Here’s My Lockdown (NEW Business) Story What’s Yours? Today I want to tell you a story, my lockdown story. What’s yours, by the way? Schools closed, so my business teaching children collapsed. A few years ago, in its heyday, we had 600 children having weekly harmonica lessons. Gigs stopped, private students could no longer come to lessons, corporate team building gigs got cancelled, and one day workshops in schools also got cancelled, so what to do?
BEN TALKS HARMONICA Ben Hewlett Vice-President
Two things happened: the government was kind enough to come to the aid of self-employed people like myself, and secondly, I was suddenly able to free up a huge amount of time by handing over the HarmonicaUK Chair.
So there I was with temporary financial support, but not much other income. On the plus side, I also had lots of free time, skill, desire (ok, desperation!) and knew lots of people in the harmonica world. What to do? The answer - obvious now - was to go 100% digital. I set up HarmonicaUK coffee mornings and handed them over to David Hambley after a few weeks, and I started doing open Sunday Zoom sessions on April 5th 2020 with three guests, all free of charge. We had pretty good turnouts and some cracking sessions - maybe you came to a few? This was all well and good, but there were mouths to feed, so I embarked on full time study - learning how to create a brand new digital harmonica business. All the years I have been producing book, audio, and, for the last ten years, video tuition got me thinking about how people learn, and I came up with an excellent plan: coaching and mentoring. So now I have a system where the growing group of students (currently 35) meets daily for a limited number of months on Zoom and Facebook. They have daily harmonica challenges to carry out and also weekly and monthly harmonica targets to reach. Each member gets five hours of live coaching and mentoring with me every week, and the whole group, including me, gives each member daily comments and helpful suggestions on their progress within the private Facebook group. I really can’t think of a better way of learning - you get constant support, motivation, engagement, feedback, friendship, challenges, fun, nurturing, and camaraderie as you work through the 90 hours of video and audio book training.
12
The magazine for HarmonicaUK
