We recently connected with Joey Harrell and have shared our conversation below.

Joey , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

The story behind our mission really has two angles—one internal and one external.

Externally, our mission at BroadwayVox is to change education in musical theatre. I like to think of our mission as our big, gnarly, one-hundred year goal. The goal we are never sure we will fully ‘achieve’—at least not in our individual careers—but is worthy of striving towards every day and providing the context for every decision we make.

The story behind that mission is pretty simple—we love people, we love education, and we love theatre. Throughout our careers we have seen how educational experiences in the arts have the power to impact hearts and minds and we believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to explore and experience the arts in a way that cultivates a sense of belonging.

We wanted to build a company centered around those beliefs, a company that could build community, and a company that could focus directly on improving education as a way to make learning more accessible, more flexible, and more fun!

So that’s the big external goal. Internally, BroadwayVox is all about community, connection, and courage. So much of the motivation to build a company was about fostering a sense of community. While NYC is one of the most populated cities in the world—it can also be quite lonely! So building a community felt like like one of the most valuable things we could do to foster deeper connections with our friends and colleagues (now referred to as family) and use the power of community to create an environment that promotes courage both in our individual work, in our teaching, and in our day to day lives.

In my mind the internal mission is essential for achieving the external. If we build a community, if we can foster a true sense of connection, then we can find the courage to take on a mission as ambitious as changing education in musical theatre.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

To understand how I got here we have to go allll the way back to childhood—kidding…kind of…but my journey is really about trusting your core values (even if you’re not sure what those values are!). I have always had an intuitive set of core values that guided my actions. Not the core values that are taught—like being polite or leading with kindness—the ones that every person possesses that intrinsically defines their character. For me, those values are—Community, Fun and Learning. (I’m a big a fan of the work of Brene Brown and identified these from her values assessment worksheet in Dare to Lead—if you haven’t read that book, I highly recommend it!)

My whole life, my core values have always worked like this— I love learning, but, for me, for learning to be continuous, it has to be FUN, and the best way to maintain fun was to learn with your friends. Whether it was playing team sports, singing in a group, playing in a band, or building a business there was a MAGIC to being able to do hard things, and perform at a very high level and only think of it as FUN. I am always chasing that sweet spot.

My journey to BroadwayVox really has to do with trusting those values—I went to college for music (specifically singing) because I loved singing and loved learning. In college that joy was tested when I ran into some challenges with my voice. My singing became physically challenging, conceptually confusing, and I no longer felt as though I had autonomy over my own voice–which was a very strange sensation made more confusing by the fact that I went to school to improve at the thing I loved and left feeling defeated.

However, I wasn’t ready to give up what I loved doing, so I pursued voice pedagogy (the teaching of singing) as a way of understanding how both re-find my joy AND to figure out how to teach in a way that helped singers maintain their own joy. The moral of that chapter of my journey was: Now that you know that the joy can be taken from you—you better figure out what it takes to hang on to it—and help others do the same!

Fast forward a few years and thanks to a ton of academic coursework, some incredible mentors at Penn State University, and whole lot of study and practice, I had re-found my joy, I understood much more about how to share that joy with others, and I was a running an independent voice studio in NYC thinking “hey, this would be way more fun if I had some friends around.” Enter Jared Trudeau, my friend and co-consipirator. Together, Jared and I begin teaching in the same studio, bouncing ideas off of each other, debating, learning, growing, and having a blast, and we realize if we want to take this dream of education to the next level, it’s time to get even more friends to join the party. That’s how BroadwayVox was born.

As a company we provide three types of resources—one to one lessons, group classes, and online courses focused in three areas, professional artist development, teacher education and musical theatre college audition preparation. We help performers and teachers learn and grow in the field of musical theatre by providing educational resources that are innovative, accessible, and rooted in musical theatre.

What sets us apart from other companies and what I am most proud of is our commitment to quality education. Education is our product and if we want to differentiate ourselves in a ever changing and growing world of education we have to focus on quality. What we guarantee is that we think about education in singing and theatre DEEPLY. It is our lives, its what we do. We apply, reflect upon and rethink teaching concepts constantly and we have built a community of colleagues who challenge ideas and encourage growth. This cycle is what helps us maintain the highest standards for education in the rapidly changing world of musical theatre.

Ok, I’m gonna wrap this one up because that was a DOOZY. If you made it to the end, thank you. If you want to know more, there’s plenty more where that came from. Hit me up.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met Jared Trudeau at a summer voice teacher conference at Penn State University. I was attending and he was teaching. After the conference I was driving back to Boston and offered to drop him off in NYC. On the car ride home my car broke down just before the George Washington Bridge—Jared and I were trapped for an hour, barely on the shoulder of the highway, collecting glares from distressed drivers, before my car magically rallied and was able to get us across the bridge and safely to our respective homes. The car is gone now, but our friendship remains.

But the story of Jared becoming my co-founder is really a story of keeping your enemies closer. Kiddingggg. Jared is one of the smartest people I know and a BRILLIANT teacher. Seriously, the guys head is filled with so much information about…so much. And he distills it beautifully in an educational setting. And in my mind, when you meet someone like that in your field, you have to get them on your team. I learn so much from Jared every day in the studio and in every collaboration. I couldn’t ask for a better co-founder, work husband and friend.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

Word of mouth referrals have been our most impactful source of growth. Sometimes thats in the form of individual conversations, and sometimes in the the form of customers sharing about our services. In our field, quality is what matters most. And when customers experience a high level of quality, they can’t help but share it with others. Both Jared and I have experienced this building our independent professional voice studios in NYC, and we continue to apply this idea to every new dimension of BroadwayVox.

Individually, we try to bring the highest quality of teaching to our studios and to the classroom every day. And for every new person that joins the BroadwayVox family we offer them opportunities and resources to continue to learn and grow as educators.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.broadwayvox.com
• Instagram: @broadwayvoxstudios, @singingwithjoeydotcom
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BroadwayVoxStudios
• Other: @broadwayvoxstudios on TikTok

Image Credits
Samuel Pickart, Maggie Bergman