Canadian Music Trades
Supplier Spotlight: My Music Staff

By: Andrew King

The main goal driving the team at My Music Staff is a relatively simple one: “We’re only successful if our members are successful, so our number one goal is to help our members thrive,” states Dasa Kajganic, marketing manager for the Burlington, ON-based software developer.

My Music Staff offers a subscription-based management solution for private music teachers and music schools. Its comprehensive feature set allows users to centrally manage their web presence, student information, scheduling, invoicing, payments, and more. Their slogan? “Whatever your goal, we can help,” and that’s a statement they take seriously.

“Whether it’s to grow your business, reduce costs, get paid on time, teach more, or stress less, My Music Staff can help achieve it,” says Kajganic. “It helps you build a better lesson program and improve the service you offer your customers. If you’re the type of business that’s still scheduling in Excel, a Google Calendar, or on paper, there’s a huge opportunity here to serve your customers better.”

My Music Staff was founded back in 2013, and the story behind its launch is as unique as its core product. “We always say that My Music Staff is a love story between our founder, a software developer, and his wife, a music teacher,” Kajganic explains. “She finally convinced him to build a system to help her manage her private music studio, and My Music Staff was born!”

Of course, the solution has grown to be far more expansive and robust in the years since. While the first iteration was catered specifically to its founder’s wife and the way she ran her business, the team soon discovered that the ways people ran their lesson programs were as diverse as their respective teaching styles.

“So, from that point forward, My Music Staff has been community driven,” Kajganic offers. “The amazing feedback we receive is the reason we can now offer a comprehensive system to accommodate a variety of lesson models.”

The company releases up to four new updates per month, with usability always at the forefront of their efforts. “We strongly believe that a robust, feature-rich software solution can still be easy and intuitive to use,” Kajganic tacks on.

The company currently boasts over a dozen employees and serves thousands of clients around the world, helping them to build a better business.

Kajganic says that accommodating the significant growth they’ve experienced in recent years has been an “exciting challenge.” As an example, they’ve gone from helping teachers and managers to send a few hundred emails per month to now sending millions. “We’ve been continuously upgrading our infrastructure in the background to handle these increasing demands and ensure we’re delivering a smooth, uninterrupted service,” she notes – again, highlighting the focus on functionality and ease-of-use.

“Additionally, we’ve had to expand our support staff and improve our processes so that we’re still delivering the timely, accurate, and personalized technical support our customers experienced when we had just a handful of members.”

To promote their services, the company has found trade events like The NAMM Show to be particularly effective and rewarding as they offer an opportunity to showcase the platform’s various tools in a live demo to a targeted audience. “Our system has a broad feature set, so it’s difficult to explain everything it can do in a single advertisement,” says Kajganic. “At shows like NAMM, we can tailor the demo to the retail owner or manager’s needs and show them specific features that would work for them and the way they run their business.”

The company takes pride in being future-focused and constantly working on new developments. Currently, the My Music Staff team is focused on helping potential users migrate towards the cloud. “With customers expecting more, the shift online allows us to automate and streamline the scheduling, invoicing, and payment processes,” Kajganic notes. “By freeing up more of their time, it allows them to focus on other aspects of their business and to deliver additional value to their clients.”

Other key projects that are currently underway include the development of an app and a partnership with point-of-sale system developer Rain Retail.

“An app has been one of our most requested features,” Kajganic says about the former, “but it requires a lot of work under the hood to make it possible. Once we have it completed, though, it will allow us to introduce some bigger and better features that weren’t previously possible.”

As for the collaboration with Rain Retail, that’s about “providing all of the tools necessary to address the challenges of modern retail – e-commerce, point-of-sale, and lesson management.”

All are examples of the team at My Music Staff diligently working towards their goal of helping their members thrive, and between direct customer feedback, online reviews, and most significantly, their impressive year-over-year growth, it seems like they’re doing a very good job of it.

Andrew King is the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Music Trade.

King, A. (2019, June). Supplier Spotlight: My Music Staff. Canadian Music Trades Magazine, 17. Retrieved from http://www.canadianmusictrade.com/online/