Mastering Your Music Career: Dawson White on Systems, Balance, and Redefining Success

Michelle Lynne: Welcome to the Fearless Artists podcast. My name is Michelle Lynne. And today I’m really happy to have Dawson White on the podcast. Dawson, welcome.

Dawson White: Thanks so much for having me.

Michelle Lynne: It’s a pleasure. So we connected on Instagram because I found your page and I was instantly excited about what you’re doing. You have your own company called Aspire Music and you work with musicians, very similar to our community, to help them build their own career. So I’d love you to just share a little bit of what you do and, most of all, how you got started.

Dawson White: Yeah, sure. So Aspire Music Company started about three years ago and it started from a place of real frustration. And I think a lot of people, especially musicians, were sitting around in the pandemic, wondering, “What are we doing and what should we do next?” And for me, it was a really good opportunity to look at my health, look backwards because I’m such a forward person that I needed a chance to look backwards and I realized I was missing performance, but I wasn’t missing my career. And I also had developed some autoimmune diseases that were really wreaking havoc on my health. And so all of these frustrations led me to start this company. And it was basically a search for how to manage myself better. You know, I was having to manage my health at a higher level. But I just needed to do that for my career, for my relationships, my family, friends, all these things. And so it started from that place, really.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, I’m glad that you’re mentioning health. I mean, everything you’re sharing sounds really serious. I think musicians are learning as we get out of school and more into our older ages that we need to take care of all the areas of our life and that it’s very difficult to balance this portfolio career, as we like to call it, because from what I understand, you have a very active performing career as well. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what your day-to-day looked like that was before the pandemic.

Dawson White: I was playing full-time with the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Ballet Orchestras, which is very intense. And, you know, especially as a viola player, it’s a very awkward instrument, and playing these five-and-a-half-hour operas, you know, and ballets that are extremely long as well—incredible art forms and great Greeks in their own respect. But in order to have the living that I wanted in Houston, I had to stack that with teaching. So I was teaching at colleges around town. I was starting nonprofits because I’m very entrepreneurial and I had a private studio, and so it just wasn’t any one area that was the problem; it was the collective lifestyle that I had as a result, so it became very toxic for me.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, and I think that resonates with so many people listening because what you’re describing, I mean, the performing, the teaching, but also the running around to rehearsals with different organizations, different projects, so that’s constantly, like, I think we also don’t talk a lot about all the energy it takes to interact with all these different people all the time. If you have a regular 9 to 5, you show up, you know your colleague, you know your boss, you kind of have this, you know, people group that you’re used to working with. And for someone like you, you’re constantly interacting with different people. You’ve got five-and-a-half hours of playing. I mean, I know from Deanna that the viola is like, you know, you’ve talked to me a lot about like the knots and stuff in her back. So I can’t, I mean, I can’t imagine what you guys are going through. So then the pandemic happens and you said you were frustrated during that time. So were you thinking already, like, what am I going to do after the confinement is over? What was your thought process?

Dawson White: Yeah, I think it was a constellation of thoughts over kind of that whole year and I also had jumped into my doctorate at the same time. And I love these things that I actually love working. So I have to have all these boundaries for myself so that I won’t work. I also just love knowledge. I love continuing to grow and I’m really career-focused. And that’s always been a great source of motivation for me. So I think doing the doctorate was really interesting at that time and it kept me busy in a good way. Like if I just sat still, I think I would have gone really crazy. So I jumped in and it was to be able to perform and Music Business and Entrepreneurship, DMA, actually.

Michelle Lynne: No way! I didn’t know that they did those. That is so cool.

Dawson White: Exactly. It’s kind of a unique thing for the University of North Texas. They had been building their music business program for a while, and that’s one reason I jumped in. Basically, it’s like a related field. 12 hours of your degree need to be in something else, you know, other than your major instrument. So I chose music business and entrepreneurship. So I was getting all this great information, being exposed to a completely different side in a different industry, really, that we tend to, as classical musicians, we tend to be so narrow in our focus and we only listen to certain types of people with certain types of success. And so it was very interesting to go way over here and, you know, read a book about how to franchise a business, which I mentioned to you before this, the Entrepreneurship Myths. And so I just became influenced by all these interesting books, speakers, teachers, all these things. And I started to realize, you know, that was happening while I was thinking about my career and I decided that I should not have to pay in hell to do what I love doing, you know, like, and that’s what it kind of felt like my health got better in the pandemic because I wasn’t playing. And then as soon as I got back to playing, all of the health issues started up again. So I realized I was sort of allergic—I say that funnily, but in a funny way, but kind of allergic to my career. It was toxic for me. So that’s when I realized, especially getting out of the pandemic and starting to play again with all these business ideas rolling around in my head. Yeah. That I need to manage my career at a much higher level, and I need to reframe what success actually is. Success is not having a certain position, it’s having a certain life. And so that was a huge, huge shift for me.

Michelle Lynne: Okay, wow, you just dropped two golden gems on us. I should not have to pay in hell for my career, and success is not a position. It’s having the life that I want.

Dawson White: Exactly.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah. I think we need to like paste that on every billboard because I’ve also gone through this journey of like redefining success because for my entire life, it was, you know, it’s the faculty position and it’s soloing concertos with the biggest orchestras in the world. And if you didn’t get there, it’s because you weren’t good enough and you didn’t practice hard enough and you didn’t make it. And then I started to learn like, “Oh, all of that is really fixed mindset.” And I don’t know, now that I’m older, I don’t know if I would have been happy if I’d made it in that way, right? That’s where the interesting question comes in, like, “Oh, if you had actually achieved what you were told success was, would that have given you the satisfaction that you’re looking for, the fulfillment, or like, you know?” Now you’re thriving, you’re working with hundreds of musicians, you’ve got this really cool company which we’re going to talk about, and you’re healthy. I think you’re in a much better place, I mean, than—so this is building success, this is building a fulfilling career that suits you and that suits your strengths. So I love this entrepreneurship thing you did. So then, when did Aspire Music come into the picture?

Dawson White: Yeah, so Aspire Music came in—I’m trying to think, there was an opportunity I had, a friend of mine was creating a business called Artist Empowered. And that was an opportunity, you know, for me to speak to musicians about some of the ideas that were brewing in my mind. And it was, now I realize it was the prototype for Aspire Music Company. And in that Zoom session, you know, I believe there were some high school musicians, there were college professors, there were colleagues and friends of mine who are pursuing auditions around the country. So it was a really big mix of people. And I was sharing with them these struggles, first of all, like I started with the struggle, and there was like this collective sigh of relief just by, you know, a musician who has the success markers talking about how stressful it actually is to have those. Not that I’m, you know, not thankful for those opportunities, but that the lifestyle that it can create can be very toxic. So that was the first moment that I realized this is a viable idea. And then I went through and parceled out like what I’ve learned through my own journey and redefining success at its core. Like basically, we need to look inward, not always outward, to figure out what success means for us. So that was the prototype. And then after that, I started coaching one-on-one with good colleagues and friends in town, just to see, like, how does it feel when I put the coaching hat on? And I’d been coaching through students for many years and helping them get to great colleges and beyond. So it was so natural and so easy. And after a year of doing that, I found out that I love coaching just as much as viola playing. And it’s because I was tapping into my why in both, in both venues. And so then from there, I started to just continue building and building and building until I left my opera and ballet jobs and pursued Aspire Music full-time. And now I still play with those organizations, I play with the Houston Symphony, but I get to choose my gigs now. And it’s a very different lifestyle than I had before.

Michelle Lynne: That is awesome and a satisfying lifestyle where you get to find out you have a whole other set of skills and strengths that bring you a lot of fulfillment and your clients. And it’s a very unique position because of your experience and your background and your musician performing lifestyle. You have a very clear understanding of what musicians mean. Whereas if they just go to any coach who doesn’t understand, you know, we’ve heard many musicians say, “Yeah, I tried coaching and they didn’t really get, like, our problems are so specific.” I think most people in my life who have, you know, quote, normal jobs, they look and they’re like, “You, your life is so busy and it’s so chaotic, how, you know, you’re doing too much,” and you hear all this, you know, opinion. And you then have to filter it. Like, do these people know what they’re talking about? Are they projecting their own limitations on me? Are they maybe just talking out of fear because they could never handle a schedule like this? Do I, or do I actually need to pay attention and listen because they know what they’re talking about? I mean, we got to filter through all this stuff. So if we have someone like you, who’s like, “Hey, I’ve been there. I went through this toxic period of my life. I found something that works. Let me help you.” I mean, I think that is just such a healthy situation. Um, I would like to go back. You’ve mentioned stress markers. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Do you have concrete things in your life that tell you, “I’m out of bounds”?

Dawson White: Yeah, actually, there are quite a few of them. And I could maybe summarize it by saying, know yourself. And through autoimmune disease, you start to say, or you start to realize certain pain comes because you’re doing certain things. So for me, it’s all food-related, usually. So if I eat certain types of food, it triggers one of the three autoimmune diseases. And so I started to become very aware of my body and cause and effect. If I eat this at this time, it’s probably going to cause this issue. And so then I transferred that skill that I learned through my health journey, I transferred it to my career and said, if I work with these types of people, it tends to diminish my mental health. Or if I work for this amount of time, um, with this type of repertoire, it will diminish my physical health. Or if I have to drive an hour and a half and then perform, then that’s going to diminish certain parts of my well-being. So I just transferred that skill over and it became like, “Wow, this whole thing is messed up. The whole system is broken.”

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, I love that. I love that analytical approach. It’s kind of like one plus one equals two for you. You’ve figured out what you need. You figure out how you function best. I love all this stuff about, you know, self-improvement, 1 percent better. What’s the optimization? It sounds like you have a really great awareness of how things run and how you feel your best and that’s what’s led to you being able to handle now all of those different hats in your life.

Dawson White: Exactly. Yeah, I think one thing that musicians really lack right now is a systems approach. And I wouldn’t get into the philosophy of systems too much because it’s actually really boring in my opinion. All we need to know, we are technicians, we look at all the details as musicians, and we really back up and say, “What is broken in this system that I can actually fix?” And so there is some analysis that needs to happen there. And it’s not that you’re not going to be successful overnight, you know, but you can tinker day by day to make your move towards that success that you want. And so you find the stressors, you try to eliminate those when you can. You find the success markers, you reach for those. And you just keep doing that every single day with lots of action. And a year later, you’re like, “Wait, I’m happy. I didn’t even realize it.” And that was kind of my experience of it.

Michelle Lynne: That’s amazing. I mean, yeah, you wake up and you’re like, “Oh, I’m looking forward to my work today. I’m looking forward to my schedule.” Um, I love this talk about systems. I mean, systems changed my life. It’s the only way that I can handle what I’m doing between performing, you know, basically full-time and running TFA. And it doesn’t cost me nearly as much energy as it did in the beginning when you have to get your systems set up and put all of this energy in and it feels like it’s never gonna work and you’re making a ton of mistakes and it’s all confusing and everything’s a mess in your brain and then somehow one day something clicks and the system runs on its own. And now, I mean, my example is I get a date, a new date from Candlelight and they’re like, “Can you be in Brussels on November 18th and play this program?” And I forward that WhatsApp message to Kasi 0.1 seconds. And within three days, my trades are booked. My hotel is booked and my iCal’s updated thanks to my beautiful assistant. And I’m just like, hands off. And I’m like, “Oh, interesting. I’m going to Bruges in three weeks. Okay, great.” Like I know it’s handled. Now I can focus on what I need to do, which is getting on stage. So I love that you’re mentioning this. Um, also I had a system failure this morning when I left my laptop at my hotel. And I was one minute away from taking a train to Brussels without my laptop before luckily I looked in my bag. So then, instead of going through this huge guilt trip like I would have in the past, I’ve been like, “Oh, I had a system failure.” Like every time I walk through a doorway, I’m going through my mental checklist. Dress, shoes, iPad, pedal, computer. You know, so I’m like, your system failed, which means you’re maybe overloaded. So now we need to take a step back and kind of see, like, do you need more rest? What’s going on? So it’s interesting that you’re sharing this because that was my thought process, but in the past, I wouldn’t have had this process to kind of evaluate from an analytical standpoint, like, “What went wrong and how can we prevent that next time?”

Dawson White: Yeah, exactly. I love this system failure. That is the antidote to perfectionism, right? That it’s not, “Oh—”

Michelle Lynne: Really?

Dawson White: You know, it can be, like, especially in this case, like, there is a system. It’s usually broken for most people in many ways. And it, they do break like that, these things happen. But instead of saying, “I did this and that, and therefore I’m terrible,” and then our self-worth goes down because of it, instead it’s a systems failure, right? Like the system is broken. So you have now moved that responsibility from, like, “I’m not perfect” to, “Well, the system didn’t work.” And so I think that’s extremely helpful. And one of the reasons we need to delegate and need to have systems is so that we can focus on the areas we really want to focus on. So I think that’s a beautiful thing to think about—the systems failure.

Michelle Lynne: That’s so cool. Well, anyone who has a coaching session with you can talk to them about their systems and go through all of that. I would love to mention the E-Myth book that you brought up in the beginning because that book changed my life. I read it five years ago. And they’re the manager, entrepreneur, and the technician. Maybe you can share how that’s affected how you run things for you.

Dawson White: Yeah, absolutely. It keeps popping up every day, actually, this mindset shift of “I’m a musician and I have to do everything,” like that’s sort of the feeling that I had so many years. “I’m a musician. I have to be the one that drives, practices, performs, teaches, you know, organizes, does all of the things.” And through that book, it helped me step back and say, “I shouldn’t do everything. I can’t do everything.” And so the technician is how we’re trained as musicians—the small details, you know, we practice, we perform, we teach, like, these are the things that we know very well. And we are trained to zoom in to the atomic level on everything. But the problem with that mindset all the time is you start to notice errors everywhere, all the time. Like, in Houston, we had terrible streets. I know every pothole, and I know the best and smoothest road to get around those potholes because I just can’t stand it. And this is such a stupid thing to be mad about, right? Like, it takes so much energy to think about that. So, through my health journey, I started going into the manager mindset, which is, “How do I manage my health? How do I manage what’s going in? And then what are the what’s going out? Like, you know, food and energy is coming in and then maybe pain is happening because of that, or my energy is going out and how can I manage that in and out, basically.” So the health journey actually helped me significantly with the manager mindset. So then I transferred that to my music business and music career and said, “I have way too many gigs that I don’t like. I have music that I don’t like. I have people I don’t enjoy playing with. And why am I doing this all the time?” Because that is success. I’m in the technician mindset, which is just get gigs and do the thing I’m supposed to do. And that’s what the technician does. But the manager says, “Wait, we have limited resources. We have limited energy. We need to optimize our income and our artistic fulfillment and our personal fulfillment all at the same time.” So that is the manager mindset. And then the entrepreneur mindset is very easy for me. I love dreaming about, you know, solving issues like the potholes and the road. No kidding. But basically, I love thinking of musicians and the future and how we can help musicians. And I started an orchestra. I started a chamber group and I started a viola society at a very young age. So I’ve always been very entrepreneurial, but what I was missing was that middle manager to kind of figure out and speak between technician and entrepreneur. So that book really helped me just clarify those three roles and that I had to operate in all three of them all the time.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, that is extremely helpful. As someone who struggled with the manager role for many years because I think the fear is probably coming from a scarcity mindset. Like, “No, I need to do everything and I can do it. I can do everything.” What do you say to someone who says, you know, pushes back on the manager idea or role or doesn’t want to be managed or, you know, that kind of—do you know what I mean?

Dawson White: Oh, absolutely. Nobody wants to do it. And even clients that are in my Conscious Self-Management program to learn how to manage themselves consciously still avoid it. And it’s just because of the way we are wired as musicians, we’re wired to zoom in. We’re not wired to zoom out and to see it. So what I say to them is, first of all, that you already do. You already do manage, even if you don’t like it. Practicing, even though the act of practicing is technician, the fact that you schedule it out and you determine what you’re going to practice is the manager mindset. Once you start to find other areas, um, either musical or non-musical where you’re, you know, exercising this skill, you can then transfer that. Here’s a good example. So one of my clients was just talking about, “Oh, I hate marketing. Like marketing is so time-intensive and it’s hard to talk about myself. It’s hard to hear what my audience wants and then me give them what they want in the form of content.” And I said, “It’s chamber music. If you are in a group and you’re listening to the first violin, and then you’re sending something back that mimics that, that is chamber music. We’ve been taught to do that. All you have to do is transfer that skill over to marketing.” So somebody sends you, like, this pain point that you hear, then you send something out, “I’ve dealt with that pain point, this is how I dealt with it.” So this idea of transferring skills is extremely helpful for musicians to get out of the technician mindset. I have found—

Michelle Lynne: I just have to take a second and highlight your lateral thinking. It is so amazing to hear how you’re taking something you learned in one area and then you apply it across the board. I think so many musicians need to learn this. I mean, it’s so helpful to think, “Hey, I learned this in my health area. Now I can bring that into my music,” or it’s like taking some from the music world that you learn now. You can apply it to an area that feels unfamiliar. I think that kind of lateral thinking is so helpful. It also streamlines our processes. So not everything is starting from scratch. If you have to bring in a new area of your life, you’re not reinventing a whole process. You’re like, “No, wait, I already think like this. I just need to apply that thinking to this new area.”

Dawson White: Yes. And this comes from the abundance mindset that you’re talking about. Like, this is one thing that I help my clients do is I actually help them list all of their skills and it takes a while and there’s so many, but once they see this, they’re like, “Whoa, what do I do with this?” I say, “Transfer them,” you know, or reinvent them or don’t do them if you don’t like it, but you become abundant. You start to realize, “Oh, just because I don’t work in the New York Hill doesn’t mean I’m not abundant,” right? So you can start saying, “I have all these skills and I can start to transfer them to different areas for, you know, my clients’ benefit, my students’ benefit, audiences’ benefit, my own benefit.” So I appreciate you bringing that up, though. That’s how I make abundance tangible, basically, is looking at everything you actually have already.

Michelle Lynne: Yeah, that’s so good. I just finished reading Smartcuts by Shane Snow. And he talks a lot about the power of lateral thinking. And so it really struck me because my example is I started Instagram on my fitness account in 2017. I was building my fitness account, I took it really seriously, I posted every day, I made a bunch of friends, you know, the girls doing the same workout program I was. And so then when I started TSA, I’m like, “Oh, I already know how to build community, I already know how to post about what I’m doing, I already know how to talk to an audience. I just have to do it in the music world,” which, you know, of course, then I had to overcome a whole bunch of imposters, limitations, all that stuff. Cause now I’m showing my piano playing and not my workout. But anyway. Okay. Please tell me, with your Aspire Music clients, like what are some of the things that you’re seeing, you know, similar problems across the board that you help people with or maybe some success stories that you could share?

Dawson White: Yeah, sure. I mean, I’ve sort of highlighted the biggest issue already, which is this perfectionism. I mean, we talked about it. A lot of people talk about it. For me, it’s not just about talking about perfectionism, but having tangible ways to overcome it. Um, yes. And man, it’s just crazy how this comes up. It comes up for my high school viola students. It comes up for freelance musicians that are my clients. It comes up with, um, people in retirement going into retirement as musicians that I work with. Um, a client that I was working with that works at a major conservatory. Every single musician deals with it because we are taught to follow. We’re literally taught to follow, um, especially string players, orchestral musicians, we are taught to follow. So then when you get into your career, you’re like, “Wait, where’s the conductor? I am now the conductor.” And you haven’t been taught to conduct. You haven’t been taught how to design your own career. And so that’s usually what I work on with all my clients is getting into that mindset, it’s career design mindset, and having all these markers and metrics and boundaries so that you know what the heck you’re doing, basically. And so I think that’s the biggest theme that I see. And I can give you kind of a small, but mighty success story that showcases how this carries out for a lot of clients. So I had this college professor that I worked with for Aspire Music. His dream was to start a business selling his compositions online and arrangements, and a lot of musicians have this very, you know, very deep goal and dream to do this. That’s the entrepreneur. That’s like, “Hey, I would love to have this extra revenue stream, connect with more people, get my music out there, showcase my musicianship.” But what stopped him every single time was a website. You just creating a website is, you know, it’s easier now to create a website than ever, but we’re talking about musicians. Musicians want to be perfect when they create their website, right? So the problem was for years, he kept coming back to this website idea and like hitting a brick wall and it was like, you know, maybe it’s legal issues with copyright, or maybe it’s the color and the font, or maybe it’s this or that. And finally, he came to me and wanted to work together on it. And I said, “Done is better than perfect. Just do it.” But here’s the big thing: no matter what we did, if he was doing the web designing, he could not turn off his perfectionism brain. So we actually delegated that to a free service that creates websites for small businesses for free. And then all he had to do was tell them, “I want this, I want that.” And then he and I could work on the language and how to, you know, how to get your ideal clients to come by these. And because, you see, I’m staying in my zone of genius, helping him with language and the why and his business formation, he’s working in his zone of genius, which is compositions. And then the web designer is in their zone of genius, but we’re all working together to make this thing happen. So after just a couple of months, he had this fully developed website. He now has a business. So it’s a small, but mighty example. Like you just have to get over that hurdle of perfectionism. And sometimes you just have to delegate it and have somebody to help you with it, which is what I’d helped him with. So I was really happy for him because now he has fulfillments like personal fulfillment, artistic fulfillment, which he doesn’t always receive from his college position, though it really helps amplify his portfolio.

Michelle Lynne: That is such a great example. So many musicians get stuck hung up on tech, um, because it is overwhelming and there are so many ways it can go wrong. And myself included, you know, we—I built our website when I was in lockdown in my parents’ trailer. I was in quarantine during 2020 and I went through Squarespace and, you know, it wasn’t pretty. It definitely wasn’t, but I was definitely in that “done is better than perfect” mindset. And then two years later, when we had some money, we invested into a web designer and they did a great job and redid our whole branding and everything went from there. For us, it was really a journey of like, “We’re going to embrace the suck.” Brené Brown uses that phrase a lot, right? Um, and the other really important thing is that most other people don’t notice the things that all these musicians are obsessing over, you know, like the last 20 percent of, like, “Oh, it’s not good enough.” Like most people are like, “Wow, a new website looks great.” They don’t see all the problems that we see. So then it just was another indication to me of how we obsess over things that don’t ultimately matter or move the needle. And then once you do have resources, you can start to invest more. I just wanted to also ask you about that. How do you, how do your clients see investing? Because, you know, hiring a web designer, many musicians might say, “Oh, but I don’t want to put up the money.”

Dawson White: Right. And that this is actually one of the things I help musicians do is go from a zero-dollar budget, essentially. So like I mentioned, the service that I recommend to them is free. And yeah. So we, you know, I’m not going to say, “Come work with me with career coaching, and then here are hundreds of dollars’ worth of monthly things you need to buy.” Eventually, yes, but you, we have to find the best offer that they can create using their talents and their why. And then we make sure that it’s viable. Do we start generating income from that source, which then we invest back into the business, which then makes the website better and gets more clients. And so it creates this system, if you will, of income generation and artistic fulfillment and personal fulfillment so that they can start scaling beyond. I mean, this is what happened with me. I had to quit my full-time orchestra position so I could make more money and be happier, right? And that was a surprise to me because those are the secure positions. But I did this for myself too, like I created my business, I did a prototype. For free, basically. I started coaching one-on-one to see if it was viable. I started putting my story out there. Thousands of people started reaching out to me about it. I created a business around it. I systematized the program. But I kept investing the money back into the business. Now I have three big programs. This is sort of like a phased approach where we start with a zero budget and we work from there up. And actually, I’ll recommend another good book, which is The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz. Basically, the premise is if you only had one sheet of toilet paper, you would get very creative and you would use what you had. I know it’s not the most, the prettiest image, but with business, it’s basically using what you have and usually what we have are all the skills, our network, we have a deep sense of like passion for music. So we tap into all of those things and then we outsource for free where we can. Maybe we hire a virtual assistant for three to five an hour overseas. And then from there you can start making some real change.

Michelle Lynne: I think everything you shared today is going to be so helpful. So thank you. Thank you for telling us your story. Thank you for, uh, sharing your process and how you’ve developed all of, uh, yeah, I’m really impressed. I’d love to hear more about Aspire Music and definitely tell people how they can follow you, how they can work with you, how they can find you.

Dawson White: Yeah, sure. So I have a free Facebook group that I’d recommend everybody join. And it’s specifically for music career design and management. That’s the name—Musicians Career Design and Management on Facebook. And we have a lot of these conversations there. And then also I’m giving away a 30-minute coaching session for anybody that’s interested. And that’s just to remove all time and cost barriers for people to move to that next step. Um, but you can also find me on Instagram @MusicAspires. And I’m on LinkedIn and everything else too.

Michelle Lynne: Dawson, that is so generous. So everybody reach out to Dawson. You can get a free 30 minutes with him. Uh, you can review all your systems. You can talk through anything that is keeping you back. Like if you’re stuck on a website or you’re stuck on something else, definitely reach out to him. If you had one takeaway for this episode, Justin, do you know what it would be? One thing that people could put into action right now?

Dawson White: Yeah, I think the biggest thing I can tell musicians is just go do it. Whatever the thing is that people are wanting to do, it’s the simplest bit of advice, but just start, you know, if you want a website, just start a website. And once you hit an issue, reach out to those around you who know how, or read up on it or whatever. We’re extremely good at solving problems. We do it thousands of times a day in our music playing. So transfer that skill, you know? Yeah. So just start and then refine. Start, then refine. Don’t think of the refined version first.

Michelle Lynne: That is unbelievably helpful. I love that. There’s been so many gems today. So thank you for everything you’ve shared. Thanks for coming on. And yeah, everybody reach out and follow you. And I’d love to connect with you again soon.

Dawson White: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.