SpeedRun Ep 10 audio engineer local bizdev p -Tales from the Sky Lounge

Okay, so another one here. One of my sons is home from college and he's getting started and he wanted some business advice and I thought, "Hey, Claude, let's see what he can do with it." So I had him type in and this is another one where it's just you kind of shake your head and you're like, "Oh man, this is awesome." So here it is. A young audio engineer, which he is, looking to start recording clients for money and make me a foolproof plan to access multiple new clients. I have access to two different studios and he named them here in Atlanta, which he does, right? So he's been hanging around as an intern at a couple of these places. And then Claude says, "Oh, well, I have some questions. What kind of clients do you want? And here's some examples. What's your current experience level? Are you new or what?" And then why did I ask this question? Very cool. Very cool to get in the mind of the flow here in the thinking module of all these models. What's your approximate budget? And it's kind of funny. I told him tree fitty, which is kind of a fun term to throw out there, tree fitty. And he answered right. He said, "I'm looking to record music artists in any genre, but specifically hip-hop. I'm professional audio engineer and the eyes of the best audio engineers available today. Blah blah blah blah." Okay. My budget is tree fitty. Okay. Go think 359 sources 7 and a half minutes. Oh my god. Your Atlanta recording studio blueprint acquisition blueprint is ready. Analysis of local hip hop scene, strategic pricing, tree fitty, marketing budget allocation, which I thought was kind of a little bit of a joke, but evidently you can do stuff with 350. Digital marketing tactics, 90-day action plan, which is perfect for him. You know, he's just getting out of, he's a third moving to fourth year student at Kaw State and he needs help thinking through stuff. And then here it is and it's lovely. But noted, where did you get this? And then he goes, "Oh yeah, I go I don't know Apache, but I go to this one and I go to Masquerade all the time." And then he says, "Yeah, Instagram. I got it." And then he starts looking and he's like, "Yeah, I'm on Discord and I don't know what Thumbtac is and that seems weird." Her case, okay, not so great there, but you know, it's just a thought. So this is where it gets scary. I said, "Before you read the next paragraph, how much you charging?" He came up with exactly that number and he was thinking about this number minus $5 an hour for the self-serve, you know, for the easy stuff. So 40 or 65. It's like exactly exactly market rate and he's hanging out with lots of people who know the business and understand. And then this you said, "Hey, $1.99 or $1,199 for, you know, combo or $3.99 for six hours and three songs." He said, "Man, that's such a great idea because people come in, they got limited money to get started and they, you know, kind of don't you they get a little bit of sticker shock by the hour, you know, so if you could discount them in bundles that gets them in $99 trial session, you know, gets them in the door." He said, "That's awesome. I'm going to do that." And then so he goes through and he reads this. He's like, "Oh, oh yeah. Here's how you spend your tree fitty. 75 on Instagram, 25 bucks for targeted ads. That's awesome. 60 on business cards. I don't know about that. You know, promo materials. I guess that's stickers and QR codes. Okay. 50 bucks for Facebook and Tik Tok. Okay. 35 for Guerilla Marketing. Oh, there's your stickers right there. Okay. So not too bad. Mailchimp start plan. Do some email marketing. Okay. Personal network. Join the association. Go to these clubs again, you know, and again, this is a list that gets you thinking. So let's go figure out where these places are and you know, go find other things. Magic City. Yeah. And then Sound Table. Oh, go partner with these places and then give them a promo offering, which is kind of cool. Develop relationships, which is absolutely key, and do a referral. And he thought, "Oh, okay. That's actually pretty good." Content, portfolio content, land specific resources. Oh, you can go get accelerator grant, which he thought was pretty cool. He never thought about going to get startup money or getting an investor. But he is now, you know, so that's kind of neat. And then off we go. Social media 30-day action plan. Do this, do this, do this. And then where was it? There was another one. Solidify three venue partnerships. Develop packages, leverage success. I don't know. There was somewhere in here where it said you got to go to like five different events a week. So oh man. So he's like, "Okay, yeah, I got to go figure it out." And then here he said I said, "Hey, Hollis, you know the plan mentioned Instagram. Why don't you just once you throw it out there and say, 'Hey, give me the last 50 performers at every venue mentioned in that target market. Talk about Instagram and what hashtags are using, how can I use them as well.'" So little typo there. And it did. It absolutely did. And it came through and it goes, "Here's rising stars you broke it down. Rising stars you should connect with." And he knows like half these people and then established artists. And he thought, "Oh, oh, these are big time folks that are still in the local scene a little bit." And he thought, "Okay, that's kind of cool. I got to go." You know, you could see the hamster wheel turning venue specific performer. And then, you know, open mic night and how do it know there's an open mic night? I don't know. Every third Tuesday. That's awesome. All the Instagram, you know, at symbols, you know. So here's the hashtags. Here's recording studio hashtags. Here's genre location. Oh my god. Engagement viral. Whatever. He said that was a misspelling and that he's seen there's like a B in there somewhere. So I don't know where that came from, but you do have to kind of watch because it'll misspell things and misspell names if you're not careful. So you definitely have to watch this and edit pretty hard before you send it out to production or in front of a customer. Man, look at that. My god, this is too much here. Too much good stuff. And that's where you get into trouble. You quit reading critically. And then I said, "Hey, what do you know? Why don't you put your name in,"

Don't you put your name in, see what it knows about you. And then it said, "Sorry, don't know Delta Hollis. Might be new emerging artist, which he is." And then here's what you can do to help. And then tag some photos and whatever. If they are a local artist, that's who you want. Follow them, engage, look for opportunities. You want to and it keeps asking questions and then at that point we're just kind of overwhelmed with the whole deal and very happy.

So what's this worth? I don't know. Raise the level of BD for a young guy that's really focused on creating his craft as audio engineer, as a rapper. He gets Instagram. He kind of knows that shaking hands is important and your network is super important. But there's a couple things in here that expanded what he's thinking about and that's super powerful.

There's going to be the haves and have nots and you got to get this. I don't see how you're going to be able to compete without it or something like it. Really cool outcome on this one.