Hi,
Bearing in mind that this is all advice from a rank amateur - just stuff I felt helped in some way:
Mixing wise -
Ken Lewis - Mixing Night Audio on Youtube. He does a 10 minute mix exercise at the start of each live episode which might be helpful. I do find his current presenting style a bit too loud and in your face for my taste. All the same I have picked up some useful tips when I've managed to watch. Might help with mixing faster.
James Lugo's Youtube channel shows the background prep work that goes in to label production. There's some videos where he goes over his mix template, plugin choices, and also a few full mix videos which might be useful.
Getting it down to a kind of formula would seem to be the right approach I feel.
Having a very small number of go to plugins, and also setting up a bunch of your own starting presets for them can speed things up a lot, as you are not second guessing what to use, and not going through the same starting moves each time (I mean you can just pick a starting preset and go from there, to save a bit of messing about).
Automation - spending time learning/setting up your daw's automation so using it is second nature helps. I have an old fader port that can be helpful too.
I have a basic template with the busses I'm likely to need, and a consistent way of organising and coloring tracks, so I know where everything is. I don't really have to think much about how I'm going to organise the session, I just have to do it.
I don't have any plugins in my template, but there's only really 3 or 4 plugins that I use mostly.
My basic list is:
Listen to play list of tracks designed to acclimatise ears
Organize tracks (whilst listening to playlist)
Put a couple of ref tracks in the session to refer to
Rough mix panning and volume only
(I kind of go - drums / bass / guitars / synths / vocals / backing vocals). I might start with the vocal.
Automation - eg vocal automation / manual de-essing, etc
Add plugins, etc - Usually eq, compression, reverb, delay, etc. in that order
Add mix bus comp / eq / limiting
Render, load in new DAW session along side other tracks for referencing.
Check next day on IEMS.
Make any fixes
Upload to forum
Get told it sucks, or have some issues pointed out that never occurred to me.
Decide whether I agree or not, then try and have a another go at it.
Do you have at least one mix under your belt that you think you really nailed? I think getting that can help confidence a lot and kind of sets an internal benchmark of what you can achieve, and how to get it.
Or just get a rough mix, chuck renaissance axx on each channel, slam it through ozone and call it a day
.
Hopefully the real experts will be back with some proper advice - it might be worth sending a pm or two, as the public forum is really for discussing mixing rather than the business side of things.
As I mentioned before it might also be worth sending Mike Senior an email as he might possibly be able to do a bespoke session to cover some of the client stuff you mentioned too, perhaps? Certainly I wouldn't have thought that there would be any harm in asking.
Oh- the Working Class Audio podcast could be worth checking out too.
Cheers!