Successful Musician Podcast Episode 71
Interviewee: Fabiana Claure
Interviewer: Jason Tonioli
Jason Tonioli
Welcome to the podcast today. My name is Jason Tonioli, and my special guest is Fabiana Claure. As we’ve been talking, Fabiana, I learned that you grew up in… Bolivia is your home nation, so we have some ties down to South America, which is amazing. We were talking in Spanish, but your background is incredible. I love your story with music and what you are doing for musicians today, and I am thrilled to have you on this podcast. But just to introduce you, so you came up through the regular university path, we’ll call it, and you were a concert pianist. You can play piano much better than I will ever be able to play piano, which is… I’ve done research on you, and you are an incredible pianist, but you had this awakening moment several years ago about the need for business in the music world to help people who who are trying to do music, to actually have a career where they weren’t just a poor musician and wrong mentality, where they don’t feel like they can ever make money as a musician. So welcome to the show, and I can’t wait to dive into your story.
Fabiana Claure
Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me here.
Jason Tonioli
So, Fabiana, to start out, let’s dive in. Your story is too good to just skip to what you’re doing now. So tell people, how in the world does somebody who is in Bolivia, now you’re in Orlando and you’re coaching musicians, how did we get there and have this successful musician path where you are literally coaching hundreds, if not thousands of artists to be successful making money in the music world?
Fabiana Claure
I would say music has always been at the corner of my identity and my passion. Ever since I can remember, I played the piano. When I was about 15 years old, I decided I really wanted to become a professional musician because growing up in the United States, I was born here in the States, in Chicago, and then moving into Bolivia. My parents are Bolivian. And finally, in Cuba, around a 15 years old, I really realized that music could be a career, not just a hobby. And it could be a career that could really fulfill me from an emotional standpoint, even if I had no idea how I would make a living, and especially against all the odds. My dad is a civil engineer with a doctorate in Civil Engineering and a master’s in economics. And when he heard that I wanted to be a musician, he was not excited. He was like, you what now? You want to do what? And I was like, well, I mean, yeah, I want to be a pianist and a musician. And he’s like, how? What is this? And I remember even at that tender age, feeling in my heart that I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like, but I know that as long as I love what I do, I’ll find a way to make it work.
Fabiana Claure
And to this day, I still believe that to be the case, because when we can tap into that passion of what we really we feel called to do and to be, nothing can stop us. And it may not look exactly the way we initially set out, but if we persist, if we continue following that passion and that intuition and finding a way, there’s no reason why we couldn’t be successful as musicians. And so growing through the whole academic side of my career, after declaring my passion for being a musician and my decision for becoming a professional musician, I moved from Cuba to the United States. My boyfriend at the time now has been. We both got scholarships, so we were able to come together, even though he is Cuban and was born and raised in Cuba. And the odds for him to be able to come to the United States were really, really slim. But we found a way to come and started a career in music, first in Charleston, South Carolina. Then we graduated and moved to Texas and got our master’s and artist certificate degrees. Then we moved to Miami and got our doctor degrees all throughout 10 years of education, all of these through music music and through scholarships.
It was that passion that really pushed us through to be able to achieve all these milestones and get all this free education, if you will, through that passion for being the best performers and pianists we could be. And so I never really questioned what I would do after my studies. I just kept going, degree after degree after degree, because the path kept opening up for me. With scholarships here, scholarships there. Why not? Just keep going, keep going. And then finishing my doctor degree, I started to realize, well, there’s no more degrees to take. That’s it. This is the end of the road. Now, what am I going to do? And that’s when I started to realize and study, actually, my dissertation was the topic of looking at how do musicians actually make a living when they graduate? What do pianists do to create sustainable careers beyond education? I started realizing, wait a minute, the odds of me just finding a full-time job as a university professor after finishing my doctor degrees is probably almost nothing. There’s no opportunity. Too many people graduate, and there’s just not enough faculty openings. I started researching the statistics, actually, looking at the data from the openings in the music vacancy list of the College Music Society, the graduation rates of the NASM, National Association of Schools of Music, and starting to look at the statistics, and I was astonished to see, wow, there are, in fact, no jobs waiting for us.
So we’re going to have to build our business. We’re going to have to become entrepreneurs because no one’s going to come and save us. And especially the two of us, and especially the two of us because both my husband and I, we were both doing the same degrees. We did all our degrees together. So there was no backup plan that one of us had a job or nothing. We both had to figure it out. So around the third year of my doctorate degree, I started to realize, well, I should probably start learning about the music business and start taking courses. And the University of Miami has a fantastic program that has so many courses available around music business and entrepreneurship. So I started taking some courses, and then quickly, I realized there’s a whole new world that I am unaware of that has to do with really helping musicians build their businesses, and I better start learning. And so it started as a need for my own survival, really, as a mechanism for just figuring out how I was going to make a living because I didn’t know. I had to learn all of that. But then quickly, it became much more than just a means to an end.
After launching my first business, right as I was finishing my doctorate degree, my husband and I started a music academy called Superior Academy of Music in Miami. Actually, it’s been 14 years. We just celebrated our 14th anniversary since founding our first business on May first, in 2011. And we launched a business that was a brick and mortar school to help musicians build and learn how to develop the right musicianship skills so that they can earn scholarships, too. Because where we went, all the schools we were able to go on full rides, none of them were Americans. All of the other students we had, they were all international. And the American students always had to pay very expensive tuition. So we realized, what if we build a music school to prepare students from the beginning stages to apply into colleges and let them actually be competitive so they can also earn scholarships like we did? And it started from that intention of giving back what we had received so generously for 10 years in different universities. And that was the initial entrepreneurial step, building our own brick and mortar school. And then after five years of building a brick and mortar business, really learning by fire, really, because we had no background in running a business on anything other than just having our own private studio, I realized, wow, there’s a lot that I learned in this process, painful lessons that I feel now I should share in a bigger way.
I shouldn’t just keep going on my own. There’s probably more people that need to know this. And so that’s when I decided to look at what else I could do and started to feel a higher sense of calling for how I could serve and give back yet again. And that’s when the University of North Texas fell on my lap, the position they were looking for someone to build a curriculum for musicians to learn to build their businesses. I decided to submit an application and say, Well, maybe I could apply. I had never applied for a university job. After I saw all those statistics, I just built my own thing. But this was the first time I said, well, maybe I could apply. And because I knew the odds were so slim, I didn’t take it too seriously, Jason. I thought, Well, who knows? I know for a fact that it’s almost impossible that I’m going to get a job. I didn’t really think much about what would happen with our business if I got the job, except my husband being the yin to my Yang, he saw it coming. He’s like, You’re going to what now?
You’re going to apply for a teaching position in Texas, but we live in Miami? How are we going to just move and leave our business if you get the job? I was so naive, like, I don’t really know about it. Let’s just cross that bridge when we get there. It sounds fun, right? Yeah, let’s just see what we’ll do. But then he was like, Oh, I know you. If you get the job, you’re going to want to say yes. So in fact, he was right. As soon as I got the position, I decided, Yeah, I actually want to do this. So we had to run our whole school for eight months so that it could continue running in Miami with all our teachers, all our students, with the brick and mortar location, but without us. And so that became a learning lesson of like, Wait, is this even real? How do we run a business without the founders in there? Of course, I knew that big companies had done it, McDonald’s, et cetera. That’s the whole concept of a franchise. But I never thought that I would be actually leaving my business one day. That in and of itself became another lesson which informed my teaching methodology.
When I started teaching at the university, I didn’t want to just teach musicians about starting businesses. I wanted to teach musicians, how do you build a business that can one day be delegated, be restructured, and give you an asset for your life that can give you the path for freedom and for other ways of living that wouldn’t require you to be in the day to day totally consumed by the business. Those were some of the principles that I started teaching and building frameworks around while being a professor at the University of North Texas, and also learning about how important it is for musicians to step out of the university music section and actually learn about business. Because I had done my own stint of testing outside of the university when I was a student, and I entered a business competition, and I won all these prizes with my husband, and that allowed us in many ways to get the support that we needed to start our first business. The first thing I did when I got to the music program at the University of North Texas was to start connecting with the business school and meeting the faculty members at the business school and starting to send our music students there and building a bridge so that our musician students wouldn’t just continue thinking that everything is just the music school in the practice rooms.
I actually started building a music competition that would be an elevator pitch competition. And thankfully, I had incredible support from the administration. They gave me all the funding, and I launched this music business competition that created a big wave in the program. It got us national attention. We became one of the top music business programs named by Billboard magazine. We were featured on television. And it was a wonderful start to this process because now we were not just teaching musicians how to build businesses, but we were actually helping them start their businesses. We were getting them funding. We were giving them everything they needed. That was also very important for me to feel like even within the context of a university, I could still create new things. In a way, I built a business inside a university. That was a great experience. And I also created an MBA program in music business in collaboration with a business school. I became part of their advisory council. So a lot of the work that I did kept crossing these areas between music and business, music and business. And within five years of being in those two worlds in the university setting, I started to realize once again that there was more I could do, that there was more I could give, and that everything I had learned up until that point, not only from starting my business, but then from putting it on autopilot to then building a university program, I started to feel this desire to once again, reach out and serve at a greater level.
And in 2020, in February of 2020, I made an announcement to my network. I signed up to get professional coaching and support, which I had always gotten every single step of the way since my first business. I had always been looking for mentorship and finding the people who had done what I wanted to do. And I decided to invest in mentorship and getting myself in the room with people who were building online businesses. And I committed to like, okay, I’m going to start teaching online now and not just within the context of the university, but I’m going to offer my knowledge to anyone who could benefit from it. I truly just approached it with a sense of service and humility and made a post and just shared and said, Hey, I’m now building a way of helping anyone and whoever needs my support. Let’s book a call, let’s talk. Little did I know that 30 days later, the world will turn upside down with the pandemic. All of a sudden, thousands of musicians were totally displaced, and the world really needed what I was just about to create. That accelerated my passion to like, Whoa, I guess I really have to do this, and I have to do this now.
I started to really lean into it while keeping my university position and a newborn and my five-year-old. But I felt this desire to like, Wow, I really need to do this. And now, this is when I have to do it. It’s almost like I had been enlisted by God in this without knowing what I was signing up for and preparing for what would happen a month later without me even knowing about it. So really, that’s when everything really got very much accelerated. And within six months, I launched a program and I started working with amazing musicians who signed up from different areas of the profession. Some of them were university professors, just like myself, who wanted to see what else they could do in their same role like I was doing. Others were just private teachers. And so many of them really gave me their vote of confidence, if you will, to help them just build something online when everything was shut down. But that also showed me what is possible, not only from a place of service, but also from a financial standpoint, because with And then six months, I broke six figures, and I had never done that in my entire life.
And all of a sudden, I recognized, wow, it’s not about effort and hustle. It’s about strategy and having the right model. And I realized I could have continued working for another 30 years, and probably in the university model that I was in with a fixed salary, I would have never crossed six figures. In fact, I know for a fact, there were full-time professors who had been teaching there for 30 years, and their salary was less than six figures. And yet I did it within a six month time span just by building a way to transfer my knowledge online without ever having done it that way. So I committed to crack the code and show musicians how to do this in their own way. And so within a year of juggling both and teaching at a university and guiding musicians online, I decided to just go all in into being an online mentor. Really now, at that point, I decided, Okay, I’m going to let go of this position. It was much to the shock of most of the people around me, to be honest, because As you know, the odds of getting this type of job are really slim.
For someone like me to have gone through a whole education, getting a doctorate, most people who get this type of education, they hold on to that type of position forever. They don’t let that go. So a lot of the people that were around me, they thought something had happened. And they were like, What? You’re going to let go of your tenure track position at the university? What happened? And I had to really explain to people that nothing had happened, that I had just developed a different desire of doing other things and just serving at a different level. And as a result, many of the musicians that I started coaching would end up doing the same things. They would end up building their own online programs and letting go of what made them, what gave them initially security. Others didn’t, and that’s okay, too, but it gave them a great option to have more options, more freedom. For the last five years now, I’ve been really focusing on creating the frameworks and the systems to show musicians, creative entrepreneurs, how to codify their knowledge and to be able to transfer that in a leveraged model that doesn’t require them to trade their time, and that gives them the freedom to win back their time while also having a completely scalable financial model. And so that’s what I’m doing now.
Jason Tonioli
I love your story. Last week, I was actually at my… I had two kids graduating from university with their associate’s degree. But as I sat there at the graduation, you see just thousands of kids all lined up, and they’ve all got their fancy hats on and all of that. It made me think back to when I was graduating back when I was at university. I remember standing in line with several kids that had been through the classes, and they were getting their bachelors with me. I thought, as I talked to them, it was like, Well, what are you going to do? I was working in marketing. I was at a bank. I went out and got an internship. I think of all of the 50 or so people who were in my program, I was the only one actually working in marketing, which I thought was so crazy. As I talked, all these people were like, Well, I’ve got this job doing this thing. I had this epiphany. I was like, Most people don’t even ever work in the thing they are doing. Marketing is one of those where you can apply that to a lot of stuff.
But as I’ve been around music and just the music programs and universities and people who’ve gone through the path. I had somebody here at my recording studio yesterday, and she’s an incredible piano player, but she said she dropped out of the piano program because all that you did was you were required to practice four hours a day. And so, yes, you’ll get really good at playing the piano. But she said, But the problem was, then what? What are you supposed to do with it? I think this is a symptom of pretty much almost every university, and every school out there. You run people through these classes and you charge tens of thousands, even sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of the time, these kids that graduate are not prepared to be able to apply those things. I mean, yes, they’ve got the theory, but they don’t have a clue how to earn money. It’s awesome that North Texas was hiring somebody to teach business for music people. But unfortunately, I don’t see that. That just doesn’t seem like a common thing. When I was in the banking world, I had a friend who was my financial advisor, and he actually was doubling down on helping doctors.
And so the banker in me is like, Okay, well, that makes sense. You got the rich doctor. That’s a great place to go be an investment advisor for them. But what he told me when we were sitting down and talking, he said, These doctors, when they come out of school, they know how to do a surgery. They know how to do the doctor thing, but they don’t have a clue about running a clinic. And he said, It’s the same thing with dentists. They can fix a tooth. They don’t have the slightest idea. And so the only option they really have is to go buy an existing practice, and hopefully they’ve got a really good office manager person to tell them what to do. Otherwise, they struggle. And I think musicians, of all people, man, it can be really, really hard if you don’t know, especially if your teachers don’t have any idea how to make a living in music because they were professors and they got their safe tenure track. That’s great. You’re good enough to be that. But I bet you 90% of those tenure track professors wouldn’t be able to make it in the real business world if they had to go be a music person or They’d very much struggle.
I think those people, a lot of them are smart enough and hard enough working, but they would be very much lost in a lot of- It’s not just music teachers.
Fabiana Claure
One of the things that I was shocked about was that I presented in many conferences during the time I was a professor. I was invited to speak in many different national music education conferences, music business conferences, the National Association of Music Merchants, the Music Business Association, MTNA. So many of these conferences where I was invited to speak and to connect with other music business and educators, even the ones who are teaching business had never had a business. They never ran their own business. They were teaching about business, but they never had a business. I was actually very shocked to learn that. But again, it’s just part of the It’s all about just producing peer-reviewed journals, articles, publications. Those are the things that are incentivized within the system. Therefore, that’s what people need to do to keep their jobs. If the parameters are not there for them to have practical knowledge that they can pass on to their students, it’s just a system that is designed to not give them the most up-to-date information unless you build an innovative branch to your curriculum or hire someone like me who’s coming from the real world and then bringing that real world experience, which there’s always…
There are some institutions who are doing that, but it is not part of the norm. Let’s just say that.
Jason Tonioli
I was talking with a couple of very successful composers the other day. They all went to Berklee School of Music, which I mean, okay, that’s one of the top in the world for film composing. I just asked them, Point Blake, I said, What do you guys think is if somebody wants to be filming video games or films at a big high level like you guys have been able to do, do they need to go to seek out those top schools? And they all smiled and they shook their heads and they said, no, not at all. They didn’t have a bad thing to say about their university experience. They said, The relationships and the things we learned were really great. But is that necessary to make it in this world? And they just said, no. One said, I learned more in the first year of working in a studio than I learned in all of the years at the school because it was applicable in the real world. That’s true with any industry. That’s not just a music thing, obviously. But I think that hands-on, figure it out is that’s how you learn, is getting in and doing some of the hard work.
Then also being smart enough to hire the right people to help you when you realize that’s not my superpower. I see all kinds of people get hung up on trying to do everything themselves. And then they’re too cheap or too short-sighted to realize, wow, I could pay somebody to do this, and they’d have it done 10 times faster and better than I would do it. And so they never actually moved beyond getting launched with whatever the thing is they talk about, pretending they want to do.
Fabiana Claure
Yes, absolutely. I agree 100 %. The good news is when you go into an institution like university and you invest in going into an environment where there’s a lot of opportunities, if you have a plan, going to a university can be one of the best things that you can do. In fact, most of the major businesses that exist today, like Facebook, like FedEx, like so many companies, were started in universities. But the thing is, you need to know what you want, and you need to be able to look for the resources that are going to get you to that destination. And when you have a plan, being at a stimulated setting with the right connections, the right relationships, you can actually… I would tell my students, You guys think you’re busy? You guys think you’ve got too much on your plate? You’re preparing for this jury, this exam, this recital? This is the best moment to start a business. And they would open their eyes like, What? You cannot tell us this, Dr. Clare. What do you mean this is the best time to start a business? I told them, yes, this is the best time when you’re the busiest, when you’ve got all these things going on, because this is when you’re going to have all these opportunities.
There’s centers where you can get some professional development support in the universities. Most universities have You have your professors that can connect you with other people that can send letters of recommendation. You have your peers that may actually be your first customers. You will never be in such a fertile ground like you are right now. When you graduate and you’re out of the matrix, good luck. If you don’t have a plan, good luck. So that would motivate them to say, Okay, maybe I should start now. And that’s what I did. I literally started while I was finishing my doctorate degree. So I don’t think I would have gotten where I did if I hadn’t decided to do it in probably the busiest time of my life, finishing my degree.
Jason Tonioli
Right. I can still remember when I was in the business school at the university, the most impactful one hour I spent in all of university was this convocation where they brought in a speaker person to come from the outside to come talk to us. And you were required to go to it for the class. And so everybody be like, oh, some guy from the business world coming to talk to us and tell us how wonderful they are. And this guy had a book. It was about internships, but he basically said, If you’re in school, you should get an internship. And he says, even if it’s going and getting coffee for somebody, what it will do is it’s the only time in your life you are essentially able to get a front door access to the CEOs and presidents and people running these companies, the guys and girls running these companies. And once you’re a worker, you’re some low level person, and you’re not going to get the time of day. But a lot of times these leaders in companies want to mentor. They want to help. And if somebody is proactive, he says, they will recognize that, and they’ll see pieces of themselves, and they want to help you.
And he says, As soon as you graduate, all their worries… You’re trying to show up, and you want to negotiate a pay, and you want to negotiate hours. And as an intern, you’re just there to learn. Look it all up, 100 %. The leadership loves that. I ended up applying for an internship at a bank. That was the last thing I wanted to do. Who wants to be a stuffy banker and wear a suit and tie all day? That’s not cool or fun, right? But I did it because of that class, and it literally changed the trajectory of my entire where I am today, because I went out and got an internship in marketing at a bank, even though I couldn’t spell mortgage and didn’t even know what it was. I pulled them enough in the interview to get all these opportunities. Internships, I’m sure you saw all kinds of opportunities being in the university when somebody would do an internship or start their own business, right?
Fabiana Claure
I created the entire internship program that exists today because there were no internships, but I created them by partnering with several institutions. And many of our students who went through the internship program became part of their companies later on. Absolutely. And we’re hired. And it’s just that real-world connection that is so critical and makes them more prepared and helps them be more informed into what their options are as they are finishing their study. And the good news is that that conversation that you had with that high-level person, probably if you were not at the university, you wouldn’t have had access to that type of person. That’s why I encourage students when they’re like, Oh, I feel cheated. My university was a waste of time. Do not give up on coming to universities and investing in coming to college and putting yourself in the room because just like we do it later, I mean, I’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to be in the room with people who are doing what I want to do, who can teach me, who I can learn from, who I can just get a little bit of their energy.
Well, you can do that for four years and find the people, find the mentors, take advantage of the guest speakers that come in, and access people that normally would be totally out of your reach for free. I mean, already included for what you’re paying. So I highly recommend anyone. But the caveat is you cannot go without a plan. You cannot go just thinking you’re just going to follow the system and you’re just going to do whatever they’re telling you to do. Even if you don’t have a full plan, you need to have a vision. You need to know that what you want is something. And as you know, the particular activation system will start showing you the way when you declare where you want it to take you.
Jason Tonioli
Absolutely. I find it so funny. I actually just had another conversation with another student, and they went to school. They went to their classes, they showed up, and they are a little bit disenamoured. I think really the key is, are you taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of your face? And even if they’re not there, who’s to say you can’t go create them? I had one person I talked to. Started a video game scoring club. It was just people like doing video games that they wanted to go learn how to do instead of just composition. Well, we’re going to create a club and we’re going to get half a dozen of us to think that’s cool, and we’re going to go write music for video games together and give each other feedback. There’s nothing out there that tells you you can’t do those things. I think that’s another thing that if I look back on university, sometimes you feel like you don’t have the power or you’re not good enough or you haven’t received the call from the university to do that thing, so who am I to do that?
It’s one of those, make your own path. If you have a bad experience in any education thing, it’s on you, in my opinion. There very well may be a really bad class out there. I’m sure there is, but you can still gain something positive from a bad class and learn from it.
Fabiana Claure
Well, it’s an incubator for real life, right, Jason? Because when we get out of school, guess what? You have to figure it out, too. No one’s going to give you everything sitting on a silver bladder, just, Hey, go be an entrepreneur and live by the beach. No, it’s going to be wild, and there will be a lot of things that are going to come at you. And your ability to respond to that and to find ways to turn disaster into opportunity, if you can do that within the context of a university, you’re already preparing yourself to be successful outside of that. So I see it as a practice session, a practice environment for something that you need to acquire as a real-world life skill, no matter what. If you complain about not being served at the university, not being given the right setting, then you’re going to complain outside of it, too. You’re going to always feel a victim that things don’t work your way and it’s hard in the market and the economy and the people. I think this is a great conversation to empower anyone listening to take ownership, whether you are at a university, whether you’re not, whatever it is.
Fabiana Claure
Ultimately, the success of your life and your business is in your ability to take ownership and make decisions. And even if you mess up, which you will, and we all have, to be able to recover and keep going and not see that as a sign of defeat or worse, to give up.
Jason Tonioli
Well, so I’m curious. So your company sells coaching, and you guys have… I know you’ve done retreats and you’ve got online webinars and online training. I mean, you guys have done a lot of great things. And if I put the skeptical hat on, I’m flipping through Facebook. It’s like, Oh, there’s this person that wants to take all my money. I mean, there’s hundreds of them out there, and there’s lots of people willing to take the money. But I think, how do you… If somebody’s a music person, how do you take somebody and actually help them make money? It’s this magic If I’m just a music person, I’m a piano teacher, someone’s like, Oh, this person says I can make thousands of dollars. It’s like, you just want to discount and be like, They’re full of it. I’ll be the first one to admit, there are some that are full of it, and they’ve got their course, and some of the courses are lousy out there. But from a business perspective as a musician, if somebody’s coming in to you guys, even, what’s that process look like? I don’t want you to make any promises that somebody’s going to go make millions of dollars, obviously.
I know you’re not going to do that. But what does that look like? And help cast this vision of what’s possible for that person that’s either a piano teacher or maybe they’re even just working a regular job, and they don’t feel like that music is even an option for them. How can they successfully be running a business? Their mind is like, Oh, my gosh, that’s just not possible. That’s their mindset, I think.
Fabiana Claure
Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think that’s a great question because especially in the recent years, Jason, I have noticed the market shift has created a sense of skepticism in most people. I think it’s due to the proliferation of so many people claiming to have the magic formula, right? And the one step wonder thing and the magic bullet. And it’s very normal that the reception of that is like, I don’t believe this. I don’t believe in this. I don’t believe in myself. Sometimes it’s no doubt in the person or in the system. There’s even doubt in their own potential, their own ability to succeed. So what we do is there are four steps we take musicians through to build their online businesses. And first of all, I want to preface this by making it very, very clear that what we help musicians do and why we’re so passionate about it is to change their business model. Because unfortunately, what most musicians and creatives think they need is more of the same, meaning they may be teaching one-on-one lessons, they may be performing and doing lots of gigs here and there, and doing all sorts of maybe producing music, managing other artists.
They may be doing all these things that require them to trade their time. And the vision of success that they have is, Oh, I’ve got 20 students. If I could only get 40, then I’m going to be okay. Or if I’m gigging twice a month, if I can get 10 a month, then I’m going to be okay. So they’re coming to us with this preconceived notion of success that is fundamentally flawed because doing more of the same will quickly become a ceiling. Even if they’re successful in creating their goals, getting to where they want to be, at some point, they won’t be able to grow anymore because the business model that depends on trading time for money will always hit a ceiling. So the first thing we do is help everyone really understand that it’s not about doing more of the same. It’s about changing the model altogether and building an online platform where, yes, you can continue releasing music, you can continue doing gigging, but you have something behind all of that to send your audience to that becomes the main foundation for your business. So for example, if you are a performer and you’re doing gigs, I’m not asking you to stop doing that.
I’m still a musician myself. I still perform, et cetera. What I’m saying is if you have an online business that you can then tell the people at the gig, Hey, scan this QR code so you can join my email list and you can invite them to work with you in your online program. Now that gig that you made $500 or $1,000 can turn into a $5,000 revenue stream because you turned that person, those two or three people who are in the audience, You turn them into a premium client in your program, which is typically going to be a higher ticket model where we recommend starting with a premium price point. But now you can actually monetize your artistry fully, not just through this one-time thing. Or if you release a book or an album, that is the beginning of a relationship, not the end. What we help musicians do through Four Steps is figuring out how to build a broader brand. Because ultimately, when you have all these sides of yourself, it can feel a bit siloed in your fraction. I’ve got one side of myself as a teacher, another side as a performer, another side as a producer, and that stops musicians from actually seeing their full value and their potential.
The first thing we do is we help them build what we call the Musicians’ Profit umbrella, like a framing around everything that they are so that they can set themselves apart, not only based on what the skills that they have, but also based on their values, their story, and create a very unique personal brand. Once that step is created as the foundation, then we show them how to build a better model for their services. So they’re not just teaching one-on-one lessons or gigging or doing things that are always trading their time, but instead, they have a platform where they can work with students, they can build videos little by and over time, create their own little library of intellectual property. So now their clients, whatever they teach, whether it’s music or how to recover from a performance-related injury or how to produce or how to manage other artists, it doesn’t necessarily have to be only teaching music, but it is about downloading your knowledge. We show them how to package it into an online program where there’s multiple touch points for their clients. It’s not just, Hey, go watch a bunch of videos, but there’s still a weekly master class, a weekly session where the founder can interact with their clients and give them live, direct, maybe laser coaching feedback.
Then there’s that model where there’s a component of asynchronous instruction. There’s a library that can be created little by little. We don’t recommend building all these videos ahead of time, by the way. That’s a big barrier. Most of the time, musicians think, Oh, I’m going to build an online program. I have to spend hours creating all these videos. That’s not at all what I did. That’s not at all what any of our clients do. Instead, it’s about really packaging it, understanding how to explain it, sell it, and then build the materials. But at least the second step is about framing the offer. What would be the thing that you could invite people to work with you through that would allow them to say, Okay, yeah, I trust you. I want to work with you. What is that framework, that system, if you will?
Jason Tonioli
I think you talked about Q&A sessions, if somebody is trying to figure out what’s the value or what’s the thing I can teach or offer, those weekly Q&A sessions, I think, are some of the very best. That’s your people that really want to engage with you. Those are your people anyway. But it’s one of those ultra valuable things that I see missing from so many courses where they just want to put the course out there. Then I think there’s a desire, probably to help people, but I don’t know whether it’s laziness or people move on and don’t want to do it. But if you really want to impact somebody, That’s why with a piano lesson, it’s great to practice all day long, but eventually you’ve got to have somebody give you some one on one feedback to help you get better. I think that’s.
Fabiana Claure
And it goes both ways. It’s feedback for the students, but it’s also feedback for the program founder, because one of the big questions is, how would I actually know what are the best things to teach? And when you have students that are meeting you once a week and asking you for help, showing you exactly what they’re stuck on and what they need from you, that’s how you’re going to decide, oh, I know what I need to create in the next training session. I’ll build it about this because I’m getting all these questions about this. So it works both ways. It’s a reciprocal give and receive, but not only the weekly master class, but also a synchronous platform where throughout the week, if your students have any additional questions, you can also answer those if you have a platform, and that’s something we help our clients build. If you have a way for people to access you outside of that weekly group call, then you’re actually speeding their rate of progress. Essentially, you’re helping them win back their time as well. Just like you’re winning your time back, your clients are winning their time back. When you do that, the price of your program goes up, the value goes up.
That leads us to section three, which is now we show artists, how do you actually sell this type of model? Because they’re used to teaching for $80 an hour or $500 a gig. They’re not used to pitching a $5,000 six-month program, which is what we help clients do. Typically, the price point is between $5,000 to $6,000 for six months of working with them. But it is a different conversation. Most physicians aren’t really used to that. The third step of what we help them do is learn how to improve their communication style and understand how to present this type of premium offer in a way that would really create trust and that would show the person why it’s a great opportunity. It’s not necessarily about targeting people who have the resources. It’s about learning how to connect with the values of your ideal clients so that they’re going to come to you because they resonate with what you’re offering, not necessarily because they have the funds. That’s the part of what we help them shift their minds. It is like, we’re not just targeting affluent students, we’re targeting the right students who are going to connect with what you have to offer.
That’s the third step. Then the fourth Our concept is building a marketing engine, which is essentially the piece of visibility that attracts, nurtures, and converts clients in a systematic way. Now, throughout all of these four things, we use our custom-built AI in the process. We’ve built We’re going to look at our own version of my brain in a marketing maestro, like custom AI. As we’re helping our clients learn all of this through videos and training and et cetera, we’re also building it alongside of them with our AI system. That It speeds up the learning curve for them, and it gives them a done for you component in the process rather than just learning and implementing it on their own. The AI builds their branding for them. It builds their offer. It creates their marketing content pieces. It helps them even learn how to communicate in real time through the sales process that we train. All throughout these four steps, using both our knowledge base as well as our custom AI, that’s how we help musicians package their skills and build profitable businesses.
Jason Tonioli
When you talk about high, we call it a high ticket sometimes, or just these higher price point offers of $5,000 or $6,000, that sounds like a lot, but I guess if you compare that to what you’re paying to go to a university, or you’re paying… It’s funny how one season of our life, we all seem like, Oh, I can spend 5, 10, $2,000, $1,000 on this university course, and I come away with no map. It just amazes me sometimes how when people leave that world, a lot of people quit investing themselves. I feel like in a lot of ways, you’re just barely, you graduate from school, you’re barely at that point where now some of these investments into yourself to level up can really have an impact. I mean, a lot of times you’re not ready. A high school kid coming out. Oftentimes people don’t have the maturity or aren’t ready for some of these online courses. Some people are ready, but I think in a lot of ways, there’s that maturity factor where you have to go and work hard and your stripes a little bit before you can be fully appreciative of some of the YouTube University, we’ll call it, that’s out there and the coaching from really some of these experts that can help take somebody’s business and see the potential they have in themselves that they oftentimes don’t even recognize.
Fabiana Claure
Yeah. I think it has to do with age, because when we’re young, we feel like we have all the time in the world. We have more time than we do money. So we’re willing to spend our time doing things on our own, trying to figure it out, go through our own ups and downs, then we are willing to invest the resources to save time. Saving time is not an issue. It’s not our priority for most 20-year-olds just graduating from college. However, when you get into the ’30s and ’40s and ’50s, this is now a stage of life where most people have other responsibilities. They have families, they have other things that take priority that no longer feel like time is this thing that is forever. And time starts to become more of a priority and something that starts to feel more elusive. So usually, I have seen, at least in my experience, it’s the people who start to realize that time is not going to be there forever and that they want to find a way to save time. That’s when the model switches and they’re like, Okay, I’d rather invest and put resources in order to win my time back rather than continuing wasting time and going through trial and error just to save the resources.
Jason Tonioli
Yeah. Interesting. I’m curious, I know we’re getting low on time here, but if you were thinking back to your career, is there one of those things, best advice you’ve ever gotten from somebody? Is there a moment where somebody told you something and it was that game changer, best advice that you’d had along the way to help you in your career, to help you realize your potential?
Fabiana Claure
Yeah. I think when it comes to success, feeling that we don’t have to do it alone is one of the most important realizations, because I think as musicians, we’re used to working really hard. We spend hours and hours and hours in the practice room, and we can’t really delegate our artistry. We don’t learn how to delegate. We are only taught that everything we achieve is coming through our hard work. And when you get into the business world and we’re trying to create your career, if you continue with that mindset alone and try to achieve everything by yourself without understanding that if you learn to delegate, if you learn to get help, if you If you try to continue being the same way you were in the practice room, you’re going to get into a path of burnout pretty quickly, and it’s going to be pretty devastating. So for me, the thing that I’ve always realized is I wish I would have started delegating sooner. I wish I would have started getting help sooner. There was something in me that felt I needed to prove to myself, maybe, and to others that I could do things, like the sense of accomplishment.
Fabiana Claure
And I didn’t realize, it took me a while to realize that that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a medal of honor, but there’s ways that we can achieve success and feel accomplished, but also do it standing on the shoulders of giants and delegating the things that we shouldn’t be doing and letting go of the desire to control everything. When you can understand that there’s probably other people that you can offload some of what you’re doing that are more capable than you. And yes, it will require investing. It will require putting some resources in. But in the long run, you’re going to be much better off focusing on what you are good at and not trying to learn all the things, and at the same time, focusing on not trying to prove that you can do it, but finding people who’ve done it and then trying to learn from them and making your own decisions beyond that. Just the concept of working with others, both from a delegation standpoint as well as from a roadmap standpoint, has been for me a lesson that I wish I would have learned a lot sooner than I did and that I hope people can really pay attention to.
Jason Tonioli
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it’s gotten easier and easier to find help as well. I know there’s lots of people that… You can even delegate stuff out to other countries. There’s so many amazing remote workers. We use over a half dozen people that help us in various ways, whether it be editing, transcribing music for me. I can do it, and I’ve done it. I still do it once in a while, but good night. It’s so much faster to have somebody transcribe a song that I’ve written, or whether it’s doing video work, or whether music videos, or a whole other thing if you’re a musician or artist that I think take hours and hours of time, and it’s so hard to do well, and it’s so expensive if you try and do it with the local professional. I think that’s phenomenal advice. Fabiana, if people want to go check out and find out more about you, where should they go? I know you do a lot of webinars. I think you’ve got some webinars coming up, and you probably have those often. I know you do in-person retreats, I’m sure, that are amazing. Where should they go if they want to find out more about what you and your team do for musicians?
Fabiana Claure
Yeah, absolutely. I would say my website is the best place, fabianaClaure. Com. I’m going to spell it out because they’re not going to F-A-B-I-A-N-A -C-L-A-U-R-E. Com. And on my website, I’m usually featuring any upcoming event or anything else that I’m hosting. I do master classes. We have our next one coming up in a few weeks. So depending on When this goes live, you may be able to catch it. We present a week-long masterclass teaching the step-by-step process that we’ve developed in the Musicians Profit Umbrella framework. And so if you catch it on time, you can find it at musiciansprofitmasterclass. com. That’s usually the main default site where you can register and be part of our journey together. It’s a live event, and I highly encourage your listeners to attend if they can. But otherwise, on my website, there’s plenty of free resources. We have a podcast as well called Musicians Creating Prosperity that you could check out. And so all of that is featured on my website.
Jason Tonioli
Awesome. Well, Fabiana, thank you so much. I think you’ve shared all kinds of value bombs for people. So go listen to this one probably more than once, and you’ll get lots of great takeaways. So thank you. And we will be, I think we’re going to be talking more in the coming week. So I look forward to continuing to get to know about what you’re doing.
Fabiana Claure
Thank you, Jason. It’s a pleasure having this conversation with you. And thank you for inviting me.
Jason Tonioli
Thanks.