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Personalized > Automated

Until a few years ago, my teaching focus was always on instructing people how to play music. Whether it was oboe when I first started out, piano, electric bass, upright bass, jazz theory, or fine-tuning performance skills.

As I built up two decades of experience running bands, booking gigs, promoting tours, creating websites, and planning albums, I had no notion I’d eventually find myself helping other musicians learn those skills.

I didn’t even realize I was learning those skills. I thought I was just doing what I had to do to survive as a working musician.

But as my community in Nashville grew to include many friends who were also chasing music dreams without much, if any, support, I felt drawn to share what I knew about social media and promo, driven by a passion for helping other women feel less alone in their journey as independent musicians.

At the time, though, I felt I had real-world experience but not coaching credibility. So I stuck with just helping friends, not feeling confident enough to call myself a coach.

2020 rolled around, and suddenly, I had the time to change that.

With touring on hold, I dove into upskilling as a music career coach. I took multiple online courses and read everything I could about being an effective coach.

I took on beta clients, created short courses teaching marketing techniques, coached for free while I figured out what worked best, and tried hard to follow the guidance of these master coaches who had created million-dollar coaching businesses and helped tens of thousands of people.

These gurus say that to build a successful coaching business, you must automate as much as possible. Create automated marketing email campaigns instead of sending individual emails, produce video courses rather than doing one-on-one real-time coaching calls, and make educational materials broad enough to apply to everyone.

So, I followed their advice and created generic video lessons about music website design, hashtag strategy, SEO, social media posting, networking strategy, and branding.

I made informational carousels and reels designed to go viral and cross-promoted everything on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Pinterest.

But in trying to build the coaching business I thought I was meant to, I discovered that attempting to coach everyone diluted what I could offer people and took away the aspect that had drawn me to coaching in the first place - the joy of connecting with someone and seeing them grow in skill and confidence.

Burnt out and disillusioned from trying to be someone I’m not, I stopped coaching altogether.

I thought creating a 12-week video course with downloaded pre-made resources was the only way to coach, so I turned clients away and busied myself playing bass and working on my other businesses.

Eventually, though, a musician whose story I really liked came along, so I decided to give it a shot, working one-on-one without a formula, script, or pre-prescribed list of tasks.

Working with this person, I remembered why I loved coaching in the first place:

I love finding someone’s story.

I enjoy figuring out what makes them tick at their core.

Uncovering why they are driven to create music and art, even if they’re not sure at first, and guiding them to find ways to share that with the world.

I love watching them realize they have something compelling to share and find unique ways to do that in a way that feels true to them.

And it unequivocally clear that you can’t do any of this by producing an automated video course series.

Musicians are not cookie-cutter, so coaching them can’t be either.

So I threw away the business books, unsubscribed from the entrepreneur email lists, and exited the coaching courses I enrolled in.

I know I will never have “$10K months” from coaching, and I will never be able to “make money while I sleep.”

However, I will get to work closely with fantastic people and help them find joy and confidence in their lives as musicians.

And that sounds great to me.

Please note: my coaching calendar is currently full, but if you’d like to get on the waitlist please reply to this Substack or check out my services here.