The Most Important Commandment in Business

To have a successful business, you must abide by one simple and straightforward rule.

I have to imagine that the reason “most businesses fail” is that most businesses don’t abide by this rule.

An extremely large number of would-be audio professionals fail because they don’t abide by this rule.

“If it’s simple then why don’t people follow the rule, Adam?”

People don’t follow this rule because it’s unsexy.

Creatives don’t follow this rule because it is, at first glance, anti-creative.

Make no mistake – this rule is the difference between just creatively expressing yourself with audio, and making money as an audio professional.

(No, I’m not saying you “cut off your proverbial creative nuts” if you make money as a pro – I’m saying there’s a difference between primarily expressing yourself, and making money)

The rule is this:

You have to sell people what they’re (already) buying.

Read that, over and over. It’s the most important sentence of this piece.

Uniqueness

“You have to find your voice.”

In creative fields, you’re told this over and over. So much that people agonize over if they can “find their voice”, if their output “sounds and feels” like them, or whatever.

In business, this is often called a Unique Selling Proposition.

It’s a combination of a few things –

The reason you buy from someone
How Jimmy Fallon sounds like Jimmy Fallon, and anyone else is just an imitator

Those two points intertwine as well. You watch (or don’t watch even) Jimmy Fallon because he is Jimmy Fallon.

You might read what I write because of what I say, how I say it, whatever. In addition you’ll buy a product of mine because of that and you trust I’m going to solve your problem.

But when it comes to business, and let me be very clear on this – if you’re an audio professional you are a business – most creative professionals go overboard with this concept.

Your Sound

I’m going to pick on composers now.

It’s nothing personal, I love you – you’re just the group that provides the clearest example to pick on. You’ll understand why in a second.

Let’s say you’re a composer. Put your imaginary composer hat on. Or, at least put your musician hat on – we’re all musicians of some sort.

Now that your composer/musician hat is on – what happens when you pick up an instrument and you play it?

You play what you like.

You have a vibe. You vibe with a certain type (or types) of music. When you play, or write, you naturally lean towards certain types of music, styles, vibes, whatever.

When you put everything you like together in a way that’s coherent and other people begin to resonate with it – we call that “finding your voice”.

But while you’ve got your musician hat on, put your business hat on too. Technically speaking, this is the proper hat order if you’re making music for a living.

What if the current business hat you’re wearing comes with few or no clients?

And you’re also agonizing over “finding your voice”?

How do you go about finding it, and finding clients?

How Business Actually Works

Business is actually pretty simple.

Customer needs a thing, business solves the need. A value exchange occurs. The end.

There’s two tricky parts to this in real life

The business doesn’t know what the customer wants without research
The customer isn’t naturally clear and forthcoming about what they want or need

Because of this you’ll have people come up with business ideas, someone say “oh, I’d totally buy that!”, the product gets created and then nobody buys it.

That could be for a large number of reasons (the market was too small, the price was too high or low, etc.), but often it’s simply because nobody actually wanted that product.

Yes, it will come as a shock – but I ran a Twitter poll once that will prove my point

Would you be interested in a “Advanced Audio Scripting with Reaper & Lua” video course?

— Adam T. Croft (@adamtcroft) June 9, 2018

The results of that question came out 90% of people saying yes, I will buy that.

Weeks later, I put out a product presale for a Reaper Scripting video course. It got zero sales.

Zero sales.

(Yes, there are 100% other reasons why that occurred. I think if I sold the same thing today, I could get more than zero – but the point is, people said they wanted it and nobody bought when given the chance.)

The moral of this story is – yes, people do bullshit you about what they actually want. No, not intentionally. It’s just that people are more likely to go “Oh, that sounds awesome!” verbally than they are to express that with a credit card.

This is a complicated situation and solving it is a completely different book much less blog post, but there’s two important takeaways

Business is a customer having a need and a business solving the need with a value exchange attatched
That transaction is much easier to write about than it is to do

Giving them What they Want

Back to the musician/composer thing.

I realize I’m conflating those two roles, and in a professional sense they’re very different. I’m likely insulting someone – but the laypeople won’t get it, and this is for the laypeople. Anyway –

You’ve got your two hats on, no clients, and you’re busy trying to figure out what you sound like.

While, on one hand, finding “your sound” is a completely noble pursuit and something you do need to do – it isn’t what gets you clients at first.

When you’re not established, you have no reputation, and nobody knows who you are – it’s nearly impossible to give an extremely impactful, unique, elevator pitch.

You have to be mind blowing to pull it off, previously unheard of.

Arguably, it’s an impossible feat. All stories of “overnight success”, off the top of my head, have some sort of explanation where the person in question slaved away for years in obscurity before “being discovered”.

Why it comes off as “overnight success” to the rest of us is because of two things

The person in question is actually unique and good, in some sense
A group highly skilled in creating elevator pitches, created a fantastic elevator pitch for you

Think about it for a second.

When you discover a “new band” that seems to break out extremely rapidly – they have music that resonates and a solid story behind it. This is all content for the consumer to truly sink their teeth into, and identify with. Most importantly, none of it is an accident.

So if you’re trying to do this, by yourself, relatively new, unskilled, or at least unproven…

Good luck.

See how crazy your expectations are of yourself?

Right.

So how do you get around this, get clients, find your voice, etc?

You have to sell people what they’re (already) buying.

This means becoming skilled in styles of composing that are used in the medium or genre you want to work in (Do compositions for the Death Note anime sound like Avengers films? No.)

Or this means becoming skilled in creating palettes of sounds used for specific games (Do sounds in Halo sound like Plants vs Zombies or Bejeweled? No.)

For me, this means learning what you actually want to know, becoming versed in it, and teaching you.

Or learning what tools you want and need, then creating them.

While all of that might sound extremely stupid and obvious to you, let me explain what your stupid side (or, my stupid side, whatever) does when you’re not actively thinking about this.

You daydream about what you’d love to make
You work on it, slave away at it
You get it near completion and start the freak out process because you don’t know if anyone will care
You put it out, and either nobody cares or only a few people
You cry yourself to sleep (this is optional, for humor purposes in this list)

So while I may love heavy metal, trip hop, or whatever – only on my bad days am I taking my craptastic trip-metal-hop-core and wondering if, or why the hell I’m not getting a job doing music for the next Avengers movie.

Trip-metal-hop-core might become a thing eventually, but first I need to start working on what “dumb filmmaker/game producer A” wants and hopefully tweak it to something I find bearable. In the process, I’ll learn more about how to do business and deal with clients, and I’ll likely even learn more about creativity that expands my creative repertoire.

Most importantly

I’m selling someone what they’re (already) buying.

Which means I’m actually making money.

Eventually (once I become an overnight success), my now artful trip-metal-hop-core will come into fashion after I’ve perfected it over countless rough experiences that create the story people buy.

Moral of the story?

(As if I need to repeat it again – but I will)

Don’t spend any time trying to figure out your perfect, personally expressive, artistic style and statement. It will find you and you will find it, with time.

Instead, focus on becoming skilled enough to work and how to sell your services (or products).

Most importantly, make sure

You you’re selling people what they’re (already) buying.