My guest this episode, Brady Davies, built something remarkable out of pure necessity. His wife started teaching piano out of their living room with 80 students. Brady would come home from his real estate job to find kids everywhere, and he’d retreat to his bedroom with a bowl of top ramen just to breathe. That living room eventually became the Piano Place, which became seven locations, which eventually became One Music Schools, an acquisition brand that has since merged with Ensemble Performing Arts, where Brady now serves as VP of Music.
But the part of his story that stuck with me wasn’t the growth. It was what he’d go back and change.
If You’re At Capacity, You’re Not Charging Enough
Brady said something that I think every school owner needs to hear. Being full is not a problem. It’s a signal. His advice, if he could go back ten years, would be to raise prices far more aggressively and actually track his numbers instead of setting pricing by feel. “I used to set my pricing just going like this,” he said, basically pointing his finger in the air and hoping it felt right.
His formula now is simple. Nudge up prices modestly for existing students, and raise them more significantly for new enrollments. Test it and watch what happens. He’s found it works almost every time. You might bring in slightly fewer new students, but your revenue goes up. Being full at the wrong price just means you’re leaving money on the table while working just as hard.
Test Cheap Before You Build Nice
When Brady scaled beyond his first two locations, he learned this the hard way. His third build out, a full class A retail buildout before proving the market, nearly broke him. For locations four, five, and six, he flipped the model. Find cheap class C office space, test the market with a low break even, and only once it filled up did he invest in the nicer buildout. It’s a lesson worth stealing if you’re eyeing a second or third location.
Track Your Churn, Not Just Your Enrollment
The metric Brady cares about most is churn, how many students you start the month with versus how many you lose. He considers under 8% monthly churn solid, and under 5% exceptional. To find the leaks, his schools require a drop form from every departing family, an informal exit survey asking why they left and how they’d rate their teacher.
He also tracks churn teacher by teacher, not just school by school. Some teachers barely lose a student in years. Others, even ones with a Juilliard degree, struggle. Brady’s takeaway was blunt and honest: credentials don’t predict connection. What matters is whether a teacher makes that one hour a genuine highlight of a kid’s week. For some students, that relationship is the most meaningful one they have with an adult, period.
Quick takeaways worth pulling out and taping to your office wall:
- Build loyalty to your school, not just to individual teachers, through consistent recognition and community
- If you’re at capacity, test a price increase before you assume you need more space
- Prove a new location cheap before you commit to a full buildout
- Track monthly churn by school and by teacher, aiming under 8%, ideally under 5%
- Use exit interviews or drop forms to find out why families actually leave
- Letting go of daily operations to a strong GM is what makes a school sellable and scalable
The Limit Was Never the Business, It Was My Belief About It
One thing Brady said toward the end really stuck with me, because I lived it too. When you only own one school, that school is your only reference point. You have nothing to compare it to. I used to think there were hard ceilings on what a music school could generate, and it turns out the ceiling was in my head, not in the business. Once you see what’s actually possible, your whole attitude shifts.
If you’re running your school solo, wearing every hat, and feeling maxed out, that’s not the finish line. It’s usually the sign that it’s time to raise your prices, build the systems that let you step back, and start asking what your school could really be worth.
