Why You’re Losing Thousands Of Dollars Every Time You…

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 91

woo 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 hype, Bro. Brian Hood and I'm here on my bald, beautiful purple shirted cohost, Christopher j. J. Thanks Christopher. Jay Graham or is it [inaudible]? Yeah, j j. That's right. What's he doing, dude? How are you doing right now man, I'm great. I am on the beautiful shores of Lake Michigan up in the pinky finger of Michigan, if you will. Taking some time out of my vacay to hang with you, Bruh. As you were moving around the place with your laptop open, I saw the view out of your window and it's like this amazing lake is dope. What's the weather like up there right now? It's pretty, so the nice thing about this area, it's right around traverse city. For those of you guys that know this area, but a ton of people from the Midwest vacation up here because it's cooler in like July and August than it would be anywhere else in the country pretty much.

And Lake Michigan looks like the Caribbean, it's gorgeous. It's like, you know, sorority and blue and teal and it's awesome. So it's like you're at the ocean but there's no salt and it's not a million miles away and it's not so hot. So it's like 75 it's awesome. Well, I'm mad at you because everyone else in our mastermind group is here in Nashville for Nam. For some of them I didn't come. And so you're up there swimming in dirty Michigan water instead of hanging with us. Crystal Clear, Michigan Water, you can see the bottom of like 40 feet. It's crazy. I've heard all about Flint, Michigan. I know about your water problems. Don't, don't try to pretend like you're honor waters. Funny story though. So we rented a boat yesterday and we're driving around like Michigan and we got my kids, my brother, my mom, my Stepdad, and we're driving, having a good time.

And all of a sudden I'm like, talk to my daughter and know her and I'm like, I know where to look at that giant bird that's flying towards us. All of a sudden it gets a little closer. I'm like [inaudible]. Here you go. Oh my gosh. It's about Eagle. And then the Bald Eagle proceeded to start a fight with three giant seagulls over the water right by our boat. And there's like a dog fight. And I assume since that's our nation's animal, it kicked their asses. Right. Actually this seagulls one that makes me so happy for some reason, I don't know why it was amazing. So he like started to fight and the seagulls were like, Oh hell no. And they started chasing them and they were faster than he was. No Way. He tucked tail and run man, tick Tuck tail and ran. What? I don't know.

I'm talking about talk tail and ran. Okay, well whatever man. Well that sounds like you're having a good time up there. Oh, we're having a blast. Ah, well that's either way. We miss you down here in Nashville, man. You got to hang out with Liz from recording Syria Rock Stars yesterday at a event that I'm not supposed to talk about and not allowed to talk about and we're not going to talk about, but just know that you guys miss some cool stuff. Everyone listening that doesn't know what I'm talking about then am I going to give you the details on? And I like being the secretive, but it was really cool. I really enjoyed it.

It was really tough for me to decide on not skipping family vacation because this was the only time our family could do it, but I think it was good and healthy that I opted for this over Nam. But I do miss you guys and especially kids, like this is where me and you first got really, really tight. Was Nam two years ago, summer and m two years ago. That's true. The first time we met and I realized, Oh my God, you're, you're really tall.

Okay.

And I'm six feet. I'm not sure it either.

This is true. Yeah. You're very tall too. What was so fun? It was like we ran into our other buddies from our mastermind group and they were like, you know, we had been kind of missing an action after meeting for the first time and like, what were you guys doing looking at spreadsheets? And we were like, yeah, we actually had been looking at spreadsheets. It was awesome.

That is so true. Yeah. We disappeared away from the rest of the NAM people to stare at spreadsheets and talk numbers in business. Uh, so fun. And that's when we were like, are we best friends now?

I think so. I think so. And then we went on the NAM floor and I had a damn near nervous breakdown with all the different noise stimulus and mostly because the drummers, that was rough.

Let's move on. I don't even want to think about that. Let's not talk about that. The good news is I don't even have a past in this year. I'm just hanging out at all the like parties and stuff at studios afterwards and like that's awesome. I don't even care about the actual event. Cause after going to the west coast one in Anaheim, there was no reason for me to go to the one in Nashville. It's like a 10th of the size.

That was dope. I would say for those of you that are kind of newer in the audio industry, go into like Winter Nam, that's the one that's in Los Angeles is such a good experience. Yes, because there's so many people there and you kind of get this picture of our industry as a whole that I had never even had until I went and I was like, oh this is what our industry is and my gosh, these audio companies don't know how to market their own products. It was just, it was really, really interesting and really, really fun.

It's so true. I would wholeheartedly recommend people go into that one and if you do come to the summer one at any point, this podcast location, my home, my studio, it's like three blocks from the music city center where they have Nam. So I love meeting up with people if they're around here. So just hit me up. Let's move on to the episode. Chris, the topic we have today, but before we get to that, we're going to talk about the people that make this show possible. We have some sponsors for this podcast, the least of which is lacroix pop open. The Sequoya here. Can you get this flavor just by the sound of that Cain opening? Chris, we're on video chat so I can see that it's lime, but it's a, it's actually a key line, not a fan of that flavor. Actually. It's trashed. This is the worst thing ever. So we're not sponsored by Lacroix, but we are indirectly because it feels our souls. You've got to look right there promptly. Moose baby problem lose. Yeah. Grapefruit flavor. Oh yeah. Yeah. So keyline was because I do, I'm just like a lazy millennial so I don't go grocery shopping. I get my groceries picked up and delivered for me.

They always pick up wrong one. When you

order it like through Amazon or something, I select the option where they use their best judgment for substitutions cause I don't want to be texted every five seconds cause my phone's always on do not disturb. So they sometimes pick the wrong flavors, substitutions and I get mad about it, but I can't be mad because I didn't have to go to the grocery store. So this is true, you know, I'd rather use that time of them shopping for me. I'd rather use that to build my business instead of shopping due to something called opportunity cost. Hint, hint. We're going to talk about that. Um, oh yeah. Right. So our real sponsors for this show, our first bounced butler. Chris, do you want to talk about what bounce Butler is and why they sponsor this show? Yeah, so bounced Butler is an app. Let's say you're like, Hey, I've got 16 songs I need to bounce today that I just finished mixing.

I'm going to sit here and bounce them one at a time in pro tools, logic, cubase, whatever doll you use, which if you're on pro tools like 10 you literally have to listen to the entire song in real time to bounce it down. Yeah. So what's a better solution? That's using an app called bounce butler. Check it out paths. butler.com bounced butler. You tell it a bunch of session files and then it bounces them all one at a time and if you want even copies of those into Dropbox so that you can get them remotely on your phone, it's dope. Yeah, that's what I usually do. I bounce to Dropbox but I do it one by one where I used to before I got bounced butler. Oh and our second sponsor is file pass.com Chris, what does file pass.com so let me tell you a quick story.

When I launched my business, it was tricky once you had more than a few customers to balance like what each person wanted, especially once you're in revision phase. I like to call that revision. Hell Yeah, revision hell. And you would get like crap. I feel like he asked me to turn the snare up on the song, but I don't see it in my emails. I don't see it in my text messages. Oh crap. It's in my linkedin messages. Damn man. Yeah. Or it's in a email thread that got split off and lost in the ether of your inbox. Yeah. So file path.com gets you out of revision hell and gets all revisions in one spot. It makes it super easy for your clients to one, give you revisions. And then two when they're like, oh I thought I told you to turn that sneer up, you can be like, no you didn't Bruh, because look, it's not in file pass.

Also there's a paywall so you can make sure that if clients want to download the finished product they have to pay you first. Super Dope. And it's one of those things where I'm like, I can't believe I didn't think of this. Yes. So think about, it's kind of like Dropbox. You share a link with a client, they can stream it in their browser with a few differentiations. One is it doesn't ask you to sign up for an app or create an account. Your clients just go straight to the song. And number two, they can leave timestamp provisions directly on the track. So you don't have to like refer to that point in the song is directly on the song. That's dope. I can't tell you how many times I've had a client be like, oh, could you listen to the, uh, the second post chorus of the, of the third chorus. Um, on the fourth song. Um, our fear, like the compressor's ducking the vocal a little bit like, Oh God

is a special skill to like decipher the like language people have used for me in the past to describe where in a song they're talking about with file paths. They just drop a pin on that track at that spot and say exactly what they want. And whenever you've done the revision, you can mark it as done in it, hides it so you can refer back to it if you need to. If not, you know, it's out of the way out of sight, out of mind you're done and you can move on and send them the next version of their songs. So super cool stuff. It's a file past.com as of right now, we're still an early access and we will be allowing more people in just in small trickles. So go there, sign up for the a waiting list if you're into that. So today at Chris we're going to be talking about a topic that I kind of talked about a little bit when I was talking about hiring somebody to shop for me so I can work on my business while they're out at the grocery store.

It's something called opportunity cost and we've probably touched on this a little bit, but not nearly as much as we should. And what sparked this was conversation we saw in our Facebook community. The greatest thing about having a Facebook community, which if you're not a member, go to the six figure home studio.com/community it'll afford you to our Facebook community or you can search for the six figure home studio community on Facebook. Look for the group. The coolest thing about this community is all the discussion that happens and we get to see like this top down view of thousands of studios and all the problems they have, all of the issues that they're bringing up. And weirdly enough, all of the flaws that people have and the flaws are not to say it's a bad thing. Everyone has flaws and weak spots and blind spots including Chris and I. And sometimes we spot these flaws and blind spots and things in other people because we see it displayed in our Facebook community and discussions. And this was one of those times, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. We're not going to try to throw anybody under the bus here, but this is a very important topic that we really haven't touched on much. So Chris, can you talk about what opportunity cost is?

Yeah, Opportunity cost is, you guys have heard the phrase, you can't have your cake and eat it too. This is a euphemism about the opportunity costs. And the idea is you can either have the cake or you can eat the cake, but once you eat the cake, you no longer have the cake. And if you have the cake, you can't eat the cake unless you want to get rid of the cake. Right? And so this idea is really, really important in business. I honestly, this is one of those things that I don't think it's possible to be successful in any industry unless you have some concept of opportunity cost because here's the thing, we're all messed up. We're all broken and we're all going to fixate on the wrong things, and when you think about opportunity costs, it helps you remember this idea that, look, you could spend time on this thing or you could make this investment or you could work on that project, but the opportunity costs is that now you can't make that investment or work on that other project or do this other thing to grow your business.

The big point is in our Facebook community, we saw some discussion that spurred this episode and Chris and I started talking about opportunity costs and what an episode would be about this, and we came to three different areas. That opportunity cost comes up that people rarely notice or that people really make mistakes on. One of those areas is being unwilling to spend money to save time. We're going to talk about that. That's what the Facebook discussion was about. People that spend time on the wrong things. There's a huge opportunity cost associated with that and then spending money on the wrong things. There's a huge opportunity cost on that because if you spend money on one thing, you don't have that money to spend on something else. So we're going to break down each of these three areas. Starting with that first, not being willing to spend money to save time.

Well, let me kind of address these three things then. Not spending money to save time, spending time on the wrong things and spending money on the wrong things. If I could go back in time, 16 years, man, and talk to younger Chris Graham, he was awful at this. He had no idea what opportunity costs was and that all I wanted to do was feel good about myself and I would do anything, whether that was spend money or spend time or whatever it happened to be, just to feel a little bit better about myself because there was so much imposter syndrome going on and most of that imposter syndrome was causing me to ignore opportunity costs. So I think this is going to be a really, really valuable episode. This is one of those ones where like as you just kind of explained the whole thing, I was like, oh my gosh, I was so bad at this back in the day.

I still struggle with this because there are still times every single week I probably do something off of this list that we're going to talk about today. So this is not like we're impervious to this. It's just it's way easier to point out other people's floss and point out your own. So this is us pointing out other people's flaws that we've seen on Facebook while also admitting that we all struggle with these same things too. So don't feel like if we talk about these things and you just are, you feel so down on yourself because you do all these things. Don't, don't fell down on yourself. Just understand that these are all preventable things to an extent, but you'll never be fully free of opportunity costs. You will always have opportunity costs and every decision you make, this is unavoidable. The best thing you can do though is to minimize the opportunity to cost on the wrong thing.

Let's talk about this. Not spending money to save time. This specifically stems from a discussion in our Facebook group about people being mad that a lot of the plugin companies are moving to subscription model. I think protools is on a subscription model now and there's just a lot of conversation around that. I'm not going to really speak on whether or not you should do a subscription model on plugin companies or not, and Chris and I both have software companies, bounce Butler and file paths that are subscription companies, so we're very biased here potentially. So take our advice here with a grain of salt.

You might not subscribe to our own beliefs. Oh my God,

I didn't know we were going to do this today. Yes, it's one of those days, Brian. Yeah, the opportunity to cost of your dad jokes, your dad pines. Let's talk on software subscriptions for a second because there's a lot of negativity around these. There's pros and cons of both sides of it, but I want to talk about people that are unwilling to pay for a subscription because it is subscription. Uh, and I see this all the time with file paths people, they're like, oh I didn't sign up because I didn't want to spend x amount a month, whatever. I don't know what our pricing is going to be yet, but it's set to something right now and people aren't willing to pay that bounce bottlers the same way. People are probably going to turn it down because they don't want to add another monthly subscription to their, and I fully understand that because every single monthly subscription you add to your bottom line, that increases your overhead, which increases your monthly expenses, which increases the amount of work you have to do just to break even. So I fully understand that. But there's an opportunity cost to blindly shooting down a subscription cost that saves you time, frustration or does some other beneficial things. So Chris, take this away cause I know you have some examples in your own business of

stuff. Here's the thing, not all subscriptions are bad and this idea, this sort of like it's a financial kind of blue collary, you know, idealism of like, aw, awesome. Scriptions are bad. Just say no if it's a subscription. To me that's crazy because when you grow a business, inevitably what you end up doing is hiring people and then you have to pay them. And when you hire someone, do you know what that is? That's a subscription. That's a subscription that you are paying for access to them to do work for you. When you have software, they can replace some of those hours that you have to hire in your business at a significantly cheaper cost. You should do it every single time because not only have you saved time, which then you could redeem to hang out with family or do whatever else exercise, but you could also take on more projects.

So now the capacity of your business to earn money, it has a ceiling. All of our businesses can never get past this imaginary number of what's the maximum amount of work that you can do and then what's the Max amount of money you can make from that when you start to get more efficient by buying a subscription. I'm going to use an example from my own life from a company called Zapier. They are not a subscriber subscriber. They're not a sponsor. Um, but Zapier Aka a Zapier. Some people call it Zapier. I pay $49 a month, I have for years and it lets me plug a lot of my systems into other websites and automate a bunch of stuff. It's really great. Is it $49 a month that I have to spend every month? Yes, but how much time does it save me and how much money does it save me to have to hire somebody else to build a bunch of web systems out that then might crash because I'm the only one using them, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. Bottom line is that when you have a subscription that saves you time, Aka increases your capacity, then it might be a really good investment and for a lot of people, these plugin subscription bundles are a far better investment than to go out and spend a couple thousand dollars to own a bunch of this stuff.

Let me touch on that a little bit. So Zapier, that software you use, for those who don't know what that is, go look into it. It's one of the best things you'll ever implement in your business. If you can find clever ways to implement it, you would probably pay $500 a month for that. If they raised their prices. That's how important it is for you. I would definitely consider it. Yep. You would consider, you would have to probably run some numbers and some nerdy spreadsheets, but I would almost bet that that's how much value are getting out of it. And that's kind of one of those things here. People look at a price of subscription for software and they don't put any consideration into the value they're getting from that. They just blindly shoot it down and it's the same for some of these plugin companies.

I would actually prefer to pay a subscription to a lot of products if it's a mission critical piece of software, meaning my entire business runs off of that, or a crucial part of my business runs off of that for a few reasons. One of those reasons is if I pay one time for a software and I'm getting constant use out of it over many, many years, but people aren't continuing to buy that software, meaning that companies not getting revenue anymore, they're going to stop supporting it. They don't have money to pay staff to further develop it, to further build things out, to keep it stable, to keep it running, to keep it bug free. And so now I have my mission critical piece of software. My business is running on, whether it's a CRM or whether it's a Zapier, which is an automation software, or whether it's for my mailing list for the six figure home studio, or whether it's my door for protools, even though I don't pay for a subscription, but it's something that is mission critical.

I want that company to be healthy. I want them to have the staff in place and the support in place that I need for my own use. And so if I'm only paying a one time fee, that means no matter how long I use that software, they're not getting any more money out of me. And that it's a very difficult place for a company to be. And I understand that from your perspective. What you get out of it is you're getting a better piece of software and you're getting a valuable piece of software that saving you more time than you're spending on it. So next part that people tend to ignore opportunity cost is spending time on the wrong things. We have all been there. This is probably one of our worst areas of opportunity cost because I think you can all understand this. If you spend time doing one thing, you're saying no to everything else you could be doing right at that point and so there's some points we have in here that we want to talk about.

I think first point to talk about is on advertising your studio. There is a number of ways you can do things and I think there's a few points in here that I want to bring up when it comes to opportunity cost between three main areas of advertising. Your studio. One is organic social media, so like posting on Instagram, posting on Facebook, posting on whatever linkedin don't actually, maybe there's some TV film guys that post on Linkedin, but doing organic social media. Chris, you've seen some guys who do this. They do really well on like Instagram. Mark Eckert, one of our guests on the podcast does really well on Instagram. You've probably seen some other guys too that do pretty well on social media. Yeah, there's a lot of people obviously who do an awful lot on social media, particularly Instagram for the recording studios. I've talked to a lot of these guys and you know, we've considered having, you know, quite a few people on the podcast and kind of the general theme that I've run into with people whose primary method of marketing is free Instagram posts, you know, they're like, well, it's free, so I'm just gonna be really active.

It's like, well, the opportunity cost there is, it takes a lot of time. It's extremely stressful. It can feel really toxic because it's a constant comparison game to everybody else and you might wake up one day and Instagram changed the rules. This is the fancy. A lot of people change their marketing strategy. When Facebook's algorithm kicked into place and all of a sudden your business account, instead of reaching 50 60 70% of your followers, now you're reaching five to 10% of your followers and that hurt a lot of businesses.

Here's the thing, everyone thinks this is brand new. Everyone thinks, oh my gosh, this is the worst thing that's ever happened. This is all that's ever happened in any new type of media ever. It used to be really, really easy to get organic search results in Google. When I started out there were a lot of things you could do. They would make your website rank really, really high and for you know, a long time I would rank really, really high on keywords like online audio mastering or audio mastering or music mastery. And I still do and a lot of those, but it was a lot of work. And then you'd wake up one day and Google will change the algorithm and now all that work that you did is gone. And that's what a lot of people don't recognize. That opportunity cost is, has a lot to do with you put work into these sorts of things and you could have put your work into something else at the time, but with a lot of this stuff, you wake up one day and all of that work that you put into something disappeared because you were playing in someone else's sandbox.

You were playing in Mark Zuckerberg sandbox and Mark Zuckerberg changed the rules and now all that work that you did is not worth anything anymore or is worth 10% of what it used to be worth and now you start to really feel that opportunity costs. Oh my gosh, why on earth didn't I start a podcast with Brian Hood years ago?

I do want to say that a lot of this sort of stuff is inevitable. Like you can't avoid some of these things. If you want to participate in organic social media, you want to have a social media presence, you're going to pay the price in the form of them changing the rules. It's the same in paid advertising. Even we're talking about organic, like free forms of advertising and we're using the word free in quotes, which is like organic social media or cold outreach. All of these things are not really free because you're spending a lot of your time and that's the opportunity cost. You could be spending that time on something else is earning you money and you could spend part of that money on paid advertising, but even some of that's not an impermeable to, is that even the right word? I don't know. In permeable to impermeable, let's make it a word. I don't know. It's a word I'm using today. Even some of that is not impermeable to change in someone else's platform. Changing like Facebook will inevitably change the way paid advertising's done their platform in the future and we're going to have to suck it up, but I think we're getting a little off topic here.

Well, not necessarily because here's the thing. It's not a zero sum game. It's not, well, you could work on Instagram or you could work on yours. SEO results on Google. You could do paid advertising or you could do a lot of email marketing. It's not do one thing and not the other. The opportunity costs could have been, instead of spending three hours per day on Instagram, spend one hour per day on Instagram, and then spend another hour per day on blogging and then spend another hour per day on paid search results. If you start to spread yourself out a lot more, you know, evenly across different sections, the market, what will happen is that you're less susceptible, you're less impermeable. Impermeable is what I, I'm looking this up now. I need to know if this is the word. I think it's impervious. You are now impervious. It's a word and I used it, right.

I want to point that out. According to Google. I don't believe you not being capable of being effected or something. So I think I used it correctly. I love it. It's fantastic. But the opportunity cost of me looking that up instead of talking about opportunity cost means that our listeners had to deal with me looking this up instead of learning valuable information. And James had to edit that in to not have a super long pause there because a add. That's true. Yeah. So the big idea here is that there's an awful lot of people in our industry who struggle with doing one thing when they could've been doing something else that would have been more beneficial to them. And in my opinion, most of the reason for that is that they want a pat on the back now instead of business growth later. Yeah. And I think that leads us to the next point really well.

And that is something we called technicians. Brain technician spread is basically where you let your stupid engineer brain take over. And I use this stupid engineer brain lightly cause I have it all the time too. Chris definitely has this and this is where you start going on this endless rabbit hole of research, spending time on learning things that don't ultimately matter or change. There's a really good book that kicked my ass called the paradox of choice by Barry Schultz. The thing. I got his name right there and one of the things Barry talks about in that book is this very idea and he calls people who struggle with this, who walk into the grocery store and look at every single box of cereal and read the ingredients before picking a box of cereal to buy. He calls these types of people maximizers. I am at my heart a massive maximizer.

I'm obsessed with getting a good deal. I'm obsessed with making everything perfect and here's the thing. In that situation, if I walk into the grocery store, I don't do this, but if I did walk into the grocery store and look at every single box of cereal and then weigh the pros and cons and consider like, well this one says it has gluten in this one says it uses hemp seed and I like hemp seed. If I go through this huge song and dance, ultimately it would have been better for me to just go in, pick the top five, you know, boxes that looked interesting and then really quickly choose because all the time that I spent on that could have been used for something far more fruitful in my life. And what happens is the reason that people do this isn't because they want the best cereal.

They want to pat themselves on the back and say, well, you know, I did the research and uh, this is by far the most superior of a cereals. And I'm smart and I want you to think I'm smart. It's about patting yourself on the back. And it's about ego. It's not about cereal, it's about ego and what Sony people do in our industry. Because let's face it guys, we're in one of the most egotistical industries in the world, especially the audio engineer type is this idea of like, I want to be elite. I want to know like, well, you know, I did the thing and I won. There's like a teenager, a boy video game mentality here that misses the point. The point isn't to win. The point is to grow your business in both the life you want. Right. And most people pass up that opportunity costs, which in this case isn't necessarily like that the cereal will be 5% better cause it won't be the opportunity cost is what could you have used that time to do instead or rather than trying to win the opportunity to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Choosing cereals or whatever that happens to be or whether you, well you know I spend $4 less per month because I switched software. It took me 47 hours to make that transition, but now I spend $4 a month that silly abandoned the pat on the back thing or at least begin to measure things where you really do deserve a pat on the back, like consistently making an extra thousand dollars a month for six months in a row. Pat Yourself on the back. Big Time for that. That's awesome. You should be super proud as opposed to this like, I have Charleston the best run because I am an audio engineer. Xtrordinair like it's a losing proposition and I say this man, I'm preaching that myself. I struggle with this stuff and thank God I struggle with it a little bit less each year.

Yeah, I remember your story back episodes and episodes ago. I remember how long ago where you talked about how you'd be sitting on the sofa with your wife while you're trying to like hang out after work and you'd be looking up text backs for diagrams for amps or whatever. Like something Super Nerdy, a vintage fender, Princeton reverb from 1966 that alert, you just heard the podcast. We don't know if you're talking this podcast.

It isn't kind of, it's vintage gear. Brian, can we change the rules? No, no. We're not changing the rules, but yeah, I mean like it's this thing of like, even in that case, let's use that example. I've talked about this a lot. You know, I would work, you know, 10, 12 hours a day producing, mixing, doing whatever, you know, the all singing, all dancing thing. And then I would hang out with my wife and we'd watch a TV show and I would be multitasking while like trying to learn more about, you know, a specific type of amplifier, thinking like that was the best use of my time. It wasn't because I was exhausted and therefore stupid constantly and had a rough marriage because I wasn't caring for my wife. Well, which then cascaded into all other areas of my life in business. Opportunity cost is about being future use best friend, not about winning present you a pat on the back.

I think that's a good example for a technician's brain. So the next area of opportunity costs related to spending time on the wrong things is something that we've all done and that is focusing on the right things at the wrong time. I have a course called the home studio startup. This is the whole premise of that course. There are so many things in your business that you need to do to be successful, but most people focus on the 80% that are fun, that doesn't do anything to push their business, and they don't spend that amount of time on the 20% of things that will push their business forward early on in their business. So this is focusing on the right things at the wrong time. So things like, give me an example, Chris, what's something that people do that is really important at some point, but for a new studio or somebody that hasn't made their first dollar yet is an important thing to do yet? What's an example?

Well, one of the things that I would mention is I think some people hear as talk about paid marketing and they think, oh, I just need to do paid marketing. Yes, well there's a couple problems there. One, if you have a website that doesn't convert, I. E that when a stranger finds it, they don't fill out your contact form or they don't, you know, message you or whatever. Or another reason for that might be that you have absolutely zero Internet presence whatsoever other than your website. So when someone googles your name, your studio name, they come up with Butkus, but guess, is that the right word? Bupkis

no, I don't even know. I don't know what you're even trying to say, but I love it.

They came up with Zilch. You know, let's say you wanted to work with Chris Graham mastering. That felt weird, let's say with me. So you would Google Chris Grant mastering, right? And you would see a lot of stuff, reviews and all over the place. If I run a paid marketing campaign and someone hears about me through that paid marketing campaign, they're probably going to do a little bit of research and there's a pretty good chance that they're going to hire me because I look like I know what I'm doing on the Internet.

Your point again is if you're trying to do the right thing at the wrong time, you someone that's brand new might hear this podcast and hear us talk about remarketing on episode 88 88 Oh look at that and think, oh, I need to do remarketing for my studio, but that's the right thing to do. But if you're brand new, you ain't have a website yet or you have a website with zero visitors a month, that's the right thing at the wrong time. You are focusing on the wrong time and all that time you spent setting up that retargeting campaign that we talked about in episode 88 you could have spent that time actually building a website or actually getting people to come to your website by many of the other things we've talked about on this podcast before. There's plenty of ways to get top of funnel activities, what we call it, but the point is you're focused on the right thing at the wrong time and that is a huge form of opportunity cost.

Well, one of the things I see people do an awful lot is they look at business development as networking. Like, I'm gonna go now. I'm going to go

do some networking. I don't know if anything's ever been accomplished by someone that said, I'm going to go with something to do some networking yet nobody calls it networking that, yeah, that was every successful at network. Yeah. It's like I'm going to be going to some parties this week for NAM at studios and I'm calling them parties in conversations, but it's networking. I'm not calling it networking because I know better than that. Yeah. Well, here's the thing.

If you are in the service business and you're trying to find clients, if that's what drives your business forward, going and meeting other people in the same industry as you probably isn't going to help at all. It'll make you feel good about yourself.

It does help with the loneliness aspect of being a home based business. Like if you're on a home studio, it does get lonely as hacks.

It definitely does. It will help with that, but it won't help with your biggest problem, which

for most of you is how the heck do I get more customers? I love that you just used tech

or how the heck do I deal with all the customers they currently have? So the networking thing is, again, it's one of these things of like if you show up at a networking event and you're brand new, you stand to gain something because you get an idea of what the reality of the marketplace is. But you're being told what the reality of the marketplace is by all your future competitors, not by customers.

I will say this, I've noticed in like the Nashville studio world, even people that are, I guess what you consider direct competitors, they're all friends. They all hang out together. They all talked about nerdy gear stuff with each other. Man, there's a lot of gears slots in Nashville, but they love each other. They're like supporting each other. So it's not so much that competitor mindset, that zero sum game. But if you go into these groups of people that are at the peak of their game and you are someone who's just getting started, you might get some good advice, but as far as networking goes, you're not going to get any customers out of it.

Well, and that's the thing is I think most people, they've heard the word networking and so they feel like it's something they need to do for their business, but they're not thinking about why they should be networking.

Let me paint a picture here. Let's make this a little more clear. Let's just say you go to a local concert or you go to a live venue of some sort and you meet bands there. You start networking for whatever reason you have business cards, you're handing out Christy of business cards. I don't have business cards. I do. Okay, whatever, and say you give them a business card and here's what happens next. They go to look you up on the Internet later on. No one's going to call Your Business Card and just hire you straight off the bat. They're going to do some research into you. This is the Internet age. Everyone googles you first. Totally. Okay. Now they can't find you on Google. They can't find you on Facebook. They can't find you because you don't have a website listed on your card. You just wasted time networking before you are ready. There we go. So that opportunity cost is absolutely wasted time because you didn't gain anything out of it and they're never going to work with you because you weren't fully prepared for that investigative research from that potential client. Right. So you weren't ready to do that. Yeah. You just weren't ready to do that yet.

Yeah. And so a big part of that too is this idea of like now they do know who you are, but they googled you and got a weird vibe because they couldn't find anything, and now they know that they don't want to work with you. So that's even worse actually. You're actually in a worse situation than you were before. And if you are in a situation where someone's like, Hey, I met this guy, I'm at this thing. I was thinking about working with them. Have you ever heard of him? Oh yeah, I've got his business card. I don't know who that guy is. I, I couldn't find any of his credits. I couldn't find his website. I couldn't find his Facebook profile. I did find his business. It had zero reviews. You know, there's all sorts of stuff where like, you have to do this in the right order. If you are networking to meet mentors, that's one thing. If you're networking to meet customers, that's another, if you have no internet presence, no evidence that you are not just a con man pretending to be who you said you were on the Internet, then you're not ready yet for that and you should it at a different time because here's the thing, it all comes back. What was the word that you used about procrastination?

Uh,

what about it? I just said that because I don't want to say it because it's dirty.

Oh, well they actually, let's, I'm not going to get into it cause we're going to be talking about that next.

Ah, let's segue.

Yeah. Let's segue into the next, the next section is spending time on the wrong things. Procrastination by inventing work. I came out with a term for this, I call it procrastination. That is where you're just inventing things to do or you're just like staying busy without actually ever pushing the needle forward

so that at the end of the day when someone's like, how was your day that you can be like,

Oh man, I'm so busy, busy work so hard, man. Dude, that's one of the things that Tim Ferriss talks about. The four hour work week. We tend to wear this badge of busy as like this badge of honor on our chests to like puff at our chest and man, things are so busy around here. I will honestly say Chris, the last few years been the best years of business for me and the least busy I've ever been.

Agreed. Same totally my thing as well and a lot of that was because of Tim Ferriss in the four hour work week. One of the things he says in there about procrastination is that people who are busy have bad priorities. They're doing the wrong things when they should be doing the things that move the needle first. Because if they did the things that moved the needle first, there'd be less of an impetus to go out and do all these other little things. They don't have a strong ability to sit down at the beginning of the day and make a list of the most important things and separate that list by to do and not yet,

well, let me say something again. Two things to say. First, I'm glad you say impetus and not impotence. Uh, two vastly, vastly different things. So I'm glad you got that right. This episode. You've messed that one up before. Uh, one of our, one of our listeners have not one of our listeners. Let me know that one. I don't know what, Oh, gracious. But the thing I want to point it out was this framework that I like to push things through. Here's the deal. Let me just say this. Every single one of us has a list of things we need to get done. Every single one of us. And what tends to happen is we want to focus on the things that we're able to check off the list that we feel like we got things done so we focus on the things that are easiest and quickest to do guilty, right?

We've all been there. I still do this to this day, but there's this framework that I like to use called ice ice and that is something you can quickly and easily do for your entire to do list for and actually here's real quick, here's how I organize things. I have my monthly to do list like my big projects for the month, my weekly task lists, and then I break that into daily tasks. Every week I'll have a list of daily tasks that I map out for the week and there's a framework you can use a called ice and it stands for impact, confidence and ease. Just give it a score. Out of five some people do have a score out of 10 I don't like scores out of town, like scores out of five and you just look at there and you say impact. What is the impact? This will have on my business at a five give it a one to five. Then on that same thing, what's my confidence level that this way actually push my business forward in some way, shape or form. What's my confidence that I can actually achieve this thing or successfully do it? Give me a score from one to five and then ease. How easily can I get this done? Level one to five and then you're going

to have a total score on that one thing. It is not perfect but it's at least a good thing for you to map out the things you should be focusing on. The things that are the highest score cause what you're going to find is all those things you wanted to do were like three and fours. All the things you need to do. The things that are gonna actually push your business forward are like nines and tens because it's, you know, three three's or a three, three and four. You know, it's like you start to really get a good picture of how big these things are in your business and which ones push them forward. That's just a quick and dirty thing for you guys to start using the ice method. That's so good. There's another method called the Eisenhower Matrix, popularized by general slash President Eisenhower. It's not as catchy as ice.

It's not as catchy as ice, but it's got a president's name. And so the, the big idea there'll be really quick about this is that it's a quadrant. There's a square with four sections, but the square divided into four. And on the upper left you've got things that are important and urgent. On the upper right you've got things that are important but not urgent. And on the bottom you have things that are urgent but not important. And then on the bottom right hand corner of this, sorry, podcasting sent the best place to explain this matrix. You've got things that are not urgent or important and it, so it helps you set this sort of priority up where you can tell, hey, this doesn't need dealt with today because it's not urgent or this needs dealt with today because it's urgent and it's important. And Man, that Matrix has been so helpful for me.

I felt like we should have the whole episode about that cause that's more than a side note. We probably should. Yeah. Super good stuff. Well all of this stuff I think is part of the base code. The problem with being a human is dealing with opportunity costs and trying to figure out what the most important thing that you can do that will accomplish your goals and your goals are growing your business. That's why you're still listening to us. Yap. On and on about this stuff. Right? So your goal is to grow your business and it can be really challenging to balance your own ego. I mean, I speak from oodles of experiences. It's really hard for me to balance my own ego with knowing what I need to do to move the needle to grow my businesses. It's a tough man and all of these things are very helpful to kind of balance those things and figure out am I procrastinating the important things because I don't want to do them or am I doing the unimportant things now so that I can just give myself a pat on the back so that I can not feel guilty when someone asks me how my day was.

So if it was a good point to move on to the last point here and that is spending money on the wrong things. We've touched on this a little bit throughout this podcast, but the opportunity cost of putting money towards one thing and not having that money now to spend on something else, and this is way more of an in depth topic that we can probably give justice for for a third point in a already hour long podcast. But I think the first and easiest thing to talk about when it comes to the opportunity to cost US spending money on the wrong things, his gear, your herb, this entire podcast

is based around the premise that gear is not the limiting factor of your studio. We have the gear sled alert. We don't allow gear talk on the podcast. We're like one of the only audio podcasts that do that and that's because we truly believe that gear is not the answer for your struggling studio and that is because of something called opportunity to cost the money you have spent on gear, you've now lost that opportunity to spend it on things that matter, things that push your business forward, whether that is paid advertising that we talked about, whether that's building your studio, whether that is hiring somebody, whether it's paying for your subscriptions that you need to run your business efficiently or if that's just to have that money in the bank so you can leave your day job and have a better emergency fund or runway fund while you're trying to get your studio off the ground. These are all things that the money is better utilized on than just owning a bunch of gear that makes you feel nice on the short term.

Yeah. Even debt, man, if you've got debt, it's probably for most people, 99% of the time just paying off your debt as opposed to spending that $1,000 to grow your Mike Cabinet or whatever it happens to be to feed your microphone addiction. So yeah, I mean there's just so many things to talk about on the gear thing where, you know, I've talked about this in the past on the podcast, but the idea for most people is imposter syndrome and when you buy gear at least for a little while, you have a little less imposter syndrome because when someone's like, what do you do for a living [inaudible] audio engineer. Oh really? And then they're thinking, well is he any good at it? Will have a $4,000 microphone. Clearly I must be good at it if I was willing to go into debt and pay interest on a credit card to purchase it. Yes.

Yup. Or the guys that have a full like 32 channel, 64 channel console in their home. I was talking about this to somebody recently. I was like, that feels like you have like a Ferrari on an island that has dirt roads. Like it's just like you are not getting the full utilization. It's not where it was meant to be. Or You have your like what I see a lot of nationals, these big lifted trucks with big mud tires driving around downtown Nashville and parking in the corporate parking structure for like an insurance company. Like that's your day job and you drive a truck like that and it's not in its true place. So you're spending money on this big expensive board that you're not utilizing to its fullest capacity. That's a big opportunity. Costs us a lot of money sitting in your living room, not capable of doing what it was truly meant to do.

Well and the big thing there is there's a lot of things you can buy in your studio. So let's say what's a good example? A live drum room.

So that moves us to the next point. Spending money on the wrong things, on wasted space for your studio. This is another big one. Drum rooms we are going to say about that. Chris.

So the idea here is like I'm going to pay four times what I would typically pay for my lease to have a giant live drum room that I will use for one to 2% of the hours that I have

access to the space that I've leased. That's one of the big benefits of living in Nashville is if for some reason, and I don't record bands anymore, I only do mixing a mastering, but if I were still recording bands, if I needed a big ass live room, you'll get it. There are dozens of studios that I could rent out at a very floatable rate and just pass on that cost to my customers and have probably a better sounding drum space. And I would even have at my podcast room now is where I put my live room used to be. But there's plenty of options. So yeah, if you're in a smaller town, there's less and less options. But most people are not fully utilizing their big ass drum room space if they have one in their studios.

Yeah. So I think for most people the opportunity costs was be in debt and have a drum room or not be in debt and have a drum room, and the big thing there is that what ends up happening is for most studios, most studios historically, especially through the nineties and two thousands was that they made the choice to have the debt and then they had a couple inconsistent months in a row and then their bills exceeded their cashflow and then they folded. Right. It would have been better if they had found a way to do what they love for their entire life by making some sound business decisions and recognizing that, yeah, you do feel like a cooler audio engineer by having the live drum room. I'm not saying this is the case for everybody, but it might make a lot more sense to do. Man, there's a really cool studio in Cleveland.

I'm not going to name drop here, but one of the guys I've been coaching, they have an interesting mothership model. I haven't been to the studio yet, but as I've been told about it and seen some cool pictures, it's a big live drummer in the middle with control rooms around the outside. I've seen similar setups to that. That's dope. So all of a sudden you've got four or five guys. I think it's fewer than that here, but that's what Matt Boudreaux of working class audio used to have. Coworking model. Yup. Yeah. A couple of guys sharing a live drum room as opposed to this like lone wolf. I've got my own live drum room and a lot of debt and yeah, it just often makes more sense to spend that money elsewhere or to not go into debt to do something like that. Yeah. I think

if you want to hear one episode that really embodies opportunity cost, it's that episode where we interviewed Matt Boudreau. It's episode 27 the title is saving over $3,000 per month by downsizing to profitability. It was Matt Boudreaux Story. He's the guy behind working class audio. Awesome dude. He actually just texted me. He's here for an am and I haven't hung out with him yet. We need to wrap up this podcast soon, so I'm going out.

Shut up. I want to go hang out with Matt. I love that.

I know, man. The next thing here, and I see this all the time as a course creator, Chris, if you had a course, you would see this all the time. Maybe someday I call these course collectors, people who waste money on courses without implementing them. There is a huge opportunity costs of this where you're spending this time analyzing a course, determining this is of course you want to buy, this is going to help your business or help your mixing skills or help your audio skills or whatever you're trying to buy a course to educate yourself on. Then you spend the money so you've have opportunity to cost on time that you could have spent building your business on money that you could've used buying something else and then you actually don't implement the course because of many reasons. But this is a huge problem that a lot of people have and there's a little weird because I sell courses and I see this all the time and I hate seeing this. I hate seeing people that join the course and six months later I check their account and they have consumed 0% of that course and I've tried to solve this, but I think it comes down to a lack of accountability in people's lives.

Totally. What does accountability, Brian, tell us about that.

Not to be too like self-serving, but coaching is in a form of accountability. Chris Offers Coaching and you have coaching clients. I don't think you're taking on any right now, but if you can find a good mentor or a good coach or a good mastermind group, which we've talked about all three of those things on the podcast before, if you can find one of those three things, that's a great form of accountability that keeps you pushing forward in something.

Well, let me hop in here. One of the things that's interesting about accountability is it's the opposite of imposter syndrome. When you're like, hey guys, like my core group of people, Hey, I decided to spend $40,000 to buy a console for my tracking studio. Hopefully those guys love you enough to be like, hey man, a pretty cool that you bought that console last year. Have you gotten any clients as a result of it? That's accountability. And then you've got to look them in the eye and be like, no, I haven't. Dammit. So that accountability is really, really helpful because imposter syndrome is mostly your fear that you don't look the way that you want to, to the people around you. Right? But accountability is the opposite. It uses that fear that these people that you love and trust in your life are gonna hold you accountable and be like, hey, you a not doing this thing that you said you did, or, Hey, you made this big investment, but you have not done anything to capitalize on it. What's up with that, Bruh? That's accountability. And that's such a powerful thing.

So this would be a probably a good time for me to mention that in six days we'll be starting our fifth accountability boot camp. We do these a few times a year. This will probably be the last one we do this year just because it's getting later in the year, but I do want to make sure people know this. If you are a current profitable producer, core student, which we have about 600 of those that are eligible right now that haven't done this before. If you are a student, you are eligible for the accountability accelerator bootcamp. Make sure you sign up for that before Sunday. This is where we take a group of people through about a hundred people or so. We split them into teams of 10 people, so like little miniature mastermind groups and we give them assignments every single week. It's a bootcamp where we make them implement things in their business and then we check your work.

That's the accountability portion. We check every single person's work and if they did it to our liking, like to our specifications, like I'm going to give one example here, but we'll have one where we tell you to build a website if you don't already have one or to revamp your website. If you already have a website and we're going to go check your website after the due date, the tasks to do at the end of every week, we're going to check those items and if you don't do them or you do them poorly, we're going to give you a strike. And if you get three strikes, we're going to kick you out of the program. How's that for some accountability? I love it. That's dope man. And every single week, if you do them, you get points for your team and at the end of the eight weeks, the teams are the most points, wins, prizes.

The last AAB we gave every person on the winning team $500 gift cards for sweetwater.com to satiate their gear lust or to buy software with this goal too. But we have all sorts of prizes. There's a huge team element to it. Everybody's inside of slack in their own like team channel. So if you are not a current profitable producer course student, you can always sign up and join before then. I'll probably send an email out about that. If people want to join, I'll send an email. But if you're a current student, which there's a lot of students that have not taken part in any AAB yet, accountability accelerator bootcamp, if you have not taken part of that, sign up today and make sure you're taking part in that before Sunday because man, I can't wait to start this next one up.

Well, we're going to have Graham Cochran on the show here on our next episode. Hopefully depending on the order that we've released these, he might've already been on the show last week, but so one of the things he talks about is the importance of having a group like that on his podcast, the Graham Cochran show, which I'm obsessed with and it's made me think, you know, listen to the gram talk about this. But then also even just your kind of pitch for AAB here that with the coaching clients I've got, I've got about 20 guys and I'm doing coaching with, I've thought about building like a little community for them to like a slack group or Facebook group just for us to be discussing that stuff.

Slack is awesome for that man cause just because of the live element, it's a live chat community versus Facebook which is like someone posts and then a few minutes later someone might show up in comment for big groups like our free Facebook community, they're like over 5,000 members. That's awesome for that kind of setup but for like you know a smaller group of like you're 20 guys or we have little over a thousand people in PPC. They're all in that community. Like that's a much better medium for that type of thing.

Super interesting man. When you've got a community like that, that one is going to hold you accountable. That tool you're going to learn from the other people in your group aside from like the course instructor or the mentor or the coach or whatever. That adds a lot of value too, but I think, you know, you mentioned earlier this sort of like loneliness thing of you know like you go and network now because you think it'll help your business, but because you're lonely and there's something there too in that going out and just networking or doing something that's not really going to help your business but might make you feel better about yourself can be really intense because it's a false sense of value. It's a false sense of not being lonely when you've got people that are actually holding you accountable, when you've got people that are invested in it, seeing you improve and not, it's just this like everyone's out for themselves.

That's where you find real accountability. That's where you find real community and that's where it starts to really not be lonely. You know? I know for us with our mastermind group with Blammo, a lot of tough love in that group and it's because of the tough love that I keep on going and it's because of the tough love that our community is awesome. I think this is kind of weird out of left field, place to go. But I think it's important to underscore, don't settle for fake community. Don't settle for fake networking, don't settle for fake friends. You got to have accountability. And if you don't, not only is your professional life not as fun, but you're also not going to grow at anywhere near the same speed.

I think that's a good place to kind of wrap this up is opportunity cost is going to be everywhere is inevitable. It's something you're always going to experience. But surrounding yourself with the right people is going to help minimize the negative impact of opportunity costs in your life in business. I love it. [inaudible] so that is it for this episode of the six figure homes to do your podcast. If you didn't notice already. Uh, this episode came out a week later than we expected it to because we, uh, wanted to get that Graham Cochran [inaudible] I started out as fast as possible cause it was so dang good. Uh, and we wanted to coincide for his, his course launch he was doing. But, uh, with Ab 5.0 uh, we actually started that yesterday. So if you did not sign up for that, and you are currently a PPC student and you are eligible, uh, you can always sign up today because we have a reserve team for ab.

Meaning if anyone fails out the first week, we will replace those failed members with the reserve team. So it may not be too late. It's probably too late if I'm being honest. But you can always sign up for a B and a, you might have a chance to get in for this one, we have over a hundred people in this one and it's gonna be a hell of a time. Next week's episode is all about charging $5 per song for mixing. And that's all I'm going to say about that. That'll be coming out next Tuesday. Brighton early 6:00 AM Oh 600 hours the same time the podcast comes out every single week. Until next time, thanks so much for listening and happy hustle.