3 Reasons Why Guitar Teachers Are Broke

They teach one on one. Most guitar teachers choose to teach one on one because it feels safe. Group teaching is indeed more challenging at first but that is to be expected. Once you gain experience it is no more challenging than one on one. It’s simply a different skill set that you can acquire over time. Group learning also has several advantages for students and I believe that group is actually hugely beneficial for learning guitar because the social interaction motivates and accelerates learning.
They ‘undervalue’ marketing. Many guitar teachers don’t see the value for two primary reasons. Firstly they don’t realise that marketing is not just a short term game. It takes time to learn what works and it’s the culmination of many tweaks that results in a success over the long term. The second reason is they don’t measure the true value of a student over the long term. If it costs $500 in marketing to obtain one new student that may seem expensive but what if your average student was worth $2000? The figure by the way is what I found to be the case for an average teacher but for a good teacher it could be 2 or 3 times higher let alone a great teacher. This also doesn’t take into account referrals which can increase the return by many multiples. $500 in marketing today can result in $10,000 or more over the long term.
They ‘undervalue’ themselves. It is a well known fact that companies who invest heavily in staff training almost always outperform their competition who invest less. Staff training can literally make or break a company. The success behind Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Google, McDonalds etc can be largely attributed to their employee training programs. In fact Google are famous for bringing in experts from around the world to train their staff on a wide range of topics. This means you should be investing in yourself as you are the most important member of your team. If you are not investing in your own education you are undervaluing yourself in the same way any employer undervalues an employee they don’t train. You are the most important employee in your business.