How To Avoid Nightmare Clients By Watching For These 8 Red Flag

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, episode 16 You're listening to the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast.

Good afternoon, Chris Graham.

Chris Graham (0:21)

I'm wonderful, Brian Hood. How are you, sir?

Brian Hood (0:24)

I'm doing great today, and I'm really excited about today's episode topic, because I think it will help a lot of people who tend to fall into the trap of just taking whatever they can get.

And so today's topic is going to be about spotting red flags. We're going to give you eight red flags to look out for whenever you are potentially talking to a new client, someone who comes to the studio or someone you're working with on a mixing project or a mastering project or whatever it is that you do.

Before you start working with them, you want to look out for red flags. You would never want to marry a girl if you spotted a ton of red flags. Otherwise, you could end in a very, very bad situation for you. And so in order to prevent yourself from getting into a bad relationship with a band or a solo artist or whatever it is that you work with, you want to spot the red flags. Chris, have you ever had red flags that you've spotted with people before?

Chris Graham (1:19)

Oh, sweet saucy molasses have I ever.

Brian Hood (1:23)

This is honestly one of the easiest episode topics we've ever had to outline before.

Chris Graham (1:27)

It really was.

Brian Hood (1:27)

It took us like three minutes.

All right, so before we actually get into this episode, we want to preface this a little bit with a couple of things. Chris, you want to go with this part?

Chris Graham (1:36)

Yeah, for sure. You know, the first thing we got to keep in mind for these red flags is depending on where you are in the world and what genre you're in, what country you're in, whether you're doing work around the corner or around the globe, culture comes into this. So some of these issues might not apply, but that's really not that important. The most important thing is that you have a personal list of red flags that you look out for. So again, this is going to be an a la carte episode of pick and choose the ones that to you sound like they're probably pretty on the money. But the best thing you can possibly do and to keep in mind is that no one knows your customers better than you do. No one's experienced what you've experienced. So having a list of, hey, in the future, I need to watch out for this. In the future, when a client says this, that should give me pause.

So that's the most important take home right out of the gates from here. Me and Brian are going to share some stories about issues that we've had and red flag policies that we have as a result of having issues.

Feel free to take some of those and put those on your own personal red flag list.

Brian Hood (2:43)

So just imagine this, if you are talking to a band, an artist, and you take on a project that you shouldn't have because you ignored a red flag, and later on down the road, they now hate you for no fault of your own, except the fault was your own because you just ignored a red flag. It's like dating a person who you were really attracted to, and they were an absolute train wreck in every other aspect of their life. They were on drugs, they stole things from people, they were a violent person or whatever, and but they were hot and you ignored that.

You have full responsibility for anything that happens in that relationship after the fact.

You have to take responsibility if you ignore red flags. And so what we want to do here in this episode is just make sure that you know what red flags to look out for, because you don't know what you don't know. And so there could be some of the nightmare projects you've had in the past are because you didn't know how to spot these red flags. And today's episode is all about helping you spot those red flags so you can skip out on those projects or pass it off to someone else.

Chris Graham (3:47)

Yeah, and a big thing to keep in mind here, especially if you are just starting out, is that oftentimes these sort of red flag clients, these sort of nightmare clients, they bounce around from engineer to engineer to engineer to engineer, and they eventually end up trying to work with new people.