Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Barrett Culpepper. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Barrett, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

By creating our own training system. The biggest challenge for us being such a niche service was finding new qualified techs. I needed a way to expedite the typical apprenticnheip experience. We spent years being understaffed. The clients were always keeping us busy with work but demand made our turnaround months out. Most luthier schools focus solely on the building of guitars and throw in a fast crash course on repair work. Building guitars and repairing guitars are totally different. I learned it was better to take on an apprentice that had no experience versus a graduate from a building school. But the drawback of that was that I would spend years investing into the skills and then the tech may leave. It was a lot of work to get them up and running and time away from my bench. We needed a better way to train and get our techs up to speed without sacrificing my workload. We began filming detailed lessons of me performing the repairs. We started at the most basic of repairs and built up the lessons to more advanced lessons. We had our first apprentice Sam go through the lessons and he was up and running and onto client repairs faster than any apprentice before! We used our lessons to train every future tech we hired on. When we saw how effective the lessons were and how it fast tracked their training, we knew we had a guitar repair luthier curriculum that was too good not to share with the world. We now have over 230 students and graduates from around the world! They are building successful business just like ours. They get continued education with our school and they even get support. Most luthier schools when you graduate, they send you on your way and that support ends there. Our students get to reach out anytime for advice and help. We also have a business course that teaches our students the exact steps we have used to scale our repair shop to one of the busiest in the country. Most of our graduates end up opening their own business versus working for another shop. We give them all the tools to make it within reach. Now, we always have a full staff of trained guitar techs and we get to teach the same techniques we use each day, to other interested folks. We took the problem of not being able to find quality techs and solved the problem for our shop but also opened up a whole new world with Guitar Repair Academy.

Barrett, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We make guitars and other stringed instruments play better than the day it was built. When you can make a guitar easier and more comfortable to play, we tend to pick up those guitars and practice more on them and we just become a better player. We take heirloom instruments passed down from generation to generation & make sure they’re at their best condition without hurting the original details. We also teach these same techniques to our family of students and graduates. We pride ourself on “no corner cutting”. I was always taught that if you’re going to take the time to do something, make sure you do it right.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Be consistent. We started filming daily “what are you working on” interviews. Mindy, our front end associate, goes around to the work benches and asks the techs what guitar they are working on and what job they are doing to it. We were told, you need to have all of these rules to build an audience, like capturing their attention in the first second, we just consistently show up with these quirky videos that showcase our techs personalities and the cool guitars on the bench. No fancy cuts & edits, no silly dances, we just share authentically what we are working on. Over the years our audience has grown. Once we hired a marketing team for some “formal training”, he told us we needed to cut out the “hey Sam, hey Mindy” portion that starts our videos, we didn’t agree with that and just kept doing our own thing. Our customers come in knowing our names. They feel like they already know us. We may not “hook” people in the first second, but the right people will find us. You get to make your own terms for the content you put out. I think the ideal follower will appreciate you for not tricking them with the marketing tactics. We don’t care the amount of followers we have we are more concerned with the right people finding us online.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The customer isn’t always right. It’s perfectly fine to turn away a client. Rarely, you may have a client that just is not worth working with. It’s perfectly fine to save the headache for yourself and your staff and refer them elsewhere. A business owner should have the right to turn down business the same as if a customer gets to choose their service provider. You get to work with your ideal clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.southeastguitarrepair.com/
• Instagram: https://www.southeastguitarrepair.com/
• Facebook: https://Facebook.com/southeastguitarrepair
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@southeastguitarrepair1456?si=2kvjHbzdrovlo0V5
• Other: School website: www.guitarrepairacademy.com

Image Credits

Mindy Culpepper