“Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.”
~ Ken Robinson

Find us on your favorite platform!
[00:00:00] Lori Brooks: Christian, Chris, welcome. And thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:05] Christian Parry: Glad to be here. Thanks.
We are super excited to dive into your entrepreneurial journey, but before we do that, I want to rewind the thought.
And I want to go back to the days of junior high or high school. Think about the days when an aunt or an uncle or even a mentor at school may have asked you what it is you want it to be when you grow up, Christian, we’ll start off.
Well, it would be the answer to that. I guess I kind of always wanted to play music and be in the music or audio industry since I’ve been playing a thing and singing for most of my life.
And so essentially ended up here because I was recording a lot of music and learned a lot about audio. And then decided to go pursue that in a college program at a school called metalwork this year, and just finished yesterday, actually with a diploma in mixing and mastering. And thank you. And so and yeah, during that time COVID ha ha COVID hit.
And so. Figuring out a way to make money, basically. So I started this business online, started doing podcasts because I know, you know, the area’s growing so rapidly and now COVID is kind of ending on Don school and it’s getting to a really good place where we’re kind of really taken to the next level.
And yeah, it’s been weird and quick and I kind of ended up here almost accidentally, but I’m happy and I’m having a good time.
[00:01:40] Lori Brooks: Yes, exactly. No, definitely. I think that the, the entire pandemic made the world speed up in multiple different ways from the digital transition to the ability to start different businesses. It definitely has done a lot, a lot of speeding up. So Chris, I’d love to. When you were a kid, you know, what was the answer to that question?
What did you want to be for up?
[00:02:06] Chris Boulton: Well, I never really had a concrete idea of what I wanted to be. I just knew I was interested in science and math and kind of took it from there. I completed a degree in mechanical engineering and am currently working as a mechanical engineer on the side as well. And.
You know, just, I love learning new things. So that’s really what I like to do. I like to learn, I like to solve problems and turns out this business as well as what else I do within engineering is it’s just that it’s learning and solving problems. Chris said he didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up.
He knew when he did not want to be when he grew up.
And so a lot of us too, you know, we recognize those areas. We want us to get clear on and not just visit us towards. Whenever the journey might turn into. So I’d love to hear about that pivot. I think Christian for you is kind of more of an evolutionary journey. There may not have been too many pivots, but I’d love to know how it was.
You started to get your feet wet in the audio engineering space when you did decide, you know, okay, this is an actual career that I could build out for me. For sure. So originally it was, it was I was just trying to make music in my university room. I actually lived with Chris for three years. We went to school together.
So he’s kind of been in there the whole way of my audio journey. And it was just a lot of YouTube videos kind of a lot of frustration slowly learning and figuring it out and. And yeah, that’s why I ended up going to college to pursue mixing and mastering because I really wanted to, I felt like I was fairly comfortable, but I knew to get to where I needed to be.
I needed to have some formal education in that area. And so yeah, and, and I started doing the podcasts back in September of 2020. Just because I honestly actually had a friend who has a podcast and I re I noticed, there was some easy things we could fix to make it sound a lot better. And so I offered to help him out and he came over one day, we recorded an episode.
I showed him some tricks and I started thinking, you know, There’s a lot of people in this industry that is based in audio that maybe don’t know the most about audio and could use a bit of help because it’s a, it’s a strange niche because in music, obviously music is audio, but everybody in music has a decent enough understanding about audio, but there’s a lot of people in podcasting that don’t really know too much.
I could use, you know, my assistants to bring them to the next level. And so would you like.
Oh, I see what you mean. But yeah, so, so I, I started using his episode kind of as a template of my work and use that as a, you know, an example to show future clients. This is what I can do and slowly building up a client base. And, and we started your podcast Powell in January when I realized, you know, okay, There is an industry here.
This is gonna work. And started working with Chris to help grow this into something bigger than just what I can handle by myself. You know what I mean? So you’re telling me that you can’t just download a dynasty or pro tools and become a Mixmaster genius. Well, anybody can become a mixing and mastering genius, but it’s.
Are you willing to put in the time to learn and figure it out? A lot of people, it’s a lot easier for them to focus on their show and their content. And then I can focus on their audio. It’s a team effort, you know? Yeah. Yeah. In a recent episode that we were reporting, we were talking about exactly that, you know, finding your focus.
And making that what you make sure you’re doing as your income generating activities and making sure to delegate or get rid of all of the other activities so that you can actually move forward in your own career. And so that’s what you’ve done. You’ve found a way in another niche industry to help others.
Focused on their industry while you focus on what you do best. So I absolutely love that. Chris, please share some of the first steps that you’ve had in terms of, you know, kind of diving into the audience. Well, yeah, like Christian said, we lived together for a few years. I am not quite as talented as musician as Christian.
He’s, he’ll be humble about it, but he’s an incredible singer and incredible guitarist, great songwriter. So I was just kind of there observing and learning so much along the way. I would always help Christian mix and just record some of his music and, you know, it, it seemed to make sense to me, it wasn’t this totally foreign concept.
So I was able to help a little bit. And that was just my introduction. Really. We did that for a few years. Then we graduated university kind of went our own separate ways and I remember. I was having a pretty bad day at the job that I was working at the time. And I thought, you know, I’ll just, I’ll call Christian.
We’ll talk about, we’ll talk this through. We’ll talk about this idea. I’ve been kind of having about podcasting and recording in the time of COVID. So I remember hearing on the radio that day an ad for something that was recorded just terribly, it sounded just, just horrible. And it was on the radio, which I thought, you know, there should be higher production value.
So I thought, you know, maybe there’s something we can do about that. So I called Christian and we talked about it and he had already started this. You started doing some podcasts. So it was interesting kind of serendipitous that we both had a similar idea around the same time. And from there, we just built it out.
We spent we spent a couple of months just really nailing down what we wanted to do, what we could offer and who we could offer it to. And that really led us here of that. I absolutely love Paul. Not only did you guys share your own evolutionary journeys, but you also share how it was the two of you and yourself.
And started really building out this practice for yourselves.
[00:08:45] Lori Brooks: So I’m super excited to hear all about podcasts piles, and, and for you to kind of share a little bit about what it is you guys are good at.
[00:08:54] Christian Parry: Yeah, sure. I’ll go ahead. So basically the company is almost basically six months old now. So the whole time we’ve just been reaching out to new clients, solely building a client base and.
There’s a lot of production. It’s not really just mixing us a lot of production to involve. So, you know, we’ll we helping people do their intros and outros and formulate those and kind of put everything together. And we’re about getting to a point now where we’re, we’re pretty busy and we actually just hired our first engineer yesterday.
So yeah, it’s a pretty exciting. And so our plan is to just keep growing and just keep collecting clients and. And to have a really solid team of engineers that can essentially do what I do on a, on a larger scale. And yeah, Chris, you got anything you want to add onto that? Yeah, no, Christian is our main audio engineer but we’re getting to a point where we need more help.
Basically. We need someone else to take on some of that. I’m less of an audio engineer. I’m more handle some of the business development, accounting administration stuff. So, yeah, we’re we’re, we’re growing in the time of COVID without being in the same city as each other, where we’ve been able to grow this.
Yeah, we actually haven’t, we haven’t seen each other in person since we started this thing, which is kind of fun. He’s at a different time zone too.
[00:10:27] Jeff Beale: So it’s just crazy what you can do nowadays over the internet and talk about a, you know, a lot of times we talk about our individual. Journeys of how we make success of a business.
Solo, you know, we did it ourselves self-made we had no help, but I mean, y’all basically came together at a partnership and a lot of people don’t talk about that essential piece of the partnerships and people. Work together along the way with success. So talk about y’all’s partnership a little bit more.
[00:11:07] Chris Boulton: Yeah, sure. Well we have very different strengths for sure. I don’t think I could do anything close to what Christian does with the audio. And while he’s focused on that, I can focus on some other aspects of the business, such as our, our planning, our business development. And it’s been great. We, because we’re, we live together.
We already know that we get along well enough and we can work together. There have definitely been some challenges, but Using using our strengths and realizing that we’re both not good at everything has really helped with helped us grow and kind of learn a little bit more about each other and about this business.
There’s a lot of elements, you know, you don’t really think about how much really goes into growing a business. Providing a service is one thing, but growing a business, there’s a lot of stuff involved where there’s some stuff I don’t like that much that maybe Chris does like boring the stumps off Chris.
Doesn’t like so much that I like doing more. So there’s a good balance. And it’s not, it’s not just a balance of responsibilities. It’s also. You know, it’s a lot more fun to build something and accomplish things with somebody and to be able to share that, you know, because anybody can kind of trap themselves in a room and re work really hard on something and try and build it.
But I think the fun of all this and, and most things in life is being able to say, you know, look at your friend and say, Hey, look what we’re doing. This is pretty cool. It’s working. And that’s what I think it gives it a bit more meaning for me at least. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:12:44] Lori Brooks: You started from somewhere where you both knew each other.
So you have that. But you also had some time apart where I’m sure you guys have grown and moved forward, but you came together and really decided that this is what you’d like to see. This is where the interest is. You both had that, that epiphany, that aha moment about the same time, you know, recognizing individually that there’s something that you could do or accomplish.
In the audio space, then you came together and made sure to then work on that partnership in any way that you could, whether it was, you know, focusing on individual’s strengths or making sure that the two of you were working together on different aspects of the practice. You made sure you guys actually were just capable of coordinate.
And I think that that in and of itself is something that a lot of people like Jeff was mentioning getting, don’t take the time to really sit down, to map out how that’s going to happen and what straights each one can play too well enough to make that partnership form gellan and kind of grow. So congratulations to both of you for taking that time to make that piece work.
So if you had the option. Christian, and then to go back, say 10 years and tell yourself something about, you know, today or warn yourself about something, say, what do you feel like that.
[00:14:12] Christian Parry: Well, 10 years ago, I would have been 14 years old. Just really getting into guitar and music and audio at that point.
And and so I was always kind of into Sonics in general. I’ve always. I’ve been a really big fan of records and how they’re recorded. And I just, I just really like sound. It’s not just music. And so it’s interesting because for a long time, I worked really hard on just one area of audio, which was my music.
You’re not always rewarded for the hard work you put in. Well, you are, you are rewarded for the hard work you put in, but it might show itself in ways you never would’ve expected. You know? Cause there’s a lot of hours I put into learning about recording and making my music and then. All of a sudden, I was like, Hey, look at this.
I have all these skills and now I can actually, it doesn’t only have to be music. I can do this podcast business as well. Maybe I can start mixing stuff in mastering stuff or working in post production and movies. So. I would say just, you know, find something that you love and work hard because even if the, the prize isn’t clear, you know, that hard work always pays off maybe in ways that you wouldn’t have expected that it would pay off.
That’s what I would say.
[00:15:30] Lori Brooks: So Chris, what would your answer be if you had to be, I would need to go back say 10 years and tell yourself something. What would that be?
[00:15:38] Chris Boulton: Similar to Christian, I would say go with the flow. You can make as detailed a plan as you want. But you can’t control it, anything, well, some things, but you can’t control most things you just need to, you got to realize that life kind of takes you in different directions.
I had no idea I’d be here where I am today. And even this podcasting business, maybe wasn’t part of my plan five years ago, but I decided to go with the flow and maybe even one year ago, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So. Roll with what life deals you go with the flow because you know, you’ll, you’ll do more harm if you say no to things.
So just accept things and just go with what life deals you really. Okay. Work hard and be flexible, be open to that pivot and those opportunities and moments that might arise that you have no idea may actually show up in your journey. So I definitely had no idea though. That TV would be something that we would eat maybe talking about, but here we all are on a brand new show.
So definitely.
[00:17:00] Christian Parry: Just say congratulations about the new show by the way.
[00:17:08] Lori Brooks: Excellent. So the show is really designed to do exactly what the two of you have stuff you want. They looked around, you saw an issue in the industry and you found a way to solve that, that problem, or that challenge in that industry. And go ahead and turn it into business. And that’s really what the show is designed to do.
It’s to help other entrepreneurs come up with a business idea and an industry that they may not have been thinking about. And you guys know the first. That we’ve had on the show. So super excited to have you on and super excited to find out what the answer to the next question is. And seeing as how you both have different areas of the business pitch to working in a positive, this may be a different answer for each Christian.
If you had a magic wand and have the opportunity to change anything operationally on the audio engineering side. Of podcast piles. What do you feel like that would be? And how do you feel the change for the industry as a whole?
[00:18:11] Christian Parry: Well, our, our kind of dream for what this will be and kind of honestly, our original idea.
Which we realized would be a pretty hard starting point and would ended up, would have to be something we work towards is to also provide like as kind of a podcast starter kit. So it would include a mic and an interface and kind of the stuff you need. And then you would be able to use that equipment and send it to us.
And then we would kind of have control over the audio that we received so consistent, and we’d be able to get everybody to that next level quicker. But if I had a wand, I would. I would give everybody one of these microphones and and a decent interface. And then, yeah, that’s, that’s what I would do.
That’s the goal. Eventually I need one.
[00:19:01] Lori Brooks: So let’s, let’s get the magic ball and
I’d love to know if you had a magic wand and Fitch team to anything, you know, on the administrative and podcast POS what do you feel like.
[00:19:18] Chris Boulton: I’d like to just centralize the whole process. I’d like to centralize everything through our website. So audio can be possibly even recorded on a, a web based interface.
It can be submitted to us through that same way. We can handle all the management and the posting and the scheduling. The episode, each episodes, as well as just managing every aspect of it through one central place. So through that website, and I think that is a goal that we’re striving for. It will be a little bit challenging to implement.
So. We’re not, we don’t foresee that in the near future, but eventually that’s what, where we would like to go
streamlining of the actual operations of receiving the content that you’re working with as well as optimizing how that content is generated in the first place to go. I have made the tools. Yeah.
Capable of sleeping at night because I’m positive. They sufficient like my own, you know, that probably keep you up dealing with, you know, whatever Mike is have chosen today, because that’s what I felt like going with.
[00:20:29] Lori Brooks: Yeah. I hear you. And I understand, so I absolutely love that. I thank you guys so very much for sharing your time, energy and your journey with the community.
So you shared this way for our viewers to find it.
[00:20:44] Christian Parry: You can find us at our website, your podcast, pal.com. We’re also on Facebook, facebook.com/or podcast, pal and Instagram at your podcast pal. So you can find us on all those places. Feel free to reach out. There’s no audio. We can’t improve. There’s no client.
We can’t work with. We’d love to hear your podcasts and help you bring it to that next place. Okay. And you guys do both audio and video. Yes. Yes. We just started doing more video and yeah. So any, any show you have, we can totally work with you to improve it. Yeah,
[00:21:22] Chris Boulton: we understand everyone has a different podcast, different style.
We can work with everything.
Okay, great.
[00:21:30] Jeff Beale: And Christian is going to take us out with the. So
[00:21:37] Christian Parry: oh boy, I don’t know about that. I don’t know if that’s a right now.
Oh, goodness.
[00:21:45] Lori Brooks: You guys have been outstanding. I thank you. Thank you for joining us today.
[00:21:50] Christian Parry: Thank you for having us. All right. So that is the end
You must be logged in to post a comment.