 What's up everybody? Once again, it's Brand Man Sean and we have a special episode for you today. As I told you guys, I had somebody special going to ask some questions. Today, I got Sir Love from Phase Six. He has an awesome YouTube channel. He's a manager that's been involved in several facets of the music business, been around some big people like T-Pain and Usher. I'm gonna let him introduce himself because I can do it for days. These guys are busy, man. For sure, for sure. I appreciate it, Brand Man. Thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, yeah. If you say, my name is Sir Love. I have a channel called Phase Six that's P-H-A-S-E Space-V-I on YouTube. You can check me out. I talk about music business. But my history in the game, I started off as a young kid, engineering and start off as an engineer, and turning with Nitty Beats, moved up to doing some stuff with Usher Records. Kind of got, you know, didn't like the part about being an engineer. So I kind of moved into marketing. From marketing, went into operations. From operations, I started doing television shows like Love and Hip Hop Atlanta. After that, I went into marketing and now I'm marketing management and now I'm managing different artists and acts and things of that nature. That's what's up. See, as you can hear, he's touched pretty much every facet of the game. So you got a lot of great information coming. We're gonna jump right into the questions. So question number one. And this question is coming from Crown in Beauty. What are the pros and cons of self-management versus having an artist manager? A great question for you as you are a manager. All right, perfect. Well, Crown to Beauty. If you are self-managing, here are some of the cons. Now at the beginning, the pros are, you had the opportunity to get everything set up. A lot of the marketing things that you talk about and the show as far as establishing your brand, finding your own identity, creating value for yourself. You had the opportunity to do that without any outside influence interference. You know, your manager may not have the same vision as you do initially. And it's hard for a person to come in and know exactly what you want if you don't have what you want pre-established, right? So once you already have an identity, the pro is you develop your identity without anybody trying to push you or sway into doing something that you don't want to do prior to them coming in. Now the disadvantages of having a manager, I say of not having a manager coming immediately when you start going up the chain and trying to become successful. And let me explain why. Maybe you're at a show, right? You're trying to run the show. Who's the person making sure that your people get into the venue? Who's the person calling the booking agent and making sure that they're building a relationship with the booking agent or the promoter? Who's the person that's negotiating your numbers and negotiating your fee? People don't like to tell the artist the truth. They like to tell the manager the truth so the manager can be the bearer of bad news. So if you don't have a manager, people may not wanna do business with you just because they don't feel like you can handle the business or they don't feel like they can be honest with you as an artist because they wanna keep a positive relationship with you but they also wanna handle the business. So at some point along the line, you're gonna need someone to be your representative and to speak for you so that you can continue on with engagements like shows, endorsements, sponsorships, opportunities. You can't do everything and everyone doesn't wanna talk to you. All right, so if I phrase it this way, it'll kinda help with both, right? So what are the core competencies of a good manager? If that person doesn't, they haven't been a manager before, if you say those core competencies, at least you know what that person who hasn't been one needs to figure out and be able to do. Not perfect. So when you're trying to choose a manager is a couple of things that you're gonna have to have. First off, everybody in the music industry in order to be successful, you need three things. You need knowledge, you need network and you need money, okay? You like your manager to have one of those three things, okay? If your manager does not have one of those three things, they need to be some type of activator, right? Activator means they're driven. They have passion, they have to type a hunger for it or they have some other skill set that allows them to be ambitious towards this goal. They need to be driven toward it, right? The drive will allow a person to acquire one of those three things that they're missing, knowledge, network of money. Another thing that you wanna look at when you're trying to get a manager is what is their history? And what have they done prior to? Most people in management have started off in some facet of the music business. They were working in publicity. They were working in booking. They were working as an A&R or they was working as an intern at a label. They come with some type of skill sets that could be useful prior to getting involved. So if you're looking for this person, you wanna make sure that they have some skill sets already that they come with, that they can start managing you with and you wanna make sure that they have one of those three things, knowledge, network, and money. There's a couple of other character things that are probably important, but you can drift on that for a while. Yeah, that character thing just applies to everybody, to anybody. Another thing that I like to note is if this person, especially if they haven't been a manager before, but I would like this in any manager to have sales skills. Like because they're managing your brain and hopefully creating new situations for you, you have those people who really literally managed, just managed the situation you already have or whatever you give them. But someone who's gonna be exponentially beneficial to you is somebody who has sales skills that can create new situations and develop business opportunities for you as an artist as well. No, that's very important. Every single time I get on the phone, I'm selling the artist. I'm presenting this artist in a way that's gonna be unique. I'm preparing tools that are gonna better allow me to sell the artist to whoever I'm selling it to. I'm coming up with a different pitch for different people in different positions to sell the artist. And when I say sell the artist, I mean trying to establish value with the other person so that they want to pay us for what we're doing or they want to engage with us and allow us to be a part of what they're doing because obviously what they're doing, if that's the case, is providing some type of exposure to it to us. So sales is important. Another question. So at what stage, this is back to more manager-specific, should an artist seek a manager? We kinda touch on this, but I wanna get more specific. An artist should seek a manager at the point in which you've established some type of A following. B, you have some deliverable. You have some type of product, right? So for example, the artist that I manage right now when I first encountered them, they already had a product that was out. They already had fans that were listening to the project. One of them already had their own website. They were already selling it on Bandcamp. They already had a direction. Both of them had some type of art director or creative director that was involved that was helping them with the branding. And so from that standpoint, all the pieces were already put together for me to come in and tweak it and now add all the other components that would be necessary to bring this into a commercial space and make it commercially viable and appealing to a label or a taste maker or a radio person or something of that nature. But you need to have your foundation. As a manager, I don't wanna come in and create you. You need to create yourself. And for part of creating yourself is putting yourself out there to decide if that's who you truly wanna be. When you drop something, you're gonna tweak it. You're gonna change it. You're gonna edit it. And at some point, it might be your second release or your third release or maybe your first release. You may have gone through so much crap just trying to get your first release out there, but you've defined who you are, essentially the brand and a lot of things you talk about on the show. Right, for sure, for sure. So I just say, you are the product. You have to create the product so the manager can manage and sell the product. I always kinda think coming from the tech side of me, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they started Apple together. Wozniak was building the computers and figuring out the direction, what's cool, what hasn't been done. And Steve Jobs is really just that guy, hey, y'all buy these computers. Point blank, you want that manager to be the person who understands your vision enough that they can sell it to other people and you are that vision. Another question, manager base, what's better? A booking agent or a manager? And really quickly, my bad, that question was from So-Win. Not gonna forget about you, So-Win. So-Win, depends on what's needed, okay? So you need a booking agent when you're trying to book shows, okay? That's obviously what they're there for. They wanna put you on a roll and they get a 10% fee on top of your booking rate, okay? That's how booking agents make their money. The time that you need a booking agent is really specifically when you have a record out there, when you have something buzzing, when you have something hot and you're trying to create an audience already, okay? If you don't have all those things in place, a booking agent may not be attracted to you, they may not want to work with you in the first place. Some booking agents have become managers over the years and sometimes you can find a manager that actually has those skill sets already. Most managers should be able to book up to some level. A manager should be able to at least close the show up to $5,000. After that, they kinda get a little more technical, but a manager should be able to at least do that. Now, when you need a manager, it's really throughout the process. The moment that you've created the product, the moment, like you said, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, product is created, now it's time to have somebody to come in and sell that product. That person is also gonna be tweaking that product for the long-term and duration. There's so many other facets that go into management outside of booking. All right, and so when also kind of delved a little bit deeper and asked, how to make sure that a manager is actually going to book you? Okay, one of the ways is to make sure that you're getting a manager that has the booking skills. It's booking, if booking is your main thing, that's what you're really looking for from a manager. Make sure you're picking a manager that has a strong background in that particular task, okay? You may, it sounds to me like you're already in a space, you probably already have records out there, you probably already have music, you're sitting here saying, I need people to hear me, I need more awareness, I need to find someone to put me on shows. If that's the case, then you probably want to start booking yourself, just being honest, as an artist, get out there and find shows. The first artist that I took on as a manager when I left Love and Hip Hop Atlanta and decided I wanted to go into this was an artist that I found at a show who had already booked themselves for a show. So if you're out there moving and shaking, you're gonna find managers that are going to appeal to what you're currently already doing in the market. But in getting kind of granular with the topic, you don't want to know how to force the manager to do booking. If the manager doesn't know how to book, then they're not gonna be effective at getting new shows. It's a skill set, you have to know how to find promoters, you probably have a relationship with promoters or you have a relationship with booking agents, you can call somebody, there's people that I can call and I know I can get $1,500 from them from an unknown act to put them on stage just because I have that relationship with them from previous things that we've done. That's only because I've operated in that space before. A person that used to be a booking agent probably has 20 people they can call like that. I don't have a few. So if you really wanna get to the money and get on the road, make sure you have a viable product, make sure it's something that makes sense for a manager to get involved in and you probably wanna pitch that viable product to a booking agent because the booking agent will see more value in participating in that. However, the booking agent will likely want you to have a manager because the booking agent is not gonna wanna deal with you directly with all of the pressing issues. Right. Other than that, you guys definitely ask some questions in the comments. Me, SirLove, will be looking out, answering those questions and getting it done. You can follow Sir at phase six on YouTube, subscribe, that's phase VI. Anything else you wanna say? Yeah, definitely check out the website, www.phasevi.com. You guys ask some booking questions. I mean, so when asked about booking, I have a whole ebook that I did about booking that kinda walks artists through what exactly I did to start because I didn't start in this game as a booking agent. I started as a manager and I had to learn it and so I broke it down for people that are getting started. And then there's other things on there like split sheets, you want someone wanting to know about copyrights and things of that nature. I explained all of that stuff on the website as well as on the show to just help you guys out with the business aspect. So as you begin marketing and taking this man's great advice to win and become successful, you're gonna need to make sure you're back in and he's taking care of me. That's the role that I play. Right, right. Definitely this guy is super great for back end. I like to focus on the front end because in specialized, so I can give you the most value. It's so heavy. I'm on marketing and so many ways to go about it. Go to this guy. I'm definitely, I wouldn't have him on here if he wasn't valuable for information and wasn't a great guy. Go to his page, phase six for sure to get all the information you can on a lot of that stuff. Once again, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button.