Jason Tonioli: And I would say for artists, if there was a tip I could have for you as you're engaging people: have some way of getting them back, even to come and get in the habit of coming again for a second and a third time, and what you'll find is a percentage of those people, if you give them $4 or $5 for free, they'll buy another thing from you in addition to that. It might take them 10 times of doing that, but as long as you have a way to re-engage them and over deliver on value, eventually it pays off. 

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology, and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

All right. So welcome back to the Modern Musician podcast. I'm super excited to be here today with the one and only Jason Tonioli. So Jason has one of the greatest business minds, I think, of anyone that I've ever connected with. He's someone who's experienced a lot of success in different business domains. And the way that he's applied that to his music career has been personally really inspiring for me, and seeing the other causes and the businesses that you're part of, Jason, have been amazing. Like what you do in Costa Rica when you hosted the mastermind for us. Just an absolutely incredible experience, and what you've created, the ecosystem there for Amazing Vacations, is awesome. So I'm really excited to have him on the podcast today. He is a new age pianist. He is a self publisher of 8 albums. He's contributed to TV documentaries, collaborated with several renowned artists, and he's also applied his business experience to several different domains. He's one of our artists who won our platinum artist award, which is when you generate over 7 figures in revenue with your music. So he is the real deal, and he knows a thing or two about providing value and building businesses.

To start with, I'd love to hear just a little bit about your story about how you got started in business and also how that transition and that kind of paid it forward into your music career.

Jason Tonioli: Yeah, I honestly, I started out as probably the normal piano playing kid that had a mom that made him practice piano. We joke about it a lot still with my mom that she won the piano war and thank goodness she did because it's been fun. Once you get over that hurdle and you start to enjoy music, which is such a hard thing, I think a lot of people start piano or guitar lessons and they'll do it for a few years, and then when it gets hard, they just quit. That's the story for more people than actually have ended up playing piano or guitar and sticking with it. All through high school, I did choirs and did a little bit of music, but I was more busy doing rock climbing and I was on the dive and swim team doing flips and belly flops and all that good stuff. So I was a very active kid. I worked 25-30 hours a week in high school and then ended up going to Weber State. I lasted 2 days in the music program up there. I'd passed an AP music test that's supposed to teach you how to do arranging and all kinds of fun stuff with music. I'd done that in high school, and when I got to the college, they told me I had to do the basic music theory 1:1 class. On day 1, we made it through whole notes and half rests. The second day of sitting through quarter notes and eighth notes in class, I went to the teacher and said: I just want to go into orchestration. I’ve published music and, I'd gotten a check actually for $2.50 for my music, so I'd hit the big time by then by my first year at college. [both laughing] I still have it framed on my wall over here, actually, I never did cash it. I was one of those where I didn't think you could make money as a musician. It was just one of those things that you typically wouldn't expect to be able to do. After that second day, I dropped out of the 1:1 class and went over to the business department at school and took marketing and accounting and got a business degree. Frankly, as I look back, that was probably one of the best things I did for my music career, even though I didn't think that was going to lead to anything with music. I ended up working at a bank as a marketing director which sounds really, really boring being a stuffy banker, but I ended up doing marketing for every department in the bank. I got to build websites and do newspaper ads. It was right in the early 2000s when the Internet was just becoming a thing. It was a really exciting time for advertising in general, because all of the old school direct mail/junk mail time and newspapers evolved into internet and email and then texting became a thing, and Facebook came about and YouTube, Google. It was honestly… I couldn't have picked a better time to probably live through the evolution of advertising mediums. I got to dabble. I got to spend $600,000-$700,000 a year of other people's money and test out all these mediums, which was a ton of fun. I spent 12 years doing that, had worked with a lot of our software vendors to develop things. We'd actually built some in house things at the bank, and what ended up happening is we developed some tools that these auditor regulator people from the government that go into banks all the time, they'd come in and they raved. We were in, they call it an exit interview in the banks, and after the auditors have spent 2-4 weeks there and try to find problems with your bank and tell you how you can do better. Anyway, what ended up happening is: it was right about 2009 when all the bank crashes had been going on and every bank out there expected to get to beat up over all of problem loans and other things like that. And the regulators spent like 30 minutes talking about the marketing department and how awesome our stuff was and how they wished every bank in the world was doing this. My CFO and the president came out of that meeting, just shaking their head. They were really happy because they hadn't gotten beat up at all, which is normally what happens in those meetings, and they're like: what do you guys do in marketing? These regulators that want to look at numbers are excited about. Anyway, in the end our processes we'd built were really well received. We told the bank people: Hey, we could probably sell this to other banks. Do you want us to do that? And they said: no we're a bank. We're not a software company. We're not interested in doing that. And we basically said, hey, can we go and try to build this and help other banks? And they said, go for it. So I ended up quitting my job and going and starting a software company going from paycheck to nothing within about a week and a half time period, which is always exciting for anybody who's done that. And then from there, built a software company that tracked volunteer hours and donations and things for the marketing department to get things approved a lot faster. That's done a lot of great things. I think it's tracked over 2 million volunteer hours in banks and credit unions around the country, which is crazy to think. I think they've processed about a half a billion dollars in donations for charities and other people in need. So anyway, cool software. About 6 years ago I was able to sell my shares and essentially retired and thought what do I do now? And I decided I'd spend a little bit more time on some music. I'd released books and CDs and put stuff up on iTunes, TuneCore, on those platforms, but I was making what a new school teacher would make: $30-40,000 a year. Which, for a musician, that's awesome. The fact that I was able to have sold stuff online, but now that I had time to spend on other things, I thought: okay let's really try and build a funnel or all these things that you always say you're going to do, but you never get around to. And ended up doing that. Went through the one funnel away challenge that ClickFunnels does, and made me rethink all of the marketing that I'd done for the last 15 years. Next thing I know, we're shipping 200 orders a day out of our garage in books. Back, call it the good old days when Facebook, I could put $3 into Mr. Zuckerberg at Facebook and it would come back and end up giving me $2 back. So just like this money machine, and I was getting new people in my list and it was amazing.

Michael Walker: And to clarify for people who are listening and watching this right now, when you say like selling books you're a instrumentalist and a piano player. So you're selling books that are like…

Jason: That you just go buy at the piano store. Yeah. It's instrumental. It's just piano solos. I think I've got 5 or 6 original song books now. I've got 8 Kim arrangement books. Some are a little more intermediate-advanced. Some are easy. But those have sold really well. I used to have a list of 2,000 people and I think I've spent about $800,000 on Facebook and Google ads over the last 2.5 years or so, which just makes me want to throw up. That's so that just seems like so much money, but as long as you're getting more than you put into Facebook out, keep playing that game. When you start losing money, then, stop, pull back. [both laughing] It's been fun. I think our record year, a couple of years ago during the pandemic, we shipped 28,000 packages out of the garage, which is insane to think that we were doing that much. We're still doing several hundred a week or that's a normal week for us. I think it's a testament to: when you bring in a lead to interact with you for the 1st time, whether you sell a book or a CD or whatever fan pack, whatever it might be, the key thing is what are you doing to onboard them or kinda have them like you or engage deeper with you. I think that's a place where a lot of people never get around to doing it. They'll launch that first thing to get a fan on whether it's Facebook, YouTube, wherever, but then there's no clear path to keep them engaged and learn about you and what you're about and see if they really want to go deeper with you. I would say I've done an okay job of that. We could always do better.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I think it would be really valuable to hear your perspective on is the idea of building a funnel, and putting funnels versus streaming. If someone is listening to us right now, and if you're here in our community then you're probably familiar with funnels and it's not necessarily a new concept, but for a lot of people, streaming and Spotify, they think of music businesses like that's how they're going to make an income. I'd love to hear from your perspective, how would you describe the difference between funnels and streaming and the pros and cons of sending someone through a funnel?

Jason: Really all a funnel is is just like a landing page to either educate somebody on something, or get somebody to do something. With the streaming revenue, people just either randomly going to find you, or hear you on a playlist, or follow you. I would say that streaming revenue is just going to be a result of whatever you want your people to go through. When I send out onboarding emails, if somebody's bought something or downloaded a free thing from me for the first time, I have a whole series of things that 1) to ask: do you play piano or are you just a listener? And so if you're a listener, immediately after that I'll send a link to a playlist. Hey here's a YouTube playlist and Spotify playlist of my stuff if you want to check it out or follow it. If they're piano players, I still send them the link to the streaming stuff, but then I say: Hey, here's a free PDF song that I think you might like to check this out. And then from there I'll also follow up, a week later, I'll send them a free coupon actually to say: Hey, go pick a song out. I got 100 songs on the website. Go choose one. Even though I'm giving them a free song, essentially, or $5 towards the thing, what I'm doing is teaching them how to go onto my website and how to purchase again from me.

Michael: Yeah.

Jason: I would say for artists, if there was a tip I could have for you as you're engaging people: have some way of getting them back, even to come and get in the habit of coming again for a second and a third time and what you'll find is a percentage of those people, if you give them $4 or $5 for free, they'll buy another thing from you in addition to that. It might take them 10 times of doing that, but as long as you have a way to re-engage them and over deliver on value, eventually it pays off. From a funnel standpoint, I think the important part as a musician is, it's just key to think about: that’s kind of an entry point. Imagine if you're walking down the hall at Walmart or just walk into a Walmart and you get bombarded with probably 1,000 items in your first 20 steps. You don't know what you're going to buy, maybe the cookies look good when you walk by and you put it in your cart but in general, that's not a good shopping experience, especially if you're a musician and you only have a limited number of items. So the key thing is as a musician, can you show that person like, okay, if I'm in the “brand new to piano player, barely, when it's introduced to Jason Tonioli” camp, if I can send you and say: Hey, check out this song. This is the favorite song of my people that like to play piano, and I can give that to him, now they've had a good interaction, a good experience, and they'll be like: Oh, I like that. Then follow up again to deliver some sort of value, whether that's a video, whether it's a music video, and there's just so many free, no cost ways for us to interact with somebody. As you think about the funnels there's different kinds of funnels. You've got: where do you bring people that aren't familiar with you? And then maybe there's… Think of it as a ladder, a value ladder. I know Russell Brunson talks about value ladders all the time. What’s the steps you want me to take? If I'm a brand new person in your community, is it: okay, you want to play the songs, but now I want you to be aware that I have stuff on streaming. Here's two of my albums. And then maybe the next level is buying some of my books. And usually as you go up that value ladder, there's additional steps. It usually gets more expensive with that, so maybe there's a $300 plan that you subscribe to. Maybe there's a get together once a year. Maybe you do concerts, and you get a VIP experience. There's all kinds of things that musicians and artists can do to think through their value ladder, but what I find is most people never bought them. They'll read the book about it, but then they typically don't implement it. They'll do the 1^st step or 2 of the value ladder, and then they'll be like: oh, I'm not making enough money. And the reality is those lower steps on your ladder are either free or low cost. You're probably not going to break even on those, but the key is finishing that race and putting together those higher ticket things.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much good stuff in there. When I think about a funnel versus streaming, it seems like there's a ton of benefits to sending people to your own funnel. The first one that comes to mind is just when you send someone to Spotify or somewhere else that, like you mentioned, the journey kind of ends there in a lot of ways, at least your communication; your connection with them. You don't own Spotify; you don't own that platform. You don't know who your people are that are on that platform. So it's like: you send them and then you don't really have an opportunity to stay connected with them or communicate with them, where when you send them to your own funnel, then you have a very clear path, very clear journey of, this is the next step. And either you can take the next step or you cannot, you basically have a decision point to move forward. So that's extremely valuable opting in, subscribing to your email list or text message updates, super valuable. What you mentioned in terms of providing value too, it sounds like a funnel is a way to, in most cases, it's extremely important to focus on providing value first, and when you send people to the funnel, some of the first steps are that you're building a relationship and you're delivering value as a way to serve them. Then there is a reciprocity that's built in when you deliver value, then if you offer something that delivers even more value, now you've built this relationship, now you've built this trust that someone's going to be more likely to do it. Racuda mentioned a +1 to your point that you made about, “training fans on how to visit your site and how to purchase things from you” including something for free. That's super smart. Having a coupon or something just so people can develop that habit and know how to do that and get the value.

Jason: One another real quick tip with that I implemented years ago but it still is in place and working: If somebody buys from me, yes, they're getting all those onboarding emails, but if they don't buy from me again within 30 days, and that includes the free downloads, because I'll send them a coupon and we send them to a WordPress site because it does such a good job of delivering those PDFs and just the digital stuffs like automatics, great, but if they haven't come back to my site and bought something or use that coupon, I send them a reminder with an extra free coupon to say: Hey, come back. It might've been a while since you've ordered something on the site. I just wanted to shoot you out a free coupon, and it just gets triggered on day 30. And I'll bet you, I get +30%. I'd have to look at the numbers, but I know it was over 30% of people would respond to that email and go buy something, even though it was just a free thing.  My guess is most of those people were lost before I sent that coupon out because they didn't engage again. It's literally like if you've got a water trough that's leaking water, I can stick my finger in it and I kept those people in that ecosystem at least aware of me and I delivered extra value. So now there's the: oh, gosh, I really liked that song…. Maybe I'll go get another one! 

Michael: Super smart. Yeah, it does seem like that's one of the big benefits of funnels too is that you can look very clearly at where the drop off points are. If you have 5 steps in the funnel and the first step is that they land on the landing page to listen to a song. And then the next step is that they opt in to join the private community with their email address. And the next step is that they purchase a small pack from you, like a fan pack. Then in those 3 steps, you can look and you can see: wow, like, 40% of people went from step 2-3, or maybe it's like 0% or like 1% of people went from this step to this step. And that really helps you clearly look and see, like maybe there's something I can do to improve that specific step, or maybe there's a glitch; maybe there's something broken with that specific step. But it seems like that's one really valuable thing that you get when you are able to look at a funnel versus if you're sending someone to a platform you don't own. You have no idea what steps they took after.

Jason: I think a lot of those, even once you've got the steps up and working, there's a tendency to not look at the stats of how it actually is working. It's like okay, I got this thing going and I got a funnel, but then what? And even with the ClickFunnels or GoHighLevel, some of these CRM tools that are out there, you can see how many people hit that page, but what you don't see very well with a lot of those is how many people dropped out along that path. There's some really cool tools. We've been using a tool called true conversion. It's an amazing tool. MouseFlow does the same thing. You can go look at that company as well, but it records the screens of every interaction that somebody has on your page. I'm not sure how the privacy rules work with that, and we followed whatever they've said we need to do. Essentially, I can watch somebody's mouse scroll down the page. One of the things I implemented about a year and a half ago: we had a funnel that was converting at like 10 or 12% close rate with cold traffic, which is insane. That was for a book and what we ended up doing was, we were selling $1,000-$2,000 dollars a day of that book, but we thought: okay, can we make it a little bit better? So what we started doing is we call it a web improvement meeting. I've got a guy in the Philippines that is on my team and he goes in and, I swear his job is to break the site and figure out where the problems are. And he's been going a year and a half and he's still find stuff every week for us, which is amazing. But we also have him looking at GoogleAnalytics, but then with TrueConversion, we have him look at some of these recordings and what we found, and here's a tip for you if you're doing a funnel or website or anything, if you don't have a link on your images, which sounds silly, you put like a picture of your CD or your book and then a button to buy it down below, we were getting almost 20% of people when we'd watch those recordings, they'd click on the picture and they'd be like click click click. So you'd see these when we look at reports, you'd see all these clicks on this image, and we're like: that's a dead link. And so we change it so the button and this stupid little picture goes the same place. And what we ended up doing is increasing our conversion rate by like 1-1.5%. We started doing little tiny tweaks to get a little bit better, a little bit better every week. At the peak of that funnel, I think we were closing between 14% and 16% on cold traffic. They didn't have a clue who we were, but we'd gotten it that much. When you run the numbers on something like that, we're talking… it was probably $100,000 or more by getting just a little bit better. Are you familiar with the cycle team from England and their story of getting a little bit better?

Michael: Oh, that's, that is ringing a bell. I feel like I probably read a book that described that, but I'd love to hear that story.

Jason: It's an amazing story and I'm going to really mess it up a little bit. So go out and you can just Google or look for the England United Kingdom cycling team. So 20 years ago, the cycling team in England was so bad that people who made bikes would not even sponsor their riders for the Tour de France because they didn't want to be associated with these guys because they were so awful and they'd never win. How sad is that? There was a guy, I want to say it was about 20 years ago, he came in and he basically said: my job is I'm going to help you improve 1%, and if we can come to practice and we can just get 1% better each day, that 1% is going to add up and add up and have this compounding effect. So whether it was wearing different material on your shorts or changing the helmet or the different angle that you were riding at, and they just basically focused on: what can we make a little tiny bit better. 1% better. And I want to say when they did the London Olympics, was that 2012ish maybe? Anyway, when the Olympics came actually to London, they ended up sweeping and winning almost every gold medal. They won multiple Tour de France’s after that. They just dominated it. It's just one of those principles where I think if you can step back as a business owner… it's overwhelming. I was at the recording studio till 9 o'clock last night and came back to 600 emails in my inbox this morning. It's overwhelming. Every one of us is so busy with things that we honestly don't have time to tackle a lot of these big, hairy goals that we've set for, maybe, the coming year. But if you can just say, okay, today, I'm going to get this one thing a little tiny bit better, that 1% adds up. 30 days of that and you're 30% increase. It's crazy to think how little tiny things can make such a big difference. So the only thing you take away from this call is: make yourself a little bit better, 1%, and go check out that story from the England cycling team. It's an awesome little story.

Michael: So good. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It's really interesting. What it kinda reminds me of is a podcast that I watched recently with Lex Friedman and Jeff Bezos. I remember just feeling, as I watched that: this is so cool that we have the ability to do this nowadays, that we can listen to conversations like this and we can learn. It's an amazing blessing. But one of the things that Jeff Bezos had mentioned was his process and how he thinks around big picture ideas and creative things that can have huge impacts, as well as the things that we're just talking about, optimization and just like the small things and just taking one step at a time. What he mentioned was that they found out that it's really important to create space for both: he calls it the paper cut issues. The paper cut issues are those optimization things where if people are having experiences where they're getting little paper cuts as they're going through this process, then you need to have a specialized movement or team around solving those paper cuts. But he also spends a lot of time just wandering around and thinking about big ideas and envisioning something totally different because, cuz if we spend all of our time thinking about the paper cuts, then we might lose some of the really big takeaways and those big experiences, which kind of leads me to the next topic that I'd love to pick your brain on, which is around masterminds and creating these horizon experiences. Maybe on a day-to-day basis, maybe we're focused on one step at a time, one thing at a time, optimizing things slowly, compound effect. Then if you can create the horizon experience where you take yourself completely out of your normal day-to-day, and you go do something that really stretches your comfort zone that helps surround you around people that give you more perspective, that also can be really valuable. So I'd love to hear your perspective. As someone who has helped host a lot of events where people have had those horizon experiences. We did our mastermind with you in Costa Rica, a few years ago for our platinum artist mastermind, and it was absolutely incredible. We did the Tarzan swing off the cliff. We saw some beautiful sites. We went rafting down very intense rivers. And we even dumped yet. We even dumped you out of a boat. Absolutely.

Jason: We even dumped you out of a boat! [both laughing]

Michael: Several times! I'd love to hear from your perspective, what is it that makes a mastermind group so important? Maybe for anyone who hasn't been a part of a mastermind group or gone out to an event like this, how would you encourage them to think about it, and is it worth it for musicians who actually attend these events, and if so, why?

Jason: I think the biggest thing, and the older the more people you meet and you realize that relationships… you can go and study and learn courses and go to university, all that type of stuff, but the reality is to make those really big jumps, usually there's some sort of relationship or connection that we've had with someone, even if it's somebody that you paid to take a course from. Maybe that's what it is. But if you think about when you've leveled up as a person, it's usually because you met somebody or you were surrounded by somebody, or met somebody who introduced you to someone that made a difference. I think that's the key thing to think about with a mastermind. There's masterminds that cost nothing, and there's masterminds I know of that cost $250,000 a year. The big thing though is you need to invest in yourself. Again, whether that's a course or whether it's a mentoring coaching type thing. I think doing a mastermind is one of those things that ought to be on your list and the end goal should be the relationships. Yes, you want to go and learn. A lot of masterminds, what people will do is they'll come and share what's working for them. They'll share the problems. The collective group of people will rally around you and give you feedback. There's a lot of masterminds that will do what they call hot seats. The ones that I've liked the best when they do that is: the person will go up into the hot seat and they'll share for 5, maybe 10 minutes about: here's what I'm dealing with, here's the big problem, and hopefully they're adding some value and teaching some things as well with that. But once people hear about the problem of: I have a hard time mailing my stuff. What should I do there? Emails don't work that I send out. What do we do? Whatever that problem might be. It might be you have a teenager kid at home, and what do I do to make him clean up his clothes off the floor? [Michael laughs] I've seen some of those too. Now imagine having a dozen other people there that want to help you. So as you share that stuff, then you shut up and you listen. A successful mastermind is: you're going to get feedback from 10 or 12 other people that are really smart and that are going to look at things a little bit differently than you do. Oftentimes they'll give you: Hey, you need to talk to this person or this person helped me with that problem or go read this book. The relationships and then usually that 1 chance you might get in the 2 or 3 day mastermind to get that problem solved is, those 2 reasons alone are why I would tell anybody to do mastermind. One thing that has been fun… After I left my software company, I ended up on a whitewater kayaking trip in Costa Rica and met some amazing guides, who you've met. We just felt like we were supposed to help these guys. Craziest dumb idea ever. Let's go start a business 2,000 miles away because that sounds like a good idea. Amazingly it's worked out. It's worked out in an awesome way. We're actually in the middle of getting ready to build a 100 room resort, and we're going to build this resort around hosting small groups and masterminds, which is going to be a ton of fun.

Michael: For those of you who are listening or watching this right now, we'll probably be attending. We're going to make sure that we do a trip there. What he's described right now for some of you, if you're in our artist development community, then you'll probably have an opportunity to actually come on a trip to this right now. What he's describing, think about it, maybe that's a very cool thing that's in your future.

Jason: What's been really fun is that we've worked with so many hotels down there. Our team is running 2-5 trips a week with different people. I don't know how logistically they do it, but they're really good at what they do. But there's really a lack of hotels in certain areas where we like to go and do some of the adventure activities that can handle groups. So we just thought, why not build it? Where it started was last year in February. I was with Jeff and John Walker and several others on this little mini mastermind. We had 2 people who came with us that wanted to learn to kayak. Luke Roberts, who's awesome, who you know. He was with us, but he was one of them that he'd never even sat in a kayak and the team worked with him. He was kayaking down class 3 rapids by the end of the week, which was crazy.

Michael: I can see that. He's kind of a daredevil. I can see him getting there pretty quick.

Jason: There's no blood or anything. It was all good. [both laughing] But what was fun, and I think this is an important aspect of the masterminds with the goal of building relationships… If you think about conferences you've been to, some people have probably heard of funnel hacking live, or there's conferences of people where you might get 1,000 or 5,000 people together, and those are really fun to do, but the reality is, you're sitting around all these other people, you talk, you might have lunch or dinner together, but normally you don't go very deep from a relationship standpoint when you're at those types of events because you're there listening to speakers. When you go to a smaller mastermind, and the focus is more on building those relationships, it's an entirely different experience. So I'm a big proponent for getting people to go to the funnel hacking live events and these good events that are going to give you 30 speakers with all these great ideas, and you walk home with 2 or 3 awesome ideas that you're going to implement, but by being around a bunch of people and becoming friends, it's just different. If you think about your friends that you've actually made, you can text somebody and say: Hey, I'm dealing with this. Can we jump on a call, and they'll just jump right on and do that. One of the things I've learned in doing a lot of these masterminds is: getting people on a raft together where they're away from their phone or even like some of the nights, if you can get people so that they're not just glued to their phone all the time, because the house is burning down back home. If you can get out of that normal work environment and actually work on hanging out with cool people, it's just a totally night and day difference for the value you end up taking home. Wherever you do that, if you want to organize your own or do something like that, I think getting people in some sort of adrenaline-type, I don't want to call it like risky “Hey, you might die” type of experience cause what we do down in Costa Rica, it's going to stretch people for sure, but when we have people on the other side of the raft with your paddling and the guide saying “paddle, paddle, paddle!” You're like, okay, if I don't paddle or my buddy over there doesn't paddle, it's not going to end well. Now, all of the sudden, you care about the person that you're on the raft with. I've seen those relationships build so much faster by putting some sort of scenario like that. And now when you go talk at dinner, you're just buddies now because you survived the near death experience or whatever it might have been, even though the guide’s like: yeah, that wasn't that bad. But for you, it was a great bonding experience. I think it's key for you to invest in yourself and put yourself in opportunities with other smart people. The other thing that I would say with masterminds is: try to put yourself around people that are at least your level or higher, because the proximity principle of being around smart, successful people is going to rub off on you, and just seeing those examples and learning what they do. I know, Michael, you've work with Jeff Walker quite a bit, and you're part of his mastermind groups. The people that you are around at those events, it's very different than other places, but you have to pay to be around those, right?

Michael: Oh yeah, there's a reason that I think out of all the investments that I've made, masterminds are the biggest ones that I've made in my business. The first investment I made was a coaching program with Jeff and that was a total life changer. It was a $12,000 program, and I've made a few $12 -18k investments and mentorship and coaching and like course related things. I joined a $50K mastermind a couple of years ago. This year, I'm in a $35K mastermind, and I wouldn't keep doing that if I wasn't getting the value from it. I wouldn't keep investing in masterminds if I didn't see the return. The reason I do is because it's incredibly valuable and you get so much from those relationships that you're building and learning from what's working for those other people. Just earlier today, we had our monthly zoom mastermind with our platinum artists. One of our platinum artists, Josh Logan, was sharing that he had a conversation with another platinum artist Scott Landis, who they hopped on a call and he shared some things he was doing with retargeting, he shared some things he was doing with his ads, and he was showing me his ads manager. He had literally gotten like a 9.6x increase in the revenue return from the campaigns just based on those little tweaks that he made and it came from the conversation that he had through that network. So I think that masterminds are incredibly valuable to be able to surround yourself with people that are on the same journey as you, that want to help you evolve, want to help you grow. We talked about this yesterday in terms of, on the flip side, in a lot of cases, we're surrounded by people that don't want us to change; that don't want us to evolve because of our surroundings, they've gotten comfortable with us and they know who we are, and so there's like an inherent resistance to change. And so if you don't surround yourself with people that are encouraging you to grow and to evolve and to help you achieve your dreams, whatever they are, then there's going to be an inherent hesitancy from the rest of it. I think masterminds, the community, the group is extremely important to surround yourself with.

Jason: Being an entrepreneur and a musician can be very lonely. I've just learned that people that are entrepreneurs, you've got to be wired a little bit different and you've got to be a little bit of a risk taker, and that's really hard for a lot of the people, family members especially that love us and want the best for us, and when you have this crazy idea that they think you're going to fail, out of the best of intentions they'll tell you: did you think about this? And they'll discourage you from doing that. And I think it's important for entrepreneurs to have that voice of reason. Hopefully you're married to one  because that person can at least be a sounding board to tell you: Hey, chasing that squirrel over there, that's a bad idea and just bring you back to reality. But in general, the lonely factor… Masterminds and just friends that are on that same journey, like you said, can help give that… It's like the shoulder angel. You got the good and the bad, and you need both of those shoulder angels to at least help you make a logical decision.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah. And there's this principle, I think that you just mentioned around how it can be lonely sometimes, I think for a lot of us. I hear this a lot from artists who are in our community that when they joined Modern Musician, and they realized that they're not alone and there's these other artists who are on this same journey. Finding a place where you are encouraged and where you belong is super important. One principle that I didn't really fully realize until years after working really hard and reaching a point where we've built something that we feel really proud of that is materially successful, is that it's the longer you stay with something, the more lonely it becomes or the more successful you become, the more lonely it becomes from a standpoint of, by its very nature…. Like for example, learning to play piano, you mentioned at the beginning, a lot of people might start learning how to play piano, but very few people actually stick with it, and they actually reached a point where they become very successful at playing piano, and even fewer people become masters of playing piano. And so kinda it goes with that principle that the more mastery that you develop in a specific area, the more lonely it's going to become because there's going to be less people who have actually made it all the way to that place and because of that, it becomes harder to relate with people who aren't piano connoisseurs. If they see you play, they'd be like, that's amazing, oh my gosh, how could you ever want to be even better? How could you even want to reach the next level? It definitely seems like that's a valuable thing that comes from just finding that group that is at the level that you're at. Like Miley Cyrus, [singing] there's always going to be another mountain. And it's true. Wherever you reach, you're always going to be evolving and growing, but finding people that understand where you're at is also really helpful because they can understand the challenges that you're going through. It's easy to be shy about sharing those challenges. You don't have an opportunity to really express those challenges generally, because people don't necessarily understand; they can't relate with you. Especially if your challenge is that you have a business that's doing $3 million a year, and you're looking to grow to $30 million a year and to impact 10x more people. There's something that feels like a first world problem of expressing that challenge.

Jason: I think the other thing is, speaking of the other mountain, a lot of times we're comfortable in our little place we're at, wherever our house is. With my business, I was making $30-40,000 a year and that was amazing as a musician but until I saw: oh my gosh, could I do $100,000? Could I do $500,000? Is a million dollars possible? When you see somebody else actually break that barrier, it's like the 4-minute mile, nobody could do it, and as soon as the first person broke that 4-minute mile, all of a sudden you have a dozen other people within a month or two that did the same thing. It wasn't that they weren't capable of doing it, but in their mind. I think mindset frankly is half the battle of just believing in yourself and then putting yourself out there. At least climb the mountain to look and see what's happening on the other side of that mountain, and if there's people over there living in, maybe they're doing something that you're not. Model after them. The crazy thing is, with YouTube and all of the free resources today, you can follow the most successful people; the Jeff Bezos, like you said you were listening to, Tony Robbins; you've got the Russell Brunson's out there. There's dozens of people that are really good that you can just go listen to a podcast for free. You don't even have to pay $10,000 to go be part of it. I find for myself, one of my best ways I've found for leveling up is, yes, I go to the funnel hacking live type events and yes, I participate in masterminds, but just forcing yourself consistently to listen to podcasts or audio books and be consistent with that. You may have to listen to 10 hours of different podcasts to get that nugget, but man, when you find that nugget it's an amazing thing. It might make you tens of thousands of dollars and be that thing. But if you didn't consistently try to level yourself up, you'll just stay right where you are.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah. That's so good. The fact that we have the ability to surround ourselves, virtually, with people who are doing the thing that we want to do is one of the most valuable resources that we have. Like you mentioned, listening to podcasts, but also, if you're an artist and you're not doing this, then you're probably the first place I would start is following all of your favorite artists on all of their channels, going out to their shows, surrounding yourself in the culture of who you want to be. I think that's sometimes something that's overlooked. Not everyone wants to be a touring musician, but if you do, then a good place to start is by attending shows; going out to the shows, meeting all of the people there, meeting the venue workers, meeting the community, the fans who were there. When we went tour hacking and we started meeting fans who were waiting in lines for shows, that was a way that we started to rub shoulders with the culture and the community, and we started to build those relationships. To your point, like you don't necessarily need to start with investing $35K or $50K in a mastermind program. When I started with Jeff, I attended his free workshop and I watched a bunch of free videos and eventually I spent a lot of money joining his programs and learning from him in a more focused way and joining the masterminds. You have the ability, you have access to be able to surround yourself with successful people and mindsets, and that's a good place to start.

I would also love to hear you talk about just the value… like you mentioned, mindset is so incredibly important. The mindset of being able to believe in yourself, getting started with it, knowing it's possible to break in that 4-minute mile. I think another really valuable mindset that every person I know that's achieved success has, is like an investor mindset. They're willing to invest, whether it's their time or their money, resources, in order to grow and learn. So I would love to hear your feedback as it relates to… for a lot of us, I think artists, one of the biggest challenges or fears is this lack of wanting to go all in or feeling like we don't have the resources to invest. I think all of us to a certain extent can come up against that challenge. “I don't have enough time. I don't have enough money to be able to achieve X, Y, Z”. So how do you recommend people think about investing and making that leap?

Jason: I think, if you backup a little bit, the “not having time or not having the money or whatever it is” really comes down to what a lot of people have called imposter syndrome, and the question you've got to ask yourself, and I think this happens to everybody, especially the higher level people, you're like: oh, my gosh, Michael Walker, Russell Brunson, these people that are really well known, they probably went through this imposter syndrome problem too. And essentially what it is you don't feel like you're worthy to be where you are. So as a musician, putting yourself out there and saying: hey, I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to go perform. A lot of times when you go up on stage, you're like: I shouldn't be here. There's 100 people out here that could play the guitar or play the piano or sing as well as I could. What business do I have being there? Eventually, from a mindset standpoint, you have to recognize that you are awesome, and trust. Don't tear yourself down and question your ability to do that. The confidence that you have will come out in whatever you're doing or performing at. That's key. If you see yourself questioning your worthiness or whatever you want to call it to be that successful person, you got to nip that in the butt. You cannot do that because it will destroy you, and if you don't believe you can do it, you won't. So that's the biggest thing, I think, from a mindset that I see people just being negative self-talk. I'm sure you've lived it, right?

Michael: Oh, yeah. I think all of us have. We had an amazing conversation yesterday with HannaH Ardensky from our team about mindset and vision and about goal setting and identity. By its very nature, when you set goals, then you have to become “not you” in order to become like the future version of you, so the old you has to die. And so by its very nature, when you set a goal, then there's a built-in imposter syndrome if you try to believe the goal, cause it's like “well, I haven't done that thing yet. I'm not that person yet”. So you have to sit with both and you have to start being the change that you want to see. You have to act as if; become that person now; start doing the things. One point that you brought up that I think is so important and easily overlooked is the willingness to show up and to embrace who you are, even if you're just starting out and you kinda suck [laughing] or you're not good yet. I've heard it described in a lot of ways. Everyone has to go through this phase where you have to suck until you don't suck anymore, and now you're awesome. You didn't sit down at the piano the first time and: Oh, you're playing a symphony, like immediately from day 1. You have to go through this process where you have to learn and grow. I think that not being willing to be vulnerable or to show up and to be who you are at those moments is one thing that holds people back. You are where you're at and if you are at a point where you're not, where you want to be at, that's okay. Just embrace it and be willing to learn. Know that, okay, maybe I'm not there yet. Maybe I can't play a symphony yet, but I can. It is possible for me to do it and I have to go through this journey of developing that skill. But being willing to show up repeatedly and to keep focused on that goal. It seems like that's one of the most important parts.

Jason: You asked about investing in yourself. I find it interesting that a lot of us… Most people graduate from high school and it's funny, a lot of people think: oh, I've graduated from high school. I'm never going back to school again. And then you've got the group that decides I'm going to go to university. And for the first time ever with the university, now you're paying thousands of dollars to actually go to learn. Depending on where you're going, you're literally spending thousands of dollars and dedicating hours and hours of time. Supposedly you're spending 4 years studying the thing you're supposed to do and people finish up with that and all of a sudden they graduate and they're like: I'm never going to go back to school again. They think that you get a diploma on the wall. Okay. Whoop dee doo, you got a diploma. Now what? I see people that go into their job and they'll learn stuff at their job, but oftentimes people don’t feel like they should continue to invest in themselves from an education standpoint, whether that be time or whether it be money. I find it so interesting that very few people are mature enough, especially in college, people have all kinds of priorities that are different, probably in college with the old party scene and all that, but when you can step back and be mature about it, and be like, okay. After I graduate, why would I quit learning? 1) the internet's changing stuff with new stuff all the time. So if you quit learning, 10 years from now, now what are you going to do? Go work for the IRS or some awful job, maybe? I think about the sloth from a Disney TV show that works at the DMV that cartoon and the sloths. How awful would that be to be in a job like that? You can use that as an example to motivate you: I don't want to do that. But again, I think it's key for people to continue to invest in themselves. Personally, it used to be a couple hundred dollars would be what I'd spend on a course every year, and I'd force myself to go through the course. And, as you level up, okay, I'm going to spend $1000 or $5000. But think about what you'd be spending if you were going to a good college and reinvest at least that much in yourself. The beauty of it now is you've got the ability to go learn from these amazing people who have been successful. If I want to go learn scoring, I can go on MasterClass.com. I can learn from Hans Zimmer for $100. I can go listen to 14 hours of him talking and dumping all his value bomb knowledge. Whoa. Where are you going to get that? You won't even find that at a university! The opportunities… There's so many opportunities now that I think a lot of people just don't realize, or maybe they're too lazy to do anything about it.

Michael: Yeah, it seems like a lot of it comes down to what we were talking about earlier on mindset: Just recognizing that it is possible, believing that you can do it, that you have what it takes, that you deserve it, and surrounding yourself with people that see that opportunity for you as well. Because it's one thing if you have a dream, but if everyone around you is cutting it down and you yourself are probably have some self doubt around, can I really do this? We have that imposter syndrome. A lot of times it takes someone outside of you, like a mentor or coach or someone that can see something in you that you don't necessarily see in yourself. I know that for me, some of the people that have changed my life in remarkable ways, I wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be here having this conversation if it wasn't for people like Jeff who were able to see something in me that I didn't see in myself. Super valuable. With that, I would love to open up the floor to any questions that you might have from our live audience right now. If you're tuning into this live on social media somewhere, we would love to bring you into our private community. We do these live podcasts every day at 1 o'clock Eastern. If you'd like to ask questions to the guests that we bring on here live, then you can actually raise your hand and come in here live. 

So looking at our chat here, I see Voz raised his hand. So Voz let's bring you on here live. What's your question that we can help with?

Voz: Yay, here I am. Okay, first off, number 1, I'll be brief. Jason I did purchase a couple of your books a couple years ago when I first got into Modern Musician and then been following/learning from what you've done. By the way, people who don't know Jason Tonioli, he is somebody worth looking up. He also has another business, which I think is a travel business.

Michael: Amazing Vacations. Yeah. They're fantastic.

Voz: Yeah. And you seem to be like a really lovely person and I'm just proud to have been able to discover you through Modern Musician. Okay. Quickly. 2 things. The first thing is: I was wondering how much of your team consists of your collaborative and your marketing team? You said you do a lot of stuff out of your own home and your own stuff. I wonder how many people are in there? That’s one. And secondly: I really think it's encouraging to understand about you being able to recognize at a young age that work you had put in before you went to college put you in a different place than where you were going into college, but you had the courage and the ability to recognize that you needed to change your focus and you went in another direction. I wonder how many of us, and I'm talking about most people, don't have the courage, they're not brave enough to step out of the “conventional” and redirect. This is more of just a fan applaud. I appreciate what you've done and it's reaffirming to hear that that’s what you've accomplished, but once again, back to your team. What does it consist of? I'd be curious. Thank-you, Michael.

Michael: Thanks Voz. Fantastic question.

Jason: So from the team and my team is going to be very different than what it was 10 years ago. Let's rewind the clock back 10 years ago when I was already doing albums and books. My team was me. I didn't even have a website that could deliver a PDF file to somebody, so I get orders on PayPal and I would manually send an email with the PDF attached to the email, and I personally do that. Most people are going to start, it's going to be you for the team. The thing that I would say you've got to decide is from a time standpoint and just knowing what you can get done: when's that point when you hire somebody to help you? It's important to decide what's the thing you need help with, and then that's when you go hire somebody. A lot of times people think: Oh, I should just go hire somebody and this person's going to be able to solve all my problems. That's usually not the case. At least what I've found. I've learned that I usually need to tackle the problem and do the thing and get an understanding of how to do it and do it for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or a couple of years even. And then when I'm really good at it or have a good understanding, that's when I can find somebody that's going to be a good fit for that. So hiring that help, especially your first person is going to be hard. If it were today when I was starting out, and you can write this down: my secret place I would go to get specific help would be to onlinejobs.ph. If you've never heard of it, it's like a LinkedIn for Philippines people. I can go on there as an employer who needs help. And I can put: Hey, I need help with transcribing music and putting it into Finale. I had 5 people who 2 or 3 of them were students that had Finale already on their computer, and I've got 1 guy now that can take a music video or just an audio recording, and he just magically puts it into music notation. The thing that I didn't realize going in was that in the Philippines, a lot of people over there don't have much of an accent, if any. So even if you need phone support or you need tech support, and it's free to use this, you can go on and say, I need somebody to do customer support and handle my chat. When we hired our first person over there, I think they were making $2.80/hour at 70 hours a week. One was working at Cole's credit cards, and he was the quality assurance manager giving coaching. This was a high level manager type person. Less than $3/hour and we were able to bring him over and we're near double the pay, and he now gets to spend time with his family versus going and traveling to the big city and only seeing him on Saturday night and Sunday morning. So go check out onlinejobs.ph. That's a huge value right there. Now what's happened is with my music. I started needing a web person, and I need somebody to do customer support. I got to the volume where I have two people now that do my customer support. One's here in Utah, that's a stay-at-home mom, and I've got one and a half people in the Philippines that help with that. I've got 2 people: I've got a web person that breaks the website, so we'll call him the web improvement specialist. I've got a graphic designer person over there that also is a WordPress person. I've got some people that do my podcast for me. So I host the successful musicians podcast. Michael, I think we're releasing one of yours any day now, so you can go listen to Michael be interviewed. It was a fun chat, but I've found people to do the specific jobs over there. So once you feel like “I just gotta have help”, go check that out first, or stay at home moms are great. In general, I think I have 7 people in the Philippines now, but we're doing my website for my music, I've got an e-commerce site that sells inspirational stories, like chicken soup for the soul type of stuff, I've got the travel agency, I've got the Amazing Vacations, Costa Rica. That's a whole tour agency. And then because I didn't want to hire an ad agency, essentially, to do all this stuff, I built my team and we had essentially 4 clients right there with the businesses I'm running. Since then, it's been over the last year and a half, we'll take on certain clients that fit very similar to my businesses that my people already know how to do, so I'm not necessarily having to teach them how to do it. We've got 3 piano artists right now that we're helping to build their website, put all these plugins and tools and fancy web things that I spent thousands of dollars doing, and I'm essentially saving people 10-20 thousand dollars by helping them do that. We do a little bit of coaching, but I'm not one that's done this like big course type of how to do it. It's very much a small “the right people, right fit for me”. In Costa Rica, I was told there's about 17 families now that are employed down there for the various things we're doing.  We're also working on the software down there for itineraries. For the amazing vacation side, I've got about 2 people that are near full-time. But just for the music, I would say I could probably get by if that was all I was doing with 2, maybe 3 people helping me and that's at the level that we're doing it. In addition to that, we have a warehouse where my daughter actually prints shipping labels and all of her friends come over and they have a party 2 or 3 times a week, in the back singing songs on the radio as they're packaging. In general, I don't think most musicians need more than 1 or 2 people until you really get to a level where hopefully people aren't doing as many crazy things as we're doing. It's one of those step back and ask myself, do I really want to do this? Because I could simplify, but most of the things I'm doing are because I feel like those are people I'm here to serve. I had a really interesting conversation with my son yesterday when we were going down to the recording studio about making money and being successful in business. A lot of times people associate success with making lots of money, and the reality is the long-term success of a business, typically, I think, comes down to is: is that business out to serve and help and make an impact and the money part will come. But if a business, even as an individual musician, if all you're focused on is making money and paying the bills, you're probably not going to be successful long-term. If you can step back and say: I'm here to serve my people, find out who those people are and impact them, you'll be much happier, but your business will actually grow more than it would if all you do is focus on money. 

Michael: So good. Yeah. We try to come back to that point a lot because it's just a fundamental truth that business is really a vehicle for value delivery. That's all it is and money while it's not a perfect system, it's helped us in a lot of ways to be able to provide value and to trade value. If you want to make more money; if you want to make 10x more money than you're currently making right now, then the way to do that is by asking: how can I provide 10x more value than I'm providing right now? The way you can provide 10x more value is you can provide the same amount of value to 10 times more people, so you can do exactly what you're doing now, but just have 10 times more people that you're providing the same value to; the same service, and now you'll have 10x your value and you'll have 10x your business, or you can provide 10 times more value to the same number of people. So you can basically, without reaching anyone new, you can just go deeper with your existing customers, your existing fans, provide 10 times more value to them, and that's another way to 10x your value. Either way, your business and your revenue is directly tied to the value that you're providing, and when you make that shift, like you're mentioning, it just helps everything in so many ways. Cause also it's less about “gimme, gimme, gimme, me, me, me” which repels; it doesn't feel good, but when we focus on contribution and providing value then people like to be provided value; to people like to receive value. You can ask questions, you can figure out what is valuable to people. How do I provide more value? It makes things so much smoother and more enjoyable.

Jason: I think your other question about having the courage or being brave enough to jump and burn the boats and go forward, I think advice I give to entrepreneurs/musicians that are thinking about that is: it's important to go all in on it, but it's also important to be responsible because I think there's a lot of times where I've seen musicians that put their heart and soul into something and they spend tens of thousands of dollars, maybe they go record, I've got a couple of people in particular I can think of, they spent tens of thousands of dollars recording an album, hiring an orchestra and their music was amazing, but then they sold a few of CDs back in the day to their friends, family members, and a couple of fools, the “friends, family, fools”, but then they never did anything after that, and I think it's important to be responsible financially as well as a business owner. If all you do is just go spend money like you have it and you don't have it, it's going to get real, really fast. And so having a game plan…. Luckily when I quit the bank, I had a wife, who's amazing, she's a schoolteacher and I'd saved up several thousand dollars of money also for kind of that rainy day, and it afforded me the ability to go for a whole year without paying ourselves. When we started Amazing Vacations, Costa Rica, we invested a lot of money in that and I spent probably the first year and a half down there… I was up here in America working, but helping back and forth with that. I went 6 years of working on that business without paying myself, but it was a conscious decision of: okay, we're going to reinvest in the thing. So as a musician, if I was to give myself advice going backwards I think having the kinda the attitude of… Here's my example: I worked at the bank and I was making good money, but I carved out $5-10,000 a year to invest back into building a website and building platforms and learning and printing books, and every dollar I made back went directly back into that music bank account. I don't think I took a draw of money for 7 years. I'd make a little bit of money and it would allow me to not have to go into debt on the credit card to print the books, or maybe I'd saved enough that I could go in and record an album in a super efficient manner where maybe I only had to spend $3,000. We record down with Chuck Meyers, he helped piano guys and he was lead composer on the Harry Potter video game and the Fortnite one that just came out in December. He was funny, this was years ago, but he told me, he goes: you're the most efficient person coming into the studio. You're prepared. You know exactly what you want to do. And he says, you just got a whole album done for less than $5,000. I won't name any names, but a very famous person came in and spent $20,000 on one song and I'm like: Oh my gosh, how would that be to be able to just drop $20,000 on a song? Maybe people listened to it. Maybe they didn't. Just being responsible when you have the courage is going to be important. So don't just blindly fly a kamikaze thing. Kamikazes usually didn't end very well, [both laughing] so don't put yourself in that situation of being brave and courageous and she can approve to everybody, but have a plan and stay with the plan.

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point. I think there's a lot of power and it gives you courage to face your fears when you know that you have some form of safety net. When you can ask yourself the question, what's the worst that could happen? And if you can know that going into it: okay the worst thing that could happen is that I totally fail and flop, but if that happens, then I'll just pick up where I left off. If you're doing a tightrope walk, like it's great you want to learn how to do it, but you should make sure you have a safety net below you so that if you fall, then you're not going to die. So yeah, definitely a valuable reminder. I know when I started Modern Musician and we started Paradise Fears, we didn't have the resources; we didn’t have the funds. We didn't have money that was like given to us. So we hustled to make it work. I've invested a lot using credit and using loans. I reached a point where I cut up all my credit cards and I don't take loans or I don't go into debt anymore. So I've kinda got mixed feelings about it. I feel like without it, I probably wouldn't be here right now and I wouldn't have made the investments that I needed to make to build a successful business, but it was also really challenging getting started and being in debt. There's a lot of weight with that. It's helpful that we do live in a society, and at least in America worst case scenario; in this absolute worst case scenario, we go bankrupt and then we sort of have a forgiveness policy. I was surprised by the groups that I've joined, the mastermind groups, how many successful entrepreneurs had experienced massive failure in their lives and their businesses. In some cases, like a lot of cases, they had actually gone bankrupt at one point. They had really gone all in, they invested, made some mistakes. It didn't work out and became a part of their journey. It was a learning experience and they're so much better off having done that, versus never have done it in the first place. So that is one thing that we have going for us is that we have safeguards in place that allow us to invest and learn.

All right. With that, Jason, this has been a fantastic conversation. I knew it was going to be great going into it, but I really appreciate your mindset and perspective. I think you bring so much wisdom from several different domains, and I appreciate that you're sharing that with the music community. I think it's one of the most important needs that all of us are solving together right now in the music industry is how to really build a healthy, sustainable business with it. So thank-you so much for what you're doing and for coming on here on the podcast to be a part of this community. For anyone who's listening right now, who's interested in connecting more or diving deeper, where'd be the best place for them to go to connect more with you.

Jason: Yeah, just shoot me an email to jason@tonioli.com. So if you can spell it you'll get it to me. My website is tonioli.com. If anybody's wanting a little bit extra help or wants to chat about their website or their funnels, I've got a really cool true conversion tool. It'll track your clicks. If you want to send me an email I've got enough credits that I can give some people some free use of that for a couple of months, and honestly, that type of thing, you'd have to have a funnel or a website, but I'd be happy to just…. It's super easy. We put the code on your funnel or whatever it is. Reach out to me and just say: hey, I listened to this thing, and you said you'd help. We're not going to do all the work for you, but it literally would take you about 2 minutes to install it, and then we can show you how to pull the reports. I'm happy to share that. It's a resource. It's one of those things where I've had a lot of people help me over the years, and this is an easy way for us to give back and provide some insight to hopefully help you as well.

Michael: Fantastic. Thank-you so much for doing that and we'll make sure to share all the links and whatnot in the show notes so people have easy access. Thanks again for being a part of the podcast today.
Hey, it’s Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow. First if you hit ‘subscribe’ then that’s make sure you don’t miss a new episode. Secondly if you share it with your friends, on social media, tag us - that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review it’s going to help us reach more musicians like you take their music to the next level. The time to be a Modern Musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.