Author: Leah McHenry

00:21 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz, branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. Joined once again by one of my most favorite people to talk to about all kinds of stuff but when it comes to this podcast, we’re talking about the music business. And that is, of course, Leah McHenry. Good to see you again.

00:44 Leah: Great to see you, CJ.

00:50 CJ: It’s great to be seen.

00:50 Leah: And I’m glad you like my amazing mug that I brought today.

00:51 CJ: Yeah, for those of you who are not watching on YouTube, she’s got… Looks like she beat up a Viking and stole his mug.

00:58 Leah: That’s right.

01:00 CJ: I mean that thing is just as…

01:02 Leah: It’s pretty cool.

01:03 CJ: Uh-huh. We would say metal.

01:06 Leah: It makes my coffee taste better. Yeah, it’s metal all right.

01:09 CJ: It’s metal, man.

01:09 Leah: Mm-hmm.

01:10 CJ: But anyway, again, Savvy Musician Show. Excited about this episode because we’re going to go even deeper into this successful versus unsuccessful ways of thinking and what determines success. I think, Leah, by now people have probably got the message that we all need to continue to change our thinking, embrace the challenges, all of the changes. We’re going to go deeper into even some more fears that are holding people back. And it’s going to be really, really relevant to all listeners today. So I’m excited about this.

Before we do that, let me share with you a student spotlight. And this is from Sam Morrison, who I believe is also a TOM student and he writes, “#Win. I posted last week that asked reading the latest Inner Circle that I realized the importance of having a Facebook group and declared to you all that mine was coming soon. Well, it’s here. I launched it last night and already have 50 people that have joined. People are posting and I see how it’s going to be a good thing. Leah is right, knowing your niche is the key. My group is called 100 Proof Southern Rock. And it’s geared towards people that love Southern rock, are tired of today’s music and want to discover new Southern Rock bands.”

You know what I like about this one, Leah? Is they got something out of the Inner Circle, and it’s a TOM student.

02:39 Leah: Yeah.

02:40 CJ: How about that?

02:41 Leah: That’s fantastic. Yeah, there’s always something to learn. And we’re going to talk about that today. There’s always something to learn. It doesn’t matter how successful you are. In fact, it’s a really weird thing that the more successful you become, the more you feel like you don’t know anything. It’s very odd.

02:56 CJ: It’s true.

02:58 Leah: There are some days I wake up I’m like, “I don’t know anything.” I feel like I know nothing. Because you realize the more information you take in, you realize how much more information there is out there and how little… I mean, my life is such a blip on the radar of this universe, this world. I don’t mean to get philosophical, but it really… There’s just always so much to learn. And you don’t want to let that overwhelm you. It’s just like, hey, one little tidbit, one little golden gem can really change so much for you. And that’s why I continually invest in myself. I continually invest into coaching and mentorship because I need that objective perspective, I need that outsider perspective of people who have walked before me who’ve made the mistakes that I don’t need to make and I can learn from them and also, they can pass on sometimes just one gem.

I’ve paid for courses and mentorships where I feel like I knew a lot already, but there was one golden gem that could make the next million dollars. And it has. So never underestimate. Don’t think that, “I already know all that stuff.” I guarantee you, you don’t. I guarantee there’s something in there that you did not know. So join the Inner Circle because there’s so much there for you in terms of topics and specialized, I mean we’ve got guests in there every month. It’s not just me and CJ, we’ve got guests in there all the time teaching on their particular topic of knowledge. There’s a tremendous amount of value.

04:37 CJ: Here’s an interesting… is that, of course, you are setting an example here by discussing this particular book that we’ve been covering, which is something you read 10 years ago, going back over it again, getting so much more out of it the second time going through it. And like Sam Morrison, in the student spotlight just said, he was reading the Inner Circle and realized the importance of the Facebook group meaning he had heard about that before. It’s not news to him. But something went off in him and he took a step on it and it was that one little thing that made a difference. And so it launches something.

So you have to think about it that way. When people subscribe to magazines, they don’t subscribe to the magazine because they learn something every time. That everything is eye-opening. Somebody who’s reading a car magazine, or something of a particular area of interest, it’s not that every single page holds something new. People subscribe to things because it reinforces values. It reinforces beliefs.

And so that’s what you want to do, is keep yourself fired up as a marketer. Because that’s, in essence, what is going to carry you into this new era of the music industry. You’ve got to think like a marketer, act like a marketer. Maybe you never have before. You just think you’re all creative and artsy-fartsy and that’s what you do all day long. If you’re going to succeed in this new era of the music industry, you have to be a marketer. Even if you end up signed to a label, you darn well better know your marketing. And so you’ll be able to see whether… In fact, if you spend any time in the Savvy Musician Academy, you’ll be able to give advice to a record label. You could give advice to a record label, I promise you.

06:22 Leah: That’s not an exaggeration.

06:24 CJ: It is not.

06:24 Leah: They’re doing things… Let me tell you something. My assistant, who works for me full-time in my music business, worked for labels for 12 years. And she can tell me and tell you, there’s all kinds of stuff you’re doing that they’re not doing that they should be doing, but they’re not. They’re not even close. And what I’m doing is nothing revolutionary. It’s what every marketer is doing. It goes to show you the state of where record labels are at right now. There are some that are catching up. Some of them finally have a Facebook Pixel on there that did it before, so yay for you. You’re only eight years behind.

07:05 CJ: Yeah. It’s interesting. He mentioned the last Inner Circle, we did write about Facebook groups and the thing that we talked about was that Facebook had recently spent $10 million for 30 seconds of a TV commercial during the US Super Bowl. $10 million for 30 seconds for Facebook, which is not even on television. Facebook happens on the little screen. And they’re advertising on the big screen. So what would Facebook talk about for 30 seconds for $10 million? What would they think was the most important thing they could talk about?

Facebook groups. And it tells you something. And that is that number one, Facebook has a problem and that is keeping people on the platform. They’ve had their security breaches. They had obviously all the trending stories, all the political fallout, everybody fighting. So people are talking bad about social media, right? So they want to keep people on. What’s the best way to keep them on? Keep them on based on affinity, interests in these Facebook groups. So Facebook is using the big screen to get people down to the little screen. And they’re doing it with affinity, Facebook groups.

So if you understand something as simple as that, that puts you light-years ahead from anybody. Meaning, I told this to a student in a conversation I recently had, that when they were trying to break through on some of their engagement and things and I said, “Just look at it this way. The Facebook algorithm has one goal in mind and one goal alone. The Facebook algorithm wants to keep people on the platform as long as possible. And the more you work to make that algorithm’s dream come true with your own page, the more the algorithm is going to show you love.”

And so these are the things that are happening. And so Facebook, again, is spending money on the big screen to get people to the small screen. I don’t know that the record labels are spending money to get people to that very same small screen. They don’t realize how powerful or maybe they do have an idea that people are on social media but they don’t understand the kind of principles of marketing and adapting them to this new format. Because as we’ve said before, Leah, there was internet marketing before social media, right?

09:38 Leah: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

09:39 CJ: But what’s changed? I mean, think about it. Would there be… Would there be a Metal Motivation? Would there be a LEAH music operation or empire without social media? How hard would it be?

09:53 Leah: No. It would be a different world completely. Yeah.

09:58 CJ: Yeah. That’s all changed. So we want you guys to know and understand that. But despite all that, all the wonderful principles and powerful hacks and everything you’ve ever wanted in a music marketing program, despite of all that, you can still stop yourself because of the way that you think. Because of the way that you feel, and we see this even in students in our courses.

10:24 Leah: Oh, yeah.

10:26 CJ: And there’s these fears, there’s these things that they don’t understand they’re doing that’s standing in their own way. Leah, you’ve got something you want to share that I think is going to take us a little bit deeper into this, profoundly.

10:39 Leah: Yeah, so the last couple of episodes, we’ve been digging into this book, I’m reading my kids. And it’s not for kids, but I’m reading it to them because these are principles I want to instill in them. It’s part of my homeschool morning time that I do with them. And it’s called the Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class by Keith Cameron Smith and I recommend that every single one of you goes and picks up a copy of this book. It’s a nice short read, very practical, easy to understand, and there are principles to live by.

There’s probably more than 10 distinctions, but these are the top 10. I just like it. It’s a great book. I read it 10 years ago before it ever made any kind of money. And before I was making any money in my music business even and now I read it, having built a multiple six-figure music business and my academy is a multiple seven-figure business, and I’m reading this through new eyes and I’m going, “Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow!” Every chapter I’m just like, “Kids, children, do you understand what this means?” And they’re like, “No. Mom, tell us.” And I tell them what this means. And I can now, not because I’ve ‘arrived’ by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve got some experience under my belt now that can speak to the truth of the principles in this book.

And I also am coming across things that are challenging me, once again, in a completely new way. Get this book, soak it in, because these are the seeds that will reap a harvest one day in your life. And in your career, whether it’s music or you have an outside business or whatever, this is going to make a difference. I’m reading segments of a few different chapters here that I think are incredibly helpful for all of our listeners.

12:28 CJ: And what’s the title again.

12:30 Leah: Oh, yeah. The title is the Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class. That’s kind of a triggering type of a title today, I think just in the political climate that we have. But again, we’ve laid the groundwork for this in the first two episodes, so please go back and listen to them if you haven’t yet, because we’ve already addressed this. And if you don’t like the word millionaire, and that seems so far off in the distance, just replace it with the top 10 distinctions between successful and the unsuccessful because there are fundamental differences in the way successful people think and the way unsuccessful people think.

And if you’re offended by the fact that I’m tying the word middle-class with unsuccessful, you have to understand, middle-class is not just about how much money you make, it’s really about your vulnerability in society, your vulnerability financially, but also mentally, emotionally, spiritually and otherwise, health-wise. It’s all-encompassing, because the way CJ and I… The reason we’re friends really is because we share a very similar worldview. We view people as a whole. We view the person as a whole person. You can’t separate finances from your mental life, your thought life. You can’t separate money from your health and your health from your career. They’re all intertwined, they’re all connected.

And so the middle-class are the most vulnerable. And that’s why politicians are always addressing the middle-class. “Here’s what I’m going to do for the middle-class. Here’s what I’m going to…” That’s because they’re the most vulnerable in society. And you think the poor and very poor are vulnerable, but oh, they have all these programs and stuff. They have all this… They’ve got welfare, they’ve got this, they’ve got that. The middle class are some of the most heavily taxed. I know this for a fact because we were in the poor category, lower-middle-class category and we nearly went bankrupt because of how heavily taxed we were as a self-employed family with a one income earning.

My husband was the sole breadwinner and I’m taking care of the kids at home. We were so heavily taxed, that we couldn’t pay for groceries sometimes. I know from personal experience that this is the case. So this is not about politics, though. I’m just saying that the point here is don’t be content just because you think you have enough for today. And that’s something we addressed in… That I read from in the first or second episode on this was, you never know what’s going to happen. You think you’re fine today, but if anything were to happen like you said, CJ, car accident, something going wrong with your car or health of a family member or yourself, anything goes wrong, and you… Most people don’t even have any savings. And that’s the status of the middle-class, no savings, no diversified income, no outside income streams. That’s the status of the middle-class.

It’s not about not being content in life, like be discontent in the negative sense. It’s about strive for more. And not talking materialism just, you can raise the bar for yourself because it will help not only you but everyone around you. It will help your family. And you can do more when you are more abundant. You can do more for yourself, you can do more for the world, you can do more for others when you are more abundant. I hope this is coming across the right way, the way I mean to and not saying that there’s something wrong with people who make X amount of money. That’s not what this is. Do you think I’m coming off the right way?

16:31 CJ: No, I think… You know what? When you said that the challenge of the middle-class is to be vulnerable, that’s probably the best way to say it. And how could we be considered compassionate if we didn’t sound some kind of alarm, if we didn’t give some kind of warning and if we didn’t know firsthand that changing the way that you think plays such a key role in the success of any one of the SMA courses. This is territory we have to tread on despite the fact that there’s a real possibility that some might be triggered or some might find offensive.

17:17 Leah: Yeah, take it the wrong way even.

17:18 CJ: Yeah. Take it the wrong way.

17:19 Leah: Yeah, I’m actually okay to some extent if there’s some people who are repelled by this, because it means they’re probably not for us, we’re not for each other. There are probably other teachers out there who are much less offensive and who won’t ruffle their feathers and won’t challenge them and they probably won’t get results either, but that’s fine. We’re just not for each other. I’m okay with this polarizing SMA a little bit or myself a little bit. I want to attract to us people who are a little more like-minded, who understand that their thinking will determine their success and that no program really is even going to do that because when they have the mentality that I must figure this out and I don’t care what it will take, that whatever it takes I’m going to do it, then my job is very easy. All I do is show those people what to do. I can show them the funnels and how you do this and how you build a brand and all those things and they were just going to take off. They’ll succeed no matter what.

My job is so easy at that point. And that’s what I want. And then this is very rewarding and enjoyable for me rather than me trying to drag people to these results that were really never in the right headspace to begin with. So it feels like… It feels like hell to be honest for me and my team trying to help these people become successful who are in the wrong headspace to begin with. That’s the problem. It’s not the course. It’s not the lessons. It’s not because Facebook moved this button around and now I can’t find where this thing is. That’s not the problem. That’s not why you’re unsuccessful. It’s all in your head, man.

19:10 CJ: Yeah, exactly.

19:12 Leah: Here we go.

19:13 CJ: Exactly. Yes, please.

19:15 Leah: I’m reading out of this book, Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class. Okay. I am assuming that you want to be more abundant than you currently are. Let’s agree about that.

19:28 CJ: Yes, you have my agreement.

19:31 Leah: Okay. “Distinction number seven, millionaires take calculated risks. The middle-class is afraid to take risks.” Think about this in terms of investing into your own skillset, mentorship, coaches, whatever, new gear even, whatever. Okay, I’ll read now. “The middle-class is trapped in a rat race because it doesn’t take risks. The only way out of the rat race is to take risks. The only way out of the rat race is to take risks. No, that is not a typo. I intentionally wrote it twice. In fact, let me write it one more time. The only way out of the rat race is to take risks.

“If you take risk out of life, you take the opportunity out of life. Taking a risk doesn’t mean taking a shot in the dark. Millionaires take calculated risks.” And he has that in all caps. “What does calculated mean? It means to gain knowledge first and to consider the consequences of failing before taking action. Use knowledge to overcome fear. Millionaires are not afraid to take risks. That’s not to say that they don’t have fears to deal with, because both millionaires and the middle class have fears. The way you handle fear, however, determines the results you will get in life.” Just stop me anytime if you have a thought here.

21:06 CJ: Right. Sure.

21:07 Leah: “Millionaires overcome fear and the middle class submits to it. So overcoming versus submitting to it. Millionaires overcome fear with knowledge. Fear is darkness and knowledge is light. Light causes darkness to disappear. Knowledge causes fear to disappear. Millionaires educate themselves before taking risks and then they consider the consequences of failing. Millionaires don’t throw their money around and hope for return.” Hmmm, that sounds similar to the things that I’ve said like people throwing their music out into the universe and hoping for a good result and hoping to get discovered.

“Millionaires practice risk management. One of the simplest ways to manage risk, I learned from my mentor”, I’ll probably butcher this guy’s name, “Nidou Wabin, he taught me to ask these three questions.” Love this part. “One, what’s the best thing that could happen? Two, what’s the worst thing that could happen? And three, what’s the most likely thing to happen? If you can live with the worst thing that could happen and if the most likely thing to happen will get you closer to your goals, then go for it.

“If you aren’t able to handle the worst that could happen, and if the most likely thing to happen doesn’t get you closer to your goals, then don’t do it. The next time you have an opportunity to take a risk, ask yourself these three questions, they’ve given me the insight I needed to make wise decisions. I see three primary fears in the middle-class that stop people from taking actions that create success. They are the fear of failure, the fear of rejection and the fear of loss. The fear of failure, it’s not a matter of if you will fail, it’s a matter of when. Millionaires understand that failure is part of the path to success. They do not fear failure. They embrace it when it comes to become wiser.

“The reason the middle-class fears failure is because it thinks failure is bad.” Dang, Facebook Ads just tanked. “Millionaires think failure is good. It gives them the opportunity to learn and grow. If you fear failure, you will not take risks. And anytime you take a risk, there is the possibility of failing. If you learn to see failure as a positive, then you’ll be able to take more risks. Your perception of and response to failure will determine the level of success you can achieve. Failure is one of life’s many teachers. Failure is life’s way of correcting us. When millionaires fail, they learn and try again. When middle-class people fail, they stop taking risks.

“A common phrase for the middle-class is, ‘I tried that before and I’m not doing it again. I tried it and it didn’t work.’” I hear that all the time about Facebook Ads and about marketing and all kinds of stuff. “The middle-class gives up after failing while millionaires keep going. You must keep going after you fail in order to achieve success.” I feel like this is so elementary and yet nobody does it.

24:37 CJ: Mm-mm. No. It still trips everybody up. It’s amazing to me how common it is, and like him, I often use the same illusion, the same example of the fear of the dark type thing. And that’s why I’ve always said, our fears that we face today with our fear of failure, fear of success, fear of risk are just a grownup’s version of a child’s fear of the dark. Same thing.

25:02 Leah: Oh yeah, the Boogey Man.

25:04 CJ: Afraid of what lies in front of you because you can’t see it.

25:08 Leah: Yeah. Okay, he’s got one. Okay. So we dealt with the fear of failure. Here’s the fear of rejection. “The middle-class puts too much importance on the acceptance of others. We all want others to accept us. We also want to be successful. Here’s a key to success. You must want to succeed more than you want the acceptance of other people. Millionaires desire success more than they desire acceptance. In order to be successful, you will have to take risks and if you fail, some people may reject you.

“The funny thing is that if you succeed, some people will still reject you. Someone once said, ‘One-third of people will like you, one-third won’t and one-third doesn’t care either way.’ Millionaires understand they can’t please everybody. If you’re addicted to the approval of people, this will keep you from taking risks. You must not let your need for acceptance keep you from taking risks. Simply understand that some people are going to reject you no matter what you do. And then do what you need to do to succeed.” That’s really good.

26:19 CJ: Mm-hmm.

26:21 Leah: Then he goes into the fear of loss. “Millionaires play to win. The middle-class plays to not lose.” Huge difference. Huge difference. “Can you imagine if a football team played defence the entire game? Their chance of winning would be zero. If you fear loss, you will only play defence when it comes to your money and your chance of financial freedom will be zero.

“People who play not to lose are always saying they should have done this or that. The biggest gap in the world is between I should and I did. Millionaires say, ‘I did.’ The middle-class is always saying, ‘I should.’ When you take risks, you may lose some money, accept it and go on. Just as failure is part of success, losing is part of winning. Did you know most millionaires have lost money several times in their lives? Some millionaires have been through bankruptcy more than once before winning the money game.

“If you want to win, you must overcome the fear of loss. The fear of loss keeps the middle-class sitting on the sidelines of life. If you want to win, you must play to win. Playing not to lose will cause you to lose.” And then the last part here is live like you were dying. “When I speak at live events, I will often include a section about living like you were dying. In that section, I discuss a survey done among a group of elderly people over the age of 90. They were asked, ‘If you had to live life over again, what would you do differently?’

“There were three answers that kept coming up repeatedly. Would you care to guess one of them? One was that they would take more risks. Did you get that? When you’re at the end of your life, you will have more regrets over the things you didn’t do than the things you did. Taking risks assures that you won’t have to live with the pain of regret. Don’t get to the end of your life and say, ‘I wish I had.’ Overcome your fears with faith and take some risks. Let me give you the other two answers. They said that they would take more time to reflect on the good moments of their lives and appreciate them and on the bad times to learn from them.

“The third most common answer was that they would do more things that would live on after they were gone. Legacy. Now, if you’re going to do something that will live on after you’re gone, you’re going to have to take some risks. People who are remembered took risks. Our elders have spoken. Take more risks, reflect more and do more things that will live on after you’re gone. If you can’t learn from a group of people over the age of 90, then you just can’t learn. I repeat, if you take the risk out of life, you take the opportunity out of life.

“Remember, knowledge is light and fear is darkness. Shine the light into the darkness and you will have the courage to take action. Millionaires overcome their fears and take action. The middle-class submits to its fears and lives with regrets. Be able to say, ‘I did,’ instead of, ‘I should.’ Calculate your risks by educating yourself and asking those three questions. Millionaires take calculated risks. The middle-class is afraid to take risks.” There we go. Isn’t that profound?

29:35 CJ: It’s fantastic. Old friend of mine used to say, “When it comes to money,” he said, “if you hang on to it, that’s the most it’ll ever be. If you let it go, that’s the least it’ll ever be.” And I think, of course, with your and my background, we understand finance a little bit differently because of the way we were taught. So sowing and reaping is a financial principle here. And the idea that money is like a seed, it’s a seed that once it’s put into the ground, it can bring a harvest of all kinds of different things.

And that could be for a charitable giving, that could be investment in your music business, it could be anything.

30:23 Leah: Yourself, yeah.

30:24 CJ: Right. Investment in yourself. You invest in a course.

30:27 Leah: That’s right.

30:28 CJ: It brings a harvest in your life as you improve, in whatever it is you’re learning about, and you make profit from it. So I think we’ve got to change that concept that we have is if you see money more as seed, and less as this thing that you’re supposed to hoard, not saying you shouldn’t save money, not suggesting anything like that, but you know that it has the power to create once it’s put in the right place, but that requires risk. There are investors who put money in things that don’t get returns for a long time, or sometimes they actually lose. And like for him-

31:09 Leah: That’s just part of it.

31:10 CJ: Failure is just built into the program. It’s not, like I said, not an issue of if but rather when, when the system is going to fail. But again, we’ve talked about this in the past that we tend to personalize failure. And that’s why we fear it. As opposed to all of the high-end technicians, for example, at the Ford Motor Company or at Ferrari, and they’re going to go in and… Or Mercedes and they go in and come up with the new Mercedes engine.

Well, they fully expect a million failures. But that’s the thing. Failure is actually… It’s not an emotional term. We’ve made it emotional, but it’s actually a mechanical term. You have a machine failure. So failures tell them what needs to be changed, what needs to be revised. So they need failure. Failure is expected. So if they’re in there and their first version of the engine fails, they don’t all go out and cry and call their moms because they have this tremendous fear of failure. No, it’s expected. They learn, they adjust, they do whatever improvements there are.

Nobody’s perfect. Nobody’s qualified in this game of life. If you can learn to not be afraid of, as we said in the last episode, change, not be afraid of risk, to putting yourself out there. Yeah, but people might say bad things. So what? Are those words going to hurt you? As we’ve said in previous episodes, words have only as much power as we grant them authority over us. Either way, no matter what, you are in control. What we want, as Leah mentioned earlier, it’s calculated risk. It’s giving you as-

33:01 Leah: I love those three questions.

33:01 CJ: Yeah, yeah. So you know. You know what you’re dealing with and you learn as much as you can. We’re not just saying throw all caution to the wind and just take the first offer. No. Do your homework. Do your research. The problem is people don’t do it. They think they do.

But we’re so accustomed to mediocrity that we think as we say, “I’ve tried everything.” Really? Did you? Did you try everything? I bet you barely scratched the surface of the potential possibilities to solve some of your biggest problems. It’s amazing what just putting yourself out there can do. Calling somebody on the phone to get the resources that you need. Let’s say you’ve been listening to this podcast for a long time and you’ve got your stuff together. You got a good website going and you’ve got fans following you on Facebook and you’re playing some live gigs and you’ve sold some CDs, but you’ve plateaued. You can’t go any higher and you’ve been listening to this podcast, but you haven’t really gone to that next level yet.

And you’re like, “Well, I’m trying to gather all the information that I can from the free podcasts that…” Well, maybe you need to talk to somebody. Maybe you need to get on the phone with somebody from our team and talk about your situation and find out let’s look at you, maybe you are ready for that next level. And it’s amazing once you do that, like he said, light dispels the darkness. So when my kids were small, it was easy for me to get them to stop crying by turning on that nightlight or cracking that bedroom door so that the light could come in and they were so much happier and there were so much…

But here’s the thing, is that fear is a complete illusion because fear is an emotion. But your emotions don’t have eyeballs. So they rely on the ones in your head. Therefore, your emotion, which is attached to your physical body cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality. That’s why you literally can scare yourself to death. That’s why you literally can worry yourself sick. Because you start to imagine the worst. And what happens? Your heart rate rises. Your actual physiology starts changing to something that’s not even real.

35:38 Leah: It’s so wild what the brain is capable of. And off-camera, we’re talking a little bit about neuroplasticity and how the brain is, all of this. And there’s a documentary about this, about people… There was a study done, I think they were on stroke victims, how they were practicing the piano. They had a segment practicing the piano physically and the other segment was only practicing in their mind. And they never touched a piano key, but when they hook their brain up to the electrodes and the machines, it shows the exact same brain activity. It’s like the brain couldn’t tell the difference between physically playing the piano and mentally playing the piano. It reacted the exact same way.

And there can sometimes even be a physical response to what you’ve created in your mind. Did I ever tell you? I don’t know if this is TMI, but my last birth with Archer, I actually rehearsed in my mind for months the way I wanted the birth to go and I actually… Mentally, I would take 20, 30 minutes a day sometimes because I was lying down a lot, rehearsing exactly how I wanted my birth to go. How the labor would go, how the delivery would go, my pain levels. I practiced not having pain and just the whole thing. It was wild, wild what happened. Now I’m not saying that I didn’t feel pain, I will say it was the most intense birth I’ve ever had because it was so fast.

It was like… But everything went exactly the way I wanted. It was just so fast. When it’s that fast, it’s quite intense. But it was the best birth I’ve ever had. It was so awesome. And so I believe that a huge part of that was the mental preparation that I did months ahead of time. Your body doesn’t know the difference between the imagination and something really happening. So, imagine what’s possible. If I could control at all I’m not saying that this is every circumstance is possible, there’s medical emergencies and stuff, but under normal circumstances, if I could control the way a birth went involving another human being, imagine what you could create in your mind for yourself and you’re not giving birth.

Okay, you’re giving birth to a new album. Or whatever is going on your music career, imagine what you can create in the physical, what’s just going on in your mind if your body doesn’t even know the difference between reality and imagination. That’s a really powerful idea.

38:14 CJ: Yeah, it really is. And I’ll often mention to people who struggle with procrastination or laziness or whatever or finding the self-discipline to do things when they need to be done, but you don’t feel like doing them. And they say, “I just get on that couch. I just don’t want to get up. I don’t want to go to the gym. I don’t want to do…”

I said, “This is all you need to do to fix that. This is all you need to do. Whatever it is, you don’t want to do that you know you should do and you don’t feel like doing it, I don’t care if you’re on the couch with a bag of potato chips in your hand and you just do not feel like getting up. All you have to do is spend just a few minutes, shut your eyes and imagine yourself doing the thing that you’re supposed to do, see yourself doing it. Make it big in your mind and just see yourself doing it with a smile on your face and energetic and just keep that there.” Because again, your emotions and your physical body can’t tell the difference. You’re going to get up, I guarantee you.

You’re going to get up, it’s just going to happen, your body is going to follow but before then you’re stuck. That’s why when I do the coaching calls, the group coaching calls in our Elite group and will often get on it because I’m talking about mindset oftentimes, so I was talking to one gentleman, and he was battling with some negative thinking. And so I was just kind of building him up.

But I asked him, I said, “I’ve been talking to you now for about 10 minutes. Would you consider right now that you are thinking and feeling a lot more positive right now than before we started this whole call?” He said, “Oh, yes, absolutely.” I said, “Well, have any of your physical circumstances changed in the last 10 minutes?” “No.” “So you saw the exact same physical circumstances?” “Yes.” “So why would you feel better?” “Because I don’t know.” I said, “I’ll tell you why. Because for 10 minutes now, you submitted your mind to my words. And so you let me guide your thoughts. And so, therefore, your emotions and your body can’t tell the difference. So it just followed the train of thought. But if you can do that by just suspending your mind listening to someone else positive, then you can also do that on your own.”

And if you can’t control your mind, then start talking this way because your thoughts have to go wherever your words go. Either way, you can completely reprogram yourself for success and start thinking like he said, like a millionaire and not so much like a vulnerable, middle-class person whose life could be disrupted at the slightest thing, something happened to their car, something happened medically, something happened with the job, Coronavirus comes into town, suddenly you can’t do this, you can’t do that. And you are so seriously affected and you can’t pay a mortgage or you can’t afford your groceries, or you don’t have a ride to work. That’s the vulnerability of the middle-class. And that’s rooted in a way of thinking and so much of that is controlled not by complacency, but by fear.

41:17 Leah: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s so good. With this book, I think there’s a reason why it’s not the 10 distinctions between millionaires and the poor. It’s millionaires and the middle-class because that’s where most of the population is currently at. Most people are… And if you’re in the poor category, you’ve got a different set of problems. They’re dealing with some completely different circumstances in a lot of cases. And so this is because it’s a short journey between the middle-class to millionaire. It’s not that far away.

And so I think that’s why it’s an important book that people read, and musicians because I just run into so many musicians with the poverty mentality. It’s unbelievable. Now people in general, I think, have a poverty mentality, but musicians especially.

42:16 CJ: Then here’s a real truth, because this goes off of what you just said because I think this is so important, what we hear from is when somebody talks about a great achievement, they call it from rags to riches, meaning usually people in the poor-class are a whole lot hungrier to get out of it.

42:44 Leah: True. Yeah.

42:46 CJ: Than the complacent middle-class. So even though it’s a shorter route from the middle-class to the millionaire, it might as well be as wide as the Grand Canyon.

42:56 Leah: That’s true, absolutely.

42:57 CJ: Because you’re not as hungry.

43:01 Leah: Yeah. They’re a little bit more content. They’re a little bit… They’re getting by. And so there’s more-

43:07 CJ: Mediocrity is good.

43:08 Leah: Exactly. There’s more mediocrity. They just get comfortable with their Netflix and chill every night. And they’re not sacrificing a little bit. It’s so easy to just get stuck in a rut and that’s why there’s books written like this, whereas honestly, I don’t know if any of this would exist, SMA, my music business, the way it is, if we hadn’t almost gone bankrupt. If there wasn’t that financial crisis where I went into turbo-mode of I must make this happen, I will make this happen, I don’t even know how yet but I’m going to and I just made up my mind.

It was like nobody could get in my way. I don’t care if there was a bull in front of me charging toward me. He was not getting in my way. Nothing can get in my way. We were struggling paycheck to paycheck, “Hey, are we going to pay for gas or groceries this week? Which one? Pick one.” It was like that and so many people are stuck there. That did drive me and it made me more determined than ever to do it. And I think that’s really the key between people who end up succeeding and those who have minimal results is one of us has the determination where it will happen.

I’ve decided it’s going to happen. I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to learn whatever it takes to do it. And the other person going, “That would be cool if I did that one day.” Huge difference between the two mentalities. I always like to say in my webinars and when I meet people, make the decision today. If you don’t have that switch flipped on, it’s not going to happen for you. I don’t care how many books and podcasts you read or listen to, I don’t care what courses you have, I don’t care how much money you’ve spent, I don’t care how good your music sounds if you have not made the decision that it’s going to happen, you will figure it out, come hell or high water, that’s what I’m looking for. Those people are going to succeed.

If you haven’t made that decision, you need to make that decision. You need to have a moment where you kind of get a little angry and it propels you toward that goal. Whatever that goal is for you, whatever that success looks like for you. That’s my challenge I want to leave with people today. You need to have that moment. And it’s literally a matter of, okay, having a talk with yourself. It’s like, nothing’s changed. I keep doing things the way I always have and never gotten a different result. That’s the definition of insanity. And it’s time to make a change. It’s time to invest in myself. It’s time to get a mentor so that I don’t have to keep repeating mistakes and piecemealing random stuff together from YouTube and Google and this guru and that guru and…

Make a decision, I don’t care if you go with SMA, find somebody that you can learn from that benefits you that’s going to help you in your career. If you choose us, I would love to be your mentor. The coaches here at SMA are phenomenal. They’re the best. And we strive to have the best customer service, the best experience for those who are taking this journey with us. But ultimately, I just want you to succeed and if that’s not with us, so be it. But the challenge is make the decision, just do it. Stop dabbling and go all the way.

46:50 CJ: Yeah. I often say that anger can be a healthy emotion when it’s directed against that which limits you. Some of us need to get a little pissed off to be productive. And obviously, if you’re listening to this podcast, then you’re listening because you want to do something with your music business. And it’s as simple as that. And so we would not invest three entire episodes of this podcast in something that we didn’t feel like was very, very important. And we had some other episodes lined up and we were in a team meeting and Leah just mentioned…

She just said, “Hey, CJ. I’ve been reading this book again and I kind of want to talk about this.” And I’ve learned one thing about Leah is that if there’s anything that gets under her crawl or gets on her heart that we could pretty much push everything else ahead in the queue and go ahead and jump on the topic that she’s passionate about, because I know that means something is really, really stirring in her heart and that’s kind of where this three-episode series came out of.

I’ll tell you what, you could give these three episodes to anybody. You don’t have to be just a musician. In fact, I would encourage some of our listeners, share those three episodes with some other creative people that you know. Share it with them. Maybe some authors, some bloggers, some photographers, some people who are just getting a little small business, maybe they opened a restaurant, anybody doing anything, a coach or something. Share these episodes with them, because I really think it’s going to make a difference. Share it with your kids. My goodness.

48:28 Leah: Absolutely. Yeah. Read this book to your kids. If you have kids, they can understand this. I mean, this could be a little family study that you do together because they’re so short. I mean, you can read it under 10 minutes. So great.

48:43 CJ: Well, listen guys-

48:44 Leah: I hope you guys have all gotten something out of this.

48:46 CJ: Yeah. If you are going to be a successful musician in this new music industry, which means going online, we’ve been sharing quite a bit lately, the quote from the recent Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins interview in which he said he would tell today’s musician to spend all of your time reaching people on the internet. Solely, exclusively, that’s what you need to be doing. And I just don’t know, Leah, if any other program that’s better than the programs offered in the Savvy Musician Academy. And the flagship one, which is The Online Musician, or TOM for short, is getting its biggest upgrade in the last couple of years now.

TOM 3.0, The Online Musician 3.0. And lots of new changes because obviously, in a couple of years, as everybody knows, technology and social media and the rules change constantly. That’s why we’re always keeping up with these things, which is why the podcast is important, why our Inner Circle program is important because we cover all the changes and the latest news and updates. But to get that codified in a course is another thing. That’s a tremendous responsibility on Leah to ferret out what’s the most important information that can be permanently established in an official course. So you feel good about this soon coming upgrade, Leah?

50:08 Leah: Oh yeah, I’m so happy with the way The Online Musician 3.0 is going. If you’re not familiar with what that is, it’s our flagship program. It’s our first big giant stepping stone for most musicians, whether they’re experienced or they’re new, but they’re really launching their music online. And they’re in the beginning stages. I consider the beginning stage, anybody who’s not yet making three to $5,000 from their music every single month, digitally, online. And if you’re making money from gigs and stuff, I consider that another revenue stream and that’s a wonderful revenue stream to have, but it’s not passive. You have to show up for it to make it happen.

I am interested in teaching musicians things they can do on the internet from their home in their pyjamas that can produce other streams of revenue for them that are consistent and reliable. And so this is all about sustainability. And there’s a lot that goes into it. There’s a lot. So branding, mindset, your niche. Your micro-niche is a huge part of this, finding your ideal audience, who’s your ideal fan, knowing everything about them, doing the research, crafting a wonderful website, understanding how to use the biggest social media platforms and not spend your entire life on them but do what you got to do to make a lasting impression and build your brand.

And then we get in a little bit of a teensy tiny little bit of advertising, but mostly I’m looking to help people do it without using paid advertising, paid media, paid traffic just yet. Because once you have those foundation pieces in place, you can then go on to market anything you want and you can go on to our advanced program later down the road where we teach all the advanced ninja stuff, all the Facebook Ads, the funnels, the big launches and all of that.

So The Online Musician 3.0 is going to be your foundation of building a castle, that stands forever. It’s really amazing. I love the upgrades we’ve done to it. We’ve added a whole module on mindset because I realized how important it is. Oh my gosh. We talk about mindset 85% of this podcast is mindset and 15% is tactics and strategies and Facebook Ads from whatever because you need that to succeed. And if we haven’t drilled it in enough in these past three episodes, then I don’t know if we can drill it in anymore. It’s just not possible.

So yeah, I’m so looking forward to this. Again, if you’re not making three to $5,000 a month from your music yet, then this is really the foundation piece you need. If you are a TOM 2.0 student, you’re like, “I’m not making three to 5000 yet,” and even some of my Elite students, you need to go back and do this course again. But never fear. If you have TOM 2.0 I got your back. You’re getting a free upgrade. Merry Christmas.

52:53 CJ: How about that? Merry Christmas. Happy birthday. Happy Valentine’s Day.

52:58 Leah: Yes. I want you, if you’re already a TOM student, I have a huge challenge for you and you need to start at the beginning. Anytime I take a new course or anything, I kind of erase my mind. I erase my hard drive, and I’m like, “I’m going into this as though I know nothing about this topic. I’m going to take it all in fresh, like a sponge, like I knew nothing before this.” That’s how I get the most out of anything I ever take. I pretend like I know nothing. I’m not looking at, “Well, I already know this stuff. Well, I’ve already done this and this isn’t applicable to me.”

No. Go in with a blank slate and you will be amazed at the stuff you missed before and the new things that you had no idea. So that’s my challenge for my previous students. I recommend… Even my Elite students, this would help them. We cover so many advanced things. Sometimes you forget the fundamentals. It’s like the martial artist with the three black belts. What do they do when they go to rehearse all the time?

54:03 CJ: Fundamentals.

54:03 Leah: They go back to the fundamentals. They just do them over and over and over again. Because without that, there is no black belt. It’s all built off of that. So if you think you’re a black belt marketer, you need the fundamentals too. I’m going to actually encourage all my students, you’re all going to need to take this again because you will be amazed at what you forgot, and it’s like me reading this book after 10 years. I first read this before I made any money and now I’m reading it after I’ve been successful, and it’s like, “Holy cow, I’m seeing this through a completely different lens.”

That’s the way The Online Musician 3.0 is going to be. For people who have never taken it and people who take it’s like, “Wow, I really, really needed that. And now I’m totally motivated all over again, I know what to do. I have fresh perspective, I have a new challenge for myself going forward.” So really excited about it. What’s the URL that people can go to get on the waitlist?

55:00 CJ: Explodeyourfanbase.com. And they should be excited about it. I’m excited about it. Explodeyourfanbase.com. Guys, you do not have to stay where you are. You don’t have to stay where you are. You don’t have to always be hoping. You don’t have to always have something gnawing on the inside of you because you haven’t fulfilled or lived some semblance of your dream. It’s not too late, you’re not too old your music’s not too weird. There’s a way. There’s other weird people just like you out there all over the world who would love to hear your weird music.

So we celebrate all of you. Believe me, between our Elite and TOM courses and students, we’ve seen just about every genre and unique niche that you could possibly think of. It’s amazing to me how many talented people there are and how diverse they are. And I mean this is men, women, age, young, old, you name it, other countries. It’s completely diverse but all applying the very same principles that Leah is describing here. You can get there if you’re faithful and if you’re unafraid, not afraid to take a risk. So go to explodeyourfanbase.com right now. I mean literally soon as you turn off this podcast I want you to go there right now. And I’m telling you, man, it is coming very soon. Within a month, this is going to be released. And it’s only going to be for a short window.

56:34 Leah: That’s right and we’re actually changing the model for how we accept new students. It will not be available year-round like it has in the past. It’s only going to be available for a short window of time. So make sure that you get on that waitlist. If this interest’s you in the slightest, make sure you’re on there.

56:51 CJ: All right guys. To do that, exposeyourfanbase.com. If you’d like to learn more about our Inner Circle program, you can go to savvymusicianacademy.com/innercircle. And please leave a review and click some stars for this podcast. Help other people discover it. We read each and every testimony in our team meetings. They are a huge encouragement to us. As I like to say, as a motivational speaker, “How do you motivate a motivator? Tell them how much they motivate you.” So tell us how much you’re inspired and encouraged by this podcast. Leah, once again, thank you.

57:22 Leah: Thank you, everybody and we’ll see you next time.

57:25 CJ: This episode is sponsored by The Online Musician 3.0, the upgraded version of the flagship music marketing course from the Savvy Musician Academy. This cutting edge music marketing course is set to release soon, so sign up now for our waiting list to receive up to date information at explodeyourfanbase.com.

Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins recently said in an interview, “If I was going to give you 60-seconds of advice, I would put your whole focus into reaching people through the internet.” There’s no better way to start reaching your ideal fans on the internet than by The Online Musician 3.0, which covers cutting edge to topics like mindset training, branding secrets and tutorials, creating a website that converts, Instagram for musicians, YouTube for musicians, using and leveraging Facebook groups monetizing your music, creating a successful album launch and much, much more. If you’re ready for your next level in creating your own online music business, then sign up now for our waiting list at explodeyourfanbase.com

00:21 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz, the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. Joined once again by her eminence, my favorite music marketer, Leah McHenry. Leah, how are you?

00:34 Leah: I’m wonderful, thank you. And I just never get over the whole eminence thing, but it’s funny to me.

00:41 CJ: It’s so necessary.

00:43 Leah: Okay.

00:46 CJ: Well, when I first started this podcast I said, “You need somebody to talk to you so that you can be properly positioned for this,” so you didn’t realize it would be like on a throne.

00:57 Leah: No, I didn’t. Thank you though.

01:00 CJ: You’re welcome. But it’s good to know it doesn’t go to your head that you keep your wits about you and stay humble.

01:07 Leah: Yes.

01:07 CJ: Leah, you have a humility.

01:10 Leah: I’m sorry. What’d you say, peasant?

01:12 CJ: That’s right. You have a humility you can be proud of, right?

01:15 Leah: Thank you, peasant.

01:19 CJ: That’s right. All right. Let me, before we get into this, and I’m excited about continuing this discussion about the successful and the unsuccessful, Leah. This is revolutionary. And as we say from spiritual circles, those who have an ear to hear, let them hear, because this is a message you desperately need to hear right now. But let me share a quick student spotlight. This is from one of our TOM students. And when we say TOM, we mean from The Online Musician course.

Dawn Boudreau who writes, “#win. I was hesitant to share because it’s small, but Karen Connor encouraged me. For years, my CD Baby digital distribution royalties have been trickling. I’ve received $20 every six to nine months. I released a new album at the end of November and had been watching for the results. It was creeping up by pennies. Then on Tuesday, it jumped from $16 to $29. Then today, it jumped to $35. All the work I’ve been putting in is starting to have an effect. It’s a small thing, but also only one little corner of my music business. I’ve also started a group last week that has over 190 members. My Facebook page likes are getting closer to 1000. Now, if I can steer these folks to my email list, I’ll feel like I am on my way.”

02:48 Leah: Wow. Love it.

02:50 CJ: Little victories. Little victories, ladies and gentlemen.

02:54 Leah: It’s great.

02:54 CJ: Nothing will rewire your brain-

02:55 Leah: Very important.

02:55 CJ: Yeah, nothing will rewire your brain than little victories. People ask me all the time, “How do I build self-confidence?” Little victories, man. And make a big deal about them. You should do something really, really small, but act like you just achieved a huge victory. High-five yourself, yell, do something, keep yourself motivated and encouraged. Because with each one of these things, you didn’t get to this place of self-defeat overnight, it was by being torn down brick by brick, and we’re going to build you back up, brick by brick, with each little victory representing one brick in that new wall of self-confidence. That’s why we share these student spotlights.

03:36 Leah: That’s right. Yes.

03:37 CJ: And so, results are results because Dawn can scale that, right?

03:43 Leah: That’s right.

03:44 CJ: They can scale. In fact, that’s what we’ve been talking about, in essence, with successful and unsuccessful people, the difference between them. One aspect of this is about scale. And in the first episode, we kind of laid the groundwork for this, and just trying to get people thinking, don’t get triggered when it comes to talking about rich or poor, upper class, middle class, millionaire, and people who aren’t millionaires and poverty thinking and all. I think we laid that groundwork sufficiently. And so now, we’re coming into, again, going deeper now, deeper to uncover the essence of the way we need to be thinking about all aspects of life, and how a mentality of success operates, how it treats things like setback, change, possibility, abundance-

04:35 Leah: Obstacles.

04:36 CJ: Obstacles. So, Leah, take us into this.

04:40 Leah: Yeah, so in case you guys didn’t listen to the last episode, definitely go back and listen to that. It sets the foundation and the tone of this whole thing we’re doing here. I’m reading a very offensive and controversial book titled “The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class” by Keith Cameron Smith. I’m reading it to my children for our homeschool morning time, which is my daily time of impartation to them, just teaching them. We learn about whatever we want, we read, we journal, all kinds of fun things. I love it. And this book is fantastic. It’s simple enough, a child can understand it, maybe not in all the different facets, but they can understand the key concept here. And my mind is blown as I’m reading this again for the second time, maybe even the third time in my life. When I first read this book, we were poor and broke and the concepts inside this book had seeded my heart. They’ve seeded my mind for success in the future.

So, once I had my music and I had a product and something to sell and I went to work and doing the things, the principles that are in this book and books like this positioned me to have the character and just the right mentality to grow my wealth. And so, I want to impart this now to you. So, I’m going to read a segment from the book today. It’s distinction number eight and it’s called “Millionaires embrace change. The middle-class is threatened by change.” This challenges me because, as a creative person, it’s difficult when sometimes there are circumstances outside your control, and it feels like the ground is moving beneath your feet, and it’s difficult to have a launchpad sometimes when there’s so much change going on. And I want you to be thinking about all the challenges you’re facing right now, whether it’s algorithm changes on Facebook or on the social platforms or changes in your band member lineup, changes in your relationships, changes that are going on, the things that seem bad, and things that seem to threaten you. This is meant to challenge you, and this is challenging me.

“Millionaires embrace change. The middle-class is threatened by change.” I’m going to read this. “Change can be positive or negative. The problem is, we don’t know which it will be when the change first presents itself. People don’t mind positive change. They actually want positive change. The problem with the middle-class is that it assumes change will be negative most of the time.” They assume it will be negative. “Millionaires assume that all change, positive or negative, will benefit them.” And I can’t pronounce this guy’s name, but I’m going to try. “Nido Quibein says, ‘For the timid in our society, change is frightening. For the comfortable, change is threatening. But for the truly confident among us, change is opportunity.’ Learn to embrace change. How well do you handle change, especially unexpected change? Learning to deal well with change is a must if you are to become a millionaire. Millionaires embrace change because they know it always brings an opportunity for growth. People who are insecure resist change. People who are confident, welcome it. Millionaires are confident.” And if you don’t like the word millionaire, just substitute that with success or successful person. Okay?

08:10 CJ: Right.

08:11 Leah: “Confidence is acquired through preparation and hard work.” I’ll read that again. “Confidence is acquired through preparation and hard work. Confidence is the result of working on yourself. It is the benefit of proving yourself to yourself. It is knowing you can handle whatever comes your way. Confidence is believing you can do whatever you choose to. Choice versus wish. Millionaires choose to be rich. The middle-class wishes it were rich. There’s a big difference between a choice and a wish. A choice is backed by belief that you can do it. A wish is backed by a doubt that you can.”

Holy smokes. Let me just stop there for a second. How many musicians do we run into that are immersed in the self-belief of doubt and of limitation?

09:06 CJ: Yep.

09:07 Leah: There’s such a gem right here. The “difference between a choice and a wish. A choice is backed by a belief that you can do it. A wish is backed by a doubt that you can.” Let that one sink in for a sec.

“Doubt is a code word for fear. The middle-class is afraid it can’t or won’t become rich.” Or substitute successful in your music business or whatever. “What’s inside of you? A belief that you can do it or a fear that you can’t? Change shows you what you’re made of. It reveals what’s inside of you. If you get angry when change comes, it’s because you have anger inside of you. If you get worried when change occurs, it’s because you are fearful. If you complain when change happens, it’s because you are ungrateful. Millionaires don’t complain or worry or get angry when change occurs. They look for the opportunity it brings. Change always gives you the opportunity to grow and become stronger. See opportunity and change. People in the middle-class fear change because they don’t know if they are strong enough to handle it.

The number one reason people resist change is fear. Fear blinds you to opportunities. When you develop a confidence and learn to accept change, you will be able to see the opportunity it is bringing to you. Someone once said, ‘In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves well-equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.’ Change teaches us new things that we need to learn. And the more we learn, the stronger and more confident we become. Confidence is strength. The more confident you become, the more prepared you are to take advantage of opportunities when they appear. You never know when an opportunity may present itself. The middle-class thinks millionaires got lucky and were in the right place at the right time. It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time, otherwise you won’t even see the opportunity. Learning to embrace change assures that you are becoming a person who can profit from life’s opportunities. The future belongs to those who can change with the times.”

I’ve been saying that for years. “The purpose of change is to change us. Learning to accept change is the first step to becoming more confident. Allowing change to change you is the real purpose of it. People are born to learn and grow. Change is life’s way of making sure we do that, and learn to fly. Resisting change is like an eaglet not wanting to leave the warmth and comfort of his nest. Eventually, Mama Eagle starts changing the warm and comfortable environment by removing her nice soft down feathers from the nest. Before you know it, sharp sticks and twigs are poking the eaglet. ‘Why are you doing this to me, Mama?’ he screams. Mama Eagle says, ‘Because it’s time you learn how to fly.'” You used that example in the last episode.

12:10 CJ: I was about to say.

12:13 Leah: That’s great.

12:13 CJ: That’s funny.

12:14 Leah: “Change is life’s way of teaching you how to fly. The next time you ask, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ remember Mama Eagle’s answer to her baby. Sometimes, we don’t know what we can do until we have to. Ask someone to think back to a difficult time of his life, when life threw him a curveball, he’ll probably say, ‘It was the best thing that ever happened to me.’ Almost everyone has an experience like that. Let’s learn a lesson from ourselves and realize that change is always meant for our good. Change is good. The quicker you learn the lesson, the sooner you will start enjoying your new strength. It feels great when you increase your confidence. Enjoy the feeling of growing and getting stronger. Embrace change when it comes, and learn how to fly. Millionaires embrace change. The middle-class is threatened by change.”

And I’m going to start a new career reading books on audible. I’m just kidding.

13:11 CJ: That’s right. That was really, really good. Yeah, that was kind of eerie how much he was using the exact same illustration.

13:19 Leah: Yeah.

13:19 CJ: And he said some other things there, which is stuff that I’ve said for years, and you mentioned that you say it yourself. I’d always used to say that being at the right place at the right time happens several times a day for those who are prepared and keep their head on a swivel. And frustration is your friend if it drives you out of the nest. So, one of the reasons why… This is an interesting factoid about why the middle-class resists change. They say that 5% of the population, the personalities of the population, are wired to be entrepreneurial, 5%. So, that means 5% are employing the rest of the world, for the most part.

14:00 Leah: Wow.

14:01 CJ: The majority of people, 65% are this, what they call just the steady types. They don’t like change.

14:09 Leah: But we need some of those people, too.

14:10 CJ: Yeah. Oh, you have to, you have to. They don’t like change. They don’t want… They want things to be predictable. So, an example would be the difference between the success of McDonald’s versus Burger King. McDonald’s doesn’t change things much. They stick with the essential basics to keep them going. They focus on the family, right? Heavy emphasis on children. And they use the primary colors: red, yellow, blue, that kind of thing. Whereas Burger King is all over the place, and so that you don’t know who exactly they’re targeting. They’re constantly changing things, so they struggle with success. Whereas, McDonald’s knows that the majority of the population wants primary colors, loves their family, lives paycheck to paycheck, doesn’t want things to change.

14:59 Leah: Yeah. Interesting.

14:59 CJ: They keep things predictable. The more predictable that you can be, the easier it is for the majority of people to function. So, some of that is good. We need predictability. I don’t want a world that’s unpredictable. I don’t want to wake up every day and wonder whether the transportation system is working or the sanitation system is working or whether my cops are going to be there today or not. Sure, we want that measure of predictability. But not resisting the change that’s necessary. Because like he said, there is opportunity in change.

So, people always ask me, and this is going to sound maybe counter, but I mean it in a different way because he’s obviously talking about long-term thinking. He mentioned earlier about long-term plans, 10 years and all that, is that people will, because I’m in a lot of success groups and all that kind of stuff and meetings and so, everybody talks about five-year plans and all of that. But I’ve learned over time that the best way to describe my approach to future planning is the two words, ‘seize opportunities’. Because SMA was not a part of my five-year plan.

16:13 Leah: Yeah, how about that? That was just out of the blue, right?

16:16 CJ: Just one of those things, right? Metal Motivation was not a part of my five-year plan. It was an idea that appeared. And so, the entrepreneur will look at it and say, “Calculate the risk” and say “is it worth it? Do I feel the idea has enough merit to go after it? Do I see future potential?” And so, they take that risk. They could be wrong. They could be wrong, but they understand that’s far, far better because there’s always something on the other side because they know that you can always keep doing it. I have somebody near and dear to me who kind of grew up in more of a blue-collar area. And so, her father is a really remarkable man. He did 25 years in the Navy, left the Navy to do 25 years as a school teacher, went from 25 years as a school teacher and is about to finish or just finished his 25th year as a deacon in a Catholic church. 25 years, 25 years-

17:13 Leah: How old is this guy? This seems, he must be like 100.

17:13 CJ: Yeah, He’s a, well, he’s just, I think he’s 91.

17:15 Leah: Wow.

17:16 CJ: 91 years old, but that was his goal to do 25 years, 25 years, and 25 years. Now, he’s got great pensions from all of these things, but what it… But this person knows me so well and knows I am so not that way. I am completely independent and entrepreneurial.

17:33 Leah: Wired so different.

17:34 CJ: Yeah, but to his experience… So, her experience too is that, well, he’s an institutional guy. I mean, what bigger institutions do you have than the U.S. Navy, the military, the public education system, and something as big and universal as the Catholic church? These are major institutions that have their pension plans and all of these things. I don’t have any of that. You know what I mean? I’m complete, I have never worked for a corporation. So-

18:05 Leah: You’re on your own.

18:05 CJ: Yep. I cannot go back into the workforce because nobody’s going to hire me. And so, I’ll always talk about-

18:11 Leah: I wonder if I could even get a job.

18:13 CJ: Exactly.

18:13 Leah: I don’t even know if I could get a job.

18:14 CJ: Who’s going to hire you? So, but I’ll always tell her that things like relationships are capital. I always say, “Relationships are capital.” I spent an hour talking to this person here. I’m so excited about it. She said, “Well, why are you so excited about it?” Because relationships are capital. I never know when something could possibly be an open door to something else. So, whereas somebody else is always checking their, I don’t know, their 401k stats or their pension stats, so they’re always looking at that because that’s what they depend on, I depend upon my own efforts. I depend on my ability to see and seize opportunity, to act quickly, to be flexible, and I recognize that relationships are capital, that everyone that I know, that everything that I know is capital.

So, I always want to be feeding, always want to be resourcing because I’m figuring, just like he did, that it’s seeding, it’s, I’m feeding myself for what could potentially come. And yes, that’s risky. Okay? And people are scared to death of the unknown. I get that. Leave a nightlight on if you’re scared of the dark, okay? I’ve got enough nightlight on. I’ve known, I’ve seen enough success in the past and I stay in my field of degree. People are like, “Man, you just do everything right.” No. Put me on a tennis court, put me on a golf course, put me on skis and you’ll see how much I don’t do everything right. I stay in my lane. I don’t go off and try to prove something and get myself killed. People say, “Why don’t you go ice skating? You want to go ice skating?” I said, “Hell, no.” This is why. Because, as of right now, there’s probably, there’s 0.00.5% chance that I will break a limb right now sitting in this chair. But the moment I put on ice skates and get on the ice, those odds just shot up dramatically.

So, I’m not looking for that adrenaline. I have the adrenaline of helping people break their limitations, and step out and increase a greater life. To me, that’s a-

20:16 Leah: Yeah. Not breaking their legs.

20:17 CJ: No. That, to me, that’s a whole lot more thrilling, helping people break the shackles of their mental chains than going out and doing-

20:25 Leah: Breaking your legs.

20:25 CJ: Yeah, go and breaking your leg. I’m not, and that doesn’t mean anybody else shouldn’t go do that. Do your thing, man. That’s the color of life. We’re all diverse. We don’t have to all be and think necessarily the same way. But no matter where you are in life, you can always think bigger. Like you said, Leah, it’s like, okay, replace millionaire with successful. What does success look like for you? And there’s no way you’re listening to this podcast… Again, there’s not one person, not one, listening to this podcast that has reached their potential. Not one.

20:56 Leah: Nope, no.

20:57 CJ: And that includes you and I.

20:58 Leah: 100%.

21:01 CJ: Right? So, that’s why we’re pushing the envelope. That’s why we’re pushing… One of the things that Leah and I get out of this and why we get so animated and excited, she’s reading to you guys from a book that she already read 10 years ago. And she’s reading it now. Back then, it was just kind of getting herself to think that way. Now, 10 years later, she’s done things that other people have dreamed about. And so now, that causes her eyeballs to change. Now, she’s reading the very same book, very same information in a different way, getting so much more out of it, and qualifying herself for her next level. Some of you guys would just like to get to where she was five years ago, let alone where she is now.

But her mind is already 10 years down the road. She’s already thinking down the road. So, what’s the big deal? Is it just her talent? Plays a small part. How much have you ever heard Leah on the podcast get into the actual production of her music? She doesn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about that. She’s talking about right-

22:09 Leah: And I’m not even good at it.

22:12 CJ: But your fans might disagree with you, but the point is, is that she’s, which she’s really passionate about. We have a verse that I love that says, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” So, I just need to hang around you for a little while to see what you’re all about, to see what you truly believe. So, when it comes to spending time with successful people, I’m going to spend my time with Leah. Because I hear what comes out of her heart. What comes out of her heart is more and more of a passion about exceeding limits.

22:43 Leah: Well, let me tell you something. When you start thinking more this way, and you’re reading books like this constantly, and you are having conversations with your kids and your spouse, you’re like, this is what you’re surrounding yourself in and you start to realize the people you hang around, you will become like them. You will become like the people you spend time with, and there’s even a saying that you are the sum of the five people you spend most time with. So, I made a decision a long time ago. I was going to hang out with really successful people. To this day, I still don’t know very many really successful people, but I hang out with them via podcasts, via their books, via their blogs. That’s how I hang out with them. They’re my mentors. They don’t even know they’re my mentors. And you also quickly realize that when you get into this abundance mindset, you realize how toxic so many people in your life really are.

23:34 CJ: Oh, yeah.

23:35 Leah: You start realizing how-

23:37 CJ: You must, you need to say that again. That is so true.

23:41 Leah: When you get into this abundance mindset, and you start realizing your own potential, it will be revealed to you how many people around you… It’s the crab in the bucket scenario. They want to pull you back down. And you need to stop spending time with them. It’s sad. And it can be lonely. Because you realize, wow, I can’t hang around most of the people in my life. This is actually really eye-opening and it’s sad. I feel a little bit… There’s a reason why I don’t have that many friends, to be honest. I don’t have that many because I have some lifelong friends and you have your relatives and stuff, but you can’t choose your relatives.

24:22 CJ: Right.

24:23 Leah: But so many people are going to be poison to your abundance. Because they’re so stuck in their poverty mentality and they’re so stuck in what is not possible for you and what is not possible for themselves. And so, your circle of friends is going to become a lot smaller, the more abundant-minded you become.

24:47 CJ: Yeah. Because the less the people around you understand how success is achieved, the more they’re going to think you cheated to get it. You know?

24:58 Leah: Yep.

24:58 CJ: They’re just, that’s going to be their assumption, because they think you are still like them. And if they haven’t done anything of significance, then if you’re doing something of significance, it must be for a reason other than hard work. Even if it’s by fate or magic or silver spoon in your mouth or whatever, you’re getting something you don’t deserve. They feel like it has everything to do with deserve. I hate that. Hate that word. Because everybody uses it. “I deserve better.” Really? Why? Why do you deserve better? And deserve in terms of who? The universe? God? The Force? What is it? Who’s supposed to give you this thing that you say you deserve better? Or that you say, “She didn’t deserve him” or “he didn’t deserve her.” Deserve has got nothing to do with it because I know some absolute devils who’ve got plenty of money.

25:53 Leah: Right.

25:54 CJ: So, deserve has-

25:55 Leah: The world isn’t fair like that.

25:56 CJ: Yeah. So who, so what’s… And I know some really, really good people who have had some really, really bad things happen to them, and are in some really, really bad straits. So, deserve has nothing to do with it but that’s how we think. And so, that’s when we start the blame game. We start playing the blame game. We start pointing fingers at everything else, everything external to us. We are the ultimate environmentalist. That don’t mean tree-hugging. Which is fine if you hug a tree, that’s okay. But environmentalist means you believe everything is determined by something external to you. So, even if it’s just, even if you can get down to class, genders, upbringing, anything that you can point to, a politician, whatever, the more they will have a part to play. But the more you keep the focus on there, then the less you realize and release the power from the one person who can truly make a change in your life.

And that’s you. Because everybody tells us to look on the bright side. But here’s the reality. If you want to look on the bright side, look in the mirror, because you are the bright side. And if you can’t say that to your situation, then you know you’re the problem. You should be able to look in the mirror and say, “I don’t care what circumstances I’m in. I am the bright side to my bad situation, because I can do something about it and I can do something about it now. I don’t need somebody to come save me. I can do this.”

27:32 Leah: Wow. Yes, this is good. I hope you guys are getting something really meaty out of this. I don’t think there’s any marketing podcasts that really go in-depth on this level. Certainly not in the musician space. So, this is really a treat. It’s a treat for us to be able to talk about it here, and I hope that you find it as valuable as we do. Because this is really the stuff that leads to lasting change and lasting results. No Instagram bot or tip is going to do what something like this is going to do. Change your thinking and that will change your life. Okay?

28:14 CJ: Exactly. I tell the students all the time, “The majority of the success is really going to come down to you.” And by that, it means not just doing the work. It means the way that you see everything. There is, I can’t… I’m sure a physics professor could come in here, Leah, and explain to us how that works, but in our third-grade explanation, we can observe it that if someone is in the right mindset, if they think this way, the changes happen. Not because it materializes magically, but because it changes so many things about us. Everything changes every aspect of how we operate physically, the way we… the time we get up, how much effort we put out, how long we stick with something. We don’t get discouraged. It all multiplies and compounds together to create the greater results than we’ve created in the past because we were limited by our thinking. “Stinking thinking,” the guys used to say all the time. And we don’t want to be guilty of it, so.

But as you said at the outset, it’s embracing change. Don’t be afraid of it. Embrace it. Don’t be limited by it because short-term thinkers, limited thinkers are afraid of change. And your greatest success, your next victory is on the other side of the change that you’re so afraid of, and you’ve got to attack it with ferocity. Resolved, meaning there’s no questioning in your mind. You’re seizing your challenges. You’re seizing change. Whatever’s in front of you, like a lion seizes an antelope. There is no second-guessing in that lion’s mind. It doesn’t sit there and wonder if he should do it, if anybody’s going to judge him. The lion’s not afraid he’s going to fail. He’s not fearful of success. He sees the line. If you were to behold it in real life, see it play out in front of you, your breath would be taken away at the ferocity, the violence of the resolve in that lion when it sees its prey. That’s exactly the way you need to be in the way that you think.

30:16 Leah: That’s right. I love it.

30:19 CJ: Okay. Well, Leah, I’m anxious to get into this next episode. We’ll save what we’ve got coming for the next episode. But again, as we said in the last episode, again, we’re kind of leaking out what’s up and coming. TOM 3.0, The Online Musician 3.0, about to receive its… When’s the last time it’s been upgraded? How long since TOM 2.0?

30:42 Leah: It’s been a couple of years, I think, since we really did an overhaul to it and just upgraded it. A lot needed to be updated. But I also, during that time, have been able to gather a lot of data of just things, kind of missing pieces of the puzzle where I think it will really help students make a significant change and impact on their music careers, and success that they have online, and moving toward making real significant money and have a lasting career. Because that’s what I’m interested in. I’m not interested in helping them make a quick buck today and then nothing tomorrow. I’m interested in helping them build an ecosystem where they launch a career online and they have multiple streams of income, because I don’t believe in putting all your eggs in one basket, and then helping them establish a real brand that’s recognizable online, a real brand that can grow.

So, we’re looking toward a sustainable model here. And so, that’s what The Online Musician 3.0 is all about. If you’re wondering what the difference is between that and our Superfan System Elite program, the Elite program is meant to be a very advanced marketing program. It assumes you kind of have some of these foundational pieces already in place. So, for that reason, we don’t accept a lot of people who do apply into that program because they’re just not ready for it yet. And so, The Online Musician 3.0 program is all about helping you establish those very significant pieces of the foundation. You can’t build a house without a foundation. Advanced marketing funnels and ads and all the ninja stuff and launches and all that. That’s like the decor of the house that’s putting on the windows and the roof and all of that.

But all of that just falls away if you don’t have that foundation. So, The Online Musician is that foundation. It’s your branding. It’s who are you, what’s your artist identity? Who is your ideal fan? Who are they? You better know everything about that fan. You better know what books they read, what magazines they read, the demographics, their psychographics, what’s their favorite movies, what’s their favorite video games? You better know all that stuff about them before you even start to go marketing, spending money on ads. And so, that’s just part of it.

But we’re going to deal with mindset. We’re going to deal with website. I believe that by the time you’re ready for our Superfan System Elite program that your website looks amazing. That should, to me, you should leave that program already having some of these big foundational pieces in place. And so, I’ve found that there’s a few holes in the program and wasn’t quite as comprehensive as I want these students… I want these students, by the time they come out of there, they should be making money, they should have a recognizable brand that they’re really proud of, and they should know exactly what the plan is, moving forward, for how they’re launching their music online and building a sustainable career that they love, whether they tour or not. How’s that?

33:45 CJ: Perfect.

33:45 Leah: Join the waitlist.

33:48 CJ: Yeah, so there’s more information. In fact, we got a webinar that you can register for. And you can get all of this information at ExplodeYourFanBase.com. ExplodeYourFanBase.com. And if all that we’re talking about is even too over your head and you’re like, “I don’t think I’m even ready for The Online Musician, well, you always have another option. And that is something we’re very, very proud of, which actually has kind of a little bit of both, fundamentals as well as some advanced material, in the Inner Circle Membership, which you can join right away. In fact, a lot of our students in TOM and in the Superfan System-

34:26 Leah: And Elite.

34:27 CJ: And elite are subscribers to the Inner Circle Membership. And you can go to SavvyMusicianAcademy.com/InnerCircle and you get a cool, beautiful full-color magazine with that, full with interviews and tips and tools and motivational articles and latest updates, what’s happening in the changes of social media and marketing. You also get an audio version, read by me, and you get a mini-tutorial, a mini-course with each month’s issue and it’s pretty, pretty cool. So, go and check that out. But, Leah-

35:04 Leah: I recommend everybody should just subscribe to that, whether you’re in TOM or Elite, just everybody needs that. And the way that’s different too is it’s addressing a little bit more of the tactical stuff on a monthly basis and a different topic every month. Things that are not necessarily part of the fundamentals but stuff that we want you to know, and stuff that I think will be helpful and will contribute toward you creating more income for yourself. So, everybody should just go subscribe to that. It’s so affordable. Can you just find the money in your couch, please? And just do this, do this for yourself. You need to immerse your brain and your body and just immerse yourself in this, so it becomes second nature. So, that’s why we created Inner Circle. Go do that.

35:46 CJ: Yep. There you go. Yeah, it’s great to have some written-format stuff so that people can go back and refer to things. In fact, there’s even, go a little bit more in-depth on the student spotlights, not just sharing their wins, but asking about what happened, what was their latest victory, what determined that victory, what did they stop doing that created that victory, and what did they start doing that created that victory? And so, it’s a lot of really cool stuff in this inner circle membership. So again, SavvyMusicianAcademy.com/InnerCircle. To check out more about what’s coming up with TOM 3.0, ExplodeYourFanBase.com. Leah, let’s do this again. How about one more episode?

This episode is sponsored by The Online Musician 3.0, the upgraded version of the flagship music marketing course from the Savvy Musician Academy. This cutting-edge music marketing course is set to release soon, so sign up now for our waiting list to receive up to date information at ExplodeYourFanBase.com. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins recently said in an interview, “If I was going to give you 60-seconds of advice, I would put your whole focus into reaching people through the Internet.” There’s no better way to start reaching your ideal fans on the Internet than by The Online Musician 3.0, which covers cutting-edge topics like mindset training, branding secrets and tutorials, creating a website that converts, Instagram for musicians, YouTube for musicians, using and leveraging Facebook groups, monetizing your music, creating a successful album launch, and much, much more. If you’re ready for your next level in creating your own online music business, then sign up now for our waiting list at ExplodeYourFanbase.com.

00:21 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz. I’m the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy, joined, I’m so thrilled to have her back, the lovely Leah McHenry. Leah, great to see you.

00:34 Leah: Great to see you and great to be here.

00:37 CJ: Where have you been?

00:39 Leah: I’ve been around. Yeah, that’s been an eventful last month, my family, we moved, an international move actually back … from the United States back to Canada for a while and that’s always a bit of a gong show but we drove up here with my minivan, with all seven of us, plus two cats and it was a five-day road trip, that was fun.

01:05 CJ: Yeah. Yeah.

01:07 Leah: We all made it out alive.

01:09 CJ: Yeah, try to keep up with the pictures and I just … I couldn’t believe how quick and also, it seems like you had made that transition. No, I mean, great to have you back, of people I have been riding in, they’ve enjoyed the interviews though and so that’s been a blessing of sorts to be able to talk to students both elite and in TOM online musician groups. Man, just great, great stories about what kind of results students are getting and so, ready to hear more of that. In fact, I’m going to start with a little student spotlight here with one of our TOM students, Tracy Forest who writes, “Hashtag win. I know it’s small peanuts but I have to say this model really works.”

“I’m about four to five … four-fifths through TOM,” which means The Online Musician, “About to launch my website and I just ran my first Facebook like ad. I have limited funds so I’m only running the ad for about a dollar a day to a pretty targeted audience. In three days, I’ve gotten 25 new likes. Imagine if I had spent $5 a day. Again, it’s a very small win but I am just amazed how when we followed the program, we get results. I’m even more fired up than ever to keep pushing and to do the hard work. Thanks, Leah and SMA.”

02:33 Leah: That’s cool and actually, I like that dollar a day strategy too, when you’re first starting out because you’re not really losing much money at all and you get your feet wet and some people say if, by spending such a low amount, you’re actually forcing the Facebook algorithm to find the exact right people because you’re limiting them so they have to work with that budget and put it in front of the right people. I actually think it’s a cool way to start out. Good job.

02:59 CJ: Yeah, good job. I think what you say there also as it relates to psychology, has a benefit because like she did, she got a taste for victory.

03:10 Leah: Yeah.

03:11 CJ: Some people can’t imagine even moving it an inch, let alone a mile, so they get this taste of achievement. This, “Wow, it really works,” so what’s the first thought that hits you? What if I spent $5 a day?

03:22 Leah: Yes.

03:22 CJ: In other words, you may not have the resources but it doesn’t mean then … but look how interested they’ll be to spend more money once they’re able to acquire it. Good news is good news, no matter what and again, if you can move it an inch, you can move it a mile so good for you.

03:41 Leah: That’s right.

03:42 CJ: Well, Leah, I’ve done a lot of coaching as of late and I’m seeing a pattern and I’ve had, like this last weekend, sat with a friend of mine, a musician and we talked for maybe two and a half or three hours and everything that I told him about 10% had to do with software, technology, what have you. I had another conversation last night with a student. We went for almost two hours. Again, 10% was about technical things in regards to software or Facebook or what have you and these are two completely different people and two completely different situations with two completely different setbacks but what they share in common is the way that they think.

They were more in their way understanding then that how much they had to understand about their own psychology, psychology of the marketplace, why people buy, what are their expectations et cetera. It just kept bringing me back because I come from a motivational side of the street.

04:47 Leah: Yeah.

04:47 CJ: For me, the way someone thinks or believes or their concepts about what’s possible, what you should be pursuing is completely central to the success of an individual. So much so that I always tell people in my groups, in the audios and video stuff that I do, that if I could spend all of my time on one subject, it would be the way that you think, which is going to influence the way that you believe et cetera. We’re going to come back to a subject that has been really on your heart for some time now. Why don’t you open us up about … because some people can kind of get … when you talk about these kinds of things, people can kind of get a little weirded out because of their … maybe their beliefs and what not but that’s kind of the point, is to help them change beliefs, help them really discover what’s possible and what should their expectations and pursuits be.

When it comes to dealing with the successful, the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful, people can get really envious, people can get jealous, people can get political. They can get partisan.

06:02 Leah: Yeah, triggered.

06:03 CJ: Right, really, really triggered so why don’t you introduce us into this?

06:08 Leah: Yeah, well, I thought it would be a really fun idea to do a little series based on a book that I’m reading my children right now. It’s not a children’s story or children’s book but it’s something that I am incorporating into my morning time with them. If you don’t know, if this is your first time listening or you don’t know too much about me, I’m a mom of five. I have five kids and they’re all homeschooled so we’re all nerds around here. We’re pretty cool nerds but we’re nerds so I … one of the things I do with them every morning is I spend like a two to three-hour chunk. Sometimes in the past, it’s been much less than that. Sometimes it was 20 minutes but I try to make it a habit.

Right now, it’s much longer than that. It’s my impartation time where we do journaling. I get to impart to them wisdom, things, values. We read books, we read nonfiction, we read fiction. We’re reading The Fellowship of the Rings right now and then also, usually, some kind of nonfiction book. Something principle-based and it’s my time to … we get to learn about anything we want. This morning, we were also watching YouTube videos on aquascaping which is like an aquarium, building like a scene in an aquarium. Some of them are incredibly elaborate. They look like an enchanted forest and stuff like, I want to make one of these and so you know it’s very interest-led stuff. It’s an amazing time, I wouldn’t trade that time for anything in the world, it’s the best.

This is a book, I’m reading to them. It is simple enough that children can understand it and they’re genuinely … I mean, their age is five to almost 14. They actually … they’re paying so much attention to this. They are gleaning from it. They are like wow, they’re really learning it and I get to be the teacher me and explain stuff, which I love and it’s extremely rewarding, being able to share this with them. The title could trigger you. The title could trigger, okay? It’s called the Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class by Keith Cameron Smith. This is … if you’re watching on YouTube … we have a YouTube channel by the way if you didn’t know.

08:20 CJ: Yeah, right.

08:21 Leah: This is what it looks like, okay and we’ll put the link in the show notes so you can get a copy of this book. It’s a very short book. Each chapter is very short but the title … there should be some people who are like, “I’m done with this podcast,” because it’s like, what an offensive title. I think 10, 15 years ago, this is not an offensive title but now it is but anyways.

08:45 CJ: Yeah, now it is, right.

08:47 Leah: The whole point of this book is the distinctions, if millionaires and middle class bothers you, just change the words to successful and unsuccessful, okay? These are the top 10 distinctions between successful people who are financially abundant and unsuccessful people or people who are just scraping by and are not happy with their situation.

09:10 CJ: Right.

09:11 Leah: There are many people in the middle class who are completely happy being in the middle class. This book isn’t really for them. It’s for people who are not happy with that status and want abundance.

09:21 CJ: Right.

09:23 Leah: There are 10 distinctions in this book and I love them. This is gold and I will say what’s mind-blowing to me is I read this book years ago, probably … I don’t know, like a decade ago. I read it long before I’d ever made any money and there’s something interesting to me looking back and I think all those books that I read about the success mindset and books like this, Distinctions Between the Millionaires and the Middle Class, I didn’t make any money for at least five, six more years after that but I really do believe it seeded me. It planted the seed that grew into a harvest later on. Once I had a product, once I understood who I was, once I understood the skills that it would take and it’s like all of a sudden, it all came together but it came together years down the road.

That’s something he actually talks about in this book when we talk about thinking long term and actually that’s about what I’m going to read to you guys here in a second. Not everything that you do reaps the harvest right this moment.

10:28 CJ: Right.

10:30 Leah: Reading books like this is planting the seeds for … in abundant harvest later down the road. It could be years. It could be months. Yeah, that’s the interesting thing to me is that I read this book so long ago and I’m reading it now and it’s blowing my mind. I’m like, not because I’ve arrived, not because, “Oh well, that’s me now.” Not at all like that. It’s blowing my mind like … it’s the same way you read a book more than once and you get something completely new out of it. That’s exactly what’s happening to me and I’m being challenged by this book. One chapter in particular which I want to cover in the future like there’s one chapter that’s really challenging me in my thinking.

That’s the whole point of us sharing this with you in this episode is … the idea is to challenge your thinking. The idea is to take you out of your comfort zone and make you consider where you’re at right now that is actually an obstacle to your success. I can’t think of possibly anything better we can even talk about on this podcast because frankly, tips and tricks and tactics only get you so far and really, if you don’t have the right mindset, then they don’t even work anyway. This is the most valuable stuff we could give you.

11:50 CJ: Yeah. I think what people have to realize is don’t be moved by a title or the way something is phrased. Try to find the principle that’s involved here because nobody is suggesting you have to go and be a millionaire, whatever.

12:03 Leah: Right.

12:03 CJ: Now, however, if you taste some success, you’re going to want to see how far you could push the envelope so don’t be surprised if you’re thinking changes over time. However, the point is, is that there are principles of increase, there’s principles that you can increase in what you’re doing. That’s what’s important, is that how does this apply to your life? How does this apply to your particular music business? Now, we don’t have necessarily a whole lot of information from musicians or recording artists about this type of thing. A lot of major recording artists are messed up in the head or they got robbed of all their money from record labels or managers and find out they’re broke and in debt, right? Somebody squandered all their earnings.

The entertainers are not necessarily the best ones to consult when it comes to this but for those people especially those who are … and believe me to the upper, upper class, being a millionaire is nothing.

13:09 Leah: That’s right.

13:09 CJ: That’s … they look at somebody who just is a millionaire as middle class. You talk to the people in the billions and they’re going to look at somebody who’s just … who makes two million dollars a year let’s just say as middle class. They’re looking like-

13:24 Leah: Small fish.

13:25 CJ: Like $30,000 a year.

13:26 Leah: Yeah.

13:27 CJ: It’s all perspective. Now, again, don’t be put off because you’ve brought into it your particular bias about something, let’s get to the principle. Obviously, Leah just mentioned here that she’s instilling this to her kids so that means she wants something perpetuated in her own household. I’ve done the same thing. My kids are all grown but they’ve been raised that way. That’s why I call it a trailer park aristocracy. I want them to think long-term and I want them to think in terms of increase, that where you are is not where you need to remain and I understand like what Leah said that some people are content with being middle class but sometimes that content with being middle class is based on an ignorance.

14:14 Leah: Right.

14:14 CJ: That if they understood the actual threat to the position that they’re in because of the way …

14:19 Leah: Well, the economy even. When you’re relying on one income stream alone and that’s it, that’s all you have, you’re vulnerable. You’re so vulnerable. Your children are vulnerable. It’s not even just about like political ideas. We’re talking even the survival here, thinking about your children in the future. It’s not a good idea to put yourself in a position where you all are financially vulnerable. There’s an entire generation here, an elderly generation. They have no savings. They have no retirement and how are we going to take care of them? I’m not trying to talk about social programs or government programs. This is not about that but you are vulnerable if you are content, that’s how I see it.

15:07 CJ: Yeah, and again, so that’s the … it comes back to the obligation that you have to yourself. What’s the capacity of your resident gifting? If there’s a million people around the world that could listen to your ethereal folk rock, right? If there’s a million people around the world that would love your ethereal folk-rock, and would literally spend upwards of anywhere between $25 to $100 a year with you, because you nurture that audience and take care of them and you give them the music and the products and things that they would enjoy, well, then, do the math. You’re going to increase. It’s not about a lust for … See, some people will … Leah, will position themselves as … somehow, they’re more noble if they decry wealth or abundance or what have you.

16:06 Leah: Right.

16:07 CJ: Somehow that’s a more noble thing and suggesting that if you have abundance, well, you’re somehow evil, you’re somehow-

16:15 Leah: Materialistic, selfish.

16:16 CJ: Bad, right. Instead of thinking well, obviously, number one if you then as the person who thinks this way had more money and since because you’re so … have such a keen sense of good and evil, that it would stand to reason that you would be the most qualified person in the room to possess said money because you would obviously know better than all money how to solve the world’s problems and the other thing is, we’re seeing this right now played out in the political theater where it’s easy to slam the riches a big category and granted yeah, you got your doubles in there man. I mean, there are very, very bad people just like there are bad people in all walks of life.

17:00 Leah: Absolutely. Let’s talk about Monsanto.

17:03 CJ: Yeah, exactly. What the point being is that if you propose some sort of political system where every class, every kind of person no matter what their lot in life is being taken care of, well, that money has to come from somewhere.

17:22 Leah: Yeah.

17:22 CJ: It has to be paid for and so, yeah, what they want to do is tax the rich which is fine, okay, if you want to say that, that’s all fine. That’s all well and good but that means somebody has to be rich.

17:32 Leah: Somebody has the money and is doing something with it.

17:35 CJ: Right.

17:36 Leah: The money doesn’t go away.

17:39 CJ: The overall point here is that increase is going to be necessary on someone’s part and so, we’re not here to make an apologetic, we’re just kind of laying the groundwork for what we want to talk about because we feel like this is such an important topic, we’re going to spend a few episodes on it. It’s just important to get past the natural knee jerk reactions to a discussion like this. We’re not just talking about that. We’re talking the principles of increase, about what really makes a difference between being successful and being unsuccessful and like you said, especially when it comes to digital marketing for the online musician, and I see this all the time with my coaching calls, is that they get too fixated on a trick or a hack or method or a piece of software.

They don’t realize that like you said, there is a connection between the way that you think and even the implementation of some of these tricks or hacks. In the conversation I had last night with a student, even your copy because the copy that they read to me was technically good copy. If you open up a copywriter’s thing, but it wasn’t genuine to them. It wasn’t personal and so, the audience is going to feel that so that’s what we’re talking about, is to change your thinking in a sense that you will begin to see increase in your life in all areas of your life, simply because you’re no longer standing in your own way mentally.

19:13 Leah: Yes, and I think that’s important. Let me read a segment from this chapter and I think the next few episodes, I’m going to read a segment from a different chapter.

19:23 CJ: Okay.

19:24 Leah: These are the ones that really stood out to me, things that hit me. Now, I just suggest, go buy the book and read the whole thing, it only take you about 10 minutes to read one chapter. There’s 10 chapters. This first distinction is really important and I think that it’s … and I love this book because it’s principle-based which means you can apply it to anything and it just carries through time, it’s timeless. “Distinction number 10, millionaires think long-term, the middle class thinks short term.” I’m going to go over here to this one segment because I think it’s a little more relevant to all of us artist and creatives. It says, “Stretch your thinking further into the future.

The longer you can stretch your thinking into the future, the richer you will become. Most multimillionaires I know personally have business plans that reach at least 10 years into the future. When I first started thinking year to year, my income really started to increase. I ask myself questions like, how can I double my income this year? How can I legally pay less in taxes this year? As I’ve seen this principle of long term thinking in the lives of my mentors, it has challenged me to look further into my future. I know have business plans that go 20 years into the future. I spend time on a regular basis thinking about what I want my life to be like five, 10 and 20 years from now.

“Then, I create plans for how to get there.” I’m going to stop there for a second because I love this. We’ve actually talked about this in episodes in the past about how it starts with a dream then turns into a plan. It starts with imagination and imagining what the future could be like and what it is you want then taking that dream and turning it into plan and reverse engineering it. This for me is like … this is gold. This is a jackpot right here. “What would you like your life to be like 10 years from now? Think about it and start planning for it. Thinking long term requires patience. Patience is an asset in the life of millionaires. Impatience is a liability in the life of the middle class.” Do you have anything to say about that?

21:39 CJ: Yeah. Well, to be honest, I couldn’t have said it any better because you do literally see that, especially, when you have a debt-based economy where there’s easy money. If you have a credit card in your pocket that you can just pull out, you’re not thinking long-term so you’re robbing your future to furnish your present.

22:00 Leah: Right, financing their entire life.

22:02 CJ: Yeah, by that means and so people don’t think economically and so, it’s funny the distinction between the different classes is the ultra-rich are not necessarily big spenders all the time. Often times, read the old book, the Millionaire Next Door, you find that they were very, very frugal people. If anything, the millionaires understand money better. They understand economics better so they’re smarter with it whereas the middle class doesn’t understand.

22:36 Leah: Our friends and family I think are sometimes shocked to see that we drive a very inexpensive minivan because that’s not where we want to put our money. There’s no return on that. There’s no ROI on a Honda Civic or a Honda Odyssey. There’s no ROI on that so why would we put all our money there? Let me continue, I like this stopping to do commentary thing, this is fun. “Middle-class people want instant gratification.” I got to say something right now. This house that we just moved into, it’s a rental house because we want to build something eventually and we’re here for about a year. This house we’re in has an extra living room and the previous house we were in, there was one big family room and there wasn’t like a formal living room and a family … this one has an extra living room. I have no furniture in it.

There’s a rug on the floor. I don’t plan on buying furniture for it. Actually, I know what I would want but I’m not going to buy it. I’m going to actually leave it empty. Do you know why?

23:41 CJ: Why?

23:42 Leah: Because it reminds me of my goals and it reminds me that this is temporary and I’m going for something bigger and better and I’m not just going to finance my life and get a bunch of furniture in here right now. I’m leaving it empty because it keeps me slightly uncomfortable and reminds me, every time I walk in there, what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

24:02 CJ: Right. Yeah, I’m similar in a sense … because I’m in a different season of life. My kids are grown even though I’ve got a couple with me, they’re adults and they’re doing their thing but we have a standard American house, a dining room and a living room and all that sort of stuff. Well, we don’t really use those rooms. I don’t use the living room. I’m either working or I’m asleep.

24:28 Leah: Or in the kitchen.

24:29 CJ: Yeah, I’m in the kitchen. So yeah, you use the kitchen, you use the bathrooms and you use the bedrooms. I’m not using the living room. I’m not using the dining room so it’s like okay, I mean, I could even go with a smaller home and my home would just be a standard home. There’s nothing … it’s a beautiful property, it’s a beautiful house but there’s nothing extravagant about it. I don’t got all the extra rooms and spas and all this kind of stuff. You have that same mentality which is to say that doesn’t mean I don’t want increase. It just means I have a higher purpose. I’m thinking like you just described ROI. What do I want something to give back from my investment?

25:11 Leah: That’s right. Okay. “Middle-class people want instant gratification. I was like that for many years. Whatever I wanted I charge to my credit card or put a little bit down and made the payments on the balance. Now, I wait for things that I want because my goal is more freedom, not comfort.” That’s where I’m at right now. “Rich and very rich people have developed the discipline of delayed gratification.” That’s a term that I teach my children. The phrase delayed gratification. “Millionaires do today what others don’t so they can have tomorrow what others won’t.” Rhymey. “The very poor, poor and middle class will never be free. More and more freedom is the goal of the rich and the very rich. They love to be in control of their lives. The very poor, poor and middle class have put control of their lives into the hands of others which ironically are the hands of the rich and the very rich.”

26:11 CJ: Isn’t that funny. Yeah, what’s the old saying, the borrower is slaved to the lender.

26:18 Leah: Yeah.

26:18 CJ: Right?

26:19 Leah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

26:21 CJ: You’re living on a slave plantation of sorts because you don’t own anything for the most part. It’s all been financed. You’re just in long-term debt-based slavery and so, the difference between maybe the middle class or lower class and the millionaire is that the millionaire is very, very aware of that fact so he or she will work aggressively in terms of it, as like you said, delaying gratification for the ultimate goal of liberty not comfort. That’s luxury and ease as a deceptive voice, where you think that if I have all the accoutrements of what people perceive as successful, the big-screen TVs and all these cars and whatnot. Well, then that is somehow liberty. No, you’re financed to the gills, you’ve got the Best Buy card, you got the Visa card, the Mastercard, the American Express Card. You got this loan, that loan and you’re financing your life away …

27:28 Leah: You’ve just trapped yourself, yeah.

27:29 CJ: Yeah, so you got the big screen TV but you’re not free, you’re not at liberty to do what you want.

27:36 Leah: “Millionaires value freedom over comfort and because they do, they get both. Because the middle-class values comfort over freedom, they will never be free. Think long-term in every area of life. I want you to be aware that this principle of thinking long-term not only applies to your financial life but to every area of life.” And this is where I want new musicians to really listen to this, “It is wise to think long-term in your relationships when you do, you will show more respect to others and think from a win-win perspective. If you think short-term in your relationships, you’ll be looking for what others can do for you and end up using people as a means to an end.” It happens all the time constantly in the music industry, constantly. People are just saying, what can you do for me? How can I use you as a stepping stone? It’s gross.

28:26 CJ: Right.

28:27 Leah: “If you or someone who always uses people for your own gain then chances are, you will be a lonely person especially in your later years. Millionaires develop long-term relationships which also helps them with their long-term financial success. They think about how they can they best serve their families, friends and clients when you reach the end of your life, it is the relationships you have developed that make you truly rich. Ask yourself on a regular basis, how you can build deeper and stronger relationships with the people you love. Just as there are people who are very poor financially, there are also people who are very poor emotionally. People who can’t love or be patient or kind.

“People who can’t forgive and people who get angry easily are very poor emotionally. Focus on becoming rich emotionally as well as financially. Becoming rich in your relationships is more than success. It is significance. It is fulfillment. Financial success without relational fulfillment is not rewarding. Think long-term in your financial life and in your emotional life. It’s wise to think long-term about your physical health. If you do, then you will make the time to exercise your body and eat more healthfully. If you don’t think long-term in your health, you will neglect exercise and eat too much junk. Chances are you’ll become overweight and live with a low amount of energy.

“Thinking long term in your health empowers you with energy to become more successful financially. Every area of life is connected and thinking long-term in each area will improve every area. It is wise to think long-term in your mental life and mental health, too. What would you like to spend your life thinking about? Is there a certain subject that inspires you? What do you enjoy giving your mental energy to? People who spend their lives thinking about things that excite and inspire them live with incredible peace of mind. People who could be considered very poor mentally are those who complain and spend their mental energy on things they dislike.

“Mentally poor people live with a lot of stress. Would you like to increase your peace of mind? If so, then start thinking long term about your mental life. Spend your mental energy on the subjects you enjoy. Dedicate your life to the fields of interest that inspire you. Find a way to make money in the areas you enjoy thinking about. This is a secret of many millionaires. They do what they love to do to make money. This makes them rich mentally and financially. Think long term in every area of your life not just financially.” One more section here, “Set more long term goals. In order to move from the poor to the middle class or from the middle class to the rich or from the rich to the very rich. Just start planning your life further into the future.

“Set more long-term goals for your life. People overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10. When you have long-term goals, you will find it easier to develop perseverance. All millionaires have had to persevere through challenges in their lives. In order to see your dreams fulfilled, you have to become a whatever it takes kind of person.” Gold, this is gold. In order … I’m going to read that again. “In order to see your dreams fulfilled, you have to become a whatever it takes kind of person. Middle-class people give up when the pressure is on since they value comfort, they don’t persevere when the going gets tough. Millionaires go the second mile and the third and the fourth.

“They do whatever it takes to experience abundance since they think long-term, they keep on keeping on until they achieve abundance and freedom. Millionaires think long-term, the middle class thinks short-term.” Boom, mic drop. That’s why I’m reading this to my children. Can you imagine if your parents have read this to you and your kid.

32:24 CJ: Yeah, because you probably may have gotten your idea of scarcity and lower-class thinking from your upbringing. It brings up the point that fundamentally, I think what people have lost sight of, is that everything, for the most part, is economic in nature, especially relationships and family, especially. Now, you have to qualify the term economic. Economic in the sense that it’s what … it’s the way of means to perpetuate something so it’s survival.

33:00 Leah: It’s an ecosystem.

33:02 CJ: Yes, so think of a … exactly. Think of a family from the middle ages under … living under a tyrannical king in Europe, right? Hoppers. Well, they didn’t get married because they read a bunch of harlequin romances and wanted to find that somebody special and maybe have a couple of kids in a white picket fence. No. Marriage was an economic decision. That’s why there were dowries and all these, money had to be exchanged because it was … and if a family had too many daughters, that was considered liabilities, because they needed boys and to be young men, to do the heavy type stuff and protect the home and all that sort of thing. Plus the average lifespan of a kid was not that great.

The average lifespan of an adult wasn’t that great. You had to have a lot of kids. Decisions about marriage and family were economic in nature, the modern age. We’re marrying because it’s just a cool thing to do or because we grew up watching Hallmark shows and watching love stories and so, we want that. There is no … that’s why we can fall in and out of love and get married three or four times and so, the modern person is not very rooted in family. The modern person is an individual, it’s what they call Adamism where you think in terms of the individual. Therefore, if you’re an individual, then who do you see yourself in terms of in the larger picture. It’s usually not family or community. It tends to be government, political party, that sort of thing.

That’s why you’ll see literal family members split over political views because they identify themselves … when you see people talking about rights, than they do duties, you know that people see themselves more in terms of these sorts of things. So, if you don’t understand that by thinking long-term, this guy is not just being cute to say, “Hey, also think long-term about your health, think long-term about your relationships.” He’s not being cute. It is a comprehensive change in your world view. World view, the way you view the world. Yourself, what’s available, what’s possible, your children, your relationships, the long-term outcome of these things. What is your desired outcome?

Most people don’t think about that Leah because most people are short-term thinkers. They spend like they’re money like they’re short-term thinkers. They don’t live long-term so they end up with what, lots of debt, not a lot of savings, everything is right now. They’re just hoping that everything is going to turn out okay but now you got something like the virus and people talking about the economic fallout and what had been all of a sudden jobs are at risk and so people panic. Why do they panic, because there was zero preparation.

36:06 Leah: That’s right. Everyone is just cleaning out the paper … the toilet paper aisles.

36:12 CJ: Yes, so that’s I think a lot of people’s reality and the point here is not to shame anyone. That’s not the point here.

36:21 Leah: It’s to inspire you. We’re trying to inspire you here to motivation.

36:25 CJ: Yeah, because … I mean, it’s going to be difficult for you to … and this is the real point I want to get across to the musician who’s listening Leah because we can get to thinking … they’re talking so much about middle, upper class that, what does it have to do with music? What it has to do with music is that, you can’t go into something, as taught by the Savvy Musician Academy, which is solely based on you doing something for yourself in entrepreneurial fashion.

36:54 Leah: Right.

36:54 CJ: Not dependent upon institutions, not dependent upon social security, not dependent upon anybody else but your own effort.

37:03 Leah: Right.

37:03 CJ: You can’t do that if you bring into it a mentality that’s based in a system that’s based upon, depending upon institutions, depending upon credit cards, depending upon all of these other things, short-term thinking because what happens if your little ads don’t work in three months? Are you going to quit?

37:21 Leah: Are you just destroyed by that?

37:24 CJ: Yeah, are you just literally taken out or you’re a long-term thinker?

37:27 Leah: I feel like this type of episode, it’s so important. I wish everybody wouldn’t buy a single course from us until they listen to this episode because so many people are just looking for a quick fix. They’re looking for, give me the tactic, give me the hack so I can get a bunch of Instagram followers but they have no thought process, no mental headspace. They’re not even giving a thought to building a long-term sustainable career that actually protects them in any type of economy. They’re just not thinking like a real business person, a business owner and just like a healthy individual who thinks longer than next week. It makes me sometimes just think … and it’s not just musicians.

It’s a whole segment of the population but the musicians that I come across so often just want, give me a result right now and if I don’t get it, give me a refund, give me my life back. I’m going to write crap about you on Reddit or whatever the heck, and I’m just like, you feeble-minded, short-term thinker like with no vision in your life, no vision for the future, no vision for yourself, do you think that you’re going to consume this information and by the mere fact that you consumed it, something magical is going to happen? Absolutely not.

38:58 CJ: That’s entitlement. That’s the danger of luxury and ease because they think if I can microwave my dinner if I can drive down to the Best Buy and pick up a TV off the shelf, pay for it with a credit that’s almost maxed out, bring it home, plug it in and watch it, then the results should be instantaneous too. Again, if you’re going into something like we teach at the Savvy Musician Academy, it is completely dependent upon you. Yes, there’s great software. Yes, there’s coaches in some of our programs to help. All of that is there but it is you and you is determined by the way that you think. If we can unlock this possibility thinking, this prosperity thinking, this abundance and increase way of thinking, we won’t be able to hold you back.

It won’t be you getting motivation from us, you will have an endless supply of just absolutely high-octane motivation because you’re going to see that there are no limits to what’s possible for you, not just financially but in terms of influence, as an artist, to touch people. If you feel like your music can really impact the life of other people, even if it’s just entertaining them, making them laugh, giving them a time to escape, enjoying your music, you have a responsibility to do that and you can’t do that without the funds.

40:28 Leah: Right.

40:29 CJ: Therefore, the more that you have, the more that you increase, the more that you can do and the more you, then, become the inspiration to other people, to help unlock them. Break the shackles of poverty thinking from them and that if everybody thinks this way, it’s not greed. It’s not greed at all.

40:48 Leah: No. The more abundance there is, the more you can do for this world.

40:52 CJ: Exactly.

40:52 Leah: The more you can do for other people, the more you can provide not just for yourself but for your family, future generations, it’s just, you need abundance to do anything in this world. It takes money to do anything, so why not have more of it, why not learn how to become a very successful musician or creative whoever you are. Learn what it takes to become that person and then learn how to grow it and then learn how to inspire other people by it.

41:25 CJ: Well, and that’s what’s been inspiring even over the past several months, Leah as you did your last launch of your winter album at the end of the year and then went into your year-end sale and then even recently, starting the sister brand which we’ve covered in previous episodes of Mythologie Candles and that’s just been blowing up. Again, setting the example of not being satisfied and not for the sake of greed but you see possibility, you’re inspired by an idea. You see how you can increase your particular empire with the candle company and so you’re not going to sit, put it on the shelf. You’re going to take steps on it. You took a risk, you didn’t know everything that was going to be involved.

You were learning so much about candles, about the shipping because now you weren’t doing drop-shipping necessarily, so you’re taking everything. You got the kids involved. Steve, your husband was involved and so, it’s a learning process and you grow through this. It’s just, there’s so much that comes out of this. It’s not just money. There’s so much that is going to make you as a better business owner, as a better marketer, as a better everything through this and that only comes because there’s a hunger for it but there’s a belief in you. You’re not limited by the lack thereof. You’re not limited to unbelief and self-doubt and second-guessing. You’re willing to go after it. So, it’s a great example.

42:50 Leah: I couldn’t have said it better. Yeah, that’s exactly it. I’m seeing the possibility and I’m seeing the challenge and I get addicted to challenging myself and not everything is going to always win. I’m okay with that. That’s actually a chapter in this book which we’ll cover in the next episode. Failure is a good thing.

43:10 CJ: Well, if you don’t throw weight on the bar, you’re not going to grow a muscle. There’s got to be resistance and if life is not sending you some, then you need to bring some on yourself.

43:18 Leah: That’s good.

43:18 CJ: Sometimes it would be expanding and so, you’ve done that and we want our students and our listeners to do that. Expand. You need to stretch yourself. You need to do something more like this, the lady we started with, the student we started with if she spent a dollar a day. That’s a stretch, that’s big and $5 will be five times that but one day, they’ll get to the place where they’ll look back and say, I remember when I was just spending $5 a day. It does open up to possibilities, so that’s growth. You’re only going to grow by resistance so every day should be like a trip to the gym for you mentally. Every day, you got to subject yourself to the heavyweight of life’s resistance.

44:04 Leah: I had a relative who was asking me about all the different things, sort of like okay, so you got your main academy going, like yeah and they’re like, okay and you’re starting the candle business? Yeah. You have your music thing too. I’m like, yeah, there’s that too. She’s like, does your brain hurt all the time? I’m like, yes it does. Yes, my brain does hurt all the time. That’s exactly … it’s like asking, do your workout suck every time? Yes, they do. Right, they’re supposed to, right? That’s the only way you’re going to actually get a benefit out of it. Challenge yourself, you guys.

44:39 CJ: Exactly because either that, either your mind is occupied with troubleshooting your business and business growth or you’re occupied with triviality which carries its own burden or worry. There’s no way you’re living where you are right now, whether middle class, lower … there’s no way you’re living that way and completely content.

45:05 Leah: Yeah.

45:05 CJ: There’s just no way because …

45:06 Leah: I think you’re lying. People must be lying, who says that?

45:09 CJ: Yeah, because you might say, “No, I’m fine, I’m perfectly fine.” Okay, so if something happened to your car tomorrow, your car was wrecked, you’re telling me you’ll be perfectly fine. You don’t have any … you have all the money you need to have that car fixed immediately, get another car immediately, if you lost your job tomorrow, which a lot of people have experienced that, you’re telling me, you’re perfectly fine? No.

45:35 Leah: A relative has a medical emergency.

45:38 CJ: Yeah, you’re perfectly fine. Today, for example, this morning. Me and my daughter were kind of troubleshooting through some of her physical stuff. So, we really need to get some blood work done and so, they have …

45:53 Leah: Labs.

45:53 CJ: Yeah, they have walk-in labs they can go to so we’re getting a comprehensive female panel for her that gets everything from hormones to whatever and then I went ahead and do the comprehensive male panel, okay? Plus, we added some blood type stuff and not cheap. Not cheap at all but you know what, it’s not even a thought. It’s not even a thought. I said, no, that’s what we need, that’s what we’re doing so yeah. I’m not tripping, whereas other people would be like, “I can’t do that.”

46:25 Leah: I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. Yeah.

46:27 CJ: Right, so what are you going to do with your kid because in my case, I’m … to the consternation of family members and whatnot, I’m not rushing her to a medical physician because I know they have two solutions. Surgery and medication.

46:45 Leah: That’s right. Yeah.

46:46 CJ: That’s it but the majority of people’s-

46:48 Leah: A pen or a knife.

46:49 CJ: Yeah. Yeah, but the majority of people’s problems have to do with their physiology, has to do with nutrition and has to do with a lot of other things. My challenge to my daughter, I said, let’s zero … let’s make sure we’ve covered the fundamentals because you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a doctor only to find out, “Oh change your diet.”

47:10 Leah: Right.

47:12 CJ: That doctor wouldn’t even know what diet.

47:14 Leah: Yeah, start there.

47:14 CJ: Let’s start there. Let’s get that and so if there still have some challenges, then we can go and pinpoint things, so we’re being smart but at the same time, we’re not worried about it. It’s great to be in a position where if I need to something to take care of something for my kid, I’m not tripping about it or somebody else is hoping a disaster doesn’t happen to car, job or health or house, God-forbid so don’t tell me you’re content. You should be discontent and let the frustration settle in from listening to this podcast. Let it be like thorns in the nest, like a mother eagle putting thorns in the nest to drive the eaglets out of the nest. Otherwise, you’ll stay in the nest.

You’ll stay in this comfort zone. You’ll stay in this place, you’ll call half-ass bad-ass and you’ll sign a contract with mediocrity because you’re discomfort is comfortable enough for you to settle for the rest of your life. Don’t stay there man. We’re trying to push you out of the nest and that’s all I got to say about that, Leah.

48:11 Leah: Yeah, the end, leave us a review, goodbye.

48:16 CJ: Okay, so we have a lot more to say about this. We wanted to lay some groundwork and Leah has got some more great stuff she’s going to be sharing with us in the next couple of episodes here but Leah, we’ve got cool stuff coming up really, really soon. We’ve been kind of leaking it out through various posts but The Online Musician 3.0.

48:40 Leah: 3.0

48:40 CJ: The flagship, 3.0 upgraded. The best just got better.

48:45 Leah: That’s right. Yeah, The Online Musician has been our flagship program, comprehensive program I would say for musicians launching their music career online, growing an organic fan base mostly without paid traffic and this is just … this is going to be the newest iteration of it. I’m really excited about it because I thought it was comprehensive before but we’ve gone a whole step further. I’m making it even more comprehensive. In the past, we didn’t have a module on mindset. We didn’t have anything on websites and a few other big things, some particular social sites like Instagram and such and we’re adding all of that in here and upgrading, updating all of that.

It’s going to be amazing and this is really for … even I would say, even experienced musicians out there but especially for people who are really trying to get their music career off the ground. You’re not making three to $5,000 a month from your music yet, this is the program for you. You’re going to want to get on the waitlist for when we launch this program there will be a link in the show notes for that. Do we know what the URL is so we can call it out?

49:58 CJ: Explode your fan base?

49:59 Leah: Explodeyourfanbase.com, I believe is the right URL and you can get on the waitlist for that and if you’re already a TOM 2.0 student, I got you. You’re going to get a free upgrade to the 3.0 so we got you and I hope that you love it.

50:16 CJ: Remember it, ladies and gentlemen. You got to say thank you when somebody does something nice for you, so say thank you, Leah, for giving me a whole … because this is …. we say upgrade. I mean, when you did, so much has changed on Facebook, in different softwares and all the stuff since then that you have to keep upgrading things because this stuff is always changing but like Apple does. Apple doesn’t say, “Hey, you need to upgrade your iPhone, come on in, we’ll give you a free one.”

50:51 Leah: Yeah. No, they don’t do that, which we did.

50:56 CJ: So, you’re going to give … listen, so if you are already a TOM 2.0 student, you are going to be automatically upgraded to version 3.0.

51:07 Leah: That’s right, and if you’re not in this program, yeah, you’ll hear all about the details. Just go sign up for the waitlist. Again, if you’re not yet making three to $5,000 a month from your music online, you need this program. That’s all there is to say about it. It’s very comprehensive, we’re covering everything from mindset which is like 95% of your success to launching your album online, all the different things you need to do, building different revenue, streams of income. We are talking about specific social media platforms and just the whole nine yards of everything I’ve done to build a six-figure music business from home without touring.

If you tour, that’s icing on the cake, man. One day when I tour, my career will probably double, but everything I’ve done up until now, I have done without touring so what are the possibilities for you? I’m going to leave on that note. Go join the waitlist, it’s going to be really exciting.

52:04 CJ: Well, thank you guys for joining us. Again, please leave a review for this podcast. We love hearing from you. We read your reviews in all of our team meetings. If there’s some stars there, click all of them. Go to our Facebook Groups, if you’re part of them and be sure to leave us a comment or suggest a topic for a future episode of the Savvy Musician Show. Leah, thanks again and let’s do this again.

52:27 Leah: All right, onto the next episode.

52:29 CJ: Take care.

52:31 Leah: Bye.

52:32 CJ: This episode is sponsored by The Online Musician 3.0, the upgraded version of the flagship music marketing course from the Savvy Musician Academy. This cutting edge music marketing course is set to release soon so sign up now for our waiting list to receive up to date information at explodeyourfanbase.com. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins recently said in an interview, “If I was going to give you 60 seconds of advice, I would put your whole focus into reach of people through the internet.” There’s no better way to start reaching your ideal fans on the internet than by The Online Musician 3.0 which covers cutting edge topics like mindset training, branding secrets and tutorials.

Creating a website that converts, Instagram for musicians, YouTube for musicians. Using and leveraging Facebook groups, monetizing your music, creating a successful album launch and much, much more. If you’re ready for your next level in creating your own online music business, then sign up now for our waiting list at explodeyourfanbase.com.

00:21 CJ: Welcome once again to The Savvy Musician Show, this is CJ Ortiz I’m the Branding and Mindset Coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. I’m excited today, not because my co-host is not here. That’s not a reason to be excited. I’m excited because, in light of the fact that she’s not here, I get once again to talk to one of our students at Savvy Musician Academy. I’m really excited about this one because I was just talking to her offline and telling her how much we brag about her offline. So it’s really a joy to get to introduce her to you. And before I do, let me just say that again, if you’d like to help out The Savvy Musician Show, please leave a review or comments on your respective podcast player, Spotify, iTunes. Just go and leave, they say stars and give us stars and leave a kind word.

It helps us to be found by other fine musicians like yourself, or you’re always welcome to go to our Facebook pages, Facebook groups, leave a comment or question, maybe a suggestion for a topic you’d like to hear Leah and I cover in the future, and yes, she will be back. She and her family moved across country and out of the country. So they’re getting situated now. She’s got a lot on her plate. She will be back soon enough. But again, I’m excited to have this special lady with me here today, a unique recording artist, very, very hard worker who has had some great breakthroughs that I’m looking forward to her telling you about. Let me welcome Noe Venable, thank you for being with me today. Noe, how are you?

01:59 Noe: Thanks so much, CJ. I’m great. It’s really surreal to be sitting here looking at you because I’ve been listening to podcasts so much and just your wisdom and the course and it’s awesome to talk to you.

02:10 CJ: Oh great. Thank you. So, yeah, it’s funny, back in the radio days when you’d hear somebody’s voice always on the radio, and then you get to meet them in person, you’re like, “That doesn’t look at all like I imagined.” But in this case, we see each other all the time in the group and you’ve been so diligent to participate in the group, which I must say for those existing students who are a part of either program to follow your lead in that, to be active in the group. You’re very active with your questions, with challenges you might have and your victories. So you found some real value there in participating in the group.

02:54 Noe: Oh yeah. It’s been incredible. I mean honestly, I would say as inspirational as the video content has been and as helpful as the podcasts have been, I would honestly say that maybe 60% of my learning in this course has really come through those Facebook group interactions in the Elite Group, both with coaches and with the other students. It’s just been incredible.

03:18 CJ: Wow. That’s a lot to say because obviously somebody is going to get fixated on the course itself and let’s see what’s included. Is it going to cover Facebook ads and how Leah does this or that and you don’t realize that yes, principles are important, but so is that accountability, and you’re obviously in there with other people just like yourself who are also battling it out in the trenches. And I guess you’ve learned a lot from others as much as they’ve learned from you.

03:54 Noe: I learned so much from others and I’ve also learned a lot through repeatedly working on verbalizing the things that I’ve been learning as I learn them. I learn, process a lot through writing. That has been incredibly helpful. I think what it really makes me think about is that I know you’ve said this so many times, but I had to have my own breakthrough of realizing it, that ultimately success is about you. It’s about how much you determine that you are going to make this work no matter what. It’s about saying, “I am going to be an artist in this life. I am not going to let this life go by without being the artists that I know I can be, and without setting up the sustainable systems that allow me to do that. I’m going to bring my message, I’m going to bring my music, I’m going to make it happen.”

And so then you know, all the video content is awesome and helpful, but the most important thing is really your own process and what are you doing with that and what kinds of questions are you asking and how alive are you in the process and how hard are you working? And the Facebook group is really the place where that plays out.

05:07 CJ: Yeah, that was very, very well said. Not because you’re quoting me at all, but no the fact that… Because I know that you speak for so many in the sense that they might feel… we said this offline briefly how you can get… There’s a cynicism almost amongst musicians today because breaking into music is hard enough as is. It always has been. But then when you add to it, this new era of the music industry where record labels are struggling, where music is so readily available through streaming services or YouTube or what have you, people feel like, well, and you just can’t make any money, you certainly can’t have your own audience. But with those challenges, they can only be met with sheer determination, which means you’ve got to come first to that realization that, “I’ll do whatever I need to do to realize this dream.” But to find out more about you Noe, tell us a little bit about your music, what you do, what you play.

06:20 Noe: Yeah. Well, I play the harp. I also play guitar and piano, some mountain dulcimer, I kind of play whatever I need to really. I’m also a home recording artist and engineering for me and creating arrangements at home is a huge part of the process of the songwriting. And so yeah, I play a lot of different things, but harp is my main instrument now and it’s part of what drew me to Savvy Musician Academy and what has drawn me into this stage of realizing that I wanted to put music out there into the world and in a big way, again. My genre, I call it Ethereal Folk Music for Seekers. And before I started doing it this way, I had a really, really beautiful experience. I had a lot of success when I was very, very young, really being out there in the world touring a lot.

I got to open for a lot of really amazing people, meet a lot of my heroes. But I was the classic story of exactly something that I’ve heard you talk about so well, which is when a young artist gets a lot of that attention and the success comes to them really easily and they don’t build up the character to be able to really cope with that and be able to sustain it. So I majorly burned out in my late 20s and just felt like I couldn’t figure out a way to do this that felt okay and good and safe and stepped away from it for a long time and then have come back, and Leah was like a huge part of what made me see that now there was a way to do this that would be integrity for me, where I could feel safe and clear and find my people and bring the message that I need to, to the world. 

So I feel more empowered than I ever have before and than I ever did back then, even when I was enjoying a lot of that sense of being in the flow and receiving a lot of feedback. This is better, now is better.

08:28 CJ: Right. And what’s interesting about this is, as I said in a recent interview with another one of the students, Jeff Pearce, is that you guys have these unique little niches in the musical marketplace and you get into things like the ethereal or in Jeff’s case, ambient music. I mean that’s not everybody, that’s not pop, that’s not Top 40. So you’re not reaching out to the mainstream. Before you got involved in the Savvy Musician Academy, what were your thoughts about the possibility of reaching a targeted community like that?

09:07 Noe: I just would never have thought it was possible for one because I wasn’t really using social media too much. And secondly, I frankly just thought that my music was way too strange. I thought I was like a big weirdo and my music was so weird. Throughout my life as an artist, there have always been people who have responded really strongly to my music. They’ve been very unique people, a few really unique people. So in a sense, like I always actually had Superfans that I would not have thought that there were very many of them. I mean how could I have known, because I don’t know many people like that in my daily life. Really it is such a niche audience that this is the only way that I could have found them. And what makes it even a little bit trickier for someone like me is that the people who tend to respond to my music are not unified by the fact that they love folk music.

Some of them love my folk music, they might love some other folk music, but they might also love gothic rock. They might also love heavy metal. There’s actually a huge spread because what they have in common is not a shared taste in a musical genre, it’s something else. And what this course gave me, the skills to do and the curiosity to do was to really try and figure out what that was that unified them and ultimately I did, through a lot of research, come to figure out some of the things that we had in common. And once I started to then use the power of online targeting on Facebook to reach these people, I’ve come to see that there actually are a lot of us. There are so many more people than I knew. So it’s about so much more than getting my music out there now. It’s honestly been about the feeling of realizing that I’m not alone in seeing the world the way I do, and that’s brought so much joy and fulfillment into my life.

11:13 CJ: Wow. I’ll tell you what, that I could close the interview right there only because what you just said is so important. And it’s powerful because it’s what people are not even thinking when it comes to promoting their music. They tend to think, “I’m going to promote my gig”, so their Facebook page is filled with events. Or they may share a song here or there, but that’s the extent of it. Not realizing that in the day in which we live, when we say digital marketing, don’t think just sales, digital communications here. You do have to think well of what you just described, which is, “I realize it’s not just a musical genre.” Man, that’s huge. It’s so important. It’s not just a genre. There is something that all of these people who have broad tastes in music, but yet are your ideal Superfan.

There is something beyond the music that they share in common. And again, the average musician, no matter what the genre is, is not thinking that way. Their minds aren’t there, therefore when they see something about what’s possible, for example, with digital marketing as promoted by the Savvy Musician Academy, they immediately discount it. They immediately try to say, “No, there’s got to be some other way. It’s a scam. It’s this. They must be doing that. There must be some hack, some special piece of software, whatever it may be.” No. What proceeds the sales, what proceeds all of these things is this thing that connects you and your audience. This shared thing. Now, of course, we talk a lot about culture and so why don’t you speak to that for a little bit, just about the culture as a means of connecting you and your audience.

13:18 Noe: If we as musicians want to be successful at getting our work out there and making a sustainable life for ourselves as artists using these tools, we have to be culture makers, we have to be culture nurturers. We have to find our people and create a safe haven where these people can communicate with each other and where we can all see that we’re not alone. And that part of the work is awesome. It feels so good. It’s so fun. I do my social media each morning in the wee hours because I have two little kids, which is part of the reason why Leah was the only coach in the world who could have spoken to me about these things. Anyone else had talked to me about it, I would have been like, “You’re crazy. That’s not my life. I have two kids. I’m working, I have to do, there’s no way.” But because she was a homeschooling mother of five…

14:18 CJ: Yeah, only the woman with five kids can speak to the woman with two kids, right?

14:25 Noe: So I’m up at 3:00 or 4:00 AM doing my social media and every day I start the day with the sense of touching into this community that I’ve been nurturing. And it brings me so much joy. Not because people are commenting about how wonderful I am or how wonderful my music is, although I do get a fair amount of that. But because I get to talk about things that are really exciting and nourishing to me, things that I’m fascinated by and things that are fascinating to them too. And everything just flows naturally from there. It’s a partaking in shared values. It’s a partaking in things that you all care about, that excite you, that are your ways of bringing your joy to the world. Because my unique culture, because of the particular people that my culture really speaks to who tend to be oftentimes are highly sensitive people, they’re people who love nature, where people who are really interested in working on ourselves on personal transformation, the conversations actually get really deep and they feed me too.

And this is where I think maybe what I’ve been discovering is a little different from what I’ve seen a lot of other people doing and I just want to share it because I want other people to know that it’s possible. It is really possible to get into really deep stuff when you’re building culture on social media. It doesn’t have to say stay shallow like, “Hey guys, what do you think of this thing?” You know, it can really get into deep stuff and it just matters that it reflects you and the interests that really naturally fit with your music. Like that’s what’s going to speak to people. It doesn’t have to look like what anyone else is doing.

16:25 CJ: Yeah. Isn’t that great? That not only do you get to play music but especially when a musician like yourself, the music that you play has these deeper philosophical elements to it and that you share now this with a community who, like you said, doesn’t mean they only listen to folk music. And I’ve said that to other students in the past, Noe where, because of their particular genre. Like there’s one guy, Christopher Elie who is very socially aware, especially environmental activism. I mean, and he’s a die-hard, and he’s a real champion for the cause. He plays folkish type music, but it’s all acoustic and he’s pretty much solo. But because he’s so much a leader of that way of thinking and voicing that message, I told him, I said, “You’re going to get people from all walks of life.”

In other words, the metalhead, let’s use a metalhead as an example, the heavy metal person who just happens to be very passionate about those very same things, who would normally not listen to any folk players, will listen to you simply because he feels so passionately about what you do. And it’s a very interesting phenomena, and again, something not usually anticipated by anybody who’s trying to break into the music industry in which we live. But it’s a joy that you do get to share community that it’s not just as you said chumming your fans with just drivel, social media drivel, but very deep conversations. Now, obviously you’re having these in the group setting, so you have a Facebook group for this and I know that you’ve been very diligent about your group, both growing your group and setting boundaries and that sorts of things to protect the kind of environment that you’re cultivating. Tell me a little bit about that.

18:31 Noe: Yeah, that’s been super interesting and important. Tending a culture really requires a certain amount of fierceness when necessary. I have to be willing to be the tigress sometimes. “No, that can’t happen here.” If you don’t do that, if you don’t really stay super present and make sure that you’re keeping abreast of anything like that, anything negative, then you’re dead in the water. Like the group will stop feeling like a safe place for people. It’s really important and especially… It’s interesting too how it gets… You have to find your own way with it. Like I know Leah, in her groups, will say, “No negativity, let’s keep this positive.”

I’ve never been comfortable saying that because my group is also really about authenticity, so I want people to feel free to share about hard things that they’re going through and I don’t, want ever that feeling of being positive to be something that makes people feel like they can’t be authentic. That means that without having a clear rule like that I have to be probably more assertive in really making sure that if anything goes south that I am right there and I’m deleting that comment and I’m reaching out to that person and saying, “that’s not going to happen here.”

I want to just say one other thing because I know a lot of us struggle with building engagement on our pages and it took me many months of really concerted work on it, showing up every day and taking Leah’s, the approach of just experiment, fail, learn from your mistakes, keep going to begin to really figure out what worked. And I had this insight the other day that I shared in the group, but I want to share it here-

20:29 CJ: Yes, please.

20:30 Noe: … if it’s useful for anyone, and that is that my brand is all about remembering the magic that’s possible in life and through mythos, through spirituality, also through literature, like Harry Potter is something that a lot of us share a passion for along with books like Lord of the Rings and Ursula Gwyn. Anyways, so this is a Harry Potter reference, but I want to say that I think a great social media post is like a sorting hat. And if you have watched Harry Potter, you’ll know that this sorting hat, when the kids arrive at Hogwarts School for Wizards, they put on the sorting hat and the hat rumbles on their head and then says out the name of the house that they’re going to live in, and they’re going to stay in that house for the rest of their time at Hogwarts.

So different houses have different identities and it’s really like the hat is going to tell you here’s what your identity is. So a good social media post, it sorts people in the same way. When you see it, if you are like meant to be with that culture that the post is representing, you feel this sense of resonance. And if it’s not for you, you’re just kind of scroll on by. You’ll probably just ignore it. You’ll probably won’t say anything. You’ll probably just be like, “Oh yeah, that’s not for me,” and move on. But your posts have to be strong enough and clear enough and reflective enough of the culture that you’re creating that they can have that sorting power.

If they’re just neither here nor there, then they won’t really have that effect. They won’t ever give someone that resonance of, “Oh, these are my people.” For me, the most beautiful sweet spot is where a post makes you go, “Wow, I feel that way inside, but I never quite found words for it.” And here’s this person saying this thing that I feel inside and then you have to know more, you have to go and experience what they’re creating and if it’s a group, then you want to contribute to it and you actually become an active member of that group and pretty soon you’re co-creating the culture together and friendships develop. And it really is like you found your house. Those relationships can really last and transform you and also pave the way for sustainability in your creative work.

23:05 CJ: Yeah, and it’s, so off the beaten path for what people think even a new approach to the music industry would be. Because most people tend to think or they approach it, not all that dissimilar from the way the music industry was before. They just feel like, “Well now it’s online so somebody else will do my marketing for me, somebody else will do my whatever for me.” Artists didn’t have to do that back during the record label days, and so they certainly shouldn’t have to do that now. And so there’s not this level of sophistication. I say sophistication because I know a lot of people out there again, are simply not familiar with it. Someone like yourself, you’re used to this to some degree now. This is the arena in which you operate.

So now you’ve created a culture, you found your little niche, your targeting people and anybody who’s listening to you and who knows you especially knows, man you’re an earthy, you mean what you say, you are into the things you’re talking about. Okay. So that means you are not, I don’t get the idea of greed or somebody lusting for popularity or any of that sort of stuff, but Noe, you’re marketing online with Facebook, evil Facebook and targeting people in an ad manager and spending money on advertising and putting together things that will ultimately be sold, God forbid. I mean, how do you harmonize that in your own mind?

24:41 Noe: Well, as far as I can see at least for now, social media is here to stay, at least for now. So we can use these technologies for good or we can use them for ill and I am determined to use this for good. And for me, there are a lot of different ways that I want to do that, that all relate to my music-making. But my music-making is a small part of it. Sales are a part of it and I have to crack that because I need to make this sustainable. I do not have a trust fund. I’m not someone who is… Like my husband and I, we’re a two artists family living in San Francisco.

25:22 CJ: Oh, wow expensive.

25:24 Noe: Which is crazy. Yeah, but I can really see now that it’s possible. I have to say that I have not really leaned in too much on sales yet but definitely have been… things have been selling very organic. Just got the results of the work I’ve been doing around building culture and building these systems and developing my relationships with people. But for me, the reason I haven’t really leaned in on the selling piece yet has to do with where I’m at in my artistic career. You know, because I am transitioning to a new instrument and I’m releasing a new album probably next year that’s going to be music that’s in some ways really different from what I’ve done up until now.

So it’s made more sense to really focus on just paving the way for this new direction and selling somewhat along the way. But building the foundation that’s going to allow it to be sustainable when I really do start to bring more of those really super amazing technical Ninja powers that Leah teaches around the more like selling oriented marketing, which I’ve done not too much of yet. But what I have done has been really effective to the extent that I’ve done it.

26:46 CJ: Well, you’re laying the foundation and you know, this is something that I often have to share with folks because everybody has their perceptions about what should happen when it should happen and what their expectations are. Because Leah can make it sound easy, not her fault, it’s just that she’s so matter of fact about her results that people are like, “Oh, well if I just go through a course, I will have these same results.” Not realizing the amount of time that it can take to, like you said, zero in on your audience, your niche, your culture, and then cultivate that. I mean this, what a culture is, right? It’s about to bring something out, right? Agriculture to bring something out. So to take a group of people like they are a piece of ground and grow something out of it, that takes time. That takes effort.

And so I like to tell people that what is true capital in the era of the digital age is an audience. That’s capital. And even if, because sometimes people are reluctant to sell… like yourself because you don’t feel like you’re at that place right now, well that’s where you want to place your emphasis. Others are just hesitant because they’re fearful of it, they are just not ready to pound their list so to speak with sales or something like that. So they’re still getting over their views about sales in general. They kind of still see it as dirty, they still see it as something that’s beneath what an artist should be. Not realizing that that’s what a record label is going to do for you.

So either way, somebody’s selling, but the fact that you build something, a community as big and as far and as wide as you want to build it, and that if those people are engaged with you, as we say in the group, if they know you, if they like you and if they trust you and they value you and they celebrate you and you celebrate them like you said, it’s organic in a lot of ways, but then when you get even more intentional about it, even more organized about it, then the results can even be that much better because the fact of the matter is, like you said, you’ve got a husband and two kids and you’re both artists and you are living in one of the most expensive areas in the world.

It is not an… for those of you who are listening who don’t know anything about San Francisco, it ain’t cheap to be in the Bay Area at all, any place in Northern California and California in general, but especially that particular region of the country, very coveted area of the country. Silicon Valley too, you name it is out there in Northern California. So it’s expensive. So you have to sustain yourself and if you don’t do it with your gifts, talents, and abilities, then you’ve got to do it with things that can some degree take you away from your gifts, talents and abilities.

29:42 Noe: If you want to live in a way that lets you bring your deepest gifts to the world, you have to make it sustainable and money is a big part of what it takes to do that. So what’s been amazing for me has just been this shift in my mindset over the last year since I started working with this course, that once I came from a place of scarcity and doubt and fear around money, and now I have total faith. I have no fear about this. I am going to make this work. And part of the reason that I feel that way is that I have actually seen it work. I took maybe a little bit of an unusual approach in the way that I applied some of the skills that I learned from this course because I had another thing that I was doing.

I actually have two music brands and I’ve been talking about my Singer/Songwriter one, but I also do something in person with families that is kind of like the children’s version of my adult Singer/Songwriter music. My adult Singer/Songwriter music is I guess you would say maybe it’s like a fairy princess or priestess sort of an archetype. It’s very much about magic in nature and I also write music for children that’s really like literally about fairies and magic in nature and I teach this class and I quickly figured out that in the beginning of this course realized I was going to really need more capital to work with, in order to be able to spend money on advertising, things like that. So what I did after testing the waters, just starting to get my Singer/Songwriter stuff up and running, was I decided to take the skills I was learning and apply them to my in-person teaching business.

It was a little different because it wasn’t online, it was in person, but I used all the same principles that I was learning. I created the automated email sequences that allowed me to basically be building relationships with people even when I wasn’t face-to-face with them, just through sending them content that I had created and also with the change in the self-worth. The way I saw myself had changed because of what I was learning in the course. So I quit any situation where I wasn’t really getting paid what I was worth and where I felt in any way like it wasn’t really serving me and really serving, bringing my work to the world in a bigger way. And within two months, I had quadrupled the income of my in-person teaching business. Now, granted, it wasn’t a huge income to begin with, but it was a substantial shift and it was completely because of applying these principles.

So I tested them, I saw that they work, I generated just a little more of a buffer so I didn’t feel stressed about money in the same way, and now I’m taking all those skills and beginning to really bring them to my Singer/Songwriter music and because of having had that experience, I do so with total faith. Like if anything is not working, it’s not the principles. Like it’s something about the way that I’m applying them. It’s something that’s not clear yet or it’s something that’s simply not ripe yet. Because the creative process is very mysterious and there’s this organic unfolding that’s always going on and I’ve learned from this course how to push past inner resistance.

I’ve learned how to work so hard. I’ve learned how to do things that I do not enjoy because I know that I’ve pushed through that inner resistance so many times at this point that I know, yeah I am not digging, sorting out all this technical stuff, but on the other side, it’s going to feel so good when all that automation is just working for me and just doing its thing. It’s like having this team of magical robots that are just going to be round the clock, working to help, bring this goodness to the world that I want to bring. Yeah, so it’s an amazing thing to test the principles, find that they work and then say, “Okay, now I know I can do this. I know I can do it.”

34:07 CJ: That’s outstanding. I’m going to make you the Mindset coach. You can take my role. That was so well done. You could be the Mindset coach, how about that?

34:17 Noe: Awesome. A ton from you and we have something in common which is I went to Divinity School. So religion and just thinking about why we are the way we are and how we learn and how do we get past all those inner gremlins. I live and breathe this stuff. It fascinates me. So I think in a way, a lot of what you have brought to this course has been a really big piece of what’s kept me really interested. Like, yeah, that’s important, that’s fascinating. I’m going to try that. I want to see how does that work?” You know.

34:56 CJ: Yeah. We speak the same language. That’s outstanding. What a great, great little interview here because I just… Everybody’s got their different thing, how the courses in the Academy has affected them and I just love the way you kind of combined some of the key elements that really determine success. We say this often that, in fact, in my own coaching calls with the students, most of what I talk about, and we’ll talk for a couple of hours and probably 95% has nothing to do with software or any particular app or anything like that because it’s these human things both in you and in your audience. The psychology of you, the psychology of your audience. Like you said, just how important it is for you to get over the concept of scarcity, impoverishment, these are real mentalities that war and neutralize people.

So people are literally in a doorless prison cell and there’s no guard at the door and yet still they stay there. So those plastic chains of their mind are much, much stronger than any real chains in life that they would literally hold themselves back from doing the very thing they’re wired to do. The very thing that they could make the greatest contribution to the world is the very thing they’re most terrified of. For whatever the reason is, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection, whatever it may be. But they literally hold themselves back. Or they have, as you said, this mindset about scarcity and that the problem is not in the principles. The problem is something we messed up, or like I said, could be out of timing, could be you didn’t get your audience to where it needed to be yet.

So those principles are done too early or you do have a great audience, but you’re not applying them consistently. There could be any number of reasons and that’s again why as you said at the outset, the coaching element and interaction with other students to see what their challenges are is so important because you’re able to get this real panoramic view than you would have if you were just dealing in that plane of just you and your screen and a module. You need that extra input, don’t you?

37:23 Noe: You know, the biggest, most valuable thing that I have learned over this last year is this if people are not really responding, if you feel like you’re not being seen somehow, it’s because you haven’t made it visible. You haven’t made yourself visible and probably in my case, this was true for me for a long time. It might be that you’re kind of actually holding back from really stepping into your own fullness of your whole message and what you really embody and stand for in the world. Like, I learned… you said something that was so helpful. You said I said this in a coaching call, I think, I don’t prepare what I’m going to say. You said, “I focus instead on just preparing the messenger.” That really spoke to me. I realized when I looked at my feet that I wasn’t really there. Like I was sharing a lot of culture-related stuff but I wasn’t actually there.

How could I be expecting to show up and respond and interact with me when they didn’t even know really who they were interacting with and I made this decision then that I was going to get so fascinated by the things that I love that are core to my message. That I was going to live inside my… That’s not going to stop thinking of my artist identity as something that was outside of myself that was an ideal to aspire to. I was going to step inside. I was going to live it. I was going to make my whole life feel like the things that drive me to share my art in the world. I was going to live it more deeply and not only that, but I was going to put it out there. I’m going to risk it. I’m going to say those things that people are afraid to say.

And I committed. I committed to a rhythm. First, I was like, “Oh my God, I can’t even imagine doing this once a week writing a revealing kind of post once a week, so I’ll do it three times.” So I started three times. Once I had done three times, I was like, “Okay, I’ll do five times.” So now, five days a week, sometimes seven days a week. I show up, I write five posts a week, and they have to be something that either makes you think or makes you feel or ask some kind of question. You know that invites you to really reflect on something deep and to do that, it’s not easy.

I need to keep myself really inspired, but it’s been like the best thing I ever did for my music because I’m so in the heart of it now. Like I really am, I’m living it now. So it doesn’t take any… There’s no disingenuousness, it’s just so real. It’s so reflective of just my process and wherever I’m at. And when we focus on the things that fascinate us, that’s when we start to be able to create content that’s fascinating to others. We have to be fascinated.

40:43 CJ: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I couldn’t agree more. As you were saying that, I was thinking of the ancient verse that says, as one senior minister is talking to a younger guy and he says in light of preparation, he said, “Meditate upon these things. Give yourself wholly to them that your profiting would appear to all.” And that’s what has to happen. It’s this to give ourselves fully to something and it should be a message. God forbid we’re devoting ourselves to television or mindless things that don’t produce any result. And it’s tempting because we live in a comfortable world. I mean, we can turn on light switches and set thermostats and order food and have it delivered to our house and things are seconds away, clicks away. You can get very, very comfortable and very, very at ease in a society like that.

So we almost have to be intentional about creating some hardship for ourselves. We have to be almost intentional to self inflict a little bit of healthy suffering to buffet the body as they say so that we don’t fall prey to those things. So that we can maximize our life and that’s our sacred duty, right? To maximize all that we are and all that we can do, hopefully for a purpose greater than ourselves. And I think that’s the key to fulfillment regardless of how much money somebody makes or how big a house they live in or any of those type of things, how well known they are. If they maximize all that they are all that they can do and do those two things for a purpose greater than themselves, I don’t know how you get any more happy than that. I don’t know how you get any more fulfilled than that.

I don’t know how you get any more content or satisfied because you’re then somebody that you can go to sleep with at night, which is a big thing for a lot of people. But then also the gratification of knowing that you did not betray what was inside you. You didn’t betray your gifts, you didn’t betray your creativity. That stuff is ready to come out. Your creativity doesn’t have a fear of rejection. Your creativity is not afraid of people. You have to get involved with that creativity to withhold it and restrain. And so I’m so glad to hear about your own personal victories, Noe in this particular thing because you are obviously a hardworking person, mother and artist and all of that when you came into the Savvy Musician Academy.

But now we gave you more things to be fussy about, more things to do, more tools to implement and you’re doing such a great job. So tell… I’ll include it in the show notes but tell everybody real quick who might be listening, how they can find out more about you.

43:34 Noe: Oh yeah, sure. So my website is noevenable.com and yeah, it’s Ethereal Folk Music For Seekers. If you’re curious to hear my music or see more about the way that I am storytelling and building community and culture, feel free to sign up for my free song sequence and see what I’m doing. I love doing that with other people. I love hearing whatever I was doing, and feel free to join my Facebook group, Nature, Spirit and Creativity. It’s an awesome group of people. If anything I’ve been sharing resonates for you, you might find some kindred souls there.

44:10 CJ: Yeah, and that’s Noe Venable so that’s, N-O-E and then V-E-N-A-B-L-E. So for those who are wondering how that’s spelled, Noe Venable. But Noe, he thanks so much for taking the time. I might bring you back some time to catch up on how progress is going. I think people are going to be interested to see more about what you’re doing down the road.

44:35 Noe: Thanks a lot CJ. It’s been a pleasure.

44:37 CJ: Once again, thank you, everybody, for joining me on The Savvy Musician Show, which you can do besides leaving a review. If you’re interested in getting connected with the Savvy Musician Academy at even an entry-level which you can do is sign up for the inner circle membership, which is a great way for you to get acclimated to digital marketing and learn a whole lot comes with a full-color newsletter that’s downloadable. You get an audio version of it, which I read if you’re not already tired of my voice just yet, and you also get a mini-tutorial there and it’s really, really helpful. People are raving about it. You can learn more about that at savvymusicianacademy.com/innercircle. Leah will be back soon enough. We miss her and we will see you guys in the next episode. Bye-bye.

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00:21 CJ: Welcome to The Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz. I am the Branding and Mindset Coach at the Savvy Musician Academy. Hope you’re having a great week. Thanks for being with us today. This is a special little podcast we’re doing today. Have a dear friend who’s also a student at The Savvy Musician Academy, currently in our Elite Program. He’s also been through The Online Musician, or TOM as we call it for short. I’m going to bring him in just a second. First of all, if you would like to please give us a review, go to your respective podcast player. If they have stars, click on as many of them as you can or write something nice. You can also always go to our Facebook Groups to leave a comment and/or question. In fact, if you have a certain topic you would like for Leah and I to cover in the future on The Savvy Musician Show, please do so.

I’ve been loving having these student interviews because when you say student, you kind of think of, “Well, this is somebody who’s not a professional.” No, they’re only a student in The Savvy Musician Academy. They’re very much professionals as it relates to music. The people that we’re bringing on are capable, experienced musicians and the gentleman that I’m bringing on today is one such, and that’s really the crux of his story. I’d like to welcome Mr. Jeff Pearce. How are you, my friend?

01:45 Jeff: I’m doing good. How are you, CJ?

01:47 CJ: Wonderful. You and I have become friends over this past year, dabbling with each other online in all sorts of formats and whatnot. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you, Jeff, and just what you’re doing. Just to talk a little bit about your music, just to get everybody on the same page with what you’re doing, tell us a little bit about the music that you play, the music that you write, and how long you’ve been doing it.

02:18 Jeff: Well, I’ve been doing what I’m doing for, wow, approaching 27 years now as far as putting albums out into the world, compact discs and all of that. It gets described as ambient music, and that’s probably as good of a description as it’ll get. I do everything on electric guitars, just layering and processing. Sometimes it sounds like an electric guitar, and most of the time it does not. It’s creating more of an atmospheric kind of ethereal sound as opposed to what people normally associate with electric guitar.

02:58 CJ: I think when you and I first talked, we talked a little bit about that particular genre of music, ambient music, and even though I kind of come from the side of the heavy metal side, you’re also very familiar with-

03:09 Jeff: Right, yeah. Well, it’s kind of hard to be our age and not be familiar with-

03:14 CJ: Not be, especially a guitar player-

03:15 Jeff: A lot of the metal groups. Oh yeah.

03:16 CJ: Especially a guitar player. Anyway, oftentimes as I said, because I also work in design and advertising and so much of what I do professionally, Jeff, requires thought, I can’t have some of the music that I love playing in the background because it’s too distractive. The lyrical content especially is too distractive, so I love music that’s instrumental, in particular, ambient music, because even instrumental stuff like your Steve Vais and Yngwie Malmsteen and that sort of thing, even those can get somewhat distracting.

03:53 Jeff: Right.

03:54 CJ: Ambient music is supposed to be just that, it’s creating an atmosphere, so I’ve learned to appreciate it over the years and specifically anything that’s come out of Windham Hill, which is kind of the watermark there of ambient music. You’ve worked with those guys.

04:11 Jeff: Oh yeah. Yeah. Will Ackerman that founded that label, he’s an old friend of mine going back to 2002, I think, 2001 or 2002, somewhere in there. They were not only one of the first instrumental labels like that that just sort of put their flag in the ground and saying, “This is what we are”, but at the start at least, they were an indie label. Will started Windham Hill so he’d have a place to release his own albums.

Over time, I’ve just begun to see there are a lot of labels like that, a lot of good labels like that that have followed. People just didn’t have an outlet for their own music and they were shopping them to labels and, of course, getting most of the time no reply at all one way or the other. There in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there kind of seemed to be a whole bunch of people saying, “You know what? I’ll do it myself.” They went on and did it themselves.

05:19 CJ: Yeah, and so that’s… I remember discovering that in the ’80s. I was, like yourself, a guitar player. I was overtaken initially by that age of guitar gods, and as you advance from Eddie Van Halen and Frank Marino and Randy Rhoads, then Yngwie and Steve Vai and then Vinnie Moore, then you keep pressing onward and into like Eric Johnson. Then, you discover these ambient players. When you listen to a Will Ackerman and… Who was the other guy? De Grassi-

05:54 Jeff: Yeah, Alex De Grassi, yeah-

05:56 CJ: You’re looking at… I mean, they’re doing it all on acoustic.

06:00 Jeff: Right, right.

06:01 CJ: These heavy-string acoustics, but you learn to appreciate the power of ambient music. Now, obviously, it’s grown into other things like kind of more of a New Age thing, and so there’s a culture there, but I mean just the pure instrumental stuff is really, really powerful music and a huge niche. There’s a lot of people around the world that listen to that music, don’t they?

06:24 Jeff: Oh yeah, yeah. There is and they listen to it exactly how you were describing. You’ve got work to do, you’re working on stuff. You need something because, let’s face it, if you’re immersed in something, sometimes you can go down that rabbit hole too far. You just kind of need something surrounding you and that’s probably not the time for Judas Priest or anything else like that. What I’ve appreciated over the years with ambient music, and it was natural for me to do it with my own music, is that there’s an amount of space in it that it’s not about filling all of the space possible. It’s about being okay with some things being quiet and some things just kind of floating.

That was something that resonated with me early on because when I was a guitar student taking classical and jazz lessons and all of that, I would just love to hold a chord and listen to it ring out and not even move on to the next one. It’s just, “No, I want to stay here. I want to stay here. I just want to listen to what’s happening as the notes fade.” As you know on the guitar, you play five notes at the same time on different strings, and each string’s going to fade out different. Some notes are going to last a little bit longer, some are going to fade out sooner. It’s just a beautiful sensation as a player to be able to experience that, but as a listener, I love that as well. The whole concept of space was really important to me to keep in my own music.

08:20 CJ: When did you start recording your own music?

08:23 Jeff: That would have been in 1993 and it was in the days before the internet as we know it. There in early ’93, I don’t think I knew anyone that even had an email account at that point. Computers were kind of the domain of businesses and a personal computer was just kind of a weird thing. You’d hear about someone with a computer in their home and it was like, “Oh, wow. They must be a scientist or they must”… Or something like that. My first album was just… I recorded it at a local studio and I had a friend of mine mix it and another friend of mine master it. Then, I had a thousand CDs in my apartment and I was going, “Okay, what do I do now? What do I do with all of these CDs?” There was just nothing at that time that you could say, “Oh, okay. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll take these and I’ll sell them on CD Baby or Bandcamp or start my own E-commerce store.” None of that was an option. The sight of all of those CDs was kind of frightening at that point.

09:48 CJ: Well, that’s always the challenge for the independent artist is, how are you going to move this product? Beginning in ’93 to let’s say about the time you discovered The Savvy Musician Academy, what year was that?

10:03 Jeff: Oh my gosh, late 2016/early 2017.

10:10 CJ: By then, how many albums had you had out approximately?

10:14 Jeff: Oh boy. Okay, I’m about to release album number 15. 14… I would have had 12 albums out at that point I think.

10:25 CJ: You’re an experienced recording artist, independent. You know your genre. You know the kind of music that you’re making, you know? You’re-

10:33 Jeff: Mm-hmm.

10:34 CJ: You’ve got your little niche. Up until the time that you come across Savvy Musician Academy, where is your head in terms of the music industry? Are you frustrated with it? You don’t know what the next way forward is?

10:46 Jeff: I didn’t know what it was. I mean, I knew that there had to be something different than what was happening because I saw the old model just crumble. I’ve told this to people. When I started releasing my music in 1993, it was kind of like getting on a roller coaster. It’s like, “Okay, I can kind of see what’s going to happen next.” You can kind of see what’s ahead as you swoop down. Then, everything just started changing. The internet changed everything, and then you had illegal downloads. You had places like Napster or the original Napster, where it was a lot sketchier. You just saw labels. I mean, like really big, solid labels just kind of crumble and disappear and they didn’t know how to handle this new thing called The World Wide Web.

They were using basically marketing techniques and approaches from the 1960’s to try to navigate this whole brave new world. I’m not going to say that I’d given up because at that point I’d released enough albums to where I knew I was still going to be doing that. That wasn’t much of a question. It was just a question of, “Well, gee, where is everyone?” I had a fairly loyal listener base at that point from basically the mail order days of when people would send me a cheque in the mail and I’d send back to them. I’d been able to keep up with them, but as far as finding a new audience, I just had no clue. I didn’t even know where to start.

12:44 CJ: Yeah, and it’s amazing because you have this access, in other words through the internet, but I said, “How do you go about that?” It reminds me of the Iron Maiden song Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Water, water everywhere-

12:55 Jeff: “But not a drop to drink.”

12:57 CJ: “Not a drop to drink”, so it’s there but you just can’t touch it, you can get to it. It’s 2016, you’re 12 albums deep. Again, experienced musician, experienced recording artist. You have an existing base. Did an ad from The Savvy Musician Academy maybe featuring Leah hit you and just say, “I wonder if”? Or were you kind of in a mode where you were looking for something?

13:24 Jeff: I wasn’t really looking for something and, quite frankly, there was a reason I wasn’t looking for something and that’s because most of the ads that I encountered online at that point were, and I’m going to phrase this as nicely as I can, they had “con artists” behind them-

13:46 CJ: Right.

13:47 Jeff: And they were what I would call not trustworthy sources. The ad that I saw with Leah, I just thought, “Why not? I could give this a try. You know what? If she rips me off, she steals my money, I’m not going to like it but I can always replace money.” What bugs me more at this point in my life is when someone wastes my time because I can’t go get time back. I can go sell one of my way-too-many guitars to get money back, but I can’t get my time back. I thought, “I’ll just start”… I think the program… I’m trying to remember. I think it was Facebook For Musicians. It’s like, “You know what? I’ll just try it. I’m probably not going to like it and it’s probably going to be full of stuff I already know, but that’s okay. I’ll try it.” Of course, I was blown away, I mean, just immediately, not only by the amount of information but the depth of knowledge that Leah had about it.

At that point, I was kind of like, “Okay, this is impressive and I can see what this can do for my career.” I started putting it to work and then when I saw The Online Musician, I thought, “Well, I’ll try it. It’s probably not going to be any good, but her first one was good. This one probably won’t be, but I’ll try it.” Of course, that was just next-level for me. Everything that I learned from that was just… It really changed how I approached not only what I was doing in a marketing sense, but also what I was doing as far as audience discovery. That was just an amazing course to have under my belt once I got it under my belt because there is a lot there. As you know, you just don’t sit down with one of these things and 45 minutes later you’re at the end of the course and you’ve got it all done. It’s not like that at all. It takes a serious amount of time.

16:13 CJ: Isn’t that interesting that… This is a big part of The Online Musician. Again, we call it TOM, T-O-M, about The Online Musician is that it does focus so much on your target audience, which is not something that your average musician or band is going to think of-

16:35 Jeff: No.

16:35 CJ: As it relates to selling music or doing anything. They assume that and so if you’ve never thought deeply about your potential target audience, then yeah, you’re going to feel lost in this online space, so you have this ability to reach people. As we’ve said in other podcasts and we’ve covered recently in our Inner Circle membership program that Facebook is a search engine, Google is a… Excuse me, Google is a search engine, Facebook is a share engine. Since Google also owns YouTube, YouTube is equally a search engine. People go to YouTube and they put in search terms, but nobody goes to Facebook and puts in a search term, no, so Facebook is a share engine. It’s not a search engine.

People get excited about content, whether it’s a silly cat video or a political story or whatever it may be and they share their memes or whatever. That’s what we call viral, viral meaning something spreading from one person to another. Then, you run into this thing of then what musicians were early on doing once YouTube came around is, “Oh, well, maybe people will discover me, and to do that I need a lot of video views on YouTube.” These become what we call vanity metrics. In other words, data that just promotes vanity. It really doesn’t do anything. You can’t do anything with these people. You don’t know who’s clicking “like”. You don’t know who’s watching, but then, with Facebook, you’ve got this ability now to target specific people who like specific things and live in specific places, et cetera.

18:17 Jeff: Exactly.

18:18 CJ: Now, the challenge for you is, “Well, I’ve never thought about my audience before.”

18:24 Jeff: Right, and once I did start to think about them at that point, especially after going through the TOM course, that completely… It went against what I would normally have done, which is good because what I was doing was nothing really. It kind of challenged a kind of long-held belief that I kind of knew what my audience was. To a certain extent I did, but there was just a lot of holes that needed to be filled in. TOM went a long way to do that. I mean, just going through that course was fantastic.

19:14 CJ: Also, early on in The Online Musician program, Leah covers culture, which again, has something to do with the shared lifestyle and community of now you as the artist and this new targeted audience that you’re trying to reach. I mean, since when does somebody think about culture? Was that an eye-opening thing for you? How important is that to what you’re doing?

19:43 Jeff: Well, first of all, that’s really important. Second of all, and I am not saying this to be self-serving so forgive me if it comes off sounding like that, I had somewhat of a fairly good if not slightly nebulous idea of my culture because of live shows that I’ve played over the years, something like that. The people that come out, you can start to spot common trends. Also, and this was important for me, 95% of the time I’m a fan of the genre that I play music in. You’d be surprised how many musicians I’ve met over the years that are playing a genre they don’t particularly like. They’re playing music that they could either take or leave.

When you have that situation, you’re going to be completely clueless as to who your culture is because as a person, you’re not going to want to hang out with the people that are really, really into the music even though you’re the one playing it because you’re not really, really into what you’re doing. When you have something like that, you’re going to be really confused as to what your culture is. As far as my culture, ambient music goes, I would say ambient listeners, and I put myself in here, too, we are very pleasant introverts. There’s a large amount of introversion. I’ve had feedback from listeners saying, “I love to take your music out into the country, put on headphones and stargaze or watch sunsets.” I don’t get a lot of people saying, “My wife and I had a party last week, so after Screaming For Vengeance by Judas Priest was over, we put on your latest album then.” So-

21:53 CJ: They’re not taking it to the gym to do squats.

21:57 Jeff: Oh, I hope not. Oh, Lord, I hope not. I can only imagine the tempo there because if you’re doing the squats, you want something fairly fast, so down up, down up. With ambient music, you just down and you wait for like 30 seconds. Okay, now come up.

22:14 CJ: Right. Now, you’ve got this culture issue, culture and lifestyle which is going to start now informing the kind of information that you’re going to put in something like this Facebook Ad Manager, which is keeping track of everybody’s interests and likes. Now, you’re discovering, “Wow, I can”… I’m really thinking now and I think we don’t ever really do this. We don’t think about, “Well, what would my ideal superfan be like? What do they read? What do they watch? What other music do they listen to?” Maybe other things. It could be in terms of the food they eat, the places that they frequent, the shows they go to, concerts, magazines. Sitting down and thinking about that and then putting that in the Ad Manager and then being able to see the actual results, that had to be incredibly empowering considering where you came from.

23:16 Jeff: Right, right. It was an awful lot of information definitely to deal with, to sit down and say, “Oh, wow, this kind of makes sense.” You can just see all of these different bits of information just kind of come together and interlock and just form… I was talking earlier about the holes of perception I had. Again, I’ve been doing this for a while, so I had a decent idea of what the culture was around the people that listen to my music, but all of that information in the Ad Manager, all of the TV land, I guess I’d say, demographics, all of that just sort of came together. It’s like, “Wow, I had not considered that.” Astronomy was the big one, and I guess-

24:11 CJ: Wow.

24:11 Jeff: It shouldn’t have been with all of the feedback I’d gotten over the years of people saying, “Yeah, I’d love to take your music out and listen to it while I watch the stars.” Well, you know what? If they took my music out, they were taking music out by a bunch of other ambient musicians, too.

24:30 CJ: Right.

24:31 Jeff: It couldn’t be just me. The astronomy one was a really big one.

24:38 CJ: Wow. It’s really interesting because, and again, you and I could talk about any one of these things really in-depth because you’ve been at this a long time now, and the fact that you are doing the natural thing that we assume which is target people who like similar artists, right?

25:00 Jeff: Right.

25:01 CJ: Let’s say there’s a whole lot of other musicians like yourself targeting those same things, but then the ad price becomes a little bit more competitive, which means that prices go up. You add this other element that maybe the other ones weren’t thinking of, which is-

25:18 Jeff: Exactly.

25:18 CJ: Something like astronomy, and suddenly now, you’re targeting something they’re not targeting, and so your ad spend goes down and you get better clients, better listeners, better superfans-

25:30 Jeff: Oh yeah.

25:30 CJ: More high quality, and again, this is all from the simple things that you learn about understanding your micro-niche, understanding your culture, understanding your superfan, and being able to survey your fans and get information about what they want. It’s empowering, man.

25:49 Jeff: It is, it is, and I also found out that pretty quickly, and I kind of suspected it, but it really drove home that people who are serious about listening to ambient music and all of that, they still love physical product. I mean, they do, and I have seen that. In my case, when I’ve just released a couple of singles, just digital singles, I’ve released them. I still… My main thing is physical product, but if I release a digital single, I will get an email within 24 hours from at least one person saying, “Oh, this is great. When are you going to put it on a CD?” It’s like, “Okay, maybe next –

26:36 CJ: Is that just… They like just holding the product? Is it the fact that they feel like it sounds better? Are they noise snobs? I mean, I sound snobs?

26:43 Jeff: Yeah. Well, there’s plenty of audio snobs that are serious ambient and New Age music listeners, but I think the product, it has to do more with engaging more of the senses. You sit down and listen. I’ve been like that with every kind of music I like. I mean, I still like physical product. I love liner notes. The more the better. When I could sit down… Even when I was a teenager with rock and metal, I’d sit down and I’d scour the liner notes. I wanted to know who the producer was. I want to know who mixed it. I wanted to know who the recording engineer was, but I also wanted to know, “Okay, what are the lyrics to this song? Any insight from the musicians themselves, even funny stuff, any funny stuff in the liner notes, I’d want that whole experience and –

27:47 CJ: A special thanks?

27:48 Jeff: A special thanks, yeah. Who do they thank, and is there an interesting story behind who they thanked?

27:54 CJ: Yeah. It’s always like maybe like, “We thank so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so, and Hershey bars.”

28:00 Jeff: Yeah, yeah-

28:00 CJ: It’s like always something like that.

28:01 Jeff: Yeah, or something like that, or they’d thank a really crappy, dive-y restaurant or a bar on the Sunset Strip or something. That was always good to see. I loved the liner notes, so that’s something else that I pay attention to when I do my projects is that the liner notes are as well done as I can do them. They’re certainly not going to be as great as other artists, but just to basically give a sense of what the recording is, how it came about, and where it sits in my overall catalog.

28:43 CJ: Well, you know, I love this because it highlights the concept that Savvy talks about a lot, which is superfans. You’re not looking for millions and millions of just generic listeners.

28:54 Jeff: Oh no.

28:55 CJ: You’re looking for the superfans. You’re looking for a smaller community of dedicated people who really are invested in this form of music. With that and with that alone, someone can sustain their livelihood well just-

29:11 Jeff: Oh, definitely.

29:12 CJ: Off the music and merchandise being sold to a dedicated community of superfans, which is why understanding micro-niche, culture, target audience, and the kind of tools to get that information is so vital to being what we now refer to as The Online Musician. Now, as we know, part of Leah’s story is that she did it as a stay-at-home mom and without touring, which still baffles music industry heads to this day. Was that an appeal to you that sort of thing? Or how much was live music still a part of your drive?

29:53 Jeff: Live music is still a part of it and I think that’s because with quite a few artists in ambient music, they don’t play live, so being able to do it live opened up doors for me that probably wouldn’t have been open had I not played live. I’ve played a lot of concerts over the years and it’s important for me to keep doing that, but I also see that just like with the music industry in general, the concert industry is changing as well.

Live shows are changing as well and some for the better, but some not for the better, just like in the music industry overall. Anything where someone is taking a new approach and getting great results, they’re going to get my attention. Leah got my attention by basically talking about how she’s a stay-at-home to five kids. She doesn’t tour and yet she’s created this really, really strong fanbase. I think that’s fantastic. It’s inspiring.

31:10 CJ: Yeah, and so for you now, moving forward again, like you said, Leah came on the radar about 2016, and so here we are into 2020. Where is Jeff Pearce now?

31:24 Jeff: I am… Like literally hours ago, I started taking preorders for my latest CD, so that would be album number 15, and it’s always each project is different. The whole idea of just sort of taking an assembly line approach making the music, it’s like, “No, it’s not like that.” Each project is different, but what The Online Musician and… I used that one right before my 13th album and what I learned from that, I’m convinced it got that album to chart on the Billboard New Age sales chart that year in 2017-

32:13 CJ: Wow.

32:14 Jeff: When that album came out. What I learned I’m also convinced it had my second-most recent album, the one that was released in the fall of 2019, it debuted at number two on the Billboard New Age sales chart. I’m completely convinced it was because of what I’ve learned through Savvy Musician Academy and the courses. Anytime you have information that you can put to use and get great results with, I mean, you’re going to keep doing that. Now, what I really like because this is… I want to make sure I get it right. This is going to be for The Online Musician 3.0, right?

33:01 CJ: Right.

33:02 Jeff: Yeah. What Leah does with her courses that other people don’t is that she goes back and updates them. When she has new information, guess what? It gets added and I found out about it. I think we both know that Facebook, just forget the rest of the internet, Facebook has changed so much since The Online Musician Volume One came out, the first one came out. Whenever there’s new info, she goes back and she makes it available. That’s just something you don’t see very much of. It’s the whole concept of you underpromise and overdeliver, and that just goes so much against the experience that I’ve had with a lot of music marketing stuff, which has been overpromise and underdeliver.

34:02 CJ: Right. Well, and that’s I think the key because, as you just noticed, this is an ever-changing landscape and what might be working now may not be working next year and what have you when Facebook and social media channels make their changes and what have you, but the thing-

34:18 Jeff: Exactly.

34:18 CJ: That’s important is that… I think Leah said this recently, principles trump tactics. So it always comes back to the proven principles of marketing that work offline, that have worked for years.

34:33 Jeff: Exactly.

34:33 CJ: Used by direct marketers to sell all sorts of things. Using these types of things in this online space, using them far more effectively than anything offline had ever achieved. I’ve made this note before. So long as I still get Domino’s Pizza mailers, even though I don’t eat Domino’s Pizza, that tells me that the offline world in marketing doesn’t have the sophisticated targeting features of, for example, Facebook. If they did, then I would be getting ketogenic mailers delivered to my house and they would only send the Domino’s ones to those who they know already like Domino’s Pizza or what have you, so they would know.

For the most part, all of these people have, all these companies have is zip codes and, are you a homeowner? Are you college… That’s about all they know, whereas in this new online space, you can get things down to age, political interests, clothes, where you shop, restaurants you eat, magazines you read, music you listen to, all of it. Zip codes, you can narrow it down so targeted and then be able to reach, again, your ideal fan, which is so when I make a point about your particular story, it brought the transition, the key transformation for you, which was you have been doing this for so long. 12 albums in, started at ’93. Again, an experienced musician, an experienced independent recording artist. You were already doing it DIY. It was already going that way.

Now, you realized there was this huge opportunity online and that you could now begin to focus your attention, but how do you get that done? Then, coming across the Savvy Musician Academy, getting those tools, and considering things that maybe weren’t considered to the depth that you did now. This has further equipped you to go into your next season. Looking forward as we conclude, do you have hope for the Jeff Pearce music empire moving forward?

36:44 Jeff: Well, first of all, I’m more than happy to take those Domino’s coupons off of you.

36:49 CJ: Yeah, sure.

36:49 Jeff: If you just want to send them to me, I’ll take those. Second, yeah, I always knew I was going to keep doing music, but I’d also prepared myself for the fact that it was probably going to take a long time, if not a very long time, for me to make it work in the way I wanted to see it. I had also kind of begrudgingly accepted that I would have to be signed to a label to get the kind of results that I wanted to see. Now that I am getting those kind of results without a label, it’s just been not only eye-opening, but it’s been fuel on the fire, you know?

37:38 CJ: Mm-hmm.

37:38 Jeff: It’s kept me moving forward because I see that there are principles that if I follow these and if I take this approach, then I’m going to get results. It’s been surprising but it’s also been encouraging at the same time that, “Wow, okay, this works. This works.” I want to make it work some more, if that makes sense, so-

38:06 CJ: Yeah. Yeah, because that’s what we call scaling, right? We can move it an inch-

38:09 Jeff: Yep.

38:09 CJ: We can move it a mile, so let’s move it. Well, that’s all. Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today on The Savvy Musician Show. Like I said, Jeff and I go back and forth offline because not only we’re friends, but we also participate in some groups together. A very, very talented musician. Jeff, where can people-

38:33 Jeff: Thank you.

38:33 CJ: Go to learn more about you?

38:36 Jeff: You can just go to jeffpearcemusic.com.

38:40 CJ: That’s P-E-A-R-C-E.

38:43 Jeff: Yeah, I’m one of four people that spell it like that in the United States, so yeah. Jeff P-E-A-R-C-E.

38:52 CJ: Jeffpearcemusic.com. We’ll have this, of course, in the show notes, but again, Jeff, thank you so much for being with us.

38:58 Jeff: Oh, thank you. I love being here.

39:01 CJ: Everybody, listen, if you’d like to learn more, we’ve got some really good things coming up as we prepare for the launch of The Online Musician 3.0. This will be the most cutting-edge version of any online musician training program. Like Jeff said, he got tired of charlatans, he got tired of people that just were not providing good information, and so if you want the latest and the greatest, then please stay tuned. We’ll be announcing more details soon about The Online Musician 3.0.

If you’re unfamiliar with any of this and you’d just like to start getting your feet wet in online marketing for musicians, the very best thing that you can do, and I encourage you to do it right now, is to sign up for our Inner Circle Membership. It is called The Inner Circle Membership and it provides you with an Inner Circle monthly newsletter/magazine, as well as an audio version of it. It’s downloadable, very downloadable, and you also get a mini-course, a mini-tutorial also with that.

It will introduce you into everything marketing, but even if you’re experienced in advance, even our most Elite students still subscribe to their Inner Circle Membership because it provides such cutting-edge information like tools of the month, books of the month, tips of the month, motivational articles, and the student spotlights, like someone like Jeff Pearce, and a whole lot of other awesome information. To learn more about that, go to savvymusicianacademy.com/innercircle. This is CJ Ortiz, again, Branding and Mindset Coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy, and we will see you guys soon.

This episode is sponsored by The Online Musician 3.0, the upgraded version of the flagship music marketing course from The Savvy Musician Academy. This cutting-edge music marketing course is set to release soon, so sign up now for our waiting list to receive up-to-date information at explodeyourfanbase.com. Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins recently said in an interview, “If I was going to give you 60-seconds of advice, I would put your whole focus into reaching people through the internet.”

There’s no better way to start reaching your ideal fans on the internet than by The Online Musician 3.0. which covers cutting-edge topics like mindset training, branding secrets and tutorials, creating a website that converts, Instagram for musicians, YouTube for musicians, using and leveraging Facebook Groups, monetizing your music, creating a successful album launch, and much, much more. If you’re ready for your next level in creating your own online music business, then sign up now for our waiting list at explodeyourfanbase.com.

00:21 CJ: Welcome to the savvy musician show the premiere podcast for music marketing. If you’re ready to get your music career off the ground, you have found a way, by utilizing the powerful tools of digital marketing you can create your own music career, your own little empire of superfans that are excited about you, love following you, share the cultural experience with you that your music also speaks to, buy your music and all the wonderful things that you create around it. That’s all possible for you, ladies and gentlemen, and to talk about this very important topic. I’ve brought in the premier expert on music marketing. Of course, you know her already, Leah McHenry. Good to see you, Leah.

01:06 Leah: Good to see you. And good to be here and have all of you listening.

01:10 CJ: Good stuff is happening here at SMA, Savvy Musician Academy. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. But before we get started today, Leah, let me share this brief student spotlight from one of our TOM students. TOM is the acronym for The Online Musician program. Shorthand is TOM. This is by Annissa Mlhns and she writes, “#win. I’m really happy to share my first big win. I’ve now reached 10,000 likes on my Facebook page, made of highly-targeted potential fans. Thank you, SMA for everything you’ve taught me and I’m looking forward to my next win”. Leah, do you remember your first little victory like that?

01:54 Leah: I do. And it was… It’s just the fuel that continues to light the fire to keep you going. Like these wins are massive.

02:04 CJ: They’re really important. And I think we’ve said before nothing… I know, I can speak for myself when I say that, nothing motivates me like results. Having some little breakthrough. And sometimes you can feel super tired and that breakthrough can come late at night. You’re ready to go to bed and give up. And all of a sudden you crack the code, or whatever it is you were working on. And isn’t it amazing how instantly energy comes, and motivation comes and now you’re staying up till three in the morning?

Well, just goes to show you that you’ve got all the energy and motivation you need. All’s you need to know is how. How do you create your music career? How do you solve your problem? How do you get followers on Facebook? How do you get people on an email list? How do you market your record? How do you do an album launch?

All of these, how questions that musicians have, they’re trying to get answered. Leah like we’ve before on YouTube and Podcasts and pieced together something to try and figure out, decode someone like yourself and how you do things. And they get more frustrated because it’s not the way necessarily forward. Which is obviously what something like a Savvy Musician Academy is here for to help them do that.

But there’s no getting around the fact that once you just have that little breakthrough and you feel that motivation and energy. Like she said, “I’m looking forward to my next win”. Because it’s addictive. There’s a certain euphoria that comes with this and you will get addicted to these breakthroughs. But this is someone here who’s having this breakthrough online. Getting Facebook followers, who’d have ever thought that we would be talking about Facebook followers as a means to building a music business.

But things like social media are like, Leah, the internet contained, right? Because people have to sign up for them, have accounts. They have to share their interest in things. And so Facebook tracks these and these become ways that skillful marketers can use to target. Like she was just describing highly targeted potential fans. Well, this is an online approach, which is why we talk about The Online Musician.

And something that you and I talked about of just a couple of months or so ago. It came out in one of the latest issues of guitar world magazine. And it was an interview with Billy Corgan, who’s the frontman of The Smashing Pumpkins. A very popular band out of the 90s. But he was talking about today’s struggling musician and what you should focus on. And he said, “Forget playing down the street”. He said… This is literally what he said.

He said, “If I was going to give you 60 seconds of advice, I would put your whole focus into reaching people through the internet”.

05:09 Leah: I love it.

05:11 CJ: So this is somebody who’s made their money, you know what I mean? Touring and the whole millions of dollars and all of that. They said if they had… If he had to give a piece of advice, he had 60 seconds to tell them something they could do. Right now it would be to focus on the internet. Wow.

05:27 Leah: Mic drop. We can just end the podcast now.

05:30 CJ: That’s it. That’s it right there. So this is somebody which I appreciate about Billy, is that he understands where things are. He understands where the industry is. He knows. He’s been on the stage for the Grammys. He’s been in TV and film. He’s done it all. And he would say, if you’re going to be a musician in today’s music industry, he said, “Put your whole-

05:56 Leah: Focus.

05:57 CJ: …focus through the internet”. Now, as we described in some of our recent episodes, there are bad ways you can do that. For example, you’ve alluded to oftentimes vanity metrics, right? So when we say online we’re not talking about just getting a bunch of YouTube views, are we?

06:17 Leah: No, and I think that’s what we need to distinguish is the difference between what is a valuable metric in a vanity metric. Two Vs, wow. Vanity and valuable. And we shared in a previous podcast episode a few episodes ago about, what are some of the marketing metrics you need to know and those are far more valuable in terms of running a real business that’s profitable, sustainable, scalable, all of those things and just merely building an audience or not even an audience, really just getting followers.

You are going to find online… When you decide to focus on this, you’re going to run into a whole lot of more scammy things. If you’re not skeptical enough already. There’s a whole bunch of scammy things out there. There are apps and bots and things out there that’s like, “Sign up for this thing and get 10,000 Instagram followers”.

And they’ll do this… There’s automated bots that will like a whole bunch of profiles and then hope that they follow you back. And then unfollow the ones that didn’t follow you. There’s all this kind of stuff that’s just vanity. Then really, are these people really going to buy your music? Most likely no.

07:31 CJ: You’re right.

07:32 Leah: And there’s all kinds of stuff. So you need to distinguish between vanity metrics and valuable metrics. And when we say putting your online focus or whole focus on in reaching people through the internet, we’re a hundred percent behind Billy Corgan. Billy Corgan, I hope you listen to this podcast. If don’t… Maybe someone knows you who will forward this and you’ll become a… I would love to have him as guest. That’d be amazing.

07:59 CJ: Yeah it would be amazing.

08:00 Leah: We should get him.

08:00 CJ: Yeah. I mean it’s… When you say online or internet, obviously like you said, that’s a broad term. And what think what’s important for people to understand is first that the internet being a vehicle for reaching people. And don’t make it more than that. It’s not mysterious. That’s really all it is. And so like we alluded to in the student spotlight, there are ideal superfans for you.

And so the key to the online effect is that by, especially with social media, you can use these powerful tools. Like the Facebook Ad Manager, the Facebook algorithm, which is keeping track of what people’s interest and likes are. Even their taste in music. And so if you can determine who you are as an artist. What you’re about. And who your superfan is, what they listened to, what they love, what they’re excited about, then this is information, right? That you can put into this powerful marketing tool called the Facebook Ad Manager and begin to actually reach those specific people. And not anybody else.

Just the people who are excited about music that is just like yours of the genre, the culture that you particularly fit in now. And when you do that, then like Leah said, you get followers. And followers, but followers who care about you. Followers who care about the stuff that you play, they enjoy that particular lifestyle, music and culture. And then from there you can begin to utilize all the other powerful online marketing tools such as video and email marketing, and then creating eCommerce sites. All the stuff that we talk about.

But I think you’ve got to have this fundamental thing in place, right? Leah, that you understand that there’s a reason why he would say focus 100% here. That doesn’t mean you’ll never play a live gig.

10:00 Leah: Right.

10:02 CJ: That comes after, right? Because you’ve got to establish this first.

10:06 Leah: Yeah, and that’s why I’ve always said the way my career worked, and I know I understand how I approach things is completely different from other people. And my way’s not the only way. Because of my circumstance with having the kids at home and them being very young and everything. I figured this was exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to put all my focus into reaching people through the internet, do my best to build an audience around the world without having left my house.

And that way when I do want a tour, anything I want to do, I’ll already have the audience. And so it’s really an audience first priority. Audience first and then my niche. You can even do it the other way around. You can figure out your niche, but audience has to be top priority. And how am I going to do that, if not through the internet? Yeah, you can play live gigs and shake one hand at a time. That’s very inefficient.

It may be, it may be rewarding and satisfying to do that in person, but it’s not efficient. And you have the leverage and the power of reaching tens of thousands, millions potentially. The Facebook platform alone has 2.5 billion active monthly users. Don’t tell me your audience isn’t there. I run into this all the time they’re like, “Oh no, my audience isn’t there”.

11:26 CJ: They are.

11:26 Leah: Out of 2.5 billion people, your audience isn’t there? Are you kidding? You are delusional. You have no idea.

11:35 CJ: No, that’s right. Because I like we’ve said in a recent episode, you can confuse what’s needed. If you think, for example, that getting discovered on a Spotify or a YouTube is the online approach, then, like you said, you’re getting into the vanity metric. You think that by just having people like something or something going viral that somehow that’s going to materialize into success. Whereas no, that’s not a business approach that’s popularity. It’s like being popular in high school. But sometimes the people who were popular in high school failed once they got out of high school.

12:15 Leah: Let’s talk about all the singers from American Idol and The Voice. Who make even to the finalists, who have zero career after the fact. And they’d been on national television in front of millions of people. I once met a guy in person, had quite an extensive conversation with him about this. He was a finalist on The Voice, talked to him in person.

And he said that exact thing. He’s like most singers and vocalists and these talented people who are on these shows, after the fact, they get totally depressed. Because they think all this exposure is going to get me the career. I’m going to get signed or someone will discover me. Even after being on TV. Exposed to millions of people. All of the executives in the world are watching this. And yet, maybe a few of them do get a deal, but most of them fall through. This guy now makes a living just gigging full time.

So he used the show as a catalyst to just play full time. But he is… I mean he’s working his tail off to do that. And so he has like a work ethic. Unbelievable. But that’s how he’s making his living now. He’s playing full time. Like doing weddings and all different kinds of things. Because he does like an acoustic thing. But so many people think that “Oh just because I was popular on a television show, now I have it made”. And yet the second they are off that show it’s game over.

It’s like everything goes away. In fact, I could probably come up with a coaching program just for these people. These poor people who have had their worlds just come down on them just crashing after these shows. And they haven’t the slightest clue even about who they are or where they really want to do too.

Because also in these shows there they’re being… Well, the way the shows work is you’re doing all these cover songs of all these other artists. And you’re not really singing your own thing. You’re not… It’s not about developing you yet. It’s about show us how you sound singing everybody else’s songs. I always think like that’s… I don’t know, I never want to build that kind of career. And then it just goes to show that when it’s all said and done those opportunities are gone.

They have nothing they… And I’m not trying to be mean. But that’s their reality. That’s what I’ve been told about this. And it’s like they’re starting at ground zero. It’s just like those people who go to Berkeley, who spent all this money and at the end of the day, they don’t even know who they are. What they’re trying to do yet. So it’s very sad. And that’s why.

14:54 CJ: Yeah. So if you’re relying on the industry, you’re relying on something that’s a very unsure foundation. As opposed to saying, “No, I’m going to create my marketplace and I’m going to reach people on my own. And I’m going to sell my music to the people who care about my music”. And the only thing that’s standing in the way between you and doing that is knowledge. Is knowing how that’s achieved. Knowing how you do the marketing. And so, again, it’s a general statement for Billy Corgan to say focus on the internet. But what he’s saying is you have to reach people. By yourself, right?

15:37 Leah: Mm-hmm.

15:37 CJ: And the best way to do that is not playing your local gig. And it’s not waiting on a record label. You have this huge door that you can go through called the internet and utilize these tools and reach the exact people that you want to reach and then get your music in front of them.

So if you think, for example, that being on The Voice or American Idol like Leah alluded to, is going to get you there. Or getting a bunch of features on playlists on Spotify or having a million views on a YouTube video. If you think that’s going to be it, no. Because you’re not getting any of that data. So a smart business person is going to do something where they’re going to get some data back about the people that are watching that are engaging with their music.

And so something like Facebook, right? Leah is going to give them that information. And to have it then you can do just give them a little taste of some of the things they could do just off of what a single music video can do on Facebook.

16:46 Leah: Oh gosh, if you have a music video, or is this my little marketing plan for it? Or just like the potential…

16:54 CJ: Yeah, just some of the things. Because, if they get a bunch of views on Facebook… A bunch of views on YouTube, not much.

17:00 Leah: YouTube, yeah. Now there are some advanced things. It’s a completely different beast. So I won’t go there. But Facebook is very easy and it’s amazing. Most people don’t know that. Everybody who watches your video is tracked and basically put into an audience of people who have watched that video. So Facebook tracks someone who watched it, even what percentage of the video they watched.

So if someone watched three seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute, however long percentage, 90%, 95% of your video. Facebook knows everything about who watched that. And you can even segment those people into groups. So I’m going to put everybody who only watched five seconds of my video in one group. I want to put everybody who watched 95% of my video in another group. It’s called a custom audience, right? It’s an audience that’s customized for a specific thing you want to group them in.

And then you can show those people ads or a more videos or an opt, in your email list. You can do anything. You have a variety of options which you can do with that. But the point is that you can do it. You can do it and it’s very inexpensive, very inexpensive. When you consider what the cost of advertising used to be back in the day. Where it’s like hey, you can do a newspaper ad, you can do a billboard, you can do television, you can do like phone book or whatever. Like this is, you’re talking pennies.

18:28 CJ: Yeah, literally like two to four cents for a video view. And if let’s say like you just said you, you’ll see you sent out one video and you just let it run for a couple of months or so. When you got 100,000 views to a highly targeted audience, right? You put into Facebook ad manager, all similar artists to you and you sent your video out to them and it reached 100,000 people. And then you see that, okay, you can ask Facebook, “Hey, give me a list of all the people who watched 90% of my video”.

Not the three-second people, but 90%. And let’s say you find out that it’s 15,000 okay. So you make, like you just said, Facebook will make for you a little custom audience just for you. Of those 15,000 people. Now let’s just say for grins and giggles, you had another music video and you say, you know what? I’m going to send this music video to that same 15,000 people. And it goes through that and you realize that of them, 8,000 people watched 90%. That 8,000 people right there, just them alone could finance the next five years of your life.

19:40 Leah: Oh my gosh, yeah. So valuable. What do you think the odds are that they might want to buy something from you in terms of music or merchandise or tickets or something? It’s so very high. And then so many other cool things you can do on Facebook is you can take that little custom audience of really valuable viewers. And first thing that you always want to do is get those people on your email list.

20:05 CJ: Get them on your list.

20:06 Leah: Get them on your email list, but you could do cool things like say, “Facebook, I want you to take these 8,000 people who are highly engaged and super interested in my content and I want you to create me another audience that is similar to this audience”. It’s not these people, they’re complete strangers, but the Facebook calls it a look-a-like audience. So it’s an audience that looks like these people.

So they have already identified your behaviors, likes and dislikes on Facebook based on the things you click on, the things you like, the things you shared, the things you save. All your behaviors are tracked, okay? And so based on other people’s similar interests and stuff, they can match that up with the people who were already watching your video. So now I can go from an audience of 8,000 I create a lookalike audience to say just a United States, for example.

Suddenly it’s going to open that up and the targeting just widened to 4.5 million people based on that 8,000. So now and now it’s going to start showing that same ad, that’s still very highly targeted, but now it’s gone to a much, much broader audience. And Facebook right now likes very big audiences. Because the algorithm is so technologically advanced that it knows what to do.

So a big audience like that works so well. So and very quickly in Facebook too there’s a learning phase. It figures out very quickly who to show it to and who not to show it to. So it has a learning phase when you launch a campaign. And it can take three to five days. It just depends on how much budget you have going, where it’ll sort out really quickly. Hey, “This group of people we thought was good, but it’s not”.

So they’re trying to get you a good result. So anyway, that’s all to say. There’s so much you can do with one little video, one little video clip. And a dang it, now that we’re talking about this makes me want to relaunch some mild lyric videos and stuff.

22:10 CJ: Yeah. Because again, it’s these fundamental things when you realize… Because like you said, you can just keep expanding. Because if you do the lookalike audience, based on a model it, after that 8,000 people who went 90% on two videos creates a lookalike audience. And that jumps you, let’s say 4.5 million. Like you said, to have similar people that you are now… And then out of the results from that to the 4.5 million, you can create more custom audiences. And it’s just on and on, and on and on. So-

22:43 Leah: And people wonder how is Leah doing it? So easy you guys.

22:48 CJ: Yeah, so this is how it is. Yeah. This is how it’s done. It’s if you know who you are if you know what your music is and you know who you’re trying to target, then… Yeah, there’s a lot more to it. Sure there is. There is copywriting. You want to make sure we write, the right things and we teach that a lot obviously in the Savvy Musician Academy. How to write, how to do it right. 

So you can get the best results for your video view ads. You can get the best results for your, opt-in ads. In other words, someone is signing up to be on your email list. But once you understand what the internet, when he says focus on the internet, this is what we’re talking about. To get you… So you don’t need a record label now.

You don’t need the voice. You don’t need American idol. You don’t need mainstream airplay. You don’t need necessarily YouTube. You don’t necessarily need Spotify. You can use all of those things. But all based the center that you have of you reaching a highly-targeted list of superfans that you are regularly engaged with. Who wants to hear more from you. Who want to listen to your music. Who will buy your music. Who will buy your merchandise, all your cool stuff that you make built around your musical brand. That is how it’s done.

And that’s why this is the new frontier. This is the new gold rush for musicians, is to get out there and start to carve out their little niche. You don’t need to be everything to everyone. Have you ever sent… I mean, I just started watch my… I’ve had it and I haven’t used it. But I just started watching one of the TV series on Apple TV Plus. My son has Disney Plus, where we had watched the-

24:39 Leah: Mandalorian?

24:39 CJ: …Mandalorian series. And of course, I’ve already got Netflix and Prime Video and Hulu and all of this sort of stuff. Okay. But I looked at just the series that they do on Amazon, the series they do on Netflix, the series they do on Hulu and Disney Plus and all this original new programming with major actors and actresses in them. I’m thinking none of this is on TV. And so there are people who are never going to see, and probably some of these series on Amazon are incredible. On Apple plus are incredible, on Disney are incredible. But only a target audience is ever going to see them.

25:22 Leah: That’s a really good point.

25:24 CJ: It’s just the new way all media is going to be distributed. You don’t need the whole world. You just need your little pocket and it’s enough to sustain it. If it’s enough to sustain all the major actors, it’s going to be enough to sustain you.

25:38 Leah: Yeah, such a good point. Amen and amen.

25:43 CJ: Well, I mean again, I think what for people it’s where they blow a gasket is, or should I say where they get their wires crossed, is because one of the biggest challenges right now is to lose the old mentality. It’s hard to see the opportunities. It’s hard to grasp this because you’re still thinking through the old way of thinking. And so we’re in this middle period where you spend… Like the Israelites, that 490 years in slavery. And as I said it, they had that 40 year period in the wilderness just to get to their next destination, whatever.

But the saying was, “They left Egypt overnight, but it took 40 years to get Egypt out of them”. You know what I mean? When you’ve lived like a slave or a cog in a machine for decades and decades. It’s hard to lose that mentality and feel empowered and see opportunity.

26:51 Leah: I come across this all the time. And it’s funny in a lot of my webinars that I teach, I bring up, it’s now on one of my official slides, is a comment from a real Facebook person when we were running an ad for something to do with Savvy Musician Academy and this person didn’t believe that you could make money online. And they said, “No, no, no. All of that’s BS. Here’s how you create a career. You have to eat, sleep, and breathe music 24/7. Play as many gigs as possible for 10 to 15 years and maybe you’ll get noticed after that. And anything else is BS”. Is what he said. Now that’s become an official slide in my webinars because I’m like, hey dude, like I understand, that’s how it used to be, that was the old way I get it.

But if you continue to think that way, you’re only limiting yourself. Like you’re not limiting me or my business or anything. You’re just limiting yourself. And it just shows that you’re just not awake yet to what the reality is. You’re not with the times my friend. And I mean that with all sincerity. And without any malice in my heart at all. Even though he was kind of rude and stuff, I just think that it explains the majority of where people are at.

And one day this will be old news and anybody… My prediction is in the next 10 years, all of these will… All of these podcast episodes will pretty much be outdated because everybody will be doing this. Every musician will know I have to have an online presence. Of course, I do online presence and I… Of course, I have to have a Shopify.

Of course, I’m running advertising. Of course, I’m doing all of these things. Who isn’t? Who isn’t doing that? And that will become the majority. That’s what we’re working towards and we’re trying to help people do is turn the tide. And so it goes from a very top-down model of label-artist model to a bottom-up structure, right?

Where it’s everybody’s taking responsibility for themselves and their results and they’re learning the skills they’ve got to learn to do it. And they’re not… Their future isn’t determined by anybody at the top at all. It’s all determined by what you do and what you put into practice and the end of the story live happily ever after.

29:13 CJ: Well, and it is literally as simple as that. And that the limitations that we impose upon ourselves, and I see this even in my motivational stuff, people, they just can’t believe that you can make something out of a broken life. They don’t believe that there’s opportunity out there. They’re just so dog-trained, to think a certain way and it’s limiting them and they don’t realize it. So guys, when we say the internet focusing on the internet, we’re not talking about just a lot of playlists on Spotify.

We’re not just talking about having a viral video on YouTube, and we’re not just talking about setting up a Facebook page for your band where you can post your next event. That’s not what we mean when we say online. It’s something much, much more sophisticated. And you may not be familiar with it, but just because you’re not familiar with it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. And that people fear the unknown, right?

That’s the child… All our fears today are just nothing more than a grownup version of a child’s fear of the dark. You’re just afraid of what’s in front of you because you can’t see. Turn on the lights. And that’s why you got to have the nightlight for the kid. That’s why you got to keep the door open for the kid. So they can see what’s ahead of them. They can see what’s around them. And because people can’t see, they hear your particular testimony Leah, of success marketing your music online and they see it’s dark to them that they can’t see how it’s done.

So all they can do is attack it. All they can do is throw things at it, right? Because they don’t know how to respond to possibility. And that’s what we share here on this podcast. Is possibility, possibility thinking, removing the limits and seeing how powerful these tools are in front of you and what you can do to utilize them to create your particular music career.

Now like we said, this is a bit more sophisticated than just simply saying focusing a hundred percent online. But that’s why we have The Online Musician course. Just as an example here. And as we said in the last episode, that’s something we’re gearing up for. Leah, you’ve been working now tirelessly on the 3.0 version-

31:23 Leah: Heck yes.

31:24 CJ: … Of The Online Musician filling it with lots of added good stuff. In fact, you said, something I couldn’t believe, it stopped me when you said it. But you were saying that this new version that’s going to come out really soon, we’ll talk more about it in ensuing podcasts, but you said you were going to automatically upgrade the 2.0 students to the 3.0-

31:47 Leah: We’re nice like that.

31:50 CJ: You got to say thank you when people do that, ladies and gentlemen. Somebody does something nice for you, you say thank you. That’s very, very generous. So if you are a 2.0 student, it’s going to be awesome that you get to be upgraded. Now I’m working with some of the actual content on the production side of it. So I’m seeing what’s involved in it. And guys, this really is a major upgrade to this program because as you guys know stuff in the technology and the social media, man, things change quickly. It’s always advancing new things being done. And so, Leah, who keeps up to speed with all of this stuff is included a lot of that.

So that’s actually coming really, really soon. Just the next couple of months are going to be announcing that a whole new way of releasing. It’s going to be at a different price point and all of that, but the value is going to blow your mind. So I really want to encourage you guys to keep that in mind. 

32:43 Leah: Yeah, and actually, there are some new modules that I’ve decided to include that I am seeing, it’s not like there was big holes before, but I as a course creator, mentor, coach type person, and when working with higher, more… I will say more advanced students, later on down the line who have gone through that, there are some key critical things that I feel that you really should come out of that program being extremely prepared for. Which wasn’t in the previous iteration.

So I’ve added some extensive stuff. One being an entire module just on mindset and that’s the first thing you’re going to go through. Is an entire module mindset. It just is so critical. And people are always asking for more of it. And I’ve also realized, if you don’t get that straight, nothing else, it won’t really go well. There’s some other things like that I won’t mention just yet cause I want to keep up the anticipation here and as we’re dialling in all the details.

But I can tell you it’s a major upgrade and I’m very proud of it and it’s something I think is going to help so many people. And for those of you, if you’ve never taken a course from the Savvy Musician Academy before, or The Online Musician anything like that, you can actually go to explodeyourfanbase.com and sign up for the waiting list. And then you… When you do that, you’ll just be notified when we’re ready to open the doors for that. And we’ll be doing some live events and stuff surrounding it, that you’ll definitely want to be there for.

34:16 Leah: So go to explodeyourfanbase.com sign up for the waitlist for The Online Musician 3.0 and we’ll let you know all the details.

34:24 CJ: Awesome. This is exciting guys. I’m telling you, The Online Musician is the first major thing to bring about a significant change in this technological revolution and its impact on the music industry. You can have a music career, so do that. Go to explodeyourfanbase.com. Sign up, get on the waiting list. We’ll let you know. Leah, thank you once again.

34:46 Leah: Thank you CJ and thanks to everyone who was listening. I hope you found it valuable. I’d love to read your review.

34:52 CJ: We’ll see you soon.

34:53 Leah: Bye.

00:19 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz. I’m the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. So excited to be joined once again by her eminence, my favorite marketer, Leah McHenry. Leah, how you doing?

00:34 Leah: Good, how are you?

00:35 CJ: Wonderful. All is well in your world?

00:39 Leah: Yes, crazy and wonderful as ever.

00:41 CJ: I know you get a lot of stuff going on. It can be a challenge for us sometimes to take out these times to do these podcasts, but we know how important it is for our listeners, and to our listeners I say. Please leave us a review. We covet your feedback, so go to your respective player and click as many stars as they give you. Write something very sweet, polite, and brag on us so other people can find it. And, of course, you’re always welcome to go to our Facebook pages, group pages, and leave a comment or question about the podcast again. We read all of these in our team meetings.

Before we get started today, let me just share with you a student spotlight. This is from one of our TOM students. Now when I say TOM, that doesn’t mean Thomas. That means The Online Musician, which is the flagship course created here at the Savvy Musician Academy, which is about to be upgraded. We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but this is Michele Vreeland and she writes “Hashtag win. I spent the last few days working my music website and Shopify shop. I did it while listening to Leah’s music, modern Celtic goddess that she is. I had two Fiverr guys helping me, one updating my website, and the other one building up my Shopify page.” Now Fiverr is a freelance site for those who are wondering. “I made all of the graphics through Canva and PicsArt. I’ve been following Leah for years, and finally in December, I decided to buy TOM, The Online Musician. 

“Before that I’ve joined in on as many webinars as I could, grabbed golden nuggets from her to try to ‘reverse engineer’, as they say, her program, but to no avail. One thing I must say, after years of listening to her podcast, when I finally purchased TOM, I was ready. I knew my micro-niche, branding, colors, and culture. So for me, I’ve been breezing through the classes. My first 90 days are fan building, so I wanted my pace to reflect that. It’s been a long road for me, but now it’s all coming together.

“My vision for my brand is clear and the clutter I had before is now a long lost memory. I have Leah to thank for that. Now I’m ready to make videos and graphics for the ads. In the past, I was always missing the simple element of build and grow. It was always grow, grow, grow, but no build, no backend to bring in the money. This feels like money to me. I get to express myself the way I always wanted to. For those of you who are still struggling finding your micro-niche, I say don’t give up. Keep trying things. See what works, what doesn’t. It took me three years to discover and fine-tune mine. It’s worth it. In the end you’ll be so happy and excited like me.”

03:19 Leah: I love that. I love that she realized that you can’t keep trying to reverse engineer stuff for free based off of free information podcasts. I mean, a lot of people try to do that, right? And they try to piece together random conflicting information even from YouTube, and Google, and sites. And what you end up getting is a conglomeration of conflicting information that’s not set in any particular order that leaves you more confused, frustrated, and banging your head against the wall wondering why nothing is really progressing for you. I’ve just seen it too many times. I’ve even done it myself before and realized, well, that was dumb. I just wasted a bunch of time. I could have just followed a system that was already put in place where someone already figured out how to do it, in what steps, and in the right order, and that would have just saved me so much time, and what is my time worth?

I think that’s what people have to decide is what is your time worth? I’m not trying to plug the program, but I also have no problem doing that either because I know how much it helps people. I know how much time it saves everyone. I know how much time I spent and money I spent to learn all of these things and I’m trying to do you a favor. I’m trying to help you guys. I’m not trying to just take your money, but you got to have skin in the game as we say, and people who pay, pay attention. If you try to get stuff for free everywhere you also have zero commitment to it, right? That’s just the way human nature works, and that’s why we have to charge.

04:49 CJ: That’s right.

04:51 Leah: It’s because there’s value. We’re exchanging value. We’re providing you an education and a service and cutting potentially years off your learning curve, and in exchange we get your money. I’m just kidding.

05:08 CJ: Actually, I had this conversation just the other day with a good friend of mine who’s a lead guitar player for a lot of major metal bands in the world. He has his own personal brand, and he’s building his thing. He does a lot of teaching guitar lessons and all of that. So I was asking him what his primary problem was with students and he said, “The big thing is they’re trying to piece together. They’re playing from YouTube videos.” And so we were talking about writing his copy and really selling his program.

And I said, “Well, what you have to do is you have to hang the albatross around that idea. So you need to call it, you need to say something like “if you’re tired of trying to do something with the YouTube guitar academy…” you have to start tarnishing it in a way for people to understand that you can’t get there because all of these young players are learning techniques, but there’s nothing to put it all together, like you said, like a system. There’s nothing to say how we get from, okay, just sitting on the end of my bed playing these little licks and things to writing music, being in a band, doing that full-time making that your career. You can’t get there at the YouTube guitar academy for that. For that you need somebody like him.

06:26 Leah: That’s right. I mean, as much as I love giving away free information this is a business. There are bills. We have to keep the lights on. There are staff that serve people. There’s a lot of overhead involved in any business. So in order to keep that running so we can help people continually we have to charge.

06:47 CJ: Sure.

06:48 Leah: That’s just the nature of doing business and offering people value. And that’s our goal here is to offer as much value as we possibly can. This podcast is free, but it’s not free at the same time. We’re taking time out of our schedules. There’s electronics running, there’s power, there’s Internet, there’s bills, so it’s actually not free for us to do this.

07:11 CJ: Right, yes. Well, I think, to be baldly stating this is if you who are listening have a gnawing on the inside of you, a calling to music that torments you, that frustrates you, and you don’t know how to get to where you need to get to, and you would do anything to solve that problem, to finally have a clear path to your music career, to finally know what to do, what is that worth to you? Because something that significant you will have to pay for. You’re not going to find that in a 10 minute YouTube video.

It takes so much. You have to learn so much. You have to not just learn a particular program or what have you. You have to then apply it to your particular brand, your micro-niche, your culture, your music, and then the coaches have to work with you to see that done. Whatever it may be, whatever the model is you’re following, you need help. And if it can be organized in a way that’s comprehensive, then sure, absolutely, people understand that. Well, I hope they understand that because you’re not going to go to Berkeley Music for free.

08:21 Leah: Oh, gosh. No.

08:23 CJ: This is a 10th of a 10th of a 10th of that.

08:26 Leah: Yeah. Unfortunately, I’ve met people who went to Berkeley, spent a hundred grand on their education and they don’t even know what their micro-niche is. They don’t know their niche. They don’t even know their brand identity. They have no artist identity at all. They have no idea how to even build a music career, zero, but they can play really well.

08:47 CJ: Right.

08:47 Leah: So all that to say those people are, I’m like, wow, now that’s some dedication. You obviously are serious. You love music. You want to do this, but, unfortunately, and I’m not trying to diss Berkeley, I think they probably have some great programs, but let’s just say what we teach is worth several degrees. And we have confirmations from people who have full-on marketing degrees, people who have taught at Berkeley and said, “There’s way more in your program than is ever in one of these Berkeley programs, and it’s a fraction of the price. Dang it.” So that’s my brag for the day is like, hey, we’re trying to help as many people as possible. We’re doing it for a fraction of what you could possibly get it with from any college, or university program, and then people want to complain that we charge for it. I’m like, are you kidding me? Just stop it.

09:41 CJ: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that kind of brings us into this topic today, Leah, which is based on some recent surveys that you took. 60% of the people surveyed, these are musicians, 60% do not believe that you can make money online with your music. 60% believe that.

10:09 Leah: I think it’s better than it was. I’m going to say probably a few years ago would have been closer to 80. I think people are beginning to wake up to this fact, but 60% is still a majority of people don’t believe you can make money online. And we survey people constantly. Anytime we’re doing live webinars, anything like that, we are always just trying to take the temperature like, hey, it’s engaging who is in the room, right? Where’s everybody at so I can make this most relevant to these people? And 60% this just tells me we have a lot of work to do, not just a third. And there’s other teachers out there, other programs, and they’re all trying to help people come to this conclusion that you can make money online.

And so we’re not the only ones out there doing that. I’m not going to take credit for that, but we’re one of several voices that are trying to help wake people up to this fact, and then give them a strategy in a very systematic way to do it. We’re not just saying you can make money online now here’s how you get some YouTube subscribers. To me, that is all vanity. There’s nothing meaningful about that. There’s nothing sustainable about that. At the end of the day, I want to know how do you live? How do you make a living off of it? My main goal with the programs at SMA is who cares about any of that stuff? I don’t care about vanity metrics. I want to know how you can make money and live off of your passion.

11:40 CJ: In your surveys, and I know you’ve talked to dozens and dozens of musicians yourself, what do you find are the common beliefs for why people don’t think this can be done? What are their objections?

11:54 Leah: Yeah, and some of these surprised me because I’m seeing some outdated beliefs, but I guess it just takes a while. One objection that people have, even sometimes comments, I always find these comments on our ads of all places, but you can’t make a living online because there’s file-sharing.

12:15 CJ: See, that’s Napster.

12:17 Leah: Right, Napster, file-sharing. People think that back when, I don’t think the Pirate Bay is up anymore, but the Pirate Bay was huge, and there’s other file-sharing sites. It’s just like, well, there’s a couple of studies that have been done where they actually showed that people who file-share aren’t less likely to buy the items. In fact, there’s an increase in their likelihood of buying something. That’s interesting to me. It’s almost like a try before you buy. Maybe there’s a percentage of people who are never going to buy anything ever, and they just file-share, and get everything for free, but that’s not your true fan anyway. Our goal here is finding true fans who love your music and want to support you. You’re probably not going to find the majority of your fans in the file-sharing community, although, maybe a percentage are. In my view that is a very outdated concern or objection, very outdated.

The other thing is I’ve had stuff leaked before. I think I had one of my albums actually leaked a couple of weeks, or a week or something before the release date. It’s happened to me. It can be upsetting. There’s also absolutely nothing I can do about it, like zero. I do not spend my time worrying about it. I don’t spend my time trying to track down whoever did it and threaten them. I view it as free publicity, free marketing, and almost like building an underground base of fans, if you will, black market fans, whatever, but I just don’t see this as a vital threat to your music sales. True fans will pay for music. They’ll find other ways to support you, too, even if that were the case. Those fans who are file-sharing and not buying your music if they’re a big fan they will absolutely go to your concert. They’re going to show up live. They will end up paying you money somewhere down the road. That’s why I’m not concerned about it at all.

14:30 CJ: Yeah, and I think that’s an important thing to note because, again, I think we’ve said this before in a recent podcast that people when you say selling your music online we tend to limit the sales to music as opposed to the fact that you have other things that you can sell. So somebody may have illegally downloaded your music to use that ancient phrase, funny to say that’s ancient, but they can’t download a T-shirt. They can’t download a hoodie. They can’t download a mug, or whatever. And so this is a total package. This is your little music empire that we’re potentially building here. Now closely related to that, Leah, is obviously going to be streaming. Things like Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, even YouTube, you got YouTube music now, which is just another kind of streaming thing.

15:22 Leah: Yeah. And they think the reason you can’t make money with music is because of these things when really it’s not. These things are not getting in the way of your sales. They’re going to help your sales. They’re going to help you. They are, most importantly, discovery tools and platforms where they would never have found you if you weren’t there in a lot of cases. If you don’t know how to do direct marketing and Facebook ads and such. If you’re not an expert on those things, these are amazing platforms where the algorithm is going to suggest you as the artist to people who are listening to other similar things. They’re going to go, oh, you like that. Here’s what’s next. Here’s what we came up with for you next. On YouTube, it’s going to be in the suggested feeds. On Spotify, they’ve got suggested playlists, suggested artists. If you like this, you’ll enjoy this.

It happens to me all the time, too, when I found an artist I really like and it will say on the bottom of the page other similar artists. I have come across so many new bands that I love just from those algorithm suggestions. So it’s absolutely your friend to be on those sites. Those sites are our friends, they are not the enemy. You do make some money with it, right? I mean, I would be on them for free if I didn’t make any money at all just for the discovery part of it, but we do actually get paid from it so that’s awesome. As people say that’s the new radio, but it’s a completely decentralized radio.

There’s not, I mean, yes, you have big labels involved with some of these, but ultimately it’s a very grassroots style where it’s all about supply and demand, right? It’s all about if you’re talented you’re going to get on the radar organically of potential fans and they’re going to up-vote you so to speak. You’re going to get onto more people. The more they save your song and save your playlist the more it’s going to trigger the Spotify algorithms, things like that. And it’s all happening organically. I would do it for free, honestly, if they paid me nothing just because it’s so valuable.

17:32 CJ: Yeah, and I think if you don’t learn to see these things in those broader terms that you just described, you are going to get so pigeonholed on that and it becomes you making the mountain out of the molehill as they say. You get obstructed because you just don’t see the value of just a brand awareness getting more people to get familiar with your music because ultimately we want to get them onto your list. We want to get them following you. We want to get them engaging with you. I’m assuming now attached to this, Leah, which is an objection you’re hearing is that, well, in light of then file-sharing and streaming, and all of this then nobody’s paying for music.

18:19 Leah: Yeah, and that’s absolutely not true. I hear about this in certain genres like, oh, in hip hop, or R&B, there’s digital only. Even in that case there’s ways of commanding a sale and that might be a term that just sounds weird to you. You’re also limiting it to just music like you already said. These people who are totally into that genre, or any genre, if they are a true fan they’re going to want the T-shirt, they want the necklace, they want the wallet, or whatever, T-shirt, hat, whatever you’re providing there. They’re going to buy the tickets. It’s really just a matter of finding those superfans and you don’t need to limit it to just music, but there’s so many. I think physical will always have a place no matter what it ends up being. Right now vinyl is making a huge comeback. Actual cassette tapes are making a comeback. They’re like a little novelty again. People are buying cassette players. We’ve talked about what was that? Was it Sony that came out with an anniversary Walkman?

19:23 CJ: A Walkman, yeah.

19:24 Leah: Discman and a Walkman, or something like that. These are for nostalgic reasons, but it’s also reigniting the novelty of it again. Physical will always have a place and even in hip hop genres and stuff where people think that, oh, yeah, in Leah’s metal world metal fans are. No. Even in the hip hop world you go to any record store there’s tons of vinyl. Tupac, and all these different artists they have a ton of vinyl, so people do pay for music. It’s a matter of can you build a brand that people get excited about?

19:58 CJ: Right.

19:58 Leah: Can you build something bigger than just the music? If you are thinking that the music alone will speak for itself, and you don’t have to do anything outside of that, that’s why no one’s buying it because you haven’t built anything yet.

20:11 CJ: Right. That’s what creates the starving artist because you just want to be on the street corner and play your music, and if people love it they’ll discover it, and they’ll do whatever. You’re leaving everything on the listener, everything. The onus is on the market itself instead of you being proactive in positioning yourself. Now, obviously, Leah, we still have the ultimate competitor, which is still mainstream radio. They just had the Grammys recently and there was artists I’ve never even heard of before. They’re being played somewhere to be able to earn these Grammys so that’s obviously still going to be mainstream radio. Whether it’s country, or pop, or whatever, you’ve got to be popular on radio in order to have those listeners.

21:08 Leah: Yeah. This is one of the objections that I hear from time to time is, oh, you can’t make money unless you’re a star, and you’re successful on mainstream radio that that has to have happened. Oh, my goodness. Well, I heard that argument when I was in Nashville when I was speaking on a panel with some other older gentlemen in the record industry. Some of them worked with some of the biggest names you’ve ever heard of, but, I think, I didn’t conceal my face very well on this panel because I had people who know me in the audience they’re like, “Yeah, we can tell that you weren’t very impressed by their perspective.” It was so old school to me. I was just like, you guys are still on Windows 7 right now, or something, and I’m on the latest Macintosh. That’s how I feel our perspectives are.

And, of course, everything they’re referring to about, oh, you need to be on mainstream radio. They’re like just write a hit. You just need to write a hit. Well, you’re speaking to a room full of songwriters who are brilliant, but they’re most likely never going to be the Lady Gaga who writes that hit song. It’s statistically not going to happen. Not because they’re not geniuses in their own right, but let’s be honest. It’s just very, very, very few people who ever do that. So that to me, if I’m sitting in there, I would think, “Well, that’s discouraging to me because I don’t write that kind of music. What if my genre doesn’t at all fit on mainstream radio, does that mean I’m doomed?”

22:50 CJ: Right.

22:50 Leah: So that to me would be discouraging. And, also, just knowing that they’re dealing with the 0.0001% of musicians in the world. They’re not talking to everyday musicians like you and I. Hey, we just want to make a living. We’re not trying to get world-famous. We’re not trying to become a household name. We just want to make a living from our music feel rewarded by what we do. We want fans around the world who hear our music, appreciate it, and support us. That’s all we’re asking for. We’re not trying to write a hit song. Those aren’t my goals.

23:21 CJ: Right.

23:21 Leah: I just want to be able to release something, maybe Crowdfund it, have it paid for, and be a little bit profitable. Is that too much to ask? It’s a very, very different perspective. I’ve also met musicians who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on radio airplay. Their parents, they remortgaged their house taking a loan out on their house to pay for radio play only for it to result in nothing but vanity metrics. Literally, did not build a single asset, not a single email address. They went nowhere except, oh, we got these plays on the radio and then that was it. This is what I’m saying. This is not a meaningful metric anymore. It’s sad to me. And so to me that’s an outdated goal and it’s an outdated way of looking at it. You’re in the old school industry if mainstream radio is a priority for you.

24:24 CJ: Yeah, yes.

24:24 Leah: That’s how I see it.

24:26 CJ: No, you’re exactly right. Of course, we’re seeing this in other industries as well. We’re still finding our way through the technological changes, but these simple premises, false beliefs are still intact. It’s just, again, another wall of impossibility for the average musician, no different than they were 40, 50 years ago when they were waiting to be discovered. Waiting to be discovered by a record label. Now they’re waiting to be discovered on Spotify. Waiting to be discovered on YouTube. It’s the same thing. It’s the same posture. And so the whole purpose here is to put you back in control. Well, actually, for the first time, maybe being in control of your music career because all you need right now, ladies and gentlemen, is a way forward.

I’ll tell you what, man, you want to motivate me when I’m really stuck in a situation whether it’s business or life, and I need to know I’ve got to make decisions and what-not nothing motivates me, I don’t need a cheerleader to come and just tell me I’m wonderful, or I can do it. If you show me a path, if I see a light, something that I can start heading towards, that’s all I need because all the energy and the motivation is built-in. What you need is because I know I’m talking to somebody right now who’s confused. You’re frustrated. You’ve probably said a lot of these things yourself. You’ve probably yourself alluded to the fact that it’s nothing but walls of impossibility. You don’t see any way in. Your particular music style is so unique. You don’t imagine that there’s more than a hundred people on the planet who would get into it. You’d be surprised to know that there’s probably a million on the planet who would absolutely love to hear. You just don’t know yet.

In a sense, you’re ignorant of the opportunities and principles and methods and tools that are available to you that will give you the end-around the record labels, the end-around Spotify, and streaming services, the end-around file-sharing, and that you’ll be able to create so many things that you’ll be able to sell to your clientele, not just your events, not just your CD, but so many other things because your music is conjoined to a culture, a lifestyle that your fans share with you. And there’s something so much broader that the music becomes a part of, and that you become a leader, and create your own little Pied Piper following of people that just absolutely love you. Superfans will buy your music. Like Leah said, the person who’s in their mom’s basement file-sharing is not your superfan, so you’re not targeting them. You’re not going after them. You’re not going to invest in them. You’re going to invest your time, energy, and effort on people who are passionate about your music. That’s your answer.

27:22 Leah: Yeah.

27:22 CJ: That’s your answer, but there’s a way to do it. And there’s a way to accomplish all that. And, Leah, like the testimony we shared, the student spotlight at the outset, it was somebody who was in that position, and for her it was when she took The Online Musician it’s just that’s when things began to go off for her. That’s when she really began to understand that there is a way out. There’s a way to do that. Once she saw the results and I think that’s what people are looking for, Leah is results. They want to see that there is a way forward. If you can open that up, that’s a tremendous thing for somebody. Working with you offline I don’t know how much you want to say about this, but you’re upgrading the existing Online Musician program.

28:17 Leah: Oh, yeah.

28:17 CJ: Can you share any bit of that?

28:19 Leah: Yeah, we’re just super excited. I’m in the middle of updating The Online Musician, the 3.0 version and that’s going to be coming out very soon. I’m excited. I’m excited for everybody who’s going to be going through that program. If you are an Online Musician 2.0 student, good news for you, you’ll be automatically upgraded to it, so woo-hoo.

28:41 CJ: Wow. Wow. That’s generous.

28:42 Leah: It is. And the price point is moving up and everything because we are really expanding the program as well. There’s some elements in there that we are really going more in-depth on that I feel are extremely important for every musician. Just keep your ear to the ground. We’ll be talking more about that in the weeks to come. Definitely make sure you’re on our email list, too, because you’re going to want to hear about that. We’ll be doing some live events around it. This is going to be probably our biggest enrollment for this program ever, and so super excited to be leading the way on that, and helping as many musicians as I can just begin this online music career. It’s never been a better time or more exciting time in history to do this.

29:27 CJ: Awesome. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen on the Savvy Musician Show. So, again, guys, like I said at the outset please leave us a review. We would love to hear from you. Again, stay tuned for more information on what’s up and coming here at the Savvy Musician Academy. Big plans underway to change your life and give you that career that you’ve always dreamed of. We’re working hard for you. We’re committed to your success. That’s something you’ve got to know. Absolutely committed to your success. Leah, thank you, again.

30:01 Leah: Hey, thanks guys and thank you, CJ. Always fun to do these.

30:05 CJ: Take care.

30:07 Leah: Bye for now.

00:18 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show. This is C.J. Ortiz I’m the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. Delighted once again to be with my lovely counterpart, Leah McHenry. Always a pleasure. How are you doing today?

00:37 Leah: Just doing fine and dandy.

00:41 CJ: Always a delight. We get excited about talking about this sort of stuff because we know that it’s creating value and it’s obviously welcomed by the audience, but also it gives us both a little chance to, you know the old saying iron sharpens iron, or I like to say strike and ignite. You throw a match in my lantern, I throw a match in your lantern it kind of flames things up. It’s always a pleasure for us to do these things because we get so much time to talk because we’re both very, very busy people, don’t have a lot of time to do that. So the podcast is a great opportunity.

But we get to share this with you guys and you guys are so awesome and special. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you’d like, we would love to hear back from you. You can leave a review with whatever podcast player you’re using, you know if it’s Spotify or Stitcher or iTunes or whatever you use, please feel free, leave a comment, give us some stars, go to our Facebook group pages, wherever you are, and you can also leave a comment there and tell us your thoughts and what you’re getting out of this show or something you’d like for us to cover in the future. We would love to hear from you.

Before we get started today, let me share a student spotlight. This is one of our Elite students, David Williams. He has a band called Welter. I had a branding coaching session with him last year, a very talented three-piece band out of Australia with a very unique niche. He writes #win. Two years ago Welters year turnover was around $3,000, most being from gigs and the odd sales. By the end of this financial year from July, 2019 to June, 2020… what he means by… Oh well, okay, by the time this year ends for him in June, 2020. He said, “Our turnover will be just over $30,000. Thanks to this course, Leah, CJ and all the coaches plus students. It’s taught me to think outside of the box. Through the help of CJ with branding, what a game-changer that was, I’ve also ended up with this no-fear attitude thanks to Steve and Leah, which has led me to making a deal with the CEO of a company to do exclusive house concerts with a wine tasting that the company was paying us to do.”

This has been a huge success for both parties so far and I will be expanding this with them for the next year and onwards. Two years ago, even if I’d had the idea, there’s no way I would have walked into a CEO’s office and said, “You need this,” which is pretty much what I said. This is the fifth income stream I wanted. Sales are picking up and our ad costs are coming down and our email list is building.

03:28 Leah: That’s fantastic.

03:28 CJ: Isn’t that great?

03:28 Leah: I love it.

03:31 CJ: What’s funny about this is that, that’s actually what he and I talked about because when we had our branding session, again the music you hear is music, it’s the kind of stuff you would hear on the radio. Very, very radio-friendly, very, very encouraging. So I was asking him, “Just where is he seeing some results?” And he started to mention to me and he said, “Well, it’s all in these wine things, wine events and wine, this and wine that.” And I said, “Why all the wining? Where does all this wine thing coming from?” Because, oh, I forgot to mention all of the band members work in the wine industry. So I said, tell me about your live events. And he said, “Well, we’ve played some of these live wine type event.” And I said, “That’s perfect. Target that market.”

They had a song, a very top 40 like song called, The Good Life. And I said, “Hey man, you know something, nothing symbolizes the good life, like a glass of wine. You could be a billionaire or you could be just middle-class and the same glass of wine signifies the same thing. And there’s a whole lot of people who love wine and fine food. And for them, the good life is not offensive. It’s something they want to hear, somebody else of a different class or whatever you say the good life and they think, “Oh, I’ll get that crap out of here.” But no, for that kind of audience, the good life is symbolized by the glass of wine. So I said, “You should be targeting these wine events, you should be doing this sort of thing.”

04:59 Leah: Totally.

05:00 CJ: And so just to hear him have that confidence to walk into a CEO’s office and say, “You need Welter to play at your events.” That’s amazing. So here again, is somebody taking a market, a music market, which is very competitive if you’re competing for radio space. But he divided the market into a particular subculture that’s just into fine food and fine wine. Isn’t that awesome?

05:24 Leah: That is splendid. It’s smart and sustainable too. They can just keep doing this.

05:31 CJ: Yep, I don’t see wine going out of style anytime soon.

05:35 Leah: No, nope.

05:36 CJ: So good for you, my friend. Good for you. Okay, so today this is an interesting topic because it was brought on by the last podcast episode we did because we were talking about Leah’s building the sister brand, her Mythologie Candles. And she had an experience we’re going to talk about here in a little bit. But it highlighted something I think will affect anybody who puts themselves out there online, Leah. And that is being discouraged, being discouraged by the feedback that you get, being discouraged when people don’t value you, being discouraged when people are overly critical, as they say, hate on you. You prepare things, you do so much with the right intent and then people question you, right? People criticize you, and you know how it is online, the speech is so harsh, the things that people would never say to your face, right? They’re more than happy to say online because what are you going to do? Get on a plane, fly 2,000 miles a slap their face? No.

So they are so free to do that, but with our little tender souls, it can discourage us. And even though it’s something that you’ve experienced, obviously umpteen times selling your own music and of course marketing, even the Savvy Musician Academy being questioned, being criticized, all of that, this appeared or raise its ugly head again. And tell me a little bit about that. What happened?

07:06 Leah: Yeah, so I’ll just say from the outset, I was not prepared when we launched Savvy Musician Academy, I really hadn’t had a lot of negative feedback yet because just thinking, this is also five years ago in my music career. I’ve come a long way since then as well. But it’s always a vulnerable feeling to put your soul out there to the internet, even just with your music. That’s bad enough. Some of you guys too have other businesses outside of your music and you’re guitar teachers or you run some other business and you’re learning how to promote it online. In fact, so many people who go through our programs now have the skill sets to promote online. They know how to do advertising, they know how to do funnels, they know how to get email addresses and all of that stuff.

It allows them to put themselves out more as well. So that’s what I did with Savvy Musician Academy. I thought, “Hey, maybe I’ll market this little e-book and maybe it will provide another little income for us since I think it could help some people.” And then that turned into the full-fledge academy. At the time I was not prepared for the onslaught of criticism that I was going to get. Here’s some red-headed chick coming out of nowhere saying she’s making money from her music and doing it without touring and she’s got five kids and blah, blah blah. That’s my story. I led with my story and, of course, we were successful right away. Actually the first month that we launched blew us out of the wire. I was like what? Like it was a pinch me, I had no idea that it was going to do what it did.

We were having to hire people in month two of the business because it grew so fast. It exploded so fast, we weren’t prepared. But at the same time, for just as many students as we got enrolled and the business was booming, exploding, at the same rate, I was being criticized, my name dragged through the mud being called every name under the sun liar, I don’t have integrity, I’m a scam artist, snake oil salesman, every name you can think of, daily, and I wasn’t prepared for that. And at the time before we were hiring people, it was me reading every single comment to address the skepticism or the insults, ban people. We didn’t have systems and processes for that kind of thing yet either. And these are all new objections.

Every time I saw one of these objections slash insults, I had to quickly learn the difference between, okay, what’s an objection in a rude way and what’s a flat out insult? Because there’s a difference between the two, people who have an objection, it’s actually addressing in a question they have for themselves. And if I can develop a thicker skin and get over my ego for a second and not take offence, I can probe a little deeper and ask them what is their true question. And it also informed me that I could do a better job in my copy in the ads. Because if people are having objections it means I haven’t addressed the questions that would kind of shut that up.

I started addressing their objections right in our ad copy. And that helped a lot. So, for example, the number one question people would blurt out in the comment is, you make all your money from selling these courses, not from music. Oh, I know if I’m going to make money, I’ll just tell people how to make money. I won’t actually go and do the thing. So that was the number one thing that came up and I started addressing it in the ad copy saying, “By the way, no, that’s not where I make all my money from. Did you know you can have more than one passion in life, people? That I really am a musician, I really am doing this and I also teach this. Isn’t that cool?” And I would also say to them, so people can’t make money off of teaching other people? Do you also get angry and upset and tell every piano and guitar teacher that they’re also a fraud because they make money off of teaching other people?

You better go down the street and tell them that they’re all snake oil salesman too. Anyway, as you can see, I learned how to address it and I would hit the nail on the head. I would address the elephant in the room right in the ad copy. A lot of times it would shut people up, but a lot of people don’t read either and they just blurt out whatever. I’ve been facing that for five years now. You’d think I have a really thick skin by now. Guess what? I don’t. I do, I do, and a lot of times I’ll read it and it doesn’t affect me at all. Every once in a while something will get under my skin and I don’t know why. All I can say is that at the end of the day, I’m an artist. At the end of the day, I really am sensitive. I really care about people so much.

And that also can make you weary when your name is tarnished. It’s my face on the cover of this, SMA. It’s my story. It’s me. And that’s something that… my staff, sure, they all take it on to. But at the end of the day, it’s my face at the moment. And so that can really make one very weary. There’s forum threads, there’s probably hate groups on Facebook against that music. I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t go looking for this stuff and I don’t want to, not for my mental health, it’s not good. But because I understand if somebody isn’t hating on you, if you don’t have trolls, if you don’t have people who are flat out insulted that you’re out in the world doing something, you probably don’t stand for anything.

12:44 CJ: Right, right.

12:45 Leah: I should expect the fact that if I’m standing for something if I’m helping people if I’m making a mark on this world, I will have haters. I will have people who don’t value me and, in fact, think I’m scum of the earth. Unfortunately, there’s just that many idiots out there who really associate that. And so I’m being vulnerable on this podcast, sharing all of this because I want to set an example for everybody else that, A, it’s part and parcel is that the expression?

13:16 CJ: Yeah.

13:17 Leah: With putting yourself on the internet with success comes also, there’s this other ugly side where people don’t value you. They don’t see all the hard work you’ve put into it. They assume the worst, they will critique and they will try to invalidate you in any way, shape or possible. They’ll dig dirt on you. They try to find stuff on you to try and invalidate you and make you completely, they want you to go away. They want to discourage you to the point where you never do this ever again. That’s the goal. Steal your joy, rob you and shut you up.

13:54 CJ: Yeah, and that can be… if you’re doing this, for example, just in music, it can be other bands. There is that level of competition and when you first told me about this, the first thing that hit me was this is envy.

14:09 Leah: Oh and haven’t even shared what actually happened recently yet.

14:12 CJ: Yeah. And the difference between jealousy and envy, envy is just a very intense form of jealousy to the degree that you actually take action on it, and you try to equalize the balance. And so that old illustration of, you have the one girl who is jealous of the cheerleader. And so it’s one thing to talk behind their back that’s jealousy and action, but then when you pour acid over the face of the cheerleader to try and destroy what she has or what she does or her strength or anything like that, that’s the end result of envy. Envy in society is a very damaging thing. We’re watching that politically, socially, we’re seeing envy, envy between classes, conflict, racial conflict, but not necessarily, people aren’t necessarily engaged in it, there’s the social controllers that are instigating these things because it obviously it empowers government, these kinds of stuff.

But envy is such a powerful drive in people because they can’t figure it out for them and it’s so more or less becomes just a reflection. They want to project obviously on you, what they struggle with themselves. But what again, these experiences with Savvy, what in the world… You’re just making candles now, Leah, you’re making little nice innocent candles. You’re not hurting anybody. You’re not breaking any law. What could anybody possibly have to say about somebody making candles?

15:46 Leah: Oh my gosh. I’ll say this from the outset, I did this to myself because I thought for some reason that this raging criticism is just for some reason musicians and it’s not, I find out. Okay. So what happened was after the initial launch of Mythologie Candles, if you didn’t hear the episode, go back one episode and listen to it. So it’s my sister brand, a fantasy inspired candle company, for fun. Anyway, of course, for months and months, I’ve been members of all these different handmade products groups out there, candle making groups and stuff because there’s a great resource where I can search, and, oh they’re troubleshooting this and the wick size, and I’m having trouble with my wax is doing something weird. I’ve been quietly learning from people for months now.

So, I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of value out of it and just getting little answers and stuff and I think, “Hey, I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. People have solved these problems, searching it up and blah, blah, blah.” And that’s always the value of groups. So after this little launch, and of course anytime people would launch their new brand, they will post about it and everybody celebrates with them. So I’m like, “Cool, I’m going to post and celebrate too because I’ve worked so hard on this. These people will understand what kind of work I put into it and they will appreciate it.” And while I’m doing it, I know I’m probably one of the top, $3,500 a day. Some of them don’t make that an entire month. Somebody is going to ask me how I did it. So what I’ll do is just share a few tips of what I did not sell anything, there’s no links there. No, nothing like that. I’m just adding value because I want to be nice and because I have value to offer and I’ve gotten so much from them, so why don’t I just give some value back?

So that’s what I did. I posted about my successful candle launch. I actually gave them a quick breakdown of what I did, a short version of the podcast previous to this, a short version of what I did, because they can do it too. And I thought, “Hey, and at the end of the day, the takeaway was in the post, learn online marketing, guys, that will really help you in your businesses.” So, I post that and thread went nuts, it went bananas. Of course, everybody’s super positive and we’re like, “Wow, this is amazing.” And the next thing you know, everybody’s asking me, “Can I hire you to do that? Can you teach me how to do that? Oh, I wish I had online marketing skills. Oh, I never thought of having an email list. How do I get emails?” And I’m going, “Oh, my goodness, this is not what I was trying to do here. But it started,

We’re talking hundreds of comments of people being flabbergasted that I could do $3,500 a day, which is amazing to me. But it’s also like, “Okay, it’s 3,500 bucks and they’re just blown away.” Then people start asking how they can do it too. Like I said, “Can I hire you? Can you do a webinar? Do you have a course?” They’re asking me, begging me for this. After a while, I finally posted a comment and I said, “Hey guys, thank you so much for the support, again, I was just here to share something because I’ve learned so much from you. I’m not here to sell anything. I don’t even have a link. I got nothing for you. However, there’s so much interest here. If there’s enough interest, I could maybe consider doing like a one-off webinar, like a power webinar where I just show you what I did. But I really don’t have time for this, to be honest. I don’t, I have too many things that are going on right now.”

So there would have to be so much demand that I couldn’t say no, basically. Then from that point on, it went sideways. People then, suddenly, I’m a snake oil salesman. I’m selling some kind of MLM. I’m dishonest. I’m advertising in a gross way. Someone’s like, “Eew, gross advertising, I lack integrity, this is just a scam. Oh, this is why marketers, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And it all started with one little, I call it a goblin comment, just like from a goblin, a little goblin just reared its little ugly head. And it was like one drop of poison. One drop of poison and the whole thread then attracted more poison and more goblins and they started going on and on and on. It got to the point I was beside myself. I was mortified that it had even happened.

This is going to sound hilarious coming from me, someone with an online business, I’m going to say they were really mean. You won’t normally hear me saying stuff like that, but they were really mean. I saw that and I was like, I fricking hate people and I quit. I hate people, I quit. I’m never teaching anybody ever again. And there was other people going, “What are you talking about? There’s nothing wrong with this post. So like blah, blah blah.” And I ended up deleting my whole post at the end of the day, even though it would have helped more people to want to read it and just give them some tips, I deleted it.

I was so upset from that and I think I was shocked because I had assumed that, “Oh, there’s only those kinds of trolls and skeptics in the music industry. Other people are more reasonable.” No they’re not. There’s a percentage of the entire population that are freaking idiots. Okay, let’s just say, are there people out there scamming who are just trying to profit off of other people and don’t actually offer value? Yes, there are. They exist. And maybe that’s why people are skeptical, but it taught me a few things. Number one, I realized that they didn’t know my value. They didn’t know. They had no context to know. Leah knows what she’s talking about because she has these other successful businesses. She’s done this and she spent a boatload of money for mentors and coaching and programs to get to the point where she was able to give us succinct steps in a valuable post and they could have taken that and run with it and actually made way more profit in their little candle businesses.

They didn’t know my value. They didn’t appreciate where I was coming from. So in that sense, I did it to myself because… But the other thing is if I came off and said, “Hey, I’ve made millions of dollars and I blah, blah, blah.” Then I’d be bragging and they would also jump down my throat, you know what I’m saying? Like you lose in any scenario in this format. They didn’t value me and therefore they didn’t value the content. They couldn’t see the value in the advice. There were a lot of people who did, right? There were so many people who are grateful, but those trolls that all of a sudden came and ruined the whole thing, they assumed the worst and it just showed me that sometimes it’s amazing when people do value you, but for some reason, the negative always seems to stick out more.

I think that’s just human nature. I just want people to know that there’s nothing wrong with you if that happens to you. If you have for every 10, 20, 100 fans who say they love your music and you get one person saying that’s a piece of crap and for some reason, that’ll ruin our day. We try not to let it ruin our day, and we try to go back and go, okay, well there’s a hundred other people who love my music. That’s what I’m supposed to be focusing on. Why does that one stick out and discourage us so much?

23:13 CJ: Yeah. I think one of the things that we do, words obviously only have as much authority over us as we grant them. If somebody were to criticize you, say the worst things to you in person, it would obviously affect you, right? There’s no way it doesn’t affect you. But if the same words were said by someone who knows you very well, the words would have so much more power than if those words were uttered by a stranger to you. So what’s the difference? They’re the exact same critical words. Why does the one from somebody who knows you differ from somebody who’s a stranger? Simply because you grant, you, not them, you grant more authority to the words of the person who knows you.

The power of a word over you has as much power as you grant it… So we have to find out why does this negative comment, why do the few that say, you know, the bad things, the mean things, why do they have more authority than the people who say the good thing? It’s because we want it to be comprehensive. We want it to be total because in our hearts it’s total.

24:28 Leah: Yeah, and you know what? On that note too, I found myself not appreciating my fans’ appreciation, because it’s like a mode you have to go into it. It’s hard to let the good comments touch your heart and not also the bad ones. You go into a defensive… Where you kind of desensitize yourself, but then you’re desensitized to all of it. So that’s the hard part is like I’m very touched by every Elite and SMA testimonial that comes in. They mean a lot to me, but it’s difficult for me to let it sink in because I’m also having to shut out all these other and filter all the negative stuff that happens. I’m also having to have a thick skin and not let those ones get to me, but let other ones get to me. It’s difficult to do that emotionally.

25:20 CJ: Yeah. Yeah. I think you can harden yourself to the positive comments and then you’re still sensitive to the negative ones. But the other thing is that we, especially people like you and I who have followings, sizable ones that because you’re always available, you’re always posting. So you hear from so many people every day and there’s only so many times you can write, thank you, my pleasure, or, Hey, that’s great. I’m glad you got value out of that. I mean, it just over and over, and over, and over and over again. I used to say if I never heard another compliment for the rest of my life, I think I’d be good.

26:03 Leah: Yeah. Because there’s a lot of them.

26:05 CJ: I saw this meme the other day, somebody had written, it says, you just got 15 likes for the first time on your Facebook posts. Then it shows a Google search engine where the person wrote in on the search, how to handle fame. And I forget, I honestly do. I forget that most people don’t do what you and I do. So they only deal with things, for the most part, on their personal page. So they’re not used to a torrent of constant feedback, constant results. When people say to me, when they asked me about what I do and where do I get my gratification from and all this sort of stuff, I said, “It’s hard not to like the gig” I said because every morning you wake up to people telling you how wonderful you are.

There’s not a lot of things you can do that, but you get too used to that. And it can come sometimes as a shock to your system, especially if you’re sensitive that somebody doesn’t like what you’re doing and they’re being actually mean spirit about it. For me, prior to social media, I spent so many years in more academic circles around philosophical and theological discussions and we would have them in these forums and on blogs and that sort of thing. And you want to talk about ruthless. This is before the age of trolls. So it was just very, very intelligent people, not afraid to go after your particular position.

So it wasn’t just insults, it was literal criticism of ideas. But the advantage of that is that now coming into the online space, it’s a whole lot easier now to deal with run of the mill troll, run of the mill hater, who’s only been on the internet since 2009 and they’re just venting themselves emotionally and did not take it seriously. So for those, Leah, again, this is… The negative stuff still stands out to me and I don’t want to pretend that it doesn’t, believe me, it does. The issue is going to be, how long it takes to recover from when somebody does this to you? For you, about a day, right?

28:22 Leah: Well, I was a lot more flustered over that than I normally get. Like, if I see negative Facebook comments, whatever, it’s like I’m always rolling my eyes most of the time it’s like, oh, gosh, oh, so original.

28:35 CJ: Haven’t heard that before?

28:37 Leah: Yeah, are you accusing me of making all my money from courses? No one’s ever accused me of that. It’s just like yawn, right? A lot of it’s yawn. But then this took me by surprise, I wasn’t expecting it to go that haywire. And I think for me and why I had the reaction like, I hate people and I want to quit, is because it goes so far beyond just like they don’t value me, which would be just neutral, right? Like they don’t care. If someone didn’t care that’s one thing. But then swinging to the other end of the spectrum where it’s no, I’m trying to take advantage of people, I’m malicious or, especially saying that I’m disingenuous or that I have some other… that I don’t have integrity. That one got to me because that’s my life. You asked Steve, you ask anybody my greatest… not even a pet peeve, it’s bigger than that.

Let’s just say I cannot handle feeling inauthentic or being inauthentic. It hurts my feelings living in a rental house because the walls are different color and that’s not authentic to who I am. It’s like not the color that represents me. I have to have it represent me to feel authentic. And so if anyone accuses me of being not genuine or anything, that one really gets under my skin. Anyway, it ruffled my feathers way more than it should have, but it did teach me a few things. And that’s also why guys, you’ve got to know when you leave reviews for us on this podcast, you write your wins in the groups, it really carries a lot of weight. Especially for me being the face of all of this, having to put up with so much crap, you don’t even know half of it.

Also, I get discouraged sometimes from students’ lack of results. I take it on myself as though it was my responsibility. Like if I’m just laying all the cards out here, I have a hard time with that. It bums me out when I’ve seen that people have paid money and they don’t log in, and they don’t finish their lessons and they’re not really trying very hard. I take it personal and I sometimes feel a responsibility that was my fault. And then if they say, it was my fault and, “Well, I’m not getting any results because blah, blah, blah.” It hurts.

And I know in my head, I know logically that’s not true. I know logically it’s not my responsibility, that’s them. And I try to make it very clear in all of our coaching and courses that it is on them. But that doesn’t mean at the end of the day that I don’t care very deeply that they aren’t getting what they were looking for and that I feel somehow like it was my fault. And I know it’s not true, but I feel it, and I am just saying it, I’m just saying it so everybody knows, I’m human. Don’t for a second think that I’m some kind of superwoman. People tell me that and that’s not true. I’m very, very mortal.

31:47 CJ: Well, I can imagine, come on guys. This is a mother of five kids. She homeschools her kids, how much of a criminal can she be? Be serious now. It’s just a ridiculous statement. It’s so easy for people to throw around, pejoratives like that, and name call and all of that. Of course, they don’t want a microscope coming up their backside. They don’t want to be judged like that. And so it’s the old, he who is without sin cast the first stone. And I think that’s, for our listeners as we wrap this up, I think that’s what they have to remember. Is number one, you got to get used to it. You got to get used to the fact that you’re going to get people who don’t value what you do and they’ve got very harsh things to say about your music.

It doesn’t matter. You have an obligation to honor the gifts and talents and abilities that are inside of you. That’s your commitment. You’re not doing things for reciprocity. You’re not doing things for what you get back. You’re doing things because it’s your responsibility to the gifts that you have. You have a love for music because you’re wired that way. And the best way to honor those precious gifts and talents that you have, those are precious man. Those are pure, those are pure. The only way you can honor those is to make them the most that they could ever be. Just to develop them to the absolute max. That’s your only obligation. The fact that people get off on it and have a great time with it and enjoy it. Man, that’s icing on the cake. But you’ve got to honor your gifts.

You have to be able to say, I must do this because I can’t do otherwise. I have to play music, I have to create, I have to fulfill that artist’s calling. And if that calling’s eating a hole on the inside of you, you have to answer that. And so, think of it as enemies, as Leah alluded to that one person as the goblin, little leprechaun, evil leprechauns and evil little goblins, I don’t mean to slander all the leprechauns out there, if you’re listening. And all of these evil little urchins that are out there that they’re more bark than they are bite. Right? And that’s all they are. And you have the power to give them authority in their words and give their words power over you. And here’s the good part about it, because you can grant power to their words over you, grant authority to their words over you, that means you can also revoke it.

You can take it back. You can take that authority back. And so having some downtime after a surprising, challenging session like Leah had in that particular group, you may need to take a little time just to regroup, but you’re going to get past it. It’s going to go out of your mind. You don’t want to quit. Because I understand I’ve been in that play. I can’t tell you how many times Leah, I have been in that place because people feel like, the old verse, it says you’re casting pearls before swine.

34:56 Leah: That’s exactly it. And to be honest, sometimes guys, you have to know, we really don’t have to do any of this. That, that one instance I said to myself, fine.

35:07 CJ: I don’t have to do it.

35:08 Leah: I don’t have to do this. I won’t share anything. I’ll go ahead and make another successful business and I won’t share one single thing about how I did it or help one single person, fine. And you guys can continue to struggle, do it on your own and I won’t even help you. That’s how it can make us feel, as creators and coaches and teachers where we’re just like, that’s it. There are the people who are so amazing and beautiful and they are sharing all that. So I don’t want to discredit them for all the encouragement they do give us, but we do get to the point where it can be really tough to just say, fine, that’s it. I’ll keep it to myself.

And so, anyways, but we’re here on this podcast sharing all of this because I think it’s important to talk about it. I think it’s important for students to understand that their coaches, their mental health is important too. It’s not all about them. So this is a give and take scenario. There’s a win-win scenario. And so I think it is very healthy to have this discussion and just let people know. And yeah, at the end of the day, this is I think the number one thing, I feel like it’s an attack on your joy. Those comments are meant to steal your joy and taint the process of your journey and of the music itself. And the idea is to get you to stop altogether. And so that’s where I think CJ, you’re right, you can’t grant them that much authority. If it gets you down, okay, give yourself a couple of hours and then regroup, like you said, regroup.

Get back to that feeling, that place a feeling good and inspired and happy. Stop thinking about the thing again. Stop thinking about the person in the comment and move on. And we’re in the age where people never had to do this at this level or deal with this sort of thing at this level with the internet. This is all new stuff, but it’s not going away. So I think we have to learn how to roll with it. And also want to say, especially as musicians becoming entrepreneurs and marketers, we do have an advantage over so many other marketers. And the fact is that we are highly sensitive people. We are so in touch with people and psychology and feelings and emotions that we really are unstoppable when you combine that with marketing knowledge and knowhow, you put those two things together and you are such a powerhouse.

And it means that we have, an Achilles heel. We have vulnerabilities because of it. But if you know it, it makes it easier. I know that I’m triggered when I don’t feel valued. When people don’t value me, that makes me want to quit. And I know that’s my trigger. And it’s probably your trigger too, when your fans don’t value you, you don’t feel valued. It makes you want to quit.

37:52 CJ: Right? Yep. That’s exactly right, exactly right.

37:56 Leah: So now that you know…

37:58 CJ: Yeah, now that you know you can do something about it, you may fall prey to it, but at least now that you know, you can do something about it. I’ll leave everybody with the two secrets of the ages when it comes to this, the greatest wisdom that you’ll ever be taught. I know I was taught it and practice it as a little kid in the schoolyard. And again, this is like beyond Buddha stuff. Okay? So this is really, really deep. But I learned it as a kid. These two things. Number one, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. And number two, I’m rubber you’re glue, right? Or you’re rubber, I’m glue. What is it with, I’m rubber you’re glue, whatever you say, bounces off of me. I’m rubber you’re glue, whatever you say, bounces off of me and sticks to you.

Even in those schoolyard days, you were prepared for trolls, right? Because there was always going to be a war of words. Whether you’re a kid or now that you’re online is the same stupid elementary school stuff. Nobody’s grown up.

39:11 Leah: Just on a mass scale.

39:13 CJ: Just on a mass scale. So, don’t take it seriously guys, don’t give it any credence. As we all like to say, I will give it all, I tell somebody in the comments, somebody will write something and they’ll go real wordy and it’s really hateful. But they’re kind of, they’re not just trying to troll, they’re being kind of serious, but they’re mean. And I just tell them, I’m going to give your comment all the attention it deserves.

39:35 Leah: Silence.

39:36 CJ: That’s all I write. And they’re like, okay, I’m waiting. I’m waiting, I’m waiting. I’m waiting. And nothing ever comes in like, oh shoot. It deserves nothing.

39:46 Leah: That’s a good one. I’m going to steal that.

39:47 CJ: Yeah, please do. Anyway, okay guys, listen. Please, again, as we said at the outset, please leave a review for the podcast and-

39:56 Leah: So we don’t quit.

39:57 CJ: So we don’t quit and get all hurt and discouraged. And listen, if you’re just getting started out with the Savvy Musician Academy, this podcast, I want to encourage you, you might be interested in… Even if you’re not, our Elite students love what I’m about to tell you about the Inner Circle membership. But this is an awesome program. It’s just $19.99 a month and you get a free just full-on newsletter/ magazine that’s downloadable with articles on the latest news and marketing and social media articles on how-tos, you get mindset, motivation stuff. You get tips, you get tools, you get recommended books of the month, you get special student spotlights.

Awesome to get introduced to marketing and reinforce your marketing knowledge and skills and keep you up to date if you’re more Elite. And then also you get a free bonus, a video mini-course each month on a particular topic. It’s really, really awesome. And this also a downloadable audio version, which I read myself if you’d like that.

40:59 Leah: Beautiful, sexy voice.

41:00 CJ: With a beautiful, sexy voice. And so you get all of that for just $19.99 a month. You can sign up today at savvymusicianacademy.com/innercircle. Leah, always a pleasure.

41:13 Leah: I hope this was helpful for you guys.

41:15 CJ: It was helpful.

41:16 Leah: Yeah. See you in the next one.

00:21 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show, this is C.J. Ortiz, I’m the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. I’m joined once again by her eminence, my favorite music marketer, Leah McHenry, good to see you, Leah.

00:33 Leah: Great to see you too and this should be fun.

00:36 CJ: I’m real excited about this. Again, we cheat, we talk offline beforehand, so we’ve got to be careful sometimes because we can talk some of the best stuff offline, and also we have to save our energy and enthusiasm for the actual show. But this is going to be a follow up to a previous episode that we did on creating a sister brand, which I think, Leah… Probably going to be a new concept still for most people. I think they’re just trying to wrap their heads around how in the world can I make money selling my music? And then they’ve got to open their mind to the fact of selling apparel and merchandise, accessories, other items, print on demand type things in order to further monetize their music and make the kind of numbers that you’ve made in the past.

And now we’re talking about something else, a sister brand, which is not necessarily based on music itself but is based on the culture and lifestyle related to the music that you make. We’re going to get into that actually by probably one of the best examples, one that’s happening right now as we speak, which is Leah’s Mythologie Candles operation. You’re going to be thrilled to hear about, again, amazing results. I’m not surprised guys, this is not just a, let’s pat Leah on the back example, she got tremendous results, it’s going to blow you away. And the purpose is to show you what she has always said which is, “Once you learn how to market, once you learn how to master online marketing, you can pretty much sell anything. You’ll never be without a job, you’ll never be without a way to earn an income.” It’s important for you to understand that.

But before we dive in Leah, let me just share a student spotlight. This is Lora Hodges, one of our Elite students and she writes, “#win, I’m super excited that our Shopify store is officially open and we have a few print-on-demand products and our digital single on it. We will be announcing our physical CD, our debut, the end of this month. Working on our email list. I would never be doing any of this had I not met Leah. I’m also grateful for all the fellow Elites and coaches who share experiences for us all to learn from and to encourage each other.”

She’s fairly new, I think just a few months I did have a coaching call with her and very talented singer, has kind of an Adele-like voice and very, very capable. So I think she’s going to do well, it’s obviously a pop type sound so she can reach a more mainstream audience. But she’s diving in and she’s realizing wow, and some of these basic things are things she’s never ever done.

03:20 Leah: Yeah. That is awesome. I’m proud of you Lora.

03:22 CJ: It’s not weird how somebody can have talent, Leah, have ability, prove it, be in a band or something like that and yet maybe even go to their graves and never ever fulfill that career that they always wanted, simply because the music industry is the way it is. There was options out there, but they’d never heard of these things before, right?

03:49 Leah: Yeah.

03:49 CJ: And so they can go through their life, always think it wasn’t meant to be, it’s just not in the cards. All of this fatalistic destiny stuff that people tell themselves, all the while it really came down to, if you understand the principles, then you can create desired outcomes and it’s as simple as that. So one of the great ways to prove this is to show how these things can happen with a sister brand. And in this case, again, Leah, your example of Mythologie candles, which is a fairly new operation. For those of us who know you behind the scenes, we’ve seen you working on this for a few months now, but now you just, you went into pre-launch release mode, finding an audience, doing all this stuff. So I’m going to ask you to kind of unpack this for us. First of all, what is Mythologie Candles?

04:39 Leah: I’m so excited to talk about this and I think before I even get into it, I think I want to give you a takeaway right now, and that is that principles, trump tactics. Principals, trump tactics, because tactics go out of style every five minutes. Facebook changes something every single day. They move the buttons around, they move everything around and you don’t know where anything is and they take away features and so many people are like, Oh, we’re screwed. No, you’re not, if you know the principles of marketing, eCommerce, just basic stuff, copywriting, basic things, how to sell, how to make a sale, basic psychology. And you don’t have to go to school for any of this stuff, you don’t need a university degree. I don’t have any degrees. I got nothing under my belt. Sorry. This is the school of hard knocks that I went through and I’ve spent a lot of money in coaches and mentorships and other programs to try and glean what I could and boil it down to the things that work. So I just want to give you that takeaway right now.

And that’s why our whole Savvy Musician Academy, including the Elite program, The Online Musician, they’re mostly all principle-based, and we teach you what’s working right now. Now that’s a tall order for me as a coach and for all of us coaches at SMA teaching you principles that are timeless, no matter what you do, and teaching you what works right now. So that’s the challenge, and that’s why SMA exists is because you need both, but if I had to pick it’s principles. I’ll take principles all day long because then it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, I can apply it, I’ll figure it out, I’ll figure the rest out.

06:13 CJ: I think that’s an important thing to note and I think we’ve hammered that before and it’s still something that I don’t think the coin has quite dropped yet for people. They still think there’s a secret. They still think there’s a … And one of the things I hate to see Leah is hacks. I mean I appreciate them for what they are, but it’s not a long-term approach, these are short-term approaches instead building off of things that work. People have been buying things for centuries. Okay?

06:41 Leah: Yeah, that’s right.

06:41 CJ: So marketing is always a part of it, and all we have to do is again, do the things that help to create conversions, principle-based. So again Leah is applying this now to her sister brand Mythologie Candles, which is obviously a candle making operation. So you’re selling actual candles, this is not print on demand, this is something you’re actually making yourself.

07:05 Leah: Yeah, I’m not sourcing it out somewhere, I’m actually hand-making them. So eventually it’ll grow. I know it’s going to grow-

07:11 CJ: Right, sure.

07:11 Leah: And I’ll probably hire people and create a team to do this. But at first, this is the order of things, you do it yourself and then you grow and expand and as the revenue is there to support it, you grow a team. I’m going to unpack for you everything I just did because I just launched the pre-order for these candles, and I’ve been working behind the scenes, like C.J. said, for a few months on this. Really just having a blast, putting my knowledge and experience of branding, products, customer experience, copywriting, advertising, I’m putting all of that into a physical product that I’m fully controlling in that I’m making the product. I get every say on every little detail. I’ve been having a blast doing this and honestly, it’s been like, some people, I don’t know what, skydive for fun, some people knit or whatever, I guess I start a new business for fun.

So that’s what I do in my spare time and it is fun because I can get the kids involved and it kind of became a little family thing, so it’s been fun. I have a lot to say, but I’m gonna unpack for you what I just did because I was quite blown away because I haven’t even tried that hard yet in terms of marketing yet. Really my first phase was to test and see if there’s even interest for a product like this. So it’s called Mythologie Candles, you can go to the mythologiecandles.com, but be aware, if you go there, you will be pixeled and now you’re going to start seeing everything from me, so just so you know.

08:40 CJ: And let’s make sure that this is not Mythologie with a Y, it’s Mythologie, G-I-E, Candles.com.

08:49 Leah: That’s right. Okay. So first I want to say that this brand, I really wanted it to hold its own, meaning I didn’t want to completely rely on my other Leah music audience that I have built. I’ve obviously worked very hard over the years to build that audience, but also I’m just promoted very heavily to them in the fourth quarter of the year between the album launch and all the crowdfunding and then all the holiday promotions. So there wasn’t a lot of space for me to heavily promote to them about this. I did, I’ll say, cross-pollinate a little bit. Meaning, I put it out there, let them know what I was doing and that if they were interested they can come over, but it was very low pressure. There was no, I sent like two emails about it and that for me, for my audience, is very little amount and there’s nothing for sale yet. They can’t buy anything yet.

It was just saying basically if you’re interested in what I’m doing, you can come sign up over here if you want to be notified about it. That was as far as I went with that. I have not even to this day pushed sales to that audience. I’ve made a few social posts letting them know where they can go, but that’s it. So really mild, mild, mild cross-pollination, I’ll call it. And the reason why I didn’t push it was like I said, I want to know that the product itself can hold its own, that it would be salivating enough to complete cold audiences. And that if I’m going to grow this brand, if I’m serious about it, it’s got to be good enough that complete strangers want it. So I went to work on building an audience. So before I had a product, before I had a website or a shop, before having anything, I started with my audience and the niche.

I had basically an MVP in the marketing world or business world, that’s your minimum viable product. So I had been making candles, I did a little candle launch for my album launch and that was like a separate thing, that’s where I got all my experience with making thousands of candles pretty much and just with all the different processes involved. But I created a minimum viable product and if you’re watching this on YouTube or anything here it is. It’s just a glass amber tumbler with a label on it and a wooden wick inside that is a crackling wooden wick. When you burn it, it’s cool, it sounds pretty ambient. It almost reminds you to go like a fireplace or something. And some like high-quality ingredients in their wax and all that.

So that’s my minimum viable product. And with that I took some photos, initially I didn’t pull out the nice camera and lighting and stuff. I just put them on my table. I had a few candles with a few test labels and I think I looked them and then I took photos on the portrait mode on my iPhone because that makes it look instantly beautiful. Where it’s all kind of blurry in the background and then the focus is on the subject. And I’m not a photographer guys, I’m really not. But you can do some nice things with your iPhone or any smartphone. And I had a few props just laying around the house so I set it on a book. I had some Moss, whatever, pine cones and whatnot and just made it kind of look nice and theme-y. First thing was let’s gauge the interest on this because you got to have something to show them.

Although I did do a couple extra things with no photo and this was a good sign as well. For example, I’ve joined a bunch of Facebook groups that were my niche audience. So, in this case, I was thinking I would maybe launch with a Lord of The Rings themed candle collection, meaning I’m creating scents that I think would match like a character or a scene or something from a movie without actually saying the character name or the scene for copyright reasons. But anyway, I went into a couple of groups and I said, “Hey, I’m creating some candles in this theme and I’m coming up with different scent ideas. Do you have any suggestions?”

And Holy smokes, it was like hundreds of comments, they went bananas. So I thought, whoa, okay. Not only did they have so much fun, like telling me, basically doing my job for me and coming up with the scents and what they are imagining. I got so much data out of that and not only gauging the interest but what they want. I got what they wanted. So that really helped me go, okay, I think this really has a potential here just based on all the engagement and all the comments and suggestions and I actually screenshotted a lot of them so I could keep it for later if I need more candle ideas because these people are insane. Some of them are crazy Tolkein, they call themselves Tolkienites, right? So Jr. Tolkien who wrote Lord Of The Rings.

And so that really helped me gauge interest. So if you’re thinking of doing a sister brand and you want a product that’s going to hold its own without having the only reason they would buy it is because that you made it. If you want it to be an awesome product all on its own, you got to start with the niche first. And there are so many different niches that you might not know, it might not even connect to the dots right now of what niche that would be. But believe me you need to think of what are people really passionate about. I mean, I’ve seen candles let’s not talk about the Gwyneth Paltrow one. I’ve seen candles with just sayings on them that people absolutely love.

I’ve seen one a candle called something about divorce papers going through or something. Yeah. I mean, people are using it, they’re using for all kinds of things. It’s just sarcasm. I’ve seen, Oh my gosh, I’ve seen some really funny ones. Funny candles, It doesn’t have to be candles people, but I’m just saying there are so many different niches out there. Listen, there is nothing proprietary about this product I made. Zero.

Everybody has access to the same ingredients, the same fragrance swells, the same vessels, even the designer I used, there’s nothing proprietary about it. And I’m so I’m aware of this. I would never win on Shark Tank for that reason. Mr. Wonderful would say you’re dead to me because there’s nothing proprietary about it. I can’t patent this. The only thing I … And so I’m aware of this, and I said the only reason this would be successful would be branding alone. Branding alone is what’s going to make probably $1 million in the next 14 months with this. Because I mean if you can’t create culture, tap into an existing one. Tap into one where people are already so passionate about it. You don’t even have to do anything. They’re just sold. So, of course, you have to have a minimum viable product and photography is going to be so important.

So even on iPhone can do a great job, so that’s what I lead with and I, I posted the photo also in a couple of groups, like Fandom groups. I even got admin permission too because if they think you’re promoting something, they’ll delete it. That, “Hey, can I permission to post this photo and see people like it?” “Yeah, go ahead.” “Awesome.” And again, they went bananas, where’s the link? Where’s the link? Where can I buy blah, blah. I was like, okay. I think I feel confident now, In fact, I wasn’t even sure beforehand if I was going to launch with Lord Of The Rings theme. I was just going to do random. But after seeing this kind of feedback and engagement, I said, I think a Lord Of The Rings or Middle Earth themed collection will be an amazing launching pad. That’s going to be a great launching pad because they’re so passionate already.

I just have to show them great photos, make a great shop, I just do the rest and they’re going to sell themselves. So that’s exactly what I did. And in fact, so the next thing after I had my audience in my niche, I knew what I was leading with. I then created a seed audience and a seed audience is obviously very tiny. So I created a Facebook page and an Instagram account and I said, “Well, I am just going to start sharing my journey.” I’m just going to start sharing like everything I’m doing from the ground up. Like, “Oh, what do you think this vessel or this vessel?” And you saw me even posting like, Hey, gold tin or silver tin. Which one do you like better? Let people vote, let them give me feedback. How did I get those people on there to begin with?

17:20 Leah: Some of it… So I did a little cross-pollinating at first, like my fans know had started these accounts. I’ve got the first, I dunno, 150 people on there. Like, not that, not even that many, they weren’t even that interested. I was like, all right, whatever. But hashtags help a lot on Instagram. Using hashtags that people are interested in. I don’t do the follow people, I’ll follow back I don’t like that method at all. I don’t like it. So I’m not doing it. Yeah, it’s grown organically and then there’re some things I’ve done to speed that up since then, but originally there that many people on there. One thing I was doing was every person who did follow, so it was two people a day or whatever, I would personally DM them, thank them for following me. I had a message in Instagram, you can do a quick message, you can pre-write something. And then he was like a shortcut, a keyboard shortcut.

So I just thanked him for following, telling them what I was doing and just cheers and thanks for showing interest in hanging out. And people were responded so well to that. They’re just like, Oh, that was it really stands out to me that you wrote me that DM. Nobody else does that. So thanks. People really appreciated it. And so that really helped build rapport. And the fact that there’s DMs happening, Instagram will now show your stuff in their feed more often because there’s been interaction. So that really helped. It only takes a minute to do that, I’m not spending all day doing that or anything. And then Facebook though I didn’t have our many followers there either until after this pre-launch happened.

So the main thing was I thought I need to build an email list. That’s the first thing. So I created those accounts and thought email list. That’s really how I’m going to do this. I’m going to do a little pre-launch. And the reason I’m gonna do pre-launch is because I don’t have any of the supplies yet to make these candles. So the way I’m going to do it, it’s called bootstrapping. You hold a pre-launch and however much people buy, there’s your capital to get the manufacturing done, to get all your supplies and then make it and you’re totally transparent and tell them that, maybe not tell them that you’re getting supplies, but just Hey, you’re going to pre-order and then we’re going to ship it to you after this date. So everything’s very open and transparent. So then you don’t want people wondering where their stuff is if you haven’t even made it yet.

So I ran an opt-in ad, it was very simple. I didn’t offer anything. I didn’t say, Oh get something for free, like sometimes we do a lot of opt-in, ads do that and that’s a great way to build your email list. But in this case, again, I wanted to make sure that this product would hold its own based on the photo, the iPhone photo that I had with the MVP. Minimum viable product. So all the opt-in said was coming soon, Middle Earth inspired candles, sign up to be notified when they’re available. That’s it. And I built a little seed audience. So I had, by the time I launched, I had 999 people. Granted there’s a small percentage of them came from, sorry. No actually those 999 people in total, I’m thinking there may have been a small percentage that had come from my other email list, but the majority, I’m going to say about 95% of it was from this ad. Because I can see, I can actually see the number in Facebook in the ad manager, how many people signed up. So I can see that.

So 999 people, My goal was I’m going to launch this one and get to a thousand people. So I didn’t even tell them a date, there was no dates attached, nothing. And on the opt-ins were really cheap. Like I want to say ballpark around 30 cents or something. Today in today’s world, people pay up to $5 for a lead, I don’t know how people, they can’t even afford that. But anyway, super, super cheap leads, just really targeting that Lord Of The Rings type people. So if they follow the books and you can do some layering and stuff like that. Our Elite students will know what I’m talking about.

So got pretty targeted, but it’s quite a wide audience because I was going to let Facebook do the work. Right now Facebook algorithms they have so much data that you can give them quite a large audience and they know what to do with it. But basically the larger audience you go, do you need to let it normalize for a longer period of time. So I’m not going to judge anything for the first few days, like three to five days, I won’t touch it. So anyway, that went splendidly. I got the 999 people on my list, I decided when I was going to launch the pre-order and of course I put a ton of work into my Shopify site. There is all kinds of work that I put into that. So but the great thing was that it was so easy because I know what to do. I know exactly what to do. Same thing I do in my music business. I don’t have tons of bells and whistles going on. It’s just very simple, very straightforward It’s very clear.

I have a tagline for the business as well. “We make fantasy inspired candles to help you tell your story.” And because if you’re like me, I changed my story all the time. I changed my mood all the time. I want a different fragrance all the time. I don’t wear the same perfume everyday because that’s boring. So same thing with candles, I burn a different one depending on my mood. So anyways, launched that the first day alone from that seed audience, okay? 999 people and say there was like a 40% open rate or something, which is good. We did a $3,400 day. I was like, this is $1 million day.

Actually it’s $1 million day because if you know the math, I think you would need to make about $2,800 a day to make $1 million in a year. Let me do my calculator. Let’s see, 2,800 x 365, yeah, that’s $1,022,000. We had like $1.5 million day, 1.3 or whatever it is. $1 million day, that’s how I look at things and you should change your thinking “Oh, I only made $200 today”, no, think in terms of what that is for the year. So I was over-the-moon-happy with those results and so we’re 10 days into this pre-order. We’ve done a total of $10,500 in 10 days. $10,500.

For a product I haven’t made, yet complete strangers are buying it without knowing who we are. We’re brand new, don’t even have testimonials, there’s no reviews, no testimonials on the site, nothing. And the engagement is crazy on my ads, they’re just tagging all their friends and “Oh my gosh, we have to buy this”, and want and need and take my money and all of those kinds of comments are happening, which is such amazing feedback. This is the easiest thing I’ve ever done by far.

24:09 CJ: Isn’t that amazing? And I hope everybody is really listening because I know for a lot of you listening, some of the terminology she may be using, is stuff you’re not familiar with. But what I want, and for those who do know, I want you to remember the core. You might’ve highlighted some little technique she used, but remember what she said and remember what’s at play here. What’s at play here is because she did do everything reductionistic, she didn’t her … In fact, I read the ad copy for her initial Facebook ad and it was just kind of, what do you say? Just, Hey, are you interested?

24:47 Leah: Are you interested? Sign up.

24:49 CJ: Sign up, and it was as simple as that. So it was no heavy copywriting. Like she said, she didn’t offer a freebie, she wanted to know that the idea itself, that the product itself was viable. That’s why she went with one product as she said, this one product. So again, understand that branding is what’s at play here, directed towards a particular culture, particular targeted audience that is interested in these type of things. So like she said, anybody could just make their own candles. This is not a proprietary item ladies and gentlemen, but this is what she meant when she said it all comes down to the branding.

And so for most people when it comes to music, when it comes to any other kind of business or book or whatever, they happen to be marketing, they don’t understand that aspect, and so this is why we go back to what she said at the beginning about principles. These are all principles at play. And I assure you guys, it is a tremendously empowering thing when you are confident in principles when you can move into absolutely unknown territory. She didn’t know how it was going to actually turn out, but look at that, a $3,400 first day and then since then, what was it? $10,500.

26:10 Leah: Yeah, so we’re doing between $500 and $1000 a day every single day right now.

26:17 CJ: So the other revenue days, we understand the first day, $3,400, and so are these other revenue days still on the 999 or have we brought in new people? Is it coming from social? What’s making up these big days?

26:37 Leah: It’s coming from a few places. So I’m continuing to post on social and, of course, when you run ads, people are going to start checking out the account that the ad is coming from so you get free likes and followers even off of that. I’m also doing the same thing I do in my music business where I’m not only posting about candles on the socials, I’m also posting memes and things that resonate with people, that has to do with the culture of the candles. Okay? The culture. So if I’m doing Lord of the Rings candles, that means I have people who are crazy about Lord of the Rings. So you’re going to see all kinds of posts and memes and things that are funny and I’m getting a wack of engagement, like shares. One post had like 300 shares on it just because it was kind of a witty meme.

Now all those people are exposed to my brand that they’re sharing with their networks and what’s, something kind of, here’s a little tip for you guys. If a bunch of people like your post, you can see all the people who’ve liked your post and if you’re on desktop email, mobile, it’ll show you the list of people who liked it and who aren’t following you, and then there’s a little invite button you can just click, invite, invite, invite, invite down the list and now your page has invited them to come like your page. And you’re getting all those for free.

So I’m doing that, that only takes two minutes out of my day to do that. So I’m posting, I’m really tapping into a culture. Like I said, if you can’t find a niche of your own, if you’re not creating it from scratch, tap into an existing niche or existing culture. I didn’t have to create the culture of Lord of the Rings, that exists long before me and long after me, so I’m just tapping into it. And it goes with my music, of course, I post Lord of the Rings stuff anyways because it goes with my music, and that’s why this is a sister brand.

28:18 CJ: And what’s great about it is that it’s not dependent upon the success of your music, right?

28:25 Leah: No, exactly.

28:25 CJ: It’s not, none of these people have no idea what you did-

28:28 Leah: No.

28:28 CJ: And so anybody can just say, Oh well, she dismisses it and say, well, she’s able to do this because it’s just taking from her existing audience that love her music. Nope, cold audience guys. There’s no way you can explain this by her previous successes or anything like that. Don’t even try that here.

28:45 Leah: That’s right.

28:46 CJ: No, what we’re trying to get to, the point is that these principles work. You must learn marketing, guys, that’s so important, that’s why we do this podcast. That’s why we have TOM. That’s why we have the Elite program. That’s why we have Inner Circle membership. It is all about teaching you the marketing principles. Leah, sometimes I wonder people are just dumb as doornails that you just keep pounding and pounding and pounding. There is no magic. There’s no secrets. Leah wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, when she began her career she was facing bankruptcy with babies. That’s where she was. She climbed out on her own.

I’ll tell you what, it kind of pisses me off, because I know because I was there and at the same time I was doing my thing. And so for years and years and years, Leah and I have slugged it out in the early days of social media, building brands, building business pages, getting to know how all of this stuff works. And you work so hard, you refine so many things, it gets so well done, bulletproof, that people think, oh, it’s just, they dismiss it as just, oh, it’s an overnight thing, oh, it’s a gimmick, oh, it’s this, oh, it’s that. You got to wonder why people rush headlong into dismissing something that successful. Is it because they’re scared that there’s work involved? Is it because they’re terrified that maybe they weren’t destined for such a thing? It’s amazing.

We look ridiculous dressed up in excuses and I don’t know why that is always the thing that people reach for. But I’ll tell you what, man, you guys should be celebrating this sort of success in Leah because you know what it tells you is that A, she’s all about what she’s all about. She practices what she preaches. She’s always on the cutting edge. She’s always pushing the envelope. That’s the kind of example that you want to follow. That’s the kind of leadership and coach and mentor that you need, so go nowhere else other than the Savvy Musician Academy. I know it sounds like a biased opinion, but I’m dead serious about that. That’s why I’m here as a coach. I’m only here because I believe in what she’s doing. I practice the same sort of principles and I have a heart and a passion for musicians. I want to see the music industry revived, but it’s all based on this.

It’s all based on principles. So yeah, you may not be at a place where you’re creating a sister brand right now, but this is the range of possibilities for you. This is how much you can tap into something that your mind has never imagined before, and I’ll leave you with this. However big you think you’re thinking, it’s not big enough and you can’t be afraid to engage in limitless thinking, you can’t. The more limited you are in your thinking, the more limited will be your results. You have to step into, really soak in your head in what’s possible and dream bigger than you’ve ever dreamed before because there is nothing standing in your way but your own doubt and unbelief.

31:58 Leah: Wow, we’ll just replay that a couple of times. Thank you for saying all that, and I am so on in agreement with you there. I do think that people, sometimes they’ll find ways to scrutinize me or my successes, but I believe it comes from a place where they don’t believe it’s possible for them. They don’t believe it’s possible for them therefore it can’t be possible for me or anybody else. And if it is, there must be some catch. There’s got to be something, some upper hand that they have that they’re not telling us. And so that’s where the skepticism comes from.

More on that later, but I just wanna agree with CJ on that. And as for where else the sales are coming from, I’m just starting to test ads now to totally cold audiences. And they’re going amazingly well. So we know that we’re going to be able to scale this thing. Mark my words, it’ll be $1 million business because of the principles, and I didn’t invent the principles you guys, this is not new stuff, I’m just applying what I know. And when you know this stuff, like I said, this is the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Not only has it been so fun and that’s what I said actually, that’s the whole purpose of me doing this company was I just need to have fun, I just need to play. Because I know this stuff so inside and out, it’s second nature to me.

It’s not stressful. There’s no deadlines. Nobody is making me do anything, I’m just doing it because it’s fun and because I want to. And I think I said in a previous podcast, I think magical things happen when you do it for fun because you want to. And are there aspects that aren’t fun that you got to do? Yeah, I hate logistics, and let me tell you, when you’re figuring out shipping options for all these different zones around the world, there’s nothing fun about that and it’s nothing but logistics, but you got to do it. And for me, the fun outweighs the things that I don’t want to do, and I’m having a blast, having so much fun with results. I can’t wait to scale this and share the results along the way in any way that I can.

33:56 CJ: Ladies and gentlemen, that right there is no limits talking. And I know that people feel like you threw a pork chop in the baby crib when you said, Oh, it will be $1 million business in a year. You know how much they can’t wrap their heads around that for anything in life, let alone, how in the world can she just so matter of fact, say then in a year it’s going to be $1 million? Well, ladies and gentlemen, try to think if we sent you over to the third world where they have to walk five miles for water and pee in the woods and struggle to survive, try to explain to them just your average day and what you do when you get up, what the temperature of your room is, what you had for breakfast, all of this stuff. Do you know how hard it would be for those little third word villagers to wrap their head around your everyday?

So don’t choke on what Leah is saying. Believe me, there was a time not too many years ago where she couldn’t wrap her head around that, not at all, but now she’s so used to breaking these boundaries, breaking these barriers of limitations, her own faith, her own confidence has grown along with it. The key is your thinking. There’s a ton of principles we want to share with you, but there’s so much we want to destroy in that limited doubting mindset of yours because if we can change that man, then we’ll unleash the lion inside of you. Nobody will be able to hold you back. You will be literally unstoppable. That’s the Savvy Musician Academy.

35:41 Leah: Wow. Amazing. Yeah, I love it. And okay, I’m going to say mindset combined with knowledge. Knowledge is power. You’re an unstoppable force if you have the mindset and you have the knowledge, you have the know-how. So I say it’s going to be $1 million company in 12 to 14 months, not just because I believe, I believe it because I have knowledge as well to back that up. I need a hundred sales a day, a hundred I need to sell a hundred candles a day. Can I get there? I’m already doing 50-something like can I get there? Yeah. I haven’t even tried marketing yet. You guys, I just put an ad out and we’re putting a little bit of a budget on it. I haven’t even tried, I’ve never tried to trade shows yet. I can think of all the other avenues. I haven’t tried sending it to influencers and people with YouTube channels and just like, I haven’t done anything yet. So I see what’s happening right now, based on the marketing principles that I’ve learned and I think “I haven’t even tried yet.” And when I do, it’s going to explode.

And in fact, we’re not even ready for that kind of production yet. So we’re going to get our ducks in a row and I need to be able, I need to be prepared to manufacture 10 times that I’m capable of right now. And then when that’s set, I’m going for it. You just watch me. I will go for it and we’re going to kill it.

37:00 CJ: Right on. Say everybody said “Amen” or “Oh, me.” Take your choice well, Leah, thank you so much for sharing that and again, ladies and gentlemen, you can go to Mythologiecandles.com now that’s Mythologie, not with a Y, it’s G-I-E mythologiecandles.com. Keep up with that, follow that page on Facebook and Instagram so you could watch this literally happen. Study her copy, she doesn’t care. Study the copy, look at the images, she’s copy everything she well, you know what I mean? But try to mimic what she’s doing and apply those principles, again, what you see being played or written for you on your own pages.

If you’d like to learn more about how maybe we can help you at the Elite level, then be sure and schedule a call with us. We’d love to talk to you about your music career. You can go to callsma.com and one of my favorite little new projects is our Inner Circle membership. If you feel like these courses and things are just too expensive and too much over your head, the inner circle membership is the best thing for you. $19.99 a month and you get a full, we’re going to call it what the full issue of the Inner Circle membership. It’s a magazine. You’ll get a downloadable PDF, you also get an audio version of us. You can listen to the whole magazine filled with articles and news tips, tools, books of the month, student spotlights, motivational articles each month, plus you get a free mini-course.

So you get a free mini-course about something involving marketing, social media, and all of good stuff. You get access to it in your own little private account each month. Again, just $19.99 you can sign up today and start now. In fact, I just finished uploaded and launched the February issue today before I started this podcast. So go check it out at savvymusicianacademy.com/inner circle. Leah, such a pleasure. Let’s do this again.

39:01 Leah: We’ll do it again. Thanks for listening guys. And just a last note here, everything I discussed in this episode, it’s Elite level. It’s advanced. If you’re just starting out calling the Elite number will probably not be for you. If you are just getting your music off the ground and you just started. So this is advanced stuff. My Elite students, they know every single thing I’m talking about here and they know how to implement it, so they just want to communicate the difference.

39:28 CJ: We’ll see you soon guys.

00:21 CJ: Welcome to the Savvy Musician Show. This is CJ Ortiz, the branding and mindset coach here at the Savvy Musician Academy. And once again joined by my favorite music marketer and yours, the lovely Leah McHenry. It’s so good to see you again.

00:38 Leah: Nice to see you too, and nice to be here and have everybody listening.

00:43 CJ: We have more fun than we deserve and we like to record these more than one at a time, batch recording as they say, but it’s such an enjoyable process because Leah and I are also really, really great friends with a lot of mutual interests. And so we talk about all kinds of stuff, not just the business stuff and we go deep into other pursuits. But I’ll tell you what though, whenever we’ve come back to centre and we get back into then to the podcast, we realize just the real importance of this particular broadcast, what happens here. Because I think, and I see it online, you see it online too, Leah, what people run in and say, and the value that’s being added to people’s lives.

This stuff is kind of secondary to us because we work in it all the time and we know the terms and the ideas and all of that. We don’t realize, oftentimes, we have to tell ourselves even to slow it down and explain things, to not assuming that everybody knows or is up to speed on everything. But still just the fact that all this valuable content can be archived, that people can go back and get, and we have the free downloads and things. I really feel like, Leah, what you set up here is just going above board when it comes to really showing forth that commitment to empowering other people to live their dream.

And I really, really hope that people grasp that. I really hope they understand that because you can really start to think that this is all about making money.

02:15 Leah: Yeah.

02:16 CJ: Because if you want to put that slander towards her or SMA or myself, then we could put it towards you. In other words, why do you want to make music and sell it? Let me guess, your motives are pure, but somebody else isn’t. No. I know Leah very well and I’m just so grateful for this.

And again, I mean, I come from a different industry, but I know that anybody, Leah, could listen to this. You could be a coach, trainer, you could be a small business owner, you could be an artisan, you could be all an author and you could still apply everything that’s taught on this podcast. In fact, if you’re a listener and you have somebody else who needs to market their business or whatever, have them tune into this podcast. Because trust me, all you got to do is switch out music for whatever it is they’re doing and you could definitely apply the same things.

Before we get into today’s episode, Leah, let me just share a spotlight. I never know what name is going to be in front of me when I read these things, so I almost want to make sure with like the dictionary does and have it spelled out, the annunciation and pronunciation.

But this is Michael J. Abrogast, one of our Elite students, and Michael writes, “#Win”. He said, “I joined this group about a year ago to promote my neo-mellow folk-pop band, The New Relics, because we were planning on recording and releasing our fifth studio album and I really wanted to do something special with my music. That didn’t happen. With family work and other obligations, the album never got finished. We still plan to do it, but over the past months, I started working on a solo project. I did the whole project completely on my own just to see if I could do it and it turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself. So I went back through the training, created a new website and social accounts, and released the first half of my album as Front Porch Poetry Volume One. After a few weeks worth of work, I’ve already got a robust online presence, an album on all the major distribution channels as well as an instrumental version packaged separately, plus several tee shirts and other items for sale on my new website. Overall, I’m feeling pretty good about where I am. Next up, music videos and monetizing my music, then a crowdfunding campaign for Volume Two.” Wow.

04:51 Leah: Wow. Productive.

04:53 CJ: Very productive. We like to see that. It’s interesting, Leah, we get all kinds, but you can tell those students who you know are going to do well just because of the way they attack their present.

05:10 Leah: Yeah. I love that you just said that, “attacking your present” as opposed to like, well, not living in the past, and not even living in the future. It’s a delicate balance because you have to imagine the future so that you know what you’re going for, but you have to live in the present, and attack in the present.

People ask me, “How do you not get overwhelmed?” Well, I don’t not get overwhelmed. But what brings me back to centre, I actually have a sticky note right in front of me that says, “Be in the present moment. What’s in front of me right now? Don’t focus on Everest.” Because our tendency is to look at Mount Everest. We’re standing at the bottom and we’re like, “Holy crap, there’s no way I’m going to make it to the top. I quit now.” That’s the tendency. And so I have to remind myself with a fluorescent pink sticky note to stay in the present moment and attack what’s right now, and that’s the key to productivity. That’s the key to stopping overwhelm.

06:16 CJ: Yeah. I have a quote actually myself that’s very similar, and it says, “When we get so fixated on the mountain, we miss how easy it is to take a step forward.”

06:25 Leah: That’s it.

06:25 CJ: It’s very simple. And so yeah, so what this guy’s doing, he just wanted to see if he could do it.

06:31 Leah: Yeah.

06:32 CJ: And he certainly did. He’s going to learn so much by doing that. And that actually kind of takes us into what we’re going to talk about today, Leah, which is about creating a sister brand, which is something that you’re engaged in right now, which is super, super exciting. In fact, you keep talking about it. We’re like, “Leah’s talking about her candle business again.” But I’m really, really pumped about this episode because just the results you’ve had so far in what you’re doing have just really been amazing and how this ties into what you’re already doing. I’m excited for you to really break this down. Creating a sister brand, what, Leah, first of all, is a sister brand?

07:11 Leah: Well, in my mind, a sister brand is something that could be… I mean, it could be a standalone brand or product or a series of products under a brand that might relate to the culture or the music you’ve already built, the music brand you’ve already built. Like I said, it could be completely unrelated and now you’re selling, I don’t know, insurance policies to dentists. I don’t care. But what I’m talking about in this instance is the possibility of going bigger and beyond just the music.

Now, I’ve always been a huge proponent of never putting all your eggs in one basket, being creative. I love this one article by Jack Conte comment that oftentimes I’ll refer to in my webinars. He wrote an article on Digital Music News. He’s one of the co-founders of Patreon and has quite a well-known band. And he had talked about in this one article about, we are the creative class now. We’re not just musicians. We’re drawing webcomics, we’re coding games and we’re creating apps. We’re doing all these other things as creatives, as musicians, thinking outside the box; and that’s how we’re making a living, people.

We’re not only just creating music, we’re doing all these other things. And so he says, “If lady Gaga is Betty’s Diner or whatever, we’re the mom and pop version of that.” We are the creative class and that means going outside of the norm. And so it may make sense for you at some point to create a sister brand off of a product that made sense for your culture. And this isn’t the only way this could go down. Like I said, you might just be an entrepreneur outside of this and maybe you’re selling gadgets and gizmos on Amazon or something. I don’t know.

But what I’m doing right now, so I’ll tell you what this is. I’ve created a candle brand, it’s called Mythologie Candles. And the way this even happened was it was, I don’t know, I saw something in my Facebook feed and it was just like a light bulb went off. This was like during I think my crowdfunding campaign or toward the end of a crowdfunding campaign and I had this light bulb go off. It was an idea. I’ve been studying e-commerce so hard and just branding and all this stuff. When the idea occurred to me, something happened inside. It was like a moment, and I was like, “Oh my goodness.” And it was like a flash happened in my mind and I saw it all. I saw everything. I’m like, “I know exactly what to do.” I’ve never made a candle before, but I know exactly what to do. It’s not rocket science. People have been making candles for thousands of years. There’s nothing proprietary about it, but I know exactly what to do.

It’s all about branding. Because the same thing as selling a t-shirt or socks or a candle or anything, anybody can make the same thing. I’m not going to patent these candles because you can’t patent candle wax. There’s nothing proprietary. It’s all positioning. It’s all branding. It’s all marketing. That’s it. And I know what to do, and I came alive. And like I said in our staff meeting yesterday, I was like, “You should always do things that make you come alive. If it makes you come alive, you should do it.” Unless it’s murder, don’t do that.

Don’t do bad things, but things that are inherently good, that are inspiring to you, that you know if I don’t do this, I’m going to regret it or I’m going to die unless I do this. That’s what happened to me. My first experiment was releasing candles as part of my album watch and I made this kind of immersive experience. I made a thousand candles. My kids got involved, Steve got involved. We did this whole thing. I really learned how to make them. I formulated everything myself. I custom blended the fragrances, I studied everything I could.

Now, I didn’t just all of a sudden make a thousand. I was actually testing, I ordered ingredients. I did a whole bunch of stuff before I went and just made them and sold them. It took a lot of testing, some trial and error. I had to learn the process. I had to do all of that. I had to come up with a good vessel to put them in. There was branding and labels involved. I had to do tests with that, so there was a lot.

The whole time I’m just like, “This is fun. I’m just doing this because it’s fun.” And when I did it, I’m like, “I want to do more of it,” so that’s a good sign. And just to reference a couple of podcast episodes ago, I said this year was about rest. And if you’re hearing this going, “Leah, that doesn’t sound restful,” then you need to go back to two episodes ago where I talked about what rest really meant for me. That was my theme word of the year.

This for me is rest. I don’t know if this is going to make sense to anyone, but this for me is rest because it means… I’m not in a rush to do anything. I don’t have any deadlines. I don’t have any massive objectives. I have some little revenue goals that I am going to try and hit. I’ll probably blow them out of the water. But there’s something magical about doing something just because you want to, just because you want.

12:46 CJ: If anybody understands this, this is obviously going to be a creative person.

12:50 Leah: Yeah.

12:50 CJ: Right?

12:52 Leah: Yeah. I bet you… I mean, am I taking a risk by just laying all my cards on the table for you guys? Yeah, kind of. I mean, could this fail miserably? It could. Of course, it could. It’s not even a thought in my mind though. I may even go as far as to say if it ever becomes un-fun that I won’t do it anymore. I’ll sell the business if it becomes a big business or I’ll just stop making them or it’ll go away. I don’t know. I’ll just not do it. But I’m doing it because I’ve had the itch to put all my knowledge of marketing, branding and e-commerce into a physical product that I am actually in full control of. And that’s the fun about handmade products is that you can control the quality, you can control even the unboxing experience.

13:46 CJ: Yes.

13:47 Leah: That’s one downside about doing print on demand, but it’s a trade-off that I’m willing to have for the profit and the ease in not having a warehouse. I mean, those are trade-offs. In this instance, I get to control all the little details and I’m just having fun doing that.

The whole premise around this candle business is that they are fantasy-themed. I’m really pairing themes or characters or a scene perhaps from a film or a book or something like that that goes with the scent and the smell and it’s recreating that. It’s another form of escape. It’s another form of taking a little mind vacation for a minute; and of course, that goes along with my music. Of course, it goes along with it because that’s what my music is all about already. I’m sure people have questions.

14:43 CJ: Yeah, they have questions like, “Well, Leah, you’re supposed to be a musician and we can see how this relates, especially you have the Celtic fantasy metal, so candles and all that stuff. I mean, we get that part. But Leah, you’re supposed to be making music. I mean, how are you going to balance this with this music career and then making candles, especially because this is also being driven by passion and love?”

15:09 Leah: Yeah. Well, guess what? There’s no rules saying that you can only make music and you can’t stop and go make jewelry for a while and launch that. There is no rules behind it. But the important thing is that I have my music business running. It’s running on its own because I have systems set up.

I also have been incredibly intentional with my goals for my music this year. I’m not trying to be super-duper profitable in my music by launching albums, doing crowdfunding and all that. Which by the end of all that said and done, it wasn’t even about profit that year anyway. That wasn’t my intention that year. But 2020 was about, as I shared in the previous episode, is about optimization, simplifying those things. I will be profitable, but I’m not trying to explode my business in my music. I’m maintaining it so that it’s really ripe and ready for when I do my next album watch, which might be the next year.

16:11 CJ: Right. Well, what’s your basic approach to… Are you doing anything different about branding this candle business? What’s your branding approach to this because that’s obviously where you’re starting?

16:22 Leah: Guess what? It’s the exact same as everything else we teach. But yeah, I get to be a little more specific because it’s one product, which is nice. And no one’s really questioning… Well, then I’m going to say, the nice thing about it being a candle is no one’s like, “What is it? What is it?” And no one’s also going to ask me, “Why do I have to pay for that? Shouldn’t it be free?”

16:48 CJ: Right. Yeah. Yeah.

16:49 Leah: That’s a little joust at those entitled people that leave me comments on our Facebook ads.

16:56 CJ: Freebies.

16:57 Leah: Yeah. Shouldn’t it be free? Why… Anyways, nobody’s going to be asking me that stuff, so in a way it’s going to be really nice to just deal with… It’s like they understand what it is. There’s no explanation involved. My only job is to position it to the right audience.

There’s really three P’s. There’s more than three in marketing, but these are the three I’m focused on right now. It’s really people, positioning and the product. Okay, and all of those things are going to inform the way I market. I’m starting with people, meaning I’ve built… I’ve actually already built an audience at the time of this recording. I’m not even selling them yet. The shop is not open, but I’ve already built an audience. I built an audience before I even tapped into my existing music audience. I created an Instagram profile, created a Facebook page. 

I had prototypes of the candles that I was working on. They weren’t even the finished labels. They’re not even the real thing yet. They’re just prototypes. I printed them off at like an online label printer on the internet and they just mailed them to your house so that I could test some different things, see how they look. But with those, and I just took photos on my iPhone in portrait mode. It’s incredible how professional they look. I didn’t spend a dime on photography and they look so good.

And based on that, I was able to build a little, what I call a seed audience. I’m garnering some interest. I created the pages and I posted very strategically in a couple of different groups. I was kind of testing the waters with some different ideas, and the way I built this little seed audience was I, first of all with these prototypes, I created basically a Middle Earth-themed collection. They all happen to be themes surrounding Lord of the Rings. There’s one called, which I’ve got one right here that I was burning, it smells awesome, it’s like leather and woods and a bit of caramel and I don’t know, it’s awesome. It’s what Aragorn smells like if you smelled him. It’s a good smell.

I had a few with these prototype labels on it. It says the title of them, and I found a few… There’s a whack of Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth-themed Facebook groups, and all I did was post a photo or to say, “Hey, I’m making some candles. I’m doing this theme. Do you have any suggestions?” No link, no, no promotions or anything like that, and it was like unbelievable. All the comments and stuff and people are like, “Well, where’s the link? Where can I buy? Blah blah blah.” It was crazy.

In fact, a couple of them got removed because everybody wanted to know links. And of course, in a lot of these groups, they don’t want promotions. And so it was like, “Holy smokes.” That really solidified in my mind, I am going to tap into this existing culture because I had some other ideas for other scents that I could launch. But because these people are crazy and their fandom is so extreme, and I’m in a couple of even just like collector groups. They’re like buy/sell groups. They buy Lord of the Rings-themed replicas and little statues and little posters and things like that. I was like, “Man, these people are serious,” and they spend a lot of money on this stuff. It for me solidified, this is a good idea. This is a good launching pad.

Now, I’m going to do other things in other collections, other scents that are not Lord of the Rings related, but this one makes a great launching pad. There’s an existing audience that I don’t have to create. I just have to tap into what’s already there. It goes along nicely with the brand I’ve already built, meaning I can cross-pollinate my existing audience because my existing audience, the Leah audience, they already love Lord of the Ring. They love all those fantasy movies and games and stuff that it’s very easy for me to say, “Hey guys, I have a sister brand over here. Are you interested ?” And a large majority of them will say, “Yes, I’m interested.”

I think the takeaway here is that I’m covering the P part of it, the people. Tapping into an existing audience makes them much easier. I don’t have to create this from scratch. I don’t have to educate people on what it is and why it’s cool because they already get it. They’re sold long before I have ever shown them my product.

And then I’ve only just yesterday sent the first email to my Leah list telling them about this brand and here’s the opt-in link if you want to be notified and you wan to get on the waitlist. Now I’m going to tap into that audience because I’m getting closer to the time when I’m going to start taking preorders. Okay, so that’s the first one, the P.

The next one is positioning, which I kind of covered a bit, but positioning is really all about, it’s the look, it’s the feel, it’s the logo, it’s the label, it’s the descriptions, it’s the photography, it’s all of that. The positioning of it doesn’t look… I mean, just off of that portrait mode photos from my phone, people were like, “These look amazing. I want to buy them right now. Where is the link?” I got DMs of people asking me about their sister’s wedding. “Do you do party favors? Do you do this? Do you do wholesale?”

I mean I’m already getting inundated. The shop’s not open yet because of the positioning. It was just a photo, and I’m not a photographer. I mean, it’s simple. It’s just an amber jar with wax in it with a label on it, take a photo on a table. The positioning, and then, of course, the theme itself is positioning, the fact that it’s relating to some culture that already exists that people are crazy about. This could be Star Wars, people. This could be anything. This could be Grumpy Cat. It could be any existing culture that people are crazy about it. Don’t think that this only works in the fantasy thing.

I’ve heard people say, “Oh well, yeah, heavy metal fans, they’re the best.” Well, yes, they are. But aside from that, this works in other totally different fields. I was just telling you about my kids, they’re totally into slime, like making their own slime. If you type in the words “making slime” on YouTube, you will see millions of videos of people going crazy, little girls to adults. There’s slime ASMR videos. I don’t know if our audience is familiar with ASMR. Oh, you just go Google that later. That’s weird.

23:53 CJ: Oh, yeah, ASMR. Yeah, yeah.

23:55 Leah: Yeah. Well, people are into the slime. They like the sound of the slime. They think it’s relaxing and the way it crackles and crunches and stuff when they’re playing with it. It’s weird. Okay, that’s a whole other weird fetish I think. But I’m just saying it’s not just fantasy, it’s not just because what I’m doing. There’s things that people go crazy for in completely different industries and different hobbies, different niches. And I want you to just not… Don’t get stuck in this. The fact that it’s Lord of the Rings and that it’s fantasy stuff that I’m bringing up. This is not the only thing this works for, but the positioning is already there. I have to do very little to make this work because it’s already… Peter Jackson and J.R. Tolkien did the work for me. I’m just tapping into it, okay.

And the third thing is the product itself. It has to be good. It has to be quality. It’s just like the music, right? We always say the music has to be good. You can have the best market in the world. If the product is crap or the music is crap, you’re not going to sell jack. Of course, I have to make the product good, and that means I’m marketing this as a premium product. This is not something cheap you could just get at Walmart. If you want Walmart, go to Walmart if that’s what you want. This is a premium product, made with premium ingredients, premium packaging. And I’m putting a whole lot of thought and detail into the unboxing experience from the tape that I use. I’m getting custom packing tape made. I mean, I’m going all the way so that it’s a memorable experience.

25:21 CJ: Wow.

25:22 Leah: Yes. That’s why people still buy physical products is because they want that experience, I mean, especially in the music world too. People still buy vinyl because it’s a listening experience. That’s why they’re doing that. I’m going all the way, okay.

Now the people, the positioning and the product itself, that’s going to all inform the way I do my marketing and it’s just going to be very straightforward, very straightforward stuff. And I’m going to do all the same stuff that I do in my music business. There’s going to be abandoned cart… I’m thinking about abandoned cart emails and sequences, same type of ads that I know to do, relationship marketing. I’m telling them who I am. I’m not just marketing like, yes, this is a product, but I’m letting them know who I am. I already have emails written telling them about my kids. I already have emails written telling them about who I am and that I homeschool them. I’m letting them into me, and I think a lot of people think that that somehow is unprofessional, and it’s not.

What’s unprofessional is not telling them who you are. I think that’s actually unprofessional. You’re trying to separate a product from who you are, a product from the brand, from the creator of it. And to me, unless you’re Walmart, unless you’re one of these huge corporations, you can’t afford to do that. You’ve got to personalize it. You have to let people know who you are and who this person is behind the scenes. Make them care. If they don’t care, then they’ll just go somewhere else where they do care.

26:52 CJ: Yes. Isn’t that amazing though, that there just is no… You didn’t go into what you went into when you started several years ago with that anticipation. It’s the more you spend time with things, the more they can potentially grow. And it goes back to the fact that you’re just using, as you said, you’re just doing the same thing you did with your music business.

As you said before was someone learns how to market, they’re never going to be without a job. There’s always something that can be sold, but even better when you can do it for your own stuff. We’ve got people who have serious cultures built around their music brands in our Elite Program and whatnot, so the possibilities are endless to what you can create related to your brand and it doesn’t have to be candles.

27:45 Leah: No.

27:46 CJ: But like Leah said, the candles aren’t limited to just her particular genre. All sorts of people have candles.

27:53 Leah: Oh yeah.

27:55 CJ: There’s so many things that you can do once you learn how to sell something, and it really is as simple as… I mean, you wouldn’t probably be doing this. You’d be buying candles, you wouldn’t be selling candles. You’re selling candles because of what you know, what you now know.

28:13 Leah: Mm-hmm, and this is the fun part, you guys. When you know this stuff and you could talk about it in your sleep, then it’s so fun. This is just fun. That’s the only reason I’m doing it is because I want to and it’s fun. And it’s, now I understand these things, I know exactly what to do. Like I said, I had a flash before my eyes and I saw it all. I saw the ads, I saw the emails, I saw the shop, I saw the… I saw all of it in an instant; and now I’m just doing what I saw because I know what to do. It’s so ingrained in me that I don’t even have to think.

And I’m not doing bells and whistles, actually, I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible when I do this with the shop I’m not going crazy on apps. It’s very straight forward and it’s all going to be about the audience. Notice, I started with the audience first before I even opened the shop, before my even first Facebook ad has ever gone out, anything like that. It all started with people and the audience, and you can do it before you’ve even released anything. I hope that encourages people too.

29:20 CJ: Yes.

29:20 Leah: Man, I’ve got so much to say and I’m sure people have even more questions when they’re hearing this. We can always do a follow-up and see how things are going. I have no idea what’s going to happen with this. I have a lot of questions myself. There’s going to be some roadblocks. Shipping is a big factor. It’s expensive to ship candles. It’s really expensive to ship it outside of the US, to Canada and the UK, so I have challenges.

This fun is not without challenges. I heard someone say, “There’s no such thing as problems, just puzzles; and puzzles are always solvable.” And I loved that when I heard that, so I was like, you know what, I’m going to encounter puzzles and we’re going to solve them and then I’ll know more and then I can help other people.

And so I am going to be sharing my journey as much as possible. Maybe not so much on this podcast, but I will be sharing it probably on the blog, on my shop, which will be mythologiecandles.com. Maybe by the time this comes out it’ll be launched, so you can check it out if you want this. I’m not even trying to promote it. But if you just want to see what I’m doing, you can check it out. But I’m going to try it.

30:27 CJ: Now that’s mythology, not Y but with I-E.

30:30 Leah: With an I-E. Yeah. Mythologie with an I-E, so yeah, mythologiecandles.com. Yeah, I’m trying to share the journey because I think that that’s an aspect of transparency that will only help the brand and just say, I’m trying to include people in and let them vote on the next scent and the next idea, and let them into some of the… I mean, I’m really taking everything I’ve taught at Savvy Musician Academy, and especially in our Elite Program and the online musician, and I’m putting that into this.

There’s nothing that I’m applying in this business that you guys don’t already have access to. You have to realize that. You have more knowledge and stuff inside of these programs that I ever had when I even launched Savvy Musician Academy. And so I’m taking all of that, I’m putting it into this. Now it’s faster for me to do it. It’s faster. It’s a shorter process now because it’s so ingrained.

31:29 CJ: Yeah, and so to the listener, and this is not going to be for everybody, it’s only going to be for some of you who are listening, you may be at that place where you’re ready to learn these principles that we’re talking about, about branding, about e-commerce, about email marketing, I mean the real deal, and really start to move forward.

You’ve been trying to piece things together through these podcasts or YouTube videos or a free download here and there, but you’re not really getting anywhere yet, but you’re ready to spend money on advertising you. You’ve got some music under your belt and you don’t just want to just take a course. You really want that helping hand. You want us looking over your shoulder. You want to really know the ins and outs of all the stuff that we talk about on this podcast. Well, that is our Elite Program. 

Have conversation with yourself, whoever you are, but think about whether you’re ready to take that step because it will be a game-changer for you. If you’re serious, if you’re ready; as we said at the outset, to attack the present, if you’re really ready to be invested and make the sacrifice for your music business, and have that music career, and stop being frustrated with not knowing what to do, stop being frustrated, get your eyes too fixated; as we said on that mountain, you don’t realize that this could be your very next step because now you’re bringing in the resources and the experts to really help you do it right; well, that’s what our Elite Program is all about.

If that’s you, I want you to go to callsma.com right now and schedule a call with us. We would love to talk to you. We’re going to ask you questions. Again, this is not for everybody, okay? It’s not for everybody. It’s got to be a good fit because we want you to succeed. We’re not just taking people in because we want somebody’s money. No, we turn people away. Some people are just not ready. We recommend to get one involved maybe in Tom or the inner circle, but if you’re ready for this then we would love to talk to you, so book a call today at callsma.com and we’ll see if we can’t help you take that next step.

But Leah, thank you so much for sharing this sister brand with us. We know, I know, it’s going to do well.

33:50 Leah: Thanks, CJ. I’m excited to share with you guys the rest of the results. We have students who are doing well with this. I know Daniel Coates, he launched, I think, necklaces for their music brand and he said at one of their shows that those necklaces outsold their CDs, which is really cool. Just, guys, people are doing it already. Get creative. Think outside the box. I’m here to help you think bigger and I’m also here to help you think more strategically. I’d love to help coach you inside of the Elite Group, so I hope to see you in there.

34:22 CJ: Guys, thank you so much. We will see you soon.