Opening A Storefront for Your Music Teaching Business

Is your music studio running out of your home? Loose acquaintances from your neighborhood entering and exiting your living room, their children leaving footprints in the hallway, the sense that you have no separation between home and work - there’s a reason some music teachers move their businesses into a storefront.

Perhaps you are consistently getting more piano students and you’re ready to scale -  a commercial space can certainly help you do that. However, it’s a big decision requiring a tremendous amount of cost, risk, and patience - tread carefully.

In this guide, I’ll discuss:

1. The Cost/Value Considerations of a Storefront

2. Costs to keep in mind when you rent a storefront

3. When is the right time to take the plunge

4. How to choose the right space

5. The marketing considerations of a storefront

Firstly, my experience with moving to a storefront.

My wife and I moved our music teaching business, the Philadelphia Piano Institute, into a storefront in January of 2020. Yes, just before Covid! We’ve been fortunate enough to scale consistently since then and are preparing to open our second physical location.

The items mentioned below are things we dealt with specifically. If you have any additional thoughts to add, please feel free to send me an email.

Also, nobody understands your goals and situation as well as you do. If you feel like now’s the time to make the jump (and maybe you’ve found a great deal on a commercial space), don’t let anyone curb your enthusiasm.

Cost+Value: Should your move your music teaching business to a physical location?

If you started your own music teaching business and are teaching from home, you have no expenses whatsoever. An internet connection, an instrument, and rent or mortgage are all things you’d be paying for anyways.

Additionally, many at-home music teachers are paid under the table, and I will certainly not be the one to tell you that’s wrong. If you don’t have to pay taxes, I won’t judge.

So let’s say you teach 30 students per week at an average per-lesson cost of $50. That’s $1,500 per week and $6,000 per month in cash. That’s not a bad living. A storefront siphons your net profit: rent, taxes, insurance, etc. eat away at your income. You will probably need to double your studio’s revenue to maintain your same personal income, and the more your scale, the more work you’ll have with client correspondence, scheduling, and more.

So if you are getting enough leads that you can scale your business to double or triple the amount of current students on your roster, you will be able to make the investment worth it over time.

COSTS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN MOVING TO A STOREFRONT

Keep in mind that this will vary wildly from region to region. The Philadelphia Piano Institute currently runs out of a storefront on a busy street in one of the most affluent neighborhoods of Philadelphia. It’s very expensive compared to a strip mall storefront in Scranton, PA.

Either way, rent-wise, you can prepare for:

1. A security deposit: possibly first month’s rent, last months’ rent, and one additional chunk equal to one month’s rent. So if your rent is $1,500, expect to pay $4,500 up front

2. Triple Net Lease (NNN): You have to pay real estate tax, maintenance, and building insurance

3. A multi-year lease: Many desirable retail spaces will require that you commit to multiple years

Now let’s say that you rented a storefront that you’d like to divide into five studios (great idea). You will need to hire a contractor to “build out” the space. If you are installing non load-bearing walls and generally dressing up the space, you’ll need to have $10K+ in capital set aside. Furthermore, you’ll need to be renting the space while the contractor works, so that’s at least one month of rent that won’t generate additional revenue.

If you run a piano teaching business, you will need to buy more pianos (or keyboards for group classes) - and you don’t need me to tell you what that costs.

You’ll also have to set up a business wifi account, purchase chairs, sound panels and whatnot, and you’ll be nickel and dimed by your city for permits and other legalities.

WHEN IS THE RIGHT TIME TO TAKE THE PLUNGE?

Some items you may want to place on your checklist:

1. You are operating at capacity or rapidly approaching capacity at your home studio

2. You enjoy a reliable flow of leads

3. You have enough capital saved to handle a security deposit, a few month’s rent, and the build-out cost for a commercial space

4. You prefer the potential of a scalable and lucrative business to the security of a good, static (and maybe tax-free) paycheck from your home studio.

5. You are ready to hire additional teachers and scale as soon as possible

YOUR MINDSET WILL CHANGE WHEN YOU’RE RENTING

You will have to start thinking like a business owner, not a cash-laden freelancer. Your profitability will plummet at the beginning, and you will have to double your business’s number of students before you start to match your previous personal earnings. In order to start making real money, you may need to triple your student base. Just get comfortable with playing the long game, and don’t expect to make much money for at least a year (if you already have a good lead flow).

YOU WILL HAVE EQUITY THOUGH, AND THAT’S A GOOD THING!

You’ll be sacrificing short term cash for long term ownership of a business, and that’s a worthwhile investment in most cases. You could potentially get acquired if you run your business well, and if you don’t go that route, you’ll be able to scale indefinitely until you are making more money than you ever could have as a private at-home teacher. It may take years though.

Choosing the right storefront for your music teaching business.

For the purposes of this article, I’m assuming you have an established presence in your town or city, have a steady flow of leads, and are simply scaling via a storefront. If you are opening a storefront without a pre-existing music student base or lead flow, that’s a different angle - email me. 

Start by finding a location where plenty of parents with kids will walk or drive by. Suburban businesses often open storefronts in busy stripmalls with a grocery store nearby, while urban businesses look for sidewalks with lots of foot traffic, proximity to affluent residential neighborhoods, and public transportation. If you run an adult-heavy music teaching business, hip neighborhoods with bars, restaurants, jazz clubs, and luxury apartments are probably a good bet (or, of course, artsy/gentrified neighborhoods that attract musically-inclined adults).

You can do demographic research on a neighborhood with movoto or neighborhood scout, but remember that you know your city and clientele better than a random website.

You’ll also need to decide on how many square feet you can afford, but don’t bother renting a retail space unless you can fit at least three private studios inside. You probably don’t want to go through all of this trouble to only be able to hire one teacher.

Then, use LoopNet, CityFeet, and even Craigslist to start hunting for storefronts in your target areas at your desired price and size. You can’t be in a rush if you want a great deal - you may need to keep looking for a month or three before you find the one. Also, make sure the commercial space is zoned properly - the listing information should mention that.

Marketing Consideration After Launching A Storefront

LOCAL SEO CONSIDERATIONS

If you locate your studio in a densely populated area of relevant people, you will be able to show up in the Google map pack when potential students search for something like “piano lessons near me.” You don’t necessarily need a storefront to harness this visibility, but it certainly helps! When you open your storefront, make sure you change your Google My Business listing information to reflect the new address, and also build lots of local citations (instances of your business name, address, and phone number) online. These are SEO services that I offer, so get in touch if you have questions.

DOES THE VISIBILITY OF THE STOREFRONT INCREASE LEAD VOLUME SIGNIFICANTLY?

If you find a location with lots of vehicle or foot traffic, you should see an increase in leads. Here’s the amount of “branded searches” my piano teaching business has received in the past six months:

We have lots of visibility online as well, but these branded searches are influenced by people who see the storefront and later search for the “Philadelphia Piano Institute” online.

YOUR SIGNAGE AND WINDOW MATERIAL

You aren’t running a speakeasy, so make sure you invest in a nice sign or awning that is easy to read. You want casual passersby to notice it and look you up later.

Also, in the front window or door, make sure your website is prominently displayed. Your website should be your main lead generating mechanism, and you want to encourage people to look it up.

GO AFTER LOCAL PR AND NEIGHBOURHOOD NEWS

If you open a storefront, you should certainly email relevant small business journalists and bloggers in your area with an announcement. People like music, and especially if you do some sort of local grand opening with snacks, music, and art, you have a good chance of getting local coverage. You can also look for local mommy blogs and Facebook pages.

Note - press coverage is not guaranteed. You may email 30 journalists and receive zero responses, and you shouldn’t feel badly if that happens. When we opened our storefront and rebranded to the Philadelphia Piano Institute, Philadelphia was in the middle of the pandemic, George Floyd riots, and other upheaval, so there was no chance that our music studio opening would be considered “newsworthy.”

In Conclusion

Is your solo teaching practice bursting at the seams? Are you flooded with inquiries? Do you have enough cash on hand to pay a security deposit, build-out costs, and a few months of rent? Are you prepared to sacrifice short term earnings for long term income growth and equity?

If the answers to those questions were “yes,” then you should consider scaling with a storefront. If you have any questions, you’re welcome to give me a call - I love chatting with music teachers, whether you are trying to hire me or not.

How To Start A Music Teaching Business

Starting a music teaching business is an aspiration many musicians share, and it’s easy to see why: you keep the entire lesson fee, work on your own schedule, choose your students, have the satisfaction of running your own small business, and enjoy the potential to grow. But it’s not as simple as hanging flyers on coffee shop walls and making a Facebook post.

In this article, we will discuss the following:

1. The most common progression teachers follow when starting their own music teaching business

2. How to set up the nuts and bolts of your studio

3. And most importantly, how to actually get students

If you find this article helpful, or if you have any questions for me, I’d love to hear from you. Send me a note at adam@musicstudiomarketing.com.

Or, if you’d rather skip the 3,000 word blog post altogether and simply start working with me, let me know. We can get your music teaching business off the ground as soon as possible.

FIRST, A QUICK PRINCIPLE: DON’T BE IN A RUSH WHEN BUILDING YOUR OWN STUDIO

Some teachers are fortunate enough to launch a studio in the town they grew up in, or perhaps they have a significant network because they stayed local after grad school. Their personal studios may grow quickly because they already know a lot of people who will take lessons from them.

But in many cases, a teacher is starting entirely from scratch.  Please realize that reaping the benefits of search engine optimization (SEO), digital marketing, and word of mouth take time. It may take six months to a year for you to have a full studio, and that’s fine! Having your own studio, as opposed to working for someone else’s business, may double your income - and trust me, most people work longer than a year to gain100% income growth.

So don’t quit your current job in a flurry of frustration and decide to start your own music teaching business. Start building your studio while you have the security of another income stream, and when the time is right, make the jump to full time self-employment.

HIGH LEVEL PROGRESSION: HOW TO START A MUSIC TEACHING BUSINESS

Firstly, here’s the most common progression I’ve seen music teachers take when starting out on their own:

1. Take another job while teaching at home on the side

2. Gradually accrue enough personal students to quit the job

3. Move to a storefront when they have enough leads and hire teachers

4. Scale via more locations, bigger space, online lessons, classes, or in-home lessons

TAKE A JOB (TEACHING OR OTHERWISE) WHILE TEACHING AT HOME ON THE SIDE

As I mentioned above, it takes some time to get your studio off the ground, and you’ll make better long term decisions if your present needs are met. Usually, the most successful home studio owners (or large music teaching business owners) started off teaching at home part time while they taught for another studio or worked another job as well.

The first benefit is security - your rent will be paid, you can eat, you can save money, and you can safely and responsibly grow your teaching business without incurring debt.

Secondly, you’ll get valuable experience. If you work at a locally respected music school for a year, for instance, you should plaster that experience all over your website and your advertisements - credibility matters to potential clients!

Thirdly, treat your job as venture capital for your personal studio. Set aside some of your salary for piano lesson advertising, web development costs, website hosting, and other small fees here and there, and that investment may end up being the best one you ever make.

GET ENOUGH PERSONAL STUDENTS TO QUIT YOUR JOB

You’ll eventually get enough inquiries for your home studio that you will need to either turn people away or quit your “real” job - this is the time to go out entirely on your own. Your best bet is to have an emergency fund set aside to help weather a lean month or two when you first make this jump, but it’s a very common progression for music teachers.

MOVE TO A STOREFRONT AND HIRE TEACHERS

This is a huge step - I recommend you read my guide to opening a storefront for your music business if you are serious. But if you are receiving a steady flow of leads that you can’t service yourself, and if you want the potential of significantly higher earnings (and responsibility!) in the future, this is the right move.

You will feel like you are losing lots of money for a while (maybe a year or more). You now have rent costs, your profit margins are tighter, you will have to pay more money in taxes, and you’ll encounter a hundred other costs. But if you are in it for the long game, this will work out in the end.

SCALE WITH MORE LOCATIONS, CLASSES, ONLINE, OR IN-HOME

After the initial move to a storefront, you’ll have to decide between maintaining the status quo, adding a second location, or moving to a bigger singular location. You can also scale by hiring teachers for only online or in-home music lessons - that move will improve your margins, but just realize that the online lesson space is wildly competitive.

The Nuts and Bolts of Starting Your Own Music Studio

CHOOSE A LOCATION FOR YOUR MUSIC STUDIO

In my “How To Get More Piano Students” guide, I discuss an important principle: your studio needs to be where the customers are. The main reason for this is that you will set up a Google My Business listing, and your website will show up in the Google Map Pack when someone searches for “piano lessons near me” - a very common phrase. This is the simplest and most reliable way to get students early on.

If you have the flexibility to move to a desirable location, do some neighborhood demographic research first to see where families live. After that, you can use Google’s keyword planner to see actual search volume for piano or other lessons in different ZIP codes.

WHAT AGES DO YOU WISH TO TEACH?

Do you specialize in early childhood lessons? All pre-college students? Do you also teach adults (highly recommended if you want to make a good living - adults love piano lessons, and they need good teachers too!).

WHAT GENRES ARE YOU QUALIFIED TO TEACH?

If you can’t play jazz or teach jazz improvisation, you should probably not advertise “jazz piano lessons” on your website. Your students will be disappointed, you may get bad reviews, and you won’t get referrals. Be honest in your representation of your skillset - you want qualified students.

WHAT CURRICULUM WILL YOU USE?

You should be able to speak intelligently about your unique teaching approach before you start receiving leads. People will ask you what methods you use, what your teaching style is, and other questions, and they want to be reassured that they are hiring an expert with a personal approach to music lessons.

WRITE A STUDIO POLICY

You need to outline your absence policy, how billing works, how students should handle absences, and everything in between. What can happen will happen, and if you don’t have a policy in place that you make people sign, you’ll have students or their parents haggling you about refunds after absences and such. Truthfully, people can be a pain, and students will probably still haggle with you over cancellations and refunds - but if you can point to a place in the studio policy where these details are outlined, you can enforce your standards.

Nail Down Your Rates

Teachers handle this a number of ways, so don’t take my opinion as the only way to do it. But here’s the pricing progression I recommend:

1. Start at a respectable, but affordable price. When you are brand new, you won’t be getting a ton of leads - so you want to be able to sign nearly everyone who emails you. If you have a decent resume, your conversion rate should be pretty good if you charge around $32-$35 per half hour for lessons.

2. As you start getting more leads or reaching capacity, raise your rates. This is because you can now afford for some people to turn you down after inquiring about lessons. Also, don’t shy away from raising the rates for your existing students. If some of them leave, that’s fine if you can replace them with higher-paying students.

3. After you’ve raised your rates and reached 90% capacity again, you can take two routes: raise rates for new students much higher because you can afford a low conversion rate, or keep your rates where they are and hire another teacher (going the storefront route).

A principle to keep in mind: If you have cheap rates, you will attract some cheap students. For instance, if you rely on Thumbtack for leads, and you charge $20 per half hour lesson, you will end up teaching some really cheap or flaky folks. People will give you a hard time about your makeup lesson policy, cancellations, and everything else you can think of.

Pricing around $35+ per half hour lesson is a decent target - you weed out the bargain-hunters, but you haven’t priced out well-meaning but less affluent families. You will still get recurring students at this price point as well (people who will continue month after month for years). If you charge $50 per half hour, for instance, you will likely disqualify a number of quality students, and you may attract people with shorter-term lessons in mind. If you wish to operate at very low volume - just 10 total students, for instance - you can charge more.

My Experience With Pricing - We charge a pretty modest rate at the Philadelphia Piano Institute, and it works for us because 1) we rely on high volume 2) 2e have amazing retention rates at this price point, allowing us to scale 3) we sincerely enjoy working with our clientele, and raising rates to “luxury brand” levels would deliver students that are perhaps not what we’re looking for, and weed out the ones we enjoy working with.

I’ve had clients who charge very high rates and only wish to get a few students here and there ($125+ per hour) - that’s fine. However, if you want to go this route, you must be prepared for a very low conversion rate and low lead volume.

Most Importantly: How To Get Music Students

It doesn’t matter how much you charge, what your studio policy is, or what your studio looks like if you aren’t getting leads. Here’s a quick guide to getting leads for your business.

Note - I’m a digital marketing expert, so my advice will lean that way. You can always call local schools, hang up flyers, join MTNA, and pursue other methods of getting students in addition to what is listed below.

INVEST IN A GOOD WEBSITE

Think about it - a student can be worth up to $3,000 per year. A $1,500 - $2,000 investment in a website that convinces leads to sign up with you is a great value when you look at it that way.

A modern music school website needs to:

• Be fast

• Be mobile-friendly

• Have tons of informational content

• Have great on-site SEO optimization

• Be beautiful

• Be authoritative

• Be user-friendly

The “fast” and “mobile-friendly” points are obvious these days. People don’t mess around with piano studio websites that won’t load or that they can’t read on their phones

The content is important for both people and Google. Potential leads want to know about you, your teaching philosophy, your experience, and your pricing before they email you. Google needs to see lots of relevant and authoritative content in order to rank your website higher.

As far as beauty is concerned, people like beautiful things! If your website is well designed (even a Squarespace template will do) and has nice photography, people will be more likely to email you. You will also get lots of comments from leads saying that they liked your website.

And lastly, user experience (UX) on your website matters. Your site needs to be easy to navigate, and your contact information has to be readily available. Have a floating contact bar at the top of the screen, or include a form on every page, for instance.

LOCAL SEO STRATEGY

If you set up a Google My Business listing, fill it out properly, and include your name, address, and phone number on your website exactly as it appears in your GMB listing, you will be eligible to show up in the Google Map Pack for phrases including “near me,” even before you’ve built many backlinks to your website.

Google ranks GMB listings for “near me” search queries partially based on proximity, so the playing field is leveled. If you need to know more about local SEO for music schools, send me an email.

LARGER SCALE SEO

Good music teacher SEO requires a significant amount of backlinks, blog posts, search engine optimized content on your services pages, and much, much more. If you want to rank on the first page of a competitive market for a phrase like “voice lessons [city],” you should be prepared to wait for several months while the SEO work kicks in.

FACEBOOK ADS AND GOOGLE ADS

Spending money on pay per click advertising could be the best decision you make when starting a music teaching business - if done well. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can easily spend $1,000+ on advertising without a single lead to show for it.

These days, Google Ads can be very expensive for music teachers in highly populated areas. That’s because Google Ads follows a bidding model, and there are tons of businesses with large budgets, like takelessons.com, Wyzant, and others. If you pursue Google Ads, keep your geographic targeting narrow, your keyword list locked in, and include as much info (including pricing) in your ads to discourage unqualified clicks.

Facebook ads (as much as I hate Facebook) is actually cheaper right now. I recommend setting up an attractive business page, either inviting your friends to like your page or running a “page likes” campaign for about $100 so you can appear more credible, then spending about $10 per day targeting audiences of people interested in piano, music lessons, and other related subject matter. You should be able to get leads for under $60 apiece this way.

IN CONCLUSION

Starting your own music teaching business and acquiring clients is a huge undertaking, but it’s definitely worth it. It’s a relatively small investment of time and money up front when you look at the bigger picture.

If you are serious about it, please send me a note. Whether we end up working together or not, I enjoy hearing about music teachers’ problems and ideas, and we can talk about your goals together.