Is Harvard a good University? It's a question that seems almost pointless. Look at the quality of the people who leave Harvard, one could cite this as evidence for the quality of their outcomes. However, the answer to the reason for the quality of the students that leave Harvard is seen at the start of the journey more than the end. To put it simply, it's a lot easier to leave Harvard than it is to enter.
Entering Harvard is one of the hardest endeavours most students will undertake, in some ways entry is a clear indicator of outcome. Of course, you could make the entry and then fail terribly, but the entire entry process is designed to try and ensure this doesn't happen.
What if there were no entrance exams? Would the outcomes be the same? We don't know, there isn't any data to test the theory.
What does this have to do with being a successful audio producer?
Everything. The success of your efforts will be determined by the choice of clients/artists more than anything else, so make sure you choose them carefully. In fact this is exactly how A&R works for record labels, their task is not to find any talent and try and make it good, their job is to find great talent and nurture it to help it reach full potential.
An actor’s rise to success is often down to the projects they chose, it’s the one script they choose to work on that made the difference.
I Will Survive
Before we continue let’s define what we mean by success. If you are reading this with the hope of being a Grammy or Emmy winner then your chances of success are slim. Hang on you think, look at all those people who you see all the time who are living that life, they’ve made it. Yes, but you see them because you and the media have what Rolf Dobelli calls survivors bias. What that means is we tend to concentrate on the small percentage of people who have made it to that level, not the much bigger number that haven’t.
Depressed? You shouldn’t be, because success is far more than what the media define it to be.
The FTSE100 or Dow Jones would have you believe there are only a few thousand companies making all the money. Those companies represent only a fraction of all the money being made, far more of it is in small companies that are single owner or have a small staff team. Those companies don’t make the news, but they’ve found an idea, survived start up, and are now making enough money to keep the lights on and keep a few families in homes with a decent standard of living. I’d call that SUCCESS. That’s probably you. Of course, dream of FTSE100, Grammy or Emmy awards, but don’t define that as the only measure of success. Feeding your family by running a small business is success too.
So back to the Harvard question and how it relates to being a successful audio producer. It’s simple, it’s this - choose your clients carefully.
Hide And Seek
I’m going to say something now that you are going to think is insane, but I want you know that I run my business this way and it’s worked for the last decade, it’s very similar to Harvard. If anyone wants to work with my agency then I make it as hard as possible. Here’s how.
Hurdle one. I don’t have any business cards, you can’t find my email or phone number online.
That seems insane, isn’t that counter to every piece of marketing advice out there? Isn’t it all about getting your face and contact details on every platform possible? I can’t be a very good marketing expert if this is the first piece of advice I’m giving, can I?
Well that depends. If I make it easy for anyone to find me then guess who can find me? Anyone. What kind of prospective clients will I get? Yep, all of them. But I don’t want any clients, I want the best clients, I want clients who really want to work with me. By putting this first barrier in place, if somebody really wants to work with me then they are going to have to really work hard to find me.
Second hurdle. We have a preliminary call to find out what they want. On this call, which for most businesses is considered to be the pitch, guess what we talk about? Them and their needs. We don’t talk about us at all. Isn’t that another moment of insanity and counter to all logic? Isn’t this the time to tell them how amazing we are and give a list of all our clients and the great work we do? No. It’s a time for us to find out as much about them as we possibly can.
At this point there are only two questions that we are trying to answer. First, what do they need? Second, can we help them? Unless we get these two questions resolved then we are all wasting our time.
Hurdle three. Once we’ve had that initial call we then ask our prospective clients to complete a questionnaire. This is what we send.
What’s your story?
What makes your business different?
Who are your competitors, and what are they better at than you?
What does your ideal customer look like?
Do you have a marketing plan?
What are you hoping to achieve from hiring a marketing consultant?
What is your expected timeframe for achieving success?
What is your marketing budget?
What does success look like to you?
Depending on what you are selling you may have a different set of questions. You might think the questionnaire is overkill. If you are a film mixer it will be about their project and what they want to achieve from it, the specific questions shown here are irrelevant, it’s the process that matters. It’s a second hurdle to get over, it helps focus the mind and determine if we are the right people to work with.
First lesson on being successful, it doesn’t happen if you don’t vet your clients.
Business is like dating, some connections are going to be a match, the sooner you figure that out, the better for all parties. I recall some years ago I accepted a job to produce an album for a female vocalist. I was young and thought I could do anything. The only problem was that I didn’t do any of my pre-vetting. I hadn’t even heard the singer before day one of recording. She couldn’t hold a note, she was awful. I was now into a situation that I needed to extract myself from, she had a problem and I couldn’t fix it. It was a hard lesson to learn.
Unless you vet your clients/customers/artists before you take on work then you are likely to take on work you can’t succeed at and it might not be because of your lack of skill and talent. It might just be a wrong match.
Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
Now our client have had three hurdles to jump over to want to work with us. Finally, after we receive the questionnaire we evaluate the client and the project and decide if working with them will bring them and us success. If the answer is no then we turn the client down. It’s not because they have a bad idea, it might be a brilliant one, but we may not be the people to make it happen.
Have I turned down some clients who have gone on to be successful? Many times, but that might be because we weren’t the right people to get them there. I love to see clients we turned down succeed, we may have stopped them getting there.
Second lesson on being successful, it’s as much about who you say no to as who you say yes.
You might have the world’s next big rap star knocking on your door, but you record and mix classical orchestra music. Or you might not have the same way of thinking about things and the chemistry is off, it can be as simple as that. All you end up doing is either working outside your area of expertise or annoying them because you see the world differently. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about agreeing on everything, that’s rarely useful. However, good chemistry means you can disagree without being disagreeable.
Are you reading this right? Yes, our clients don’t choose us, we choose them. This might sound daring, even insane, but what’s even more insane is to enter into work with people without first knowing who they are and what they need. What the entire process is for us to reduce the odds of failure. Their businesses and ideas matter, we need to be the right fit and this entire process is to try and determine that. It would be remiss of me to waste their time and money without doing this kind of due diligence.
In over a decade my business has gone from strength to strength. Why? Because we made sure we picked the best candidates in the first place. It can be scary, creative types have a propensity to say yes to everything and then repent at leisure. However, just imagine if the YES you said last week to the average project is now stopping you from working on the great one? You end up spending weeks or months on something that may never be all you hope for it, despite your best efforts.
I made an error of judgment last year. A brand I’d wanted to work with for a long time, considered one of the best in the industry contacted me to work on a project. I allowed all my usual due diligence to go out of the window and was seduced by their big name… what could possibly go wrong after all? Everything, it turned out. In a matter of weeks it went from a strong pitch for a great idea to me being screamed at down the phone and being threatened with all sorts of stuff. It took me weeks to work it all through in my mind as I asked endless questions about the situation. What I did wrong was I said yes before vetting the project. I failed to ask the right questions to see if it was something that I could help make great. I don’t plan to make the same mistake again. I don’t expect them to call me again and I’m thankful knowing that.
We often think as YES making opportunities for us, sometimes it’s our NO that does that.
Is Harvard a good university? Of course it is, but selection plays a significant part in that success.
It is said one should choose their friends carefully. I want to suggest you pay as much care to the people and projects you work on, it can be the difference between success and failure.
More Business Advice From Russ Hughes
If you want to run a successful audio business then check out The Book Dad Told Me Not to Write: You Can Run a Better Business with These Simple Words of Wisdom by Russ Hughes. The acclaimed book on running a small business. Check it out on Amazon and see reader reviews.
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