We recently connected with Matt Earley and have shared our conversation below.

Matt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Quality control is a challenge almost every entrepreneur has had to focus on when growing – any advice, stories or insight around how to best ensure quality is maintained as your business scales?

From our inception, we have had a focus on quality control over the records we produce. We have always taken an approach of “how can this be done better” for each step of the process, even if that means that it increases our operating costs.

The most important step in ensuring high quality records is helping our employees to see the same vision. We have been extremely blessed to have the most amazing team, many of whom have been with us for over a decade now. Having a team that believes in our mission of making the best records on the planet helps not only to accomlish that mission, but also helps new employees and new customers become believers in our process as well.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started working with records in college, at the local record store (Finders Records, in Bowling Green, Ohio). Back then, I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to specifically do for a career, but I knew I wanted to be in the music business in some manner.

My first job out of college was with a record wholesaler in Columbus, Ohio (Campus Records) – I answered an ad in Billboard Magazine for an open sales position that they had at the time. Campus Records was bought by Arrow/ATM Distributing (a larger music wholesaler), which was eventually bought by Alliance Entertainment (now the largest music wholesaler in the world). I worked in sales through each new acquisition/incarnation of the companies, and every year, vinyl record sales grew.

In 2008, I decided that it was time to start a pressing plant. I searched the country for machinery – I connected with the former owner of Dynamic Sun (pressing plant in NJ), who told me “we just sold everything to somebody in Ohio yesterday!”. Sun’s owner would not reveal the identity of the investor, but after some sleuthing around on the Ohio Secretary of State website to find any business filings with the word “Records”, I found Vince Slusarz, the founder of Gotta Groove Recods. I was able to connect with Vince; we met about a week later, and over the next year, made the decision to go into business together.

Here we are almost 16 years later, and Gotta Groove is going strong, pressing records for hundreds of different indie labels and musicians throughout the year.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

Neither myself, my business partners, nor any of our employees had any prior experience manufacturing vinyl records. Some had some manufacturing experience in general – but making vinyl records can be a unique animal, even to folks with decades of manufacturing experience.

I believe that this is actually one of the key reasons for our ongoing success — when you (and your team) are forced to learn everything from scratch, you wind up on the other side really knowing every facet of every step of the processes involved much deeper than you otherwise would. Also, you do not inherit any “bad habits” from other operations when you start from scratch – so you (and your team) get to form the best processes for the business, vs doing things that are just “how they were always done” elsewhere.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

One of our best sources of customers is word of mouth from existing customers. It was not always this way – and we still do our fair share of cold emails / cold calls / cold DMs – which are all still very successful ways to get new customers. I have always found through cold calls that people tend to be a little surprised we are reaching out directly to work with them. I do not think it is this way in every industry, but in our industry, I think just the approach of contacting someone directly leaves a very positive impression upon them. It may not instantly turn into a sale, but it starts a relationship, which can lead to something down the road.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gottagrooverecords.com / www.recordplating.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/gottagrooverecs
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/gottagrooverecs