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Suburban music schools have not historically been fertile ground for Silicon Valley-inspired entrepreneurs, but the Stormer brothers saw an opportunity.
“We are here to make our world a more musical place,” Blue Mountains classical guitarist Phil Stormer told The Business Breakthrough Podcast in 2024.
Brothers Phil and Joel Stormer had ambitious plans: They hosted a lavish boat party – “yachty by nature” – on board the 75-foot Aquarius in 2023, then declared they wanted 20 Stormer Music schools by the end of 2024.
But what started as Australia’s first music school empire has now disintegrated, leaving teachers unable to pay rent, parents owed money, struggling tutors forced to buy music books and non-verbal NDIS students without vital services.
International School of Music veteran Ros Thrift accused Stormer Music of stealing from staff and parents.
“You don’t go to a restaurant and eat all their food and say I’m not paying for the meal,” she said.
Phil Stormer told this masthead on Friday he was “very, very sorry” for not being able to pay employees and refund customers.
“I deeply regret the harm and hurt that we’ve caused, and we have been actively working to rectify the situation as much as we can,” he said. “Our heart has always been to see musicians flourish and do well.”
The Stormer brothers blossomed out of a family crisis. Their father, suburban lawyer Terence Stormer, was struck off as a solicitor in 2011 for taking money from a client, misleading a Law Society investigation and maintaining an “improper lien of trust funds”. The Administrative Decisions Tribunal found he painted himself as a victim, took little responsibility for his actions and engaged in the “most serious class of disgraceful or dishonourable” conduct for a solicitor.
In the midst of their father’s legal despair, the brothers turned the family home in the Blue Mountains into a music school, while hosting stages at the Glenbrook Village Festival and the Blaxland Explorers Day festival. They were quickly overwhelmed by students coming in “all day, every day”.
From the foot of the mountains, Stormer Music grew east towards Sydney, with franchises in Kogarah, Parramatta and Penrith, and one in Killarney Heights that licensed branding and curriculum from the International School of Music. It also grew south to Victoria, where it opened branches in Kilsyth and Ringwood.
In 2024, Phil Stormer said he had been inspired by the E-Myth Revisited, Michael E Gerber’s Silicon Valley treatise, which urged entrepreneurs not to spend too much time actually running the business. “Build a system that works, and then find people to run it,” Gerber wrote.
But as it expanded rapidly, Stormer Music systems were unable to cope, leaving students stranded without classes and staff confronted by furious parents, while the brothers focused their attention on acquiring new sites.
“Until recently, we were quite successful,” Phil Stormer said on Friday. “We managed to become the largest music school in Australia. I couldn’t even tell you how many lessons we’ve done.”
Now Stormer Music’s staff and students are angry, accusing the brothers of fleecing wages and fees and coaching them to lie to parents and other employees.
Piano teacher Stella Mountain taught at Killarney Heights for years before the Stormer brothers closed the branch at the end of last year.
She says that when she confronted Phil about parents’ concerns about not receiving their promised refunds, he told her, “listen to them and make them feel heard, and say what they want to hear without actually promising anything”.
“At the end of this conversation, we were like, ‘whoa, he said a lot, but he literally just laid his own move on us’,” Mountain said.
Mountain says she is still owed $4472 in payments and superannuation from her work at the Killarney Heights school. Her sister, Claudia, says she is owed $1621. Both would go months without pay as they tried to keep their classes afloat. For scores of university students, young tutors and visa holders employed by Stormer Music, that meant the difference between paying rent and buying groceries.
“I know the recent delays in both communication and pay have been frustrating, and I want to take responsibility for that,” Phil wrote to staff in December. “It hasn’t been an easy period. A combination of factors have placed significant pressure on us these last few years.”
Phil laid the blame on the cost of living, business regulations and accounting errors. He said he had taken “corrective action” to stabilise the business and he pledged to implement a structured payment plan to pay back staff.
He also told teachers who had chosen to take a “work pause” – because they had not been paid – they had created “a significant administrative and financial burden”.
“We weren’t saying you have to work for free,” Phil said on Friday. “We were trying to say it would help us.”
Five months on, Stella and Claudia have still not seen a cent.
“It’s just the lack of respect we were shown,” Claudia said. “We would do end-of-term concerts unpaid. I would have to buy students’ books with my own money.”
Phil Stormer rejected claims that teachers had had to buy their students’ books. He said he had not been drawing a wage from the business while he tried to pay back staff and parents.
“We have paid lots of people, and we have struggled to pay lots of people as well,” he said. “The reason that we’ve tried to continue what we’re doing is in the spirit of making good on our obligations.”
From 16 Stormer Music locations in NSW and Victoria in March 2024, only two now remain.
Former teachers, including Juan Torres, an NDIS music therapist who worked at the brothers’ schools in Kogarah, Bankstown and Gregory Hills, say they are owed significant amounts.
Torres specialises in music therapy classes for kids with autism, ADHD, schizophrenia and depression, including sessions that have helped some non-verbal children start to speak.
“It’s essential for them,” he said. “Parents would say to me, ‘with occupational therapy, he doesn’t want to do anything, but with music, it’s totally different. He wants to participate, he wants to dance, he wants to sing’.”
In a claim lodged with the small claims tribunal, Torres says he is owed $15,000. Stormer has launched a counter-claim, saying Torres owes them up to $50,000, alleging forms he filled out for therapy sessions “failed to meet professional standards” and accusing him of stealing their NDIS clients.
“It’s had a huge impact on me,” Torres says. “I was worried I was about to lose my apartment and my car.”
While Stormer Music teachers struggled to pay the rent, the brothers continued plotting their expansion.
In August 2024, a month after a staff member complained they had been paid only half their wages, the brothers acquired Haworth Guitars, one of the few Australian music stores listed among the top 100 globally by the National Association of Music Merchants, a US-based trade body.
It has not been going well.
Dozens of reviews since the takeover show customers waiting months for guitars they have ordered, as well as unanswered emails and missed Christmas gifts.
“Everything people have warned about is true,” one reviewer wrote in February.
“Only shop here if you want to pay for fresh air,” said another.
Phil told the Business Breakthrough Podcast that he took every review as an opportunity.
“I’d rather be hated than irrelevant,” he said.
The podcast was hosted by Glenn Haworth, a business coach who sold Haworth Guitars to the Stormer brothers and has since seen the shop’s reputation – named after his family – plummet.
“I feel for anyone that’s involved with it,” said Haworth. “Obviously, there are some people who have been quite affected by it, and our name has copped it. I’ve always thought they’re good guys who’ve had a crack. I don’t believe it was ever their intent to try to rip anyone off.”
Michael Kasif, a franchisee, puts the total damage from his experience with Stormer Music at $350,000 after he pulled out of an agreement because he believed the business had failed to support its franchisees and that its systems were dysfunctional.
“It’s not just the fact that we’re dealing with loss and stress. They pretty much threatened to take our livelihood away. At the time, we thought our lives were over,” he says.
Stormer Music has launched a counterclaim, saying that Kasif and other franchisees had walked out on a five-year agreement and that they have taken the company’s model and started their own music businesses.
“I think they view themselves as these entrepreneurs,” said Kasif. “But it’s quite disgusting when you realise that they’re happy to just cut corners wherever they can.”
Former Stormer Music human resources manager Jacob Nicastri says he was sacked after raising concerns about the company overcharging NDIS students and staff not being paid wages and superannuation. Stormer Music denied the claims.
“It was massive financial and emotional pressure,” Nicastri said.
“A year after my termination, they’ve assessed the work that I’ve done, and they’ve decided that there were periods I wasn’t working, and I now owe them double what I’m trying to sue them for. This is their standard tactic across the board.”
The 38-year-old accused the company of exploiting its staff and failing to respond to their concerns.
“I really reject that,” Phil Stormer said. “This has been my life’s work for 20-plus years, and I show up every day. The last few years have been some of the most difficult times to run a business I’ve ever experienced.”
Nicastri, Torres and Kasif were first featured on A Current Affair in October last year, hoping public pressure would force the company to pay staff, parents and students what they were owed.
Instead, without providing evidence, Stormer attacked ACA’s reporting.
“Like all things ACA, it was very one-sided, contained lies and was done to tell the story they wanted to,” Stormer Music wrote in an email to staff after the story aired. “They even showed up at our studio a few times to chase us down. While they did offer us a chance to comment, we didn’t feel they would present our side fairly, so we declined.”
Parents of Stormer Music students say they have had enough.
“The fact that they have been able to get away with it for so long, I’m shocked,” said Vivienne Ni, whose seven-year-old son took piano lessons at Killarney Heights and who has not received the promised refund since the school closed in November.
From a group of about 60 families owed a refund for Killarney Heights term fees paid in advance, only one has received it at the time of publication – one of the reporters on this story. Families were promised a refund within 10 days.
NSW Fair Trading said it was investigating Stormer Music. “It would not be appropriate to comment further during an active investigation,” a spokesperson said.
“The first operator had it for 20 years, and it grew like a tree,” said Thrift, the International School of Music founder.
“And then these people took over, and I think they thought they were going to make a zillion dollars by running a music school empire. It was just a nightmare from the get-go.”
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