This many years down the road, I think what surprises me the most are the long term relationships that have come from that first day I put the shingle out. It isn't just the continuity of individuals--sure, we have wonderful long term relationships with area teachers (Piano teacher Cathy Gilchrist was one of our very first regular customers, and we still see each other regularly). But the number of lives that have been blended in with the store still astonishes me...
Rich Pokrywka was an early trumpet student of ours. We saw him through grade school and high school. He went off to BW to major in music and then to Georgia for his masters. Married and starting a family, he returned to the area and taught at the store. He left again to pursue his doctorate at OSU, and came back again to teach. He's been associated with the store in some way for over half of his life.
The Ryan family deserves special mention: their oldest son Dan took lessons with Cheryl before the store ever opened. Add the other ten Ryan siblings, most of whom took lessons at the store...and we've had a family member in the lesson program almost continuously for 25 years! Mark is still taking with Cheryl at this writing, and Carrie just left for college.
The Hamms have contributed two of their kids to the Skyline workforce. Darren started in guitar at age 9, and began working for the store at 16. Deanna was a couple of years behind him. Darren was on staff and fully involved in the planning of some of our long term signature events: Hawaiian Shirt Day, Mardi Gras, and Christmas Eve would probably not have flown without his enthusiasm--or at least willingness to humor me and go along for the ride. It's one thing to plan an event. But staff members (first) and customers have to buy in to it. Darren was a willing partner in crime on events, even when attendance was low. There will be blog entries for all our signature events...some war stories will undoubtedly emerge. Darren and Deanna's parents, Don and Dianne, are still Front Porch regulars, and Dianne has been Queen of the Boo-fay at Mardi Gras since year one. Having the support of an entire family-for many years--is gratifying beyond anything.
There are so many more--families that have supported the store, students who have returned to enroll their children, kids who worked for me and now have careers and families, and who still keep in touch. Faculty members, spread all over the world, who still remember teaching at Skyline Music with appreciation and fondness.
Touching lives this way, weaving a tapestry from so many threads...it's not what you think about when you ring up a sale or sign up a student. But it's probably the most accurate measure of the success of what we've done. Profit is nourishment to keep the business running. But food is not who we are, and profit is not the story of our business. We help people make music. That's what I've always said, and it is the definition I'm proudest of, always.
Twenty-Five Years: helping people make music in every way.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
How Different the Times...
One of the things that we take for granted is the technology we use. For those of us who grew up with television, life with radio alone (that would be broadcast radio, gang, not the Internet version) seems quaint. Even if you don't watch TV, you're aware of it and its impact. Kids today have never lived without cell phones and the Internet, and likely wonder how we got anything done in the oh-so-primitive 1980s.
My mother would have been 100 on October 21, 2011. She had me well into her 40's, and while the insanity of a woman in her 50's with TWO toddlers isn't that odd now (given the grandparents faced with raising their grandkids) in the day, it was more than odd. It was downright aberrant.
In related fashion, many of the things we did with the store seem both quaint technologically and were odd in the society of our industry. In 1987. the computer we started the store with (at a time when 2/3 of the industry did not use computers) was an APPLE IIC, along with its Imagewriter II dot matrix pin-feed printer.(Thanks to one of our first students, John Kurokawa, for rubbing that in recently in an email on LinkedIn.)
We cobbled up our documents pasting text blocks and images with rubber cement onto a template, in a process that makes scrapbooking look like magic. It's why I jumped on PageMaker the instant we had the opportunity. The fax machine was an expensive gadget, and we only got one (eventually) because all our suppliers expected us to have one.
There was no reason to email, no Internet to speak of, no ebay, facebook, or twitter, of course, and even a decade in from our opening, a store website was far ahead of the curve.
But while we couldn't do the things we do today (including now, YouTube and CafePress) because the technology wasn't widely available, it would have been difficult to seriously imagine some of the tech possibilities we have now even five years ahead of launch. (I joked about the silliness of GPS dog collars when the units were in their infancy and over $1000...now, it's an app, and why not use it to track a lost pet?) Still, we have embraced the technology we could use, adding our website, youtube, ebay, and facebook as they made sense for the business. And in each instance, I have added them myself, not at the prompt of a younger staff member pushing me to get with the times.When we've delayed, it has been a resource issue, not lack of awareness or intent. We were registered on ebay in 1998, but it wasn't until 2008 that we found the right way to integrate it into our business. CafePress was an epiphany for me--Darren Hamm and I tried to do our own designs for totes and other music novelties in the 90's, and it was just too expensive to have inventory made in bulk. Manufacturing on Demand made it work. Some ideas were in place long before technology made them possible.
But we were ahead of the curve in many social respects when in came to helping people make music. In 1987, it was odd to base a store around an education program. (The first document ever created for the store, and still virtually identical to the original, was the Private Instruction Program brochure.) Outside of the conservatory, it was unusual to see degreed teachers, female teachers (particularly on guitar and drums), or non-Caucasian teachers.Even offering a discount to students--one of the very first things I put down on paper, months before we opened) was considered crazy. "Students will buy from you anyway! Why give them a break?" was the prevailing wisdom.
In the retail music trade, we used slatwall and track lighting when most of the stores in MI were still on pegboard and fluorescent lights. Heck, a color scheme was off the wall, and virtually no one priced guitars and other big ticket items, because most stores quoted a price based on how savvy they thought the buyer was. So moms or newbie kids got regularly gouged to pay for the pros who asked "What's MY price, dude?"
It was odd for a mom to even frequent a music store. Most parents avoided the store I once worked for (moms often sent the dads in), coming in to buy when needed, but never hanging around much. Band stores delivered to the schools, combo stores catered to the teens and pros, and hoped no one else would wander in and waste their time.
Adult students, now 20% of our enrollment and growing? Discouraged by teachers and stores alike, with rare exceptions. Little kids..."you're taking your little one into a music store? With all the freaky people there?" Music stores were either stuffy institutions or boys clubs back then, and I didn't want to work for either.
Truthfully, it's not like the world was ready for change. Piano teachers looked askance at the big-haired rockers that walked in to get strings from me in the early days. The spandex crowd felt it totally uncool to be in the same room with qrandmotherly types.
We had many people who wouldn't take lessons from a woman, Asian, long-haired, (or short-haired) teacher, and that isn't even thinking about the issues raised when gay or lesbian faculty members are thrown into the mix. You also have to remember the freaked-out panic during the early AIDS years.
I've never spent time dwelling on it. No one but me realizes how much heat we took for believing that the best person to teach might be someone whose background, race or lifestyle might not match waspy middle America. We could have played it safer, but it wouldn't have been me or what I thought was right.
So I think about this now, and I realize, from my perspective, that it was just what I did. My mom saw technology go from Wright Brothers airplanes to moon landings and beyond. Heck, she pre-dated refrigeration. But she took it all in stride, using what made sense to her (even using an Apple computer in her 70s) and didn't worry about the rest.
She was socially ahead of her time, marrying (her second husband) a man 11 years her junior, entering the workforce and self-supporting in her 20s (yes, during the Depression no less), and having kids in her 40s when most mommies were late teens and 20s. She never did any of this to make a statement. She was too early to be part of a trend. It was just how life played out for her.
Similarly, we bucked a lot of trends, but it was because I saw things differently, not because I had some grand vision of the music industry as it should be. I came to have some beliefs, but when I opened the doors, I just wanted to help people make music and take care of customers.
Sometimes, it's as much rolling with it and being yourself as anything. My mom did it...I just seem to have followed in her footsteps.
My mother would have been 100 on October 21, 2011. She had me well into her 40's, and while the insanity of a woman in her 50's with TWO toddlers isn't that odd now (given the grandparents faced with raising their grandkids) in the day, it was more than odd. It was downright aberrant.
In related fashion, many of the things we did with the store seem both quaint technologically and were odd in the society of our industry. In 1987. the computer we started the store with (at a time when 2/3 of the industry did not use computers) was an APPLE IIC, along with its Imagewriter II dot matrix pin-feed printer.(Thanks to one of our first students, John Kurokawa, for rubbing that in recently in an email on LinkedIn.)
We cobbled up our documents pasting text blocks and images with rubber cement onto a template, in a process that makes scrapbooking look like magic. It's why I jumped on PageMaker the instant we had the opportunity. The fax machine was an expensive gadget, and we only got one (eventually) because all our suppliers expected us to have one.
There was no reason to email, no Internet to speak of, no ebay, facebook, or twitter, of course, and even a decade in from our opening, a store website was far ahead of the curve.
But while we couldn't do the things we do today (including now, YouTube and CafePress) because the technology wasn't widely available, it would have been difficult to seriously imagine some of the tech possibilities we have now even five years ahead of launch. (I joked about the silliness of GPS dog collars when the units were in their infancy and over $1000...now, it's an app, and why not use it to track a lost pet?) Still, we have embraced the technology we could use, adding our website, youtube, ebay, and facebook as they made sense for the business. And in each instance, I have added them myself, not at the prompt of a younger staff member pushing me to get with the times.When we've delayed, it has been a resource issue, not lack of awareness or intent. We were registered on ebay in 1998, but it wasn't until 2008 that we found the right way to integrate it into our business. CafePress was an epiphany for me--Darren Hamm and I tried to do our own designs for totes and other music novelties in the 90's, and it was just too expensive to have inventory made in bulk. Manufacturing on Demand made it work. Some ideas were in place long before technology made them possible.
But we were ahead of the curve in many social respects when in came to helping people make music. In 1987, it was odd to base a store around an education program. (The first document ever created for the store, and still virtually identical to the original, was the Private Instruction Program brochure.) Outside of the conservatory, it was unusual to see degreed teachers, female teachers (particularly on guitar and drums), or non-Caucasian teachers.Even offering a discount to students--one of the very first things I put down on paper, months before we opened) was considered crazy. "Students will buy from you anyway! Why give them a break?" was the prevailing wisdom.
In the retail music trade, we used slatwall and track lighting when most of the stores in MI were still on pegboard and fluorescent lights. Heck, a color scheme was off the wall, and virtually no one priced guitars and other big ticket items, because most stores quoted a price based on how savvy they thought the buyer was. So moms or newbie kids got regularly gouged to pay for the pros who asked "What's MY price, dude?"
It was odd for a mom to even frequent a music store. Most parents avoided the store I once worked for (moms often sent the dads in), coming in to buy when needed, but never hanging around much. Band stores delivered to the schools, combo stores catered to the teens and pros, and hoped no one else would wander in and waste their time.
Adult students, now 20% of our enrollment and growing? Discouraged by teachers and stores alike, with rare exceptions. Little kids..."you're taking your little one into a music store? With all the freaky people there?" Music stores were either stuffy institutions or boys clubs back then, and I didn't want to work for either.
Truthfully, it's not like the world was ready for change. Piano teachers looked askance at the big-haired rockers that walked in to get strings from me in the early days. The spandex crowd felt it totally uncool to be in the same room with qrandmotherly types.
We had many people who wouldn't take lessons from a woman, Asian, long-haired, (or short-haired) teacher, and that isn't even thinking about the issues raised when gay or lesbian faculty members are thrown into the mix. You also have to remember the freaked-out panic during the early AIDS years.
I've never spent time dwelling on it. No one but me realizes how much heat we took for believing that the best person to teach might be someone whose background, race or lifestyle might not match waspy middle America. We could have played it safer, but it wouldn't have been me or what I thought was right.
So I think about this now, and I realize, from my perspective, that it was just what I did. My mom saw technology go from Wright Brothers airplanes to moon landings and beyond. Heck, she pre-dated refrigeration. But she took it all in stride, using what made sense to her (even using an Apple computer in her 70s) and didn't worry about the rest.
She was socially ahead of her time, marrying (her second husband) a man 11 years her junior, entering the workforce and self-supporting in her 20s (yes, during the Depression no less), and having kids in her 40s when most mommies were late teens and 20s. She never did any of this to make a statement. She was too early to be part of a trend. It was just how life played out for her.
Similarly, we bucked a lot of trends, but it was because I saw things differently, not because I had some grand vision of the music industry as it should be. I came to have some beliefs, but when I opened the doors, I just wanted to help people make music and take care of customers.
Sometimes, it's as much rolling with it and being yourself as anything. My mom did it...I just seem to have followed in her footsteps.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Preparing for Milestones
On February 2, (yes, Groundhog Day--the auspicious nature of our start has never been lost on me) 2012, we will begin to celebrate 25 years of Skyline Music. The sheer number of people who we've met, helped, and who continue to be our customers and friends is gratifying, and when I stop to think about it, astonishing and humbling. There's so much to remember, to celebrate, and let's not forget, so many people who we still help every day. I may be overly ambitious even trying to blog this--but I'd wish I had if I didn't try, so here it is.
It's going to be a busy year!
It's going to be a busy year!
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