

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Brink.
Chris, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
In September of 2012, my wife, Anna and I, found out we were pregnant with our 1st child, a baby girl. I was playing in a full-time band, traveling the country, but was beginning to feel the need to settle down and enter in to a more “local” source of employment. In order to make our family a priority. Being on the road most of the time was not where I wanted to be with a baby coming. Five months later, in January 2013, we both decided it was best, for our family, for me to come off the road, away from traveling, and into the unknown.
We had no idea what we were supposed to do or where we were supposed to do it. At this point, Anna was five months pregnant, and I was without a consistent job. My fears were growing, but still felt and knew that God had something for us in the unknown. The very month I stepped away from traveling, I began offering music lessons at Legacy Community Academy, where my wife was currently teaching Kindergarten. LCA was kind enough to allow me to walk in and begin offering piano and guitar lessons to any of their students who wanted to do so.
The response initially was not overwhelming. I think, the first month, I was teaching two students. After the second month, I think we may have been up to five or so. Despite the humble number of students early on, Anna and I both felt a huge peace about me teaching those students.
We felt like it was greater than what we could see, and that God was going to do something incredible, greater than anything we could have imagined. Over the next several months, we began to see substantial growth. By the time our daughter, Emsleigh, was born in May, we were up to around twenty or so students and were getting more and more excited about what we were doing. Our constant motif was that we needed to value the families of our students just as much as the music we were teaching. As we continued to make this a priority, we continued to see growth. Even over the course of the summer when students are normally taking time off, we experienced incredible growth. Month by month, we were getting closer to the point where I needed additional teachers to handle the workload. This led us to dream about beginning a music school.
As we were dreaming and thinking about what could be, we began meeting with some influential people in our lives to help us shape what our vision would look like. A few words came to the forefront that would help us establish our vision for Rooted: Community, Family, Rooted and Legacy. We officially opened the doors to Rooted Music Coaching in August of 2014, starting with just four coaches and fifty students. In the Spring of 2017, we launched Rooted Music Online, where students from not just around the country, but around the world are now learning with us in an online format.
As we head into the Fall of 2020, almost six years since we began, we now are approaching two-hundred students coming in weekly for lessons with our coaches and close to two thousand students learning with us in an online format. Our vision is for our students to be surrounded by an incredible community of other musicians, who are both challenging and encouraging them, creating a flourishing community of musicians!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No road to success or even towards building something you believe in is ever easy or without challenge. I think the way we view these challenges and obstacles is the key. But one of the biggest challenges was simply saying, “Yes” to the calling we had. It meant leaving the only job I had ever known and stepping into a completely new area of employment when we had a child currently on the way.
Even while not knowing where money was going to come from to pay bills during this period of unknown, I firmly believed that this was what I was called to do in this time and season. I believed that God had called us into this and that despite challenging times, He would take care of us all along the way.
In the early days and years of getting a business up and running, especially at a young age, finances are never easy. There are always more bills and expenses to cover than you really know what to do with. All I can say is that God has been incredibly faithful in this area as well.
I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to constantly prepare and gain data and info to know what might lie ahead and work to prepare for it. But the best thing I could do at the end of each day, was to rest, have faith and trust that God would be faithful to us. Not that I didn’t have a role to play in working hard, but that I could rest in the fact that I would do the best job that I could and leave the results and worrying up to Him.
I’d love to say that I exemplified this every step of the way, but the truth is I didn’t. There were days when I doubted and thought about shutting everything down. But, when I would give those emotions the chance to get out of my head, voice them and really think through it all, I knew I had to continue to press on and lean in to what I needed to do.
Rooted Music Coaching – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Rooted Music Coaching is a music school designed to help students learn to play the music they love on the instrument they love. One of the biggest differentiators is that our coaches go above and beyond to really care for and even sometimes mentor the students. We recognize that we have a big role in these students lives… Have a half hour or more time slot every single week with most of our students is a significant amount of time to not only teach them about music, but to pour into them. We want to encourage and care for them, helping them see recognize the value they have and the uniqueness that make them special. For us, music is a passion and teaching it is a means to and end… The end is not for these students to become incredible players, but to become to understand their value and worth and to live their lives in a state of confidence, knowing that they are loved and known in a community of people who support them!
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
In the future, we are looking to expand out into more locations around the city of Atlanta as well as increase the size of our online presence in order to help as many as we can who are not able to be here in person.
Contact Info:
- Address: 11940 Alpharetta Hwy, Suite 121
Alpharetta, GA 30009 - Website: http://www.rootedmusiccoaching.com/studio
- Phone: 470-289-1291
- Email: admin@rootedmusiccoaching.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rootedmusiccoaching/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rootedmusiccoaching
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