

The enemy has a position. Let's say I'm in charge and I'm like, okay, Bob, you're going to go around the side, Joe, you're going to go over the Hill. Steve, you're going to like hide in the water and then pop out with a machine gun like Rambo on the count of 75 there's going to be this really coordinated dance in order to do this.

Brian: [00:24:50] Sounds overly complex.

Chris: [00:24:52] Sounds overly complex or it could be like, all right, gas. Here's the deal. Y'all gonna go left. You guys are going to go right. Our goal is to take that foxhole right over there. Do whatever you gotta do to make it happen.

Go. Commander's intent is, Hey, here's our plan, but my goal is this. Change the plan because here's the thing.

There's a saying that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, or everyone has a plan until they come in contact with the enemy and then all of a sudden it just gets way too complex.

If you hire somebody that you can commander's intent and be like, look man,

I need this mixed to be done.

And I needed to sound like this other song that we did previously. They know what the goal is and they can make decisions to navigate on the way, and if you've got a problem solver, they'll figure it out on their own. If you don't have a problem solver, somebody that's been, I'm gonna use a term here

over-scheduled

you get a problem.

problem with people that have been over-scheduled is they have been told on every assignment they've ever done exactly what they need to do.

You need to take this test and answer all 100 questions. It's multiple choice. That's not the mindset that we need

in the recording studio industry or almost any other industry

for that matter.

need people who can figure out what a problem is and solve it and creative and new ways. These are the best hires.

is one of the reasons, like I'm skeptical

where our education systems at right now. I think there will be change. I know that there's hope here, but there's a problem because the people that you hire right out of school.

Are actually totally the opposite of qualified because they haven't learned how to problem solve on their own yet.

of them anyways.

Brian: [00:26:24] So talking about who we should hire. Chris, why can't we just go with like interns? Cause there's a lot of intern programs at colleges. There's probably an over abundance of interns that are out there. Why not just go for the free route.

Chris: [00:26:36] Well, again, advice buffet. I am not going to have the right answer for everyone on this podcast, but I have some issues with the intern model,

and I think you got to ask yourself,

what does an intern want.

And I think what an intern wants is to come in to learn really, really, really, really fast

then probably go start a business that competes with you.

There's not a lot of investment or longterm desire for most interns.

They want to pick up the information and then move on. There's not a lot of yell, let's be a team. You and I together. Let's do this thing like you and me. Brian.

Brian: [00:27:11] Again though, like when I hire an assistant, I have full expectations that if I hire someone within our community that at some point they're going to leave me to go out on their own because my goal for them is to have like a fully fledged career in the audio industry, not be my assistant for the rest of their lives.

There are certain interns that will eventually get to the point where they'll compete with you if that's their end goal, fine, whatever. I think the bigger issue with interns is that they are a management nightmare. They are people that came straight out of the over-scheduled for the term that you use.

They're straight out of college, they're over schooled, or they're currently in college. They've never really had a problem solve. You're going to have to over manage them. You're going to have to hold their hand through every single step in the process, and all that's going to do is take you away from what you actually want to do with your time, which is build your business or do those.

What is it? The peak hourly work, but you talked about earlier at the beginning of this episode, interns didn't allow for that. There are always exceptions to the rule. There are some fantastic interns in the world. I've met some good interns. I've had one good intern before, but the majority of interns that I have talked to and met and heard of are a management nightmare and they're usually more trouble than they're worth.

Sorry, any interns listening to the podcast right now?

Chris: [00:28:18] Well, and some of the issue there, I hope there are people that you know, or that age, and they're listening to podcasts. Some of the issue

that school also sets you up with this idea that it's all grownups

to serve

you.

of whether they're getting paid or not.

Brian: [00:28:34] All I heard was duty, but what were you talking about?

Chris: [00:28:37] I think a lot of interns don't ask themselves,

in this for the people that are hiring me.

And I think that's why most interns aren't great. You know, most interns applications that I've ever seen is like,

know, with mud dream too, will work

in the music industry.

really know what

in the music industry.

Oh, okay. Cool. Cool, cool. I don't want to be a hater here.

But I just think the model's not great. You've got people that come right out of school, they're over-scheduled and undereducated.

the reality of the situation.

they walk in not knowing what the real world is like, and they expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter,

Brian: [00:29:13] Golden platter.

Chris: [00:29:14] on a golden platter.

Brian: [00:29:15] Yeah.

Chris: [00:29:16] And okay, well now you're going to work on mix session prep, but next week you're going to be mixing hit records.

Brian: [00:29:21] Yeah, that's the timeline, right?

Chris: [00:29:23] Yeah. That's the timeline. That's what every intern is looking for,

this is complicated by the fact

that we have a lot of audio schools

100% of the people who apply.

Brian: [00:29:34] Yeah. Fell sail university has one of those, which we're not going to get into fail sale, or is it so fail

Chris: [00:29:39] So fail. There it

Brian: [00:29:40] whatever. Either one works.

Chris: [00:29:41] I can't believe we haven't gotten pushback from this yet. We haven't heard a peep.

Brian: [00:29:44] Yeah. I don't know either, but we haven't because it's true. Let's talk into who we can hire, and I wanted to go ahead and state something that in passion-driven industries, we have a massive advantage over the talent pool that we can hire from. So in the audio industry, there are so many people that this is the passion that they want to pursue.

There is so much innate desire to do. Audio for a living that you have the pick of the litter. As someone that is ready to hire, you have access to such a larger talent pool. Then most other industries that are non passion-driven and that allows you to get someone at a very good rate that is overqualified for the position because they want to work for you and whatever that you are doing.

Chris: [00:30:23] Yeah. It is a funny thing. I like to joke around about how in most major cities in the U S you could walk outside. If you needed an intern and you could scream,

does anybody want to work? Am I recording studio?

And like three people are going to be like,

I've got $65,000 in debt from an audio school. Pick me.

It's a really weird

that we live in right now because there are so many people

audio degrees.

Brian: [00:30:49] Yeah. If I ran around Nashville screaming that I'd be like the pied Piper. I just have a trail of out of work, audio engineers behind me like wanting work. It's not quite like that, but your point is taken like there is a lot of people that are trying to do this. And not all of them listen to this podcast.

Not all of them take the business side seriously. Not all of them take their personal development seriously. And so not all of them are capable of actually achieving what they want to achieve. But you listening to this podcast, you who is ready to hire somebody, you are in the position to take someone like that and utilize their talents that are misappropriated in what they're doing right now.

Chris: [00:31:23] Totally man. Well.

I move on a little bit?

Brian: [00:31:25] Yeah.

Chris: [00:31:26] When I first got into audio, I immediately did what everybody else did is I was like, Oh interns, they'll work for free. I'll hire them.

And there were usually people that I had, you know, friendships with, but it was tricky cause I would spend so much time training them

by the time they started to be doing work that was super duper helpful,

were ready to move on.

Internships by their very nature are transient

and it's difficult to build a business.

And train people up fast enough

the arts

them to be of any use to you within like a three month period. It's very, very challenging.

I think

a scarcity mindset there of like, well, I'm going to hire interns because they're free,

and that prevents you from looking at hiring people that scare you.

people that

are already smarter than you.

Already more talented than you

or have the potential to be

That has been a really big kind of transition for me as I've processed this whole hiring thing. Cause again, like I'm not an expert here, I'm learning this stuff.

And as I have looked at like who are people

I'm nervous about, how they would compete with me if they wanted to.

And I think if you want to build a good team,

you want to build a football team, you should hire people who are capable of tackling you.

they're not capable of tackling you,

do you have them on your football team? That's a serious question to ask. If you're in a sports team, you're going to get the best

that you can, hopefully ones that are better than you

who are more specialized than you are.

Brian: [00:32:49] As someone who just went to the premiere of national is new major league soccer team. I went to the premier game for that and that makes me think of like people in Europe listening right now, and you're talking about like tackling and football and they're just like, what the fuck is this kind of talking about tackling and football.

We're talking about American football here.

Chris: [00:33:06] Yeah. So it applies to any sport. Let's use basketball cause it's a little more universal.

I'm going to build a basketball team, I want to get people on that team who can beat me at basketball,

Brian: [00:33:16] Yup.

Chris: [00:33:17] That's how you build a team. Often in our sort of industry,

people who have, are really, really talented in some areas and they want to specialize in that.

Or there's people that are really, really talented in some areas and not great yet. And others.

We're going to talk about this more,

my philosophy with hiring.

that you should hire people that you see as students

you hope they graduate.

You hope that someday they move on to bigger and better things.

become addicted to you, that you don't put golden handcuffs on them.

And I think

you're thinking about it in this way,

when you're trying to go giver of like, how can I serve them?

can I grow them?

probably where you're going to have the biggest and best teams.

Brian: [00:33:57] Yeah.

Chris: [00:33:57] I'm obsessed with this idea.

funny, like when we first met, we immediately started talking about hiring. It was like one of the first conversations we had on the way to Vance's

summer jam

Brian: [00:34:07] name drop bro.

Chris: [00:34:08] sick named.

Yeah, I guess I did. Sorry. Eh, that was really, really fun. No, that was it. Super cool. Party.

Brian: [00:34:17] Yeah, it was. So there's a few different ways to handle payments when it comes to hiring somebody. I don't think we should really talk about specific numbers because it's going to vary so much depending on what positioning you're hiring. Depending on what sort of person you're hiring, where you're located.

Like San Francisco, you're gonna pay a lot more than someone you might. In Athens, Alabama, where I originally was from. But there are a few different ways to pay someone. I think it's worth talking about the different payment methods you can use when it comes to hiring somebody. And let me just give a quick overview.

We can kind of dive into each of these. One is hourly, that's the most obvious. The second is like a salary or a set monthly payment, and the third is a project based payment. So first it's right off the bat hourly. Chris, this is a pretty easy one to grasp. You hire somebody, you're paying them a set amount of money per hour and you're tracking the amount of hours that they work for you.

What are your thoughts on this payment form?

Chris: [00:35:08] I think this one is tricky because it's predicated on

them tracking their time

appropriately.

Brian: [00:35:15] Let me also back up here. When hiring, there are two positions you can hire. There's in person and then there is remote. Both. Chris and I have remote assistance. James lives in like, I don't even know where you live, James Connecticut or something. Or Vermont. Yeah. There's one of those tiny little States up in the Northeast that only a couple of which I've been to, and then your assistant lives in Canada.

Chris: [00:35:36] Toronto.

Brian: [00:35:36] And so it's a different story when you're talking about tracking hours, depending on where they live. So all these types of payment, whether it's hourly, salary, or project based, is going to lend itself depending on the situation and whether it's in person or remote. So now let's go back into this into hourly pay.

Hourly pay works well when you have someone in the studio for small amounts of time, let's just say they come in. Four a couple of hours each day to clean toilets and to clean up session work, you know, rewrap the cables and clean the desks up and to get everything finished up for the day. That's a good situation, in my opinion, for like an hourly type employee where you're just, you know, you come in between five and seven every day or eight and 10 every day.

And I know that if you showed up that day, I'm going to pay you for your two hours for that day. That's where that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is where it's a remote employee and they're responsible for tracking their own hours. That gets in this dicey territory of like incentivizing them to not track hours accurately or, I dunno, what are your thoughts on this?

Chris: [00:36:32] Yeah. I mean, it's tricky because you've got a couple things going on here. One.

have to be tracking their time, which people forget to do.

Brian: [00:36:39] And also it's tedious.

Chris: [00:36:40] It's tedious. It's pain in the butt, and then inevitably anyone that's tracking their time is going to not do it right sometimes, and they're gonna have to make up their hours, and then they're going to feel weird about like, ah, did I overestimate or did I underestimate, am I getting ripped off or am I ripping them off?

That's not a good feeling.

the other component is you got to trust him.

they say they're working in a certain number of hours, you have to trust that they.

We're honest about it,

and that's a tricky way to have a relationship. I'm not saying that will never work. There are certainly occasions when it does.

There's certainly people who have been very successful doing that, but I think it's deceptively tricky.

Brian: [00:37:13] And that leads us to the second type of payment, which is a salary, and this is where you pay somebody a set amount of money. Four. I guess a set amount of hours or just the understanding that you will do the things that are asked of you. This differs depending on what sort of industry you're in and what sort of employer hiring.

Just for example, like Trevor, the CTO of sound Stripe, when he hires a new developer, Trevor's my best friend, by the way. He's the cofounder of file pass.com. And he's the one who created file pass. If he hires somebody at his other business sounds Stripe and is hiring them on a salary, he's not really going to track their hours, but he has certain expectations for that employee and they need to fulfill their expectations in order to collect that salary every month or every year.

So that's a different situation. Then what I have experienced in, which is a part time salary employee where I will give. X amount per month, four a certain amount of hours per week or up to a certain amount of hours per week. And I love this model because I don't have to track hours. I have a certain threshold of work that I'm gonna give this person every single week or month, and it's going to take hopefully up to a certain amount of hours and hopefully not over that.

And if it's under that, I don't really care because I'm getting enough value out of the person in order to pay that set monthly fee that I've guaranteed them. There's a win win here because. If there's a slow week or a slow month, they're getting a lot of money for a little amount of work.  I'm still getting the value that I need and the value that I want.

I also can budget for it because I know exactly what I'm going to pay every single month. There are no surprises there. And then at a certain point, if the employees consistently going over X amount of hours per week that you have asked for that you have negotiated with them, then you start worrying about upping their salary every month.

Chris, what are your thoughts on this sort of way to pay people.

Chris: [00:38:58] So part-time salary can be tricky

you approach it from the mindset of full time salary. There are a lot of books and a lot of ideas about how to manage people that are salaried,

but they have nothing to do with managing people who are part time salary.

who are part time salaried.

morale I think is everything. They should be having fun.

They should be enjoying it and if they are,

probably going to put in like an awful lot of hours for you cause they enjoy the work.

If they don't,

it's this weird efficiency thing where they're trying to work the absolute bare minimum

that they make the absolute maximum and it starts to get tricky there.

when you start to have expectations about like, Hey man, I called you, you didn't pick up, Hey man, a text you, you didn't get right back to me within 67 seconds. Like when you start to have these weird expectations about like,

you're my slave. Drop what you're doing. Whenever I say jump,

gets way on cool.

and cool. I'm not down with that. And I've seen a lot of people

hire for a salary, part time position

and have it blow up in their face because they have this crazy expectation as if they're paying them full time.

And that's not the case. When someone's part-time, they have to do other stuff to make money,

have to give them the room to do that.

And I think in our industry.

you're going to hire somebody.

a big fan of part-time salaried

because I love when someone's doing other things outside of what they're doing for me to grow themselves.

Brian: [00:40:22] Agreed.

Chris: [00:40:23] So the upside of hourly.

Is you can try it.

The downside of hourly, this is a pain in the butt.

Brian: [00:40:29] It's messy.

Chris: [00:40:30] It's messy.

The upside of salary is it's easy if you have the cash flow to be able to afford it.

my big thing, I think for, you know, you mentioned the guy with the Grammys sitting next to him is listen to the podcast right now.

In most of those cases, I would say salary, part time, position,

and hire a problem solver who is loyal and dedicated and fun and a good hangout,

hang out, a good hang

Brian: [00:40:53] There you go.

Chris: [00:40:53] good thing.

I think that's an interesting way to do it. I have done

our next way of hiring pain people

Brian: [00:41:01] Yeah, project basis. One of my favorite ways to do it, but it only makes sense if you're doing project based work. You're not going to do project based pricing on what I'm doing with James because he's got like ongoing work and set things that he has to do for me every single week or month, so it just doesn't make sense.

We're project-based pricing works fantastically, is four mixed prep work. Where it's a session, it's a certain amount of deliverables and there is a set start and end date for that project and no ongoing work after that. That's a really good situation for project based pricing where it's like, Oh, you're only coming in the studio just to do my drum editing, and when that drum editing is done, I'm not going to see you again until I have another project ready for drum editing.

There's your project based pricing or hourly in that situation too. It depends on how you want to do it, but this is the alternative. This is a set rate type of pricing similar to salary, but for small project type work that lends itself well to hourly as well.

Chris: [00:41:56] So project based pricing is really interesting for a bunch of reasons. One of those is it makes profit sharing really, really easy.

Brian: [00:42:03] Yup.

Chris: [00:42:03] You can say, Hey,

a project.

cut is,

be this percent? Let's go.

thing that makes project based pricing so interesting,

it's very low liability.

Hourly.

You can get into a situation where like, yeah, man, go ahead and

edit this podcast for us.

Brian: [00:42:19] 15 hours later.

Chris: [00:42:21] hours later. I was like, what the hell are you doing? Don't do that.

Brian: [00:42:24] Yeah.

Chris: [00:42:24] Like with hourly, you have to put in caps and say.

Hey, once you work on this, it shouldn't take you any more than this amount of time.

So you can put a check in and say, Hey, could you spell check my entire website?

Don't spend more than an hour on it

project base and with sourly sourly sourly salary was salary. There's not as much impetus to do that, though. It is still going to help.

Brian: [00:42:45] There's a little push and pull here. So with hourly based work, the incentive is for them to stretch it out as long as possible. With project based work, the incentive is them to get it done as fast as possible because they're getting a set price. The negative with that though is the, the quality may drop as a result of that.

So there is a balance there too, making sure the quality is where it needs to be when you do project based pricing or that the speed is where it needs to be when you're doing hourly pricing, those are two things to watch out for and two things that you need to have done the work enough yourself.

There's very few things that I've. Ever hired out for my own businesses to where I didn't do them first. So I had a benchmark of how long it should take and the quality of which it should be done. And if I hire for hourly work, I know the quality of which it should be done in the speed of which it should be done.

And if I do it project based work, I know how long it should take you and I know what the quality of the deliverable should be as well. So there's some things to keep in mind there. Chris continued on what you were saying.

Chris: [00:43:39] That was super duper interesting, man.

Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it in that regard. If you know the push and pull

the push and pull, I think related that with sour salad. Salar li

Brian: [00:43:49] you're the one making up words today, man.

Chris: [00:43:51] man. Like we're switching spots here. I'm going gonna make a dad joke real quick.

Brian: [00:43:54] Mmm. Those aren't very punny, Chris.

Chris: [00:44:00] That was awful.

Brian: [00:44:01] I know. Cause we're switching roles here. Yeah. And how does that make you feel, man?

Chris: [00:44:04] doesn't feel good,

Brian: [00:44:04] No, it doesn't.

Chris: [00:44:06] but I'm not going to stop. Don't worry.

Brian: [00:44:08] Okay.

Chris: [00:44:09] salary only,

Brian: [00:44:12] Huh.

Chris: [00:44:13] is interesting because it has its own, you know, upsides and downsides as well too.

let's kind of bring this home.

Brian: [00:44:19] Well, actually stop there. You mentioned that salary has its own push and pull as well, and it does, and it's probably worth exploring, and you kinda touched on it, but I want to mention it here. The push and pull with salary pay is, I want to just keep dumping things on to James to do. And James is like, I've got other shit to do.

I don't want to do any more of your bullshit. Brian, stop it. This week's probably one of those a week for James cause it's jury duty week for me and I'm just dumping extra shit on his plate and he's probably hating it right now. And so that's the push and pull. The salary work is the employer wants to keep dumping things on.

And the employee wants it, like just what's the skimming by minimum, not the James is like, that board is using James example here. What's the minimum I can get by with doing so that I can focus on the other shit that I want to do, which is like this, this and this. It has nothing to do with you employer guy who I'm just collecting a paycheck from.

Again, not talking about James here, just talking about the conversation as a whole. Cause James is an angel.

Chris: [00:45:11] Yeah. He truly is. Amazing.

have, part of the thing with salary too is

you do an hourly salary or project-based. I can't believe I just pronounced all those things. That

Brian: [00:45:21] You got it right, man.

Chris: [00:45:22] that was amazing.

There are a lot of tools that you can use. We're not going to get heavy into them, but there are a lot of tools you can use that make collaboration with someone the easier,

use an app called HelpScout to manage my inbox.

Let's multiple people,

know, participate in the answering of emails. That's really nice.

Kyle just turned me onto an app called Asana, a S a N. a.

Brian: [00:45:41] Project management. It takes the place of like Trello. It's a lot more powerful than Trello. There's also a website called teamwork. There's a website called monday.com and then there is another one called click up. Those are all basically competitors of each other. Have fun analyzing all those. By the way, project management analysis, like trying to figure out which one you want to use.

That's one of those tedious tasks you could ever do. I almost wish I wouldn't have told everyone, but I do want you to go through and look at all those. If you're looking for project management software.

Chris: [00:46:08] What we did is we created our own project management system to evaluate all the other project management systems

a lot of steps to it. Before we decided on a project

Brian: [00:46:18] I can't tell if you're joking or not, but because it almost makes sense to do that.

Chris: [00:46:21] I mean it sounds like something that Chris Graham, like 10 years ago would've been like, Oh, I'm

Brian: [00:46:24] Yeah.

Chris: [00:46:25] code to figure this out.

But like, dude,

Brian: [00:46:27] Okay.

Chris: [00:46:27] on.

Brian: [00:46:29] What did that come from? The Asana thing, by the way, what was the point of that?

Chris: [00:46:32] That when you're working in collaborating with other people, whether that's hourly salary or project based, you gotta have like a home base where you can see are they done yet? Like what are they getting ready to work on next? What should they prioritize.

Brian: [00:46:43] Yeah. If you're working on projects together, James and I don't really work on set projects. He just has deliverables like. Set things he does repeatedly, every month or every week. And so we've just never really stuck to any sort of specific project management tool. We both use an app called  and so that's what he uses for his repeating tasks.

And that's where I put a lot of my stuff. But we don't really, I need to work from a task list together.

Chris: [00:47:05] It's an interesting word to do list.

did joist.

yeah, this kind of sums up the hourly versus salary versus project based thing.

Brian: [00:47:14] so Chris, we've done this topic justice. Is there anything we need to do to wrap this episode up here?

Chris: [00:47:18] Well, let's just kind of sum up what we've talked about, but first of all, let's talk about this spirit behind hiring people.

You can approach hiring people from the standpoint of,

want you to help me and I want to pay you as little as possible

keep you from quitting and to make sure that you're doing a decent job.

Brian: [00:47:34] Yeah. The Walmart approach.

Chris: [00:47:35] The Walmart approach, which does not work well in our industry. And I think the flip side of that is that you should look at hiring people

they are your students.

And hopefully someday they will graduate, but you want to make sure that you're in a position where you guys can be a team to grow them for the longterm, not this stupid internship.

Why don't you come on and work with me for 90 days? I'll show you everything I know and then you can start your own mastering company.

What did I get out of this? I don't know.

I don't think that's a great model, but I think

if you were finding people and like, I want to pour into you for the longterm and see you grow.

And hopefully someday you graduate. That's where I think it starts to get interesting.

could involve profit sharing. That could involve a lot of teaching. There's a lot of different ways that it could look,

I think it's finding the right person that you trust.

an amazing problem solver.

That's got great people skills.

That's a grower, someone that's becoming better and that wants to become better and that they want to become better through working for you.

think that's pretty cool.

valuable for us all to think about what are you doing from a Go-Giver standpoint when you hire somebody.

Brian: [00:48:47] So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio pod. Now I have a question for you. Do you mix and master music or any kind of audio for that matter? Do you ever send that music to your clients and then gather feedback from those clients in order to make the music rat? Well, if that sounds like you, I've got a little bitty for you.

It goes by the name of file, pass.com file pass.com is file sharing for the audio industry. When you upload songs to file pass.com and send them to your clients, they can leave timestamp comments or rod on the music just like SoundCloud, except the audio don't sound like ass. Matter of fact, we got lossless audio.

Now you might be thinking, what the hell is lossless audio? That's just a fancy city boy. You up a term just means when you upload something, we don't change it. What's your client strains is exactly what you uploaded. Now that's fucking cool one though. Some even better than that, you can protect your files with a pay wall and that just means when you send your music to a client, they can't download that to, they pay you money.

So if you want a 14 day free trial, a file pass, just go to file, pass.com. Tell me more. Brian sent, you

Chris: [00:49:54] There's a great story here.

I'm

a vegetarian who, believe it or not, is vegan curious now

Brian: [00:50:03] can, can we say, just save the fucking story man. Cause like

Chris: [00:50:14] is a way better story behind me saying that. Then I

Brian: [00:50:17] That'd even, I just, I don't even want to know the story yet. Just tell me about your vegan curious story please. Cause that's an amazing term in and of itself. Hippy asshole. I can't wait to make funny on the podcast. I love you. I love you though. This is all in love. I just, I did that. That phrase caught me off guard is what it is and I don't want to run.

I want to talk through all this on the podcast.