Today we’d like to introduce you to Molly Webb.
Hi Molly, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Our story goes back to when I was teaching voice and piano on my own, out of a small studio a few blocks from where our Costa Mesa studio is today. A few years into teaching, I was too full to take any new students and hired our first associate teacher, my friend Janelle. Soon after, my husband, Travis, and I began hiring more teachers, my sister took over marketing, and my mom and I continued to run OC Glee, our performance group. It was a true family business.
After several years of growth, adding students, teachers, and locations, we formed a nonprofit 501(c)(3) and used our revenue to fund charitable initiatives, including after-school music programs, free tutoring services, and research on civic participation.
About six months before the pandemic hit, we had begun working on an online music service. What started as an effort to make music lessons, and high-quality, evidence-based voice lessons in particular, accessible to more people turned into a lifeboat. We taught both live online lessons and asynchronous, highly affordable pocket lessons—a picture-in-picture lesson in which our voice teachers offers personalized feedback and tips to their student.
Now, at the end of 2022, we’re thrilled to have 3 boutique studios in Orange County, along with a network of online students. We’ve taught people living in India, Pakistan, England, France, and throughout the US. I even had the opportunity to warm someone in New York City up right before her callback on Broadway!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Not even close! I don’t think there’s any small service business that survived the shutdowns that would say it’s been smooth sailing.
Our first major obstacle actually happened even before that with AB5, when California music schools were required to convert their teachers from independent contractors into employees. It not only became significantly more expensive to run the business, but it was also an unwelcome change for many of the teachers, who liked the gig economy and the more flexible roles in our company. That’s not to say it was all bad switching over to an employee model. In the end, it’s been great being able to offer paid training, benefits, and more stable jobs to our teachers. We have a wonderful group that I’m very grateful to have.
After changing our business model and weathering the AB5 storm, the pandemic hit, and it’s probably pretty easy to imagine how rough that’s been. It was fortunate that we had a head start on our online lesson programs, and it wasn’t as quick and dramatic a pivot for us as it was for many other music schools, but there were still many, many challenges: the significant percentage of our student base who didn’t want to take online music lessons, of course; the uncertainty of reopening (shutting down over-and-over) so that no one really knew how to plan a few weeks into the future; then eventually reopening with constantly evolving safety measures. It was chaos. There was even a period of time I would teach a lesson in my backyard and then race to my desk inside to run an online lesson and then back out for another yard lesson.
We thought we were in the clear in March 2021 and saw rapid re-growth for a few months, only to have the combination of the Delta wave alongside reopening schools and shifting schedules knock us back again.
But we’re still here, so happy to be back in person with most of our students and loving the return to our old pre-pandemic recital schedule (that’s back in theaters and no longer outdoors!)
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Our organization is called The Inside Voice, which we rebranded from its former name, Molly’s Music. Our specialty is voice lessons and everything that goes along with that—accompaniment instruments (piano, guitar, and ukulele lessons), mic technique, performance workshops and camps, and of course recitals.
We pride ourselves on evidence-based voice lessons. There’s a lot of myths in the vocal world—that you should learn classical singing first, that you shouldn’t belt, that there’s one “correct” way to breathe for singing, a whole host of misconceptions about larynx height and what the diaphragm does…. At TIV, we want to make sure that when we give a student an instruction, it’s not just because it got passed down over the years but is something backed by vocal science.
A perfect example of this is larynx height. If you talk to an old-school classical teacher, you’ll hear that your larynx should remain in a low position. If you talk to someone who studied Speech Level Singing, you’ll hear that your larynx should always remain in a neutral position. However, real-world research makes it very clear that there’s no one optimal position for your larynx and that for perfectly healthy singers, it raises and lowers based on pitch and voice quality. Our goal is to do away with the false vocal advice that’s stuck around over the years and replace it with informed, healthy real-world practices.
Another huge goal of ours is to take singing out of the purely performative space and return it to the health, wellness, and celebratory space it belonged to through much of history. While we pride ourselves on our recitals and other performance outlets, we want to make sure people know that they don’t need to have the ambition to perform to get something out of it. There are so many health benefits to singing, from stress relief to memory enhancement. It’s even been shown to increase your pain threshold. With all these remarkable reasons to sing, we truly believe that everyone should learn to love their voice.
As far as services that we offer, we provide boutique in-person voice lessons in our three studios in Orange County, as well as in-home lessons. We also offer online lessons, both live and asynchronously—what we call pocket lessons, a picture-in-picture video with personalized feedback and tips.
What matters most to you?
There’s this George Eliot quote that I love: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” That’s really what matters most to me. As a voice teacher, I’m not out there starting and stopping wars or saving people’s lives through brain surgery. But I want to leave people’s lives a little better than they were before coming to me, whether that’s helping them get accepted into their dream music school or simply giving them the space to sing their hearts out and feel seen and heard after a particularly rough school or work day. I want to run a company that’s a net good for the world, and I believe that’s what we’re doing.
Pricing:
- Basic Tier: $29.95/month
- Standard Tier: $69.96/month
- Premium Tier: $89.95/month
- Concierge Tier: Starting at $99/month
Contact Info:
- Website: http://theinsidevoice.org
- Instagram: @the_inside_voice
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mollysmusicschool
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-inside-voice
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/theinsidevoice
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/menu/mollys-music-costa-mesa-2
