How To Get Away From Selling Time for Money

Now, you might be a music teacher like me or some other service provider who is selling their time for money, and you're feeling like you're in the rat race and you're wondering, how do I get out of this? I'm exhausted. I'm tired of chasing clients. I'm tired of chasing this, that and the other thing. I don't have time for my family, and I could really use a nap, so. I know exactly how you feel. I used to teach, you know, 50, 60 students a week. I was teaching, you know, sometimes until 10 o' clock at night. I was teaching on the weekends. And it's exhausting. It really is exhausting. And, you know, I have more and more people who wanted to fill my schedule, and I was just like, I can't do this. So for me, at the time, I thought the only way to really leverage time and grow a business was to start hiring other people. Okay. And then a few years later, three brick and mortar locations with 26 employees. I realize there's a lot of work. It is a lot of work. And I still have, you know, I still have two of the brick and mortar locations. We lost one during COVID but we still have two of the brick and mortar locations, and we still have a bunch of employees. But I have people to help me now because it's a lot of work. Growing a music school business. So what I did instead was I kind of pivoted into online because once I opened three music school locations, you know, I wasn't working in the business. I didn't have students anymore. I kind of weaned out all my students and I was working on the business. Okay. What happened was I really missed the teaching aspect of it. I really did miss the teaching aspect. And I said, okay, what can I do? What can I do that allows me to fill this passion for teaching, but not have to be locked down to a location that I need to be here Mondays, you know, three to 10, or whatever that time is, because life was getting busy and I needed flexibility in my schedule. So. So I said, I'm going to go online and try this YouTube thing because, you know, I can create content and it will allow me to build a business. And I did that for a number of years and wasn't really getting anywhere. The first two years on YouTube were pretty pitiful. I always tell people, like, I uploaded my first video, and it was one view, and it was probably me just making sure I had uploaded the video correctly. So, you know, I get so many clients who reach out to me, mostly musicians who are like, okay, I, I really want to start phasing out my one on one teaching. I really, like, I'm just getting exhausted. I'm trying to do the group lesson thing and like, I'm just tired and I want more time for myself, I want more time for my family and I feel like I'm chasing my own tail here. It's like the rat race, literally. And I tell teachers like, okay, the best thing that you can do one is to stop overloading yourself with more and more clients. There's only so many people that you can teach in a week and going to groups is a great way to make more money in any type of service. Whether you're a fitness person, whether you're a musician like myself and you're, you know, you're teaching guitar, piano or whatever. If you can teach many to one, you can make more money, but you're still selling your time for money. And that's where people come to me because they're like, I want to stop selling my time for money. And I said, then you need to make a course. All right, we need to make something so that even when people inquire if you're full or you're starting a waiting list, you can sell them a course. You can make money off those people while they're waiting on your waiting list. Or if you can't help them, maybe you're too expensive for them. Then you can say, hey, well I have this mini course. You could go buy that for X number of dollars and still make money off the person. So, so that's a win, win. Now the thing is, once you have a course, it just, it doesn't mean a bunch of people are going to buy it. You have to start creating a brand. And a lot of studio owners that I work with, they, they kind of have a brand around their studio. Even me, I had a brand around, you know, first my private studio and then around my music school. But I didn't really have a good online presence, you know, even with YouTube. Like I said, I uploaded my first video, I got one view. So you get a lot of people who are going on to YouTube and going on to social media thinking they're gonna make tons of money right off the bat. And I just wanna let you know, it doesn't happen that way. Most of the people I've worked with, it takes, you know, usually a couple years for things to get going, for that momentum to start building. But I have worked with some clients who've made great Money online. And they're starting to ask the questions about like the work life balance, being like, I don't have to take all these students, but understand in the beginning you are going to have to maintain that one on one business until you can start transitioning out. I have one client, his name's Cameron and he messages me all the time and he's like, I just replaced one student, like, or I just replaced two students. And so it's cool because like he's making money and he has that long term goal of being like, okay, like I know I'm not going to make like a million dollars today. Maybe over the course of a few years I could do that. But like my goal right now is just to replace one student or my goal is to replace two students and then eventually my goal is can I replace a whole day of teaching? And the more and more you can do that, the more motivating it becomes to work on content. Because that's the hard grind for a lot of content creators is you're putting all this content out, you're editing. I mean, look at this channel here. I think I have 800 subscribers with the release of this video. You know, I'm not, I'm not really killing it here right now, but I understand that I'm creating a new brand, creating a new channel. And that takes time to grow it. Really? Even with all the experience in the world, it takes time to grow a YouTube channel. And anyone who tells you that they can give you some magic pill to grow from zero to a hundred thousand subscribers overnight is really bullshitting you because it takes time. And are there ways to do things a little bit faster? Yeah, you could do stuff with Google Ads. And I have a video up here to show you how you can use Google Ads to, to promote your channel. But if you do it in the wrong way, you could hurt your channel too. So you really, really have to be careful. And there's so many great social media platforms out there to build a brand. There's Instagram, there's TikTok. I, you know, I have one client, drum teacher, he kills it on Instagram and I'm like, dude, like, keep going heavy on Instagram because it's working for you. Like YouTube's working for me. I'm not, I admit I'm not the greatest at Instagram, but I'm getting more and more people now who are talking with me on Instagram and buying courses. So like, I'm building that. But for me, YouTube is still like the biggest. And then My website, okay, So I use YouTube and I use my website to, to find and gain clients. You know, if you're someone who's in that rat race of, you know, selling time for money. Selling time for money. Selling time for money. You need to pivot and make a switch and you have to figure out what game you're going to play. Now the online course business, it takes time. It really does. And if you're looking to save time first, what I would do is if you're teaching one on one, see if you can create some doubles or triples. All right? That's a great way to free up your time and keep making the same amount of money. Okay, so maybe you're doing, maybe I've like usually you do 30 minute lessons. Okay. And maybe you're like, alright, great, I'm going to give you for the same price, going to give you a 45 minute lesson, but you know there's going to be someone else in your class. So now you can kind of blend these people together. You can charge the same price as, you know, two half hours equals an hour. Now you're giving it to 45 minutes. You just save 15 minutes of your time. And again, you can reduce your schedule to free up a day to do content creation. Because even for me it was hard to create that content in the beginning. You know, I was lugging equipment over to my music school and I didn't really have a room to create in. So I was kind of, you know, that was one of the pluses I learned from the beginning, batch recording. So I was batch recording stuff right from the get go just based on my recording studio in availability was I had to do that because I'd have to break everything down because teachers would be coming in in the afternoon and start teaching. And I couldn't have all this equipment set up in, in the teaching space. So once you start weaning down your one on one, you can really focus on creating content. You know, I do admit that I had a benefit that I had already gotten. I had another business that I supported myself. But even in that business I was weaning away from the one on one. So as I got more teachers who were coming in and making more income for the business, I would slowly start dropping a day and I'd be like, okay, drop one day, drop two days, drop three days. So what I'm telling you, even though it's, it's slightly different, you're going from doing one on one, right? To online. I went from one on one to growing a business, which, which took a long time to then going online. Okay, so you're kind of skipping a step. And in full transparency, I wish I didn't start the music school. It was the only way I thought that I could grow in scale of business. And now I realize, like, the more scale, scalable, and better option is, is online. I think it maybe takes a little bit longer in terms of getting things going, but in terms of having flexibility of time, it's definitely, definitely the better option. So if you're someone who is really, really considering going the YouTube option, I'd highly recommend you watch that video over there where I talk about the pros and cons of being a YouTuber. There are some amazing pros, but there are some cons that come along with it. And, and you should know what you're getting into before you dive headfirst into YouTube.