Lauren Bateman walks through opening your first teaching space, from converting a spare bedroom to renting church rooms to a full commercial location. Start at home if you can, she says. Wait until you have around 50 steady students before committing to commercial rent.
Hey guys, welcome back. In this video, we're going to talk about your first teaching space and what that might consist of and how you might go about finding that. So some of you are going to be lucky. You're going to have a space in your house. So I was fortunate enough. I had a two bedroom apartment and my second bedroom was pretty much an office and a practice space for my band at the time. So I turned that into a teaching space. And I wish I had a picture of this because it was, it looked like five tornadoes had gone through it, a monsoon and, and whatever else, I mean, it was the worst. It was horrible. So if you think, you know, you don't have a good teaching space. Mine was probably like disgusting because I had a litter box like out in the hall for my cat. I, I had a dog that I had inherited from a family member that was like pissing all over my apartment. So it was like not a good setup to begin with. But I was still able to be successful in that environment, which is very interesting. So what I would recommend now, knowing what I know now in retrospect, I would recommend getting a place that is nice and clean. It doesn't have to be over the top. Cleanliness is super important. That's something I didn't understand when I was in my 20s, but cleanliness is very important, especially if you're catering to moms and kids. Like, if a mom comes in your house and your house is disgusting, they're probably not gonna let their kid take lessons there because, you know, there's stigmas out in the world today. You know, we live in a very dangerous world. So we want people to come to, if it's our home, we want them to come to a space where they feel safe, they feel welcome, and it's clean. Now say you don't have a spare bedroom. And if you do have a spare bedroom and you're going to teach out of it, do not have a bed in the room that you teach out of for the same reasons I just spoke about. If you're teaching kids or, you know, if you're a male teacher and you're teaching female, that would be very uncomfortable to teach in a room where you have a bed. So I would not recommend that. If you have a futon, that's okay as long as it's up in the futon position. But you should have a room that is dedicated to teaching. So this could be a living room. This could be a living room. I would recommend, like, if you have a coffee table to Maybe take it out of the room for your lessons to minimize the fact that you're in a, in a living room and keep it as clean as possible and make sure you have the right equipment and the right tools there. You know, you can, the technology is really big today. So if you have a TV in your living room and you have a laptop, you can get an HDMI cable and plug that in so people can see that you're being interactive using your tv. So now your TV becomes part, it's not part of the living room, it becomes part of the studio that you're teaching out of. So it becomes more of like a teaching prop as opposed to the fact that your coach is there and you're watching tv. So I would minimize the living room space as much as possible. Probably, if possible, take down personal photos and maybe put up some more music related photos. What I did, very simple way to decorate is I bought, I went to like Goodwill stores or, you know, those types of discount stores. And I would buy old albums and I would buy album frames and I would just hang those up on the wall because it was something that was cheap. I mean, I could buy albums for like one or two dollars, these picture frames, like five bucks. And I would just hang these albums up on the wall and I would have a bunch of cool looking.
I was gonna say cool looking decorations on the wall that were music related. So that's what I recommend for a teaching space. Now if you're saying, Lauren, I don't really have a good living room, I have a roommate or I'm still living with my parents and I don't really have a good space. So at that point you might wanna look into renting a room from either maybe a community center. You could ask a church if you could rent a room. Some churches have spare spaces in like rectories or something where you might be able to rent a room maybe two or three days a week and you can do that, or maybe there's a community center in your town that you can rent a room, you know, again, one or two days a week just to get you started. And there are some, you know, music facilities there. Are you, you could go start teaching at a music school to get students. And there's some places that you might, you know, there's some music facilities where you can rent a room to teach, you can get students through their facility, but you can also rent a room through one of those teaching facilities. So those are kind of your options for starting a new kind of business enterprise. I wouldn't go out right away and get a full blown commercial location. I didn't get my first commercial space until I have been teaching for a couple years and we built up maybe like 50 or so students. So I had some cash flow in the business to pay for the rent. Because that's the hard thing with getting into a big commercial space is you have rent, you have overhead, you have bills to pay. Whereas if you do this out of your house, you can actually save a lot of money. But you can also get some tax write offs by working out of your house too, which actually helps you save money. I'm not going to talk about that in this video. I would recommend getting an accountant and talking to them about that, about a home business and the things that you can write off in your business to kind of save you some money. So those are our avenues. Either we're using a spare bedroom or an office in a house or apartment that we have. You're using your living room, if you have a living room, and clearing it out so that it's very minimalized and looks more like a teaching space rather than a living room. And then you also could go and rent a room from a community center or from a church. You might be able to do that locally. And then the last one is to either teach at a music school or find some kind of music school like facility that rents rooms to teachers. Those are kind of your options for getting started in the space. So see what works best for you in your living situation and then go from there.
