Blog Launch

Welcome to our blog! I am excited to begin sharing the goals of Tolbert Music LLC as well our wisdom on getting your students to practice and continue to enjoy music. We envision this blog as being a series of consistent, quick, targeted articles that will help you to enhance your student's experience of their music lessons.

I'd like to kick us off by speaking to the origins of Tolbert Music LLC, our founding principles, and our mission for the future.

It's easier said than done to get a private studio up and running in Northern Virginia. At risk of boring my readership on the outset, I will cut the story down a bit. Word of mouth spread first through the Lake Barcroft and Bailey's Elementary community (shout out to Jill Anderson for getting me started) that I was teaching lessons in student homes. It took a few years, but when I finally acquired a full studio I decided I would quit my job with Fairfax County to pursue the private teaching full-time. The studio has been a huge success and I've never been more satisfied and proud of my work, than serving the wonderful families that I have taught over the last several years.

I didn't want to halt the forward motion of my career so I began pondering on how to grow. My father-in-law shared a book with some sage advice that I took to heart - Your reward in life will be directly proportional to your service; If you want to be happier, make others happy. If you want to be more active, help others be more active. If you want to be spiritually fulfilled, fulfill others in this way. If you want to make more money, find a way to make money for others.

I knew that my struggles to start a studio were shared by my colleagues. Many of us end up teaching at music stores to find students, a gig that I had picked up while my personal studio was growing. Unfortunately, the stores are simply not able to provide a consistent enough student body, nor enough pay for lessons for teachers to treat it as a full-time job.

If I wanted to expand my studio there was only one way left to do it - help expand the studios of other teachers.

I intend to dedicate an entire blog post discussing my insight on the music lesson market but for now, suffice it to say that my first step to establishing Tolbert Music LLC was figuring out how to provide a better service to both my clients and my teachers, than music stores. We now occupy a unique and superior niche of the market.

Treating my teachers right, and developing strong relationships with clients are our founding principles. If I plan to have instructors work for me, I am not only going to need to provide work that the instructor can subsist upon but work that they can flourish with. Clients need to be provided an experience that is not only superior to our competition, but that brings music into their lives in a way that the whole family begins to value and even cherish it.

Mike Dranove was my first partner. He is an excellent musician and teacher that I am very lucky to call a friend. After experiencing significant success with expanding Mike's studio, I decided to reach out to others. Eventually, the stars aligned and one of my closest friends from college, Mike Drennan (yes, different guy with a painfully similar name) made a move from Buffalo, NY to Alexandria, VA, on the hopes that I'd be able to help him out. It's taken the better part of a year but Mike is closing in on full-time work. We're not only talking next steps for how to expand the business but entertaining some 5-year plans and goals. Along the way I have also begun helping to build the studios of JennaMarie Warfield, Chris Troiano, Amanda Fish, Nicole Lytle, and Zach Granger. Check out their bios over on our 'teachers' tab. I am honored to be working with them, and am committed to finding them as many students as their studios can hold! Help us out by passing on our info! We say thank you in the form of finder's fees and waived lesson fees.

Our mission for the future entails a greater list of services to our clients including the continuation of student recitals, new teacher recitals where our students can come see us perform, performance ensembles for students to come learn with their peers, and broader community outreach to get our students involved in sharing their music through charity and competition.

Tune in next week for an entry in which I'll share some of the most pertinent insights I have learned over the last few years about getting students to practice without having to nag them!