Key Takeaways
- Why Jonny failed out of high school and how working with a great teacher at 16 shattered his self doubt and laid the foundation for his life’s work.
- How running his music school naturally led Jonny to launch his membership site – and the moment he realized no one else was providing the same service he was.
- The reason Jonny requires everyone in his membership site to have a charitable focus.
- How Jonny’s business attracts donors, government funding, and sponsorships – and why this never happens for entrepreneurs who solely want to squeeze as many dollars out of their business as possible.
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“The more generous I am, the more profit I seem to make.” – Jonny Wilson “The reason you exist is to just solve some sort of problem and provide something that makes someone’s life better because of the problem you’ve solved.” – Jonny WilsonEpisode Resources
BuildAMusicSchool.com GoodtimeMusicAcademy.co.nzTranscript
Read The Transcript
Shelli: Jonny Wilson, you’re awesome. Welcome to the It’s a TRIBE Thing Podcast. How are you, my friend?
Jonny: I’m awesome. Thanks for having me on, Shelli.
Shelli: It’s my absolute pleasure. I love your story. I personally am a music enthusiast so I’m super stoked to tell the story of your membership site build a music school and I just wanted to like briefly introduce you a little bit because you have won The Young Businessperson of The Year Award. You have been given the Local Hero Medal and I’m wondering if you can share with us your story because you weren’t always this revered person in your community. Who were you at the beginning before this great journey to being an entrepreneur, a music school owner, and now a membership site owner?
Jonny: Yeah. Sure. Well, I was homeless because I didn’t like school at all. I failed most of my high school years. I hated going. I’m going to try and skip class and the only thing that I felt that I had any shred of talent was playing the drums but I was always told that that could never be a real career so I didn’t really pursue it. And then when I was about 16 years old, I had a drumming teacher who was at university studying music and he taught me how to play better and he inspired me to be a leader and just encouraged me that I could pursue music as a career and he changed my life so radically that I just wanted to be like him and so I went and did a music degree. I’m studying jazz drumming and when I finished, I had all sorts of opportunities whether it was to go play on a cruise ship or there was to play in different bands touring the world or all sorts of different things, but I had had my life changed by this person so radically that I decided I wanted to build a music school and the music school that I sort of wish I got to go to but it was all modeled around what this tutor had done for me. And so, we focused on being a school getting kids on the positive hobbies with positive role models. And so, that school started with about 30 students of me teaching privately and today 10 years later, it’s about 2,000 students.
Shelli: Wow.
Jonny: Yeah. It’s pretty crazy and, yeah, my team went from just myself to now my whole team is about 60 people. So, that’s the main part, going from a failed student to building an actual physical music school.
Shelli: That’s incredible. And so, wow, this is so great. So, I also am a drum enthusiast. I actually had a drum lesson with Pink’s drummer a while back, mostly because somebody challenged me I couldn’t make it happen. It’s so incredible what you said about the teacher who believed in you and who taught you how to be a leader because it’s amazing, it’s profound to be seen but it’s incredible to be understood. And to be understood by somebody who’s in a mentorship role who has the ability to lead you through and see the best in yourself is a life-changing exercise. So, can you tell us a little bit more about that teacher and what was it about him that inspired you? Because the thing that I love that you said was he helped you envision something bigger than yourself and see the possibility and see the possibility in yourself. So, for all of those people listening right now who are maybe have gifts or talents who are looking to do something with them, but maybe think they can’t just like you were told, can you walk us through that transformation for yourself?
Jonny: Yeah. Sure. Well, I think the thing that made the biggest difference for me was someone that was just constantly encouraging me no matter what. And so, even when you’re a young person, you’re making a few dumb decisions and so the time of your life you’re usually the most you get yourself the most insecure to have someone that’s a bit older than you that you see as someone cool that is just telling you that you’re awesome and that you have the potential to do whatever you put your mind to and I was not a really great musician. I had some potential and that’s what he saw and I was just someone that, yeah, paying attention to the teacher that I had and just encouraged me that if I focused on that one thing and I didn’t worry about all the other things that I wasn’t that good at in life, now if I just focused on that one thing, I could really make something of myself and that’s what he did. And so, I think that just sort of shattered the self-doubt I had about myself in terms of coming out of failing high school and thinking that I was stupid because I wasn’t good at this whole mess of cross-section of things but I actually had the shred of potential and he, yeah, just encouraged me to pursue that thing to the best of your ability, to be the nicest guy around, to be the most encouraging person, be the hardest worker, and you will be able to do whatever you like with that skill, and that changed my life.
Shelli: Well, it’s incredible because you’re going on to change so many lives based on paying it forward from what he did for you and it’s incredible when somebody is able to, somebody who you admire and trust and respect who, like you said, is maybe a little bit older, a little bit further down the path that you want to go down, looks you straight in the eye and says, “No, you got this. You’re okay,” and I know that that happened for me years ago as well. And I didn’t believe in myself, but I borrowed that person’s confidence until I had my own and I just like so want to salute you for doing the same thing because what your teacher did for you back in the day, you’re now doing for thousands of kids.
Jonny: Yeah. It’s pretty cool and one of my goals is being too because when you’re a teenager it’s probably your most selfish time of life as well. You sort of think that you know everything and the world owes you everything and what makes it worse for musicians is that I get really good at the instrument. They get caught up on the stage and then all of a sudden, they get super cocky or arrogant because they think they’ve beaten everyone else because they’re getting all this attention and they don’t know how to deal with it. So, at my school, what I decided to do when I started was that anyone who became sort of 14 years upwards, they as much as possible I would get them involved in teaching younger kids for free from…
Shelli: Oh, that’s brilliant.
Jonny: …backgrounds. And so, it’s a whole mass of leadership development program around music as well and so parents love it because the very first thing that they learn in terms of their training is the importance of integrity and it needs to be the same person when you come and be a core musician, music mentor with us. You need to be the same person here as you are at home. So, you’re not allowed to come here and be this amazing role model to these underprivileged kids and go home and be a complete jerk to your parents so parents love it. We’re just trying to inspire people that music changes lives and trying to make it accessible to not only middle-class rich white families but actually getting some of the toughest kids from the toughest home lives, getting them to full scholarship programs and paying it forward. So, yeah, that’s what we’re about here.
Shelli: That’s brilliant and I am 100% on the same page. Music heals and when you use music to teach as well leadership and life skills, that is the recipe for brilliance.
Jonny: Yeah. Well, all I know is it changed my life, gave me confidence and direction and purpose, and I see it happening to hundreds and thousands of kids every year through what we do. So, I was going to keep on doing it and we won’t reach every single person. For some people, it will be sport, art, science, math, but for our group, our tribe it’s music that changes their lives and just be part of it, I guess.
Shelli: That’s incredible. Incredible. So, how did that work for you initially? You started the music school. How did that transition into running a membership site? And if you can tell us sort of how the membership site serves your people and in what capacity you’re able to reach them, help them, and serve them?
Jonny: Yeah. Sure. So, our school that I’ve just described is a physical music school so we have a building, we have mobile classrooms. We’re in through the IR study, which is the Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, but the membership idea came because, obviously, with building a big school, we’re the largest school in our country because our country is pretty small, only about 4 million people. So, we’re getting that sort of fame and recognition and winning some awards like Young Business Person of The Year, and all those sorts of things. You attract a lot of other musicians, music schools, music teachers, and they want to know how you’ve done it. And so, I just slammed for years with people wanting to come visit, wanting to come spend a day with me, wanting to take me out for lunch, wanting to have a phone call, wanting to have a Skype, and that wasn’t just national even. It was internationally as well.
And of course, my journey has been so blessed to have so many amazing people that put time into me and so I want to do that for everyone else but I just physically could not fit everyone in and so I had to start thinking how can I actually take everything that I’ve learned, every system, procedure, business practice, marketing resource, every secret that we’ve got in going from 30 students to 2,000 and how can I package that in a way that’s going to be able to replicate myself and help more people. And so, that’s how the membership idea came along and so, yeah, that’s how it came along. That’s your question, yeah?
Shelli: Sorry? Yeah.
Jonny: Sorry. Yes, so I was just saying that’s the answer to why I decided to build a membership basically. I couldn’t coach everyone that asked me to coach them and so I hate to figure out how to put it in the program. So, when someone got in touch, I could say, “Hey, here’s this program. Check it out,” instead of taking me out for lunch or come and spending a day with me.
Shelli: So, for the people who are your members and are now able to take advantage of this amazing brain and vision that you have with what you’ve created, what is some of the feedback you’re getting from them, and what is some of the transformations that they’re making in other communities for their kids?
Jonny: Yeah. It’s pretty exciting. One of the things I did before I started this, I did go and research to see what sort of programs are out there because if people ask for my help. I assumed surely there’d be lots of people doing what I’m doing and I’ll just direct them to one of the courses. But what I found was that most of the courses that were out there were being run by people just running small schools, a few hundred students, maybe up to 500, and a lot of what they were teaching was just bland, boring, or what I would actually say is just wrong. And so, I realized I actually need to make something to show people how to do it right because there are so many times in my journey where you come home and just pull my eyes out because it’s just so tough and I had to learn all those lessons the hard way. And so, I’m able to actually show the people like this is what you do, this is how you build a successful music teaching business and skip a lot of those hard mistakes and heartache. So, giving that stuff to everyone in our group called the band squad, the feedback is just incredible, and a lot of them have actually taken other programs and they’ve written all these big references saying that it’s unlike any other program, blows them out of the water. So, that’s really encouraging.
But for me, someone who wants to make a difference with my skills, I’ve encouraged everyone else to do that and to think about having a social enterprise type model and at least this charitable arm of your business. Because every single person that’s in our band squad, our Build A Music School squad, they have to have some sort of charitable focus within their business. And so, the stories are incredible. We’ve got people that are donating through concert fundraisers to animal shelters. We’ve got people performing at elderly homes, people reaching refugees, underprivileged kids like you sit in different disability groups and that’s, yeah, people in wheelchairs or Asperger’s or different sort of mental things that make these people feel like they’re outside of society and lift out. And so, I guess I’ve been able to encourage everyone to think about what would I call the least of these. These people that are on the fringe and use just a portion of their time to imitate those people and that’s so encouraging.
Shelli: I always like tracing things back to the root and this is such a great story because through your membership site, you’re able to reach all of these people and all of these people, not just the people that you’re reaching that are interested in building music school, but with what you just addressed in terms of paying it forward and helping the elderly, refugees, kids, the disabled, it’s incredible to think the power of vision and of somebody believing in you but when you trace it back to the root of that teacher who instilled that confidence and that leadership in you then you went on to do all of these amazing things, build these school and have this membership site that is now having this massive ripple effect in the world. So, for all of those people who are listening to this interview right now, what advice would you give them for the vision, the thought, or the dream they have that right now they think is too big to conquer?
Jonny: I think for me, one of the things that’s important and I use it as part of that tagline is it’s important to run a business or membership that not only makes a profit but makes a difference. Now, that is a worldview statement and some people would not agree and they may just want to make a profit and that’s the only focus but what I’ve experienced and it’s just my personal story is the more generous I am, the more profit I seem to make because you actually draw people in because people want to hang out with people that are encouraging, giving, generous. And I can tell you upwards of probably 12 stories of people that have actually come along without being prompted, seeing what we’re doing, and just given us like massive chunks of money, I think the biggest one is probably a $50,000.
Shelli: Wow.
Jonny: And now we get all these funding from government and local government and also the sponsors. And it’s all being because we have wanted to make a difference as well as make a profit whether it’s a business or a membership. Like, the reason you exist is to just solve some sort of problem and provide something that makes someone’s life better because of the problem you’ve solved, and in doing that, if you think more about what you’re trying to solve and who you’re trying to help, you just go through it faster because people were drawn to that because that’s the energy you’re bringing to the table. But if you’re just bringing to the table, I’m trying to squeeze as many dollars out of it as possible, I think that people whether you realize it or not, they see through that and they’re not as engaged of you and you don’t bring the obvious because that’s not in teaching you have. And so, not to sound perfect or anything, but that is my focus to help people as much as possible and that is just me but the more you help people, the more you seem to grow, and the more money you seem to earn in doing so.
Shelli: Well, it’s funny because people, you’re right, people do sense when you’re doing things for the right reason, but also it attracts the kind of people you really, really want to work with as well.
Jonny: Totally. Yeah.
Shelli: So, let me ask you this. So, your first launch, what was that experience like, the very first time you said, “Okay. You know, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to do this?” And did you have any feelings of nervousness or overwhelm or anything like that? And if so, how did you work through that?
Jonny: Yeah. This is quite funny to say because obviously, I’ve built a big business. I’ve won some awards like I’m confident who I am as a person but when I launched my beta launch which I’m encouraged to do and I’m so thankful that I did do, I didn’t have a list at all. I figured out a sneaky way to build a list, and I emailed a whole bunch of people that in my industry and I put myself out there and I made my little videos with the sales pitch at the end. And I put it out, and I literally didn’t sleep the whole night because we’re in a different time zone to everyone else and as sort of 1, 2 in the morning starts rolling over for us, America’s starting to wake up and people are starting to read my emails and I just couldn’t stop my checking my phone. I was getting replies and I was getting like really cool replies and great ones and I was getting nasty ones and I was getting a whole mix and I was so nervous. And of course, I had to wait to about day five or six before the last promo video which had a buy button. And so, for that four or five days to whatever it was, I got the worst sleep of my year, but this feeling was and you’re so nervous because it’s just the hardest thing you know being a musician yourself, you put your art out there and you think, “This is part of me. Will people like it? Will they hate it? Will they trash it?” And I had all those feelings, nervous, wondering if it was going on. But the night of the sales cart opened, the next morning I woke up and there was $9,000 in my PayPal account.
Shelli: Whoa. Good for you.
Jonny: Which was amazing and it just keeps going for the next few days and I think it closed with about $35,000, $36,000.
Shelli: That’s incredible. So, when you’re going through the launch process and you have these trepidations at the beginning and you thought like, “I’m just going to go ahead and do it. I’m going to move forward even though I’m scared.” What was the biggest fear that you had that turned out not to be true?
Jonny: It’s such a good question and I wish I had thought about that to give you a really, really smart answer. Give me a second to think, biggest fear. I mean, it’s probably that one of thinking like do I really have what people want? Like, do people actually want this or would they reject to me or would they check out what I’ve built and I’ve poured my heart and soul into and say, “Oh, this is actually correct.” It was probably that sort of thing. And I was very pleasantly surprised. Well, I thought it was good but I was not surprised. I was relieved. I mean, everyone actually starts checking out and then I got all the feedback saying this is incredible, this is what we wanted. I got someone made me a video message saying that he was depressed of thinking about packing up his whole business but a bunch of the things that I’ve given him and strategies has unlocked a newfound freshness and excitement and it’s changed his life. So, that sort of stuff was such a relief after all their self-doubt in that period.
Shelli: Well, that’s incredible and your results definitely speak for themselves. That’s incredible. So, congrats on that for, A, moving through the nervousness and getting it done because had you not done that, all of these thousands and thousands of people that you’re impacting, directly and indirectly, would be not able to take advantage of the gifts that you provide. So, that’s amazing. If people are looking for you online, Jonny, where is the best place for them to find you?
Jonny: Yes. So, the membership about how to build a school of music school is called BuildAMusicSchool.com and so we’ve taken that, made our community band squad. So, you can find us there. If you want to check our school and the charitable work that we’re doing, that’s GoodtimeMusicAcademy.co.nz so those are the two main sites.
Shelli: Sounds brilliant. I appreciate your time and thank you so much for the work you’re doing in the world. It’s incredible and my hats off to you, my friend. Thank you for hanging out with us.
Jonny: Thanks so much.
[END]
