John and David Connors, Connors Music – Modernizing A Music Store

[00:00:00] Eric: Welcome to The Music Shop podcast, where we talk with music retailers from across the country about the challenges of running their business and how they succeed. I’m your host, Eric Thornton. Today we’ve got John and David Connors from Connors Music up in Ontario, Canada. Thanks for joining.

[00:00:27] John: Thanks for having us on the podcast.

[00:00:30] Eric: So, before we hopped on the show, we were able to chat a little bit and you guys were explaining how there’s, you know… this is a family business, a lot of family members involved. So can you guys give us a background on Connors Music and where it came from and where it’s at now?

[00:00:42] John: Yeah, for sure. So our dad, Paul Connors, started Connors Music in 1978 primarily as a teaching studio. Like he really got started, he was just teaching private lessons and it was our mom, said to him, like, “why don’t you just open a store and have some things that the kids can get from you?” and he grew it that way and we got all involved in it. So Dave, myself and our other brother, Joe in the late 90s into the 2000s and we run it as a family business to this day.

[00:01:11] Eric: Very cool. So I take it that it’s evolved a little bit beyond then, the music classes.

[00:01:15] John: Yes, of course.

[00:01:15] David: Yeah. Yeah, Every aspect of the music industry now, pretty much, from live sound production, rental department, full instrument repair department, electronics repair department, MI retail. Lesson programming, obviously, is still a major focal point. We have a recording studio.

[00:01:33] John: And then we added online lessons…

[00:01:35] David: Online lessons.

[00:01:36] John: …at the start of the pandemic, and then back to doing in person, as well now, too.

[00:01:40] David: So, which is when we launched the online web store, which is how we met Rain.

[00:01:45] John: Yeah.

[00:01:46] Eric: Awesome. And what are your individual roles there?

[00:01:51] John: There is a lot of crossover, so everyone gets involved in every element of the business. But Dave?

[00:01:56] David: I’m primarily in charge of the repair department. I actually apprenticed as a carpenter before working at the family music store and then transitioned all those skills into guitar repair, which has evolved into band instrument repair and just about anything you bring in here, including a kitchen chair or whatever. I do all the building maintenance and everything. And then I also am primarily on the rental department for all the PAs that go out and helping with the live sound production and those aspects of it. And that’s my main focus. And then I got drawn into the web design and the launch of the website.

[00:02:31] John: Yeah, I was gonna say and then you teach bass guitar.

[00:02:33] David: I teach bass guitar, yeah.

[00:02:34] John: Yeah. And then our other brother, Joe teaches banjo and guitar and primarily focuses on the lesson program and then my primary area is, buying and managing the inventory and, so sales manager, I guess.

[00:02:47] David: And then dad keeps us all inline.

[00:02:49] John: Yeah, that’s right. The CEO.

[00:02:51] David: Yeah.

[00:02:52] John: And then we have a sister as well, who taught for us. She’s a singer, so she taught vocals. So that was her role there.

[00:02:57] David: Yeah. Bernadette Connors.

[00:02:59] John: So then it was kind of funny because as much as I was in primary focus on the retail when the pandemic started, I thought, okay. I don’t… like we didn’t have an online web store. Like we ran just an in-house software point of sale program that I’d put together as a high school project, honestly, and we were still using that. So from 1999 until 2019, we were using this software program made in File Maker Pro. I don’t know if that, if you’re like, whoa…

[00:03:27] Eric: I’m not familiar with that, but going that long with, with a single point of sale that you built…

[00:03:32] John: There you go. Yeah, thank you.

[00:03:34] Eric: That’s pretty impressive.

[00:03:34] John: It did manage the inventory.

[00:03:36] David: Mom wanted us to go back to bill books and handwriting, but we said, “no.”

[00:03:40] John: So I just thought, like, we’re gonna batten down the hatches and post on Facebook and Dave really took the reins and said, “no, we need a web store, like we needed this a while ago, but now we ‘need it’ need it.” because for a large point of the time, we couldn’t have customers in the store.

[00:03:56] David: Yeah.

[00:03:56] John: Right, because of various safety measures at different times.

[00:03:59] Eric: So then at that point, was there research that you had already done or how did you even come across Rain?

[00:04:03] David: So my brother, Joe had started research a couple years in advance and he hadn’t crossed the path with Rain at that point. And then when I decided to take over the reins on the website idea, because they had kind of made me in charge of designing what we were using, Weebley at the time. So I was like, okay, this is over. I’m done with this. If I have to do this, I’m gonna be in charge of all of this.

[00:04:26] So I started just Googling and I stumbled across Rain on your YouTube tutorials. And I was like, wow, I really like the way this looks, the way it functions. So I called the number and I should look it up, but the sales guy I got was amazing. He was really nice. And walked me through everything. And then I called one of your competitors and had the same conversation after and was not impressed with the conversation the same way and I went, I’m sold. I like the direction this is heading. And then I had to bring all that information back to the table and the family and say, okay, here’s A and B, cuz dad always likes two quotes, or three, if we can get it.

[00:05:07] But in the music industry POS there’s really not more than two, really. There might be a sort of third, But we didn’t call them… So then I said, “here’s this and here’s this and this and this,” and we went back and forth and it took about a month, I think, of convincing with the family to get through all the logistics and that File Maker Pro was not suitable to keep, and that the bill book was not a good idea to bring back and that we needed to move forward. So at that point we went with Rain and the rest is history, in a sense.

[00:05:43] Eric: That’s awesome. So was John the most disappointed then, the fact that his old system got… you know, that it went to the sunset?

[00:05:50] David: We gave it a badge of honor and it’s still on his desktop. If you want to ever, we’ll screen share with you one day and you can see it.

[00:06:00] John: No, I got over it pretty fast cause like… for example, like, doing a purchase order, I couldn’t do in the old system. So once I got this idea, like, wow, I can do a purchase order in Rain, email it direct to my sales rep. It retains that information. And then when I received the order, I was like, this is gonna be so much better, like so better organized. And then you know, I hit receive, print my barcodes for in-store, and everything goes up on our website, like available for people to buy. My mind was blown.

[00:06:32] David: Yeah.

[00:06:34] Eric: It’s awesome to hear people have that experience and see the value of that firsthand. So it’s great to hear stories like that.

[00:06:41] Now, I guess switching systems I know is a major pain point and especially since you guys were using one for so long, what were the challenges that you guys faced as you just switched systems? Were there certain employees that just didn’t wanna learn? Did it take some people just longer to figure out or, what was, I guess that switching process? Maybe you didn’t have very many challenges, but yeah, would love to know more about that.

[00:07:05] David: Well, so for me at the beginning, the idea of moving of all the product information over was a nightmare, and when I was dealing with the two different competitors, as far as how that was gonna look, Rain was amazing. They were like, you send us the CSV files and we’ll take care of it. And I was like, oh, okay. How do I do that?

[00:07:23] John: And then you said to me, “are there CSV files?”

[00:07:27] David: And John said, “I don’t know if…”

[00:07:29] John: No, like I said, we got those. We got those.

[00:07:30] David: Yeah. So I clicked the export button and I emailed it to the onboarding guy and within seven days, Our entire customer files, product file, all the history, purchase history, everything was inputted. And I logged in and I was like, Oh, it’s here. Yeah. Wow. That was amazing. And the other company was like, it was gonna take a couple months, they said, and I was gonna have to do it. And I was like, I don’t know how to do this, right? And then like, if you want more tech support, you have to pay extra. I was like, “what? You’re already charging me too much.” I was like, this is ridiculous.

[00:08:01] John: But then the first growing pain of course is we didn’t have a web store. So our CSV file was like product name, price, cost, short description…

[00:08:11] David: maybe sometimes barcodes.

[00:08:12] John: Yeah. We had no SKUs, no nothing. So it was like open every product, add a photo, add a description, make it web ready, right?

[00:08:20] David: Yeah.

[00:08:21] John: So that was like, a lot of sleepless nights.

[00:08:23] David: But with the YouTube tutorials, it was so good. Onboarding in that first week we had zoom chats and video training sessions and anytime I’ve had a problem, I call you guys and within, you know, minutes, you’re like, oh, here we go or it’s a big problem that we broke something seriously, which is hard to do. I managed to do it once, I think. And they were like, oh, and within, you know, 12 hours they had that item fixed, you know?

[00:08:49] John: We’ve never been down, though.

[00:08:50] David: No, no, never been been down.

[00:08:51] John: You’ve never shut the system down.

[00:08:52] David: No, I mean, it was like a specific item I broke somehow and they didn’t know how I broke it, but yeah. And then as far as employees, they’ve all been excited cuz, the YouTube tutorials is a big thing. They’re fun. They’re, you know, Jess from Rain Retail is just lovely to listen to, you know… “Thanks, Jess! You know, I learned something new today!” and that was a big component cause I just send them the video. “Oh, you need to learn the rent to own section or you need to learn the consignment section” and I send them the video and they’d all watch it and be happy and learn it. So for the most part, there’s been no reluctancy.

[00:09:24] And even with my repair department, I have my electronics and a band instrument repair guy that work remotely from their homes. And I was able to give them cloud based logins with permissions to just the technician section I made. As a user they go in and update work orders and give me notes, and then they text me information through the texting portal. And then I receive, oh, this is amazing. I got the update. I’ll let the customer know and it’s all in one place. It’s amazing.

[00:09:55] Eric: You know, I don’t know if I’ve talked to a store that has done repair work remotely, but you bring up that point that it’s, you know, with it being cloud based, it’s totally possible. You just gotta have a workstation set up at your house or yeah, somewhere remote. That’s really interesting.

[00:10:10] So the switch, when did you guys switch or go live with things? Was it kind of sounding like what summer or end of 2020? Or May? Just to get a timeline reference here?

[00:10:22] David: It was a blur, but yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:23] Eric: Okay. So now that you guys have your products online and it’s been a couple of years at this point, what’s that process been like? What are the benefits you guys have seen? Has that changed much of how your business has had to function? Are you guys selling on Reverb? Just any thoughts there with those that are trying to make the jump to more web but haven’t done it yet and maybe are nervous about it.

[00:10:47] John: Yeah. So I’d say like there’s three, like major effects we saw right away.

[00:10:52] One was that when we were in, sort of lockdown times or safety measure times, customers could buy product right on our website and do curbside pickup or have us ship it to them. So that did start happening, especially cuz at that time in May 2020 in Ontario, like you couldn’t go into a retail story unless it was like products that you needed, like, uh….

[00:11:13] David: Food.

[00:11:14] John: Food. Yeah.

[00:11:15] Eric: Okay, and you guys have had a decent amount of closed, like businesses, lot of people in like, throughout the past couple of years.

[00:11:22] John: Yeah. There’s been different times off and on. Okay. So, during those times we were still able to have our product in front of the customers. They could buy it, like I said, and it was happening frequently.

[00:11:31] David: Yeah.

[00:11:32] John: Then what would’ve been the following January, we did an online NAMM. It was like a virtual NAMM show, like, for the music trade and that’s where Reverb did a presentation that I got really interested in cuz we were dealing a little more used product, like trade-ins and stuff.

[00:11:49] And then we found out Rain had an integration and I could literally just toggle it on. And the product’s now on Rain, like on our website, on Reverb, and the inventory is in real time with both areas. So like last night, somebody bought a used keyboard gig bag on reverb and now I know for certain that nobody’s gonna buy that off our website. So that was awesome.

[00:12:13] And then the other ongoing major effect is customers coming in, and this happens like daily now, customers come in and say, “I was on your website and I saw you had this and this and this. Where is it in the store?” We’ve got school teachers calling and saying, yeah, I’m thinking about fitting our class with these things and I saw this on your website.

[00:12:30] David: Sometimes I say I didn’t even know we had that and then I go, I don’t know where, let me go looking here. Oh, here it is. This is cool. You know.

[00:12:37] John: So even though the ROI is sometimes hard to measure that way because you don’t have that direct, like they bought it on the website, paid through, you know the portal. But they came into the store. But like we’re taking note of it all the time. They’re pre-shopping on our website and coming in and buying it.

[00:12:55] David: And then with all that said, the SEO rating that Rain kind of achieves fairly organically without having to do a lot of metadata tags and things that I’m not that familiar with, but I was trying to figure out along the way, coast to coast, we’re getting sales in BC. We’re getting sales in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, all over Canada, plus all over the world.

[00:13:18] John: For the American viewers, Canada’s really big.

[00:13:20] David: Yeah, and then for the Americans though, we didn’t set up shipping to the states or worldwide yet just cuz we weren’t comfortable with how to manage all that yet. So we said, we’ll just do Canada and then we’ll look at it. Well, we get phone calls that say, “Hey, I’m in L.A. and you have a R Tom Mute for a snare I can’t find anywhere.” I said, “okay, well, we’ll figure out how to ship it to you.” So we do it over the phone and figure it out.

[00:13:47] And I had a guy call me from Italy one time. He’s like, “you have this guitar stand.” I’m like, “yeah, except shipping’s gonna be more than the stand, but yes, we have it.” So, I mean, we’ve come across people finding us from all over the world on the website. So that’s a pretty unreal experience.

[00:14:06] Eric: Today’s episode is sponsored by Rain Retail Software. Rain helps specialty retail, like music stores, manage all the pieces of their business. It’s great for managing instrument repairs, tracking, inventory in-store and online, or taking recurring payments for instrument rentals. Rain also has built in tools for communicating with customer so you can keep them in the loop and coming back to your store. With our Reverb.com integration, you can connect your inventory to their site and expose your business to a larger worldwide audience. With everything built into one system, it makes this process seamless and incredibly easy. Rain does all of this and more. For listeners to the podcast, rain is offering 50% off your startup costs. Click the link in the description or call (385) 217-6158 to schedule a demo and redeem this offer. And now back to the show

[00:15:04] Now before the switch Rain, you said you had a Weebly site if I remember correctly. Were you listing products on it all or was it just too much of a pain?

[00:15:11] David: When the pandemic hit, I built the store in the Weebly thing, and I started building products and figuring it out and it was a nightmare. And I was terrified because I was like, if I sell this on the web store and I don’t see it, and then I sell it in store and then it’s not real time with the inventory, how do you navigate that?

[00:15:28] John: And especially, there has been an effect on the flow of product.

[00:15:32] David: Oh, supply chain, right?

[00:15:33] John: Yeah. So if somebody buys something on your website that you don’t have, and you have to turn around and say, “that’s gonna be six months to get that.” Like, that’s not all products, but there have been products that have been massive delays with, so yeah. You know, you don’t want to get into that situation where you’re over promising and under delivering with a customer. So we’ve tried to keep our website reflecting what we have.

[00:15:54] David: So I built that whole Weebley store and figured out how to do it and then I never went live with it. I never published it cuz I was just like… there was too many logistical nightmares. I thought that it wasn’t gonna work for us.

[00:16:04] John: Yeah, and before that connorsmusic.ca just had like, a few examples of things we sold and then it was more like a brochure. Like, here’s our lesson program. Here’s our rates and policies. Right? We sell some things. Static. We had, you know, logos of the brands we sold, but you couldn’t see actively what kind of stuff we had in the store at any given time. But now of course it’s all categorized and everything. Pretty much like, yeah, almost every product we have we’ve got up on our website available for people to see and buy.

[00:16:38] Eric: That’s awesome. You mentioned as, you know, some of your web buyers, schools which is interesting cuz, you know, most music stores are working with schools because there’s just a lot that can be done with the school. There’s the rental side. There’s the repair side. What’s your process look like working with schools? Are you all kind of ed. reps. yourselves? Do you guys have dedicated ed. reps. or what does that look like?

[00:17:00] John: That mostly lands on my plate. I’m interacting with the schools. It helped cuz I did do a few years of teaching band classes at the elementary level, in the local schools here. So I sort of understood their needs. But one of the challenges we found is that school to school, the needs varied so much. So if I tried to produce something like here’s our catalog of products, then you bring it in. They go, well, we don’t do band here. We do ukulele, right? Or we have a guitar class.

[00:17:27] What do you have for, you know, 24 guitars, kind of thing. So now I could just say like, peruse the website, find what you need, and then we can do quotes right in Rain. And I’ve done this multiple times now where we produce a quote, send it directly to the school, then they call back and modify or get the purchase order in place. And so that has been an amazing tool for me as well.

[00:17:50] Eric: So schools are using the website to go and look at the products.

[00:17:54] John: Yeah, like teachers have limited time to get the products they need for it to run their classes, right? So if they can be on their prep time at school on the website… if they come around to your store to look, it’s because they’re doing it on their free time and you know, between, you know, the hours in class and the marking and everything, that’s not something that they’re keen on, right? So to be able to use our website, to see what we have, and then again, us using the tools for quoting and invoicing has been just great.

[00:18:24] David: Well, and that school in King City, how did that one transpire?

[00:18:27] John: yeah, they just did a web order, right on the website for a pile of ukuleles and we just delivered them.

[00:18:33] David: They emailed, “can you deliver these?” “Yeah, sure.” Yeah. That’s a lot of ukuleles.

[00:18:38] John: Yeah. So Dave’s mentioned King City. So we’re about an hour north of Toronto in a fairly small community called Georgina, all in Ontario, so south of us are some larger communities and some of them have bought through us.

[00:18:48] David: And that one’s like 30-40 minutes.

[00:18:51] Eric: Interesting. And it’s sounding like these are schools that you haven’t even reached out to, but have just found you online and now is another school to work with and you’re selling them things. You’re now gonna be working on repairs and things like that because they like the experience.

[00:19:06] John: So it was both like we were reconnecting with schools that we’d been doing business with before, you know, the old school way. But yes, it would. It helped us reach out to new customers as well, for sure.

[00:19:17] Eric: You guys have just started to explore and have found some… sounds like great success with having an online store. But brick and mortar is where you started and where you’ve gone for years. I feel like you guys have probably felt the people not coming into the brick and mortar. The customers coming in more than a standard store, just because of your location. How do you see brick and mortar over the next five years? You know, we’ll say 5-10 years. How do you see brick and mortar fitting into the equation, just with music retail in general?

[00:19:46] David: Like, I personally find that musicians specifically like a personal experience and they like to know, like, if they’re buying a guitar, they wanna know the builder, and the woods, and they want to touch and feel. It’s really a specific tactical experience.

[00:20:03] And so, as much as online is growing rapidly, the backlash that we’ve seen from customers that say, “well, that’s fine, but I really wanna touch it. I really wanna play it. I know this model guitar is great, but I wanna play six of them and pick the one I want,” right? So I think for the music industry specifically, there will always be a brick and mortar component that they want. And I mean, I know some people who’ve bought guitars at big box stores and a string breaks and they return it as a defective product. That’s not a defective product, that’s a broken string, right? You’re gonna break strings and those stores receive them as defective products and send them back to the distributors and the wholesalers who go, “are you kidding me? It’s a broken string!”

[00:20:47] So I think that having a dedicated music store with a brick and mortar experience is critical. I do believe that the web is growing rapidly and you need to be there in that experience. Your strings and your patch cords, and your accessories need to be flying off the shelves in boxes and getting shipped all over where people are cuz they don’t want to drive two hours to the nearest music store for that but they will for the guitar purchase or that very personal experience, or the repair, having a repair technician. Personally, I find our little 20 minute radius is becoming a two hour radius for people driving to me to get them to work on their guitars and fix them.

[00:21:25] Eric: So interesting. That’s awesome to hear. So if you could take… I mean, you’ve got your business focused on so many different areas, just, you know, like you talked about. You’ve got the rental, the rent to own, the repair shop. If you could pick one area to focus on and grow your business over the next year or two, you know, it sounds like the last couple years it was definitely an online focus. What would that area be to focus on over the next year or two if you could only pick one area? Maybe we’ll open up to two.

[00:21:56] David: Well, John can pick an area. I’ll pick an area. We’ll do that.

[00:21:59] John: All right. You go first.

[00:22:00] David: Okay. Repairs. No, I mean…

[00:22:03] John: You want to grow… you want more repairs?

[00:22:06] David: Not unless I have more repair technicians, which is just me in-house right now. Wow, this is so incredibly hard. You go first.

[00:22:12] John: Okay. I’ll go first. So we use a software program for our scheduling for a lesson program. It’s called My Music Staff and I think we mentioned earlier that we have them online and in person.

[00:22:22] But at the beginning of the pandemic, like our student count went… I’m gonna say we dropped about 60% of our students cuz we were only in person at that time. And we kept them all just online and then now have grown back an in-person program. So our focus does, I think, wanna be on growing that lesson program again. I’m gonna say to where it was pre-pandemic and beyond because for us the ripple effect on the retail side is so great.

[00:22:50] And of course, you know, It’s something we love. It’s our passion project is sharing music with people that want to get into it. And I’m saying that not just kids, of course. We got adult students as well. So anybody who wants to get into music. That’s why the business started in the first place.

[00:23:05] David: Instead of saying the repair department, I will say the service department because as a brick and mortar, the thing that sets us aside from all the online stores, all the other music stores, the only thing we can offer greater than the most affordable patch cord is the best service experience. So if we can build anything service related, whether it’s the repair department or the studio or whatever our customer’s needs are at that moment, physically, if we could, that would be what my focus would be.

[00:23:34] John: I thought you were gonna say rentals too, which is in there.

[00:23:36] David: Rentals. Yeah.

[00:23:37] John: And again, the Rain rental module.

[00:23:39] David: Oh, it’s awesome.

[00:23:40] John: Like we’ve always done rentals, but it’s not been a…

[00:23:43] David: It was a clipboard.

[00:23:44] John: Yeah, it wasn’t a well organized part of our business.

[00:23:46] David: It’s a bad day. And that clipboard still has the old contracts on it. Yeah, like from like three, four years ago. I have to go through it still and it’s in the back room and I’m just look at it like a nightmare. I don’t even wanna touch it.

[00:23:58] John: Now somebody wants to rent something, you come in, you do the reservation in Rain, you take your deposit and everything and it manages it. And then when you go to book something else and it says, no, you can’t, that’s not available.

[00:24:10] David: …which was not what used to happen. It used to be, “where did that thing go?”

[00:24:13] Eric: These are your PA rentals?…

[00:24:14] David: Student guitars.

[00:24:15] John: Yes. For our students as well. So, you know, it’s sort of like, we want to grow the areas that we always wanted to grow, but use these tools to help us do it now.

[00:24:24] Eric: Great. Well, that’s awesome feedback. So John and David, it has been awesome to talk to you both today. I feel like you guys, you know, you can just tell by your personality, your enthusiasm, you guys have a lot of fun with what you’re doing there. Glad business is going well for you. Thanks again for joining the podcast.

[00:24:39] John: Thanks for having us.

[00:24:41] David: Take care.

[00:24:47] Eric: Thank you for listening to The Music Shop. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a rating or review to let us know what you think. For more interviews with business owners, visit rainpos.com/interviews where you’ll find transcripts, show notes and videos for all our episodes.