We recently connected with Jorge Hernandez and have shared our conversation below.
Jorge, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
By 2020, I had a respectable business as a manager for recording artists, producers, writers, and youtube influencers. In January 2020, I started a record label with two other music managers. We had a very humble beginning and started our company with $7,500 total. In March of that year, a very reputable media company made a lucrative offer to buy my management company and essentially make me an acquihire. I instead opted to continue on my independent path primarily because I thought there was great potential in the record label my partners and I formed. One year later we entered into a joint venture agreement with Atlantic Records. Three years later we are very much a going concern and still going strong.
Jorge, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a lifelong music geek and music business entrepreneur. Since I was a kid, music has been at the center of my life. I was a serious musician starting around age 13 and ended up receiving my master’s degree in music performance by the age of 25. Around that time I lived in a town called Bloomington, IN where there was a vibrant music scene, but nobody doing anything with it. That was the beginning of my music business career. I started a small record label out of my college bedroom that morphed into a management company. By 1999 I moved to Los Angeles and was hired to work as an A&R executive and general manager for a newly formed record label. I stayed in that role for four years. After that, I started over as a music manager. The years between 2003 through about 2008 were fun, and filled with a lot of hope, and seemingly great opportunity. However, If I’m being honest, by the end of 2008 I felt trapped and didn’t know what to do. My career had essentially stalled.
I ended up going back to school to earn my MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management. I was ready to hang it up in so far as music was concerned. I even managed to raise slightly more than $1 million dollars for a tech start-up and pursued that. However, the longer I was away from the music business, the more miserable I was. By 2014, I needed to find a way back in. For the third time in my career, I started over and began managing an artist who was also a writer. That led to a lot of different doors opening up and new opportunities that eventually got me right back into the swing of things. By 2019, the trajectory of my career was like that proverbial hockey stick on a graph, it just shot straight up.
If I look back on my career, the one element that I think is most important for anyone to achieve success is tenacity. The music business is a very high-risk endeavor and it can wear you down to hustle and grind, only to come up empty every time. It might have defied all logic, but the truth is I’m only here because I decided to dust myself off after each failure and try again. The beauty of being an entrepreneur, and I believe this regardless of industry, is you can be wrong as many times as you like, but you only have to be right once.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
I once heard an interview with Russell Simmons, a legendary music executive. He was asked about two interns he once had, Julie Greenwald, who is currently a music mogul, Chairman and CEO of Atlantic Music Group, and Diddy aka Sean Combs. Russell said that when interns usually came to work for him, they almost always came with the mindset of, “How do I get ahead?” “How do I turn this into a job, or a way for me to further my career.” Russell said that both Julie and Diddy came at being an intern differently. Their mindset was, “How can I be of service?” Whatever someone needed, whether it was an errand, coffee, photocopies, whatever it was, according to Russell, Julie and Diddy were always of service, no matter the task. Russell’s contention was, when you are of service, that’s when you are valuable and then good things happen to you and for you. This was a bit of a eureka moment for me because up to that point in my career, I always was looking at things from the perspective of “How do I get ahead?” “How do I turn this into a way for me to further my career.”
From that moment forward, I stopped thinking of myself when I met people. Instead, I asked that person, and myself, how can I be of service? That completely changed everything. I wouldn’t have the career I have today otherwise. The joint venture record label I co-founded, which is at the center of my career, came about because of this mindset. One of my partners was a relative newcomer to the music business when I met him in 2018. He used to call me all the time for advice and to pick my brain about what he was doing. I made myself available to him all the time and was one of the few people who would take his call. We became friends and a mentor-mentee relationship developed. Because of him, I met my other partner and the three of us decided to start the company we currently have.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
We made a conscience choice on day one which was, let’s create a company where we would want to come and work every day. We definitely seek a certain type of person to work with us which is people who are self-starters. We encourage them to behave like entrepreneurs within our own company. We gave them the space to also feel like the needs they may have in their personal lives are met. We don’t keep track of days off or things of that nature. You need to work from home? Totally fine. You want to take some time off for a vacation or have a family issue to attend to, that’s fine too. Our feeling is just so long as the work is getting done, we are not going to micromanage you. That works very well for our company.
