How I built and sold my Music Production Company

Hi all,

by trade I am a musician. I have been playing instruments and making music (writing, arranging, producing) for over 20 years. I studied at Berklee College of Music and worked in various Recording Studios with famous artists (Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Branford Marsalis, Maysa Leak, Bon Jovi..).

In 2001 I started my own music production company and small recording studio. I had a lot of expertise in writing, arranging and producing music and was very confident in my abilities to become successful. I spent a lot of time honing my craft and produced very high level work.

However, I had never had any training in business, marketing, accounting and sales and really had no idea about how to start and run a successful business. Although I had success here and there, it was not consistent enough for me to be able to stay in the music industry. In end of 2004/05 I sold my company and recording studio assets and had to close up shop.

Since then I have learned a great deal about what it takes to make a business successful and looking back on my music business experience I learned some very important lessons:

1. Being excellent at what you do is your cost-of-entry into the market. However if you don't market your talents/ products, have sales systems set up and work them consistently, then no one will know about how good you are and your business will go nowhere.

2. An effective online presence is inevitable. You must have a functioning and well laid out website in order to be competitive today. It is especially important to have systems integrated that allow you to interact with your customer base, such as newsletters, refer a friend, contests, email list database, free stuff, consistent updates on your activities, e-commerce functionality etc. (A lot of this stuff didn't exist when I was running my business, especially sites like Myspace.com can be helpful today)

3. You must build a brand that is compelling, memorable and expresses what you are about. Have a cool logo, marketing collateral, perhaps merchandize, a sticky tagline, perhaps theme melody (think Intel or NBC) etc. You must keep your brand and the way you represent yourself consistent at all times and don't do anything that doesn't fit with your brand. You will confuse your customer.

4. You must do networking, sales, follow ups and business development all the time. This is something that most business owners don't do. Things like sales, follow up systems, making connections, getting the word out there (through conferences, PR, etc.) only work if done all the time and consistently.

5. Market, market, market your business. If you don't know about marketing I strongly suggest to hire someone that does and works with start-up businesses. They can usually help you to streamline your current efforts and educate you about additional options fairly quickly. Read books about this. Marketing is really the main reason why most businesses fail. You should have many different marketing channels set up that run without you having to be there all the time such as referral systems, affiliate systems, incentive systems to reward those that refer you, automatic email and contatc manager systems, systems that track your results with different campaigns etc. Be online, offline and anywhere in between.

I hope some of these tips are benefitial to you in looking at your business in a different way. Remember: you must always be able to answer these two questions - What do I offer and why should anyone care?

Best,
Kai Witte

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RE: How I built and sold my Music Production Compa 2007-04-04 00:08:15
   You learned some very valuable lessons. Lots of people start companies to give themselves a job. They don't realize all the marketing and sales that must go into making their businesses successful. - Jeri Quinn

RE: How I built and sold my Music Production Compa 2007-03-05 10:15:40
   You say it was a failure but classified it as a success - Joseph Patton