In 2003 I was gifted an #ibanez Jem Jr (My First Decent Guitar). The following year I found myself wanting a source of income but I was just 11 years old. What was I to do? I decided that teaching guitar would be the most obvious option. My biggest challenge was my age - How would people do business with or take an 11-year-old seriously? 

I had spent a few months testing out the idea of teaching guitar to a few school friends and had quickly realised that the conventional way of teaching at the time, focused more on the idea of the perfect guitarist, following strict music theory. There was an opportunity in offering significantly more value in creating a new method that focused on playing first, and theory later (a ratio of 80:20, of practical to theory, for the first three months of lessons!). 

I set out on a mission to refine this idea (paper and pen) and by the time I was 12 years old, I was ready to go! But there was a milestone… another blow to my business idea that left me at the starting point all over again.. I had my idea of the perfect course but no students.. How was I going to first gain students and secondly become profitable enough to reach my financial targets? 

This is when it hit me-

Money talks, but money is also flexible… an icebreaker if you need it to be. I was to enter the market and be the cheapest guitar lecturer in my area! A side effect of this was that effort versus reward was an issue - so I decided to counter this by offering group classes.. I was to charge R100 per month to anyone who wanted to join my group classes. 

In a matter of weeks, I had gone from teaching 2 students to over 40. My students were as young as five years of age up until 64. I was almost immediately inundated. 

I hit the draw board, made my first purchase with my profits being a secondhand Dell laptop together with a cheap printer. This allowed me to categorise my week into classes grouped by age, create actual invoices and further refine my course. Since then I have never looked back. This was one of my very first tastes of success in life. 

In retrospect, this was mostly possible as I was completely focused on #value. I was the most affordable lecturer and offered classes that were bursting with material that was focused on delivering the results that students cared about - Playing Guitar! 

After a while, I started to set value goals and the best average I attained was getting absolute beginners playing radio songs within eight weeks (given a strict and focused practice regime). Years later I went on to study music production, which started my foundation in multimedia…

Get it Magazine (August 2008)