Guitar Solutions, Leicester, United Kingdom. 101 likes. Why choose Guitar Solutions? Guitar Solutions has been growing in Leicester for a number of years, and is consistently getting bigger and...
Learning by doing, and how not to do it. 4 Things I learnt from my first business.
Guitar Solutions. My first business.
What an experience. So much time spent, and late nights. Trying and trying and trying again.
GS is on hiatus right now. It has been for a few years. It may well be forever at this point. I keep toying with the idea of following through with the big rebrand I had lined up shortly before I gave up and kicking it back into gear.
(Note -I did give up. I had a bad stint after the biggest opportunity that had ever presented for GS became a sour, arduous experience. I set it to one side, I needed a break, and never picked it up again).
The knowledge is there. The enthusiasm’s there. But, so is the key takeaway from it all.
You can’t just start a business and expect it to be financially viable.
A successful business needs a little more thought than none at all. I started GS because I needed more money, I wanted more money. I looked at my skills and thought “What can I do, I can fix guitars”, and went from there.
Musicians, as a rule, don’t tend to have a whole bunch of cash anyway. Especially after a couple of years in 2008 when the recession hit. People were literally losing their jobs. Things like a spanky service on the guitar was just too luxurious to consider.
If I’d considered it at all, I’d have realised that it was a very small marketplace, and I was going to struggle.
Now, any one of today’s sales and marketing gurus will tell you that getting right down to specifics is good. Find your niche. Make it super focused.
This is great when the people in that niche have plenty of cash to buy your services. But if they aren’t there, it’s gonna be an uphill battle.
Thing is, those clients were there. I knew they were. I wanted them but was too scared to approach them. The impostor syndrome was so strong I didn’t dare promise them anything, which didn’t matter cos I didn’t approach them at all.
I didn’t consider learning to sell cos I thought of it as pushy, sleazy absolutely not for me or my customers.
People would ask me about work and I’d pitch them, and 4/5 times they’d say “Cool, I’ll give you a shout on payday”. Payday never came.
The most salesy I ever got would be to say, “I can squeeze you in this week, before XYZ for *name drop*, and we can sort out the other stuff (payment) after”.
This improved things a bit. The workflow increased, happy customers came back. Until the “pay me later” bit reared its head and I ended up waiting 2 months for payment for a big job. It shouldn’t have been a problem except that I’d sunk all the assets I had into paying the supplier to complete this one. Deposits I’d put down on items to buy and sell were forfeited. It cost me more to come back from than I made.
I rethought the pay me later approach. It was a hard lesson in Liquidity, the lifeblood cash flow of a business.
If the cash flow stops, the business stops.
It served a second lesson too. Serving friends. The guy I did the work for was a friend, in a locally known touring band, they were doing well. It made total business sense, plus my mate wasn’t going to let me down on his end of the bargain, was he.....?
There’s lessons in owning your own business that you’ll NEVER expect. You end up doing things you never saw coming, and you get to see people you think you know really well in a very different light.
Honestly, now, I avoid working with anyone I have a prior relationship with. Just in case.
I wasn’t gonna let myself be a mug again. It was the second time that working with a mate had burned me. The first time I started teaching lessons with another friend of mine. I put the word around, sorted a venue to teach in, hand wrote the lesson plans and teaching materials, and dealt with the contact with the client - a lady looking for guitar lessons for her two daughters, about 9 and 11 years old, during the summer holidays. The first lesson went really well, we got paid and I split the cash with him 50-50 like we agreed.
The second week came, we started the lesson. He was hungover and swore, albeit casually in front of the girls. NOT COOL. I told him that if that’s how he felt then I’d do the lesson without him. They never rebooked. My reputation as a teacher was dead, thanks to my friend.
So, be very careful who you trust your time, money and reputation with.
Anyways, I persevered. It took a little while, but basically, I lent the business the cash from my own pocket. I wasn’t about to let all that effort lose steam and go to nothing. Custom was steady but slow. I tried to get people engaging online, to interact with the posts I found. I’d get a like. One post had a few shares, and no-one even mentioned GS. I was gutted.
I know now that I was trying to market, but didn’t know it. I thought if I post cool content then people will talk about GS. This is kinda true, cos content marketing IS a thing, but it’s one aspect.
You need a call to action (tell people what to do - call me, email, message here, get in touch for your 10% discount, today only!) But you need to tell them how you can help them. Don’t just say “We’re so great, we’re the best, blah blah”.
Try “We’re the best. We’re the best because whatever instrument you send to us will be so improved, and make your playing so great, whoever you like will fall at your feet pleading to go out with you! Oh, and the record company will offer you so much cash you’ll be crushed”.
Well, not quite like that, it’s long-winded for a start. But what it does is portray the benefits of your services. They imagine the hotties falling at their feet, and swimming in cash.
Some people care about the height of the action on a guitar neck. Others care about it cos they know it’ll make them shred and look SICK. AS. FUCK.
Y’see the difference?
What you do is one thing, but how it relates to the customer is the important bit, so tell them that.
On top of all this, I learnt about registering as self-employed and doing tax returns, which aren’t nearly as terrible as you think they are, getting adverts in relevant magazines, buying domains and hosting. Trying to set up a website (I was using the wrong platform).... The list goes on.
Choose your niche.
Cash is king
Be careful who you let in.
Learn to market yourself. Tell your customers how your services benefit them.
Read this. Remember the pitfalls I discovered. Set your business up anyway (after relevant research!) and GO FOR IT!
Good luck!
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