In this interview, Scott shares how he transitioned 230 kids in his music school to a group piano model.
Like most academy owners, he was initially skeptical of making this move…
Would the quality of the group lessons be as high? Would parents complain? Would they quit?
Not only did his worst fears not come true…. The transition and subsequent results absolutely exceeded his expectations in every way.
If you are an academy owner, you need to tune into this interview…
Your student retention, education quality, and margins could be massively better than what you are experiencing right now.
Here’s what we cover in this video:
- Scott’s motivation to switch from private to group piano lessons
- Benefits of group lessons over private lessons
- How he boosted student progress by 3x with a group piano program
- Overcoming parent hesitation to group lessons
- Transitioning individual students to group
- The mind-boggling results their students achieved after the transition (documented and verified)
Do not miss this interview!
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Full Transcript: How Group Piano Lessons Work For Music Schools
Introduction: Meet Scott, Founder of Music Pillars
Daniel
Hey, this is Daniel from GroupLessons.com and with me today, I have Scott from Music Pillars, a really cool academy that has been working with Piano Express | GroupLessons.com for a little bit of time now. Scott and I recently had a conversation via email and we were talking about his experience as a rather large music academy, switching from a mostly private lesson model to a group lesson model…
And Scott and I just came up with this idea that he’d come on, we’d have a conversation, we’d record that conversation and release it. Because I think there’s a lot of value, there’s a lot of wisdom that Scott has accrued to himself in going through this experience– an experience that, I have to say, a lot of academy owners are very afraid to go through. There’s this phrase that I use– the bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn. And there’s a lot of “perceived risk” that an academy owner has in switching up their programming, and especially switching to a programming that is perhaps unfamiliar to parents.
So Scott, I really appreciate you coming on. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Maybe a really good way to start would just be to introduce yourself, fill in some of the details that I didn’t give here in the opening, the introduction, talk a little bit about your academy… just to give people a sense of you and the business that you built.
Scott
Sure, yeah. You know, there’s certainly many studios larger than us. And of course, there’s certainly studios smaller than us. Between all of our programs, we teach about 300 students. We just passed May 2024, and that was the 10-year mark of being open for us. I’m also a general music teacher.
Daniel
Can you tell us a little bit about what instruments you offer and maybe even programming? Like do you do preschool classes, stuff like that? Again, I think that just helps dimensionalize what it is that you all are doing.
Scott
Yeah. So we do piano, voice, guitar, drums, and bass guitar for the instruments. We have not added strings or woodwinds here intentionally. It took a while for us to be good at each of those instruments I just listed for you. And there’s a difference between offering it and being good at it, so it took us a while to get good at each of those.
We also run a musical theater program. And so in that case, both our music program and our theater program overlaps. A lot of our vocal students will sing in our shows. We just finished Beauty and the Beast. And quite a few of our piano players will play in the orchestra.
We used to teach three and four year olds, and I think it is hard to be good at everything, so I intentionally made the decision to not continue doing those classes and to start students roughly when they can approach Piano Express‘s level one. And so there are some five-year-olds, there’s a four-year-old that is ready for that– is able to sit and be focused, but usually they’re entering first grade. Not always, not always, but usually they’re first graders.
Why Explore a Group Piano Class Model?
Daniel
What originally led you to consider a group lesson model? Was there a problem you were experiencing? Was there frustration you had in the business? Was it just an opportunity thing for you? I’m curious what led you to the model.
Outcomes in Private Lessons Were Not Consistently Excellent
Scott
Yeah, so that was actually a lot of painful reflection on hitting 10 years. So I began looking for other ways to run a better program about seven and a half years ago, eight years ago. I would pour my heart and soul into them and I would do their lessons and I would send them home.
And then in their lesson, I would do videos of me playing it and I would send them YouTube links and I would send that… And I have to say that this isn’t a hard and fast number, but as I began getting close to the… in 10 years, I realized that probably only 5- 8% of the students could count and play in time.
Now they “played“ Faber Level 4, 3B, Level 5… they were out of the books. But to be honest, they were just hacking through it. They were just playing complicated sounding things very poorly. A student does not have the ability to self-regulate themselves at home. So no matter what I sent home, I could send home a video, I could say, I could write down the metronome markings, I could send home me playing at different level markings, I could send home backing tracks and then they would play it…
A student cannot self-regulate. And so I began to look for ways that students could get feedback in between lessons in a useful way. Because I was just miserable. I just consider my first 10 years a failure on the music side. And I realize people listening to this may do the math of 300 students and go, you know, if only… but I really did not consider what we did to be successful.
I mean, we had kids playing Carnegie hall. Of course every studio at this size has those kids. Everybody has their show ponies. But I’m talking about the bread and butter students. I’m talking about the average student. It was just a total failure. So that’s a long answer, but I was basically disgusted with results and heartbroken over students that were giving it their all and simply not progressing very well.
Those were the two, those were the big drivers.
Daniel
I imagine during that time that you looked for solutions. And we probably could go through a laundry list of solutions that you looked for. And I bet a lot of people would resonate with those. I bet I would resonate with those because part of my journey to group lessons– I really relate with what you’re saying– there was a desire to improve student results. And oddly, it’s odd that the reputation that group lessons have is that it’s somehow lesser than private lessons when my experience has been quite the opposite. The structure has actually given me more time with the students and my students progressed much, much faster in a group lesson model. And I’ve used several.
And without stealing your thunder, I guess the question I would have to ask is what eventually had you settle on GroupLessons.com / Piano Express? I’m genuinely curious.
Group Piano Class Actually Improved Student Outcomes
Scott
Yeah. So the group dynamic, because I’m a general music teacher, I already understood all of the positives of group music classes. And there’s a lot of them, right? So I won’t go through that list now. So the first I actually used was Dorla Aparicio. So I contacted her, I bought all of her stuff and I actually taught that for a year.
The major issue with that one is that they go home and just play into an echo chamber, basically hack into an echo chamber and then come back. They don’t have the feedback mechanism. So it only gets half of the way there. So it had the group part. It had a longer class format. That was good. We had the fun, we had the interaction, we had the group numbers… so that’s good.
But then they just go home to an echo chamber and hack away for six days and then come back and there’s no way for them to know. You can write, highlight… I mean, I’ve done everything, you know, crazy stickers to big highlighters to sending home an MP3, whatever you want to do. They have to have a feedback loop telling them how they played 30 seconds ago. What actually was it?
And that’s what I saw that Express knew, was the feedback loop. That they could progress, they could move through their book at home, they could pass off music before they even got to the next class. And so that was huge for me.
Daniel
Was there any hesitation you had about switching to group?
Scott
I don’t know if it was fear or hesitation. I was ready to get going and to do it. I recognized that the software feedback loop was very powerful and the group part was powerful and that Piano Express combined those.
So I was down to do that. I knew that when it was successful, that would mean some teachers would lose their job. I knew that there would be a perception from teachers that only teach individuals of which 95% or more of studio teachers only have that experience and have no classroom management experience or skill at the time.
So, and that’s also how they were taught growing up. They were taught individually, right? So I knew that trying to be successful convincing a teacher would also be a major. So I did have a lot of reservations, but it was not about the effectiveness of the program. It was all about the scalability within a studio that is at scale already.
Daniel
And the observation I have about how you all adopted– and this would be information that only I’m privy to because of the unique advantage point I have– is that the way you adopted is typically the way that larger academies adopt, which is that your ramp up time was longer than the average smaller school or a single teacher studio that’s maybe teaching out of the front room of their house. I’m pretty sure your ramp up time was around a year, wasn’t it? Where you were slowly building your numbers over a year?
Scott
I only did the classes on Mondays to start. That’s the only availability I had with juggling all the other things of running the studio. And it was important for me initially to live it and breathe it as that first teacher. Not forever, but to do it, to live it and breathe it and be part of it.
So yes, it was at least a year before we even had over a hundred students in the program. But that was by design. It’s not like we didn’t have hundreds of students. It was that there’s a lot of competing non-correlated factors in a larger studio.
Daniel
Sure, sure. Now, what I will tell you, while this has been the majority experience, we had a large academy at the end of 2022 convert 178 students into this model in about eight weeks. They were very aggressive. So it has been done, and that isn’t against anything you’re saying here, Scott. It’s just, I do want to raise the expectation or the possibility for someone who was like, well, what if I do just want to dive in? It’s been done. Not as often, but it has.
And then the second thing is there is something that we’ve done here in 2024 that we weren’t doing back when you started. And I don’t know if it would have materially changed things for you, but we do have a new team member at Piano Express named Jared.
He’s got a couple of names around here, but the main title that we use is basically Client Success Coach. And he helps new studios onboard. And we have already noticed with the large influx of studios we’ve gotten over the spring and summer here since he started, we’re seeing them kind of go through the early stages a lot faster because they have like this ready reference.
And as we’ve grown as a company, we’ve reinvested back into more benefits for the people who are starting.
This was an area that we saw there could be a lot of value for studios because in those early days. The hardest period in having a group program in your academy or school is always at the beginning. It’s always hard to do something new. So we just want to make that onboarding process, that conversion process, a lot easier. And it’s why we have this client success coach now. So I thought I’d just drop that in here because that is a role that we’re going to continue to use.
Is there anything that has surprised you about using Piano Express that you didn’t anticipate before using it?
Scott
Yeah, there’s two big things. One is that by the time students are finishing even level four, 100% of them can count and play in rhythm and play while listening to other musicians in the same room.
Contrast that with when I was doing individual, I probably had 5% of our students that could do that. So that was a massive, you know, I felt like we were finally raising actual, budding, early intermediate musicians.
The second thing that really caught me off guard actually positively was that the rate of learning was much faster than I thought it was going to be. Noticing that anecdotally in class, that was the genesis for why I went ahead and we had by that time roughly a hundred individual in Piano Expres, and then we had another hundred or so across some other instruments. And that’s why I took some time and we actually began doing actual quantitative research on the progression because I knew that they would probably do a little better in group.
But.. I did not realize they would do orders of magnitude better.
Daniel
How much better were they doing?
Scott
My God. I mean, I wouldn’t believe this if I hadn’t seen it myself and actually done the data, but students were progressing 2.5x to 3x the rate of an individual student.
I wanted to make sure that we took some time and were really quantitative, so it took us some time to go through every single student individually and track the pages they had gone through, how many, and then compare that with roughly comparable students in Piano Express. But it was pretty dramatic. And once we saw that data, then I wrote up the document, which I believe you shared on a YouTube video. And we began meeting with parents to let them know we’re basically closing it down.
Now, we did not close down everything from this document, but we did close down everything up through level six. But this was everybody 2B and below.
The Challenges of Onboarding Parents To Group Piano Class
In that process, we did lose individual students. And I did my best. In fact, I even forwarded you some of the emails that I think are good for teachers to see. There were some parents that honest to God just really didn’t feel like it, and they would say, “Well, you know, since you’re unwilling to help my child any further…” and this is after I’d had a 35-minute conversation, given them the data, and shown them their own child’s results. That part was tough.
Daniel
Yeah. And I don’t know exactly what the numbers were on that. You know, I have helped somewhere between 500-600 studios convert to group lessons since 2017. Even in my own studio I didn’t have perfect conversion. I had a parent that was very stubborn. She knew better than me, you know, that sort of thing. She just refused to put her kids in what was clearly a better structure, so they left.
Here’s the truth. And I’ve said this over and over again, but I think it bears repeating because someone will find this video and they’ll never hear another video of mine. And this is just so important to hear. The hardest people to convince will be the people you’re currently working with because humans are resistant to change and they’ve been used to experiencing you in the way that they currently have.
New people coming in will not be nearly as resistant. And this is what I found in academies that I’ve worked with over the years, is that new people coming in are way more open to what you’re doing. They’re way more open to seeing that data and to seeing the possibilities for their kids.
So sometimes there does have to be a little creative destruction to create a better possible future.
Scott
Yes, I would agree with that and I’ve experienced that myself. Every single parent that was a musician had zero issues with it because I just went down the list musically about why: rhythm, counting, learning to play while listening. You just go through the musical items. It’s very straightforward.
The only parents that I lost were ones that would readily admit, “I don’t have any background in this. I don’t know anything about music.” And I found that baffling. I just thought, you know, I have to get better at being convincing because I cannot believe that this parent that does not know anything, couldn’t find middle C on the piano, somehow knows the best way to teach their child.
But I had the conversation enough that I realized it’s part of how it goes. One of the misconceptions, sometimes with musical parents, but it doesn’t take too long to go through, is that a child who can “play” a Clementi sonata very poorly can pass level four typically when they sit down. They cannot sight read and play in time.
And so I’ve had this happen: the child in that initial assessment, as I explained where I’d like to go with them, they’re in tears. They are frustrated. So I have learned to describe that to them and to their parents beforehand. I will say that there is a misconception you need to understand. When you look at Haydn’s Sonata, you see 16th notes, you see a lot of bars of music. They’re not playing it well. You, parent, and I know that both musically, okay? But they’re hacking through it.
Now, if we go and have them try to play level four or five, the music is “easy”, right? So this music is going to look easy to you because it is easier than what you are playing. What is going to be frustrating for you is that you don’t count. And that is really hard to realize. And you’re gonna find that the software is really brutal on you because it doesn’t really care who you are. It doesn’t care, it’s just a machine.
So I’ve had to try to do that some and that’s been helpful because the tears do come. If the child is 8-10, depending on their personal behavioral disposition, they’re going from more advanced music that they hack through to actually now becoming a functioning musician. It’s really difficult at first.
Daniel
I have two observations about this that I would just contextualize for anyone listening or watching on YouTube. One, those tears are a measurement of the feeling that the child has when they switch from subjective judgment from a teacher to an objective measurement of what they’re technically doing from a piece of software.
The second thing I would point out is that once kids get used to that, and it doesn’t take them long, the reward for them is just better skill. And the number one thing I’ve said is that the best way to make music lessons fun is to make it feel easy. And sometimes you have to experience a little bit of short-term pain for long-term gain.
Part of the reason why retention in my studio was sky high was that I was brutal on kids. Again, even before Piano Express existed in my old group structure, I was brutal on kids in that first book. I put so much pressure because I knew it would pay off down the line because I didn’t have kids quitting at 2A or 2B in Faber. Most of the kids in my studio would go the distance and go all the way through the method, not hacking, you know?
Now we’ve got an even better system here. And the other thing, the final thing I’ll say about this, is that one of the pieces of advice that we give when you’re bringing kids into Express is we have a book correlation guide where if you’re coming from another method into this one, we often recommend bumping down to make up for that subjectivity that you had put into your piano teaching over the years.
We recommend that you bump kids back a little bit because otherwise it’s going to be a very rough landing for them in this new method. Maybe the last thing I would say in this conversation would just be that, as teachers, there’s a lot of tools out there. And there are three tools that we’re working with at Express.
There are method books out there, there are group methods out there. You even referenced a few earlier in this conversation. There are apps out there. But there isn’t anything up to this point that has combined the three of those into a cohesive whole. And that’s what we’ve done here at Express.
I don’t even mind saying it in that way because really the genius behind the method is Greg. It’s not me. I’m marketing operations in this company. Greg is the genius behind it. So I have no problem bragging about my best friend of 20 years and what he’s created in terms of the educational content.
But I do just want to point that out because I don’t think we’ve ever really said that publicly before, just that we’ve taken three different kinds of tools that are all available and mixed them all together.
Scott, is there anything else that you want to talk about?
Scott
Thank you.
People should do it. It’s new, so it will feel scary. That’s normal. If you run a larger studio, you have some additional things to think through. That’s normal too. I think that for me, what I would like to share in closing, and it will be helpful to some teachers, is that for the most part, we, and certainly I, got into this because of the connection and beauty that is to teach a child music.
We want to give them the best that we can. As I began having conversations with parents, some of which did not pan out the way I wanted to, at the core of this, I am doing what is best for their child, period. I know that.
Now, whether or not I can convince the parent of that or not doesn’t change the fact that I am doing what is best for their child. Now that may mean they get rid of me. That may mean that they go somewhere else. That may mean that their child just stops doing music. I mean, obviously we all work hard for that not to happen. But if the heart of that can just stay the same, ask yourself, are you doing what’s best for the child?
If you just keep that at the heart of it, which is probably why most of us even got into this crazy business, is because we wanted to make an impact through music on our community… And part of that involves doing the very best you can. And this is the very best you can do. It makes the decisions pretty easy.