Max Larson, Centre Music House - Using Software To Save Time

The Music Shop: Conversations in Music Retail

Max Larson of Centre Music House discusses how his family built a business based on private lessons. Max has spent the last decade modernizing and automating the business to enable staff to focus on what they do best and enable technology to solve some of its backend processes.

Max tells the story of how modernizing lesson scheduling helped eliminate time and effort from the hassle of managing 400 students and 20 instructors. He also explains how software has enabled the music store and its business to continue to grow and gain greater market share in the area.

Key Insights

• Even if you don’t earn a commission or make a sale, it still might make sense to do.
• Don’t try to reinvent a process that someone else has expertise in.
• Pay for expertise and let experts take care of it.
• Just because it is easy for someone else doesn’t mean it will be easy for you.

Episode Highlights

• "It saves us man hours, man or woman hours, like, the things that my dad was doing when I started working here, I was like, you're doing what? You're spending, how many hours doing this? And it'd be like, we can just automate so much, you know, and it saved us just hundreds of hours. Even stuff just like updating our checkbook, you know, he was...manually doing that?"
• "We can't necessarily afford to hire five or 10 people to do a job, having software to just run the background and take care of things. It just saves us so much time because it's just us, you know, and a couple of other people. And if it wasn't for that, we'd have to be doing everything manually. So yeah, software is everything."
• "And I spent so many hours trying to figure it out. I was just like, this is dumb. Like other people have figured this out. I'm just going to pay them to provide the service. And so that's, that's kinda like the other side of the coin. It's like, you don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making your life easier through software. It's like, you focus on what you're good at in your store: building relationships and selling products and lessons. And then Rain has figured it out. Pay them and it's done and when things break, they take care of it. It's great."

Guest Bio

Max Larson is a second generation family owner at Centre Music House. The store was founded in 1973 and serves Framingham, Massachusetts. Centre Music House believes music has the power to bring joy and positive change into the lives of the people who create, share, and listen to it.

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