This week we are featuring Mark Robinson, Founder and Chairman of Rocksteady Music School.
Rocksteady Music School is transforming the way kids learn music by teaching them to play in bands and perform the songs that they love, live in front of their whole school!
Mark has been playing music for many years, and the idea behind Rocksteady came to him when he was studying philosophy at university. After graduating he began teaching music privately and found he was getting loads of referrals because the state schools weren’t quite delivering what children wanted.
“I had to find out why this was happening,” Mark told us. “So I decided to work in a primary school as a music teacher for a year.”
Armed with the intelligence from working inside a school, together with his ideas on how music education should work, Mark left and founded Rocksteady. He built the business based on the understanding of how children learn, how they build their confidence and develop their instinctive understanding of shared accountability in a group. Mark gathered a team of fellow musicians and soon had 20 people on board, which has grown steadily over the last 10 years.
Three years ago, Mark decided to bring in a new CEO to help really grow the business.
“For me, the exciting part is the start-up phase and the initial scaling when the market proves that you’ve got the model right. To grow beyond the start-up stage and really scale the business needs processes and structures, and that’s really not my thing. I needed to find someone who had strong business and commercial experience, whilst maintaining the culture at the foundation of Rocksteady.”
To find the right person, Mark wrote up a 30-page job spec, detailing everything that was and was not important about the right candidate for the job. Then he met with headhunters and they found the right person who was fully aligned to the Rocksteady way and wanted to make it happen. With a new CEO on board, Mark had to make some big changes himself:
“I deliberately stepped away from the day-to-day stuff. I wanted to make sure we had hired the right person and that meant letting go. It took me 6 months to gradually step back, but once I did I decided that the real way to manage the transition was to let him get on with running the business. So I went on holiday for 7 weeks!”
After the holiday, Mark decided to play a non-executive role in the business, which meant going to board meetings, working on long-term strategic planning and, as the Founder, being the guardian of the brand and culture.
Mark told us about his proudest moment as the Founder of Rocksteady:
“At the Portsmouth Guildhall, two children I used to teach were playing a duet. This was their first time playing in front of an audience anywhere near that size. Half way through the song the keyboard player got lost. They carried on like true performers, communicated quietly, quickly decided what they were going to do and went back into the verse. They had learned to handle themselves on stage. Seeing that Rocksteady can give 9 year old children the confidence to do that in front of 2,000 people was amazing.”
The business continues to go from strength to strength and now numbers 100 staff. More kids are learning not just to play music, but also to become more confident in themselves and as leaders and role models in their schools. And Mark keeps on doing what he loves.
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