“Building It” Fast Is Simply A Matter Of Following What Works In The Majority Of Successful Martial Art Schools…

Starting a martial art school is tough – and growing a martial art school is even tougher.

That’s why I spent a lot of time in my first school analyzing my operations and comparing them to what successful school owners did. I traveled and spent time with them, observing first-hand what they were doing to grow their schools.

From those observations, I compared what successful instructors were doing, and settled on the activities that were most common among the schools I observed…

It’s not like I kept a bunch of data tables and graphs; it was nothing so complicated as all that. Basically, if I saw a lot of successful instructors doing something, I figured it was important and made note of it.

Then, I made sure I was doing those exact same tasks and activities in my own school on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Now after 15 years of doing this, I’m able to boil down the key elements to martial arts business success into a very simple formula and very thorough checklists, ensuring that I’m hitting on all eight cylinders in my martial art school operations.

This month, I’ve decided to share that formula and most of those checklist items with you in the remainder of this article. Want to hit 100 martial arts students fast, and then continue that growth? Read the rest of this entry »

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Multiple Marketing Methods Spell Lead Generation Success For Smart School Owners

I always talk about multiple source lead generation, and I often say I don’t care where a lead comes from. I felt I needed to provide some clarification on this, so I don’t give the impression that you don’t have to track your lead sources.

What I mean is that I’ll take a lead from ANY source – the lead doesn’t know where it came from. (I’m about to get off on a tangent, but bear with me here because this will be highly instructive.)

Why You Need To Cultivate Multiple Lead Sources

Here’s the deal – relying too much on one lead source is a serious mistake.

Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

Skip The Middle-Man And Go Directly To Your Local Consumers

Direct marketing is an area of marketing that can be very successfully used by savvy martial art school owners. But just what exactly is “direct marketing”?

There are two qualifying characteristics that distinguish direct marketing from other forms of marketing:

1. It is delivered directly to the consumer via mail, email, telemarketing, or other direct means -
2. It is focused on “call-to-action” marketing; in other words, the marketing piece focuses on getting the consumer to take a specific action immediately -

Direct Marketing For Martial Art Schools

For our purposes, we typically focus on three forms of direct marketing:

• fliering and door hanger distribution,
• email,
• and direct mail marketing.

Fliering houses, distributing door hangers, and direct mail all are pretty much in the same category as far as direct marketing goes.

However, I believe door hangers are the superior method. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

Learning What Triggers Buying Decisions Can Mean The Difference Between Failure And Success

Do you know why people buy?

It seems like such a simple question, one that most people would glibly answer, “Because they want stuff.”

True, but that really merely scratches the surface. In truth, people buy for a multitude of reasons, but what triggers a consumer to make a buying decision…

Well, that’s a whole different story. And, if you can identify and leverage buying triggers, you can greatly increase your chances of growing and running a thriving martial arts school for years to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Colors To Strengthen Your Local Brand And Unify Your Business Image

Colors are strongly tied to emotion, and this is just as true for marketing as it is for the way you decorate your school.

• Strong, vibrant colors convey energy and excitement.
• Warm colors and earth tones convey a sense of peace and calm.
• Green conveys healing and well-being. It can also be associated with wealth and money, at least here in the United States.
• Black is foreboding, but can convey strength (plus, young men think it’s cool).
• White backgrounds are easier to read with dark text. Light text on a dark background is much harder to read and remember (this has been proven in studies regarding how people learn and retain information).

You should consider your colors carefully when decorating your school or creating a marketing piece. The right colors and layout can go a long way to improving your results when it comes to attracting new business.

Decorating Your School

Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing Plan For the Months of March and April, 2010: Seasonal Promotion – Easter

1. Print Ads: Keep placing your ads wherever they are working, and pull them from any publication that fails to pull leads.

And just because no one signed up that called last month, it doesn’t mean you should pull the ad! All it means is that you need to work on your phone and enrollment skills.

Remember, you are going to enroll about half your leads if you’re an expert salesperson, about 25% if you aren’t. So, base your ROI (return on investment) on your average numbers, and if you got enough calls to cover the cost of the ad the same month (from initial payments on new members) then keep running the ad. Read the rest of this entry »

Chances Are It’s What You’re Not Doing That’s Hurting Your Business…

Let me start this article by stating up front – the following may sound like one big long pitch for my stuff, but hear me out. I’ve advised hundreds of martial arts instructors over the last Read the rest of this entry »

How to Increase Your Business Dramatically Without Increasing Your Overhead

In Jay Abraham’s excellent book, Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, Mr. Abraham claims that there are only three ways you can increase your business:

1. By increasing your number of clients -
2. By increasing the average size of the sale per client -
3. By increasing the number of times clients return and buy again.

So, let’s take a look at Mr. Abraham’s observation above, and see how exactly we can apply that to the business of teaching martial arts. Read the rest of this entry »

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Wanna’ Crush Your Competition?

Crushing your competition right out of the gate is a hard thing to do…

Especially if you’re opening your school in a tough market with lots of competitors.

Even so, there is only one nearly surefire way I know of to crush your competitors…

And that’s to compete on a totally different playing field than the ones they are running their businesses on…

Here’s how you can do exactly that, and secure your school’s financial future by carving out a niche in your market that is uniquely yours and yours alone. Read the rest of this entry »

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Marketing Plan for the Months of February/March

1. Print Ads: If you’re running ads in print publications and they’re working, keep it up. Also, start considering hiring a door-to-door flier company to target area neighborhoods around your school with the fliers from this month.

Or, get your leadership team out on a Saturday morning and make an event out of it… offer a prize for the first team to distribute 100 fliers on doors (send them out by twos, make sure an adult is in each team). Take them all out for an inexpensive meal after.

2. Banner Sign: Put your 3 foot by 8 foot banner sign in front of your school… Read the rest of this entry »

A Confused Mind Never Buys…

Recently, a MASAI member asked me how many sheets of information he should hand out to his new students and prospects.

Apparently he’d been told by an “expert” that he needed to hand out a ton of information to new students, ostensibly to increase the likelihood that his prospects would enroll…

Well, if you’ve been reading my materials for any length of time, you know that I hold a strong dislike for unnecessary complexity in any shape or form in any process – be it in business systems, martial arts technique, or teaching methods.

And, the above situation is no exception. Let me explain why I think overloading new prospects with information is a mistake, and allow me to show you how to make your enrollment process much, much simpler.

Read the rest of this entry »

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If You Schedule It Without Promoting It, They Probably Won’t Come

Most intelligent and thinking school owners know that the more services they offer their clients, the more opportunities it creates to increase their school’s income.

Think about it… your students are going to spend money on “extras” each month, anyway. They may as well be spending that money at your school.

The thing is, it can be quite frustrating to plan, schedule, and host a special event, only to have a poor turnout. And, it’s even worse when you lose money. However, there’s a simple way to make certain every special event you host makes a profit… Read the rest of this entry »

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A Built In Retention Program

While some schools are resistant to the idea of having an elite membership in their studio, the fact remains that many of your students will jump at the chance to belong to such a program.

The reason is that you already have students who are extremely dedicated and motivated to train… so why not offer them a program that recognizes and rewards them for their commitment?

Black belt club is a perfect way to do this. And, before you get worked up into a tizzy, let me clarify by saying that the way I set up my BBC has nothing to do with selling belts. Instead, it’s all about keeping the program quality high and rewarding good students.

Here’s how I do it: Read the rest of this entry »

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Lesson Plan? What The Heck’s A Lesson Plan?

The most common response I get from instructors when I ask whether they use lesson plans is:

“Naw, not really… mostly I just wing it.”

Winging it may seem like the thing to do when you’re an experienced instructor, or when the thought of one more weekly chore seems as daunting as squaring off against Fedor with both hands tied behind your back. (What do they feed that guy, anyway? Oh, that’s right – other MMA fighters…)

But, a return to the venerable, oft-maligned lesson plan can greatly improve your ability to teach more effectively… and to do so on a consistent basis.

Let’s look at some reasons why lesson plans are a must if you want to grow your school: Read the rest of this entry »

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How to Create a Lead Generating Machine In Under 90 Days… (Almost) For Free!

Most everyone asks me about martial arts marketing; or more specifically, how to get more students into their school. This seems to be a universal problem for school owners across the country.

For the majority of school owners, the main challenge with regards to getting more students is getting your programs in front of enough people (in other words, lead generation).

This is typically due to one of two issues:

1. A lack of or inadequate amount of marketing -
2. Ineffective marketing -

More often than not, with new school owners they aren’t marketing enough due to lack of funds with which to do so. Ten years ago, I’d have told any such school owner to get out and do some flyering and door hangers, an extremely time-intensive (but usually very effective) task.

Thankfully, we now live in an internet age where everyone has a world of potential customers at their fingertips. The question is, how do you reach them?

Well, that’s what this article is going to explain. Read the rest of this entry »

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