The Most Impactful Thing For A Music Career

Hey, what's up gigging pros, it's Jared Judge, welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. So as you might know, I got back from vacation earlier this week, took my wife and I, we went down to Colorado Springs, just about an hour and 15 minutes south of Denver. Had an amazing time. I did not do any work, which was awesome. However, I do want to happily report that I booked four gigs during that time. And I didn't do any of the work to do that. And I want to share with you guys how this happened. Because, you know, it's amazing what can happen through the power of automation and delegation. So this might be a little bit of a more complex subject than we typically discuss on the Gigging Musician Podcast. But it is so incredibly powerful, that can be applied to your gigging careers, your music careers, and also like other aspects of your life, too. You know, if you've got a day job, that you can leverage this power to do less work, but also get more done. And I first discovered this, back when I was in grad school. Well, let's just automation I've always kind of known about because I've been a nerd. Ever since hadn't know I was born. But in middle school, I started teaching myself how to code. And that was when I realized, like, computers can do a lot of the work that we do, if we give it explicit instructions. But the true power of this and how it applied to a music career really happened when I started my gigging act, you know, dream city strings, a string quartet, when I was in grad school. So I started that, in grad school, I was studying orchestra conducting, which is a very time intensive field, you have to be practicing, you know, it's similar to having a degree in, in an instrument, you have to be practicing hours every single day, you have to be attending rehearsals, hours every single day, you have to be in music classes, you know, history theory, all that kind of thing, hours a day. And then, on top of that, I started to write research papers, because that's what our our college wanted us to do. And taking lessons. Plus, I wanted a social life, you know, who doesn't want a social life. So I was very busy in grad school. That was actually when I met my wife, we were in band together. And so all these things were like I wanted to do, I want to do the normal music school thing. But I also wanted to start this string quartet, specifically treating it as a business because that's kind of the whole philosophy of the Gigging Musician Podcast is we treat our music careers as businesses. So I wanted to maximize the number of bookings we had, without adding too much time, which, of course, when I first started, I was not leveraging the power of automation and delegation. It was like basically adding another full time job to my plate, which was in your busy and music school, you don't have time for a full time job. But I did it anyway. Because I don't know Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm passionate, maybe a bit of both windows. And then I randomly I think it was at an estate sale, because I also liked, it was one of the things that my now wife, then girlfriend did from time to time was go to these estate sales, and just look at all the stuff that they were selling. There's books and pieces of furniture, even got a keyboard extend for just for fun there. And one of the books that I found was called The Four Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss, Timothy Ferriss, I think is when it goes by in the book cover. And he's like, yeah, that title sounds really amazing. You know, who wouldn't want a four hour workweek, versus the typical 40 Hour Workweek that a full time job is typically classified as, meanwhile, at the time, I was probably pulling an 80 Hour Workweek between music school and starting a business. So it's like, how can we get that 80 hours down to four? Of course, I couldn't really replace practicing, you gotta gotta practice go to class gotta get the degree as they say. But, you know, what if this book had some gold nuggets that I could apply to the business I was starting. So I read it. And it was incredible. Some of the stuff did not apply to what I was doing. But nonetheless, like the principles and concepts that it taught, really got my wheels spinning, and the gears turning about how could I do this? And maybe even like, start some of the things that he was teaching. But basically, the whole book came down to two things, which is automation, and delegation. So automation is how can you take those He did things that you do on a daily basis, or weekly basis or monthly basis, and outsource it to a computer to do the work, you know, can we get a computer to do certain things. And many of you know the story that I launched my string quartet learn how to market it. And we were actually super busy with tons of gigs, which led to an organizational problem that I was scheduling musicians for, you know, dozens of gigs every every month. And that became so much work on top of the, you know, 5060 hours of spending in grad school, that I actually missed a gig. Because I failed at one of the organizational pieces, I did not schedule musicians for the gig. And I get that phone call from the wedding planner saying Where the heck are the strings, He better get your butts over here in 10 minutes. Of course, nobody could get there in 10 minutes. And so that was a terrible experience. I felt awful. And that's when I applied the first principle of The Four Hour Workweek to my string quartet. By creating an app, which is now BookLive, it's being used by over 2000 musicians to the first thing that I had to do was automate the scheduling of my musicians, which was incredible. I click one button, sends out emails and texts to all of the musicians saying, Hey, are you available for this gig? Here's the date, the time the venue, the pay, click this button, yes or no, they click yes, they're locked in, they click No, then it moves on to the next musician on my roster. And all without me lifting a single finger, the robot does all the work, which to me is huge. Like that's a huge time saver. And, yeah, it just takes so much off of my plate. So I applied that to other things, too. Like, you know, there's a lot more to leading a successful gigging act than just scheduling musicians. There's also marketing, there's also sales. There's also the fulfillment of that, like purchasing sheet music, distributing it to a string quartet, scheduling, rehearsals, all that kind of thing. There are tons of pieces within all of those tasks that can be automated. And so I keep going with that, and build automations upon automations, which is why, you know, I don't really spend that much time actually running my act. But then that brings us to the other piece of the equation, which was, you know, how did I book four gigs, this past weekend when I was on vacation, and I didn't actually do any work. And that comes through delegation. Delegation is incredible. A lot of musicians are really bad at it, I was to win, I still struggle with it from time to time. But it was a conscious effort to become better at it. And delegation is when you pass the work off to somebody else to do it for you. This could be somebody near you, this could be somebody who volunteers for you. For example, one of our String Quartet members, Denise, she does a bit of volunteer work for our group, in exchange, you know, I help her launch a competing string quartet in Milwaukee, which I'm more than happy to do. Because, you know, my goal is just to make all musicians successful. So I do a bit of personal work for her. In exchange, she does a bit of work for the string quartet. So that is one way of doing it the other way is hiring it out. And, to me, this has been one of the most impactful things. In my music career has been hiring an assistant, I have an assistant. In fact, most of the podcasts that you listen to have been uploaded and taken care of online, by the assistant, I just record the podcast on my phone, which is what I'm doing right now. And then I send the audio file over to my assistant, his name is Reinald. He's amazing. He's actually located in the Philippines. And he's what's considered a virtual assistant. Virtual Assistant is not a robot. It's a real person. And Reinald, my virtual assistant is amazing. And he takes care of all of the administrative tasks. But I approach it similarly to automation. Like, I know exactly what needs to be done. To the point like I've done these tasks, so many times, including the gig booking like he sent emails to the people who are trying to book me, he did a little bit of sales. And then he wrote the contract using BookLive, which is he automated the contract writing and then sent them the link and then BookLive collected their signature and collected their, you know, booking fee, the deposit that we take to book a gig. So I've done this so many times that I've created, step by step instructions written out that we have a library of that Reinald has access to and he just follows those instructions step by step. So it gives done, I don't have to do it, I did have to do it a couple times, the first few times I did each task, but then, you know, pass over the instructions to him, walk him through them, have him do a couple of test tasks of it, making sure that my quality control is still there. And then for new tasks, he's actually able to figure out how they should be done, just because he knows my business so well. And so, yeah, I am so incredibly grateful to Reinald. And I understand how powerful this is, to the point where I've even given access to my Fulltime Music Academy, Gold members, I give them five hours of his time, every single month for him to do tasks on their behalf. And so he spends a lot of time reaching out to venues on behalf of other musicians, securing those connections and partnerships. He's built people's websites, he's done social media stuff, he's he does a lot. He's like, incredible, we have a team of a couple of others to help out. But that, to me is the power of delegation is like, these musicians don't have to spend the time doing it. And also, the other thing is like, they don't have to experience the fear of pressing the send button. For those emails to venues, they don't have to experience the self doubt, and the nerves that go along with it. They know that it needs to be done. And they're just happy to, you know, ask renal to do it, and know that it gets done. So that is the power of automation and delegation. And I would not have the music career that I have without both of those things. And I guess this is kind of a little episode tribute to my personal assistant Reinald because he is amazing. And I hope he listens to this episode, and just realizes how grateful I am for him. And I'll shoot him a message just let him know, I was thinking about him too. But I hope this helps you think about how you could leverage this in your music career. And I will actually talk about this in the free 5-day Fulltime Music Challenge coming up May 1. And so it's totally free. You definitely gotta join set aside five hours this week, to make a massive impact on your music career. Whether that's getting more bookings, whether that's learned how to take some work off your plate, whether that's just to get a direction to go to if you feel like you've been floundering around with your music career for a while, thinking like, oh, I don't know exactly where I'm going with this. Let me give you that direction. So join me for free at FulltimeMusicChallenge.com Definitely take me up on the free VIP upgrade. That to me has been one of the most impactful experiences for our musician, and I'd love to see you in it. So yeah, go to FulltimeMusicChallenge.com join us there and thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "You are just one gig away!".