Episode 56

Rob Price | CEO, School of Rock | On Navigating Your Career (#56)

Rob Price, CEO of School of Rock, engages in a heartfelt discussion about the transformative power of music education and its impact on youth mental health. He emphasizes the alarming pre-existing pandemic of anxiety and depression among young people, which has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.

Through the lens of his experiences and the stories of franchisees, Rob illustrates how music has served as a lifeline, helping to mitigate feelings of loneliness and bullying. The essence of School of Rock goes beyond merely teaching music; it is about creating a supportive community that fosters personal growth and self-expression.

Rob shares that the school has expanded to 319 locations across 15 countries, creating a global network that taps into universal passions for music and learning. This episode is a testimony to the life-changing potential of engaging with music, showcasing real-life stories of kids and franchisees who have found purpose and joy through their involvement with School of Rock.

Takeaways:

  • The pandemic of anxiety and depression among young people necessitates innovative approaches, like music education, to foster healing and community.
  • School of Rock's franchisees often have personal experiences that inspire them to create supportive environments for children.
  • Rob Price emphasizes the transformative power of music in combating loneliness and fostering connections among youth.
  • Creating a fulfilling career involves aligning personal passions with professional opportunities, even through challenging transitions.
  • Franchisees at School of Rock are often seeking to leave a meaningful legacy in their communities, beyond just financial gains.
  • The importance of receiving and reflecting on feedback, especially from difficult situations, cannot be overstated in personal and professional growth.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

  • School of Rock
  • CVS
  • Home Depot
  • Allman Brothers
  • Little River Band
  • Paramount
  • Andrew Lloyd Webber
Transcript
Rob Price:

We had a pandemic before COVID at school abroad, and that pandemic is anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, which is widespread, rampant, epidemic levels within young people.

Rob Price:

And a lot of people who are our franchisees either navigated through those experiences with their own kids, and music is what got them out of it or appreciate the power of it from their own experiences as children.

Rob Price:

So one of the coolest, not one of the coolest.

Rob Price:

The coolest thing about School of Rock is not the music.

Rob Price:

The coolest thing about School of the Brock is that we've saved a lot of lives, and we've transformed a lot of lives, and we've saved kids from bullying, and we've saved kids from isolation and loneliness.

Chuck Allen:

That, my friends, is Rob Price, CEO of School of Rock.

Chuck Allen:

And in this episode, he's talking with me about how to navigate career transitions both before and after.

Chuck Allen:

You may choose to make a cool change.

Chuck Allen:

Hi, everyone.

Chuck Allen:

This is Chuck Allen, a work life coach that believes all of us can use a little more joy and adventure in our everyday lives.

Chuck Allen:

Because you're gonna make a change at some point, right?

Chuck Allen:

Why not make it cool?

Chuck Allen:

Rob, welcome to cool change.

Chuck Allen:

I'm excited to have you on the show.

Rob Price:

It's great to be with you, Chuck.

Rob Price:

This is.

Rob Price:

This is gonna be fun.

Chuck Allen:

Tell us the story about school of rock.

Chuck Allen:

What is it all about?

Rob Price:

Sure.

Rob Price:

So, school of Rock started just over 20 years ago, and it was founded, like most irrational startups, you know, as a completely innovative idea and in a single location by an entrepreneur.

Rob Price:

And the very basic idea then, is still the very basic idea today.

Rob Price:

Which is the best way to teach kids, largely, and people more generally, to not just be musicians, but to love learning music for life is to put them together in a group and have them working towards a show.

Rob Price:

And so our philosophy is that individual instruction is important, it's essential, it's necessary, but it's insufficient.

Rob Price:

And so all of our students, what we endeavor to do is put them in a show.

Rob Price:

They'll work for ten to twelve weeks towards an objective.

Rob Price:

And that might be a Zeppelin show or a Zappa show, or it might be something more current, or maybe something that's a throwback to classic blues.

Rob Price:

And it's been great for us.

Rob Price:

So we've grown now to 319 schools in 15 countries, mostly franchised.

Rob Price:

So it's kind of an exciting kind of franchise model as well.

Rob Price:

And it's really struck a chord, so to speak, with, with people universally.

Rob Price:

It taps into those passions that people have for music and for learning and child development.

Rob Price:

And those are really universal phenomena.

Chuck Allen:

Well, I see you've been traveling quite a bit lately.

Chuck Allen:

I see you online.

Chuck Allen:

Looks like you were just in South America.

Chuck Allen:

What's going on down there?

Rob Price:

Yeah, our second largest market is Brazil.

Rob Price:

We've got 35 schools.

Rob Price:

Actually, 36 schools in Brazil will have dozens and dozens more.

Rob Price:

Our partners there think that the full capacity in the country could be as many as 300 units.

Rob Price:

And I believe I'll get this right.

Rob Price:

There's about 700 cities in Brazil with more than a million residents.

Rob Price:

So I'm not betting against our partners down there.

Rob Price:

It's a very vibrant business for us.

Rob Price:

And we're also in Chile and Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, and then closer to the US and Mexico as well.

Rob Price:

So Central and South America for us is a very, very important part of our business and really vibrant contribution to our culture.

Chuck Allen:

Well, you threw out names like Zappa, Zeppelin, you mentioned some blues.

Chuck Allen:

Is this genre always going to be rock and roll related, even in South America?

Rob Price:

Yeah, it's a great question.

Rob Price:

We view it really in two ways.

Rob Price:

We do have a firm belief that the classic canon of rock and roll is from its initiation to the modern day.

Rob Price:

So the kind of the modern band construction of the bass, the guitar, keyboard, drums, vocals, is a particularly good teaching device.

Rob Price:

So we're pretty committed to it.

Rob Price:

And we love rock and roll.

Rob Price:

So admittedly, we have a little bit of a bias, but we have been very flexible, both domestically to include blues, to include rock, rap, to include even hip hop, and more sometimes jazz.

Rob Price:

But we want to make sure that it's meeting our pedagogical objectives and that it's an ensemble based learning in our non us markets.

Rob Price:

We're very, very enthusiastic and very committed to local music in addition to international rock and roll.

Rob Price:

So rock, thankfully, is a pretty universally consumed genre, but it comes to life really differently.

Rob Price:

In Brazil, for example, there's a whole genre called sambarak.

Rob Price:

And so you'll see samba rock shows and local artists highlighted in every kind.

Rob Price:

In Brazil, for example, and similarly in other countries.

Chuck Allen:

Very cool.

Chuck Allen:

You know, I've got to ask this question and get it out of the way up front, because listeners are going to want to know any connection with the movie of almost 20 years ago.

Chuck Allen:

School of Rock.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

So the answer is there's a connection, but not exactly what folks might expect.

Rob Price:

So our concept predated the Jack Black movie, the Paramount film, and that came later.

Rob Price:

And in about:

Rob Price:

And at that point, shall we say, there was an energetic legal discussion between the two parties regarding rights.

Rob Price:

And now we are.

Rob Price:

That is all resolved.

Rob Price:

We have a good relationship with both Paramount and Andrew Lloyd Webber's team.

Rob Price:

We're very enthusiastic about the success of those franchises, but we came first as an enterprise and we're very proud of that.

Rob Price:

And what's seen in the Jack Black film is not what we do, but it's not so far from what we do that it's harmful.

Rob Price:

I would say that it's really constructive.

Rob Price:

The spirit of individual expression and rich passion.

Rob Price:

Let's say that our operational and safety precautions and our discipline are a little bit more than Jack shows in the film with our students, which is why.

Chuck Allen:

You'Re still in business.

Rob Price:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

We would not be taking our students on a bus without telling the parents.

Chuck Allen:

So a little bit about your history with the company when you took it over, was this part of some sort of a cool change of your own, you know, from a different.

Chuck Allen:

How did you grow up and then fall into this situation?

Rob Price:

Yeah, you know, I always considered myself more of a creative kid.

Rob Price:

I was a musician from childhood, keyboard player and singer, enthusiastic singer, and a really, really miserably bad self taught guitar player, which I'm still a pretty miserably bad self taught guitar player.

Rob Price:

And so I found myself, though, as I think many people do, drawn into a career based more on my proficiencies, my technical proficiencies.

Rob Price:

And, you know, this kid from Poughkeepsie had ambitions to have, you know, a comfortable existence, as most people do as they're growing up.

Rob Price:

So you get caught as, as probably is the theme of many of your conversations in a treadmill of doing things that are more an overlap of what you're good at and that pay well than necessarily what you're good at and you love.

Rob Price:

And so I had a long career of successive roles that I was generally competent and successful, and I had growing, a growing career from it progression.

Rob Price:

But indeed, as each year passed and each financial threshold that I met in terms of goals that you'd set out three years before, four years before, even a year before, and you felt.

Rob Price:

I felt a hollowness emerging.

Rob Price:

And it became clearer and clearer to me that the culture of the company had very meaningful monetary value to me.

Rob Price:

And then, of course, if I could combine that with working on something that I think changes the world and that changed my world when I was a kid and changed my kids world when they were younger, that seemed like a pretty.

Rob Price:

Well, it seemed like an unattainable objective.

Rob Price:

But, of course, that became clear to me that that was the objective.

Rob Price:

So, yeah, this was very much a coming home to my true passions, although I think, as may be apropos to your listeners on your podcast, is that it wasn't completely bereft of a connection to the things that I'd done before.

Rob Price:

So I think that there is something to that where you do want to leverage things that you've got a track record and some experience in, and then attach that two things that are more in alignment with your passions and your joie de vivre.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Chuck Allen:

You know, something we talk about sometimes is that it feels to me like it's a good idea for people to go through a boot camp of sorts in life, whether that be an actual boot camp like I did with the marines, or, you know, a boot camp of going to work for whatever, some nine to five, eight to five, sort of a consultancy or a company or, you know, something where you are rolling up your sleeves, you're doing the hard work.

Chuck Allen:

Maybe it's not your passion.

Chuck Allen:

You're doing it from necessity, or maybe you've inherited a script from your parents or your community, and this is what you ought to do.

Chuck Allen:

What I've seen many times, though, is that the lessons that are learned in those environments are crucial later when we sometimes do decide to do something more in line with our liking or with our strengths.

Chuck Allen:

Um, and so that all of that time is not for naught.

Chuck Allen:

You know, it's.

Chuck Allen:

It's not lost.

Chuck Allen:

It's actually, you're able to pull some things unexpectedly from previous lives into what you're doing right now.

Chuck Allen:

Has that been the case for you as well?

Rob Price:

Absolutely.

Rob Price:

I think that's a really keen insight, and, you know, which I had largely discovered accidentally.

Rob Price:

And I think that, you know, whether it's from my early days as a entry level consultant, the analytical skills that I developed to working in retail, and largely family owned retail, where I got an extraordinary sense of the passion and the commitment that the unit is the unit of analysis, the individual store or school or enterprises or forward facing, consumer facing unit, is what matters to.

Rob Price:

When I was at CV's pharmacy and I ran marketing and I ran the extra care business, the loyalty program, and understood the incredible power of big data.

Rob Price:

Before, big data was really a thing, but I didn't.

Rob Price:

One thing that I think back on, and maybe this is something that's useful for your listeners, is I could have been even more effective if I was assembling these skills in a much more disciplined way.

Rob Price:

If I said to myself, here's my end state, broadly defined, what would be the most powerful, fungible, deployable skills, kind of in different settings, that would.

Rob Price:

That I'm on the way to.

Rob Price:

So I was very lucky that most of the skills that I accumulated along the way ended up being useful to me in my current role.

Rob Price:

But I think that it's probably a much better strategy to not count on serendipity and to be much more disciplined.

Rob Price:

And that is also, I think, a really powerful way for people to slog through the pre cool change stage, which is to say, okay, this is a miserable job, or this is not the job I want, but what within this job?

Rob Price:

What within these relationships, by the way, even what are the things that I can learn to never do again but go to school on the misery, understand what it is?

Rob Price:

So I think that accumulation is really important.

Rob Price:

And, you know, I could craft a story to make it sound like I assembled this career with great precision.

Rob Price:

I didn't, but I was really lucky that the assembly ended up being useful for what I do today and what I hope to do in the future.

Chuck Allen:

So your counsel, though, would be to, if you can conjure some future abstract vision of at least the point on the horizon to which you're headed, like this is generally where I'd like to go.

Chuck Allen:

These are generally my strengths, generally my passions.

Chuck Allen:

So that you're paying attention in your current role, whatever it is, to see whether or not you are picking up some insights, skills, strengths along the way, that you can move, at least generally in that direction.

Rob Price:

I think that's right.

Rob Price:

And Chuck, I'll give one more friendly amendment to that, which is that very few people who are listening to your broadcast are not going to be, wouldn't have leadership, for example, or culture or relationship building or customer relations, customer interactions as part of that abstract vision.

Rob Price:

So while I think that there's great luxury and importance of maintaining an abstraction, I also think it's a little bit like, well, what are the things that I'll definitely need to tap into, sort of regardless of where I land, if you're a small business operator, if you're a bigger business operator, in both cases, unless you're a sole practitioner and you're an individual contributor, you're going to have to influence people.

Rob Price:

So I would go to school on what are the very greatest skills, and one of the things that I think would help people tolerate the more miserable times is go to school on horrible people.

Rob Price:

Go to school on your worst boss.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

Go to school on your worst customer, your worst colleague.

Rob Price:

Write it down.

Rob Price:

Capture the insights.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Chuck Allen:

I often have clients who have a very difficult colleague, maybe a very difficult boss.

Chuck Allen:

And what we're careful to talk about is that we not lose the lesson while it's available, because you're not always going to have that person working there.

Chuck Allen:

But there are some insights and some learnings that you can get from these difficult situations that you simply can't get when everything is just placid and everything's humming along very well.

Rob Price:

You know, I'd add to that that very few horrible bosses think they're horrible bosses, and it's possible that we might grow up to become horrible bosses, that we don't think we're horrible bosses.

Rob Price:

So we're just not that kind of horrible the one that we didn't like, but we're other kinds of horrible.

Rob Price:

So I think that one of the other things to study about those relationships is what leads.

Rob Price:

What's the underpinning flaw, or the gap or the vulnerability that leads to somebody who we perceive as awful to not know that they're awful themselves?

Rob Price:

Or alternatively, is there something wrong in our perceptions?

Rob Price:

Maybe they're not awful and we're just impatient, or we don't understand the method to the madness.

Rob Price:

So I think if you go, if you consider a bad boss as a study subject, it changes your whole ability to tolerate that kind of toxic relationship.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Chuck Allen:

I mean, it gives you some actual new purpose to your work.

Chuck Allen:

And if you look around and all of your teammates are completely tolerable and working really well, you might want to do some self examination to make sure that you're not the one.

Rob Price:

Correct?

Rob Price:

Correct.

Chuck Allen:

So there's also a piece of that that feels as though when we talk about giving purpose to our work, let's say that we're in a career, a job, whatever that is not our passion, our strength.

Chuck Allen:

It's not terribly cool.

Chuck Allen:

And we know that we're doing it from necessity.

Chuck Allen:

We'd like to do something else in the future.

Chuck Allen:

It feels like we could.

Chuck Allen:

What we're touching on here is we could make a pseudo job role out of mapping out our future to get to the next step, whatever that is.

Chuck Allen:

Like that in itself could become a vocation for us.

Chuck Allen:

This intention of moving from this to something else, doing the self work, all of that, you could look at that as a way of becoming your primary vocation.

Chuck Allen:

It doesn't pay necessarily.

Chuck Allen:

Your day job is paying, but that layer that you're putting on top of it that intentionality and treating it like a job that has roles and has tasks associated with it is probably a good way to give yourself purpose and to launch yourself toward that new direction a little bit more purposefully.

Rob Price:

Yeah, I'll see you and I'll raise you on that.

Rob Price:

And I think this is something I did a little bit more intentionally.

Rob Price:

That kind of builds upon the important idea that you're talking about.

Rob Price:

When I was at my most discontented or felt most hollow, I would busy myself with a couple of different categories of what you're describing.

Rob Price:

One would be to do a lot of reading and observation and just fantasizing about what it is that it seemed that would be fun to do.

Rob Price:

And by the way, I had things on the list that now I know in retrospect would have been miserable and I'd be terrible at.

Rob Price:

But not just the making a job of the dreaming and the planning and the plotting, but also making a job.

Rob Price:

As we were talking about the studying in your environment, the assembly of skills within the environment, you're getting paid to get another master's degree, or if you don't have one, or your first master's degree, or in some cases, your listeners, if they haven't gotten a college education, you're getting paid in your job to assemble your degree, your undergraduate degree.

Rob Price:

You're learning a whole thing, a whole set of skills.

Rob Price:

The third thing is to spend as much time getting feedback as possible.

Rob Price:

One thing that I became very, very good at was asking for and doing my best, but not always succeeding, but asking for feedback.

Rob Price:

And one thing that I also had a continuous string of luck on in that regard was I had mostly incredible bosses and colleagues who were very generous feedback with feedback.

Rob Price:

Sometimes that generosity was a two by four to the head.

Rob Price:

very first one that I got in:

Rob Price:

And I reread them.

Rob Price:

And by the way, they're the same review every year.

Rob Price:

Every year.

Rob Price:

Every year.

Rob Price:

So I think that being intentional about all three of those categories in reverse, self improvement, studying your environment and then dreaming about where you want to go to, that can be.

Rob Price:

It's like planning a trip.

Rob Price:

It's fun to plan a trip.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

So I strongly urge that, and I think it's very gratifying and it will help you make better choices.

Chuck Allen:

You're reminding me of a situation when I was at the Home Depot headquarters in Atlanta, working there, developing training programs for managers.

Chuck Allen:

And my feedback from performance review to performance review was, there's some good things on there, but I was not a great listener to other people.

Chuck Allen:

Eventually, the director of training, guy named Jeff Barrington, came to me and said, chuck, come take a walk with me.

Chuck Allen:

How many people ring your phone asking for your opinion on things?

Chuck Allen:

None.

Chuck Allen:

How many people stand in your doorway and they would like to get your thoughts on something?

Chuck Allen:

None.

Chuck Allen:

Let me tell you why.

Chuck Allen:

Because you don't listen to anyone.

Chuck Allen:

The reality is, you don't care what anyone else thinks.

Chuck Allen:

You're always right.

Chuck Allen:

You're always convincing everyone that you're right.

Chuck Allen:

So you're now surrounded by people who have nothing to say to you.

Chuck Allen:

And your influence is shrinking rapidly.

Chuck Allen:

And that conversation, that difficult feedback that I did not enjoy at the time, has been instrumental, really, throughout the rest of my career.

Chuck Allen:

And then so using those difficult situations and to your point, gathering that difficult feedback early on, paying attention to it, can really pay dividends for a long time.

Rob Price:

Chuck, you remind me of an amazing anecdote.

Rob Price:

If I've got time to share one, sure.

Rob Price:

Along the same lines.

Rob Price:

And I think maybe then you and I can punchline why it's so important in this context of a cool change.

Rob Price:

I was at Heb grocery in San Antonio, Texas, by the way, I've talked about this experience probably once a month.

Rob Price:

This is how formative it was.

Rob Price:

I had just been promoted to run the private label business.

Rob Price:

I was very young.

Rob Price:

I was very brash.

Rob Price:

And Charles Butt, who was the owner of the company, this very enigmatic and brilliant and fascinating leader, calls me into his office after I was promoted, about ten days after I was promoted.

Rob Price:

And he says, so, rob, tell me what you've learned about the role.

Rob Price:

This is new and exciting.

Rob Price:

What are your plans?

Rob Price:

What's your strategy, et cetera, et cetera.

Rob Price:

And I start waxing poetic about this.

Rob Price:

All of my visions was incredible in such a short period of time, how many answers I had.

Rob Price:

And he's taking notes, assiduous notes.

Rob Price:

And I'm saying to myself, this is amazing.

Rob Price:

Finally, somebody understands how incredibly brilliant I am.

Rob Price:

And he goes on and on and on.

Rob Price:

And he finally says, I don't know how long I was talking.

Rob Price:

He says, rob, can I interrupt you and ask you one question?

Rob Price:

I said, well, of course, Charles.

Rob Price:

And I figure since he owns the company, I'd let him ask one question.

Chuck Allen:

How kind.

Rob Price:

So he said, how much longer are you going to be talking?

Rob Price:

And he said, you've been in the job for ten days.

Rob Price:

The proper answer to the question that I asked was, Charles, I have no idea.

Rob Price:

The answer to that question, I've only been in the job for ten days.

Rob Price:

What do you know?

Rob Price:

You're a little older than I.

Rob Price:

You've been at this for a while.

Rob Price:

What are your objectives?

Rob Price:

What are you in the market for as the leader of this company?

Rob Price:

And I get lower and lower and lower and lower.

Rob Price:

And to this day, like that.

Rob Price:

Can you still feel that story that you were just describing like it was yesterday?

Rob Price:

Absolutely.

Chuck Allen:

Still brings.

Rob Price:

Sadly, it took me many, many, many years to meaningfully improve on that.

Rob Price:

And I'm still not great versus others that I've met in that regard.

Rob Price:

But I'm so much better because he had the generosity to do that.

Rob Price:

Punchline to the story.

Rob Price:

I get back to my office after feeling like one feet tall, and I'm only 2ft tall, so 1ft was 50% of my height.

Rob Price:

So I get to back to my office and the next day a letter comes from Charles saying, want to tell you how excited I am about you in this role.

Rob Price:

You're going to do great.

Rob Price:

And it's so important what we're working on.

Rob Price:

Just get this listening bit under control.

Rob Price:

Your fan, Charles and I still have that letter.

Rob Price:

I still have that letter.

Chuck Allen:

He right sized it for you?

Rob Price:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

And maybe the lesson from our two experiences for folks on this transition that we're passionate about is embrace that feedback.

Rob Price:

Look for it.

Rob Price:

Find the person who likes you the least.

Rob Price:

Don't go to your advocates.

Rob Price:

Don't go to your.

Rob Price:

Now, Charles liked me.

Rob Price:

He wanted me to be successful.

Rob Price:

But I think even better, embrace the feedback from folks who.

Rob Price:

Who you may question whether they're right.

Chuck Allen:

Well, you, like me, needed the verbal two x four.

Chuck Allen:

And at the same time, though, we were offered a hand back up off the ground very quickly so that we knew that we had their support.

Chuck Allen:

I love that story.

Chuck Allen:

It seems to me that anyone who decides to buy into the school of rock concept is, by default, doing something very cool.

Chuck Allen:

Very interesting.

Chuck Allen:

I'm curious what stories of meaningful life change that you might have seen happen with people in your company, people who decide what is the franchisee model?

Chuck Allen:

And who are these folks that are coming in there to run these units?

Rob Price:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

So, of our 318 units, all but 47 of them are franchised.

Rob Price:

We own and operate.

Rob Price:

47 of them love running our own schools, but most are franchise.

Rob Price:

So we could spend hours and hours answering that question, because the truth is that every story is different.

Rob Price:

The journey and what the school of Rock is a franchise opportunity.

Rob Price:

And what franchises a franchise business is accomplishing.

Rob Price:

For an investor, everyone is different.

Rob Price:

But the generalizable dimensions are that it tends to be people kind of at our stage in age, you know, in their forties and their fifties, who have achieved success and significance in some element of their life and accumulated some of these life skills.

Rob Price:

But generally what I find in our community is it's a people who are now looking to establish their legacy, that they wanna.

Rob Price:

They wanna stretch their business skills.

Rob Price:

They're not embarrassed about doing wealth building and chasing value creation.

Rob Price:

You know, very few people want to invest a few hundred thousand dollars for no gain.

Rob Price:

That's called charity.

Rob Price:

That's easy to do, easier to do in some ways.

Rob Price:

But the thing that is very different in our business that I think has a lot of applicability to your listener group, is that it is people who are using this as an opportunity to say, I want to do something that is creative.

Rob Price:

I want to do something that is making an impact on people's lives.

Rob Price:

And I've heard some amazing stories which will absolutely be heart wrenching.

Rob Price:

We have franchisees who have done this as legacies to lost children, children that they had that were passionate about music, that got, you know, sadly, they lost to a disease or an unanticipated accident.

Rob Price:

We have many people who, you know, have come to a natural end, either retirement or an unintended retirement with a severance package.

Rob Price:

And it's a reset, it's a wake up call for them.

Rob Price:

Which is to say, I don't feel like I've getting to retirement doesn't actually feel like enough to me.

Rob Price:

And getting early retired feels actually like a blow.

Rob Price:

It feels like I worked to some level objective, and then somebody told me that they didn't have any further ambitions for me.

Rob Price:

So that's a very common story.

Rob Price:

But the thing that is universal amongst our franchisees is that we, you know, we definitely have as a minimum requirement folks who seek to have a financially successful business, but none of our franchisees that would be sufficient for.

Rob Price:

There are other franchises that are more passive, less complicated in some ways, less emotionally challenging, that are easy, easier money, I would guess, mathematically, but they're substantially less fulfilling.

Rob Price:

So what we find is ten weeks into their first season, when they're doing that Zeppelin show, or a Beatles show, or Green Day show, or early blues show, and they see these little kids that came into the school ten weeks before, tripping over cables, and they put on a show with a couple hour show, it brings tears to everyone's eyes.

Rob Price:

The other thing that we find is a common phenomenon is that what I just described for our franchisees is even more true for our students.

Rob Price:

You know, we, and I know this more from COVID We had a pandemic before COVID at School of Rock, and that pandemic is anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, which is widespread, rampant, epidemic levels within young people.

Rob Price:

And a lot of people who are our franchisees either navigated through those experiences with their own kids, and music is what got them out of it or appreciate the power of it from their own experience as children.

Chuck Allen:

Wow.

Rob Price:

And so one of the coolest, not one of the coolest.

Rob Price:

The coolest thing about School of Rock is not the music.

Rob Price:

The coolest thing about school of the Brock is that we've saved a lot of lives and we've transformed a lot of lives, and we've saved kids from bullying, and we've saved kids from isolation and loneliness.

Rob Price:

And, you know, I would never presuppose or be so arrogant as to say we are.

Rob Price:

We replace authentic clinical interventions or therapeutic solutions.

Rob Price:

But I can't tell you in five years, in the hundreds of parents that I've met, how many stories I have heard of lives changed and lives saved.

Rob Price:

So I think that's what our franchisees are looking for.

Rob Price:

And maybe one of the lessons in that is that sometimes people stop short of what will actually give them gratification.

Rob Price:

It's so easy to say the cool change I want is be my own boss.

Rob Price:

At what?

Rob Price:

Why do you want to be your own?

Rob Price:

Okay, you could be a, you know, you could be a drug dealer and be your own boss.

Rob Price:

I mean, there's any number of ways to be your own boss, but what do you want to accomplish to whatever.

Rob Price:

What do you want to leave behind?

Rob Price:

What gives you satisfaction?

Rob Price:

Now, some people aren't sentimental and some people don't like loud music, so we would be a bad match for them, but there's something else for them.

Rob Price:

So it's that double click in to say, what is it that we want to.

Rob Price:

What we want to leave behind?

Rob Price:

What is it that we want to be known for?

Rob Price:

What actually gives us joy?

Rob Price:

What will actually bring the tear to the eye to even the most jaded person?

Rob Price:

So that's, what are the, that's the common theme I see amongst our franchisees now.

Rob Price:

We're card carrying capitalists, so we're not, we're not embarrassed about building a business around that, but that's insufficient for meeting all of our objectives.

Rob Price:

We want to do that and change the world.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Chuck Allen:

And have this sort of priceless fuel that's driving you.

Chuck Allen:

And I'm sure.

Chuck Allen:

Part of now the corporate culture and the story that's attractive to other people who want to make a difference in people's lives, for sure.

Rob Price:

In fact, that's why we.

Rob Price:

I think there's a lot that one can draw if you're on this cool change journey, whether it's thinking about a franchise or thinking about another opportunity.

Rob Price:

Listen to the words used really carefully by the counterparty, the hiring personnel, the partner, the franchisor, whoever it is, whoever it is that you're engaging with.

Rob Price:

We don't sell franchise.

Rob Price:

We never use the term selling franchises.

Rob Price:

We award franchises.

Rob Price:

And it sounds like it's a gimmick, but no, we actually genuinely believe that.

Rob Price:

We're out there curating, we're recruiting like minded individuals and we're protecting ourselves from the enthusiastic check writer who actually doesn't care.

Rob Price:

We would sooner say no.

Chuck Allen:

Well, did I hear you say to me that part of your awarding process is to have you help talk them out of purchasing or getting into or investing in a franchise or the business?

Rob Price:

It is my franchise development team's least favorite part of the process, but I think it's one of the most important things that we do.

Rob Price:

This is probably analogous to other non franchise examples, but if your listeners will indulge me to talk a little bit about franchising.

Rob Price:

In our world, there's typically something called a discovery day, a meeting where as you're getting very serious about the concept, you meet in person and you interact with each other.

Rob Price:

You visit the operations and you really, really dig in.

Rob Price:

And we do that late in the process because we only want to do that once.

Rob Price:

We have a pretty good hunch that these folks are our tribe, so we do it at the end of the process.

Rob Price:

Instead of calling it a discovery day, we call it an opening act.

Rob Price:

It's the opening act to your.

Rob Price:

Your potential career with us.

Rob Price:

And the very last thing I do is try to talk them out of it at the end.

Rob Price:

And I that includes a little tongue in cheek, but includes some very, very specific things, which is these are the things that are going to suck most about this.

Rob Price:

These are the things that, if you don't have this style of management or leadership or passion will be grueling for you.

Rob Price:

So what we want to protect from, and this is maybe the most applicable to the broad range of your listeners, is that when you're making a cool change and contemplating it, it's like a rebound relationship.

Rob Price:

Sometimes you use other people's definitions of what's cool to be a proxy for your own and you have to be very careful.

Rob Price:

So you have to make sure that you scrutinize, you interrogate the opportunity to make sure that it doesn't include things that you find dreadfully boring, distasteful, unappealing, unimportant.

Rob Price:

And that doesn't speak to your soul.

Rob Price:

y to do is I go through about:

Rob Price:

You know, your days are going to be like this.

Rob Price:

I talk extensively about the nuance of dealing with both a child and their parent.

Rob Price:

I talk about the fact this child is not your child.

Rob Price:

You have to love your child biologically, but not all children are likable all the time.

Chuck Allen:

Yeah.

Rob Price:

So we go through this, and I think it's the.

Rob Price:

For me, it also meets what I think is a moral obligation of mine, which is that I really don't want to draw somebody into this big of a commitment unless it's just right for them.

Chuck Allen:

You're stirring some sort of creative energy in me a little bit that I'm thinking, you know, there's a couple of school of rock locations here in Portland, and I'm thinking, would be kind of fun to go learn how to play cool change by little river band.

Rob Price:

Hey, let's.

Chuck Allen:

You've mentioned kids.

Chuck Allen:

Can I just go in there and, like, learn how to play stuff?

Rob Price:

Like.

Rob Price:

Absolutely.

Rob Price:

You know, the.

Rob Price:

And I'm glad you asked that, because that's one of the negative byproducts of the Jack Black movie, is that it implies that we're just for kids.

Rob Price:

We have a very big business in adulthood, adult fans.

Rob Price:

And it's a very.

Rob Price:

We do the same thing.

Rob Price:

We'll give you an individual lesson, but we'll throw you right into a performance group.

Rob Price:

It's super fun from a social standpoint, and it's very accommodating of different skill levels.

Rob Price:

One of our actually patented pedagogical elements is that we have a way to make sure that a lower level guitar player can play with a better keyboard player.

Rob Price:

But absolutely, come on into Portland.

Rob Price:

You tell them, you know, Rob, and as soon as they say who, they'll say, rob who?

Rob Price:

And then they'll give you the regular price.

Rob Price:

But yeah, our Portlands area schools are incredible.

Rob Price:

And so please come on in.

Rob Price:

And it's never too late.

Rob Price:

I'm still learning guitar, and I've been a school of rock student myself, so I can recommend it, not just as the CEO.

Chuck Allen:

Well, you know, a lot of our listeners and some of my coaching clients, they're not looking to make wholesale changes in their lives.

Chuck Allen:

They're looking to just do something at times more cool, more interesting, more useful, more meaningful.

Chuck Allen:

And sometimes that might include taking on an art like this, taking on some sort of a new talent, expanding a skill.

Chuck Allen:

It sounds like this would be an interesting avenue for people to consider something like this.

Rob Price:

Well, you raise a really interesting point.

Rob Price:

I find myself, when I'm at times of malaise, that I waste my time on the malaise, and I don't actually consume any of that energy that's building up on advancing the cause.

Rob Price:

We talked about a few things before which were more businessy, right?

Rob Price:

You know, plotting the path and self evaluation, etc, etcetera.

Rob Price:

But it's amazing to me how much somebody, how much we, not somebody else, how much all of us end up wasting valuable energy doing thoroughly non value added tasks, social media, watching tv, watching sports, sitting around.

Rob Price:

Sorry, if you're a big sports fan, instead of doing something that actually opens up those channels, gets the synapses firing.

Rob Price:

So we have a firm point of view for children about the power of the neural connections that are made through music.

Rob Price:

And it may not be music if your aspiration is to perhaps own a golf course.

Rob Price:

Well, don't just go play.

Rob Price:

Go caddy for someone.

Rob Price:

Go do something.

Rob Price:

Go to a webinar on turf and do something.

Rob Price:

And so I completely agree with you.

Rob Price:

And I find, you know, the profile of our adult students is fascinating.

Rob Price:

It's CEO's, CFO's, salespeople, lawyers, homemakers, the whole spectrum.

Rob Price:

The whole spectrum.

Rob Price:

And those folks are all trying to either fuel their own cool change or they're feeding it with just raw energy.

Rob Price:

They're actually on a journey or they're just giving it a little bit of a push along.

Chuck Allen:

Let me throw you a curveball here.

Chuck Allen:

As we start to wrap up, I really enjoyed our conversation.

Chuck Allen:

The question is this.

Chuck Allen:

You're going to throw a party for 50 or so of your closest friends, and you can invite any living musician to come play at a private concert.

Chuck Allen:

Who is it going to be and why?

Rob Price:

Oh, my gosh.

Rob Price:

That's a cruel question.

Rob Price:

You know, I'm going to throw an interesting one at you, which is, I just watched the documentary about Chuck Lavelle, and Chuck Lavelle was the keyboardist for the Allman brothers, but also for stones, late in his career and has been a regular contributor.

Rob Price:

You'd be astounded at how much of the classic rock canon his keyboard playing has been on.

Rob Price:

So Chuck's listening to this.

Rob Price:

I'm a super fan, a big, big fan of Chuck.

Rob Price:

Leavella and I even liked fongs and sea level, which was his band, that.

Rob Price:

That he had for a while.

Rob Price:

And why?

Rob Price:

You asked why?

Rob Price:

The reason is that Chuck is somebody who reinvented himself constantly.

Rob Price:

And he never let the termination of one chapter of his life end and feel like.

Rob Price:

And go into despair that he couldn't participate and contribute.

Rob Price:

He was an amazing networker.

Rob Price:

Super nice guy.

Rob Price:

Is an amazing networker.

Rob Price:

Super nice guy.

Rob Price:

Everybody holds him in high regard.

Rob Price:

And he also was humble.

Rob Price:

He took gigs that may have been beneath him by objective standards.

Rob Price:

The other thing is, Chuck has a whole other passion outside of music.

Rob Price:

He's this passionate environmentalist and forestry expert.

Rob Price:

Now, that doesn't interest me a bit.

Rob Price:

I mean, I like trees.

Rob Price:

I'm all for trees.

Rob Price:

Go trees.

Rob Price:

But he's just so into it.

Rob Price:

And I just love to talk to him about like, what's that all about?

Rob Price:

Because I think people were interesting.

Rob Price:

Interesting to have a dinner with are not celebrities.

Rob Price:

I think people who are interested to have dinner with are people who are thinkers, who are passionate.

Rob Price:

And I just like to talk.

Rob Price:

I'd like to jam with them, but then I'd like to talk about trees because I don't know anything about trees.

Rob Price:

Maybe that's what I'm supposed to do when I grow up.

Chuck Allen:

That's awesome.

Chuck Allen:

That's awesome.

Chuck Allen:

Well, what a fantastic conversation.

Chuck Allen:

I'm inclined to just wrap up and say, what's the next big change for you?

Chuck Allen:

Is the.

Chuck Allen:

Is there another big change on the horizon outside of music learning something different?

Chuck Allen:

Or is this it for the next foreseeable future?

Rob Price:

Well, you know, I'm a little restless, certainly not professionally.

Rob Price:

I love my job and they're going to have to drag me out, you know, with a crane or something.

Rob Price:

So I don't see any changes for me professionally.

Rob Price:

But my wife and I recently bought an rv and we took our inaugural trip.

Rob Price:

And I think one of the cool change parts of life is when you're an empty nester and you get to rediscover and have a re honeymoon with your significant other.

Rob Price:

And so you may see me out in the road.

Rob Price:

If I'm on the side of the road, please stop and help.

Rob Price:

Especially if I can't get the dump working.

Rob Price:

Exactly.

Rob Price:

I'll be very happy to receive some help.

Rob Price:

But I think it's a good way to end because maybe the most important cool change you do is the ones you do with the ones you love.

Rob Price:

So with friends and family, and I'm excited with this journey with my wife to not kill each other.

Rob Price:

Drive along the highway in a tin.

Chuck Allen:

Can, hopefully with some good playlists going.

Rob Price:

For sure.

Rob Price:

Guarantee that.

Chuck Allen:

Rob, thanks again.

Chuck Allen:

We really appreciate you being on the show.

Chuck Allen:

Great luck to you.

Rob Price:

Great to be with you, Chuck.

Chuck Allen:

Well, that was awesome.

Chuck Allen:

I hope you enjoyed that chat with Rob as much as I did so much in there.

Chuck Allen:

If you've ever thought about getting a personal coach to help you work through your own life and work changes, I'd love to hear from you.

Chuck Allen:

Visit me@coolchangepodcast.com to set up a free 15 minutes phone call and see if I can be of any assistance to you.

Chuck Allen:

Until next time, this is Chuck Allen reminding you that if you're going to make a change, for crying out loud, make it cool.

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About the Podcast

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Cool Change
Embrace Life Transitions with Purpose and Joy

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About your host

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Chuck Allen

Many talk about purposeful change, but true examples are rare. I strive to be one of those examples and invite you to join me on this journey.

With over 30 years of experience working with everyone from Fortune 50 executives to college students, I've learned that no one has all the answers. The key is finding the approach that resonates with you.

I challenge myself and others to rethink the scripts we've inherited and design lives that are uniquely our own. I'm passionate about connecting with change-makers who are living differently and showing us what's possible.