Winning The Sustainability Wars: Three Crucial Ingredients For A Sustainable, Long-Term Career

This is the six figure homes studio podcast, episode 77

the sixth bigger home 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,

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald and beautiful and purple shirted cohost, Chris Graham. How are you doing Chris? My purple shirted? Is that what you just said? Yeah, I mean you always wear a purple shirt, so I just call you my beautiful purple shirted cohost now. Gotcha. You want to spread those words out purple shirted yeah, I realized I slurred and I was like, should I go back and rerecord that? I'm good. It sounded like I've made a mess in my pants. My pool started. Yeah, man, I'm good. How are you Brian? I'm fine, dude. Just trying to, I don't know. Come up with some good pre episode banter. Yeah, no, I'm just trying to get through this intro so we can get to what this episode is actually about. I'm with you, Chris. What is new in your life? Well, I accidentally went vegetarian and couple of weeks ago. How do you accidentally go vegetarian and why? Well, I had not had meat in like two days and I just kinda kept it up and it's been great. I feel amazing. I've lost a bunch of weight. Well, if it works for you, man, go for it. I personally love eating it, vegetarian restaurants, but I don't want to be vegetarian because I enjoy eating meat.

I was the same and I really, really like eating vegetarian food and it just sorta happened. It's been really good.

Well, welcome back to another episode of the Vegetarian podcasts where we talk about animal cruelty and how bad it is. Yeah. All right guys, let's go. No, what are we talking about it this week, Chris? Well, I had a thought

that I think would be good for us to talk about. You guys have heard of the loudness wars. It's this idea that, you know, for a period of time everyone was like, oh, I'll make our song loud or make her sung louder. And all the bands were coming up with records that were a little bit louder than the last record and so on and so forth until it all sounded like garbage. And it's interesting. I think there are a couple of wars that have begun as the loudness wars have ended. And one of the things we talk about in this podcast that I think is fascinating is bigger studios, as we all know, many of them have gone into business. There's been a transition to more of a home studio business model, or at least a more sustainable business model. And I think what's happening amongst us as a community of audio engineers is there's a new war that I'm going to call this sustainability wars. And essentially what that means is that all of us are trying to work with awesome bands and those of us that are able to create sustainable businesses and stay in business for the long haul have the best shot at two things. One, mastery becoming absolutely incredible at our craft and to having an opportunity to work with a life changing artists. So the sustainability wars is what I want to call this and that's what we're going to talk about in the episode today. How do you win in the sustainability wars?

Yeah, and I've talked about this on Facebook in regards to artists and the example I've used before is the band bring me the horizon. They were just like a local metal core band in the UK. They weren't very good in my opinion. They had gained a little bit of traction, but nothing major commercial. But then they slowly evolve their sound until they finally landed on this unique style of rock that seems to have caught on. And if you're in an and of the genre, you probably haven't heard of them before. They're kind of like in the mainstream rock world, but they are an order of magnitude 10 2030 times larger than they ever were in their metal days. And if they would not have stayed around long enough to reach that sound, they would have never experienced the explosive growth they've experienced as an artist. And I've seen this also in the studio world.

People who show a lot of promise, they have a lot of early signs of success, but they end up burning out and just moving completely out of the industry before they've ever had a chance to really catch on and blow up as a producer or a mixer or a mastering engineer. And so really this whole episode is that just hopefully food for thought on how you can stay around long enough to start gaining traction and hopefully doing this fulltime for hopefully the rest of your life if that's what you're into. But the last thing I want to see is people who have every single box ticked. They have every single thing they need to be successful, but they can't run the race long enough to make it. And that's what this episode is about today is how do you actually sustain yourself long enough to make a living out of this?

Well, and you brought up an interesting point that we don't have our outline here and it's the idea of iteration. Bring me the horizon was able to experiment and iterate on what it was they were doing until they found something that resonated with people. I think the sustainability wars, there's a lot of this idea of experimenting and iterating and try new things and seeing if it works, and that's a big part of, I think the ability to win in the long term. If you look at business history, very few super successful people started doing something and ended up doing the exact same thing they started doing for a lot of people. As they started doing something that led to something a little different, which led to something even different, which led to sending even weirder and then all of a sudden they're doing this crazy thing. Graham Cochran, case in point, we've had them on the show in the past. Graham Cochran started as a recording engineer, made some tutorial videos at one point for some people. He was working with wham Bam. He's the most well known recording studio tutorial maker in the world and part of the seven figure club. Pretty incredible.

He's a great example and I think everyone's heard of some example of this. You hear about the 10 year overnight success, you hear about that a lot of Nashville, it's like someone that you've never heard of and all of a sudden they're huge and famous and they had this big hit, single did skyrocketed him and his success in the limelight. But what you don't know about as the 10 years of hustle and grind they had to put in to get to that point to ever reach that single that blew them up. So what are the things that we can do as audio engineers to get us through that 10 year slog so that we can hopefully reach the light at the end of the tunnel? And it doesn't always end in a overnight success at the end of that 10 year struggle, sometimes it's you're just barely your heads above water and you're, you're happy and you're making a little bit of money and you're able to do this full time. And that's really the peak of what you're going to experience. There's going to be the other people that have a massive amount of success if they can just get through the slog of the early part of your career. So let's actually start with our outline here. Chris. What is the first point in our outline of actually winning the sustainability wars?

Well, we talked about this last week on the how to raise your prices episode. The first thing that you need to establish is walkaway power. You need to be in a position where you don't have to say yes to every single person that comes your way. And you know, a good example of this, we've all had people like this. You know, you get your business up and running, you've got a website, you've got a Google business listing, you've got all the things, you've got a bunch of reviews, you look like a real business and you get a phone call and it's someone,

hi, my name is Lois. I was wondering if you can convert my cassette tapes to digital files.

You're in a position where you're like, oh gosh, that's not the service we provide. I want to say yes to lowest though. In a situation like that you don't have walkaway power or a better example is somebody walks into your studio and is like, Hey, loser wants you to record my record. Do everything I say and I'm going to berate you the entire time. And in a situation like that, you should say, go away. No, I'm not going to work with you because you're an asshole. You need walkaway power. You need to be in a position where you can focus on what's working and on what's duplicatable on getting clients that you can get more of and that you want more of instead of wasting your time on clients that are only wasting your time.

Yeah, and there's a couple reasons for this. One of those is these types of clients that are just toxic and painful to work with. You're going to burn out before you ever really achieve any level of success. You're going to burn out. You're going to move on to something else because this was just too hard and you couldn't put in the work because you had to say yes to all these clients that really just drag you down. A lot of you can resonate with this because you're in that place right now where you're burned out because you're having to say yes to every single client. The flip side is you may not be burned out, but you're ruining your reputation by working with some of these clients that you have no business working with because you didn't have walkaway power. You said yes to these terrible projects that are really just trash artists and I hate to say that, but there are trash artists out there and they do work with somebody and you don't want to be the person that they're working with because that doesn't do anything to help your reputation. So walk away. Power works for both sides of those equations and it's easier said than done. But we have a few tips here on establishing walkaway power so that when you do get that project where on the back of your mind you should say no to it but you don't have the power, you're hopefully have the walkaway power to actually say no to that project instead of saying yes.

Totally. Well, let's talk about some of the different ways that you can get walk away power. What are things that we can do? The give us the confidence to say no to projects that we don't want and the first one here, the most important, the one you should focus on before you talk about any of these other ideas is having low expenses. If you're in a position where your expenses were, what you need to make each month is a huge amount. This is both your personal expenses and your studio expenses. If you're in a position where you're like, well, would I got to have my Mazda Rati it's only $900 a month. If you're in a situation like that and you're trying to like, well I got out of my mom's Rottie and I'm trying to live out my lifelong dream of being a record producer. Like, dude, get rid of the Mazzarati. Yeah, unless it's helping you get clients and it really significant way

and in all honesty it's not a Maserati for most people. It's like that brand new Ford f two 50 that you wanted to buy any car. Really my opinion over I would say over 10 or 15,000 which is like so low compared to most people, but I'm also like I'm still driving a 2006 Honda pilot, but any car, I'd say over $20,000 is still, I feel like a waste of money for people who are trying to establish a new career as all I'm trying to say. You can get to that point whenever you want, but in order to keep your overhead as low as possible, that means cutting back on certain things that, I hate to say it this way, but this is the harsh truth of Brian would come out. You don't deserve it yet because you haven't earned it. I don't know how else to say it. Yeah.

This might be something of cutting back on how often you go out to dinner. For a lot of people, this blows my mind like I'm kind of weird and that I don't really drink.

I'll have like

a 10th of a glass of bourbon like every three months because it's yummy. But other than that, like a lot of my friends especially, you know in college and stuff would go out and drop 50 bucks at the bar on Friday night and then another 50 bucks on Saturday night and be like, that's insane. Why would you spend that much money if you're in a situation like that and you're not colic, just drink at home, man.

Just in their defense. I wouldn't say dropping some money on the weekend at the bars, quite alcoholic status, but I definitely agree with the point of do some pregaming or at least drink at home whenever you can just save money. And it's the same with restaurants. Like there's no difference in that versus spending 50 bucks in a mill every other day or on the weekends. That stuff adds up quick. If you are on a very tight budget and you're barely keeping your head above water and the studio world and you're doing these sorts of expenses that you really could cut back on if you wanted to, if you're not willing to make the sacrifice now, at least on the short term, you're going to have a really hard time winning in the sustainability wars, and honestly, it even ties into our second point here, which is not just low expenses, but building an emergency fund. Building an emergency fund is one of the best ways to build walkaway power because when you have six to 12 months of expenses sitting in the bank with nothing to do except sustain you, when times are hard, you can say no to that project. That is the absolute trash project of the year. It's going to be a punisher.

They're going to be horrible to work with. It's going to be terrible in product, and you're gonna hurt your reputation along the way. You could say no to that because you have six months or 12 months of saving in the bank and you have low expenses along the way so that immerses you find will last longer. Love that. The illustration that I think about is, this is sort of like when you're pursuing the passion like this, especially if you're thinking about quitting your job, it's sort of like, well, I want to be a boxer but I don't really need to train. I don't really need endurance. I'm just awesome. I'm just going to get in the ring and I'll be fine. When I decided to stop producing, stop mixing, stop recording and only focus on mastering. I had a job as a worship leader. Part time at a church is about 10 hours a week, wasn't a ton of time, was an incredible amount of stress, but it was only 10 hours and I had 30 hours.

If I was working a 40 hour week, which I never did, I always worked like an additional 40 hours a week on top of that. But you know this was maybe 10 or 12 years ago. Yeah. About 12 years ago and it gave me an opportunity to have a little bit of income coming in so that I could sustain myself as a build up my customer list. So having a side hustle that gives you flexibility and some cash can be the secret to winning the sustainability war. They can get you to a point where you're good enough that you can charge enough and have enough customers to do this for the longterm. Yeah, and part of having a side hustle doesn't mean going out and getting a day job. The thing about side hustles, you still need time to work on your business and in your business and if your day job doesn't support that, then that's not a side hustle.

That is a day job and it's going to take you away from ever really reaching that inflection point in your studio that you want to hit. The other side is if you can have a good side hustle that is flexible based on your scheduling. So like driving for Lyft, driving for Uber, we talked about this on a previous episode. If you are able to have a flexible side hustle that can ebb and flow as your studio has ups and downs, that gives you walk away power. And that also puts you in a really good position to when you finally start to niche down. Because here's the thing I see people, they don't niche down at all because they're afraid of losing out on projects so they won't raise their prices. We talked about last week on raising your prices. They won't raise their rates because the fear of missing out on a project.

Well, when you have a side hustle, when you have expenses low, when you have an emergency fund, all of those things are available now. Now you can niche down, now you can raise your rates, now you can do all these other things. It opens up a whole world of opportunities. All of these things work in tandem to not just keep you sustainable for the long run, but to help you thrive and help you hit that inflection point faster. I love it. So one of the other things you can do to have walkaway power is not just to have a side hustle, but for many of you you might be married or he might have a partner. And in a situation like that, this is something that I also really benefited from. When my wife and I were first married, she was able to get a pretty decent job as a school teacher and for a couple of years she made most of the money that we had in our family.

She had a pretty solid job making, you know, $35,000 a year, $40,000 a year. And that allowed me to really focus on building my business. I was in a position where I could spend the time working on my business rather than in my business. And really that's the secret. I would definitely not be successful if it wasn't for her. She set me up to be in a position where now she hasn't needed to work for years. And having a partner, having somebody that you can tag team with can be really huge. Somebody that's got a dedicated partner with a solid job that's willing to put in a year or two working in a business, it's probably going to win in the long term versus somebody who doesn't have that support

and I can hear that voice in the back of some of your heads right now. I can hear it from here, from my voice to your headphones, to your brain, back to my head. That's the loop that's going on right now and I hear this going on in your head right now and it is. You're going to make me get my wife to work. I'm not going to make her work or you're making me sell my truck. I'm not selling my truck or you making me get a side job. I'm not getting a site like you have to let go of the ego that's not letting you sacrifice on the short term. All of this is going to take some amount of sacrifice on the short term so that you can have success for the longterm and then if you're not willing to make that sacrifice in some way, shape or form, someone else is going to have the ability to make those sacrifices. I love it when you use your real voice on this podcast.

I mean I was born and raised in Alabama, so that's my actual voice. I've met your family. Yeah, you are my wedding. You met my family and friends and from the, from Alabama. This is not my real voice. This is the voice I just put on for the podcasts. You know how you watch like a news anchor and they're like today on the five o'clock news, like this is my news anchor voice and let him one on one of my friends and family. I just talk like this right here. Oh Man, I love it. All right, so that's all we have for walkaway power. Honestly, like it takes some sacrifice. It is a little bit inconvenient or a lot of bit inconvenient, very inconvenient for a lot of people because it forces you to get over it. Some ego in some areas it forces you to be inconvenienced in some ways, but long term, if you can establish walkaway power where you can say no to projects that you have no business taking on saying no to those projects that are going to wear you down and not progress your career forward, that is going to help you win the sustainability work.

Here's a thought, I think for many of us, can we talk about this on the podcast all the time? This idea of the lie is if you build it, they will come. That's rooted in this idea of well I'm passionate about this and I've got what it takes because the world owes me cause I really like this and all my teachers, kindergarten through fifth grade told me that I'm special and I can do anything I want and I'm therefore entitled to having any career that I've chosen. There's a little bit of a privilege issue there. And I think for many of us, the real issue is one, you're not entitled to do anything that you want for a living. The world doesn't owe you crap. And number two, if you are passionate about doing for a living, are you passionate enough to experience discomfort in other areas of your life in order to build this career?

If you're not passionate enough about music production to sell your truck that you shouldn't own, or if you're not passionate enough about your career, do you have an apartment and a not as nice area of town that costs a little bit less? You're not that passionate. Your passion has to be great enough for you to make sacrifices to build something over the longterm. So I'm not the only one here with the truth bombs. So let's talk about the next point. Chris. What does the next point in winning the sustainability wars? I've got a great story here for you guys about how you can turn your weakness into strength. Turning your weakness into strength is this idea of figuring out, well, I lost. How can I make this into a win or I don't have this skill? How can I make this into an advantage? And there's a great story from Star Wars on how to do this.

When they made the first movie a new hope, Mark Campbell, the guy who plays Luke Skywalker, right before they released that movie, he in Classic Young, stupid movie star fashion, got into a terrible car accident because he was driving recklessly. He bought a fast, fancy car and then got into a wreck. Yeah, he bought a fast, fancy car. He rolled the car and he's seriously messed his face up. He completely broke his cheek and his nose and he had to have all kinds of reconstructive surgery and he had all kinds of scars. Now they knew they were going to make a second star wars, which is the empire strikes back. But the director knew, well, he looks different now. He's got scars on his face. Crap, this might ruin the movie. How do we keep making the movie and maybe even take those scars and make them into a win?

And the idea was, well, let's have them get attacked by a giant snow monster that'll like mall his face and there'll be this good introduction to like his first photo that he defeats using the force. And so it's this really, really cool scene where Luke is out in the Snowy Tundra and the monster attacks the monster hang them upside down in a snow cave and he has to use the force to get his light saber, which is out of his reach. And then he cuts off the arm of the snow monster thing and then later on it's like, oh well his face is all messed up cause he got slapped by an abominable snowman. Yeah. Literally. It looks like an abominable snowman. It's hilarious. Yeah, it's crazy. It's like a white version of the thing from what's the movie Harry and the Hendersons? Well, yeah, that or what's the other movie?

That Pixar movie, it doesn't matter. I'm down a rabbit hole. But the idea here was that George Lucas was able to take something that for a less creative individual would have really messed the movie up. And he made it into this amazing classic scene that makes the empire strikes back. Just really come out of the gate strong as a movie. So this is this idea of taking something that's not ideal and turning it into something awesome. They made it work. Yeah, they made it work. If you can see the world through that Lens and use your creativity to figure out, well something bad just happened, but I figured out a way to make it a win. If you can figure that out, you will always win. So

how does that translate to home studios? Because obviously most of us don't have scars on her face that we have to somehow turn into an awesome plot point in a movie.

I would say for me that had a lot to do with why I got into mastering in the first place. Oh, do tell. I was really good with the technology side of things. As a producer I was really good with compressors and hearing compression and you know, getting

things set up. You were like the average cave dwelling home studio owner. Yeah. You loved all the buttons and whistles and bells. I was an Uber nerd. We can all relate to that. Yeah, but the thing that I wasn't that good at was I didn't have great people skills in a recording session. What's funny is that's literally exactly how I got into mixing as well. It's like, yeah, I suck with people and I was like, I should probably not focus on this as much because this is not one of my strengths.

I know I've told this story in the podcast before, but it's worth repeating. I'll never forget. I was working on a song with my fiance at the time, my now wife and I just didn't know how to produce a vocalist, especially my fiance, and we went in the studio, we recorded the song, she got in the booth, she sang this beautiful take and at the end to take, I was like, okay, cool, let's do that again. Like no encouragement. No. Like that was beautiful honey, thank you for singing this song about me and a microphone. And she just burst into tears

and I was, and she just lost her mind. And I was like, Oh my God, I'm so bad at this.

So for me, my weakness was that I wasn't great working one on one with clients and conveniently enough I had some mastering skills. And guess what? You don't have to do that as a mastering engineer, people don't come to the studio even like some of the finest mastering studios in the world, like less than 1% of their projects or attended anymore. And so for me, my weakness became a strength. My inability to interface with people in my strength, that being able to be like just put me alone in a room and let me do my thing became something that really worked out well for me as a mastering engineer.

I share that exact same story and that was what my shift and a mixing has been like. I don't have to deal with people, but I want to make a point here. And that is you and I both still worked on our people skills. We still worked on those weaknesses. It's not like we just gave up, so that's one point here. I want to make sure we're clear on. Yeah, everyone loves me now. Everybody. Oh yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. I kid, I kid. We're both like the most abrasive people we know and somehow we're like the best of friends despite that fact is true. I think it's because I don't have to hold back with you at all and it's to be able to

just like say the truth and not have to temper it with bs.

Yeah, exactly. We don't have to sugarcoat anything, but let's move on to some other examples because there are some examples, people that I know that have turn weaknesses into strengths. One of those guys is a guy here in Nashville that I met at a coffee shop of all places and just kind of get to know him because we would just go to the same coffee shop all the time. I had gone from basically being homeless to buying this just old beat up like 1970s tour bus did he completely like renovated inside and out to live in and to run his recording studio out of. So he went from like being completely homeless and made changes and did things to flip that around to where now he has this really cool seventies tour bus that he records bands out of and he's doing great with that.

Yeah, so a way that you could tell that story is, hi, I'm an audio engineer and I live in a bus or hi, I'm an audio engineer, I'm the number one mobile recording studio in Tennessee.

Please don't sell like a used car side when you say it. Whenever you do,

there's this idea of spin of how do you take your weakness and make it a strength or potentially just minimize it. You know, our stories are more about us minimizing an area of weakness so we don't have to deal with it anymore. This idea that he, you know, took the fact that he was homeless and living in a van and all of a sudden like made it sound cool, made some adjustments to that van, made some improvements. That's awesome. The ability that creativity to see a problem and say, well, how could I solve this in a way that actually makes me more marketable is pretty cool.

Yeah. There's other ways of, this can be worked as well because they've talked about on the podcast before using the mothership model. That's where you work out of your home studio and when you need a bigger room or a bigger studio or a nicer gear or more treated room for mixing or whatever other service you need, you just go rent out a space in a bigger studio. The great part about that is you get the benefits of these bigger spaces

and you get the benefits of really low overhead because you're just working out of your home and you get the best of both worlds. That's taking a weakness of not having a big studio in not having a big fancy space and you're spending that and turning it into a strength because now you're not just tied down to one location. You can go to any location you want and you can take your artists along the way and you can take photographs at each one of these locations for your social media posts and now you look like a bad ass because you have tons of photos of you working in sessions or tons of video of you working in sessions at five or six different nice studios around town and the guy who owns is one location. Can't do that because he has to work out of that location because he has to pay the bills at that one location.

Well that drives me nuts. I know some of you, I can hear you through your airpods. Some of you are thinking like, well, but are you even allowed to like post pictures of yourself in the studio with gear or that you don't own? Yes you are. Yes, you will. Totally are allowed to do that. Let me ask you a question. Do you own or rent the house that you live in or the apartment?

If you rent it, then by that same argument, you post any photos of your home studio. If you just rent the home or you shouldn't post any photos. Oh, well I saw that you were made a post on Instagram of like you're nice looking kitchen, but I know for a fact that you rent and you can't, you can't do that when you're on Instagram. You're bragging about what you own 11 he finally use your real voice crest. Yeah, that it, that is my actual real voice. Yeah. Yeah. I'm from hell and that's how everyone talks. They're amazing actually. But yes, if you are working out of these studios, if you feel like you're scamming people because you're posting photos in these studios, no, you have access to the studios. These artists can come into these studios with you. It is not weird to post photos from all of these studios. As a matter of fact, I think it'd be stupid not to post photos from all these studios. So taking a small weakness like that and turning into a major strength, that is what we're talking about here when it comes to building a sustainable business. Find ways to take the things that are not working and make them work. That's the gist of it.

I love that man. I love that. So one of the ways you could do that, we have a lot of people that listen to this podcast who are really into heavy rock. They're into, you know, metal

and that's because my background is in that and a lot of the people that has been following what I do over the years is in that world. So that's kind of like that was the foundation of the six figure home studio audience was the metal heads.

Exactly. Metal is an interesting Shondra and that it is ridiculously high. Fi Hi fi means a massive focus on fidelity. Fidelity. I can't believe I'm multiple layers of definition here. This is stupid. I shouldn't do this anymore. High fives. This idea of like everything is pristine and perfect. If you love metal but you're not good at producing a high five sound, then don't produce a low fi sound. Make a low fi sound work. There are so many records, so many of, I think the best records found a way to make a low fi sound work for the production of the record. They made it sound intentional.

Don't be focused on watching everyone else run their race. Sometimes the best players make their own sound with what they're doing. Any person I've ever seen do this. I've seen people that have made a massive impact in their own niche producing or mixing bands, but they hate their own mixes, their own sound. They think it's imperfect. But what people end up finding, and this is one of the reasons people listened to our podcast, is people are drawn to in perfection, people see the imperfections and other people's work via podcast or in their music or mixes. And that's part of what makes it unique and cool. So all of the Chris Preaching to himself from 15 or actually now 16 years ago. Those are all the things that Chris says like 30 40 times per episode, and sometimes Chris might think he should stop saying it as much.

I'm like, just keep saying it because it's hilarious. It's part of what makes this podcast our podcast. It's the same in mixing. You may not like that weird frequency in your guitars that you do or in the drums that you do, but some people are attracted to that. And if you can just find a way to harness that and find your own sound within that, you will have a lot more success than trying to make yourself sound like some watered down version of another producer. So that is the take home here. When it comes to turning a weakness into a strength, it is the same. And skills, your audio skills do not always translate to what you're trying to do, but sometimes what you're trying to do is something that was popular for years ago, and if you're trying to make something that's popular today, your skills are perfectly suited to that. You're just not using them the right way. A frigging love that man. I'm just preaching to myself from 15 days.

There's an element there of having a signature sound versus being able to do a really good impersonation and like you mentioned like that weird frequency and a guitar or something like that. Every great guitarist that you can think of, you could probably play a solo from them and within three or four notes recognize who that player was because there's gonna be some weird Isms of how they play that distinguished them. I think it's better to be memorable than it is to be good. It's better to have a style where people are like, oh man, this sounds like a such and such song that's so much better in the marketplace as far as like becoming popular than to be like this sounds just like every other popular song that's out right now. And that makes me like it. No, that doesn't work that way. And I think like, you know a good example, we have to bring this up right now cause it's a phenomena is the old town road song. Have you heard this Brian? I don't even know what you're talking about. There's this rap song that's kind of country and the lyrics are basically, I'm going to take my horse down to old town road and Damn Bram Bram, but it's rap and it's like exploding right now. It's like number one on like five charts.

Is it little Nass x?

It is little Nast ex and his song is so weird and it's like honkytonky gangster rap.

Should it play the uh, the remix of the original I'm looking for right now.

Oh, the original all the way. All the way. Okay. I'm playing it right now. We're going to cut this out so we don't get any, any, any copyright claims. All right, well I have, now I've heard this song. It's so weird, but because it's so weird, it's blown up because everyone's like, wow, that's a new thing. People like new things, they don't like imitations of old things. Yup. And just to kind of really,

I guess wrap this specific point up, turning your weaknesses into strengths. I think the real point here is this is actually what we'll end up getting you out of this. Just merely sustaining yourself into hitting that inflection point of success. If you do not turn your weaknesses into strengths, you will merely just keep treading water for the rest of your life until you either give up or you're forced out one of the two. And if you can start to turn your weaknesses into strengths, not only does it make it easier to win the sustainability wars, it also puts you in a place to where you can hit that inflection point and your career can start to actually gain traction and take off. So let's move on to the third and final point. When it comes to winning the sustainability wars and that avoiding extremism. What is extremism, Brian?

Extremism essentially just going too far in either direction. And I think the easiest way to explain this is when we talk about niching down. When Chris and I talk about in the podcast all the time, find your niche, find your niche, find your niche. People tend to take either extreme. By the way, niching down just means focusing on one genre or one service or one or two genres are one or two services. You're not trying to appeal to everyone and extremism is going one of two opposites. Opposite number one or extreme number one is not niching down at all because you don't want to lose any work. You're afraid of losing artists. If I don't try to offer all services to all genres, then how are people going to every hire me? I might miss out on this work or that band that wanted this service or this band that wanted that service.

That's one extreme and that's going to be equally deadly as this other extreme, which is over niching, where you go so far down the rabbit hole of niching down to where you're only working with low fi rap country in Atlanta. That's your niche and that's the only thing you work on and you will say no to every other project that is extremism the other way. And if you niche down too early, too soon in your careers, you're going to really, really hurt yourself. So I think just understanding that when you listen to the advice we give on this podcast, every single episode where we're giving you some sort of advice, you're going to run the danger of hurting yourself morning and helping yourself by going either extreme by either overdoing it or underdoing it. Yeah, and that's the thing. You have to figure it out for yourself.

We can't tell you how to do that. You have to figure out for yourself what the appropriate amount of niching is. If you live in a town of 500 people, it might make a lot of sense too niche to be the audio guy who does all the recording stuff. Yeah. If you live in a town of 500,000 people and there are 50 other audio guys who do all the recording stuff, it's gonna make sense to say, I'm only a mix engineer or I only record vocalists. This type of stuff gives you a market advantage. That's the point of niching down allows you to gain mastery and it allows you to leverage branding and marketing so that when people think of a problem, they think of you as the solution and this problem with extremism is not just itching down. There's other examples we want to give you here and I think one to talk about is systemization or systemizing and your business.

I've seen this a lot in the Facebook community. I've seen this a lot in the students in my courses and that is the, here we talk about or hear Chris talk about systems he's built out in his business and I'll use an example of putting a quote request form on your website. That is a system and that's a great system to have, but an example of going to extreme on it is asking your client 80 questions on that quote form. That's not a good system to build out and so if you start going one extreme with systemization is just as bad as having no systemization at all. If you don't have any systemization in your business, and if just for those of you who are not really falling on with the systemization stuff that we're talking about, we talk about it in depth on episode 26 systems that you can implement today in order to help your business run more efficiently. That's episode 26 go listen to that and you'll understand really what we're talking about here when it comes to systemization, but if you don't do any systemization in your business at all, you run the risk of

being overwhelmed, barely keeping your head above water, always

running and putting out fires left and right, never really gaining any traction, never getting ahead on your tasks and you're always in reactionary mode. That's one extreme and that's what happens if you put no systems in place in your business. The opposite can also be true. If you put too many systems in place in your business, you will run the risk of building out systems for the sake of building out systems. And so you actually end up spending more time than you're gaining by putting systems in a place which Chris, you can probably speak to this rabbit hole a little bit when it goes down the rabbit hole of over systemizing something.

Yeah, there have definitely been quite a number of situations in my life where I am not in a good spot mentally not in a good healthy area. And I'm like, you know what? I need a system for this thing in my business and I'll build the system and I'll bust my butt. I'll work for like seven hours on it into the night and I'll finish, go to bed, wake up the next morning and say to myself, I don't need this system. I didn't need to build this in the first place. I built it for the wrong reasons. It's really easy to get over focused and to just spend all this time spinning your wheels, but it's even more dangerous when you build a system. That's so complicated that it breaks all the time or that's so complicated that your customers are like, dude, screw this guy. I'm out. If you don't have enough customers and you over systemized too soon, a good system is going to lead to some people not wanting to work with you. Mark Eckert, when he came on the show, talked about his f word boy. Five fabs inform his deep fuck boy, 5,000 that was episode number 68 mark has this crazy form that takes 20 minutes to fill out. Mark has a lot of people that want to work with him, so a lot of people start his form and don't finish. That's okay for mark,

but if you try to implement his forum in your business, you're going to fall flat very quickly. You're not gonna have anyone ever fill that out because that's not

bill for you. You're not there yet. Yeah. You have to be really careful with systemization. You have to choose the right amount. If you do too little, it can kill you. If you do too much, it can kill you.

What can you give a specific example of when you over systemize something and Chris Graham mastering?

Oh yeah, for sure. When I first started Chris Gray mastering, I was like, well, if someone reaches out to me for a free mastering sample, I want to make sure I have all the information I need. So they need to fill out, you know, 13 fields of information. I need their phone number, I need where they're from. I need a link to a reference. I need, you know, how many songs on the actual project that the sample was from. I had all this information. And then once they filled that in, they could then upload the file. But only after they'd had written out all this stuff. And what would happen is people would be like, they'd start and be like, Ugh, screw this guy. I'm out. And I didn't have enough customers back then. And as a result of me asking too much information up front, people just bailed.

So I over systemize and it was, I've mentioned this before in the podcast, but man, when I switched to a shorter project form, it was absolutely incredible. Your business blew up. Business blew up and I started asking these questions later in the process and the big thing you to keep in mind is that efficiency isn't something you should be going for until you have problems. You don't want to start by building an efficient system. That's actually a really good point here that's worth emphasizing when it comes to extremism on systemization. People try to build out systems for problems they don't have yet and that is really the wrong move. It is the wrong move. Once you have a problem, then build out the system. Do you have an example of when you under systemized a problem? Yeah, so many. Our podcast isn't long enough for me to list all those off.

You know, for me like there are plenty of things in my life right now that I believe are under systemized. The problem with building a system is it's complicated, it's time consuming and it requires an awful lot of skill to do well. Also for me, there was an area of my business when I first started out with Chris Graham. Mastering there was massively under systemized back in the day. I've mentioned this before, but back in the day we didn't have Dropbox. And so if a client wanted to send me files, I would ask them to download this stupid app called you, send it. Ooh God, we all remember that crap. Oh, it was terrible. So they would send me an email through you send it. I would then manually download the files, label the files myself, master than myself, and then manually upload them to use, send it, and then manually send them a link to those files.

Which is funny because you just basically described the process that most people would probably still use today. It may not be you send it, but they're using some system where they're doing exactly what you just talked about. We transfer, uh, we transfer, don't use, we transfer. It's terrible. No. So when you've got a system like that where every time you work with a client, it takes you time and you've got to put this in context as a mastering engineer. Even when beginning now, there was at least a couple of projects a day. And that was working on, so at the end of every day I had to do all this stuff manually. Inevitably I would send a client the wrong files. I would send you know, client number one client number three songs and client number two's fine number one songs because I didn't have a system and because I was under systemize, it literally took me at least best case scenario, an extra hour, a day of file management that I inevitably messed up and that under systemization almost took me out of the game.

It was exhausting. So that's just one good example of under systemizing and what kind of damage that can do to your business. But let's move on to another point, another example, because that one may not be relevant for all our listeners here and we're trying to really drive the point that going and extreme in either way can be very detrimental to keeping you alive long enough to hit that inflection point in order to win the sustainability. Worse one area we see the sin can be paid marketing going either extreme on this. I think there's a few things to talk about here. Let's talk about first the extreme going in. This may be too soon or too fast, too hot and heavy, maybe spending too much money. Chris, what do you say to those who take paid marketing to the extreme? Well, there's the first group of people I would say have this really ridiculous idea that like you can't, you shouldn't do paid marketing in audio.

If you're in music production, you just shouldn't do any paid marketing at all. That's this stupid idea and that's one extreme. That's the extreme of not doing any paid marketing at all and being adamantly against it altogether. Yeah. The other extreme, which is equally stupid, it probably more stupid, it's more dangerous, is this idea of like you should spend at least $2,000 every month from day one on marketing. That is also extremely dangerous. Most people are in a situation where they are either spending too much or not enough. Almost nobody is perfectly doing paid marketing. Where do you think you lie right now, Chris? I'm under marketing right now. How so? Well, let me be honest. I am not doing enough paid marketing for my mastering services to you guys that are listening to the show right now. I'm not really doing anything with that. I know I need to cause it's like 6,000 audio engineers who probably need a mastering engineer at some point.

That's true. Going to candidly, our audience is a very good target market for Chris Graham. mastering.com totally. So you'll probably see some ads eventually that I'll be retargeting people that listen to the podcast just to say, hey remember me, I'm on a podcast. Maybe I should have asked her a song for you to be also candid. I just went the other extreme where I was over marketing and pretty much anyone listening to this podcast right now has probably seen my ads like every day for the last six months. And I've just now cut all my ads off right now cause I'm revamping some stuff. And so I went from the extreme of like way too much ads to now I'm doing no ads at all. And then I'll try to find my balance. But that's kind of where I'm at. And it was an expensive mistake though, at least the last couple of months of over marketing and going to the extreme of thinking I had to do this much every day and I was just doing too much.

Yeah, so the important take home here I think is that if you're not doing any paid marketing, it might be one of the reasons you're not as successful as you want to be right now. It can be make or break for some people who are just trying to keep their head above water as part of the winning the sustainability wars. There may be an aspect of paid marketing that plays in today. It might just be retargeting, it may just be a small amount, but it doesn't have to be zero and it doesn't have to be $2,000 a month. It's probably somewhere in the middle. Yeah, and to my frustration for people that say you should never do any paid marketing, most people that say that don't know about all the different types of paid marketing. There is many different types of paid marketing as there are grains of sand on earth. There are so many, some of them are profitable, some of them aren't. And it's different for every business. So let's move on to the final point on extremism. And that is what this one almost got me. Brian really almost destroyed my career so many times when I was a young man. Really? Well, this

one is taking education to the extreme. What the hell does that mean, Chris? Taking education to the extreme. Is that even possible? Yes. Tell us a story.

When you have things that you need to do to your business and you don't want to do them, what many people will do is they will distract themselves with education. Ooh,

that's some hard truth right there, man. And I'm so guilty of this myself.

You know what's really some tough love? Some of you are doing it right now with this podcast. Ooh.

It's like, Hey, you just listen to 76 other episodes of shit you didn't actually implement and now you're on to episode 77 and you still haven't implemented a damn thing yet. And this is us speaking truth and love to you. We love you. And we're going to speak the truth to you, but she need to stop listening to this podcast and start going to do some shit.

I used to do this all the time when I was a producer, I was like fixated on guitar tone and I thought like to master guitar tone, I need to understand every single component in my main amp that I like to use, which was a really fancy 1966 fender, Princeton reverb here. Slut. Yeah, there we go. We hadn't had one in a while. We haven't had one in a while. So there's this amp is one of my favorite things on this earth and I was obsessed with like, well I need you to be able to know what each of the capacitors does in which each of the tubes do.

Wow. That is the nerdiest thing I've ever heard. Oh, it was so nerdy. I'm so bored by this.

Yeah, you should be. So it was my wife, I assure you. So what I should have been doing was going out and meeting new potential customers, but I was afraid of doing that. So I would distract myself with like, well I need to learn this thing. I need to watch these tutorials or need to read these schematics and I would just do stuff so that I would feel productive without actually doing the work that actually mattered there was going to help me grow my business.

Yep. And that is the danger of taking education to the extreme. And that is you just keep consuming content, you're consuming, consuming, consuming. You're always in consumption mode and you're never in action mode. You're never actually doing anything with the stuff you're learning. And the opposite is also true. The people that take no education, they don't do anything to get better at what they're doing. But I don't think there's any way, listen to this podcast because you're obviously listening to a podcast about self improvement. So that's probably not your problem. Your problem is likely if it's either extreme, it's the extreme of too much education and not enough action. Yeah. So this is huge,

man. This was really, really challenging for me to recognize that my fears were keeping me from moving forward and that I was satiating my desire to feel productive by just continuing to sell self-educated.

Good word, man. Satiating. I liked that satiating. Well, I think just to kind of wrap this up, let's just talk about the three main points of winning the sustainability. Worse first is establishing walk away power and some way, shape or form. The second is turning weaknesses into strengths, especially those witnesses you know are the problem right now. And then the third is avoiding extremism. Either overdoing something or under doing something and that goes along with every podcast episode that we've ever put out as far as the advice we give the extremism on either either way can be very detrimental to your business. If you can do those three things, if you can establish walkaway power and turn weaknesses into strengths and avoid extremism, if you can just do those three things, it's going to be much easier I think at least to sustain yourself as you work, to build your credibility, build your brand, get more clients, get more leads, get your website built out. All the things that comes with this. There's a lot of dropout points is a lot of places that people hit roadblocks and they just throw their hands up and give up. But if you can get these three things in place, it's going to be a lot easier to avoid hitting roadblocks the your career.

So that's it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Hopefully you got something out of that episode that you're going to take action on. So many of us are barely keeping our heads above water as studio owners and hopefully there is something from this episode that you take away that will help you keep your head afloat until you are thriving. Side note just so you are all aware, I've actually been working on a new piece of software with Trevor. He was actually one of the guests on episode 71 where he talked about the future of Spotify and how it will affect your business. He and I have partnered up together to create a piece of software that is going to be helpful for a lot of our listeners and I want to kind of paint the vision for what this is, what it does.

Hat will be helpful for you because we'll be launching somewhat soon. We don't have a launch date yet, but we're in Beta right now. We have a good few dozen Beta customers who are all using file pass for their projects and it is been awesome to see their feedback so far. So file pass serves two purposes. It allows you to send all of your mixes, all of your masters, any of your rough mixes or any songs you're collaborating with clients on. It allows you to send links to your clients where they can stream high quality wave files so that the songs that you send your clients will sound the best they possibly can. We do no incoding on anything when you've uploaded it, but more than just that your clients can leave timestamped comments on each of the songs that you send them and so you can quickly gather revisions into one place and actually have timestamps instead of having to hope that your clients include those in your revisions.

The second thing filed pass does is that it gives you the option to put a pay wall between you and your client and your file. So if you send a file to a client, they still owe you money, you just put how much money they owe you and the client can stream the file, they can play the file, they can add revisions that can collaborate with you. Then comment back and forth on things, but they cannot download the filed until they pay the balance. And this is hopefully going to help a lot of you guys out that are either doing test projects, you're doing free work in the hopes that they actually pay you in the future. Or for those of you who do extra work on the side and you just, it's an extra 50 bucks and you don't feel like dealing with the process of when they finally pay you at 2:00 AM aventure remembering to send them the file later on.

It's all automated. So as soon as they pay the download button appears and they can actually download the track. We've got a lot more cool features in the works. Um, it will be getting through Beta and adding a few more things here and there and we're not taking on any more Beta customers right now and there's no real call to action on this other than to just let you know that it will be coming to expect it sometime in the near future and to sign up for the free trial whenever we have it available. And just for you guys who are still with me, Trevor, my co founder, he's the one who is behind sound stripe. He's the CTO, the chief technology officer for sound stripe.com. And we actually had the CEO on the podcast as well back in episode 36 are we talking about sync licensing?

Trevor knows what he's doing. He's built an awesome piece of software already. We're just in Beta right now and it's already, in my opinion, good enough to go prime time of fry now if we wanted to. But, uh, we've got a few more loose ends to, to clean up and cannot wait to get this into your hands. For those of you who are working with, you know, probably 10, 15 songs a month are the people that are getting the most use out of this. Uh, we've got mastering engineers on their people doing 40, 50 songs a month on the platform right now. And you can imagine when you're doing that many songs, how chaotic it can be. So this is just one tool, one system that's going to help simplify and take some of the burden off of, uh, the process of gathering revisions and getting payments.

So keep an eye out for file pass. Uh, next week's episode. We actually have an awesome interview with the host of the creative peptalk, Mr Andy Jay Pizza. And this is one of my favorite interviews probably cause it's so interesting to hear the topic of motivation, mindset. All of these things that Chris and I talk about on here all the time, hearing it from someone who's in a completely separate career filled someone who's not in the audio world, but he sees the exact same problems and issues for the tens of thousands of listeners for his podcast in the creative space. Um, I think he's in mostly graphic design and illustration, but, uh, he's on the podcast next week, brightened early 6:00 AM Tuesday morning. Make sure you show up. And until next time, thanks so much for listening. Happy Hustling.