I’ve been a fully self employed guitar teacher for years and you can definitely make a decent living doing it.
If you do right, you can work as little as four hours a day, five days a week and still take 6-8 weeks holiday a year.
How much you earn will depend on a few factors.
Whether you are just starting or want to expand your business I highly recommend doing the exercise below to figure out your earning potential.
Your Hourly Rate
First of all you need to figure out how much you are going to charge.
My advice is to aim high with your pricing. But you also have to be realistic.
You should check out your competition so you can see what people are willing to pay and then aim to be in at least the top 10%.
Let say for example you charge $60 an hour.
Hours A Week
In a perfect world, guitar teachers would be able to work 9 to 5 and get to clock off and spend their evenings and weekends doing whatever they want.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Most of your students are going to be in school or work and you will have to base your business around that fact.
On a weekday I can fit in around 4 to 5 hours teaching and on a weekend you could do as much as 6.
One of the mistakes people make when planning anything in the future is that they are too optimistic. With your business plans you have to be conservative.
So let’s say, you are going to work 4 hours Mon to Fri and 4 hours on Sat.
Which gives you a grand total of 24 hours of teaching.
That means you have the potential to take $1,440 a week.
Overheads (Costs)
But that $1,440 is not all yours.
You have to pay your overheads or costs.
This could be renting a teaching space or petrol if you are travelling to other people’s homes etc.
If you really want to keep your costs down you should be teaching online.
Whatever your costs are will be dependent on your individual situation, but you need to figure out what the average cost will be and then subtract it from your earnings.
Let’s say your costs are $240 a week. $1,440 – $240 will leave you with $1,200 a week profit.
That $1,200 a week is yours. But you will obviously have to pay tax on that.
Yearly Earnings
Last thing is to figure how much you are going to earn over a year.
You’ll need to take some holiday, and even if you don’t your students will.
I’ve found that no one wants lessons over the two weeks at Christmas and August is a really dead month. So that is six weeks, but other things might come up so I usually estimate 8 weeks holiday.
Which leave 44 weeks a year to work.
Last bit of maths.
$1,200 x 44 = $52,800 a year.
Not bad for working four hours a day doing something you love.
Obviously you could earn much more by charging more or working more hours. But in my experience the figures I use are much more realistic.
Always beware of the guru promising you six figure sums for doing very little!
As I said, this will be different for all guitar teachers but it is definitely worth figuring out how much you can earn with a successful guitar teaching business and also how much work you actually want to do.