The Top 11 Tools For Creating Your Own Six Figure Home Studio

Hello, Brian Hood, here from the six-

figure

home

studio

. Don't worry, I've noticed a trend on YouTube and that trend is that there are more than enough tutorials to mix it up. There are more than enough tutorials for equipment addons. Insert whatever you want VST here. Look, there are tons of people about it, but I see relatively little to no guidance on

tools

for

your

studio

that will actually give you a return on investment (ROI), so in this video I want to break down 11 of my favorite

tools

. that I use in my own studio business to increase my efficiency, which generates more income or directly increases my income for my studio, so these are equipment, tools or software that will give you a return on investment or a return on the investment for

your

money. and this will also be what I consider a buffet of advice.

You can just take one of these 11 or a few of these 11 tools and implement them in your business, but don't feel like you have to take them all, but this is going to be a good overview of some really good tools that you can start implementing in your studio to help improve your business and by the way, if you're struggling with the business of running your studio, feel free to hit the subscribe button below this. video because I'm going to post a lot more things like this in the future. First on my list of tools with a return on investment attached.

Tools that will help you earn more money for your study. It's something called best proposals. a proposal software that I have been using for about a year and a half and this is amazing. I don't have time to go too deep into this, so you'll have to bear with me as I go. this is just this, I want you to imagine that a band asks me for the price of a project and you say, hey, it's going to be $5,000 and it includes this, it doesn't include this, let me know if you're interested. and you just sent it in an email, that's what I did for most of my career and that's what I called the white trash proposal method, this is what I call the high class proposal method and again no I have time to get into this, but this is what you see every time you enter the proposal.

Now there's a little introductory area here that prepares you emotionally for what you're about to read. I'm trying to put some emotion behind it. Your heart and soul in the music, don't let your mix break it because I mix and master. You've worked hard on your music. You want it to be heard and appreciated by current and future fans once you release those songs. They are there forever. This is what you see on the first page. It's just the introduction. them the process and the time scale you know step 1 step 2 step 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 the time scale how long should this take?

I give you a little about me Brian, meet Brian, he's not the most terrible Hulme in the world 19 he's professional experience I'm here to make you sound good that's all, talk about the price, it's all there once you agree to all the terms and conditions, non-refundable application, scheduling, no hidden fees, that kind of thing once they get over everything they have What you have to do is write your name to sign and this is the interesting part: they can pay the deposit through of this software, so this is something called bed proposals. If you like this template, I have set up an affiliate link through them where the first one is.

It's a free trial for the software if you just want to try it out, no credit card required, but you can go to better proposals dot studio and you can sign up for a free account and you can get this template that I just showed you upload it to your account where you can change photos or words, but you have the good skeleton there to start better proposals. This is a great way to stand out from your competitors who aren't doing something like this, I think. This will be the standard for the future of recording studios.

Everyone will start to expect to see this kind of thing in the studios. Another interesting thing about this software is that you receive an email notification as soon as someone opens this email, whether it happens immediately or within months. in the future or reopen it in six months. This is a good time. When they open it, you can see how much time they spend on each page. This is a great way to know if they are serious about you in the first place. If they are reading each page in detail or if they are skimming straight through the price and then they leave, or you can, this is a great reason to email them, so let's say six months later they dropped. the map that you're trying to get the project and they open the email in six months or the proposal in six months, you can just email them and say, Hey, I was thinking about you the other day, how's this going? project? that kind of thing you can just pop up, let's say on top of mine, this is a really cool way to stay in the mind.

Next on my list is something called stripe, this is the URL stripe com, this is a payment processor, now this is a really boring tool. but if you want to use something like best proposals or really any other payment platform other than PayPal and you want to start accepting payments, you need to have something like Stripe to integrate with so you can accept credit card payments, now best proposals and a number. A lot of other things out there will definitely integrate with Stripe because this is basically the industry standard. This is what you want to sign up for if you want to start accepting credit card payments and it's very easy to set up, really easy to use and it will deposit. the money directly to your bank account as soon as you get it instead of PayPal where you keep it in this state of limbo.

I personally use PayPal and Stripe, but this is something you'll definitely want to implement into your business if you want to. start accepting payments through these other apps that I'm going to talk about today, number three on my list today is something called Google Voice. You can get it by going to Voice Google Comm, but this is a tool that's really great if you have a separate phone if you want a separate phone number for your business, so if you have a recording studio and you want to have a separate phone number on your same mobile device, you will have to have two phones, you only have one phone, two Google numbers.

Voice is 100% free, it's easy to sign up, and as long as you have a Gmail account, you can sign up. This allows you to accept calls and text messages on a separate number and in the Google Voice app and keep it completely separate from your personal life and your relationship reasons this is great, first and foremost is not having to give your personal number to your clients so they don't disturb you, you can set do not disturb time for your business phone but not your personal phone and it allows you to separate your personal life from your business, something I highly recommend to any recording studio owner.

The second advantage is that you can have separate voice messages for your personal phone and your business phone. way you're not intermingling the bathroom, it's really weird when I call like it's a friend's phone and they have like a business voicemail or when I call a business phone and it's like a personal voicemail, it's just not very professional, so sign up for this it's free. and there's really no reason you shouldn't use it if you want to have separate numbers for your business. Also, if you look down at the bottom of the screen, it's available for Android iOS and a web app, and will link to others as well. tools that I mentioned today, so it's very versatile and will integrate a clock into all different types of platforms, so now we're at number four on my list and this is something called GoDaddy accounting.

This is a company I hate. I hate GoDaddy. but their accounting software is solid, it's ten dollars a month for this software, but when it comes to organizing your finances in a way that's super easy to follow and gives you trends, gives you tax documents, gives you reports based in the month you know. monthly income and quarters and all these fancy things that some will need more than others at the end of the day, it saves you time and it saves you money, so ten dollars a month is a small price to pay, even if that only saves you an or two hours per month throughout the year, that will go a long way and save you a lot of time and frustration, especially people who reside in the US when it comes to generating tax reports for your CPA, your CPA certificate.

I think that's what it means like they'll be able to take these reports and run them. I'll give you a quick overview of this so that within the dashboard you have an overall month-over-month profit and loss. a total profit for the year has total income for the year has total expenses for the year if you start if you track hours you can track through this and it will automatically enter invoices. You can also make invoices through this. gives you a complete breakdown of your business expenses gives you more tax notifications all kinds of cool stuff on this page also links all your credit cards to all your bank accounts, so it automatically imports all your expenses into your account and It integrates with PayPal and Raya that I mentioned earlier and automatically brings all your income here so you don't manually enter any information, but the interesting part is in the tax area.

This is the only thing I wanted to show if you scroll down here. You can export this right here and it will make it extraordinarily easy for your CPA to do your taxes. It saves them time, which saves you money, which makes everyone's life easier at the end of the day. Very good at electronic accounting. I highly recommend it. I'm not a paid affiliate for any source in town, it's just the only one I found at the price that does what I want it to do. Number five on my list of really useful tools that will give you a return on investment (ROI) is something now called rescue time.

This app is a free version and has a paid version. I use the free version for years. I upgraded to the paid version only because I found it very insightful and useful but this is an app that resides on your computer and installs on it's on my laptop it's on my desktop it's not on mobile but you might They'll switch to that soon which would be awesome, it's a bit annoying but it's not a deal breaker and this watches everything you do, it's a bit creepy but it says it gives you a monthly report, you can actually break it down however you want, but it gives you a report on how you're spending your time and you actually get a weekly email that says how many hours you had for productive time. how many hours you had for unproductive time and this is how it changed compared to the previous week so this has been really good to keep me on track and make sure I'm not starting to slide so a couple of things if you look at this dashboard I've logged 65 hours so far this month, that's 104 hours less than last month, but we're only halfway through the month, so the daily totals, the daily patterns, how much is spinning in each of these areas makes sense.

I can see you know my peak, if you look at peak times, which tends to be before 10am. m., it's mostly work, then I get more into design and composition towards the afternoon and then later on, this is the time I'm usually most distracted by. I'm in a crisis situation right now when it comes to business, so I'm working a lot more than playing, but if you look at the good thing, let's go back to April 2018, 170 hours logged, the same productivity score that you dan. a pulse call but it's a score of 79 percent 31 percent trading 52 hours and if I go to the previous month 78 then I'm pretty stable at this point this year, but this is where it becomes a powerful thing if you go annually and I can see the general trends of your business throughout the year, so this year I logged 750 hours.

I have a productivity pulse of 77 percent, as they call it. If you look at the graph, it's actually pretty good reading productive versus unproductive time, with bad down there. but come to 2017, I have now gone from a productivity pulse of 79 to 65 and this is one of the reasons why, in the first place, throughout the year I logged twenty-three forty-four hours on any of my computers, see a pair? interesting things that I think are really useful for spotting patterns in my business, so I spent the first six weeks of the year traveling abroad. I was in Thailand in Cambodia for the first six weeks of the year and as you can see here, look how.

How much unproductive time and how long it took me to get back to where I normally am. This is a good place to be. This is a bad place to be. It took me another three months to regain the momentum I lost with that. trip and then hit another colleague with burnout over the summer, so this tells me two things, firstly, I can't go six weeks without working again, that takes too much away from a minimal path, sothat if I take another trip, I either have to work while traveling to maintain my momentum and my desire to work or I have to take shorter trips of three to four weeks at most because I lose too much momentum.

The second thing I noticed is that around June I'm starting to get back into my flow. I've reached a point of exhaustion that makes me do this super inefficient, exhaustion mode where I don't get much productivity, so now this year what I've done is in June I have a shorter trip scheduled in June that will allow me to get away to recharge and hopefully avoid that late summer burnout I had last year, so it's really cool, this is all done automatically. I don't have to do any of this manually, but the information you get from this is invaluable, especially when we start looking at trends over time.

If we look back at 2016, we see the same stupid burnout mode in the middle of summer and then another one in the fall, so seeing this type of thing I think is very important to make sure you catch these negative trends and then stop them before they happen. start, you know, changing your habits or changing your routines. prevent this type of thing from happening again, this type of thing you can detect with the free account, one hundred percent free, you don't have to pay for it, there are just a couple of extra things that you get from the paid account and then also you're getting weekly reports so you don't have to verify this account you're going to have to go to your dashboard you're just going to get weekly emails to keep up with number six on my list of tools for your studio this is a site called Wix comm, this is a website builder that I've talked about in the past, that I've talked about in the six

figure

houses for podcasting and I have a whole course that shows you how to go through this is a free course that you can access by going to recording studio website communication, but first I wanted to show you a couple of things here, let me show you my studio website that I built in Wix and I'm not going to use terminology based on my gender.

Don't say don't say this kind of stuff on your website if you don't work with heavy music, but this is my studios website, it's very easy to build, it has my portfolio, it has a quote request form, it has a little about me. and people can fill this out and potentially work with me if I choose to work with them, a couple of things about this is editing your site to build your site, everything is extraordinarily simple to use if I go into the editor here. I'll just show you a quick behind the scenes here, everything here is completely drag and drop, you can move things, you can resize things, you can change font sizes, you can move buttons, you can do whatever you want.

I want with this I'm going to undo all of this I don't want to save it and you can add your portfolio to all of this it's very easy to use very easy to organize and make it look the way you want and even my site won't look fantastic. You can definitely make it look much better. You can add animations. You can do little things like shadows. You can change the style of the button. But this is Wix. I have created my entire studio website there. I use WordPress for six figure

home

studio communications because I need a little more power for that, for most recording studio websites Wix is ​​the easiest tool to use and is the one I fully support again if want. to show if you want to see how i built this site i have a full course that walks you through how to create a site identical to this just go to the recording studio website com and you can sign up for free course number seven on my list. of tools for your study that will give you a return on investment is something called Google Analytics Once you've created a website, the next thing you need to do is set up a Google Analytics account.

I'm not going to tell you how to do it, there are a lot of tutorials online, just know that this is something you need and I'll give you a quick summary from my own site, this is four, five, six recordings, traffic information from the last three, four years, the last four years, actually, you can see the trends that you're having. I had a good time in mid-2015, another peak there, but overall over the years I've been pretty stable I'd say, so one of the main reasons you want this connected to your website is to know where you are.

You don't have if you don't get clients, what's the problem? Are people not visiting your website? This will tell you that there are people who visit your website but do not make legal requests or call your phone number. try scheduling a meeting or whatever your call to action is if they are not taking the action you want them to take or even booking study time if they are not doing what you want them to do on your site, this Next I will tell you that You can see what languages ​​people who come to your site speak.

You can also see the location of all the people who come to your site, what country they are from, so you will see most of my people from the United States very frequently. from Russia, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, no real surprises for me except Russia, but I think Russia has a tendency to send spam traffic to websites, so I don't really trust the Russian thing still on the list: you can see where your people are. come from this is another big thing for me, my biggest source of traffic has been organic and direct search and if you have organic and direct search as your main traffic sources, that means one thing and one thing, almost always one thing that It means I have a good word of mouth customer base in your favor, so let me paint the picture here.

The reason I get organic search here is not because people are writing in a Nashville recording studio or a metal recording studio or whatever, even though I write four. -five-six recording, so they type in Brian Hood's studio, they're looking for me specifically. I know this because I can see the search data behind how people find me through organic search, secondly, if people go directly to my site. writing four, five, six recordings com, that means someone said, go to this website or I told them, go to this website, so that's a good sign of a good and healthy recording studio, secondly, if It has a lot of referral traffic, people who sin in traffic.

For you, you can see where it's coming from, so there may be traffic sources that you didn't know you had and you can start trying to foster those relationships with the people who are referring traffic to you in an effort to attract more traffic. Next is behavior. You can see a couple of really important things about the behavior on your website. Some of those things are average time on page. The number of visits to the page. Your bounce rate. All of these things are great indications of the health of your website or its effectiveness. of your website so first of all time on page is people doing anything on your website when they come to your page and if there is high time on page that means you are listening to Through your portfolio, they may be reading a little about you.

If you take the time to fill out your quote form, four minutes is a great bounce rate, you generally want to see less than 50 percent, that's the number of people who come to your site without taking any action and then just leave. , but in my case, because I'm very niche and also because I probably get a lot of unqualified traffic, eighty-eight percent is not abnormal. What you really want to know is the total percentage of people who visit your site and take the action that you want them to take and then those people who take that action, how many of them actually become customers?

This is all done through Google Analytics and there are many other things you can do here, you can look week by day, month, you can really dig into this data, but this is a saying I heard a long time ago now let's say it all the time no. I thought of this but what is measured is managed or another way of saying it is what is not measured is not managed. So if you are not measuring all this data, if you are not looking at all this data continuously, there is no way you can change to have a more effective website, so Google Analytics is a very, very useful tool and a tool that I think. anyone who has a website should have it, and if you have a studio, you should have a website, which means I should have Google Analytics number 8 on my list of tools, a tool called calendly.

This one is awesome for those who like to program things. especially for people who are booking studio time, let me give you a real quick rundown of the things you can do with this. First of all, it ties into your calendar, which is really great if you have things that are already on your calendar, let's just say. you put a personal lunch meeting or a personal trip or something and you block time on your calendar, it will automatically update so no one can book that time or those dates on your calendar, that's the first cool thing you do.

You don't have to continually update it within Cali, it updates for you based on your personal calendar, whether it's Google Calendar or Apple Calendar. Secondly, people can pay for specific hours of their reservation, so let's say you have some hours that people can book and to reserve those hours they have to pay within calendly if you sign up for Stripe which is one of the tools that I talked about before, you can connect that to Calendly and you can accept payments to reserve time on your schedule, this is super easy for anyone. to use and all you have to do is send them a link so a great example of this is for people who want to book lunch with me through the six figure home studio if they're in town I'll just send them a link and all you have to do is choose a time that is on that calendar and it will automatically block it.

I'll block the timeout on my calendar, it will automatically block the timeout on your calendar, and it automatically sends reminders to both of us so we don't forget. If someone books study time with you, you want them to first pay for that second, don't forget that study time, and thirdly, you want it to be added to both of you. calendars, which is very critical for things to actually work as far as systems go, so let's take a look at this, if someone hits a link while you're sending it, this is for a 60 minute block of time, a 60 minute meeting or a coffee or lunch or even an hour of study and then this will sync with my counter, so if you click, let's say Wednesday, May 23, you can choose a time that works for you, press confirm and then the end of your name and email if so.

When accepting payments, they would also enter their payment information here and then hit scheduled event. My calendar is really easy to use because you don't have to go back and forth. The only thing that sucks more than anything is phone/calendar etiquette. tag meaning like Hey, can you have a lunch meeting tomorrow at noon? Oh no, I already have a meeting or not. I'll be out and about on Thursday for you. Oh no, thirst doesn't work. How about next Friday? Well, no Fridays. It doesn't work for me, instead of going back and forth, just send someone the damn link and what I'll have to do is choose the time that works for them and you know it works for you because it's already synced with your counter, so the calendar It's great and something I think most, if not all, of you could use for your study.

Number nine on my tools list is actually the rare hardware recommendation. I almost never recommend hardware when it comes to recording studios because most hardware when you get past the entry-level equipment, most hardware doesn't really have much return on investment (ROI), at least none that you can easily track. This piece of hardware definitely has a return on investment (ROI) attached because this is something that will save you time in the studio. So just a quick summary of how you can use this, you can basically program any key press you want on any of these keys here or any key combination or any specific set of key presses in a row.

A quick example of one thing I would like to do is set up anything on the keyboard to never have to take my hand off the mouse and never have to lift my hand off the left side of the keyboard, so a quick example of this is the Delete key. Now the delete key is something that when you're working and you have to press the delete key, you have to take your hand off the mouse to press it or you have to take your left hand off the other side of the keyboard and press it and that slows you down.

It's not much, but It's a little bit and you have to do it a lot, so over time it really adds up, so all I have to do is set the Delete key to where it is, let's say at the bottom rightfrom this. keyboard down here and what I'll have to do is tap it with my pinky and now I'll never have to lift my hand and there are all kinds of ways you can do this where you can quickly reach over with your left hand and tap a key instead. Go to the right side of your keyboard now, this is really useful in pro tools where you don't have custom shortcuts so you can't create shortcuts to work for your workflow, instead you can set keystrokes that you want. this keyboard now let me give you an example of the actual macro keys that you can set up and this is a combination of keys that you can press in a row and you just press one key and it does all those things in a row, one of In the examples that I use, I'm using the Pro Tools example here, so forgive me if you're on another wrist, but if I want to highlight all the unused regions in Pro Tools, I think it's like command shift U or something.

I remember how to do more and it will highlight all the unused regions and then I want to clarify that I didn't have to press the Shift option or the Shift B command. I think something like that and then I have to press Enter to say "OK." I want to delete them and I do it several times a day, maybe even twice an hour when I'm editing Drummond, whatever, this is all done with a single key press, just type the keystrokes you want with the delay you want. whatever you want between keystrokes and I can press a key and it will automatically select all unused regions, automatically remove all unused regions and then automatically press Enter to confirm there are a million other things I use this for, but that's just one example. of a series of button presses in a row that you can set up with a single key press on this thing and you'll just know the best way to use this because there are always things that you do on the keyboard that are really efficient from an ergonomic standpoint or really inefficient in terms of how many times you have to do in a row or do these keys solve anything with this, but I really recommend you buy it, it's $145 on Amazon, but if it even saves you 10 to 15 seconds per hour or per day over a long period of time, this will give you a return on investment in your time. a lot of time, you're a little bit of time for the rest of your career, it's something I can highly recommend, so check this out, think about some really interesting ways you can use this, maybe I'll do another video later where I'll talk about how I use this number 10 on my list of tools for your study that will give you a return on investment (ROI) it is closed point IO this is the URL and this is the name of the company this is a CRM a relationship management software with the client there is a free version of this that if you want this is expensive if you want to go to HubSpot communications they have a CRM that is free but with some limitations but I will cover the closed IO because that is the one I use think about this and I want to show you a quick overview of how we use this.

Think about how the interaction goes with you and a customer. Someone asks you about your anger. You sent a proposal. A high class proposal like the one I mentioned before. it falls off the map and then you forget about it and then you lose the project because you never follow it. This is what happens with most projects and this is what happened to me for years until I started using closed on I/O. This is how it happens now that someone contacts you for a price, it comes through the court request form on your website and now we're close to point IO, so let's say Creed contacted me about an album mix and I tell them that that's what it will be like. $5,000 for the mix of that album, so now let's say that to keep things as clear as possible, I can now create an opportunity here.

I sent them a proposal, a high class proposal for $5,000 and I think it will close, let's say they are I'm going to go to the studio around June. I'm going to put mid-June here and I can say it's a $5,000 ten-song album mix and I got it right and the proposal has been submitted. This is an active live agreement and our opportunity as they call it and now I sent the proposal and I want to set a reminder to follow up in a week and I will have to click save and now this task will be in my inbox in a week so I never forget to follow up with this person with any email they send me.

This is because of the way I use my personal email, so there's a lot of gibberish here, but all the emails we exchange are on this timeline in chronological view. I can check old emails with current emails and I can use all kinds of templates and stuff, but let me quickly show you a key feature if you're going to I'm going to set this up for today if I go into my Inbox now I have a reminder here to follow up with Crede, so today let's say I come in here and I'm going to follow up.

I was going to respond and send a follow up right here. Hey Scott, I just want to fight you. I'm sure you received my last email or that you received my proposal. I can edit this, however, I want it to be sent by my administrative assistant because my administrative assistant here is the one who does this. I hit submit and then I can hit check to remind me. to follow up if there is no response in a week I hit send and now I don't have to do anything else. There's always a constant reminder for me to follow up on this project now, if they respond that will show up in my inbox too. and inside my inbox there will be an email that will appear there and now that I followed up, I hit the check mark, it's done and this is just one of the super quick overviews of CRM, maybe the feature that I will do the most A detailed view of this, but the CRM czar is very good at helping you stay on top of each project, whether you get 15 20 30 quotes or 20 30 proposals that you send out every month, there is absolutely no way you can stay on top of it. day manually.

With this, this is a system that you can use to help you automatically stay up to date with all of your business emails and finally, the last, but definitely not the least, of the tools in my 11 tools for your studio will give you provides return on investment (ROI). This is a tool. Called zapier or zapier however you want to pronounce it, this is the most complex tool on this list and I'm not going to read all of this for you, but I encourage you to visit this website and read all of this. because there's more than I could explain here, but just a quick summary of this, think about this, there are many pieces of software that you can use for your business, at least from what I mean, I only told you another ten besides this one , but few of those pieces of software to talk to you will ever talk to each other all that to say there are different pieces of software in the world and some don't talk to each other zabi ER is an intermediary, a translator who will take information from a piece of software and move it to another piece of software and I'll give you a couple quick examples of how this might work for you.

Let's say you sign up for Calendly and close a Oh, right, the CRM if someone calls. If you're closed and you're not answering the phone or someone is calling you through Google Voice and you're not answering the phone, then you can zap or automatically text them a link that says, "Hey, sorry, I missed your call." . If you want to schedule a call with me, click this link to have someone call you and you can automatically text them instead of relying on voicemail or relying on them to answer when you call back if you're really busy and don't Are you connected. phone all the time can text automatically, you can have Zapier automatically text you, a link in the calendar to sign up for a scheduled meeting with you, this is just one of a million different variations, another would be if you sign up for Wix, well your forms in Wix don't pass data to your CRM, your customer relationship management software, so you can use zapier to link the contact form information you get from them to pass by zapier a closed, so it automatically imports everything for so you don't have to do it again manually, it integrates with thousands of different apps and there are all kinds of things called triggers and actions, when something happens, do this again.

I encourage you to delve deeper into this. I definitely will. I have to do another video on zapier in the future, but this is a good overview to let you know that this exists and really, for all of these software that I'm covering here, none of them are really detailed in this video. It lasted a lot longer than I thought, but I'm still only scratching the surface of many of these programs, so read this list and really see which of them work for you again. This is a set of tips, but don't let this overwhelm you.

There is a lot of software here, there are a lot of possibilities again, just pick the few that work for you if you want links to all of these tools along with 40 other resources that I think are my favorite tools for studying your business. just go to the dot studio resource guide, that's the url. I will send you a PDF called the ultimate resource guide for profitable producers and it will be a list of 50 resources that are similar to this or other versions of this and that will include links to the things that I just talked about, you can go to that URL again, It's the dot studio resource guide and you can sign up and I'll send you a PDF with a bunch of different resources like this, you probably don't even know a lot of these exist because no one really talks about this stuff.

I'm trying to change the game in the six-figure home studio again. If you liked this video and want more like it, just hit the subscribe button. I will be coming out with more videos like this in the future until next time happy rush and have a nice day