Should You Do It All?

Hey, what's up gigging pros. It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. I am on my way to a gig, it is a birthday party gig on a Wednesday night at Cherry Hills Country Club in, I think it's Centennial, Colorado might be in a different town. But that's kind of the area, just a little suburb of Denver. And I have an hour drive here. So you guys are stuck with me for a whole hour. Just kidding. We'll stick to our short form format. But I'm actually on my way from a venue tour up in Boulder. So that's why I've got this hour drive ahead of me. Plus, we're heading into rush hour Denver traffic port planning on my part, but I'm going to enjoy the consequences of my actions. Remember, this is not convenient, building a music career. B, being your own entrepreneur is never convenient. That's why not everybody does it. That was the thesis of a couple episodes ago. Anyway, today, I want to congratulate one of my Fulltime Music Academy Platinum members for doing something amazing, related to growing a business, his own music business, he runs a band in the Philadelphia area. And he did something that business owners struggle to do. And that's honestly a reason why a lot of them fail and do not grow past a certain level. And why a lot of businesses go out is because they fail to do this, which is he delegated. And I'm very proud of him for doing that. Alright, so he recently his band played at a festival, they got some nice footage of the band playing on their phone on one of the band members phones, got that video sent to him. But the problem with that video is that is zoomed out. So the band has kind of taken up a small portion of the video. And it's a little tilted, which is pretty funny. So you could see some guy's feet that's lying back enjoying himself in the footage. So he just wanted to edit it and trim it down to a minute and zoom in, take care of transitions fade in fade out that kind of thing. And so this Fulltime Music Academy member, you know, could he learn how to edit his own video? Yes, he could. And I'm sure many of you know how to edit your own video, or you are confident that you could learn it. But the question is, should you learn how to edit your own video and apply that question to any other skill that is not in the realm of what you want to do as a musician, which is playing your instrument. The only exception to this would be marketing and selling your your music, I don't think you should outsource that, I think you should learn how to do that. That's the whole thesis of this podcast. But as far as like these small tasks, that they're not like$100 An hour tasks, they're, you know, I don't you can get people to do this for you for five bucks on fiverr.com. Instead, he was going to spend hours learning how to use a video editing tool, which you know, I had recommended cap cut to him a while ago. And it was frustrating. It can be frustrating experience learning a new piece of software, learning how to do all the little things to trim it down and do your transitions and zoom in and fix the tilt. And then even when you learn how to do all those things, there's so many layers of depth to it. Like you know, being a sound engineer is not just about turning the knobs and plugging stuff in. There's real art and skill to it. That, you know, if you just spend a couple hours watching YouTube videos, you're not going to get the depth of those skills. Same for video editing, same for all these other things, even like copywriting. But so we I asked him the question in our Platinum coaching session today, he was telling me, I asked him, How long do you think it would take for you to learn and do this and get a decent result and you said two hours, which might not sound like a lot. But in the grand scheme of things, those hours add up because you're not just learning how to do this for this one video, you're figuring it out for each video, because each video is gonna have quirks that time is going to add up and multiply. And then all the other skills that you shouldn't have to learn, that's going to add up and then all of a sudden, you're spending so much time doing all this stuff that really somebody else could do. Okay, one second here, I got to navigate, then change some lanes here and we're going to get on 25 south towards Denver. Okay, anyway, back to a regular scheduled programming, which is I asked him the question, well, you're gonna spend two hours on this. Is it worth your time to do this? And not only are you spending time doing it, you're also introducing frustration and headache. that permeates into your perception of yourself. Because if you get frustrated With this, you know, long term that frustration also adds up, diminishes your confidence in doing what you need to do to market and sell your act. So should you spend those two hours, which is more than just the time, or there's somebody online on a site like fiverr.com, that could do this probably for about five bucks. And so after a little bit of deliberation, he came to the conclusion. Yeah, I shouldn't do this. Let me just hire this out. So while we were on our Platinum session, which is those are one on one sessions that I do with some musicians who elected to take that program. I wish he shared his screen with me, he went on fiverr.com, I helped him hire his first Freelancer on Fiverr. We searched for a video editor checked reviews, checked sample work, and decided to hire this one person. And sure enough, they were charging $5. So is it worth $5, which, you know, it's cheaper than a cup of Starbucks these days to take something off your plate that would have caused you to spend over two hours and the frustration? So the answer is obviously a logical Yes, you know, I'd give away five bucks to take away and annoyance that's going to take up hours of my time. And, you know, if you consider if you can do something with those hours, that will make you money, you're probably going to earn more than $2.50 an hour, which is what the rate that you're basically paying to have this done. So he hired the person online on Fiverr. And then I helped him navigate the requirements. Because when you hire a freelancer online, you have to tell them explicitly what to do. In this case, we had to upload the video, the raw footage to fiverr.com. And then we had to tell the Freelancer what we wanted done, which really took a paragraph. And it's even easier these days with tools like chat, GBT, you can actually generate instructions for freelancers, which is amazing. But that's kind of beyond the scope of what we did. So anyway, And then there was a confirmation message that said this will be done in under 24 hours. And when he did that, it when he saw that he was just elated, he was like this would have taken me days, I probably would have procrastinated this for weeks and get frustrated and curse my computer, and maybe even given up. And here it is just done for him. So the lesson there is should you be doing all the things that you're doing? A while ago, I talked about delegating. And that's why I hired a virtual assistant in my business said I shouldn't be doing all the things that I don't need to be doing. And if you think that there's something that you need to be done that you need to be the one doing, perhaps that's true, because there are certain things. But more often than not, you don't need to be doing he submitted the requirements. After fivers service fees, I everything. And it's so easy. And it's so cheap. With platforms like fiverr.com, or upwork.com is another one that I've used successfully, you could hire almost anything on those platforms, you can hire voice actors, you could probably even hire music. Actually, I know you can hire musicians to record for you, I've seen that. And I've even offered my skills. But I never got any work off of that just because I never dove deep into that. So you can enter practically anything on those platforms, within reason and legality. But it's an amazing way to gain something very important in your business, which is called leverage. Leverage is when you get a disproportionate output from an input. So if you put in a minimal amount of effort, you get a maximum amount of return on that. So by hiring somebody, you're not the one to do it, you put in think it came out to $8.36, something like that. minimal effort. You gave him some money, yes, but you know, five bucks. But in exchange, you get a high quality products that you personally didn't have to spend your time, effort, and emotion doing. So, go check out fiverr.com I'm not getting paid by fiverr.com to endorse them. Nor am I getting paid by upwork.com. But I really feel like you know, if you're in if you're treating your music career as a business, there are tools and resources at your business's disposal that you have to start tapping into. So otherwise you will get burnt out. You will not get the results that you want. You'll be frustrated and your music and your instrument will be left in its case, gathering dust, dark discipline. Alright, I got too much time on my hand. I'm going to wrap up this episode. By the way, if you want to learn a little bit more about this whole delegating thing, I do teach how to do this in our Fulltime Music Academy which you can get a free trial of when you get your free copy of the gig vaults, a treasure trove of over 24,665 high end venue and event planner contacts. All yours for the one low price of $0 comes with a 30 day trial of Fulltime Music Academy. And you can decide if you want to continue after those 30 days. Most of our members do because they get so much out of it that it's a no brainer, but you don't have to make that decision when you sign up. Go to OpenTheGigVault.com Get your free copy today. And remember, "Your music will not market itself!".