Success stories / Jennet Ingle
Jennet Ingle · The Invincible Oboist · Founding member
They say musicians can’t make real money. She built a business around everything she loves to do.
Meet the CEO
A professional oboist and teacher who built an online business that lets her lean toward what brings her joy.
Jennet Ingle is a professional oboist who performs as principal oboe, plays solo recitals and concertos, and founded The Invincible Oboist. She also makes and sells oboe reeds, runs a weekly Reed Club, hosts the podcast Crushing Classical, and wrote The Happiest Musician: How to Thrive in Your Creative Career.
She came out of conservatory expecting the one big orchestra job, a path guarded by gatekeepers with only a handful of openings in the country. Instead she built a portfolio career, first by accident and then very intentionally, and joined The CEO Collective® as a founding member in March 2020.
The goal
Stop building the parachute while falling. See the business clearly enough to organize it, track it and grow it, with more time for the creative projects she loves.
Before The CEO Collective®
Doing all right. Overwhelmed all the time.
01
A narrow definition of success
Conservatory taught one path: win an orchestra job or a tenured professorship. She reached the finals again and again among 50 to 70 players, and kept not quite getting the job.
02
A teaching model that broke her
Weekly private lessons with middle and high schoolers, every Tuesday at 4:15, five percent better each week, forever. In 2019 she lovingly sent all her private students on to other teachers.
03
Inventing everything from scratch
She didn’t see any other musicians building a business like hers, so she was reinventing the wheel, with no way to organize, track or tell whether her systems were working.
“Before I joined The CEO Collective, I was doing all right in my business, but I didn’t understand how to organize, how to track, how my systems were working, and I felt overwhelmed all the time.”
The 90 Day CEO Operating System® at work
What the system actually built for Jennet.
Jennet joined in the very first cohort, in March 2020, just as the pandemic began. The Collective helped her zoom out of the weeds and see that her business ran on the same principles as everyone else’s, so she could borrow solutions instead of inventing them.
Phase 01
From YouTube videos to a suite of programs
Instructional reed videos, made to answer customer emails, grew an audience, and Zoom let oboists from all over the world gather. Now she runs The Invincible Oboist, Zero to Reedmaker, a weekly Reed Club and Invincible Oboist Flow.
“I realized how joyful and how much fun it was to teach something that I know how to teach in a group.”
Phase 02
A CEO Date every Sunday
A weekly CEO Date, an extra one on the first of the month, and a plan a quarter at a time. The CEO Scorecard keeps her honest about building the business, not just working in it.
“Okay, I’ve been working this entire week, did I actually do anything for my business or was I just making reeds for people?”
Phase 03
Letting go of the graphics
Hiring a virtual assistant felt uncomfortable, so they started project by project. Now her assistant handles social media, landing pages and graphics, faster and better than Jennet could on her own.
“Handing off the graphics and social media postings of my business has been the most freeing thing ever in the world.”
In her own words
What it looks like when a musician sees herself as a CEO.
I used to feel like a good musician, and now I feel like a powerful leader, helper, coach and supporter of people, and a terrific musician. Everything I’ve been doing these last few years has been additive.
It felt like I was inventing the whole thing as I went along. But I came to realize that no, this is actually just a thing, and if I can zoom out, I can use solutions other people have come up with. That year in The CEO Collective was transformational.
I really think The CEO Collective was what let me see myself as a CEO. I still wear my CEO hat when I go running.
Before that, everybody in my circle was a musician, and everyone was buried in the same scarcity stuff. Everyone was freaking out when the pandemic hit and all the performances went away. Instead, I built an online empire.
I just keep leaning toward the things that make me happy and away from the things that don’t. The more I build the income streams so that financial stability exists, the easier it is to lean away from the things I don’t like.
What’s different now
Jennet’s biggest wins.
Result 01
Time back for creative projects
“I know what I’m supposed to be working on, I know how to do it, and I have so much more time to explore my creative projects.”
Result 02
A book for every creative
“Please, please, creative people and musicians, lean toward the parts of your career that bring you joy and develop those to where you can thrive and shine in the world from that place of abundance.”
Result 03
Saying no, from abundance
“I don’t drive for Holiday Pops concerts anymore. Because I’m coming from a place of abundance and not a place of scarcity anymore, it feels so different to me.”
Result 04
Investing in support
“Another thing I really gained from The CEO Collective was the idea that it is worth paying money to get the help, the support, the guidance, and the professional development that I need.”
Featured episode · Promote Yourself to CEO®
How the Happiest Musician Built a Predictably Profitable Business with Jennet Ingle
Jennet joins Racheal to talk about the portfolio career that replaced the one big orchestra job, how a niche YouTube channel about oboe reeds grew into a suite of online programs, and the CEO habits she still uses every week.
More member stories.
900 actors trainedElise Arsenault“We’ve brought 900 actors through this program since 2019. So many of them are award-winning narrators today.”Read her story ↗
Four books in 7 monthsAshley Jablow“What started as an idea in a wine bar in February became four books in my hands by October.”Read her story ↗
50% of clients from TikTokMegan Gersch“The structure gives me the baseline to come back to.”Read her story ↗You don’t have to choose between your art and a business that pays.
If you’ve been told your creative work can’t be a real living, The CEO Collective® is where you build one: a plan a quarter at a time, the habits that keep you on track, and a room full of people building alongside you.