In this episode of Madsen's Musings, I discuss keeping workflow and commerce systems streamlined.
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A transcript is provided below the video.

Hey guys, it's Nate Madsen, I'm the owner, composer, and sound designer behind Madsen Studios.  It's been a while since I've done a vlog, sorry about that - life got crazy doing the move and doing some travelling for work, various things like that - but I wanted to just quickly talk about something I had happen to me yesterday.

I had to go by the ATT store to buy a new iPhone case, and it took them about... I kid you not... about twenty-five minutes.  I got the case picked out within two minutes, and I had a rep working with me super fast.  I mean, it wasn't a line, it wasn't like a busy day at the ATT store, but the internet or the computer system; something was broken, and so they went to multiple machines and finally they said "we can go back and try a fourth time", and at that point I said "I think I'm done" and I walked out of the store.

That store lost out on the sale.  I mean I had my wallet out, I had the product selected, I was ready to go, and because they had some technical issues they missed out on the sale.

You never want that to happen with your own freelance work, so you want to try to make your process as fluid and streamlined, as easy and as quick as possible to use.  That way you can get the most sales happening.

Here's another example, another store.  I used to work at the Apple Store, just for about six months after my time at [unclear] ended, before I went fully freelance for five years, and people would remark all the time, the fact that we had these little, they call them Apple Pays I think; they're basically like iPods that were modified slightly.  They could take credit card payments and all that stuff, we could do cash tender with a drawer, but all remotely controlled by these devices, and every employee in the Apple Store walked around and had them.  People would just comment "man, this is awesome, I've never seen this before", and back in the day - this was 2010 - I had never seen any other store do that before either.  Now maybe it's more popular and common now, but at the time it's pretty revolutionary.  But it made it very easy to check out with anyone in the store.

So you want to try to make your process as streamlined, as easy as possible.  Now that doesn't mean letting customers walk all over you.  I'll tell you very quickly about a story I had where a recent Fiverr client was pretty particular and pretty difficult.  It was one of those situations where he asked me to just do a full four-and-a-half minutes of audio.  I give him my rate, and he goes "ok, tell you what - I don't need four-and-a-half-minutes of audio, I need like, a minute-and-a-half" or something like that, because he started doing all this like... I can recycle this chunk over here, and do this over there, and had - to be honest - kind of a confusing response.  And I know what he was doing, he was trying to say "oh okay, you cost this much, well we're going to bring the price down by recycling and reusing more of the content and not have you create as much original content", and I told him "your message is a little bit confusing, I wish you had told me what you need exactly from the get-go, that way I could have given you the most accurate and best quote from the start of this", and he got kind of mad at me and said "well I feel like I've been perfectly clear with you".  We didn't work together. [Chuckle.]  It's one of those things where I could tell it wasn't really flowing very well, and so I tried to explain my situation, saying I spent a lot of time going through mapping out the time that you need, because -- a point for clarification, he didn't come out and say "I need four-and-a-half minutes of music".  He said "I have these four songs, and I need saxophone solos during the choruses", and I manually had to go through and map out the time for all those, add them up, and give him the bid, so there was a lot more work on my end, and it was honestly kind of wasted time.  

So my point is, I'm being a little bit long-winded, a little bit distracted here, is try to make your process as easy, as streamlined, as fluid as possible.  That way you can maximise the number of sales you have.  But don't be afraid to push back when a client might be a little bit confusing, might be trying to work the system a little bit, and say "well these are my rates".

If you like the vidoes please hit like, subscribe, comment.  Ask me questions, I'm here to help.  I've got some new stuff coming out of the works soon, and other than that it's just been a mad house of financing, and SGI work, and then dad... parent stuff, so dad AND parent stuff, they're two different things, I'll talk to you later, bye.