Posts Tagged ‘Complacency’

Knowing and Doing the Basics is the Key to Martial Arts Business Success

Do you have your basics down? Not your martial arts basics, but your business basics. Find out by reading this article.

Do you have your martial arts business basics down?

You know – those top priority concepts, skills, and tasks that are essential to running a successful martial art school?

Maybe you haven’t given much thought to what those are… but if you’ve read Small Dojo Big Profits, you know about the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s Principle).

Pareto believed that eighty percent of your results come from just twenty percent of your efforts, and I’ve found this to be true in my own businesses.

That’s why it’s so important to know what those “20% activities” are. Once you do, you can focus in on those activities, and cut out most of the extraneous stuff. By doing so, not only will you become more productive, but you’ll also have more time away from your school.

So, let’s examine the “basic foundation” of running a successful martial arts school, and then we can look at which daily tasks and goals we need to focus on to leverage our workday and maximize our effectiveness.
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Don’t Get Too Comfortable With Your Success – A Small Amount of Worry Is A Healthy Thing

"Do it now!" is Brian Tracy's favorite maxim, and mine as well. And, I would also add, "Plan for it now!" - read this article to find out why.

One of the most difficult truths to convey to instructors is the fact that complacency will destroy your business.

I very nearly learned this lesson the hard way a few years after opening my first school. When I opened that school, the main challenge I faced was overcoming the negative impressions previous schools had left on the local community.

However, after about six months I was able to develop a positive reputation as an honest school that provided quality martial arts instruction. I enjoyed a period of a few years in which I was the sole full-time school in the area.

Yet, this period was to be short-lived as two chains (one local, one national) opened branch locations in my town in the following years. And, it caught me completely by surprise.

Ah, complacency. It can sneak up and hamstring you if you’re not careful. Let’s examine what we need to do to stay on our toes without going crazy with worry.
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Efficiency, Sanity, And Profitability Go Hand In Hand

Your profitability and sanity rely on how efficiently your school is run. Setting up your school to be low-stress early on is a sure way to maintain both.

Running a martial arts school can easily become a high-stress nightmare for new instructors. At first when you just have a few students, it’s a piece of cake. However, once you start growing beyond a few dozen students the enormity of managing a school can sneak up on you, until one day you wake up and realize, “I have no life outside my school!”

Well, running a high-stress school is a quick path to instructor/owner burnout, and a good way to ruin your business. Stress and fatigue leads to burnout, burnout leads to complacency, and complacency will soon lead to an empty floor.

I’d like to help you avoid all that. Here’s how to avoid burnout by setting your school up to be low maintenance from the very beginning. Read the rest of this entry »