Where Children Have Fun Learning Music
Company background and marketplace
HarpsCool was set up in 1995 by Ben Hewlett, trading under the name of HarpsCool and working from home, covering the Bristol area.
HarpsCool started out in the late 90s with Ben teaching harmonica at Dulwich College. He started playing harmonica in the mid 80's and studied first with Paul Lamb, and then with Brendan Power who introduced him to teaching, now these guys are the most respected players in the UK.
Ben left London returning to his native Bristol, and started teaching harmonica at Red Maids School, St Ursula’s, and Colston Girls School, he also ran a couple of harmonica evening courses and a blues band workshop each week at the Folk House. After a year or so he added some state schools having joined Bristol and BaNES Music Services.
Pretty soon he was working five days a week and getting exhausted without earning enough so he went independent around 2001 and took on a bunch of new schools.
Luckily a couple of ex-students approached him and asked if they could do some teaching so he trained them up and handed over some schools to them and took on some more to keep him busy, pretty soon he was working five days a week again taking on and training more prospective teachers.
Having topped 600 students, 10 teachers and 40 schools at times and made some classic mistakes along the way he realised he needed a Management Team to help run HarpsCool and to help the business to grow organically. The plan was to introduce more people to playing the harmonica by taking on more schools and more teachers and to also increase the instruments we teach at a future date.
Our experience and expertise together with our proven lead generation strategies is one of the main reasons for our continued growth. We are now in a position to expand our operation further through a franchise network of individuals.
HarpsCool - products and services
The core Business is teaching primary school children how to play the harmonica in small groups of six for thirty minutes once a week.
Other products and services include:
- Whole Class teaching
- Secondary school teaching
- Private school teaching
- Adult Education
- Early years music
- Birthday Parties
- Transitional workshops for Y2/3 and Y6/7
- School staff team-building workshops
- After School Clubs
- Holiday Clubs
- Merchandising
- Festivals
Please note that all these 'Other Products' are not represented in the income figures shown and can more than double the income of the business.
