Hello all, this is my first blog post for the Hubbard College. Through these following blogs you can find how I use what I learned at the school in my career training to help me with my business plans. To give you a little information about myself I’m a 22-year old musician (Multi-instrumentalist.) and live in Los Angeles. I am a freelance musician, meaning I play for people who pay me to record or perform with them. I also have been teaching private music lessons for the last 8 years both from my own studio location as well as from a music school in Pasadena and a private school in Canoga Park. About 3 years ago I became more interested in how I could get more work as a musician and how to increase my student roster and keep them coming in. I wanted to finally have that waiting list I dreamed about. I started doing various things, i.e. student referral rewards, Internet ads, etc. to promote myself and found the business side of my lessons to be rather hit-or-miss. Sometimes my promo would work and other times I’d lose money printing. So I started reading business magazines and finance articles in magazines but nothing seemed to help as they only addressed problems large corporations had. I needed something more basic that could be applied from the top down; something that could apply to an individual’s career all the way up to a large corporation. I was invited about a year ago to one of Hubbard College’s Talent Café nights to play some music and got an idea after taking a tour, of the self-paced college degree they offer. I before had considered going to one of the many California Colleges to get some sort of Business Administration Degree, but I had just finished a year earlier, the Musician’s Institute and felt it was time to get my career on the move. I liked the idea of coming to a college and studying on my own schedule, there in the school. So I signed up for the degree program! Now I’m almost done with my program here at the Hubbard College only a year later… Sure beats a 4-year degree! Through my blog posts you’ll read about my successes in applying the courses I’ve taken here. Enjoy what’s to come in my future posts. Cassidy Turbin