Lauren Bateman: Earning $1.5M a Year Teaching Guitar

You left a stable career in pharmaceuticals to pursue your dream of teaching music. Can you share more about that time?

I used to work for a pharmaceutical company called AstraZeneca. My degree is in biology and archaeology and I worked in cancer research for a number of years. While it was very rewarding, I just felt like there was something else I should be doing, particularly to help people. 

I wanted to do something with music even though I never went to school for music. I took piano lessons when I was younger and failed at it miserably. But I played guitar and I liked writing songs and playing music. So I said, well, I'm going to quit my very stable job and become a musician — and at 27, that's exactly what I did.

How did you go about getting those first couple of clients?

I had a website, but I also did the old school [tactic] of flyering cars. I used to get up at five o'clock in the morning on a Sunday because I knew that's when people would be home and I would walk around the neighborhood and flyer people's cars. 

I would get a lot of angry phone calls from people that I put a flyer on their car, but I also did get some of my initial students from those. Over time, as the website grew and became more popular and I had a Google listing, I started getting clients a little bit more organically to the point where I didn't have to go out and flyer all the time.

Your business started as a brick and mortar studio. Can you share how you transitioned the business online?

I started teaching privately out of my home and then eventually, it got so popular that I graduated to a full blown commercial studio and I still have the commercial studios today. 

I had two physical locations at that time, but I really wasn't teaching a lot. I had about three or four students that I had worked with forever, but I was doing a lot of managing. And that's what made me go online — I really missed the teaching side of things.

I needed to be able to teach in a way that didn’t require me to be stuck in a physical location on a specific day at a specific time. So I was like, let me try doing this YouTube thing and see if that gets any traction. I started recording content in 2017 on YouTube and that was the year I filmed my first course. 

I eventually got married and went away for a month in October of 2019. While I was away, one of my videos started taking off and I didn't know what had happened because all of a sudden I was getting emails for every course sale, and it was happening a lot more frequently than usual. 

So I went over to my website to see what was going on and I saw a huge spike in traffic. Then I checked my YouTube and saw one of my videos went from getting like 10 to 20 views a day to getting 3,000-4,000 views a day in a matter of like two weeks. It just exploded. It was crazy. And that was really the indicator to me that this is something I really need to pay attention to and something that I need to figure out because the exposure was helping me sell a lot of courses.

You’ve now built a thriving business through your courses, memberships, and coaching. When did you realize the online business would become your full-time focus?

When that video took off, I went from making a few hundred bucks a month to about $3,000. That was on top of the salary I was paying myself from the music school. 

A few months later, COVID hit and I was very fortunate that I had all this stuff in place before that happened because at the end of March, they shut down my music school. We changed everything over to Zoom, but my third school location lost 50% of its enrollment because we had just opened that location in October of 2019.

We probably lost about 35% of our business overnight. We weren't getting any inquiries and we didn't know if we were going to go bankrupt. Then in April, people started buying my courses because they were at home and wanted to learn guitar. They’d find me on YouTube and liked the way I teach, so they’d go to my website and purchase my course. In April, I made $16,000 just for myself. 

The music school was making a lot more money but obviously you get a lot more overhead and operating expenses. I made $16,000 and I didn't have to give a penny to anyone else which was absolutely amazing and that was life-changing for sure. That not only got us through COVID, but also showed me the potential of what an online course business could be.

You mentioned your audience is primarily older learners and you've designed your course specifically for them. What do you think is the importance of building a target audience? 

Because I had taught one-on-one and privately, I knew my favorite person to teach was always 50 and 60-year-olds. Our lessons were just a lot of fun. And I couldn't believe that people were paying me money to have that much fun teaching a lesson with them. So I was like, this is the population that I want to try and connect with online. 

One of the biggest obstacles to learning guitar is you don't have time or you don't have money. A great thing about that audience is that a lot of people in their 60s and 70s are retired, so they have the time. And some of them are really well off, so they have the money, too. 

I think that was really helpful because it gave me a very specific target audience to sell to and in marketing, it helps to be specific like that. They say if you sell to everyone, you don't sell to anyone. So I focus on marketing to an older audience, even though I do get some younger students as well.

Once you know your audience, how do you identify your niche on YouTube and create content that resonates strongly with them?

If you're just getting started on YouTube, I always tell people to think of the things that you're most passionate about. What are the things that you could do and talk about for hours? What is the thing that people approach you about because they think you're an expert in it? For example, my wife's a nurse, so whenever someone has an ailment or a cut or something, they call her because she’s an expert. 

Once you have your topic, your first videos are gonna be horrible — just accept that they're not gonna be perfect or polished. But you should start by sharing the top 10 questions that people ask you all the time about your niche and your expertise. And you are going to find your voice through that [process]. 

For me, it probably took me about 30 videos to get comfortable just talking to a camera. If you've never done that before, it's really weird to look at a camera and visualize it as if you're having a conversation with a person. You're also going to be a bit nervous because you're going to be in the back of your head wondering what other people think about you. 

As you're releasing content, watch the views. Which videos are getting more views than others? Maybe most of your videos only get 20 or 30 views, but your next one gets 100 views. Well, that's telling you there was something in that video that really spoke to your audience. You should go back and look at that and find out what that is. I think sometimes we have an idea about what our niche is or who our audience is, but it's the content that we put out that really dials that in more for people.

You offer a free crash course that serves as a lead magnet and drives people to your email funnel. Can you share more about that?

We send most of our Facebook advertising to this free crash course on my website. The headline is learn to play real songs in 14 days and the goal of that course is to be a confidence builder and show people that it’s possible to learn guitar. 

It's also a way for me to offer something for free and give them a chance to experience what it's like to take a course with me. If that works really well for them after 14 days, they're more likely to buy the full course.

I promote both the paid and free course on my YouTube videos. I push both. If I'm doing something like how to tune your guitar, which is an absolute beginner thing, I'll recommend they grab the free crash course. If I'm doing a video that's about strumming, which is a little bit more late beginner, I might say, if you like this and you're interested, go check out my seven level guitar system. It really depends on the content of the video as to whether I'll recommend the paid course or the free course.

Looking back on your journey from quitting your job to now running a thriving online business, what's the most important lesson you've learned along the way?

I think the most important lesson is to stay true to yourself and your principles and really serve clients how you would like to serve them. There's so many different gurus out there who are telling you this is the best way to do things or my way is the best way to do things. I've taken advice from coaches in the past and it just doesn't feel like me.

For instance, I don't want someone to not be happy with my product. If someone wants a refund, we just give them a refund. But that's me and that's my business, and I'm not gonna hard sell people. Know who you are as a person. Don't try to be someone else. You have to be yourself because that's what people love. 

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