Wednesday, January 24, 2024
In this episode, Jared Judge dives into the transformative potential of having a personal assistant for your gigging act. He explores how an assistant can handle the myriad administrative tasks that come with running a successful musical act, from marketing and social media management to editing gig videos and more. Jared shares his own experiences with virtual assistants and how they have been game-changers for members of his Fulltime Music Academy. He discusses the benefits of offloading routine tasks, allowing musicians to focus on their art and personal life. The episode also covers the practical aspects of working with assistants, including task delegation and communication strategies. Jared's insights provide valuable guidance for musicians looking to streamline their business operations and achieve greater success in their careers.
"Teaching Jan how to turn what he subconsciously did into a step-by-step logical framework was a big aha moment for both him and me."
- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Secret To an Unlimited Stream of High-Paying Private Event Gigs …Without Spending a Fortune on Online Advertising or Having Any Connections!
- Fulltime Music Academy (Gig Vault): 24,665 High-End Venues + Event Planners: Use this directory to book your highest-paid gig to-date.
What's up, gigging pros? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Alright.
Just came from the gym. It's a great, beautiful morning. It's like 48 degrees out and it's perfect temperature to cool down after a nice hard workout.
I wanted to. There are two directions I could take today's podcast. I'm probably just gonna do one now.
Maybe I'll record another one later. Later. But wanted to revisit the idea of having an assistant who does all of the administrative stuff for your gigging act.
And by the way, this doesn't just apply to gigging acts, this applies to everything. Like, if you run a business, you could have them do all the admin for your business. Which by the way, gigging acts our business is surprise.
It also could even apply to your family operations if you had an assistant to do all of your appointment scheduling and run errands for you. How amazing would that be? So I apologize. I'm out of breath.
Okay, so getting back to how to use an assistant for your gigging act, think of all of the extra stuff that you have to do to run a musical act, because it's not just about practicing and performing, right? I guess some musicians think it is, but they're the ones who are stuck in the practice room not getting any gigs and not making money off of their gigs.
So you guys realize that there's a lot to this business, including everything from marketing your act, putting together posters of your upcoming shows, emailing venues to try to get them to book you, and putting up social media posts, creating the actual content for the social posts.
Like if you get videos from a gig, well, who's going to edit it? Most likely it's you.
And so how amazing would it be to offload a bunch of that work to somebody else, either for cheaper than you would be able to do it?
Because even though you're probably not paying yourself for that admin time, it's still costing you money and costing you opportunities that you could be spending that time elsewhere, like hanging out with your family, going to the movies, learning a new tune, et cetera.
So think about what that would save you and allow you to do if you didn't have to do all of those tasks. So that is the big case for having an assistant.
And I did a whole episode a while back about virtual assistants. This is kind of a follow up, part two to that, because recently I've been doing an experiment. I have two virtual assistants who work for me, and I also lend them out to members of my Fulltime Music Academy.
And inside of Fulltime Music Academy, there is a special form to fill out to request the virtual assistants to perform a task for you. And the form has a lot of options that you could have them pick from. Some of them are email venues or even find new venues to reach out to, et cetera.
But it's already a great experience for our Fulltime Music Academy members. A lot of them say this has been game changing for them, but I know that it could be better because the problem with that format is you fill out a form and then you have to wait because your task kind of goes into a line and it goes to the end of the line after all the other tasks that have been submitted. And some of those tasks take longer than others.
And so you might have to wait a couple of days or even a week to get it done. And what if circumstances change between now and when your task is finally ready to be worked on?
Still, it's a good solution. I don't know of any other companies that are offering anything like this, but I'm always on this lookout for better ways of doing things, and I think I've stumbled upon it because one of my platinum Fulltime Music Academy members, Jan, came to me and said he was looking to like he loved working with the Dream team, but he wanted more support and he wanted more personal assistance.
He said, well, I guess I'm in the market to hire my own virtual assistant. Can you help me? And I said, let's come up with a creative way to make this happen for you. When you hire a virtual assistant, the end result is great, but it takes time and effort to find this person.
You have to put out listings on job sites like upwork.com or fiver.com for exactly what you're looking for.
You have to find somebody who's in the right budget for you, and then you have to train them on how to be a good virtual assistant to you, which oftentimes they have to learn your communication style, they have to learn your expectations.
And then the most important part aside from that is they have to learn all of the different job specific tasks. Like what does it look like to prospect for a venue in Austin, Texas?
What does it look like to email and follow up with them? What is it like to create social media posts? And so I think he knew what he was getting into and said, well, what if? Do you really feel like you need a full time virtual assistant? He said, no, not really.
I just need an hour or so every day. And it was that consistency of every day, which was what made him search for one in the first place. So I said, well, what if there was a way we could basically lend you my virtual assistants in that exact way where an hour a day you would be able to chat with them? A messaging app.
In our case, we use slack. So what if I invited you to our slack channel with your personal virtual assistant? So I lent him Charo. Charo is one of my two virtual assistants and taught Jan how to log into slack and then message with Charo every day.
And we've been doing that for just under a week now. And it's been amazing to watch on the sidelines as Jan starts to offload all of these tasks that he would normally be doing.
Example, you know, the most recent one is he's got a band of about six people, and they all have different availabilities, which means their ability to take gigs is dependent on knowing who's available on what day and hits January.
So he wants to be able to book out at least a year in advance. So knowing who's available in up to a year out is very difficult to manage. So I said, why don't we let that be one of the first tasks you offload to Charo? And he said, that sounds good.
That would take a lot of headache off of my plate. And so I taught Jan how to work with a virtual assistant and teach them new tasks, which is pretty interesting because you have to really think about how you do the task anyway.
A lot of times it's just kind of second nature to us and you have to step out of your subconscious and make the subconscious conscious and say, well, in order to request, get everybody's availability, I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all of them.
And so the first step is to log into my email and send a specific email template to the band. And here's the email template saying, hey, could you guys let me know your unavailable weekends next six months or whatever? And here are the email addresses I send it to. So that's step one, send those emails.
And then step two is monitor my inbox every day, which Charo can do that now, because know, working with Jan every single day, monitor my inbox every day for replies. And when they get a reply, update the spreadsheet for that specific person with the dates that they've given us. And that is step two.
Step three would be if so and so, or if anybody doesn't respond within three days or so, then send this follow up template and then just repeat that until we get everybody's availability.
And so teaching Jan how to turn what he subconsciously did into a step by step logical framework, I think was a big aha moment for both him and me. And I think it's enabling him to think about all of the tasks that he would have done normally that he doesn't need to do.
Right? Because if you could teach somebody else how to do it, then all of a sudden you've freed yourself from it, which is amazing. I don't know. I just need to share that experience because I'm thinking of offering that specific experience to more musicians.
Would you like to have a virtual assistant every single day where you log in and send you a neat little green hand? Today I will be working on getting you more preferred paper chips in your gig vault. Are there any higher priority tasks today? Like, how cool would that be? If you're interested, let me know. You can email me.
Jared@booklive.com and I'd be happy to kind of chat with you, figure out how we can make that work, because, yeah, we're still figuring this out. I don't have all the answers, but I just know that on a path towards making this really amazing thing, that could help a ton of musicians.
So that's all I got for you guys today. Sorry about all the wind, but hope this was a helpful, insightful episode. And that's it for you.
So thanks for tuning into another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "Your music will not market itself!".
Bye, everybody.
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