How To Break Through An 8-Year Income Plateau To FINALLY Hit 6 Figures | With Stephen Helvig

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 195

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. Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and I'm here with a very special guest, because this is a guest that is from our own community and has been a part of our community for a number of years. I don't know how many years, actually, but this is Stephen Helvig. First of all, say hi to everybody, Stephen.

Stephen Helvig (0:38)

Hey, everybody. Glad to be here.

Brian Hood (0:40)

Yeah, and so I want to start this interview off just straight from the get-go here. You spent eight years in what I call zombie land. You did just about everything you can possibly do wrong, just being fully candid based on our pre-interview. You did things, you had no clear goals when you started. You had no ambitions, no mentorship outside help.

And what I gathered from our pre-interview, you had tons of low points during that eight year gap of what I call zombie land, and you were basically just coasting along.

And I feel like a lot of our listeners are in this phase of their life right now. So before we get into the story of that eight years of zombie land, of just cruising along, maybe not loving your career in audio, I want you to tell our audience, first of all, what do you do and where are you now as a business compared to those eight years in zombie land?

Stephen Helvig (1:24)

Well, I'm a music producer, a studio owner.

I do everything from engineering, composing to the final music production, mixing, mastering, kind of a one-stop shop. I would say that at that eight year mark, I was probably doing like 50K a year, and now I'm over the six figure mark. And I would say even the first few years after I started turning things around, it was kind of a slow growth, and then it really started taking off in the last five years is where it really, you know, the efforts that I started to put in started to pay off, I guess.

Brian Hood (2:02)

Yeah, and I believe, I can't remember exactly where we came across your story, Stephen, but I believe it was in our Facebook community you'd posted something about this, and everyone can resonate with this. It's like you struggle for so long. And again, 50K, by the way, is no small feat. Like most people would be happy with that. But at the same time, like 50K revenue is not the same as 50K income.

Stephen Helvig (2:23)

That's correct. Especially if you have a studio of my size.

Brian Hood (2:27)

Yeah, so speaking of which, give the audience an idea of what your studio setup is like, the size of it, and everything associated with it, just so we have the kind of the grasp there.

Stephen Helvig (2:35)

I'm somewhere between a home studio and a commercial studio. It is in a home. I rent somebody else's home for my home studio. It's a pretty unusual setup. In fact, the whole studio is, the live room is completely underground, and it's an old, it was built as a squash ball court.

And the control room that I'm sitting in now looks down into the squash ball court. And the other rooms that I have are converted from like an old rec room. So this house was built like in the late 60s, early 70s, and it was a gym, hot tub room, squash ball court, all underneath the house.

It's a really unique kind of layout. Really cool. The live room is large. It's 28 feet long, 18 feet wide, with 13 foot high ceilings, which is pretty high considering it's a basement.

Brian Hood (3:22)

Yeah, seriously.

Stephen Helvig (3:23)

Yeah, you know, the whole studio probably is around 1,500 square feet of space. So, you know, when people pull up, they think, oh, this is probably a home studio.

But then when they walk in, they're like, wow, I never would have thought this was here.

Brian Hood (3:35)

It reminds me a lot of the studios you have in Nashville here in the neighborhood specifically called Berry Hills, which is where a lot of the studios congregate in the Nashville area.

And so you'll drive up and it'll just look like an old ranch style home that was built in the 60s or 70s, like a mid-century style home. And you walk in and it's just gutted and it's got a million dollar build out and it's beautiful. And it's like, what? You would not see that from the outside. So that's cool. So really quick, before we get into the story there, give us an idea of that 50K. What was the actual take home pay back then during the Zombieland years? Cause I'm actually curious. You don't have to share this, but I'm just kind of curious what that actually amounted to.