Local DJ Turns Passion into Profit with Mixing Maryland

Music is important. It adds mood and color to the experiences people go though, and songs can have very strong emotional memories attached to them.

Special occasions—most frequently weddings—require somebody who can arrange the night’s musical selections, keep the guests dancing and handle the flow of the heavily scrutinized evening.

Ryan Deal, of Bowie, started his career as a DJ the way many artists and musicians do. ”I started doing it just in my room with my equipment and slowly branched out to start doing parties, and now we’re doing weddings and corporate events too,” he said.

Deal comes from a background in marketing, earning a Bachelor’s in Advertising and Mass Communication from Towson University and working for numerous companies doing consulting work in the past few years. He said that training and experience helped him to quickly build a strong client base when he formalized his company, Mixing Maryland.

“The main thing about us is that we do things differently,” said Deal. He said Mixing Maryland is more modern, and gets away from the old style of “radio announcer” and cheesy gimmicks from the weddings of the past.

"We are very affordable and with a lot of skill and fun behind it, instead of treating it as just a job. We all really love doing this,” Deal said of him and his staff of DJs. “The coolest thing about owning a small business is you get to do what you want, and you get to try to do things differently.  If you see a company doing something wrong, you can try to do it better yourself.”

This year Mixing Maryland provided the entertainment for about 20 weddings and numerous parties and corporate events, and Deal said he’s already booked 20 more weddings for next year as well as other gigs and hopes to continue to expand his client base and reach throughout the area.

“DJing really is just a lot of word-of-mouth, it’s hard to find a good DJ,” he said. Deal said that word-of-mouth is extremely important in the industry, especially since each event he or his company works, their performance is seen by potentially hundreds of people who may want to book him for there events in the future, if they do well.

Deal said the biggest challenge to get Mixing Maryland off the ground was coming up with the funds to buy all of the equipment he would need to work larger events, including backups for everything, cables and numerous other items that quickly add up to a hefty bill.

Deal said he would DJ parties and pick up jobs wherever possible for the first few years and would save up to buy more equipment, rights to more songs and everything else he would need to facilitate larger jobs.

At the end of the day, Deal said he loves owning Maryland Mixing because he loves to DJ, and that the best part of his job is making sure his clients have a great experience at their event.

“The most rewarding thing is just the feedback,” he said. “I have a job where I get to dance, party, hang and make people really happy.”