We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matt McFarland a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Matt, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

School of Rock is the most revolutionary and largest music education program in the world. We have over 330 locations worldwide. The things that set us apart are that we are performance based and we are all about the community. Our philosophy is that we want our students to play with other students around their same age, play in a band, and actually get the rockstar experience playing a real rock concert up on a real stage. We don’t do recitals, we do rock concerts! The other big differentiator is that we have a huge community within School of Rock. We have a space that allows students to come whenever they want to hang out with other students, practice, and make new friends. We don’t want to be a place that our students come once a week for a private lesson, and that’s it. We want them coming multiple times a week for lessons, rehearsals, or just to hang out. We want our students to feel seen and like they matter. In a world that is constantly trying to divide us, we want to be the place that brings people together to be apart of a bigger community.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I started my School of Rock journey back when I was in high school. I played drums at SOR for a couple of years. After that I went on to study video production in college in Indiana. After graduating I worked for the Indianapolis Colts doing video production for them. When I got let go from there, I filled in at School of Rock as a Studio Coordinator. From day one, I fell in love with the bigger mission of SOR, how much we change kids lives, and seeing students as young as 9 years old shredding some Eddie Van Halen. From Studio Coordinator, I worked my way up to an assistant general manager, to general manager of my own location, then ending up moving down to South Carolina to own and start up the very first School of Rock in South Carolina. My wife and I run this location now. She is the. general manager of the Mount Pleasant location, and I now oversee 5 School of Rock locations in SC, Indiana, and Wisconsin. I am most proud of the managers we hire, the teachers, and staff that we have. Not one of them is just looking to get extra money. They are wanting to help change kids lives, and that’s what they do every day.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

Typically the best source of clients for us is our referrals. Once one student in a neighborhood attends School of Rock, all of a sudden all the rest of the neighborhood is reaching out to us to take a free demo lesson. Music is a contagious thing. It is also a huge community thing as well. Kids don’t want to just take private lessons once a week. They want to play in a community, or a band, and then want to be able to share what they learned by rocking out on stage! So once one person does that, all of a sudden, that’s all they can talk about with their friends.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

The positive thing about being a franchise is that since there are 330+ worldwide, almost everyone has heard of School of Rock in some way. With the Charleston area being such a big melting pot of people moving here, it has been awesome to hear nearly every one of our new students tell us that they saw a School of Rock play back home where they are from. We also have a lot of people have family or friends that have suggested they try out School of Rock. We are a massive growing community where major brands are starting to notice us. We have partnerships with Fender, Zildjian, Remo, Vic Firth, Gretsch for instrument partnerships. We also have played at big festivals such as Rock in Rio, Summerfest, and Lollapalooza.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.schoolofrock.com/locations/mountpleasant
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schoolofrockmountpleasant/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/schoolofrockmountpleasant
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SchoolofRockUSA