Developing a business idea...

I'll be honest, my business idea kind of just popped into my head as I was driving home from Nashville one day. The drive from Nashville to Little Rock is about 6 hours, so I had plenty of time to work a mental "rough draft" of my business plan in my head.

It was 2005, and I had just finished a week at the National Guitar Workshop (NGW) in Nashville. NGW is a week long guitar/bass/drum camp where you literally wake up thinking about music, talk and play music all day and then go to bed thinking about music. It was music 24 hours a day. Every time I attend one of these camps, my playing goes through the roof because I have the guitar in my hands for like 12 hours a day.

As I was driving home after camp, I thought how great it would be if Little Rock had a place where you could take lessons, group classes, jam with other people and just hang out and talk about music ... much like I did at NGW.

Voila' - there was the start of my business idea!

I knew that I had the skills to teach guitar, but there were already several established studios in the area. If the business idea was to have any legs to stand on, I would have to create a niche offering that no other studio provided.

Given that the other studios were doing lessons and some workshops every now and then, the niche would be the jam sessions. A jam session is where players get together and play a common song that they all know or just play over a static chord progression and take turns soloing.

And, in my opinion, if you want to get better at making music, you have to play with other people. Staying at home practicing your scales and chords over and over will not do as much for you as an hour or two a week jamming with other people.

So, there was the business idea ...

A music studio that would offer lessons, regular workshops and a weekly jam session for students. In addition, I wanted to create an environment where the students felt welcomed even when they didn't have lessons or a jam session. If they wanted to come up and hang out to talk about music and play a bit, great!

I'll stop here for now. Next time, I tell you how I fleshed everything out on the way home and presented it to my wife (for the first of many times before she gave in)...