Posts Tagged ‘Cash Flow’

Once You Fill Your School, You Have to Work to Keep It Full

There are easier ways to keep students in your school than joint-locking them in the parking lot.

As I’ve said many times, when you’re starting a new martial art school (or any business) your first priority is building revenue. Cash flow is what runs a business and what keeps it running. Without cash flow your business simply will not grow.

Now, building cash flow is a function of marketing and sales. We market to attract new prospective clients, and then use effective sales tactics to enroll them in our programs. Simple, right?

However, one thing many school owners overlook is retention systems. Retention systems allow you to keep the cash flow that you have, so you aren’t spinning your wheels by taking one step forward and two steps back in growing your school.

I’ve seen this happen many times with new school owners as well as with experienced but under-performing school owners who begin implementing my recommended marketing practices in their business. If they don’t have quality-control and retention systems in place to handle the sudden influx of students, they’ll have a very hard time keeping those students they worked so very hard to get, and that’s a crying shame. Read the rest of this entry »

Speed Kills…

Sometimes you're better off taking your bike instead of the express route... especially when it comes to growing your school. Move too fast, and the results can be disastrous.

In the past six months, out of the hundreds of site members we have, I’ve had just three site members contact me to tell me they were either closing their schools or scaling back on their operations…

Although this is an extremely low percentage of failure – especially during an extended recession – I believe that it will be instructive to examine reasons why these schools didn’t make it, in order that we can all avoid making the same mistakes.

In each case, these folks were new school owners or instructors who were in the early stages of launching a school. In two of the three cases, the instructors were teaching in part-time locations, yet they both cited a lack of cash-flow as the reason for their having to “close” their schools. (Note: In the third case, the instructor lost his lease and couldn’t find another suitable location within his budget – a reason totally beyond his control.)

What went wrong here? Upon further probing, the reason in each case was made plain. In their impatience with starting a new business, they just moved ahead too fast and it killed their schools – a very common mistake. This is something I’ve had experience with in the past myself, and which led to my developing the Small Dojo Big Profits method of starting a martial arts school.

Now, before I go on here let me state that there’s no shame in making mistakes when you’re starting a business. Believe me, every successful business owner can rattle off a least two or three major mistakes they made when they were first starting out. The only shame is in not learning from your own mistakes or from those of someone else, which is why you should read this article carefully to avoid these very common mistakes. Read the rest of this entry »

How To Become A Top School By Focusing On The “Big Five” Principles of Martial Arts School Management

Just like learning martial arts, launching and growing a school simply requires focusing on the correct "technique"

Running a martial arts school successfully is really pretty simple – it’s getting your school off the ground that is the hard part. Even so, the same principles that allow you to manage a school effectively are the very same principles needed to get you through your launch period.

Think it’s complicated? It’s really not… launching and growing your school is really just a matter of staying focused on the “Big Five” areas of martial arts school management.

No matter where you are in the business life-cycle, I recommend that every month you should review your current operations as they relate to each of the “Big Five” management principles, then pick one crucial thing to implement/improve upon in each area, and then repeat this process every month thereafter.

By the way, the “Big Five” areas are: Read the rest of this entry »