In this episode, John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) talks with Jonny Wilson, founder of Build A Music School and Hello Cashflow.
As a coach to hundreds of music school owners, Jonny has a perspective that few others do. A common struggle he noticed for studio owners to understanding their business financials — something he used to find challenging too. So he built Hello Cashflow. In this discussion Wilson shares how music school owners can master their finances using Hello Cashflow’s innovative tools designed for small business owners without an accounting background.
Included:
- How cash flow management impacts both small and large decisions in music school management, and the importance of understanding where your money is going.
- Why accounting reports often confuse music school owners and don’t always give you a complete picture, and how to turn financial data into clear, actionable steps in a plan.
- Jonny shares his seven financial habits for success that all music school owners should adopt for a profitable and sustainable business.
- How Hello Cashflow’s AI-driven budgeting helps studios project cash flow that impacts all areas of running a business, like expansion investments, admin hires, and giving yourself a raise — all presented in an easy to understand visual timeline.
This episode explains simple habits—regular reconciliation, tax planning and monthly reviews—and shows how understanding your numbers makes your teaching sustainable and profitable, so you can focus on music while your business thrives.
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Episode Transcript:
(Please note: This transcript was generated by robots. There may be errors. For the best experience, please listen to the podcast episode.)
John Kozicki (00:01.173)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor Podcast. My name’s John Kazicki, and my guest today is a drummer and the founder of New Zealand’s largest private music school, Good Time Music Academy. He’s also the founder of Build a Music School, the online coaching platform and community for music instructors and studio owners. And now the co-founder of Hello Cash Flow, his newest project, which is a financial software tool.
That helps small business owners interpret financial reports into usable information. Johnny Wilson, hey, how are you doing today, Johnny?
Jonny Wilson (00:38.914)
Hey John, I’m doing awesome. Thanks so much for the opportunity to come on and always love hanging out with you and hearing what you’re up to.
John Kozicki (00:45.345)
Welcome to the podcast. First time having you on here. Really excited to finally get you on the podcast. And talk about your newest venture, which is Hello Cash Flow. And I think that will really tie into our audience here, music school owners, as well as a lot of small businesses. But before we get into Hello Cash Flow.
I think most listeners probably know you from Build a Music School. but I actually want to go even just a little bit further back, even before BAM, and probably I don’t know, maybe before your days running your music school. I’ve noticed in our conversations and just in observation, you have a real knack as a teacher for.
inability to assess what’s holding someone back and how to help them overcome that. really be being able to help people identify their goals and and figure out what’s holding them back. So I was curious, where does that all come from?
Jonny Wilson (02:04.519)
you’re very kind to say that. I think growing up in my life and probably most music school owners have a similar story. You have someone that got alongside you and they taught you how to be a leader and how to, you know, have some self confidence in what you’re doing and I just had a whole range of amazing people like that in my life. And as you look at phenomenal people in the world and what they’re doing, you you realise that they don’t start like that and you just want to
be excellent at what you do and so you learn that actually there’s a set of habits, there’s a set of work ethic, there’s a t you know, set of character traits that you want to develop. And so as I’ve learnt those myself, I try pass them on to other people and I guess I just have this belief because I’ve witnessed it myself that le a leader’s job is to create more leaders. And so that’s what I try do with whatever I’m doing.
John Kozicki (02:59.131)
Okay. yeah, I definitely see that progression. And and I I think we do that with students. at least we try effectively, right? We we do that exact thing. We look for what are the goals, what are the tools that they need to achieve those goals, and we then we put it in their hands. and again, I think you’ve done that with with with Build a Music School and it seems like
That’s kind of what’s going on here with hello cash flow as well. So in your simplest terms, I know I talked a little bit about Hello Cash Flow briefly in that intro, but w tell our listeners what is what is hello cash flow?
Jonny Wilson (03:44.354)
Yeah, so if I I’ll give you the snapshot of where it’s come from so it makes sense. when I was running my music school, it wasn’t until the very sort of last, I don’t know, three or four years where I really got a grasp on the finances. we we grew to be the largest in the country. We grew to about two thousand students, but it probably wasn’t until we got to about twelve, thirteen hundred that we actually kind of got the hang of managing the money side.
So we could have this amazing highlight reel, the best videos in town of what was going on, the the best teachers, all that cool stuff. But behind the scenes it was an absolute roller coaster. And there were moments where, you know, I’d be pouring over a spreadsheet trying to figure something out and I just couldn’t make it make sense. I wondered like why are we always profitable but there’s no cash in the bank and why do we keep falling short as we get to, you know, summer holidays, all this sort of stuff. And there was one moment where my wife I
I showed her a spreadsheet I’d been working on for some sort of plans ahead for the next year and she just said to me, like, I I just don’t want to look at it. I don’t I don’t believe these anymore. We’ll just work as hard as we work and we’ll s you know, spend as little as we can and we’ll hopefully there’s enough for us in the tax ban at the end of the year. And that was kinda the reality and it was a big wake up call for me and so it set me on this journey of thinking, hey, if I wanna be in this business for a long time, I need to learn to master this skill.
John Kozicki (04:59.728)
Mm.
Jonny Wilson (05:10.613)
And so I ch I checked out all the other tools that are on the market for managing the cash flow and the finances. Now I use Xero, which is one of the two big accounting companies. There’s QuickBooks and Sage and MYOB and things like that. But those really sort of help your accountant do their job, pay your taxes, keep you out of prison. But they don’t really do anything like tell you, hey, when am I gonna run out of cash? Can I afford to hire this person? you know, what’s my cash flow runway?
John Kozicki (05:31.032)
Mm-hmm.
Jonny Wilson (05:40.13)
what do I have a marketing problem or a retention problem? All these kind of day-to-day decisions that you needed to make. And so people kind of just default to this, okay. Well I’ll just try to spend as little as I can and make as much as I can, hope that it just kind of works out. And so we ended up realizing there isn’t a tool out there to really nail this for business owners. So I just built one myself with a spreadsheet. Every month I’d take my numbers from zero.
I’d copy them into this spreadsheet, which was tedious, but then I would have these twenty, thirty different tabs that would allow me to see what the hell was going on and make the right decisions. And then once we sort of, you know, passed two thousand students and won a bunch of awards, the the BAM squad launched. And it was really this one tool that kind of turned everything around for me. And I started giving that tool to everyone in the BAM Squad and they all struggled with the same thing, these cash flow issues and even similar ones with
Partners or spouses you know, feeling the financial pressure more than them. And then the natural next step was, well, it’s really annoying having to pull these numbers in manually each month from my accounting software. So we began this journey to actually build a proper software company with developers and and so that’s what Hello Cash Flow’s evolved into today. And we’ve got our first sort of five or six hundred customers, we’ve raised a million dollars and we
John Kozicki (06:48.624)
Mm-hmm.
Jonny Wilson (07:06.315)
Have built something pretty amazing that hasn’t been done before in this space. So bit of a long story there, but that’s where it’s come from, the pain that we wrestled with, and you may have even experienced that yourself, and I’m sure many of your listeners have. And we basically want to get everyone connected to this tool because it’s like turning the lights on for the first time, and you finally feel in control and you can see what’s going on, make the right decisions, and just have better cash flow. and final thing I’ll say is
everything that you went into your music school for was probably things like to be your own boss, to have freedom, to, you know, help young people, to provide jobs, to h earn more money, to travel, have an asset to sell, all these things. They only actually come about if you’ve got good cash flow. And so that’s what we’re passionate about solving for everyone.
John Kozicki (07:53.488)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (07:57.169)
Y you were talking about how you built this elaborate spreadsheet. And I y I feel like I’m I’m I’m pretty decent with a spreadsheet myself. I went to business school, so I know how to take the data and turn it into graphs. Is that what you’re doing? Were you inputting all that data and then creating different formulas and making graphs so that you could visually see what’s going on? And I ask that only because you shared with me the
A demo video of Hello Cash Flow. And that was what was really striking about it to me was to be able to see the visuals and and again going back to that idea of of spreadsheets where yeah, they’re all numbers, but numbers don’t really tell the same story as the visuals.
Jonny Wilson (08:49.217)
Yeah, totally. So you anyone could grab their numbers and, you know, chuck them into AI and get a graph that shows how your expenses and revenue or profit trends and things like that. But there’s a it’s a lot harder to well, one, keep it up to date. So by the time you’ve made your spreadsheet and you go to bed, you wake up the next morning, it’s out of date, right? And so that’s the that’s the first problem is you want something that you don’t have to like build things and prompt everything. It’s just one click in the right place and you’ve got the question that you want.
The next thing would be the next layer is not just how did my mum numbers change over time. It’s things like I’m gr you might want to ask, is my I’m I’m growing, right? My revenue’s going up, but are my expenses rising faster than my revenue? ‘Cause that will make me a little less excited. So things like that, that would take you a long time to kind of figure out, well, is you know, my revenue might have gone up X percent, but what about my expenses? And
So it’s questions like that where you can just get the answer with a click or I wanna hire three new teachers and you know, knock down a wall and create a bigger group lesson room and I want to you know buy a grand piano and you know I want to make seventeen changes in my music school, what will that do to my cash flow? And typically you would pour over a spreadsheet for hours, figuring that out. You don’t really know what your bank account’s gonna be in three months time or six months time.
John Kozicki (09:46.961)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (10:06.385)
Mm-hmm.
Jonny Wilson (10:15.283)
Now you can do that in, you know, a couple of minutes and see what would happen and just remove all the risk before you make the decision.
John Kozicki (10:23.761)
So the the what are some of the tools that with this, because you had mentioned, maybe I want to hire a new instructor, maybe I want to hire, maybe I want to do a build out and do some studio improvements. those all obviously involve projections. And when I looked at the video you shared with me, one of the features that it sounds similar to what you were just talking about is targets. Is that w would you would you consider that being part of the targets?
For instance, if let’s say it take a build out, for instance, right? I know that this this build out is gonna cost me twenty thousand dollars. how am I going to finance that and when will when will I break even from if I get a bank loan? Is is that what that that feature is for?
Jonny Wilson (11:13.835)
Yeah, so you’re probably mixing two features there. So the scenario tool will let you plan anything and that could be in growth mode or cost cutting mode. Like not everyone’s in growth mode. A lot of people need to cut costs and trim things and so you can quickly do that to figure out what will happen. So that’s sort of your scenario and forecasting and you’ll see what your bank ballast does, when you break even, and all how it all breaks down your business and you can just keep tweaking until you’re happy and you go, Great, let’s make that decision and go for it.
Targets is a separate thing. It’s called the yeah, my targets section. And you can set targets for anything. And this is really crucial because a lot of music schools will a i the default is, you know, like I’ve said twice now, earn as much as you can, spend as little as you can, hope that there’s enough money for you and the tax man at the end of the year. But if you actually say, No, I want my music school to have a to pay me, you know, let’s say seventy thousand dollars
and I want to have 20% net profit. You can set those both as targets and then every day that you log in when you’ve you know you’ve reconciled your QuickBooks or your Xero account, you see yourself inching towards those goals and those targets. And you can set as many as you like. You might even have a team member that has, you know, worked for you for three years and you know that if you don’t get them up to a full time salary so that they can, you know, buy their first house or get married.
they’re gonna quit and so you might set a target for for you know, John’s wages. or you might have a power bill you’re trying to get under and you wanna set a target for the power to be under three hundred dollars a month or something. that goal of setting targets, it’s that whole you know, if you aim at nothing you’ll hit it every time. But if you what is it whatever you measure kind of succeeds. So I I think that’s a really powerful thing to be checking all the time, setting many targets.
John Kozicki (13:00.529)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (13:08.955)
I loved what you said right there because I’m I’m a big fan of understanding that the things that you focus on are usually the things that you’re gonna see progress on. And this financial stuff, the the accounting, and again, you know, I mentioned I I went to business school, so I know maybe I’m not exactly the same as as a lot of the the music school owners who may be less familiar with.
the the accounting and and the numbers or just feel out of their depth when it comes to that stuff. I think we tend to avoid those things again because maybe we do feel insecure. And then if we do go to focus on them, it feels overwhelming. And the irony being that really what this is is this is setting up a plan, as you said, targets
But the problem is there’s so many variables that are are involved, right? So you’ve got expenses, you’ve got instructor pay, you’ve got revenue that, and all these little things change what the overall outcome is, right? So it sounds like targets, what it allows you to do is you set that target, and in Hello Cash Flow, you can sort of see how these little variables will ultimately impact the outcome. And by then,
being able to see how these variables impact the outcome, then you can say, like, I need a plan to maybe increase my student number by 10 this month and 10 this month. And then I’ll start to see this progress. And it it sort of visually breaks all that down. Am I, am I hitting it?
Jonny Wilson (14:58.411)
Yeah, absolutely. and there’s I love what you said at the end there around I need X amount of students and so that ties into, you know, like the pricing question because if you if you aren’t making enough or you you wanna make more, your family literally just needs another two hundred dollars a week to keep up with all the costs that are rising, you either can raise your prices to cover that or you can you know, get more students. But often you don’t know like
what your price actually should be. Because a lot of people just look locally and they go, it’s slightly above the average, that’ll do. But what you’re doing is you’re just looking at everyone else that’s kind of doing that and putting a finger in the air and just kind of figuring it out from no science at all. Whereas with Hello Cashflow you can literally see, okay, over the c across of the the year with all the students coming and going and all the different months, I know exactly what my average revenue or average profit per month is per customer.
John Kozicki (15:32.581)
Yeah.
Jonny Wilson (15:57.664)
If I need to earn another whatever thousand dollars a month, I know that that’s exactly, you know, seventeen new customers, and so therefore I can go and you know do that. If I w want to, you know, increase the prices, I can I can tweak the numbers and see, okay, that will cover it, but I’ll expect a drop off, so I’ll raise it. And so it just gives you something a little more scientific. And everything that you said before that is you’re kind of talking about the feeling of just
feeling in control and I think that’s what people want is that it is confusing if you just get given a bunch of complicated spreadsheets and you feel like to solve anything you have to, you know, pour over them for hours or load them into AI or call your accountant for a meeting that’s gonna cost you four hundred bucks an hour or something. you just want to feel in control so you can make the decision today, not in two weeks when someone can meet with you. And so that that’s the whole goal and so
the thing we sort of say behind the scenes is obviously we’re musicians is our our biggest heart for the product, but we’re obviously to make it work we have to use it for other people as well. And we sort of say, Hey, we we want the plumber’s wife to understand this or your local hairdresser or the the guy that flunked school and he’s got a little landscaping business. It’s like it has to work for the most absolute beginner person so that they feel in control. That’s that’s the goal.
John Kozicki (17:09.702)
Mm, mm.
John Kozicki (17:23.822)
Yeah, that’s that’s cool because I I you know I l spend a lot of time looking at profit and loss statements and I’ll even create profit and loss statements for different aspects of of the business. Like we had we had a big performance last weekend and it was something completely different than we’ve ever done, different venue, different scenario. So we’re charging different, you know, different ticket costs and and everything and different photographers. So all of these variables were different. So
Jonny Wilson (17:43.233)
Wow.
John Kozicki (17:54.194)
Created a profit and loss statement, but even still, the concert was Saturday. I went into that concert thinking, like, all right, well, I know how many people we need to show up and buy tickets. You know, I’m pretty confident I have a good idea because I created the profit and loss statement, but it wasn’t like I still wasn’t 100% confident, right? So it wasn’t until after the concert I looked at it and was like, okay, it was super successful.
And that’s just a microcosm of everything in our business. So, and again, I’m comfortable with looking at a profit loss statement. And I I’m sure that a lot of studio owners might not be there. So I can see where the benefits are in when it comes to projections, seeing into the future rather than just looking at the PL and saying, okay, this is what happened.
Maybe next time we do it differently.
Jonny Wilson (18:55.809)
Yeah, I love that. And yeah, and you’re lucky you’re a bit more savvy and well trained than other people. And sometimes I wish that I’d, you know, done a business degree before I started my own music school ’cause it probably would have saved me a lot of blood, sweat, tears and pray. but at the end of the day, everyone if they want to build a successful music school, they have to learn this stuff. It’s it’s not something where you can just, you know, delegate it all off to a bookkeeper and accountant and rock up every three months to check in or
wait till the end of year financials. You you do have to learn it and the things that you’re doing while you’re a maybe a five figure music school or a six figure music school are just they’re just not habits that are going to get you to a seven or multi seven figure business. And it’s not that hard once you learn it. You just have to dedicate a bit of time to it. And everyone that’s a entrepreneur who’s dedicated enough time to launch a music school has work ethic and the skills to do it. So I I would encourage people
take the time to master it because like I said earlier, everything you went into business for will only come to pass if you have good cash flow. And if you don’t, it’s the thing that will cause the most stress. It’s like people and cash flow. Those are the two things that will prevent you sleeping well at night.
John Kozicki (20:13.666)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I feel like we’re kind of getting a little geeky here on the on the accounting and the business stuff. So I want to try and bring it back around to to a a bit more relatable with with our audience. what do you think is maybe maybe like top one or two features in Hello Cash Flow that you feel would be most beneficial to say
Jonny Wilson (20:19.617)
Yeah.
Jonny Wilson (20:28.331)
Yeah, cool.
John Kozicki (20:42.576)
Well, okay, let’s do it like this. Let’s do most beneficial for a music school owner who is not quite to a hundred students, and then maybe to a music school owner who is say two hundred and above.
Jonny Wilson (21:06.327)
Got it. Okay. Well let me let me answer this slightly differently and I I will I will do that. So set a hundred and then two hundred plus. The first thing that everyone needs to do is there’s there’s basically seven little commitments that you want to make to yourself. And I’ll go through them really quickly. The first is that you will set like a reconciling rhythm. So it means that every every week or every month at maximum
You will reconcile your numbers. Okay. You don’t just wait till your next accounting report’s done. You need to be looking at it because you’ll catch things. You’ll be am I still subscribed to that? I don’t need that anymore. You’ll save money, you’ll watch it, things will improve. So reconcile, chuck it in your calendar. Second thing is set aside all your taxes as you go. Just put it in a separate account. Doesn’t mean have to pay it immediately, but set it aside so that you won’t spend it and get into trouble. Third thing is no matter where you’re at, pay yourself consistently.
John Kozicki (21:46.32)
Mm-hmm.
Jonny Wilson (22:02.419)
Even if it’s you’re starting out, you’re investing, pay yourself a dollar a week. Just get into the habit, increase it, increase it until you’re you’re paid what you what it would cost to replace yourself. That’s your first big milestone. Fourth thing is that you wanna budget everything. And when you budget, you have to plan to earn more than you spend, right? So you you do your little budgeting. the next big feature we’re about to release, which is awesome, is
Everyone hates budgeting, it sucks. But we’ve we’ve built this AI budget editor so it’ll look at it and go, Hey John, you budgeted, you know, seven hundred dollars per month for Sophie, but you’ve actually been spending eight hundred and twenty. Do you want to change it? And you click yes, and then it immediately changes it. So it’s showing you how accurate all your budgeting is and it goes to bunch of basically just a bunch of clicks to speed it up. fifth thing was you need to count the cost before every big decision. So that’s the scenario tool.
which no matter what level you’re at, one hundred or one thousand, you’re you’re just quickly running a little scenario before you hire that person, you buy that equipment, you open that location, etc. and you’ll just r remove the risk. And then the last two is sort of, hey, you need to, you know, do a monthly action plan, sort of review how’d the month go, what do we learn from it, what do I need to tweak going forward this month? And that’s probably one of the best disciplines I’ve ever done. First of the month, I set aside
you know, two or three hours every month to review the finances, the strategic plan, to make the tweaks for the month ahead, and you’re just constantly tweaking and aligning. And then if you do all that, keep it up. Seventh number seven is just make money, make a difference. and we can talk about that if you want. So I think those things apply to no matter mo sorry, no matter what level you’re at, whether you’ve got a hundred or, you know, five thousand students.
And I think the key things that people want to know is like, am I spending more than I make? Have I budgeted to spend more than I’m gonna make? Can I afford that next decision? And if you only worked on those three things, that would be like level one and that will keep you out of trouble. The next the next level I’ll touch on and then I’ll throw back to you, John, is now we wanna start measuring all the things that matter in a music school and we don’t want them on, you know, seven different platforms.
Jonny Wilson (24:22.153)
And so what we’ve built in is a bunch of custom reports. So with a click you’ll know what’s my average revenue per customer, what’s my churn rate, which means the percentage of people that leave every month, what’s my growth rate? what’s my lifetime value? How much does it cost me to get a new student? And what’s that been over the last year? Is it getting better or worse? And so you get all these insights that a music school owner needs. And so as you grow, you’re basically just trying to, you know, cover the costs and
get your team surrounded around your weaknesses and to to grow the business. But now as you approach that next level you’re starting to think more strategically around should I be investing a lot more in marketing right now or improving retention or are my prices correct? And you just need those right data points with a click of a button interpreted for you so that you can make the right decision.
John Kozicki (25:18.776)
Okay, I’m going to I’m gonna ask a tough question. Maybe push back a little. Maybe not push back isn’t the term. Now you you mentioned those seven things, and one of them that that you mentioned was just it it’s real simple, making sure you’re reconciling on a regular basis. and th so I would say that
Jonny Wilson (25:37.869)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (25:44.963)
Again, going back to what I said, you know, you’re going to the things that you focus on are the things that you’re going to see improvement on, right? So those seven things, if a music school owner, again, probably a musician, doesn’t have a background in in finance or accounting or or anything like that, if they start to focus on those things on a regular basis, that that’s like out of their comfort zone already.
Right. So that’s I think that’s a big that’s a big order. That’s a tall order for for some music school owners. But I would argue that even if they just start doing those seven things, they’re gonna see improvement in their business because they’re focused on their finances. So what do you think is how is Hello Cash flow
Jonny Wilson (26:29.965)
Mm.
John Kozicki (26:37.466)
going to ease that discomfort. You know what I’m saying? Cause that’s that’s like, okay, I’m jumping all in here, I’m getting comfortable with with numbers. How is hello cash flow going to ease that burden?
Jonny Wilson (26:51.755)
Yeah, it’s good question. so I guess the main thing is that you’ll be able to actually understand it. You’re not just gonna be staring at pages of numbers going, I know these pages and these numbers tell a story, but heck, I can’t see it. It’s actually being sort of interpreted for you and so as you learn, you know, where to go and where to click and and and there are parts like I might have showed you on on the home page, there’s
John Kozicki (27:08.095)
Mm, yeah.
Jonny Wilson (27:19.821)
There’s basically nine top questions everyone asks and you can pin any of them to your your page. So literally of the click of a button, you get the thing that you care about today and and you can answer it. So your time that you would spend is just getting drastically cut down. So our goal is actually not for you to get addicted to the platform and just be spending hours on it like say Facebook’s goal. Ours is like we want you to log in
John Kozicki (27:43.374)
Right, yeah, yeah.
Jonny Wilson (27:47.265)
quickly be able to make the decision you need to today and then get back to work. So that that’s our goal.
John Kozicki (27:55.013)
There I think there is a little bit of a again, the the the visual, very striking. It it’s really there’s great visuals in Hello Cashflow from what you showed me. graphs, numbers, it’s interactive. I think in watching the the demo you shared with me i
It can feel a little a little video video game esque in a sense, right? So if you if you push this up, let’s see what that’s gonna happen to to my bottom line. If you push that down, right? So that I think is is very intuitive. and I think maybe that aspect can can make people feel a little bit more comfortable again, because it’s not just looking at the PL statement, it’s not just looking at the numbers. So I I think
Jonny Wilson (28:41.676)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (28:42.956)
That was that was one thing that really impressed me from from what I saw. So good job there.
Jonny Wilson (28:48.033)
You know what, I’m gonna clip that and give that to my developer team because what we’re talking about is in your budget editor you can click on any any line.
And instead of just saying, well, I’m gonna, you know, spend a hundred dollars on on gas this month and one twenty next month and things like that, you you actually see it like a graph, a line graph as well. And you can drag and drop the points. Kind of like a digital EQ on a sound desk if anyone’s played with that. And and I I had to wrestle for that idea because they’re like, This is really hard, this is gonna take a lot of time and I was like, No, this is what musicians want. They wanna be able to just drag, drop, cool, done. And they can see it, they can move it.
John Kozicki (29:12.005)
Yeah.
Jonny Wilson (29:26.805)
So I’m glad you like that feature.
John Kozicki (29:28.91)
Yeah, I also want to mention a another one that that really impressed me in the in that demo video you shared with me, the admin wage tool. And there is a big, there’s a big pain point, I think, with music school owners, right? You you you’re a musician, you start a music school, you’re doing all the admin yourself, then you decide like, okay, time to hire some help here for this. And it’s really easy to predict when you hire instructors.
How that’s going to change your business, right? Very simple calculation because instructors are also generating revenue, right? I bring in an instructor, they have this many these many students, I’m gonna pay them this much. You can see the immediate benefit. Admins are a different story from a strictly financial perspective, admins are a liability.
Right. They are they’re going to cost you money and not necessarily make you money. so talk a little bit about that that admin wage tool.
Jonny Wilson (30:39.553)
Yeah, well I think there was in the scenario tool where I was saying if you wanna hire an admin, here’s how you do it and you obviously can click in. I’m gonna answer it a couple of different ways. So one is you’re gonna see exactly for any expense like what what percentage you’re spending per month on it. Now, the first thing you’re gonna ask is after you’ve got it all dialed in and you see what’s going on, people are gonna say, Well, is that good? And
I mentioned before that we we raised about a million dollars for our first round to start growing this thing and doing some pretty crazy stuff. Now, they’re not giving us a million dollars for what we have today. They’re giving us a million dollars for where it’s headed in the future. And
One of the things that we’re we’re working on, which is gonna take a while to to get going, but you can’t get with AI, you can’t get from your accounting software is basically the benchmarks. And so what you wanna know is if I have a hundred students and I am, you know, spending eight percent of my revenue on admin support for my music school, is that good? Is that normal? Is that what everyone does? And you’ll be able to soon click a button, see where the benchmark is.
For your size, your industry, etc., and be able to see how you’re kind of comparing, and you might be doing better or worse than the average.
So that’s one thing we’re really excited about. So as we as we grow, get more data and you’ll be able to see and that will both give you a sense of, you know, how you sit compared to others and also help you make again faster decisions of no, I shouldn’t get excited and, you know, hire that that new building that’s, you know, forty two percent of my revenue with fifty two rooms. No, I should actually you know, tone it down because generally people’s leases are under
Jonny Wilson (32:27.963)
say fourteen percent. So that’s that’s one of the key things. We’re really excited and as soon as we’ve got a certain number of music schools we’re gonna start producing those benchmarks early next year. So it’s gonna be cool.
John Kozicki (32:43.449)
So the benchmarks are just so I’m clear on this and maybe so listens listeners are clear, so that’s that’s are you pulling data from other users or are you put pulling data from outside of the platform to understand what is typical for example, what is a typical percentage pay for an admin?
Jonny Wilson (33:05.271)
Yeah, good question. So we will pull it from our own users so that’ll be part of our privacy policy is hey, we we will have benchmarks and your data is used for that anonymously of course and so you will benefit from that and you won’t be able to get it anywhere else. And we won’t sell that data anywhere.
John Kozicki (33:10.146)
Okay.
John Kozicki (33:18.383)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (33:23.427)
Gotcha. Gotcha. So as this scales, as more users are on board, everything becomes more valuable. That’s that’s the slick model right there.
Jonny Wilson (33:32.373)
Mm.
Yeah. Basically, yeah. So you would start, you know, probably globally and then as as you get enough people and and you don’t need a huge amount. Like you I imagine you would probably still want to know what the benchmarks were even for a hundred music schools across the US, right? and when it becomes a thousand, ten thousand, it becomes more enriched. But
eventually you’ll be able to, you know, see it for your country, you know, your city, etc. And again it’s it’s you’re not showing any individual person’s data. It’s it’s that sort of what’s the word I’m looking for? there’s a fancy word that they use in the team that I’m forgetting right now, but they’re collating all that data to give it to you in the format that’s helpful. Yeah, that’s the word. Yeah. Got it. You’re smarter than me, John, there you go.
John Kozicki (34:19.043)
Yeah, it’s like an an aggregate, an aggregate of the the percentage. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I don’t know about that, but I appreciate the the sentiment, Johnny. all right. now again for for the the the music school owner who who still might be thinking like, my gosh, John and Johnny were just talking about all the these financials and talking about like
Jonny Wilson (34:47.661)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (34:48.385)
accounting jargon and I still don’t feel comfortable, what would you say to that music school owner to get them more comfortable? Regardless of what we talked about with with what you focus on is what you’re gonna see progress in, right? You have to get comfortable with those numbers. You have to get comfortable with looking at your finances. But what would you say to that music school owner that still might be kind of like
I don’t know, I still feel uncomfortable. I know I should be doing this. But to convince them that this is the tool for them.
Jonny Wilson (35:25.813)
Yeah, it’s great question. And I would say, the reason you’re uncomfortable is because it’s never been given to you in a format that is comfortable and that’s basically what Hello Cash Flow is. And so two extra things well, two or three things that are gonna help you is one, obviously the platform itself is literally made from musicians first. So everything is business owner first. So it is simple, like everything’s in like we’re we’re literally behind the scenes are like explain this
John Kozicki (35:35.171)
Bingo.
Jonny Wilson (35:54.37)
Like you’re explaining it to a 16 year old, you know? So everything’s simple that you can understand it. Next thing is that you can connect in your accountant or your bookkeeper. So you can actually work together on it. If you don’t even want to touch it, you could say to your bookkeeper, Hey, every every month or every Friday, I want you to reconcile our accounts and send me this PDF version. There’s like a one button click and you get everything into a beautiful PDF that you could just read kind of the summary for the week or the month. or the yeah.
John Kozicki (35:57.017)
Yeah.
Jonny Wilson (36:24.019)
And so I think understanding it is the main pain point that we’re solving. Two, you’ve got your accountant or bookkeeper to wrap around the support. Three, there’s all sorts of education around it that we’re building out to help you as well. We’ve got a private Hello Cashflow community we’ve just launched as well. And so so I’m in there helping people as well and our team of plenty of accountants and other people to support you.
and then there’s stacks and stacks of extra resources and cash flow tips and things like that. So it’s not just a tool where you pay a subscription, you’re on your own, it’s kinda like a whole ecosystem, almost like what we’ve built with the the BAM squad. But this is just about having better cash flow and understanding it and feeling confident.
John Kozicki (37:06.979)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (37:12.621)
Nice. I love it. I love it. as we start to reach the finish line here on this conversation, two things. One, any other features that you think are really important to mention for music school owners, and then we’ll talk about how people can look into Hello Cash Flow.
Jonny Wilson (37:33.516)
Yeah. There’s lots lots coming. I guess the one I should touch on would be AI. So you w what we’ve got coming, I mentioned the AI budget editor, but you if you still struggle to understand or still feels a bit overwhelming, the AI layers is coming where it’s interpreting everything even more simply for you. So giving you the the basic summaries. we’re working on like notifications, so you’ll
You’ll be able to get notifications to your phone, to your email saying, Hey John, you actually just surpassed your marketing budget for the month and there’s still seven days left. Just wanted to let you know that. Or, hey John, congratulations, you just hit your income goal for for the month and you’re only halfway through. And so that stuff’s really exciting for me because it again, it’s like the gamification, but I’m I’m competitive. It’s like I want targets, I want to stay on track and and hear from you know the app. So
the notifications, the AI sort of breakdowns and then within that if if the AI and the app knows your finances, knows all your custom metrics and knows the whole industry’s metrics and finances, the knowledge you’re able to get is gonna be far superior than other other sources. And most people are kind of flying blind. You know, the music school down the road’s not gonna tell you how much money they earned this month or what portion actually goes to yourself.
so those are some of the things that I’m really excited about just getting rocking over this next little while.
John Kozicki (39:07.309)
Okay, now for fun, Johnny I know you’re a drummer, but his cell hello cash flow easy enough for a drummer to use, as the band hierarchy goes.
Jonny Wilson (39:10.764)
Mm-hmm.
Jonny Wilson (39:15.297)
Yeah.
It must be if a if a drummer basically designed it and built half of it. Yes, it is. I did not do well at school and drums was like this is the only thing I have a shred of any talent in and I wasn’t even that good when I went into university and so yeah, if a if a a bit of a high school dropout like me can can do it, you can do it.
John Kozicki (39:25.016)
Okay.
John Kozicki (39:34.086)
Ha ha.
John Kozicki (39:42.605)
Nice, nice. All right. And people who want to check out Hilo Cash Flow, obviously website, right? Any other other resources that you want to share here for them?
Jonny Wilson (39:54.123)
Yeah, just check out HelloCashflow dot com and if you want to reach out to me anytime, happy for you to do that directly. Johnny at build a music school dot com and Johnny spelt J O N N Y.
John Kozicki (40:07.223)
Right, we’ll link it in the show notes, of course. And I think we’ll we’ll wrap it up. Johnny, this has been really great. Again, I’m really glad I was finally able to get you on the podcast and and talk about this big, exciting new project. And hopefully our listeners will check it out and we’ll see you next time.
Jonny Wilson (40:27.639)
Thanks so much, John, and appreciate everything that you do for the community as well.
John Kozicki (40:31.984)
Well, thank you, Johnny. All right, we’ll see you later.
