How to Set Up a Guitar-Teaching Business Destined for Success

Teaching the guitar can be a great way to spread the art, boost your portfolio as a musician, and make some money while you’re at it. If you think you’ve got great guitar skills, passion for music and want to make a living out what you love doing the most, teaching is most definitely something you should look into!

But the simple fact is that you might be a great guitar player, however it is not as easy to be a great guitar teacher. Here are a few tips and pointers on how you can set up a successful guitar-teaching business from the ground-up, and become a great guitar teacher in the process:

1. Gear

So you’re serious about teaching the guitar, and getting your guitar teaching business up. One of the first things you can do to start off on the right foot is getting your guitar gear in order – and avoid wasting time, money and energy.

Apart from the obvious, such as your guitar(s), cables and amp(s) and checking to see if they work, you’ll need a powerful computer (a laptop, perhaps?) hooked up to a high-speed broadband internet connection. You and your students will need access to download and stream audio files, as well as access tab-sheets, for instance.

You’ll also need to hook up your system with a professional sound system if you haven’t done so already. Look for professional-grade system made by the likes of Harman/Kardon, BOSE, or JBL.

I also recommend getting a few cheap acoustic and electric guitars (perhaps from a flea market, your local pawn shop, or a garage sale) as backup instruments. And speaking of spares, I would also suggest getting a set of spare cables, as well as guitar strings and picks. Trust me, getting stranded in the middle of a teaching session just because your strings broke and you don’t have any spares will make you look extremely unprofessional!

2. Teaching Space (Studio)

This is as important as the first point above; having a proper, professional studio space where you take your classes is essential. A professional-looking space will project a professional image of you, whereas a messy, cluttered, small, unorganized and a shabby looking place will quite obviously not do a very good job of making you look good, will it.

As far as a studio is concerned, you have a few choices here:

(i) Rent out a studio space somewhere, big enough for a few students.

(ii) Set a small home-office inside your home/apartment as a studio for taking classes.

In either one of those cases, make sure your studio projects a good, professional image of you; people will judge you based on how your office looks. In addition, I would also suggest setting up a video camera to record all sessions – with the consent of your students of course. Doing so will not only allow you to cover your ass (especially if you have students coming to your place alone) and protect yourself against, say, an inappropriate behavior complaint, it will also allow you to share the footage with your students so that they can review it at any time, and point out any mistakes with their technique, for instance.

(N/B: It is important to know that you also have the option to teach the guitar at your students’ homes: Personally, I would not advise doing this. You’ll end up wasting a ton of your time on road and will probably waste a lot of money on gas in the process.)

3. Class Management System

Once again, your guitar teaching business is a business. Which means that it will have two distinct component: teaching, and all other business-related tasks.

When your teaching business finally takes off, you’ll want to concentrate on the actually delivering the lessons, and would definitely want to automate (or outsource) all other business-related tasks.

Use a lessons management system (such as this one here or here) to automate many of the different aspects involved in the management of your business (such as payments, more below). Programs such as these automate and take care of a lot of business-related tasks for you so you can concentrate on the actual lesson delivery itself. A quick Google search will yield tons of results on many different classroom/lesson management systems, so you can choose whichever suits your needs the best.

Use Microsoft Excel, or your chosen lesson management system to keep a track of payments, generate bills and invoices, sending out automated emails, and other such administrative tasks.

4. Publicity and Promotion

This is one aspect of your business your lessons/class management system won’t be able to for you. And for many teachers, this might be the toughest one as well!

The objective is simple: you have to get the word out and start getting students. Offer an incentive to draw people in: free lessons for 2 months to the first 10 students who sign up.

Use any and all free resources to advertise your business: your blog, social profiles, online forums, etc. Apart from free, get flyers printed and have them put up at your local college campus, in and around your neighborhood, and the like. Have someone design your flyers/brochures – name and address of business, a bit of description, the location, and some contact information. Get a soft-copy of this as well, so that you can attach it with emails and put it up on your website.

Advertise on your Youtube channel (or make a Youtube channel for yourself if you don’t have one already). Pay someone to get a basic Wordpress-based website made for you (online presence and online publicity is essential!).

Remember, growing your business is perhaps one of the most important (if not the most important) aspects of your business, directly related to its success or failure.

5. The Lessons

This is a tricky one. For students looking to learn a particular skill, or improve or work upon a technique, for instance, it might be a good idea to take individual classes. In such a case, book back-to-back lessons (it is good if your students see you teaching other students).

If for instance, you get a few students wanting to learn how to play the guitar, or work on a particular skill, it will most definitely be better to group them into one single class. You could even offer a class-discount to students, the more students in a class, the less each student has to pay.

It might also be a good idea to offer something like a ‘distant learning program’ to students willing to learn the guitar from you, but are geographically far away. Skype-based lessons are gaining popularity, and it might be a good idea to look into offering lessons to students from other parts of the country, or even international students!

6. Payments

Be very strict about this, your guitar teaching business is precisely that: a business. Businesses have strict rules about payments, and therefore you need to have stringent payment policies.

You can offer a couple of trial lessons to new students, but the first thing you should do is make it a policy for having students – new and old – to pay for all lessons in advance. What you could do is divide lessons according to proficiency, style, skills, or songs (like many online guitar learning websites do), and offer lessons as packages – where the more lessons a student buys, the bigger the discount he gets. In addition, use your classroom management system to send out an automated email whenever a student reaches his package limit.

A cancellation policy should also be an essential part of your payment and lessons policy. Provide students with free ‘trial’ lessons, and something like a 3-day/72-hour opt-out time period.

Draft a lesson-policy of sorts by putting all this information on paper, and hand a copy of this ‘contract’ to all new students for them to sign it. This allows you to cover all your bases, while projecting a professional image of yourself in the process. Remember, if you take the business aspects of your teaching seriously, so will your students.

Good luck! And do leave us your feedback in the comments.