Client Acquisition For Mastering Engineers: How To Win, Maintain, And Organize Thousands Of Clients | With Mike Cervantes Of The Foxboro

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 248

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the show, first of all, welcome, glad to have you here. This show is for creatives who want to earn more money from their creative skills as a freelancer without selling their soul. If that sounds like you, you are at the right place. For my longtime listeners, especially for those who have been around for more than 100 episodes, we're going back to our roots today. For those who didn't know, my background is in music production. The show used to be called, like 100 episodes ago, the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast. It was for recording studio owners. And we're going back to our roots because I have a guest and longtime listener, someone who's listened to every episode of this podcast on the show. So his name is Mike Cervantes. He is a mastering engineer, a very successful mastering engineer that runs a mastering studio called the Foxboro. If you've really been a long time listener of the show, you've probably heard me talk about him on the show a couple of times for various reasons throughout our show, but I've never had him on here before. For those who are new, are not part of the audio world, I'll give you a quick and dirty Mastering for Dummies breakdown of what mastering is. It's just like the last phase, the last step in the audio production process, typically in music.

And for risk of vastly oversimplifying, it just makes all the levels of the songs from song to song on an album, the same level, usually louder.

And that's about all I'm going to say.

This has been the perpetual punching bag on the 6 Figure Creative podcast, the mastering services, because it is one of the hardest to differentiate in, because it is not what I would consider a transformational service. And that's why I wanted to bring Mike on the show. One of many reasons. Not only is Mike a multi-6 figure mastering engineer, which is already impressive enough and already very difficult to do for a multitude of reasons, competition aside, I've also been around to watch the vast majority of his career. Mike and I, we've met up for lunch before he really started his mastering journey. I've been able to follow along his journey as he's had more and more success. And he was actually like one of the early, early beta users of one of my software companies, Filepass. When we launched in 2018, he was like one of the first 20 people to sign up for that. And he's been using it ever since. So if you're still watching and you're not in the audio world, here's why Mike is worth listening to. Aside from the money conversation, he has worked with clients like Dolly Parton for King and Country, Avril Lavigne, Snoop Dogg, Rascal Flatts. He's got over 21 number one singles to his name as a mastering engineer and at least two gold records, maybe more. I didn't ask how many more he had besides the two that were behind him in this interview on the wall. But in this conversation, this is actually part one of two. We split this episode into two parter. In this episode, we talk about how he got traction early in his career with so much competition. Again, this is why I give mastering.

And honestly, a lot of the like smaller, quicker type service industries, like if you're a photographer, the headshot world, or if you are a graphic designer doing logos, that's sort of like one and done quick and dirty kind of projects tend to be very hard to differentiate and separate yourself. For example, if you can go to fiverr.com right now and hire somebody for the exact service that you offer, mastering is one of those things, by the way, then chances are you're in a service that's really hard to differentiate and really hard to stand out. So we talked about that, how he got started early in his career. We talked about how he went about choosing a business name, whether he should have gone under his personal name or a business name and the pros and cons of both sides and how that's played out throughout his career. We talked about how he approached client acquisition when he started versus how that looks now for him, because it's a lot different now than what it was in the beginning. And then we even talk about how he manages over a thousand projects and honestly, probably thousands of projects per year as a master engineer. Some of the systems he uses, some of the tools he uses, really good conversation. So without further delay, here's my conversation with Mike Cervantes of the Foxboro.