A few months ago I started a session with a local band. While booking the time, the singer/guitarist told me one of the main reasons he was coming to record with me. It turns out that a year earlier he had called a bunch of local studios asking how to go about insuring his home studio. I was the only person that called him back, and we had a short chat about what insurance agents would deal with studios and what they would cover. He ran his home studio commercially for a few years and then tired of it, deciding to focus on his own music. When it came time to make an album he called me, as he had already felt we had a good rapport and he'd heard a few records I'd done.
Years earlier, not long after Jackpot! started, we were really busy. When a single person manages and engineers their own studio, the hardest thing is keeping up with the business while doing a large amount of sessions. Returning phone calls, paying bills, doing the books and cleaning up become overwhelming after 12 ten-hour days in a row. After my complaining about folks calling in asking about recording "a demo", a term I still do not really understand, I caught my assistant answering the phone and saying, "We don't do demos, we do albums," as she hung up. All of a sudden I got rather nervous — were we scaring off future business? We had a talk and decided to investigate each call that came in, no matter how pointless it might sound at first.