How to Start a Music Academy (Business Design II)

I’ll teach you how to start a music academy or whatever your specialty is. And I do it by designing your business model with the support of the canvas model and explaining it to you step by step!

This is part two of our series on building an academy that we started in the following article: Setting Up an Academy Design with Canvas!

There we learned to give value to our proposal. We did this to differentiate ourselves from the competition and increase the likelihood of success. Watch as we begin to fill our canvas:

This series will help you regardless of your academy. We titled the article “How to start a music academy” because we decided to take music classes as an example, but you choose the specialty of your academy.

So I invite you to watch the first part above so that we can continue building our business.

How to start a music academy (canvas model).

In the first article, we learned how to create a value proposition. However, a proposal alone will not bear fruit. It’s as if we have a bait and not a fish, so we will meet those fish, that is, who will be our customers!

Step 2: Customer Segmentation Get ready to win customers!

When we open a business, we (almost always) want to make money, and for this we need clients, so we despair and try to apply like that!

The most important thing is that in this series how to start a music academy we will learn that this is a big mistake… First we have to know our customers and then promote ourselves.

It’s like going fishing and not knowing what kind of fish your target is. What is happening? You can catch something that doesn’t suit you, losing effort and money in the process.

So I ask you to accompany me in this step and to describe the profile that a person must have to become our client.

Customer segmentation of a music college.

We will work with people between the ages of 7 and 40. But these are not our customers, they are our students!

Do we offer lessons to a child? Of course not, we have to convince the parents, most of the children don’t like to watch the lessons at all.

Then we use age, purchasing power, location and person type as criteria for segmentation. Oh, and we can’t forget the parenting profession, you’ll know why! See how the segmentation would look like:

• People between 15 and 40 years.
• Parents of children aged 7 to 15 years.
• Location: our city and nearby places (it’s almost impossible for someone from a distant city to come just for our services).
• Type of person: Educated people. Eye! it has nothing to do with whether the person has money or not. Education is not measured by the amount of money. According to the criteria, we look at educated people because they most want their children to be educated and specialize in something.
• Profession of parents: office jobs that take up time to share with their children. People who have busy jobs don’t usually share with their children, so they send them to other activities to distract themselves, such as watching classes at academies.

Anything else…

Although we have already considered location in terms of distance, we can also take it in terms of the type of place.

For example city or country? People who live in the country are not very comfortable for us, children have other distractions and they have many spaces to distract themselves.

His parents don’t care if they send him to an academy. However, those in the city do so because they do not want their children to face various dangers such as kidnapping on the street.

So we’re targeting parents who live in the city

On the other hand, we have chosen 7 as the minimum age because it is the most recommended age music point. If we capture this in our canvas mockup, it would look like this:

Step 3: Distribution channels – contacting the customer.

At the moment we have a good value proposition and we know the qualities that our customers should have. It is time to work on the connection of these two elements, ie the means or distribution channels!

We have to describe What means do we use so that people with the characteristics of our customers know our academy?

Are you still interested in how to start a conservatoire? check out our channels:

Physical and conventional channels.

We pay for spots on local radio and television. Nothing special! but also consider the following:

Organize visits to promote the Academy with your city’s educational institutions (schools, high schools, universities).

Some kind of festival or mini-concert can be organized to encourage young people to study music.

In these institutions we find a great potential of people for music.

For this purpose we can also organize concerts in the city. There’s nothing better for promoting ourselves than showing what we’ve got.

If you pay attention, it is a strategy that never dies, because you would organize the concert with your own students to achieve:

• Encourage your students to keep going because they will see their teaching bearing fruit, so much so that they are already performing publicly!
• You will attract public attention where there may be parents interested in their children being educated in your academy as well as young people interested.

online channels.

We will create an account on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. There we broadcast videos from our concerts and simple tutorials on how to play a musical instrument or sing.

This will show that we understand our work and will encourage more people to attend our academy.

We can also create a blog and share basic courses, music tips, etc., which is of great value for people with the profile of the client we are looking for. We have to position ourselves very well on Google to get more exposure.

We can pay for ad campaigns, look for fan sites and Facebook groups with an audience in our area, and pay to have them promote us.

If your academy isn’t music, you can…

…use the same physical and conventional media with the exception of concerts. You could replace this with visits and basic and free courses in institutions, English courses, computer science, dance, etc.

With online media, you can do the same thing, only the content you share varies. Instead of teaching concerts and music classes, you can make tutorials your specialty.

Look how we’re progressing!

Step 4: Customer relationship – Loyal customers.

[Tweet “Un cliente fiel nace de una buena relación #HazloFácil”]

With what we have designed so far we can say that we have the tools for clients to come to our academy.

However, an entrepreneur who really knows how to start a conservatoire is not satisfied!

And the thing is, we don’t do anything about winning a customer and then leaving. We need loyal customers! and for that we need to develop strategies to maintain a good relationship with the customer.

Relationship with the client in a dance academy:

The first thing that needs to be clear is that we need to offer quality courses and deliver on our value proposition.

Upon registration and the start of the academic period, the student will receive a schedule of all activities and a guide with all of the classes that will be taught. This way it will be found and, if you wish, you can read it in advance in order to come prepared to class.

As we mentioned earlier, we will be offering free tools to use within the academy for those who don’t have one.

Keep in mind that we will be working on a broad schedule. This makes it easier for the customer to customize.

Pre-announced concerts are presented to students to show what they have learned. In order to strengthen our relations, we will secure the first places for two of the student’s relatives.

This is even more important when we work with children, so we involve their parents who decide whether their child stays in our academy or not.

With children, meetings are held with the parents from time to time to keep them informed of their client’s learning process.

At the end of each lesson or module we give the customer a satisfaction form to find out how our work was for them. This way we will know more easily that we need to improve.

What’s next now?

We’ve come a long way in this article. We went from pure value proposition to segmenting customers, setting up the channels to reach them, outlining strategies for improving our relationship with customers and retaining them!

But that’s not all, and in our third and final part on starting a music academy (business design) we will learn how to:

• Describe sources of income.
• What are our main resources and activities?
• Who are our partners?
• Design our cost structure.

I’m waiting for you in the third part! Click on the link: Building a Music Academy (Business Design III).

For details, I leave you a recommended reading: Service Companies with the Canvas Model + Examples.

Thank you for reading us.

Until next time!