 Boston Section |
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Boston Section |
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On February 13th, members of the Boston section of the Audio Engineering Society met to discuss an issue that spans every niche of the industry: how to survive, pay the bills, and take care of the mundane matters of finances so that you can continue doing the work you love. Whether a corporate employee or self-employed consultant, freelance engineer or salaried wonk, making sure food gets on the table is a motivation we all share. A panel of experts — people who are successfully making a living — met to share their thoughts about how they got where they are today.
Jay Rose, owner/operator of Digital Playroom, a commercial post-production studio in Brookline, headed up the panel. With him were Dr. Barry Blesser, past AES president and recipient of its Bronze, Silver, and Governor’s Awards; Geoff Steadman, audio marketing consultant, location recording engineer, and former product manager for Orban;; Martin Polon, principal forecaster at Polon Research International, industry journalist, and audio educator with ties to UCLA, Interlochen, and the University of Massachusetts; and Jim Baltimore, a financial advisor and managing partner of Baltimore, Lukas & Company, P.C., a 15-person CPA firm in Newton.
Mr. Steadman started out with a few tips on engineering survival: first, realize that a network of contacts is invaluable — don’t burn any bridges, and "treat your competitors as friends". In an industry as small as ours, it’s a bad idea to alienate anyone; you might want to work with them in the future. Even if you don’t, at some point you might need their recommendation or assistance. By the time you need to use this network, it’s too late to start building it, so start now by working to make yourself visible. Beware of living in a box. Make sure you get noticed, even by people who you aren’t directly working for: the end clients, tradeshow representatives, salesmen, etc. "Good deeds come back," Geoff said, adding that with the type of networking that goes on within audio, karma can be a valuable and very real thing. Every time your name gets mentioned in a good way, one more person will consider hiring you.
Unfortunately, we engineers tend to concentrate on numbers, rather than the people behind those numbers. But technologies come and go, and if we’re focused just on the technology, we’ll go with them. People are a constant, though, especially in a service-focused industry like audio. Sales, whether selling a product, a service, or your resume, is about relationships — the buyer’s feelings towards the seller play strongly into the decision to buy. More importantly, a sale doesn’t end with the transaction, but rather continues on to the next sale, and only through maintaining the relationships can you insure that there will be a next sale.
Dr. Blesser echoed this with a discussion of the psychology of sales: "We may be in audio because we love it, but that’s a lifestyle, not a business. We’re a product, merchandise. You don’t survive on love." Everyone has a ‘payoff system’, a reason for doing what they do. Dr. Blesser listed a few different systems people may have and some differences between them:
and a few others, including delusional and secrecy payoff systems. If you want to make a deal with someone, you have to know what their payoff system is so that you can make an appealing offer, Dr. Blesser said. If you offer a patriarch something in a way that mentions having fun, or fitting in with everyone else, he’ll most likely not be enticed by your deal. The tough part about these payoff systems is that we’re very rarely aware of our own, much less anybody else’s. However, it’s necessary to know how to deal with people above and below you in the ‘money food chain’; a metaphor Dr. Blesser used to describe the relationships between buyers and sellers. The fact is that every buyer is selling something, and every seller is also buying something. We may buy tape, mix a production, and then sell it to a commercial producer, who then sells it to his advertisers, who use it to sell product, possibly to the person who made the tape that started it. By knowing to whom your buyer is selling, you can better figure out what his payoff system is.
Martin Polon has been following trends in the audio industry for many years, including the disappearance of jobs, from 50,000 in 1980 to 20,000 now. Audio is a tough industry to enter, both in terms of support to colleges — the audio industry offers less to universities than any other field (companies like IBM, and Motorola regularly give computers or lend personnel to colleges) — and in terms of support from financial backers. A recent article in the New York Times was titled "Death of the Recording Studio." Banks now view recording studios as bad investments, and won’t finance them.
The answer to this lack of support by the field is to make your own support on a personal level, through interactions between people, rather than companies that are likely to disappear as fast as they arrived–something we’ve seen a lot of in the dotcom world. Jay Rose suggests that the way to make yourself last beyond the technology you’re using is to find a niche that you can fill, but be sure the niche isn’t tied to a specific technology. For example, if you merely present yourself as an expert in C++, you may be perceived as useless if a newer language becomes popular. But if your clients or employer realize you have a unique creative approach to designing audio algorithms, you’re ‘future-proof.’ This also means you have to market aggressively – Jay remarked that when he started out, "I had to sell myself six days a week so I’d have some work to do on the seventh." He added that even if you’re a successful solo practitioner, you have to remember that you’re still a business: keep a separate checkbook and credit card for business expenses, and spend at least a few days a month on business matters that have nothing to do with engineering.
So, what if your unique niche is not something that can be found in a corporate environment, and you are becoming self-employed? Jim Baltimore discussed the tax strategies of the freelancer, mentioning that under current laws, there are no real benefits to forming a corporation as opposed to being a proprietor, other than liability. In terms of taxes, there’s a good deal of parity now between self-employment and corporate employment. The important thing to be aware of is the type of expenses you can use to reduce your income: deductions are legal if they’re "ordinary, necessary, and used to produce income," whether or not there’s a line on the tax form for the particular deduction you want to take. The panelists agreed that professional help can be invaluable for a self-employed person: you may or may not need a lawyer on retainer, but you should definitely form a long-term relationship with an accountant
The central theme throughout the evening was networking and dealing with people — selling yourself to your clients, your boss, or anyone else who needs your services or skills. Because many of us deal with product and distribution, it’s easy to forget that we’re in a service industry that relies on customers’ perceptions. Thanks of the BAES go to the panelists for reminding us that there is indeed a ghost in the machine.
For further information, panelists recommended Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, Getting to Yes by Yuri Fisher, The World According to Peter Drucker by Jack Beaty, and Games People Play, by Eric Berne.
-Dan Rose
