For many university students, they know the struggle of not being able to access a lot of things they can at home; a car, their own bathroom and even hobby items that just don’t have any room in student housing.
For Emilee Feely, her inaccessibility to a piano while trying to become a piano teacher led her to create Feely Piano School.
The school is a mobile music school that sends piano teachers to the students’ house instead of bringing the students into a studio.
“I was wanting to teach music lessons and I didn’t have a piano available to me in the city that I was living in, and because I was living a university lifestyle, I wasn’t in a place to commit to one space and would often be in different places, so the best way to create a job that is flexible to your unsteady location is to go to their home, so I started doing that,” said Emilee Feely, founder of the Feely Piano School.
The school currently operates out of seven different cities in Ontario, and also has instructors located in Alberta and Nova Scotia.
These instructors are able to travel to different students in their city and provide piano lessons for low costs. The costs of these lessons start as low as $23 for a 30-minute lesson in the comfort of the student’s own home.
“We have 23 teachers now, they’re located throughout Ontario as well as we have teachers in Halifax and Edmonton, and Waterloo is the most dense, as 30 per cent of the school is located in Waterloo,” Feely said.
Though music is enjoyed and should be taught around the world, Feely wants to educate Canadians in piano before taking her talents globally.
“Right now, we’re taking it city by city, I would like to conquer Canada first, what we’re doing in India is kind of a spin off of the business, to create an app to track piano homework,” Feely said.
Music is part of her nature, as both her childhood and university career were defined by music.
“I studied music at the University of Toronto, and then I was dating somebody in Waterloo and wanted to make extra income as I was seeing him on my way there. I have a musical education history and my father is a classical guitarist too, so I’ve had it in the house since I was growing up.”
The school currently is only teaching piano, however after Feely has mastered the art of booking and tracking her students, she aims to expand to other instruments to diversify the range of music education they teach.
“The reason for being only piano right now is that I’ve just designed software to create an easier booking system, it’s been very manual entry and it’s difficult to schedule so many people, and in so many different places with so many different schedules, so the reason we only offer piano right now is that I’m launching new software to facilitate the bookings,” Feely said.
“The way I’ve designed the software it will be able to offer any service. Afterwards, hopefully in September of 2019, we’re looking to offer guitar, so we are going to be opening different instruments for sure.”
Though the Feely Piano School was created in order to serve eager piano students, they are always looking for more instructors who are passionate about education in music who may not have the equipment or space of their own but do have the skills necessary to teach others.
Find out more at www.feelymusic.com
