The gap
You’ve spent years, probably decades, getting good at four things:
Playing. Performing. Teaching. Making content.
Nobody had to talk you into any of them. You would do them for free, and somewhere along the way, you probably did. Then there’s everything else.
The ads. The funnel. The list you know you should be mailing and aren’t. The course you keep meaning to build, or rebuild. The offer you’ve never actually priced properly. The checkout page nobody has touched in three years.
Maybe you’ve tried to handle all of it yourself, at midnight, after a session, with whatever was left in the tank. Maybe you hired somebody once and it went badly enough that you took the whole thing back in-house. Or maybe you’ve simply never gotten to it, because the tour, the studio and the channel take every hour you have and then ask for a few more.
Whichever one it is, it’s sitting there costing you money every single month, and it’s pulling you away from the only work you actually wanted to do in the first place.
You keep playing, teaching and creating.
I’ll run the business.
How I got here
I studied music theory and composition in college. Classical guitar was my instrument. For years after that, teaching guitar was my entire income, out of a shop in Akron, Ohio. Then YouTube showed up and started giving away everything I charged for.
One by one, my students stopped booking. I couldn’t compete with free, and I couldn’t compete with on demand. Back then, free and on demand together was not a fight anybody won. It took this industry years to work out that music education could be sold online at all, and I was around for the long stretch before anyone had figured that out.
So I took a job at the call center down the road. Nobody wakes up hoping to become a telemarketer. I did it because rent is not optional. First day on the phones, I outsold the entire room, and that accident redirected the next twenty years of my life.
The platform that ended my teaching business is the one that built yours. I’ve been on both sides of it.
How I got here
Agent. Assistant supervisor. Supervisor. Management.
A 300 seat floor moving north of $500M a year.
Then I built a call center from scratch and ran quality assurance for it as director.
Then director of a $250M a year operation.
Corporate came next. Brand management, which meant getting copy, creative, graphics and media buying all pointed at the same offer on the same date, and out the door on time.
After that, consulting. I built and trained sales teams for direct response companies, and one of them was a well established technology and marketing firm that sold exclusively to the top internet marketers in the world. I won’t name the people I closed, or taught my teams to close, but you would recognize them instantly. To sell a machine like that, you have to understand the machine. So I learned every lever they were pulling.
Then I stopped selling other people’s machines and started running my own, as director of business development, one company after another. Not the ad guy. Not the email guy. The strategist over all of it.
It worked. On supplements. On widgets. On ecommerce. On anything with a margin.
And I liked it a little less every year, because none of it was music.
How I got here
I decided the job was to help musicians finally get paid for the thing they spent their lives learning. Since then, I have only worked with music education brands.
The narrowness is the product. You don’t have to explain modes, technique, theory or how your students actually progress. You don’t have to explain why your audience trusts one teacher and not another, or why a beginner course sold to intermediate players dies on the vine. I studied this music. I taught it. I sell it for a living.
You’ll skip the part where you explain your world to a marketer.
Proof
My first marketing partner had me sign away fifty percent of my course royalties. The second agency came out of the finance niche, completely misread my brand, and tried to get me to record sleazy ads. Ryan understands what I’ve built and exactly who we’re advertising to. We went from one or two products at $97 to more than twenty, including a high ticket offer I could never have put together myself. Now I don’t have to think about new ads or new products. I get to play guitar.
BernthBernth Guitar Academy
Fifteen years in business, and I had been burned by every marketing guru I hired. Ryan started with my Facebook ads and went way past the numbers, into what my message actually was. I went from negative return on ad spend, to positive, to growing. Then he took over my email. The biggest thing I have now is peace of mind. I found my guy and my team, for good.
David WallimannGuitar Playback
Ryan is what you would call an A player. You don’t map out a project and hold his hand. You give him the ball and he takes it to the end zone, every time, without ever bothering you. He will make your life easier and your company better.
Jonathan BoydBreakthrough Guitar
The numbers
I was brought in that April, on a business that had every reason to keep sliding. Sixty days later revenue was up 91%. The audience didn’t change. What changed was what we did with it.
None of that came from a bigger ad budget.
Bump order reversed
Same two products, same offer, same traffic. We reversed which one was the bump. It earned five and a half times more, and the attach rate went from 15.6% to 38.6%. Almost nobody tests this, because the attach rate looks acceptable in either direction.
One email sequence
Share of an entire launch that came from a single sequence, sent to a segment nobody had planned to mail. It out-earned the waitlist and the previous buyers combined, and it was not in the original launch plan at all.
Zero media cost
Revenue added in one month by a placement that costs nothing to run. It didn’t exist before we built it, and it now earns every month without taking a dollar out of the ad budget.
Platform milestones
Clients past in course sales.
Teachable · Digistore24 · Kajabi
Sold through the offers, funnels, ads and email I built and run. Counted by the platforms. Not by me.
Scope
Think of it less as a service and more as a seat at your table. I’m the direct response strategist for your business. If it has to do with making money, it’s mine to worry about, not yours.
I go through your following, your catalog, your teaching style, your buyers and the people who almost bought, until I know your avatar’s fears, frustrations and ambitions better than they could explain them themselves.
If the course exists, we rebuild it to meet your customer where their head actually is. If it doesn’t exist yet, I design it with you from the ground up, around what your people are already trying to solve.
Front end, order bumps, upsells, and the shockingly expensive offer you assume nobody in your audience would ever pay for. They pay for it.
Landing pages, checkout, video sales letters, ad scripts, ad images, ad video. Written and built for you, end to end. You don’t write any of it.
Strategy and media buying that has to stay profitable at scale, not just look clever in a screenshot.
Value first, promotions second, revenue every month from the audience you already have. One promotion to a single client’s existing list did over six figures.
New courses, new offers, better numbers. The work compounds, which is the entire point of having someone in this seat instead of hiring a vendor twice a year.
Let’s talk
One hour with me, and you’ll know exactly what to fix first, what it’s worth, and what happens next. You leave with that plan whether or not you ever hire me.
$97 · Music education brands only
Trusted by
BernthCole RollandGuitar PlaybackTom Hess
Breakthrough GuitarBrandon AckerStanton Moore
and 20+ more music education brands