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The 3 Roads To 6 Figures (Choose Wisely)
In this episode, Chris Graham and Brian Hood discuss three main business models you can use to build your studio to six figures. Though you can try to use several models instead of choosing one, it is typically easier to focus on just one.
Listen in to hear the pros and cons of the three business models which could boost your studio to new levels if executed correctly!
In this episode you'll discover:
Why choosing a business model will benefit your business
What you can learn from Chris and Brian's mistakes when they were starting their businesses
Why having an emergency fund is incredibly important, especially if you use the high-dollar, low-volume business model
Why statistics are vital to high-volume businesses
How marketing should be handled for a high-volume business
Why a "student of life" will beat out the naturally awesome audio engineer
What makes systems key to a low-dollar, high-volume business
What the fastest way to six figures is
What the major setback to a recurring business model is
How ripping someone off might be a great business model
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"If one of those systems breaks, have fun." – Chris Graham
"I always have a six-month cushion of living expenses. . . I could go six months without being paid a dollar and I'm fine. But most people, I would say 90% of people, d not have that in the bank and again that's why a lot of studios can go out of business, because they are not financially prepared for that sort of swing in their income." – Brian Hood
456 Recordings – www.456recordings.com
Chris Graham – www.chrisgrahammastering.com
The Profitable Producer Course – theprofitableproducer.com
The Home Studio Startup Course – www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/10k
6FHS Facebook Community – http://thesixfigurehomestudio.com/community
The Six Figure Home Studio – https://www.youtube.com/thesixfigurehomestudio
The Six Figure Home Studio Podcast – podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com
Episode 26: Systems You Can Implement TODAY In Order To Help Your Business Run More Efficiently – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/systems-you-can-implement-today-in-order-to-help-your-business-run-more-efficiently/
Episode 33: 5 Studio Niches Ripe For The Taking – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/5-audio-niches-ripe-for-the-taking/
Episode 36: Sync Licensing: The Gateway To Passive Income For Audio Entrepreneurs – With Travis Terrell – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/sync-licensing-the-gateway-to-passive-income-for-audio-entrepreneurs-with-travis-terrell/
Episode 52: Why Every Home Studio Owner Should Have A "Do NOT Do" List – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/why-every-home-studio-owner-should-have-a-do-not-do-list/
Episode 54: What Drug Dealers Can Teach Recording Studios – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/what-drug-dealers-can-teach-recording-studios/
Episode 57: How Recording Studios Can Get (And Stay) Out Of Debt – https://www.thesixfigurehomestudio.com/how-recording-studios-can-get-and-stay-out-of-debt/
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson – http://a.co/d/iu18fVL
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers – http://a.co/d/aSPBi9T
Sweet Maria's – https://www.sweetmarias.com/
Fresh Roast SR500 – https://www.amazon.com/FreshRoast-SR500-Automatic-Coffee-Roaster/dp/B0034D9ONO/
Aeropress – https://aeropressinc.com/
Artists/People
Billy Decker – http://www.billydecker.com/
Bon Iver – https://boniver.org/
Sufjan Stevens – https://sufjan.com/
Twenty-One Pilots – http://www.twentyonepilots.com/
Automatic Episode Transcript — Please excuse any errors, not reviewed for accuracy
This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 58.
six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian and Chris. Welcome back to another episode of the the six
figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my amazing, beautiful. He's got a little scruffy, almost a little 5:00 shadow going on right now. Chris Graham. Chris, how you doing today man? I'm pretty good, man. How about yourself? Uh, sorry, I just got a sip of my tea for my Penguin Cup. James. Don't edit that out. That's like, got to sound awful because I put a ton of compression on my vocals during this. And you're going to hear like a gulp of tea. Headphones like Lune, 20 decibels of gain reduction is not the way most people want to start their day. That extra reminds me back in the day I was recording a band called Gideon and I'm, I'm kind of throwing them under the bus right now and they still exist. So, uh, sorry Dan, but they're vocalist actually threw up in his mouth in my vocal booth and then swallowed it at at 30 decibels again, like I had headphones on at the time and it's one of the most scarring experiences I've ever had in my.
James. Can you edit that sound bit in right now? Thanks for the guys grown man. Spoiling his own vomit at 30 decibels. Gary Ducks. Okay man. Hey, I have, I have a question for you. Yeah. How has a power nap been treating you? I've done like three in the past week. I didn't do one today because I just got so excited about work stuff. It's a struggle for me because you do yours. Like if you go back to episode number 52, why every home studio owners should have a do not do list. If you go back to that episode, Chris Talks about his do not do list is no work, no email, nothing after lunch before he's had his power nap and that's something that he lives by. I don't have that on my do not do list so I need to start working on that. But after lunch, like the perfect time to do this.
That's great. I've just not been consistent with it. I do want to touch on one thing real quick. This is another thing that people listening to the podcast don't get experienced, but don't forget this one. You might be on a video anywhere. Probably. It's not worth putting on facebook, but I got this in the mail, Chris, and for those of you who can't see. Oh yeah, my birthday, my oldest sister's Sean sent me a mouse pad. Don't use a metal span. It's the logo for the six figure homes video podcast, which is our faces in orange that were drawn up by my artist and he's got a bunch of quotes from the podcast like poop poop on there because Chris and I, beginning of every episode in order to sync up our audio, we say one, two, three poop. We have shut your hormel health.
We have no bitch picking. That's another one of my quotes. Just a whole. It's a whole bunch of our quotes so it cuts out anyways. I'm not gonna. Try to say this for audience. I'll have a picture of it in our show notes though, at the six figure home studio.com/ 58. My love for shawn has increased at least 17 percent from seeing that. Sean's a swell gets adorable. If you guys don't remember Sean. Sean was the guy who edited the first 50 episodes of our podcast or like the first 40 episodes and he was my assistant for like a year. Then people now his studio has gotten busy and he left to go do his own thing, which is cool. But he gave me this birthday present. It was super nice to him. So thank you sean. Miss you buddy. All right, so today's episode is one that uh, I think we're all gonna.
Let me say something. I will go ahead. I just wanted to follow up on the power napping thing because of how addicting that massive productivity and mental health increases. Man. Once I got going down that road, and again, 12 minutes after lunch, I set my alarm for 12 minutes. I take a 12 minute power nap. It is my number one productivity hack. You know, it's weird. That's something I feel like I need to get more into. I haven't the two times I've done it, I felt great the rest of the day, but I haven't experienced that like rush that I have to chase the dragon that you would imagine with a drug of some sort. Like I haven't felt that like, oh my God, this is the thing I've been missing. I'll go ahead and say like most things in my life that I've tried meditation, I've tried something like brain enhancing supplements, stuff like Alpha brain.
I've tried all sorts of like journaling. I've tried affirmations, I've tried all these things that people swear by and none of those things have necessarily stuck with me. None of those things that I thought were going to be game changers have really done it for me and so I think everyone has to kind of find their own thing. Absolutely not saying power naps aren't going to be in my future. I'm just saying like, I haven't found that thing that really pushes me over the edge to want to continue it. Well, that's. I think the theme of our entire podcast is hopefully it's not that anybody would take all of our advice. If you're taking all of our advice, stop listening, go away. We're going to ruin your life if you do that or you're going to be so perfect. No one can relate with you.
You'll be six figures by tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Yeah, so definitely the advice buffet type of thing, and at least for me and for my body, that 12 minute power nap, unbelievable. But yeah, for me, the power and the power nap is inconsistency. If you go like four, five, six, seven days in a row, you get that consistency. It really starts to change and your body starts to be like Chris, Chris, Chris, Chris. It's like 1230. You really need to go to sleep for 12 minutes. Hey, in all fairness, I think that's honestly like a huge part of anything that you're trying that's new. If you don't give it enough to even give it a fair shot, you can't say it doesn't work. Like affirmations. I always found them cheesy and I would say that probably tainted the effectiveness of it naps. I would just say a lack of consistency there.
You know, I haven't really haven't had a chance to go to fair chance. Alpha brain. Oh yeah. It's like brain supplements. So like Alpha brain, there's like another one. I think Tim Ferriss actually had one called brain quicken, which he sold that brand off if he talks about it in the four hour work week. But those I did give a fair chance. I give 60 days on those, uh, taking the supplement twice a day or whatever it called for and that one didn't work. But anyways, all that to say don't, don't try all these new things. That's what Shiny Object Syndrome is where you're just all these new things. You're not giving it a fair chance and then you're just writing it off and moving onto the next thing. That's what I want to avoid. So I will say, in all fairness, I have not given the nap a consistent enough effort in order to fill the effects of it.
Well, I'm definitely a big fan of like when you're trying to hack your performance, when you're trying to get better at something, you should probably start with like the natural stuff like drinking more water or exercise or sleeping things. There's just all these, hey, these have been around as long as humans have been around probably big levers in the performance equation. Anyways. Yeah. I love that conversation and it's a blast to talk about and to hear feedback from other people. They're like, wow, I tried this. It really worked for me, or oh my gosh, acupuncture, whatever. Massage for me, my latest jam. Talk about it before yoga. I love it. My wife and I have started taking yoga classes together.
Funny story is I'm sitting on my sofa and it's like a vent pops up event notification on my phone. It's like a yoga at 7:00 PM and I'm like, what the hell is this? I look at it and it's like, get the instructor's name. The address of the place says, Yup. Level is. Then I realized this is our shared podcasts calendar that Chris had mistakenly put the yoga on. Oops, and so I texted him out of nowhere, just like, hey, how's, uh, how's yoga going? Liz is my favorite instructor and probably confused you in to realize that it was the calendar
a minute, a minute. But yeah, yeah. I've, uh, this is a big rabbit hole, but a useful one. I think for you guys. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but for me one of my big productivity killers is that I have left shoulder issues. I generally, when I work too much I get too stressed, my body tightens up and then it's just a runaway train of like a, I don't want to work because I'm in a bad mood because I'm sore. Uh, I'm in pain and yoga has been an amazing way to get my mind. My mind doesn't get right unless my body's right. So case in point. Liz is in her class last night and she prefaced the yoga class last night with, no, don't feel bad if you fall asleep during this class. And I was like, yeah, thank God it's nap for adults is my kind of workout. Yeah. The Yoga thing has been really, really helpful for me.
I also want to say we're gonna just gonna make this a regular segment because we're 10 minutes in the podcast and haven't said a damn thing about what we're going to talk about today. Next on this week's segment of cool new shit. I love it. Yeah. My fiance got me a Mocha pot for my birthday. Woo. And it's like the Super Nice, like Italian made like your original one and I will have to say that this is a very fun, interesting way to experience coffee. It's as close as I've gotten to a suppressor without it actually being expressed and it's like this pot that you put like fine ground coffee in it, similar to an espresso. You don't pack it down as hard and it boils water up from the bottom through the espresso into the top chamber and it's like super, super strong. It's like I essentially had five shots of espresso.
I like drake, a full coffee cup of Espresso and I was jacked. I was wired the rest of the day. It was too much, but as it tastes fantastic, I need to get one of those fun little additions. I had one at one point and I ended up giving it away years ago, but I need to get back into that because with my beans, you know, like I'm, I'm in a good spot with my roasting technique, but same length, really strength, full body coffee is always the pursuit, not watered down. Yeah. This is why you and I love era press. I made my mom era press over the Thanksgiving holiday last month. She couldn't handle it and she's like, oh, it's too strong. I literally had to fill the cup up. It was halfway full. I filled it all the way full with just plain water and that was the string she liked.
That's awesome. Chris and I, we've kind of worked ourselves into a hole here when it comes to just how strong we like our coffee. Now we're just going to be drinking straight espresso the rest of her life. I'm just going to start roasting beans and chewing them in the morning. I'm not going to remove water from the equation. Funny, my mom usually gets me chocolate covered espresso beans for Christmas each year, like it's a stocking stuffer. They're delicious. Nice case here. Listen to podcasts for the first time. This is not how things usually go. Yeah, we're in a good mood today. Chris and I are both coffee sluts, absolute coffee sluts, and we roast our own beans. Chris got me into that. We Love era press and now this Mocha pot thing has been something fun thrown in the mix. I wonder if we could get a coffee sponsor for the show.
Maybe that would. I mean it's perfectly in line. Like you drink coffee while you work, like just. Well, and another thing is like you guys, you listeners, you producers and engineers and stuff, if you're turning on a bunch of musical influencers onto coffee, that could be good for a cough. Yeah, I'll call sweet Maria's guys. Yes. That's where we get our beans from. Suite areas, dotcom. Shout out to sweet. Maria is actually. Here we go. Here we go. Here's a whole segment. Here's our coffee slot week segment. We use sweet Maria's to order our unroasted beans. We both use a about six bucks a pound. Six bucks a pound. What's the roaster? We use the fresh roast. 500. We don't live together by the way. We just have the same rig, so yeah, just for you confuse people. Chrysalis in Ohio, I live in Nashville but we both use the same roaster and we both use era presses to make our coffee once it's roasted and I use her brevelle like a high end.
Nice grinder because you can set the size, it remembers the setting. You don't have to time your grind, you can just grind. It sets it for 12 seconds and it's done at that 40 setting. You use a hand grinder, the hand grinder, it's like 20 bucks. That's great. That's it for coffee a week, so I'm sure at least one of you is like all get to the take your shot or grow our studios. Here's the thing, like I'm only half kidding. If a client comes to you and they're thinking about recording with you or you're trying to get an internship at a studio or whatever, to look them in the eye and say, I will make you the best cup of coffee you've ever had in your life is massively powerful. Like you guys want to know how it got on this podcast. I Made Brian a cup of coffee and there was a done deal.
Done deal a second. I had a Chris Graham did a cup of coffee and no joke. I had people coming to me just asking if they can buy bags of roasted coffee beans from me. I will never sell a bag. My agreement with my fiance is that I would never would monetize my coffee hobby because I have this bad habit of monetizing my hobbies, but I will say that coffee that you roasted yourself like the day before, that makes a great gift for people and it takes you seven minutes. It's no sweat off your back. It's like seventy five cents worth of beans, but it's such a high value to them that they get freshly roasted beans that tastes amazing. If we can turn even a few of our listeners on the being little coffee slots, I'm going to be all right. I'm going to be all about that. So here's a
both. I don't produce anymore. Maybe someday I will occasionally, but I would imagine if I had a artist coming over and I was like grinding my beans by hand and like pouring out the water at the 174 degrees and doing the whole like ritual in front of them and then handed them that cup of coffee, they're going to feel so cared about and so valued. Their performance will be dramatically affected by having the Best Cup of coffee they've ever had. It's a mind blowing experience. So anyways, coffee is a great way to manipulate your clients' emotions. So how committed.
Alright, so now that we've had enough coffee, sled talk and other stuff, let's talk about what we're going to be discussing in today's episode. I have a feeling the fact that we just spent 10, 15 minutes talking about pre-talk is almost our previous episode banter. That's usually like two and a half minutes. Yeah. That was a banter record. Yeah. Yes. World record on the six figure I'm sitting podcast. I will say that this is probably gonna be in a long episode because there's just so much good stuff to talk about in this subject and the subject is three separate paths to six figures. We're going to discuss three different business models that you could potentially use because here's the deal. If you choose the wrong business model for your skillset and your abilities, you're never gonna make it. It's one of those things that like there are massive implications for choosing the wrong business model and Chris and I are going to discuss the difference between his business model and my business model and they were going to propose a third business model. That is stuff we've talked about in the past, but we haven't really discussed in depth yet. So Chris, do you wanna go over the three business models real quick for starters, some of you are
probably thinking business model. What in the Harry Heck is that? So business model is kind of hard to define. It is literally the basics of how your business operates. Do you take a payment before you do work? Do you take a payment after you do work? Are you going after big clients or even if they're small clients that gets all the nitty gritty that you could say that what you're doing isn't the important thing. It's the actual financial levers and gears and how they all function together. That's business model. So that being said, there are a couple of different business models that you can have in our industry in the audio industry. One of them is Brian's business model. Big Clients, big money, not a whole lot of them.
So high dollar, high value, low volume meaning like I'm doing a small amount of them per month and per year.
Right? My business model is completely the opposite and that's one of the reasons we make good cohost on the show. My services are mastering. I do many, many, many, many mastering projects, but my price is pretty low, about 55 songs starting there and I'm more around $600. Right, so I need way more customers to have a year that's over six figures than Brian does. There's upsides and there's downsides to that. We're going to talk about the differences there, but the third business model that we're going to talk about, Brian, why don't you take that one? Yeah. The third business model is one, you're seeing a lot more these days in other industries, especially software and that's the recurring revenue model. That's why you see so many software companies trying to get you on a subscription because it is more predictable and you know you can budget more.
There's a whole lot of benefits we're going to talk about with that, but there's also some opportunities within the audio world that you can take advantage of recurring revenue that you may not have thought about before. Now, we've talked about some of these, we've touched on them in the past, but we're gonna go a little more into depth about this on this episode. The third business model is a recurring income or recurring revenue business model, so all three of these business models are predicated on something we talked about a lot on the show and that's niche. If you have a niche where you're like, okay, I do essentially the same service, the same types of customers, whether that's a small number of customers at a large dollar amount or a huge number of customers at a small dollar amount or a reoccurring revenue model subscription based in some way.
Those are the three most popular ways where people are actually successfully breaking six figures. I'm not aware of anybody. I'm sure there's at least somebody out there who's consistently making six figures who has all three of these business models and they tried to do them all at the same time. They started, hey, we're going to do all these things. Everybody that I know that's kicking ass started with a lot of things, didn't do so well picked. One of them began becoming really, really, really good at their specialization and only after they had super mastered it, they began to expand onto other things and I had to kind of agree with you on that. I don't, I can't think of, and there's probably some out there, but I can't think of off the top of my head. A single person who's earned a substantial amount of money in audio that hasn't had one of those three business models, whether it's high volume, low dollar amount, high dollar amount, low volume or some sort of recurring revenue, and you could also probably chalk up recurring revenue to songwriting royalties.
Yeah, definitely. That would fall into that as well. So I do know some producers that have done really well with that alone. So there's upsides, there's downsides to all these business models. We're going to talk about that and kind of compare and contrast. This is fun because you know, Brian, you obviously chose the business model that you chose and I obviously chose the one that I chose for different reasons and ultimately choosing the business model is not just about success. It's about building the life that you want and what you want your life to look like. You can't just open a book and be like, yeah, that that's what I want to do. It's different for all of us and that's why it's so important that when you're listening to a podcast like this, that it's a choose your own adventure, that it's a an advice buffet and that you figure out what tools are available and then you apply them to build the life that you want. Now, important stuff. If you don't know what the life you want looks like, none of this matters. Go figure that out and try to figure out what you know. If your definition of the life that you want is quote unquote successful, what you're really saying is, I just want the respect of my family and peers.
That side right there, don't edit that out. That's my response there is you're going to have a hard time. One breaking six figures because you're a ball of emotions. You're gonna have trouble breaking five figures. Yeah. Your motivations are all over the place and some days you're going to feel like impress and mommy and you're going to work really hard and other days you and mommy had a fight and you don't care about trying to impress her, so you're not going to have a good day in the studio. So let's get this rolling. So Brian, tell us about your business model. High dollar, low volume. Yeah, so my business model is not how I started when I first started out with 50 bucks a song. There's no way you're breaking six figures at 50 bucks a song at the amount of time it takes to fully produced track engineer mix, master a song.
There's just impossible to do that. There's not enough time in the week. I started off that way and just slowly inched my price up as I gathered demand for my sound and I eventually reached a point where I could charge a very high amount considering the amount of time I've put into it now there's a lot more that goes into this because I made a change in 2015 where I cut out tracking and producing and lodging of artists completely. I cut that out to where I wasn't working with bands in the studio, but I was only doing mixing work and that's what I did. A lot of changes which we can talk about, but it's not really that relevant for this conversation, but it was still in compared to your business model. It was still high value, low time compared to yours, which is low time, low value, high volume.
So you know, on average about 20 songs a month that fluctuates. Now I'd probably do a little less now than I used to, but you know, charging around $600 a song. It doesn't take a whole lot of songs to break around 10 k a month. It doesn't take a whole lot. So you know, nowadays even if I just do 10 songs in a month, that's still six grand, which is still a solid amount of income. Well you said something interesting there that inching your price up and you know, we could do a whole episode on that raising your rates and we probably should because I need to learn how to do that. I think maybe maybe not. We'll see by the end of this episode. Yeah. So that's a super important part. They're basically, if I'm hearing your right, your story was you started really cheap and like most of us did the same thing and we're basically making $5 an hour when you first start out, if you're lucky. Not only did I work for cheap, but I did everything which is, you know, to mistakes. But at the same time, and this is something I've talked about more and more recently, the first paid project I did I only three, four bucks an hour
on it, which is ridiculous, but it got my foot in the door for my first paid project. And then that artist ended up coming back to me several times throughout my career and I probably did around $10,000 worth of work with that one client over their lifetime. Not only that, the amount of people they referred me to over my career brought in tens of thousands of dollars if you count the people they referred me to and the people those people referred me to is this whole networking effect that all stemmed from that first artist. So when you're just getting started out, this is kind of a side note, don't worry about trying to charge top dollar like I'm talking about today. It's okay to take a bath and get kind of quote screwed over and what you're getting paid on early projects, but just note that you would need to make sure you're working on an upward trajectory with your rates and your sitting stagnant at a place.
If you're sitting stagnant, there's probably a reason for it. And hopefully this podcast and maybe even some of this episode can help uncover why that is. Yeah, well in retrospect, you know, we were basically doing the same thing. I was in a different genre than you, but when I first started out I was like the all singing, all dancing producer. I would try to find an artist, usually singer songwriter and I would do everything other than like, well I would help them with writing, but mostly it was like, okay, you're going to sing and play guitar and I'm going to fill in the gaps. If I could go back and do that again. I was probably a little too aggressive early on and I liked what you said about kind of take a bath on those early projects. What I would have done in retrospect is I would have sold the artists on head doing a project with me and then I would have spent almost all the money on renting a studio.
What I did instead was spend almost all the money on gear. It worked out SORTA, but in retrospect I would have done more of a shiny flashy experience where it was like, Hey, I'll even hire an engineer and if you want to get into making records, the solution isn't necessarily to become an engineer. I would say if you're thinking about getting into making records of the solution is to hire one and convince an artist to let you like produce. You don't have to use that word, but that's what you're essentially doing is like, Hey, I'm going to facilitate. I think going over some pros and cons of this business model will be prudent at this point and I want to talk about the first was talking about the good parts of this business model where you're charging a lot but doing a relatively small amount of work.
I'd say the first pro in this business model is the fact that deal flow is extremely sustainable and what I mean by deal flow is if you are trying to get just mixed 10 songs a month, which is six grand, or let's just say 15 songs a month, which would break past the six figures point. If you're trying to look for 15 songs a month, you could probably get that in three to five paid projects because most projects are going to have two, three, four songs involved with it. Some are going to have more than that, but if you're looking for three to five paid projects per month, do you think it's that hard to get the amount of leads required to do that? So if you just think about it, we talk about this in a funnel mindset. To get three to five paid projects, I may have to send out 10 to 15 quotes each month and to get 10 to 15 quotes, that means I need to get about 200 to 400 people to come to my every month.
That is a lot easier to do than Chris's business model, which requires hundreds of leads per month. In my world. Ten to 15 leads per month is a much, much more manageable way in order to break that six figure mark. So that's the biggest pro with this business model as it takes a lot less work for communication with your clients, with managing quotes, with generating quotes from clients. All of these things are a walk in the park compared to Chris's business model each. Yeah. We'll talk about yours in a second. Yeah. Okay. So the. I'd say the second pro with this business model is you get a lot more, I'd say facetime with your clients now. I do mixing work now so I don't get as much literal face to face time as I used to when I was doing full tracking, editing, mixing and mastering.
But either way, if you're doing Mexican project, it's a lot higher touch and that means I get more communication time with them, which means I build a deeper relationship with those clients, which means I get more referrals from those clients because I've built a relationship with those clients. If you're in a business model where you're working with a lot of clients, you know you're spending a little time with each of those clients. It's a lot harder to build any sort of deep, meaningful relationship with your clients. Not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot more difficult, so in my business model, being able to build those relationships means I'm going to get a lot more business from those people down the road, not only when they come back to me but when they refer their friends to me for mixing services or back in the day when I was doing tracking, editing services, so it was a lot easier to get started because we're mixing and mastering or tracking and producing.
If you don't have a good relationship with the clients, it's really hard to generate referrals and for me, the lifeblood of my entire businesses. Referrals because for four, five, six recordings, which is my studio, which I don't want to talk about it that much. Four or five six recordings.com. That's my studio's website. For anyone who has to check that out, if you've never really looked me up, that's where I live. In order to sustain my income, I rely completely on word of mouth. I don't do paid advertising for my studio. I do a ton of paid advertising for the six figure home studio as a website, but I do very little to no paid advertising for my studio and that's because in the business model that I've chosen, word of mouth is more than enough to sustain my business. Uh,
yeah. Well let me ask you this. So the issue with your business model is consistency. Oh my God. Yeah. So with my business model, because I'm working on working for hundreds of clients a year, each month looks pretty much just like the last, you know, like it might go up or down maybe 20 percent, but very, very rarely. Is there ever any like, oh man,
I don't have any. Yeah, that's one of the biggest issues with this business model because there's a few things that come with us and this is where we kind of get into the cons of the high dollar value, low amount of project, my business model, this is where we get into con to this. One of the biggest cons is that a consistency that you talked about. And that's because if you miss one project, say one person cancels or that one big project that you've been talking to for the last six months fall through the cracks, so they break up or they go with another producer, you just missed out on five or $10,000. That's a substantial amount of income tied to one client or let's just say you have what I call a VIP client. That's someone
that sends you a lot of work every month as a mixing engineer. There's a few studios that I work with that will send me five to 10 mixing projects a year. And that's a substantial amount of income. Well, if they find another mixing engineer work with or they start mixing their own stuff, then I lost out on a client that was a good five figure chunk of income that I could have counted on every year. But it's now gone. So my studio can hit wild fluctuations. And in Twenty 15, that actually happened to me. Twenty 15, January of Twenty 15, I had a $20,000 a month and I could pull up the numbers here, but I'm not. I don't have them up and ready for me, but it was like 21, 20,000, 20,000, 21,000, something like that in January that following February one month later I made $1,800.
Oh, I don't know any other businesses where you're going to have that wild of a swing in income from one month to the next in the same year. That's insane to me. Yeah, and so that's the kind of stuff that you're going to experience if you're going after this business model is not for the faint of heart. Well man, yeah, that is very intense and I know sort of my perspective as a mastering engineer is interesting in this conversation because as a mastering engineer, I'm working with you. I'm working with people that have your business model so I have relationships with just tons and tons and tons of mix engineers and producers and all singing, all dancing producers. So I'm hearing a lot of stories and especially because it's like I am the finish line. It's like, Hey, get it Chris. He's going to put the finishing touches on it and then it's done.
And at that point, like the producers are, if it was a rough client, I'm the shoulder to cry on. Yeah, like the massive up and down swings of that business model are brutal. Yeah. It can break a lot of studios that are not financially prepared. I always had a six month cushion of living expenses to where if I could go six months without being paid a dollar a minute and find. That's amazing. Most people I would say 90 percent of people do not have that in the bank. And again, that's why a lot of studios can go into businesses because they are not financially prepared for that sort of swinging their income. Yeah. Well let me sort of encourage you there. The fact that at that age, it's not that long ago, but you know, it seems like forever ago that you had the wisdom to have that cushion.
To have that, you know, we talked about this on previous episodes, have a runway where if you suddenly didn't have work, you're going to be okay. You, Mr. Listener, Mrs, listener, whoever's listening, if you are, I don't know, in the 50th percentile as far as skill, but you're in the 90th percentile as far as having this sort of wisdom that Brian had to have runway to have some money in the bank so that you can afford to live. Even if you don't make anything. It doesn't matter if other engineers are better than you. If they're in the 10th percentile financially, just wait for them to go to business because they will at that point, those clients are coming to you. If you go back to episode number 57, the last episode we did where we talk about debt, living in debt is the opposite of living with emergency supply of money. So like for me, if I had a string of bad months, it just came out of my emergency fund and then until that emergency got slim, which
it never did. I never went below half on my emergency fund. But you know, as an emergency fund is going down, I'm not that stressed out because I can see if I can physically see in my bank account how many months of runway I have left before I'm broken. I'm going to go into debt, but when you're in debt, you're constantly working back from the other way. When you're having good months, you have to pay that debt down and then whenever you have a string of bad much you're watching your debts pile up and you have no end in sight of when that's gonna happen. And so if you are the person where you're constantly in debt and you're always trying to work your way out of it and you never can go. Listen to Dave Ramsey. He has a whole podcast. He has courses of his own, he has books, total money makeover.
I go recommend that book. There are a lot of things out there that can help you live the opposite of that. And that's who I followed when I was getting started and had my emergency fund in place. Oh man, that's awesome. So this is an interesting segue here because we're talking about these first two business models, which is low volume, high dollar, which is you, or low dollar high volume, which is me. This is a good segue because debt is a much, much different conversation when you have a high volume, low dollar. This is a good segue because I know exactly where you're going with this. Yeah, because when you're doing high volume, low dollar statistics are your friend when you're doing high volume, low dollar and you've gone through the trudge of generating enough leads and enough buzz so that you're getting that consistent work.
So for me, my months are super duper consistent. To me that's like the best part of your business model is yes. You just have such consistency. And for the listeners who don't understand why, just think about for a second, think about this. If you work a day job, you have a single source of income and if that employer fires you, that single source of income has gone. Yup. And so in my world I have multiple sources of income, which is great. So if I lose one of those sources of income, I have dozens more, but we talked about it before where one last source of income could still be 10 grand. It's still a massive amount of money. Well, you look at Chris, Chris has hundreds of sources of income because every single one of his clients is a little trickle of income into his bank account.
So if you have Chris's situation, Chris has what's called diversification in his income, meaning that he can lose multiple projects and he won't even feel it. You won't even notice it in his bank account because he has so many other people paying him. So that's the beauty of this business model is that stability and something called statistic significance. Meaning when you look at his data on Google analytics or in any of his website stuff that he has going on, there are more than enough people to come to a site and have gone through his funnels to where it is statistically valid. Meaning that the numbers are not flukes. It is completely consistent and that generates this number every single month that he can almost guarantee he's going to get within reason obviously. Well, and usually if there's a shocker, it's a shockingly big month. It's like, wow, why did. Basically what will happen is some sort of thing I did accidentally marketed the snot
out of me and a bunch of new projects showed up, but it's basically the same each month and has been for, I don't know, five years, six years, seven years like it's been a long time or it's been like just a consistent growth each month and you know, there have been like plateaus I've hit and that's another conversation, but back to my point here about debt when you are high volume, low dollar and that was very intentional on my part. Debt becomes manageable. You can make investments and be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, 10 grand in debt or 20 grand in debt or whatever. Well, I know what my cashflow is. I know my deal flow is consistent so I can start to take risks with a business model like that, that somebody in a large project, small volume, it would just be really scary and really dangerous there.
Yeah, like if I think about like say I set aside a marketing budget of 20 grand a year, there could be months where I spend two grand that month and I never see a single penny of it for six months. That means I have six months of spending two grand that's $12,000 before I see a single dollar returned to me because it's just one of those things. It could be a month where I get a ton of income or months where I have no income. There's no rhyme or reason to it because there's no statistical significant data out there. There's just like you're hoping that one person, that one client you're going to get is gonna come to you. Whereas in your world, there's just so many people you know in your business model that it just makes sense for you. Well, and let me talk about that.
So what I did with my business model is I got lucky luck had a lot to do with it. I had a really good idea for my website, the before and after player. So what I noticed was in mastering that most people had no freaking clue what it was. And I built a really great website called [inaudible] dot com where you can select the genre of your song, you know, let's say rock, and then you can hear the unmastered version and switch back and forth in real time through the master version. So what made this a good idea was it made it easy for people to understand, oh, oh wow. Oh, it's warmer, it's louder, there's more punch. There's this weird like nuance the magical thing happening. I get what he does, I want that for my music. So what I did was I started advertising on Google adwords.
Again, luckier. Nobody was using Google adwords. It was really, really low competition. It's really high competition now. So I started putting, I think my first monthly budget was 300 bucks. That's more than I'd probably recommend at this point, but I started investing in advertising. People would come and hire me, so I was sure that the advertising dollars I was spending, we're working and then I would raise my budget up a little bit the next month, maybe three slash 20, maybe 30, 40, and eventually a year later it's like, okay, I'm spending $500 a month and so when Brian says budgeting $20,000 a month in March for you will you do not do is take $20,000 in loan and spend it. That's awful. You don't know if you're gonna make money on this. So what you do is you start spending small amounts of money consistently and you see if it works and if it does then you raise the budget.
And you know, I have spent way more money on advertising than I've spent on my house. I've owned my house for like 11 years, so I've spent a lot of money on advertising, but these are pretty sure bets because it's a budget that I spend consistently each month that I tweak it a little bit. And so when you are high volume, low dollar, you can start to learn if that's working, when you are low volume, high dollar, you don't know if your advertising is working. So my advice there would be, and we've talked about this before, you should spend money. Everybody with the business should spend some amount of money on marketing. If you're not, it's probably because you don't know what's possible with paid marketing. And the best place to start is remarketing. Remarketing, we've talked about this before on the podcast is essentially if someone comes to your website that they'll begin to see ads, but only after coming to your website first.
That's really cheap. Let me add to this real quick, and I don't want to make this a whole episode about ads, but I do want to just point out a couple things about that business model differences. When paid advertising comes into play with Chris's paid advertising model, his average project size is probably somewhere between 250 and $500. That's just a guess. Yep. I'm confronted. Okay, cool. In my business model, it's usually closer to 2000 to $2,500. Now, from what I've seen best practices with paid advertising, when you're testing different ads out, you typically want to spend two to three times your project size, your average price per project, two to three times that number before you can say that that test is a success or a failure and that's just for one test. So if you're running 10 different tests, in Chris's world that can be up to $1,500 per test about rice, $15,000 to test 10 different ideas and some of those will work.
Some of them won't. Some of that will be a waste of money. So with that we'll see a return for him. If you're just brand new and just starting out, that's a big investment for anybody, but when you go to my world and you're spending 5,000, $7,500 per test, that's 50 to $75,000 for those same 10 tests before you can really say if it's a success or a failure and I don't know anyone with that kind of budget. Just starting out and I even myself, it's really, really difficult and that's why I don't do paid advertising in my studio. Now with the six figure, I'm studios a different story because I'm advertising different things in. Some of the courses I sell are in a price range where I can do all these sorts of tests, but in the studio world where I'm have this $2,500 average price per project that is extremely difficult.
I'm going to drop a really good nugget here. I'm going to reach way in my back pocket in here and pull this out. My advice to you, if you were considering paid marketing for your studio, whether you're high dollar, low volume or low volume, high dollar, pay attention to this. This is the good stuff here is that you start with marketing campaigns. You do something as a marketing campaign, whether that's facebook ads, instagram ads, Youtube ads, whatever. Just be sure that your first venture into it has several things. One is a sure thing, spend your money on corners of the Internet where it is almost guaranteed that one out of two people that see that ad are going to buy from you. Do not start with a silver bullet. You know I'm going to bet the farm mentality. Don't do that. That will put you out of business.
Figure out where on the Internet can I run a small, cheap paid ad that's guaranteed to win. Number two is have a monthly budget. Those are the two things and if you are right about the spot that you're advertising on the Internet, like let's say that you mix world music and you go on Google at world music site, sort of rhythmic. It's heavy drums and so you go on Google and you find that nobody has any ads on the keywords world music mixing or mixing and mastering world music. There's no ads on that. Now, right away you can say, okay, literally no one's advertising on this. This is my niche. Spend 50 bucks a month to show up first on Google search results for that. That's a guaranteed win. People who want what you offer are looking for it and are not finding it, and you can be the first result.
So do something like that. Don't spend too much money, see how it works out. Let it go a couple of months before you turn it off. I wouldn't even back up before you do any of that sort of stuff. Your first ad dollars you ever spent should be on retargeting. Oh yeah, totally. And if you don't have enough people coming to your website to do retargeting, you're in no way, shape or form ready for paid advertising in my opinion. Well, I think in most cases you're probably right. I'd say probably 60 to 70 percent of the time. Well let me argue one quick point with that and that is you credit yourself with luck when it comes to paid advertising and having a business model success, but I'm going to do two points with that. First is there were a lot of other studios not that long after you that had before and after players that went absolutely nowhere.
It's true. So that was one point. The second point is you put in way more work into figuring out paid ads compared to any other studio and so just the sheer fact that you were willing to put in the work for some basic education on the subject, on copywriting, on ads, on how it all works, on how the system works so that you can make the most of it. Ninety five percent of people will not put that amount of work in, so if you're just willing to put it in basic work, you can get a lot further than anyone else. That's just advice all across the board. In any industry, any career, anything you're doing, data advice kind of rings true all across the board. Right? And so case in point, if you put two people in front of me, one of them is a terrible audio engineer, but is a student of life is just the type of person that's like, I'm going to go to the library and get three books on this subject and learn everything about a law.
You've got that guy and then you have somebody else who is a naturally awesome audio engineer, and you asked me to predict who will be successful in two years. I'm going to go with the student of life every freaking time. Yep. Me Too. I'm going to put all my money on that horse, so let's actually go back to your business model real quick, a side track, but it's okay because this is an an outline, unscripted podcast, and we just do whatever the hell we want here. Going back to your business model, you were talking about the stability that you get. That's one of the biggest pros. What are some other pros that come with the business model that you've gone with here? Well, so here's the thing. I'm a Weirdo. Most people in our industry, their dream is to get a grammy and to work with Sony, Columbia, Warner brothers, etc.
I don't really care to do that. If it comes my way. Yeah, sure. Maybe that sounds great, but the thing that I have always thought was the coolest thing in the world was when somebody makes a record in a log cabin somewhere with crap here and it's beautiful and it's authentic and it becomes like an indie darling, you know the bonnyville ehr record from years ago or the sufi on stevens from years ago. Sorry to drop artists' names. He probably. Some of you don't know. Don't feel bad about that. yeah. I have no idea who those people are. I know who bond of areas. It's when someone does an independent record. There are little guy that becomes a big guy. I don't want to work with a bunch of big guys that are texting me at 4:00 AM in the morning and demanding that we get everything ready so that it ships to walmart on time.
I want to work with the small guys that are going to be big. That's always what I've thought is the coolest and I tried to do that with my business and I just got lucky enough that I pulled it off and I have a business that's very consistent. Now my goal from the beginning was never consistency. I didn't know anything about what we're talking about right now. I just was like, hey, I want to work with a lot of independent artists. How is this approach? I'm just trying to get where the pro is in this. It's a pro because you get to make a lot of cool friends when you're doing high volume and my wife will tell you, if I walk into a restaurant, what I want to do is make friends with everybody in the restaurant. I want to know the names of all the servers.
I want to know the names of the people that You know we ordered from and it's a problem. I just love meeting new people and you know when you're trying to get in and out of a restaurant on a date with your wife, that can be a problem. When you are trying to run a mastering studio and you're working with a couple artists a day. It's great and it works very Much in my favor, but most importantly it's just really, really fun. I do want to point out something that you're not saying, but you're kind of implying, and this is something that I've kinda here. This is the opposite of my situation. My pro was I get really deep relationships with the few artists that I work with. You get somewhat good relationship, so I'm sure you have deep relationships with some of your clients, but you get top of mind with hundreds of clients and so that means if someone asks about mastering or mentions the need for masterIng and you happen to be top of mind with those people, you get that network effect, but you get that multiplied all across the world compared to my little area because I have a dozen clients a year.
You know, it's like a very small amount of clients that I'm working with compared to you, so you just have. You may not be as deep relationship with all your clients, but you get a much bigger network effect overall because you just have so many soldiers out there fighting your battle for you. You're hitting the nail on the head. Maybe I should clarify, what I love about the pro of a bunch of small clients is this feels like I'm trying to promote myself. That's not how I want this to come off. Do it, promote it. I like hearing people's stories. I read a lot because I like stories and with the small client you get to hear a lot of short stories. I love that. I want to hear about the song. I want to hear why they wrote this song. I want to hear about this new band that they're trying to get off the ground.
I want to hear about their studio and for me, I don't know. For me that's the life I want. I'm probably too abrasive over the long run to be like, hey, comes been 57 hours with me. Actually that's one of the big things I ran into and that's why I stopped doing full production and tracking and editing in the studio because because my personality does not lend itself well to be in basically a sardine can with five other guys. I forgot to talk about that kind of long projects as well, but go on with your story, so yeah, you might like our podcast, but you probably don't want to live with me for 57 hours while they work on a record. That's not my wheelhouse. I'm probably too intense for that. I don't know if intense is the right word, but I'm going to bug you if anyone here knows the enneagram, which maybe we'll have an episode of that in the future.
Chris is an eight on the enneagram, which is the challenger. Yup. That's my baby. Yeah. So inevitably what's going to happen, and I have a long history of this in my relationships, is I'm going to see something and say, you know, this isn't right, and then there's going to be friction and I can't help myself. So as a mastering engineer who likes to make lots of friends and meet people and hear their stories, that never becomes an issue for me. but as like the all singing, all dancing producer, not maybe a great thing. Let's shift gears here and go from pros to cons because there are a lot of cons that come with your business model. As we were doing high volume. I'll go and tell you right now, you're working with a ton of clients and so this seems to me to be a potential communications nightmares this correct?
Yes, it is. So, um, if you are well, time out real quick before you go into this, you don't have to give us exact specifics. Can you give me a ballpark idea of how many total projects you'll do in a month? How many total free samples that requires to do or court request or whatever you do. Can you give us some just rough numbers so we even understand what ballpark you're in because I would almost guarantee that no one listened to this podcast isn't even close to the numbers you're working with right now. That's just me guessing. Maybe there is, but I want to know some numbers. Well, let me dodge this a little bit because I don't want to give them. Give us numbers, chris specific numbers. It's more than you would think and what that essentially ends up being people is that 10 people you're talking to a month, it ends up being hundreds and hundreds of year of paying clients and how many is that per month of conversations that have people interested in working with you? I have no idea. It's a loss of 10 to 100 people. Is it 500 people reaching out? Is it
a thousand gimme? I'm going to be nosy as hell here. I'm just genuinely curious what university you're in.
I don't know. It's. I've worked with more than one artist every day. For years I've worked with more than three artists every day for years. It's more than that.
Yes. I just want to give everybody an idea of the sheer number of email threads that he has to navigate to do this.
Yes. It's a little more complex than that. When you first start out and your system suck and you're doing high volume, low dollar, the emails are bonkers. it is an untenable at times gets really, really difficult when your systems get really, really, really good. I made a post in our facebook community about the power of forms on your website, my forms on my website, like, hey, okay, you just put the project with me. Here's a form to give me information about your project. Are you looking for really loud masters or you're looking for really good sandy masters. Have you labeled your tracks with their track order or have you labeled your songs with the track order? Have you. There's just a huge number of questions that are easy for the client to answer, but that avoid the necessity of an email thread, so yes, it's a lot of people to talk to, but if your systems are good enough, the clients know that I know everything I need to know and there's not like that last minute. Wait, wait, wait. How was this onto or was this on three? Oh gosh, I don't know what you mean.
The reason I'm pushing on this so hard is Because I just want people to understand that chances are not good that you're going to put the amount of amazing systems in place to chris has here, so if you're trying to scale to six figures doing high volume, low dollar, it takes a completely differEnt skill set than audio. This is true. It takes a really special, magical combination of skillsets that only one person in the university I know possesses and that's chris grant. I don't know many other people that I'm sure there are out there. They do exist, but I don't know many people that have the capabilities of doing chris is doing here and so if
trying to do mastering projects and only mastering and just forget the fact that you have to generate hundreds of leads per month. If you do get those paid projects, you now have to manage dozens, maybe hundreds of projects per month and that meanS you now have a communications nightmare if you don't put these things into place. So to me that's the con and I'm kind of drawing out from thiS conversation. It may not be a con for you, but it would be for almost any other mastering studio.
Oh, it is a con for me. So I guess what we would say is if you are low volume, high dollar, your systems are much less important than if you are high volume, low dollar. If your systems are not rock solid in managing projects and in making sure that your clients understand what's going on and that you have all the information you need and they have information they need. There is a multiplier effect and what's going to happen. Especially if like I had this happen before. If one of those systems breaks, have fun. It's awful. So that being said, you know, we talked about derek sivers on this podcast a lot. He wrote a book called anything you want. He'S the guy that grew cd baby and he has an awesome story that makes me look like a total amateur as far as this high volume, low dollar thing.
And at derek sivers peak he had something like 80,000 customers. In all fairness, he did have a staff of 50 people or something. Well, he did, but he tells a story that is mind blowing and he says, you know, I had to get really good at writing emails because I would send out a newsletter to my 80,000 people and if I was unclear about something, I would get 5,000 email responses. I would have to hire somebody to answer these emails and it would cost me about $5,000 in labor to have someone wanted a time answer all these emails. That's a nightmare. It is a nightmare, but it tells a good story and that when you are low dollar, high volume your systems. It's so important because you can't do High volume, low dollar without really good systems. And inevitably what's going to happen is, and this has been a struggle for me in my whole career, is that sometimes you're big and things are going really well, but then the system hiccups or you make a decision that causes a hiccup or that causes a miscommunication and all the sudden people stop asking you for mastering samples or people start entering their email address wrong and your form or file stop uploading correctly.
And you know, you had 10 maStering samples that you did on a tuesday and you go to send them and all of a sudden nobody gets their samples back. So there's all sorts of weird isms and what we are way deep in the weeds here. But your system has become so much more important and it is a weird thing. You have to be good at the service itself. You have to be good at the customer service component, you have to be good at the marketing component.
You have to also be great and not ever avoiding those things you don't necessarily want to do because in your business those things start piling up fast and it will wreck your business. Right?
And then the last piece of that systems, I got lucky there. we've got some opportunities afforded to me there. Thank goD, but this isn't about me. This isn't about like hippie. Chris did something crazy.
The thing is like it is about you because your business model is a good example of the high volume, low dollar amount. That's true. Working well and for people to hear both the good and the bad because here's the thing that I want people to understand in both of our stories here. There's still a ton of variations within both of our stories that someone else might experience slightly differently than us, but in both of our business models, there is no perfect business model out there. I mean, we'll talk about what kind of touch on the recurring revenue model, but even that's not perfect, but between the two of our business models, there's still massive hurdles to overcome and we're hoping that once You've heard both of our stories, the good and the bad. If you're early in your career and you choose the wrong business model, like you choose chris's business model and it turns out you're a system slob and you have no way to set up proper systems in your business that's going to be short lived.
Or if you're in my world and you are just super self conscious about raising your rates to $600 a song. That takes a certain kind of confidence that not a lot of people have. Very true. Knowing the battles that you have to fight in each of these business models is honestly like that is the biggest part of your success. If you choose the wrong business model, you put the right person in the wrong business model, it's going to be doomed to failure and that's what we're hoping to get out of this. Yeah. Well, you just saId something that was really cool. You have a certain tenacity that's impressive of having the nuts to say, well, I'm more expensive this month than I was last month and I've done that many times. Yeah, I'm awful at that. I've raised my rates. Let me count one, two, maybe four or five times ever in like 10 years and that's not good.
And you know, there's been some tweaks here and there has not been kept up with inflation. I'm just curious. Probably not three percent a year, but I want to say two things about that. One is that the longer I've been in business, the more efficient I get. I'm really fast when I'm mastering this song. I know what I want to do instantaneously. When I listened to a song, because you put it on your 6,000 hours or 10,000 hours or whatever, right? My blink, so I can sit down. I often know what I want to do before I haven't been in a play. I can read the wave form like neo in the matrix at this point, but because of that, my dollars per hour have only gotten way north my whole career because I'm passing that savings onto my customers, which in turn gives me more customers.
It's like you may have risen to your rates a few times, but at the end of the day you've become way more profitable over those years without the need for rate increases, which is the beauty of your business model. As you become more efficient so it becomes more affordable as your clients. You can charge less than your competitors and still earn more than them because you have put in the work to do that. Exactly. So, and the other thing I would say is that when I first got into systemizing so that I could continue to grow and handle it basically, could I complete more projects in an hour? My initial hesitation was that I thought that systemization was about removing the human element and it was about not talking to my customers and being that prototypical there a funny meme I saw on facebook today and someone got on google and typed in why are mastering engineers so and you can imagine like real shit right now, arrogant.
Like, like jusT dumb, you know, like toe headed. Like it's just all these different. I don't know if he faked it or what, but it was just, it was not very long. Like it was maybe two nice things and the rest were anti people. They were anti social skills. So the thing I'm trying to say here is that when your systems get better, especially with the high volume, low dollar thing, it gives you the opportunity to be more relational. You're less burned out at the end of the day. And my favorite part of building all these systems as I'll never forget, like there've been times when I was like, okay, I just finished a new system and wow, I'm saving a measurable amount of time each day and I'm going to put that time into making phone calls and oh my gosh, my satisfaction in my job has dramatically increased.
And so the system's afforded me the opportunity to be more relational and not be like, dude, I'm, I'm trying to master so many songs today we're going to talk to you a joker about your stupid song. LIke moving away from that and more towards like, do tell me your story was rocket fuel for my business and was fun. I think that's actually a huge takeaway is if you go back to episode number 26, we talked about systems that you can implement today in order to help your business run more efficiently. Go back and listen to that episode. we talked about a lot of different things, an episode that you can look to implement, but the bottom line is if it saves you time that you can then spend back on your customers or in your business or on some other major thing. That is huge when it comes to getting yourself out of this rut that you might be in right now.
Yeah. As we approach this third business model, this might be jumping the gun a little bit, but I think it's worth pointing out that time is right in the podcast. I feel like is that you need to, as a studio owner, as somebody who wants to do some kind of music or audio thing for a living, you need to think about the life that you want and you need to create a business model that facilitates that so that rather than fitting your life and the cracks of your business, that you're able to fit your business and the cracks of your life and hear me on this, especially you young guys, it's really hard to visualize this when you're 22, 23, 24. If you find the right person and get married and you have kids, you'll thank me later. You want to build a business that's compatible with the life that you want.
My whole thing to get real vulnerable with you guys was all this is hashed out, you know, with my family, so I don't think I'm putting anything too far out there that'll offend anybody and I don't think my dad listens to this podcast anyways, but for me, my dad was on the road a lot growing up and that created a lot of tension for our family. I knew very young that I didn't want to be on the road and I became a musician at a young age and was making a really good living as a musician and knew that success, that the business model meant a lot of travel and I didn't want to do that. So that's why I got no audio. So I think as you're thinking about what you want your life to look like, what does a business look like if it's compatible with that?
That's what you should be working on building. Yeah. I've put a lot of thought into that these past few years and I'd say that's probably my biggest reason for moving into real estate, so hardcore like don't talk about this on the podcast much, but most of my income over the past three years has actually been from real estate and the reason for that is because that is a business model that fits my lifestyle more and that's why I've put so much of my time and effort and energy and money into that world. Let's move on to the third business model here, and that is the recurring revenue model. I know we're running late as hell in this show, but at the end of the day, it's our podcast. We can do what we want. Um, you can stop listening if you're over this recurring revenue model. We talk about it a little bit on episode
36 where we talk about sync licensing, the gateway to passive income for audio entrepreneurs. There are a lot of different paths to recurring revenue. We're not going to talk as much about those specific paths. We also talked about it back in episode number 33 where we talk about the five studio niches ripe for the taking. We talk about the podcast editing, which is a recurring revenue model. We're not going to focus on the specifics here. What we are going to talk about is the benefits of the recurring revenue model, the pros and cons of their current revenue model, because I think that's really where the biggest differences here compared to what chris does and compare to what I do.
So as far as reoccurring revenue goes, this is a little out of left field. I know that many of your recurring revenue, how is it even possible? So let's back up. So I talked about figuring out what you want your life to look like. Unless you are even more of a hippie than I am, you will probably have rent or a mortgage and you will probably have a car payment and you will probably have a netflix monthly bill and you will probably have fill in the blank. You're going to have a monthly bills. So the business that you want needs to have a certain amount of income each month, right? so the upside of my business model is it my very difficult to build as far as the marketing piece and the systems piece goes, but the great upside is really consistent income month, month on brian's side, you can make a lot more money, a lot faster, but the income is all over the place.
You're going to have really good months and really sloW months and unless you have the discipline to do what brian did and save a bunch of money, it's going to be rough and there's a whole lot more that goes in that equation. But there's this third business model which I think the smartest, most creative of you and people in our industry are going to figure it out how to do is a reoccurring revenue model. It's some sort of subscription and there are a couple of different types of businesses you could build that facilitate this. we mentioned on episode 33, five studio niches ripe for the taking that there are business models that lend itself to reoccurring. So two of those business models are one, having a podcasting studio, because guess what, podcasts, there's like to be consistent. They like to drop every week because they can't grow their podcast unless they do,
which by the way, we have not missed a week yet in the past over a year and our podcast has grown every single no month,
chris for showing up. Unbelievable. So a podcast studio is interesting because you have a lot of people who have no idea how to audio engineer. We're willing to pay you to record them each week, record and slash or edit and slash or edit and slash or mix and slash or the whole nine yards. there's a growing demand for good audio engineers amongst podcasters. Another one, and I love this business model. If any of you are having a lot of success with this, please go to facebook. Go to the sixth year, comes to the community and brag about yourself. Make a post and say, hey, the brian and chris said this would be okay, but if you have figured out how to convince artists to sign up for a subscription with you to record one song per month, hats off, you're living the freaking dream because your revenue is consistent and you have a low volume, high dollar service probably you might figure out how to do high volume, low dollar on that.
Super inTeresting stuff though to talk about. The biggest benefit for the reoccurring business model here is that once you find a customer, you're done at least for a long while, you have that income that you can almost guarantee is going to be in your bank account every single month, and in chris's world and in my world, we're lucky to get the same customer twIce in a year. If that. True, and usually when we find a customer, we'd have to then go find another customer and then we have to go find another customer. With the reoccurring revenue model, you have a customer that is now under your wing and then you can go find another customer that's just going to stack the income on top of that and you have that baseline of income every single month that you can depend on and you can budget around and you don't have those wIld swings of income like I have.
Yeah. If the fastest way to six figures is a reoccurring revenue model, if you can find a way that makes it work. Yeah. So if you really want to put your creativity to the test, figure out how to do this, and here's the thing. I think it serves artists better than a traditional model because if an artist wants to keep their fans engaged, they have to consistently drop songs. This whole model of like, well, we're going to take years off and then drop a new album doesn't work unless you're 21 pilots, you know, like their engagement with their fans is insane. They're fans love them more than the next 10 bands that theIr fans love. Like it's they're, they're an anomaly, so don't look at them and say, well, but 21 pilots releases records. That band isn't as good as 21 pilots, so this released one song per record for most of us.
The bulk of the market as far as producing goes, goes into up and coming artists, right? Obviously. So if you can convince an up and coming artists, look, if you want to get popular, I can help you, but what you need to do is you need to subscribe to recording one song with me for 300 bucks, whatever each month and we're going to sit down with a calendar and we're going to go ahead and we're going to block that time out and I'm going to give you a deal. It's going to be cheaper the more months you book in advance with me and we're going to do an automatic withdrawal on your credit card, which is definitely what I recommend. And if you do that, you can get to the point. If your systems are decent where you can say, well, if you cancel within this amount of time, then you substitute this amount of money and then we need to reschedule and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, you know, figure that all out. Then you could conceivably get to the point where every day is booked for the foreseeable future and then it's just a matter of, hey guys, I'm raising my rates 20 bucks this month. You cool with that? Yeah, I'm in. Let's do it. So that reoccurring business model is fascinating because it delivers the most important thing in our industry and it is predictability, stability, and predictability. I will say to counter that and to bring up probably one of the biggest cons when it comes to the reoccurring revenue model, and
that is if you don't have a model that works for both parties and is bringing value to both parties, yeah, you're going to have people drop left and right. It's called churn. The amount of customers you lose every month is going to skyrocket. It's going to be like trying to fill a leaky bucket with massive holes in it. It's not possible no matter how much money you dump into marketIng, know how many clients you get, you're losing them faster than you can gain them, and that is a broken model that you cannot sustain, so that's one thing that many businesses on a reoccurring revenue model have completely failed. They've completely bombed because they couldn't figure out how to add value to both parties, their value and the clients value, and instead they focused on that stability. They put the blinders on because they wanted that stability in their income that's coming in every single month, but they didn't stop to think about is this adding value to my client every single month and if it's not, they're going to cancel and I'm going to lose that customer.
So here's what I would say. I think a fun way to end thIs episode is for us to just sort of spitball some ideas for you guys on how to build a business like this. I don't know of anyone that's done this on any large scale. I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure we just don't know about them, but brian, let's just spitball some ideas on how to add value to their customers. How do you build up your roster of reoccurring artists so that they come back each month and ideally pay you in advance? There's a couple of things to keep in mind. You can do like a subscription model like you're talking about. That's all fine and well, that's a little more difficult in my mind to sustain long term and to really come up with a model that benefits both parties, but what I will say is just because it's not on a recurring subscription or reoccurring subscription, is it recurring or reoccurring?
I don't fucking know. It doesn't matter. Someone to listen to the podcast can correct us. Email podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com with your english knowledge. Just because they're not on a recurring subscription doesn't mean it's not a recurring revenue business. For example, if I am an audio editor and I'm working with different studios doing all of their drum alignment or drum quantitation, drum editing, or I'm doing all of their vocal comping for them or doing all of their pitch correction, any client that person sends me every single month, I don't have to go find those clients. That's a recurring income. Now it's going to vary a little bit because it's not a set subscription every single month. Although you could probably figure out somethiNg that works that way, but at the end of the day, those people are still giving me clients every single month, so don't think it has to be on some sort of recurring revenue like you would with your quickbooks account.
You can find ways to get that predictable, stable revenue every month without it being on a model like that. And to me that's a little easier I think to do. I love that. So here's an idea with that. So I have a friend of mine who is struggling with this stuff and he was thinking about how to do a business like this and my advice to him, there were a couple different services he was thinking about doing, but he's primarily an unbelievable editor named micah powers, unbelievable editor. This guy brings a sheen and a tightness that's mindblowing. and so we were talking about him getting a little bit more into that and my advice to him that I'd give to anybody else is
reach out to some studios if you're doing the editing thing or if you're doing the leaving the mixing thing. Heck, even the mastering thing is I would reach out to studios and say, hey, um, that, you know, do a lot of volume and you'd say, hey, could you send me a song that you guys have already finished and released and let me do my thing to it and send it back and see what you guys think. BasIcally a retroactive free sample. That's my advice is reach out to these people. Say, hey, let me show us when you started at all, or did you? Yeah. This all got started because I reached out to studios and begged them to send me something that had already been released and honestly, it's probably my biggest regret that I didn't do it more, but reach out, begged and say, hey, can I show you what I can do and if you're good at it and you're cheaper, or if you're way better than their other guy and cost more, you know that there's any combination of those two things.
This goes back to episode number 54, what drug dealers can teach recording studios. Bingo. This is that free sample that you're trying to get them hooked on what you offer and if you can get your foot in the door giving out free, hit that free sample and it's an unsolicited request for a free sample. That is a way to get your foot in the door. We're not having to pay for advertising. You're not having to do a whole lot of work. it's not hard to reach out to someone and ask if you can do a free test mix of free test, master test, edit. I will say, I have been asked about these things in the past. I haven't really jumped on any of them, but I'm one person. You're going to get rejected way more than you'll ever get on these sorts of things, but honestly, if you think about it from a recurring revenue standpoint, if you're an audio editor or you do remote drums or you do any sort of work where that person might come back to you multiple times, then if you're hitting up the right people, what I call it, vip clients, people that send you tons of work every single month or a year, then you don't have to get that many yeses.
You get two or three yeses out of hundreds of nos. Then you've just added a lot of Income to your bottom line every month. So let's say hypothetically that you are an aspiring mix engineer and that one of the things that you're really good at is you're a chameleon. Let's say you're really good at imitating other people's mixes. You know, we talked about on a previous episode about ripping other producers off and ripping people's style off and the problem was with that, but let's say that's what you're good at. Let's say that you're really good at like I can make a song sound just like Billy Decker can. I just don't have a name to go with it. So here's my advice to you. Reach out to Billy Decker and tell him that and say, man, love what you do. My mixes sound really close to your so here's what I propose.
I bet you would love to have someone prep your mixes for you and I bet if you had someone that you were really, really happy with that eventually you'd want to hand off more and more and more of the heavy lifting to that person. That's sort of a dream if you're a mix engineer. Let me add to that because I actually put a note in Pro Tools called knowledge bomb because that to me is absolute genius and something I didn't think about before. When you can rip someone off, rip someone sound off, tHis opens up an opportunity that I haven't really thought of before. You would think you wouldn't go straight to
the person who you're ripping off, but I just thought of this as you're saying this. If you take your ability to sound like this other person and you say, hey, I know you're busy. If you have any artists that you just either don't want to work with or don't have time to work with, I would love to pick that sort of work up and you can work out a commission or they may just do it because they like you, but if there's some way you can add value, they're doing a free test mix or you're just picking up scraps or helping them with mixed prep for free or whatever it happens to be, but if you can be the person that they're passing their scraps to, that's a really good way to get started. In my opinion. THat's a great artist that I've passed on that if I had someone that sounded just like me, I'd probably send them or close to lightened.
He's similar to me. I'd probably send to that person if I like that person and can trusted that person would put a pretty good product out. That's an interesting way to start. You know, in a situation where you're like, hey, okay, I'll take on this project. I'm full up. I don't want to take more projects, but I know I can hand it to this guy who sounds just like me and then he's going to hand me a pro tool session, plugins and all, and I'm going to be like, yeah, that's 95 percent of the way there. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, and send to client. That is a dreamy scenario. If I were a mix engineer, that's what I'd want. What do you think chris lord algae does? Oh, I guarantee you that there is some kid listening to this podcast right now. It's like you don't even know about me, but that's interesting because in a situation like that, the longterm impact is that if you've got consistent revenue, you've got a chance at living long enough to build a great business.
That's the real rub here is that this isn't about how good you are, it's about how long you can survive and if you can survive long enough, man, then the opportunities will come and you might be amazing, but it might be the right skill at the wrong time, you know, to be a great mix engineer in 2008 with the financial crisis and all that stuff. Like it's rough how good you are. Didn't necessarily matter. So just to kinda wrap this episode up, I know we got way off into the weeds on this episode and multiple, multiple times because there's just so much within this subject. When you start pulling apart different business models, there is a lot to unravel with this. So if you're wondering how we got off the weeds so much, it's fine. Just know that there's a lot of knowledge bombs from this episode.
Just trying to pick the few that you got from this. if you're maybe going down the path of the wrong business model, you're trying to do christmas business model, but you know you're not a systems minded person. You know, you don't have the technIcal ability to put all of the technical pieces of software in a place to run your business so that you can then focus on mastering. If that's not the world you want to be in, don't go to a mastering. If you're my world and you just don't see yourself and let me interject there. I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from getting into mass. I am. I'm trying to dissuade anyone who's getting into mastering that doesn't have, that, doesn't have the right capabilities and brain to get into mastering. That's what I'm trying to dissuade. Well, the other flip side is for them to get into high dollar mastering.
I'm pretty cheap. If your thing is like, I want to collect a lot of analog gear and convince people that that's what really matters. It doesn't, but if you can convince people of that and 300 a song or something like that, then maybe that would work out great for you. But yeah, don't try to be like inexpensive and do a ton of projects at the same time. And again, we're just trying to show you how these business models operate so that you can make the informed decision what you want to pursue or if you're spinning your wheels for years in a certain business model, maybe it's time to put a foot down, pivot into another business model, whether it's reoccurring revenue or it's the high dollar low work. Maybe it's time to pivot as well, but this episode hopefully it gave you kind of a deep dive into each of these three business models so that you can go and make an informed decision on what's going to work for you because there is no one size fits all for anyone on this earth. I'm sorry it doesn't exist, but what we can do is give you our perspectives and then hopefully you can take that and run with it and have some success in your business. Not just a successful business, but a successful life with your business that supports.
So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. As always, we have the show notes@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash 58 or slash five eight. That's where we have links to books we mentioned in this episode links to other episodes that we mentioned in this episode, links to that mouse pad that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, a photo of that and a link to the facebook community where we are actually discussing this episode in our community, so if you want to join the discussion, just go to the six figure home studio.com/ 58. Funny story. Something really stuck with me from this episode that bothered me and that was the discussion of is it reoccurring or is it recurring? Which one do we use when it comes to income that comes in every single month, is that recurring income or is that reoccurring income?
I know that the suspense is killing you. I looked this up and from what my research shows, the appropriate usage is the recurring income. If it's something that happens predictably every month that is recurring. If it's something that just happens occasionally or something that doesn't happen often and it happened again, then it's a reoccurring. There's your english lesson for the day. Next week's episode is not about english. It's not about coffee, it's not about whatever other stuff we talked about today on today's way off the beaten path episode. Next week's episode is actually awesome. We interview a guy named Austin Hall. He is a very successful pop producer who got his start 100 percent online and what I mean is he didn't do any local work. He did not rely on any word of mouth advertising. He did not rely on working with local bands. He started his business online.
He's grown his business online and he's maintained his business online with only bands and artists that he is found online all through the power of facebook communities. So if that sounds interesting to you, if you are In a city that just doesn't make sense to work with local artists or does it make sense to connect with other producers who can send you work consistently? Like a place like nashville or la or New York, if that is you, if you were looking for a place to find online clients, next week's episode is 100 percent for you. Do not miss it and just so you know, next two days, christmas day. So our episode is actually going to come out the day after christmas on wednesday, so on your way home from christmas with your famIly so you can listen to our episode on that fund with a road trip or on the plane or whatever you do, but that comes out wednesday morning, bright and early 6:00 AM. Until next time, thanks for listening and happy hustling.
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text:
Maja Todorović (27. januar 1990, Split) dramski je pisac i scenarista.

Rođena u Splitu, odrasla u Herceg Novom, živi u Beogradu. Završila je Fakultet dramskih umetnosti u Beogradu, gde je diplomirala  na katedri za dramaturgiju. Na prvom konkursu Beogradskog dramskog pozorišta za dramski prvenac osvaja prvu nagradu za dramu "Drekavac", rad sa III godine studija. Za diplomsku dramu "Kinez" osvojila je nagradu prvog konkursa za najbolji dramski tekst za djecu i mlade ASSITEJ centra Crna Gora, koji je ta teatarska organizacija 2013. godine raspisala u saradnji sa Kotorskim festivalom pozorišta za djecu i Gradskim pozorištem Podgorica. Za istu dramu na Nušićevom konkursu za najbolji dramski tekst 2012. godine osvaja drugo mesto.

Autorka je teksta projekta "Njegoš za početnike", u režiji Marije Perović, kojim je zatvoren 27. Budva grad teatar.

Dela

Pozorišni komadi:
 Drekavac (BDP, režija: Milena Pavlović)
 Pakovana devojka (dip. predstava BDP), režija: Staša Koprivica
 Kinez ( Gradsko pozorište Podgorica), režija: Anja Suša
 Šćeri moja,... (Nagrada za najbolju dramu - CRNOGORSKO NARODNO POZORIŠTE)
 Antigona 1918 (SNP, režija: Milan Nešković)
 Nečista krv ( NP, režija: Milan Nešković)

Filmovi:
Ajvar
Toma

TV Serije:
Žigosani u reketu
Dug moru 2
Toma

Reference

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm6442525/

Spoljašnje veze
 Udruženje dramskih pisaca Srbije

Рођени 1990.
Српске књижевнице
Српски сценаристи

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia