From a podcast interview featuring Phillip Edwards, CEO of MultiTracks.com.
In this episode of CEO Growth Talks, Pete Hayes interviews Phillip Edwards, CEO of MultiTracks.com, to discuss his journey from worship leader to tech entrepreneur. Phillip reveals how he transformed worship services with professional-quality multitracks, tackled licensing challenges, and expanded globally. He highlights the importance of a customer-centric approach, innovation, and building a dynamic company culture. By focusing on strategic growth and sustainable innovation, MultiTracks.com continues to revolutionize worship tech, ensuring every customer’s needs are met while paving the way for exciting future developments.
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“I stayed focused on what our customers needed because I understood it—I was one of them. We reached a point where we started investing in software, building an ecosystem, and working to tie everything together. The goal was that if you came to us, all your needs would be met.” Phillip Edwards |
MultiTracks.com has been a pioneer in the worship music space since 2006, offering technology-driven solutions to enhance worship services worldwide.
The company is actively expanding its global footprint, working to localize its offerings across different languages and territories.
A company’s growth is heavily informed by customer feedback and needs, fostering an environment driven by innovation and excellence.
Building a company culture based on trust, healthy conflict resolution, and teamwork is essential for sustained growth and innovation.
Addressing licensing complexities head-on, MultiTracks.com provides comprehensive solutions that simplify the process for churches and encourage broader adoption.
Follow Phillip Edwards on LinkedIn
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[Episode Transcript]
[00:00:00] Pete Hayes: Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to Chief Outsiders' CEO Growth Talks. I'm thrilled to welcome Phillip Edwards, the CEO and founder of MultiTracks.com right here in Austin, Texas. You guys might get tired of meeting executives in Austin, but I don't, because there are some really awesome ones. Welcome, Phillip.
[00:00:17] Phillip Edwards: Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you here today.
[00:00:21] Pete Hayes: Oh my gosh. I guess right off the bat, explain to folks what MultiTracks.com is.
[00:00:26] Phillip Edwards: Okay. Well, MultiTracks.com is the name of our company. I can define what a multitrack is. In 2006, we were one of the first companies, if not the first, to release multitracks into a marketplace for download commercially, and we serve worship teams and churches.
[00:00:48] Phillip Edwards: When I got started, I thought, look, this would be great to take the actual multitracks from artists and make them available for worship leaders to use in their church services. That’s how MultiTracks.com was born. A multitrack is the individual parts from a record. So think of drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, vocals. A normal multitrack would have all those individual parts that make up a recording. It’s everything minus the lead vocal so that you can use any individual part to add into your worship team. So, let’s say one Sunday morning, the bass player is sick and can’t make it or they just don’t show up—whatever the problem is.
[00:01:33] Phillip Edwards: You’ve got the bass guitar from the record that you can add into your live sound, live performance. So it fills in for the missing gaps, if you will. So a multitrack, think of it as a noun. It's a thing. It’s a digital product that you can download. But many of you may know the term multitracking. That’s a verb, and that’s what the Beatles did. They were one of the first ones to do it back in the late sixties. You can multitrack a recording. The earliest recordings were like a single microphone in a room and all the musicians gathered around it. The Beatles started four-tracking recordings.
[00:02:06] Phillip Edwards: So they got the drums separate, the bass separate, maybe a guitar and vocals separate. Today we multitrack to the tune of 20, 30, 40 instruments sometimes, and in our space, we just went to all the record labels and said, "Hey, can we have a copy of those and would you separate them out so that musicians and churches all around the world can use them?" And they were crazy enough to say yes. So that’s how we got our start back in the mid-2000s, really 2005, 2006.
[00:02:35] Pete Hayes: And let me jump in. This is not a little business, and I’m thinking just here in Austin, there are smaller churches, which benefit because you can have a bigger, more predictable, more worshipful sound for that band, but then mega-churches using it. How big is your footprint around the globe?
[00:02:56] Phillip Edwards: That’s a moving target because we have churches of all sizes, and then we have individuals who buy products from us as well. So we have many tens of thousands of accounts of varying size and degree. We do have a footprint around the globe. We’re, of course, in the U.S. and in all English-speaking territories, so Canada, Australia, the UK, and anywhere around the world that speaks English. Then we also have a good footprint in Latin America. We’ve been in for 10 years—Brazil for Portuguese-speaking, and of course, Portugal and others. We really go by language, right? So Portuguese, then French—those have all been around for eight, nine, ten years. We just launched last summer in South Korea, and we just signed three more brand managers and territories yet to launch, but all are very important and very exciting for MultiTracks.com.
[00:03:47] Phillip Edwards: Those should come in the next year. So that’s our plan, to just keep serving different territories with the same technologies but hiring brand managers that can localize what we do for different territories.
[00:04:01] Pete Hayes: You’re a very special business leader because you’re entrepreneurial—you came into this literally coming from the user space. You’ve been a worship leader for a long time. You saw the need, but then you had the acumen to develop this. For those familiar with the Growth Gears book that my partner and I wrote, there are two kinds of CEOs: those that are market-oriented and those that are operationally oriented. The market-oriented ones are going to grow faster than their industry peers.
[00:04:31] Phillip Edwards: You are basically in a technology business, which puts you in a place where you have to be market-oriented because things change so fast.
[00:04:39] Phillip Edwards: My observation is that you've made it through a lot of the difficult stages in terms of size, employment, and revenue hurdles. What I know about you, because I do know quite a bit, is that you just keep having big plans about bringing new ideas to the marketplace. I mean, where does this come from?
[00:04:56] Phillip Edwards: Yeah, so I was our customer, and that's how I started the business. I was a worship leader in 2005, and I had the idea for the business because I was building tracks myself. So, I thought, "Look, somebody has got to do this." I knew just enough not to know how hard it was going to be. So, I went around—maybe that's why I was smart enough to ask the question, but maybe dumb enough not to know all that I was going to face. I feel like I just really stayed focused throughout the years on what our customers needed because I knew what that was—because I was that person. So, I raised a little bit of money, got the company started, built a website, recorded 30 or so tracks, and then began to go to the record labels and ask them to participate. The first part of my journey definitely took some time. That wilderness season was early on in the company's history and in my career.
[00:05:49] Phillip Edwards: But at some point, we hit a trajectory where we started investing in software, and we learned that part of the business. Then we started building an ecosystem and trying to tie everything together. So, if you came to us, you got all your needs met. I think that's been a big part of our momentum in these last few years.
[00:06:10] Phillip Edwards: But to answer your question, how do we keep coming up with new ideas? I think it's because we’re a company full of people who were once our customers and who have joined this team to keep solving those problems. Our mission statement is to save worship leaders' time for what really matters.
[00:06:27] Phillip Edwards: So, we're focused a little less on—though the dollars matter, it means people have voted that we're doing a good job. We're focused a little—I mean, we're focused on that, but a little less on that and a little more on what is each unique piece of impact, what is the next succession, and how we need to serve our customers.
[00:06:46] Phillip Edwards: So, do you rely solely on your employees' experience as a customer, or do you reach out? How do you stay in touch with the wants and needs of your customer base?
[00:06:58] Phillip Edwards: So, we have a pretty healthy product team that stays connected to a good-sized support team, and they meet once a week. They're talking about what we're hearing firsthand from customers. Last Sunday, we categorized all the feature requests. What's great about our product is this: it’s for worship leaders on a Sunday or music directors. This is how they do what they do. If they're using us, they become pretty reliant, and they receive a lot of value from our ecosystem. I could probably even just, for listeners, tell you a quick explanation of what that is.
[00:07:31] Phillip Edwards: So, we have customers who are preparing music for a Sunday morning, so they're running tracks. They also have charts that display what to play. There's an app for both of those that sync together. We also can trigger lyrics on a screen, but also connect that to how to run lights that could be changing in time with the music.
[00:07:52] Phillip Edwards: So, we've created this synchronized stage, or connected stage, as we call it. Because we're so integrated into a Sunday morning, we also hear back, and people let us know. They tell us what they love. They tell us what they don't love. They will tell us what they're missing. So, we have a pretty long feature request list from our customers because they're such, I think, big fans of what we do.
[00:08:16] Phillip Edwards: We really try to stay close to that data and let it inform how we grow. One of our core values is customer-driven innovation, and we really want to prioritize customer feedback, even over any internal stakeholders.
[00:08:31] Phillip Edwards: Yeah, and you have a pretty serious competitor—pretty good size, with pretty good pockets.
[00:08:38] Phillip Edwards: How do you keep track of them? How do you respond? Are you ahead all the time? Is it a yin and a yang? You're in a competitive, really tough competitive situation, aren't you? But still, both entities are really doing quite well.
[00:08:51] Phillip Edwards: Yeah. I think, in our unique space, we've always been the leader in the track space. Although there are different competitors out there, I feel confident we're pretty uniquely positioned in that space. Now, we did a couple of years ago, move into a space that was somewhat new for us—it's the licensing space. In churches, a long time ago, there were hymnals, which still are today, but conceptually, hymnals, long ago, were all there was.
[00:09:20] Phillip Edwards: The idea of the publishing or the lyrical component in a printed book is covered, but when you start displaying it on the screen, there needed to be a way to cover the song publishing or the underlying lyrics in a song. There's an entity a long time ago that solved that problem about 30 years ago.
[00:09:40] Phillip Edwards: They're called CCLI, and they brought a solution to the market. But from our perspective, there hadn't been a lot of innovation in that space for quite a long time. People had to report manually by keeping track of the songs they sing every six months, keeping track of your songs, and entering them one by one on a website.
[00:10:02] Phillip Edwards: In 2020, 2021, we just thought this is a bit archaic, so we already know all this data. What if we got into this space? Yes, there was some pushback or concern in an industry that's doing so well. Do we need another player in that space? But the great news is that through many conversations, we were able to convince the industry.
[00:10:24] Phillip Edwards: Not only do you need this, but it's going to serve customers well and allow us to get into a new space that we're in today. That licensing space is growing for us.
[00:10:32] Pete Hayes: Yeah, and that's part of that full package, and COVID triggered things too, because all of a sudden, churches that weren't streaming had a congregation. Now, in order to technically keep the virtual doors open, they had to stream. That's actually a different component to the licensing then.
[00:10:49] Phillip Edwards: That is, yeah. There's a lyrical component and the ability to use a multitrack in a live stream. That's just another activity that wasn't licensed, but we came up with a license for that.
[00:11:01] Phillip Edwards: That was really a gratis license—it was free for everyone during COVID. We bolted on those rights that were tied to the licensing of the multitrack they were already using. So it's a complicated world of song publishing and master licensing, but at the end of the day, we gave an all-in-one solution that was comprehensive.
[00:11:20] Phillip Edwards: It was transparent, required no customer to manually enter data, and what's exciting is now this other entity has changed everything they do as a result of how we entered the space. It all is customer-driven and benefits the customer in the end. So yeah, we're in that space now, and that's growing really well.
[00:11:40] Pete Hayes: One of the things that just fascinates me is you mentioned that there's the single user, the small churches, and then there are mega-churches. Having been a customer of yours in our church, which is a small-to-mid-sized congregation, but it's not just, "Hey, I can turn on the bass if I want to." It's, "I can bring in all that presence of a produced track to a band that is made up of all volunteers, and it's just trying to get through some charts." Some guitarists are playing camp chords, and others are trying to find the hook. But to be able to dial up the choir or the gospel singers in the background, if you do it just right, the congregation thinks it's their voices anyway. They never ever get the sense that you're with tracks, but they get a better experience and they're drawn in, they engage deeper. It's a little bit magical what you guys have pulled off here.
[00:12:39] Phillip Edwards: Well, yeah. I was fascinated to learn a long time ago that most touring professional musicians are doing this. Even when you go to a U2 concert, you have The Edge on guitar, but he recorded three different parts on the record, maybe four. But when I went and saw them, it's not just his echo box.
[00:12:59] Pete Hayes: That's taken care of.
[00:13:01] Phillip Edwards: When I saw them at the Sphere, you think that all they put through those speakers was what was live? You have these incredible visuals for every song that have to be perfectly timed. They're not just walking and randomly starting these songs whenever they want to. They have a click track that's clicking in their ears.
[00:13:19] Phillip Edwards: That's keeping them all perfectly in time, and they have a voice. I've heard the actual, you could Google it and find U2's leaked monitor mixes, but they have a voice queuing them in for every section, telling them what's coming next, because you're not leaving anything to chance, right?
[00:13:35] Phillip Edwards: So you can just have a great time live and play, and you don't have to be worried about where you are in the song or what's coming next. You just have that cue always telling you. What I believe it does is create freedom for everybody to play together.
[00:13:48] Phillip Edwards: You rehearse with your parts ahead of time. You walk in, you're prepared. You're using industry-standard practices for just about every live touring act. There may be some that don't, but by and large, if you're synchronizing a show and a stage and lyrics and lights, you're all playing in time with clicks. If you went to Abbey Road and had an amazing orchestra record a string section, you're not going to leave that part out. You're running those tracks because you can't just take the orchestra around with you live. So it opens up a whole new world of excellence and production, and the fact that it's helping churches for that experience—we love that.
[00:14:28] Pete Hayes: That's great. Let's change the chapters here. You have an amazing set of employees from what I can tell. They love what they do. They know there's a purpose. They stick around. How do you describe the culture that you've created with them to foster that atmosphere?
[00:14:45] Phillip Edwards: Yeah. Well, thank you. I agree. I'm biased. I think we have a great set of employees. We have about 80 right now. Some are remote, some are in the office—probably two-thirds remote. So that's certainly something we have to be mindful of, but we do our best to keep the vision of who we're serving and why we're doing it upfront.
[00:15:07] Phillip Edwards: Our core values are healthy and high-performing teams. I mentioned customer-driven innovation and executing with excellence. So, on healthy and high-performing teams, we talk about things like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. If you know that book by Patrick Lencioni, great teams are built on trust. They're willing to engage in healthy conflict and make commitments, hold themselves accountable, and then measure their success by results. Those five points are at the foundation of every great team, and for a long time, things like healthy conflict were maybe a little hard for certain team members, but if you can come into an environment where you can say what you think is right and you can have conflict and not fear that, I think that makes a great environment and a fun place to work, and it makes the product the end goal and not the individual who said it.
[00:16:00] Phillip Edwards: I don't know if we have one thing that makes our place a great place to work, but I think those values influence it. Excellence isn't perfection, but it's giving what you have—it's bringing your best. I think we have a team that is passionate about why we do what we do, and a lot of our team uses our products, which is a bonus. We're bought in, you know?
[00:16:20] Pete Hayes: You know, Patrick's model in the table groups model in the book is called Five Dysfunctions of a Team, but isn't it interesting? There are certainly countless organizations that have read the book as a group, had a wake-up call, and went, "Oh my gosh, we've got some work to do here." But then a younger company like yours sees this model as a way to build excellence.
[00:16:44] Pete Hayes: Did you tap it because you thought, "We need to fix something," or did you tap it and say, "Hey, wait a minute. This is a model for excellence"?
[00:16:50] Phillip Edwards: Yeah, actually, it was probably 2014, 15, 16, maybe 15 and 16. So, a while ago, we had a leader on our team who was given some real influence in the company, but it became apparent.
[00:17:03] Phillip Edwards: That individual was building a bit of a faction under themselves, and it was hard. We went through probably a tough season of trying to figure out how to navigate as a leadership team. We were a young team; we'd never encountered that, and those principles we had to go through. We probably spent a good year in content from Henry Cloud and Patrick Lencioni.
[00:17:23] Phillip Edwards: What came as a result is there was one leader that we knew needed to leave, but the rest of our team got pretty tight and pretty strong together and all those guys are still here and part of my senior leadership team today. I'd read that book on a church staff, and then I picked it up in the middle of that incident, and I was reading a whole new book, you know, because of what I was living through.
[00:17:44] Phillip Edwards: But I've gone on to make it a big part of our culture, and we just teach it methodically as part of onboarding, as part of team week. We have guests from Table Group come in every year as a part of our annual team week event, and we just immerse ourselves in that content. Ideal Team Player is another one. Humble, hungry, and smart. So, that's what we're looking for in every team member.
[00:18:07] Pete Hayes: In our business, The Advantage is the ultimate altogether guidebook, and what guides our culture is Patrick's book called Getting Naked. Have you read that one?
[00:18:18] Phillip Edwards: I haven't read that one yet.
[00:18:19] Pete Hayes: It's addressed to consultancies. It's the first book we send to new hires at Chief Outsiders, and it's been fantastic for more than a decade.
[00:18:28] Phillip Edwards: That's awesome.
[00:18:29] Pete Hayes: Well, so as the company's growing, what's the hardest thing to keep on the rails with this guidebook, and does the culture get strained? Are there other organizational challenges? Where do you feel the strain? Because you guys are growing well and having great success, but what are the things you have to pay attention to?
[00:18:46] Phillip Edwards: Yeah, one thing that comes to mind: I think it's easy to want to chase after the next shiny thing. So, I try to be careful not to do that, and also as we grow, we can do more things, and we are. I just came out of a budget meeting for next year, and so we've got some really fun things planned. And we've been investing in a couple of key things that are about to launch that have been methodical, taken over a year.
[00:19:18] Phillip Edwards: I think we have a standard: we don't want to do something halfway, but at the same time, we don't want to spread ourselves too thin.
[00:19:23] Phillip Edwards: So, I think it's only after the last 10 years of real growth and maturity that I feel like we've reached where we need to, and the software tracks ecosystem of things. We're going to start to step outside of that only now. And so I think that has been a challenge at different times—not trying to do too much or build too wide.
[00:19:39] Phillip Edwards: But I think what's great is we know our customers, and we know what they need. Being able to step into some new spaces next year, I think, will be fun, but we have the foundation to be able to build upon to do that well.
[00:19:51] Pete Hayes: With these steps that you might take, are they to get more of the same kinds of customers? Are you looking at a completely different customer set, or is it all of the above?
[00:20:00] Phillip Edwards: With everything I just mentioned, it's just bolting on another need that we're solving.
[00:20:06] Pete Hayes: Okay. Does that make you more attractive to the organizations you haven't already reached?
[00:20:12] Phillip Edwards: I think it's expansion revenue for the people that we're already serving. It's a good bit of that. I don't think it makes us more attractive to new audiences. I will say we're in a lot of the bigger churches. A lot of the tech-savvy churches. We are having conversations about how to reach the broader market, which is a lot of smaller churches, and we're doing that successfully, but how do we find them?
[00:20:36] Phillip Edwards: How do we make sure they know about us? We're always thinking of creative ways to do that, but it's still the same market, still the same customer.
[00:20:44] Pete Hayes: So, we maybe just covered it, but what's next? Is that what's next, is it? Is there anything else that's next that we should be watching for from MultiTracks.com?
[00:20:54] Phillip Edwards: Yeah. We'll be announcing several new things next year. As far as what can I say that's next? Oh, I should do another podcast with you when we get some news to share. I'll be able to share a lot of new things.
[00:21:08] Pete Hayes: Maybe to close, Phillip, what's your greatest personal challenge right now? You've got the business, you've got a beautiful family. How are you developing? What are you working on yourself?
[00:21:18] Phillip Edwards: That's a great question. I think that I love this company, and I'm uniquely wired on the visionary side, but I still do a lot of the operations side. I would love to hand that away to someone else right now. It doesn't feel like that's the right time, but I see that coming. Being able to continue to give away more and more parts of the company that I'm doing today, I think is an exciting thing. It's a challenge that's right in front of me as to when how and who, but that's going to open up new opportunities for me to expand in some of these new areas.
[00:21:50] Phillip Edwards: It's the only way I'll be able to do it. But from a leadership team standpoint, I don't have an operations person. I'm CEO and COO, I don't have a board that I'm responsible for. I'm not raising funds. So, a lot of the typical CEO responsibilities, I don't have on a day-to-day basis. Beginning to venture into some new areas and then hand day-to-day operations away is something that's on my plate for the future. It's probably my biggest challenge right now.
[00:22:15] Pete Hayes: Yeah, well good for you to have that awareness.
[00:22:17] Pete Hayes: Well, Phillip, it's been great spending some time with you. I know everybody who's listening and watching has enjoyed this immensely. For those of you, I'm just cause I'm sure some folks are also your customers who are listening and watching like me, who are passionate about what you and your team have pulled together.
[00:22:33] Pete Hayes: If you haven't ever seen the studio tracks that MultiTracks puts on, what do you guys call that? The studio? Sessions, studio sessions. You have artists come into your studio, and I think it's the best of intimate, semi-acoustic. You don't always go. It's not like a live performance, even though it is live within your studio, but it's a studio performance.
[00:22:58] Pete Hayes: So, intimate. I would offer that up to everybody to check out MultiTracks.com for that reason alone. Check out their studio sessions.
[00:23:05] Phillip Edwards: Thank you. Yeah, they're on YouTube. We've got Brian and Jenn Johnson and the Bethel team coming in for the first time in a couple of weeks. So we're excited to host them, and it's all on our YouTube, but Pete, thank you for having me.
[00:23:17] Phillip Edwards: It's been a pleasure to connect with you, and thanks for all your encouragement over the years and for being a customer, and it's awesome. Thank you.
[00:23:24] Pete Hayes: Well, that's awesome. Well, thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on CEO Growth Talks.