Hey, what's happening guys? In this video, I'm going to show you our exact three-step sales process that we use to get clients for our agency growth response. I've done a few videos in the past on some of the tactics that we use, like sending simple social media messages on platforms like LinkedIn, sending messages on cold email and Facebook and Instagram. But in this video, it's going to be more of a big picture overview. The birds-eye view looks at our exact sales process so that you can understand, because I've been getting dozens of questions on, hey, how do you get clients? How does it work? How does your processor strategy work? This is a video that's going to answer that question and show you exactly what that process looks like. Now, this is a free training that I did in my Facebook group. So if you like trainings just like this, make sure you go below into the description. It's a 100% free Facebook group on how to start an online business to link digital services and scale it to six figures plus per year. So if you're interested in that, it's a free group. Join below. There should be a link in the description. And it's whether you're an SMA or drop servicing agency, a marketing or advertising consultant or a graphic designer, a copywriter, any type of digital services business. If you already have one or you're looking to start one, that's going to be the group to be to get the most access to me and the most help from me. So if you're interested in that, make sure you go below, hit the link in the description to join 100% free. If not, no worries. I hope you guys get a lot of value out of this training. So let's jump into it right now. All right, what's going on guys in this free training, I'm going to show you our predictable three step sales process that we use to convert leads into paying clients for our agency growth response where we do done for you LinkedIn prospecting and lead generation for companies in the B2B technology space. Now, before I can go over that need to first understand what is a sales process and why is it so important that you have one. So let's jump into that real quick. I'm going to talk about this and then we'll jump into the exact three step process that we use. Now, a sales process is simply a set of repeatable steps that takes a person from the early stage of awareness just hearing about your company for the first time to a closed sale, right? The set of steps for a person follows, they just hear about your company, the set of steps they follow to becoming a paying client with you. Now there's three reasons why you need one, right? There's number one, it's clarity. It gives you clarity. It eliminates any confusion and gives you extreme clarity on what to do in each step of the process. So you can look at the process and say, okay, I'm on step number one, I can go to step number two now. I did step number two, I can go to step number three, right? So it eliminates any confusion and gives you complete clarity on what to do in each step of your sales process. Now that leads to point number two, which is ease of execution. When you have clarity and when you know what to do in each step of the process, execution becomes simple, becomes easy because you can just look at your process and say, okay, I did step number one, I do step number two now, I did step number two, I did step number three, and so on and so forth, right? We have been using the same three-step sales process for two years now. We've gotten better at it over time and the only reason we're able to get better is because we use the same process, which gives us clarity, it makes it makes execution simple and step by step. And that leads me to step or point number three, which is increasing sales. Most people, they don't have a sales process and their sales suffer as a result. When you have extreme clarity and you're able to execute efficiently on this sales process, your sales will increase. You're going to be able to build momentum. You're going to be able to get better over time. And every prospect or person that comes into your business, you're going to know exactly what to do, right? You're going to do the same sales process for everyone who comes into your business. There's so many business owners and entrepreneurs I talk to and I'll say, okay, what does your sales process look like? How do you take someone from an early stage of awareness to a closed sale and then be like, well, it depends. We have like seven different processes. It depends where they come from and what they say and all these different things, right? And then I ask them, why do you have seven different processes? Why don't you have one clear predictable set of steps that they follow to becoming a paying client with you? And most of the times, they just don't have an answer. They're like, well, I don't know. I thought we had to do something different depending on the prospect, right? Well, if you have a predictable sales process in place that takes a prospect from cold to booked and a closed sale with you, you're going to be able to build some massive momentum and get better and better over time. That's going to help you to increase your sales, right? So real quick, I want to make it clear every, there's different business types and different types of sales processes, right? The one I'm going to be talking about here is what we use to sell high ticket digital services. So there's e-commerce stores out there, right? There's low ticket drop servicing agencies where they send people to a cartridge page or a Shopify page, and they just have a buy now button and someone clicks buy now and they check out and that's their sales process. This is not the same for us, okay? So if you're one of those people who just never want to talk to anyone and never want to get on the phone or talk to your potential clients, this is probably not going to be for you, right? This is for high ticket digital services where you're going to be building relationships with your clients and you're building a long term sustainable business selling digital services, okay? So before I jump into the sales process, I just want to make that clear. Let's get into it right now. Our predictable three-step sales process for converting leads into paying clients. I call it PQC. What does that stand for? Prospect, qualify and close. So I've done a few videos on this now on the prospecting phase and even the qualify phase here or qualify step, right? In the prospect phase, we're doing something called outbound prospecting. Now that outbound prospecting, you want to think of it like you're throwing a spear, right? You're going out to the market, don't actually think of like you're throwing spears at your audience but you're basically going out to your market and you're sending them messages to get them interested in what you have to offer or to find people who are interested in what you have to offer, right? So how do we do that? We use free social media platforms like LinkedIn, first of all, right? What are we doing on LinkedIn? We're searching for ideal prospects or ideal clients. We're connecting with them on LinkedIn and then we're sending them a message. Hey, so and so, we offer done for you LinkedIn lead generation services for companies in the B2B technology space. Are you interested in having conversation on how that could work for you? Then what we do is we try to book a 15-minute discovery call and I'll talk about what that is in a second, right? I have a video on that as well if you guys want to watch that. But LinkedIn is just one social media channel we can use, right? So we're again, we're searching for ideal prospects, our market, we're then sending them a connection request. Once they accept that, we send them a series of messages to get them interested in what we have to offer and getting on a phone call with us. Two other places that we use are Facebook and Instagram. So what we're going to do with Facebook is we're going to find niche specific Facebook groups. So I'm going to find software groups, groups about groups on Facebook around software as a service, right? I'm then going to join those groups. And I'm going to send a friend request to people in those groups who fit my ideal client profile. These are typically founders of SaaS company, software companies, right? Then I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to send them a direct message, see if they're interested in learning more about how we can help them get more customers using LinkedIn. And then if they are interested, we'll hop on a 15-minute discovery call to make sure it's a fit. The third place is Instagram. So what we're doing here is we are finding niche specific pages. I'm going to find software related pages or hashtags, right? Software life or like software founder hashtags, right? Then I'm going to find these pages. I'm going to follow these pages, maybe engage with them a little bit, like their photos, comment on their photos. And then I'm going to send them some direct messages, right? The same exact thing. Hey, we have this service on LinkedIn helps you get more customers for your SaaS or you're interested in having a conversation about how we can help you do that, right? 15-minute discovery call. The third place is cold emails. So what we're doing here is we're building a list of our ideal prospects. Again, SaaS founders, 11 to 15 employees, most of the time they're in the US, they're also in like Canada and in the UK as well. We're building a list of our prospects based on our ideal client profile. Then we're sending them a cold email, same type of message to see if they're interested in learning more about our service and how it can help them. 15-minute discovery call, right? So you can see all these outbound prospecting channels, it has the same goal, get this 15-minute discovery call, right? So we're just using all these channels because this is where our audience is hanging out, right? They're on their email. They are checking their email every day. They are on Facebook every day. Everyone has a Facebook account. Many people have Instagram accounts as well, right? So they're also on LinkedIn. They treat it like a resume, right? So that's kind of like their professional platform. So we go to these platforms and we're throwing spears to try and target our exact ideal prospects, right? So we're going out to the market and we're finding them and we're sending them messages. Now, this orange block here is inbound. So what are we doing here? Well, inbound is getting people to come to us, right? We're getting people to come in to us and into our business. How do we do that? Well, as we're building our network on LinkedIn and as we're building our network on Instagram and Facebook, we can start stimulating our audience, our market and stirring the pot by posting valuable content and insights and tips and tricks on our LinkedIn and our Facebook profiles, right? So we're posting and you guys can look at my profile or in my Facebook group. I post a lot of value in my Facebook group. That's an example of these Facebook inbound posts, right? On LinkedIn, I'm posting twice a week valuable tips, tricks, insights, third-party articles that might be useful to my audience, right? I'm giving them value so that they have interest in checking out my profile and having a conversation with me, right? Again, the goal here is to get them to schedule a call with us. Now, let's talk about step number two. I have an entire video on this, so I'm not going to go too in-depth, but step number two is to qualify. We want to make sure on the discovery call, the goal of it is to make sure that we're a fit to work together, right? There's going to be people who respond to your messages, who don't have money or who just aren't a fit for your service, who you can't help. So what we're doing in this discovery call phase is we are understanding the prospect's current situation and desired situation in relation to what we have to offer, right? So we might ask things, we offer lead generation as a service on LinkedIn. We might be asking them, hey, where are you currently at with your lead gen? How many leads or appointments are you currently getting a month? Oh, you're getting 10. Where would you like that to be? Oh, you want to get 20. Okay. Well, we can help you with that. We can help you bridge the gap between that 10 leads a month and that 20 leads a month. We can help you with our LinkedIn service, right? So you're trying to understand where are they currently at in relation to what you have to offer? Where do they want to go? What's the result or outcome that they want to have? And the third thing you want to understand is can you help them bridge the gap, right? So if they are asking for something that you can help them with, that you can help them bridge the gap on, then don't move forward with them, disqualify them, right? So we're trying to qualify them to make sure that we have the solution to their problem and what they're looking to get out of it, right? The fourth thing you understand in the discovery call is do they have the need and the budget to solve the problem right now, right? So if someone says, no, I don't really want to solve this right now. I can't wait like three years to do it. Then that's not someone you want to talk to. You don't want to spend any more time talking to that person, right? So you want to make sure that they're like, yes, I need to solve this right now. It's a big problem. I am willing to pay for this solution if you have a solution. If they, if this is the person that you're talking to and they want to solve, they want to solve their problem now and they have the budget to do that, then you're going to schedule a demo with them to show them how your service can help them, right? Exactly how it can help them get to their, from their current situation to the desired situation, right? The demo is when you show them, hey, this is step number one. This is what we do. This is step number two. This is what we do. These are the results of each of these steps and how it's going to help you go from here, your 10 leads a month to your 20 leads a month. This is how our service works to get you there, right? So that's as, that's simple as what the demo is. It's a 30 minute demo usually and we're just showing the prospect. Hey, you told me this is where you are. You told me this is where you want to go. This is how our service can help you get there, right? So this is our sales process. This is the same thing that we've been using for two years now. We're prospecting, we're getting people interested in what we have to offer. We're qualifying them on a 15 minute phone call and then we're showing them a demo, right? So there's so many different sales processes out there again, right? There's people on YouTube talking about drop servicing who have never done or sold any kind of services before. They're just driving people to a cartridge page and they check out there. That's, if that's you, then this, the way that we do it over here is probably not for you. We sell high ticket digital services for four to five figures per month and we have relationships with our clients. We talk to our clients. So if you're not interested in talking to clients and growing a long term sustainable business, then this sales process, you can just throw it out the window and don't even use this because you're going to have to talk to people. Okay? That's just how it works. So let's go into our sales process in a little more detail one more time. Step one, prospect. We're going to use Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and cold email to generate interested leads and appointments. People who want to jump on the phone with us. Step number two is we're going to qualify them. So we get on a 15 to 20 minute discovery call to qualify the lead, ensure they're fit, ensure that we can help them go from a current situation that they hate to a desired situation that they really want to be at in relation to what we have to offer. And then also to figure out if they want to solve that problem and have the budget to solve it right now. Step number three is to close, getting on a sales call to walk the lead through a demo and invite them to become a client at the end. Right? Show them, Hey, this is how we can help you. Are you interested in moving forward and solving this problem now? That's what we ask on the demo. Now this is the best sales process to use in the beginning. Only once you have five or more clients, you can start to automate parts of the sales process. But as the founder, you always want to start here and you want to be doing this yourself first. Right? You don't want to be the person who's like, I can't close one deal on my own for my very own company. I'm going to try and outsource it. You can't outsource anything around the sales process and generating leads. If you can't close yourself, right? If you can't get your first few clients yourself, then how do you expect the sales person to come on board and close clients for you? You got to lead by example, get your own clients first, put in the work, do this PQC sales process, get your first few clients. And once you do that, then you can start to automate parts of the process using like paid ads and video sales letters and all that stuff. But until then do this yourself first. Every day, you should be prospecting. You should be using these platforms, right? To get people interested in these discovery calls. If you don't have enough discovery calls, that means you're not doing enough prospecting. You need to work on your prospecting, right? So this should be your main focus, generating these first appointments here, right? Once you have enough of these appointments coming in, then your goal is to get some clients, right? You're going to talk to them, qualify them, see if they're a fit. If they are, you're going to close them on your demo, okay? So that is it for this sales process. Our three step sales process, PQC, prospect, qualify and close. You're prospecting using free social media platforms and emails.  That's our very simple sales process and I highly recommend you start and stick with this for a year plus because it works. It's very simple and it allows you to move quickly and execute, okay? So I hope this is helpful for you guys, this free training. If you like this, make sure that you like this video and comment below. And if you're watching this in the Facebook group, make sure you comment with any questions you have as well, okay? So I hope this is helpful for you guys and I'll see you in the next video.


Welcome to the Drum History podcast. I am joined today by Mike Johnston, owner of Mikelessons.com and co-host of the Modern Drummer podcast. Mike, how are you man? I'm good buddy. Thank you for having me. It's an honor. Oh, this is awesome. It's a little different to have another A, another podcaster on here and B, someone who's talking about something that is basically happening in the starting in the 2000s. Yeah, it's definitely something that happened quick as technology usually does. And as far as the podcast thing, let's see if we can make it through this and be professional and not have to cut this up too much. Exactly. And let me back up and say what we're talking about today is the kind of the advent of online drum lessons, which I think is extremely cool because it's something that's relatively new to me. But I know that it's for the generation that's kind of in it right now, it's how they're learning and it's how they're becoming drummers, the great drummers that they are with the YouTube generation and Instagram and all that stuff. So I'm excited to hear about it. Well, then let's dive in. Cool man. Well, why don't we start with, you are obviously kind of an expert and an authority in this world. But I think I'd find it interesting to hear a little bit about your background, teaching, playing, and then we can get into the actual nitty gritty of the first time someone was streaming a drum lesson. Yeah, absolutely. Well, for me, I never took myself that seriously as a drummer and going through junior high or elementary school, junior high, high school, it was, it was not my identifier. It wasn't like what I considered myself. I wasn't the kid that had drumsticks in his back pocket. So everyone knew that he played drums or anything like that. I was always second or third or fourth chair in school band, even through high school. So it wasn't that big of a deal to me Intel right around senior year of high school. And honestly, that's when my eyes were open to the world of modern rock. Like I think it was getting the single soundtrack that changed my life. I was, I was like, what is this music? Like who are these pumpkins and why are they smashing everything? And what's this pearl jam about? Yeah. And it just changed everything. I was like, okay, now drums are cool to me. Because to me, drums were school band, marching band, jazz band, and it was, I liked playing the drums, but it definitely wasn't something that really was my passion. And then once I discovered that rock side of things, that's when I just completely obsessed over it. And so that led to my first music store job. I got a job at a place called drumming guitar city in Sacramento, when I was about 17 years old, I just graduated from high school. So I was almost 18. And that was just eyeopening in itself to see the world of the drum industry on a retail side. Plus we offered private drum lessons there. And it was a really cool store that had private drum lessons. It's hard to explain, but all the drum lesson rooms had glass doors and they were inside the store. So you could always see the drum lessons going on. Oh, that's cool. And I just remember being, that was the first time I was truly jealous of a drum job. I was never overly jealous of touring drummers or anything else that I saw. But when I saw that, I was like, I want to be that guy.  And yeah, luckily, one of the teachers had to leave for reasons of pulling a gun out during a lesson and putting it on the floor, Tom. Oh my God. Was that like out of anger? He was a, he was an older gentleman and he was just frustrated. And he was teaching a young kid, a young girl actually. And oh my God, he said, he told me before the cops showed up, he told me, he's like, all I said, I pulled out my piece, I put it on the floor, Tom. And I said, what do I have to do to make you practice? And I just remember, I was like 17. I was like, you're so getting fired. And then dude, wow. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. So he got fired. And then that, the next day, the owner said, all right, you're our new drum teacher. Wow. Just one rule though. And so I inherited 60. Just don't bring a, don't bring a gun. Yeah, exactly. I was like, okay, I will, I can adhere to your rules. He literally, the owner literally gave me $20 in cash and just said, he was like, Mike, you gotta, you gotta get like an outfit or something.    And so yeah, I went down to the Salvation Army and got an adult outfit with my $20. And then, yeah, so I inherited 65 students in a day. So never taught drums a day in my life, had 65 students. And because he was an older gentleman, the previous teacher, I inherited a lot of adult students. And by the end of the first week, I had lost over half of the students. They all just said, yeah, I'm not coming back. And so I can tell you right now, I'm not a natural teacher. It's not something I was natural at whatsoever. And then I just, I, well, one, I thought, I still have 35 students. This is awesome. And then, and then I just worked really hard to become a teacher. So that's kind of where the teaching bugs started. And I fell in love with it. I started to obsess over explanations over the, I saw the delivery of information as an art form in itself that could be practiced the same way I was practicing drums. So I started practicing my teaching as much as I could. So that's kind of where that all started. And then it just got stopped all of a sudden by my band getting a record deal when I was like 20, almost 21 years old. Wow. That's a good problem to have. Yeah. You know, it's weird. It wasn't one of my dreams. So I really didn't know how to handle it. I was having so much fun teaching drums. And then my band, it was my buddies and, and it was fun, but it, I wasn't the guy that was like someday we're going to get a deal and then we're going to tour and then we're going to make videos. I mean, this was still in the heyday of MTV. So, um, and I'm from a small town Sacramento, California at the time, the only bands that had gotten a deal from our town in my generation were the Deftones and Cake. So that was so out of reach for us. We were like, I'm not going to get a record deal. And then we did. And then I had to make the decision like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to, by that time I had built myself back up to 70 students per week. And I was going to have to leave all 70 of them, 70 conversations of, Hey, I'm sorry, I'm not your son's big brother anymore. I have to leave town for the next six years. Oh my God. Yeah.   You're kind of a psychiatrist sometimes.  And it's really hard. The drums are almost, the drums are almost the smallest part of a private drum lesson when you're dealing with anyone between five years old to 25 years old. I mean, even sometimes with the adults, but definitely with the kids that are going through everything. Because what I noticed in my years of private teaching is you are the only one that's close to them, but doesn't know anyone in their social circle. So they can tell you anything, and you can't possibly spill the beans because you don't know anyone that they know. Yeah. You don't care that they're open up to you. Yeah. You don't care that they're being bullied at school or they're popular. It's just, did you practice? How are you doing? How's the drums? Yeah, talk to me, open up. And they see the foam on the walls and assume, okay, this is a soundproof room. I can tell you the truth. Here's what's going on. And so it's like, all right, let's get into it. So yeah, so I, when I got, my band got signed, it was actually quite a difficult decision. And my father and my mom both helped me out a lot with it and just said, okay, what just happened to you with this record deal? That is luck and timing. Yes. You didn't, that's not strictly hard work. You can't ever count on that happening again. You can get yourself back to 70 students at some point through work, but this is luck and timing. Take advantage of it right now. Good advice. Yeah. So you did it. You went on the road, obviously, right? I did. Cool. Yeah. So right when I turned 21 was when we started our first tour and then I spent the next six years touring and making albums. And we were on Hollywood Records, which is owned by Disney. So financially, we had a great record deal and we had tons of support and we were, so they could have us out with amazing bands of that time. Deftones, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Filter, Stain, all the festivals. So I got a chance to play with Foo Fighters and Blink. And even though it was always in an opening and supporting role, I was still very lucky that I got the chance to experience that and see all of it so that I knew in my heart that one day I'd bring those experiences back to my students. Some day I'd have a student that was just signing his first record deal or her first record deal and I could tell them what they're about to experience. Here's what it's like. Here's why you don't need a manager yet. Here's why you do need a manager. Stuff's getting real. And so, yeah, for me, it was kind of like a six-year period of time that I was just collecting information that would be passed on in future lessons. Yeah. It also legitimizes you a little bit to, and not that it matters, but that you can kind of raise your price just a little bit or maybe you're a little more sought after because you have that background.  Absolutely. And I will say where it did come in handy is when I finally made the decision to leave the touring world behind so that I could teach full time again, I moved to a brand new city that I'd never been to. And without having my touring passed, am I recording passed? I don't think I would have gotten a job as fast as I did at a music store. But I was able to say I'm the drummer from this band. We were assigned to this label. I've opened for these artists. I have these endorsements. And instantly they said, oh, yeah, do you want to teach three days a week, four days a week?  Yeah, absolutely. So you said you did it for six years and then I believe in 2005 you stopped and went back to teaching, right? So then that's around that time. Let's pick it up there and obviously move forward because I think that's when you started to get the idea of doing this online, right? Yeah, so the world had changed quite a bit. It's funny to say, but in 2002, 2003, in that time, we were begging our record label that had all of Disney's money to make us a website. And they were like, there's no need for a website for just a band. Wow. So the world was way different. And by 2005, YouTube had launched. Google acquired them in 2006. So that's when it kind of became a little more mainstream. Even though iTunes came out in 2003, it took until about 2006, 2007 until people really knew what it was. And so at that point, I had come home. I'd started teaching again at another store called Skips Music. And what I did was anytime I would take weekend gigs or weekend tours that took me out of town, I would film on like a JVC camcorder. I would film the lesson for the student. And there was this new thing called YouTube. And I could upload my video to YouTube. And for me at that time, YouTube was not what we see YouTube as. YouTube to me was Dropbox. They were willing to hold my video for free. And Bandwidth was so expensive at that time that that was a goldmine to me. It was like, you're going to park a 15 minute while at the time they actually had time limits on your videos, but they'll park a 10 minute video for me for free. This is amazing. Yeah, really. Well, tech wise at that time, I'm filming on tape, then firewire out of the camera to my computer, open software and then press play on the camcorder. You have to play the whole video as it's transferring to your computer. And then you have to use, you know, render that with a codec to get that up to YouTube. And they could only handle a couple codecs at the time. I think they accepted quick time. Yep. That's funny. You know, or MO dot MOV and maybe one or two others. MPEG, you know, motion JPEGs. And that was about it. So it was it was a very daunting process. But that's where I started doing that. And then while that was happening, and that was building that those, those lessons that I only put up for my private students, I guess I just didn't realize at the time how public they were, and they started gaining a ton of views. And I think with seeing that and then seeing iTunes come along and break up albums into songs, that's where I started to get the idea. What if instead of putting out a 45 minute DVD or a two hour DVD like everyone was doing at the time, what if I put out songs as drum lessons instead of an album? Why don't I just put out the Samba, the jazz Samba, like here's a five minute lesson. And so where things really took a big change for me and turned for me and definitely for our industry is at that time in 2006 and 2007, almost all of the content on YouTube was pre-recorded content made for a different purpose that was then uploaded to YouTube. We made this drum DVD or this is the performance of the Modern Drummer Festival. Let's put it on YouTube. Yeah, really? Well, I was one of the first ones at the time to actually speak to the consumers of this platform by saying, what's up, YouTubers? This is Mike Johnston. And that immediately changed things because then people were like, Oh my gosh, he didn't make this for a DVD. He's making this specifically for me to be watched on this platform. That's unbelievable. And honestly, it makes me, you saying that makes me think of downloading around that time downloading like Tony Royster Jr.'s solo when he's 12 on the red kit at the Modern Drummer Festival on Morpheus or Kazaa or Napster or whatever. Yes. I remember all of that. Exactly.  And you just, you watch that over and over it again.  But you know it in and out. I could probably, I could sing back Tony's solo to you, you know, like when he goes into his DC go-go beat using the splash cymbals and then it's the double bass thing while he's doing the up and down on the splashes. And I mean, I remember when we had access to that stuff, the only way we could see it was through a DVD or through even a videotape at that time. And so when YouTube came along and gave us access to people's hidden private videos of their drum sheds, you know, like, oh my gosh, I think that's Vinnie at the Baked Potato. This is insane. I'm, I used to have to travel to Los Angeles to watch Vinnie at the Baked Potato, but now I'm at home watching it. So I know all of this stuff is so taken for granted now at this point, but 10, 15 years ago it was, it was honestly quite groundbreaking. Yeah, absolutely. And you could rewind and then play it and rewind and play it and practice and all that stuff. That's, that's crazy. So, so that's like 2005, 2006. How many, how many views were you getting at that point? Like what, what kind of numbers were you looking at? Yeah, I, you know, because of where we were in the history of YouTube, there were no numbers to compare yourself to. So I remember when my first video, I think in my first upload was in 2006 and it was called how to play double bass with one foot. And it was literally just saying, okay, well, when I was a kid, my parents couldn't afford a double pedal. So I used my floor tom as my first bass drum and my bass drum as my left foot really. Cool. Yeah. And I just, I just worked on all my rudiments between hand and foot. So when that video hit, I mean, gosh, even when it hit 5,000 views, I was like, why would 5,000 people want to know about this? And then it hit 20,000. And then that same year when that video hit 100,000 views, that's when I finally said, okay, if I had 99 cents from each one of these views, the way that iTunes gets 99 cents per song at the time, that would be a very good business. And that's when Mike's lessons.com, Mike's lessons.com started. Wow. So you're right place, right time.  So it's kind of like a, like a perfect storm of, of, of drumming. You know, I think the thing that it taught me the most because I had no background in business whatsoever. The thing that it taught me the most is one of the easiest ways to be successful in business is to be the client of the business because I wasn't making content for YouTube because I thought it was going to be successful. I was making YouTube content because I wanted Vinny and Dave to be making it and they weren't making it. So it was like, okay, well, what, and I would literally, I'd sit down at the kit and I'd say, what do I wish Vinny, Dave, Dennis Chambers would do? Like for me on YouTube, and I would just try to do that for other people. And so it was actually really easy because I wasn't trying to guess what other people wanted. I was just guessing what I would want as a drum consumer because I was that guy. I was the one in 2006 going all over YouTube, typing in bludgeon. Where's the bludgeon? Like, what is this thing that I keep hearing about? And, you know, YouTube at the time was, it was like opening Christmas presents every morning. Because every morning in the beginning of YouTube, someone else finally donated some archival footage of something. I finally got to see Tony Williams play drums when he was 17 with Miles. Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, so that's Jack Dijonet. I've heard the name, I've seen him in a magazine, but I've never seen him play drums. And that was what YouTube did for all of us was it gave us access to our heroes on a level that we'd never had before. Yeah, it brings the history and honestly on a daily basis on Instagram, I find old YouTube videos, I download them, I post them, and it continues to this day. So it's a way for people to access their heroes, which is just amazing. It's really cool for sure. All right. And then in this time, let's get to how you actually made this into a business though. Because as we all know, you can post stuff, but that doesn't mean you're making money on it. And that doesn't mean people are going to automatically find it.  Yeah. I was simultaneously building one business while accidentally self-destructing another. So at this time, I had opened my own school called the Drum Lab. And once again, I'm starting businesses, but I know nothing about business. I'm just doing whatever I think is normal. People are asking me questions with acronyms like, what's your ROI? I'm like, I have no idea what that means. I know how you feel. So it was all new to me. And what I didn't understand, while I was building my name on a social media level, I was building my name to a point that the parents and drummers of Sacramento wouldn't take lessons with any of my other teachers because I was the one they were seeing on YouTube. So I would say, well, I'm sorry, I'm all full up, but I have six other teachers that are far superior to me and many other disciplines of drumming. Let's set your son or daughter up with one of them and they'd say, no, we'll just wait for you. And I was like, uh-oh, now my business can't grow because my schedule is full and I'm teaching my local community that I'm the one they want to take lessons from, which is not the case. If you have a nine-year-old beginning drummer, it doesn't need me. So anyway, so what I eventually did was I sold the Drum Lab to one of the teachers. That teacher has done very well with it. There's three locations and he was smart enough to stay out of the way with his name. He marketed the business rather than himself. So then when I sold that, that's when I officially launched Mike'sLessons.com and once again, starting from scratch, you're like, how do you make a website? What's a URL? What's a domain name? I don't know what any of this stuff is. So I had to learn all of that. So 2009 was when Mike'sLessons.com officially launched and then my thought was once I got to 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, I thought, okay, if 10% of those will follow me to a paid website, then that is a great living and everything will be good. Now there was no subscription model at the time, so I was still just doing everything all a cart, 99 cents per lesson. But if I had 10,000 drummers, maybe getting a 99 cent lesson every week, then that's fine. And so that was my goal at least. Definitely did not happen like that in the beginning. Yeah, I'm sure it was a slow start. Oh, and if you think about 2009, and you're asking people to enter in their credit card information on a website. Yeah, no. And you're asking teenagers to get their credit card from their parents. So it was much more of a struggle than I anticipated in the beginning. But the good thing was that iTunes had set a precedent for it. So I was able to tell these drummers, it's iTunes for drummers, then they could pass that on to their parents. And it all kind of made sense. But I remember thinking I don't need people to get more into online drum lessons. What I need is for the parents to start anything online, so that when the kid comes to them and says, I want to take online drum lessons, it's just like your online sewing lessons, just like your online sushi making lessons. Then there was something to the parallel for them, which we didn't have at the time. So yeah, so started Mike's lessons.com. And at that time, it was just all a cart shopping for individual lessons. And then the next, let's clarify because like, all right, so these are by lesson, they are pre recorded kind of like a like categorized lessons that you've already uploaded. There's basically a step by step starting at lesson one, here's how to hold your sticks, whatever. And then they download them as opposed to which I originally was like, is it this? Is it you're actually having a Skype lesson, which I realized Skype probably didn't exist. But people are accessing a database on your website where they are basically subscribing to get access to a variety of different lessons. Right. Instead of a one on one kind of thing. Cool. And at that time, there were no in in bed codes didn't even exist. So at that time, you actually gave them the lesson, like you put it in an FTP folder. When they press the purchase button, they actually downloaded the actual video to their desktop. And then they owned it. And so there's still thousands of videos on YouTube that are my old videos that someone else has uploaded because I they paid for it. And I gave it to them. There was no other way to deliver videos. Streaming wasn't really a thing. I mean, YouTube was the only one that was streaming videos. And it wasn't even live streaming. They were just allowing you to watch it. But there was no way to to watch the video unless I did YouTube. And I didn't want I felt that it cheapened it if you went to my website.  It was obviously their player. Yeah. And I said, No, I want this to I want when you get to Mike's lessons.com, I want the drummer to know I made every ounce of this for you. I was thinking about you through every step, every color, every button is for you. And so yeah, so that's that was how it started in the beginning. And then the thing that kind of took it over the top was the the live streaming lessons. And that happened in 2010. So it was it was kind of like the YouTube community was building I was not at that time, the only drum teacher in the game anymore online drum teacher. And so the only way I could push past the competition was to start live streaming. So people had live access to me, which is silly to make it sound like it's a big deal now, because we can all do it on Instagram with our phone. But at that time, it was almost impossible to do. I mean, so back up for a second, were you the first guy? I know this is it's always hard to say the first of anything. But would you safely say that at this point, you were probably one of the first guys, if not the first guy to actually pioneer this idea of online drum lessons for purchase one at a time 99 cents at a time. Yeah, so turning it I would say the things that I'm fairly confident about now obviously I couldn't watch every video that was ever uploaded. But in the YouTube world, I think I was at least in the first handful of drummers that made content for YouTube, where everyone else was taking pre recorded content from a DVD and uploading it to YouTube, I was saying, Hello, YouTubers, I'm Mike and I made this for you and no one else and you will never see it anywhere else other than here. And then taking that to a paid website there, I know that I must have been at least in the first few because there was nothing that I could look to to even set my own prices. So I had to set my prices based off of iTunes, that's where we got 99 cents from. And then I set my once we started the live streaming, we created a subscription model, and we set that price based off of a conversation that I had with a South African drum magazine that was interviewing me. And when we finally concluded the interview, I told him what my plans were. And, and I said, you know, I, I don't want people to learn how to play drums for me on YouTube. My YouTube lessons are tips and tricks, but that's not how to play drums. Yeah, really, if you want to learn how to actually play this instrument, I'm going to charge you for it because by charging you for it, it creates an agreement between the two of us, you're paying for it. So you're going to practice harder, you're going to value the information more, and I'm charging for it. So I'm sure it's going to do my research and make sure that everything I say is correct.  But if I did that on my website, where I'm charging you for information, I would, it would destroy me like on a personal level. So I take it much more serious. So I was talking to him about that and I said, what's a good price? I'm thinking maybe $100 a month. And that was based off the fact of how much it cost me to stream live streaming live back in 2010 was insanely expensive. And he just said, there's not a single drummer here in South Africa that can afford $100 a month for drum lessons. And I said, okay, give me a number like what would be the norm? And he was like maybe $20 a month. So because of that conversation, for the next six years, our price stayed at $19.99. And it was, it had nothing to do with the market or anything. It was just based off of a conversation with a guy in South Africa. That's funny. I mean, if I think of it as when I used to teach, it was $50 for an hour, 25 for a half hour. So that'd be $200 for four lessons for the month. But it puts into perspective of there's a, I don't want to say it's, you expect it to be a little bit cheaper if you're watching a video that everyone can download versus a one-on-one sitting in the room. So that's just kind of an interesting, you know, element to it. I totally agree. And the way that we did it in the beginning was we tried to hit 6 p.m. for every major market that we had people signing up from because when you would sign up for our lessons, we'd get like a PayPal report, okay, that he's in the UK and she's in Latvia and he's in Canada. And we'd say, okay, here's our major markets. So I would get up and I would do a live stream for an hour at 10 a.m. I do another one at noon. I do another one at three. And I do another one at six. And I did that three times per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.  But my thought was, okay, it is right now. But if we can get a thousand drummers to pay $20 a month, that's $20,000 a month. That's great. And I'm sitting at home streaming. This is great. And that was kind of the idea. Then it exploded past that. And then I would say around in that same time, that's when you started having other people show up on YouTube doing the same thing. But what was great is for the most part, it wasn't copycats. You were seeing like, oh, wow, okay, well, that's I taught a paradiddle inversion lesson as well. But I sure didn't teach it like that. That guy or that girl's got a really cool perspective. Or, you know, because it was like the Wild Wild West at that time, we were all just trying to figure things out. None of us are cinematographers. So we would see someone else's video and go, Oh man, that's where I should put my camera. Or you'd even hit somebody up and say, what lens are you using? How does your kit look like that? So it was a really cool time. Yeah, it's people, I think in general, drummers, I mean, we're not, we don't tend to hate on each other. I mean, case in point, us talking right now, both being drum podcasters, like I love this podcast. And I'm just stoked that you even, you know, would want to be on this. I think it's people just helping each other out. And to back up and clarify, so people would pay, they would get the access to the online catalog of lessons. And then they would also get two times a week a live stream. So for 20 bucks a month, that's an, I would consider that a really good deal. At the time it was for sure. And right around that same time, we were starting to get educational subscription model websites like Linda.com. There weren't a lot though. I mean, really, it was, it was still very new. I think around that same time. Then Jared from Drumeo launched free drum lessons.com, which was kind of free, but kind of not. I'm pretty sure at, at some point into the depth of that site, you could then buy content. And I remember that being the first thing that came up where I was like, Oh, I'm not alone anymore. Yeah. And yeah, there's nothing better than seeing someone else do what you thought you had locked up. And then you go, I better step up my game. Yeah. Because if he's going to do it, then someone else is going to do it. And so, but because just like you said, we're drummers, it was healthy competition. It wasn't like, who's this punk? It was instead it was like, Oh, it's on me to make sure that I keep growing because I'm not going to be alone forever in this. Yeah, you guys are different.  I think a lot of people think of Drumeo and Mike's lessons as the two big online, I don't want to say mega, but the really big distributors of lessons and all this stuff. And obviously the differentiating factor is Mike's lessons is you, whereas Drumeo or free, it's obviously, I don't know when it stopped being free. Now it's Drumeo. Yeah. It's obviously Drumeo now, but that's a multitude of different drummers, which I feel like I get a little bit of a one-on-one kind of perspective from you versus they're just different. There's, there's not, they are really different. And I'm happy that they are different because well one, I'm happy that there's lots of people doing it because I can't expect every drummer in the world to one understand my style of education. I can't expect every drummer in the world to get along with me, even just my online personality. So we need to have options. But where Drumeo is at now, I think is a beautiful place, which and they're the best in the world at doing it, which is they bring the greatest drummers in the world to you. And instead of counting on those drummers to learn how to work their cameras and work all their microphones and create a live stream, Drumeo will do it for those drummers. And so they're bringing you this amazing content from these amazing players. But at some point, that player then leaves and is no longer a part of that ecosystem. You know, they do their two hours or whatever. And then the next one comes in. My thing is almost the opposite. It's the personalized version of online education where, no, I'm here for you, man. And I don't think either or better or worse, I think both need to exist. There needs to be a platform for the world to find out who is Gergo Borlai, who is Anna Canillas. I keep hearing this name, Benny Greb. It's like, well, I'm not going to do that. And Drumeo is going to do it better than anyone in the world at this point in time. And I'm totally happy that they're in the scene doing it. And then what I decided to do is I realized early on, I'm just not an artist. I wish I was, I wish I went and saw Dave Weckel last night. I wish I was Dave Weckel. But I'm not. I'm my passion is for explaining things, not for playing things. So what I realized was like, okay, I'm going to do general education. I'm going to teach the world. This is the basics of drumming all the way up to the advanced level of drumming. If you want to know how to do it the way this person does it or that person, luckily technology now has us at a place where most of those people have online content. So I want to be the person to teach you the paradiddle. I want JP Bouvet to show you how he uses the paradiddle. But I don't want you going to JP or Will Kennedy or Dave Weckel and asking them what the paradiddle is. I'll handle that. And then, or maybe you're at Drumeo watching on a canillus and she mentions quintuplets and because of my lessons, that's not a foreign word to you. You know what quintuplets are. Absolutely. That's a really cool way to look at it because you're teaching the fundamentals up to the expert stuff, but you're teaching it with a black and white. Here's what it is versus a here's all the color of what we all do individually after you've played for a long time, which is really cool. Right. And that's where I remember YouTube getting is I was thinking, I can't wait till we're at a place where there's 600 lessons on using the six-stroke roll and each one is someone else's take on that thing. I'll be the one to tell you what the six-stroke roll is. I'll show you a couple of variations and I might even show you what I personally do with it, but you would notice the humility in the clip where I would almost downgrade that part. Like, here's what I do with it, but don't worry about that. Here's what Tony Williams does with it. You know, and it's a, for me, the only time I ever reference what someone else does with something is when they're deceased. I feel okay teaching things from people that aren't here anymore, but if that person's alive, all I'm going to do is refer you to them. Hear them do it. Yeah. Exactly. Well, they're here. Like I don't, I could, because that drove me nuts in the YouTube world where people would use someone else's information and someone else's name in the title to get views. And my thought is like, wait, I don't, he's still alive. She's still alive. Why don't you go ask them? So yeah. And if I have a big social media platform, there might be a drummer that's one generation ahead of me. A good example would be Todd Suckerman. I could, you know, 10 years ago when Todd came on the scene or maybe six, seven years ago, when he came on the, the online scene with his first DVD methods and mechanics, nobody in my age group knew who he was because sticks is a generation before us. So I was able to use my platform and send 100,000 followers to go check him out, go buy his DVD because it's amazing. And I, I think we all owe it to each other to keep spreading that out.  Another drummer told me to go check them out. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.  And now that's different than, honestly, you watch that and you're like, this isn't really actually much of a lesson. It is to a degree, but it's not a, he's teaching it to you like step by step. It's more like rewind, watch what he did, played it, then rewind, do it again versus it's, it's just different. It's different flavors. Well, at that time, so you've got DCI making a lot of those videos, then eventually Hudson and a few other companies. And at that time, education was let's grab a somewhat famous drummer or a famous drummer and record them for a few hours. And maybe they'll give us a gem or two. And that was the DVD. And then every once in a while, you'd get somebody brilliant, like a Rod Morgenstein that would break it all down or, or even a Dennis Chambers would just let it slip. Like, well, these are called sweeps. I'm like sweeps. That's what they're called. Okay. So yeah, so for me as somebody that had fallen in love deeply with education, I knew that I was never going to be at the time at least recognized enough to have Hudson or DCI call me to make a DVD. But YouTube and technology in general had given us the opportunity to make our own DVDs. And, and on YouTube, because the quality was so bad, putting up a even a decent video looked pretty darn good. No one was like, Oh, this isn't as good as the Dennis Chambers DVD. They were comparing it to the cat fart video that played right before mine. So they're like, dude, this is way clearer than that. And so that stuff, it was something like I said, we were all navigating that together. And the guitar world was starting to get in on it as well. And just, and I think what was happening too, as people were realizing, you can have all the recognition in the world and all the fame in the world. But the only thing that's going to carry value and get people to leave this platform of YouTube and go to a paid website to create what we now call online drum lessons was education. No one was going to do it for drum covers. No one was going to do it for performances. Because everyone tried. They'd say, Okay, here's the first three minutes of our concert.  And everyone would say, No, yeah, I'll let someone else get it on your website. They'll steal it. And then they'll upload it to YouTube. So I'll wait for that. Exactly. But education was the one thing that people were willing to pay for. And still are. Yeah. That's, I mean, if you're at a certain level of wanting to learn, you typically, you see the value. I honestly think that that's starting to evolve more with the multitude of different, like for audio engineering, there's ones for drums for everything. It's a ton of stuff like that. But now, before we move on from drumming, I want to ask you the hard hitting question of, if you were asked to go on drumming and do some lessons, would you do it? I've been asked. Really? Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So one, no, I don't think I would, but mainly because I don't know how to say this without being rude, but I kind of don't need to. No, sure. As far as I have my own platform and I'm very comfortable in it and I really like it. And I think that I don't know that there's a need for me on a platform like Drumeo, unless I was to work for them full-time as a teacher, but I think Drumeo's platform is much better for the artist that you just never have access to. You have so much access to me through YouTube and from mikeslussins.com. Drumeo is that time where you go like, oh my gosh, they got Eric Harland. I've never even heard his voice. Is he British? Or they got whoever, I remember thinking that, there was somebody that I could have sworn was German and then I saw them on Drumeo and I was like, that guy's British. Wow, okay. Never heard him speak before. That's what Drumeo's for, for giving you access to the people you don't have access to and for the people that aren't willing or probably don't have the time to make their own content.  When was he supposed to make your little Instagram clip for you? So that, I think that that's probably why I wouldn't do the Drumeo thing, but when I do, I will say this, I have a lot of friends in the drum world and for a while it used to be weird where they would just be like, hey man, are you cool if I go on Drumeo? I'm like, dude, I'm very cool. We're friends, I love you. Everything's good. But now it's, it's almost switched to the point of like, you should totally do that. Yeah, that's a, it's a great move, especially if it's somebody that isn't known. I would say, even if, because we used to have guests on Mike's, Mike's lessons.com a long time ago, but it was kind of the opposite of the way that Drumeo does it. We would bring in these special artists similar to the way they do it, but instead of it being public, it was only for our paid subscribers. It was a reward to the people that were paying for their content. And we would say, okay, we're giving you access to this guy named Yoast Nickel, or we had Benny Greb here. Cool. It was like Tobias Ralf, Johnny Rabb, we would bring in those guys and then say, no one else in the world gets to see this, but you, this is a reward for you. You're going to have unlimited access. He's going to take question and answer until we're all done. And we did that for a while. And then I would say that that was when I had to make the decision, am I a host or am I an educator? And I didn't, I didn't like being that guy that was like interviewing the drummer and it's like, no, no, no, I want to be the educator. Yes. It's just a different beast completely. It totally is. And that comes down to passion. And I think that if you follow your passion, whatever it is, you're going to be fine rather than chasing, you know, chasing money, chasing recognition, my passion is teaching. When we would bring in some of the best drum teachers in the world to be our guests, I would, I had to sit on my hands while they were teaching. So I was like, no, no, no, no, don't explain it like that. Explain it. You know, and then I was like, this is not, I can't do this. I'm not meant for this. I'm an only child. Just let me, let me out there. All right. Well, that's a, that's a very good answer. So moving forward, it kind of seems like we go through where, where online lessons get bigger and they get more popular where now when I hear the term online lesson, I almost think more of, I see on Instagram and I see stuff, hey, I'm going to be doing Skype lessons this Saturday, like Rich Redmond does it, all these people do it. And I've never done that. I've never experienced it. I've never even seen what it's like, but it seems almost commonplace now. Yeah. I think, I think that the Skype lesson works great, especially for the Q and A stuff, not always the drumming stuff because the setup it takes to make a good Skype lesson is really difficult. I mean, I couldn't do what I do.  I mean, we have four cinema level cameras all streaming at the same time. We have a camera operator that's in here, switching the camera angles. And we're going through, I mean, you have full blown flawless zero delay audio, mics and everything. And, but at the same time, it is only one way. The great thing about Skype is it's two way. I can see you where in my situation, it's kind of like a TV broadcast. I'm broadcasting it to you, but I can't see you. And then we field questions. But I do think the Skype thing gives you that access to your favorite drummers where in all honesty, if I could take a lesson right now with Dave Weckel, Vinnie Caliud, Dennis Chambers, whatever, you know, icon I could think of, I really don't know that I would need to have my sticks in my hand. Most of what I want to know, I need to talk to them. I need to speak to them. So I think the Skype lessons work great for that. I'm with you. I've never done one personally, but I use Skype a lot for other things. And I do a lot of business lessons through Skype. And I think the talking is great. The delay on the drumming can be a little bit tough. Whether you have a mic set up going into your iPad or your phone can be a little bit tough. But that's pretty normal. I also think that we hit a little renaissance recently, probably about two years ago in online drum lessons where for a while, the drum lessons on YouTube, I'm talking maybe 2012, 2013, they were getting shorter and shorter and shorter. Like, can I teach you a lick in under three minutes? And then under two minutes. And then eventually what happened was Instagram expanded from 15 seconds to 30 seconds to eventually where they are now, which is a minute. And people started making content for that minute timeline, even in especially educators. Well, what happened is when that was going on, YouTube, which had been kind of suffering, then found their own identity as long as the long form content holder of long form education. And so all of a sudden YouTube videos went from three to four minutes up to 10 minutes to 11 minutes to 12 minutes. And what happened is platform wise, you've got people watching YouTube in a chair, they're either on a desktop, a laptop, maybe on a smart TV on their couch, and they're settling in for the long haul. People on Instagram are walking with their phones and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So everything kind of found its own place in the last two to three years. And now it's very different. The YouTube creators are, you almost have to be a cinematographer to make content for you. Seriously, yeah. Yeah. And greens are huge, too. I mean, it's just amazing that people using like chroma key and all that stuff just to get something.  Yeah. And that's great. You can't, I would say for anyone that's getting ready to start their YouTube channel or wants to start creating online drum lessons, you don't have to worry about having the best camera in the world. I mean, God, I've got friends that are using GoPros and it looks fantastic. So what I would say is your quality video and audio can never be at a level that it detracts or distracts from the education.  But other than that, sometimes, you know, I found really early on that art and education did not go well together, meaning that if I, no one wants to see my drum lessons in black and white, anyone wants to see it with an Instagram filter on the top of it. So no, you're whatever you're filming, you know, and that stuff works great if I'm playing a solo. But if I'm teaching, it needs to be my job as an educator as far as cameras and microphones is to make you feel that you are in the room with me. That's why I've for the last two and a half years, I've never had more than two mics on my kit. I have an overhead mic and a bass drum mic, which is like insane for somebody that has an audio technica endorsement and has, you know, mixing boards and Neve Prize. But what I noticed is with that sound, there was nothing happening between me speaking and then me playing. It was like you were in the room with me. When I did a close mic setup, I would speak.  And now we're in a studio. And it was like, that's fine for performance. But when I'm teaching you, I need you to feel like you're in that room with me. And so I think as long as you can do that, that's great. And that can be done even with one camera and one mic. So that's, and then when it comes to the platform of Instagram for the online lessons on Instagram, we are totally accepting of bad quality. As far as you don't even have to have mics, you could just use your phone and that would be more than enough because that platform is accepting of it. And the way you can think about the platform is what was your video sandwiched in between?  So my content can be fine there. Yeah. On YouTube, I might be sandwiched between Peter McKinnon making like a full blown cinematographers video and then Alexis commercial. So I kind of have to step up my game. Yeah. Well, and you have, but I think it's translating across both, which so you're kind of in the, in a happy medium. And I never really thought about the, the use of less of the multitrack kind of situation with more mics and just kind of keeping it, keeping it level now. And, and honestly, what this makes me think too is is drum teachers, drum lessons in stores aren't dead. They're not gone because of all of this has happened. But no, I'm sure that at first there was a little bit of a little bit of anger towards you from some teacher saying, dude, what are you doing, man? You're killing me here. I'm trying to hustle to get students. Yeah. In the very beginning, I remember one, there, you know, if we go back now to 2006, 2007, the big thing for people to communicate through was either my space, but that was very private. You were communicating with one person at a time because there wasn't a wall like we have on Facebook now. Like there wasn't a threaded timeline. Or you went into drum forums and like drum forums are like the CD underbelly of the drum industry. It's just where everybody gets all their negativity out all the cause drum forums don't require your first and last name or definitely back then, you know, it was always somehow, it was always Tom a drummer, 22, you know, or heisty fan 76 was coming after me. Pearl guy 420. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Pearl guy for life. 420 every time. And so in the beginning, it was, I would say, quite hurtful because none of us had social media armor yet. We didn't know that this was the world.  I was like, wait, what? Like I literally just taught you a sticking pattern. How, how did that happen? How did you get so upset about that? And so then eventually what I started doing on the forums was I would somebody would say, Hey man, they're going after you on this forum. And I would say, okay, like that's fine. So I would go there and I would see like just a full thread of hate. I would say, Hey guys, my name is Mike Johnson. I'm the guy that you're talking all the smack about. This is my cell phone number. Please call me anytime so that we can actually straighten this out. I don't know what I did to offend you so much. And usually one or two people would call and it would always be an older private drum teacher that saw this as a threat. And I had to explain to them, I am going to create so many brand new drummers that never even thought about touching this instrument. And I, they will need private lessons because online lessons won't be enough. They're going to need someone to sit in a room with them and see their hands and to hear their dynamics. And cause at that time, I didn't have the service I have now where you actually upload your videos to me on a private server and all. I mean, now it's much more interactive. But in 2006 2007, I was, it was a one way street. I put content out and I have no idea if you're practicing it or not. And so I was saying my price is $20 a month. It's at a level that they can afford me and afford you at the same time. This is going to be a benefit to you in the long run. And some of them understood that and most of them didn't at the time. Now it's totally different. Now I think a private instructor has to have online content because how would a parent validate whether you can teach drums or not?  Yeah. And then they go, Oh yeah, I got to hear him or her speak. I saw their demeanor. I saw the inside of their room that they'll be teaching you. Cool. Now I'm willing to drop my kid off for a half an hour or an hour. That's extremely interesting. So it's changed a lot for sure. Yeah, really. Wow. It kind of validates you. And honestly, now you see many, most drummers, if you're actually trying to do it and you're really out there, you're posting stuff online and you're, you know, you might not be starting a business and kind of creating a whole, for lack of a better term, industry, which it is an industry. But it is a way and people do need to supplement and actually there's something about being in the room with someone and actually talking to them, which I think you would completely agree. And that's, that's kind of the opposite of what you're doing. But now do you still teach any private lessons or is it all online? Yeah. So the one thing that we have, we still have the Mike's lessons.com drum camps. So we host 10 of those per year. They're a week long. We host 10 of those per year at the studio. And that is my chance to actually lab time the content and see, you know, what am I helping you or am I hurting you? I remember, and I remember this very specifically. And I would assume Jared went through this with free drum lessons.com and any other of the online teachers at the time went through this, where you would see your YouTube lessons show up in someone's drumming in the worst possible way. Yeah. Where I was like, oh my God, you're playing 30 second note crossover licks in a pop tune in the verse because you saw my video. I'm so sorry. Yeah. Not the right time. And so, yeah. So we had to then find the responsibility level of this.  That's way different than teaching them how to, you know, I don't know, gut a fish or something. I didn't teach them anything. So I thought, oh, man. And so that's what the camps do is give me a chance to be one on one with the drummers, see them, hear them and go, oh, wow.  That's really loud. And so, or the opposite and go, you know what, it didn't translate before on your videos, you have something special. And that's something that's like, I mean, God, I can't even tell you as an educator how wonderful it is to tell someone that without any hyperbole when you're being truly honest to just take them aside and go, just so you know, the thing you do is not normal. You are quite incredible. And I'm not talking like on a talent level, it could just be literally just feel like, yeah, touch. We had a female student here last year, Ashlyn Shanafelt. And she, to her, she was like, I don't know, just a gig and drummer. And but as soon as she played all of us in the camp, including myself, we're going, there's something different about you, like you play with so much feel and so much care for groove. And within that same week, because we're streaming, here we are online streaming again, we're streaming a lot of the camp live on Instagram. I got a call from the John, the owner of Cherry Hill Custom Drums. And he was like, that girl, Ashlyn, does she have an endorsement? Wow. And I was like, no. And now she's a fully endorsed artist for Cherry Hill Custom Drums. But that's like the dream is to sit there and go, okay, like you have something special. And I don't know that I can always do that on the internet. Now, as far as private one-on-one lessons, yeah, so we have like a batch of drummers that I really enjoy being part of their growth from Northern California. And so they kind of have the open vibe with my wife to book private lessons for one hour lessons. And that's something that's really important to me too, because I need to spend that time with another drummer to gauge almost the difficulty level of what I'm teaching. Like, okay, I sat down with an intermediate drummer, showed him this thing that I'm going to be teaching online. And it took a full hour for him to even grasp the concept. I'm not ready to teach this online. We're gonna have to break this into simpler chunks. Or I gave this hand pattern to a beginning drummer, and she got it in five minutes. Okay, cool. This is a great four minute lesson. And so teaching in in person helps me, I guess, gauge how difficult the lessons should be and what what I should put them in. Are they beginner, intermediate, advanced or pro? And what should the expectations be? Because I got to lab time with a person. Well, I mean, I think that's smart, because I think a lot of people who are in the world of online teaching and lessons are probably looking at you as kind of a, you know, to guide them. So it's cool that you can actually look at it and kind of self correct the correct the course as you go with actually working with human beings one on one, which is what it's all about, you know. Yeah.  This is the first time in the history of music that we have drummers that are becoming or musicians, I should say, they're becoming very well recognized. And they've never played with another human being. They've only been in their bedroom playing drums. And so I try my best to not let my age and my old school mentality get in the way of, well, that's not how it's supposed to be done. It's like, I don't think like that. That's just how it is done. Now I have to say, okay, if that is the landscape, how can I help these drummers? Because I don't see myself as an online teacher. I'm sure that, you know, many other people doing what I'm doing, don't see themselves that way either. I see myself as an educator. And right now, it's happening online. It used to be for me happening privately. And someday, maybe it goes back and it's like, well, I'm writing books again. And it's like, well, I just want to teach drums. I don't care what the medium is that I do it. But when I see the YouTube drummers that are going bananas, I have to resist the urge to type, hey, man, don't ever do that on a gig. And that I have to realize, you know what, this person probably doesn't even want to have a gig. They're having the time of their life just playing this instrument and expressing themselves. And now it's the that version of it is a new form of art. I have to accept it for what it is and figure out, okay, how can I help you move forward with your dreams? Instead of trying to validate your dreams, if they're your dreams, they're validated already. How can I help you move forward with that? Well, it's the same as you saying, which I completely respect and get is like, I'm not an online drum teacher. I'm a drum teacher and an educator. They're not a YouTube drummer or an Instagram drummer. They're a drummer.  It's like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. It's just opening up the world to another huge amount of drummers that they didn't know existed. And it's in your pocket right now, you know, you can watch them all. And we need that to build the scene. Listening to your interview with, was it William F. Ludwig III? Yep. Yep. Yeah, listening to that interview and when he spoke about the Beatles and that moment, those are the moments that expand our industry because new people that have never considered playing the instrument take up the instrument. And if we have that now, we had that with the Beatles, we had that with definitely with people like Lars Ulrich and Tommy Lee, no matter what you think of their drumming, they got people that didn't play drums to start playing drums. And then when we got Travis Barker, and I mean, how many thousands of drummers were created just from him being him. So I never judged that stuff as anything. It's valid because it's getting people into an amazing art form that we kind of live and breathe and die for. So I think where we're at now with online lessons, online drumming, all of that, it just, it's the norm. And I'm totally happy to see people get excited about it. And it also gives people that never would have been discovered because of where they live. Now, all of a sudden, some guy in the middle of nowhere has got 100,000 followers and maybe some drum endorsements where, I mean, if we go all the way back to the beginning of this podcast, and I said, my record deal was a product of luck and timing. Some of the greatest musicians on the planet never get that luck and timing. But now they control their own fate by making their own content and putting it out for the world to see. Absolutely. Very well put because, I mean, honestly, I don't know if I would have, I mean, I'm sitting in Cincinnati, Ohio, which I think has a great music scene and there's a lot of stuff going on, but it's Ohio and it's different than being in California where it may be a little bit easier to get to get recognition. So we're using it all. Mike, this is, I mean, this is just, it's cool, man. You're opening, I mean, I can't speak for everyone, but I was unaware of a lot of this world. So I think it's extremely cool and I'm sure there's a lot of people who maybe didn't think like, I can brush up on drum lessons by downloading a video at my house and learn in the privacy of my own home without, let's be real, interacting with another human being and build a relationship with you. I mean, that's extremely cool. I think it's the future, honestly. Well, thanks, man. And I think that we are at that point that I wanted to be at a decade ago where my mom signed up for some online service and my aunts and uncles are and now it's the norm. So when young drummers want to start learning how to play the drums online, it's not such a foreign thing to get their parents to get that a year subscription to whatever website for their Christmas present. And I think that, you know, and it's giving people like me access to Dave Weckel's online school of drumming. It's like, well, hell, this is what I wanted in the first place. This is great. So I think we're in a good place. We have to make sure that we hold each other accountable and make sure that the content that's being delivered is being delivered by people that really did their homework and really fellowshiped with the exercises that they're teaching and that we're all trying to step up each other's games. But at the moment, I will say this, I can't speak for guitars, but I have a feeling that it's not quite what drums are. The drum world is so incredibly supportive and so incredibly beautiful towards each other that it's just wonderful. And once everyone realizes it is absolutely pointless to fight for the scraps of somebody else's student roster, instead, get out there and create new drummers. Find people that were about to start a hobby and they didn't know that this hobby existed and how wonderful it can be, turn them into drummers and then you don't have to fight for someone else's students. And that goes for private drum lessons too. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's hard to get students and we talked before last week on the phone and you said you're competing with football, you're competing with soccer and those are hard to compete with, but people out there want to learn the drums and everything you've said, I think it is a great community and we are all in this together and people keep getting better. The YouTube generation has just, which I think is a generation after me because I'm 28, it's just turned people into monsters. People are getting so good and you see the four-year-old drummer playing at Nahum, I forget his name, but it was like, it's just insane. I mean, it's awesome. I think we can wrap up with something to speak to that. For all of you out there that are somewhat new to the instrument, maybe, and I would consider honestly your first 10 years, you're still pretty new to the instrument because this thing takes a long time to learn, but be careful in the world of YouTube and on Instagram. It's okay to follow drummers, but make sure whoever you're following, make sure they're inspiring you and not defeating you. I really don't follow that many drummers.  It's cinematographers that make me want to make better videos. It's gear because I'm a gear lover, so it's tons of vintage drum gear. I follow you, that's how I found out about you in the first place because the clips that you post inspire me. They don't defeat me. What I don't do is follow all the trendiest drummers in the world and as I'm scrolling, I just hate myself more and more because I can't play any of that stuff. So it's okay. In all honesty, I follow a lot of drummers that I eventually muted because I just emotionally couldn't even handle how good these people were. I was like, okay, apparently I'm the worst drummer that's ever lived. It's like, no, that's a sample size of, this guy probably recorded that video for six hours to get that 30 seconds. But in my mind, my mind tells me, no, he just woke up, fell out of bed and ripped those chops. Yeah. So instead I replaced that person with amazing architecture and I replaced the next person that made me hate myself with amazing photography. And so when I scroll through my Instagram feed, it's nothing but inspiration. And then I want to create new content for the world because of that. Man, well put, well put in a world of just endless, great drummers, you got to choose what you ingest. Well, Mike, why don't you tell people where they can find you and all that good stuff, your website, your Instagram, Facebook, everything like that. So Mike's lessons.com is the website and my personal email address is Mike at Mike's lessons.com. If you have any questions, especially about the site or just what we talked about, I mean, there's so much that, that changed in such a quick amount of time that I love talking about this stuff. So you can email me at Mike at Mike's lessons.com website Mike's lessons.com. And then on Instagram, you can follow me at Mike's lessons.com. And I would definitely encourage you guys to check out all the platforms that are out there that are offering online education because the one thing, the paradiddle or the flamadiddle or the Swiss triplet, it is set in stone. It will never change. But the delivery of that information will always change from person to person. So if you don't click with me in my style of education, that's not on you. That's on me.  Yeah, absolutely. Everyone, everyone plays to the beat of a different drummer, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. Well, Mike, it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you, man. I'm a big fan of yours. So this is like a dream come true. So, and thanks for enjoying the show. And I really appreciate that, buddy. Cool. All right, Mike, we'll have a great day, man. Take it easy. If you like this podcast, find me on social media at drum history, and please share, rate and leave a review. And let me know topics that you would like to learn about in the future. Until next time, keep on learning. This is a Gwynn Sound podcast.


From Soju's radio and television, this is the Army Now. The Pelvic Protection System is one of the Army's newest lines of defense against dismounted improvised explosive devices. Staff Sergeant Ross Cox firmly believes in this equipment after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan. I just, the next thing I hear is a boom and I'm just looking, I'm laying on my back looking up in a tree and I see my knee pad sitting up in a tree and all I'm thinking, I'm just going, you know, that's not good, that is not good. Realizing he lost his left leg in the explosion, he asked his medic about other body parts. And then I was like, how are my, how are my, how are my privates, how are my boys? And I looked down and, you know, I didn't have any pain there. He said, you know, those are okay. I know that it played a huge part in my injuries based on what I've been told. It's the Army now.


Hey guys welcome back come again TV the only place on YouTube we're all geek culture collides I'm Shannon and today on this show we're taking a look at one of the masters of the universe Minis, so what we have here is castle grayskull it's the case for the Eternium minis and This is Really good likeness of castle grayskull. I have to say I'm quite impressed by all the detail They managed to get into this little sculpt It looks Just like the old castle grayskull play set from the 80s Quite surprised you got The skull face here the drawbridge the drawbridge the drawbridge does not open and It doesn't open how you would expect it to you know most things open from the right Whereas this one Opens from the left and inside We get jitsu and he does come with his little sword there and Here's the inside of the castle Let's go ahead and take tag off and we'll just go and set that there for now and We'll open up his accessory and With his accessory comes a little mini catalog of The masters of the universe Eternium minis you got trap jaw you got Skeletor you got Horde zombie he-man you got jitsu you got man arms ram man buzz off and he-man And then there's the other side Really cool and we'll go ahead and open up jitsu and his blade just sits right in his hand As for articulation the only articulation the arms move both arms move all the way around and The head moves waste moves No leg articulation While the main part of the body is solid plastic the arms torso and the head or solid plastic though from the waist down is a soft rubbery plastic and If you try to stand him with his arm His karate chop on hand out He'll fall over you kind of need that arm hand down To provide a little extra support But the detail isn't that bad and of course his blade does just slide right into this hand Now this hand is a little bit softer plastic It looks like they might have just glued this on after the fact after they had already Done the mold For the rest of it. I could be wrong though, but Let's go ahead and We'll do two shots Of each both the kids so there you have it my friends I hope you enjoyed this episode of come again TV Make sure you hit the subscribe button and a little like icon and we'll see you again in the future take care If you enjoyed that video make sure you hit the subscribe button right there So you stay up to date on all things geek culture also go ahead and check out one of these two Playlists on the side for more videos just like the one you just watched I'm Shannon for come again TV the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. Take care geeks