IAM1007- Founder Runs a Nationwide Children’s Music Company

Jamie Kolnick is a writer, mama, musician, philanthropist, and the founder/CEO of the nationwide children’s music company, “Jam with Jamie” which offers parties, classes, events, and education to ages 3 months- 10 years of age. Jamie is currently writing a comedic coming-of-age memoir about loss and lives in Miami with her husband, two boys, Zach and Evan, and a little girl on the way.

• CEO Hack: Meditation
• CEO Nugget: It's okay, it doesn't have to happen now and it's your journey
• CEO Defined: Being a part of a team and collaborating

Website: http://www.jamwithjamie.com/

http://www.jamiekolnick.com/

Instagram: @jamwithjamie
@jamiekolnick

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-kolnick-97737928/

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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00:15 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. And I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jamie Konick of Jam with Jamie. Jamie, it's awesome having you on the show.

00:51 – Jamie Kolnick

Thanks for having me. This is great.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely super excited to have you on and hear about all the awesome work that you're doing. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Jamie so you can hear about some of the awesome work that she's doing. Jamie is a writer, mama, musician, philanthropist, and the founder and CEO of the nationwide children's music company Jam with Jamie, which offers parties, classes, events, and education to ages 3 months and 10 years of age, to 10 years of age. Jamie is currently writing a comedic coming-of-age memoir about loss and lives in Miami with her husband, 2 boys, Zach and Evan, and has a little girl on the way. Congratulations. And Jamie, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:29 – Jamie Kolnick

Yeah, let's do it. Let's chat.

01:30 – Gresham Harkless

All right, let's make it happen. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:39 – Jamie Kolnick

Absolutely. I started Jam with Jamie, right? You want to hear about how we got that, the children's biz started. So I actually grew up in Miami where I am now. I just moved from New York to Miami. I grew up doing children's theater even as a kid myself so and I was always surrounded by music. I was always singing. My mom always made the joke that I came out of the womb not crying, but going la la la la. So that was her mom's joke throughout my life.

02:08 – Gresham Harkless

There you go.

02:09 – Jamie Kolnick

But I'm. So, you know, I've always been musical and I was working with kids, even as a kid myself in children's theater at a place called Actors Playhouse in Miami off Miracle Mile. And when I went to school at UT Austin for theater and then I moved to New York and I really wanted to be on Broadway and I was auditioning for everything and I ended up doing more children's theater. That's always been my niche. I guess I'm like a character actor. So I would end up doing these like funny roles and character actresses lend themselves to like big children's theater productions. Kids love, you know, the funny, kooky person that I was. And, then I was working as a musician at a couple of private clubs and also at preschools, teaching music to babies and toddlers.

And it was actually my mom's idea, who's since passed to start my own company called Jam with Jamie, to which I said, Mom, that's a horrible name. And she's like, No, Jamie, it's great. And I was like, Okay, fine jam with Jamie, let's do it. So I started off doing a party for like her friend's daughter, you know, the little connection there, her friend's daughter's first birthday. And I was so scared because I'm like, I've been playing guitar. I played the tar since I was like a junior in high school, but I was, you know, I would pick it up. I'd learn a couple of chords. I'd learn like the general by dispatch. I put it back down. I start playing the general by dispatch again. Then I play Run Around by Blues Travelers.

I'm sure there are a lot of guitar players out there that like have the three songs that they play really well. That was me for a very long time. Now I'm like the girl who plays guitar and sings, but like I don't sing that. I don't play guitar that well. I just mostly sing and perform well. You know, the guitar was like my prop, right? It was like, and for kids music, you need like, I don't wanna dumb down kid's music because there's incredible children's musicians. For me, it was like, okay, I need this to help me get through a show. And I was scared about it. When I went to this kid's first birthday party, I was terrified. I'm like, I was terrified about singing and playing guitar at the same time.

But you know, after 12 years now, obviously, things have settled down in that fear department. But that first party, I was like, the strumming, the coordinating of like the strumming and the singing, it was like, for me, that was like my hardest, the most challenging part of breaking into this comfort zone of performing with an instrument. Cause I had, through all my classes, I had like a guitarist or keyboard player behind me, even though I kind of knew guitar, I was like, okay, I can sing and I can be with the kids and I can hold the props. But like once I had, it was just me and I needed to accompany myself, it was terrifying. But you know, after having parties for a long time, that fear went away.

And I began to do an off-Broadway children's show with music by Lori Berkner, who's an incredible children's musician. I was booked up on the weekends, which meant I had this demand coming in for birthday parties but couldn't fulfill the demand. So I started hiring more people in the New York area. And then when I began to do that, I was like, oh, like, I don't have to go to every party myself. Like, I can hire people, train them, build a team. And I think I've always been in these entrepreneur woman groups throughout my whole like adult life. And I remember 1 of my goals was like, I want to expand the company. And I remember sitting there, I was just in New York, I want to expand the company.

And long story short, 12 years later, we're in, you know, 8 states nationwide, we have 50 performers working for the company. I have 2 kids, One on the way. I don't perform as much anymore. I mostly run the business alongside my best friend also, who is my operations manager, Aliyah, and another woman, Rhiannon, who I just hired to be our head of marketing and brand strategy. We have a great social media platform at this point and working with incredible companies. I'm just super grateful for all of the success that we've been able to have throughout from the start to now.

The relationships we've built and I just love meeting new people and making happy experiences for families, for schools, for companies, for you know, I mean we wherever you can imagine children's music is where we are. Anywhere from, from you know private buildings where the families need something to do in the buildings, we work with the buildings directly or malls. We're just starting up this great relationship with all of the malls in LA, the Caruso malls in LA. And then a bunch of schools, We place the music teachers in schools and we train them.

We have a homeschool program now because of the pandemic life. We have, actually created this incredible curriculum and homeschool program that has been thriving and we're doing enrichment programming, birthday parties, classes, and events. And it's nice to see people getting back to life a little bit with a lot of outside parties. But you know, people want to socialize people are ready to get back in the world. So It's nice to be a part of that and bring a joyous element to getting back into life and socializing.

07:41 – Gresham Harkless

I know you touched on a little bit of what you do and how you work with your clients. Could you take us through a little bit more of that? And what you think is what I like to call your secret sauce, the thing you either personally feel makes you unique or maybe the business as a whole and makes it unique and different to go back on something you touched on and that we always have.

07:55 – Jamie Kolnick

We're always going to have a challenge. You like that I talked about the journey. None of us got to this by waking up the next day. I think the secret is loving the journey, not needing to be results, like needing the result right then because most of our life, no matter what we're seeking to do is about the journey. If we don't like that part of the process and the discovery and the creation, then what are we doing right because like one thing everything can change in a second. So I think my secret sauce and its look, I don't always practice what I preach. I'm not perfect. I can, you know, some days be thinking so much about the future and so much about the past. But my goal is to appreciate the little things that are happening each day in that moment as much as I can.

And I'm sure people hear this all the time. They're like, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. But like, really, I mean, it seems like the reason why people repeat it over and over is because it's the secret sauce. It's like, that's it, you know, appreciate the journey, not the destination, because when you get to the destination, you're still gonna be wondering what's next. So, and that's always gonna be the case, at least for me. So I have to purposefully think about now, and how to be grateful for what's right in front of me.

09:22 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's absolutely huge. I'm definitely that person as well too, because I'm always like, you know, what's next after that? So you kind of have to make sure that you're, you know, I guess balancing that with, you know, being able to kind of appreciate that current moment. Do you feel, and I want to drill down a little bit more, do you feel like because you're so passionate about what you're doing, does that play a part in you being able to kind of understand and appreciate the journey as well?

09:44 – Jamie Kolnic

Yeah, I love what we do. I love what we do, but I also wear many hats. And I think that what makes me excited about my day-to-day life is that it's not just the founder and CEO of Jam with Jamie, I'm the creator of children's shows, writing music, it mom to 2 beautiful 3 and 5-year-old boys and a little girl I'm so excited for that's on the way. You know, it's, I mean, family, and it's friend, niece, all those things that make me is what I think helps me in those moments where I'm like, okay, Jamie, stop thinking about the future, stop thinking about the past, think about what you have right now. It's that like spark inside of me that I'm like, Oh, I love everything I'm doing right now. Like, and I, again, like sometimes I wake up and I'm like, wake up and I'm like, Oh, everything sucks.

You know, we all do. We're like, especially in pandemic at life, even when you, When I remind myself, it's nice to talk to you. I'm like, I have a lot of cool things that I'm doing, mom running the company, I'm writing a memoir that I've been working on for a few years now. It's cause we're not always doing everything at once. So we don't always, We don't think about all of the wonderful things that we're doing in our lives, but I'm sure if anybody listening were to think about, to write down a list of all the things that they have in their lives and all the hats that they wear, they would see too how that can maybe help them stay present because they can focus on.

okay, that's all the good that I have right now and who knows some of it could be lost in a second so that's where we can start to get that perspective without having to go through the crappy thing to gain that perspective, which I unfortunately, having lost my parents and my brother in the span of 10 years, I lost my brother in a car accident in 98. My dad to leukemia in 2004, and my mom to breast cancer in 2009. I've I'm very intimate with missing what I don't have anymore and taking for granted what I did have when I had it. So maybe that's another way that I've unfortunately gained that perspective to try and appreciate what's right in front of me because I know what it's like when it goes away.

12:07 – Gresham Harkless:

I definitely appreciate that. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that you think makes you more effective and efficient?

12:19 – Jamie Kolnick

Meditation for me.

12:21 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to ask you now for what I call CEO Nugget. So that could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. You might've touched on this, but it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell your younger business self.

12:32 – Jamie Kolnick:

I would tell my younger business self, it's okay. It doesn't all have to happen right now. No matter what happens, that is your journey and that is a good journey.

12:45 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that nugget. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Jamie, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:55 – Jamie Kolnick:

Being a CEO to me means being a part of a team and collaborating. The first word that came to mind is leader because I do think being a leader is really important as a part of that team. I'm constantly evolving and learning how to be the best leader that I can be. I think that we all thrive by looking at the people that are on our team as equals. No matter if they're running SEO or Instagram or whatever, I think that we all thrive by looking at the people who are on our team as equals. No matter if they're running SEO or Instagram or they're going out and the performers on our team or their whatever role there that we are on the team, we're all doing this together. So, I know that I'm running the ship, but I think all of our brains go together to make the ship go from point A to point B.

13:48 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that definition, Jamie. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get out of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

14:02 – Jamie Kolnick

Absolutely. Well, you can follow us on Instagram at jamwithjami. My personal Instagram is jamiekolnik if you want to see more of my children. I'm working on making that look more like a business page. Like this is like 10 years from now, you're gonna ask me, what would you have told yourself 10 years ago, what you would have done with your, what you would have done with your personal business, your Jamie Kulnick brand. I think it needs a little bit of work as far as that. But right now I only have time to post pictures of my children and I probably need to delegate that, right?

To get somebody to help me build my personal brand. As I write my memoir, which is a coming-of-age memoir about life and loss, and inspired by my mother who really wanted to write her own memoir. And as she passed away, expressed that to me, and I told her I would do it for her. And so this is an extension of her. I'm an extension of her. And it's become more my voice, but it's our story. And so I've been working on that. And you can follow along on, I mean, Instagram is really where I'm at. We only have time for so much, right? There's no tweeting going on, just Instagram.

And of course, you can email us through there as well and I'm just so grateful to have had this time with you this was this was a really wonderful conversation and it brightened up my day and it's nice to have these talks so I can we can remind ourselves of what we feel about our businesses, our lives, our perspective. Sometimes you get lost in everything and lose that perspective. So this was really a breath of fresh air.

15:44 – Gresham Harkless:

Yeah, Jamie, I truly appreciate you taking some time out. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well, but I think it also is a great reminder of how far we've come because sometimes we can get so focused on what needs to be done today that we forget that time that you were sitting in front of the, with the guitar, you know, in front of that first group of kids and being able to kind of see how far you've come and grow from that. But also too, like how strong your why is, it sounds like, you know, with your mom and the name of the company with the memoir and so many things that I'm sure she's definitely appreciative of everything you're doing. And of course, we appreciate your time as well. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:21 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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