Why “The Hero’s Journey” Is The Solution To Your Marketing Problems

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 101

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

episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host. I think I burped in the pause there. I am your host. Do not edit death burp, weird throat bourbon. I was like, hi. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple shirted classes, four eyed cohost. Keep it comment four as is kind of an insult. My cohost, Christopher J. Graham. Chris, how are you doing today, my friend? I'm fantastic, sir. How are you? Pretty good, man. We just wrapped up this past week. Now we're determining all the prizes and accolades and finalizing scoring so we know who the winners of the gift cards are at the finals here we have a playoff at the end. Only three teams win gift cards. I'm a gear slit. So tell me what was the gift card forward? It doesn't have to be for gear slide stuff.

It's for Sweetwater and if you're overseas it's for your own local music store, so, Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Let me ask you a serious question, Bryan. Okay. What I've been saving this question for some time. Oh my God. A company comes to us. If they could manufacture audio gear, they could manufacture musical instruments is something kind of in our take a hike. It's what I'd say. I don't care what your offer is. Okay. Well here's the question. What company, if they offered you free stuff, would you be unable to say no to off the top of my head, I can't think of a single thing.

Okay. Well, other than any headphone company, I'm going to answer the question for myself. Okay. Other than any high end headphone company, just like randomly, I'm going to go ahead and say this is so weird. Martin guitars. Yeah, I know you have that. I was going to say weird obsession, but that's not a weird obsession. Like those are good guitars. Oh my gosh, they're so good. Your whole background with singer songwriters, so I understand. Yeah. I would say yes to them. It's just weird cause I have everything that I want. I don't want anything else. It's a weird sort of, I don't want to say this, just being content. That's amazing and I think we should all strive for that. I'm gonna tell a story. I haven't told this story before. This is the best single sales experience of my entire life. Speaking of Martin guitars when I was in college, actually when I graduated, just for the record, you've told this story a few times in the podcast I have about why, what's music? Oh yeah. I'm all about hearing it again. Now let's hear a Chris Graham story. Okay. Okay. Sorry. There are people that just picked up the podcast and last 10 15 episodes. You want to tell it to them. So I graduated college, some family members gave me some money and I was a singer song writer and I was like, I want to get a really nice acoustic guitar. And I found this little tiny shop. Much to

my chagrin, I just found out has closed. Really? They just closed. They just closed. You've spoken highly of them for years now. Oh my gosh. It was a paradise freaking like Eric Clapton would, well he lives not too far from the shop, but people would come from overseas to go to the shop. It's called wild woods music. It was in Coshocton, Ohio, literally in the middle of nowhere. And it sounds like a nothing city. It is. And no fans get shocked and you're beautiful though. I'm Googling it. I went there to buy a Martin O M 21 guitar cause they were the only people that stopped it anywhere near me. If you're wondering what that noise was, that's the gear slot alert. We do that anytime. Uh, it's almost always

Chris, anytime specific gears mentioned, because we don't allow that on this podcast.

Well, I'm going to get like one or two more and I get to the shop and I'm playing the guitar and the guy walks in the owner and he looks at me and he says, Hey man, I don't mean to be offensive, but they guitar's not for you. And I was like,

Oh my God,

gosh, this is going downhill really fast. He turned around, grabbed a guitar off the wall and he said, here, try this. And he handed me a Martin HD 28 it's another gear swindler cool. There it is. And I played one single cord, a G chord on that guitar and I knew that she had to be mine. I had to leave the store price be damned. It was $1,860 Brian and I bought that guitar and that guy, he listened to me play and he like got my essence and he knew this guy needs that guitar.

He also knew that the guitar you were playing was only 300

no it was not. It was like 50 it was like 1500 it was not that much of an issue. So maybe it was like 13 or 1400 but I've never met somebody in a sales position that just like knew me, like saw my soul and was like, you need this. And it was amazing

probably because he's been in your place before Chris and I think that actually is a really good segue into the topic of today's episode.

Excellent segue, Brian. Hood high five through the internet.

Yes, internet high five. We're talking about two things today and we're going to save understanding your customer's journey till the very end, but first, before we get to that, we're going to talk about something called the hero's journey. How many times have we mentioned the book story brand on this podcast? Chris, do you think it? Dozen times. 1,762 somebody could probably read through our transcripts, commandF on their computers and see how many times we've mentioned it before, but it's a book we've highly recommended. It's also a podcast. They have a blog. They have a course, they have a live event they do in Nashville three or four times a year and it's called the StoryBrand marketing class or some marketing workshop or something.

I love how everyone that's not from Nashville calls it Nashville and everyone that's from Nashville calls it Nashville.

I don't think anything you just said makes sense. It's Nashville.

Okay. Rewind the podcast. Listen to about how Brian pronounced that I am Southern sometimes.

Anyways, we're going to talk about something called the hero's journey. And the reason we wanted to talk about this as a, this is a really important thing to grasp when it comes to appealing to your target customer is a really important thing to understand when you creating your website. And it's just an important thing to understand this hero's journey. Anytime you're trying to guide someone from an unknown prospect to a paying customer. And I feel like we just have not done this topic justice on the podcast, so I figured, Hey, why not do an entire episode on the hero's journey? Yeah, we've mentioned it. Yeah,

we've never completely explained it. And so I've mentioned Donald Miller, the guy that wrote this book before and how amazing he is. His book, it's called StoryBrand, and it's basically taking this idea of the hero's journey and applying it to your marketing for your company. And here's the thing, the idea behind the hero's journey is that there's pretty much only one story that's ever been told. And that story is the hero's journey. Brian, tell me the only story ever told.

There's like seven parts of this story. Yeah, and when you hear this, I want you to think about pretty much any movie you've watched in your lifetime. Really think about the Lord of the rings. Think about star Wars especially like really like big epics. So I mentioned those two movies, star Wars, which is a series of movies and Lord of the rings. Think through those movies specifically cause most people have seen those movies. Harry Potter is another one. If you've seen that, if you're a nerd, basically if you're a nerd, you've seen a movie with this basic heroes journey it. Here's the journey in a nutshell and then we're going to dive into each of these in detail. Phase one, a character number two with a problem. Number three meets a guide. Number four, a guide who gives them a plan. Number five then calls them to action and then that results either in number six which is success, or number seven which is failure or a combination of both.

Sometimes, and this is the basic elements of those movies that I just talked about, Harry Potter, Lord of the rings, star Wars. If you really think through those movies, they all share these same elements of story and there's tons of books like this. All the fantasy novels I read are essentially this exact story arc a but it really actually matters in your marketing. And that's really the big differentiator that Donald Miller has in his StoryBrand brand is that he has taken what he learned in the movie slash book industry, writing his books that and then were turned into movies and then he's turned that into marketing material, how he teaches other businesses to market to their customers using this hero's journey. Anything to add to this, Chris, before I dive into how this applies to this, the average home studio owner, cause that's the important thing. We are going to distill this down to how this actually applies to you, the podcast listener.

Well I would list off a couple examples in this and I think the most interesting part of the hero's journey is that you've got the hero and you've got the guide. And if you've heard us talk about this at length at all on the podcast, what you need to do and what Don Miller says you need to do in his book is you need to be the guide and what most businesses do wrong is they cast themselves as the hero. Yes, that don't work. So here's a few examples of the hero's journey. We had star Wars. Luke is obviously the hero. The guide comes in several forms. Yoda is a guide. Obi wan Kenobi is a guide. The matrix, classic hero's journey movie. Obviously Neo is the hero, Morpheus is the guide, but so is what is it the prophet or the the woman, what's the, I forget her name. The Oracle. Yeah. You guys are yelling at me through your speakers. The Oracle. Now the good one is wizard of Oz obviously like the fairy godmother character is the guide and Dorothy is the hero. Lord of the rings is really clear. Frodo is the hero and pretty much everybody else has a guide, especially Gandalf. Gandalf is kind of the most classic guide. Star Trek, captain James T. Kirk. He's the hero. Spock is the guide.

It's a little out there because that's a TV show which doesn't really follow the traditional story arc, but within each episode you could say, unless you're talking about the movie, the star Wars movies, the more recent ones, then it's very much the story arc we're talking about here. So let's actually dive in how this applies to us as business owners, specifically home studio owners, mixing engineers, mastering engineers, all the like, this is the same for pretty much all of us. We've already mentioned this. You are not the hero, so when we get to step one here, you have a hero, a character that is not you, that is your customer, your customer. When we get to step two here has a problem. In Chris's case, they have songs that are mixed but not mastered. That's a problem. Or in my case, they have songs that are recorded and edited but aren't mixed and in your case is going to be different because of what services you offer.

Then they're going to meet a guide. That guide. It should be you. However, most people do not set themselves up to be a guide. Their website is all about me, me, me, me, me. They set me as the hero. I'm the mastering engineer hero and that doesn't look very good if you're trying to be the guide to the story, you're trying to be the guide to this person to help them solve their problems. So in this case, we already have a few things to talk about. Chris, we talked about the fact that you're not the hero, you are the guide Chris. But then we talk about the fact that you are the guide. What are some things that we can do as business owners to really make sure they understand that we are there to guide them through this process that they're about to go through.

Because for some people, this can be a scary thing, just like Frodo. He's got to throw this ring into the with a Lake of fire or something. That's a scary thing. Like a fire that the volcano, sorry. Fires of more adore you. There we go. Your Twitter, you're the huge nerd that loves the Lord of the rings. I'm the mere pled that just likes the movies anyway. So you've got these hero journeys. There's certain that the guide has that the hero is not going to have. There's a certain confidence level. I think that the guide has that the hero doesn't have

there is, but let's sort of recast the Lord of the rings movie cause we've probably all seen that in regards to what we get wrong in our industry. Like the norm is that Frodo sets off in the journey and then Gandalf, who's the audio engineers or producer or the mastering engineer that mixing engineer or whatever is suddenly like Frodo, um, you're in competent and inexperienced, therefore I will carry the ring. Oh man. Right.

That is so true for so many people. It's an elitist Hottie attitude that is like high and mighty and fresh. Looking down upon the hero when it's actually, it's a completely different dynamic. I've never seen a movie where the guide was like that.

Yeah. We're the guides like eh, nice try. I'll, I'll take it from here. Yeah. And yeah, I mean the Frodo Gandalf relationship is so interesting because like Gandalf seems to be pretty qualified, right? He can like talk to moths and Eagles and do magic and crazy stuff like that, so why does he just take the ring like it's perfect because Frodo is completely unqualified and that's what makes them qualified and I think in our industry when it comes to music expertise in music does not lead to like a connection with listeners. There's something about you listen to a song and you're like, Oh my gosh, this person gets me. Oh my gosh, we're kindred spirits. Oh my gosh. They understand a piece of my life that I haven't told other people about. It's not that they're like, wow, man. Or they S they could probably identify any frequency on the spectrum just by listening or they have an SSL.

Yeah, pencil in their studio. Yeah. I'm like, there's such an interesting reversal that we are so guilty of. And basically every single part of the music services industry is that the people who make your skin crawl, who come off as like, Oh gosh, I just need to shut up. They're doing that. Like the Gandalf Frodo, why don't you give me the ring for awhile? Rather than like the, you know, I'm not trying to Rob you, I'm trying to help you, you know, like this do not take me for some conjure of cheap tricks, you know? Wow. Just keep quoting Lord of the rings. Oh man, you shall not high pass.

So let's move on because we have this guide, he meets this guide. But step four I think is what sets apart the hero from the guide. And that is the guide gives them a plan. And if you are the kind of person that is trying to talk up yourself as I do this and I have this years experience and I have this degree and I have this gear, you're doing nothing to help them solve their problem, to help give them a plan for solving their problem. And so you lose in this scenario, you do not get the customer in this scenario. You have to have a plan for them.

Now, here's the caveat to that though, in every great hero's journey movie I've ever seen, the hero doesn't get a super specific plan. They get a plan, you know, like in, in, in star Wars it's like, you know, you have to face Vader, you know, then you'll be a Jedi. But it's not like super specific about like another example is Lord of the rings canned off, you know, basically it's like, ah, front, Oh wow. More doors that way is basically the extent of like the advice. And there's a little bit of like, well maybe we'll go this way, maybe we'll go that way. But eventually Frodo was just kind of like a general direction after Frodo, you know, kind of leaves the fellowship in the ring and there's not a whole lot going on there. And I think that's part of a good guide. A good guide gives instruction and comes up with a plan, but not too specific of a plan. And I, we've all seen this in the studio where you have a producer that's just way too like

first we're going to do this [inaudible] and then you're gonna do this and you're going to exactly imitate what I did in that. It's going to be this song. Great. Music's very rarely made that way. Yeah. That's micromanaging. Yeah. There's more of a like bring out the best in the musician and then get the crap out of the way. Yeah. It's the same in Harry Potter. It's like in the first movie or first book you're going after the Sorcerer's stone because this is an important part to the whole puzzle and the next movie we're going to go after the goblet of fire cause this is an important part of the, I can't remember if capita fire is the second one or not, but you get what I'm saying. You are making sure that their plan is sending them off towards the right pieces of the puzzle. It's not micromanaging how they accomplish that.

Right, because the important aspect of a hero is that it's their victory. They win. They have to be the one that gets the football into the end zone. If they don't get it into the end zone, if you're carrying them while they're carrying the ball, it's not a true victory for them and it's not a good story and there's something in us. People have talked about this for years of why are humans so obsessed with the hero's journey? Why is this part of who we are? It's like hardwired into our DNA that we're just like, Ooh, hero's journey. Tell me more. Like we just can't get enough of it. There's some aspect of this story that resonates and it's one of the reasons it's so effective as you're trying to market your service that it works. Like a musician hears that and is like, ah, this sounds familiar.

He's cast himself as a guide and he's going to help me get across this particular barrier, but then he's going to let me do my thing and let me become the truest version of myself to discover my true essence. There's something awesome there. Gosh, like it is the sign of, not to be too harsh here, but like an amateur audio professional when they're just like obsessed with I'm the hero, let me show off and use words like, uh, actually like all the time. That's not a good look and then sure as heck is not going to win you any friends.

I think the big area most of us failed to realize is that we are just a small piece of their overall puzzle in their careers and they have so many other things to worry about that by not being the guide, we're just adding to their problems. If you can become the guide in this story, which this is just the fourth step, creating a plan for them and having a plan for them in this phase of their journey. If you can be the guide in this scenario, it's going to go so much more smoothly for you because it makes this part a joy in their overall journey. Again, the journey of recording or mixing or mastering a song or an album is only a small piece of their entire journey and you have to make sure you're making this as smooth as possible because if you make this difficult for them, they're not gonna want to work with you again.

They're not going to refer their friends to you for the next time. It's going to be a one and done scenario for you if you make this difficult, but if you make this an absolute joy, then they're going to want to come back to you. They're going to want to refer their friends to you and it's going to be a much, much easier process in the future for gaining more and more clients and making that, we talked about it before, but the word of mouth, keeping your calendar full, that 100% word of mouth referral work to be done. So anything else that I add to this before moving on to the next step, Chris?

Yeah, I'm going to take us down a little bit of a rabbit hole here for a minute. One of the only useful things I learned in school was this thing called Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We've talked about this back in episode number eight, why marketing is not the solution for most struggling home studios.

That was like one of our first good episodes. Yeah, I believe so as well. And so this idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, this is a pyramid. So visualize like an equal lateral triangle, if you will. It's just pyramid. Think about a pyramid. Think about a triangle. So I nerded out there for a minute. Yeah. Wow. Talk about not being the guide now I did it. Oh my God. So this pyramid has one, two, three, four, five levels and the base level, the foundational thing, the foundational need that everyone has is psychological. Totally messed that up. It's physiological. I read that wrong. So like food, water, warmth, rest, those sorts of things. Once they have all those needs, they move on to the next needs, which are safety needs, security, safety, et cetera. Once they've got those. So the theory goes, the next need that they'd go after is belongingness and love.

So like intimate relationships. Friends, that sort of thing. Community, community. Yeah. Above that. The next thing, the second to last thing is esteem, so it's like prestige, feelings of accomplishment, respect and then the last, the tip of the top of that pyramid which is so interesting. I think this probably every other day at least sometimes more often is self actualization, so that's achieving one's full potential including your creative abilities. Super duper interesting and a guide's job is to help the artist move up the triangle. Caveat. Many artists get the self actualization, the very top of that pyramid confused with the second highest one. That's esteem. Many artists think that the esteem of others is the goal. Those are tricky guys to guide. Those are tricky people to be around because they think that self actualization is fame. It's not. It's achieving your full potential creatively and there's like an element of integrity of like you are the same person top to bottom.

You're the same person in your mind and in your heart when something like that happens and you are achieving your potential, that self actualization when you get popular, that is not self actualization. As a guide, we need to understand that musicians and everybody else for that matter are tricky in that like our goal is to get them to self actualization, but they often miss the boat a little bit and get too focused on the esteem. Sometimes that second to last part of the pyramid can cause an awful lot of problems in that journey to the top of it. And I think that

the reason that's such a hard thing to distinguish between is because in the music industry you're really at anywhere that you see people that are successful in the self actualization piece. As a result of that is they gain more prestige and fame from that. But there's also people who gain fame without self actual actualization. So it's this really tricky thing to spot and this is what you see a lot on Instagram. If you are like the person that follows people on Instagram, you see people who look like they've self-actualized or have this amazing life that you want to mimic. But the reality is they're just doing that to get to that second to last rung in the ladder, which is a steam and they actually haven't self-actualized. I can't even do that even a word. You see what I'm saying though? It's this whole facade essentially. So it's tricky. That's kind of a rabbit hole, but it's probably worth it's own episode.

It kinda is worth its own episode. I would say a couple more things as we kind of dive down this rabbit hole or wrap up this rabbit hole or wrap up this rabbit hole yet. One, you look at certain artists and you're like, okay, you're just going for the esteem thing. So there was like this chapter and I want to say the late nineties or mid two thousands or whatever and it was like a bunch of bands came out that sounded the same but rock bands. So it was like creed and stained and puddle of mud and Nickelback.

They all have that same, and I was talking my wife about this

hello?

Like that's kind of like the voice they had and all those off

with homes. White, old Brown.

Right. Only one of those bands was probably self actualizing.

The rest of them were just trying to go for the esteem. That speculation. It's speculation. Yeah, I would probably agree with you. I'd say there's a pretty good chance I'm right there and here's one of the problems and what one of the purposes of this podcast is that many audio engineers aren't successful. We're trying to help people that are trying to start small businesses that aren't successful because they confuse those last two bits of the pyramid. They're going after esteem. They want mom to say, wow, you did make a good career choice. You know, they want their friends to respect them and be like, Oh, he's the audio engineer. He's amazing. And that keeps them from getting to the highest level of the pyramid, which is self-actualization, which is so hard to describe. But there's multiple levels of this here. And my point is that if you are trying to be a guide, you might be getting stuck on the esteem part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

And if you are, you're going to be, again, you guys know I don't like to cuss in the mic. You're going to be a shitty guide and I think this definitely relates to this conversation because when it comes to the step of giving them a plan as the guide, I'm going to read this from the StoryBrand PDF that I was kind of reviewing before this episode and this'll be in our show notes. If you go to the six figure home studio.com/one zero one that's slashed one Oh one when you get to the part where it talks about giving them a plan and this is what the StoryBrand PDs says, it says when the hero meets the guide, they are confused. The hero's confused. The job of the guide then is to break them through the hero's confusion and give them confidence that their life can be better.

They do this by giving the hero a plan. Now this is where it kind of goes along with a long rabbit hole. We just wind down. The plan can be as simple as a paradigm shift. You used to think this way, but I want you to think the other way or it can be as complex as a multilevel strategy that will help the hero win a complicated battle. I think this definitely goes in line with that sort of paradigm shift that you're not really working towards self actualization and we need to talk about this as a producer, musician relationship as your guide. We should talk this kind of stuff out and I think if you really like, I've never gotten this deep in a conversation with one of my clients and I think it if I did it would do nothing but strengthen the bond of our relationship because the musician, let me think about this from my old career when I was in a metal band, if any producer really got in depth with this sort of stuff and like dug deep into like the why behind the music we're creating and digging into our plan this deeply.

Like I would trust them wholeheartedly compared to someone who's just like, here's a price, let me know when you're ready to book. You know? Well, and I think here's the issue there is that when the musician comes to a producer or someone that's going to help them make a record, what the musician wants is, they're not saying it in these words, but here's my assumption. If it's a good project, the musician is saying, I need someone to help me self-actualize. And for a producer or anyone in the audio services, music services industry to come in and say to somebody, Oh, you clearly want esteem. I'm a successful audio engineer and I can help you get

esteem. I know about esteem. A musician hears that and it's just like, what? What the crap are you talking about? Like that doesn't make any, you're an audio engineer. Do you have any idea how much more esteem musicians have in society that audio engineers?

I have 10,000 Instagram followers. Chris, what are you doing? I know a lot about esteem. C'mon.

Yeah, it's not a thing, but to say, here's the thing, let's look at star Wars. Obi wan Kenobi. Did Obi wan Kenobi know who he was? Yeah. You bet your butt. He did. Did Yoda know who he was? Yeah. Did Luke Skywalker at the beginning know who he was? Not even the least, not even Yoda and Obi wan Kenobi. Our producers, Luke Skywalker's and musician Obi wan Kenobi and Yoda are trying to help Luke figure out who he is. They're trying to unleash his inner self so that he can achieve his potential.

You know what's crazy about this is when you think about how much you need to know as a producer or mixing engineer, anyone that's client facing, you have to know a lot, especially if you're working closely with the artist. This is where you go back to episode number one when it comes to just self education. There are so many hats you have to wear to be successful in that respect and there's so much you have to know, like I don't feel like you can half-ass this career and make it just because of the fact that you have to be a guide in a guide, has to know their shit. You can't be a guide that's flying by the seat of his pants.

You have to self actualize. You have to know who you are, which we constantly talk about it. Find your niche, that self actualizing.

I didn't mean to go down this rabbit hole in this episode, but it's good that we did when you start talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs are some in a Google that. So I can have this visual guide and if you go to the six figure home studio.com/one zero one there will be a visual representation of this hierarchy of needs from Maslow. I love Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So if we're looking at this, the reason this is so important is because we got physiological needs, safety. I'd say most people have those two things down in the U S or at least in first world countries. Love and belonging is one that I think most people struggle with. They have no sense of community, they are never around people. They just sit in their cave. And then esteem is one that I would say the majority of people producing music probably don't have at this moment. So the question now comes down to can you be a successful guide as a producer or engineer or whatever, can you be a successful guide if you're still struggling with those third and fourth rungs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs here, do you need to have love and belonging down and esteemed down before you can be a great guide?

Wow, that's a heavy question man. I think that you do, but again, this is music and I love when I'm talking to like a potential client on the phone from a mastering project. One of the things I love to say is like, look man, mastering is mostly art and it's some science and here I'll prove it to you. Why do humans like music?

I have no idea to be honest with you. I that's a deeper question than I could ever answer.

I don't even have a theory. Well, I do have a theory. I'll share it with you. Here's my theory. I think that there's a such thing as God. I think he made us and I think that music is part of his language and that we know it in part and that when we sing and make songs, we're essentially saying Google Gaga. It's the very beginning of a much more intense language. I'm fascinated by this. Absolutely fascinated by this. And it's almost more interesting if there is no God because what the actual crap is happening. Why do I like get teary eyed when I listen to certain songs and I get sick to my stomach and I listen to other ones? Who knows? It's crazy. We're super deep cause you're weak cause I'm weak. I'm emotionally weak man. Anyways, so I think that there is an awful lot. One of the things I keep thinking about in this conversation is this idea of like you gotta figure out, you don't want to overly diagnose the musician. You don't want to like try to claim that you understand this stuff too much or it's going to explode in your face I think. But I think you got to figure out where on Maslow's hierarchy of needs someone is and you have to help them through each of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Yes, and I think you need to guide yourself through that as well because I don't know the answer to this, but I think you're going to at least struggle significantly if you are not in the self-actualization piece of Maslow's hierarchy of needs because here's the deal. Once you get to the self actualization part of the very top of the pyramid, that's when you go back to episode eight of the podcast where we talk about why marketing is not the solution for most struggling studios. I have an article by the same topic basically, and that's where you start the home studio business hierarchy. It's basically a parody of Mazlow's hierarchy of needs, but it's only that little top triangle, the self actualization part, but it's for your whole business. So then you have to start a whole other set of issues that you have to deal with and I think you're going to continually struggle in that if you don't have Maslow's are giving these down first.

Well, let's reign this in. Let's come back to the hero's journey. But I'll say one thing. I'm sure some of you are listening to this and are like, Oh my gosh, psychology music or musicians like guiding them through Maslow's heart. Oh, that sounds too complicated. Yeah, yeah, sure it does.

Yeah. I think you need a psych degree to do this.

Well, it sure does sound complicated, but you don't have to. My job as a mastering engineer and you know your job as a mix engineer or whatever it happens to be, you don't have to do the whole thing. You just have to help them get to the next step. You look at star Wars, let's go back to it. What was all B one Kenobi's role was just to get Luke started. What was Yodas role to take them to the next level? You look at the Lord of the rings. What was smuggles role? Weirdly, he was a kind of guide, I guess weirdly, he was a guide. Each of the people in the fellowship of the rings was a specific type of guide, generally speaking, and they each guided Frodo through a piece of that journey. Having a niche is owning a piece of that hero's journey and being like, Hey man, you need to get through frickin like, what's the thing with Sheila, the big spider where they're passing through, I forget what it's called. [inaudible]

guys are yelling at me. I'm still embarrassing. You're too nerdy for me at this point, so like I know. Anyways, you think back to Lord of the rings. There's the giant spider thing. We all remember that it was Sam. Oh, Oh, come on man. They're going through almost, I remember the spider in Harry Potter before. I remember the spider in the Lord of the rings. They're almost in a mortar or they're passing over like this last bit of mountain before they get into the more door like area and there's this giant freaking spider that is like as old as time. It's like super duper. If you read like the Silmarillion and other like weird token nerd stuff. Anyways, so they get their Sheila, she lobe. Yeah, Sam wise gangy bore them back and put them in the stew. Boy matcha. Put them in a stew PO Tito's.

No one knows what you're talking about. I'm so sorry. Clue. Okay, I'll shut up. You'll probably edit most of this out, but here's the thing. No fruit. Frodo has a problem and it's like Shilo is the pain, the buns and he's trying to get past it. Sam is the guide. Sam is the guide in that part of the story when they're in the dead marshes, you know those like swampy things. Smuggles the guide when they are trying to get back from more door at the very end, the Eagles you could probably say are the guide. Each character plays a role. There's not just one guide. Most movies that have one guide are kind of boring. You don't have to be one guide. You don't have to understand all this. You just have to own one piece of, I understand the journey that you're on and I can help you get to the next step.

Well, let's finish our journey through this hero's journey because we got stalled at the part where they'd come up with a plan. They give them a plan. If only we had a guide. I know, I know. So let's just recap real quick. So we're back to this. We have a hero with a problem who meets a guide in that guide gives them a plan. Now this is an important part that you can't skip. If you have a plan, you have to then call them to action, call their hero to action and this is where you are basically making sure they act on the plan that you give them. Pretty simple. Yeah man. Not to like turn this into pitch town here real quick, but this is business coaching. Like when I'm coaching somebody, I've got a couple of spots open. By the way, if you want more information on that, on me being your business coach, go to Chris grant, mastering.com/coaching I've got a couple of people that just graduated, so a couple more spots are open, but that's what I'm doing is I'm helping them come up with a plan and then I'm calling them to action.

We call it actionables. They're like, this is what you need to do, man. And then they work on it and then we meet again and I'm like, yeah, good job. This is the next thing you need to do. That's business coaching.

Yeah, so I think that's the macro level of things when you talk about calling into action, but there's also micro hero's journeys that you need to think through and that's like your website. Your website is a little miniature hero's journey. You're the character, hits your website, finds that you are the guide with a plan and then you're calling them to action on your website, which is to contact me for a rate or contact us for a quote or contact me to start the conversation on whatever else.

One of the things that's so interesting about this, and this is going to get real weird here, so brace yourself. Your website is an extension of you. A good website is a guide. The reason that my website's done really well for me the little before and after player is that people go on there and they say, Oh so fat's mastering cause they can flip back and forth before and after that. Ah, I see why this is so important. Chris Graham is my guide. He's gonna help me across the finish line of finishing this record. I'm only the finish line guy. I didn't help them get to the finish line. I just helped them cross it. Your website should do that. It's an extension of you and it's you pitching yourself as a guide. If you're a point, Hey, I can help you get to point B. That's the purpose of your website. So now let's talk through this

and just to kind of give you the end of the story here, they meet them, they give them a plan, they give them a call to action and then that call to action results in either success or failure. Now ultimately your skills and a little bit of luck and that your clients skills are going to determine whether it's a success or failure. So there's things you can do in that, but if you get the rest of this right, it's hopefully gonna get the success or failure thing is going to sort itself out. But I think one of the things that, this is kind of the second part of the podcast now, this is something that Chris and I were talking about before we did this show when we were talking through two different podcast episode topics and we realized this is really the one episode and that is how can you understand, truly understand the hero's journey, what the hero is going through.

If you've never been there yourself. If you've never been a musician who's been trying to make it in the music industry, how can you understand what they're going through right now, and this brings up a whole lot of questions and even some speculation that I'll probably talk about in this episode, but I think most of the successful producers and engineers and mixing and mastering designers that I know most of them has had some sort of music career in the past, successful or failure, it doesn't really matter. They at least tried to have a successful career in their past in making music and now they fully understand what it takes to be a musician and they're able to much more easily communicate how they're going to guide them through this part of the process.

Totally. Let me address what you just said. The idea of most successful producers makes engineers, mastering engineers fill in the blank, had some kind of music career, successful or not. Here's the thing. It's not whether they were popular or not. It's whether they self actualized or not. That's success. I discovered a little bit more about who I was through playing guitar I self actualized. There's no way I'd be doing this podcast if I had not like spent a lot of time trying to be a musician a long time ago.

Yeah. And so when it comes to actually being a great guide, I think part of it I would love to chat with, and I'm sure there's some out there, producers who are just like on the music fan and now I want to produce music and I have no history of trying to be a musician, can't speak the language, and yet somehow I have a successful production or mixing your mastering career. I can't think of anyone that matches that, but I know there are some people in our community that are trying to have successful audio careers without ever attempting to live the life of a musician. They don't understand what it's like to try to create music, to try and get that music out in the world, to collaborate with other people and all of the needs and desires and wants that come along with that. The problems that come along with that. And that's step two or the hero's journey is the hero has a problem. And the less you understand about the problems and all the nuances of those problems, the less successful your marketing attempts will be and your ability to turn that person into a customer.

Totally. I'm going to use an example here. If someone that I think does a great job with this, we had Warren Hewart on the show a long time ago. He was our guest on episode 28 Warren does the produce like a pro YouTube channel. It's enormous. Warren has, I think he's Grammy nominated. He's got platinum records. He's the real deal and here's what I'd say about Warren. I saw a video of Warren playing a guitar the other day and Warren is like a child when it comes to planting guitar, and I mean that in the absolute most positive way to insult our guests. It's what are you doing man? He's like a child and that he is so clearly having so much fun when he plays the guitar. It's the joy of a child with the talent of a man who's put in the work. Yes, he has the talent of a full grown man and the joy of a child when that dude plays guitar, and that's what makes Warren a great producer. He speaks the language, he understands the journey that a musician is on to self actualize with an instrument or with song or whatever. It's so apparent when I see that guy play guitar specifically when he's playing, he's got this like Brian May, queen guitar, and when he plays that thing you can just tell. He's just like, yeah man. Like he's so into it and he's so clearly speaks to the language of the musician. That's so cool.

And here's my bit of speculation here is I am curious how many people in our community that are struggling to find a niche. How many of them were not musicians that tried to make music that tried to have successful music careers? I would bet it's a large number of people because in my history I was in the metal world that was in the metal niche as a musician and so I stepped into the production mixing, mastering world. I was doing metal and so that was a natural transition from one niche to another. I brought my niche over to the audio world with me and that's the story for so many other people and I'm curious the ones that are struggling to find a niche, if that's the same case for those people. I don't know. I don't have any data on this under, it's just speculation.

Yeah, speculation. So yeah, that's an interesting question and this kind of brings us to the next part of this episode. I suspect that one of the best things that we could do as a community of music service professionals is to make music our own music. I think there's something there and I think it's not for everybody, but I think for a lot of you as you are struggling to find your ideal clients, I think it might be helpful for you to put yourself in their shoes by trying to make your own passion project. Because if you do that, the golden rule starts to work. You start to be able to treat them the way you would want to be treated because you've been in their shoes. It's powerful stuff.

I'm going to agree with you for a second. And then I'm gonna play the devil's advocate for a second cause I like doing that. So I'm gonna agree with you in the fact that if you have no history of making music, this is a great exercise because you're gonna learn so much and not only that, you're going to build relationships in the style of music that you're writing music in because you can collaborate with people, you can co-write with people. You're going to make friends who are also trying to strive towards the same goals as you and those people might end up being clients or at least advocates for your studio in the future. Now, where I play the devil's advocate is that if you are a struggling recording studio, that usually means that you have a day job and when you have a day job that means your spare time is spent in your studio. Where in the grand scheme of things do you find time to try to create music that you're trying to get out into the world? Good question. For some people that is impossible or nearly impossible, do you tell those people to just simply stop trying to record right now and start making music so that you have some sort of of history with this?

I think for some people that is the right answer. Let's say you're in a car and that car gets stuck in the mud and you're revving your engine and you're not getting out of the mud and you're late for wherever you're trying to go. And someone says, well you gotta get out and you gotta put some sand in the mud under your tires, maybe a piece of cardboard, maybe some sticks, maybe some gravel. Someone gives you that advice cause it'll give you better traction. They say, and you say, I don't know. I don't have time to do that. I'm in a hurry and you just start hitting the gas pedal.

Woo.

Impressive sounds. I can't do it to win. It sounds like when I listened back to this later, but when you say, I don't have time to get out of the car and make sure that my wheels have more traction, there's a problem. Yeah. I'm not saying everybody should go out and make their own record. That's in the music services industry, but I'm saying for some people you don't have time because you don't have traction and you don't have traction because you don't speak the language.

Also, if you're a musician, chops aren't up to par. It's going to be tough depending on what services you're offering. If you're trying to produce music with people and you can't speak the language and give great input on song structures and understand the what goes into creating a great song, you're not going to be able to do your job very well and that comes with putting in the hours as a musician.

You know, this is funny. This is just occurring to me, but like I, this will be long gone by the time this episode comes out. I'm playing a show tomorrow night where I'm flying up there. Right now I'm getting a ticket. It's in Athens, Ohio at [inaudible]. All right, where's my tickets? I haven't played in two years at least, but that doesn't mean I'm out of practice because I play at least two or three or four hours a week for my kids. When I put them to bed, I'll get my guitar out and sometimes like, you know, it'd be eight o'clock. We're putting, you know, a Nora, she's three. I'm putting her to bed and I'm trying to get her bed by like eight eight 30 and nine 30 rolls around cause I've been playing guitar for her the whole time and it's awesome. They love it.

My kids are obsessed with me playing guitar for them probably because I'm self-actualizing when I do it and it's like, Oh, that's really dad. Like that's the truest version of dad is when he's playing guitar. And it was so cute and it's occurring to me right now that I do. That affects how I have conversations with the people that work with me. Like being in that moment where I'm like, yes, I played what I meant. Maybe just for one measure like that. I actually got it right where I was. Yes, that was, that was exactly it, but that makes it so much easier just to talk to other musicians because I understand what they're going after. They want that moment where they play something and even if it's just for a measure, just for a note that they were the truest version of themselves for just a second and that's a wonderful feeling when that happens. It's really great.

I found flights to Athens, Ohio. I can leave tomorrow at 5:35 AM and arrive by 11:00 AM $201 round trip.

Wow. Okay. I don't recommend that you come back. You can if you want.

I'm going to look for YouTube videos on that and then we're going to post them on our show notes@episodesixfigurehomestudio.com slash one zero one if there's a live video on YouTube, it will be on that show notes page.

Oh gracious. My music is not cool enough for our audience. Like we've got a lot of guys that I'm like pretty foci. It's like weird folk. I might do another record someday, like a folk Trannika records. It'd be like elements of electronic and hip hop from a customer standpoint. But it's folk music. Yeah. Sweet. Edit that out. James [inaudible]

you stated your intentions and now the world knows and we're looking for that record.

Hey, I said I might, I said I might mostly just for my kids like because when my kids were way off in the weeds, yeah that's fine. But for my kids, like the moment that they probably feel the closest to me is when I'm playing guitar for them before bed. So I should probably record a record for them in case I die. Right. This would be an important valuable connection to their dad. And so I probably will at some point.

So just to kind of wrap this episode up, we talked about the hero's journey, how that applies to your marketing towards communicating with artists and then we had this kind of meandering but also important discussion of really getting to understand the hero's journey as it pertains to your customers by becoming your own customer. Anything you want to say to just wrap this episode up because there's a lot to digest here. I don't know. There are actionables like go update your website, take off anything that makes you look like the hero and make it look more like the guide and go to our show notes page. Actually there's that PDF from StoryBrand that's probably worth a once over from anyone who hasn't read that yet, but anything else you want to add to it? Chris,

I'm going to take a hard left turn here. I've been on a journey past couple of months, six months or so, and that journey started when I mentioned on the podcast that a long time ago I made a piece of software called bounce Butler and I didn't think anybody would care and a lot of people did and a lot of people reached out and they said, Oh my gosh, you automated bouncing. Can I has that and it's done. It's ready. I'm there man. If you want bounce Butler, I need so many people to test it. We're in beta testing now, which means it's free. Go download it. As of right now on bounce butler.com and you can start using bounce Butler for free. If you can break the app, submit a support request, it'll be clear how to do that when you're using the app. I'm going to see if I can make this app super duper rock solid. It's being used all over the world right now.

My friend Bryant, who is a, he works at sound Stripe. I saw that he posted on Facebook about it the other day about how much he loved it and he was thanking you for it and he was talking it up as we were playing borderlands three the other day. I still play video games, by the way. I'm not a complete business owner. I like to have some free time, but he's my X-Box live buddy and coworker. Sometimes we go out and work at coffee shops from our laptops.

Fun fact about Brian. Brian was my guide when we were hiking up the side of a mountain in like nine feet of snow at Yosemite. Brian's in very good physical shape. I only recently have gotten in mediocre physical shape.

Yeah. Bryan looks like one of those marble statues from Greek times when there was just like these chiseled men. That's what Bryant looks like.

He's a very large, strong man and I barely knew him but he stated the back of the pack as we walked up the mountain to help me as I

huffed and puffed cause you were so far in the back. I really was. But I did eventually. Thanks to Brian pass you guys up and get way ahead of you guys. I waited a long time for you to catch up. Mr. Brian Hood. Only because we stopped for photos and pictures. Oh, come on and help this girl who had like snow shoes on and was like tripping through things cause she should've taken them off and almost died. Anyways, we're way off. The point of this whole thing is right here is bounced. Baller is 100% free to use in beta right now. Go try to break it because you need people to try to bounce things down. And I want to give our listeners some advice that I gave Brian, which is what kind of gave him his aha moment cause he was struggling with bounced Butler at first.

Here's the way I suggest trying out bounced Butler little user education here. Save a session and this is for an example. If you have to do like a vocal up version of vocal down version, an instrumental version and say you have 10 songs to do, I personally do all my songs in one session but I'm not going to pretend like everyone else says that, but create a session, save as master, that's your final product and then mute the vocals, save as instrumental, unmute the vocals, turn them up, save as vocal up and rinse and repeat for all the versions. Now you have like five versions of each song. Each has its own session file. Yep. It's its own session file. And then if you have 10 songs that you do that too, that took you all of maybe 2030 minutes to set up and that's going to balance 50 versions of songs or 50 sessions to bounce down is a minimum of like a hundred minutes, 200 minutes.

I don't know. Depends on if it's offline or online bouncing and depends on how many plugins you have on, but you will save a ton of time if you just wait to the end of the day or wait till lunchtime and then just select them on bounce Butler and then just move on with life. Why it does its thing and it's just like it's heaven. Yeah, it's a taste of automation in your studio. We talk about systems, we talk about automation, this podcast a lot. This is a great way to start experimenting with that. I've mentioned this before, I'll say it again. When people have been telling me it's like a dishwasher. As soon as you've experienced that type of automation, that type of system in your life, I'm never not having a dishwasher again. You can't go back. And just to clarify, I had to twist your arm to do the free thing.

So yeah, this is me twisting Chris's arm to let all of our community have this app for free right now. So this is a free beta period. Just download it. All you need is an email address. You don't need a credit card or anything, and just start doing hundreds of balances in your life is going to be better. Now, I had a scarcity mindset call back to previous episode and you talked me out of it and said, no, 96 where you're talking about how you're sabotaging your business, which you were with one of those five toxic mindsets, the scarcity mindset. You weren't going to do a free period. And I said, no, just do it free. So that's free. Go to [inaudible] dot com download it. If you'd bounce a lot, this is going to change your life. I guarantee it.

[inaudible]

so that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Do you want some further reading on this? I highly recommend buying the book, building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. We mentioned it in the podcast and we've mentioned it on previous podcast. I think the last episode, episode 100 was one of the books I mentioned in the show because it changes your mindset around marketing in general. And if you just finished up my, I think today should have been my last email from the recording studio marketing class that I was given away to everybody that's on my mailing list. This goes along so perfectly with that entire class. So make sure before you start updating your website or any of the other parts of your marketing materials or your marketing funnel, you read this book and you start implementing this hero's journey framework and all of your marketing.

Next week is a podcast episode a. We're Chris and I are going to try to convince you the listener, why you should start a podcast of your own in your niche or with whatever skills you have. Uh, and we have a ton of arguments and I'll give you one quick argument right now why you need to listen to this episode and why you should start a podcast. And that is because a, I'm sure you've heard of the buzz of podcast, your podcast listening listener yourself. And I'm sure you're starting to hear more buzz around this. Uh, from, uh, if you have a day job, maybe your coworkers or maybe your friends, your family, uh, talk about podcasts they listen to because podcasting is becoming mainstream, but it's not yet reached the saturation point. Let me throw some numbers@yourealquickbasedonnumbersreleasedbypodcastinsights.com and these are numbers that were confirmed by Apple.

There are 550,000 active podcasts right now. And that might sound like a lot, but when you compare that to the amount of active blogs that are on the internet right now, I've seen mixed numbers, but there are somewhere between 500 million and 800 million active blogs on the internet right now. We just crossed the half million Mark for podcasts. So we haven't even remotely come close to over-saturation in the podcast world and there are just so many opportunities for you to slice off just a little bit of that podcast pie for yourself and we talk about it in the episode, but you don't have to have a massively successful podcast in order for it to make an impact to your business. Chris and I, we talked, we, we looked through all of our numbers and if we just survived off advertising dollars, our podcast would bring in like $800 a month as far as the standard advertising rates for podcasts.

Chris may, Chris and I, we make a lot more than 800 and something dollars a month from our podcast because we monetize it through other means. You can do the same for your business, for your studio. All you need is an active listenership of a small group of your ideal customers and that can make a massive impact to your business. And if you do this now before podcasting really blows up, while we're still on the beginning part of this bell curve in podcasting, I think it can make a massive longterm impact and you will be set up for taking advantage of this skyrocketing and you will be set up to take advantage of the massive skyrocketing popularity of podcasting for the next several years. All right. That's it for this episode. I'm going to go off. We leave, me and my wife, we leave at like, so I think our flight goes off at 6:00 AM tomorrow.

Ugh, I hate 6:00 AM flights were flying off to Mexico or Cancun specifically for our week long vacation. Um, if you listen to this podcast regularly, you listened through as I was gone for our honeymoon and our honeymoon was amazing but it was very like active, like if, if you aren't familiar with, it was like episode 70 somewhere in the 70s. My wife and I was got a one way ticket to Paris and we just winged it for like five weeks and then we booked a flight home and it was a lot of fun. But it was very actively, we're kind of like chasing good weather and figuring out what city we're gonna go to next and then booking the hotel. So it was like very much a lot of work to travel that way. And so for this trip, we're gone for the next week or so, and an all inclusive resort in Cancun.

The least amount of effort you'd need to do, we just show up and they do everything else for us. And so I'm looking forward to just having a week of relaxation, especially considering the last week or so ago, we finished up, uh, the, the eight week accountability accelerator bootcamp for our profitable bruiser core students that is draining to do so. It's going to take a little RNR. So, uh, that being said, we've already recorded next week's episode, so you won't be missing a beat on a next week's episode that comes out bright and early Tuesday morning. So again, thanks so much for listening to this podcast and happy hustling.