What's up gigging musicians. Today I wanted to chat about goal setting for musicians specifically for gigging musicians. So I've been working with one of my students on setting some goals and helping him build his gigging career, more or less from scratch, he's played a couple gigs that I've helped him get previously, but he wants to be able to do it himself. And, you know, he wants to do it full time. So, you know, most musicians, when we start out, we're like, I want to play good music, I want to play some really cool venues, cool places, and I want to play with my friends, like, I want this to be a really fun social activity that also pays a couple bills here and there. But it's not necessarily important that it pays a full time living. But for some people, when you know, you start out doing it, and you kind of catch the bug, you get addicted to these things. And you do want it to become your full time living. That's where I was at, you know, back when I was in grad school. And so for my students, he's at that point, right now he caught the bug, he loves playing gigs, he's ready to make this a full time career out of it. And so the first thing that we did together, was we started to set some goals. So the first goal that he told me, I asked him, How much do you need to make a year? That would be a comfortable living for you like what what kind of salary would you kind of expect? And he thought about it for a second, and he gave me a number. And his number was $40,000. And you know, that is a very concrete goal, it's a good, good goal to make in a year with just music alone. Now, once you have that goal number, then there are a couple of factors that determine how do you get to that goal. If you think about it, well, you on average, when you play a gig, you get an average payment. And that is kind of one of the big levers that you can pull to get to your goal, either slower or faster. And so I asked him, like, up until this point, what has your average gig paid for you? And he told me $200, you know, that's a decent sized amount to get per gig. But if we reverse engineer it, and we're, you know, you need to meet a goal of $40,000 a year, how many gigs a year does that mean, you need to play. So we got out the calculator. We did 40,000 divided by $200. And we found out that he needed to play 200 gigs in a year. Now, if you're thinking about that, well, there are 52 weekends in a year. That means you need to be playing about four gigs a week. And for some people that's feasible. For some people, that's a lot of work. For some people, that's not enough. But what is a way to get to that goal faster without having to play 200 gigs in a year? Well, it raise the rates. And right off the bat, you know him and I worked on raising his personal rates, he plays in a jazz combo, where, you know, if he's charged his private event clients and certain amount, he has to compensate people other than himself. So that's one of his challenges that he's working on, especially Well, what does that do to the number of gigs he needs to play that he's newer to the scene. And so, immediately, we kind of worked out, well, let's raise let's double your rate to start. And we'll probably go up again, pretty soon after you get some in a year, cuts it in half, instead of doing 200 gigs a more social proof and everything. So let's do 400 gig. So now that we're doing 400 a gig for him. year, he now only needs to do 100 gigs in a year, which is just about to every single week, which is much more accomplishable. And using some of the other tools like the offer stack that I covered in one of the previous episodes of this podcast, that is how to justify higher rates. And I know he can go even higher. And I know there's some of you on this podcast that says you know, $400 is laughable. And he'll get there. I know he will. But as you know, you have to work up to it. So he has to establish himself a little bit more in the scene to get there. So now that he knows that he needs two gigs, a week, it becomes a much more manageable task, saying like, Okay, I need two gigs a week. What are the steps that I need to take? What are the marketing actions that I need to take to lend me those two gigs a week, and if you know anything about marketing funnels and the gigging funnels that I helped musicians set up, you just worked backwards, like if you know what actions lead up to you booking a gig. And you know how many times those actions like what's the success ratio, that conversion rate for each step? You work backwards to figure out okay, I need to make X number of phone calls every single week to land myself two gigs a week. And so that's what goes setting is so important because it drives the type and the number of actions you need to take to get the result that you're looking for. So you know, that it's working for him, we really helped to define his strategy and what kind of funnels he needs in place to really blow up his marketing. And it's also worked for me, because you know, when I started pretty early on, I didn't have goals, I was just kind of shooting in the dark. But when I started to figure out, oh, this is working, then I started to put some numbers to it and set some goals, realistic goals, but then I met those goals. And what's cool is that once you meet those goals, your confidence level increases. And then you start to be able to accomplish even greater things, you build up your capacity. And actually like because of that, just last night, I was at an awards show for Wisconsin bride magazine. They do an award show every year where they get vendors, wedding vendors from across the state. All together in a room, there are three nominees in each category. And my group, Dream City Strings. One Wisconsin's best ceremony music of 2021. So that's pretty exciting. And that's, that's the power of goal setting. And I hope that this inspires you to start to set some goals for yourself as a gigging musician, and then start to work backwards, break that goal down into manageable chunks, and do the actions necessary and the quantity of actions necessary to achieve if you got any value out of this podcast. I hope that you like subscribe and share it with your friends. take some action. And again, like I've said in the past couple of episodes, I have a couple spots for a few more students to help define those goals and help you work towards achieving what you want to achieve out of your music career. So reach out to me Jared@BookLive.com, and I hope to see you on the next Gigging Musician podcast.