The Signal to Noise of Business

Quite a few of you have emailed me over the years since I started writing with the following sentiment:

“How do I go about getting clients? Like, GOOD clients. You know – the ones who pay me well, see my brilliance, and let me do whatever I want and we never disagree on anything ever?!”

Okay, so heavy sarcasm, but your point is often this:

I just want to enjoy what I do, with people I trust, and get paid. How?

Well, a dissertation could be written about how to uncover wonderful clients. Quite frankly, a lot of those have been written. So, that’s not where I’m going to start today.

Instead, we’re going to cover the important first step of the process. This assumes you already have clients or know how to get bad ones by whatever methods.

Even better, to explain this – I’m going to use a really simple concept that you already know and love. It’s a concept that also seems to apply to everything in the known universe.

Signal to Noise Ratio

One of the first things most aspiring professional audio engineers learn is a concept called “signal to noise ratio”.

This is, of course, a comparison of how much crap you don’t want versus crap you want that you have in a given audio signal (technical terminology here). Your goal, as an audio engineer, is to get as much signal (crap you want) as possible while getting rid of as much noise (crap you don’t want) as possible – simultaneously.

The methods of how to do this vary on context – from using microphone rejection and pickup patterns properly in the field, to saying “f*** it we’ll do fix it in post!” and making a poor sap’s life miserable later.

As I said before, I’ve found that this concept applies nearly universally to everything.

Injest loads of trashy entertainment in lieu of spending time learning? Your brain will suffer for it.

Injest loads of Doritos & Mountain Dew instead of whole foods and cool, crisp water? Your body will suffer for it.

Sit on your butt and play hours of video games (or type blogs) instead of hitting the gym? Your body will suffer for it.

Spend hours on social media inadvertently instead of reading books or having real human interaction? Your mind will suffer for it.

Work with lots of craptastic clients you can’t trust instead of working on yourself and meeting trustworthy people? Your work will suffer for it.

Ah! Now you see where I’m getting at…

The point is this – the more crap you allow in, the less room you have for the good stuff.

The Use in Business

If you’re trying to start your own business or work as a contractor, then a lot of your job is finding the right people to work with.

This is the direct opposite of how the vast majority of unemployed or underemployed sound people go about trying to find work. The typical story is:

“I’ve messaged a variety of devs on message boards, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit – nobody got back to me except people who wanted me to work for ‘credit’!”

Occasionally, the people who send out these large blasts of contact to everyone they can will find work. That work will be with small-time clients who can’t pay much, and promise the world after the game is done.

You’ll get promised pay in percentage, as the “first choice” supplier on their next game, whatever – anything except for paying you legitimate dollars in your pocket now.

These clients are noise. Because they’re noise – they’re not extremely hard to find.

Funny how that works, right? If you don’t really know what you’re doing it’s way easier to get a crappy audio signal than a good one.

(If you don’t think that’s true, break down all of your equipment and ask your mom to spend an afternoon recording a “podcast” with your equipment. With none of your help.)

So, now that I’m sure you get the concept, your next question is

“Okay, I’ve got a bunch of noise. How do I get “signal”? The good clients!”

The first step is this – get rid of the bad ones.

Purging

I can’t prescribe you a step-by-step guide to how this works. Everyone has to pay bills, and therefore not everyone can just drop all of the work they have if it’s paying their bills. That’s also not what I’m trying to tell you to do.

But, eventually those clients are going to have to go away. Either you’re going to cut them out (the best option), or they’re going to drop you like a sack of potatoes (the unwanted option) eventually.

You can ease the bleeding many ways – all of which involve work. You can push yourself to find new clients, you can get a side-job to cover yourself, and many other things.

But the key to the whole concept is this –

Whether you like it or not, you cannot have a good clean signal that still contains a high level of noise.

You’re probably always going to have some noise. If you boost a signal high enough, there’s a noise floor. But the goal is to get that noise floor low enough that it’s not a big deal. Which means purging as much noise from your life as possible.

Believe me, it’s not as hard as you’re imagining it is. It’s just uncomfortable – because the places with high signal to noise ratios are places like:

Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Reddit
Forums and Chats
Cold email
Even some meetups, conferences – though that has a lot to do with how you approach them too

You’ll find a much lower signal to noise ratio when exploring options like

Most meetups, conferences – especially when connecting with new people
Meetups and groups not focused on your discipline (ie: programming, design, etc.)
Paid membership groups (ie: Gamkedo)
“Warm” email introductions
Existing trustworthy professional relationships (not all need to be in games – you can learn a lot from generally successful people)

These things all work for different varying reasons. They usually fall under two camps –

There’s just less people like you around
There’s a barrier to entry (money, difficulty, existing connections)

Note that the vast majority of those options are also long term approaches. Yes, you can find an amazing client through happenstance of an unexpected introduction tomorrow – but it’s much more likely that you’ll spend a lot of time where you feel like nothing is working until magically it does.

If you go read biographies of successful people – that’s most often just the normal process. We all know that “overnight successes” usually don’t exist. Instead, it’s 10 years that most of the world only learned about last week. You’re not exempt.

But, the faster you learn how to get the noise out of your life – the faster you’ll learn how to get a good “business signal” and keep it that way.

That’s why – at first you might have to say “yes” to every opportunity that comes your way. But almost as quickly as it succeeds, that strategy will then horribly fail you if you keep it up. Once you’ve got a little headway, your “yes” responses have to turn into “no” responses. That’s not out of maliciousness or ill intent – but just because your short term goals change and you have to up your standards to reach your longer term goals. Unfortunately, you can’t keep everyone happy.

What Did I Just Say?

I just rambled for quite a while about a relatively simple topic. I had to ramble, because many of you need examples and don’t want to listen to me because it’s uncomfortable.

I get it, I was there too once. Just, get started.

In case you missed it – here’s what I said:

You understand the concept of “signal to noise ratio” because you’re a sound engineer
“Signal to noise ratio” applies to everything in your entire life
Bad, untrustworthy clients that are hard to work with are noise
To get more “signal” (good clients) – you first must get rid of the noise
Getting rid of “the noise” isn’t super easy, but it’s not as hard as you’d think
Get offline with your search, and look in unexpected places that have some barriers to entry

BOOM! Pursue that long enough, and I bet you’re going to find some good things.