How to sell without selling out with Don’t Keep your Day Job’s Cathy Heller

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Music entrepreneur, author, coach and podcast host Cathy Heller was crushed early in her career when her record label dropped her. But she discovered another way to make money from her music and staged the ultimate multi-million dollar comeback. 


Cathy’s Money Story:

Cathy Heller:
Yeah. My money story. I came out to LA wanting to write music. That was all I knew I loved doing as a kid. I thought, all right, I'm going to do that thing that you see them do in movies. I'm going to go out to LA. I grew up on the East Coast. I was going to figure it out and I had to get a job and pay the bills. I got a job as an assistant in an office and I had a roommate and she was an actress and I was doing my thing. And eventually I started writing music and I wrote some mediocre songs and they got better. And I finally got a record deal. I actually did. I remember sitting with Ron Fair at Interscope, I had just signed and Lady Gaga was there recording Paparazzi and I was like, oh my God, I'm sitting in this room. It's amazing.

Bobbi Rebell:
That must've been so surreal.

Cathy Heller:
It was really surreal. And by the way, hearing Paparazzi recorded is really cool because if you go back now and listen, you'll hear what I'm referring to. There's all these strings on the recording and it makes the pop music just sound like some other dimension is going on and it's beautiful. It was just amazing. But I got dropped from the label a few months later. While I was actually sitting there in the studio, Ron Fair, my producer at the time, he said to me, "You know Cathy, when I first came out to LA, I met with Bill Conti." Bill Conti is the guy who did the music for Rocky and so many other iconic movies and he said to him, "You know Ron, you're a really good songwriter but you're an amazing producer." And he said, "And I wound up making a living really as one of the best producers in the industry."

Cathy Heller:
And I remember that story and I didn't know three, four months later that I'd get dropped from the label, but I did and I wound up going and getting a quote unquote real job and I did so many things. I worked in a floral design studio. I thought, oh, if I can't do the thing I love that's creative, I'll do something else creative. As if it's going to scratch that same itch and it doesn't. I think we all have tried that. And then a friend of mine said, "If you're not going to do what you love, just make money." And I said, "Well how do you do that?" She said, "You do real estate." She said, "I know a guy who works in commercial real estate, he lives in Brentwood. You should go work for him."

Cathy Heller:
She introduces me and I start working in commercial real estate. I don't know the first thing about cap rates or mortgages and he says, "All you have to do is pick up the phone, call about 20 to 30 people a day and set some meetings for me and I'll give you good money if you can set meetings." And I wound up being pretty good at it and then I was there for two years and it was really like golden handcuffs because he was paying me a 150 grand to sit at this desk and make phone calls for him.

Bobbi Rebell:
Life is going by and you're not in the music business.

Cathy Heller:
No, I wasn't doing anything I loved. And I remember one day I was driving and I was crying so hard, I had to pull over to the side of the road and I thought to myself, I just, I don't know where I went, but I don't recognize myself. I am not this girl. I don't wear pantsuits. I don't blow my hair out. I don't talk this way. And I thought, gosh, we were talking about Tony Robbins before because he wrote the forward to your book and he always says, "Success without fulfillment is like the ultimate failure." And I felt like I couldn't breathe. I was like, I don't care that I'm driving a cute little Mercedes convertible. I don't care that I can eat sushi whenever I want. I don't feel like myself. I am so not me.

Cathy Heller:
And I decided I was going to quit and I quit my job, which I don't recommend to people. What I recommend to people now is that you build a runway and build a side hustle and validate your idea. And there's so many great tools and ways to do that so that you don't have to just jump. But I did. I couldn't take it. I just jumped.

Bobbi Rebell:
What was that like when you went in? You just went in one day and quit. Did you have overhead? Rent? You didn't have a family at the time, I assume.

Cathy Heller:
No, I was only 26. I quit and I thought to myself, oh by the time I run out of whatever tiny amount of savings I have from this job, I'm sure I'll be making money in music. And I saw that there was a whole world of musicians who were licensing their songs to TV shows, like Grey's Anatomy in One Tree Hill at the time and ads for McDonald's and Pepsi and Walmart. And I was like, what is this whole road? I wish I would've known about it.

Bobbi Rebell:
I'm thinking that now. I never even thought about that whole world. And you're just observing it and there's a business behind that.

Cathy Heller:
Oh, it's a huge business. And this article, this article was really opening my eyes. It was telling me that people in this field were making hundreds of thousands of dollars because ad agencies were paying the artists 50, 60, $70,000 a pop for just the use, just the license, not the ownership to use the song in an ad. And television shows were spending something like five or $10,000 per song in an episode. Of course it's more for an ad because there might be one retail ad for a campaign versus 22 episodes and six songs an episode, but still five or 10 grand to have your song used in a show or $50,000 to have your song used in a Walmart spot.

Cathy Heller:
I was getting pretty excited about that and so I made that decision that I would do everything I could to figure out who were the clients, who were the people choosing songs at Paramount and NBC and Lion's Gate and ad agencies like Ogilvy and Deutsche and McCann. Who were those people? And what did they need? And I had never asked myself that question before. Up until that moment, I thought that you either did something you loved that came completely from your heart or you built someone else's dream and you sold out. I never really understood that you could marry the two things, that you could be who you were and feel authentic and at the same time you could know that someone else has a need and a want and that you could answer that with your gifts. And then that's really how you make a living.

Cathy Heller:
And it made so much sense. All of a sudden it's like the lights went on and I thought, wow. And I started telling songwriter friends of mine who were starving and working jobs that they hated, barista jobs and insurance jobs, and I said to them, "Look, have you ever looked at this this way?" And they said, "Oh my gosh, you're going to be such a sell out. You're going to hate the music you write." And I said, "Oh my God."

Bobbi Rebell:
They said that?

Cathy Heller:
Oh, they had so much resistance.

Bobbi Rebell:
Really?

Cathy Heller:
Because people, especially artists believe that if you're really an artist, then you're probably starving because you're so authentic. And that definitely doesn't account for people like Michelangelo who died with $50 million to his name before inflation. He would be a billionaire today. It doesn't account for people like John Williams who's written all the scores to Star Wars and Jaws and all of these movies. It doesn't account for any of the people you've ever supported. Whether it's somebody concert, you go to a piece of art. Why? Because all of the people that I just mentioned are people who absolutely care what their customer, what their audience needs and wants.

Cathy Heller:
And I realize that the difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby is something you do for you. But a business has to have at its core, radical, radical, radical empathy because it means that something that I'm doing in this world, someone else is going to value and they're going to pay me for it. I got that. And so I got excited. I actually got excited to find out how I could serve and I started to do the next thing which I tell people to do, which is I think everybody has Michael Jordan talent at something. But we're really missing momentum. And what we need to do is validate our ideas and we need to get feedback by going out and talking to human beings about what they need.

Cathy Heller:
And so I started to do that really scary, scary thing, which was pick up the phone and call Warner Brothers and call all these ad agencies and call Disney and call brands and ask questions about what kinds of campaigns, what kinds of stories they were telling, what kinds of things they needed musically. What kinds of sonic palettes. Did they like strings? Did they like ukuleles? Is the story this year about sisters? Is it about female empowerment? Is it about being there for someone? And people I am telling you, they were so happy to tell me what they needed. They were so happy that for the first time in a long time somebody reached out and it was refreshing to them that I wasn't calling to pitch myself and to read a script and try to be impressive.

Cathy Heller:
I was calling to ask what I could do to use my talent to help and long story short, within 18 months I started making $100,000 writing songs for film and TV and then that grew second and third year I started making $300,000 a year and then I got written about in Variety and Billboard and the LA Weekly and when I say written about, it wasn't a two line blurb about this girl who was writing music for film and TV. It was a full page story, not just digitally but in print magazines with a picture of me telling the story about how I was taking matters into my own hands and I was really successful.

 
“A hobby is something you do for you. But a business has to have at it’s core radical empathy. Because it means that something that I am doing in this world someone else is going to value and they are going to pay me for it.”
 

Cathy’s Money Lesson:

Cathy Heller:
You've got to validate your idea and I think what most people do is they think about businesses backwards where they think to themselves, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to sit in my little cave and I'm going to come up with this line of cupcakes or this jewelry I'm going to do or I'm going to write the whole book before they ever test it. Before they ever figure out who would buy this jewelry? Who would eat these cupcakes? And maybe I should go and in tandem with this person who I'm making it for, maybe I should be getting their input, getting feedback and then weaving that feedback into my process. I think that people just don't realize that we make it harder than it needs to be and if you look at any successful company, they are testing ideas all the time. They are paying for your feedback. They are doing focus groups because it works.

Cathy Heller:
And then this sounds really simple but it's usually really hard. You have to go out and tell people about your idea. You have to make sure that you're going out in the world and you are letting people know about it and instead of saying, "Well, I'm going to think about this and noodle around on my about page for 40 hours." No, it's pick up the phone and make the call. Let them know what's so awesome about what you're doing as opposed to telling them, how you do what you do. People forget that we don't buy things, we buy feelings, we buy results. And so often when you ask someone, "Tell me about the thing that you're creating or service you're offering." People sort of get tongue tied.

Bobbi Rebell:
How many people do you think you called for every time you place a song in the early years before you were known?

Cathy Heller:
It's hundreds.

Bobbi Rebell:
Hundreds?

Cathy Heller:
Yeah. And when people would say no to me, and there were times that people not only said no, but said, "Don't ever send music like this. It's so mediocre." And instead of me being completely devastated, because obviously I wasn't completely devastated. I felt bad, I felt gross, I felt stupid sometimes. But I would take the feedback and I knew that I would give myself the grace to get better at it.

 
“I would take the feedback. And I would give myself the grace to get better at it.”
 

Cathy’s Money Tip:

Cathy Heller:
Yeah. My everyday money tip is something that I learned from Jen Sincero who wrote, You are a Badass. When she was on my podcast, she was living at 40 years old in a, she was living in a garage eating cans of tuna fish and she's like, something's got to change. And she did a bunch of self help stuff. And finally somebody said to her, why don't you write a letter to money? And she's like, what does that mean? And she wrote a letter to money and she was like, money, I hate you. Money, you're the reason for everyone's problems. And she realized at the end of the letter that she was carrying around feeling so much resistance to money because deep down money is something that she felt would make her less of a kind person. And that was a choice she didn't want to make. She didn't want to either have money and be a jerk or not have money, but she chose not having money if it meant she would have her integrity.

Cathy Heller:
And so I often tell people, "Why don't you write a letter to money?" Because sometimes what we find out is that at the root of it we might be sabotaging ourself because we might believe that money is something we feel shame around. If it's not shame for having it and being a jerk, sometimes it's shame like who am I to deserve to have good things? And when we can get to the root of that, it's very important because ultimately in life the results of our life, it has to do with what we really deep down want.

Bobbi Rebell:
Tell us more about where people can follow up and learn more about you and your podcast and your book and all things Cathy Heller.

 
“We don’t buy things. We buy feelings. We buy results.”
 

Bobbi’s Financial Grownup Tips:

Financial Grownup Tip #1:

Some of Cathy's best clients were the very ones who rejected her earlier in her career. When I asked Cathy about this after the interview, she explained that if she was being honest with herself, her work just was not that good initially when she pitched them. She had to get better at her craft. It's business. It's not personal. Early rejection is not forever rejection. Try to find out why your work wasn't accepted and then work on the work.

Financial Grownup Tip #2:

Cathy talked about how some of her musician friends called her a sellout. Look guys, making an honest living is not selling out. There is no glory in being a starving artist. It doesn't make you a better artist to not earn money. Nor by the way, is there any historical precedent for this over romanticized idea. Professional artists, Michelangelo, for example, died in 1564 at the age of 88. His net worth by many reports in the ballpark of $7 million.


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Advice, Authors, Entrepreneurs, Family + Relationships, Financial Grownup, Get Paid More, Money, Personal Finance, Podcasts, Role Models, Women Role Models, Women EntrepreneursBobbi Rebell KaufmanCathy Heller, Personal Development, Don't Keep Your Day Job, Author, Depression, Purpose