Stuck Like Sticky The Stick Insect, Stuck On A Sticky Bun? (thank you, Blackadder!)

🛑Stop Being Stuck: How to Creatively Break Free

Firstly, this week I’d like to say a huge thank you to everyone who reached out over the passing of my father. You literally swamped my inbox and DMs, and I haven’t had a chance to individually thank you all—so please accept my gratitude here. We clearly have a very caring community, and it really means a lot, thank you, friends x

I’ve been writing my little speech for the funeral, and hopefully, it will generate a few chuckles on the day, but I ran into a bit of writer's block, which alternated with option paralysis. Once I got going, there were just so many stories and anecdotes I could have gone on for hours!

That experience got me thinking. We’ve also been looking at bottlenecks in our own business—many of you read the email earlier this week about the price rise on our MUM-10 and why we had to implement it.

So, for this week’s email, I thought I’d talk about these inevitable roadblocks and break them down into three key areas to appeal to the widest number of you.

1. The Creative Bottleneck (Writer’s Block)

There are many fixes for this, but my favourite is good old collaboration. I was a little stuck with what to write for this section, so I asked one of the best, most prolific songwriters I know for some inspiration—our very own Sam Reck. Here’s what he had to say:

"Writer’s block isn’t a lack of ideas; they’re all around us—it’s a lack of connection to those things. When you’re blocked, your creativity hasn't vanished; it’s that the bridge between your brain and your keyboard (or pen) has gone a bit wobbly. You’re overthinking, over-editing, over-criticizing—basically, you’ve built a wall between yourself and the joy of expression.""Think about musicians. They don’t get 'guitarist’s block.' They just pick up the guitar, start noodling, and before long, something interesting happens. The same goes for painters: they make marks. The first ones might be rubbish, but those marks unlock the rest.""A change of scenery, a cup of coffee, a reframing of your current situation—all good writers have tools to turn the mundane into beauty. Maybe the hiss of the espresso machine turns into the rhythm of a drum beat, or the rain outside inspires a new character's mood.""The trick is this: Creativity doesn’t start with quality—it starts with movement. Writer’s block is not a creative problem; it’s a perfection problem. The stuff that feels hardest to write is often the most important because that’s where the discomfort lives, and discomfort is where creative growth hides."

Thank you, Sam!

2. The Gear Bottleneck (Gear Acquisition Syndrome)

Beware of this one; it can often be used as an excuse! How many times have you put off finishing something because you’ve convinced yourself you just need that new instrument, piece of hardware, or plugin?

With today’s technology, that's often just a delay tactic. If you can’t make a great record using a free DAW on a cheap laptop, you can’t make one with anything. Don’t let this one fool you!

However, there is benefit in niching down, finding your thing, and suitably equipping yourself for success.

• Back in the late 1980s, I decided I wanted to be a Hammond player. I didn’t own one and deemed that kind of essential!

• The truth is, most UK studios at the time had one, but things really took off for me when I did eventually buy my own.

• That one single purchase led to an entire career, and some 36 years later, I still don’t own another keyboard instrument—I don't need to! I found my thing and stuck with it.

Don’t let Gear Acquisition Syndrome dictate what you can and can’t do. If there is something absolutely vital (which will usually be an instrument—no successful mixing engineer achieved success because of one specific piece of hardware), then get it, learn it, and make a success of it. Otherwise, it’s just an excuse.

3. The Business Bottleneck (Scaling Your Income)

Something is always slowing you down. The real difference in business is that the bottlenecks never really go away—you clear one and are immediately faced with another further down the line.

For us, our most recent has been supply vs. demand. We just can't make enough product to satisfy the demand for it, so the short-term solution is to raise our prices. This does mean we will be able to support a long-term solution, at least financially, this time around!

If you’re running a service-based audio business (mixing, production, etc.), your current bottleneck is probably one of these three:

A. ⛔Lead Generation (Not Enough Clients)

This is where I see most people struggle. They’re great at their craft but just haven’t got enough leads coming in. Unblocking this is all about your marketing chops:

• Content marketing

• Paid ads

• Networking in your genre

• Actively searching for and approaching dream clients

We’ll be covering all of this in a future video on our YouTube channel.

B. 🚒Inability to Deliver (Too Many Clients)

This is a great bottleneck to have! Raising your rates nearly always fixes it. Clients will naturally drop off from the bottom, meaning you’ll generate the same revenue with fewer clients and less stress.

This can also be aided with systems, processes, and AI that shave hours off the "bum-in-seat" administrative parts of a job:

• Bouncing projects

• Uploading

• Notifying clients

These can all be easily automated these days.

C. 💰Pricing, Scaling, and Profitability

We see this a lot with "jack-of-all-trades" producers (which is why we always suggest niching down into a genre). The all-round producer tends to focus on a price-competitive mindset instead of the value-driven one that specialist producers command.

To overcome this:

• Stop charging an hourly rate. Adopt a project-based price structure instead.

• Adopt an impactful, outcome-driven marketing strategy. For example, charge for "A radio-ready master that enables curated playlisting on major streaming platforms" rather than "4 hours of mastering."

• Adopt dynamic pricing. A high-profit business rarely offers a single, fixed price. Raise your rates when you’re busy, and drop them a little during quiet times.

That’s all for this week, but please hit reply on this email and tell us what your main bottleneck is—creative, in business, or otherwise. It helps us more than you know!

Thanks for reading, see you next week.

Lots of love

Mark