Business Xcelerator Business of the Month - Mikes Lessons

Share:    

By Sean Burrows This month's Business Xcelerator business of the month was a real treat to interview

. Five years ago, Mike Johnston was a working touring musician with the likes of Filter (Warner Brothers Records) and Simon Says (Hollywood Records). Today he stays in one place for work and is earning a bigger, more consistent income. What is he doing differently? Not much, he is still playing drums and loving every minute of it. In fact, he loves it even more now than he did when he was playing in front of 20,000 people. "On tour I discovered I had more of a passion for teaching the other drummers than I did for being on stage!" But don't get the idea that Mr. Johnston settled for something less when he decided to make a life out of teaching music instead of performing it. Quite the contrary! Mike Johnston has invented a new way of sharing music education, and he has found it to be extremely rewarding. Not only is it rewarding business, but Mike is truly an industry first. As an endorser for Aquarian Drum Heads, they saw what he was accomplishing, and saw him as a wave of the future. He became the first educator to have a full page magazine ad taken out on just him. "Aquarian ran these ads in both, Drum and Modern Drummer." I said, "What are you doing? I'm just a drum teacher! But the investment they made in me legitimized what I was doing THAT much more, and I was no longer a crack-up on YouTube just trying to get by, somehow that made things real." BX: Performing on stage in front of massive crowds is a pretty big high, was it shocking to discover that you got an even bigger high out of teaching than performing? MJ: Absolutely and that's why I thought like, hey man, this is a lot of people's dreams. Let me get out of this and help people get to this point since I already know how I got here. It wasn't my dream, but I know that it's a lot of people's dream so I wanted help these people get closer to achieving their dream. BX: Touring rock star to online drumming guru is a big jump. How did you make that happen? MJ: Well, on tour I would spend most of my time teaching the other drummers. It wasn't like I was saying, "I bet you can't do this." It was more like, "Hey, I was just on stage and while I was spacing out playing this song, I thought of something. What do you guys think of this?" I was trying to contribute because I was on tour with Travis Barker from Blink 182, Taylor Hawkins and Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters, John Otto from Limp Bizkit, and Jon Wysocki from Staind. These drummers were great players so I wasn't trying to teach them like I was their superior. I just kind of realized, I was having more fun doing that than when I was on stage. I have more of a passion for creating parts and breaking them down to other drummers than I do actually playing the drums on stage and doing the rock star thing. I just got so much of a high out of that compared to being on stage in front of 20,000 people bored out of my mind, but as soon as I was teaching those other drummers something, I was in heaven. At that point it became obvious to me that I was meant more for teaching than I was for touring. BX: Having downloaded a lot of your video lessons myself and sitting through the private lesson broadcast, it is obvious that you aren't self-taught; you know what you are doing. What kind of formal training background do you have? MJ: I started taking private lessons when I was five. I was absolutely terrible for probably the first seven or eight years. Like bad enough that my teachers accused me of not practicing because I was so bad. They said well you couldn't possibly practice and be this bad. So I definitely wasn't a natural. BX: You definitely have an x-factor to your teaching, and obviously a lot of your students/customers online value your teaching approach. What is it that sets YOU apart? MJ: As a kid I was practicing three to four hours a day, every day and not improving at all but luckily I was so young. Eventually when I was thirteen, things finally started to click, and I started to understand myself as far as how I needed to break things down to learn them. My teacher would teach me something, I would nod my head and pretend I understood it and then I would go home and break it down for myself, and that's kind of how I developed my teaching style. I learned to teach by re-teaching myself what I had just learned. This process helped me develop patience because every one of my students that struggled, I understand. I get it. I'm like I know what your body feel s like. I know how awkward this is and I'll walk you through it. Where a natural drummer that tries to teach will just look at a kid and go like, "Why aren't you doing it? Do better!" No kid wants to fail. No kid is trying to be bad. So it helps for me to have that great crystal clear memory of what my limbs felt like being awkward and it helps me break things down for people. BX: How exactly did you transition from being a touring working musician to making a career out of teaching? MJ: When I decided to start teaching full time, I knew that to do that I needed a big roster. So I worked tirelessly trying to build that up. My goal was to have 90 students per week, and I did everything I could think of. I knew how hard it is to get private students. I knew that I had no control over how much better other drummers than me. There's nothing I can do about that, but I also knew the one thing I could control was I could outwork somebody. I have that option to just stay up later, to promote harder, and to put more effort into building my brand. When you're an independent contractor your brand is you so I just was tireless and just relentless on building the brand, Mike Johnston. I went into every school in our area and told their band director, I will tune your snare drums once a month, and give all of your kids a free private clinic once a month if in turn; you refer all of your drummers to me. I did that at 20 different schools and then within a couple of months I had 90 private students studying with me per week. So once I built up to that, I opened the Drum Lab about three years ago. BX: At this point you're teaching students like any other music teacher would, in a traditional one-on-one fashion. How did the online part happen? MJ: Once I had the Drum Lab really going; it was myself and six other teachers under me, and things got really busy. I was still doing these two or three day mini tours, to the point where I had to miss somebody's lesson. So, I would pre-record it and put it up on YouTube, and send the link to my students. Before I knew it, a lesson I recorded for eight or nine students a week previous would have 6,000 views! It made me wonder, "Why would 6,000 people watch this? It's just a drum lesson." It didn't make any sense to me. From there one of my lessons had a 100,000 views and then 200,000 views. I was thinking, "I don't want to be selfish, but if I just had $0.99 for every one of these views, we'd be in business!" So then I decided to look into building a website where I could sell products. I asked some companies and they gave me the big $10,000 quotes. I freaked out and wound up spending two months every night from 11PM to 4AM online learning how to build websites. At the time I'd never even emailed before and I couldn't afford to pay somebody to build a site so I had to do it myself. So I learned graphic design, I learned action script, I learned HTML and I learned JavaScript and I learned how to build everything by myself so my overhead remained zero besides my GoDaddy hosting team and that was it. Or at least that was the beginning of it. To read the full version of this article visit the Business Xcelerator Online Magazine.

Business Xcelerator Business of the Month - Mikes Lessons

By: Sean Burrows

POST COMMENT

Mechanical Animation And Hvac Design Services Be Different By Buying Custom Business Cards ? Product Launch Manager Training - Product Launch Formula Http://www.mlm-mentor.info/articles/5linx-training-explode-your-5linx-business-4521/ Long-range Uhf Rfid Reader With Multiple Configuration Options Agree In Order To Disagree: Closing The Sale More Easily By Avoiding Confrontations Better Healthcare Through A Better Hospital Revenue Cycle Discover Small Business Credit Card: A Perfect Match For Your Business Data Quality And The Hospital Revenue Cycle Cash For Watches A Great Way To Leave The Bank Out Of Your Business Affairs Either Fail Horribly With Google Adwords...... A Better Hospital Revenue Cycle Begins At Registration Getting Started In Column Writing, Websites