Matthew Rusk Student Entrepreneur in Residence

For so many businesses lockdowns have absolutely decimated their income streams, preventing their customers from attending their premises to purchase the service or products that they provide. In April 2020 I was very concerned that the numbers of lessons taught by the music teachers in our teaching community would take a nose-dive right down to basically nothing, as the entire business had be designed for in-person lessons.

However, I had underestimated the desire, ability and determination that the teacher community had in regard to moving their lessons and their students online within just a small numbers of weeks. To put it another way, the ability for music students to take lessons on Zoom, Skype, Teams and other platforms saved us as a business and enabled us to continue to keep going during the last year.

Of course, not all of the music teachers in our community moved online – for some, the instrument made it challenging to move online. Drum teachers, for example, have had a more challenging time teaching online compared to guitar teachers. For others, the way they taught didn’t suit to online teaching, some singing teachers are a good example of this as they focus a lot on addressing the way that a student’s posture, neck tension and stance impact their voice – something that they just couldn’t translate to the online environment. Finally, for some teachers, the technical abilities required to move online were just a step too far and they felt they couldn’t achieve the results they wanted from a technical point of view.

Nonetheless, this is certainly a smaller number of the teachers within the community than I would have expected prior to lockdown. There are teachers who had previously told me they would never teach online, that once lockdown came moved online and have been teaching really successfully (and dare I say it, enjoying it!). The numbers of online music lessons enquiries have massively increased, perhaps unsurprisingly, during lockdown – creating an opportunity for music teachers to offer lessons to students that are located across the world.

This has enabled students to access incredibly high-quality music teachers that perhaps they wouldn’t be able to in their area, as well as enabling music teachers to do things they never thoughts possible before – for example, move house and retain students in large numbers or consider going on tour and taking students with them virtually. From all of this it is clear that a music business like the one that I run required an online music lesson strategy and we are delighted to announce a new part of the platform dedicated to online music lessons and the teachers within our community who are able to teach them.

It will be really interesting to see the legacy of lockdowns and whether students will continue to enquire in such high numbers for online lessons or whether Zoom lessons – of all types – will be consigned to “that is so 2020”! Only time will tell, but as teachers we have learned so much about teaching via Zoom and I can say that had this not happened then I am sure that many businesses would no longer be with us.

Posted under MGR Music, Music Teachers

Each student’s inspiration to start learning to play a musical instrument is slightly different. Sometimes it is parents that encourage a child to learn an instrument, with them selecting the instrument and taking them through the process of learning – for that student to later fall in love with that instrument as they see themselves succeeding upon it. Quite often, however, the motivation comes from the student itself – perhaps inspired by the music that they are passionate about, wishing to replicate it.

I certainly fall into that group, with Nirvana being my inspiration to wanting to learn to play the guitar. It wasn’t that I wanted to “learn to play the guitar” in its own right, instead I wanted to play along with my favourite Nirvana songs. It is a subtle difference but one that meant that I practiced a lot, as I wasn’t thinking I was learning the guitar but instead getting better at playing along with my favourite songs. It is akin to an individual that is trying to motivate themselves to go to the gym, compared to the athlete who is training for an event – for the latter going to and being in the gym is just part of the process, rather than a goal in its own right.

As many academics will agree, the 10,000 hours rule to master a skill like playing an instrument, is so well-document that it really is as simple as the number of hours a student puts in will determine their ability. Therefore, my motivation for playing Nirvana songs simply meant that I was built up more hours spent on the guitar, without really noticing that I was practicing. This was really the secret to me learning the guitar. The second aspect of the hours invested is the quality of that practice or learning. I can certainly say having a guitar teacher to help guide me through the information in a logical way had a huge impact on my learning ability.

This is why I believe there will always be a case for professional music teachers being able to find work, even with resources like YouTube out there. The reason is not a students ability to access content, but the ability for a student to go through the relevant content in a logical order. In other words, it is the teacher’s ability to curate the content and tailor it to an individual student that makes their music lessons so impactful.

All of this has been on my mind this week, as I was delighted to see that the team put MusicTeacher.com live and students can now start to enquire for music teachers featured in the music teacher database. This will help students, with an array of motivations to learn their chosen instrument, to start their journey towards the 10,000 hours. It is a great moment and now we will wait for the first enquiry to come through the database!

Posted under MGR Music, Music Teacher, Music Teachers

Trying to keep with my daily updates for the new Music Teacher platform, one of the most challenging aspects of setting-up a new online business is how can you plan it in such a way as to make it scale. Often what is easy with a small amount of customers is often unmanagable as the customer numbers increase – specifically business administration, for example responding to customer queries or answering common onboarding questions becomes ever more time intensive. This draws key resources, in terms of people, time and energy, away from continuing to develop the business – after all there is a distinct different between maintaining a business and growing it rapidly.

One common pitful is to design a business model that by the time that you get to the stage that you need to scale the model itself cannot support the hiring of individuals to help validate the scaled model. In other words, while it is founder(s) doing the tasks the profile margin is worthwhile, however, as the business grows and further employees need to come in to support, then actually the cost of employing an individual to do the task cuts so far into the business model that it makes it no longer viable.

This has been an aspect of the project that I am very keen to try to plan for from day one, how can the website scale to 1,000 teachers then to 5,000 teachers, using a model that is sustainable and doesn’t simply overload the core team, reducing the customer experience and team enjoyment. I know I still has so much to learn in this field and would love to get any readers thoughts on how to build a business model that scales from 10 to 1,000 to 10,000 size while ensuring that the business infrastructure can cope with that development.

Posted under Music Teacher

It has taken many months but it is with tremendous pride to share with you the launch of a new music teacher database, named MusicTeacher.com. This is part of a vision to develop the platform into an internationally recognized platform for music students to find professional music teachers, giving them the confidence that they are taking lessons with high-quality music tutors.

With the success of the mgrmusic.com platform, where I believe we carefully developed a business model and perfected our internal processes, we are now ready to bring that onto the international stage with a website that is easily recognisable and rememberable. I will be updating as often as I can, updating on key statistics like the numbers of teachers who form part of the music teacher community on the platform and the numbers of music students who have enquired for lessons.

The very first steps will be planning the migration of the current music teachers featured on the mgrmusic.com, moving their profiles over to the new platform and communicating out to teachers the rebranding. This will be a gradual process, individually migrating each teacher’s profile, as well as the pages of the mgrmusic.com that will find a new home on MusicTeacher.com. The old platform will remain live for music teachers to access their community area and the forums, but activity and focus will switch to the new platform over the next few months – with the clear aim of growing the community of music teachers in areas where we have recieved high numbers of enquiries during 2020, namely America and Asia.

The platform itself will be very similar in structure to mgrmusic.com, with students able to search for music lessons to find high-quality, professional music teachers, able to teach their either in-person or online. These teachers can be located anywhere in the world and will be carefully vetted and interviewed before being included on the new platform. It is a really exciting project to start and I will keep you updated as frequently as I can with the progress and migration to the new home of our international teacher database.

Posted under MGR Music, mgrmusic.com