In this episode, John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) and Mandy York (Music Time of Milford) talk with Amy Nunez from Ensemble Performing Arts on how to make your music school both sustainable and saleable. This is part one of a two-part series with the team from Ensemble about what selling and purchasing a music school is like.
Amie is a corporate development manager at Ensemble and shares her journey from music school owner to facilitating studio sales and exit strategies. As a former school owner herself now working for Ensemble Performing Arts she has a unique perspective. She explains valuation basics, what buyers look for, and simple steps (like a ‘vacation strategy’) to test and strengthen your team and systems.
In this episode:
- Learn how developing a studio exit strategy and a focus on valuation can benefit your music school now, even if you never decide to sell.
- Amie explains key indicators and links between financial health and profitability of music schools
- How a ‘vacation strategy’ can work as a test-run for longer-term exit strategy.
- How the keys to building a scalable and sustainable business model give owners long-term options to sell, but also freedom and flexibility to be more fluid in the everyday operations now.
Learn why reducing owner dependency, documenting systems, training instructors, and cleaning up finances are essential—not just for an eventual sale but for better day‑to‑day operations.
In Part Two we speak with Jeff Homer, founder of Ensemble Performing Arts.
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Episode Transcript:
John Kozicki (00:01.369)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor Podcast. My name is John Kozicki.
Mandy (00:06.208)
and I’m Mandi York.
John Kozicki (00:08.447)
Mandy, we’ve got a guest today. Someone I met last month at NAMM. So our guest, is a corporate development manager at Ensemble Performing Arts. She’s a lifelong musician and ballet dancer. And she’s actually a former performing arts school owner herself before she actually sold.
Mandy (00:10.402)
Yay!
John Kozicki (00:38.561)
her school to ensemble, who she now works for, Amy Nunes. How are you, Amy?
Amie Nunez (00:46.431)
I’m doing well, how are you guys?
Mandy (00:49.976)
Great, so glad you’re here.
John Kozicki (00:50.253)
We’re good. Yeah. So to set this up, Amy, we met at NAMM about a month ago and we’d not met before. And you came to the session that I spoke at. And after my session, you came up to me, introduced yourself. And do you remember what you said to me? You said, have you ever thought about selling your music school?
Amie Nunez (00:51.529)
Yeah, thank you so much.
Amie Nunez (01:18.847)
Straight up.
John Kozicki (01:20.909)
Yeah, I mean, there was a little bit of there was a little bit of like, a back and forth first. Yeah, it wasn’t you didn’t come in hard right away. Like, hey, do you want to sell? Yeah, right. Not the first one. But that’s I guess that is that in part what you do at ensemble.
Amie Nunez (01:24.435)
There was a little, yeah.
Amie Nunez (01:29.311)
That wasn’t the first sentence.
Amie Nunez (01:40.48)
Yeah, so my job is really crazy and super fun. I find it a little hard to explain because I think that people are not used to, I don’t know, this concept of there being.
an option for studio owners to potentially sell in the future, like me explaining what I do. It just takes people a minute to process. But the long and short of it is I am a corporate development manager for Ensemble. Essentially, I am the go-between person for studio owners who are interested in selling or creating an exit strategy in partnership with Ensemble. And then
getting them in connection with our team who puts together valuations and makes sure that we would be a good fit for a buyer and potentially makes a deal and then takes over the acquisition piece. So I’m kind of the first step for any studio owner to get in touch with our team and just ask questions. What does it look like when Ensemble buys a business? What does it mean for me? Like with the whole of the logistics, the psychology of it, what was it like to sell yours? I’m that first person to have a conversation with studio owners.
John Kozicki (02:50.455)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (02:54.899)
and then I kind of collect financials and answer questions and then pass them along to kind of the next step when they’re ready, if they’re ready and worth a good fit.
John Kozicki (03:02.901)
Yeah, so is part of that, like those same interactions that I had with you where you just kind of come up to people and said, hey, you want to sell?
Amie Nunez (03:10.463)
Yeah, well, I, so I was, my husband and I ran a music school together for about a decade and we taught freelance for many, many years before we actually opened our music school. We knew, we knew when we opened our music school and…
were kind of growing and accidentally growing and the business kind of grew faster than we anticipated. We knew our end goal was to move one day. We knew that we needed an exit strategy in place, but we were clueless. We had no idea what that looked like. We were just hoping that when the time was right, someone would fall out of the sky and it would just work out for us. We would find someone who might be interested in taking over. And I learned the hard way that it just doesn’t really
John Kozicki (03:51.885)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (04:00.485)
work out like that. So for us it didn’t. And so something that is really important to me being a part of this ensemble team is just letting people know that we’re here. It’s a sensitive topic. It’s really hard to get in touch with studio owners and
John Kozicki (04:02.508)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (04:13.612)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (04:21.151)
You know, especially for studio owners who have built really really successful businesses and programs, it’s hard to find them and get in touch with them, but the hard work that I do is just finding owners and just saying, hey, I’m here. We may not be anything you’re interested in, but I don’t want you to be as lost as I was. So if this has ever crossed your mind, if you’re trying to make plans for the future, here’s my contact info. Because again, it really is personal to me. I want to make sure that the studio owners are more educated than I was.
John Kozicki (04:48.108)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (04:51.105)
going through the process myself.
John Kozicki (04:54.048)
Well, I’m glad you mentioned your school. And I want to go back to that just to kind of create like a mutual understanding. Now, I’m assuming and correct me if I’m wrong, but did you start your school in a similar way that most studio owners start? You mentioned that you freelancing, right? And then I’m assuming you decided like we can do this.
Right? That passion is there.
Amie Nunez (05:24.871)
Right, so it’s a funny story because my husband and got married in 2012, in September of 2012, and the summer before, he had a full-time job and he said, hey, I know we’re about to get married, but I would really like to pursue teaching music full-time.
And he told my parents, he said, hey, is that okay with you guys? I know I’m about to marry your daughter. I’m about to quit my job and teach guitar. And everybody was on board. He had shown, I mean, he had been teaching for many, many years and.
John Kozicki (05:51.798)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (05:57.14)
was really passionate about it. was a lucrative side hustle for him and he could really see the big picture of what it could turn into. And so he did that right before we got married. I was working a full-time job, which was great because at the time, us having the stability of my income while he kind of tried this venture out was really great. But I very, very quickly got jealous of how much fun he was having teaching music all day. And so I had to kind of like very, I was embarrassed to
John Kozicki (06:16.886)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (06:21.528)
yeah. Uh-huh.
Amie Nunez (06:27.193)
but I said, you know, can I also quit my job and teach music too? So it started out with, I mean, I was renting a space, a choir room in a local church and my husband was teaching out of our apartment and we were both doing house calls. It turned into…
John Kozicki (06:31.143)
Ha ha!
Amie Nunez (06:44.863)
I mean, we both are hustlers. We like to get stuff done and when we have a vision, we’ll chase after it until we see it happen. Before we knew it, the two of us were teaching well over 100 lessons a week.
John Kozicki (06:49.558)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (06:58.747)
And we just went, okay, this is cool. We’re making great money. Like we’re making a good living doing this, but this is not sustainable. This is crazy. And so we looked for a little commercial space that we could rent and started really, really small. We had a buddy who wanted to teach with us. So we kind of hired a couple of our friends to teach and take the overflow because we had waiting lists. So we hired a couple of friends to start coming on board. And before we knew it, mean, musicians were coming out of the woodworks who wanted to work.
John Kozicki (07:06.015)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (07:28.731)
for us, the culture we were creating was really cool and collaborative. We grew out of that first space in like nine months and so we had to look for something that was like a little thousand square foot house in downtown Hattiesburg that was commercial. Anyway we ended up finding our next space 5,000 square feet and we moved into that one. It just kind of kept snowballing and snowballing and we were so excited at the pace we were growing but very much a building the plane as it flew situation.
situation where we didn’t we had no experience having employees and then John you and I were kind of talking I mean you have much more experience running music schools than I do but You you kind of there weren’t a whole lot of resources For us to I mean I would scour the internet for I don’t know any kind of
John Kozicki (07:59.65)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (08:19.649)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (08:23.071)
I don’t know, support group? What do we mean? I was just looking for community and other people who could help us build something that would stay, that was scalable and would stay on the test of time. And I think he and I are really organized and we did a good job, but there are certainly things we could have done better, but yeah, it just kept growing and growing and growing. And then I don’t even remember what your original question was, but that’s our origin story. That’s how it happened.
John Kozicki (08:25.12)
Yeah, right? huh.
John Kozicki (08:48.62)
Well, yeah, where I was going with this is and you you gave me what I was looking for, which is. How does it start? And and your story is very similar to, think, a lot of people. And you even said in there we were just trying to figure it out. And that’s all about, I think. Figuring out how to scale your business because it isn’t sustainable to just
Mandy (08:51.714)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (09:17.9)
keep grinding and grinding and grinding, right? And in those early days, we’re not afraid of the hard work. We’re not afraid of like putting in the hours because we’re excited about it. And but yes, you have to take a step back and figure out like, OK, how do I how do I continue to maintain this and grow it? Not at the expense of my own sanity and like the hours that I’m putting in. So
When did you, when did you think, and you also said that it was kind of a goal at some point to sell anyway, but you just didn’t know how that was gonna work. You and I had talked before and a little bit before we started this conversation about me selling my first music school, and that was in like 2013, so this type of thing that you do with that ensemble didn’t exist then. But for me, it was an agreement with.
two of my instructors who worked for me. And because my choices were either that or basically close up shop when I decided I was gonna move. But for you, how did you ultimately come to the decision to sell?
Amie Nunez (10:36.927)
Wow, huge question. Existential question. No pressure on this one. We kind of got to, mean, to be completely honest, I remember looking at my husband and just saying, I really want to just be married to you and not have to be business partners because it had taken, on a personal level, it had taken over our lives. I…
John Kozicki (10:38.838)
It is.
John Kozicki (10:55.499)
Mmm.
John Kozicki (11:00.139)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (11:02.301)
I just remember, I mean, there was no meal at home, vacation, date night. We couldn’t escape the monster we had created. I mean, it was something we were so proud of, but we could tell we just didn’t have the stamina to keep doing what we were doing. And…
I think we had gotten to a point where we were really proud of the size that our company had grown and we weren’t really sure that we had the, like you’re talking about that early on excitement and passion, you’re like willing to sacrifice anything to kind of chase this dream. We had just run out of energy and we knew that whatever was gonna happen next with the studio, like the next…
I guess level of growth. We didn’t have it in us to do it, to be honest. We kind of had a light bulb moment where we went somebody with more.
John Kozicki (11:53.26)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (11:58.932)
gas in the tank and more excitement and vision is gonna be the person to take it to the next level because we’ve worn ourselves out and we weren’t anywhere close to our family. as time went on and we had little nieces and nephews and our family was growing, we were going, we wanna be closer to our family. So there were just a lot of personal things in the background that really motivated us to go ahead and get the ball rolling and start looking at options.
Mandy (12:28.479)
I thought it was interesting too. You said earlier that when you started, you knew this wasn’t going to be something that you were going to do forever. Okay. Yeah.
John Kozicki (12:28.799)
You
Amie Nunez (12:34.845)
Yeah. You’re like, what is that? Well, we, so I went to, grew up really close to New Orleans, Louisiana, and I went to the University of Southern Mississippi for college. And I wanted to be a music engineer. So I took, was part of the production program there. Ended up definitely, as you know, I ended up kind of going a different route and we started this music school together, but we just.
we’re misplaced Cajuns. knew that Hattiesburg wasn’t home and we knew that just for the long term that wasn’t a place that we wanted to stay for the rest of our lives. So we always had in the back of our minds, we’re building this and we’re making a good living and this is great but it’s not gonna be a forever place for us to live here. So did that answer your question kind of where our head was we started? No.
Mandy (13:22.285)
Yeah, yeah, well, it’s interesting. Yeah, because we all have different motivations going in or different five, 10 year plans, right? Yeah.
John Kozicki (13:32.448)
Amy, mentioned, you also said two words that I want to dig into a little bit. Yeah, you mentioned you didn’t have, you felt like you didn’t have the gas and the vision to take it to where it was going to go next. And I see those two words as being almost like two potentially different things. Like one is grit, gas is like energy and grit and like I’m going for it. Vision.
Amie Nunez (13:45.343)
Mm.
Amie Nunez (13:55.315)
Mmm, okay.
John Kozicki (14:02.389)
can also be about ability to understand what the business structure looks like in that next phase, right? So when we are building, we have an idea of like how the pieces fit together. like, I personally, like I’ve never worked in large offices. I’ve worked in small offices, so I’ve worked with small business structures. But…
Amie Nunez (14:11.163)
true. Yep.
John Kozicki (14:29.959)
understanding like a larger business structure. I don’t have any hands on experience with that. So I wonder from your perspective now being that you work for a larger company that buys music schools and now ensemble under that umbrella, there’s many, many music schools. I’m assuming hundreds of instructors. Do you think you have a
better idea of what vision would have been for yourself in that situation.
Amie Nunez (15:10.527)
Do you mean in terms of, I, like, knowing what my end goal was? Give me the question one more time, because I really like what you’re saying. I want to make sure I acknowledge it. Okay.
John Kozicki (15:19.157)
Sure. I’ll phrase it a different way. I’ll phrase it a different way. Under the umbrella of ensemble, you get to see a lot of different business structures as well as the business structure that you’re working in, which is called ensemble. And having that insight now, do you feel like you could have applied, if you had that insight back then,
Could you apply different systems or different things in place with your former music school, or performance art school, to take it to that next level?
Amie Nunez (15:57.343)
Yes.
100%, okay, I understand your question better now, thank you. 100%, I talk with studio owners all the time and I’m able to give them tips. I’m gleaning so much valuable information from studio owners like yourselves who are doing things differently than I did and they’re experiencing really great work-life balance that I didn’t have. Profit margins that are healthier than mine were ways of
Delegating and trusting their staff and empowering their staff that I was afraid to do so I’m getting to I’m getting to talk to People and learn all of these really incredible easily implementable Things that that I just they weren’t on my radar back then so yeah to answer your question I don’t know if it would have changed how long
we would have owned our business. Like I think because like you were saying, Mandy, I mean, our end goal was to eventually relocate and do something different. But I don’t think that we would have exited our business in a state of burnout. I think we would have left.
John Kozicki (17:02.761)
Hmm.
Amie Nunez (17:04.223)
Now when we sold our business, the trajectory was great. I mean it was a healthy business, it was growing, but the way that we left was very much from a like we were tired. Instead of having created something, well, guess John your question made me kind of go, I could go a couple of different directions.
Knowing what I know now, we probably could have even kept our music school and created a structure and a staff that could have run it without us being there all the time. And that’s something that I…
John Kozicki (17:37.918)
Gotcha.
Amie Nunez (17:41.054)
This is something I hear all the time from studio owners is the idea of delegating and finding employees that you trust enough to run things and do things the way that you would do them is terrifying. And not only is it scary to delegate things and start to hand pieces of your business to your staff and just go, I hope they do it right. That’s scary, but also it’s another expense, right? So a lot of studio owners are trying to save money by doing everything themselves. It really ends up backfiring in the long
because you end up like me, burnt out. You might have saved some cash along the way, but you didn’t give yourself any head space to really look at your studio objectively and start identifying the things that would help you grow in your community and you could focus on big picture things. those are a couple of things that come to mind. I don’t think we would have left as burnt out as we were. And also there probably could have been some flexibility there in our…
Go forward plan. We might have been able to maintain ownership move and still have a fully functioning studio that ran well I mean, but we hadn’t we didn’t create our business to run that way So that wasn’t an option for us
John Kozicki (18:44.905)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (18:50.878)
Right.
I love that as kind of a segue into what you do now. Now, what we wanted to talk about when I initially reached out to you about this was valuation and exit strategies, which is what you said you do a lot of with studio owners. So let’s first talk about valuations and what that actually means in…
practical terms for a music school.
Amie Nunez (19:26.739)
Yep, so this is something that I love talking to people about because most, again, this can be a sensitive topic and people don’t know who they can talk to and who do, you you might have an accountant friend that you want to talk to but they’re in your community. How do you start asking people questions about what your business is worth and so I love having these conversations where I can kind of pull the curtain back and…
John Kozicki (19:51.359)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (19:52.768)
I mean, valuation sometimes can sound scary because I think when people think about valuation, think if I get a valuation done, it means that I am moving forward and trying to.
change ownership of my business. it’s not, mean, knowing what your business is worth is a really, really valuable marker for you to measure growth. If you have vision of bringing in partners for your business, I mean, there’s a hundred different reasons why knowing what your business is worth is just a valuable piece of the puzzle. So for us, and I’ll tell you from my personal experience, this is just my personality. When we were looking to sell, I actually had three valuations done.
Thank
because the first one I had done I didn’t like. had this, you know, I had this number in my head that was more of an emotional number. Just if I could get this for my business, it’ll all have been worth it. And so the first number that I got back was from my accountant and I was disappointed by it, you know, took some time to digest it and kind of come to terms with it. We worked with a broker for a season to try to help us sell our business and the valuation he put together for me was same as the first one, which let me
John Kozicki (20:38.086)
Hahaha!
Mandy (20:38.669)
Thank
John Kozicki (21:05.48)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (21:05.909)
I mean we were in the right ballpark the final valuation we had done was through ensemble and if they all three of those came back the same which was good for me to know that this is a this is industry standard for a service-based business like what we do The long the the short way to explain how valuation is done Is it’s a multiple of your profits? It’s way more nuanced than that But essentially what you’re looking at is you want to look at how much your business is profiting but then
you can add back to that number any expenses associated with you. You’re kind of trying to paint a picture of maybe what the business would look like if you weren’t there for a moment. So you’re adding back things like salary and for me a lot of things that I was running through the business like cell phone bills and travel expenses, home office, any health insurance, anything associated with you go ahead and add it back to your profits.
John Kozicki (21:47.175)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (22:03.103)
From there, the next step is to look at what your business would need to function without you. Are there new hires that would need to be made to replace your labor in the business? Are you teaching a lot and a lot of the income is coming from you working yourself? Are you doing a lot of administrative work that someone would need to take on if you weren’t there? So you’re crunching those numbers. you’re adding back expenses associated with you, then you’re subtracting what it would cost to replace you in the business.
understanding of that number there it’s typically multiplied somewhere in a range of 2.5 to 3.5 and that number that if you kind of do that exercise that financial exercise that number usually will be pretty close to what a fair evaluation or potential offer from a company like ours or or another buyer if you’re looking to sell to someone within your studio or someone in the community that’s kind of how you can come up with a fair price.
John Kozicki (23:02.003)
What so if I’m understanding correctly based on what you just said, it sounds like as an owner of a music school, things that would make your business maybe more attractive from a seller’s perspective is if as an owner you’re teaching less or none at all, as an owner you have an admin team that’s
handling most of the admin and you’re not. So basically the less you’re doing as an owner, the better. Is that accurate? Or are there other things that would make one school look more attractive than another?
Amie Nunez (23:45.822)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So.
you’re totally right and sometimes that’s hard for people to if you’re really passionate about teaching or if you’re really you love the back end and you like doing the administrative work it doesn’t necessarily mean that for your business to be attractive to a buyer that you need to like stop doing the things that you love that’s that’s not true what what you need to have is a proven track record that your business will not completely fall apart if you step away that’s what you need to
John Kozicki (24:18.227)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (24:18.803)
show. So that’s something that I wish we had done better with our business and something I’ve learned since is my husband was teaching all day. I was doing a lot of administrative work so we had to have a really serious conversation with Ensemble where they said hey we love what you’ve built the culture is amazing your teachers are great the whole I mean you have a track record of great retention and your student base stays I mean your numbers are growing all that’s great but you haven’t proven that your business is
gonna be okay and can function well without you guys just there all the time.
And so to answer your question, my husband loves to teach. if we had a couple of years before we sold, if we had said, all right, we’re gonna start changing things so that our business is gonna be ready to purchase in a couple of years, no more teaching. I mean, that would have sucked the, I mean, that would have taken the wind out of his sails, right? Cause that’s what he loves and wants to do. However, what I was doing on the administrative side was I was putting out fires all day long. I was doing, was answering phones and emails.
John Kozicki (25:10.206)
Mm-hmm.
Right, yeah.
Amie Nunez (25:24.137)
had a team of administrative staff that were fantastic, but I was so controlling. I mean this in a good way, quality control was very important to me, and I knew if I did it myself, it would get done right.
I was scared to let go of some pieces and start testing out my staff to see what they can handle without me and that’s where I think most studio owners make the same mistake is It’s just the fear of what’s gonna happen if I start
Letting my staff do some of the things that I do But what that communicate if you can kind of get past that hurdle and start creating teams and empowering your staff to handle things So that I mean we I talk with studio owners all the time and just say hey if you wanted to go on a one week vacation What would break first like if you’re if your cell phone doesn’t work because you’re on a cruise What’s gonna be the thing that you know is not gonna go well if it happens while you’re gone. Those are the types of exercises
that I think studio owners need to do because those are the things that a potential new owner needs to know are figured out already. Because if you’re not there and your team has no clue how Amie would answer this question or how does she respond to this email, if you have no systems and processes that protect your business, if you’re not available,
then that’s where things tend to fall apart or make a business less valuable to a potential new owner.
John Kozicki (26:56.841)
So you mentioned some good things, I think, that paint a picture about what would maybe hinder evaluation. And conversely, the opposite obviously would boost evaluation, I’m assuming. But are there any other things that maybe would be surprising for people to hear? Like, that’s an aspect that would boost evaluation.
Amie Nunez (27:24.575)
I think people who are running a music school aren’t surprised by the things that I’ll talk with them about. A lot of it is retention rates. Because not only is someone like Ensemble looking at your financials, we want to know that you’re profitable and that your business is healthy financially. Obviously that’s important and that doesn’t surprise anybody. But a lot of what’s, there are some more qualitative things
that a new potential owner is going to really take into consideration and that’s what’s your culture? Do you have an environment that is, I know I keep saying the word empowering, but does your staff feel valued and do they feel like they know what’s going on and you guys are all part of the same team? Do you, I mean if you’re working with…
primarily younger kids, what does that culture look like? Are you a studio that, do you know who your main demographic is and does your brand support that? Those types of things. Do you have a recognizable brand? Holy cow, a lot of people, if they’ve been doing this for decades and decades, I think for some younger studio owners, this is a piece of cake, it makes total sense. But a lot of times I talk to studio owners who have been doing this for a really long time and their branding and digital marketing and their social media presence is
really behind the times. And so things like that, while it might not change, like when I was talking about the financial piece earlier in that multiple that we use, while you can’t really multiply how many Facebook followers you have or Instagram followers you have, that doesn’t directly…
impact the numbers per se, can make you, it may give you a little bit more negotiating room if you’re able to say like, this is my place in the community, it’s strong, I have this track record of community engagement and relationships, like we are a staple in our community. Things like that will give you some negotiating power when you’re talking to a potential buyer.
John Kozicki (29:34.441)
Let me ask you, and this might be an impossible question to answer, but I think when we’re talking about music school owners, we’d like to pride ourselves in those things that you’re mentioning. Like, I am really part of the community and I’m involved and all those things that you mentioned. How do you measure that though? How do you, know, like how do you…
Amie Nunez (29:38.546)
No.
John Kozicki (30:02.962)
How do you put a number to that or how do you prove it to a potential buyer or is it something that you just kind of have to convince someone?
Amie Nunez (30:11.731)
You might kind of have to convince. I’m not the person who sits at the table for Ensemble and has the conversations where we’re going, hey, this is an offer, and there might be some Google Room here and there. I know what it was like with my experience, and there was a lot of value placed in our, and this is something I really genuinely love about Ensemble, is we’re really committed to legacy. So what you’ve created, and the culture and the brand and the,
The product that you have been fine tuning for your community is really important to us. It’s not gonna benefit anyone for us to step in and change those things that you’ve been developing in your community for many, many years. So we like to preserve and be good stewards of what already exists. I think for me,
the reputation that we had. This is a really good, John, you kind of got me, I’m spinning, trying to think through how that really can, well, how it can really translate. Again, because I’m not the one sitting at the table having those conversations further down the road. I can’t say for sure how it really, if there’s like a formula that they might use or we have this much wiggle room if they have this kind of.
John Kozicki (31:08.151)
Hahaha
John Kozicki (31:23.612)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Amie Nunez (31:26.939)
Instagram following it doesn’t look like that, but it does mean something and It makes you more appealing. Here’s what here’s what I will say
you can appeal to a much larger audience of potential buyers if you have those things in place. It’s going to give you more options. If you kind of pigeonhole yourself and you create something that would only work for one very specific type of buyer, you just have fewer options for yourself. So when it comes time to talking to someone in your community, someone on staff, someone like Ensemble, it’s not going to hurt for you to have a following in a community of people who support your
business locally. That’s only going to make you look better to a bigger group of potential buyers. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question exactly, but I’m going to be chewing on this one. I’m going to be chewing on this one little bit after. It’s a hard one.
John Kozicki (32:17.552)
Yeah, well, I admittedly it’s a hard I think it was a really hard question to answer and for perspective, I mean, like I look at my own school and I think, my God, my instructors are the best. My my clients are the best. My students are the best. This community is the best. I think the world of it and I don’t think anyone else could do it right. I like maybe it’s ego, but that’s how I feel about it. But from someone on the outside.
Amie Nunez (32:31.305)
Mm.
John Kozicki (32:47.526)
I don’t have a way to say like, here’s why. I just say like, man, I really feel that, you know? And you know what I mean?
Amie Nunez (32:55.007)
I really feel, yeah. Okay, so John, you know one thing that you can do and for studio, I think this is something that studio owners can do right now is always, always ask for reviews. Get Google reviews, Yelp reviews, get people talking, put testimonials all over any place you can get them because that you can’t…
Mandy (32:57.143)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (33:20.351)
I was gonna say you can’t fake that, but I know that there are ways that people do. But that’s a really easy way. mean, if you’re, cause that’s something that we do look at. We look at what Google reviews look like and how many there are, how many stars do you have, because that paints a really realistic picture of how your company is viewed by your clients and by the community. And that’s something, that’s a really good way to…
John Kozicki (33:23.354)
Hahaha!
Amie Nunez (33:47.839)
to get information from people it’s not just coming from you that my business is amazing. They want to hear it from other people. Because obviously we think it’s amazing.
John Kozicki (33:57.096)
Okay, I want to go back to another thing that you said about asking a studio owner if they wanted to take a vacation for a week.
Amie Nunez (34:09.21)
Mmm.
John Kozicki (34:11.655)
How would that happen? No, this is kind of on the heels of where I was gonna go with the other thing that you do, which is help owners create exit strategies. What if we framed it more like instead of an exit strategy, which suggests I’m leaving my business, what if we just framed it as vacation strategy, right? Because that suggests that
you’re coming back and you have a strategy for a vacation, but it’s like a microcosm of what could happen in the future if you do decide to sell because that’s really what I want to give our listeners, whether they want to sell or whether they’re not. Hopefully they’re not at that point you were where you just burnt out. I got to sell. But what can I do to start creating my vacation strategy?
Amie Nunez (35:05.021)
I love this so much and I’m definitely gonna steal that. I’m gonna start saying vacation strategy. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I mean, those are, it’s a really great exercise to do. Even if you have no vacation coming up, sit down and just, if you’re an entrepreneur, studio owner, you already, if you even just think about vacation, if you’re anything like me, you get a knot in your stomach and you go, no, no, no, no, no.
John Kozicki (35:08.807)
Steal away. Yeah.
Mandy (35:10.391)
Hehehe.
Mandy (35:30.957)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (35:31.22)
Like, this is not gonna work, who’s gonna do this, who’s gonna make, you just already have a list. So even just starting there, what things popped into your head first, what I would suggest people do is make that list of things that are gonna break first. And for me, I’ll tell you what those things were for me. I was the person who handled the majority of scheduling and I also did all of the like,
John Kozicki (35:31.431)
You
John Kozicki (35:56.006)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (35:58.72)
emails and responding to angry parents that kind of stuff because I consider that to be really sensitive so I wanted to be the one handling it but I also didn’t I had never trained anyone to run payroll for me or pay bills or like I was the only one who knew how to do that. I had never documented how and when those things happened so I would I would say for any any studio owner like this afternoon
John Kozicki (36:10.652)
Mmm.
Amie Nunez (36:24.063)
Go ahead and make that list of things that make you panic a little bit when you think someone else might have to do them or they won’t get done if you’re gone. And then start writing down, like create a handbook.
or some kind of, you know, you’re on vacation, hand it to your staff and be like, this is how I handle all this stuff and here’s how you can, you know, keep things running without me. Having your systems and processes written down, even just for your own peace of mind, is a really great first step.
John Kozicki (36:55.825)
How involved do you think a handbook and processes should be?
Amie Nunez (37:03.133)
I think every little thing that you think is gonna be common sense for someone else needs to be written down.
Just because it’s, and you guys know this, I anybody who employs other people, you know that there are things that come very naturally to you that other people have to be told. And that’s fine, we’re all wired differently and especially being in the entrepreneurial seat, like our brains are just different, right? Like we just, just are, the entrepreneurial curse, right? Like you just cannot help but be a certain way. But I don’t think that,
John Kozicki (37:10.247)
Okay.
Amie Nunez (37:39.142)
Any detail is too small. And I did start doing this. It took me a while to get to this point, but I did start writing down things for myself and I was taking screenshots. And if this pops up when you’re doing this, here’s, I wanted there to be a flow chart that made it really, really clear for my staff that in my absence, they could just pop it open to page whatever and go, okay, this is how Amy would do this. If I can’t get it to work, here’s someone else on staff who might know. I don’t think you should spare any detail because again,
It might feel like something second nature and easy for you, but it’s not gonna be for everybody else. And that’s things as simple as how to answer an angry email. Like those things, we might know how to handle that, because it comes naturally to us, but those things need to be spelled out. Words to use and words not to use, you know?
John Kozicki (38:31.547)
This is, sorry, go ahead, Mandy.
Mandy (38:31.629)
I’m
I completely, I completely agree. Like, I think that’s something, yeah, I’ve learned that over the 10 years too, is that I think initially I was a little worried to like, you know, like to offend people, like that I was giving them too much detail, you know? And so, but now I’m like, Nope, be redundant. Give them more detail than what they need. Yes. Because things do come just like second nature to us. And we think of every little detail and not everybody does.
Amie Nunez (38:47.485)
Yeah, sure.
Amie Nunez (38:53.811)
Be redundant. Yeah.
Amie Nunez (39:01.107)
Yep. It’s a hard thing to balance. Yeah, I love this. Yeah.
Mandy (39:02.989)
I love this vacation strategy. And yes. And then I, it was last year, I did like an out of the, or a couple of years ago, went out of the country with a really busy itinerary. had things really set up before I left and, um, and then things went well. And then, so come back and say, Oh, you did a really great job with that. Why don’t we keep that on your plate?
Amie Nunez (39:26.771)
Yes. Yeah.
Mandy (39:29.653)
You know what I mean? This is a good way to evaluate what you’re doing, how you can pass it off and then, you know, take.
Amie Nunez (39:36.42)
And those little exercises, you’ll see who in your staff really likes the challenge and rises to the occasion and which ones don’t. And that can be really great indicators of who’s ready for more responsibility and who’s not quite the right fit for that. There are there are smaller ways you can do it. I’ve heard of studio owners, and I would do this occasionally, I would be like, hey, tomorrow’s a test day, I’m not answering my phone.
Let’s just see what happens. Hopefully we can’t burn the whole business to the ground in one business day, hopefully. So I would do things like that where I would just go, hey, I’m not gonna be available. We’re just kind of testing areas that we need to strengthen in the school and what you guys have questions about that I haven’t quite equipped you for yet. I knew that my staff could handle, obviously I didn’t do that before they were ready, but I would do little tests just to kind of see what fell through the cracks and where I needed to prepare them.
Mandy (40:04.877)
Yeah. Yeah.
John Kozicki (40:05.423)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (40:33.395)
better.
John Kozicki (40:36.134)
So what do you think are qualities that you see in studio owners that make it easier for them to transition when there is an exit strategy or when you are working on exit strategies?
Amie Nunez (40:58.163)
I really like this question. I have found that, and I have hundreds and hundreds of conversations with studio owners who are just trying to wrap their brains around, do I wanna do this until I’m in my 80s? do I, is, you know, I love what I do and how could I?
They’re maybe not ready right now, but it is on their mind of what the long term is gonna look like for them. I wish that more studio owners could kind of let go of the tortured artist persona that…
John Kozicki (41:39.354)
Mmm.
Amie Nunez (41:40.372)
that we find a lot in our industry. It’s this idea of I’m suffering for my students, I’m suffering for this business because it’s this, it’s the arts, it’s kids. we’re kind of, there’s a little bit of a martyrdom thing that happens with music education that I’m not a fan of. I’ve been there and I did it, but it doesn’t help or empower anybody.
John Kozicki (41:56.164)
Yes.
Amie Nunez (42:07.871)
past you teaching your students and maybe being miserable. mean, there are pieces of that that are really commendable and it’s beautiful to just, but there’s this psychological phenomenon that happens where an entrepreneur…
in the music space feels guilty for having a successful business and maybe being able to afford to go on a vacation or drive a car that’s not a beater or I mean there’s this idea that if we’re successful that somehow that’s a shameful thing and the people who do better
John Kozicki (42:27.59)
Mm, yeah.
John Kozicki (42:33.67)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (42:43.345)
and have more peace and work-life balance are people who have let go of that. And they’ve just been like, look, I want stability for my family, for my staff. If my business is stable and profitable, I can serve my clients better. It’s not about just suffering for the art. Those people tend to do better. They do better mentally when a transition happens because they already have let go of that.
enmeshment of who they are as a teacher and who they are as a business owner and their personal lives. The ones who are so bound to their identity as a teacher and can’t kind of get themselves out of that mindset to start thinking a bigger picture, this is a much harder transition for them.
John Kozicki (43:31.45)
Hmm. That’s an amazing answer because it’s it. I was really you know when I when I pitched that I was thinking more about. What are the mechanical things in the business or one of the mechanical things that that owners have in place and you’re really talking about? Like psychological things and understanding yourself and your self worth and like what this means.
Mandy (43:35.265)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (44:02.145)
across the board, not just in your studio, but for your life. That’s that’s kind of profound. It’s not very often where I’m like kind of stuck in this podcast and realize like, shoot, I got to get back and ask another question. But you just did it, Amy. okay. All right. So
Amie Nunez (44:04.159)
100%.
John Kozicki (44:25.059)
Well, I’m going to go to my list then. What are the top three things owners can do right now to improve their school’s position, whether they want to sell or
Amie Nunez (44:33.631)
Yeah, great question. A, I would say start practicing delegating things. Just try it. Try it and see how it goes. The result of that will inform you of…
ways that your studio likely needs to improve a little bit. Absolutely great exercise. Delegate one thing and just see what happens. Another thing is clean up your finances. Make sure that the way that you are documenting expenses and income is clean and clear to any third party that might look at it one day.
Whether you sell or not doesn’t matter. When you’re doing your taxes or if you’re trying to improve your budget or you’re trying to figure out where that money went, you’ve gotta have clean, clean financials. John, another thing that I’m glad that we did that I would recommend any studio owner do is find…
Find us a school that you aspire to be like and get in touch with that owner. If there’s somebody, whether it’s a competing studio with you or another studio in another city that’s just knocking it out of the park and they just look amazing and you would give anything to be like them, find the studios that are doing it better than you and go talk to those owners. Treat them to coffee. Find those people and…
see if there are ways that you can pick their brain or collaborate with them so that you can start to learn from their experiences. That’s something we did early, early on and it saved us. We were going, oh hey, it’s so nice to meet you. Here’s all the things we’re gonna do with our music school and they would go, no, no, that’s not a good idea. This would be a way to improve that. They saved us from a world of hurt with some advice and strategies that they had implemented years prior and so we were able to learn from their…
Amie Nunez (46:25.725)
history and their knowledge and I hope that that’s something that I would recommend to any studio owner is just find some other studio owners to talk to especially the ones who are doing it better than you.
John Kozicki (46:38.085)
Quick follow up to the clean financials. What does that look like in practice? mean, is this, we’re looking at our P &L statement every month, you know, is it basically like I give my files to my accountant and the accountant doesn’t have to ask questions. What do you think that translates to?
Amie Nunez (46:58.493)
That’s a really good question and I think it depends on the school and kind of how you’re set up, the size of your school too.
There are some things just like we talked about earlier things that came really naturally to me, but some studio owners It just doesn’t cross their mind again and maybe like you guys I mean we’re we’re artists who then like kind of fell into this Space where now we need to be really good accountants and HR managers and like all these things So the the financial piece mean on a on a basic level it could be you may I mean somebody might be listening right now who needs to know that you need to have a
business bank account setup that is separate from your personal finances and you need to track your I mean something as simple as you need to have a business debit card or a business line of credit that is separate from your financial your personal financials and your family financials so that it’s a lot cleaner and easier for you to pull up purchase histories line of credit stuff. I mean having having just
on a foundational level having separate accounts for your business and your personal is something that some people don’t do. And maybe their business is young enough that they’re okay with that right now, but that’s not gonna be scalable. if you have growth on your mind, start there and make sure that those things are separate. But when you’re, I mean, as your studio is bigger and you’re starting to look at, just like you asked about PNLs, I mean…
John Kozicki (48:08.357)
You
Amie Nunez (48:24.631)
most successful studio owners that I’m talking to, they know their P &Ls in and out. They’re very familiar with what’s being tracked in their QuickBooks and they know where improvements need to be made. They’re not surprised when their profit looks a little bit different this year than it did last year because they’ve been tracking it all along. There are some really basic things that we could talk about that just seem to be
common sense and easy, but beginner studio owners might not be thinking of yet. And then the bigger you get, yeah, when you start getting accountants involved and sharing your PNL statements, I think at least quarterly reviewing your financials is an absolute must.
John Kozicki (49:10.763)
Okay, so we’re going to bring it home here, but what was it like for you personally to hand over ownership of your studio and maybe give like one positive one negative?
Amie Nunez (49:29.439)
Mmm.
To be completely honest, it was a really great quality of life shift that we made.
John Kozicki (49:40.175)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (49:40.476)
My husband and I are such, we can be workaholics, especially myself. I threw myself into growing the business and really lost a lot of, I didn’t have work-life balance, that I didn’t even know how to do that. And so for us to make the change of handing it off, and I really trusted, mean, Ensemble was so kind and careful about preserving
our legacy and making sure that my staff was really taken care of. I felt really confident about that. So being able to let go of something that you know just really had had the business did not take a toll on us. The entrepreneurial entrepreneurial lifestyle and us not having work-life balance is what took a toll. So for me to be able to step away from that and have a season of kind of
getting my, getting my, my cortisol, like my, everything kind of balanced back out again was really, really good for me. So I, the first, to answer that part of your question, like being able to step away was a really, really positive thing for us because it allowed us to kind of balance back out and,
John Kozicki (50:44.014)
Ha ha.
Amie Nunez (51:02.461)
I didn’t feel that just it took a little while for that risk that feeling of risk that I just had in the pit of my stomach all the time to be able to let go of that was really really great. I I think that the negative the only negative I could think of John is really it was just hard it was hard to let go and it I really just contradicted myself. Hold on
John Kozicki (51:29.368)
Hahaha
Amie Nunez (51:29.639)
It was easy to let go logistically and emotionally from my role as the owner. What I had a hard time with was just the identity that I had attached to it.
Which is why I kind of brought up that that tortured artist thing because you kind of have some pride in that right? So the suffering there’s some pride in the suffering so to be able to really feel confident that Taking a payout for what I had built the asset that I built I think there was a little bit of Psychologically, it was a little bit hard to go. Okay, like no that was an okay thing to do if it had not been an arts business If I had I don’t know created some Bitcoin company and then sold it I would have felt great but because I was selling something
John Kozicki (51:48.665)
Mm-hmm.
Amie Nunez (52:12.609)
that was about making rock stars and making kids dreams come true. There was a little piece there that felt, we struggled a little bit with, this look like selling out?
A lot of people when we sold called to check on us and they said, are you okay? We thought you were living your dream. Like we thought this was like, are you and your husband okay? Like surely for you to sell means that something bad happened. People just didn’t understand that for us, this was like a really big lift in quality of life shift for us. So the negative was just kind of like learning to really feel confident about the decision that we made. to be honest, Mandy, John, I’m an entrepreneur.
at heart and I still get that little entrepreneurial itch where I go, I need a side hustle. I need something like it’s still there in the back of my mind. And so it has been nice. Like I love working for a bigger company and that that piece of my life has really, really improved. But there’s this little, I don’t know if it’s an angel or a devil on my shoulder that’s like you, you need to make something again. I’m just waiting. I’ll see how long I can stave that voice off.
John Kozicki (52:59.938)
Mm-hmm.
John Kozicki (53:18.083)
Yeah.
Amy, this like the conversation has been great. I it’s funny because I it it really was I think we got across the points of what you do at Ensemble as it relates to valuation and exit strategies, strategies and things like that. But I like that we were able to frame it more from the perspective of you going through that journey.
Because I honestly, I kind of thought we would be talking more about like what you do for ensemble on a day to day basis. And it really kind of came more from a reflection point and which I think is really helpful for other studio owners and those in our situation. Go ahead.
Amie Nunez (54:14.759)
Yeah, this is just really, it’s a really big.
Decision to make for anyone to build something from the ground up and then go where what happens to this? In a life event that changes whether I can continue running it or not when I’m ready to retire If I have to move one day like that, it’s it’s a it’s a big deal And so I love I love talking about my story I nothing is off limits because I I did not have anyone to talk to and I didn’t have a lot of resources and so I I am very
willing to talk about what it was like for me and that’s those are the conversations that I have most of the time if I call a student John just like with you me meeting you at NAMM and saying hey have you ever thought about this even though that you know even though that you weren’t you know jumping at the yes I did I mean it wasn’t like we it was this
John Kozicki (55:00.536)
Yeah.
John Kozicki (55:09.9)
I said no, by the way, for the record.
Amie Nunez (55:11.751)
Yeah, he did say no. For the record, he said no. But it turns into creating and building relationships with other people in the industry so that we can all support each other. That’s what it’s all about is making sure that I felt like I was on an island as a studio owner. And that’s not fun.
Mandy (55:11.817)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (55:30.843)
So the more resources and the more tools that I can provide for other studio owners, the better. That’s what I want. That’s what’s really, really important to me. John, you’re so funny. Yeah. Reading you right now, I will just say this into your audience who’s listening. I got to listen to you speak and it was just, it was very, very educational and really exciting to hear about what you guys are doing with your school. Got me all fired up.
John Kozicki (55:58.18)
Well, thank you, thank you. Well, Amy, this has been fantastic. For studio owners who might want to reach out to you and might want to explore this idea, where can they find you?
Amie Nunez (55:59.616)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (56:12.083)
Yeah, it’s really easy to jump on the Ensemble Schools website and contact me there, but I’ll tell you the easiest way is to just email me. If you email me at amyame.nunez.com, can chat as much as you want. And listen, I talk with studio owners all the time who have no interest in selling. They just want to know.
How does it work? What are my options? again, let’s build a network of people who are really, really educated and have options when the time comes. So even if you just have questions about anything I talked about today but have no interest in selling to Ensemble, hit me up. I’m all for it.
John Kozicki (56:55.972)
That’s awesome. I appreciate that, Amy. So we will wrap this one up then and we’ll see you next time.
Amie Nunez (56:59.165)
Yeah.
Amie Nunez (57:04.391)
Yeah, thank you guys. Thanks, Mandy. Thanks, John.
Mandy (57:06.135)
Thanks Amy, yeah.
