Piano Studios & Scalability
In thinking about the future of our piano studio, the question of scalability comes to the fore. As you may know, scalability in marketing refers to the ability a business has of running smoothly as it grows larger and larger Business analysts will tell you that in order for a business to be scalable, there must be a well thought out plan in place.
As a piano teacher, of course I enjoy teaching for the sake of teaching. But as a business owner, I have to think about things like scalability, growth and sustainability, if I want my business to survive.
This is where we run into dificulties. Because, right now our piano studio isn't scalable. That is, I can take on 3, maybe 4 students, at the most, with how packed my schedule is. As it stands, this part of the business is not scalable; it cannot grow beyond a certain point.
So, I have tried to create scalability over the past two years, but have not yet been successful. One idea was to be more of a manager of teachers. I would refer interested students in my area to available teachers in the area. The studio would profit on the exchange, acting as a sort of "piano teacher brokerage firm" for other nearby studios. Our job would not be to do the teaching, but rather to manage the relationship between the teacher and the student.
It sounded good in theory, but hasn't panned out in practice. The main reason is that we just don't receive enough inquiries to supply teachers with enough students to keep the teachers interested. Launching such an aggressive, far-reaching marketing campaign would require more time and resources than we have at our disposal, at the moment.
Additionally, the plan fails because of the location factor. Often I would have an interested student in one city, but an available teacher only in a distant city. Or, vice versa. We could never quite match up the student and teacher in the same area.
Moreover, most of the teachers with whom we worked did not want to accept only one or two new students at a time. Instead, they wanted a handful at a time. This compounds the location problem. Think about how difficult it is to get 5 interested students, all at the same time, all in the same city!
Not to mention, finding good teachers is harder than you may think. And you not only have to find them, you have to interview them, do background checks, check references. You have to advertise, correspond, answer questions. This just became too time-consuming for me. So, then I'd have to hire someone to do this, which is an additional expense. As a small business, we don't have an HR dept. to handle all this!
So, this is the problem, one of scalability. Any thoughts out there on how we can solve this problem?
2 Comments:
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Well, months later, the vision has become reality. The Barbara Ehrlich Piano Studio has grown immensely since November 2009 and is thriving. Barbara is doing a superb job and is making quite a namw for her studio in Somerset County.
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