Mason Music

Describe how Opus1 has helped you better manage and grow your school?

Park Butterworth: Opus1 has been a complete game changer for us here at Mason Music. We went from managing our leads, our customers, our teachers’ experience in multiple softwares, multiple systems and spreadsheets to one single system, which is Opus. Our prospects populate directly from our Opus hosted intake form. Right into our Opus Prospect pipeline, allowing us to follow up with them very intentionally, individually, and even automatically through their automated campaigns. Overall, I would say we have more control over the quality of the student, customer, teacher, and ultimately the administrative or operations experience of just running the business. Beyond this, I would say that the relationships that we’ve formed with other schools who use the software platform have been extremely invaluable. They have been so open with their systems, their processes, their staffing, the way that they do things, and it’s been really insightful for our business as we’ve learned to grow in scale using a lot of their similar ideas. So I really cannot describe in enough detail how great Opus has been for us.

What would you tell someone who is thinking about trying Opus1?

Park Butterworth: If you’re thinking about making the change to Opus, you absolutely should. There’s no time like the present. Sure, changing systems, changing softwares is a massive undertaking. There’s no two ways around that. This challenge often gets more difficult as you grow. So there’s no time like the present. Ask yourself if you would rather deal with the short-term pain of making that migration to the Opus platform or dealing with the long-term consistent pain of continuing to encounter the same headaches, the same challenges, the same empty promises that your current software system gives you. It is worth it. Take the plunge. Here are my words. Opus offers a white glove implementation. They’re going to guide you and your leadership team, your operations team through the process. They’ll help you set up your settings, move your customer information, add your teaching staff, help you migrate your your backend payment processing, so much more. They were even open to our team’s feedback about the migration process and are constantly working to improve that and the software. Ultimately, I would say that Opus is a software specifically designed for music schools. This means they understand your challenges, they understand your customers, they know who you’re serving. They know the people that work for you, your employees. You’re not having to mold or craft a more generalized scheduling software solution to your needs and deal with all the headaches that that provides. So with Opus, you’re not just another subscriber, another transaction on their books, you and your business are a valued partner helping serve one another as both of you grow.

What did you use before Opus1 and what’s better about Opus1?

Park Butterworth: Prior to using Opus One, we used a plethora of different software systems. Our business originally launched simply using Google Calendar, Google Workspace, and Square for scheduling and billing. Around 6 years after the business launch, we did transition to using Teacher Zone. Teacher Zone truly was a significant step forward in our ability to lead and manage our business. It brought a lot of different features to the table that were very impactful for us. However, as a music school with 5 locations here in our local market and growing, we found many of Teacher Zone’s frustrations and, and limitations very frustrating. The limitations, the lack of fidelity and reporting, the duplicative management of our staff across different teaching locations, um, it’s very, very challenging, and all these changes spurred us to make a change in the spring of 2024. Simply put, Opus is just better in every single way. I mean, from the speed of the software, the nuance, the level of control we can have over the granular micro details of the system, it’s just super impactful. Sure, Opus has limitations. There’s no way to sugarcoat that, but I’ve seen countless times just in the past year where the barriers that we’ve encountered, or issues that we’ve encountered within Opus1 have been addressed by their team. We have been consistently solicited for our feedback on their system, and we’ve seen that feedback implemented into the software. And in my perspective, that feedback loop builds so much trust between our business and Opus1. It truly feels exciting to be a part of the Opus ecosystem at this time and watch both of our businesses grow together. Um, it genuinely feels like the, like Opus continues to grow and adapt to meet our ever-changing needs as a unique business and I know they’re going to do the same for you.