Case studies

Whatever your situation, you could teach guitar. Whether you want to teach full time to replace your job or want to teach part time to bring in additional income, the teaching resources available in this site will help you out. The case studies below show how teaching guitar could make you a lot more money than a job.

Case Study 1: How you can make more than double the money a part-time job pays you

If you’re studying at school and want to earn some money, the most common option most people will take is to get a part time job weeknights or on weekends. This case study will compare a part time ‘McJob’ to teaching a couple guitar lessons a week and see what’s really worth your time.

Sally has a part time job at a fast food chain and earns $14 an hour. She works 6 hours on the weekend which takes up a huge part of her Saturday night. Sally earns $84 a week working 6 hours (plus travelling time to and from work).

Susan decides to teach guitar instead of getting a part time job. She finds a couple students and ends up with 3 half-hour lessons on weeknights, and a whole hour lesson on Saturday mornings. The half hour lessons are with school children so she sets her rate at $20 for 30 minutes. The whole hour lesson on Saturdays is for an adult so she sets the rate at $50 for the hour. Susan will earn $110 per week working 2.5 hours.

Lets compare Sally and Susan’s earnings and time spent working:

• Sally works a total of 6 hours a week. Susan works a total of 2.5 hours a week. Susan works less than half the time Sally does.
• Sally earns $84 a week. Susan earns $110 a week. Susan earns an extra $26 a week while working less than half the time.
• Sally works at a rate of $14 per hour. Susan earns an average of $44 per hour. Susan earns over three times the rate that Sally works for.

By teaching guitar a couple nights a week, Susan has managed to earn more than a person working 6 hours a week in half the time!

If Susan and Sally continue their hours as they are now, by the end of the year Sally would have earned about $4,400 for 312 hours of work and Susan would have earned about $5,700 for 130 hours worth of lessons. That’s $1,300 extra earnings for a fraction of the hours spent working. It should be pretty clear how significant the difference this can be over time.
If Susan were to take on more students and teach guitar for 6 hours a week (ie: the same amount of time Sally works per week), she will earn between $240 and $300 a week! That’s
over three times the money Sally earns for the same time!

If you’re currently studying at University or College, you can see the unfair advantage teaching guitar has over a traditional part time job. You could work less hours than other students and still earn significantly more money. Working less hours means you will have more time to do the things you want to do. It also looks good on a resume: managing multiple students, time-management, etc.

Here's a quick summary of this case study comparing a traditional part time job to teaching guitar.

If Susan and Sally only wanted to earn $100 per week, this is how long each would need to work:

If Susan and Sally both worked the same number of hours a week, this is how much they would each earn:

Case Study 2: How you can quit your job and work for yourself

You can see the significant difference working part-time as a teacher vs a part time job has on earnings and work hours. But what if you want to quit your job and work full time as a teacher? What would that be like? This quick case study will compare working at an average job to teaching guitar full time.

John has a desk job which pays an average salary of $40,000 a year. He works 40 hours a week, sometimes working overtime and on weekends.

Jack recently quit his job and started teaching guitar full time. Jack also had a $40,000 per year job before he quit and he wants to earn the same money while freeing up time to do the things he wants to do such as writing music. After setting up a basic website, Jack managed to find 15 students which he has timetabled all between Monday and Wednesday. Jack teaches 5 students a day (one hour lesson each) for three days to total 15 hours a week. Jack has now freed up both Thursday and Friday so he has a four day weekend and a three day work-week. Jack has set his hourly lesson rate at $50 so he makes $750 a week for three days’ work. Over the year this rate averages out to just under $40,000 a year. By teaching guitar, Jack now works less than half the hours as John and still earns the same amount of money.

This site will provide you with practical tools and resources to achieve the same (or better) results as described in the case studies above.

Click here to find out more on what this site can provide you with.