Life & Work with Justin Newton

Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Newton.

Hi Justin, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in a musical family. My parents played music together before my brother and I were born and we both grew up playing music in school band and in rock bands around New England as we got older. Naturally, I was drawn to tinkering with mixers microphones, routing them to cassette recorders to try to make recordings of my band, and other bands we knew. When it came time to pick a field of study in college I chose audio production and moved to Boston to fill out a hobby into skills that could be a real profession.

After college, I stayed around New England for a few more years balancing a day job and doing audio production as a side-job until 2012 when I met my future wife. She was a teacher and a new job was bringing her to Cincinnati Ohio. We decided to get married and move our life to Cincinnati. That’s when made the leap. In summer 2013 we landed in Cincinnati. I dumped the day job, and started to work full time in audio production.

It was a lean first couple years as I built my reputation here but by year 3 my business income was steadily growing faster than my growth goals!

Now in year 8, I’m on my second home-studio build. I work most days here, but occasionally go remote with my gear to a client location, or work at another local studio when needed.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It’s not always been easy and in some ways, it’s still not easy!

When I first started, I had just moved to a new city and didn’t know anybody.

I remember driving around to any local music shops I could find to hang flyers for my services and chat up the shopkeepers about other leads.

So much of this business is word-of-mouth so you really have to brute force that at first. I took some jobs that were not great work and really low paying just to get some reputation started. It feels painful in those early days and it feels like there’s going to be no way out of the hole of trying to price myself low enough to get any job.

It did work, though, and soon the problem of not having any work to fill my days was replaced with a new one.

My days were full of low-paying work, but I didn’t have extra time left to scout for better work, and you feel this fear that I’ll lose what little income I have if I start asking for what I’m really worth.

What it took was some business education in this industry, which I found in a Facebook group for freelancing audio professionals just like me.

With the help of this group bouncing ideas and philosophy of business around, I was able to work on bettering my brand, my website, and my policies. I focussed on providing a premium product and client experience. My focus changed from one of “I’m a low cost audio engineer who will work on anything” to “My goal is top quality audio production and I take on jobs who want that as their main goal”.
With this change, I was able to target clients who wanted that top quality and understand that top quality is worth more. This is when my business started growing faster.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve always loved working on music but as I grew my business it was clear early on that music alone wasn’t going to keep the lights on. I discovered a love for other kinds of audio production and now about half my business each year is music and the other half is dialog and video sound mixing. Things like tv shows and films, audiobooks, and podcasts especially have really blown up since the COVID-19 pandemic changed all our lives.

Some would see that as not really specialized at all, but I actually do think specializing is the important detail that finally made my business catch and start growing. In this case, it wasn’t any particular genre or media that I chose (although I do limit myself a bit from genres of music I have little experience with). I think the way I specialized was to start saying no to projects where I could tell the client wasn’t putting quality at the top of their priorities. When I started insisting on working only with clients who top priority was quality, the average budget of my projects went up. I was free to bring better sounding final products to the client, without fear of spending too much time and making too little money. Those projects are ambassadors for my reputation out in the world and that insistence on quality comes back around and leads to more clients with the same goals!

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I believe luck is a construct of the human mind. It’s shown in studies that people who perceive themselves to be lucky take more chances than those who perceive themselves to be unlucky. Taking more chances will lead to having more successes, even if the rate of success to failure is the same. So if you think you are lucky, you’ll have more success. Not because of some supernatural event that makes the chances you take turn out better; just because you take more chances at all!

With an understanding like this, it’s hard to use the word luck when talking about my business. I worked at it, some things I did were risks. It’s my tendency to remember the success events and forget the failures so, am I lucky? Sure! But not more than anybody else.

Contact Info:

• Email: justin@jaysongstudio.com
• Website: http://jaysongstudio.com
• Instagram: @jaysongstudio

Image Credits
Justin Newton
Tye Newton