BABE #345: KATE DEPALMA - Founder, Bold City Music Co.
Three years ago, Kate felt frustrated, defeated, and unhappy in her professional life. The job she held at the time (and the ones she held prior to it) didn’t fulfill her, and she was ready for a change. Coupling her passion for music and drive to enhance music education, Kate decided to open up Bold City Music Co., a non-judgmental, non-competitive learning space for people of all ages and abilities to pursue music education. Currently serving nearly 40 students (and counting), it’s safe to say Kate made the right move—for herself, her local community and beyond.
The Basics:
Hometown: Goshen, NY
Current city: Jacksonville, FL
Alma mater: University at Albany
Degree: B.A., Music
Very first job: Working for the local newspaper in my hometown. My job was to stick all of the address labels on the newspapers and then carry them to the post office.
Hustle: Founder/Owner/Music Instructor, Bold City Music Co.
The Interests:
Babe you admire and why?
Laurie Lee is a Jacksonville lawyer and one of the most badass people I know. She’s the lawyer who helped my partners and I incorporate our business last winter. She’s incredibly intelligent and really knows what she’s doing. She started The Legal Department. I can’t wait to work with her again.
What would you eat for your very last meal?
Almost definitely spaghetti and meatballs. (But they have to be really good meatballs.)
What’s something you want to learn or master?
I’ve always wanted to be a singer and front a band. I sing all of the time when I’m alone, and I think I have a pretty decent voice. Maybe I’ll give it a try someday.
The Hustle:
Tell us about your hustle.
I think most people running a small business have many different roles throughout their day. As the Founder/Owner/Music Instructor of Bold City Music Co., I spend the most time working with students—teaching lessons, planning curriculum, talking with parents on the phone, getting to know new students who may want to take lessons, etc. But I also spend a lot of time managing the boring tasks: bookkeeping, accounting, regulatory compliance, that kind of work. Those are way more stressful, because the consequences can be pretty severe if I make any mistakes, and those consequences can affect my partners too, but I think I’m pretty good at managing it. I’m also the janitor. My partners take care of the social media, general networking, marketing, website maintenance, and really everything that makes me uncomfortable. I think we’re very compatible. I also have to work side jobs off and on sometimes. I think a lot of people running startups have to do that. So, sometimes part of my BCMC hustle is allowing time for a side hustle while making sure I can still run my parts of the business.
What does your typical workday look like?
I don’t have a “typical” workday, but almost every morning begins with packing a lunch for my girlfriend and making several servings of coffee for myself. I try to create and maintain routines, but I rarely succeed. My workday is usually a lot of making calls and answering emails, keeping up with the bookkeeping, making (usually vain) attempts at completing larger and longer term items on the BCMC to-do list, managing students, trying to find new students, trying to find new programs for my current students to do, developing new curriculum, and eventually making my way to the classroom in the early afternoons where I then get to relax and be still for a while as I teach lessons to my students into the evening.
Have you always had a passion for music?
My dad is a musical guy and he comes from a musical family, so I’m sure that’s where I get all of this from. He had a bunch of instruments my brother and I were allowed to play with when we were young, and we had musical toys to play with too. I don’t have any memory of this, but my parents claim that as a toddler I used to march around my home, family in tow, singing this one song from “Barney.” As I sang, I would bash on whatever toy instruments we had lying around the house. Then, when I was around 5, I started bugging my parents to teach me how to play the violin. They decided I was too young to begin taking lessons at the time, but I kept asking about it and eventually they decided I was ready to get started. In the meantime, they got me and my brother small guitars to learn how to play. I still have that guitar! It stays in the classroom where my students get to learn and play on it. It’s a little beat-up now, but it’s very well loved. As for professional pursuit of music, I was in my second year of college when I chose to pursue music (and political science) academically. I ended up working as a TA for my university tutoring lower-level classes in music theory and administering ear-training exams. I also played in the university orchestra and chamber ensembles, played weddings and gigs with friends outside of class, taught violin lessons on the side, and eventually after college started getting hired to play and teach music.
Tell us about Bold City Music Co.
My girlfriend Laura and I were walking home from a date one night back in 2017. I was telling her about how much I hated my job at the time, and how much I hated all the other jobs I’d had before that. I was sick of not ever being able to make ends meet, no matter how hard I worked. I was also renting this tiny office as a practice space at night. After I finished ranting about my retail job, my girlfriend asked me, “So, what else would you rather do instead?” And I answered that I’d kind of had this idea in my head of maybe, someday, starting a music school. Her response was, “OK, so why don’t you just do that?” That’s when that spark went off—realizing I had a ton of ideas that could make music education a lot better for a lot of people. None of the details were clear, but I held on to an outline as Laura and I started working on BCMC together. It really helped that I didn’t have much to lose. I was broke, I didn’t like my job, and I didn’t think I’d be able to find a better job. So, I didn’t really feel like I was taking a huge risk. We used that office space as our first classroom (which we are still using now) and started a sole proprietorship under my name. A couple of years, another business partner (hey, Keri!) and an unbelievable amount of work and anxiety later, we are still holding on to that spark and that outline and slowly filling in those missing details a little more every day. Now, we have an incorporated business and almost 40 students. We’ve expanded from just one teacher for piano and violin lessons to multiple teachers and a whole array of instruments including brass and woodwinds. We also just kicked off our “Let’s Make Music!” program, which is a workshop series designed for young kids and their guardians to learn how to make music together.
Why is community involvement so important to your business?
Because we’re humans and it’s our job to connect with each other! We all have to exist on this planet together, so we’d all better get along with each other and help each other out. Also, my profession wouldn’t exist without community. Musicians need people to play with—rock bands, symphonic bands, marching bands, choirs, orchestras, symphonic orchestras, ensembles, circles, whatever you want to call them. As a musician, I do feel an obligation to help people feel better, so that’s part of it too.I try to build community involvement into as many BCMC programs as possible. It’s really important to me. I want my students to learn that we can all do things to connect with and help each other, and that when we work together we can all make a lot of people happier. One of the simplest ways I try to teach them this is through our food drives, which we run before every recital. It’s a really good way to teach even the youngest kids that some people don’t have enough food to eat and that we can all help feed people who are hungry. Some of our more advanced students now volunteer monthly at the Ronald McDonald House as part of their performance curriculum requirements. They perform for the residents, and this month they are also volunteering to teach some of the younger residents how to play easy songs on the piano. My students asked me if they could do this! I’m really proud of them for recognizing a need in their community and taking responsibility for filling it.
What’s been your biggest career milestone?
In December of 2018, we got a letter from our lawyer telling us we had successfully registered Bold City Music Co. as a business in the state of Florida. Laura was home with me, and we received and then read the letter together. I can’t explain how far out of reach a music school seemed up until that moment, ever since that first conversation we’d had together about my crappy retail job years prior. I was scared that I had no idea what I was doing and I thought I had made a huge mistake by even thinking I could actually start a real music school. All of those fears from when I was 15 and [felt like I was] not good enough, and again when I was in college and still not good enough were coming back. But receiving a real piece of paper from a real lawyer telling me that BCMC wasn’t just in my imagination anymore felt like the biggest achievement in the world. It was an almost unbelievable reward for everything we’d worked for since we first got the idea for a music school, and it made me more proud than I’d ever felt in my life. We actually started a music school. After I read that letter I just sat down on my couch and cried.
How has being a woman—and a member of the LGBTQ+ community—affected your professional experience?
My LGBTQ+ identity is much more challenging than my gender. I don’t hide or lie about my identity around my students, because I don’t want to teach them that some people need to hide who they really are. But I also won’t disclose any information about myself unless I am asked about it directly. I spend a lot of time working with a lot of different kinds of people, and a lot of them voice very strong opinions about “polarizing” topics. I have to evaluate what’s appropriate to say, when to keep my mouth shut to avoid unnecessary conflict, or whether my silence perpetuates a much bigger systemic problem during each conversation. Before I speak up, I have to decide whether my decision to speak is worth risking a loss of income from that student, which can really damage our small business. These decisions are all especially challenging when I feel personally targeted by anti-LGBTQ+ comments, and sometimes it’s really difficult not to let anger cloud my judgement. This has all gotten a lot easier since we became BCMC and openly pro-LGBTQ+, though, and the overwhelming majority of my daily interactions are with really wonderful people.
What’s the gender ratio like in your industry? Do you see it evolving?
I don’t know any specific ratios, and I’m sure a lot of statistics are probably at least a little inaccurate. But the music industry is packed with all kinds of insanely skilled, creative, and prolific women. We are wildly underrepresented and underpaid, but I think that this is improving. You can check out the creators and team members of She Shreds and Tom Tom. They do a ton of work to create inclusive and supportive spaces for women in our industry. And there are organizations like Girls Rock Camp Alliance creating supportive spaces for the next generation of musicians.
Career and/or life advice for other babes?
Nothing ever goes the way it was planned, and progress never unfolds in a way that makes any sense. I’m still trying to accept this. I think the best anyone can do is wake up every day and feel glad about everything and everyone we have in our lives. We can imagine everything we truly want for ourselves, and fill in all the little details like the people we’re with and the places we are and the things we’re doing. We can especially fill in what we feel like. Then we can just do our best to try to create little moments of those details in our reality every day.
Connect with Kate:
Facebook / Instagram / Personal IG / Email
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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