Clients, Clarity and Gratitude: My Conversation with Nate, Ben and Neil

Nate Kelmes, Ben Holmes and Neil Merchant host Sound Discussion, a show where working musicians and engineers talk through the parts of the job they've lived firsthand. This one started as an Instagram DM, a simple question about what was holding them back, that turned out to be harder to answer than either side expected. So we answered it out loud, for an hour and a half: what you actually need, what success actually looks like, and why gratitude for the work in front of you changes how you build everything else.

Key Moments

"Outreach is like showing someone a car, and they take seeing the car to mean they know how to drive now. Those are very different things."

"Let's say I give you unlimited clients right now. How many could you even take on? What would you tell them on that call?"

"The long game is actually not a destination. It's what you're committed to doing repeatedly."

"Mindset is the master fader. It's the most important thing. It's going to move everything else."

"I'm grateful for every boring task I do in the business, not just for when I get the work. All of it is in service of the thing."

"I Need More Clients" Is Usually A Symptom

I'm a data nerd. I've gone back through thousands of my own DMs, a couple hundred strategy call transcripts, and a lot of hours of longer-term work, and one pattern is close to universal: nearly everyone comes to me for outreach. They might call it getting clients, or getting work, or just "the result," but it's the same ask.

And outreach is sometimes the least important thing going on. If you're losing money every month, a $100 song isn't going to fix that, and neither is a $500 one. Sometimes the fastest way to more money is spending less of it first. Sometimes the problem underneath is that you don't believe you deserve to be paid, and until that moves, more leads just give you more chances to undercharge.

So I play a game with people. Say I hand you unlimited clients right now. How many can you actually take on? What happens on the call? Then we rehearse it. I play the artist, from the one who has no idea what they're doing to the one who's trying to get something for nothing, and in real time you can see exactly where it breaks. I don't expect anyone to diagnose themselves. I do expect them to tell me the truth about where things are, including "I didn't make anything last month." That's a fine answer. We just need to know it.

Outreach Is The Car, Not The Driving

I put off teaching outreach for as long as I responsibly can, because I've watched what happens when people get it too early. You show someone the car and they thank you and get in. They don't know the road, there's no map, and nobody checked whether there's gas in it.

The same thing happens with the idea that one call can transform a business. It can open things up, and it often does. But an hour isn't a rebuild, and I'd rather lose the sale than pretend otherwise. I'll be honest that "get more clients" is a headline on my own site, because that's the language people arrive with. I just never start there, and it has cost me work in the DMs when someone asks if I'll teach them sales and I say "not first." I'll take that trade. Building the top floors before the foundation isn't a shortcut. It's a collapse on a delay.

Know Your Number Before You Do Anything Else

The first real question I ask is simple: how much money do you need to survive? I ask for four numbers, from survival up through the tiers above it to an ideal. People love to say the ideal is a million a year, and that's fine as a dream. What helps is a realistic ideal, one high enough to stretch you and grounded enough that you'll have momentum to go higher once you get there.

Almost nobody can answer the first number. "I guess, like, two grand?" Is it $1,500? Is it $1,832? Without that, there's no strategy, because your rates, your volume and your offer all have to reflect it. If you need $2,000 a month, a whole set of options opens up that doesn't exist for someone who needs $10,000. And if you need $10,000 a month and you're charging $50 a song, the hosts did the math live on air: that's 200 songs a month. The math breaks before we've even started, and at that point more outreach is just pouring water into a broken pipe.

There Is No Endgame

I've been taking improv classes, and improv has a word for this. After you build the world of a scene, you find the game: the thing you keep doing, repeatedly, that makes it work. Careers are like that. The long game isn't a place you land where everything is figured out. It's what you're committed to doing over and over.

People hear "endgame" and picture the end of learning, the end of needing to earn, the end of striving. I got to speak at Mix with the Masters this year, which for a lot of people would be the endgame. For me it was another day of the week, and not even a great one. I was grateful and present for every minute of it, and then it was over.

A client told me a few days into our work together that he felt worse than before we started. My ego had to sit with that for a second. But he was right, and it's a normal part of the process: you bottom out the moment you realize how much you don't know. What happens after that is where it actually begins. You'll never know everything. If you can get comfortable with "I don't know this yet, so I'll learn it," and keep doing that forever, your life gets pretty interesting.

What Success Actually Looks Like

Most of us never give ourselves the space to think about this. Everything moves fast, distraction is constant, and it takes real discipline to sit still long enough to ask what you actually want.

Sometimes on a call I'll have someone close their eyes and walk through an ideal day. The answers are so consistent it's almost funny. A walk, usually with a dog. Nature. A slow morning with their partner. Work that's fulfilling, where they feel connected and in flow, and then they know when to put it down. A movie at night. It almost always looks like being outside of the studio.

But that's rarely what people say to their peers. In the noise, we pick the loudest version of success: the Grammys, the credits, the trophy on the wall, or, my favorite, the multiple Grammys in a box that you pretend not to care about. Nobody's born wanting that. It's copied from someone who copied someone else, sanded down into the internet's version of a life. Some of my favorite clients are the ones who say they need $20,000 or $40,000 a year. Great. Now we can design a real life around that, not just more hours of work.

Should You Quit Your Day Job?

Sometimes I'll be on a call with someone who's ready for the top ten outreach tips, and I'll tell them I think they should keep their job. They look at me like they just wasted their money.

But look at the numbers. If you made $100,000 this year and $12,000 of it came from mixing, that's $1,000 a month. If you need $6,000 a month to live, quitting today puts you $5,000 in the hole every month. Until you've proven you can reach the lowest tier, the leap is just debt with a nicer story.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. One of my very first clients had a job with access to a great studio, where he could mix his own work whenever he wanted. So instead of quitting, he had an open conversation with his boss about where he was headed, and we worked out a gradual path: full-time to part-time to freelance, once the mixing income was consistently there. And I don't mean the first month you hit the number. Maybe it's six months in a row.

That's what I mean by opportunity identification. Full-time, could you go part-time? Part-time, could you contract? The job is often cast as the enemy, the reason you're not doing music full-time, when you haven't yet worked out what you need, who you're for or how you'll reach them. People who leave anyway get a hard lesson: everything the company was doing for them, they now have to do themselves.

The Myth Of No Plan B

There's a heroism mythology in music. Everything has to be a sacrifice: "I sold everything to get my first guitar." Okay, I can see that you really wanted it. That's about all it tells me. It doesn't mean you can play it.

"I had no Plan B" is the same story, and it's worth investigating who's telling it. Sometimes the Plan B is their parents, who paid for the room, the gear and the rent, and still do. From the outside you see a studio nicer than most working engineers have, and you think you need to be just like that. Sometimes it's low rent. Not long ago I had four roommates in Bushwick and paid $900 a month, and one gig covered a great month. I could have stood in front of a studio and said "no Plan B" too. And sometimes the Plan B is a cafe job they're ashamed to mention. People on private calls with me will admit they got zero songs this month more easily than they'll admit they have a full-time job.

That shame tells you how strong the myth is. Having another job doesn't make you less legitimate. If what you value is providing for your family and your job is doing that, you might be more aligned with your values than you think. There's a flip side, too. Some people stay at a job because running a business means putting themselves on the hook, and that's scary. And some people realize they don't want a mixing career at all. I had a client decide that a week after a strategy call and apologize for wasting my time. It was the best thing he could have told me. The worst place to be is the in-between: pretending you hate your job because you think you should be doing something you don't actually want to do. Pick the strategy you have, commit to it, and be proud of the decision.

Gratitude For The Work In Front Of You

I have people rush into calls to tell me how miserable their job is, and the job is in a great studio, working for a great person, on great projects. Fifteen-year-old you would not hate this. Are you grateful for any of it? When I told my old bosses I was putting out a record, they helped me with the marketing and came to the shows. My first paycheck bought the guitar I still play today.

At the start of every strategy call, I have a note to pause and thank the person. It's easy to speed straight into the problem. But everything in the frame behind me, the framed Descendants record, the old New York subway sign, the apartment itself, exists because people paid for work I do. Being on a show like this is part of that, whether or not a single client comes from it.

That includes the boring parts. Updating camera firmware before a call. Messages, accounting, email. The long project I've been chipping away at for months, where some days the work from yesterday gets undone and I have to do it again. That I can afford a day like that at all is something to be grateful for. Wins like Mix with the Masters are indications that you did the work. The day ended. I walked into that building and I walked out of it. If I couldn't feel it fully while it was happening, it might as well not have happened.

My biggest concern for some people is that they'll actually win the Grammy. Because if they get there having ignored their family and burned everyone along the way, they'll be the most miserable they've ever been, with no goal left and nothing healed. The award won't fix any of that.

What Else We Got Into

• Why good outreach treats the other person as a person with a whole life, not a buy button, and how this episode started from exactly that kind of DM
• Growing up with parents in sales, swearing I'd never need to learn it, and selling my first t-shirt design in ninth grade
• Comparing yourself at twenty to engineers who are fifty, and why betting on being the one-in-a-trillion exception is a bad plan
• Imposter syndrome, and the difference between being worthy of what you want and having done the work to get it
• Neil's friends who went full-time gigging, went back to a day job, and now enjoy playing more
• Flipping the table on strategy calls: thinking like a buyer to understand the people who buy from you
• My first band, Misled Youth, and the MS Paint logo that still lives on my desktop

Watch If...

• You keep saying "I need more clients" and more clients haven't changed anything
• You couldn't say, to the dollar, what you need each month
• You're thinking about quitting your day job to mix full-time
• You feel like having another job makes you less legitimate
• You're chasing a finish line that someone else defined for you
• You've lost track of what's already going right

Nate, Ben and Neil were generous with their own stories here, including the parts that are still in progress, and that's what made this conversation work. If you're building a career in audio, Sound Discussion is worth the subscribe.