Trying to keep a small business afloat.
Keeping everybody happy.
This article takes a look at the good and the bad parts of being a private music teacher, and the struggles to keep everyone happy.
I started teaching guitar lessons sometime around 1996. I was working part time at the airport, making part time money. I struggled with my bills, so I decided that I would take my buddy Mike's advice and try doing a few lessons on the side, at the music store where he was also teaching. I knew nothing about starting my own business or what to expect. I had always worked jobs with a steady paycheck.
I left the airport in February 1997, and decided to do lessons as my main source of income. I hadn't really thought about doing the math, but I would soon learn about the perpetual instability in income of being a musician and a private instructor.
I loved the teaching part. It came very easy to me. I learned how to teach by literally meeting new students and finding out what they wanted to learn. All I had to go on was my experience as a musician since high school.
Teaching beginner students meant that I would never really to deal with advanced students. I took on a few intermediate students, but I never really ran into any problems with students not being satisfied with what they were learning from me. I purchased many music theory books and studied them as much as I could. Again, this was the easy part for me because I really enjoyed playing guitar with my students. My biggest problem was me making enough money to support myself.
At the end of 1997, I had to make a choice to move in with a band mate/friend of mine and split the rent with him at his apartment. I needed to share expenses so I could hopefully catch up financially. In 1998, my roommate and I moved into a nicer apartment with more room. I built up a good roster of students, but still I found myself living on credit cards. Our lease was up at the end of the year. I was still barely getting by. He moved out to the coast with his then girlfriend, and I moved back to the apartment complex where I lived before moving in with him.
Luckily, I was able to move back to that apartment complex without any hassles. In fact, I won a six-months free-rent raffle. I was friends with the manager at the time, and I found out many years later that he had purposely stuffed the ballot box to make sure that I would win. I guess, it was his way of trying to help me out.
Ultimately, after going back to the airport one more time to try and work a part time job for two weeks, I had to file for bankruptcy. It was a very low point in my career and in my life. It was also a second chance for me to start over and get back on my feet. For the next few years, I did okay. I didn't have a cloud of debt hanging over my head, and with access to the internet becoming a reality for the masses.
I got my first computer in 1999, and began to advertise online. I was scheduling more in-home lessons than I was at the music store. Sometime around 2001, the music store was purchased by a chain corporation and management no longer saw fit to have music teachers in their store. I had to find another place to teach.
I ended up sharing a small room with Mike at our lead singers’ church in West Orlando. This was ideal for me because I could schedule a handful of students there during the week and do all in-house lessons on the weekends. Over the next several years, I tried different options that included working at a music school and being part of a brand new music teaching software development company for the blind. Both of those companies ultimately failed.
I was on my own to do all in-house lessons. It gave me the freedom to schedule lessons that made more sense logistically. I could charge more money to go to the homes of my students. Throughout the next several years, things were fairly steady. In 2009, I designed my first customized website. I learned the do's and dont's about online marketing with Google adwords. I was somehow managing to keep my business afloat. Then, I began to have more and more problems with my aging vehicle.
I needed a new, more reliable car. On January 1, 2014, I got my newer car. I signed my life away and agreed to pay nearly $200/month for the next seven years. I was just happy to have a nice car that I could rely on. 2014 would become one of my best years ever. I had upwards of about 20 students scheduled each week. I was making great money and paying all of my bills on time. I had food in my refrigerator and money in my pocket. Then for reasons I have never fully understood, I began to lose students. They either gave up and quit or simply decided to habitually cancel their lessons.
I did everything I could to get and keep anybody scheduled. I dropped my rates, offered free lessons, scheduled early morning and late night lessons, but nothing seemed to work. Just like that, I was poor again. I couldn't pay my rent or my bills. I had almost no food to eat. I had to beg family and friends on social media to help me out with a few dollars. Everyone had suggestions on how to fix my problems, but none of them were practical or useful. Then one morning I discovered that after missing three payments in a row, my car had been repossessed.
I got my car back the very next day, after paying all of the back debts. It seemed as though, no matter what I did to try to keep a roster of students, I would start one new student and lose two. In the Spring of 2017, I was down to four students a week. I had no choice but to get a job and walk away from teaching for the first time in 20 years.
Between 2017 and 2021, my life had taken on many new chapters in challenges. I went back and got a part time job at the airport. It didn't pay very well, so I got a better job that did. I worked everyday. I was always on time, and I never called out sick. I was promoted within nine months to a sub-supervisor position. Everything was finally going well for me again. Then on March 6, 2019, I collapsed at work and ended up in the hospital for two weeks.
2019 turned out to be a very dramatic milestone in my life. I lost everything. I had to literally start completely over and try to climb up from the bottom of the deepest well. In January 2020, I got my job back and went back to work. The plandemic began one month after my return to Florida. Any idealistic dreams I had about climbing the ladder into management were shattered and immediately met with my own health concerns from my collapse along with the inevitable changing of contracts and the inept management from my new employer. I needed to change my life to something that wouldn't kill me.
In August 2021, I quit that job and went back to teaching guitar lessons. It was an easy decision for me. It no longer made sense to me to risk my health and well being for a job that would replace me tomorrow. I wanted to do something with my life that made me happy and gave me purpose. When you live to tell the story of surviving a stroke and a heart attack, everything about your perspectives in life changes dramatically. My priorities changed because I had truly come face to face with my own mortality.
I love teaching music. I am good at it. It is the longest career I have ever had in my entire life. The nature of instabilities and the realities of what I do haven't changed much. Not only do I have to deal with the occasional weekly cancellations from students, I now face daily perpetual health issues that sometimes force me to have to cancel an entire day of lessons too.
Most of my students don't really have too much of a problem with this because I have explained to most of them about my health issues. Most of them have been very understanding with me as I try to get my life back on track.
But, not everyone is as understanding as I'd like them to be. I can't count on everyone else to think the way I do about being kind to everyone, regardless of their circumstances or battles they are fighting. Some people can be very self-important and much less than understanding. If I have to deal with one out of a dozen people who feel the need to tell me vent their frustrations towards me, then I have to try to remember the perspectives of the balances of the good and bad things about teaching.
For me to think that I will make everybody happy with what I do, would be idealistic and naive. I'm almost 60 years old. I've lived long enough to know that you cannot please everyone, no matter what you do. This too shall pass until the next time when I will have to deal with someone who isn't happy with the way I do things. Ultimately, it beats working for a meaningless, tedious, mind-numbing job. The bills keep piling up, everything will always get more and more expensive, and trying to earn a meager living as a music teacher will always be a struggle. I love what I do because I know that I am making a difference in the lives of my students. I have my purpose in life and I'm good at it.
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