Exactly.
The main thing you have to worry about is if you can afford to do it. Then you have to ask yourself if you can seriously dedicate the amount of effort and energy that this profession demands. Then worry about how to go about it. You can even start small, like in John's case. My boss started at his house with 4 SM57's and a little Tascam 4-track. Then he started getting "business" (i.e. friend's wanting demos, etc.), and then he started charging like $100 a day, and he would do it on the weekends when he was off from work or whatever. So he was making $200 a weekend, about $800 a month just from working on the weekends doing it. After a couple of months he invested in a live mixer that had outputs for every input, and at first he just mixed through the board into the stereo main outs and into his computer through the sound card. Then he saved money from that and got himself a pair of Delta 1010's, so he could get 16 of those channels into his PC. Meanwhile buying a mic here, a mic there, etc. Eventually he had 4 Delta 1010's, a nicer console, and a lot of outboard stuff. He was up to $20/hour and still doing it at his house, he quit his regular job at this point because he was booked a couple of months in advance all the time. He was making about $2.5k a month in profits. Then he got lucky and a friend of his that had a building already converted for a studio wanted out of his lease and dropped him a line, he took it over, and then 4 months later here I am running the show. He started with like, $600 in equipment...not bad. Now we have about $35k in equipment, are booked 6 months + in advance, and have sessions in 8 hour blocks at $40/hour and then we have blockouts that are a whole week @ $2.5k to start. Everything is paid for at this point, so the studio brings over $10k a month easy, all profits, including all of our other services (cd design, mix and master only, reamping, drum replacement, session music, cd duplication, and graphic design as well as website design.). A lot of the stuff we do now is due in large part to the fact that I'm here. He would've never offered reamping or drum replacement (Drumagog'ing), cd label design, website/graphic design, cd duplication, or just a mix/master only session unless it was for me. He's a very old-school engineer and very straightforward at that. He's very business oriented and that helps, because he set up goals and met every single one of them. That's a big part of jumping into this.
~e.a
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