In this episode John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) speaks with Brady Davies, the founder of One Music Schools. Brady shares his family’s journey of opening a single piano lesson studio (The Piano Place), expanding to multiple locations, and now leading a company that purchase music schools.
Join us as Brady delves into the intricacies of acquiring music schools, what he looks for in potential buys, and the seamless ways he integrates them into his successful brand while preserving their unique legacies.
In this episode:
- Brady offers resources for music school owners looking to sell or improve their operations.
- How community and individual student engagement are essential for a successful music school.
- The things Brady and his company look for when considering a school for purchase.
- What the negotiation and purchase process looks like.
- Brady’s post-acquisition focus on maintaining the legacy of the school as a priority.
- Tips for school owners to make their studio a valuable prospect for sale, even if they aren’t looking to sell.
Gain valuable insights into the importance of robust systems and processes in running multiple music schools efficiently, and why these are essential whether you are planning to sell or simply wish to streamline your operations.
Get the FREE eBook, 6 Stages to Selling Your Music School, by visiting OneMusicSchool.com
Your ratings and reviews on Apple Podcast and Spotify are always appreciated!
Join our private Facebook group, “The Modern Music School,” a community for like-minded professionals to connect and share insights.
Looking for a simple and effective guitar curriculum that includes FREE instructor training and support? Consider John’s book, Complete Guitar Strumming.
Episode Transcript:
John Kozicki (00:01.759)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor Podcast. My name is John Kozicki and my co-host Mandy York could not be with us today. joining me is the, I think the co-owner of The Piano Place, which is a multi-location lesson studio in Utah. believe 12 locations, is that correct? Okay. And the founder of One Music Schools.
Brady Davies (00:23.638)
Yeah, with that brand, yes.
John Kozicki (00:29.997)
which is a company that purchases music schools. And Brady Davies is joining us on the podcast. How are you, Brady?
Brady Davies (00:39.63)
Hey, good, thanks for having me on. It’s been awesome to meet you and be on here, so I appreciate it.
John Kozicki (00:42.029)
Yeah, of course.
So a little clarification on that intro. Now I know the piano place. My understanding is that that was your wife’s, that was kind of her brainchild, correct?
Brady Davies (00:57.55)
Correct, yeah. when I kind of the quick story with it was when I met my wife, she, and I’ll preface this, I’m not a musician and I regret it every single day in this business. Like every teacher I meet comes up to me and says, so who did you study with? And I’m like, I didn’t study with nobody. But my wife was an accomplished pianist and when I met her, she had like 80 students and was teaching all hours of the day and
John Kozicki (00:58.83)
Okay.
John Kozicki (01:10.317)
Hahaha
John Kozicki (01:16.943)
Ha ha ha ha!
Brady Davies (01:27.63)
When we got married, she brought all those kids into our house and we, they, I remember vividly coming home from, was, my background was more real estate development and brokerage. And so I’d come home from my real estate job and warm up like some ramen noodles and like sit in my room by myself because I was all the kids in my house all the time that weren’t mine. And so I’d sit there by myself, but then we, we got,
pregnant with our first kid and we were like, my wife’s like, I cannot keep this up. And so that led to her starting a brand called The Piano Place here in Utah and hiring teachers and kind of expanding from there. So.
John Kozicki (02:05.709)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (02:10.327)
Okay, so by sort of by default, you’re you’re you’re associated with piano place. And and I think the way that you told me previously was you kind of saw how your wife was doing all the administrative work and you’re jumping in to help. And that’s how she roped you into into into working with her, correct?
Brady Davies (02:33.07)
Yeah, mean, so again, I was doing commercial real estate brokerage a lot of the time at that point in my career. I, my first, at that time, I had just really like leased out my first spaces to some tenants. And I remember they were signing leases for like five, 10 years. And within like the first six months, the first two I had done, I think had gone out of business. And I’m like, there’s no way I’m ever gonna.
lease a space, like this is so risky, I’ll never do this. And to my wife’s credit, she was way more entrepreneurial than I was and pushed super hard and said, we’re gonna lease a space, like we’re gonna go build out a space, we’re gonna do this. We rolled all of our savings and some more, I think, into our first location. And the whole time I was kind of, you know, dragging my feet, I was like, this is your thing, not mine. But eventually, you know, when it came to
bookkeeping and setting up the spaces and hanging all the pictures and putting the furniture together. She kind of had brought me in and I started to like it. I started to really see the vision of what she had and it took me a few months to get there, but she brought me along for that journey.
John Kozicki (03:49.37)
I love that, that’s that scrappiness of the studio owners and the entrepreneurs that we see in our business. And with the piano place, is it 12 locations now?
Brady Davies (04:04.526)
You know, I think we’re at 13 with that brand. 13 people. Yeah.
John Kozicki (04:06.723)
wow, OK. And so along that path with with the piano play studios, how long? How long is that trajectory where you go from? The instance that you just told me where you know you’re you’re opening up that first location to where the piano places now is now with 13 locations.
Brady Davies (04:29.484)
Yeah, so it was a fun journey for sure. So our first location, I think, and we still have it today, was only five rooms. And we thought that’d be plenty. And I was terrified. I think our rent, I mean, it’s a small kind of main street location down where we live. And I’m just based out of, just outside of Salt Lake City. So that space was five rooms. When we, you know, I was terrified. I didn’t think we’d be able to.
John Kozicki (04:44.612)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (04:58.008)
get enough teachers in there and enough students in there to justify the, I think our lease at the time was like eight or 900 bucks. So I was really scared thinking that. We were blown away. Within six months, I think we were at around 250 students. So we went from 80 to like 250, like super fast. And we were running out of space in that building.
John Kozicki (05:07.267)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (05:22.031)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (05:26.062)
And so we went ahead and we were just kind of out of desperation. went and we leased some space in another building, like three buildings down from that one, know, different property, different ownership, but we called it an extension location and it’s funny to this day, you know, we have those original five and that extension has really become the main one. like 17 rooms in that one now, but kept adding rooms to it and.
John Kozicki (05:52.761)
Wow.
Brady Davies (05:55.128)
getting more suites in that building. So that’s still how it’s set up today. So we had those, that kind of was going on and that was like our, that was year one. And I really thought we were like, hey, we have something here. This, this thing’s really growing. It was kind of a fun revolutionary thing, at least in our area. You know, most of people’s experience with music was going down to the old lady down the street who would slap rulers. And so.
John Kozicki (06:18.575)
Mm hmm. All right.
Brady Davies (06:21.346)
We, our, our vision was to, you know, breathe new life and traditional music lessons to make it something fun, to focus on the life lessons that come with music and to really, I think, blow away our families and our students, not only in the pedagogy and learning of music, but also in the performances and making, you know, recitals and concerts a really big deal on a really fun experience that they could remember. So we kind of had those guiding principles.
there in the beginning and so and then we kind of went to year two and decided to lease out another space in a town near us in Lehigh, Utah. This time we did that one was 12 rooms and we built it out and we were fortunate enough for that one as well to really take off. And so we kind of did that same trajectory. So we did that second and then year two was that year three, we did our third location.
John Kozicki (07:00.217)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (07:19.534)
Um, and then, uh, we got, you know, I’ll fast forward all the way to year eight. I think we got to nine locations. So we were all opening, you know, roughly about a location a year, uh, that way de novo sort of thing. So yeah, it was, it it was crazy and a lot of, you know, a lot of stress, lots of construction. Uh, we, we were fortunate if we worked with the same construction company that just.
John Kozicki (07:31.673)
That’s incredible.
John Kozicki (07:35.576)
Okay.
John Kozicki (07:41.261)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (07:46.328)
kind of knew what we wanted and towards the end there got really good at, you know, I hardly had to talk to them. They just busted it out. So it was great.
John Kozicki (07:54.34)
I think that that probably speaks to, I’ve got to imagine that like you just have systems in place that work for everything. I mean, if you’re saying that your contractors who do the build out already know what they’re going to do, well, that speaks to having a plan and a process and a system for that build out. I would assume that that also has to apply to
hiring and admin staff and all the processes in these multiple locations. Is that correct?
Brady Davies (08:29.708)
Yeah, and it comes from almost out of necessity. And I’ll admit, that’s never been my strong suit. I’ve tried to implement those and I’m probably too ADD and I love chasing the deals. I love finding the new spaces. I did a great job at that focusing growth, but I have to tip my hat off a lot to our operations team. Currently it’s two ladies who have been with us practically from the beginning.
John Kozicki (08:56.877)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (08:56.898)
who have been amazing at really instituting like a strong operations checklist. We, from site selection all the way to grand opening, there’s a checklist that they have for all of that. And we have software we use that, task management software that helps us to organize that. And it just, it flows. works really, really well. So I have to give.
Kudos to them for implementing that and doing that.
John Kozicki (09:24.718)
Yeah.
So taking you back to putting you in the mindset of year one when you were opening that first location, was the plan at that point to have multiple locations, you think, or was it was it really focused on just that one? And then as as things sort of picked up, was there maybe a realization, a moment where you decided, you know what? We could make this
repeatable, we could do these other locations. Obviously you mentioned the necessity of outgrowing that first space, but where was it that you decided we’re going to open multiple locations of the piano place?
Brady Davies (10:11.554)
Yeah, for me, I probably came to that conclusion myself about six months into that first location when we were finding we needed a second one. I think my wife, on the other hand, she was like 50 from the get-go, know, keep going. She was sold on it from the get-go and later she brought me along and I was more sold on it as we went.
John Kozicki (10:21.113)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (10:28.548)
my gosh, yeah.
Brady Davies (10:38.734)
That was the, you know, that became the intent and what was cool and I look back on those days because we’re now, you know, it’s been 10 years since we opened that first location. What I loved about it is, you know, we, I would honestly say probably the first five locations, we bet everything on it. You know, I would have lost everything if one of those had gone down. And, but I also think back to that. I didn’t really have a lot to lose either. And so.
John Kozicki (11:02.286)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (11:07.534)
I tell entrepreneurs and people that all the time, especially the younger you are, it’s so much easier to risk everything. It becomes harder and harder as things go further into the future. That was something that I was appreciative of. We were able to truly risk everything. We kept all of our equity in doing so. There were some times where it got
know, a little scary and things where we had risked a lot to get to that point. And it took a little bit of like getting to five or six locations to really then to see the dividends come from that. So.
John Kozicki (11:49.07)
Okay, so you mentioned your operations people who have everything in check. You mentioned the multiple locations. I wanna swing back around to the vision of what you wanted to do, or I guess this may be like you speaking for your wife as kind of the instructor and like kind of the brains behind the creative side, updating the lesson experience from
like the piano lessons that I had as a kid, which I went to the lady down the street. So are we talking private lessons or talking groups? You mentioned concerts. What is that vision and how do you how do you execute that?
Brady Davies (12:26.083)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (12:40.45)
Yeah, it comes down to a lot of little things and over the years, can say this, my vision for it and the ideas that I have are probably, originally in the first couple of years were like 100 % of what we were doing and now it’s probably 15%. It’s been great to pick up ideas and practices from other schools and owners as they’ve gone through this process. But we just, we saw a huge need to…
to make it something that was fun. And so all of our schools, even the ones that we acquire, we, for example, we put a store in them and do a money system and have our own currency within the
John Kozicki (13:22.645)
so it’s like kind of a reward system, a almost like a Chuck E. Cheese style, like tickets and yeah. Okay.
Brady Davies (13:24.75)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. And but we go all out on the prizes and even like for the teens and adults, we have like Chick-fil-A gift cards and Starbucks gift cards and all sorts of fun stuff. So they there’s all sorts of rewards and we were constantly and you can get, know, dollars for effort or for, you know, it’s all based on the teacher’s discretion, but dollars for effort or for, you know, performing or doing something hard or coming back, you know.
from something difficult. So there’s all sorts of things that they can get money for and spend it. So that was some, one of the core principles from the beginning was we wanted to make like a fun incentivizing experience for the kids. And so they see that when they walk in and they’re usually pretty pumped from the beginning. So.
John Kozicki (14:00.111)
Gotcha.
John Kozicki (14:08.143)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (14:13.999)
Cool. instrument wise, we talking, I mean, what instruments do you teach at the piano place? Obviously piano, right?
Brady Davies (14:24.642)
Yeah, yeah. That we started with that name because we were like, we’re only going to do piano. And then we, that changed after a few weeks, but the name stuck. So it worked. But, we teach piano, guitar, voice, violin, drums, cello, ukulele. I think that’s, that probably covers 98 % of it. we do, we do band classes. So, and that’s.
John Kozicki (14:32.044)
huh.
Brady Davies (14:53.96)
fun part, which I know you’re really big into as well, John. Yes. And so we, you know, we allow our private students to try out for different bands and ensembles and to play in those. And that was a huge, I think, you know, at least for our area here in Utah was kind of a revolutionary thing. So that, so we have that, we have those options and then we have kind of like the pre-K kids toddler classes.
John Kozicki (14:57.02)
yeah, yeah, big into the bands, yep.
John Kozicki (15:13.711)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (15:21.219)
Yeah, those exploratory classes. We’re sort of getting a little bit tangential from my original focus with this, but I got to ask with the band classes and the private lessons, I always like to ask about retention and if you see any sort of correlation between groups in that community compared to private lessons, if you see anything there.
Brady Davies (15:23.148)
Yeah, classes.
John Kozicki (15:50.829)
I mean, you’ve got a lot of data to look at, obviously.
Brady Davies (15:52.738)
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. You know, I wish I could say it’s X times more. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but if you were to ask me to roughly guess what it is, I think it’s double the likelihood that you’ll retain a student if they participate in a band than if they just do private lessons for sure. Yeah.
John Kozicki (16:12.995)
Yeah, I don’t have hard numbers for my studio, but yeah, I think at least twice as long, you know, for the retention. Okay, so that’s all like kind of the setup based on the piano place, which is sort of where everything started. But now you also operate one music schools and one music schools, your goal is acquiring other studios, is that correct?
Brady Davies (16:20.898)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (16:42.582)
Yeah, so kind of what happened with us is we got, so again, we’ve been open for 10 years. We got to year eight and we had nine piano place locations and we knew there was some infill we wanted to do still within the state of Utah. And we felt like we were doing a great job at becoming kind of a household name in the state. However, we wanted to expand outside of Utah and to look at other options. And we kind of recognized that that time as well that
to expand and to start a piano place in a different market. Say we jump over to Los Angeles, that would be kind of starting from scratch a little bit where it’d be less of a known brand and a new market. at that time, we kind of saw the opportunity that there was markets that had kind of done a little bit of what we had done within their local markets already.
John Kozicki (17:25.069)
Right.
Brady Davies (17:38.346)
And so we kind of pivoted at that point to be more acquisition first minded as opposed to de novo, know, opening up new schools. And so that was year eight. Again, we’re in year 10 now. And since that time, we’ve done 20 acquisitions in about two years. So just.
John Kozicki (17:59.578)
That’s amazing. So yeah, in 10 years went from opening that scrappy little studio that transitioned out of your home into now owning 30 lesson studios. Let’s dig into that, the acquisitions. With the goal being…
Brady Davies (18:11.523)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (18:22.999)
I mean, you kind of dropped it in their conversation earlier. Wife said 50 right? 50 locations. I’ll hold you to that. You’ve got a couple more years before you hit that apparently. So what are the when you’re looking for studios to acquire now? Are you looking for studios that are similar? Are you looking for studios that are in specific locations? What are?
Brady Davies (18:27.362)
Yeah.
Yeah.
John Kozicki (18:52.164)
What are some of the key points that you’re looking at when you’re considering purchasing a music school?
Brady Davies (18:59.842)
Yeah, I’d say first and foremost, we’re looking for ones that are standouts in the community. At the end of the day, we think that music lessons is all about community, families, and individual students, and they have to be hitting on all of those fronts, I think, to be a great fit for us. Obviously, there’s a financial element to it as well.
And so we’re typically, know, our floor for like the smallest school we’d buy is typically like 200, 225 students.
John Kozicki (19:33.188)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (19:33.678)
pencils financially with it. We’re looking for schools that are doing, from a hard financial number, it’s like 150,000 plus in EBITDA. So kind of net profit after all your expenses there. So we’re kind of looking for schools like that. And then I think what makes a school, I often get asked, what makes a school valuable? What are you looking for that way?
Truly, I think the biggest thing that makes any school valuable is to have some operating systems in place. And that allows the owner to be absentee because, you know, we own schools now from Oregon all the way to Connecticut. So from Pacific to Atlantic there. And I obviously can’t be at every location every single day.
John Kozicki (20:24.911)
Sure.
Brady Davies (20:25.9)
Making sure that you have a manager or a great admin who could step into a management role is crucial, I think, to be able to be a standout school that can potentially sell your school at some point.
John Kozicki (20:41.389)
Gotcha. All right. So that that sort of highlights the as you’re sort of looking right. And do you actively seek out these studios? I mean, do you do research? Do you have people coming to you saying, hey, we’re thinking of selling.
Brady Davies (21:00.014)
Yeah, it’s been both for sure. I’d say of our 20 or so about 75 % have come directly to us. 25 % we’ve probably knocked down their door and they’ve been willing to sell. yeah, we do.
John Kozicki (21:08.205)
Okay.
John Kozicki (21:14.031)
Yeah. OK, and then. Assuming there’s a I mean, we won’t get into the negotiations, because I would imagine like that could be. And just about anything can be negotiated when it comes to this this kind of thing. But once you do acquire a new school. What happens then? Do you rebrand? Do you keep it the same? Do you Are there things that you change?
Brady Davies (21:30.22)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (21:43.673)
Do you keep people on staff? That’s a burning question in my mind, because I think it could go a lot of different ways.
Brady Davies (21:52.172)
Yeah, no, totally. When I was in my real estate job, for example, there was a time where we got acquired. And I remember being in the shoes of that job as an employee or guess contractor of the company.
same thing and being like, what does this mean? And being apprehensive. And I think everyone feels that way if they’re being acquired by another company is, what’s next? What’s gonna happen to me? Are these guys gonna come in here and just clean house? And that’s the thing that we try to lead with. usually as we’re getting close to closing.
We have a meeting with all of the teachers of the school that we’re buying. We do a Zoom call and our number one goal is to assure them that they are the most valuable asset of this entire sale and that there’s nothing changing in that regard. And truly that is the case. If anything, we try to add on to their experience with it. usually, these teachers don’t have benefits. They’re not receiving.
They’re not able to tap into that with a single location. I know certainly for me, it took us maybe like seven or eight locations to be able to afford benefits for our teachers. So we offer them, we’re able to give them benefits and usually that’s a huge up. We don’t change their pay rates. We do everything we can to keep the staff in place.
John Kozicki (23:04.963)
Sure, yeah.
Brady Davies (23:17.526)
And so from that aspect, nothing changes. We only hope to enhance their experience. What we do, there’s some things we change from a marketing standpoint where we’ll upgrade the website a little bit. We usually update their lesson management software. We’ll switch them to another one that we all use. And then when it comes to their name, we don’t change it. We, you know,
A lot of these schools that we’ve acquired, know, I have one, for example, it’s called the Gwinnett School of Music in kind of outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Open now for 42 years and four locations. They’re all located like on Maine and Maine of all of those, the towns that they’re in. And Gwinnett School of Music is literally named after the county that they’re in. And so I’m like, why would I change any of this? You know, it’s, it’s been
John Kozicki (23:53.999)
Mm-hmm.
Gosh.
Brady Davies (24:12.696)
for a long time, why would I put a different stamp on there? And so that’s kind of been our goal is, again, believing again in the power of a local community music school, it’s been our goal to keep it the same. Now what we try to do is we try to offload and to kind of like, what’s the word, enhance the backend operations of the schools so that they can operate. Yeah.
John Kozicki (24:37.391)
Streamlines, streamlines George, you’re looking for Brady. Yeah.
Brady Davies (24:40.076)
Yeah, I’m thinking of like supercharging them, you know, we want them to feel like they have the back end of a large organization, which they do. But on the front end to the customers, represent, we try to represent and give the same care towards our customers as if they are a local community school.
John Kozicki (24:59.503)
I think that’s, I mean, I think that would be reassuring for someone in that position that they have decided to sell, that you do recognize that the asset is longevity and the staff that’s already there and invested in it. I think that’s really smart. And what you come to the table with then is,
being able to offer more, like the benefits, because I mean, I would imagine, like, you’ve got to have hundreds on your staff at this point, right?
Brady Davies (25:39.31)
Yeah, yeah, we’re, I think we’re at 425 or so right now.
John Kozicki (25:43.248)
OK, and I mean, maybe a hard question to answer, but of those 425 ish, you know, like what percentage of I mean the most of the greatest percentage I’m assuming is going to be in your instructors and then you’ve got admins and management for all those locations and then hate to use the word Brady, but corporate, right?
Brady Davies (26:09.646)
Yeah, we hate that word too.
John Kozicki (26:14.095)
So, but yeah, having that that support there, I think there’s just a little bit more security in in knowing that. OK. Yes, there’s a bigger organization behind this, and if you’re trying to maintain the integrity of the legacy of that, that music school, it feels more like you’re gaining rather than you’re losing.
Right? Like as opposed to a company that comes in and says, okay, well now you’re going to wear these t-shirts and you’re or these polo shirts and this is how we do this. And like, yeah, you did it like this before, but this is how we do it because these are our systems. And you mentioned a little bit of that with the the software, but it does sound like you’re sort of focused on on maintaining the integrity of the legacy of each of those locations.
Brady Davies (26:54.082)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (27:12.044)
Yeah, know, there’s schools that do, for example, they’ll have a different concert or, you know, recital or whatever schedule than Piano Place does, for example, and we allow them to continue to do that. So if there’s things, you know, and if they do some group classes, you know, slightly different than our other schools, we allow them to continue to do that as well. want, you know, we don’t touch at all how the teachers teach.
and we allow them kind of that freedom to continue to do what they’re doing. So that’s always been a big goal of ours.
John Kozicki (27:46.832)
OK, then I mean that kind of leads me to wonder about, I mean, if you’ve got the instructor sort of doing what they’ve been doing, are there any specific curriculums that you bring in and you suggest or you impose?
Brady Davies (28:04.854)
Yeah, we don’t. To make it simple, we don’t at all. We allow them to, again, they got in that position for a reason. They’re doing something right, obviously. I heard this stat the other day. think 7 % of small businesses actually have the opportunity to sell their business. And so to be in that elite category, I think, it shows that they’re doing something right. So we don’t touch that.
John Kozicki (28:15.567)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (28:32.878)
Now we are, we’re how Leonard distributors and you know, anything in that library, we’re like have at it, you know, we, we’ll, we, we charge the students for the books and we’ll do things that way. And, and so we allow the teachers to still tailor that curriculum however they want. I will say we have a proprietary app that we developed in house. This might be the one change we do from a teacher standpoint into how they teach, but.
John Kozicki (28:56.207)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (29:01.036)
I think it only enhances what they’re already doing, but it’s more of a, it’s a goal setting progress reporting app that celebrates kind of the milestones that students hit along the way in their musical journey. And it’s cool when they updated, sends the parent a super nice data rich report showing where their students at. And so.
John Kozicki (29:22.233)
So that’s primarily for students and parents. Okay, and then is that tied to that reward system that you mentioned at the piano place? Okay.
Brady Davies (29:25.816)
Correct, yep.
Brady Davies (29:32.716)
Correct. Yep. Yeah. So we just, we just launched that, you know, within the last couple of months here and it’s, it’s been awesome. So it’s a cool thing. And, and the teachers, know, at first there was some apprehension like, Hey, you know, I’m to be updating this. We have them update it once a month, but I think it’s only like driven home to the students and the parents like, Hey, progress is happening with the student. You should be happy about it.
John Kozicki (29:56.174)
Yeah, nice, nice. And that reward system, is that something that you introduce into all of the locations? Because I know reward systems aren’t something, like I don’t do a reward system at my studio. And I know not all studios do that. Some of them do. But with your new acquisitions, the new locations, do you implement that?
Brady Davies (30:10.04)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (30:18.348)
We do, that is one thing we do implement that I think is a little bit of a change. But to be honest, I’ve never, you say that, and I forget that we do that because I’ve never heard once any pushback from anyone about doing that. I think they’ve always been excited about it, the teachers have. Yeah, or they’re all lying to me.
John Kozicki (30:36.355)
Yeah, very cool, very cool. Okay, so question for you since Brady, you have a lot of interactions with music school owners and I’m assuming some of those interactions don’t result in a sale or any sort of negotiations, but with your experience,
Brady Davies (30:57.773)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (31:05.753)
From your observations, what are maybe one or two things you would suggest sort of industry-wide to music school owners to maybe encourage them to up their game or because again, going back to that original vision for the piano place, clearly you saw, okay, this is what we don’t want to do. This is the direction we do want to go.
Brady Davies (31:31.939)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (31:34.573)
Are there any bits of advice for studio owners that you might offer?
Brady Davies (31:40.086)
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’ll go back to the point, the number one thing is removing yourself from the business to a certain degree. Now, you’re, you know, you can always be involved in some form or fashion, but, you know, I’ve talked to studio owners, for example, where it’s a, let’s say it’s a 200 person studio, but the owner teaches 80 of the students and wants to, that’s really hard to.
to underwrite that and to say, all 80 of these students are gonna stay and you’re getting 100 % of the profit from that and I have to pay a teacher to step into your shoes. So that’d be my number one tip. The number two I would say is, I would say remove any, and this was a painful thing we had to go through a few years ago, but you kind of feel isolated in a bubble when you start your school. You really don’t.
John Kozicki (32:17.668)
Right.
Brady Davies (32:33.87)
I still think to this day there could be a lot more done to give people more resources and best practices and things. think about those processes that you have that are just nagging you and super annoying and hard to do or something that worked and there was a reason for it years ago, there’s no longer a reason for it now. Every business has them. mean, we still have them within our company. Get rid of those and simplify them.
John Kozicki (32:41.337)
Mm-hmm.
Brady Davies (33:01.902)
I can’t emphasize that enough. The simpler, and the parents like it too, the simpler your company is, the simpler your policies are, the better. those would kind of be my main two pieces of advice.
John Kozicki (33:12.751)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (33:17.837)
What would be, to push a little bit on that, when you say simplify, does anything specific come to mind?
Brady Davies (33:29.388)
Yeah, I’ll say ones for us that changed our life and I see it still with a lot of other schools. Taking checks and cash and having to, you know, I met an owner who like deposits like 300 checks a week and is chasing them down. Just get auto pay, get, you know, on a credit card system, you know, it makes it way, it makes your school more valuable. you know, it makes, yeah, all of that makes it so much easier.
John Kozicki (33:32.152)
Okay.
John Kozicki (33:45.688)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (34:00.226)
In the beginning for us from a billing standpoint, we used to charge based on how many lessons someone took in a month, as opposed to like a flat rate. And we always had issues with that where, and I know there’s probably schools listening to this who charge that way and they’re like, is for us and it might work. My experience has been more often than not that billing that way causes confusion for the parents and they’re like, why am I paying?
John Kozicki (34:09.401)
Yep.
John Kozicki (34:20.153)
Sure.
Brady Davies (34:29.486)
extra this month when I paid X last month. I remember back then, it’d be like the last week of the month, and we’re like, we got to hurry and update X, Y, Z on the invoices. Go through your list of 600 students and make sure that the Monday ones get charged this or that. There’s a lot of things like that that I think are still present.
John Kozicki (34:33.304)
I agree.
Brady Davies (34:56.034)
that you don’t need to do. think it’s easier in that case, know, sell bill flat rate, you know, monthly and increase your price a little bit to cover what you got before, you know, and so things like that. And then there’s a lot, I’ll mention one other thing, you know, there’s, sometimes people will have really weird pay structures with admin or teachers that, or their admin have really weird hours.
Just little things like that, like how could I simplify this? And I think even if you aren’t selling, I think people are always asking business owners, what’s your exit strategy? How long till you exit the business? And you might not know that and that’s okay, but I think you should always operate in a way that I could exit tomorrow if I wanted to. And that should be the constant goal and the constant focus of how could I give this to some
John Kozicki (35:25.815)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (35:49.431)
I love that.
Brady Davies (35:55.608)
guy on the street who’d never run a music school, how could I make this as simple as possible for someone to step into?
John Kozicki (36:01.915)
I think that’s great advice. I heard a quote earlier last week, this week, and to kind of get into the mind of, think, some of us, the studio owners, the quote was something to the effect of we’re more afraid of what we have to lose if we change than what we potentially could gain.
Brady Davies (36:28.653)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (36:28.929)
If we if we do change like it, you know, it’s it’s it’s easier to see what we could lose from a change versus what we could gain from the unknown. So yeah.
Brady Davies (36:38.092)
Yeah, I’ll say this, know, it was, I think three years ago, you know, just as just a fun example with that, because I remember this stat, but we switched from variable billing to flat rate month to month. And I remember we measured it, you know, three months removed after making that change. And it was funny to see our call rates, so the people calling in, you know, our customer care lines and stuff.
dropped by like 28 % or something like that, the high 20s. And we’re getting less calls and our retention had gone up like half a point. so it just makes it simpler, just things like that. And there’s tons of awesome, cool, simple changes that you can make. it’s always, I find, I’ll go on vacation, for example, and I’ll sit back and I’ll think about some of these things, like being removed from the business. And I come back and I’m like,
John Kozicki (37:11.693)
Yeah.
Brady Davies (37:35.618)
Yeah, let’s simplify that. Like that should be way easier than how we make it, you know? So that’s my advice.
John Kozicki (37:42.713)
That’s fantastic, Brady. So I think we’ll wrap this one up. This has been fantastic. Now, Brady, if any listeners are thinking like, maybe I should contact Brady and open up a discussion about selling my studio. Where should they contact you? Where should they look?
Brady Davies (38:05.77)
Yeah, we have a contact form and a free ebook as well. Kind of a guide to preparing to sell your school for those who are even just interested. But there’s also a contact form on there if you are interested in having a direct discussion with either myself or a member of our team. Our website is onemusicschools.com. So one spell to apple and E.
John Kozicki (38:28.143)
Okay. We will put that in the show notes and Brady Davies, thank you for joining me on this episode. It’s been really enlightening and appreciate speaking with you.
Brady Davies (38:40.64)
Hey, thanks a ton, John. Super fun to meet you and to be on here, so I appreciate it.
John Kozicki (38:45.41)
Yeah, yeah. All right, well, we’ll wrap this one up. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.
