Why Mastermind Groups Are The #1 Best Way To Find (And Fix) Your Biggest Blindspots

This is the six figure, a home studio podcast, episode 79

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

figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my amazing and beautiful cohost Chris Graham. Chris, how you doing today man? I'm fantastic. Bryan, how are you sir? I'm doing pretty good man. My air conditioner is kind of Wonky right now in the studio, so like it is like running 24 seven just barely keeping it at 74 degrees in here, like 85 degrees outside. Not even that hot. I called my air dude, he hasn't called me back. So other than that things are good. I'm just like sweaty right now. We just finished a podcast episode which says we did things completely backwards today. We're going to talk about in a second, but I just finished podcasts episodes, Islamic sweaty cause it's hot in this house, so that's where I'm at. Other than that and I've got a slight headache so really I'm not great, but I'm American so I'm trying to just say I'm doing awesome.

That's how we do here in America. Yeah. Well good for you Brian. Way To put on a happy face, my friend. I am happy like I love it. We just talked about but I do have a headache and I am sweaty and I can't wait to get up. Well I have no idea what we're doing but I can only guess that we're recording this right now as an intro for the episode that we just sort of accidentally recorded. The way the podcast works typically is Chris and I will go down a long checklist and then one of the points in that checklist is to discuss topic ideas for today, news flash, we don't actually know what we are going to talk about each week. We just come in and we talk through ideas and eventually one pops out there like, hey, that's something that is really a struggle.

We see this in the community or Christie's it with this coaching clients where I see it and profitable Preuss or core students or insert thing here we just realize this a problem or something. You were experiencing ourselves in our own businesses, but we started talking about potential ideas for an episode. We started talking about finding your own blind spots in your personal life and your business and then it sort of launched into this conversation's really good conversation to you and I had and then like somewhere halfway through it we decided to is the episode. So sorry, we're just going to keep talking and then eventually we'll figure out what to do with the intro. Chris, what is the topic for the episode we just recorded today? Chris? It's sort of two things. It's how to find your own blind spots, why it's important to find your own blind spots.

And I guess the third thing of the power of community and the power of having relationships with people that can help you do that. We talk about finding a mentor, we talk about go where you need to go to grow and at the end we really go deep into mastermind groups and even trying something out to help our community find their own mastermind groups. So if you're interested in something like that, stick around towards the end of the episode where we give you a URL to go to. We're not trying to monetize this in any way, we're just trying to find a way for our people to find mastermind groups. And so I know a lot of people out there listen to our conversations about Chris and i's mastermind group and are a little envious or they want the same thing, but they don't know who to go to to do this because there may be solid off in a small town but not around people that can do a mastermind with. So we're trying to hopefully solve that problem. It's just a spur of the moment thing that came up. So we'll see if this works or not. Anything else, Chris, before we get into this?

I think that's it, man. This conversation was incredible. It was really encouraging to me. And I'm glad that we just sort of, we're laid back about letting our conversation turned into an episode.

Yeah. So if you're wondering why, like we sound way less energetic at the beginning of this interview or this conversation is because we were just talking Chris and I like we bump our energy levels like 10 x when we actually start the interview. Cause especially cause I start off like look, go back to another episode. Like I start off really energetic and that kind of carries on in the episode. But when Chris and I are just talking, we tend to be a little more like relaxed and chill. So that's probably the tone when we transition to this. Anyways, I'm going to stop delaying. This is the conversation person I just had enjoy.

I think this is fascinating.

There've been a number of books that I've read over the years that I have fixated on something they said and it was the wrong thing at the wrong time. And so for me, one of the biggest things that I took home that was the most dangerous was I read good to great and in good to great, the essential kind of take home is that an institution that lasts for generations was initially led by a level five liter, which is somebody who doesn't have a big personality. And he was very behind the scenes and is an encourager and an enabler. Not a larger than life Steve jobs style personality,

except some of the examples use in good to great, like Enron are gone and Steve Jobs and apple are still around. So it's kind of one of those like how much,

well, and that's the problem as I read that book and was like, okay, well I'm going to suppress my big personality for a couple of years. And it was a massive mistake. This podcast was me and a lot of ways shedding that wasn't applicable. Let's lean in with this. And it's great. And so there's a lot of topics there of like when you're self educating, you're going to have gaps and sometimes you're going to learn something. It was just not right for you. This whole like advice buffet thing falls apart. If you're allergic to shellfish and you pick out something with shellfish in it. There's a lot of really great content buried in there of like there've been a couple of things that I've read. Another example is mastering the Rockefeller habits. I still use concepts that I learned in that every day, but one of the ideas was a business that can grow up more than 50% per year in gross revenue is called a gazelle and I got fixated on being a Gazelle and in the service industry it's a very stupid plan.

You're not going to be able to keep up with that. So how does this go back to the blind spots topic? It goes back to the blind spots topic because if you are listening to our podcast and you are applying the wrong stuff or you're listening to other people and applying the wrong stuff or reading the wrong books that don't apply to who you are. So case in point. One of my, this guys I'm working with today who was like, oh I'm going to read, built to sell, but he doesn't have any salesman experience yet. He was going to read it because he wants to get better at sales and it was like, oh, you're not trying to build a business that you can sell

to me though. That book has nothing to do with selling your business. That's why I love that book. I avoided it forever cause I thought it was about building a business that you could sell the entire book. It's about niching down. It's almost like the pumpkin plan. Another, it's like a reincarnation of the pumpkin plan by Mike McAlary. It's where you are finding the services in the clients that bring you the most joy in the most income and the least headache. [inaudible] 80 20 and yet you're throwing away the 20% that gives you 80% of the headaches and you're doubling down on the 20% that can bring you 80% of the income and joy. And so in the book it's logo creation. Yes, but he doesn't have customers yet. Oh, okay. So yeah, you're, you're exactly right. That's the wrong book for you if you don't have customers yet.

So my point here though is like the blind spots episode. I don't feel like I've put it together in an overarching concept yet other than just calling up blind spots. But this idea that like we might overemphasize your ability to select from an advice buffet, you should be aware that you might get a pretty bad stomachache if you select the wrong advice at the wrong time. And that's one of the things that I think people like about our podcast is that we're really open, that there isn't one size fits all. It's so much more complicated than that. And it's so annoying to get on like youtube or something and someone's like, well, every time you mix a vocal you're going to want to pull up.

You're Pultec you and your fair child compressor, you're going to want to go to setting three on the,

like all of this like one size fits all. This will always solve your problem is total bull. And as far as I know, we're the only people in our industry that I've ever seen pushed this idea of like,

well there's tools and sometimes you need a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Yeah, I'd say like most mixing tutorials that grew up watching where like always take out this frequency on kick drum. I always take out this frequency on guitars. I always boost this frequency. And so it's like this very cookie cutter advice and this is why you hear a lot of cookie cutter mixes in metal. Yeah. How do you keep people from taking the wrong device at the wrong time? Because like we can serve up this entire buffet, but if people want to just eat this shitty junk food that makes them feel good, what are we going to do to stop them? Like it's easy to like point out the problem, but how do you solve the problem? That's a great question. I mean getting a business coach helps but reading self improvement books that are about maturing. So like essentially [inaudible] I'm reading this book right now, I don't know if you've read it. The subtle art of not giving a bleep that out, James,

it's the, the book is fantastic, but that's sort of this idea of like you only have a certain number of secret actually give choose them wisely. Wisely.

I try to read that book and I couldn't because I quickly realized that I don't, I don't give them, so the books just like preaching to the choir, you're especially good at that. I'm the second best person I know with that. I still have a long way to go. This is a great content podcasts right now. So do I man. What if we call this the problem of self education? I guess it is a promise of education. One of the big issues is having self awareness and I think part of an understanding which pieces of the advice buffet to pick up and eat is going to determine which stage of business you're in and I know I'm looking for that podcast episode we did where we talked about different stages of a business. Yeah. It ultimately comes back to that idea of like you have different stages.

If you don't have sales yet, you don't need systems. So episode 17 of the podcast, the five stages of a successful recording career, we outlined five different stages and each of those five different stages have their own problems, their own basically ups and downs and their own needs. And someone who's in Stage one is going to have a lot different takeaway from this podcast than someone who's in stage five. Like it's a completely different set of problems and skills required. And that's why when you go back and talking about from good to great, you were like a stage one entrepreneur reading a stage five entrepreneurs book. That's for like CEOs that are at like $50 million a year in revenue that you're trying to get to $500 million a year in revenue. That is what that type of book is for. Not The guy who's in his freaking bedroom mastering mixes, trying to figure out how to get to his first hundred thousand dollars like that's why it did more damage than good to you and that you're just now getting past that and much like you're talking about built to sell with your coaching client where he was trying to read, built to sell by, doesn't have clients yet.

So that book has an apical with him yet. So I think part of us identifying what stage you're in. I think episode 17 is probably a really good episode to go back to and kind of re listened to because it came out more than a year ago, March six 2018 so like I don't know how about anyone else's, but I'm the type of person where if I haven't listened to a podcast episode in a long time, I need a refresher. And so in the context of this episode, if you're trying to figure out what piece of advice buffet do I need to listen to so that I am not missing these blind spots first, identifying what stage you're at and then start figuring out which pieces go with it. Anything else with that? Well, I think a lot of this stems back to some of our societal issues with education, with big education in, Oh God, here we go. We've got hippie Chris coming out. Here we go. Yeah. For those who don't know, Chris is the biggest hippie. I know. He doesn't have like long hair flowing down to his back of his neck because he's completely bald shaven. But if he had hair, it would be down to his butt. He would have it in a braid. He would be wearing a jean jacket and a purple shirt. Wait a minute, I am wearing a Jean Jacques identifiable and I do have some flare on it. I've got a pin that you go 100% jazzed.

You'll literally have a pen on it and you called it flare. What movie is that from office space. Yeah. Okay. So anyways, you're going into your hippie rant, which some people with and some people

will hate. So we love polarizing content on this. Bad guys, go for it. Let's just say some people resonate with and some people haven't resonated with yet. So I think I'm only like 40% serious there guys. I'm not that arrogant. But I think some of this comes back to education that we were told as kids. There's a way to do things and as a result we believe there's a way to do things in business. The only like standard advice that works 100% of the time is you have to be unique in the marketplace. You can't just clone another business and be successful, not in a creative field. And like any other business, like blown away, like that's called franchising. You have like one, Mcdonald's is exactly the same as the other. Yes, but there's a catch there. There's a geography piece. Each Mcdonald's does have a unique selling proposition and it's that we're here and the other one is there.

Each Mcdonald's has a monopoly. You never see a Mcdonald's across the street from a Mcdonald's unlike Starbucks. Yeah. Starbucks. I see like literally two in the same mall. And I'm like the fuck what? Go back to your point though. You were going somewhere with that. Yeah. So my point is that what we have been taught from a very young age is there is a way that things are done. And when you get on, you know, we were talking about this earlier, this idea of you go on youtube and you're like, well, I need to learn how to make a better sounding snare. It's not hard to find a platinum record selling person who tells you every single time you gotta use this compressor and the z Q settings in this preset and always use, uh, the pro tools, Dever plugin. Why do you sound like a neck beard?

Like gamer dude who hasn't slept in six weeks because he's been on a Warcraft binge and has chips on his shirt. That's all the baby boomers that are successful in our industry. They all, they all sound like that. And we've lost three of our listeners. Sorry guys. Have a good one because we don't have many of those people on our, I'm actually, maybe we do. I don't know. I hope we do man. I hope it's a wide variety. I hope we do too. I hope you're not actually making fun of him. I'm not. What I'm making fun of is this one size fits all mentality and it's really easy to consume a bunch of content or to have gone to school and to get this idea that there is always a one size fits all approach and all you have to do to get quote unquote mastery is fine.

That one size fits all approach and it's just out there waiting for you in a youtube video and all you have to do is find it. Life is so much more complex than that. There are so many more shades of gray. Let's back up. So a pharmacy, our podcast is a lot like a pharmacy. There are many different medicines for your business in there. Some of them are behind the counter. Some of them we don't talk about because it's like, well here's the thing with that piece of business knowledge. For some people that's the one thing that will keep their business alive but for others it will kill it instantaneously. That's a good example. Most medicines are medicines and some context and poisons in other contexts. Dang, that's so tricky when you're trying to self educate because you naturally you're going to have these gaps and there are naturally going to be things that you learn that you didn't realize were actually poisonous for where you were and that was my issue with the book.

Good to great. Jim Collins is amazing, the author, but that book is for corporate people. It's for people with huge organizations that are trying to figure out how to stay relevant in an era of change and I have no intention of building a huge corporate entity that trades on the Nasdaq or something like that and so I read that book and was like, Okay these are gospel truths because this was on the New York Times bestseller. This must be one size fits all because Jim Collins is about as wise as they come, but I wasn't wise enough to take what I learned in that book and to say, is this for me or is this not for me yet or is this never going to be for me at all? This was medicine for certain situations and poison for others. My takeaway from that book was that all of the biggest, most longstanding businesses that were successful had one thing in common and it was that their leader didn't have a big personality.

It was somebody that sort of stayed behind the scenes that was quiet, that enabled others, and I naturally have always had a very big boisterous personality. No way, always been kind of flamboyant and so I took that as you need to repress that part of who you naturally are. And that was one of the main reasons I didn't make content that I didn't have a youtube channel that I didn't have a podcast was I was terrified that by using my big personality that it was going to be dangerous and toxic for me when in fact it was the absolutely, the thing that I should've been doing all along in this podcast has been an amazing education for me in that of like, Oh hey this, you should talk more and stuff. People sometimes like that.

So what other blind spots are people kind of missing out on right now? I think, did we talk about the one that you had the realization on this week when I kind of like stuck you with a hard truth in the gut? Did we talk about that early? I don't even know what we've talked about cause like I'm sure we preface this and ensure the podcast. We just started talking about topic ideas and then this naturally morphed into conversation when we're like, all right, we're just going to keep this so, so I don't know exactly where in the conversation this picked up. But go back to that story.

Yeah. Okay. So in fashion guys, all I've ever wanted as an audio guy is free stuff. I know many of you relate with this, but as a kid I was in a weird spot and that my parents had a lot of money but we were very tight with our budget. I never had like disposable income or you know, my mom wouldn't let go out and buy me some random thing that I wanted ever.

Which is why your parents had a lot of money. Now that you see it from the other side. Yeah,

this is true. So I was always macgyvering I was always like negotiating and trying to find a way like can I borrow this or can I have this or you know, it didn't make money. So I was trying to like barter with people in other ways and as a result I kind of have this fixation with free gear and this podcast has made me struggle because we have that a lot of opportunities to get free stuff.

You even shoe horned a gear slutty section at the end of a podcast called mail time or something. That one episode.

Yeah, I know. Well it was because I'm obsessed with free gear. So like case in point, full disclosure, we have been thinking about taking sponsors on. One of the companies were the most interested in working with the sonar works. Sonar works, sent me this amazing pair of

Sennheiser six 50 headphones with their software and I'm obsessed with it. There's your gear, slow alert for the day. But I got so fixated on, oh my gosh, somebody sent me headphones. Hi.

And I started focusing on it a lot. So we went to NAM and had been reaching out to all these companies and talking to them about free gear and it was a weird experience. I just was super obsessed and fixated on it and we were hanging out the other day and we were in our mastermind group, which we call blammo. It's me, Brian Yorkey, Vimentin Dixon, Chris limb that does mixed an online map. Boudreaux drove working class, audio lead Shaw of according to Your Rock Stars. Um, Ian Shepherd of all the loudness wars stuff. He's got a bunch of different things that he does and a couple other people that show up every once in awhile and we're just kind of having a conversation. And I shared with the group that I had found myself struggling with the whole getting stuff for free thing. I fixate on it and Brian said something that only they only like Brian and I could say to each other that wouldn't like offend a normal person. But he said, you got kind of frustrated with me on the call and you said Chris is like, he's like a, he's like a horny 14 year old that's obsessed with sex when it comes to getting free gear. And it was this like, oh, when you have the allure of gear

dangle in front of you, you're like, uh, just passed puberty teenage boy. Yeah. That's like all I can think about. That's how you act. That's how your mannerisms are. That's how you, your face lights up. It's like exactly how I see it for you. It's stupid. It's ridiculous. Yeah. It's kind of dumb.

Well, you said that and there was this moment of like, oh, he's right and that's disgusting. I need to stop. And so this sort of blind spot thing, it was like a really big epiphany for me and my wife was just super pumped that I understood what you said and that it clicked with me for some reason because she knows this to be very, very true about me.

She knows you better than any other human on this earth probably. Yeah, and that means she is very aware of your care slot because someone who's probably listened to one time in the podcast is aware of your gears slightness right now. Yeah, so man, it's been interesting.

It's been a really interesting week for that in that regard because it's challenged me to look at how I use my time. It's challenged me to look at how I use my energy and man, it's been really, really, really healthy to just suddenly be like, oh, I can see in that blind spot now and I've been wasting all this freaking time on this stupid thing. I know this is probably like I'm ranting in. This probably doesn't feel like it applies to many people that are listening. Maybe it does. I don't know.

I could say it absolutely does because so many people, it may not be gear or free gear, but there's something that you obsess over like a teenage boy. There is something that you obsessed over that is not pushing you forward at all, and that's the biggest blind spot that's probably worth fixing in your life. Whatever that is. It can be gear. It could be mixing tutorials, it could be this podcast, it could. There's a number of things that it could be, but it's something that you obsess over. You spend all your time and effort and energy wasted on trying to figure out our consumer, learn about, you're just using it as a distraction instead of working on the things that are actually gonna push your business forward, and that is half the battle. As a solo entrepreneur, you don't have some under life that'll sit you down and tell you like, hey man, you, you, you are so far off the beaten path of where you should be. Like you are so far off track as a business owner, like most people did not have the person that are going to sit down and tell them that. And so you go down these rabbit holes as a solo entrepreneur where you do not have the ability to get out of it. You don't even know you should get out of it because you are in this weird feedback loop without outside perspective. And until you have someone that can sit you down and slapping in the face and say, Chris, stop obsessing over free gear.

You don't. Yeah, well it man, it's, here's the motif that I, you know, always using the podcast. If I could go back in time and talk to Chris Graham from 16 years ago,

there we go. We switched the number finally because your birthday was recently. For those who weren't aware,

this is true. If I could sit down with them and be like, look dude, don't do this, this, this and this, and make sure you read that, that, that and that it would have made such a difference in my life and my marriage, in my friendships, in the quality of the projects I made. You know, I would get in these situations where I would just fix it on the wrong thing and didn't realize I was fixating on the wrong thing. And it made it tricky with clients, especially when I was producing and they made it tricky with trying to be done was work at the end of the day and hang out with my wife, man. It's just such an important thing. And we live in an era where there's this dangerous lone wolf mentality that all you need is a computer, Google and youtube and that's it. You'll be fine.

I'm guilty of that too. Like the first, like seven years of my career, I was preaching that I was like, I went to the University of Google and I learned this all on my own and I don't need anyone else's help. Like I was that guy that was siloed off. I was in a bubble 24 seven like no outside input and my mental health suffered for it. My social life suffered for it. My physical health suffered for it and so that is a definite danger and I was definitely one of the people that we're preaching the virtues of self reliance and only now in my old age and wisdom of 30 2:00 AM I starting to realize they like having outside perspective, having friends, having people that have had a different life perspective than you at different life experience than you. Only once you have these sorts of people surrounding you, do you really find those weaknesses in those blind spots that you are absolutely oblivious to.

Case in point, my friend Trevor, he was on the podcast on episode 71 Trevor's the guy that has in the past literally sat me down over dinner and pulled up an Evernote file of shit he wanted to talk to me about. I love him. He's so awesome. He's the kind of guy like he will take notes on shit you're doing wrong. Not in a mean like you're doing this, this, this, this and this wrong. Not In that at all. But he'll say like, dude, you are really walking all over people when you give them business advice. The first time I sat down for like a lunch with the CEO of sound stripe just to talk about their marketing stuff when they were getting started I had noticed something that I thought was a weak point in the way they're doing things and I like lit into them in the way that I am where I'm like, Holy Shit, that's so dumb.

I can't believe he like and delivering that sort of news to someone like Chris. Certain personalities can take that, but 99% of humans on earth do not communicate that way. It's absolutely insane. And so like eventually Trevor sat me down and was like, dude, the way you approach the situation like was not good. It was like very abrasive. It didn't make you look good. You are not doing yourself any favors towards building relationships. And that was something that after that moment when he had like a list and that was just one example that wasn't like there was just one example on the list of things about like my abrasive personality and interactions, especially in kind of like a coaching situation that is this sort of stuff. Like only when he sat me down and told me about this stuff did I realized that I had an issue and this is not the first time that's happened in the past. It was a complaining I was a huge complaint or for years where I would just constantly complain about every little thing and until my friend sent me down and said, Brian, stop complaining so much. It's really hard to be around you that I make improvements. So all I've tried to say at this point is surround yourself with people that are going to help you in the long run and stop siloing yourself off from the rest of the world.

Totally. And there's a couple of points I would make about that. One is that in our society, and back to what my problem with education is that somebody somewhere said, you know what we should do to teach kids things? Let's put all the kids that are the same age together and isolate them from the older, wiser, more experienced kids who can also teach them. This was a very dumb idea and like there were some upsides to it for sure, but when you put people that are multiple ages in the same room, and evidently what happens is the older guy that's learned some stuff the hard way communicates to the younger and that ends up being a very, very good and healthy thing. Our society is fixated on only having relationships with people that are pretty much exactly your same age. You know, that's one of the things I love about a podcast is like I get life advice from Seth Goden every week on his Akimbo podcast.

He is so much older and wiser, mostly wiser than me, and it's amazing to hear somebody with as much experience and wisdom as him and just like reset what I see as normal as far as wisdom and intelligence. If you're 22 and you only hang out with maybe 19 to 24 year olds, that's a problem. Most 19 to 24 year olds are not going to be like, Yo Dude, you need to cut this out. And there's something really wrong with our society in that. And I think it stems back from this idea of like everybody that I grew up with was no more than one year younger than me and no more than like two months older than me. There's a really narrow age group and that really robbed me. At one point my wife and I were going to a church that was all people in their 20s which is even crazier because it was like, hey, we're all trying to like better ourselves, but none of us here have any more experience than anyone else here. So we're all doing the same stupid stuff because we've been isolated from the older mentor type people who could pour into our lives and say, hey, you shouldn't do that. I used to do that and here's what happened and here's the danger.

I'm going to play the devil's advocate here. One of the bigger reasons they separate people in schools is more because older people tend to take advantage of younger people because of their own immaturity. Instead of passing the wisdom down, they end up taking advantage in bullying and that's one of the reasons they silo off grades and I'm sure it's obviously not the case across the board, but I would say in general that's a big reason is that the older kids, maybe to a certain point, this is not the case, but most older kids do not have the emotional maturity to actually mentor younger kids, but that's just me playing devil's advocate, but we don't have to talk about it right now.

No, I think that's actually an interesting rabbit hole for us to explore because yes, there is a drawback to mix at the ages and they have a bunch of young kids with a bunch of older kids. You're going to have some older kids that are going to not be cool about that, but you're also going to have some older kids that are going to be pretty cool about that. There's upsides and downsides to having kids sectioned off in a silo of only kids their own age and I think it's ultimately this question that comes back to this idea of one size fits all. Making the decision for all children everywhere are for all people everywhere that says this is the only way to do this. It's really tricky when it comes to something as complicated as education and I dunno, I think a lot of the tank home for our audience here is that if you don't have one friends in your life that will speak truth to you or to anyone that's older than, or three anyone that's like a coach or that's in a position of mentorship or that it's specifically the relationship, the nature of the relationship is I'm going to tell you some stuff to help you be better.

I'm going to mentor you or I'm going to take you under my wing or I'm going to train you. We have this weird thing in our society. When you get a bunch of people that are all the same age and they all hang out, they develop an aversion to correction. That makes sense.

Yeah. I think one interesting thing to talk about here is something we haven't talked about before, but how do you find a mentor, Chris? How does one find a mentor? Because I'm going to talk about myself. This is where I was in 2011 and 2012 lacy spraying Alabama town of 3000 people and uh, to get to my house, she took dry creek cove road and turned left when he got to the junkyard. You pass three trailers and when you get to the abandoned limo at the end of the gravel driveway, you turn left. That's my studio's driveway. I'm not making this up. That was actually how you got to my studio. That's amazing. All that to say, I wasn't surrounded by people that could speak truth into my life. Young, old, didn't matter. How does someone in that position find even a mentor that can help them see the blind spots in their lives or in their businesses? Like how does one actually do that? Because the opportunity and Lacey Springs, Alabama isn't great. Now granted I was like 25 30 minutes away from Huntsville, which is a quarter of a million people, ish, maybe 200,000 people. But still it wasn't like I had the ability to go into town and get me a mentor. Like there was just not an easy way to do that.

Well that brings up an interesting question. You know, we've talked about this a lot in the past. If you live in a small town and you're trying to do this audio stuff for a living, should you move, I would say moving to find clients can be smart, but moving to find mentors is even smarter. Doing what you gotta do to invest in yourself. Because here's the thing. If you get a client and you learn a thing or two working with them, great. That's going to help you for the rest of your career. What you can learn from a mentor can help you for the rest of your life and in a significantly larger way than, oh well now I know how to gate snares a little more efficiently because I experimented a little bit and I saw a youtube tutorial, so I would say a couple of things. One go where you got to go to grow.

Ooh, that's like such a good slogan. It is. Can that be our unofficial slogan? Can that just be now a thing that Chris Graham always says, one of your criticisms,

it's one of my criticisms. Go where you need to go to grow gallery. You need to go to grow. That sounds like my grandpa made that up. My Dad's coming through, so go where you need to go to grow.

Let's not take away from the point. That's actually a really good point. Go where you need to go in order to grow as a human, as an entrepreneur, as a business, as a insert thing here, whatever it is, go where you need to go to grow. Love that.

Yeah. Another thing I would say is the power of mastermind groups. Mastermind groups are amazing and you have no excuse to not be in a mastermind. A mastermind group is so easy. You get on Google hangouts, you get a couple people that are trying to do the same thing you are. When you do a mastermind group, you need a format. There's a couple different things you can do. We used to do a format called happy crappy re. You'd go around the group and each person would say, hey, this is what made me happy this week and this is what was crappy this week. One of the things we do now is we have a list of questions and we go through and we each answer those questions with a time limit. That's important. You don't want somebody that comes into the group and it's like, wow, my mom has got a pimple and my, my dad had, you know his, his socks smell really bad and we tried to Wa, you know, you don't want a guy that just goes and goes and goes and goes and go.

You want a time limit and you want to go around and a couple of things happen there. When you've got a mastermind group of likeminded people, you're going to have people that are going to say things that are going to inspire you. You have people that are going to have solutions to problems that you are experiencing and I think most importantly is you're going to hear from other people that they struggle with the same stuff that you do. That's so powerful to hear from someone else that's like, oh yeah, man, I've really been struggling with that same thing too. I haven't been really getting caught up on that. Oh man, I don't suck that path. Other people have the same problems I do.

That's part of it. But the last thing you want to do is be stuck in a, me too mastermind, let me to mastermind is I've got this problem. Oh, me too. Oh, me too. Oh, me too. Oh, me too,

Huh? Well that sucks.

Next thing, like that's not gonna help anybody out. You really want a mastermind group is diverse enough to where, yes, there are people that are experiencing the same problems with you, but there's also people that have experienced those same problems and gotten past those things and can help the entire group get past those things as well. So that's another thing is you need people that are on the same playing field, the same general area, but at completely different industries or completely different perspectives or at least different services if it's a studio thing, so that there's enough variety there to where you can help each other get through similar problems, but you're not all stuck in the same place.

So here's the thing, there's a little bit of a competition when you make a mastermind group and it comes down to you are the average of the five people you hang out with the most. And if you do a weekly mastermind group, you will probably be the average of that mastermind group. So when you get into a mastermind group, you want to make sure that you are below average in that mastermind group that you're like, let me in. I shouldn't be in this group. These guys are way too cool for me. If you feel that way, that's a good mastermind group. If you're thinking to yourself, man, I just feel like I'm the coolest guy in this group and I just feel like I'm way more awesome than these dudes. That's a bad mastermind group to be in. Yeah, no, no, no. Get that Outta here.

The worst case mastermind group you can possibly have is a group where everyone has the same blind spot that's terrible or where everyone's like, hey, let's go around and speak in platitudes and be like a really felt like a, you can't make a good record without gear sled alert. Oh Neve 10 73 preamps and in everyone else is like, yeah, totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, I totally agree. That's terrible. You definitely don't want everyone with the same perspective. There should be some tension in a mastermind group. Just like Brian and I described earlier, this idea where he walked in almost like Chris is like a fricking 14 year old boy who was obsessed with that was such a healthy facet of the mastermind group and it's when you have a situation like that, we call that a hot seat. When there's a hot seat and somebody or the whole group says, Brian, why do you wear your hats with a straight bill? You look ridiculous. You need to curve the bill like a baseball player to keep the sun out of your eyes.

This is the difference between a 32 year old and a 38 year old Chris. You missed that threshold when hats 37 whatever. You missed that threshold when the hats stopped being curved flat. It's true. It's so funny. I saw a meme and I don't talk about it means much, but it just said when did this and it was a flat build hat become sexier than this and it was a curve build hat and it said curves are sexy. Terrific,

sexy man. I curved my ass all the way. Yeah, you should be able to pull it down and no one should be able to see your eyes and she'd be like a tunnel that you're looking through. That's hot.

Yeah. I used to wear hats like that when I played golf a lot and when I played baseball a lot, but I don't do either of those things much anymore, so I just wear a flat bill is my bro. Anyways, let's go back on topic here. The point is you need people that are willing to be a little bit mean and you have to be open enough to not get offended. And if you have to walk on eggshells in your mastermind group, you're probably in the wrong group. Or if you can't get through a mastermind without getting bent out of shape because you didn't like what you heard, you're probably not ready for a mastermind group. So it really does take a healthy perspective. It takes healthy personality and it takes a little bit of toughness to get through a good mastermind session because if you get through it, everyone's happy, everyone's smiling, nothing crazy happened and you part ways, sure that's great for hangout. Maybe good for renewing your energy for the week, but it doesn't really help push the needle forward as far as self improvement. So you really have to find a mastermind group is going to bring you value. I didn't mean for this to go down the mastermind group rabbit hole, but this is just me and Chris talking. So at this point, this is such an unscripted episode that we're just like talking at this point.

Totally well and I think it's healthy. We're really into this idea of an advice buffet and the idea of an advice buffet is rooted in one concept and that's this sort of tolerance idea that what works for you might not work for him. What works for him might not work for you. It's really important when you're in a mastermind group to recognize that the worst ideas in the world are one size fits all ideas. There's an irony there because that's a one size fits all idea in itself, but in my opinion, the only one size fits all idea. That's good is that one size fits all ideas are good.

Okay. You're the dude. You're doing great, Chris. I lost myself. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Maybe we'll cut it out. Maybe we won't. Who knows?

Yeah. When you're in a mastermind group, it should be a group that embraces that. There aren't one size fits all ideas that when you go to a mastermind group, you're looking for tools that didn't sound right. You're looking for tools that you can use in your business of like, you know, one of the things I learned big time, we had Bjork fan on the show a while back. You Irvin taught me a crap ton about email marketing. He knows so much about that. I'm kind of the systems guy in our mastermind group and if there's like a systems issue, I'm the one that's probably going to have the most to say on that.

I don't know what I am. I'm just a resident mean guy who just sends me and stuff. I'm still abrasive by the way. I've just tried to tone it down for people. I don't know. You're the successful guy and our and our mastermind group. You're the money guy. Everyone's like, Gosh, how is he? How does he do this? Let's let's take his profitable producer course. It's good stuff, man. Chris, what do you think about this idea, and this just came to mind while we were talking, what if we helped some of our listeners get into mastermind groups? What if we created some sort of way for people to find each other for mastermind groups? That would be so cool. Yeah. What can we do for that landing page where they just sign up for mastermind groups and then we do something with that? Here's the deal, because this is not planned by the way.

We're just like, if I'm thinking about myself, when I was stuck in Alabama, I had no one around me. I couldn't get a mentor. I eventually did move to Nashville, so I go where I grow or whatever your face was, go where you need to go to grow. You got to go where you gotta go to grow, man, that's wrap my head. Go where you got to go to grow. Yeah, so eventually I moved to Nashville for those who don't know in 2012 and Nashville was not a place where I found a ton of clients because to this day, I think I've worked with one national clients as I moved here. So it's like it never was a big part of my business, but what it did do is put me around amazing people. Like Trevor from sound stripe, like Travis from sound stripe, like my friend Brandon who runs an agency of like 2025 people.

These people in my life that I would have never ever in a million years ever gotten around had I not made the move to Nashville. But that doesn't help the person who is stuck somewhere who can't move for whatever reason, whether it's financial or family or job or golden handcuffs, whatever it is, you cannot move. So there's gotta be people that are stuck that can't get to somewhere where they can get a good mentor, but they might be being a good mastermind group cause ours just meet online like me and [inaudible] are the only people here in Nashville. Everyone else is spread around the u s or the the UK in Ian's case or Canada and Christa's case. Yeah. And this is something that I do inside the profitable producer course. When we do the accountability accelerator bootcamps, we usually do a few of those a year. We're about to start one up soon here.

Actually when we do those, we put people into mastermind groups and those tend to meet once a week and we still have people that were in the very first boot camp that are still meeting up to this day like two years ago or a year and a half ago. They're still meeting weekly, which is awesome to hear, but not everyone's going to be the profitable which is of course because frankly it's not cheap and that means that if we were trying to help as many people as possible with this mastermind thing, it can't be limited to those that are just in the course. So like I'm just trying to think of ways that we can help get people into mastermind groups that are maybe stuck in an area and I don't know what that would look like if we do something instead of our community or if we do like a form that they fill out or just fill out an email, like put your name in the middle in here and then we'll let you know when we organize something. I don't know. What do you think, Chris?

I think this is a really cool idea. You know we had kind of thrown around the idea of doing some sort of, you know, paid community and of you know, kind of Higher End Business coaching thing

and we may still do that as long as the value's there, but this is one of those things like

I don't want to put a mastermind group of other people behind a pay wall. You know what I'm saying? Like yeah, it's not right.

Yeah. If we do a high end coaching thing and we help people create mastermind groups in that and we are a vital part of those groups of help structuring it, like that's a complete different thing because we're putting our time, effort, energy and expertise in to help create those. But these, I feel like we can either put some sort of place where people can sign up or find each other. I don't know what the system would be. I don't know how hard this would be. This may be completely cut from the podcast if we can't figure this out. I figured it's the least worth talking about because this is a real problem that people probably have and it'd be great for the community man. Think about like our Facebook group, there's over 5,000 people in that Facebook group in a large portion of those may need that.

I have an idea what Abu, what if we did this like Middle School Gym Class, Dodge ball style and we figured out a couple people, let's say a dozen to start with that would be team captains and we had a spot where people could go in to sign up to say, Hey, I want to be in a mastermind group. I love the podcast, I love the community. I want a weekly meeting of a couple people. I don't think more than five is good, but about five or six people. Well you need like

five or six core people, which means you're going to have about 10 in your group because usually there's a handful, they can't make it every week. So it's good to have like 10 people in the group and about half of those will show up weekly.

And then usually what I'll tell people is like if people don't show up,

they're not part of the group. It's one of those things you can be strict about it or whatever you can say like or kicking it from the group if you don't show up

for a month or something. Or you can just say like we do with blammo. If you can come, come. If you can't, can't, you know it's one of those like we're not that strict about it. Well what if we kind of took some of the people that have been more active in our community, made those team captains had a spot where people could go and say, hey, I want to be part of a mastermind group. And those team captains sorta dodge ball style where like I picked Joe and then the next guys I picked Steve.

Here's my idea. I think we go to the six figure on studio.com/mastermind we're going to have a forum. It's just going to be name and email and what we're gonna do is we're going to just see how many people are interested in this. If it's a pretty large amount of people, we will send out a team leader application. This is how we do it. Inside PPC, inside of the profitable producer course, we send a team leader application outlet people apply to be team leaders will select a handful of those. We'll send another email out about people that want to join the mastermind groups. You'll fill another form out with the understanding that this information you submit will be seen by the team leaders and the team leaders will go through and pick who they want in their mastermind based on the applications. If this somehow it works, I'm going to be blown away that this actually works.

Yeah, it may not work but it's worth an effort because going back to the mastermind thing, it is really vital to have an outside perspective. It is really vital to have a community of some sort. If you're not around people that are like bringing you up in that average of five people, it's important that you get around those types of people that are going to help bring you up and the only way I knew to do that is either to go where you need to go to grow as Chris says, and now I'm saying more than you actually, I'm the one that lasts around that or actually you know what go where need to go to grow means online as well on my mastermind is a great way to do it. So 100% yeah, well hopefully we'll be able to get some of you guys involved in some mastermind groups that'll be encouraging to you.

One of the things that's great about a mastermind is if it's well done, if it's the perfect combination of people, there's no competitors in it. You know like Matt Boudreaux and Lid Shaw both have really popular podcasts for audio engineers. There isn't an ounce of competition a month before of us know if anything. We've all helped each other out. Like Matt Boudreau's listeners have found their way to us. Our listeners have found our way to him and the same with recording studio rock stars. His listeners have found their way to both mats in ours podcast, so it's like a rising tide lifts all ships and that's how you should see your mastermind group. Everyone should be helping everyone else out. Rarely will you get to the place where it says zero sum game where if they win, I can't win. It's not how it works. There's a difference between the abundance mindset where you are there to help everyone out and they are going to help you out and everyone's going to help each other out.

That's the way it should be. And then there's the fixed mindset, which is just saying like it's just the hyper competitive. If they win I can't win and if I win they can't win. Zero sum game. If you are the type of person that has that mindset where you are worried about getting into a group with your competitors and if they find out your trade secrets, you'll never recover from this. It will be detrimental to your career. That's a really good sign that you should probably get into a mastermind group to help get over that. Yeah, I mean, our mastermind group has just been amazing. We've all taught each other a lot and a lot of cool stuff has come out of that mastermind group. This podcast came out of that mastermind group. I've got a memory on Facebook yesterday. I checked these every now and again, not all the time, and it was like memories from different past events in my life and then it was like two years ago today you added Chris Graham on Facebook.

I saw that too. Ah, happy two year anniversary. Mr Chris Graham on Facebook friends, which shows how quickly our relationship moved because within six months of adding each other on Facebook, we were starting a podcast together. Yeah, and then within another six months I was a member of your wedding party, I think, or maybe nine months or something. Yeah. Something, no, no, no, no, no. It was a year and nine months. Okay. Let's just, cause he took so long to pop the question, it just took you awhile. I'm just a very intentional manner, very intentional manner. So just to wrap this episode up, I think the whole topic that we started on was finding your blind spots. And the biggest problem with blind spots is you don't see them. They're blind spots that you have no idea what they are or a few know what they are. You have so much denial in place that you won't face that. So the best way that I can see in go back and listen to the episode, because this is what we've talked about the whole time. The best way I can see is to get yourself around people that can help you with those blind spots. And that's like to me, the overarching message here. Just get around better people.

Yeah. Well one last thought, one of the things that's been really helpful for me over the last year, we had Grand Cochran on the show and after we had Graham Cochran on the show, it was just really apparent to me that he was wise in ways that I was not. And I ended up hiring him as a business coach. I worked with them for six months. We met once a month and it was absolutely awesome. He crushed blind spots for me. His perspective on such a large number of things was just incredible and it's kind of weird because I've got a lot of experience in the building is service business area. He has a lot of experience in the building, a content focus business area. I got no experience in the content business thing and oops, the podcast took off. Now it's something I do a lot of and so it was just absolutely incredible and honestly one of my biggest takeaways from working with Graham was, Holy Crap, business coaching is awesome and that's why I started offering business coaching on the side.

I am absolutely a fulltime mastering engineer. I can do this in the fringes, but what I have found is that hanging out with a, with a student for an hour once a month has been one of the highlights of my day. Everyday that I get to do it. It's honestly something where I get a little bit bummed when I don't get to hang out with somebody and see their eyes light up when we talk about strategies for them to build their business around their own lives and to gain the freedom that they want. So it's worth mentioning to sort of pitch this, I've got a couple more spots that I could handle taking on from the coaching perspective. So if you're thinking about the coaching thing and you're thinking, man, Chris Graham seems kind of cool. I wouldn't mind meeting with him monthly. Check out Chris Graham, mastering.com/coaching taking on a couple more people. I've got a couple of people that will be ending the coaching program that have done it for the past couple of months. I'd love to hear from you. It's something I try to make affordable for everybody. I don't say yes to anyone that I don't think would make a lot more than what I charge for business coaching. So check that out. Chris Graham, asking.com/coaching maybe I can help you find some of your blind spots

and I don't do coaching mainly because I've got another project I've been very, very busy with. I mentioned at the end of last podcast but it was filed pass. We just bought the.com domain. Chris, did I tell you about that? Well I got the email, I saw that. Yeah. So we now have file paths.com that'll be a a a platform. We'll be launching so much soon. You're welcome to go there. I mean if anyone listening right now, like I mentioned on the last episode, I didn't give any URL or call to action. We still had a ton of people come to the site, but we had just switched it over so like the email form wasn't actually working. So anyone that signed up for Beta didn't even get on the list. We've closed Beta, we're not taking on any more customers, but if you want to keep up with what file passes up to over the next few weeks or months, you can go there, sign up for the waiting list and we'll just send you updates as they happen.

So one of the hardest things in my business as an audio engineer is you finish a project and then you need feedback from the client on things that will be changed in the project. This is much more relevant as a mix engineer when it makes engineers working with a client, the client might say, Hey, you know, I'm going to send you a giant ridiculously poorly formatted email with way more information than I need. And like at four minutes and 22 seconds, could you turn up the this vocal harmony by one db file passes. This amazing service that Brian and Trevor working on were when you have a project with a client, you upload the file to file pass and you send it to the client, you can put that file behind a paywall so it's a potentially finish mix. The client can then pay you in full for your services before being able to download it or they can request revisions and go through a whole amazing format of selecting points within that song and putting notes in there saying, Hey, could you turn this up?

Hey, could you turn that down? Hey, could you tune this vocal, et cetera. It really streamlines the revision process and in my opinion, when you're building an audio services business, one of the most ripe for systemization parts of those businesses is the revision process. It can be really tricky, especially if you're doing multiple stages of revisions to keep everything straight and do not have like, well, we've got this Facebook message over here and an Instagram message over here in an email over here in the text over here. Let me take all the information from all the different band members, put it together and use that as revision requests. When you're using one system like file pass, all the sudden all that information comes in from one spot and you can go through those multiple versions with clients and they can easily see the progression in their work. And it's awesome. So you guys should check out file passes.

And just to add to that, I even had really, really good systems for how I collected revisions and I had a template I send out and they had to format it a specific way and then they would do that and it would be perfect. But I still had to then copy and paste their email with all the revisions and put it into Evernote. And then as I did each revision I would go back into the Evernote file and I would like make it bold or crossed the line out. So I knew which revisions I had done. And then when I was done, if I had a question about one like I don't know what they meant about this, I had to copy that specific revision request, put into an email, type out exactly like I don't understand what you mean here or this revision is really dumb, I'm not doing it.

Or I would have to like reply that way. And then there'll be like three or four of those that I'd have to Vince in the email. And then they would send another email back to clarify and then I would have to either copy and paste that back into Evernote file. It was a great system as the best I could do, but now I don't have to do any of that. It's literally get a revision from a client. If I have any questions, I'll just hit the reply button in the comment and ask them what they're talking about and they will have the conversation and the common thread and then I can mark the comment is done and archive it. So I now know that I've done that revision and I don't have to do anymore, but I also have record of it so that if they ask for any counter intuitive revisions, so it's like turned the vocals up two DB here. Well now I can't hear the snare, John. Well, two mixes ago you asked me to turn the vocals up, two DB and that's going to drown out the snare drum because they're fighting for dominance in the center channel. Let's talk about this because this is what's gonna happen is you're going to keep asking me to turn things up and it's going to turn everything else down. So let's have a real actual conversation about this that is making this so much easier. So that's my 2 cents on file tasks.

Well I'm really excited about this. One of the things that's the biggest bummer that I've heard from people when they are working with a client is sometimes you get an ornery client. I love that word or winery Henri, an ornery client who loves to be like I told you to turn the snare and the bridge down 1.7 DB and you didn't do it. You incompetent sac. You get sometimes clients that really fixate on bossing people around and when you've got a system like file pass where all of the information's in one spot and you can be like, no, you didn't say that. It's not in file paths. So

yeah, my whole goal is to make the software the bad guy. So you don't have to be, so when you need to collect a payment from a client, send them a file, then they realize they can't download the file from file pass until they pay for it. And then you don't look like the bad guy. Or when you say, Hey, this is what your revision actually said, look at file pass. Now we're the bad guy for you so you can look good.

That's amazing Brian. Well, I'm sure that's going to be awesome. I'm sure you and Trevor going to crush it because you guys are two of the smartest people I know,

but that's why I'm not offering coaching Chris, in case you were wondering.

Well, I am. So, uh, there's a couple more spots. Chris [inaudible] Dot com slash coaching check out [inaudible] dot com look at us.

How many calls to actions can we put in a single episode?

I don't know. Follow me on Instagram at a Brian underscore h zero zero d. Dot. Wait, what? Oh, I messed it up.

We should stop talking. So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Hopefully that episode one too rambly for you. I think we hit some pretty good points even though we kind of just stumbled into the episode topic and I know we told you a lot of different links to go to there for a lot of different things. Uh, I guess it's another little chooser and adventure advice buffet for the different things that Chris and I have going on in our lives. So I'm gonna go over a lot of these one more time. If you are at the point where you know you have some blind spots, you know, you need to get around some people that are going to make you a better person to help you spot those blind spots, which is really anyone listening to this podcast, let's be honest.

I mean Chris and I to this day have stupid blind spots and our mastermind is a really good place for us to help each other out with those blind spots. If that's you and you need help to get into a mastermind or you're interested in being a one of these mastermind group leaders where you are the, uh, the team captain. So to speak and you want to pick your dodge ball team, you go to the six figure home, studio.com/mastermind and uh, whether you want to be a leader or just an attendee and a mastermind group, go there, fill out the form and we'll get back to you there. The second thing is if you are interested in file pass, um, we have a thing going right now where we're doing early access and I'm only doing this for a set type of person. People that are doing at least five to 10 songs a month or if you're mastering engineer or at least 2025 songs a month, um, in their studios consistently.

If that is you go to file pass.com and apply for early access or just go to the top right of that screen and you can book a one on one demo with me. I'll walk you through file pass, how it will work in your business specifically. But again, if you're not doing this full time at this point, wait until we do a public launch and then this'll be a thing for you to sign up for, but file [inaudible] dot com if that's you, if you're at a point in your business where you need one on one help with what you've got going on, you've got some really unique situations. Chris Graham does some awesome coaching. He's got some really, really good stories from his students so far. He's added a lot of value to their lives, so if you want that, go to Chris Graham, mastering.com/coaching and then as always, all these links, everything that just talked about right now, you can just go to the six figure home studio.com/seven nine that slash 79 and all the links I just mentioned will be on that show notes page there. I think that's all I got right now. I'm not going to keep rambling. I don't know what next week's episode is about, but it's probably going to be a damn good one cause that's how we put out it's damn good episodes right in early next Tuesday morning, 6:00 AM that episode goes live, episode 80 until next time. Thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.