 What's up everybody once again it's Brandon Shawn and we got to talk about how do you hire a manager, how do you hire a publicist, PR person, how do you hire a lot of these different positions in the music industry and I have one primary answer. Ask around. Yup and I mean it's pretty much that simple. Why am I saying ask around though? Well we have a lot of these agencies that are online, a lot of these companies that you see and when you look at these companies people are asking me all the time, brand man is this a scam, brand man what do you think about this company, what do you think about this company? Well I haven't worked with a lot of these random companies so some of them I say okay yeah it's kind of obvious that's probably a scam but then a lot of them I might check out and it may or may not be a scam and I'm not going to say somebody's a scam when I don't necessarily know. I usually say hey bro you got to figure it out for yourself, give it a try. I understand these companies are selling themselves, you might go to their website or you might go to their IG page and they say this, that is a third but at the end of the day you should probably try to find some artists that they've worked with or figure out somebody in their circle or who might have known about them or heard of them before and ask them about that experience. That's going to be the best way whether it's a lawyer, whether it's a publicist, PR manager, all of those people it's something you should probably do before hand with anybody in the same way a job asks for referrals you should probably consider looking into that. Why is this so important? Well at the end of the day your music is your business and it doesn't mean somebody's going to be a scam. Somebody might not be a scam though somebody might say okay that person's a scam or that's a sketchy person I would mess with them but some people might say yo dope person great character they're awesome however at the end of the day they never get results or at the end of the day they're just not good at their job in general right you never know what that might be that you get whatever the intel or information but when you're talking about your business which is your music you should just ask around spend that time try to figure out who they may have worked with ask those people get some kind of third party unbiased opinion and move from there and at the end of the day those people might be cool with them in some sort of way and might not want to say anything bad so you don't get the complete objective opinion but it's best to do some sort of research and get more information so you're not completely blindsided at the end of the day you have to build the habit of doing this type of research so you protect your own business even when all that is said and done somebody could have performed well for everybody but for whatever reason they can't get things done for you because a lot of this stuff isn't necessarily agreed especially when it comes to like marketing campaigns but one thing that i can tell you if you have pretty much nothing going on nothing at all right you barely have any fans and things like that and people are just saying hey they're gonna break you or they're just super excited coming at you saying they want to work with you they want to do these blog posts with you or they want to i don't know just get you out there it's probably something that you want to look into or be hesitant about because it's very hard to break an artist very hard you know a lot of great people who have had problems breaking an artist who are very knowledgeable maybe have connections things like that otherwise we would see artists breaking every day so it might be hard to hear this way but if you don't have anything going on you shouldn't even want to work with somebody who wants to work with you because they're probably scamming you in the first place of course there's different situations it's not for every single thing like a playlist placement things like that make sense if you don't have a following or nothing going on but you get my point and be serious about that because you understand what you got going on you need to spend more time getting the ball rolling in most of these cases a lot of artists before they reach out to people or start to actually accept deals when other people speak to them other than that though i would love to know what you guys think some of your experiences in finding people to work with you some of your experiences with scams and like what are some warning signs and i don't know like just find some tips whatever makes sense to you put it in the comment section below and as always if you like this video go ahead and like button if you like it might as well share it and if you're not subscribed you know what to do hit that subscribe