Fabiana Claure has been in the music industry her whole life. Armed with a full scholarship education, money was of no concern to her. But when she was finishing her studies, she contemplated how she could make a living. Together with her husband, they decided to venture into music entrepreneurship and start an academy. In this episode, she emphasizes the importance of helping and encouraging musicians to have the courage to decide on what they feel is right. Are you ready to take that leap of faith? You have what it takes to be successful.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Taking The Leap Into Music Entrepreneurship With Fabiana Claure

I’m excited to be here with Fabiana Claure from The Musician’s Profit Umbrella. We are going to talk about all things musicians and entrepreneurship, which is one of my favorite topics. What are the ways that musicians can make money, and transition out of that starving artist mentality that a lot of us started out in? I want to get started by finding out a bit about Fabiana’s story, how she started out working in music, and how she transitioned to being online and encouraging musicians to be entrepreneurs?

Thank you, Bree. I am delighted to be in your show. Thank you for having me. It is a great opportunity to connect with your community. You have been doing such amazing work. I want to congratulate you for creating such a wonderful path, building content and opportunities for musicians to get out of that starving artist mentality and learn the viable ways for creating thriving careers in the arts. Congratulations on your work. I’m excited to connect and have this conversation with you.

A little bit more about my journey, I was a pianist for my entire life. All of my degrees were in piano performance. I have an international background. My parents are from Bolivia and I grew up in different parts of the world, in the US, Bolivia and Cuba. Several years ago, my husband and I came from Cuba to Charleston. We started our higher education here in the US and pursued our Bachelor’s, Master’s, art certificates and doctorate degrees in different parts of the country. It was all about performing.

We played internationally and won competitions, with orchestras and had a wonderful experience of developing a career as a musician. I’m proving to myself that it is possible to be a successful musician and not have to have a second career that would be the backup plan. I went all in, much to the dismay of my parents, especially my dad who was a civil engineer with a Master’s in Economics. He was like, “You are going to be a pianist?” No one was a musician in my family. I decided to go all in.

I remember telling my dad when I was a teenager, “Dad, I love music. I know I’m going to be successful because I love it. If I love it, it is going to work out. Trust me, don’t worry,” and it did. For most of my career leading up to my doctorate, I did not think about anything else in music. I did not think about business and how I was going to make a living. I focused on becoming the best pianist I could be.

As I started adulting, I started to figure out, “How am I going to make a living?” I started to realize that there were some significant gaps in my education that everything I had strived for was missing a very important element. How am I going to make money when I finished all of this fun trajectory of studying, performing, getting ready for the next concert, this and that? Fortunately, all of my education was sponsored by a full scholarship. Money was not ever an issue going through college. That was a blessing and also a curse because I did not worry about it until the very end.

When I was finishing my doctorate, I started to wonder, “Now what?” Initially, I was under the mentality that I was going to follow what I knew and what I was familiar with, which was to graduate with a doctorate, pursue a university tenure track position, and get a faculty job somewhere.

I started to look at how that process went, how competitive it was, and how difficult it was to get a university position right out of college. It became almost an obsession of mine to investigate. I wrote my dissertation around this topic. What are the ways that pianists are able to make thriving careers that allow them to stay active as musicians while still making a living?

I started to get serious about investigating and looking at the data and statistics. Much to the shock of my committee, they were like, “These are grim statistics that you are bringing. You have to publish this.” They even asked me, “Do you have to publish this in your dissertation?” I was like, “Yes, because I’m just learning about this now. I wish I would have known this much sooner. I want people to know all these statistics.”

That was the first wake-up call. I started looking at the music business program that the university had. I decided to take some courses. I start learning about the music business and entrepreneurship. I realized that I had been already an entrepreneur without knowing it. I had already been doing lots of things. I just didn’t understand what those concepts looked like.

I became fascinated with the similarities between music and business, and how the traits that we develop as musicians can be easily transferable to the business world that could help us set ourselves apart. That became the culminating part of my education. Pretty quickly, I started to think about how I can make my own money, and how I can create my livelihood without needing someone to hire me.

My husband and I attended a conference at the MTNA’s national meeting in 2010. As we returned from that, we had the idea of building our own music school. It was right around the time when we were about to finish. We said, “This would be awesome. Let’s create a music school that addresses a problem that we identified around the gaps that most entering Music majors have when they start college.

It became a process of learning how to put a business plan together and how to create every step of the way. I’m starting to pitch it, presenting it in different venues, getting support and mentorship from business coaches, advisors and venture capitalists. We started to position ourselves everywhere we can.

Eventually, you get fascinated with the similarities between music and business. Click To Tweet

We even entered a music business plan competition in the School of Business where everyone else was an MBA candidate. We were the only pianists there. They were scratching their heads, “What in the world are you both doing here? You guys are pianists. You should be in the practice room.” We won second prize for the Best Written Business Plan award and the Best Entrepreneurial Spirit award in that competition and raised almost $10,000.

We are able to launch our first music academy. For the last several years, we have been running it remotely across the country. We moved to Texas when I was appointed Director for the Music Business and Entrepreneurship Program at UNT, where they needed someone to come in and help musicians build their careers.

We had to restructure our school to continue running it without us there. For the past several years, we have been running it from Texas, mainly my husband. It has been a great journey of learning not just how to create businesses but also how to delegate them and let them run without needing every aspect of involvement in it.

A couple of years ago, as I was running the program at UNT and helping musicians in that capacity as a university educator, I realized that there was a need for even more support so that all of this content could be absorbed and valued beyond the university realm exclusively. I started learning how to position myself in the online space.

I had been very active in conferences prior to that and doing a lot of speaking engagements and things, but not in the online space. It was a great opportunity to learn how to position myself, build an online brand, package all of the things that I could offer into a unified sense of identity, and build a coaching program.

It has been several years that I have been doing this in the online space and helping musicians all around the world. I reached a point where I had to make a decision because the business was taking me in a direction that was difficult to keep up with my full-time job at the university. I had to make a decision if I wanted to go all-in in my business, let it grow and allow it to get to the level that I know it can be, I had to quit my full-time job.

I quit my full-time job and that was a big decision. It was probably one of the biggest decisions that I made in my life. It is a big risk but I’m very grateful that I gave myself that chance to go all-in. That has now been a new thing that I’m trying to inspire musicians, to not feel that they need to hold on to things when they no longer serve them, but to be able to learn how to build their careers in a way that allows them to release whatever they need to release, whenever they want.

It is interesting because your background was pretty much all in universities until you moved online. I have a completely different background. I was doing everything online from the beginning. My husband was a university professor, not in music, but we are experiencing that too. It is the idea of letting go of that security. Maybe he wants to go do something else because he has been in that world for many years.

That is a hard thing to give up. I’m impressed that you did that. You built something first. You did not just go like, “I’m going to burn everything to the ground, go out and start building something from scratch and hope it works.” Where do you feel people need to be in order to make that big leap? Maybe they are in a corporate job, in a university, working for another music school or something. What do you think they need to do on their end as an entrepreneur to prove to themselves like, “This is the thing. I can do this and it’s time to take the leap?”

I wish I had the specific answer to tell you, “This is the exact moment.” If there is one thing I have learned from this experience and from taking that leap of faith is that you need to do it when you feel you need to do it. When you start feeling that something needs to change, it is a great moment to start creating things. In reality, you are never going to feel 100% safe doing it. You are never going to have a guarantee and that actionable plan like, “This is going to work. Now, I’m going to take the leap of faith.”

There needs to be an element of betting on yourself and saying, “I have reached a point now where I want to give myself a chance to do it. I’m going to let go of what no longer serves me.” You will start seeing how much you can advance and grow. You are going to be surprised at things that can happen when you are willing to let go.

There are many reasons why you are holding onto things longer than you should. I’m not saying that you quit at the very beginning. I’m just saying work your way into feeling that sense of relative confidence that what you are building can be successful. When you feel that you want to go all-in, that is the best time to do it.

In reality, the longer you hold onto things that are going to take away your energy and focus, the harder it is going to be for you to build what you want to build. That “jumping off the cliff” attitude is also going to force you to give it your all when you are building your own business. You are not going to have that foot towards the back that you are stepping back and say, “If it does not work, I could always go back to this.”

 

I was listening to Napoleon Hills, Think and Grow Rich, which is such a great legendary classic. That is something they were talking about. That was one of the key characteristics that all of the people they researched did. They referred to it as they burned the bridges behind them. They had no way out. What allowed all of those successful millionaires and billionaires to get that type of prosperity and wealth in their lives is that they were all-in.

The thing about it is that you can’t tell how stressed you are or how much you are put putting up with things until you change. I tell you this because I felt that myself. I wasn’t at a point of breakthrough necessarily. When many of my colleagues heard the news and learned that I had stepped out of a tenured track position, they were like, “What in the world? What happened? We need to know. What was the problem?”

There wasn’t anything that specifically happened. I got to a point where I outgrew it and I felt like I needed more. I know I can get more. I had already exceeded more than doubled my entire year-long salary in academia with my business. I knew that the potential for me to grow was there, but nothing happened. It wasn’t like a big problem. As I was keeping my university job and working on my online coaching business, I started to feel very overwhelmed and burned out.

I’m also a mother of two. It started to feel like it was a lot. The moment I realized how much pressure I was under was after I quit. After I sent the letter, submitted my resignation and released it lovingly, in the next few days, I felt this amazing sense of relief. This sense of wonder of like, “I have got all this time that I can do it exactly the way I wanted. This is amazing.” I started to feel this liberation that I did not realize I needed until after I took the leap of faith. My word of advice to your audience is even if you feel you are okay, you’re hanging in there and it’s not that bad, you won’t know how great it can be until you give yourself a chance.

Having that mental white space, suddenly, many more ideas can come to you because your mind isn’t having to work on all the problems that are at that other job that you are working on.

I do not think people need to rush into things. They need to follow their instinct. There isn’t a specific timeline that everyone needs to follow. There are many advantages of keeping your job as you are starting a business because it gives you an opportunity to have relative stability in terms of income and cashflow. It can even give you an opportunity to reinvest some of your income into more support for yourself, into hiring an assistant, into having more support around building all of the different things you need as a business owner versus having to be doing it all yourself.

There are great advantages of creating a business with some additional income coming in at the beginning. I have met many successful entrepreneurs who started their businesses while still having a job. They went on for 1, 2 or even more years until they got to that breakthrough moment where they said, “I’m ready to jump. I’m going to do it. I’m ready to go all in.”

Everyone needs to tune into their own intuition a little bit, and know that there won’t ever be 100% certainty that you are going to be ready. It is like having kids. You are never quite sure if you are ready to be a parent and you’re like, “I’m going to give it a try and see what happens.” It is the same feeling. It is an intuitive process but a beautiful one. If you give yourself a chance and you are willing to give that opportunity to succeed, you may also fail, but it is a matter of saying yes to yourself instead of thinking that you are not going to do it because it could fail. You are making a decision.

As human beings, we make decisions based on love or fear. It is either one of those two emotions. I believe the being willing to go all-in into our businesses, even though we know it could fail, we’re still giving ourselves that opportunity to succeed. We are loving ourselves in that process versus not doing it because we are afraid we are going to fail. That is a decision made out of fear. That’s also a great way to make that decision. When you feel the need, tune into it. Are you more afraid or are you more loving? If you are leaning towards, “I’m still terrified but I want to do this,” do it because the fear is never going to go away. It is part of this process.

One of my students would ask me when I was teaching at the university, “Dr. Claure, how did you know that your business was set? At what point did you feel that your business was successful and you had achieved your goal and everything was safe?” I told them, “I will let you know when I feel that way. It hasn’t happened yet. I will be the first to let you know whenever I get to that point.”

In reality, I do not think I have ever felt that way about my business and I do not know when I’m going to feel that way. It is like adopting that mentality of being okay with risk and knowing it is part of it. We all know that risk-taking is one of the core characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. Their ability to take calculated risks. It’s not irresponsible risks but risks nonetheless.

A lot of the musicians that I worked with over the past several years, I have been trying to encourage them to understand that as a solo musician, in a band or whatever, they are already acting as an entrepreneur because they are running a business, whether they realize it or not. I have started working with some people who are already musicians and they want to start teaching or a coaching program. Are you working mostly with people who are doing teaching and coaching programs? Are you also working with musicians who are building a business and a fan base?

I like to see it as both. In order for you to build an online business, you need a fan base and a community. You need to build awareness of your brand. I like to help musicians unite all of their interests if they are performing or teaching or they have any administrative or other related non-musical expertise. I like to help them see how they can package it all into one united brand, and build their fan base and community.

You don’t need to hold onto things when they no longer serve you. Learn how to build your career in a way that allows you to release what you need to release. Click To Tweet

Whether it is selling albums, having a teaching offer or a way for people to work with them as a coach or as a consultant or whatever they decide to put together, they’re doing it on top of a strong brand foundation. By putting all of the things together, it makes it easier for people to get what they are about and set themselves apart.

I like that because we do get a lot of people coming to us and they are like, “I have been a musician. I’ve been building my performing brand or recording brand for all these years and now I want to teach.” They are always like, “Should I start a new social media? Should I have a different brand name for my teaching?” I always say no, mostly on my side, because I know that if they got multiple accounts, they are not going to be able to keep up with that and it’s going to make them crazy.

I love the idea of bringing everything under one roof. It’s probably why you call your brand the Umbrella. It makes sense to me now. Do you get people coming to you who are resistant to that like, “I want my teaching to be separate?” Maybe their artist’s name is some different persona name than their personal name.

That used to be such an interesting topic of debate when I was in the university setting, especially my voice students. They would come with their bios. We worked a lot on helping them create their bios. They would not mention anything other than their opera roles. Their bios were there. They sang in this opera role. Even at that moment, I would say, “What else do you bring to the table? Do you know how many singers’ resumes I can put next to this one that has a ton of opera roles? What else do you bring? How else can I define you? How else can we look at what your artistry is about, what your philosophy is about, and what your values are? Let’s start talking.”

They would say, “We have been requested by the opera production department that we can only put opera roles in the bio. We are not allowed to discuss anything else, certainly not teaching. Anything else we put is going to detract from the value of us being featured in a lead role in such and such opera.” This was very much institutionalized in many ways. I have seen this comment as part of the training.

I can understand that, especially with an opera role. You are trying to blend into a story, a character and all that versus when you are a performer and you say you are a vocalist, but you have your own style in recordings. It is more about you and who you are as a person.

It was interesting because those were the first conversations that I had with musicians. We were trying to look at things a little bit differently. We’re trying to explore how you can find a different way to still give it its place in your resume but not limit yourself to only that. That was the beginning of this process.

A lot of the people that come to me now are in that conundrum. They are trying to figure out how to unite all of the different things that they have been doing. I have interviewed people who are YouTubers. Zac Collins comes to mind. He is a great percussionist. He has created one of the most popular YouTube channels, but he started it with a different name. He shared with us his journey. He was like, “I started it with a different name because I was not sure if it was going to be successful.” It became successful that now it is still with that different name. There was this fear. Sometimes we do not know if things are going to work out. He ended up becoming widely successful with this YouTube channel with a different name.

That is interesting to share with the people we coach because you could fail but you could also succeed. It is that thing we were talking about before. You want to give yourself a chance and go all in. I encourage musicians to put a brand together with all of their things. They ask me, “When I go to your website, we see your side as an entrepreneur, educator, pianist and speaker.” I’m writing a book now. I believe in uniting it all because people ultimately will come to you because of that combination of superpowers versus just one thing.

I certainly do the same thing in my bio. It starts out with musician, recording artist, bestselling author and speaker. It is all together in one. Musicians do a lot of things that maybe they are discounting. I get the same thing too like wanting to have separate bios. Maybe they think that is going to confuse or overwhelm people, but it does paint you as a big asset. I love what you said about all their superpowers in one place.

One of the hardest things that musicians struggle with is differentiation. They are taught to blend in and fit in the standards. It’s like when you prepare for juries. You have to do certain things and certain criteria. You have to fit in the standard and get graded according to what you are doing and how well you are fitting in. It is very much ingrained in the training of how musicians are taught to be.

When you audition, you have to make sure you play your excerpt, whatever it is. Everyone else is doing the same thing. You have to try and do it the best way, but everyone is standardized in a certain way. When you start looking at yourself through The Musician’s Profit Umbrella lens, you are like, “I could set myself apart, not just by trying to be the best performer I can be. I’m trying to play better than everyone else, but to bring a different narrative to my artistry, to bring a different presence to what I represent, to infuse my story, my values and my belief systems so that people come to me and they see the whole person, not just an amazing pianist, trumpet player or composer. They get to see everything.” We all know that stories are what help people connect. A big part of this is bringing in our legacy, story, tradition, upbringing and roots, everything we can into the brand.

It is such a bummer that they are learning it that way at the university. With the landscape we are in, they are going to need to be online and blending in is the worst thing you can do. In order to draw your perfect audience to you, blending in is not going to work at all.

 

It’s the result of certain things that have been institutionalized through history, with the rise of institutions and the advent of now getting musicians to come in, go through a curriculum and be able to meet certain criteria in order to pass to the next level. There is certainly a place for that type of benchmark setting.

I’m an examiner for The Royal Conservatory of Music. I went through their training to help evaluate the performance of musicians throughout the country. I traveled to Canada and I did the training with them there. I have been traveling throughout the country, examining musicians and helping them understand where their progress is and how they can look forward to the next level.

There is a time and a place for meeting certain standards and being able to get yourself from one learning phase to the next learning phase. That is a great thing, but when it comes to building your livelihood and your career, transferring that from musical development to business development, we need to start evolving that mentality a little bit. We need to be more willing to look at what sets us apart rather than how we can just fit in.

When you are at the university, you do have to learn certain things in certain ways and be proficient in all of that. I went somewhere that did not have any business training whatsoever. It was more like a conservatory style. I came out this amazing musician but I had no idea what to do with it. I resonate with what you are talking about.

We talked about being an entrepreneur, getting out there and starting your business. I wanted to get into bringing in help because I also find there is a lot of resistance to this. It’s mostly because they say, “I’m not making enough money in order to pay somebody to help me.” It becomes this vicious cycle where they can never get ahead because they are only one person. They can only do so much.

I try to say, “Think about it. If you had this extra time, you could maybe do two more gigs a month, and you could pay for it, or you would do a lot more things that you could not do because you are one person.” They have this fear of bringing someone on because it is costing them money. I would love to hear your perspective on that.

That was one of my favorite topics. I’m so glad you asked about that. I went through that too. I started a business with my husband. We did all the jobs. We taught piano, did marketing, recruited the clients, did the bookkeeping and cleaned the academy. We did it all. I get it. That is how most entrepreneurs start. We had to go through the process of learning how to create the right systems, find the right support and how to delegate.

I remember the first week that we opened our academy. Our business advisors were telling us, “You need to have an assistant.” I had two. One came Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the other one came Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. They took turns. I remember walking them through the academy and trying to be the CEO or whatever. I confessed to them, “I have no idea what to tell you to do. I do not know how you are going to help me. I know you need to help me. I don’t know what to tell you to do because it was not a chip that I had developed.”

Part of the reasons why most solopreneurs initially resist the idea of bringing in people, in addition to the financial concern, is not knowing how to set up their job, how to measure progress, and how to create an actionable plan for growth and scalability. They do not know. They do not want to deal with it. They prefer not to do it. They just do it on their own and keep doing it themselves.

The process of delegation and scaling your business needs to start way before you think about teams. It needs to start in your actual program, service delivery, and how do you serve your clients. I have a client who was teaching cello. She joined our program. Within a matter of months, she launched a group program. She was able to scale and cross the six-figure mark. Now she is working on building her teams.

Every step of the way, I’m telling her, “How can you remove yourself?” At some point, she confessed to me. She was like, “You are always asking me to remove myself. First, you wanted me to group my students and figure out a way to deliver value without having it be just one-on-one. Now you want me to remove myself from the marketing, the prospecting and the recruiting. Every time you are telling me to remove myself, how much am I supposed to remove myself?”

It is a very important mindset because I believe the more you want your organization to grow, the more you need to become a strategic thinker, not a doer and not a producer. You need to become the person who is in the chess game. You’re trying to look at the different pieces of the puzzle and what needs to take place. No one will do that for you. You need to be the mastermind strategic thinker.

If you are caught either teaching or running the business all day, no one will do that and you’ll always stay at that same level. My philosophy and what I like to encourage musicians to look at in terms of support, delegation, team building, and systems building is starting with their actual program, then moving into the administrative part and growing from there. Always remember that the more you can have space to think, the more your business will grow.

You can't really tell how stressed you are or how much you are putting up with things until you change. Click To Tweet

Having that hour to go on my walk every day and have my thinking time is major. I came up with some major ideas in my business that I never would be able to do otherwise if I was just doing. There is also the fact that you do need to be the public face of your business. You can have a lot of people helping you with marketing, but no one can come on this show and be talking in place of you. Maybe eventually, but now you are the figurehead and the face. You need to have time to be able to come and go on a show, do interviews, do training, speak in places and things like that. You can’t do that if you are teaching piano all the time.

It’s why I’m happy that you have created these types of platforms with the podcast and all the things that you do. One of the most profit-producing activities that as CEO musicians we can embrace is helping get ourselves out there and become visible. Whether you are on a podcast, doing a Facebook live, doing an Instagram live, anytime you are behind a microphone, you need to see it as one of the most profit-producing activities you can be doing.

When we are talking about profit-producing activities, it is a whole important part of this conversation. You start realizing the amount of money you are wasting by doing things like improving your website, developing this funnel, or doing all these things that you may be tempted to do that you’re maybe good at. I have a client who joins our program. She was so good at making Canva graphics. She kept putting together all these beautiful graphics. She was excited and I had to ask her lovingly to stop. I had to say, “You are going to find this as weird advice, but I need you to stop making these beautiful Canva graphics and start focusing on designing your offer, putting it out there, and getting yourself more in a strategy mindset versus doing all of these Canva graphics.

That brings up such a great point because you find something that you are good at, that is in the weeds like that, where you are making Canva graphics and you are like, “I feel so great making these. These look awesome. It is fun.” One reason you might continue to make them is because it allows you to avoid the things that are scary and uncomfortable that you were telling her to do.

I have to confess. I am that way too. I have told myself, and it’s something I’m always trying to check in, “What are of the things that I’m doing that even though I enjoy, I probably should not because there are other scarier things that I need to be doing that I’m avoiding.”

We have these comfort zone things that make us feel accomplished, safe and comfortable in doing them. It is like, “I’m being productive and I’m working for my business.” It allows us to push those things in the background that we might feel uncomfortable doing.

It’s why when you have no choice but to delegate, meaning when you have someone who is on the payroll who is waiting for the task and for you to tell them what to do even if you do not know what to tell them to do like me when I started, it is going to force you to start developing that CEO muscle in your brain because someone is waiting versus when you do not have someone. You can be more lenient. You are like, “I will keep doing it and testing around.” My recommendation every single time is as soon as you start working with musicians, start with an assistant. Get yourself someone who can take things off your plate. Do not feel tempted to do it all on your own.

I have some conversations even before I start working with clients to make sure they are okay with that. “This is going to be the journey. I’m going to be honest, there is going to be parts of this that you are going to learn, but you are not going to want to do. You are going to need to be quickly willing to let this go and have someone take it on. It is important but it is not what you should be doing.” They already know going in that their likeliest chance of success is going to be based on their willingness to get support.

That is good that you are giving them that heads up like, “This is coming. You are going to need to do it. It might not be easy and uncomfortable.” This brings me to the last question I want to cover. We have covered such amazing things. As I have worked with people and up-leveled myself, I wanted to say to people, “I want you guys to be the CEO of your business.” That was my goal.

What I have learned is that a lot of times, the people that are coming to me are not at the level where that even resonates with them. They are like, “CEO? I’m just a musician. That makes no sense to me. I can’t even see myself in that role.” Do you find that and how do you help them transition into the mindset of like, “I can be a CEO?”

The word CEO is very foreign in the music world. The way I like to frame it is what are their desires? What do they want? Usually, in most cases, it is to win back their time, to be able to take care of themselves. I try to connect first from the places where I know we are in harmony like we are together. From the consonant chord of like, “Let’s get you to understand that you want to win back your time. You do not want to have to be hustling your way through this career. You don’t want to be burning yourself out. You want to be able to make more money.”

When they feel that empathy and sense that the person they are talking to gets them and understands what they want, I find that they are more willing to consider other ways of seeing and doing things. They get that foundation of like, “Yes, you get me,” versus if I rush too much into trying to present the new vision of what they need to become without acknowledging and making them aware that I get it. I’m a musician too. I like to be practicing the piano all day long and not have to worry about anything. That is why I became who I became. All of my degrees are in piano and I get it.

Even in marketing principle, when we are talking with our potential clients and talking with people on our team, we always have to find the common denominator first. It’s finding a way to connect and to understand that we are safe. Someone is there to hold space for us. When we trust the other person, we are more willing to be led and to be guided into new perspectives.

This is something that I have focused on. Whenever I rush that process, that is when I recognize the resistance. That is how I have managed to connect. There is a term by Dan Siegel. He is a parenting coach. I have two kids so I read a lot of parenting books. He calls it, “Connect then redirect.” It is a thing. When you want to help people embrace a new perspective, a new vision, and understand things that are foreign to them. The first step is to connect and then you redirect.

 

When my son is sitting there saying, “I do not want to go to bed, this and that.” Whenever I try to say, “No, you have to go to bed.” He won’t do it. I need to sit in there and be like, “I know you are playing this. This is very fun. I know you would like to stay. I get it but we need to go to bed.” I practice this daily in multiple areas of my life and not just in my business.

I love that parenting example because as I work with people and then further down the road, I introduce this idea, they are like, “Maybe this does not seem crazy and foreign.” I’m not going to put “Become the CEO of your music business” on a sales page because people are going to be, “That is not for me. That is way down the road.” You got to bring people slowly into this idea and allow them to trust you. You have their best interests in mind. I love that perspective. This has been such a great conversation. I would love for you to tell our audience how they can find out more about you, your website and your socials.

You can visit my website. It is FabianaClaure.com. I have everything there on my website. There are also links to my social media channels. I have Instagram, @Fabiana.Claure, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all the good things. I also have a Facebook group called Musicians Creating Prosperity. You are welcome to follow me online. Feel free to connect with me. I would love to be able to have any conversation and connect with anyone who would be interested.

Thank you so much, Fabiana. This has been such a great conversation. I love it when we can have more give-and-take conversations about things that I’m passionate about. A lot of times on the show, I’m learning about new things or trying to expose musicians to new apps and things like that. Conversations like this light me up. I appreciated you coming on and being able to talk about entrepreneurship and musicians.

Thank you, Bree. It has been wonderful having this conversation. I hope that it inspires all of your readers to go ahead and jump off the cliff, take action, go for what they want, and not feel that they need to feel safe before they do things, but to listen to their intuition and love themselves enough to give themselves a chance.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Fabiana Claure
• MTNA
• Music Business and Entrepreneurship Program
• Think and Grow Rich
• The Royal Conservatory of Music
• @Fabiana.Claure – Instagram
• Facebook – Fabiana Claure
• LinkedIn – Fabiana Claure
• Twitter – Fabiana Claure
• Musicians Creating Prosperity – Facebook group

 

About Fabiana Claure

Dr. Fabiana Claure creates financial and artistic prosperity for musicians so they can win back their time and build a legacy – without sacrificing their artistic dreams or family life.

Fabiana was the Founder and Director of the University of North Texas Music Business and Entrepreneurship program for five years, where she helped hundreds of musicians create music businesses and got the program ranked among the top 15 music business schools in the US by Billboard magazine for the entire time she led the program.

A pianist and business strategist for musicians, Fabiana is the Founder and CEO of The Musician’s Profit Umbrella®, a global business mentorship program that helps musicians create thriving online music businesses that cross the 5 and 6 – figure mark in as little as 6 months.