Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Alek Wasserman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Alek, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
I grew up in a pretty classic “Midwestern work ethic” home, where working hard was probably our number one value. My mom grew up on a dairy farm, so my brother and I were never allowed to make excuses for anything. Wanted to sleep in from school? “That would never happen on the farm!” So I think a strong work ethic was instilled from an early age. We were also avid competitive swimmers growing up, and that’s a sport where you might be practicing twice a day as early as age 12, with some kind of swimming either six or seven days a week.
When I got to college, I initially struggled quite a bit with taking on music as an academic endeavor instead of just taking piano lessons. I didn’t understand music theory or ear training, so I got bad grades the first two terms of my freshman year. The school gave me a warning that they would pull my scholarship if I didn’t get my act together, so I had to take a long, hard look in the mirror at age 19. From there, I worked extremely hard to turn everything around and I even made the Dean’s List my sophomore year. When I got to grad school, my grades were much better than they had been in undergrad.
On the professional level, I worked for about a year before I shipped to U.S. Army Basic Combat Training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Needless to say, the drill sergeants at Fort Jackson taught me everything I didn’t already know about working hard! You can learn some of the basics of running a business in Basic Training; one of the main things is that everything needs to get done to the best of your ability, and you need to hold yourself accountable to it so no one else experiences any problems.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am the Founder & Lead Instructor at Triad Music Academy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where we build lifelong pianists. We differentiate ourselves from other mid-large sized music schools by exclusively focusing our efforts and resources on the piano, so we can provide students with the most valuable learning experience.
All of our students receive weekly (or twice-weekly) lessons, and can participate in three recitals a year. We also offer three masterclasses a year, where students can perform for and be coached by local university piano professors. In the past, we’ve had faculty from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Duke University, and Winston-Salem State University. This year, we’re going to welcome faculty from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with two more schools to be determined.
Outside of lessons, students have unlimited access to our growing library of over 20 exclusive online lessons; this includes lessons on early concepts like naming the white keys, and more advanced lessons like playing minor scales. We also offer Unlimited Lesson Support, so students can text or email me directly with their questions in between lessons, however much they need, and regardless of which instructor they have.
Currently, we have six piano instructors and 95 students. Lessons are offered in our main studio, in students’ homes, or even in instructors’ home studios. Our methods have produced lifetime piano playing results, such as my former student who is now a sophomore at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The most important area of knowledge you can have is understanding everything about the product or service you provide. Before I decided to start Triad Music Academy, I had already worked as a piano teacher and public school music teacher for several years. I studied these areas in college and grad school, and I was well-equipped to be successful. You can always learn the business skills, but if you don’t have a value to provide to your community, it’s hard to put your marketing and management to work.
An important quality you need to get started is resiliency. It’s a little cliché, but starting a business is scary. I quit my job as a public school music teacher and didn’t have enough students to replace my income at first. But I knew that I had to keep going with marketing, teaching piano, and achieving student success or I’d be in trouble. You will get better at all of these things as you go.
Marketing may be the single most important skill, especially in the business I’m in. Most people, especially if they went to music school prior to maybe the last five years, learned absolutely nothing about running a business when they were in college. I was definitely one of them! So you have plenty of great music teachers who don’t succeed in finding students because they don’t want to do proper marketing, or don’t understand how to do it. You can be the best at what you do in the world, but if it doesn’t translate to an attractive product or service for those around you, it will be difficult to make a living with your craft.
What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?
Our biggest area of growth over the past 12 months has been our transition out of being a single-teacher studio and into a multi-studio school. One year ago, I was operating Triad Music Academy as a sole proprietorship and hadn’t even formed an LLC. I had about 33 students and no other teachers underneath me. Now, we’re an LLC, and like I said before we have six teachers and 95 students at present.
We’ve had to open a second studio (and we’ll probably move into an even bigger space soon), and I’ve had to grind so much harder than I ever thought just to set up all the proper infrastructure to make this all happen. I have learned a ton by bringing other teachers into the organization. They each have their own unique approaches to teaching and playing the piano, and having all these new faces among the students and parents has taught me what the needs and identity of our school truly are.
I also managed to meet my wife, get married, and start a family in that time! You could say it’s been a crazy year!
Contact Info:
- Website: triadmuiscacademy.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/triadmusicacademy/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/triadmusicacademy
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC97Vvlz28r3PmBeBClA5Bhw
