Hey guys, James here!

I posted that poll the other day in The Better Band Bureau Facebook group trying to find out what you guys want to learn on how to successfully run your band as a business.

Because remember, your band is a brand, your brand is a business.

And one thing that many people wanted to learn about, it seems, aside from everything which was the most popular option, was project management.

So I thought what better way to showcase project management than what I'm doing right now because I'm working on building The Better Band Bureau into a more structured thing where you guys can go learn.

Obviously there'll still be a Facebook group and there'll still be lots of interaction, but I want to have more content so I'm watching a website which will be out soon.

I'm gonna have free content on there, I'm gonna have group coaching stuff where you can learn with other people, there's gonna be the Facebook group still, all that stuff together and I'm really looking forward to it because I think you are all going to learn a lot from it and I think I'm gonna learn from it too.

Which, that's really why I started The Better Band Bureau is because I thought, “I have this really great network, and I want to learn, and I want to help other people learn.”

Because every single person has different skills and abilities that they can share and so that's what I'm trying to do here with The Better Band Bureau.

Now, as far as project management goes I thought that showing you what I'm doing right now to schedule February for The Better Band Bureau would be a really cool idea.

I'm using two main apps to do this.

I'm using a Coggle right here which is a mind mapping software, and I am using the free version it lets you do three mind maps for free. If you just go to coggle.it right here that is the website for this.

So here I'm just planning out potential things that I can put out where you would get some value from learning it.

So you can see I have some general categories, I have music release, legal, general, content, and merchandise. And this is all from the perspective of a band so when it says content these are contests, videos, and photos that you as a band are gonna be posting.

But, it's going to be advice that I'm giving you or topics for discussion that I'm going to be posting about.

The thing I really like about Coggle is that it lets you visualize what you're thinking of and it's really great to add ideas and jot down notes.

So, for example if I wanted to add something under merchandise, I just go up here for merchandise and would say posters. What makes a good poster?

That could be an interesting thing because posters seem really simple, but there's actually a lot that goes into it because it comes down to quality if you put out posters on eight-and-a-half by eleven paper printed from your desk jet printer at home it's probably not gonna make you look super pro.

And since your band is a brand, you want to keep that up.

Such a simple thing but it could be a topic for The Better Band Bureau.

Now let's go over to the other piece of software I'm using which
is Trello.

So here you can see some of the things I've got in the works, I actually have been working on the website for a while as you can see here.

Here which you can see I'm working on is group lessons because I'm gonna try to schedule some group lessons for February.

I have a few ideas as you can see here on the mind map and I'm gonna use some of those probably gonna try to stick to one every two weeks or maybe once a week if you guys are really into it which would be awesome.

You can see here that I have a deadline set, and then I've split out several individual tasks.

And I'm just flushing this out myself right now, so I'm gonna be adding more to this and systematizing it so I can successfully month after month plan this out and have an easy template to follow.

So content planning, okay, we've got some ideas that's good we can check that off.

Then I have to create a schedule.

Okay, I write down a schedule, I'll use a calendar app I'll use something, I have yet to determine that and then I have to create the individual lesson plans which I'll create a new card for each of those by going here in Trello, which is Trello.com by the way and adding a card.

So for this one oh well let's see project management that's what we're doing right now. Project management and there we go we have a card.

So then I would add a due date and I would add some checklist steps. So due date let's set that to Saturday might as well and then checklist, add, record video.

Well I'm doing that right now so I can go ahead and check that off and then edit video, get captions, upload and schedule video, and create discussion post.

So you can see it's all kind of coming together and then once I have this going I can actually make this a template if I just copy it and put in lesson template.

And I choose where to put it which is outline draft, no I don't want that there I want it over in the queued section, and then it can be at the bottom and I'm just going to tag it with B-B-B so I know it's for this and boom here's that!

And then because it's a template we don't want the due date, click that, remove boom you're done there's your template.

So this kinda project management thing can work for all sorts of things.

It's really useful for keeping track of what you're working on just think, if you're gonna put out an album or even a single, there are a lot of things that go into it.

Obviously, you have the recording, the mixing, and the mastering. But that's the easy part, especially when you're going to an all-in-one an engineer who will do everything from start to finish.

What you don't typically think about, at least right away, is then well how am I going to distribute it?

Am I going to register it with the Library of Congress?

Do I have a publisher or am I going to self publish it?

Those are just three things.

Then you have to think of artwork, who's gonna do the artwork?

And of course the big thing, having a solid marketing plan.

When I say marketing that doesn't mean have to pay for it, although there is an element to that, there's also word-of-mouth marketing, just talking to people really and all other kinds of marketing that you can do without spending ad dollars.

I'm not saying don't spend any money, but there are ways to do it!

But, that's another lesson.

So, if you have any questions about project management, these are just two super simple ways to go about it.

Again, I'm not going into depth with the uses for it because you could be recording an album, you could be planning a tour, you could be creating a music video, there are so many different things that you can do.

So, I'm really not going to go into depth with that but if you have questions leave a comment, I will get
back to it as soon as I can.

Aside from that, have a great night guys!