IAM1144- Songwriter Touches the Lives of Millions of People

Dave Combs is a songwriter, photographer, and entrepreneur with four decades of experience writing over 120 songs, creating fourteen albums of soothing, relaxing instrumental piano music, and building a successful music business. His songwriting began with the now popular standard, Rachel’s Song. His soothing, relaxing music has been played millions of times worldwide on radio, satellite, and all internet streaming media and it continues to touch the lives of millions of people all over the world. He is also the author of the new book, Touched By The Music: How the Story and Music of Rachel’s Song Can Change Your Life.

• CEO Hack: My persistence
• CEO Nugget: Leverage data to be more effective
• CEO Defined: The buck stops here

Website: https://www.combsmusic.com/

Facebook: TouchedByTheMusic
LinkedIn: dave-combs-62998a6
Pandora: Gary Prim
Spotify: Gary Prim
Twitter: @davidmcombs
YouTube Channel: combs music

Instagram: @combsmusic

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Transcription

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00:15 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. And I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dave Combs of combsmusic.com. Dave, it's great to have you on the show.

00:52 – Dave Combs

Great to be here. Thank you.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Thank you for jumping on and super excited to have you on. And what I wanted to do is just read a little bit more about Dave so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Dave is a songwriter, photographer, and entrepreneur with 4 decades of experience writing over 120 songs, creating 14 albums of soothing, relaxing instrumental piano music, and building a successful music business. His songwriting began with the now-popular standard Rachel's song.

His soothing, relaxing music has been played millions of times worldwide on the radio satellite, and all internet streaming media. And he continues to touch the lives of millions of people all over the world. He's also the author of the new book, Touched by the Music, how the story and music of Rachel's songs can change your life. Dave, super excited to have you on the show and hear about all the awesome things that you've been doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:41 – Dave Combs

I am ready. Let's roll.

01:42 – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:51 – Dave Combs

Well, it all got started with one song, the song that you mentioned, Rachel's song. Well, that was 40 years ago, ironically, 40 years ago this year. So I'm celebrating the 40th anniversary of that song.

02:02 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Happy anniversary.

02:04 – Dave Combs

I wrote that song in January of 1981 and it was just a song that came to me as I was sitting at my piano and playing. You've probably heard this many times from songwriters. I didn't really intend to write it. I just played it. And it was an inspiration. I really believe it was a gift to me from God on high. I just have no other way to explain it. But that was what started it. And then once the song got discovered by my wife, for example, she got it stuck in her head and she didn't even know that it was a song that I had written.

She got all excited when I told her it was just something I made up. And so she made me write it down. And I did that. And then 3 years later, friends of ours had a little baby girl and they asked us to be her godparents. And I played it at her christening service and named it after her and that's how the song got its name. But then rolled forward another 3 years I was in Nashville Tennessee working up I worked for AT&T Network Systems for 22 and a half years and when I was in Nashville Tennessee Linda said why don't you get a demo recording of Rachel's song?

So I searched around, found a studio, found a musician named Gary Prim, and got a quote demo made of my recording. Now I was naive enough to think that the demo sounded cheap. But as you know, in any industry, when you're making a demonstration product, whether it's a piece of furniture, a piece of equipment, whatever, you want that demo, it's got to be super good. That's what I ended up with a demo of Rachel's song that sounded beyond my imagination. Just unbelievable. So I got it played on the radio. And every time it got played on the radio, the phones lit up at the station.

The response was just enormous. And then more and more stations picked it up and eventually got it played on every radio, easy listening radio station in the entire country. And you can imagine the response from that was just enormous. I started getting something I'd never gotten in my life, fan mail. And so when that started coming in, I thought, wow, we might have something that might be the genesis of a business here. And so we got to looking around, well, people wanted to buy it. Well, all I had was a little 45 record of it.

So I ended up writing more songs, which I discovered I could do because I was 34 years old until I wrote my first song. And so I wrote enough for a whole album and got the CD made. That was back when CDs first started and now they're fading out. And so I got a CD made, sent the CDs around to places and people started ordering the music, and then it just kind of snowballed. It was like anybody in an entrepreneurial business, a lot of times you don't control the whole, you know, you're on this train to ride and sometimes it's going with or without you, right? So it took off and I ended up having to hire somebody full-time to help me answer the phone, fill the orders for the music, and that thing.

So I wrote enough for another album and then another album and things just kind of grew and grew and grew and took a life of their own. So it's really an entrepreneur story of growing from one song to an album to several albums. Then how do you get the album sold? You run into brick walls with record stores that don't want to have anything to do with you. So you just find another way to do it. Say, okay, well maybe gift shops will sell it. Well, lo and behold, they did. They played it. Customers liked it. They sold it. I had over a thousand gift shops at one time in the United States playing and selling my music.

It was a real job to get those thousand. They didn't come automatically, but that's kind of how it grew. And even today as things, now we're all thinking, how do we get exposure on social media? How do you get on Spotify? How do you get on iHeartRadio? How do you get on Pandora and iTunes and all these places? And so that's the entrepreneur in me keeps wanting those juices to keep flowing, you know, there's all the other opportunities. And so that's kind of a short version of my career from one song to where I am today.

06:04 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I absolutely love that. I love how you said a lot of times when you get things to start flowing, you get the spigot and you start turning it on, it's hard to turn it back off. And once you start thinking of those ideas, you gotta let them keep flowing because some really phenomenal things can kind of come from there.

06:17 – Dave Combs

Absolutely.

06:19 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know you touched a little bit on your business. I wanted to see if there's anything additional you wanted to let us know about what you do with your business. Also, I wanted to hear a little bit more about your book how that helps, and what you're doing to serve clients.

06:32 – Dave Combs

Well, my music business has obviously evolved into the digital world with now it's mainly streaming and digital downloads. And so, but then, in the past, when people bought CDs or bought music, they would see my address on the back of the CD or cassette tape or whatever, and they would, the music touched them so deeply that they took the time to sit down and write me a letter. And I ended up, Gresham, getting over 50, 000 notes and letters from people. And a lot of them were really touching, you know, they were pouring their heart out about this song, you know, saved several, saved their life.

I guess they were in some dire circumstances and were, you know, about to do something bad to themselves and they didn't. Or people were sick and in pain and the music helped them. I've got these wonderful letters. Last year, my wife said, we got these 50, 000 letters over here full of wonderful stories. Why don't you write a book about that? And all these stories about how you built your business from nothing to where it is. And I got to think about it and said, okay, well, I sat down and I'm more I just wrote and wrote and wrote. And lots of stories kept coming out. And lo and behold, I end up with enough for an entire book.

So that's why the title of the book is called Touched by the Music. And it's about all those stories of my journey and how my music not only touched my life but the lives of everybody who heard it as well. And so I'm really excited about this book that when it finally gets totally finished and out, it's gonna be great because the forward has been written by Jack Canfield, the author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. And I've got endorsements from lots of really fantastic people. And it's been quite a journey.

08:23 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And God's definitely winked at my life as well, too. So I could definitely attest to that as well. So truly appreciate that. And so what would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? And this could be for yourself personally or your book or your business or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets shit apart and makes it unique?

08:40 – Dave Combs

Well, I think the music itself really, and I can't explain it exactly, except that the music when people don't know me, they don't know Gary Prim, the artist that plays it, they don't know anything about the background of the song. And when they sit there and listen to the music and tears come running down their cheeks or their emotions really come to the front, There's just something there about that music that I don't know what you call it, a special sauce or something, but it's there that just, it comes out. And it's really, I'm blessed to have that. Not every song has that.

09:14 – Gresham Harkless

I definitely appreciate that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:27 – Dave Combs

I think the characteristic that I've always seemed to always have is my persistence. I never take no as a final answer. If I run into something where I can't quite get where I want to in a straight line, I find a way to go around it, over it, under it, or through it. And it's that persistence, I think, has helped me. Because you start within the music business, it's a competitive business out there. There's a thousand millions, maybe, of songwriters and lots of millions more songs. To break through that and to make a success of it, it takes some persistence imagination creativity energy, and willingness to work.

I mean, a lot of time when I was on the phone trying to get gift shops around the country on a Saturday and Sunday, I made enough phone calls to gift shops asking for them to try my music that my phone book in a month came in a shoebox size. Because I was making hundreds and hundreds of phone calls Just saying, do you sell any music of the tapes you play in your shop? And then 29 out of 30 would say no, but I'd get that one that said yes. And then I'd just keep going. And then eventually I figured out how to become more efficient by calling the, I think I told you about the tourist areas is where my music was mostly sold.

I needed to market my music in tourist areas. But I didn't know where they were in the country. I knew where a few of them were like Gatlinburg and, you know, in Ellicott City in Maryland and places like that. But I didn't know where they were in the far west or Midwest, where I had probably never even been in my life. I finally used my analytical skills to put some dots together. I realized that if a tourist town, how would you define a tourist town? Number one, it's a town that thrives on tourists, which means that the local population is probably pretty small. But on a busy weekend or whatever, their population maybe 10 times the local population.

So I figured, well, let's see, tourist towns have lots of shops and few people that live there. So now I need to figure out how to find those places. So I found that I could purchase the mailing list of all the gift shops in the entire country. This is back in the 1980s. It came in a computer printout. Today, you just get it on a thumb drive or something and download it. But it came in a printout and it had every gift shop in the country by city, by state, alphabetically. Then I went to the library and found a big book called The Marketing Atlas that had every little crossroad in the United States and its population.

So I took those 2 pieces of information and counted up gift shops in a town. I probably didn't know where the town was, but I'd just say, whoa, this town's got 17 gift shops. Okay, looked at the same town up over here in the book and it says, their population is only 850 people. There's no way in the world 850 people can support 17 gift shops, right? So that must be a tourist town. So I took that whole printout and the database and I put it on my computer. I'm a computer, I started my career as a computer programmer. So I'm a computer geek, I guess at heart. And so I took the data, put it in a database, the city and town, city and state, how many gift shops, what's population, and another column said okay now calculate the ratio of gift shops per population.

That ratio then I went after the whole database and then sorted it according to that ratio. And of course, the towns in whatever state it was that had the most gift shops per population just rose right to the top, right at the top of the list. Here's Gatlinburg, by golly, and here are other towns across the country. And so they all just rose to the top like cream. And I started calling those instead of everybody at random. And my hit rate went from 1 in 30 to 1 in 5. Well, that is an aha moment or a breakthrough for any small business where you find a way to target your customers. It's like finding a secret ad sequence on Facebook or on social media.

When you finally place an ad and you say, I only paid a hundred dollars for this ad, but I got $5, 000 worth of orders from it. Well, now that's a pretty good deal. Let's do some more of that. So it was that kind of aha moment for me when it just put me in high gear. And that's when I got on the phone and man, I called every one of those in the entire country and got over a thousand gift shops. So that's how that happened.

14:11 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love you telling that story. And it's just a reminder, I think when we first connected, we talked a little bit about, you know, doing big data before data was as big as it is now, and being able to kind of understand those sequences, understand how to be more effective and efficient, and to be able to do that. I definitely feel like that's a nugget that we all can kind of remind ourselves of as CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners of just being able to kind of leverage that data no matter the kind of platforms that we're using now to be able to be more effective because the data is there.

We just have to kind of connect those dots, so to speak, so that we can get to where we want to be. I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Dave, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:51 – Dave Combs

To me, it means that the buck stops here. That you are the, when it says chief executive officer, You are, that's where the decision making stops. I mean, you are in charge.

15:05 – Gresham Harkless

Dave, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get ahold of you, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

15:19 – Dave Combs

Well the the best way to get a hold of me probably is just to go to my website and find the links there to contact me my website again is www.combsmusic.com and my email is just dave at combsmusic.com and I read them all and I answer them all. And there's also a place on there that, and I encourage everybody to go get your own copy of the song and let it touch you as well. And then there's a place on there where I would love to hear your stories. Like I did for 50, 000 others, keep that ball rolling. Let me hear the stories of how my music has touched you as well, I'd love to hear from you.

15:56 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you. I love kind of hearing your story, hearing how that song grew into all the awesome things you've been able to do to create so many other stories and so many impacts that you had in so many lives. So appreciate you of course for doing that, taking some time out with us today and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:30 – Outro