In this episode John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) speaks with Sam Lellouche, founder of lesson studio management software Opus1.io. Sam recounts how his frustrations with available tools turned into developing a studio management platform built to solve real music-school problems like scheduling, billing, makeups, communication and staff workflows. As co-owner of a music school with his wife, paired with his background in tech, Sam understands customer-driven product development, automation that reduces admin workload, and metrics that help schools scale profitably.
In this episode:
- Opus1 started with a small music school and grew significantly.
- The software was developed to solve specific problems faced by music schools.
- Flexibility in scheduling and billing is crucial for customer retention.
- Customer feedback directly influences the development of new features for Opus1.
- The software aims to streamline operations and reduce administrative burdens.
- Data-driven decisions are essential for scaling a music school.
- The importance of having a supportive team and community in the music education sector.
- Opus1 offers a comprehensive solution for managing music schools.
- Investing in the right software can save time and increase profitability.
This episode is packed with insights on customer-centric development, pricing strategies, and the key traits of successful music school owners. The conversation highlights the importance of flexibility, innovation, and understanding the unique needs of music education. From starting a music lesson business to growing and scaling your studio, this episode is filled with usable information!
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Episode Transcript:
John Kozicki (00:01.635)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor podcast. My name is John Kozicki and joining me on the podcast today is the founder of OpusOne.io and he is also the owner and executive director of OpusOne Music School with locations in Mountain View and Palo Alto, California. Sam Lelouch, how are you today, Sam?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (00:26.528)
I’m doing great. Hi John. Thanks for having me.
John Kozicki (00:29.735)
Of course, of course. So we’re gonna talk about Opus One today, the software. Probably we’re gonna talk about Opus One, the music school also. So how do you think we should distinguish between the two in this conversation to not get confused?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (00:45.964)
mean, it’s a great question. The names are confusing and I’m obviously not good with names. When I started the software company, I’m like, I’m just going to use the Opus One name. It’s such a great name. It’s such music related. But yeah, so there is Opus One Music Studio, the music school, and technically Opus One Development Studio is the name of the company that built the software called Opus One IO. I mean, the story really started with my music school. I can start from the start and really trying to…
So as you said, right, I’m not a musician myself. So my wife is the classically trained piano teacher who started Opus One actually before, a few years before she met me. And I’ve always been into music. played multiple instruments, love music, but my career has really been in tech and business in Silicon Valley here in Palo Alto and Mountain View.
John Kozicki (01:25.491)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (01:34.505)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (01:37.446)
And really the story started when I met my wife. I was super impressed that she she had started her own business. She was not just teaching students in her living room. She was she had started a school and I actually saw the school because it was near my in the strip mall near near my grocery shop nearby my house. And I noticed the school and I love music. So I checked it out anyway. So I met her and and
John Kozicki (01:51.177)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (01:59.433)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (02:07.979)
And she was, you know, as we started dating, she was telling me kind of, you know, every day kind of the problems that she was facing. It was every day like, oh, I have this mom who wants some makeup and I have this teacher that wants to quit. I have a teacher that’s taking too much time off. Oh, yeah, all these problems.
John Kozicki (02:20.681)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (02:21.664)
And I started kind of getting sucked in that that industry and solving those problems with her because she would ask me every day those questions. And and thus I really got into music school. I was taking piano lessons at the time. So I ended up taking piano lessons at her school. and long story short, you know, when I met her, she had about a hundred something students. And actually she was she was about to give up. She was telling me, you know, I work so hard. We don’t really I make less money than if I just taught full time and I have to deal with all these problems.
John Kozicki (02:29.053)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (02:49.789)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (02:51.55)
run payroll, have to do marketing, have to do all these things. And it’s overwhelming. And she was kind of the first-class ceiling that we see a lot of schools struggle when they get two or three teachers. really…
Music school owners don’t go to an MBA and open a music school, right? They’re solo teachers and then they end up hiring a second teacher, renting a space and they become business owners, right? Overnight and it takes, it’s overwhelming. It’s a lot of things that you have to learn how to figure out. so I knew nothing about music schools. I only loved music and I told her, hey, you have a great brand going on. You have a great name. have two or three, four employees at the time. You have customers.
John Kozicki (03:10.878)
Right.
John Kozicki (03:29.627)
An excellent name. So good you used it twice, right?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (03:31.872)
Great name. Yeah. And, and, and I’m like, you know, it would be a shame to give up and let’s let’s try to so I told her let’s let me let’s see if I can help you. Right. Let’s see if we can figure this out together. And, you know, it’s it’s it was a journey, right? So mean, fast forward now we have 1400 students over three locations. So we went from 100 something students in that close to 10 a little bit over 10 years journey.
John Kozicki (03:43.689)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (03:54.483)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (04:00.299)
And,
Yeah, so about 100 students to 1400. Now I let you do the math. We charge about $300 per month. We’re in Palo Alto, so pretty affluent area here. We had also lot of competition with a of other schools in the area. yeah, so through that journey, really figuring out and streamlining our operations and trying to really solve all these problems that we’re having daily, especially as we scale, we got bigger and bigger problems to deal with. And yeah, and so we through that journey, we tried,
streamline operations, we had to do a lot of things. And I’ll talk about some of them. really the way the software came in is after a few years of trying all kinds of different software, they were all really bad. They were all either really clunky, they were either not built for music schools. I’ll name a few names. We were on Pike 13 for a while, but before that we had Jack Rabbit. Before that we had MindBuddy and others. And they were just very clunky. They didn’t do what we needed. And also as we started scaling, we also saw like other
software that were built for music school but really built for the solo teachers, right? Not built for the schools with hundreds of students. I also had a strong conviction that we had to offer flexibility to our customers. So I’ll talk a little about makeup and automating makeups and self-booking, for example. And the story, for example, on the makeups is that
A lot of the problems that every day we were dealing with was about make-ups and rescheduling. Constantly I saw that problem keep coming back. And at first I told my wife, hey, you I don’t know how music schools work, but what do your competitors do? they don’t do make-ups. So I’m like, okay, how about we do make-ups? How about we offer more flexibility to our customers? They will appreciate it. Maybe we can even charge more for lessons if we offer some level of flexibility because moms are busy. The kids have all these activities and school events and things like that. And of course they have to respect their teacher’s time, but they
John Kozicki (05:49.192)
Sure, sure.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (05:52.962)
flexibility in some time, know, and maybe multiple times a year, cancel lessons and book and book a makeup lesson so they get what they paid for. So we started offering a lot of flexibility around makeup, but quickly after two or three hundred students, it became a nightmare. was, I mean, most music school learners know what I’m talking about. And we were burning through admin staff who were getting frustrated. And it took forever to train them on the software they were using at the time. They were making mistakes. We had maybe a couple of different staff at the time.
John Kozicki (06:06.872)
Yeah, right. We know where this goes. huh.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (06:22.748)
we realized that every staff was having a different process to do certain things and it would take like so many clicks to enroll the students and people could not sign up on their own, people could not cancel lessons on their own, people could not book their makeups.
We had so many problems. it went from, I mean, I can give you another few examples. For example, my wife would spend hours, hours, hours working before the recitals. And that’s the only one we had maybe 300 students, not even like thousands like now. And I would ask her, what are you doing? What are you spending so much time doing? And I’m like, I’m aligning all the students’ names on our recital program because then we have to print it and we have to make it like a little booklet. And she would spend hours and hours doing it. So I started first building little tools that helped us on my weekends.
John Kozicki (06:52.018)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (07:06.735)
helped her run the school and automate certain things like generating a resale program or getting some metrics for the business. Like how many trials did we have last month? How many converted to full-time lessons? What is our lifetime of our students? What is our teacher’s retention? Because we’re doing performance review for teachers.
John Kozicki (07:07.346)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (07:27.197)
and we having no data on how they were doing, whether retaining their students or not. So we were just missing all the business metrics that we needed to run the business and simple things like almost every day my wife would ask me, can you help me run a custom mail merge or something? I need to email all the students that are taking guitar on Tuesday because we have this guitar showcase coming up. Or I need to email only the piano students. So only the piano students that we lost in the last 30 days. And it was impossible to do. That was just, we’re using a mix of mail
John Kozicki (07:54.684)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (07:57.203)
and merge lists and Excel and Google Sheets and doing exports and filtering. And we realized quickly that, hold on, the student take the lesson, but we want to email the parents. And they’re two different things, although they’re connected. So we’re having all these different problems.
Fast forward a couple of years of frustration and I spent actually a lot of time at the front desk myself because as you surely know when your staff doesn’t show up on especially I had a full-time job at a time but on Saturday and Sunday I would be at the front desk because sometimes our staff gets sick and somebody’s got to be there. So I really learn all the day to day and all the frustrations on enrolling students and dealing with a teacher telling us at 8 45 a.m. hey you know I have a flat day I’m not coming today or I’m sick and I have to all of sudden cancel like 20 lessons and email 20 parents and
John Kozicki (08:39.879)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (08:43.575)
issue them a make up credits or refund and dealing with all these day to day, you know, sometimes painful operations and it gets more painful as you get bigger and bigger. So we try different software.
John Kozicki (08:51.931)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (08:53.769)
And none of them really did what we want. And we scaled it very painfully. were, like I said, burning through admin staff who were staying for six months and nine months and then couldn’t, we were just tired and exhausted of dealing with all the makeup drama and the rescheduling and just how busy it was, all the busy work they had to do. Whether it was planning the resettlement, running payroll, just doing billing. At the time we were doing…
John Kozicki (09:13.82)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (09:21.225)
You know, as you know, there’s some months are five Mondays, some months are four Mondays, some months are three Mondays because of holidays and not every month has four lessons. So we were doing all kinds of crazy things to do billing correctly and to bill our customers. It was just unmanageable. And I’m like, how do people run music schools? This is just insane. And we try all the different software out there. I’m like, there’s got to be a software. I mean, at first he was using pen and paper and Google Calendar. So I’m like, first we have to get you off this. We’ll never scale.
John Kozicki (09:49.028)
So Sam, let me interject here and ask a question because when you said the pen and paper and Google calendars, I was there with my first music school, the very first one, right? And at that point, we’re talking 2009, there weren’t a lot of software options at that point. So going back to those early days, what timeframe are we talking and how long had the school been running?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (09:52.102)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (10:16.2)
Good question. So I think it was, yeah, so my wife started the school in 2006 actually. So we’re gonna be celebrating 20 years actually next year. It’s really exciting. She met me only a few years later when she actually opened her real first location in Mountain View. So maybe 2011, 2012, around that time.
John Kozicki (10:22.96)
Okay. Wow. Yeah.
John Kozicki (10:37.212)
Okay, yeah, so not a lot of software options at that time. And would you say that’s when your wheels started spinning, thinking, when did you start thinking like, you know what, we tried these software platforms and maybe I should just build one myself. When did that happen?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (10:42.21)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (10:58.151)
All right.
It took a few years. also, obviously, our personal stories were dating. So it wasn’t really my business. I was just helping my girlfriend at the time. And then two, three years, two, three, four years went by. And then eventually we got engaged and opened a second location. I’m like, at some point, I’m like, this is my business now. I need to run it with her. And I’m committed not just to this relationship, obviously, but to this business. I loved it. It was exciting. And that’s actually coincide when we opened up our second location.
John Kozicki (11:07.464)
Yeah, yeah, right.
John Kozicki (11:16.995)
Right.
John Kozicki (11:23.335)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (11:29.594)
And at that time, really started every night after work at 6, 7 p.m. I would go to the studio, interview teachers, sometimes fire teachers, because the school was open until 9 p.m. So I had a day job and then I had a night job. You know, you say you have your nine to five and your five to nine, right? So I had my five to nine. And then my weekends were consumed for years about running the music school. So sitting at the front desk and dealing with teachers, hiring staff, training them, figuring out our operations.
John Kozicki (11:43.836)
Yeah. Right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (11:59.459)
reshaping our policies, updating our pricing, dealing with every aspect of the music school. So I really got involved. then, of course, I had a full-time job and a busy career in tech at the time. But eventually, just the frustration just kept accumulating. And we got maybe painfully to 400 students, still very painful. And we tried different software at the time. And with every new software, we’re making improvements. But it was also obviously very painful to migrate from one software to another. We’re making some improvements, but we’re still lacking tons of stuff.
John Kozicki (12:15.73)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (12:29.305)
frustrated telling us why are you sending me a lesson reminder exactly 24 hours before the lesson when it’s too late to cancel and I’m like because that’s what our software does I have no control over those you know like I’m sorry I know it’s frustrating and they would be confused when they try to cancel a lesson with the software we’re using back then they couldn’t and mind you I’m dealing with
John Kozicki (12:39.666)
Yeah, yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (12:50.201)
with parents that are executive at Facebook or Meta or Google engineers or, know, in an affluent Silicon Valley area where people tell me like, can’t you have a better software than this? Like, why is, why is your software looking like it was built in 1996 and never evolved since? Why can’t I log in from my phone? Why can’t I cancel lessons or reschedule? I can book a lesson. I can book an appointment at the genius bar at the Apple store, but I can’t cancel my lesson and book a makeup lesson. So we were dealing with all these frustration, my stuff.
John Kozicki (13:01.692)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (13:20.056)
was frustrated. My wife also took hours, sometimes to run payroll and building was a nightmare. mean, at some point I was thinking, oh my God, this is just impossible. We’re never going to make it. know, scaling this business is just going to be impossible. But slowly but surely we tweaked our policies, streamlined our operations, know, learn how to do marketing correctly, learn how to really identify problems. And I always try to take an innovative approach to addressing those problems. We had competitors that were using certain systems and I’m not going to
John Kozicki (13:30.066)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (13:48.422)
where there are certain systems out there where they help you with templated policies and stuff like that. And I looked at the policy and I’m like, I don’t like it. No makeups or two makeups a year. My customers don’t like that. We want to offer more flexibility than that. So I was trying to say, okay, let’s try to figure out if we can offer customers really the flexibility they want while…
John Kozicki (14:01.575)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (14:09.286)
being able to scale our business, right? Maybe there is a way to make both happen, right? And eventually, we trick different software, I built little tools on my weekends on top of Pike 13 at the time, then eventually…
John Kozicki (14:13.841)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (14:24.422)
around 2016, 2017 or end of 2017, I told my wife, you know what, I’m fed up. We’re at we’re stagnating around four or 500 students. It’s very, very painful. We spend all our weekends doing busy work and burning through staff. And we were not able to scale this business. And there’s so much potential, by the way, because I also saw in the music school business, a lot of the traits that I like in business in general, recurring revenue, you know, long lifetime value of students, right, a six year old piano student.
John Kozicki (14:51.259)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (14:54.375)
will be with us for maybe eight to 10 years. So there’s a lot of value plus obviously the advantage of doing something we’re passionate about running our recitals and seeing these kids grow and play music and all that stuff. So I’m like, I see some good business fundamentals. I see us doing something that we truly love and are passionate about. There’s gotta be a way we can scale this business and live off it. Because obviously I was working in tech and we were reinvesting all our money in growing the school. But I’m like, we need to go to, and I was doing
the math with my wife and say, know, if we had 400 students or 500 students, look how much we can start really like making money with this. We’re not, know, it’s, it’s, it could be a very profitable business if we scale it. I mean, obviously the margins are not very high, but we can, if we, if we, only we could scale it, if we only, could get, you know, a hundred, 200, 300 more students do the math and look. And we also had great retention. Our teachers are amazing and our students stayed with us for years. I’m like, look at the retention, look at the value that we can do also for the community and grow this business. But if.
we could have streamlined operations and solve all these problems. So eventually, I them, listen, I’ve been using this software for years now. I sometimes know this software better than their own support team. And we ask them questions. They don’t even know their own software. And I know their software better than them. I think I can build something better than this. I’m going to quit my job. I was VP of product and engineering at a tech company here in the Bay Area.
John Kozicki (16:13.905)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (16:22.563)
I was just both excited about running the school and full time and also building something. And I told my wife, listen.
you know, we’re gonna build the best software we wanna use to manage our own school. We’re gonna solve all our problems because every problem we have, can see a way to, with technology, optimize it, whether it’s payroll, whether it’s communicating with students, whether it’s billing, whether it’s self-booking and self-scheduling, whether it’s managing our group classes, whether it’s all these different aspects. I can build software. It’s gonna take me a while. We’re gonna do it gradually, but I’m gonna quit my job, I’m gonna build it. And my wife is very supportive. She told me, go for it.
pretty scary. And that’s really how Opus One IO was born. And I hired a couple of junior developers that I mentored and we built it. We got ourselves in a room 10 in our Palo Alto studio, and we built the software. within about exactly about a year, actually, we ended up having what we call an MVP, a minimum viable product that we could use. And we switched all our operations for my school overnight on January 1st, 2019, to using Opus One IO. And we were using
Pack 13 at the time, so we migrated everything over, credit cards, customers, schedule, and it worked great. My staff loved it. They’re like, my God, I can cancel a lesson in one button. The school policies enforce automatically. The make-ups are issued automatically. People can self-book their lessons. They were seeing all these benefits where it took 50 clicks to do something to enroll a student or to… I can give you a couple of examples. When you enrolled a student, you had no idea if that slot was available on an ongoing basis. You had to open three windows to
see, okay, which room is that teacher in on Tuesday? And is that time available that day, but also in the next five, six, eight, 10, 12 weeks? had to, and going through the calendar would take like five seconds every time it would take.
John Kozicki (18:05.275)
Yeah.
Right, right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (18:14.061)
half an hour to book a student, it was crazy. all of sudden the interface was fast, the system was modern. It would take me a few clicks to do things. And then we just kept adding features and things that we needed. Like, you know, somebody cancels at the last minute. I can batch cancel all these lessons in one click. the teacher, or I can batch assign all these lessons when a teacher tells us they’re not coming today. We can assign all these lessons to a sub teacher. And guess what? In one click, all the students get notified by email.
get an SMS later on and they get the bio and the photo of the sub teacher so they know who’s subbing for them. They don’t have to call them one by one or email them one by one.
John Kozicki (18:45.692)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (18:52.653)
So we just kind of like started optimizing all these different aspects of running the school. And then we started scaling and we went from four, five, six, seven, eight, 900 students within a couple of years. Then the pandemic hit, we all took a hit then and we know what happened. And by the way, when the pandemic hit, we added the join online button. And we were one of the first software, if not the only for a long time, where people could join their Zoom lesson with one click and get connected to the right room with the right teacher.
John Kozicki (19:05.691)
Yeah. Right.
John Kozicki (19:19.611)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (19:22.549)
schools but at that point we had launched Opus One IO to the public and we had several schools using it or at least our first maybe 30 or 50 early adopters and they were telling us you know we’re we’re SMSing people manually every day to tell them to give them their zoom links to make sure because I mean we’re all trying to survive at the time at the time it was not about scaling it was about surviving right you remember those days so making sure people still join their lessons online you remember and like so there were schools back then at that time we had launched Opus One IO to the public
John Kozicki (19:38.886)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (19:44.807)
Mmm, absolutely.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (19:52.405)
telling us, you know, we’re SMSing our students every day, manually, through a separate software. We copy pasting phone numbers and Zoom IDs. And we have this Excel sheet with all the Zoom links for all our teachers. And we’re SMSing, you know, 50, 70, 100 people a day to remind them of their Zoom lesson. And I’m like, OK, that’s crazy. So we implemented with a few months, we implemented SMS in Opus One I.O. and also the Join Online button. And people could just like SMS customers for other reasons and join their lessons online.
So we just kind of like try to adapt and really spending a lot of time talking to customers to really adapt to all the different ways they run their schools and the things that they really needed and just build those features over the years. And that’s really when we started scaling, right? It was just by being obsessed with what customers needed, both me as my own school owner customer.
But also, you know, then as we started having two, five, 10, 20, 50, 100 music school customers telling us every day the things they needed, we’ve just been listening and implementing everything they, well, not everything, but a lot of what those schools needed and really changing their lives and optimizing their business and helping them scale.
John Kozicki (20:58.584)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (21:03.408)
Well, and that gets to one of my questions. Now, first off, I’d say the foundation for what you’re doing with Opus One, it’s clear that you saw the specific problems in running a music school. So you’re like hands-on with those specific problems. And the entire project was all about how do we, and you use the word scale a number of times. How do we solve these problems so that we can scale?
How do we solve these problems so that we don’t have turnover with our admin staff who are getting frustrated with what we’re doing? So you were looking at building kind of this all-in-one studio management software that will solve all these small little problems to allow you to run your business in a freer way. Now, you also mentioned, just now you mentioned feedback from users. How much does the feedback
directly influence the direction of Opus One’s features and development.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (22:07.753)
I I would say it’s crucial.
You know, we realized two things when we started early on is that first we had to have great support because we had to help those schools migrate. I had done the migration from Jackrabbit to PAC 13 and PAC 13 to Opus when I’ve done those migrations. And many times I was asking myself, how does somebody do that? I’m an engineer. I was able to script and automate stuff. It was just so painful. My wife would have never done able to do it on her own. So how does an average music school owner go through these migrations? They’re very difficult. So we have to have great support and people who really know the product inside out.
And also we had to really listen to our customers. And this is true for any tech company. You have to be extremely obsessed with your customers and talk to them all day long. you know, early on we did not necessarily support all the different cancellation policy and billing models that different music schools use and we had to listen. And, you know, I was using a flat monthly billing, but then we had schools that tell us, you know, we really want the invoice to be automatically generated based on whether there’s five lessons or four lessons or three lessons that month.
John Kozicki (22:57.573)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (23:07.046)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (23:08.577)
Three weeks later, we had that feature, right? We had schools tell us, hey, know, in this state in the US, we have to charge sales taxes for lessons. So we added sales taxes. So we’ve just been listening. We have a Facebook group for our customers. There’s tons of feature requests daily, and we try our best to implement everything we can that makes sense. I spent tons of time myself. Now we have a much bigger team. We have over 50 employees now. were, maybe two years ago, we’re still less than 10. So we listen to our customers. We’re constantly on calls with customers, understanding their problems.
John Kozicki (23:10.535)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (23:16.999)
Sure.
John Kozicki (23:26.471)
Hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (23:38.53)
Sometimes we disagree on what is a good business practice, but over time, when there is enough music schools that need a certain feature, we’ll implement it, right? And we’ve been implementing things from, really started with the core, is billing and scheduling. Then we added resettled management. So for example, managing resettles, letting students self-enroll, letting teachers enter the pieces, calculating the length of the session, of your resettled session to make sure each session doesn’t go over, assigning accompanists, backing tracks, all these little things.
John Kozicki (23:47.879)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (24:08.583)
that music schools need to run their recitals, for example, generating the program. And for years now at my school and many of Opus, one of your customers, when people walk in the recital, they just scan a QR code and they have the program on their phone. They don’t need to print those booklets anymore. So we’ve just been constantly adding things that help these schools operate. So whether it’s recital, billing, scheduling, payroll, communication, and then we started adding SMS, so being able to batch SMS students or follow up also with leads over SMS,
John Kozicki (24:21.254)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (24:38.306)
Some people are more likely to respond to you than if you’re calling them and they don’t recognize a number. So adding SMS, we’ve added also, this is more recently, we also added voice so you can place phone calls in Opus One I.O. and when a customer calls you, you know who they are. You know how many times I picked up the phone on my school and I’m like, sorry, what’s the name of your child? What is your name? And I can’t find them in the system and they’re driving, they’re late for the lesson, I don’t know who I’m talking to. So now, know, somebody calls you, you’re picked up in Opus One I.O. and you see their name and you can see right away, are they a prospect, are they a member?
John Kozicki (24:56.494)
Yeah,
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (25:08.257)
Are they?
And we do tons of other cool stuff with Opus One IO Voice that we just launched. does also AI transcription of your calls and helps your staff follow up on next steps with your prospect and things like that. So that we have whole tons of information on Opus One IO Voice on our website. So we added SMS voice and then we also added a full CRM suite so you can manage your prospects. You can go and follow up on leads and you have these different stages you can customize. So at my school we have prospect new, prospect trial, trial follow
John Kozicki (25:30.362)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (25:39.522)
So after they had a trial, if they haven’t signed up yet, we need to follow up with them and we need to call them, SMS them, email them to make sure they sign up.
So having all these tools to do effective kind of like conversion, you know, of trials and into members. We added also reputation management. we go and get all your Google and Yelp reviews and help give you tools to get more reviews. obviously, hopefully five star reviews, which is super important for discovery and getting customers to know your school. We added prospect management, as I said, and then we had also email marketing. So you can also do your email marketing in Opus One, what we call like you start a newsletter, your one-time
campaign or your ongoing campaign with DripCampaign. So we’re adding all these different tools and we have an exciting roadmap of more things that we’re going to be adding. But we just kind of like…
Try to provide everything in one place that music schools need, right? To communicate with their parents. Basically, the vision was to handle the whole life cycle of the students, right? From the discovery, how they find you, how do they sign up for a trial with, you know, obviously self-booking and being able to self-book. Convert automatically if that slot is available. How does a student after a trial get an automated email that says, thank you for attending your trial, this slot is available. Do you actually want to sign up and secure it? Click here and accept.
John Kozicki (26:28.698)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (26:54.714)
terms and conditions and sign up, obviously payments. So trial conversion. then, you know, dealing with the day to day retention and upselling and referral, right? So the whole customer life cycle and, you know, your recitals, everything. So really trying to have this all in one platform that music schools can use to operate that scale. And now what’s really magical about it is whether it’s on Facebook, when I go to events, people walk up to me and tell me, my God, know, Sam, I want to thank you because your software changed our life. We’re about to
go bankrupt or about to give up on our music school and now we’re thriving. We’re opening a second location, a third location. We have five, six, seven, 108 students and we’re able to operate. I mean, there’s still challenges, you I won’t lie to you. It doesn’t solve everything. You know, I have problems today with teachers. that’s sometimes, know, software will not fix that. But I mean, we streamlined everything we could, right? Everything that we can automate, everything that we can give you tools. And again, this is, this is problems you start seeing when you start
John Kozicki (27:40.998)
Sure, sure.
John Kozicki (27:45.584)
Right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (27:54.449)
scaling, right?
What I often tell people, like if you have maybe 60 students and you’re happy there, there is other software that are a better fit for you, right? We’re going to be the right software for you if you either you really want to scale to the hundreds of students or you already had a couple hundred students and you really want to scale and operate more efficiently. This is really what Opus One IU was designed for. mean, sometimes we have, you know, smaller schools that join us and we’re happy to help them as much as we can. But the software will be more complicated, will be more, you know, have more, more settings.
things to set up up front.
John Kozicki (28:27.556)
Yeah. Well, and I want to backtrack just a little bit because you were talking about all the different features and number one, scheduling and billing. That is, think, baseline what all of us need to function smoothly and efficiently and so that we can set our payments on autopay and we get, you know, a nice flow of income coming in every month consistently. Now, from
user’s point of view, what features of Opus One, because there’s so many, consistently deliver the most value to their businesses, do you think? And that’s not including the scheduling and the billing.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (29:12.314)
Yeah, I mean, there’s so many. mean, I’ll tell you lesson notes, for example, right? Like that’s something that I made mandatory in my school. Every teacher write lesson notes during the lesson.
instead of after the lesson. And parents, we started doing that during the pandemic because sharing PDFs and music sheets during the pandemic was painful. They were doing it through our admin email and it was painful. So we added a feature to share PDFs and music sheets and adding lesson notes. And it became an invaluable tool because now when teachers do makeups or subbing for each other, they have all the notes of what the student’s been working on. So there’s just one example where it makes, it’s not just a benefit for the end user. We realize parents now are calling us out sometime where the teacher forget to write lesson notes.
John Kozicki (29:30.203)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (29:53.087)
And not only it benefits parents, which helps retention, obviously, because parents know what they’re paying for. They’re managing expectations with your students and the parents, as you know, it’s very important because they want to know what they’re paying for and what this is going. How is my kid doing, right? But then we realize it’s invaluable for teachers because they can sub for each other. When the teacher is sick, we can just assign the lessons to another teacher and then guess what? They know exactly what scale, what book they were working on and they can just sub on the spots, right? So this is just one example.
John Kozicki (30:21.401)
Right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (30:23.05)
We have tons and I have to say, know, for some people, they tell me, you know, the resettled features save their life or just the SMS and the prospect management who are using five or six different tools that cost us sometime over a thousand dollars a month. And now for a third of that, we have everything in one place, better integrated. Some of the problems I was telling you about earlier, like how do you email people correctly, whether it’s for a newsletter or resettled announcement or you have an exam sign up or anything that you have, you have to target specifically certain teachers
by day, room, location, instrument, right? And it’s practically impossible to do with any software out there except Opus. In Opus you can just go to the calendar, filter by room, location, staff, instrument, teacher, whatever you want, and batch email, batch SMS people in one click. And people use that all day long.
John Kozicki (30:56.974)
Yes.
John Kozicki (31:08.419)
Yeah, that’s so convenient. As I’m sitting here in Michigan right now and it’s snowing today, we don’t think we’re gonna have a snow day, right? But that’s the exact example when we have to close here because of snow, as a for instance. Well, it’s one day, so we’ve gotta make sure we’re only contacting those people on that day.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (31:14.521)
Exactly, you know.
John Kozicki (31:33.891)
because tomorrow everything’s gonna be fine. So yes, it’s just a matter of figuring out what we’re gonna do.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (31:36.359)
Yeah.
And it’s not just contacting them, it’s maybe you’re issuing them a makeup credit because you don’t want them to lose that lesson. Maybe you don’t want to refund that lesson, you want to give them a makeup credit and then you want to let them self book that makeup on another day that you are open. So these are the things that schools owner know and deal with every day. Things like closures. So I’ll give you a couple of examples of things that are more advanced that we do that nobody else does or comes remotely close to doing. You’re have holidays where you’re closed and you have students booked on those holidays because you have a Monday student, well there’s gonna be a
that you’re closed for holidays. So we automatically skip those lessons and if you do what we call dynamic billing, that student will not be billed for that lesson because maybe that month will only have three Mondays because there’s not a fourth or a fifth Monday. Nobody else does that correctly. But now let’s say that students moves from Monday to Tuesday. Well, that lesson is gonna happen now because it was not happening on Monday, but now it’s happening on Tuesday, right? So how does billing gets recalculated automatically when not your closures don’t change, but your students sometimes change schedule
John Kozicki (32:33.445)
Sure.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (32:37.144)
over time, right? So how do you move that Monday students and reactivate those Monday lessons that were not happening before? And now that it’s a Tuesday students. So rescheduling of lessons on a recurring basis with the billing that goes with it. Being able to…
So for example, even if you take a step back, holiday closures, we all close our school for Christmas, it’s coming up in a couple of weeks, for Thanksgiving, for July 4th, or depending on other countries. I had to go and manually cancel lessons, hundreds of lessons in the calendar with previous software. There was no batch cancellations. And I had to actually bat, even I think there was a software that did eventually have batch cancellation, but I had to go and batch cancel. Why am I doing this? We know when we’re closed, the lessons can be automatically marked as closed.
John Kozicki (33:10.714)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (33:22.395)
activated when the lessons move. So we implemented all these features that end up saving you. And again, this is something you deal with when you have hundreds of students or at least a hundred or 200 students. When you have 50 students, you can deal with it. You’re going to go cancel the lessons manually or email those people manually. But when you start dealing with any kind of scale, all these daily problems become impossible to deal with or so time consuming and also error prone. Because as soon as you do something, we’re all humans. We’re going to make mistakes. So I used to be so frustrated with the admins when they make mistakes. But now I realize, you know, they’re humans. They’re going to make
John Kozicki (33:34.329)
Yes. Yeah.
John Kozicki (33:45.142)
Yes. Right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (33:52.308)
Mistakes. When there is manual process, you will make mistakes. And guess what? Because I said at the front desk, I know that the phone is ringing. A kid just got hurt. A teacher is telling you they’re running late and you have like five things happening at the same time. What should I do? And then of course, you’re going to forget to do something and make a mistake. Typical mistakes my admins used to make was we had software and most of them work that way where the billing and the scheduling are disconnected. Right. So sometimes even a different software. But even if you have it in the same software, would enroll the
John Kozicki (33:53.391)
Hehe.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (34:22.141)
and forget to bill them. Or you would unenroll the students and you leave them on the calendar, you remove the billing, but you leave them on the calendar because the two are decoupled and you always forget one or the other, not always, but often do. Or sometimes you bill them at the wrong amount and you have to go look up in your sheet, okay, piano 45 minutes with a level two teacher is this much, okay. so I’ve had amends constantly making mistakes of forgetting the billing of the booking on the enrollment or the unenrollment or
billing people at the wrong price. And in open sign, you cannot make those mistakes. The billing and the scheduling is tightly coupled. When you enroll the students, you have to deal with the billing right now. You can do what we call a enroll now and pay later, but the invoice is there. You can’t forget about it. If you unenroll a student, the invoice gets removed automatically and you can set the end date of that lesson. You can even transfer credits. You can do all kinds of things. So these things that we threw.
experiencing all these pains, right? We’re really kind of like address all these little things that were painful and that basically, you know, were hindering our growth. And, and then, you know, when you start unlocking all that time, I’ve had schools, larger, larger schools switching from other software that have one name telling us, Sam, I have three admins now they have too much time. They used to do so much busy work. I have all these extra employees.
John Kozicki (35:19.48)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (35:41.081)
And I told them, first, don’t fire them. I’m sure there’s other things they can do. They can follow up on prospect. can, they can generate a social media content. They can work on marketing. They can work on your next resettles. There’s so much things that they can do, but they were realizing they were busy doing so much busy work to run their school with hundreds of students that now they have all these admins having all that extra time that they can focus on what? On the students, on the parents, on the experience at your school, instead of doing things that a robot can automate or that the cloud and the system can automate. Right. So the idea is to.
John Kozicki (36:10.564)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (36:11.074)
Streamline operations, remove the busy work, focus your staff on providing value to the customers. What I tell my school admins is when somebody walks in, give them a tour of the school, ask them about their music background, ask them about why they want to learn music, bond with the customer, talk to the kid. And they have time to do that because the trial is already self booked. People self book the trial, they found us online, self book the trial, they walk in, we just click on one button to take attendance. Our admin staff can focus on the customer experience.
John Kozicki (36:33.039)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (36:40.876)
And then guess what? By the time the mom leaves the school after the trial lesson, they already got what we call a auto conversion email. something that says, you for attending your piano trial. We hope you enjoyed it. Click here to sign up. And they can sign up from their phone. Of course, they can talk to our admins to ask about a policy and we can do our thing. But we have more time to focus on the people and focus on the experience, on the arts, on the education, than focusing on doing the busy work. You know what I mean?
John Kozicki (37:08.293)
I want to ask you this Sam, because when you’re describing these features and what they do and mistakes that can happen, mistakes that can’t happen, I’m getting the sense, and I’m going to tread lightly here, but I’m getting the sense that you approached some of these features from a perspective of it’s hard to hire good help and these tasks have to get done.
So how can I have a system where if I mistakenly make a bad hire maybe in the admin department and mistakes do happen, how can I make these features work so that the mistakes aren’t catastrophic? They’re just maybe like minor mistakes right here.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (37:56.599)
Yeah. I mean, it’s fun way to look at it, but I think you’ll agree with me and most people listening to this will agree with me. When you hire multiple admins and those problems keep happening, the problem is not the admin you hired. It’s not a one time bad hire.
when you realize you have a systemic problem, when your school policy is too complex, and it takes weeks to remember it, to understand it, do you think the mom that walks in is gonna understand it if your school policy is too complicated, or if you have so many different pricing, or so many different instruments, or if your makeup policy is that you get a makeup only if it’s a blue moon, if you’re notified with more than 30 hours and this and that, if your system is too complex, no human, first of all, this is the thing that we tell most business owners need to understand is,
John Kozicki (38:15.031)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (38:23.628)
Right, right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (38:40.315)
Nobody is gonna care about your business as much as you do, right? The admin you hire at the front desk, it’s just a job for them. I mean, they love working there. There’s a lot of other reasons why they wanna be there, but…
John Kozicki (38:43.076)
Sure.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (38:50.873)
the level of involvement they’re gonna have is nowhere near your own as a business owner, right? So you can’t have the same expectation, right? And if you keep hiring admins and you keep having the same problems, the problem is not the admins, you. Not you personally, but you because your system is too complex or you don’t have the right tools for them, or maybe the right training program. So there’s a lot of different reasons that, so it’s not just one bad hire. mean, sometimes you have a bad hire and people that don’t show up or that we’ve all kind of sometimes had bad admins or people that are just not reliable. But if your admin shows up on
John Kozicki (38:55.436)
Right, of course.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (39:20.907)
but then make mistakes, maybe because you don’t have the right software, maybe because you don’t have the right policy, right? So look at how to solve the problems and look at removing the judgment, right? Like I said, my admins would forget to build students sometimes. So how do I make it that they can’t forget? Or they would double book.
John Kozicki (39:24.057)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (39:37.732)
Yeah, and that’s what made me think that, right? Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (39:40.663)
Yeah, they would double book a room because it was so complex to look at which room is the teacher in and then, I mean, it would take some time, a back and forth of emails to organize a makeup for one student with one teacher. No, no, Opus 1, they would tell you exactly what teacher is available and when, and if they need to be off, they submit a time off request and those times get blocked automatically. So you cannot book a teacher on the day that you’re closed or the day that the teacher is off. So the idea is like, we’re not gonna fix the humans and the system is too complex for them. We’re just gonna try to…
mind the operation, simplify the system, and also have the tools that can automate as much as possible. And again, so that I’d rather my admin have a conversation with a kid and the parents and talk about the value of music education and why our school is so great than having to do 50 clicks and find the right room and find, how much should I bill you? I’ll make sure I don’t forget this. and the phone is running now. You know how busy it can be, right? So the problem is not going to be your admin, it’s your tools and your system.
John Kozicki (40:31.757)
Right, yeah.
John Kozicki (40:36.868)
So on the topic of complexity, and maybe complexity isn’t the adjective, but robustness is. Now, Opus One is a very robust system. And I can see that not everyone’s going to use all the features in Opus One. And that’s okay. But with that robustness, I’m gonna transition now into the price, right? So I’ve had…
yourself. I’ve had a few other founders of some other software platforms on the podcast and Opus One is on the higher end of the scale in terms of price for the features that are offered and comparatively to some of the other platforms. Now, maybe who is going to benefit most from a software like Opus One and who maybe
is it not the best fit for?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (41:38.2)
That’s a very good question. listen, what I tell people is if you come to us and you have 50, 60, or 70 students and you’re happy there, we may not be the right fit for you. And it’s great if you’re a solo teacher or you just have a couple of teachers and you’re renting a small space and you don’t really looking to scale. There’s other software that are simpler to set up, cheaper, that will do just fine for you. Now, if you…
are already at 100, 200, and you want to scale more, even if you’re below 100 students, but you do want to scale, you’re going to be hiring two or three teachers and you really want to start making more money and grow your business, you know.
touching and affecting a broader community in your area, you’re going to software that can help you scale. And think about your time. I mean, sometimes we have people telling us, our best base package starts at $98. And we have people sometimes coming from another software that have one name and tell us, today I’m paying only $60.
And I’m like, okay, and $98 is a big increase. Okay, so how much do you value your time? If I can say you’re just one or two hours a week, you know, it’s not worth the 20 bucks a month extra you may have to pay for Opus. And then you’re gonna realize when you save dozens or hundreds of hours a month, those hours add up to thousands of dollars. And when you see that if OpusOne can help you save enough time to book one more student, that student already pays for even our top tier package. So people quickly realize, funny, sometimes we have smaller schools that come to us and they’re like, well, $98 is a lot of
John Kozicki (42:36.964)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (43:06.451)
money and like, okay, well, you know, try it. And first of all, there’s no contract so you can start and it’s monthly payment. We don’t lock you in any type of long-term contract. You can stop it’s month to month payment. This is what I believe, by the way, same for my music school. You know, we have a sticky product. have a great product. got, we want to retain you because of a great offering, whether it’s my music lessons or my music software. We’re not retaining you because we lock you in a contract. don’t believe in contracts and, semester billing and that kind of things. I want to offer people flexibility and earn their, their business every month.
John Kozicki (43:24.089)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (43:36.344)
and it’s working. So if we help you scale, so going back to those sometimes those customers that come to us with $90 a lot of money, okay, we’ll try. And then within weeks or months after they go live, they’re like, oh my God, we already doubled, we have 150 students now. And you know what? Now I want the SMS feature, I want the voice feature, I want your plus package with the prospect. And now they’re spending three, $400 a month with us, but they realize that they made…
John Kozicki (44:02.24)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (44:04.406)
that money tenfold on a monthly basis just from using the software and the time that they gain. And then they look at what else am I paying for? Am I paying for a phone system? That’s another $60, $90 there. I’m paying for an email system, MailChimp. That might be $60, $80, $90, $100. I’m paying for Referizr, or I’m paying for an SMS system. I’m paying for a, now I’m starting to manage my prospect, I’m paying for PipeDrive or some other CRM. So they look at all the other things they’re paying and they start doing the math and they all discover
connected, they all need to be exported, imported. I have these, or I’m paying an admin, you know, five hours a week to sort through my prospect and they’re all in a Google sheet and it’s unmanageable. When you start counting all that time that you spend with your admins, the mistakes made, then you realize, may be paying two or three hundred dollars, two or three hundred dollars a month. It might be really worth it because I’m going to save thousands on the labor costs to do all that work and those software that I can take out.
John Kozicki (44:48.162)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (45:00.386)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (45:04.215)
we had customers, sometimes we had four or five, six different software with Zapier in between. So some of those may be the more technical, technically savvy customers sometimes that realized like once we switched to Opus, we had such a complex system where we had the Trello board and then Zapier and then we created tasks automatically to make sure we don’t forget this. And then we had the Pike 13 or this and then we had Ring Central and then we had five or six different systems. And they’re like.
John Kozicki (45:13.475)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (45:29.385)
We took them all out, Opus and replaced all of it. And maybe the two or $300 a month that we’re paying for Opus, we saved five or $600. And this is just on the software, let alone the time that we saved on the admin time to.
John Kozicki (45:32.547)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (45:41.187)
Yeah, when I talk with music school owners and there is pushback about studio management software, I always just recommend do the math, right? Like, what is your monthly price for this thing? What are you paying an admin? How many hours is that? And like, it makes sense so quick, so quick. Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (46:03.615)
Yeah, and you know…
I mean, we also automate your billing. So you think about the time and the convenience that you offer parents that they can just put their credit card in and get auto billed and you don’t spend any time on billing. I have 1,400 students who don’t spend any time on billing. Their invoice are generated automatically, right? With the right amounts, too. And we can apply discounts, we can apply different things and credits and makeup credits when you do makeups or not. And we support different makeup models. We support the group makeup, we support the no makeup, we support the makeup only for teacher absence, we support
John Kozicki (46:20.302)
Right.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (46:35.656)
make up credits for cancellation, late cancellation. There’s a lot of settings that support limits on how many make up credits somebody can have per instrument or in a period of time. we have all these different settings that adapt to your school policy, but it saves you so much time and allows you to scale. I mean, I’ll tell you, you can do the math. I have 1400 students. There was no way we would have scaled this much.
without a tool that’s tremendous operations. And we see, by the way, it’s not just us. Now we have over 700 schools using Opus 1.io in 15 different countries and I think over 2,000 locations, if not more. We’ve enabled over 10 million lessons to date and we’re growing by probably something between 30 to 50 schools a month right now.
John Kozicki (47:07.737)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (47:16.979)
I don’t want to say everybody, but a lot of schools are switching to Opus One. There is a reason for that. And I mean, we’re extremely proud that we’re able to provide this industry that we love so much, a tool that really helped them scale and thrive. So yeah, it’s about, and I want to add one more thing is because I was one of them, a lot of music school owners got burned before. They were sold something that wasn’t it.
Right. I was sold the software that was not built for music schools in the past. And I was told, yeah, it does all these things. And when I try to implement, was scratching my head. I’m like, no, it doesn’t. That doesn’t work for my school. This is obviously was built for a gym or yoga studio or something else than a music school. And, you know, there are software clearly it’s in the name. I’m not going to name them. I’m not going to name them. But you can see from how they’re named that they’re not they were not built for music schools. And you have schools that sometimes have to kind of like bend backwards.
John Kozicki (47:53.656)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (48:11.895)
and have to do crazy workarounds to make the software work. And if you’re a music school, why are you using a gym software, right? You should be using a software built for music schools, right? And obviously we’re one that was built. By the way, I’m a music school owner, but probably 80 % of our employees are all musicians, teachers, people who worked at music schools as admins or teachers. our whole DNA is music schools and performing out schools.
John Kozicki (48:18.595)
Sure.
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (48:39.949)
So you’re talking about the staff at Opus One. Yeah, the software, the software, not the school, right? Yeah, okay.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (48:42.32)
Our employees. Opus One, you? Yeah. Correct.
Yeah, absolutely. mean, VP of sales grew up in a music schools. A lot of our sales team are former guitar or drums teachers. I mean, we’ve been hiring people who understand this industry, who can connect with the music school owners and really understand. And why? Because when I talk to, when I was doing sales and I was doing a lot of the things in the early days, I would talk to people who tell me, Sam, you’re the first person I talked to that actually understand my business. I’ve talked to salespeople at other software and they just don’t understand what music schools are, how they operate.
John Kozicki (48:59.651)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (49:16.789)
You understand the concept of makeups and teacher absences, all that stuff. You’re the first person I talked to that actually uses the right language, understand what I’m going through. And then they took a chance on us, right? And it’s not just me, but people that we’ve hired in our team. We’ve been really focusing on people from the industry who can really connect and help music school. So I would say if you’re a music school and you want to scale and you want to operate more efficiently, really check it out and talk to our team and use a music school software. One that’s really built
for music schools. There’s not that many built for music schools. There is a lot that are built more for the wellness industry, you know, without naming any names and clearly not really adapting to what you need. Use the software for your industry and obviously I personally use the best. I’m not gonna lie, but use a software that was really built for your industry by people from your industry will make a big difference for you. Yeah, go ahead.
John Kozicki (49:48.865)
Right, yeah, there aren’t.
John Kozicki (49:54.339)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (50:11.556)
All right, I got one more question for you, Sam. And this is not related to software. But when you look across the most successful music school owners that you interact with on a fairly regular basis, do you notice any consistent traits or habits or systems or even ways of thinking that set them apart?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (50:34.685)
Yeah.
There’s a lot of we could do a whole episode on this and I’m happy to come back to do it. I mean, and again, and this is what I’m what I’m about to say is really business focused, right? So for example, I don’t want to upset anybody. But I found that private lessons are more conductive to a recurring business because they don’t have start and end and people are you know, your lifetime and your lifetime value with the customer will be better with private lessons. So I see some of the biggest schools those that scale in the hundreds and thousands focusing mostly on private lessons, recurring business.
John Kozicki (50:39.192)
We could, yeah, yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (51:07.217)
monthly billing, simple streamline operations, simple billing. Obviously everything ultimately with Opus. I found that flexibility around makeups are very important. And if you can automate it with Opus, it’s even better because you don’t have the headaches that come with it. Parents appreciate, you can retain your students longer if you offer flexibility, some level of flexibility for rescheduling. By the way, I have nothing against group classes. I do group class at my school. We see a lot of schools who are doing group classes. They have certain advantages and certain trade-offs that you have to be careful about.
Something that I say also again purely business focus think about your customer lifetime and the lifetime value of those customers, right? So think about for example
a 16 or 17 year old guitar student that’s going to come in, learn five chords and then go and be off to college in a year. What is their lifetime and lifetime value compared to a six year old piano student who’s going to do a BRSM exam and stay with you for 10 years, right? So obviously if your thing is teaching guitar, teach guitar. At the end of the day, we’re not doing this for the money. We’re doing this because we love the arts and because we’re there. But if you want to scale your business, think about where the money is. Think about what your opponent is.
John Kozicki (51:55.456)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (52:15.825)
scales are to scale are and think about certain business KPIs like your lifetime and lifetime value. How much is it’s worth spending to get a new customer?
and how much that customer is going to bring you in revenue over the next year, two years, three years more, what kind of customers will stay with you longer than others? When you do your teacher performance reviews, it’s a tough time. Everybody wants a raise, and there is inflation, it’s hard to live on a teacher salary. So I have these, I mean, I have over 50 teachers, so I almost have every week a teacher performance review and a salary, tough salary negotiation. You know what I do? In Opus One I.O., I have a per teacher retention report.
John Kozicki (52:53.677)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (52:57.937)
I can see month to month how many students this teacher gained or lost.
and I can calculate the average lifetime of their students. So sometimes you look at a teacher and you’re oh, this teacher’s doing great, they’re full, great. But guess what? If that teacher loses three, four, five students every month, I am paying money in ads, in admin time, in trials that are discounted to get new students in. providing that teacher a flow of new students every month, that’s costing me money, versus a teacher that has 9800 % retention.
John Kozicki (53:31.693)
Right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (53:32.804)
There are certain business KPIs that you need to look at, your room utilization, your teacher, your per teacher student retention.
This will help you make decisions. Decisions are not made in a vacuum on how you give somebody a raise. If you hire a new teacher, if you should offer this instrument or not, if you should focus on your ads on piano or violin or guitar, everything comes from data. And if you don’t have the right tools, you cannot have the right data. So OpenSign gives you all these business KPIs that you need to really make the right decision. By the way, our community, our Facebook group has a lot of discussions and we help you also identify the KPIs you need and use those reports. These reports give you the data that you
you really need to make decisions, right? So to go back to the teacher example, I tell the teacher, look, you’re doing great, but you lose three, four, five students every month. Look at your data, it’s right there. So guess what? Every new students that I bring you cost me this much in ads or in time. I’d rather give you that money than give it to Google or Facebook to pay for more ads to get your new students. So how about we work together to help you retain your students longer or retain them better during the summer so I can give you more money instead of giving it to Google?
John Kozicki (54:31.683)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (54:38.664)
Right. I love that. I love that approach. Yeah, I love that approach. Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (54:39.485)
in ads. That’s a much easier conversation to have because it’s rooted in data. It’s not rooted in I like you, I don’t like you, and you’re getting a raise, you don’t get a raise, right? So again, this is just one example, but mean, room utilization is another one. My wife had this complex set of spreadsheets she used to use to see, do we have room to hire another teacher and which data we have available? Now you have a room utilization report in Opus One I.O. You can see, and we have multiple locations and this.
John Kozicki (54:49.655)
Right, right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (55:06.435)
up to 14 rooms per location, so it can be a lot to manage.
But we can quickly see at a glance which rooms are underutilized, which rooms are not utilized, and we can quickly see, we have a, you’re gonna have rooms with a drum set, a room with the guitar amps, and room with piano. So you don’t know, you have to look at what are the resources that you have, and what is available for you to make your next hire, maybe. So do you have room to hire maybe another full-time piano teacher or not, right? Maybe if all your piano teachers are full, but your violin teachers are not full.
John Kozicki (55:33.165)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (55:39.344)
So maybe you should focus your ads on piano and not violin, or the opposite. Maybe I forgot what example I just gave you, but you know what I mean, right? So a lot of these decisions you have to make daily about do I give this teacher a raise? Do I hire another teacher? Should I spend more money on this type of ad or this one? Should all be rooted in data? And we see obviously the schools that scale, those that have the right tool, get the right data, make the right decision.
John Kozicki (55:45.387)
Yeah.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (56:02.786)
and then able to really spend their marketing money in the right place, focus on the right customers, retain their customers longer, and eventually have a thriving business that can really sustain growing and having a more comfortable and happy life with happy teachers and happy admins.
John Kozicki (56:21.827)
Right, and that’s what we all want. So I think that’s fantastic insight. So Sam, where can people get a demo of Opus One or where do they, if they’re interested, where can they reach out and find out?
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (56:37.273)
Yeah, absolutely.
I’m in our website opus1.io. Check it out. can book a demo with our team. We also have a Facebook group, a Facebook page. There’s a YouTube channel as well. have a lot of videos and demos. But I mean, I would say probably just contact our team. Start with a demo. And by the way, our team is really, we’re really careful about this. Our sales team are all, like I said, music professionals. They will ask you about your pain points. They’re not gonna just try to sell you a software.
help you solve your pain points. So talk to our team. Tell them what what are you struggling with? Where are you a number of students? What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to scale? Are you trying to do this? Are you trying to find more time to teach more? Are you trying to find more time to maybe spend less time in the business and on the business? Maybe open another location, right? Or maybe do something else. We have schools that went on and started nonprofit and there are so much safe time from running the day to day operations that they could start doing a nonprofit and doing things they’re really passionate about instead of running billing and sketching.
John Kozicki (57:38.839)
Hmm
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (57:39.441)
scheduling and payroll. So talk to our team, go to our website, book a demo and join the other hundreds of music schools that are switched to Opus and I think you won’t regret it.
John Kozicki (57:50.435)
All right. Well, Sam Haluish, is, it was a pleasure. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you. And I’m looking forward to, I know we’re going to see each other at NAMM in January, correct? All right.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (58:02.159)
Yep.
We have a booth at NAMM, actually. Thanks for reminding me. We’ve been at NAMM for the past three, four years now. We’ll be at NAMM. I don’t have the exact booth number, but it will be on our website and our Facebook page as well. Come check us out at NAMM. we also have, I know you have a speaking engagement there. We also gonna be speaking there as well. And we will be hosting a customer appreciation dinner, which we’ll invite not just customers, but also other non-customers. So if you wanna meet our team, NAMM is a great time in January.
John Kozicki (58:05.901)
Okay.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (58:32.849)
to come meet us.
John Kozicki (58:34.947)
Great, fantastic. Well, I will be there and I’m looking forward to meeting up in person, Sam. Well, thank you for joining me today on Rock School Proprietor Podcast and we’ll see you next time.
Sam Lellouche (opus1.io) (58:45.359)
Thanks for having me, that was great.
