Hey everyone, welcome back
again to a new episode of electronic
dance money.
As always, I am your host, Cristian besito. Hope you guys are doing well. I know I’m doing well. I don’t know if any of you guys are coffee beans like me. Over the years I’ve gotten more and more and more into coffee and now I’m like now I’m just now really into it.
I just got an arrow press.
Amazing. It’s the I don’t like if you guys just brew coffee in a coffee pot, you’re missing out on some amazing arrow press action, the arrow presses so just makes coffees so much more delicious. So much stronger. You get rid of that bitter acidic taste and you just taste the flavor so much more highly recommend in aeropress so I’ve been on this aeropress binge. I just ordered some new coffee beans to them going to roast myself from Colombia, which is I’m so excited. Can’t wait, can’t wait. I’m sure most of you are looking at the title and going, Well, what the hell is this about? And yes, you know, it is true believer or not. We, as producers can learn a thing about McDonald’s and their business model. I think everyone can learn a thing or two about McDonald’s and their business model. If you don’t really know the story of McDonald’s in 1952, Ray Kroc, who basically purchased McDonald’s from the owners, he used to be a milkshake salesman, or sorry, a milkshake machine salesman. And so he went into McDonald’s and he saw he saw the process that was he saw the process that the owners were using to
basically they
they basically created a system That was very precise, anyone could learn the system. And it was quick, fast, they could handle big long lines. And Ray Kroc saw this and was inspired by it, and
so much so that he
eventually went back to the business owners and wanted to franchise out the business. And they agreed, and within 12 years, they had one of the fastest growing businesses in the entire
world.
And in less than 40 years, McDonald’s was generating over $40 billion a year just within 40 years from 1952 to 1992.
That is unbelievable.
And now Now, how did the question you should be asking is how did they get to that point? How did they go from this family owned business in San Bernardino, California to this massive worldwide international food chain? Ray Kroc came up with the business format franchise. Which This is basically creating you basically create a franchise prototype now. Now the idea of franchises have been around for a while like Coca Cola has dealt with franchising. Same with Ford motors. The idea of the franchise has been around for a while, but what McDonald’s did was create a system for the franchise prototype for the average entrepreneur that can be utilized in any specific way. What he did was he created he created the prototype, so the prototype of what will have what the franchise would be. Now some of you might be asking, What is a franchise franchise prototype? Exactly? Well, it’s a it’s a model for a business. When you create a franchise prototype, it’s the model for what the business is going to be. They’ve got some very specific systems down to the tee, everything is like there’s a system for every single thing and when these systems are created, Do you have this well oiled machine that kind of works passively, it’s just consistently working and you can duplicate this process across the board anywhere at any time and teach anyone the entire process itself. And so what that does is people get the exact same experience when they go to that place when you go to McDonald’s you know what to expect every single
one of them looks the same
you know what the Met what’s on the menu you know how it’s going to be prepared. You know what the bathrooms are going to be like you know what it’s gonna be like to stand in line you know, it’s gonna be like to get drinks you know what drinks are there? You know what it’s like going through the drive thru so everything has a specific system
and
with that, you know what to expect when you go there when you go to chick fil a
you know what kind of chicken sandwich you’re gonna get.
When you go to Popeyes you know what kind of fried chicken your gag is same with KFC they and these are duplicated in specific ways. They can be ran the exact same everywhere else.
And Ray Kroc is the one.
He’s the founding father of this prototype of this way of doing business. And it was so successful that thousands of other entrepreneurs took up this process and started creating their own franchise prototypes for their business model. And eventually, they were able to duplicate their business and grow it as a franchise and make tons of money. So what does this have to do with being music producers? How can the franchise prototype be implemented as producers? Well, it’s pretty simple. Obviously, you’re not a food chain. You’re not a retail store. You’re a musician. That doesn’t mean that you can’t create this, this model this quote unquote model that could be duplicated because here’s the thing When you’re when you’re thinking about your business model,
and
I’m taking this into account as a producer, you know, producing a track, there’s that that’s created, let’s say that’s cooking the food. When you get inspired by another track, and you want to try to track in a specific genre, that could be the ordering of the food. So you’ve ordered your food, you decided you want to maybe make a future bass track. Now you have to cook the food, cooking the food is producing the track, wrapping the food up, is mixing it and handing it off to the customers mastering and releasing. Okay, so so we have this idea of what this looks like. So now, how do we create a business model or a system for each one of these processes? the ordering of the food, how do you get inspired Where does your creativity come from? How do you create a
system
where, you know, you’re going to be inspired by something that could be working out while you’re listening to music, they could be walking. It could be going for a run. It could be playing video games, who knows it’s gonna be different for everyone, but you have to figure out what is it that triggers that creativity? You could be like me where it’s a lot of not producing at all.
I don’t, I don’t produce regularly.
But what happens is occasionally I’m like, Oh, I really want to write check. This burst of creativity just pops into my mind. I have this itch you guys have heard me talk about before I have this itch I have to scratch it. I go in produce a track boom, right? The best thing I’ve ever written. I there’s not a good way for me to duplicate that other than waiting in that’s my system in place for that.
But I’m okay with that
because I don’t want to be a full time touring artists or producer I don’t really care for that.
So
I don’t need to create this really great system where I’m consistently
being
getting creativity being inspired. But
some of you
do get inspired more often you want to be full time producer. So you have to figure out a system in which you are getting creative and inspired when you need to be. Okay, so let’s say we’ve created that system. Now you have to create a system for the actual production, the actual cooking of the food. McDonald’s has this stuff down by the tee. I mean, I think I think McDonald’s doesn’t let their fries sit in the warmer for more than seven minutes. Now, I will attest that I’m sure most of you had have had old fries from McDonald’s and you know, they’ve been sitting in that warmer longer and you can’t have you’re not gonna have perfection. You know, you’re gonna have bad, bad businesses, you’re gonna have people running bad McDonald’s, and that happens and
you know, if you complete
it I don’t know if you’ve ever complained to McDonald’s. But if you have, they do give you like free coupons and stuff.
They resolve that issue because
because the customer matters to them. But the point is, is they have these systems just perfect that there’s a specific way that the food is cooked. There’s a specific way the Big Mac is prepared. There’s just a
specific way that
the Quarter Pounder is prepared. There’s a specific way that the bathrooms are cleaned. There’s a specific way that they take your order because they’ve tested these systems in their prototype business. they’ve tested multiple ways of doing things they found what is more efficient, was the most efficient way of going about this. And then when they found out the results in what was the best way about cooking the fries and leaving them in the fryer or Leaving and leaving them in the warmer when they found the best method, then they were able to process that out, they were able to write that down and process it out to all the other restaurants. Now, this doesn’t mean that you’re trying to duplicate yourself as a producer. But the point is, is this, what this develops is efficiency. You know what to expect when you’re going into producing a track, you know, what you what buttons you need to press where you need to look what you need to do. So you don’t waste time because time is one of the most valuable assets
that we have.
We’re getting less and less of it.
By the second as you’re listening to this podcast, you have fewer time right now than when you hit play. So if you think about that, you need to be taking that into account when you’re even producing The more tracks you finish, the better they’re gonna get. The more tracks you promote, the better you’re gonna get at promoting.
But in order to
progress even further and further things need to be efficient within a system. You’ve heard me talk about systems,
time and time and time
again. And it’s because of how important they are.
Before you implement
the franchise prototype or you start developing your own prototype for your your yourself and your own business, there’s some things that are that that you have to take into account before you start develop the developing these systems. I mean, the first major one is understanding your vision and your mission. What are what is your end goal? Where do you want to be at? How many years is it going to take you to get to that end goal and
you have to be realistic
if you want to be a touring
artist, playing major festivals, and you haven’t even released your first track.
You can’t put that goal in three years.
I mean, you can.
But be real with yourself. Are you working that much?
Are you networking that much?
Is your promotion down? so well? I
mean, you haven’t even tested if you haven’t released a track, right? So how do you know your promotions that go to your marketing is going to be that good? takes a while to really figure that stuff out? It’s not easy. I’m not saying that none of you can do it. I’m just saying if you’re if that’s your goal in three years, you haven’t even released a single track yet. And you’ve been producing for two years. Is that realistic? Is that goal? More well placed in 10 years? So you have to figure out what what’s your vision? What’s your mission? in it what one of the best ways to understanding your vision and your mission. Is to picture yourself at your own funeral.
What are people saying about you?
How many people are there?
What do you want people to be saying about you at your funeral? How
many people do you want there?
With that in mind, you can start to backpedal to figure out what your goals should be.
Maybe you want to be honored across social
media, by your fans, and other people within the industry. Well, how do you get there, then?
What do you have to develop to get there?
Now once you have your vision and your mission down, then it’s time to really take a step in in the system’s direction, creating reliable systems for everything. Now, this goes into the things that I’ve done to the thing that I’ve talked about many times and the fact of working on your bed. Business rather than in it. This is the same with like working on your systems. As a producer instead of just producing or just promoting marketing.
Come up, write down,
every single step you take. When you produce a track, every single step,
I opened the DA,
I look for kick sample, I look for a snail then I start writing the main lead I look for lead sound, I write the melody for I write the baseline, write down every single step. This part is going to be very important. There’s a reason why you write down these steps you need to have this stuff written down. There’s going to be two reasons why you want these written down. This doesn’t this goes the same for when you’re doing research for new samples or new sounds. This is the same for when you’re promoting a track when you’re searching for record labels. These all can be broken down into individual jobs. Now you have to write down what steps you take Every from from point A to point B, how do you get from the beginning of the process to the end? Write down each step. And then mark how much it costs you. So maybe it takes you five minutes to look for lead. Well, if How much does that cost for that five minutes? Is it 25 cents? Just write $1 amount next to that, what the cost of that is? Because then you can determine how much is it costing you in time to write an entire track? And how can you reduce how long it takes you so that your dollar per hour goes up, it still cost that much. But if you do it in a shorter amount of time, you’re going to start making more money, your payout for that time. Now in this this stuff can be utilized later on when you can start like if you can hire a virtual assistant or you start building a team, like we’ve talked about in the last episode. with Carlos and Gino, we talked about building a team in the episode before that episode
29 and 30.
We talked
about building a team when you start building a team, you can start outsourcing some of these things to to people within your team now might not necessarily be the production stuff, but it might be some of the marketing stuff or the promotional stuff. Now you have $1 written down for how much that costs. But if you have a very if you have a, if you have a good system in place, you can hand this off to them and say, these are the steps you need to take these, this is the way that I run my business. This is the way that I run my artistry. This is how it needs to be run. And this is what it’s gonna This is what I’m gonna pay for doing this. You know, I mean, do the math like you’re you’re, you’re not gonna have to overpay someone, you can start paying for an actual team, but it’s going to take a couple of years for you to develop this franchise. So it’s so everything has a proper system in place. Now, the next step, once you have all that stuff written down, is to track your systems and analyze them every couple of weeks. This is working on your business instead of in it, looking at your systems, looking at your list of things. What can you do to automate some things? How can you make the system be improved, like we talked about reducing how long it takes to do something?
This is this is right into
automating things if it has to do with production, maybe you can set up macros, so you just hit one key it does three things. We’ve talked about macros in the past. But if you can set up macros to reduce how long it takes to do something, it still cost that much to do something, maybe it’s 25 cents that you spend five minutes doing something well now it takes you two seconds, but it still costs 25 cents. That number goes up. I mean an insane amount The money you made in that one second was more than it took you in five minutes. So you need to be tracking your systems you need to be analyzing working on your business instead of in it. Look at where you can improve systems, across the board with everything marketing, promotion, research, looking for new samples, new leads production, everything in this you know, this is also analyzing your templates. We’ve talked about that before improving on your templates, so it takes less time to do things. This is all about creating a system in analyzing them and improving them. And you have to be consistent with the way you work. If you’re not consistent with the way you work. There’s not a good way for you to track and analyze everything you can’t reliably track and analyze and improve your systems. If you’re not consistent with the way you work. Again, we’re creating a franchise prototype, something where we would be able to To take our quote unquote manuals for our quote unquote employees or future franchisees, we should be developing some sort of manual. So we can hand this off to someone who’s got a high school level education, and they read it and they know exactly what they have to do. Because eventually, if you are going to be a full time producer, you’re gonna have a team, you’re gonna have to offload some of this stuff. And if you don’t have stuff in place, you don’t have these manuals, quote, unquote manuals in place, if you don’t have systems in place, when you hand this off to someone and you just generally tell them what you want them to do. They’re going to do it but not your way and not the way you want it to be done. And that will eventually catch up with you and frustrate you. So we want to avoid that. We want to be very crystal clear with what is the vision and our mission and relay that to our team. And within the manual you give them that really If we do this this way, because of this, because if we don’t do it this way, then we can’t get to this goal. because things are not running the way that the system needs to be ran. In order for the artist to be successful. There’s a lot that we can learn from how McDonald’s created the franchise prototype, and the franchise model business model. Because this can be replicated in every single piece of your life. It’s not just as a business, this could be replicated in your own personal life. However, you don’t know if something works if you haven’t tested it, and you haven’t tracked data. And yes, I do mean tracking it, create a spreadsheet, learn how to use Excel, it will significantly help you out with testing this, these types of data, this type of data. If you develop a system and work on that system, and you’re consistent with the way you work on that system for two weeks in everyday you track how many long it takes you to do something. And then you go in for the next two weeks in or you analyze everything over the past two weeks ago, okay? What could I do to improve these things? Okay, I could try this. Try that, you know, maybe it’s setting up macros for production. Maybe it’s creating email templates for when you’re emailing record labels. Or maybe even using templates for your email list. Maybe you have a specific email template that you use every single time and, or maybe there’s a specific way you would like to write your email. So you create a template. So everything’s already developed, and you can kind of copy and paste information into that. Maybe that’s what you do. Well, then track over the next two weeks after the changes you made has it reduced how long it’s taking you to do something? If it has that system is good. But again, you want to every once in a while, come back in, can you improve that even further.
This is all setting
you up for success in the future. By the way This isn’t necessarily that everything’s going to be crystal clear right on from here from this point on in like your systems perfect. No, this is getting to that perfect system over the next couple of years. So that when you start seeing success,
you can handle it.
When you’re doing all this traveling, when you’re touring, when you have a handful of remixes lined up, or you have to produce a certain amount of tracks by cific, specific date, you can accept those projects and you can go Yeah, no problem. You get it done every single time. People trust you, because they trust your workflow. They trust that you know what you’re doing because you’re consistent every time you get the project done early, because you have a system in place so that you can develop these tracks. Like Like you know, the back of your hand. This is setting you up for success more than anything else. Now, one of the One of the best things I recommend for some of you guys to check out for like if you’re looking looking at ways to improve your systems and automate things is Zapier. Zapier is fucking great. I think I might have mentioned it before on the podcast, but you can automate so many things in that. I know like one of the automations I have in places, Zapier will text me every time I have a new quote request. So I can see five new quote requests come in, rather than digging through emails or not knowing if an email actually went through for a quote request. And a few days have gone by and I do have a quote request by I don’t know it, and that has happened and that can cause issues. So I’ve developed a system I’ve created I’ve created an automation where I’ll get a text so I know immediately when I have a quote request. So I remember I it’s a reminder for me a check for me to answer that and send out new proposals for leads or clients. You can use Zapier in a bunch of different ways go look through, it’s free for the first five zaps you have. And then they have a paid version, which I think is like 20 or $25 a month for something like 25 zaps, but you can do a lot of stuff with Zapier. It, basically it allows you to connect other apps with each other that normally wouldn’t be able to integrate. So it’s really, really useful, really cool. Now, the book that is completely based on this episode that all my inspiration came from is the E myth revisited. Why most successful businesses don’t work and what to do about it. I’ve mentioned this in previous few episodes, I think, read it, get the book, read it, there’s a lot more information in it. Then I just I gave you kind of a rundown of what the book is all about. And it’s about implementing the franchise prototype and how to go go about that, but there’s so much more detail in the book.
That I did not nail on that you will be
glad you read
could not recommend this book.
Enough. This should be honestly
like the very first book you read if you’re starting out as a producer, because it’s going to teach you about creating the the template of
your success.
And if you can, if you can read it, and you can think about how you can implement it with yourself as a producer, or maybe even as a business owner, if you are running your own studio or whatever it is you’re doing, you’re going to be miles ahead of everyone else. And if you’re consistent with it and work on it, you you will be thanking yourself. I highly, highly, highly recommend it. But that is it for today guys. I hope you enjoyed this one
fairly quick.
But I think we nailed on some really good topics. I think I broke everything down for you guys in in a in a good way where you can analyze what I mean and hopefully Start working on this stuff. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t listen to this Epsom government. That’s interesting work on it. I think you’d be surprised at how how much more successful you can be and how much more comfortable you can be and confident with what you’re doing if you actually implement these kinds of tips and tricks. As always, head to facebook.com join the electronic dance money community, head to Apple podcasts, leave a review there. Envious audio.com slash Episode 31 is where the show notes will be with all the links. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Have a good one and I’ll see you next time.