Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Molly Webb. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Molly, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
This question resonated with me because of how my husband, Travis, and I got into our new software business. Prior to starting our SaaS business, Yo-Do, Inc., we built and ran (for almost 2 decades) an Orange County-based music school, The Inside Voice. As with any business, The Inside Voice had its ups and downs, particularly during Covid, but one of the recurring issues we faced was that we couldn’t seem to grow it past about 250 students. Once we hit that number, we’d reach a number of challenges and bottlenecks that would slow down our team, decrease the time we could spend doing what we cared about–that is, forming great relationships with the families we taught and served–and invariably lose some of our current students and leads.
We jumped from software platform to software platform, trying to find a perfect fit that would help increase our efficiency enough to keep up with our sales processes and, of course, our current customers’ needs. We ended up cobbling together a hodgepodge of software, from databases, to video platforms, to CRM, to task management, to project management, to marketing programs. It wasn’t that simpler, more unified systems didn’t exist. It was that they were expensive and complex and required developers to maintain them–something out of reach for a small music company.
It was because of these challenges that Travis initiated a partnership with some wonderful people–our team of developers, ARP Ideas, and our amazing UX designer, Tiffanie Battram–and set to work developing our own all-in-one business management software.
At first, we had no plans to use it for anything outside our own company. Because of the software, The Inside Voice blew way past the 250 student mark, and swelled to nearly 400 within the first year of use. Fortuitously, in the midst of all this, a national company called Ensemble Music reached out to us about buying our business to help expand their presence in the Southern California market. After a lot of heavy discussion, Travis and I made the decision to sell our music company so that we could take our software (now called Yo-Do) to market.
Our mission is to ensure that small and mid-sized service businesses avoid some of the struggles we faced throughout our growth. 99.9% of businesses in the US qualify as “small,” and we believe that they should have the same access to excellent all-inclusive tools that larger businesses have. On top of that, as these companies grow, we want to give them the tools to keep that small business touch that they had in their earlier years. After all, that’s why most of us started our companies to begin with.
Molly, 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?
Hi! I’m Molly, and I’m the founder of Molly’s Music (eventually The Inside Voice) and the marketing director of Yo-Do, Inc. Since I told the story of how my husband, Travis, and went from music school owners to starting a software company in the last question, I’ll use this space to tell you a little about Yo-Do.
Yo-Do is a comprehensive business management CRM, helping give big business tools to small and mid-sized service businesses. It includes learning management tools, including video integration; a patented task management system; timesheets; client and employee tracking; communication and notification; scheduling and billing; email and SMS marketing, along with a wide variety of other features still in development.
One of the most unique aspects of Yo-Do is that it doesn’t treat every user the same. Every service business has three stakeholders: the customer who needs the service in question, the expert who provides the service, and the administrator who keeps track of all the things required to transact business in the 21st century (i.e. billing, scheduling, communications, etc). Yo-Do provides a unique set of tools for each stakeholder. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. We’re really proud of that part of the design. It’s so different than most tools out there.
Our music coordinator team was less overwhelmed because of how integrated everything is, the teachers filled up faster, and the vocal students had easy access to so many vocal exercises and instructional videos. On top of that, pocket lessons (a term we coined and trademarked when we created The Inside Voice) have never been easier. Students can record themselves within the Yo-Do app and send them to their instructor and receive back a picture-in-picture video lesson with the teacher commenting on the original video. Even though we sold The Inside Voice, I still teach there and absolutely love having access to these resources.
Yo-Do is currently in beta testing, primarily with The Inside Voice, but will fully launch in Q1 of 2024. We’re starting with Yo-Do Arts, optimized for music, art, dance, and acting schools. By next year, we plan to add swim and other exercises classes, martial arts, and rehabilitation (including physical therapy and speech therapy).
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
Treating our team well has always been immensely important to Travis and me. We have very different management styles (he’s a much more authoritative figure than I’ll ever be), but we share the goals of treating people like adults and like the professionals that they are, as well as always being fair and honest with them.
I’ve learned that most people would much prefer that you’re honest and direct with them than that you tell them what they want to hear in the moment, even if that feels harder to do. When we managed our music company, for example, if there was something a teacher could improve on, it often felt tough to tell them that as opposed to making up reasons why a student didn’t sign up. But the only way that teacher would start signing up more students is if they had some idea what type of feedback they were receiving. Hearing that everything was perfect helped no one. The teacher would make the same mistakes again and again, the students wouldn’t be happy and would decide against taking lessons, and the teacher would eventually leave the job for lack of students. It almost always went better when we took the route of kindly talking to the teacher about what the issue was. Of course, there were a few people over the years who didn’t take it well, but the vast majority of the people we spoke to appreciated the honesty and used it as a chance to improve.
It’s important to also keep in mind that everyone needs to be noticed for the things they do well, not just the things they need to work on. Counterintuitively, that can be the hardest to remember when you’re working with someone who’s really amazing. It can feel unnecessary, and even patronizing, to compliment them for things that they’ve always been good at, but as with any relationship, you need to make people feel seen.
Last, I’ll share a piece of advice that I got from a business owner friend a while back: play to your employees’ strengths. Some are going to be super detail oriented but be nervous about phone calls. Others are going to be incredibly personable and magnetic but feel uncomfortable as soon as anything is too routinized. Discover what people’s strengths are, and really find ways for them to shine. They’ll be happier, you’ll be happier, and your company will be better for it.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Haha, when we ran The Inside Voice, we went through it all: legislation that upended our original business model, a house fire that burned down both our house and our recording studio, Covid of course, and then all the ensuing instability that hit the business world post-Covid.
I started my teaching business just out of college, right before the 2008 recession knocked us all back.
Next, came AB5, the California legislation that changed how independent contractors were classified. To clarify, pretty much every small music business before that point hired independent contractors to teach. It meant that the business could afford to pay them more for each student, and for the most part, it was preferred by the teachers as well–at least the ones we polled. Most of them wanted teaching as a side gig they could do while making their own music, not a job they had to request time off from whenever they needed to reschedule a student. AB5 was a killer for most of the music business owners I knew because the business model had to change, and with it our management style and pay structure. As most business owners know, changes, even positive ones, tend to usher in instability, and we lost a good percentage of our staff at that time. It wasn’t even just teachers who were upset who decided to leave–it was also ones who just figured they may as well make that life change they were putting off now rather than sign a new contract.
Travis was very up on the legislation, and we made the absolute best of it that we could, even with the hit we took. We were excited to be able to finally offer things like PTO, paid training, and health insurance–options that weren’t available to us or our teachers prior to the switch.
I don’t think Covid really needs much explanation. That era alone required so much resilience from small businesses everywhere. Like everyone, we went through the online phase. We kind of lucked out with that one because we had begun working on our online offerings before the pandemic happened, just so that we’d have the opportunity to work with students from further away. And like many, we went through the singing through plexiglass phase, the outdoor music lessons and outdoor events phase, the singing-through-a-mask-with-the-windows-open phase, and the rapid-Covid-test-before-a-recital phase. Our students were so remarkably supportive and understanding through all of that–I’ll never forget some of their kindness.
And yeah, our house and recording studio randomly burned down at some point during all that!
It’s been a real journey, as was selling our beloved company and pivoting to software, but I’m so grateful for all the relationships we’ve made and everything we’ve learned over the years. I’m positive Yo-Do will bring its own obstacles we have to overcome, but I’m excited to set out on the path.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://yo-do.com
- Instagram: @yodoapp
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yodoinc
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yo-do
- Twitter: @yodo_app
- Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Yo-Do-Inc