How To Build A Multi-Six Figure Video Production Business Using Cold Emails | With Anthony Craparotta

152_Anthony solo

Brian: [00:00:00] This is the six figure creative podcast episode 1 52. Welcome back to another episode of the six figure creative podcast. I'm your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my big bald beautiful purple shirted, cohost, Christopher, big bald. Beautiful. What I'm speaking about your I'm speaking about your mustache, which you still haven't gotten rid of.

[00:00:41] Chris: [00:00:41] Oh, yeah, man. It's um, if I jumped off, like, I don't know an airplane, I wouldn't need a parachute. This thing is big enough to,

[00:00:48] Brian: [00:00:48] There's so much resistance in that one, mustache to parachute your pig ass 40,000 feet to the ground.

[00:00:55] Chris: [00:00:55] I love it. It's fun.

[00:00:57] Brian: [00:00:57] Yeah,

[00:00:57] Chris: [00:00:57] I've always wanted one. How are you?

[00:00:59] Brian: [00:00:59] Man, I'm going to be a hundred percent real with you right now. I've liked this. What's the term malaise. Is that the term

[00:01:06] Chris: [00:01:06] Maybe,

[00:01:07] Brian: [00:01:07] I'm going to look that up real quick so I can share a new word with people, Malays.

[00:01:12] Yes. A general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness, whose exact cause of difficult to identify malaise.

[00:01:18] Chris: [00:01:18] oh my,

[00:01:20] Brian: [00:01:20] y'all hear that on,

[00:01:21] Chris: [00:01:21] yeah.

[00:01:22] Brian: [00:01:22] I hit the Google like pronounced thing. Malaise. Yeah. That's where I'm at right now. Yeah. It's nothing. It's like not a severe thing. It's not depression. It's not really even burnout, but it's like, it's like that feeling when you, uh, you slept too late on a cloudy morning and you just feel like crap.

[00:01:37] That's kind of where I've been the last few days where I'm like, I feel like I'm not making any progress and stuff. So that's the real Bryan. But everyone, this listen to this podcast or any number of time has heard that Brian

[00:01:46] Chris: [00:01:46] I to take Malays and mix it with ketchup and dip French fries in it.

[00:01:50] Brian: [00:01:50] sat here. I know you mean Manet's and there's, that's your pun that you're trying to do right now, but anyone who mixes male with Manet's is an absolute Savage. It's disgusting. I, I do not support it. Do not. not on this podcast.

[00:02:04] Chris: [00:02:04] Do you know what Manet's is made of

[00:02:05] Brian: [00:02:05] It's made of, uh, olive oil and egg.

[00:02:08] Chris: [00:02:08] and you add acid, like, so you put like vinegar in it and it literally rots the eggs and that's Manet's

[00:02:14] Brian: [00:02:14] Yeah. I've tried to make it myself before, because I've never liked store-bought Manet's and I was like, if I make it myself, maybe I'll like it. But then you have to like have either a really good mixer or you have to be really fast with a whisker, get a, a whisker is like your ticket. So to get the emulsion to hack actually have it.

[00:02:31] Okay. So let's back out of it. We're we're so far deep, like down the stupid rabbit hole. And we have our guests sitting here staring at us saying, what the hell? So let's actually, Chris, I'm gonna let you into our guests because our guest is a certified bad-ass and I don't want to mess us up because you know him better than I do.

[00:02:44] So really quick, tell us who our guest is. And then we're going to start.

[00:02:47] Chris: [00:02:47] well, I'll tell you what, Anthony, why don't you just quickly say hello? Tell us who you are briefly. And then I'm going to tell everybody how freaking awesome.

[00:02:57] Anthony: [00:02:57] Hello everybody. My name is Anthony. I run a. We bids.com. We're based in Toronto, Canada, and the, in the great north. And we are the web's number one lyric video company. We produce animated video content for artists and record labels all over.

[00:03:11] Chris: [00:03:11] Oh, boy, I'm so excited.

[00:03:12] Brian: [00:03:12] There's so much to unpack in that little blurb.

[00:03:16] Chris: [00:03:16] So Anthony, I've had the amazing opportunity of doing business coaching with you and your business is, is absolutely amazing. Your story is so cool. And that you went from a number of things to focusing on making lyric videos for people. And at this point, is it fair to say you've worked with every major label on the face of it?

[00:03:37] Anthony: [00:03:37] I'm certain there's a few we haven't, but certainly in terms of like all the big boys, you know, we kind of one by one, been checking them off the list. The big one that we were waiting for was Atlantic records. And we, we crossed them off the list a couple of weeks ago with Jason Derulo and Adam Levine.

[00:03:50] But, um, we've been sort of working our way up from, you know, artists that I used to tour with back when I was just a musician, uh, just a musician back when I was only a musician. And now it's moved well beyond just the, our peers in the kind of local scene around us. And some of our biggest relationships are in country.

[00:04:06] All over the world from Australia to Asia, we do a lot of business in the Netherlands and Germany. And of course America, where, you know, the hotspot of the music industry. We do a ton of work in the states as well.

[00:04:16] Chris: [00:04:16] well.

[00:04:16] What makes your story so interesting is that you have focused on a, on a niche and a niche

[00:04:21] Anthony: [00:04:21] does Google.

[00:04:22] Brian: [00:04:22] Nope. Nope, Nope. Niche, Chris.

[00:04:24] Chris: [00:04:24] niche. We say niche.

[00:04:26] Brian: [00:04:26] I have definitively look this up.

[00:04:28] Chris: [00:04:28] Okay.

[00:04:28] Brian: [00:04:28] Either one is well now, but niche is the correct answer. Niche is just now.

[00:04:34] Chris: [00:04:34] Fantastic. Okay. Well, your niche, Anthony is so interesting in that artists, bands, labels, et cetera. They come to you and that this is amazing in the midst of COVID they come to you and they say, Hey, we would like you to animate a kickass music video for us that does the lyrics in the video that will look amazing and we'll make our artists look awesome.

[00:04:56] Can you make this video?

[00:04:58] Anthony: [00:04:58] That's basically it. Yeah. I mean, it, obviously it starts with, you know, anytime you're getting into a lane like this, we start with independent artists and you kind of build a bit of a reputation. And I think, you know, one of the things, uh, I mean, I suppose the reason we're even talking is that our lyric video business has been successful.

[00:05:12] There's a lot of people who make lyric videos, but so I think the reason our business has been successful is what we actually do is we solve a problem, you know, record labels and artists, managers, and publicists release date comes fast. We've all been there where it's like released days a week ago, a week away, five days away tomorrow, today, and you don't have a video for that song that happens.

[00:05:34] It seems quite a bit. And so what we found is we're coming into the space to kind of do the same thing. As we used to do shooting music videos, it turned out it's a very different thing. Music videos are something people plan at plan sometimes six months or a year in advance. And they're meticulously planning it.

[00:05:48] Lyric videos seem to almost fill a hole in a marketing plan. It's like this remix turned out even better than we expected. Oh no, we don't have a video for it. It's not going to get the attention it deserves. And so we became problem solvers. And I think that sort of was the basis for the growth of our.

[00:06:03] Brian: [00:06:03] You're in the ass saving business, basically like you save people's asses that miss deadlines and have, have to all of a sudden scrape up sometimes not in all cases, obviously all your clients are amazing, but these are just the outliers. The clients that something happened, something went wrong and all of a sudden they have to scramble to get a music video done, and you're solving the problem of the last minute music video with a high, high, high quality compared to other offers.

[00:06:23] Anthony: [00:06:23] Yeah, the music industry is full of personalities and egos and, and a lot of different people have their hands in the pie. So sometimes I think it just slips through the cracks, like who was responsible for making sure that was a video, not only for the original, but for the remix or, uh, maybe, you know, you shot a music video for single one and you completely forgot that, you know, all of your planning went into that crazy 10 location, music video.

[00:06:45] It comes out seven days pass and the label starts going, what do you got for single two? And it's like, oh, I don't have enough time to plan that again. I put my soul into that first one. And so sometimes it's a mistake and other times it's. The wave of the industry and that an artist can only plan so many videos for an album.

[00:06:59] And you don't always know, maybe the seventh track on the album is really resonating. It's either blowing up on Tik TOK or your core fans just really responded to it. And you just hadn't planned a video for that song. So there's a lot of different reasons why you might find yourself wanting the, kind of like a digital video solution like ours.

[00:07:15] You also think about rappers who maybe have a big name feature on a song that you can't afford to get that guy in the video. It's like, there's a lot of different reasons. You might find yourself thinking about animated.

[00:07:25] Brian: [00:07:25] Well, so I actually want to zoom out here now and kind of look at the overview of, of you Anthony and lyric fitz.com and why you're relevant to our audience of just our, our past audience of home studio owners, and then our future audience of just freelance creatives as a whole. I want to talk about why you're relevant to them, but I also want to point out something that you've mentioned that's super, super important is that you solve a very specific problem.

[00:07:49] And I think too many freelancers focus too much on the services they provide, not the problems that they solve. And I think that the fact that you said that just as a natural part of this conversation, Shows why you're successful because you understand that fundamental difference between a service and a solution and people who sell solutions are making the money you're making and people who sell services are the people on Fiverr and Upwork making 10, 15 bucks an hour.

[00:08:14] So no, no shade to those people, but I want those people to learn that that's not the way to do business in 2021 and beyond. So real quick, we were talking before this. And when did you start this? By the way, when did you start lyric vince.com.

[00:08:25] Anthony: [00:08:25] We launched lyric bids six years ago. Um, actually just a couple of weeks ago, we just passed our six year anniversary of, of this business. When we bought the domain for $29 on a, on a whim, like, well, we felt like it was going to be a trend. So the funny story about, about the start of the businesses, lyric dot com like that domain was something like $3,500, a crazy amount of money.

[00:08:46] And I remember thinking like, oh wow, that's going to be, you know, that's kind of evidence that maybe I'm right, that this is going to be a trend cause someone's sitting on that domain. So then I type lyric, vids.com thinking like it'll probably be 500 bucks less and it was, you know, 29, 99. And so I scooped up lyric vids.com thinking like, I think that was an oversight for whoever's buying up all the, kind of the lyric video related domains.

[00:09:05] It really was kind of like a hail Mary at the beginning, thinking let's go out, let's grab a domain and put some chips on this kind of this trend that we think we see happening on YouTube. And that was about six years.

[00:09:15] Brian: [00:09:15] Yeah. So you bought that domain six years ago, started this just weeks ago. It was six years ago. So six years in some weeks. And you hit your first six-figure year, I guess, halfway through that about three years ago. And you've been growing steadily at a hundred percent year over year growth since then.

[00:09:29] So people could do the math that they want to do and figure that stuff out. But you're doing really, really, really, really well, especially for something that I think is, uh, I, I would've thought would have been a really saturated market and I could be wrong, but I've seen in my lifetime, so many different kind of lyric videos out there.

[00:09:43] And I can't, I can only imagine how much competition there is. So can you talk about kind of early on what you did to set yourself apart from competition to reach that first six-figure year?

[00:09:52] Anthony: [00:09:52] Yeah, absolutely. So w well, what's interesting about the lyric video space that I think is different than some of the other creative entrepreneurial. Uh, efforts is that while there was a lot of competition, they were fragmented and they weren't organized, I think correctly. So when we broke into the animation space, you know, obviously we are not, we didn't invent lyric videos, animated music, videos have been mind blowing for decades, but those companies weren't public facing.

[00:10:16] They aren't advertising in a way where it's like, you can just walk up to them and ask how much for one of their services. They kind of play that as, you know, the whole music industry works this way, this like secret game of like, if you're cool enough to know the secret, knock you'll know which door to knock on, and then maybe you could get an animated video.

[00:10:31] And that's kind of like how it was before we came around. And so we, what I think we did, we were one of the companies at the forefront. Popularizing and like public icing the service where it's like, this is how much it costs. And we also did some work at streamlining animation because the sky's the limit.

[00:10:47] You can draw a hundred frames per second, you know, three dimensional worlds, or you can keep it to simple typography and there's kind of the sky's the limit. So we tried to narrow the scope of, of service a little bit, so we could pinpoint what the pricing would be and make it easy for someone who's never bought an animated video to buy that first video and not have it be a stressful experience and not have it feel like they maybe got out negotiated and paid too much money for their video.

[00:11:11] So we took a very transparent approach so that people knew we were honest and upfront. So you knew what our prices were before we even spoke with us. And I think some of those things helped us, uh, create a basis for the reputation that was to follow. Once we, once we proved we weren't going to drop the ball.

[00:11:27] When you sent us your money, when you trusted us with your.

[00:11:30] Brian: [00:11:30] Yeah. So you were talking about kind of narrowing that scope of work. You were doing animated music videos, essentially. That's the kind of the broader thing. And that again, can be this massive, massive undertaking or it can be, but you actually said no, I'm going to actually put boundaries up on what we're doing.

[00:11:44] And you created, what's known in the industry as a productized service.

[00:11:48] Anthony: [00:11:48] Exactly.

[00:11:48] Brian: [00:11:48] You took a service that could just be this like never ending. You don't know when this pricing is going to stop going up. And all of a sudden you spent $50,000 on an animated video and you expected to spend five. You said, okay, the way we're going to do things are yes, there's going to be limits.

[00:12:02] Yes. There's going to be boundaries. Yes, sir. We're going to have all sorts of barriers in place to keep the scope of work from going out of place. But the result is you have a it's I don't want to, I don't like to use this because this is a kind of a negative connotation, but with McDonald's, you know what, you're going to get, love it or hate it, you know what you're going to get.

[00:12:18] And when you productize a service like this, if you have a service that's providing a solution that they like and that they want, and that the desire and you put a price on it, that is, that is less than the value that you're creating. Because you're, again, you're saving some, but sometimes then all of a sudden those boundaries look great because I know exactly what I'm getting for my five or 10 or whatever many thousand dollars they're spending on this.

[00:12:40] And I don't have to wonder what's the bill going to be at the end of this. So that productize service is kind of the core foundation of your business. From what I'm understanding is that.

[00:12:49] Anthony: [00:12:49] The thing is we were teaching customers about animation while they're buying videos from us. It's like a lot of the time a customer comes to us. And just by the way they ask the question, I know they've not spent a lot of time thinking about animation because what they're asking for it. As high as like the Michael Jackson video of, of lyric videos.

[00:13:05] And it has seemed to have an, a very small budget, which they're not crazy. They just, they've never thought about motion graphics. They don't realize that roto scoping is the most time consuming thing you can do in the whole world. And so, you know what we're doing a lot of the times, while we're selling, we're educating people about, you know, this is actually more time-consuming than this.

[00:13:22] And so, um, you know, and this is one of the things I've worked with Chris on is how do I sell to my customers while educating them and not be, not in like a patronizing way? Like, Hey bud, you can't afford that. It becomes like, let me break down for you. Some tears, which makes it easy for you to kind of move up that ladder and stop where the budget is comfortable for you, where the budget is comfortable and the, what you get back is desirable and boom, that's the video level for you.

[00:13:46] And so I just tried to create that ladder for other people, so that then I could just kind of sit back and let people ultimately decide for themselves if they want to.

[00:13:53] Brian: [00:13:53] Yeah. So you talked about education during sales, which is super important. And I want to plant a seed because you tell me that most of your business comes from direct outreach, basically cold email. I get into that, like super deep. So for anyone here who has done cold outreach, it hasn't worked for them or they want to start trying it.

[00:14:09] I can tell you this episode is going to be super helpful for you. Um, as we dig into that more, but you talked about pricing tiers, and I actually would love to hear your thoughts on how you think through creating those tiers so that it makes sense for you. It makes sense for your customers. And it gives them options because I do know one thing about sales and that is instead of here's the price.

[00:14:29] Yes or no, it's here are your options, which do you want? That's a subtle shift, but it's a big shift in conversions because now they're thinking through which one is right for us. Not do I want them yes or no. And if you, if you catch that one is a yes or no, the other is a yes, yes, yes. We're just not sure which one.

[00:14:47] That's the, the subtle shift. I'd love you to talk about creating those tiers. If you have any thoughts.

[00:14:51] Anthony: [00:14:51] Yeah. And we've shuffled the prices on those tiers. A number of times over the years, as we kind of finessed what we're able to do for that budget for each piece. And, you know, our lowest end piece starts at $250. It's a very simple like karaoke video, essentially, but we wanted to create an entry point that is not scary for anybody.

[00:15:07] It's not scary for, you know, a garage band or someone who's in high school making their first song. And then what ends up happening is it gets them in the door thinking about, okay, so that's not so crazy. I'm not going to get my shirt taken off my back. And then they start moving up those wrongs and they see what 500 gets them and they see what seven 50 gets them.

[00:15:23] And then they see what a thousand gets them. And for the way our company works, our top tier is a thousand dollars and up. And that's where we kind of get the best of both worlds because we get transparent pricing on the first hand to kind of create some trust. And it shows you how our pricing is. And then once you get over a certain point, it does kind of turn into negotiation and, you know, per project pricing where I'm able to give really special deals when there's a project I'm excited about.

[00:15:47] Or if we're working with a legacy act right now, working on something with Paul Anka and Olivia Newton, John, and we gave them a great rate because who wouldn't want to be working with, you know, the artists that their parents grew up listening to. So, you know, we have what I like about our pricing system and what I've not necessarily seen elsewhere is that we kind of do have like the menu pricing for people who are really worried about the bottom dollar, they independent artists.

[00:16:08] And then when you're dealing with Jason Derulo, it does move up into the, you know, what we call our infinity package, which is everything above, you know, and it can go up all the way up into, you know, 20 to $25,000, if you're really trying to, you know, melt people's faces off. And so I think there's something to be said about, you know, you can have your cake and eat it too.

[00:16:24] If you create like a nice sort of pricing model.

[00:16:27] Chris: [00:16:27] That was one of my favorite things to work with you on was breaking that idea down that you've got a client, they walk in the door, they think they know in their mind what they want and what you are offering, what you win. If you get a lyric video made what you potentially stand to win, um, is that you go viral, your friends and your family.

[00:16:47] Think you're awesome. You meet the person of your dreams. Because you're kind of famous now. Like there's just, so once you open that door to like, Hey, I made a song, Hey, there's a cool video that goes with it. Hey, it's on YouTube. The sky's the limit. And you do such an interesting job with the tears of letting people be like, wow.

[00:17:10] But if it was a little bit better, maybe, yeah. Let's, let's upgrade, man. That's worth an extra 500. I mean, like it's a lottery ticket mine as well. And I love that as we build out that system and I got, I got, I got a shout out to my manager and assistant Kyle. He's a legend. He, he was unbelievable helping us pull this stuff together.

[00:17:32] I think what's so cool about this is I remember when we first rolled out this sort of automated system where you could check out yourself was when you started telling me like, dude, like I sold a video, but then the guy upgraded without me.

[00:17:46] Anthony: [00:17:46] Yeah. Yeah, that, that was an important

[00:17:48] Chris: [00:17:48] Yeah. Crazy.

[00:17:50] Anthony: [00:17:50] that I didn't ask for.

[00:17:52] Chris: [00:17:52] Yeah.

[00:17:53] Anthony: [00:17:53] one of the things that you said, and, and, and I know you didn't mean anything negative by it, but I think it's an important point for the identity of me and the business is we don't sell the dream. That's why it's not a part of our marketing is like, this is how you get famous.

[00:18:04] And I know that's not how you, that's not how you run your business either, but that's, it's an important differentiation for me because so many people who offer services to artists, they lean on a really easy pedestal of like I'm selling the dream. We've actually flipped it on its ass a little bit in that we call our videos vehicles.

[00:18:21] It's a vehicle to deliver your song. You know, we talk about how music is hard to share on social. So you need a vehicle to share the song in this place where songs aren't meant to go, right, is on, on Instagram or on Twitter. Twitter is not really conducive to sharing music. If you have off the little 45 second clip, all of a sudden, it's a great place to share music and it can go viral and push people back to your socials.

[00:18:41] So we've actually started creating content, um, that, that we send to our customers after they buy a video that helps them I'm get a return on that investment, helps them get a return on the video investment, so that they're feeling good about the purchase so that they do get some money of those things.

[00:18:56] They do get those compliments from their friends and they do get those tweets that help reinforce why they bought the video to begin with. And then I also think it helps bring, I mean, and to be honest with you, this is something I learned from your guys' podcasts when you help with that buyers are more, so they ultimately come back a little bit quicker, right?

[00:19:11] So, um, that's, you know, we've gone a, gone away from the negative and tried to use the positive, but use the positive in a way that does grow.

[00:19:18] Chris: [00:19:18] Well, I'm so glad you brought that up. I guess what I was trying to say before is that you let the artists go there on their own, that the system lets them make that decision. And you're not making these pie in the sky. Like I'm going to make you a star. Like that drives me nuts. When you see these crappy businesses that are selling fake dreams to con like young kids, you don't do that at all.

[00:19:41] Brian: [00:19:41] That pushes away the kind of artists that Anthony is going after though. Like, if you're a big artists, you're like, that's not how it works.

[00:19:47] Anthony: [00:19:47] Even with the independent artists. It's so funny. Cause you guys know her, right. H E R the R and B singer got like a pile of Grammys. We were working with her when she was just on SoundCloud and you just don't know who's going to be who, and even if they're not going to be who I think of it like this, if some, you know, mom and Alabama or Austria, he was going to send me $500 for a video, $500 is a fair bit of money in that person's world.

[00:20:08] I would rather not have an empire that makes an extra six figures. And I have to deal with the fact that I'm kind of pulling the last money out of people, people who, who maybe can't afford, I would way, way, way rather have it be like, Hey, this is what we do. You know, we will 100% pour ourselves into your project if you want to buy a video from us.

[00:20:25] And that's what kind of the billboard. And then like Chris alluded to, they come through, they go through the checkout and they just say, I want this thing. And then we honor it. And cause I think like, even if they don't become her, even if they don't get five Grammys down the road, this is the video, they show their kids or they show their grandkids one day and it's like, it's a meaningful part of their legacy anyways.

[00:20:42] And so that's sort of how we think about the business and that it's not about become famous or don't become famous. It's like some of them become famous and then it's super public facing in the world, sees it. But for everyone else that was there, that was their moment to shine when they were 25 and they made that album.

[00:20:55] Right. So it's still super meaningful. I think in that.

[00:20:57] Chris: [00:20:57] I love that.

[00:20:58] Brian: [00:20:58] Yeah. So, um, let's talk about the scaling thing again. A hundred percent year over year, the last three years. Basically doubling your business every year, which is really, really difficult to do. Especially once you break the six figure mark in a service-based business. I don't know many people that can continue to do that.

[00:21:15] There's two challenges of that. One is getting enough customers to do that, which I would like to talk to you about with your outreach emails that you do. And then the second part is actually building the systems and the delivery mechanisms to be able to fulfill on that much work, because it's one thing to sell and sell and sell and get customers.

[00:21:29] And this is a completely other thing to make those customers happy so that they refer others to use it. They come back to you so that like, and all without like pulling your hair out and dying from overwork, you know, like there's like a bunch of challenges with that. There's so much to unpack with that, right?

[00:21:42] Like to just chat with you about starting with the, the outreach emails. Can you start to talk about a, what was it that you land on that as your strategy? Because there's a million different strategies that are out there let's actually start there. What made you land on outreach?

[00:21:55] Anthony: [00:21:55] Natural progression, I suppose. It's like, so, you know, at first it's word of mouth, Hey, you heard this Anthony Guy makes pretty good videos. That's like the next ring of the dart board or whatever. Right. And it goes out a little further and a little further, but at a certain point we plateaued, we plateaued regionally, you know, here in Canada and in the Toronto area, Toronto is a lot like New York and that there's a lot here.

[00:22:13] So you can kind of, you know, run a business just here and be fine, but we sort of plateaued. And, um, I think it was my wife and business partner, Jess, who's now the creative director at the company and like the creative genius behind what we do. That's how we keep our customers by the way. But how we get the customers is she just started going through Spotify, new music.

[00:22:31] Because those are not only professional enough to have been able to jump through a couple of hoops and land on that playlist, which sort of suggests they maybe have a manager or at the very least a little bit of momentum. And it just seemed like a great place to start reaching out to people. And they're obviously putting out music recently.

[00:22:46] So that was the first ideas. What if we reached out to the people who are landing on new music Friday, and then we started reaching to new music, Friday Australia and UK. And, and so that was sort of the basis of what we did. And really simply I'm happy to share this because I think for a good business, this model works.

[00:23:00] All we do is we search through something like, you know, new music, Friday playlist, and then we go to the Facebook and we type the artists name in, and a good percentage of those artists have an email address and we reach out to them and introduce ourselves. That's kind of been, our whole thing is it's very not sales pressure approach.

[00:23:15] It's very much like, Hey, do you have an animator on your team? Because if you don't, we'd love to be considered. That's sort of the energy of our, of our sales outreach. And because of that, what I find us getting is thank you so much for your email. Let me pass this onto my man. You know, I forwarded your email to all of my peers.

[00:23:31] I got, we get emails like that, where I forwarded your email to all of my peers and you can't really buy that type of advertising. And that you've kind of jumped through this loophole and someone's soft recommended you to a pile of professionals in their world. So I think there's a lot to be said about that kind of honest and introductory approach, because I know they likely don't have 25 animators on their team.

[00:23:52] Maybe they have one, maybe they have zero. Maybe they have two. So you're saying, Hey, do you have any on your team who does what we do? If not, we'd love to be considered, you know, you're going to be considered by a decent percentage of those people.

[00:24:02] Brian: [00:24:02] Yeah. So just to kind of sum up the strategy so far, you are looking for a constantly refreshing list of your ideal type of clients, and that happens for you to be Spotify like new music playlist.

[00:24:14] Anthony: [00:24:14] And there's a lot of ways you could approach that, right? People can do SoundCloud. You could. There's a lot of places that excited artists.

[00:24:21] Brian: [00:24:21] Yep.

[00:24:22] Anthony: [00:24:22] You know, it's, it could be music conferences. There's a lot of places that you could go find a hundred excited artists who have an album coming out that year. Do you know what I mean?

[00:24:29] But I think the philosophy behind it, the philosophy of like, Hey, I'm a reliable, easygoing entity in this business. Here's the thing that I do. Let me know if you have any problems that could be solved by the thing that I do. Even your approach, even that energy of your approach. I think speaks to that.

[00:24:45] That's somebody I wouldn't mind having in my pocket in case something goes.

[00:24:47] Chris: [00:24:47] I think what's so great about that is, you know, we talk about niching down all the time on the podcast, and it's one of the things that comes up the most when I'm talking to people or when I'm coaching. Is sort of sense that people are like, Yeah. but why like, I don't totally get why I should mention it.

[00:25:04] Cause I'm pretty good at a couple things. And I think you just nailed it. If you are offering a service that is roughly comparable to many, many, many, many, many other people cold outreach, isn't going to work. If you got cold outreach from a gas station, Hey, uh, you should come to our gas station. We're charging $2 and 47 cents a gallon.

[00:25:25] You'd be like, I don't care because there's other gas stations around. It's a commodity. It's not exciting. But when someone's like, Hey, you drive a Jeep Renegade. I do. I love it. It's fantastic. It's got two sunroofs. Woo. And we offer Jeep Renegade, customization and accessories. You should come by. I'd be like, oh, whoa, okay.

[00:25:48] I'm interested because I've never heard of anyone that offers and specializes in that one specific thing. So the fact that you've niched down allows you to do cold outreach differently than a commodity service.

[00:26:00] Anthony: [00:26:00] Yeah. And people remember it. You know, in our particular case, you combine niching with outreach and the name of our business, lyric vids.com. And it's like, who does lyric videos again? Who, what was that company that emailed us last July? And it's like, it's, by the time you're asking yourself that question, you've already answered the name of our business.

[00:26:17] And so a lot of ways, I sort of feel like a couple of key decisions like that. And, uh, like a monkey could run this company at a certain point. Cause it's just like, people are just going to answer those emails. And then at a certain point we stopped sending emails and we started teaching our friends to send them.

[00:26:30] So we have a little Salesforce, which is just like my sister and our friends who need a little bit of extra work on the side because it's a really easy job that I can teach you via zoom. And you can do for me from your home. And so one thing I've been telling some of my business peers who are in non creative spaces too, is instead of giving the money to ducks, pay someone to do outreach, you're going to get the same conversion.

[00:26:48] And it's such a fun, different approach. It's like dumping $10,000 into Facebook, which is one way to do it. Or I put my sister on salary for $10,000. And to me that was a more, uh, interesting and dynamic way to approach advertising my business. Doesn't maybe work for everybody.

[00:27:03] Chris: [00:27:03] Brian needs to say something he's so giddy and excited, right?

[00:27:08] Brian: [00:27:08] Just boom. I'm like, dude, I've spent like hundreds of thousands has, oh, Zucker. Like he's gotten so much of my money. I'm just thinking like, damn, think of how many people I could hire to do some of this stuff for me. Like good guy.

[00:27:18] Anthony: [00:27:18] You could have a department, bro. You'd have like a whole advertising department for that much money.

[00:27:22] Brian: [00:27:22] All right. We're going to talk about this later. All right. So I wanna, I wanna, I wanna mention something that is really important about this. So when you're doing your, your direct outreach email, it's essentially what I consider like the straight pitch approach, where you're, you're essentially trying to get them to consider you in that first email.

[00:27:37] Is that your approach?

[00:27:38] Anthony: [00:27:38] Yeah. Um, especially because I've never articulated this to myself, but since Chris put it this way, because we are niche and I know the answer is they don't, they do not have an animator of my wife's level. Who's upstairs on their team. I know that the odds are, they don't every now and then I get an email that they do.

[00:27:53] And I'm always like too shy, but I know that the vast majority do not. And so I presume to say, you know, here's a little bit about us. And so I drop a couple of the big names, the kinds of names that we wouldn't have on our resume, like Drake and Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin. If we weren't at least over a certain.

[00:28:11] Threshold of reliability and output. And so I kind of use that to build a little trust and then I full transparency. I use some big buzzwords in the next paragraph to show them that I'm switched on and I'm a marketing guy and I'm not just like copy pasting email from some sweatshop, uh, animation studio, you know, talk, just talk about like creating memorable and noteworthy visuals.

[00:28:32] It's like these types of words, just tell them I'm switched on I'm someone you can have a business conversation with. And then I keep it very friendly that those are my three ingredients is built through the names, let them know that I'm smart and that we are capable of hopping on a zoom and hashing things out with their team.

[00:28:47] And then three end in a very nice and warm and non pressury way. And we leave it there that's been our whole approach. And one of the things I love about that is not only has it been successful, but it's so much easier on us as a company to approach it that way, to not approach it from a crazy sales objectives and like trying to.

[00:29:03] I'm relaxed, man. I'm, I'm just chilling out, consuming some cannabis and like sending like my casual introduction emails, you know what I mean? It's, it's a, it's a far more positive way to run the business than thinking of sales as like this really intense, like objective that we have to hit. And if you don't, if you don't get it, then screw you, you know, we've really approached it from kind of like a friendly neighbor kind of way.

[00:29:23] Brian: [00:29:23] Do you have the link to your website in your email? I assume you do.

[00:29:26] Anthony: [00:29:26] We have links to example videos at the bottom of the email, we include a very short snippet of our pricing, kind of outline the one that's on our website with some links to that stuff. And then at the bottom it just says, lyric bids.com. We recently added a link tree I'm really pretty proud about that has like our noteworthy work.

[00:29:41] So it has like all like the work we did for foreigner or, um, just kind of like the big name stuff that sort of shortlisted, and that we added that to the bottom of all our emails, just trying to do as much work as we can to be like, look at who we work with without having to seem kind of too desperate about it.

[00:29:53] So burying it in a link tree is kind of a nice way to do that as well.

[00:29:56] Brian: [00:29:56] So there's a lot to unpack everything you've just said so far.

[00:29:59] Anthony: [00:29:59] Yeah. I talk really fast as well. So my apologies.

[00:30:03] Brian: [00:30:03] No. I just like to, I like to do this cause like when I listen to podcasts, because I listened to a ton of podcasts, I love when hosts go back and kind of sum up what was said and bring out any important things, because it makes the experience as a listener so much better because now I'm thinking through objectively what was just said instead of just passively consuming it, it forces people to think through what they're learning.

[00:30:21] So one of the things you mentioned is a couple things. One is adding social proof to emails, you list your notable clients in the email. So that it's, it says if I'm good enough for Aretha Franklin, I'm probably good enough for you person. Who's on SoundCloud right

[00:30:36] Chris: [00:30:36] I deserve your RDSP ECT.

[00:30:39] Brian: [00:30:39] There you go. This, the Chris Graham we know and love. Uh, so that's, that's a really important point. And second of all, you link to your website and some of your work, but your website has all your work all over it. Your website is incredible. It's really well done. And I think anyone who is doing cold outreach needs to consider how their website plays into their success or failure, because people are not just going to instantly reply based on what you said in an email and say, yeah, I'm in, they're going to suss you out as the Aussies, like to say, I learned that word from my Australian friends.

[00:31:09] Anthony: [00:31:09] 100%. They don't assume that you're telling the truth about those names. They click and go.

[00:31:13] Brian: [00:31:13] Yup. And so they're looking at your website and people should obviously go and they see the, obviously you have like an animated above the fold thing where the hero section typically is, and it looks awesome. Has got a lot of your branding stuff on it. You have the social proof bar. So our clients include basically every record label that matters under that is like a list of everything.

[00:31:32] You know, notable music video that you, you wanted to add to your proposal, you have your portfolio. There, you have pricing information you have, and this is my favorite thing is like the 1, 2, 3 process. Like here's the next steps. Here's what it's like to work with us. And then a big call to action, which leads people to a contact form.

[00:31:48] It's pretty much dead on what I teach in the six figure home studio, six figure creative world on how to put together a website. You just went next level on the overall design, which makes sense, because that's kind of your vibe of what you do.

[00:31:58] Anthony: [00:31:58] The way we thought about it and trust me, the SEO guys rinsed us for this website because they want it to be faster loading and they want it to be sleeker. But what I explained to the SEO guys is I'm glad you brought that up because I don't know that anyone speaks to this. Cause the SEO guys are so loud when it comes to like how you should make a web.

[00:32:13] Is I wanted my website to feel like when you open an apple box where it's like the whole experience of it, it's shiny. And it, it feels like they spent way too much money making this box. I could have saved money if they'd given me a cheaper box and like that experience of, you know, of like the unboxing process building trust.

[00:32:30] And I thought about, I that's how I wanted our website to feel. Was that like, oh, this is a Cadillac. This is made out of Cadillac parts. And they easily could have gone with something more slick than this, but it speaks to them being this, you know, slick digital agency. And so thumbs down to the SEO guys.

[00:32:44] I continue to, to tell them they're wrong about that in saying that my SEO hasn't been great. So, uh, the right in some way, in some regards as well,

[00:32:52] Brian: [00:32:52] I would, I'm doing some one thing. So you mentioned slow website, so website speed versus beautiful website. And I think there's some truth to, especially in a visually creative world in our world. And my, like in my kind of circles, which is audio, it's not so much visual creativity. It's, it's auditory creativity.

[00:33:07] So your portfolio speaks for itself in the audio world. And the design is kind of the back seat for the most part. And I still wholeheartedly believe great copywriting, great portfolio speaking to their desires, like solving a problem will always convert better than a flashy website, but you do both. So that's obviously going to work well, but I went, I went, I checked your website speeds, right?

[00:33:25] Eight speeds expecting to see like 15 out of a hundred on mobile expectancy, 45 out of a hundred on.

[00:33:30] Anthony: [00:33:30] What is it? I don't know. What is it?

[00:33:32] Brian: [00:33:32] So that's what I usually see. Like people that have WIC sites and other websites, you're 57 out of a hundred on mobile, which is actually above most sites that I've ever looked at this on. And you're 72 on desktop.

[00:33:42] So you're actually above most people that I've looked at. And that's even with like 50 YouTube videos embedded on your page.

[00:33:49] Anthony: [00:33:49] That's awesome. Thank you.

[00:33:50] Brian: [00:33:50] Yeah. So it's better than I thought. What is your site built on? Just if you want to share with audience.

[00:33:54] Anthony: [00:33:54] Um, yeah, no. So I've got a really talented web guru in my world. I'm a big fan of collecting ninjas. Find people who are like the greatest at a thing. Doesn't matter what the thing is. I put that person in my pocket and I give them a kiss on the cheek. Every time I see them. And Lena, Lena is one of those people for me.

[00:34:10] So Lena has been building websites forever, forever, and ever. I never needed her ninja skills for any of my other businesses, but it was time. About a year ago, we put a little bit of money into a lyric bids website. Being what I told her is I want this to compete with like spotify.com. I want this to feel like, you know, is that some Silicon valley company that just dumped money into the website.

[00:34:29] And so, um, it's sheets as she tells me, and I don't know what this means. It's bootstrap, CSS and custom coding is what she.

[00:34:38] Brian: [00:34:38] That's about the only way you're going to get a website that looks like this with those sorts of load space, to do this on Squarespace, Wix or WordPress, you're going to get the worst load speeds of all time. But there's cons with that before everyone runs out and goes higher as the developer that they don't know as a ninja, it's going to be a pain in the ass.

[00:34:52] If you hire someone that's bad, anytime you want to add a new piece of your portfolio, you now have to go through a gatekeeper that basically holds your website ransom.

[00:34:59] Anthony: [00:34:59] That is true. That is, uh, currently my, my setup is that I have good news is in this case, I've got a great relationship with them, but it absolutely, I did learn that the more ambitious you are with your website, it puts some handcuffs on it. You're not able to kind of have it be that fluid piece that some of us are used to with these new offerings.

[00:35:15] Brian: [00:35:15] Yeah. So my best friend who's, uh, like now the CTO and co-founder of sound stripe.com. He's my co-founder for file pass. Like he built my first studio website and he's my best friend. He was my best man at my wedding. And it was still a pain in the ass to get him to update anything just because good developers are.

[00:35:32] So that's why I'm not a huge fan of, yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about, um, sales emails. Let's continue that trend. Cause I really liked this, this conversation that we're having. I know that people are finding this useful. It's going to be very useful for people that are struggling with this or trying to get started with us, or maybe need some inspiration that this is an approach that can work.

[00:35:47] If you can find a way to differentiate yourself, you're not just a mixing engineer. You're mixing engineer who only uses studio gear from the year 1970 to 1979. You know, like something unique like that. How many emails do you typically send out in a month? Do you track stats around.

[00:36:01] Anthony: [00:36:01] Oh, yeah, I do. So I, I know that. Let me start with the total number. So the total number that we've sent is 23,000. And I know this because we're just shy of it. Now we're at like 22,900 or something like that. So in saying that whenever I. Producer friends, because producers are always the ones being like, how do I get new customers?

[00:36:19] Because they make beats all day and they have no one to sell them to. Right. So, uh, what I tell them is right, when you think you've messaged every band in a country, a whole new wave of them turned 16, and there's like another 10,000 bands and rappers and DJs and producers kind of launched that bucket never ends.

[00:36:35] Furthermore, we don't just message artists. We've kind of elevated. And we started contacting music, PR firms and music, publishing companies and music licensing companies, because these days, all those roles have bled into each other, right? Like people are doing a little bit of everything. Tour bookers are buying lyric videos for their acts and, and things like that.

[00:36:50] And you would think music companies would be even easier to get to the bottom of the bucket on, because they're, these are whole company. Not all my friends, the longer I go at it, the longer my list gets. It's like the more I dig that the list gets longer and longer, it never gets any shorter. And so it just tells you that if you're up to the challenge, if you have the ability to like burn the fire, cause it's not easy sending that many sales emails, there is unlimited possible customers out there to reach out to in that way.

[00:37:17] So in saying that, you know, I think probably we're sending something around three to 500 a week. And then for a little while, what we do is this, let me pass on a tip per sales emails, I think is gold December. My business slows down. I imagine recording studios is very much the same thing. December slows down like crazy.

[00:37:34] And so what I do is I spend the month of December, everyone on my team sends sales emails, and we schedule them for January and February.

[00:37:41] Chris: [00:37:41] Oh, that's brilliant.

[00:37:43] Anthony: [00:37:43] So we start the year with like 6,000 sales emails. No scheduled for like January, February one, like every week, just like bump up up. And then I just see those emails go out automatically for through the first quarter, which is basically takes the time where I'm sitting on my butt, doing nothing and gassing up the sales for the, for the following year.

[00:37:58] So I think that's the kind of thing you can do. You can even do it on a Sunday night where it's like, I'm doing nothing. I'm going to work for an hour and schedule emails for Wednesday at noon. When I know is a good time to be reaching out to my customers when they made it through their Monday and Tuesday meeting.

[00:38:08] So that's one of the ways I use kind of sales emails to kind of efficiently push my business, even during downtime.

[00:38:15] Brian: [00:38:15] Okay. So that's. Man. I feel like I could talk forever. So we're going to have to find a time to end this interview at some point.

[00:38:21] Anthony: [00:38:21] Well, we'll come back for part two another time.

[00:38:23] Brian: [00:38:23] Yeah. We have 30 other questions. So, so you're, you're doing three to 500 a week give or take. And you did that big push at the end of the year where you're scheduling. I want to talk about real quick tools.

[00:38:32] What are you actually using to send these out? So you're not getting flagged for spam and all these other issues that can come with sending that many emails.

[00:38:38] Anthony: [00:38:38] Uh, I'm using clothes right now, uh, recommended by our friend, Chris. Um, listen, giving the flowers where it's deserved. We were already doing sales before I was put onto your guys' podcast, but the sales was working and I didn't know what to do next. And getting turned into your podcast was when I learned about customer systems and I was like, oh, I'm sending sales emails and I'm not documenting them and I'm not keeping those.

[00:39:00] So the 23,000 is actually sprung when I started turning into your podcast, because that's when I decided to go out and get a CMS and start doing some of the actual infrastructure and not just constantly pushing from like a kind of a hustler I turned from, I went from a hustler to like a businessman by implementing those systems.

[00:39:17] So really a lot of that kudos to you guys. Cause it wasn't until then that I even thought about smartifying that process. I was just pushing, pushing, pushing, because I knew it would make me money. But then through the podcast, I was turned onto the idea of like, oh, all this hours I'm putting into is just bleeding out the bottom of the strainer.

[00:39:32] I could, I could put a bucket underneath it and catch everything for me. That's closed.

[00:39:36] Brian: [00:39:36] Yeah. So it's just for anyone who's not familiar with. Let me just clarify real quick terminology, CRM, customer relationship management system. That's what that, that's what that is. And it's closed.com. You probably have some stuff to say about that. Chris closed.

[00:39:47] Chris: [00:39:47] Yeah. So when Anthony and I first started working together, um, I recommended clothes as a CRM. So, um, for those either they're listening to this episode in our like CRM, what, what are they even talking about? So if you're sending out email from say, OSX mail or Gmail or whatever, and you're doing customer outreach, it's on you to remember to follow up with that person it's on you to have notes about that business and that individual.

[00:40:11] Brian: [00:40:11] And it's on you to track metrics on open rates on Glint, click through rates, on response rates on how those initial outreaches, how many percentage of those get to the next stage, which is a, having a conversation or booking a call or whatever. Like all of this has done automatically through close or a seat, a good CRM, not so much if you're doing this manually through outlook or.

[00:40:32] Chris: [00:40:32] Yeah, so closes amazing. There'll be a link in the description. We go to Chris Graham, coaching.com/closed. There'll be a little tutorial video that I made an affiliate link there, but with clothes, it does everything. It tracks your opportunities, attracts your sales. You can have custom fields where when you go to look at an email from somebody, you see all the conversations you've ever had from them in a timeline, all the phone calls, all the text messages, all the notes that you have.

[00:40:58] You've got links on the side, and this is one of the cool things we did for you. Anthony is when you open up an email and close there's links on that left side of the page, where you can be like, I need to go to monday.com, which is where. All of your tasks and you just click the link and it takes you right to that clients.

[00:41:13] Section of monday.com. The integration links are all plugged in. So you're never like, oh, I'm going to copy and paste their email, go to the next website, go to the search bar, all that stupid. You can automate all of that so that you click a link, bam, you're right where you need to go. You can check your invoices, everything that you need.

[00:41:29] And I'm a big fan of building a service business and all businesses really around a hub. And I think that that hub should be a CRM. And I think that the best CRM on the market right now is close to go to Chris Graham, coaching.com/close. You can check it out. It's absolutely incredible.

[00:41:45] Anthony: [00:41:45] It's changed my business. I'm I'm literally, from the other perspective, listen to you say almost that exact same rant. And, uh, I actually went to Salesforce at first. Didn't like it as much. And then through you edit, I ended up back at, I know, but they sponsor NBA games and stuff. So it's like, it's just, it's in your brain.

[00:42:02] You know what I mean?

[00:42:03] Brian: [00:42:03] Salesforce is the old dinosaur who refuses to die. They're just too big to be killed.

[00:42:07] Anthony: [00:42:07] I know that now.

[00:42:09] Brian: [00:42:09] And pipe drive is the one I switched to, but I might be going back to close soon because they've added a lot of new stuff. Anyway, let's not get in this conversation. I want to go back. Now we've talked about tools a little bit, and that makes sense.

[00:42:18] Now that be able to manage that many outreach messages closes a great tool for that. Um, how much customization are you doing on the, on the emails themselves? Are you just sending a pretty much blanket template with very little? Are you sending very personalized? We, without numbers, you can't really personalize it much.

[00:42:32] Anthony: [00:42:32] We have templates for kind of different genres. Cause we do so much work in like European, electronic music and they do not care that we worked with Zac brown and they don't, they don't care about it's like those, those names mean nothing. Once you get overseas and maybe not nothing, but you know, it doesn't have the same splash.

[00:42:48] And similarly, our biggest European DJ. These guys have like 50 million views per video and no one in America has ever heard that name. And so our templates largely have different trust-building names listed and I'll somewhat fluctuate my wording a little bit, like when I'm talking to a publicist, because publicists have kind of like this air of like talk to me, like I like an insider or don't talk to me at all.

[00:43:08] It's kind of like a publicist kind of angle. You know what I mean? And with a musician it's a little bit more grassroots, like, and they really don't respond well to sales pressure. So I tend to be really, really like, this is what we do. It's really bad-ass have a look. And if, you know, let us know if you've got a release we can help with.

[00:43:22] And so we've got those templates set up and I just very quickly choose based on the limited information I've got, because these days it's harder and harder to tell, you know, where somebody's balls just based on their look and even hearing a song. Sometimes it can be a bit, not necessarily telling them everything you need to know about that.

[00:43:37] Sound and career, but we can kind of make a judgment call roughly which kind of pot to put them in. And then we change the first name. That's it. But what I will say is once they reply, I turn the charm on and I think that's where you can make up for any lack of customization and email. One is you give them a whole bunch of email too, which wipes away any thought that maybe they're just part of some copy paste.

[00:43:57] Brian: [00:43:57] That's great. So I would love to know the process behind gathering three to 500 names and email addresses per week. That is an insane amount. And I feel like part of the secret of that has to be a really dialed in system to gather those sorts of emails, that number of email addresses.

[00:44:15] Anthony: [00:44:15] It's honestly. So that's one, that's hard to, it's hard to break down without getting into some like boring conversations about how one searches for things on Google, you know, but what I will say is I use Google, my best lead searches come from music companies. My ideal target avatar customer is a music manager type of music coordinator type for a management company or a couple of artists or a label.

[00:44:39] And those guys all are mostly reachable by email and mostly they don't list their emails on social media. So I dig deep on Google and you'd be surprised how many emails are listed as part of let's say a band says. For booking information go here. And so what I do is I'll simply Google, like@warnerbrothers.com plus booking or something like that.

[00:45:00] And then you'll find countless websites where bands have listed a whole number of email addresses for their various booking agencies and PR agencies. And we do the same thing we reach out. So we've just used Google. And to be honest, when you're going to catch a lot of outdated email addresses, we get a lot of like, Hey, I've moved on.

[00:45:13] The music industry has a fast turnover rate, probably even more than a lot of other industries. So it happens quite a bit that we get an email bounce back from someone that says, Hey, I've moved on to this other company. And then I emailed them at that company says, Hey, I've moved on to this other company.

[00:45:25] And you're like, you're following them through the out of office or like, uh, I've moved on emails. You know, that's kind of the part and parcel. You're just digging up Google. It's not the most timely place to look for email addresses, but for us, the proof has been in there.

[00:45:37] Chris: [00:45:37] I love that tip that you just gave of you are finding bands who list, who to contact for booking in order to find a decision maker that you can do business with. That's really good.

[00:45:49] Brian: [00:45:49] Yeah, I call those gatekeepers or VIP leads. The people that have control of multiple projects in their pocket.

[00:45:55] Anthony: [00:45:55] Yeah, exactly.

[00:45:56] Brian: [00:45:56] That's great. So, all right. So we've talked a bit about this, your email in three to 500 a week. It's helped your business scale a hundred percent year over year. The last few years, you've got a team that you've basically outsourced this, these tasks to, for the most part, are there struggles around trying to outsource this sort of cold outreach?

[00:46:12] I mean, I, first of all, you have to make it work yourself before you outsource this. But outside of that,

[00:46:17] Anthony: [00:46:17] That's important. Yeah. So it started with just me and Jessica doing it ourselves. So we proved it worked in the beginning. And then what happened was we got too busy to do this. I got like, like all sales, you get too busy to do the sales. And then you put the sales efforts down. And then at a certain point we had ambitions to grow and we had a friend who was working with us, kind of part-time on some admin stuff.

[00:46:35] And it's like, Hey, do you want to bring your laptop over? And I'll show you how to do the sales thing. And then we can sell. And then sort of helps if the sell higher sell higher. And then we, so we started started that process. And so now we've kind of been doing that back and forth. And to be honest, and you alluded to this earlier in the, in the podcast.

[00:46:51] Now we reached the higher bottleneck. Now we've reached the produce. The videos, bottleneck that we always knew was going to come eventually if the sales was so effective, um, where we started to have to turn down clients. And that was really the a day I had been pushing off as much as possible that day.

[00:47:05] We have to start telling someone, we cannot take this project on because we've got too many things backed up, unfortunately. So we hit that moment for the first time, like a week ago after like it's, you know, six years. And so I'm in the process of hiring, but during a pandemic and for something so specialized as animation with kind of a unique eye for design and, you know, music and cultural references, it's quite a Darryl hoop to jump through.

[00:47:29] And so that's become a challenge in its own. Right. And it's so interesting when you want a business like this, how the more successful you are, you just unlock new challenges. That are increasingly difficult. So this one's not easy. We haven't yet cracked it. We spent the last two weeks interviewing and, you know, peel it like peering through the, you know, the, the new animation graduates of the world and the, and the, the unemployed animators because of kind of what's happened over the last two years.

[00:47:51] And it's, it's really difficult. So it's been, uh, it's been a really interesting journey and in that turns out the sales part for us was the easy part. And then now scaling to kind of do the, uh, the output is, is proving to be a little bit more.

[00:48:04] Chris: [00:48:04] So with that, that has been not frustrating. You know, for me, uh, coaching you, I have been really excited for you to get in a position where you're like, okay, our supply is huge. We could take on twice as many customers because you're right. You are so unbelievable at sales and the business is so great.

[00:48:23] The bottleneck is the service. The bottleneck is your ability to provide services for number of people. And I've gotten so excited and we've talked about this at length. I've gotten so excited about like, I want to experiment with these type of ads and these type of ads and these type of ads, like to really experiment with scaling up.

[00:48:40] But at the same time, let me ask a question. Put on my coaching hat here. When supply is limited in the service industry, one of the most common reactions is to just raise your prices. Right? Talk about that. Have you thought about that? Are you planning on it?

[00:48:54] Anthony: [00:48:54] We have, we raised our prices like four times in the last two years. Not all of our prices are baseline. That $250 price has kind of stayed where it is. We make those very, very quickly. And as I've mentioned, it's kind of like the, like put in the door to our business for now. It's going to stay. The tricky part is we've made it to a place where our partners are the biggest in the world that we've done like five videos for Cielo green.

[00:49:15] It's tough to tell Cielo green, you want double them.

[00:49:18] Chris: [00:49:18] Okay.

[00:49:19] Anthony: [00:49:19] It's not so much the Indies. I could put the prices up on my website that could happen, but Cielo doesn't check the prices on my website. You know what I mean? Nor does Warner brothers, nor does Atlantic. They send you a video with a budget. And so what I have to say, so Atlantic, for example, they'll send me a Derulo brief and say here's $10,000 for this.

[00:49:36] So, what I have to do now is say, you're going to get less for that money than I gave you last time. And that's a hard way to win business. So I'm on the top end, which is where most of our money is coming from. Is those big projects. It's really, I forgot to raise the price quickly. It's easy to do kind of slowly, slowly inching in that direction of providing a little, little bit less than I would have maybe for that money six months ago.

[00:49:57] But it's hard to do the thing where you go whoop we're up, we're up 25%, but on the low end that something I can do, I recently did it where I moved my platinums from 500 to seven 50, and we got a couple of grumpy emails, but you know, for people listening, not that not as many as I thought I was going to get, because when it's manualized prices, you can just change the menu.

[00:50:13] But unfortunately for us, with the, with the, with the accounts, I haven't yet cracked that code. How does one change the pricing with their accounts when their accounts are so prestigious? So that's a challenge.

[00:50:22] Chris: [00:50:22] It's funny, old customers are really hard to transition because they have in their mind, you think about like, if you went to McDonald's and they had raised their prices 25%, or it changed their menu. What, what I was used to that there is a difficult element when you're raising your prices to balance that between new customers and old customers, which I think is where that supply and demand thing comes in.

[00:50:43] If we can get you in a position where supply, if you can get you in a position where your supply is no longer an issue where you're like, oh man, I could triple our business and be fine. Then you can start to work on bringing in new customers. And the new customers are where you really have pricing.

[00:50:59] Anthony: [00:50:59] Yeah, absolutely. That's that's exactly right. So right now, um, I'll keep it short because I know this doesn't relate to everybody listening, but, um, we've got some really cool ideas about building a platform for animators, for people who, who know video software, but don't know how to connect with Ty Dolla.

[00:51:14] We become a platform for those creatives in a way where we're able to pay them to essentially fill their resume with these incredible names that are our resume is full. So, you know, one only needs, you know, a few Stevie Nicks is, and Ty Dolla signs on their resume to be able to kind of create some upward mobility for themselves.

[00:51:31] We have this idea about essentially in the way we already have this for illustrators. So if we sell a cartoon to a record label, we have a few illustrators here who work for us full time, but they're busy pretty quickly, pretty quickly. My full-time illustrators are like booked out for a month on a cartoon.

[00:51:45] So what we do is we've kind of created a platform for illustrators because there's a lot of illustrators in the world who are at home drawing on their iPads and on their computers. We're basically, we act as kind of like a, a middleman to connect that illustrator to a really meaningful public facing project puts money on the, on the table for them.

[00:52:01] And it kind of puts them at the front of the line on a project that they probably wouldn't ever be considered for just based on their, on their drawings. Because to get to the front of the line for a TST entitle assigned video requires years of industry loophole. Jumping has nothing to do with your ability to draw.

[00:52:14] And so we're currently in a position of trying to create that same opportunity for animators. It's just a little bit more of a specialized skill set, so gonna require some learning to, to put us in that position. But I like the idea of us providing a service to artists that simultaneously kind of provides a service to the artists who make the video is kind of a fun place to be.

[00:52:31] Brian: [00:52:31] Your URL still lends itself. Well, to be a platform, whether it, and not just a service. Yeah. Um, so real quick, are you still hiring animators or anything like that? Is there like a, and we can cut this out, if not, but is there like a website you want to send people to, to maybe apply or.

[00:52:45] Anthony: [00:52:45] That's actually why I, uh, why I mentioned it because we are hiring and I have a feeling, you know, we will have filled the position that I'm most excited about filling right now, relatively soon, we're making great headway on that, but we're a growing business. And in the way that we've staffed up to like 14 illustrators who are able to kind of call on as needed.

[00:53:02] I love the idea of, of creating like a network of these creative entrepreneurs who know after effects, who know how to animate, who is like, Hey, I've got a little bit of time on my schedule. I would love to kind of augment my resume with the kinds of artists that they're working with over at lyric fits.

[00:53:15] The best thing I would say is to reach out to us by email his contact at lyric bids, doc. You would speak with me. I'll, I'll be the one monitoring that inbox pretty much 24 7 anyways. But yeah, if for whatever reason this lands and you're like, Hey, I, I have some of those skills. You're, you're very free now.

[00:53:29] Or even in the distant future, uh, to reach out to us. That's I would see that being as a need we'll probably have for the foreseeable foreseeable future.

[00:53:37] Brian: [00:53:37] And also if you're a creative entrepreneur that can solve any of Anthony's problems, you also have a cold email that he just gave you, that you can send your own cold email to get hired.

[00:53:45] Anthony: [00:53:45] Please do,

[00:53:48] Chris: [00:53:48] Okay.

[00:53:48] Anthony: [00:53:48] please do.

[00:53:49] Brian: [00:53:49] that's great, man. So, uh, yeah, I hit him up contact@lyricvids.com. If, uh, if you're interested in collaborating on working together on working for him on anything, there's one kind of missing link that we've had in this conversation so far that I think is worth mentioning. And that is in your cold outreach message.

[00:54:03] You mentioned some of those big acts that you've worked with that are social proof indicators that says if they're good enough for lyric feds, and they're good enough for my SoundCloud career. So if you don't have that, this could be a potential way to start getting those names on your resume, where you're either working through another company, you're a part of a bigger project or a tertiary way of doing this would be simply to just work your way up.

[00:54:25] And maybe you're reaching out to other local artists and you're mentioning the other local artists that you've worked with. And now you're working with regional artists and you mentioned the other regional artists you've worked with it. Doesn't have to be the biggest names ever to exist on the earth from day one.

[00:54:37] That's not really.

[00:54:38] Anthony: [00:54:38] We use the same system way before the name was Whitney. So once upon a time, I was really excited that we had made a video from Maestro fresh Wes cause here in Canada, Maestro fresh west was like a big rapper in the eighties. He's a very accessible guy he's around and he's not a global superstar, but it was just like now with Stevie Nicks or whatever, it was a way of being like, oh, he's not just a kid.

[00:54:58] He's a kid who has some respect in the local community enough that this person was willing to trust a record with him, you know? And so that could start off with someone who's not that famous at all, but he's just known to have great taste. You know, there's always like that local band that like, they're not huge, but they've got exquisite taste.

[00:55:13] It's like still that, that would still say a lot about what you do as a cover artist or as a, as an engineer because everyone knows those guys don't play around when it comes to.

[00:55:21] Chris: [00:55:21] Well, one of the things that You're doing that I love, and this is a philosophy that I have gotten more and more into over the past two or three years, is this idea that as a freelancer or as anything, if you are running any sort of business, I think that your power, your sales power comes down to how short your resume is.

[00:55:40] How short can you make your resume? Can you have one sentence that's enough for you? And I'm going to be forward here and just share my own story on that.

[00:55:48] Brian: [00:55:48] You're going to be very self-serving here and talk about your ego.

[00:55:51] Chris: [00:55:51] Yeah, it's going to be, self-serving brace yourself, but it's like, I think a good example. I think I'm doing a good job here. So as far as the business coaching thing goes at this point, I've worked with Amy Grammy and Tony winners. If I can find a client who has an Oscar, then I can say, hi, I'm Chris Graham.

[00:56:09] I'm a business coach for creatives, and I've worked with Amy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony winners. That's my resume. I don't need anything else. Other than that sentence. And you do such an awesome job with lyric vids of doing that same thing, that proof of authority in the shortest possible sentence, where someone can go on your website and immediately there's trust belt.

[00:56:29] It's like either he's lying and is a psychopath, or he's telling the truth. And he's absolutely capable of helping me. I love it.

[00:56:38] Anthony: [00:56:38] Yeah, absolutely. And listen to, what's really funny about that is for the longest time, the biggest names we work with were not listed anywhere. It doesn't say on Stevie's video that we did it, it doesn't say underneath this video that we did it because at that level they don't tend to do a lot of like deep, deep credits.

[00:56:52] And that was same way that like an independent would do, but also were sort of a white envelope where that like the, the label made the video, but the label doesn't make videos. So the label hired us. So by the time it lands on a wreath as YouTube channel, it's like kind of gone through a couple of the approvals and the loopholes.

[00:57:08] So really recently we're so excited, but the band foreigner, you guys know foreigner they're the first ever like legacy act that put video by lyric fitz.com in the information for, we did cold as ice. And I want to know what love is. And for us, that was a really big moment. Cause now it's sort of like it's proof of, we're not psychopaths.

[00:57:24] It's like, you could go. And see our name listed there. And I think obviously people knew we weren't, but you know, it meant, it meant something to me to be like, we got, we got some on the board where, you know, we crossed that threshold. Cause even with the size of our resume, the next special for us was we don't want to be behind the scenes anymore.

[00:57:39] We'd like to be credited for these, for these things.

[00:57:41] Brian: [00:57:41] That creates the passive referrals, where you're literally every single client major client you work with that gets, I mean, you get a hundred million views on a YouTube video that has created by lyric vids.com at the end or in the description somewhere, you'll have 10 of those out there. Like how many of even like a 0.0, zero 1% click through rate, like people actually going to your website is a significant number for a service-based industry.

[00:58:04] So that's definitely a significant source of traffic that you're going to start getting more and more of.

[00:58:09] Anthony: [00:58:09] And really the big, the biggest lesson there was, I had to work up the competence to ask the bigger the artists. It was tough to say, Hey, will you credit us? And to go on further, it takes even more balls to say, will you credit us as lyric fitz.com because it's a domain. So you're not just saying video by Anthony crop Harada and his team up in Toronto, Canada, it's video by lyric bids.com.

[00:58:29] And so that's really been important to me to try to get them to say now, occasionally I hear a little bit of like a oh, on the domain. And so what we say is, will you credit lyric bids media? Because if you Google lyric bids media, it takes you to. It's still, but we do push for the, will you credit lyric vids and its wording's importance the way my emails.

[00:58:46] This is what my email says. It says, if you guys post credits in your YouTube info song, right? I always list songwriter mixed by distributed by because I know that a lot of bands do list those three things. Would you be willing to list video by lyric bids.com among the other production credits? Because it becomes really hard to say no to that.

[00:59:04] If you're going to list all of those other credits, will you also list the people who made the video? You're posting them under. We get very few nos. We get a lot of don't answers, but we get very few nos. And so that's become a big part of what we've been doing over the last six months.

[00:59:18] Chris: [00:59:18] That is such an awesome tip. That's something. I know that our audience struggles with a lot and we've talked about this, you know, one of the things, one of the reasons we. The podcast is 600 creative. Is there a different creative industries that have different sacred cows in the audio industry? If you don't get credited, you are not allowed to be angry in the photography industry.

[00:59:39] If you don't get credit, the person who didn't credit you is just the worst and they should be dragged through the mud. And they will. It's fascinating to me that the photography industry really gets that right. Or maybe is even too intense about it. I don't know.

[00:59:53] Anthony: [00:59:53] It's because they're ask bro. It's because you think about photographer, personalities, they're very like more likely to be in your face. And I think a lot worse, uh co-writers and session producers are a little bit more passive, I think. And so they're not necessarily being like, Hey, you, you didn't say that you didn't tag the correct Instagram on your story, which a photographer will straight up do I've I've been accused of not crediting cause I credited the wrong photographer or something.

[01:00:16] Right. So they're, they're straight up willing to police that stuff. And so I think a lot of that falls on us as creatives to kind of, to draw that box and be like, this matters to us.

[01:00:24] Chris: [01:00:24] Well, and I think that's what makes this new season of the podcast. So interesting is there's so much stuff like that, that we, as creatives can learn and take from other creative industries that are next door to ours and be like, you know what, there's a cultural issue in audio that we don't have the kahunas to speak up for ourselves.

[01:00:44] Anthony: [01:00:44] Also credits are free. Why not credits are free? That's my whole thing is that like credit everybody, they're more likely to support the thing. There's a million good reasons why.

[01:00:52] Chris: [01:00:52] Yeah.

[01:00:53] Brian: [01:00:53] You touched on a good point, the culture and photography, the expectation amongst photographers is that you will credit. And so when you don't, they're the wrong ones in the audio world. And in some other creative industries, it's not the norm. It's not the expectation. It's not the social. To credit. So if you don't credit, that's just the way things go, suck it up.

[01:01:13] Buttercup. I want anyone in our community that needs to be like one of the fundamental rules of the six-figure creative community that you get credited for your work in the appropriate places. That needs to be the expectation amongst all of our listeners for all of their projects. And I think that needs to be the norm for everyone.

[01:01:30] I think, I think this is a good reason for it is just listening through Anthony's story here,

[01:01:34] Chris: [01:01:34] Let me throw out an idea, Anthony, this is, this might be a terrible idea, so please shoot it down.

[01:01:38] Brian: [01:01:38] which means I'll cut it out. If it is a terrible.

[01:01:40] Chris: [01:01:40] Yeah. So what if you, on your project forms asked for all the credits, songwriters, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you never asked the client whether they wanted to do credits or not. And as a stock, part of your service, you included like a cinematic credit roll at the end, and you just did it and you put yourself in,

[01:01:59] Anthony: [01:01:59] Unfortunately, what in bad ideas on. Yeah, no. Um, artists and labels are really particularly what happens at the end of videos. We tried to push for a long time to put the single art at the end, because so often the video itself is based on the single art. So we thought there's real value in showing people, this is what the cover looks like.

[01:02:14] Go to Spotify, look for this it's it looks just like this video you watched and label started asking us to remove it because things like apple TV is like, no, no, no, it has to be a non-black. And so there's all these expec kind of guidelines that they just would prefer. It starts on black ends on black, and doesn't have any of those kinds of like header and footers.

[01:02:30] Now, independent artists love it. Independent artists love when you end on 10 logos and bring credits up. But the big artists, Les, and little artists seem really willing to credit us. And so I think it doesn't solve the bottleneck that we have necessarily.

[01:02:42] Chris: [01:02:42] I think there's still potential there. And that idea, then please, please push back. I'm okay with leaving this in. I'm comfortable with the fact that I have bad ideas All the time.

[01:02:50] Brian: [01:02:50] All the time.

[01:02:51] Anthony: [01:02:51] Oh, me too.

[01:02:52] Chris: [01:02:52] all the time. One of the things we've talked about in coaching sessions is this idea. You've got two buckets. You've got your agency clients, essentially.

[01:03:00] And then you've got your individual clients and you need to have two different processes for these clients. Maybe their agency clients are all by hand. They don't ask them to fill out any forms. You're hand holding everything because they are 50% of your revenue for, you know, for customers that 50% of your revenue, you don't use the system for them.

[01:03:16] But for everybody else that are creating the bulk of the stress and the bulk of the actual man hours, you can really start to automate and systemize that and play the numbers game there. I'm wondering if for independence, perhaps it's like, if you're below your infinity package, you just include credits automatically and they have to ask for it as a revision to remove those credits.

[01:03:38] And I'm wondering how much traffic and attention you could get just from going to the little guy.

[01:03:44] Anthony: [01:03:44] Yeah, no for sure. So two things, first of all, we, if they already provided all those credits would be really easy to. The minute I asked for it. I feel like I might be creating hoops, not necessarily cutting them out because in the current case for the independence, we have a really, really great system where when they receive their email is that little blurb about if you list these credits, this is how we like to be credited amongst them.

[01:04:06] And then for most to them, we followed it up with, we'd love to offer you a 10% discount next video. So it becomes, and this that's something we often do universally, but especially for a new customer where there's like the first time that we've ever asked them to credit us. And because for us to tell them to knock $25 off a video, it was no problem.

[01:04:21] I spend that much money on sales efforts. Anyways, it becomes like we asked for something that's totally reasonable. And then we give them something they weren't expecting. And so that for us has been a real winner in getting ourselves credited. Uh, YouTube. And I would argue the information section under the video is the most useful because if you see something really cool, it's like rainbow spinning today, or next week, there's a video coming out for this group called lion bay, but it's an animated video and it's really like visually impressive.

[01:04:48] And so I emailed them specifically because they're kind of a buzz and I said, would you be willing to credit us? And I was, I took a little more careful care in that email. They're the kind of act who might not, and they were willing to, they said, yes, we're absolutely the video's amazing credit. You, it's the kind of video where you're looking at it going, who made this?

[01:05:03] Cause it's like, things are, it's like a kaleidoscope of cartoons. And so if you think who made this, you don't think to skip to the end of the video, you hit that little arrow next to underneath the video and you hope it's listed right there. It says video buy. And so that's where, we're where we strive to be.

[01:05:18] Is that, that you go down to the credits video by, because I think people are likely to click it and be like, even if you're just a fan and be like, this is pretty cool who made this? And we always joke that, you know, music video is the new music and we're the Beatles. And it's like, people just don't know that yet.

[01:05:33] It's like, do you know what I'm saying? It's like music videos are a whole new paradigm of shift of music and we're the best at it. And so I w I've tried to create a fandom even among just music fans, where it's like, Hey, who, who made this video click go to go see the website? And so that's just kind of put some of the psychology and the philosophy about how you've approached it.

[01:05:52] Chris: [01:05:52] That's awesome. You're doing a great job with that. And to me, what you are doing, you're asking the right. As you were thinking about the right things, you are mining in an area that nobody else has mined before you are digging a hole, looking for gold and experimenting with these ideas. I think it's just fascinating because some of them are going to work.

[01:06:14] Kudos, dude, you're kicking it.

[01:06:16] Anthony: [01:06:16] Thanks, man. It's been a lot of fun. You guys have been a real value added. I mean, as I've already said in India, as you know, from a distance, there was a couple of little, little things about the psychology of your website as I was in the middle of building. Uh, that website last year. And I met, you know, I was sending Lena notes from the podcast.

[01:06:31] And then later on with what led to the systems is like, you guys really kind of like came in at a serendipitous time where I was really hungry for new ideas to help me grow the business. And as the story goes, of course ultimately ended up hiring you to come in much closer, analyze my business and continue to provide some of that insight from a much closer proximity, which has been invaluable.

[01:06:52] The work that we did this past winter is made this year's growth possible. Even, I don't think we could have handled it if we hadn't have done the work that we did between November and January. And then so now to come to kind of come full circle and chat on the podcast about some of those ideas and where that's kind of taken me to me, I've been going on all week about how this is like a fun full circle moment.

[01:07:08] So I really appreciate you guys having.

[01:07:10] Brian: [01:07:10] We're stoked to have you on, man. I, uh, I feel like we could talk for like five more hours about this. So we're going to have to definitely have you back on the podcast in the future. And I always hear podcasts. I'll say that. And then they never had them back on the podcast. So we gotta be,

[01:07:21] Chris: [01:07:21] Brian means it.

[01:07:23] Brian: [01:07:23] uh, yeah, I always meet it.

[01:07:24] Chris: [01:07:24] We have both learned a lot from you today, man. You are an exemplary creator. And an exemplary businessman.

[01:07:31] Anthony: [01:07:31] Thank you, man. That's very nice of you to say I very much appreciate that.

[01:07:34] Brian: [01:07:34] All right. So, uh, is there anything you want people to do? Do you have a call to action, basically? You know what? Call to action.

[01:07:39] Anthony: [01:07:39] If you are the kind of person who is in like a central creative space, you run a studio or you're a music manager or whatever. Um, you're my favorite kind of people. You're the kind of people that we solve problems for in a very real way. You know, we shot a music video, didn't turn out how we wanted. We don't have enough time left in the week.

[01:07:55] You know, those headaches, that's what we do for a living. And so reach out because whether you need a video now, or whether you need a video later, or whether you need some other creative solution that we provide as part of your live event experience or whatever. You know, that's what we do. And so, um, those are my favorite people in the network.

[01:08:09] I stay collecting passionate coordinators, you know, music coordinators, and I would love to meet even more of those people that maybe listened to this podcast. And if you're a musician lyric bids.com at lyric vids, I'm a musician myself. You can find me on socials, uh, under the alias ill vibe and, you know, new music out and always experimenting with new ideas and new art forms under my own kind of umbrella and big shout out to my wife who is, uh, at least 50% of the value of this business and does anything that's really exciting visually that I think is probably as dynamic and forward thinking as my approach from the business management side.

[01:08:43] So those are my.

[01:08:45] Chris: [01:08:45] Let me sprinkle some sauce on those shout-outs because I want to speak directly to the listeners here, and I want to pitch you to them. Most of our audience at this point are producers mix engineers, mastering engineers, people that run studio those. And I think one of the biggest problems that that industry has, is getting the artists to promote themselves and getting the artists to promote the people that they've worked with.

[01:09:10] There's a really weird. Issue in music where people feel like, eh, if I promote my.

[01:09:16] own music, it means that I'm a sellout. It means I'm not real. It means that I'm augmenting my talent with marketing and I'm undermining my talent by doing that. So silly. That's so silly. So here's the thing. If you are helping people make records, it behooves you to help them make material, to promote the songs you're working on with them.

[01:09:39] In my opinion, and I, I, a hundred percent believe this, the single easiest way to help an artist make content to promote their music is to send them to lyric vids.com and to say, have Anthony and his team make a kick-ass animated lyric video for you guys so that you can promote that as well. You don't need a $10,000 budget to hire a cinematographer and gaffers and lighting guys and all this stuff, you can literally just be like, Hey, here's the song, Anthony, can you gotta to take care of the rest?

[01:10:11] So we have something to promote. Bam. That is super duper interesting. And I think there's also an opportunity for, as Anthony's having that conversation about credit for them to get your credits as a producer, as a mix engineers and mastering engineer in that video, or at least in that description as well.

[01:10:26] So I just want to wholeheartedly to our audience pitch lyric vids hard, you should be pitching lyric vids to your clients so that your clients are promoting their art and the work they did with you.

[01:10:39] Brian: [01:10:39] go. You've got thousands of little soldiers out there as a Salesforce for you now, Anthony.

[01:10:43] Anthony: [01:10:43] 100% and listen on that note. And I think just one thing really, you know, great to put in there is we do a lot of partner pricing with our partners in those types of positions where it's like, we give them kind of like a wholesale price that allows them to kind of like add a little on if they'd like, or as always as we word it.

[01:10:56] If you don't want to add on, if you don't feel good about that, it allows you to pass that savings. Your guy's like, Hey, I, I get kind of an inside price from, from my guy, Anthony, over here that you couldn't get, if you didn't come through me. So whether you'd like to add, you know, a $75 on for your time by selling a video onto one of the artists who comes to your studio, or you'd like to be able to be like, I have great deals through my relationships.

[01:11:15] That's the kind of thing we do regularly with our, with our partners. So that's something to keep in mind. If a, if Chris is very complimentary rent resonated.

[01:11:22] Brian: [01:11:22] Okay.

[01:11:23] Chris: [01:11:23] Well, there's something so cool there of like, when you first start producing records, you're like, okay, I'm going to record. And I'm going to be playing my guitar on these records and I'm going to mix them and I'm mastering myself. Then as you get bigger and better and have bigger budgets and you're like, Okay. now I have a mastering engineer.

[01:11:39] I have a mastering engineer and a mix engineer that opportunity to begin to add people to that team. It is such a win to add lyric video guy to that team as well, so that you can send your musician to them because it behooves you as a mastering engineer. Like, I hate to say this, but like, I'm not going to help you get any more customers.

[01:11:58] If you hire me to master your record. I can't, there's nothing I can do about that. But you, Anthony absolutely can

[01:12:04] Brian: [01:12:04] Yeah. So we needed to have a kind of a just one-to-one episode with about me and you about this. Chris. I think we've talked about this in the past. I have to look this up is I don't have my spreadsheet right in front of me, of the past episodes, but where it's taught is about building your, your.

[01:12:18] Chris: [01:12:18] Passover.

[01:12:19] Brian: [01:12:19] It's a referral circle.

[01:12:19] It's kind of what we kind of dubbed it. And it's where you have built out all these other team members that do complimentary services. And now as we're shifting the six-figure creative now, that is like, absolutely like if you're listening and you're not in the audio world, you're in the design world, you're in the video world, the photo world illustration world you're in one of these other creative fields.

[01:12:38] It is absolutely crucial that you start connecting with these other cogs in the wheel that make the machine up that helps these artists or helps these businesses grow, learn fizz.com, a great Coggin machine for the music world. Do you do corporate videos too? Or you just do lyric.

[01:12:52] Anthony: [01:12:52] Oh, no, we absolutely do corporate we've focused because all the momentum from coming out of my music career, cause we built, we sort of built this business on the back of, I was a touring musician who was coming out of that and you know, you've got all these peers in the music industry. So that's where the, you know, the first rocks land.

[01:13:05] But you know, we recently did a project for Louis Vuitton. We did something for the NBA, Canada goose, which is a big brand up here in Canada. So we kind of started to dabble. What's really fun is the way that the, your music clients can gain some momentum and almost like skip out of the lane and land in the next lane.

[01:13:19] The clients in the music land get impressive enough that the corporate people are impressed now. So they're kind of willing to trust you to kind of come over to their side. So we've just, just started. I have my background when I was younger, was in the ad business. So I was hesitant to go back into that lane and do really boring kind of corporate videos.

[01:13:34] So now that we've got a lot more momentum, it frees us up to do kind of sexy corporate videos. And that's what, that's what we're really enjoying doing on the side right now.

[01:13:41] Brian: [01:13:41] That's a good niche. We do sexy vids. No, no, don't do that. nevermind.com. No, no, no.

[01:13:46] Anthony: [01:13:46] Very different niche.

[01:13:47] Brian: [01:13:47] Yeah, very different niche. All right. I'm going to end on that. This is already been a long enough conversation, always good in, on a low point like that. So thank you so much for coming on Anthony. And,

[01:13:56] Anthony: [01:13:56] That was great guys. Thank you, man. Every everything I could have hoped.

[01:14:04] Brian: [01:14:04] so that is it for this interview with Anthony. What was his last name?

[01:14:08] Chris: [01:14:08] So I have a phobia of saying people's names wrong. So I don't want to say it

[01:14:14] Brian: [01:14:14] That was our interview with, that was our interview with Anthony from lyric vids. Whose last name, Chris doesn't want to say. And last name, which I can't remember,

[01:14:23] Chris: [01:14:23] I'm going to risk it. Correct? Crap. Crap. I'm not a really dry it. I'm seriously. I'm of all the things on earth saying someone's name wrong. I don't know why.

[01:14:33] Brian: [01:14:33] dude. I love it. In the coaching calls. I try my best to mispronounce names. Cause it's so funny to me. So I'll try to say, is it crap? A Latta crap. Lotta, I don't know what it was. It was.

[01:14:44] Chris: [01:14:44] I have a phobia. I like I'm 99.9%. Sure how to say it, but I won't risk it. Like that's I just, I can't, especially on

[01:14:53] Brian: [01:14:53] Which is funny. Cause like as entrepreneurs, we have to be accepting of failure all the time. Like as an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to fail, which is a completely different inter uh, episode in conversation in of itself. But holy crap, that interview was amazing. Like, thanks for bringing him onto the podcast as one of your coaching clients, because that dude is awesome.

[01:15:12] And I want to bring it back on to talk about stuff, but like man, the outreach thing, that's one area that I have students that have had success with that. I definitely know it works. I've definitely seen different approaches that work in different ways.

[01:15:22] Chris: [01:15:22] He's a samurai ninja with cold outreach.

[01:15:25] Brian: [01:15:25] Yes, but I don't know many people that are doing three to five to 700 a week. That's an insane number now, granted, because he has a team that's doing as more people doing it, he has a good system and process set up for finding emails for putting them to a CRM for reaching out via templates. All that stuff is pretty well systemized.

[01:15:41] So it's not, if you just say 500 a week, that's a hundred a day. If you're doing outreach for a hundred a day, like if you have a, a good search system set up like in Google or on playlist or on Instagram hashtags or on or on Facebook communities or these different areas where your ideal clients congregate, I think it can be manageable at least at a smaller scale.

[01:16:01] Again, you don't have to be doing multiple six figures a year sending out 500 emails a week. You can send a hundred emails out a week, which is what does that 10 50 a day is that, am I math wrong?

[01:16:12] Chris: [01:16:12] Not even

[01:16:13] Brian: [01:16:13] even close 10 a day. I'm sorry. 20 a day. Good. God, my math is wrong. Don't let me do your account.

[01:16:19] Chris: [01:16:19] still wrong. It's seven. It's divided by seven. Oh, well, if you're thinking five days.

[01:16:23] Brian: [01:16:23] I do find it. I don't, I don't work on, I don't work on Saturday, Sunday, so I always count thing as five days a week, but yeah, you can, you can scale it down and still have success. But the big thing is he's consistently sending out a large number of emails, whatever a large number of emails is to you is up to you, but it's, and he's doing what I call this straight to pitch method, which is like, you're essentially like trying to get them to have interest in hiring you straight off the bat, which I always, I kinda go back and forth on for the longest time I taught that.

[01:16:50] And then I went back and said, no, let's do the Go-Giver approach, which is you're starting conversations. You're trying to add value. You're trying to build a relationship. And then you pitch, and, and that works when it's a really high ticket item when you're selling thousands of dollars worth of services for something.

[01:17:03] And, uh, when you have, you know, time.

[01:17:08] Chris: [01:17:08] Well, and there's a third thing that Anthony does so well is that he has a niche. He is so rare.

[01:17:14] Brian: [01:17:14] Okay. What's that there's like the, the phases of an industry. And I I'm going to butcher this, but this is really important point that you brought up in this conversation kind of entailed was, and God, this is gonna be the longest episode of all time. But anyways, it's, it's like when, when you are the first to do something, all you need to do to market that is let other people know that you exist.

[01:17:33] And then when competitors start coming in, now you still have to start telling you. Why you're different than everyone else. And then it gets even more saturated and then you've got to figure out all these it's like, it's like every time it gets more and more saturated, you've got to do more and more to market your services.

[01:17:48] And so when you were talking about our, when Anthony was talking about, he doesn't really have a great way to do this for mixing engineers. That's because mixing engineers is a much more saturated place than someone like lyric videos, because although it is relatively saturated, not that many people at his level doing it.

[01:18:02] So he has kind of a monopoly on the market, which was kind of how I had mixing probably eight years ago earlier in my career when it was like, there's not that many people in my area doing this. So I kind of had to pay the litter. And as it got more and more saturated, I had to do more and more and more to build my name and get more clients in the door.

[01:18:19] So it is one of those things that like, it doesn't mean it can't be done. It just means you have to add spice to your bland dish. Like if you're starving, it doesn't just give me food. I don't care what it is. But once I have a plethora of food to choose from, you got to start adding some interesting spices to those dishes or else I'm not.

[01:18:35] Chris: [01:18:35] Oh, yes, dude. I'm loving that illustration. And I think that that's something that we've probably struggled to explain in the last season of the podcast that like, Hey, cold outreach. Yes, it works. But if you're complaining that it doesn't work and you're saying, Hey, uh, I'm trying to market a copycat service.

[01:18:54] That's not as good as who I'm copying or maybe is as good, but doesn't have as much social proof or authority. Of course, it's not going to work. If I get cold emails about a new brand of Kleenex, do you think I'm going to change from Kleenex? No. of course.

[01:19:10] Brian: [01:19:10] I love that just bland as example. So I've been thinking about this a lot, and I just think that people, when they, when they start doing audio services or really any creative service, cause we're the, six-figure creative. Now they just look to their peers and people around them and they say, oh, I would love to do that in this.

[01:19:25] I'm going to do that too. So it's like, it's like, uh, I'll do that to kind of service. And they don't put any thought into the problem they're solving and who they're solving it for. And if you don't do those steps, it is going to be very difficult to make anything work, cold outreach, paid ads, SEO, referrals, networking.

[01:19:43] None of those things will work, even though we know all those things work. So when none of those things work, the problem, isn't those methods, those vehicles to get in clients. It's you, you're the problem. You're not interesting enough. You're not spicy enough. You don't have, you don't have anything to is differentiating you.

[01:19:58] And so. These things won't work for you. So it's, it's, it's getting down to the fundamentals of why you're struggling. It's not because of this flashy new thing that came out, this new marketing method. It's not because tech talks now the big thing, it's not because clubhouse is the big thing. It's not because future social media platform, that will be the future of all things is not working.

[01:20:16] It's because you fundamentally have not put in the work to differentiate yourself, to find what's unique about.

[01:20:24] Chris: [01:20:24] So a perfect example of that. Brian is donuts. Donuts is a pretty saturated market. You can buy donuts everywhere, but a number of years ago, somebody had an idea for a cronut it's part croissant it's part donut, and it went hyper ridiculously viral because it was a little bit different and I've never had a cronut.

[01:20:44] I want to try the cronut so bad, but here's the thing that I think is interesting about this. The baker who came up with cronuts, he did not set out to redefine the breakfast pastry. At least I, I seriously doubt that he did, he set out with a dream and that dream is probably to make donuts. Right? You wanted to run this doughnut business.

[01:21:03] Here's the question I would have for him was switching your lanes was becoming branded as the cronut guy. Creatively satisfying for you. Was the pivot creatively satisfying for you? If Anthony were here? I would. I wish I'd asked him this. You set out to become a rapper. You inadvertently became the CEO of the number one lyric video company on the planet.

[01:21:24] Was that creatively satisfying for you? And was it more creatively satisfying for you than being a rapper of successful one at that? And I would guess I know Anthony, well, somebody he's going to say, oh, absolutely. Like ridiculously satisfying. So I think for a lot of people with the niche thing, when we talk about. niche that there's this resistance, like why I don't want to do something new and different because it wasn't my dream initially.

[01:21:48] Well, here's the thing. If you're a creative, I would guess that what you are really, truly chasing is that moment of creative satisfaction when you make something and you're like, ah, yes, that is cool. And it's beautiful and it's awesome. And I'm proud of myself and I. You'll get that more. If you're weirder, if you do something that's in a smaller niche, that's more focused that plays more into your strengths instead of a copycat creative service.