Premium Pricing, Strong Retention, and the In-Home Advantage — Nicole Kovar on Building Piano & More

David Martin (00:33.464)
Well, Nicole Kovar, welcome to the show. So happy to have you on here and get a chance to talk to you today.

Nicole Kovar (00:41.606)
Thank you, David. I’m really excited and just happy to be here.

David Martin (00:46.91)
Awesome, awesome. So you’re the founder and executive director of Piano and More, a Northern Virginia based music education organization offering in-home private lessons in piano, guitar, and voice. And you’re also the creator of the nonprofit program called Play It Forward, great name by the way, which partners with schools to provide free piano lessons, keyboards, and musical resources to low income students who otherwise may not have access to music education.

You also host a Facebook group called In-Home Music Studio Teachers and Owners. So people just need to go there, request to join any in-home music educators. This is a great, sounds like a great resource where you’re educating and you’re creating a community and a network.

Nicole Kovar (01:29.947)
Yes.

Nicole Kovar (01:36.59)
Yes, definitely. There’s always like discussions happening. I’ve even done like lives and given away free resources. So it’s a good community because and it’s a needed community because teaching in-home lessons, it’s a niche within a niche. So it’s good to kind of network and meet others.

David Martin (01:56.844)
Yeah, yeah, so, you know, tell me about piano and more. Like, how did you sort of get into being a business owner? Did you start as a teacher? Yeah, tell me a little bit about that.

Nicole Kovar (02:12.988)
Yeah, I like to say it happened accidentally. I think a lot of us, like the more music studio owners I talked to, I noticed a lot of us didn’t really plan to operate, to manage, own a music school. So yeah, it just kind of came naturally. I love music. I did it as a side hustle after my full-time job when I graduated from a grad school and

I quickly built up my own waitlist and in fact it was the moms on that waitlist that pushed me to, they gave me that confidence to go out there and hire another music teacher because they really liked my approach, the way I taught and the different perspective I had. So they were like, if you would just teach other teachers to teach this way, which was basically like, let’s make it fun.

make it more enjoyable. Like we don’t have to fit everybody into this box that music often seems to be in. So yeah, I just, I got that confidence. hired two teachers and suddenly it filled up their schedules and it just kept rolling and rolling. And here we are today.

David Martin (03:32.61)
Now, what’s your main instrument?

Nicole Kovar (03:35.769)
It’s piano.

David Martin (03:37.08)
So piano is your main instrument. When did you, and you were teaching piano or do you also teach other instruments?

Nicole Kovar (03:39.323)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (03:45.757)
I taught all three actually. I did a little bit of guitar and voice as well, but my primary instrument was definitely piano.

David Martin (03:47.829)
Okay.

David Martin (03:56.392)
Okay, okay. Hence the name piano and more that that makes sense. So you started off just going in home like you didn’t even you didn’t even have students coming to you even from the beginning.

Nicole Kovar (03:59.856)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (04:08.412)
No, I’ve never had a student come to me. I’ve always traveled.

David Martin (04:12.238)
So how did you come up with that? I mean, the traditional model, as we know, is like, you have your little piano in the corner and you’re having kids come by the house in the living room or whatever, and you’re teaching lessons. So why did you, from the very beginning, decide to do it a different way?

Nicole Kovar (04:24.188)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (04:32.888)
Yeah, I do know like traditionally even I when I grew up I went to my music teacher’s house and I learned in her home. Yeah, so I know whenever I say I’m an in-home music teacher most people like or not most but sometimes there’s this confusion like is it the teacher’s home or is it my home because I know that’s part of the culture. But I had just finished grad school.

David Martin (04:40.611)
Right? Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (04:58.172)
And living in Northern Virginia, it’s extremely expensive here. So I had like two roommates and I didn’t want to deal with bringing, you know, my professional, I didn’t want to bring my professional work to a shared household. So from the beginning, it had to be like I was going to come to them. And yeah, and there’s such a huge demand for it. It really wasn’t that hard to fill up my schedule.

I think a lot of people that when they play around with offering in-home services, in-home music lessons, like filling up schedules is not the hard part, at least in my experience here in my area. What they eventually run into is managing as the hard part for in-home lessons, maybe a little bit harder than even a music school. At least that’s kind of what I picked up throughout the years.

So that, yeah, I feel like there is a low barrier to entry when it comes to in-home music lessons. And it was just easy. I didn’t have a lot and the demand was high. So I was just like, why not? Why not do this?

David Martin (06:15.628)
Did you find that, I mean, I guess the obvious advantage to it is that, mom picks up kids from school and doesn’t have to run all around town, dropping them off at swimming and all those things. And then just another stop along the way. mean, yeah, I guess she has to do that either way, but like not just, that’s not just another stop along the way. They can just be home and you come to them. So it’s very convenient. So would you say that’s like,

Nicole Kovar (06:30.523)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (06:40.251)
Yeah.

David Martin (06:43.96)
when you’re talking to parents and it’s kind of like your pitch, is that usually the lever that they’re most excited about? Just the fact that it’s convenient that you’re coming to them?

Nicole Kovar (06:55.416)
Yeah, 100%. That’s huge for this area. I think for most cities now, multiple kids, especially if you have more than one child, your child usually is in multiple activities. what I’ve learned, especially like I did this for eight years, sorry, eight years, I taught in-home lessons for eight years. So I directly saw their lives and I see them every single week, right, for years. So

I actually got to see what their life looked like at home. And it really is a hustle and bustle, especially in that after school time. Like they’re trying to do homework. They’re trying to figure out dinner. They have two or three kids coming in out, soccer practice, ballet, piano lessons. Like there really was a constant shuffle in these households. And I even got to see like the moms and like get to know them a lot more, right? Because I’m already there.

talking with them and it is their safe space. So they share a lot more and absolutely it was like they were, it was just a relief. It was such a relief for them to be like, wow, I can get such a high quality instructor to come to my home and, play this beautiful music in the background while I’m still able to move forward with these other responsibilities I have.

David Martin (08:21.91)
Yeah, yeah. mean, I can see that. I can totally see that. And I think that totally makes sense. So it obviously has advantages, right? Convenience probably being near or at the top, right? You know, and even for you, I guess the advantage is you don’t, it’s very low. There’s a very low cost. Like your fixed costs are very minimal. I mean, your vehicle, right? And so just from a

Nicole Kovar (08:26.492)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (08:35.163)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (08:46.926)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David Martin (08:51.374)
just from that standpoint, that makes sense. but talk about, like the first thing I think of, right? When I think of like challenges that you have to face, and you said you did this for eight years. How do you know the environment you’re going into is going to be an okay environment? You know, like the instrument’s gonna be okay. Maybe the, you know, I don’t know. I’m just thinking off the top of my head, like a dog, you know, in the yard that you have to navigate. Maybe safety issues, concern, you know, people in the home, like.

How did you navigate that when you doing it?

Nicole Kovar (09:26.064)
Yeah, it’s a really good question. And it’s something I thought about, like, how do I know I’m going to be safe? And the parents would ask me vice versa, like, how do we know you’re safe? So yeah, it definitely is on both sides. I always tell myself, I’m not the first person to encounter this problem. There are plenty of businesses out there that have

David Martin (09:38.72)
Right, yeah.

Nicole Kovar (09:54.479)
encounter this problem and overcome it. So there’s a lot of in-home service businesses that like, you know, you can think of your typical plumbers, electricians, like how do they do it? Then you can think of like professional tutoring websites where they actually do work with children. How do they do it? And I just learned from them. So a couple things is obviously the background checks.

David Martin (10:23.214)
Hmm.

Nicole Kovar (10:23.36)
but we’ll do a deeper dive into background checks, on our end for, so for teachers will not only look at just like a normal background, but we’ll also do like a driving test record. cause they’ll be driving in the neighborhoods and they’re also working with children. We want them to be exceptional role models. So it is very important. and also we’re very strategic on our service areas. So.

I don’t want to take on that risk, right? I do want to minimize my risk. Not only that, but we’re a premium service. So we already, like that kind of naturally happens where we do have to only operate in zip codes that can afford our services. So, and also just being efficient. Like we don’t want our teachers driving constantly.

The after-school window is very small. So we want them teaching. We don’t want them driving so we have to be very strategic in what service areas we’re going to work in and That helps a lot. Another thing is like you can create your own policies so one policy we have is The parent or if we’re working if we’re teaching a minor there has to be an adult nearby

And we’re not saying that the parent has to be in the room, but definitely within earshot distance. So I remember one time I was teaching a mom and, or sorry, I was teaching at a home and I was working with the student and I had been working with them for quite a while. Like it probably had been a year or two, but she just was like, all right, I want to do some errands. I’m, I’m leaving. See ya.

And at the time I was a solo teacher, so I was just like, okay. But I was a lot younger too. This was like maybe 10, nine years ago. But then I was like, that can’t happen. Like we need to make sure there’s always an adult in the home. Like parents can’t just go off and run errands. Like we’re not a glorified babysitter, so yeah.

David Martin (12:32.248)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (12:42.454)
Right, yeah, exactly, because now you’re basically becoming a babysitting service as well as a music educator. So, do you ever deal with it? So, if people say, yeah, I agree, we won’t leave during the lesson, is that a non-issue now? Or does it still happen?

Nicole Kovar (12:46.881)
Mm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (13:04.462)
It is a policy and that’s part of the training. For teachers, we tell them this is very important. You do not want to be in the he said, she said kind of thing. You do need to have an adult nearby. So we make that very clear.

David Martin (13:17.111)
Right.

David Martin (13:22.444)
Yeah, yeah. What were some of the, like, so obviously that was a challenge, you know, at the beginning when you were learning about putting together some of your policies. Were you ever in a situation where you felt unsafe or you, you you walk into this house and you’re like, my goodness, I gotta get out of here as fast as possible.

Nicole Kovar (13:38.237)
Yeah, there was never a situation where I felt unsafe. There were a couple times where, like, there were, we had to go over an issue and the parent got a little heated. I never felt unsafe, but I was like, this is another thing. Like, as a solo teacher, I have to deal with these really uncomfortable conversations and

They have leverage because I’m in their home. So that’s one of the good things of having an in-home studio where you don’t have to deal with that. You don’t have to have those hard conversations that can be delegated to the admin team, the studio that you work for. So that’s really something to think about. But I will tell you this one story. It wasn’t me. It actually happened to one of our teachers.

David Martin (14:09.602)
Hmm.

Nicole Kovar (14:36.644)
So he was, and this was at a time where our rate was not a premium rate. so this kind of felt, this is one way of how you can filter out situations like this with simply having a higher price point. But yeah, he went to a home and it was a trial lesson. We do a 50 % off trial lesson. We would never do a free trial lesson basically for safety reasons.

but we do have a discounted trial lesson. So he came to this home and they had a keyboard in the basement and it was an older home and the basement was kind of like a storage. They used it for storage. It was very musty down there. He was like, I’m pretty sure there’s mold growing down there. He was like, I do not want to go back. Like it was very uncomfortable.

It was like this really small little keyboard. So that was definitely a lesson there is we have to ask now, like what kind of instrument do you have? And that really gives us a lot of insight on do they really value this or what’s their intention here?

David Martin (15:52.0)
No, I think that’s very smart. Just getting at least a mental picture before you send somebody else into that situation to make sure that everything is okay. And I think you’re right that charging a premium rate definitely filters out a lot of those potentially dangerous or awkward or not good situations for teachers to be in.

Nicole Kovar (15:59.109)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Martin (16:18.83)
So as you started to grow, you said it happened pretty quickly, hiring other teachers, that kind of thing. What were some of the biggest challenges operationally when you realized, now I have this other person that I need to, that I’m sending out to these people’s homes?

Nicole Kovar (16:37.85)
Yeah, could you repeat that? Did you say challenges? Sorry, one more time.

David Martin (16:43.298)
Yeah, so when you were first starting to hire teachers, know, like, and I think we all face this, you know, whether they’re, you know, coming to a brick and mortar location, you know, or whether we’re sending teachers out, the moment you have teachers representing your brand and your company, it inherently introduces a new

Nicole Kovar (16:58.512)
Yeah.

David Martin (17:11.502)
type of challenge, right? Like when you’re the only teacher, it’s easier to kind of back up the product, right? Like it’s me, I am the product, I’m teaching these students, so like any issues or questions about the curriculum or whatever, it’s easy to answer those. But as soon as you have somebody else involved and you’re sending other teachers, you don’t really know really what they’re doing in the lesson, you just get the feedback and the results of it. So what were some of those challenges that you faced?

Nicole Kovar (17:14.512)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (17:39.936)
at the beginning when you first started hiring.

Nicole Kovar (17:42.737)
Yeah, at the beginning, guess it’s the common mistake that everybody kind of has to figure out along the way is what do I not want? what, like, and I just wrote about this in the Facebook group, actually, like what was a mistake that I learned the hard way? And I really think the biggest lesson for me in the beginning was not assuming.

that everybody had the strengths and skills that I had. Like I just assumed if you’re a music teacher that you would have great communication, that you would respond within five to eight hours. It wouldn’t take you days. I just assumed that you would show up on time and not arrive 10, 15 minutes late, week after week. I assumed so many things.

David Martin (18:33.112)
Ha ha ha.

Nicole Kovar (18:37.34)
I assumed that they cared as much as I did. And that was also a huge revelation. Like this is not their business. Why would they think about it 24 seven? So I think just the basics of that pretty much every school owner is going to go through. That was a just awakening. Like, I have to figure out this new starting point.

because it definitely isn’t up here, I have to figure out what is the new starting point and then I have to create the training and the resources to start from this new starting point. And once I figured that out, which I had to talk to a couple of upset parents, you know, before I actually realized that. But yeah, once I got to that point, then I really…

I was able to quickly implement it into their training. And it hasn’t been too bad. It’s been pretty good. One thing that I’m really proud about us is that we have a knack for attracting really great teachers, and we have a really great team of teachers.

David Martin (19:44.301)
Yeah.

David Martin (19:57.42)
You know, you make a really astute observation in that when you first start hiring the, I think most people assume this. I think you’re right. Most people assume that the people that you’re hiring, when you give them a task to do, which in this case will just be driving to somebody’s house, arriving at a certain time, teaching a lesson and then leaving, right? Like, and then maybe going to the next person’s house. But like, you assume that they’re going to do all of those things in, you know, a reasonable way, right?

Nicole Kovar (20:26.702)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Martin (20:27.862)
Like you say, showing up on time, dressing well, having a smile on their face when they’re talking to the parent, interacting with the, like we make these assumptions based on how we would operate. And what we learn quickly, like you so well said, we learn that not everybody does that. We can’t,

Nicole Kovar (20:31.376)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Martin (20:55.468)
just assume that they’re going to do all of those things or they’ll do all those things well or at all. And so that is a hard lesson, I think, for every business owner. And it’s something that we all have to face at a certain point. And this is why the best companies have rigorous training, number one, but number two,

Nicole Kovar (21:05.616)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (21:21.118)
systems for everything. And as a reasonable person would look through these systems and be like, well, of course I’m going to look people in the eye when I talk to them. Of course I’m going to smile, you know, when I’m meeting somebody for the first time. But it’s like, no, that’s not obvious, unfortunately, because it does, you know, you realize you have to teach people every step of the way. And if you don’t, then you can’t be surprised when you have this inconsistent result coming from people.

Nicole Kovar (21:23.382)
yes.

Nicole Kovar (21:29.395)
my goodness, yes.

Nicole Kovar (21:35.94)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (21:49.467)
I love that you said that. You cannot be surprised. You cannot, you have to write everything. And I know a lot of us are like, wow, why do they write such like common sense instructions? It’s because not everybody operates the same way. Like I even had a mom that was like, he didn’t even say, how are you? He just walked in and just went right to business. He didn’t have any kind of like relationship, you know.

David Martin (22:01.134)
Yeah

Nicole Kovar (22:17.712)
communication already to help warm up the student. So yeah, it’s just like, you do have to remind them and teach them because people do have different priorities.

David Martin (22:28.928)
Right, right, they do. And it’s unfortunate, but there are lot of teachers out there that don’t really understand the fact that when you’re asked to teach a lesson, we’re not literally saying, just show up and teach this curriculum from this page to this page and that’s it. It’s not that literal. There’s a relationship there that needs to be nurtured.

Nicole Kovar (22:55.944)
yeah.

David Martin (22:57.658)
And so that involves a lot of non-teaching elements, right, to it. And so the non-teaching aspect of teaching in some ways is more important than actually teaching.

Nicole Kovar (23:03.779)
yes. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (23:12.206)
I 100 % believe it’s more important.

David Martin (23:15.446)
Yeah, yeah, wild. No, I love that you brought that. It was a great point. So let’s get down to some specifics here, because I’m very curious as it relates to the scheduling and the travel time. I think most people that aren’t in, you know, that do teach more under one location and have everyone come to them. think, you know, scheduling is like the, it’s the, you know,

The thing we all have to manage and we all have to deal with, it’s a big job and it’s always changing. So how do you manage scheduling teachers and then the travel between lessons? And how do you build that margin? And what’s the overall, I guess, high level, just to help somebody like me, I didn’t do it this way, I did it more the traditional route of having a location and people came to us.

Nicole Kovar (24:12.828)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (24:12.916)
How do you do that and what does it look like?

Nicole Kovar (24:15.898)
Yeah, it is different. And it took me a couple of years to actually nail it down. Like in the beginning, I was just saying yes to everybody. And I was driving like, yes, I still created back to back efficiency, but I would drive so far sometimes, like 45 minutes for a 30 minute lesson, and then another 30 minutes for maybe an hour lesson. And so I really, at the end of the day, I didn’t have enough teaching time.

And not only is it not economical, but you get burned out. Like you stop enjoying it. Like I remember as it, when I was in home teaching full-time, I remember sometimes I would love Wednesdays and I would hate Fridays or whatever. And I would always ask myself, why? Why do I hate Fridays? And it always came down to the route. Like,

David Martin (25:02.798)
Yeah.

David Martin (25:11.47)
Hmm.

Nicole Kovar (25:11.952)
that route had more traffic or it was too long or it really came down to that. So I started realizing as the years went on, what we were like, the design was basically set to fail if we just said yes to everybody and every zip code and that we, was, it was paramount that if we wanted to survive and be a school for decades to come,

that we had to create like efficient scheduling protocol. And we had to follow like a list of, okay, this is what we will do and this is what we will have to say no to. And so now what we try to do is we schedule everybody within 15 minute increments. So that way they can really maximize that teaching window of time.

So, and what that is is basically if you end a lesson at 4.30, your next lesson will end at four or start at 4.45. So you really shouldn’t be driving for a long period of time. We try to stack you like within neighborhoods. So that way you’re just driving within the neighborhood and you still have some time to kind of chat a little bit at least like a couple of minutes with the parent or with the all pair, whoever is there.

and kind of give them a little bit of the lesson assignments. yeah, 15 minute increments. also really limit our service areas. So we actually had to go through this process one year where we had to say goodbye to long term students, like students that had been with us for four or five years. We had to let them go because they were just too far.

and we didn’t have enough students around them or something like that.

David Martin (27:08.63)
So do you have, like so for those students, for example, do you have any teachers that teach online where they could just teach from their home studio or something like that? Or is it not?

Nicole Kovar (27:20.604)
There are, we don’t do any kind of online lessons, but I do know of plenty of in-home studios that also offer online. We just saw a big reluctance to online right after COVID, like 22, 23, people were really like pushing against online. we just didn’t, we’re a studio that follows demand. And when we see that there’s demand and a huge struggle to get people to enroll, then we’re just like, no.

That’s fine. have plenty of other demand to meet. So, yeah.

David Martin (27:54.262)
I love that. You follow demand. That’s great. I agree. Totally agree. So how do you maintain profitability while paying your teachers? And I’m assuming you have some type of compensation for gas or travel time or whatever. How do those economics work?

Nicole Kovar (28:15.644)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we don’t we currently we hire them as 1099 and at some point I would like to do like a full-time position for certain teachers that are with us and teaching a lot more hours But since they’re 1099 we don’t do any kind of like we’re paying you for gas but what we do is we increase their pay rate so

David Martin (28:21.358)
Okay.

Nicole Kovar (28:42.684)
we have to pay our teachers more than a traditional music studio or music school because that extra pay rate is factoring in their mileage and their travel time. So that’s basically what we do is if the average teacher pay rate in the area, if it’s $50 an hour, then we’re going to hike it up to 55 or something. We’ll establish like a formula for the area.

David Martin (28:51.982)
Right.

Nicole Kovar (29:11.002)
and hike it up to accommodate that extra time and mileage.

David Martin (29:15.448)
Do you have a formula? is it the teacher pay rate is a percentage of the tuition you’re charging or is it more just whatever the pay rate is in that area, you just pay it and it’s, but like does it affect tuition? So like, do you have more tuition rates than just one rate or like how does that work?

Nicole Kovar (29:38.158)
No, we have one tuition, one payment plan, and we really try to do a gross margin where we can, I’m sorry, I’m getting a little lost. Ask me one more time, I’m sorry.

David Martin (29:43.544)
Okay.

David Martin (29:54.508)
Yeah, no, you’re fine. You’re fine. I know I’m getting into the nitty gritty, but I’m just curious because I think a lot of people would be curious about this too. It’s like you’re paying the teachers for teaching, but you’re also paying them for traveling now, right? And so…

Nicole Kovar (30:08.396)
No, that’s what I’m saying is we don’t pay them to travel. We just give them a higher pay rate to help compensate for that.

David Martin (30:16.576)
Okay, but you kind of, so you are paying them, it’s just you’re paying them in their pay rate, right? So you’re paying them more than what you would normally pay a traditional teacher because you’re adding travel costs into that, right? So yeah, so that’s, so do you have like a margin that you’re shooting for when you’re paying them?

Nicole Kovar (30:37.018)
when we’re paying them like a margin.

David Martin (30:39.33)
Yeah, so like if, for example, if you’re charging $100, I’ll just use simple math, if you’re charging $100 for students, would you be at like, would you say, well, the most I’m gonna pay a teacher is $40 because that’s 40 % of the total tuition that we’re bringing in.

Nicole Kovar (30:43.686)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (30:57.378)
you’re talking about gross profit margins. yes. Yeah, we. So our goal one one day is to have 65 % gross profit margins like a cut between studio and teacher. But that’s not what it is today. It’s more like any and we have different rates for different teachers, right? But we’re anywhere from 55 to 58. Percent of a gross profit margin.

David Martin (30:59.318)
Yes, correct.

David Martin (31:07.789)
Okay.

David Martin (31:25.654)
Okay, okay. Your goal is 60, so your goal is to pay more?

Nicole Kovar (31:27.387)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (31:32.558)
I guess I’m not understanding your question. thought, no. So I thought you’re talking, you’re asking for the gross profit margin, which is the cut, right? What this, what like we charge and then the school will take 65 % and then the, the teacher takes the, or what are, I’m sorry.

David Martin (31:35.077)
no no no, you’re fine, you’re-

David Martin (31:42.028)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

David Martin (31:49.582)
Oh, okay, yep, yep. I think we’re talking about the same thing just in reverse. So when we’re talking, when I’m thinking of your profit, your gross profit, then I think of it in terms of like, if your cost is $65 out of the 100, then that would be, you’d be at 65%.

Nicole Kovar (31:55.649)
Okay.

Nicole Kovar (32:03.099)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (32:18.126)
you’re actually correct. Like the profit margin is actually 65%. So it would be like the reverse of that. Okay, yeah. No, we’re tracking, we’re tracking. So you’re at 50, you said 50 to 55 % is that’s what the studio is bringing in.

Nicole Kovar (32:22.458)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (32:26.684)
Okay.

Nicole Kovar (32:38.652)
55 to 58%, yes.

David Martin (32:40.878)
55, 58%, okay. And your goal is to get that up to 65 % profit. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, yeah, no, that, I think that’s really good. I mean, because for you, I think your economics are a little bit different in that you don’t have hard costs or as many hard costs because you don’t have a physical location that you have to pay for, right? And so there’s more room in the budget for profitability.

Nicole Kovar (32:45.638)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (33:03.608)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (33:10.683)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (33:10.798)
Do you have a, on that note, just again, if you’re willing to share, is there a net profit margin that you guys are shooting for?

Nicole Kovar (33:23.546)
Honestly, it’s we’re not focused on that right now because we’re really testing the market. We’re just focused on the gross profit margin right now. We’re trying to really test the market. How far can we push prices without having to add too many additional services but still pay a premium pay rate for teachers?

So the net profit will land somewhere eventually, but right now my focus is getting to that 65 % gross profit margin.

David Martin (33:56.782)
Sure, yeah. How do you decide when to expand into other areas? Because you were talking about like you try to keep your areas really tight, you know, so that teachers aren’t having to drive a long distance from one house to another. So is there, mean, I’m sure you have some big giant map where you’ve got all the pins or, whatever, but like that’s an interesting, what I like about that.

is I remember at one point I pulled up Google and there was some kind of Google map feature. I can’t remember even how to do it now, but I had all my students and I put in, I uploaded the file with all their different addresses and I could see on a map where all the students lived. And that was so interesting. The thing that you lose when you have a brick and mortar where everyone’s coming to you is

Nicole Kovar (34:45.766)
Mmm.

David Martin (34:55.662)
You don’t really look at that. You know, at least I didn’t. You don’t really look and see where your students are coming from as a whole. And I was able to see, I was like, oh, wow, we have certain areas that we’re really not even targeting, that we should target. And other areas were just like, my goodness, I didn’t realize we were getting so many students from this particular area. And so I think one of the advantages that you have is that you can see, obviously you have to because you’re

Nicole Kovar (34:59.536)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (35:03.482)
that makes sense.

David Martin (35:25.454)
to all of these addresses, right? These teachers sending them out to, you know, where all of your students are, like very specifically where the regions and the areas are that you have your students. And that’s interesting data to know, right? Because you can see the areas that are popular, the areas that are less popular. So how do you decide like, we’re now saturated this region, we’re gonna…

Nicole Kovar (35:38.672)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David Martin (35:55.288)
push it out, we’re going to push the boundary out, or maybe we’re going to go into this whole new town or something like that. Do you have any kind of mechanism to decide when that’s going to happen?

Nicole Kovar (36:05.06)
I wish I had a really great answer for you, but to be honest, we haven’t reached that level yet where we’re thinking about expanding. Like, we just haven’t. There’s so much more to grow here still, and I haven’t looked into that.

David Martin (36:13.687)
Okay.

David Martin (36:21.89)
Well, it’s an interesting thing to think about for sure. It sounds like you guys have a lot of demand and you’re in a fairly densely populated area. so saturation point is usually much higher than we even think about. And so, and you obviously haven’t hit that point yet. And so that’s, I think that’s awesome. Okay, so let’s talk about like some of the tools that you use to run this whole.

Nicole Kovar (36:37.168)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (36:42.576)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (36:50.38)
this whole thing where you’re scheduling your teachers and your communication and your staff and all that kind of stuff. So what tools do you use?

Nicole Kovar (37:01.274)
Well, the number one tool of all time is going to be your studio management software tool. And yeah, and we are big fans of Opus One. So I think we started with them. I should have written this down. Was it 2023? Or? I don’t know. It’s been a couple years and I can’t I can’t imagine being able to

David Martin (37:06.894)
Yes, I think that’s true.

Nicole Kovar (37:27.484)
Yeah, I would have to be so much more in the weeds. I would have to hire so much a bigger admin team. Like if it weren’t for Opus, we would, we would be constantly having to deal with building our own systems and dealing with Zapier and errors and all this stuff. So it’s really nice to have a studio management software that helps with prospects.

you know, leads, collecting leads, making sure that we know where they are in the stage. Like, have they had a trial lesson with us? Should we contact them, follow up? How many times have we followed up with them?

David Martin (38:09.678)
What did you use before, Opus?

Nicole Kovar (38:11.77)
We used acuity scheduling. Yeah. It worked fine until it didn’t, until the studio got too big. Yeah. And then…

David Martin (38:14.432)
Okay, and how did that work?

David Martin (38:22.19)
That’s a great way of saying it. What were some of the reasons why it started to not work?

Nicole Kovar (38:32.346)
Well, I wasn’t like, I don’t know if I was truly a business owner because I kind of let everybody do their own thing. I let the parents kind of decide when they were gonna have their lessons. So they just, was kind of, it was very a la carte and it wasn’t stable for anybody, for me or the teachers. So.

When I honestly I’ll tell you when I switched over to Opus, I realized how much more I had to like pick up the ball. Like if I wanted to have a music school, there was so much I had to implement. I had to implement like structure and policies. Like yeah, I had policies, but the policies were so lax. Like the parents walked all over us and we were driving everywhere. It was

It wasn’t sustainable. And when we grew to like 180 students with acuity, it just didn’t work anymore. Like there were complaints, there were lessons missing, teachers that didn’t update, you know, the schedule correctly. And so who knows if was I double paying them? There were just constant question marks that I had to dig and dig and look for. And then with OPUS,

everything just suddenly became very clear. Like this happened, this didn’t. But before I got to that point, I really had to do a lot of work in managing our, changing our policies. And we really had to go through a couple of chapters of that.

David Martin (40:12.024)
So it’s kind of like when you made the switch, it sort of shined a light on the areas that needed to be needed to be changed and updated in your business.

Nicole Kovar (40:17.057)
yeah. definitely did. Which I was not prepared to do. I was not prepared to do so I would warn any any studio owner that is transferring to Opus, yeah make sure you have policies that are actually built sustainably for a business because if you’re super laid back then yeah it will it will

will shine too many lights. It might feel a little too overwhelming.

David Martin (40:51.158)
So then on that note, how do you deal with, so like if a teacher’s at a student’s home and they’re finishing up a lesson and then mom comes in the room and says, hey, we wanna change our day, you know, from Monday or whatever to Thursday, is that something the teacher does? Or does the teacher say, call these people, know, call this number and they’ll take care of it for you or go to this, like,

Nicole Kovar (40:58.671)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (41:16.039)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (41:20.792)
How is that managed? Because in a school setting, what we would always do is we would tell the teacher, don’t deal with all that stuff. We want our staff to deal with it because we want as few people changing the schedule as possible. So how do you deal with that?

Nicole Kovar (41:27.975)
Right.

Nicole Kovar (41:33.691)
Right, yeah.

Nicole Kovar (41:37.596)
This was a lesson that I learned with Opus because I was originally, I put everything on the teachers. Like the teachers were the admin and the teachers and driving a lot. And it really was too much. It wasn’t sustainable and it wasn’t a good design. So when I onboarded with Opus, I realized all these things and I just started to understand that.

I, if I wanted to provide a good job for them and also have a sustainable business, then I had to put less responsibility on the teachers and remove that, take that away and actually build an admin team. Like have a front desk. And I say that in front quotes, because obviously we don’t have a front desk. But I needed to hire a front desk admin person, which for us is basically a VA and

David Martin (42:24.159)
Right. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (42:34.843)
they handle all of that because try just try training a team of 10-15 teachers like here’s an SOP you got to do this every time you know you want to change the schedule like things are gonna go wrong so it’s it’s so much easier to just train your admin to do those fine details than it is to train 10-15 teachers that aren’t really

their heart isn’t in the admin. Like their heart is clearly to teach. So yeah, I highly recommend taking off that burden from the teachers and the parents, try to minimize the mistakes, try to make it as simple as possible and have a specialist in the right areas.

David Martin (43:05.133)
Right.

David Martin (43:24.568)
So in that scenario, you have a mom, what would happen?

Nicole Kovar (43:27.0)
Yeah, in that scenario.

Well, we actually don’t do makeups. So if a student wants to reschedule a lesson, they have to cancel it. There is no makeup. If the teacher cancels a lesson, then yes, they can make up. And it is limited because of that no makeup policy that we have. We always tell our teachers, like, this is a commitment. If we’re…

David Martin (43:33.986)
Okay.

Nicole Kovar (43:57.672)
basically telling the student they have to be committed, then the teacher also has to be committed. that doesn’t really happen with us with the rescheduling with students. But if the teacher does want to reschedule, then they would, and I’m not in the operations anymore, so I have to like think back to what the policy is. But yeah, but they would have to reach out to our admin and

David Martin (44:20.183)
Yeah, good for you. Good for you. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (44:27.165)
to process it, right? So there are different ways a teacher can cancel a lesson. And so the admin will be like, okay, here are different ways to process that cancellation. What would you like to do?

David Martin (44:40.352)
Right, so it sounds like what you’re saying is the teacher gives them a phone number or redirects them to the VA who then handles those administrative questions essentially.

Nicole Kovar (44:53.785)
Yeah, if the student wants to cancel, the nice thing with Opus is that you have an account. Everybody has an account. They can see how much money they, like their bills, they can see how much they’ve invested. They can look back at monthly invoices from the past, the next month’s invoice. And yeah, they can even log in and click cancel and cancel the lesson.

David Martin (45:02.188)
Right.

Nicole Kovar (45:21.157)
So we tell them either they can click cancel in the portal or they can call us our admin team and they can cancel the lesson for them.

David Martin (45:30.444)
Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s good. I think that’s good. Because I went through the same lesson, like I learned that same lesson, that you cannot put administrative tasks on teachers. Like I mean, I suppose at the very beginning you can to a certain extent, but very quickly I learned that the teachers did not take the job to do scheduling and reschedule. In fact, a lot of them took the job because they didn’t want.

Nicole Kovar (45:47.314)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (45:58.392)
to do any of the administrative stuff. Many of them had their own studios and realized it was way too much work. And so they take this job because all they gotta do is show up and teach and that’s what they love. And so I think that’s very smart. So you already answered one of the questions. My next question is how do you handle cancellations? You just don’t offer makeups at all.

Nicole Kovar (46:07.229)
Great.

David Martin (46:27.634)
That’s interesting. And rescheduling and no shows. So no shows is kind of an interesting thing because you’re going to the student’s house. But have you ever had a situation where the students just aren’t there? Like the family’s just gone and the teacher shows up and nobody’s home.

Nicole Kovar (46:41.959)
Right.

Nicole Kovar (46:51.685)
Yes, yeah, it’s happened. It doesn’t happen often because it is a premium service. they’re going to lose a lot of money if that happens a lot. yeah, it has happened where they’re running late. So we’ll have some policies where, yes, we require the teacher to knock, stay there for at least five, I don’t know, I don’t remember what it is, maybe five or 10 minutes if nobody’s

David Martin (46:53.986)
Yeah?

David Martin (46:59.691)
Sure.

Nicole Kovar (47:21.245)
responded within that time, then you can go. We’re still going to pay you for that time. But we do try to leave a little bit of a grace area. And yeah, sometimes they haven’t gotten any kind of response. And so that would be a student no show. And then they just leave and they still get paid. So it’s not that bad. But we’ll have the admin reach out to them and let them know like, hey,

David Martin (47:38.476)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (47:50.078)
just so you know, you had a teacher and we definitely want to minimize any kind of no shows like this is how you can cancel and so forth.

David Martin (48:00.846)
Yeah. How do you deal with teachers that maybe have car trouble? Like, let’s say their car is, you it breaks down or the car runs out of gas or, whatever. Like, what does that just, I mean, that would just disrupt your whole schedule for the rest of the day for the teacher.

Nicole Kovar (48:07.665)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (48:17.357)
Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty important to have a car. You can’t really Uber or walk your way for our studio. Like, yeah, we live close to DC and we do have a pretty good metro system here. But because we have that 15 minute protocol, like there’s you just can’t you can’t teach as many students within the same day if you’re walking because that doubles your travel time, right? So that was the whole point of

creating efficient schedules. So yeah, if the teacher doesn’t have a vehicle for that day, and this goes back to there are multiple ways for us to process cancellations. So one way that a teacher can process a cancellation is they can make it up. So we’ll reschedule it to another day. Another one is they can take one of their two weeks of unpaid leave.

So in our policy, account for, instead of giving a cancellation, instead of doing 24 hour makeups, what we do is we add four to five free lessons into the student’s overall tuition. And two of those can be taken as a studio cancellation. So that’s for these unforeseen circumstances where the teacher has a flat tire or something happens or they’re sick.

Maybe they had a wedding on a Thursday. you know, it’s things like that that you can’t predict. So yeah, we have allotted those cancellations into the tuition that everyone is aware of when they first enroll. And to be honest, people are very grateful for the service. Like keep in mind, the moms love, the moms and dads, I don’t want to single out the dads, the moms and dads.

David Martin (49:49.069)
Right.

David Martin (50:06.606)
Right.

David Martin (50:11.276)
Right. Sure. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (50:14.321)
They tell us all the time like how thankful they are that we exist. And they understand things happen. So generally people are willing to make it work as long as things aren’t happening consistently. So that’s our job. That’s my job as the studio owner is to make sure that teachers aren’t abusing any of this and that we are professional. And

Obviously a teacher is going to want to fix their car ASAP or else they’re not going to have, they’re not going to be able to work the next couple of days. So yeah, that’s pretty important.

David Martin (50:54.702)
Well, you know, know Uber has a requirement, you know, order to sign up for their, you know, being a driver, have to, you know, the drivers have to have a certain year, like, or newer vehicle. I don’t think it has to be a certain brand of vehicle. I think it just has to be a certain year or newer vehicle. And…

Nicole Kovar (51:10.833)
Mmm. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (51:20.433)
Okay.

David Martin (51:22.484)
It’s because of this very thing that we’re talking about. Like the car is actually what they’re using to make money. the car is what, and I think in Uber’s case, it’s a little different because the customers are actually getting into the car, right? So the car is part of the product that, that Uber is selling, right? So they want to make sure that it’s a certain age or newer. But, so I don’t know if you have or could have some type of policy where you require a certain condition.

Nicole Kovar (51:34.439)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (51:51.308)
of their vehicle since that is their only way or their main way to be getting from vehicle to vehicle or lesson to lesson.

Nicole Kovar (51:59.73)
That’s a really good idea. We haven’t gotten to that. Thankfully, we haven’t had that issue yet where the car was the issue. But that’s certainly something that we would have to deploy if it did become an issue.

David Martin (52:16.91)
Yeah, and it might not be a relevant thing for what you’re doing, certainly, it is interesting. I think as an entrepreneur, we’re always thinking of all the possibility or the possible scenarios and trying to strategically position ourselves so that we don’t have to encounter every pitfall, right? But no, that’s fascinating. So do you have like a…

Nicole Kovar (52:20.189)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (52:29.885)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (52:36.549)
That’s so true. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Martin (52:46.376)
onboarding process for these teachers that you’re hiring? And can you sort of walk me through how, like let’s say you have a new teacher and you’re, you know, like the interview process and then, you know, how long before they can kind of go out on their own, so to speak.

Nicole Kovar (52:50.417)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (53:06.043)
Yeah, this is extremely important for us. And we spend a lot of time in our resources, really working with the teacher and building teacher culture, not just training, but managing the teachers because, and this is, if you really want to look at the differences between like a commercial studio space, school space versus in-home,

Like obviously what’s lacking is we don’t have a central location and I don’t get a lot of face time with our teachers. Our front desk, end quotes, doesn’t get a lot of face time with our teachers and teachers also don’t really get to see each other. So we do spend a lot of time building those relationships with the teachers in the beginning. We’ll have, like if you’re, if you want to go back to the hiring process, there’s multiple stages.

There’s a lot of investment that happens between both parties, the teacher and our school. So we’ll have like a phone interview, then we’ll do resources, sorry, references. We’ll ask them to submit like a skills video. Basically play one of the harder pieces on the instruments that you want to teach, submit a video of that.

we have very specifically designed questions in the interview to kind of get an understanding of their mindset and their experience. and we, I’m like thinking of certain stories. but yeah, we had to learn along the way, like not everybody, even if they tell you, yeah, I can drive, I can do this. Not everybody can.

David Martin (54:45.698)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (54:58.461)
And they don’t always realize it until they’re in it. so we start to look for like along the way we’ve picked up along, we’ve picked up some of those things and we start to look for that within the interview process. So we can actually

David Martin (54:58.85)
Hmm.

David Martin (55:12.504)
Like what are the things that you’re looking, like it takes a specific kind of teacher that can drive from place to place, keep track of their timing. I know for me, a lot of even really good teachers had a hard time ending their lesson on time. It’s like the bane of my existence trying to get them to end their lesson on time, because they’re great teachers. But in a situation like this, it’s like they have to not only end their lesson,

Nicole Kovar (55:20.892)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (55:31.131)
Yeah.

David Martin (55:40.13)
They got to get in the car and they got to drive to the next location to start the next lesson on time. So how do you filter out those teachers where it’s like maybe some red flags where you know that they would not be a good fit?

Nicole Kovar (55:43.067)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Kovar (55:55.824)
Yeah, I’m trying to think of a specific case. And like I said, I don’t spend too much in the hiring pipeline anymore. I do do the virtual interviews though. So something that I really look for is the adaptability piece. Like, do they have a lot of concerns? And it’s okay to have concerns. But if they keep, if I can tell that it’s stressing them out already,

David Martin (56:12.75)
Mmm.

Nicole Kovar (56:24.957)
And I’m like, okay, the chances are that being in traffic or on the road is going to stress you out more. So I am trying to look for that durability piece and also adaptability. And if you have like a lot of demands, I guess demands isn’t the right word, but requirements. we recently, I never met him, but I saw a

application come through and my team submitted it. They’re like, I don’t know about this guy, but Nicole, what do you think? Should we offer a virtual interview? And he really had just a lot of things like, I do not want this. I do want this. I do not want this. And it was just very specific. So I just, that was just something like, okay, yeah, within home teaching, you have to adapt. You’re going to be in different households. Some households are going to be loud.

Some households are gonna be quiet, quiet. Some households will give you dinner. Some households will, you know, not do anything. They’ll just, the kid will open the door and you’ll just go to the living room and teach and you’ll leave. So adaptability is part of the job and I really look for that when I’m speaking to somebody, yeah.

David Martin (57:47.058)
Mm I love that. Yeah, that’s that is very insightful. And I think for anybody looking to, you know, build their business model this way and, you know, or maybe if you’re listening, you’re thinking, well, I’m doing in home and I want to start hiring teachers. I think that is a that is gold what you just said, like, look for teachers that have that adaptability and are willing to just kind of to to

Nicole Kovar (58:05.937)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (58:15.992)
go into environments that might be completely different, one house to the next. I think that’s really good. You know, one of the things that we, as we got bigger, we realized we were missing, and this was in the brick and mortar, so I’d imagine it’s even more for you, is just this sense of community. I had a lot of teachers say they would love to meet the other teachers, but they never get a chance to because their schedule is like they’re on an island, you know? It’s like they come in and then they leave.

Nicole Kovar (58:43.493)
Right. Yeah.

David Martin (58:45.206)
And so have you had that at all with your business? Have you had your teachers saying things like, I’d love to meet the other teachers, love to collaborate, share ideas?

Nicole Kovar (58:54.935)
Right. Yeah. I’m so glad you told me that because I thought that was just an us problem. But okay, good. Even the like on-site music schools struggle with this. Yes, definitely. And I taught myself in home for eight years. I felt so isolated. I was just talking to parents and students all day and my friends, they were like, my colleague this and then my colleague is doing this cabin. You want to go? And they just had so much

David Martin (58:59.406)
No, no.

Nicole Kovar (59:24.411)
more chances to build friendships than I did. And that was really frustrating to me. So when I did start hiring teachers, I realized I wanted to build a culture. And in fact, it was necessary. Like, I had to build trust between myself and them. Like, I wanted to trust them. And the only way to do that is more face time and more time spent together. So that was

Honestly, from the very beginning, something I worked on is building community, not only within our students, but also the teacher community. So yes, we do host teacher socials throughout the school year. The last one we did, we went bowling for the end of the year. After our winter recital, we all went bowling, but we’ve done all kinds of stuff. We’ve done branches, recital dinners, we’ve gone rock climbing.

We’ve done hikes, we’ve done paint classes, because yeah, we don’t have that location. And we also do monthly meetings virtually. So we’ll just talk about teacher tips and things that teachers might be going through. And that community, that teacher culture is, I would say, even more important for in-home studios because

We don’t have a student retention problem because the in-home is not only so convenient, but it’s also one of the best ways to build relationships. So teacher and students have really strong relationships and that can carry on for years and years. yeah, it’s the teacher retention. It’s making sure that you’re building.

a studio where they love to work at and they love to be at. And so that’s something we spend a lot of time and resources on is building teacher culture.

David Martin (01:01:25.462)
That’s great. Yeah, and I everything that you said, I would encourage even you know, whether it’s a brick and mortar or an in home, I think those bringing teachers together both for educational purposes. So like you said, sharing tips, we did the same thing. We call them teacher assemblies in monthly. We would do something and then the fun stuff, you know, just getting together to have fun with your colleagues, I think is very powerful and it works.

Nicole Kovar (01:01:43.366)
nice

Nicole Kovar (01:01:51.399)
you

David Martin (01:01:55.222)
It really does work. You mentioned student retention. Your student retention is good. How would you track it as a monthly retention rate, or how do you monitor your retention?

Nicole Kovar (01:02:12.711)
We’ve gotten much better at tracking the last couple of years, like since starting with Opus that definitely opened my eyes to how powerful numbers are. So after onboarding with Opus and then seeing the numbers and then starting to hire an admin team and realizing like, they are responsible for certain numbers. I need to create like a metric dashboard.

David Martin (01:02:20.098)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:02:40.367)
So we have gotten much better. Now we have like weekly team meetings with all the VAs and we go over our weekly metrics, our monthly metrics. So yes, student retention we’ve seen is really good. We’ve only started tracking it though the last couple of years. So it’s not like we don’t have the most accurate lifetime value, but.

David Martin (01:03:03.822)
How do you track it? So last couple of years, is your student retention, you don’t mind me asking?

Nicole Kovar (01:03:12.829)
I would need to pull it up for you. Let me see if I can pull it up actually. If we have time for that.

David Martin (01:03:19.288)
You know, it’s one of those things I know, absolutely, yeah, go ahead. So it’s one of those things I think that for many years I had a very difficult time coming up with this metric myself. Like, how do you quantify your retention because you’ve got these people signing up for subscriptions and then you’ve got people dropping at different times? Like, what’s the best way to track it? And I ended up with…

Nicole Kovar (01:03:31.279)
Yeah.

David Martin (01:03:48.974)
I feel like the best way to know sort of like on a rolling scale what the retention was, what the retention rate was. So the way I tracked it was just simply every single month I tracked it for how many people dropped out that particular month as a percentage of my total enrollment, right? So like if I have, again, easy math. So if you have a hundred students,

I didn’t wanna drop any more than five. So that would be 5 % drop rate or 95 % retention rate. Again, either side of the coin you wanna put that on. So for me, I tracked it that way and that was the standard that I held my schools to. But yeah, anyway, I don’t know if that makes sense. for me, that was the easiest way.

to finally have a hard number in every single month, that would be something that I could look at.

Nicole Kovar (01:04:51.837)
Yeah, we’re currently still collecting our 2025 metrics. And I don’t really have them look at average lifetime. Just we only do it annually. Like we do have our turn rate here. But I don’t have a good one for 20. I don’t have anything for 2025. And I also don’t do them. So I don’t know what our formula is. I have our finance director.

David Martin (01:05:07.096)
Sure.

Nicole Kovar (01:05:19.997)
collect all these metrics and she’s in communication with Opus as well. So I don’t have a good number for you. I wish I did. All right.

David Martin (01:05:21.432)
Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, it’s totally fine. It’s totally fine. And I think it really, for anything, it’s just an interesting thing to talk about because I always say that there’s certain metrics in your business that you want to stay close to because it’ll tell you the health of your business. It tells you kind of what’s going on inside the walls.

Nicole Kovar (01:05:36.701)
for sure.

David Martin (01:05:53.548)
You know, like I like to know how many students came in last month and I like to know how many students dropped out last month. Those are metrics that’ll be very interesting for you to know, right? In addition to that, I like to know how many students, so as it relates to, so we’re in January now, this is the largest enrollment month of the year. So I like to know how many students did I get last year this month and how many, you know, as compared to how I’m doing this year this month.

Nicole Kovar (01:05:56.765)
Okay.

Nicole Kovar (01:06:10.799)
Right. Yeah.

David Martin (01:06:24.046)
So year over year numbers, think are very important to kind of measure against because again, really you’re just looking at the health of your business, right? You’re trying to determine are things going in the right direction or are there some warning signs or some red flags and usually the warning signs are there in the numbers, you know? And so, yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:06:44.611)
Mm Yeah. Our turn rate. Sorry, I want to give you some kind of numbers because like, I know they’re important. And I do want to inspire people to really start tracking this because it will also point to certain issues. So like our turn rate, which is how many how many times people cancel, it’s quite low. It’s I’m looking throughout the months. It’s like two, 3 %

Summer was the biggest and that was seven, no 13 % here for July, for June, we had some cancellations here. But overall, we are open all year round and turn rates are very, very low. So.

David Martin (01:07:27.212)
Yeah, that sounds fantastic. Yeah, 2 to 3 % during the year and even 10 to 15 % in the summer is not uncommon at all. But yeah, so it sounds like what you’re saying is as a general rule, the in-home model has better retention than the brick and mortar model from your experience.

Nicole Kovar (01:07:55.608)
Yeah, and I’ve never operated an on-site school. I’ve never seen somebody’s metrics on an on-site school, but I do speak to a lot of music school owners, and they’re constantly talking about student retention. And I have never had to worry or think about student retention. My thoughts are always teacher retention.

David Martin (01:08:21.441)
Mm.

Nicole Kovar (01:08:22.461)
because student retention has never been alarming or concerning.

David Martin (01:08:28.652)
You know what’s interesting about that? Just in terms of teacher retention, I think you’re smart in thinking about. How you know how you can pay your teachers best because the thing to remember is that if your student retention is really good, that’ll mean the lifetime value of each student is going to be higher than average, right? You know, so and especially if you’re charging premium prices.

So you might be making, so an average school might be making, let’s just say $2,000 lifetime value per student in a brick and mortar. Whereas you might be making four or $5,000 lifetime value per student, which I’m guessing is probably closer to your number. But what that means is that you can actually afford to pay your teachers more because you have less cost to acquire new customers.

Nicole Kovar (01:09:11.417)
Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:09:23.975)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

David Martin (01:09:25.92)
And so one of the things that you could do looking forward to for teacher retention is, and maybe you’re doing something similar to this, but it’s just where my mind goes, is you can tie the retention, I mean, you can tie the teacher pay to the retention and give them significant bumps in pay as they report their…

annual retention or every quarterly retention or however you want to like whatever the cadence is of when you give them raises. Usually it’s a good idea to give them a raise right away. You know, give them a quick win within 90 days and then do annual increases. That’s just what we did and it worked really well. But if you do something like that, but think in term more in terms of the fact that you’re already making quite a bit of money off of your students as is so your teacher.

Nicole Kovar (01:10:03.869)
Nice.

David Martin (01:10:17.838)
usually I tell school owners to keep it below 40%. But for you, you might be able to pay a lot more to your teachers just simply because you’re getting a lot more value from your students, right? And so there’s more margin there.

Nicole Kovar (01:10:37.021)
That certainly is one reason. like, for us, student retention really isn’t a problem, right? So we actually don’t, and this makes sense for onsite studios. Like if that is an issue, then you definitely want to incentivize your teachers and reward them based off of that metric. But because that’s not an issue with us, we don’t actually reward them off of that metric. We do have other metrics and that is the community aspect.

Because that’s where we, like if you really do want to compare between the two, that’s where we struggle, right? We don’t have that location. So we have to ask our teachers to spend more time building community within the teacher community and the student community. And so that’s how we actually incentivize them.

David Martin (01:11:12.46)
Mm-hmm.

David Martin (01:11:25.366)
Yeah, no, I think that’s great. I think that’s great. So if somebody were listening and wanting to start a an in-home studio,

just kind of high level, what mistakes would you say you would want to have? Or maybe you could talk to your younger self, right? What would you say to that younger self, that person that’s wanting to get started to avoid kind of those common mistakes that people make when they’re starting in home?

Nicole Kovar (01:11:48.6)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:12:02.386)
Yeah. So this April will be our 10 year anniversary. So I’ll have to look back 10 years, but man, those lessons burned strongly in my mind. So that will not be a problem. But yeah, 10 years ago, I wish I had figured out my pricing point right out from the gate. I wish I had understood the quality of service I was bringing and not be afraid to charge higher prices.

David Martin (01:12:06.647)
Wow.

David Martin (01:12:13.334)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:12:31.495)
than even the most prestigious school in our area. And that would have saved me so much pain. If I had just had better margins from the start, so much pain would have been avoided. But because I tried to give like a affordable, super affordable rate, like below.

industry average. I just didn’t believe in myself, you know, initially. So I just gave them a cheap, cheap rate and I’m not afraid to share it. I’ll even share it. Like I remember thinking $10 an hour was how much my parents paid for my piano lessons. So I’m going to charge $25 an hour. No, no, no. $25 for 30 minutes. That’s what it was. Yeah. For, okay. Yeah. 30 minutes. But that was an in-home service. Like that’s ridiculous.

David Martin (01:13:17.294)
For a third, okay.

David Martin (01:13:23.746)
Right? Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:13:24.189)
So yeah, now we’re like closer to 90, $100 for 30 minutes. And so you can see the drastic, how far I had to incrementally raise prices. It’s not easy. Like I’ve had to really raise prices on our clients. And sometimes they left and sometimes they were like, it’s about time Nicole.

David Martin (01:13:31.363)
Yeah.

Nicole Kovar (01:13:53.39)
So yeah, and honestly, I wouldn’t be afraid to raise prices. Like if you’re in this moment right now where you are feeling the strain, you have a beautiful music school, but the margins are just so tight that you have to do everything and you’re overworked and you’re struggling. Number one, find a community. I would really recommend find other people. Don’t be afraid to reach out to even your competitors.

It’s going to be so much easier if you can help each other than if you compete against each other. So that’s my first tip. number two, like raise your prices. That will change your life. You will start to love your job. You will start to attract better people. And with better people, everything becomes easier. So don’t be afraid to do it. Even 20 % increases, 30 % increases.

that will actually help you build the better business. It will filter out people that didn’t care as much and it will attract people that are curious and do care. So don’t be afraid to raise prices. That’s my number one.

David Martin (01:15:10.19)
Well said. I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had so many conversations where we talk about all these strategies and then at the end of it it’s like, well, if you just raise your prices and just forget everything else I said. It really does fix so many things. And most people are undercharging. Most people. I’ve yet to talk with somebody that overcharges their students.

Nicole Kovar (01:15:22.309)
right yeah yeah

Nicole Kovar (01:15:32.785)
move.

David Martin (01:15:40.13)
The other piece to that I would just add is create a cadence for raising prices. So don’t just raise them. Build that into your business model so that every year there is some type of price increase. It’s so smart. Well, yeah, I’m so impressed, Nicole, with what you’ve built. Do you have goals for the next three to five years? Are there some new expansions and some new initiatives that you’re working towards?

Nicole Kovar (01:16:00.305)
Thank you.

Nicole Kovar (01:16:08.497)
There’s always goals. There’s always goals, David. But yes, I am looking forward to diversifying our income a little bit more. And I’m actually opening, well, it’s not set. We don’t have a launch date, but we’re organizing the program to start opening in school programs. So right now we have a private lesson program one-on-one that’s in home. And

I want to be able to offer, I told you, I think I said it earlier in this interview, I want to have full time employed teachers. And the only way to do that is to give them work during the day. So we want to start offering work hours in the means of working in schools and having an in school program. So

That will be a huge new project for me. I really don’t have a lot of experience with this. So I’m to be doing a lot of research, a lot of talking with other school owners and really looking forward to expanding, expanding piano and more.

David Martin (01:17:15.502)
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And you have your nonprofit Play It Forward. Do you want to say anything about that?

Nicole Kovar (01:17:21.149)
Yeah. Yeah, that is a program very near and dear to my heart. I basically, I started it in 2018, where I was just helping some music teachers for their recital. had a recital. I was not hosting, they were hosting. So I was just kind of helping and operating in the background. And I noticed that we were only catering to certain populations.

And I started to wonder like our area here in Northern Virginia, we’re such a diverse culture. Like there’s all kinds of backgrounds here, but for some reason, when I looked at our recitals and the audiences at our recitals, it wasn’t diverse. And so I started to really think about this, like what’s happening to the piano culture.

Who plays piano? Why do those people play piano? Why do other cultures not play piano? And I started learning like like I know in my school and this was in Texas so not Virginia but in in Texas we had keyboard classes that were Elective it was optional. But like if you wanted to learn you could learn through your public school here in Northern, Virginia

there’s no piano or keyboard classes in your public school. So it almost seemed like, okay, piano is now only for the privileged. And I didn’t want that. I felt like piano for so long was for all sorts of people. So I opened up a program where we now are partnering with Title I schools, which in Virginia, this is like low income schools. So it’s for kids that

you know, are low income and they wouldn’t have any other opportunity to learn piano, but they do want to learn piano. They can apply. They’ll go through application process and once you’re in, you get your own keyboard. We provide the keyboard. They can take it home to practice. You get a private lesson every single week. have a couple students that have been with us for four or five years now and they’re performing at recitals.

Nicole Kovar (01:19:42.321)
They literally went from zero to now playing classical music in their home and or pop music or Latin music, whatever they want to play. And they proudly stand there on that stage and they’re like, I’m the first pianist in my family. So that’s pretty cool.

David Martin (01:20:01.868)
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And to know that that’s something that you created and you built, that’s got to feel pretty good.

Nicole Kovar (01:20:09.583)
Yeah, it’s really heartwarming for sure.

David Martin (01:20:13.654)
Yeah, yeah. Well, Nicole, I’m again so impressed with what you’ve built, not just with your business, with your nonprofit. Now, for those that want more information and get connected with you in your Facebook group, it’s called In-Home Music Studio Teachers and Owners. You do have to request to join. So make sure you check that out if that’s something you want to learn more about and connect with Nicole.

But yeah, Nicole, thank you so much for being on the show. It was a pleasure to chat with you and to learn more about what you do.

Nicole Kovar (01:20:48.121)
My pleasure as well. Thank you so much.