So How much is that?

Mhmm. Alright. Welcome. We are the podcast editor's mastermind, and

we're getting started actually a little bit early again. That's twice in a

row now that we've done that. Not sure what's happening. But anyway, tonight, I'm gonna

be in the hot seat, and I'm not at all nervous about that. And we

haven't talked about it backstage or anything, but We'll be talking about that. The hope

here is that you'll pick something up for your business as well as we talk

through some of the challenges that I'm facing. Joining me on this side

is Jennifer Longworth with Bourbon Barrel Podcasting. You didn't say who

you were, by the way. Oh, okay. I'm Brian. You can find me at top

tier audio.com, which you may or may not wanna do this call. We'll see. And

then we have actually 3 special guests. All of them are from Tansy

Astra Academy, and you might recognize Tara And, also, Jesse, they've both

been on the show, and then we've also got Amanda joining us on the side

where my arm is sticking off the camera. So welcome to the 3

of you. So I'm the newbie here is what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.

Yeah. You're the newbie, but that's okay because we're kind and gentle or something like

that. Anyway, On the last episode of the Podcast Editor's Mastermind, we were

talking about some of the things that are going on in our business, and I

shared that I'd faced some recent business challenges through the course of last

year. Business had declined for a number of reasons that had to do

with people stopping production, all that kind of stuff. And we said, hey. Maybe on

the next episode, we'll put Brian in the hot seat. I said,

okay. And then the next day, Jesse reached out and said, hey. This is the

kind of stuff that we do at Tanziastro Academy. Would you mind if we came

on the show and talked to you about it? So that's what we've done. With

that, I'm gonna try and get out of the way and let the 3 of

them Make this into something useful. So I'm gonna pass it on to

you. So you were talking about just

problems you were You were trying to plan for 2024.

Yeah. You said you were looking at pricing,

marketing. I think there were a couple other things we'll get

to. So, Tara, actually, Amanda,

you and I can start with the pricing stuff. The first thing I wanna

say, though, Brian, is you are not the only person who is dealing with this

at all. This is very common what you're talking about. People who've been in

business for decades run into the same issues you're talking about, so

it's not a it's not a Brian specific issue that's going on.

But pricing, I I feel like pricing is always the really

tricky part because you wanna be competitive, but you want

to make sure that you can get the clients, and you have to make sure

you're not working twice as hard for the same amount

as other people, and it's there's no right answer. You can't just Google

what should my prices be, and then you're good to go. Though a lot of

it, I think, just it comes into getting to know your clients, really talking

to people, trying to find those people who will be honest about

what They can afford to pay what they see value in

how you can differentiate yourself from others, but it takes Time

to build those relationships. I think sometimes people get in the, I need sales.

I need a client right now. They're offering half of what I know that I'm

worth, But I need the work right now, so I'm gonna take it. And that

just kinda gets you in a trap, but usually, if you're able to talk to

somebody and get to understand well, I

offer the these same services as other people, but I offer them in a

different way that might serve you better. But the communication

has to be there. You have to get them first, which is where Tara

and the marketing probably comes in. But And then

AI is changing all of this too, and so

many of us have, like, package pricing. And I think

we need to start shifting away from thinking of packages

as in the what that we do and more in the how.

Start looking at offering levels of

service where we focus more on giving

premium service to those who pay The premium,

having a standard service where it's a lot more we're

using AI wherever we can to have a

more efficient workflow because whether we

like it or not, trying to sell people on the

importance of quality is difficult enough now.

Wait another year, 2, 3 years down the road. It's going to

be almost impossible to try to tell people

why they need to be hiring us to do all of

this manual high quality work when they can't hear the

difference. So there's a lot of things kind of in

flux right now in the podcast editing space,

and it's just kind of a matter of figuring out What value

can we offer to clients that can't be replaced by

AI? If we really look at it, production

work is at the bottom rung of the overall

ladder. If we want to do better with

making income, We need to find ways to move higher up

that ladder so that we're not focused primarily on

the production. I mean, this has been kind of the

underpinning of conversations over the last year. Right? And it feels

a little bit like, Yeah. I know that, but,

also, I don't really know how to think about some of

this yet. There are certain parts of my workflow that do

Include some AI tools. I think I probably use some of the same tools that

Jesse does, which help with some parts of this. But there's still

in everything that I do, there's a a human element. I was actually having

a client call yesterday, and they were talking about using Descript.

And because I've used Descript before, I was able to ask a couple of questions

about some shortcomings of that software and highlight how I can do that

better. But at the same time, like, I can't see myself ever

offering what I would call only service. And I hate to pick on

that software, but, you know, the automated removals and

whatever it didn't properly scribe is assumed to be silent, and so you're

missing stuff here and there. Like, I can't see that ever being something that I

would offer, and so I'm a little bit uncertain to think about How I would

think about different levels of service and differentiation as it relates

to pricing. One of the ways is to Look at

the different services you offer and figure out what

stuff can we use more AI heavy,

what stuff I mean, we know tools are going to keep getting

better. Right now, the editing itself is the one thing that's

going to be Difficult to move to strictly AI

because more clients are looking for people

who can offer everything, show notes,

whatever the services are. Are there things we

can use AI to be able to offer

those without adding significantly to the price so we can

still compete without making everything

focusing on AI everything. So we

use, like, AI for show notes and descriptions,

titles, stuff like that, Not really adding a whole lot to the

cost, so we can focus on the manual work we need to

do. So is that kind of streamlining planning your internal processes so

you're spending less time doing the work so you don't have

to charge quite so much. Because if you can get into that flow where, Okay.

I can use these AI tools. It cuts a lot of the manual time, then

you're not feeling as crunched. Well, I have this show, and now I have to

spend all of this time doing this. And then I have do these show notes,

and I have to do all of this stuff, and then it becomes more

time intense per each client. Is it kinda using those

processes producer the amount of time you have to spend

on the same thing so you don't feel like you have to keep charging more

to balance your time. Because it's kind of a time management thing too. Right? Like,

you're 1 person. You can only take on you only have so many hours,

and it's being able to allocate those hours in a way that

helps you a little bit more. And sometimes it's not even

tools related to editing. There's the whole back end

process, client interaction. If there's ways we

can streamline the back end of the business, that helps us

as well. If if I can ask, what are the some of the things that

you've been able to streamline from the back end? Because I like to think mine

is pretty streamlined, but, hey, I only know my business. We're in the middle

of transitioning over to HoneyBook where we can

basically Automate the entire process from

the time they go to our website, they click a

link, they can book a call, We can gather information from

them, give then, say, have a

discovery call with them, provide them a quote with different

manager, they can choose the package. Once they choose

that, they get invoiced, then they get their

the client agreement. We can automate the onboarding

producer. So that's one of the things we're working on

right now as opposed to Having our contracts

and PandaDoc and trying to bring everything into one

place where we can automate as much of that process as possible.

Okay. Yeah. I guess I was thinking more in terms of, like, the ongoing client

interactions like file delivery, that kind of stuff. But that's a it's a good another

good take on it. They have these fun portals where you can upload files

and communicate that way to HoneyBook? And you can actually link it to your

Gmail account. If you have, like, your or if you have, like, Google Workspace for

your email, you can connect to that so you can sync your calendars

and all of that fun stuff. That's HoneyBook as well? Mhmm. Yeah. Oh,

wow. Okay. I guess I need to go check them out again. It does come

as as an expense. You know? We always try to keep your overhead low,

but It's that whole time time versus money. I

mean, both have the the value, but it's if you're able to,

maybe you spend the, And I don't actually know what HoneyBook costs, but you spend

a little bit per month and but you don't have to put

as much time and energy into all that back end and stuff. Now you have

more hours available that you can do the marketing things that you

don't really wanna do, but you know you need to, or maybe that's the time

that you get to spend with your personal things that you wanna do,

but it's sometimes that extra cost is going to be

minimal when you compare it to the amount of time you save. Yeah.

I I can totally see that. I was actually looking through my books earlier,

and, one of the things that I discovered was one of the Most significant

expenses I had last year, which wasn't a huge surprise, was subcontractors

because I had some people working on some shows for me. And

because the business has kind of declined, I've had to stop doing

that as you would expect. Right? You have to preserve the margin, And

so maybe there are some ways that this kind of automation could

reduce the need for that. I don't know that I would ever get back 2

hours per episode, but maybe there's enough there. Why do you think your business

declined this year? Because I'm hearing it a lot across the board, and it seems

like it's for similar reasons. A combination of client life

changes and different directions. So there was I didn't have any clients

that said I'm leaving you for another editor, but what I did have

was Three shows that were through a production company,

and that company stopped operations so I lost those

shows Because they're not making them anymore. And then I had 2

others where the hosts just stopped producing the show. You know,

they just said, hey. I'm done. It wasn't a whole lot of I'm losing them

to Jennifer or to Daniel or to Jesse. It

was a lot of we're stopping the show. Won't need you anymore because we're not

gonna pay you to not produce a show. Right? So that's kind of the driving

factor for me. I mean, I could guess at the overarching

Stuff. But I think it's it's really just the clients changing.

Right? Yeah. I guess I should all say on the on the personal side, Once

this started going, I didn't do a ton to go and try recapturing business.

I mean, I did put myself out there a little bit, and I did have

a number of client calls where Things

just didn't line up and never really got any feedback. You know, is it price,

or is it you decided you didn't need an editor. I never really got that,

but Didn't replace them with anything during the year, which is how we got

here. So I think that's a nice segue into marketing.

Sure. I was just gonna say, I I think when

people are fearing the, you know, recession coming, when

we keep hearing the r word, when we keep hearing People are losing jobs. I

mean, every time I sign on to LinkedIn, there's another layoff announcement, or

my feed is just filled with more and more of my colleagues being laid off.

Mhmm. My connection's being laid off. There's a lot of fear in the

air, and I think oftentimes the first place

people start to cut budgets is in

creative marketing. And one of the things I hear and I've

heard a lot this year over and over when it comes to podcasting,

when have talked to prospects when I've talked to clients, and I ask,

have you considered podcasting? Well, we did in the past,

but it was a lot of work and a lot of cost, and we

didn't see the return on investment. We couldn't really trace

how it was helping us with our business or how it was, you know,

helping us with conversions or getting us clients, so we stopped

because it just seemed like too much work and too much time. I've heard that

Over and over. And so when we're in this time period where there's a lot

of fear and penny pinching, People are

like, okay. I don't need the podcast anymore. Let's just stop that.

So in the marketing and branding world, we call that threats. Like, we

when we look for threats threats to our business when we do that

little SWAT chart. Are you familiar with that? Mhmm. I think that might be the

case here. Be and not necessarily that There's there was something

wrong with your service or they weren't happy with your service. It does seem

like a pattern across the board right now. So you

said that you work a full time job and you're traveling

a lot. A little more travel this year. Yeah. How many

hours a week Would you say you have to devote to your

podcast business? In the past, I've been doing about 10 hours

a week. It's significantly less right now because I don't have

the work to fill the time. But, yeah, 10, sometimes up to

15. That once I got to 15 is where things kinda got a little

shaky, and so that's when I started bringing in contractors because it it got to

be a little bit much. And then I discovered that I only get, like, a

50% return on having the contractor because I still have to go back and

review stuff, and there's an administrative overhead on that, but I

got back sometime. So you feel like 10 to 15 hours a week

is about your limit. If you were to get the clients back, that's

the most you could spend right now while working full time? I think

that's I mean, I don't know that I would ever say the most. Right? Because

there's probably a chance you could find something else here and there, but that seems

to be what was sustainable. And I'll call it nearly healthy.

I don't know that it was truly healthy, but at least nearly healthy. Okay. So

it says your you said your ultimate dream, at least by

2027 would be to have a full fledged

production business. Mhmm. Now Is is

your goal to eventually have your own business full time and

that be your main focus? Yeah. I find that as The

business grows. It becomes harder to maintain focus between the job and the

business. And so, like, when it's small, it's easier. When it gets bigger,

it's harder. So there's Eventually, you can't you can't have 2 full time

things. Right? Or at least I can't. Maybe other people can. What does the

production business look like? Does it have employees? Is it almost like an

agency, or is it just you and some contractors still? So, I

mean, that's partly what I've been struggling with because And maybe some of this

is presumption, but it's hard for me to imagine being able

to have a level of stability and provide stability for my clients

without having at least contractors or some level of employees. And

my experience so far has been that, contractors

are expensive, Then they should be. Right? Because they're good at what they do,

but there's a lot of not that I've had employees, but, you know, there's some

additional overhead or additional administration from having employees.

So I'm not super firm on what that would need to be. I just feel

like I shouldn't be the only person in the business ultimately

Producer because it all relies on me.

And as much as I enjoy doing the work, I don't think that's right thing

for the clients, and I'm not sure that it's the right thing long term because

I would hate to get sick for a week and have all my clients miss

their deadlines because I'm not there. Right? And, conversely, I'd

hate to reach out to Jesse and a couple of other editors and say, can

you do all of these this week? By the way, I don't have any guidelines

for you. Just figure it out. Like, that's Not only expensive, but it's not right

for them, and it's not right for the client. So, like, I feel like there's

gotta be a sweet spot there for me somewhere. Do you always wanna do

production? Yeah. That's part of the problem. Right? You enjoy

it? I do. Yeah. There's just something about it. I mean, like anything, it

you get into it, and sometimes you're not really feeling it. But, yeah, I love

it. I really do. So it sounds like the perfect scenario

for you. You get to continue doing what you love production, but you would have

help so you're not overwhelmed, and you can have ample vacation

each year. Yeah. You can have that flexibility to take time off when

you need it and have you know, be with your family, have that work, life

balance. Yeah. So I think the first question is thinking through

what would it take to get there? How many clients would that be? What would

that look like? What would you need to make? Right now, you said, you know,

you're look you want it to at least be comparable with your full time role.

Right? Yeah. I mean, it it would need to be pretty close, or I'd have

to have some really hard conversations with my wife. Right? Because

we have kids and and a house and stuff. Right?

So, I can't just abdicate that responsibility

because I wanna go chase my dreams. So, yeah, it has to be close. Yeah.

And without throwing out exact numbers, how Sorry. I can't

word this right. What percentage of your business income

is, your full time income? Doing math in

my head, which is a pretty bad thing to do. I would say as of

last year, it was probably 10 to 15%,

But the business declined through the year. And I'm also thinking profit,

not gross revenue. And the year prior, it was probably

closer to 20 to 25%, somewhere in that range. So

think like, job went up, business went down, so that widens

the gap. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's one of those things that's gonna

take time to build. It's gonna take time to get up to equal what you're

currently making in your full time income. Yeah. And I'll say, like,

maybe this is just me, but I can't foresee how I could

truly get up to parity at a part time level. Like,

there would have to be some kind of plan to close the gap,

or I'd have to be building out that employee base or whatever that looks like

in terms of support Because I can't I can't foresee something

where 10 editing only clients would ever get me

to anywhere near what I would need to be even if I was charging

Well, maybe with super premium rates. I don't know. I mean, it depends on what

you can get people to pay, but how long will they pay that? Right? I

mean, somebody might be willing to pay $1,000 an episode for an audio only

edit Right now? 2 years from now, probably not. And that that's

Amanda's expert. She is the expert of all things money, so

I'll let her delve into that a little bit more. But the first part when

you're thinking about brand and marketing is really clarifying those

goals, figuring that part out, figuring out, okay, I

have a ways to go before I can match my full time income. I'm not

gonna do it all this year because that's not realistic. So how many clients

do I wanna have this year? How many clients do I wanna have next year?

What do I wanna be doing? What does that look like? Do I

want to be managing employees? Would I feel more comfortable just

having contractors that help me out when I need the help? You know, thinking through

all that because managing and bringing on employees isn't for everyone. It

could feel like a huge responsibility. Other people are like, yep. I

wanna scale up. I wanna have a whole agency. I wanna go.

So thinking about Where do you fit there? What's gonna

be best for you? And then thinking about what income you

ideally want to make and then planning toward that

and thinking, okay. Well, what marketing activities can I

do that will help me reach these exact goals? Because then it'll help

you measure what your marketing efforts are doing

for you. So in terms of, let's say and I'm just gonna throw this out.

Let's say your goal this year was to get 20 clients. And right

now, you have 0 clients. So where do you

start? The first thing you'd wanna really look at is,

okay, Is my messaging working for me? Do I really understand

my target audience? Do I know where to find them? So I'll

ask that of you. Do you have a certain niche? Do you have

a certain type of client that you've worked with, that you

loved working with, and you want a 100 more of them? Yeah.

So that's kind of where I've been stuck. I've really enjoyed working with the

indie podcasters. I'll call it the 1 person show

Or a couple person show. Right? So you get to work with the

showrunner. You don't work with a committee. I really prefer that.

However, my experience has been most of them don't have the

budget to support the kind of editing that they actually want. So that's always been

the gap. So I have worked with a large company. We'll see

if that continues. I don't know. Their show is on hiatus, so we'll we'll see

if that ever comes back. I enjoyed that because I was still working with the

showrunner even though it was a larger company, but then you've got the issue of

payment terms. Right? You you never get prepayment from a large company. You

get net 30 if you're lucky. Right? And so there's some some

stuff I'm trying to work through, but I would say I like working with the

showrunner. I don't necessarily have a specific niche. I would

prefer people with a larger budget, business owners, that kinda thing, but not

necessarily Not necessarily tied to, like, the coaching community or

the whatever. I I don't really have a preference there.

I just wanna work with people that are passionate about what they do and can

pay. That's the tricky part. Are there any

topics that have really fascinated you? So, I mean, one of the

shows that I worked on was Focusrite's show, where

they interview audio engineers because I love audio. That's super interesting to

me. I was also really surprised that they would have outsourced their production because it's

a whole company of audio people, but they did, and I'm good with that. The

other one that really surprised me was I have 1 client right now that basically

just Interviews people about things, doctors, whatever.

It's just who she met and what what they can and, surprisingly,

Like, she's probably 15 years older than I am, something like that. But the topics

that she's choosing, even though it's not what I would normally listen to, I get

done editing every episode. I'm like, I'm smarter because of what she did. So, like,

it's just things I can learn about, I guess. I wish I was more

specific. I really do. You just wanna learn new things. What do you

really love about working with the indie show runners

specifically? Yeah. I mean, they care about what they're doing.

They enjoy what they're doing. If they didn't, they'd just stop. I mean,

for lack of a better they bring it or they don't. And they the ones

that I've worked with, they generally do. They care about growing their show. They

most of most of the ones that I work with care about the audio quality,

care about the show quality. Some of them, I haven't ended up with

anybody that wishes they could just hold my hand while I do the editing for

them. Like, can you like, they're not super control freaks. I don't have any of

this whole we have to deal with legal or any of that stuff. It's just

nice to work with the showrunner. I I think that's a lot of it right

there. Yeah. I'm what I'm hearing is you love working with, like, passionate

thought leaders and mentors Mhmm. Who love what they

do, who love to teach and educate others

and really want to keep growing and really

care about the quality of their podcast and the quality of what they put out

there. Like you said, they really care about what they do. So I

think when you're thinking about your messaging, when you're

thinking about your marketing, starting there, What would they

really resonate with? Because you really resonate with them. What kind of

messaging would draw them in talking about Those things talking

about I work with podcasters who really care about what they

do. I work with mentors. I'm a, you know, insatiable

learner myself, And, you know, I love

working with people who are passionate about these topics and passionate about educating

their community. I'm just spitballing right now. But these are

this is where you can start really connecting with the people

you wanna be working with in terms of your

external presence. Right? The other piece of it is

doing that market research. It helps to know who

you wanna work with, who you like working with. So you mentioned the indie

showrunner, but thinking about, okay, which one of

them has the budget? What are the ones who have the budget

to pay for my quality of work? Where do they exist? Where do they live?

Where can I find them? So thinking through that

piece of it, where do these

showrunners hang out online? Do you know? No.

Because if I did, I would totally be there.

Well, where did you find them? One of them was a referral from,

Well, same person. So Jesse went through the podcast

engineering school. That's how I found the Focusrite Show is through that. It was a

referral through that. One of them was just a random

post in a podcasting group where somebody said I'm looking for an editor,

and Somebody, I think it might have been Steve Stewart, tagged me and said, hey.

He lives in Nashville. You should talk to him because I think it was the

Nashville group. It was it was that kinda thing. Almost all of the people

I've found have either been referrals or somebody that I've

interacted with online, generally in one of the Facebook groups for

podcast, because I love those people even though, you know, there's a a

zillion editors in there. Every once in a while, I find 1, and

they actually wanna work with me. I I don't know why. I mean, you mentioned

passion for audio, so maybe you can start

there. Because it's easiest when you can at

least think of, Hey. I'd really like to do more

shows about audio, or I'd really like to do more shows about, I'm

just throwing this out here, like marketing or music. If

you have topics you already know you like in

industries that you feel drawn to for one reason or manager,

it helps when you're doing that research to be able to start with something because

it's easier than to pinpoint where Those people might hang

out and join those groups and join those communities. I find

people have a lot of luck joining groups and just

participating, engaging, and not selling anything, just being part of

those groups on, you know, community. There's Discord groups, for

instance. There's Facebook groups. There is Reddit.

Like, you can find just about any topic you would

ever want to know about, join. It doesn't matter what it is.

Type it in. You will find it. You will find a

whole group thread about it. But it it really is. It's

a good place to start and really think

of to start your research and gather that information

And meet people and talk to people. The other thing that

really helps is if you have, you know, communicate you're

still communicating with former clients or current clients or you have good

relationships with people who, hey. If they read a podcast, you'd love to work

with them, being able to talk to them. Just say, hey.

Would you have a coffee with me in person virtual depending on the

situation? And just ask them about their day. Ask them about their challenges.

Ask them, Like, if they were to run a podcast,

what would they be concerned about? What would they wanna do? It's just being

curious, learning about them So you have a better

idea again of how to talk to them, how to communicate with them. So for

instance, if you're setting up, like, a funnel on your website,

you know what offers to make them that are really gonna entice the

types of people you want to work with. So a lot of marketing isn't

necessarily just writing a bunch of blogs and posting a bunch of

social media. It's really connecting with and getting to know the people you you

wanna work with and talk to. So those are 2 things that I might

start with. Just figure out and get a clearer

picture of What you want to do, where you wanna go, and who

you wanna be working with. And I know that's hard when you're just a curious

person and you wanna learn everything because I'm the same way. So many people have

asked me, you know, Tara, you need to niche down with marketing? And I'm

a marketer. And I'm like, I I Amanda's laughing because

she knows. I'm like, I I love working with

nonprofits. I love working with creatives. I love working

with so many different types of people in industries, and I've I've

enjoyed doing that. And when somebody asked me niche down, That's a

little stressful because I'm like, I don't know. But I found

it's much easier to just pinpoint 1 industry

and start there and see how I like it. And if I

feel like, you know what? I wanna work with other types of people, I can.

I can branch out from there because it's so much easier to start

smaller and mark it there and grow than it is to

try and just say, oh, I'll work with anybody. You know?

I just love people. I love connecting with people. You can say that, But it's

a little bit harder to target your messaging and your emails

if you wanna do that. And the last thing I'll talk about, because I feel

like I'm taking up too much time on marketing, But, is

really thinking through your prospect journey, so

to speak, and what you're willing to do

marketing wise. What are your passions? Because it's not helpful

to do the things you don't love doing when it comes to marketing. Because if

somebody says, well, you you need to write 5 blogs a month,

Brian. How do you feel about that? Does that Make you excited?

No. Makes me the opposite

of excited. Exactly. What about if I said

you have to produce 1 podcast episode a

month talking about what you love and what's on your mind? That sounds a

little more interesting. It sounds a little more interesting. So it's about figuring

that out too. Yeah. You know, what are the things that you love doing

that you can put out there that are helping people, informing

people, educating people. I think the show is a really good part of

that Because people get to know you, they get to know your personality,

and that goes a long way. Yeah. I love doing this show. I

I honestly do. I mean, we struggle a little bit internally because we're always thinking,

like, this doesn't really point anybody else back to our businesses. Right? Because

our audience is Editor and producers.

So we're we're basically upskilling our competition, but we love them. So,

like, how do we not do that? Right? But that's a wonderful thing. You're helping

people, and you're actually growing

your peep people's trust in you and your brand because they see that

you're doing that, and you're not doing it to sell anything. You're just doing

it because you love doing it, and it comes across as authentic and

real, and I would wanna work with you. Sorry, Jesse.

It's fine. I'm used to it. Well, I'd say

the same thing about Jesse. You both have that. You're both authentic. You both love

educating and just helping people for the sake of helping people. And

who doesn't wanna work with people like that? You know? I mean, that is all

part of branding and marketing. It's you're already doing it.

It's more just thinking about, okay, what Avenues are gonna work best for

me. Thank you. And that kinda ties into, though, like you said, you're building

this community. Say you and Jesse have a lot of things in common. As

you do build your business and you get to that point where you need to

have somebody else because you can't be the only person doing the work all the

time, you need to go on that trip, You had mentioned that you, you

know, sometimes have to hire a contractor, but then you

and all of that. So if you have somebody like I'm just gonna keep using

Jesse because his face is right there, and he's the person to use for

that. But If you and Jesse could probably come to some kind of

agreement that would work, that if you work in similar ways, you

care about people in the same way because it's really hard to find somebody that

you trust that can do your work. Like you said, you even

go back, and you kinda have to check the contractor's work because

it's They're your clients, and you have a certain level of quality

that you want to deliver. It's really, really hard to get to

that point where you trust somebody else to do that same level of

quality so you don't have to go check their work. And I I you'd

say that from from my it took me years years years to find somebody in

in my production work, which is more in TV and film, but finding

somebody who I could actually just say, okay. You go handle this. I'm not

going to worry about it. You're gonna take care of it. You're gonna do it

in a way that I'm comfortable with. I don't have to second guess what you're

doing. We're okay here. But having somebody like that

eventually and I think a community like this, you're building that that

networking thing, not just in terms of clients, because once you get a Client's

word-of-mouth goes probably further than anything as far

you know, you find somebody like, oh, well, this guy does really good work for

me. Oh, You they then they hear somebody who might be looking for an

editor, and they'll refer you. But also on the internal business

side, If you have someone else that can help you with maybe the things that

you don't like. Like you said, maybe maybe Jesse loves blogs. I I don't

think that's the case, But maybe in this community,

you you find someone, and you're able to kinda work things out in a

way where you're supporting each other even if you're not in the same

business necessarily. You're not business partners, but you can still

partner with other, maybe, small business owners, individuals

that can build things going forward. And that that helps too because

then you're still doing your own business, but you don't feel so alone in

that business. It's important to start to realize

that the reality of making a living off

of podcasters is going to be difficult.

Ideally, we're looking for people who

happen to podcast but are other things.

Businesses, coaches, people who

have a monetary gain from the podcast,

They're going to value what we do better than podcasters

who are struggling to even pay for whatever

they're doing for the show. So like tarot was

saying, trying to figure out who you can work with.

If you try to market yourself to podcasters,

What happens when you see somebody post in a Facebook group saying,

I'm looking for a podcast editor? All the editors come out.

Exactly. Yeah. You see a 100 responses within an

hour. Mhmm. But if you go to let's use Tara's

example of marketing. You wanna work with marketers. If you go

into marketing group, you might be the only podcast editor

there. So when people have questions about podcasting, They're going

to go to you. So all of a sudden, you're the big fish in a

small pond as opposed to a fish that you can't even see in the

pond because there's so many of them. So that's one of the biggest things I

found is my best clients aren't podcasters.

They use podcasting as part of their business, whether it's brand awareness,

Lead generation, personal branding, whatever

the case is. So that's another

thing that kind of ties in with what Tara was saying. If we

try to target everybody, we can't really target anybody.

And that direct? I was

gonna ask. And what is your reaction to that, Brian? I can tell from your

expression. You're like No. I mean, that's That's not new news.

Right? It's just a real challenge to find that right

group of people. I'm Obviously, not opposed to working

with business owners. I do have a little bit of head junk to work through

in terms of the coaching space because almost everything I've seen in that space

is quantity, quantity, quantity. Who cares about quality?

It it's it's your MVP. It doesn't have to be good, and that tends

to overflow. And so my experience has been it's really hard to

find somebody who cares as much about quality as they're going

to expect you to care about the quality of their show, that makes sense.

I don't like being in the position where I care more about the client's show

than they do. That to me is very uncomfortable, So I wanna know that they

do more, and most of what I've seen isn't that. That doesn't mean

it's not out there. Maybe I'm just hanging out with the wrong groups. Well, that's

where really qualifying your client your prospects really

comes in. The more you can narrow that down, you can

focus your copy. You can make it clear to them if

you're the type that doesn't care about anything. You're looking for an MVP

product. I'm not the person for you. You can make it

clear. Like you were saying earlier, I wanna work with the people

who take pride in their show. They want the best, and they're

willing to pay for that. You use your website to communicate

that, and that helps kind of weed out

those tire kickers or the people that just want Fast

turnaround, large quantities regardless of how it

sounds. I'm taking notes as you should.

What podcast do you really love listening to? What are your top 3 that

you don't miss? So currently And it's not

because of the quality of the show. But currently, the podcast 2 point o

show, I catch that one pretty religiously, Pod News Daily,

And then there's a couple others that are kind of focused in that same

vein. But right now, because I don't have a commute and because I've

been fairly busy, my listening is way down from what it used to be. So

there are other shows that used to be in that queue that were more for

enjoyment rather than just staying up to date that have kinda fallen by

the wayside. So I don't really have one where I go like, that's my pleasure

listen. Well, what was your pleasure listen? I'm trying to think because it's been a

bit there there were some that kinda funny that I enjoyed. I'm not really thinking

about those. I think probably from a quality standpoint and

learning stuff, I really enjoyed 20,000 hertz, Which is, like, super

off the chain from a quality standpoint. Most of the

other scripted shows really kind of, I don't enjoy them,

but that was one where I was like, I really like what they've done here.

Do you enjoy more talk like, interview style type

shows where it's like this, Just talking back and forth, that's nothing

that's scripted? I tend to. Yeah. If I'm gonna do something scripted, it's

probably gonna be streaming video or something like that. For

podcasting for me, I tend to like it being that more raw

experience. Not no shade on the audio dramas or anything. It's just

If I'm gonna do a drama, it's gonna be something where I'm gonna sit down

and watch it so that it's actually taking my attention. If I'm

listening to a podcast, it's because I'm driving or doing something else.

Mhmm. Are those the kinds of podcast that you prefer producing?

The interviews? Absolutely. Interviews, monologues, panel discussions,

I love those. I've not really done much in the actually, I don't know

that I've done anything in the scripted space yet. Not that I'm opposed to it,

but that's not really what my skill set is. At least from my perspective, I've

gotten really good at the the audio repair, the mix and

master, and the straight through linear edit. I don't Tend

to do story edits. It's just not a skill set that I've really spent much

time with, and honestly, I've never had a client with a budget that could

support me going through and Mhmm. Mapping out their show and then figuring out what

to cut because that's gonna be multiples of what I currently

charge. I don't know how many, but it's not gonna be just 1 multiple.

Understandable. So I haven't heard of 20,000 hertz. What is it

about? It's about sound. I I know it sounds

ridiculous. It's a it's put out by a sound design company,

and they tend to go through weird things about sound. The one that I

remember was The people that do voice overs for subways,

I really enjoyed that one. That's kind of a ridiculous topic, but it was

really well done, and I enjoyed it. I don't enjoy the ads. I realized

I gotta pay for the show, but, man, 3 minute breaks for paid

ads, I'll skip that every day. So it sounds like you are just about

as obsessed with sound as Jesse, and I don't think I've met anyone

as obsessed with sound as Jesse. Like, he will hear things in

music And in TV shows and just about

anything. He'll he'll tell me the frequencies in my voice, like, where my

voice falls to a point where I'm like, I don't hear that. What are you

talking about? He's like, you can't hear that? No. I can't hear

that. Yeah. I have issues. They're

similar to Jesse's, probably. My wife still doesn't know what I mean when I say,

yeah. I can hear the tube saturation in that one, but That's okay.

Shouldn't have to. I mean, yeah, you both have that

similarity where it's really import that sound experience

is really important to what you do every day. You put a lot of effort

and love into that. So I think, again, Really bringing

that out. And, again, I haven't I know I went to your website a long

time ago. I haven't been to it recently. Talking about that

more specifically, like, let that Love of sound

and the experience that you wanna give others, the audio

experience. Let that shine through and talk

about it. Share your thoughts on it. Share the why. Get people to

care about it. Tell your story about it. Because I think you

know, granted, if we're using a bunch of Technical terms, and

we're talking about I'm not even gonna try to use sound design terms.

But if we're throwing a bunch of that out, Yeah. You might attract

audiophiles. You might attract people like you. But if you can find a

way to talk about what you do in a way that I could understand it

and relate to it or Amanda and put that out

there, I think, again, that's that can really help. You know, just thinking through

really unique ways you can communicate and do what you love and

put that out there in a way that's not forced. You're not writing those blogs

every month to talk about this or that. Another way

it's helpful to know who you wanna work with is you can actually

talk about those topics that they care about. So using

the example of marketers again. Marketers, they care about

conversion rates and open rates on email and what

What the latest thing with Google is and, you know,

basically, the latest compliance we have to go after, and

and we have to add these records to our, you know, business. Email

thing? Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because the it is. Like, life in marketing

is just filled with updates and keeping up with Technology

and keeping up with what Google is doing and what the latest,

you know, best practices are for our website and how we send

emails and how we keep data. It goes on and

on, and most marketers are just running around going, I don't

have time for this, and now they want me to start a podcast. Are You're

kidding me. I don't have time. Help me.

So, you know, if you were interested, for example, in working with marketers,

you might start Thinking through, okay, how can I help these poor people?

How can I make their day a little bit easier talking about some of

these topics? So, again, like, when you're thinking about

who you wanna work with or if there are some industries that you feel like

you can contribute to meaningfully, That's, again, a really good

place to start. And we don't have to get it right the 1st

time. This is all an ongoing iterative iterative

process. What matters is starting

somewhere, seeing what works, and adapt as we

go. I have a question for you, and it it's My stuff is always

the boring stuff. Right? It's like the business y stuff. It's the that's what nobody

ever wants to talk about. But So you said said that you

can allocate maybe 10 hours a week to your business,

but you haven't as much because you're you've lost these clients. Are

you still spending 10 hours on your business? Like, the time that you

used to spend on client work, are you using that for your marketing,

for your other things like, time management

becomes a really unpopular thing, but a very

necessary thing, especially, I think one of the hardest things to do is

to manage a full time job and then

try to build a a business in your off time Well, you said you also

have a wife and kids, and that's a whole lot of stuff. And you

are 1 person and, you know, same amount of hours in the day.

So it sometimes it becomes almost, like, giving yourself a schedule. Like,

you might only have a few hours of editing to do, but you'd know

Like, are you filling that extra 5 hours then with doing

things that can help you get to where you wanna be on the these next

steps? Or is it more like, well, I don't have the work right now, so

I'm gonna go do this other thing? Are are you thinking about

it pretty actively? Or I've been kind of

directionless, which is part of what led to the

conversation that we had a couple of weeks ago. So the answer is

no, But it's not because I haven't wanted to. It's because I

haven't really had anything to put my focus against, and so I

took the position. I'm not gonna sit flounder right now. I'm gonna wait until I've

got a little bit of direction before I start doing something,

and maybe that's an excuse. I'll Potentially own that as an excuse, but

it's what I've been doing. So I've been sleeping, in the

mornings instead of producing podcasts before I go to work,

which has been nice, but I'm I'm ready to start doing some

stuff. I think it's still finding that balance. Sleep is very important. You're gonna

do better work when you you're well rested. You're gonna feel better,

and I think it's it's the hard thing. Right? Everybody's trying to find this

work, life balance. You just happen to have 2 works. You have

your full time work, and you have the work that you're passionate about, and you

want to make your full time work, but you have to like, if if you

were to not have your full time job, Suddenly, you have, what,

40, 50 extra hours in the week whether you commute or not. Like, there's a

lot of time that is spent that you could then invest

into marketing and all of these other things, but then you don't have the

income to make you comfortable. It's that you know, it's

And everybody has their different threshold of when it's time to make that leap

of, okay. I'm I'm getting close, and I know that if I had more

time, then I could get to that next step in my journey, but that

next step requires letting go of the comfort and the security. And that's not what

I'm telling you to do by any means. I'm not advising ever anybody

to take that leap before they're ready because it you know, it

can be scary. It can be very exciting and and fulfilling and all of that,

but it's Do you have a lot of the things like, is

it all in your head mostly? Do you think about it a lot, but there's

not really like, I know you're taking notes now, but do you have any

Anything kind of written down just to get it out of your head of these

are the things I wanna do. These are things I need to do so you

can kind of get them organized in a way. Sometimes if you're a

visual person, just even seeing a bunch of things on a

maybe not pen and paper, but sometimes that works or Whatever

app you like to write or draw things in, but just to kinda get it

all out of your head. Because I think a lot of times, people,

Creatives, especially, but, you know, a lot of people, we just we think a

lot, and it it seems like, oh, well, no. I I know all the things

that I need to know. It's all in my head. But once you actually start

writing it down or typing it out or however it is, then suddenly

you realize, like, Okay. Yeah. I I I have some things to work

with here. And if I started at this point and then okay. Now I have

I can start building a strategy. Or if you don't like the word strategy, just

a, you know, a step by step a to do a fancy to do list,

if you will. Because sometimes words like strategy will throw somebody off. Like, no.

I I don't I don't wanna be strategic. I wanna be creative.

But that's the the other part about the running the business is You get

to do all the creative things, but, unfortunately, it does require a lot of

the this kind of stuff. Yeah. So

I I would say, Currently, no. Not a lot written

down. All the all the existing production processes, those are all

written down. I can do those from memory, but, yeah, those are all written down,

of course. The marketing and some of this

stuff, no. No. It's not. Don't have a good reason why except I've

not done it, I guess. I think you're good at you have the production processes

down because that's what you like to do. And that's, I mean, the stuff that

you don't wanna do, you're gonna intentionally put your focus on that because it's not

fun. It's like yeah. I always use bookkeeping as a thing. Nobody

wants to do bookkeeping. Keeping. Nobody is, like, thinking, I can't wait to get home

tonight and go dig into my accounts receivables. It's just not

really well, I there are probably people out there who do like that. I shouldn't

say nobody, but in the creative world, I have,

not met many of them. It's usually the first thing that people outsource,

But it is something to think about too that and I forget. You'd mentioned say,

like, again, we're back to blogs, and Jesse's, for whatever reason, not going to write

your blogs, And that's what you think that you need to do. There

is that again, with it's the value of time and kinda considering it.

It's you can do it yourself, But if it it takes all the joy out

of your world to think, I have to sit here, and I have to write

this thing, how much time are you spending on it

Versus if you hired somebody who loves to write blogs

or if it's bookkeeping, how much you know, you might spend

3, 4 hours doing this stuff that you don't enjoy doing is not making you

happy at all. You could pay somebody else, and, yes, that's an expense,

But that person who loves doing books might be able to do

that 3 or 4 hours of your work in 1 hour. And

so it's It's just but it frees up 4 hours of your time to then

dedicate to something that will make you happier or maybe

bring more value back to you. Like, maybe it's and maybe it is.

It's finding these groups that you wanna hang out in, and then you spend that

extra 3 or 4 hours interacting with the people you wanna be talking

to, and then that could lead to some work. So I'm always a

big fan of keep your expenses low. But if you're

spending a lot of time doing something that you hate or are not good at,

like, those are the 2 things that you outsource. If you don't like doing it

or you're not good at it or maybe not good at. You're just

maybe less efficient than others at. We'll we'll put it that

way. But sometimes that's a way,

Especially when you have such limited time to be able to

you are spending a little bit, but it's kind of an investment that you

can hopefully then because, you know, if you take that 3 hours and then you

get a new client, now it just it paid for that, you know,

BlogBryder bookkeeper person or people. And they're

all finished. Thank you. I've got one little thing, and then I know we've gotta

wrap it up. But, essentially, to get where you're going, you need to

get started. Every journey is 1 step at a time. If we

don't take that 1st step, we're never going to get anywhere. We

can't let the analysis paralysis Getting our

way. Thank you. Thank you all. With that, we do need to go ahead and

wrap it up because we committed to an hour, and we like to be people

of our word. But, also, I have a suspicion that some of the

people either watching live or catching the the replay or the

podcast later might like what they hear and might wanna take a

similar step for themselves. You guys did this for us for

free, which was very generous and very kind. But if somebody wants to be part

of the community, who should I ask about how they can do that? Tara, you're

kind of handling what we're working on right now.

Yeah. So I would love to talk to people and help them out. You can

reach me at tanziestr.com

and schedule a call with me. And we're actually

working on packages aimed at creatives

to help Them solve the problems they're having like

this. Which I guess made this the perfect time for us to all get together

and talk about this and The right time for me to have problems. So, everybody,

you're welcome. With that, we're gonna go ahead and say goodbye. If you joined us

live, we're super glad that you were here. If you caught the replay or the

podcast later, Glad that you could do that. So I'm Brian. I'm at top

tier audio .com. And, then on this side is

Jennifer Longworth, Bourbon and Barrel podcasting.com. Amanda

Annette, you can find me at aardvarkgirl.com. That's 2 a's in

aardvark. Jesse, you can find me at

Tansieaster Audio or Tanziaster Academy. Tara,

you can find me at tanziaster.com. And unable to

join us tonight, we're Daniel Abendroth at rothmedia.audio,

and Carrie, who you can find at carrie.land.

I should remember that because it's so much fun to say, but carrie.land. Thank you

everybody for joining us, and we'll see you next week. And I've gotta click a

button, so we'll see if I can do that. Bye. Bye.

So How much is that?