How To Greatly Expand Your Guitar Teaching Business By Avoding The Most Common Mistakes Guitar Teachers Usually Make

Do you face difficulties attracting and retaining guitar students who will stay with you for years? Are you struggling to consistently create advanced guitar students who are satisfied with their musical abilities? Do you desire and deserve to earn more money from teaching guitar?

Many guitar teachers would agree with at least one of these questions. I used to struggle with the same challenges when I first started teaching guitar. I had a limited number of students and found it challenging to make a living from teaching guitar. My biggest challenges were getting consistent results with different types of students, having reliable systems in place for attracting more students and keeping my existing students from quitting before achieving their musical goals. I also couldn’t see an effective way to grow my income beyond increasing the number of hours I taught or raising my lesson rates to high levels.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much help from anyone on how to change my situation. Although there were some great musicians teaching guitar in my area, few had a thriving guitar teaching business that guaranteed efficient, effective, and consistent results for students and financial success for the guitar instructor.

It became clear to me that following the traditional approaches to teaching guitar was not going to bring me the results I was after. It took a long time of studying successful business people outside of music, along with a lot of trial and error, before I finally started to understand why my earlier attempts to become successful teaching guitar were so ineffective. Eventually, I realized what I needed to change in my approach before I could begin a very successful guitar teaching business.

In this article, I will describe some of the most serious mistakes you need to avoid in your guitar teaching business and provide you with useful information on how to do so.

Note: This post focuses specifically on how to improve the business side of guitar teaching. The “teaching side” of the teaching business will be discussed in a future guitar teaching post.

Before you continue reading the rest of the post, I would like you to take a special test to evaluate your level of readiness for becoming the most successful guitar teacher in your area.

The most important thing for a guitar teacher is the results that their students achieve. If you consistently produce good guitar players, your positive reputation will spread and referrals will come to you. Therefore, if your business is not growing as fast as you want it to, you should ask yourself how effective you are at getting results with your students. If your students are not happy with the results they are getting, you should take a closer look at your teaching techniques and figure out how to teach more effectively and add more value to your students’ lives. One way to improve as a teacher is to take classes with the most successful guitar teacher you can find and learn how to teach better.
Many guitar teachers get so caught up in teaching that they don’t actively work to expand and grow their business. As a result, they end up owning a job rather than a business. While your guitar teaching business can grow on its own to some extent, it will grow much faster if you invest time each week into things that can accelerate its growth, such as marketing, analyzing and improving your teaching methods and business models, creating referral programs, joint ventures, and partnerships. By being proactive and planning how you want your business to grow in the next 3, 6, and 12 months, you will see many positive results.
The best way to distinguish yourself from your competition is to not have any. This may seem impossible since there are likely many guitar teachers in your area, but one effective way to make all competition irrelevant is to offer something that no other guitar teacher in your area does. This could be a variety of teaching models or innovative ways of overcoming objections from potential students. For example, many guitar teachers can only attract students who live close to their studio, but by creating resources for students to study during their commute, you can attract students who live further away.
Many guitar teachers only know how to grow their business linearly, which limits their overall growth and the number of people they can help. By focusing on multiple areas of your business, such as keeping your current students longer, establishing joint ventures with music shops, and converting a high percentage of prospects into students, you can achieve geometric growth. Taking advertising classes and thinking of unconventional ways to attract students can also greatly increase the effectiveness of your efforts. The most important thing is to provide clear proof of your success with previous students and back up every claim you make.

Manuel Marino

Manuel Marino is a seasoned Senior Producer, Music Composer, and Artist with over a decade of experience. He specializes in branded entertainment across various mediums, including video games, films, and advertising campaigns. With 20+ years as a game music composer, Manuel has worked on numerous platforms, creating diverse orchestral soundtracks. HIRE ME