Life & Work with Jessica Schatz

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Schatz.

Hi Jessica, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m the oldest of four girls and played a main role in raising my younger sisters. My mom was physically and mentally ill and kept us from going to school for religious reasons. We were “unschooled” and taught ourselves whatever we could mostly by reading from a young age. I started playing piano when I was about 10 years old and started teaching when I was 15. I remember my first student came to our house because I didn’t have my driver’s license yet! I was super into teaching and wanted to do as much of it as I could. It fit in perfectly with my love of piano and the skill set I had been developing with my sisters. I continued to improve my teaching skill and eventually got an official piano teaching job at a performing arts center at our church. By some miracle, I got a decent SAT score and went to Rochester College to study music. Throughout that time, I taught about 40 students at the church while putting myself through college to get my piano performance degree.

Once I graduated in 2009, I decided to open my own piano studio in my dad’s house in Novi so I could try out all the ideas I had been dreaming up during my time teaching at my church. I was really excited to start getting more involved with the business side of things – marketing, building my own website, creating my own policies, setting my own rates, etc. My studio started to grow really quickly and I started getting the idea that I wanted to take it even farther. I started talking with my dad about hiring some other teachers and opening my own music school outside of the house. My dad has a finance background and is very conservative, but despite that, he was very supportive and believed in me every step of the way. I started writing up financial projections, looking for commercial spaces to lease, interviewing teachers, creating my first set of systems & procedures for my business, and so much more. I worked every hour of every day from November 2009 until the grand opening of my new school, Expressions Music Academy, in September of 2010… and then just never stopped working.

I took my 50 piano students with me and continued to teach them at my new school in the afternoons and evenings while building my business every day before and after teaching. By the end of the first 9 months, we had a little over 100 students. We continued to painstakingly add students to our little 6-studio school in Novi month after month, until we hit 250 students in 2013 and decided to expand our building to 18 rooms. While those filled up, we got the itch to open a second location in Troy in 2014 and did so. There was a major learning curve to learning how to run my business in two locations, but we got the hang of it and then decided to open a third in Plymouth in 2o17. We opened our 4th and 5th locations in West Bloomfield and Rochester Hills on the same day in April of 2019 and had 1,900 students in total by the end of that year.

And then the pandemic hit. We lost 20% of our student base over the course of the next few months. Our students withdrew in droves and we worried every day whether we would survive. During the lockdown, we transitioned all of our remaining students to Zoom lessons and continued our business with our teachers teaching in their homes, our students taking lessons in their own homes, and my administrative staff running operations from their homes. We re-opened our buildings in the fall, started enrolling students again, got our numbers back to pre-covid and then some, and then finally hit the elusive 2,000 students in August of 2021.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve been researching new markets into which Expressions could expand. With our 5 locations in the Metro Detroit area, we feel we’ve nearly saturated the market. There are a few other cities we’re considering expanding into, but our empire here is nearly complete and we don’t want to be done yet. With that in mind, I decided to expand out of state. After much research, I landed on the Metro DC area and we are now preparing to open 8 new locations there by the end of spring 2022. Our first three locations are opening on September 7th, and the rest are scheduled to open between January and April of next year.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I can’t even count the number of mistakes I’ve made. My style is to move very quickly. My staff makes fun of me for how quickly I turn around my ideas. I might wake up with an idea one day and have it fully implemented the next – I’m talking full school-wide, employee-wide changes. Some of these have worked out really well and are still in practice today, and some were absolutely ridiculous. Haha!

One area that was always tough for me was marketing. I tried every opportunity that came along and learned the hard way (by losing thousands of dollars when we didn’t have much) which types of marketing opportunities work for us and which don’t. Just in the last year or so, we’ve really gotten it down to a science, but it’s been year after year of making a lot of mistakes in that area.

Another thing that we’ve taken a long time to figure out is our niche as a school. From the first day I opened Expressions, I imagined all the group classes we would have – theory classes, history classes, performance classes, bands, orchestras, choirs. We tried all of those multiple times for multiple years and all drove us absolutely insane. We learned over the course of the last 11 years that our specialty is in private lessons. When we really focus our resources on that, we are at our best in every way. I’m so glad we know this now!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I think one thing that I’ve always been known for in my career as a business owner is my ability to inspire my people. I’ve always been really passionate about teaching and leading since I was very young. I have nearly 200 employees now between my administrative/management staff and my teachers, and I’ve learned how to treat them in a way that makes them want to work really hard for me. I make myself very approachable and am very personal and informal with my employees. I am flexible with them and make sure they’re always taken care of! I stress health and balance in their lives both inside and outside of work. At the same time, they know what I expect. Work is fun and our culture is super supportive and upbeat, but work is also challenging. We have a lot to get done and I push us at top speeds! I have learned how to balance these areas and my employees have enjoyed both the feeling of genuinely being cared for as a whole person and also the feeling of accomplishment because they’re working HARD!

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Growth. Since I was young, I’ve been fascinated by personal growth. I love to learn and grow myself personally. I’ve learned to enjoy the process rather than always just going for the results. I am also fascinated by watching others grow. My right-hand person, Alex, has been with me for 10 years now. He was 21 years old when I first hired him… a baby! Watching him grow from who he was then to who he is now has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. My whole business is centered around growth – I grow myself as a leader, I challenge my staff and teachers to grow themselves, and then we all work together to help grow our students! What a gift!

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://www.expressionsmusicacademy.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/expressionsmusicacademy

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