Time and Energy Vampires

Hey, what's up gigging pros. It's Jared and welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Today I'm going to talk about "Energy and Time Vampires" and how they sabotage your music career. But first, I want to apologize for being a little bit missing in action here. It's been very hectic in Milwaukee. It's our summertime gigging season is upon us, we have multiple gigs every single weekend. And on top of that, I just spent two weeks down in Phoenix, Arizona, at a marketing conference and spending some time with family. So I have not made the time to record some episodes. But I'm back and I'm committed to you my gigging pros. And we're going to, we're going to just get back into our routine here. So I was recently inspired to talk about "Energy and Time Vampires", because of one of my marketing mentors named Dan Kennedy. He has a podcast called The Magnetic Marketing Podcast, which I highly recommend you listen to, if you're interested in learning more about the nitty gritty of marketing on a very general level. These are marketing tactics that will apply to every single business, but you can pull out the nuggets and figure out how do you apply this to your music career. So one of the topics I was listening to recently was about"Energy and Time Vampires", which are things that interrupt or take time and energy away from you, that you feel like might be necessary to do at the time. But ultimately, they reduce the quality of your life, they make it more frustrating to do what you do. And on a practical level, they minimize your ability to make money as a musician. So think about your music career right now, what are the time vampires, some of them will be unique to your specific situation situation, but some of them will be a little bit more universal. Some of the ones that come to my mind are there are clients that I work with who hire me for their events that sometimes need nonstop hand holding, those are time and energy vampires. And they're tricky to work with, because, you know, they just want your support all the way they're very nervous, or they're very controlling and demanding. And you have to spend a lot of time and a lot of energy, consoling them and maybe even bending your will to theirs, which is not a good situation to be in as a musician, you know, musicians, we get taken advantage of all the time. And it's, it's honestly, it's not fair. It's time that that stops. But what Dan Kennedy said in his podcast was that there's a way to actually prevent these time vampires from from even entering in your world and minimizing their ability to exert their control over you. So for the example of the time vampire client, when you're marketing your group, which you know, as as a gigging Pro, we all market our groups, that's how we get high paying gigs. When you're marketing your group, there's ways to filter out clients who are not good fits for you. Like on your homepage, or whatever page you use to generate leads, you can have a frequently asked question section that says, what's the process when working with you. And you can write that in there, set your boundaries and say, what we'll do is we'll have a kickoff music planning meeting, where we'll spend 30 minutes where I will get you set up on our online music portal, which, by the way, if you're not signed up for BookLive, you've got to try BookLive, because this is one way to reduce your time vampires. So you tell them, we'll set up a 30 minute meeting that kickoff your music planning portal, which will set up the timeline for your event, and then you get to pick your songs from our list, we do not take requests. Or if you want to set those boundaries and dictate how that works. And then have that meeting, give them all that they need to get started. And then tell them that you don't necessarily make changes after a certain deadline. So set deadlines for them, too. So what this does is this empowers them to have control over what you can do, while still setting very clear boundaries of your time and boundaries of what you're willing to do without getting paid extra. So that's a way to kind of weed out and rein in the time and energy vampire of clients who demand more of you than you're willing to give. Another one might be musicians that you work with. So if you're a band leader, maybe you know of a musician or two, who is a little more high maintenance, and they take a lot of energy, a lot of cajoling, maybe they don't respond to your your messages to schedule them. And that becomes a time energy because you have to spend so much time chasing them down, that you no longer have enough time to start pursuing more gigs. You have to focus on the gigs that you have. And so that's a big problem that you have to kind of rein in so how can we eliminate that time vampire from your your workload? And that could again be using BookLive to automatically remind them and it'll chase them down until they You get a response from them. Or you might need to have a conversation with them say, hey, look, every single gig, I'm chasing you down to get a response, or whatever the things I need from you, and you're not not giving it to me, this needs to change because it's holding the band back. And that conversation might be uncomfortable. But ultimately, if they're preventing you from doing your job, they're preventing themselves from getting more high paying work, they're preventing themselves from playing More music, and getting their music out there in the world. And they're clearly not going to stop without some sort of persuasion from you. So that's another option. Option three in that situation might be can you replace this person, if they're not a good fit for you, you don't have time to constantly fight this battle with them. So could you find a replacement? Are there music schools where you can recruit another violinist or they're open mic nights, where you can listen and find a drummer, that would be a good fit for your band. So these are all options, and I know it sounds harsh, but at the end of the day, it's your music career. It's your ability to make money with your music, and support your family. It's your ability to play as many gigs as you want and get your music in the world. And you can't have these time and energy vampires preventing you from doing that job. So I'm curious let me know what your time vampires are. Find me on Instagram. You know, my my handle is @JaredJudge or on TikTok. I started at TikTok it's FullTime Musician. So make sure to like and follow me on TikTok if you're a TikToker, or just shoot me an email Jared@BookLive.com. I'm curious what are your time and energy vampires when growing your music career? And let's start that conversation. So thanks again for listening to The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, 'You are just one gig away!'