We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christian Caicedo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Christian, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

The most important lesson I learned was the implementation of systems and automation. For years I would be stuck doing non-important tasks that took a lot of time away from me.

I would have to touch each step of my lead generation, sales, onboarding and actual client work.

This is where systems and automation really improved my overall success in increasing my dollar per hour without raising prices, hours on the job, and looking at my business from a top down position to see how everything works together.

It took probably 20-30 hours to learn the different tools and automation processes that I implemented, but it allowed me to save significantly more time month over month. When you’re a solopreneur, every minute of your day matters.

My automation process looked like this – A lead fills out the form on my homepage. That data gets sent to my CRM, which it then creates a deal with a value based on the service they are needing (mixing or mastering). From there, an automated email gets sent to the lead to schedule a sales call with a Calendly link for them to book. If they book the call, great, I will see it in my calendar and give the lead a call at their scheduled time. If they do not book the call, then a follow up email gets sent to them 2 days later and moves them along the pipeline.

After the call, I send the client a proposal with the cost of their project. Once the proposal is signed, the client then pays the deposit amount right within my proposal software. This is where things get fun. I integrated Zapier with my proposal software, Quickbooks invoicing, my CRM, Dropbox, and my email.

After the deposit is paid and proposal is signed, Zapier determines the remaining balance due and sends that invoice to the client. After a few minutes, the client then receives and email with 3 items. 1, a link to all of my walk-through guides on how to prep their project. 2, a link to schedule time on my calendar to work on their project. 3, a customized dropbox link, specifically for this client, for them to upload their project into my business Dropbox account which is synced to my desktop for work.

To touch each one of those pieces would take me anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour per lead/client. Now the process is automated so I only have to talk to the client, send the proposal, and work on the actual project. A total process time of 4-8 hours turns in to about 3-4 hours of work.

Christian, 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?

My name is Christian Caicedo, I own Envious Audio in Austin, TX which is a mixing and mastering studio for EDM producers.

One of the core problems that my target audience faces is getting their tracks to sound as clean and loud as professionals that have been full time in the business for 10+ years. That’s where I come in. I help clean up artists tracks and make them ready for release to play on the dancefloor.

I first started as an electronic music producer back in 2013. Around 2017 I was thinking of ways that I could implement the years of training I had into an actual business. Eventually, my musical skills would pay the bills and I could basically get paid to keep learning new things and focus on my own music in my free time.

The thing I’m most proud about is developing my own podcast called Electronic Dance Money. The podcast focuses on teaching EDM producers the business side of the industry. How to market a track, develop business skills to be used as supplemental income to their passion, designing systems to best utilize their time, as well as how to build an audience of followers that care about the thing they create.

I took that podcast from about 10 listeners/month to around 1k monthly listeners/month in about 3 years. Most of it was word of mouth with little to no marketing behind it, not even content. Which I will say, was the biggest pain point in my growth. I just wouldn’t ever put enough content clips out of the show on social media. That’s my biggest regret and the thing that I would do differently if I could go back in time.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

So I’m the only person that actually runs my business. I have no one to answer to, other than my clients. I handle the sales, marketing, accounting, and physical work. When you’re running the ship on your own, there are a lot of questionable things. There are many hats you have to wear and you need to learn each piece of those, even if you plan on outsourcing them.

As a solopreneur, there are too many months where you don’t know if you’re going to get a new client or have a returning client. The odds are stacked against you and there are slow months. There are months where no one needs work and you start questioning everything in front of you. Did I make the right move? Should I have invested in x marketing plan? Do people even care about this service I offer anymore? Am I even good enough to compete with others on a global scale?

Imposter syndrome kicks in very fast, and it will grow exponentially if you don’t stop it in it’s tracks.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stared at my computer with no work to do an questioning it all. But sitting and doing nothing doesn’t fix a single thing. Even though there’s no client work to be done, there is still a never ending plate of things to try and test. There was a point where I didn’t get any work for about 4 months and needed to get something going quick to try and ramp up the rate at which I was receiving leads. So I decided to take a risk and start implementing multiple marketing channels. I spent about 10 hours developing a webinar to showcase my skills and teach my target audience exactly what I do. But the thing about that, is that they aren’t me. They won’t be able to do exactly what I do, the way I do it, because they are not me. This opens the door for them to try out what I do, but fall short and end up wanting to work with me. That really helped bring some additional clients in. At the same time, I started working developing some Google Search Ads. At this time it was in the middle of COVID in 2020 so everyone was at home. Most of my target audience is spread across the world so I can market to anyone from anywhere. This advantage allowed me to snag them in the search results with looking for the answer to their problem. Everyone was on social media so I was able to run some social ads for my webinar to hook them when they were doom scrolling on their phone.

The point of these examples is to show that when things get tough, you have to keep moving. You need to start testing new ideas and ways of getting in front of your audience to capture them when they need you most.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Being a source of help. Helping your audience is all they care about. Too many people focus on what they do and how good they are at doing it. But no one cares about you or how you do it. They want a solution, and you have to be answer to their problem.

You target audience is the hero in the story of your business. It’s not you, no matter how much you think it is. Make them feel like the hero. You are the Obi-Wan to client, guiding them along their path and journey. Servicing them and helping when it’s needed most.

If you do not figure that out ASAP, you’re doomed to fail and wonder where it went wrong. Put the story of your client first and show them that you’re a means to the end of their journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://enviousaudio.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/enviousaudio
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/enviousaudio1

Image Credits
Paxton Conners