Posts Tagged ‘Family Members’

A Good Graduation Ceremony Both Attracts And Keeps Students

Making your martial arts promotion ceremonies meaningful and memorable is an effective way to both keep and attract students.

Graduation night is a concept I picked up from observing successful school owners from around the country. When I started my first school, I tried to network with and visit as many successful school owners as I could, both to exchange ideas and to observe their “best practices” in action.

One thing I observed was that, in many of the most successful schools, they used belt promotions as a means of both increasing their retention and to promote their programs. For retention purposes, nothing beats getting the family members of your students involved and giving them an opportunity to see their loved one in action.

In addition, this is also a powerful incentive for your students to perform well and stay committed to their training, because they want to be able to “show” their family how they are progressing in their martial arts training.

Likewise when it comes to attracting new students, there are few things more powerful than third-party endorsements. And, the best third-party endorsements are those people can witness with their own eyes. As they say, “Seeing is believing”. Well, when friends of your students see them getting recognition for their hard work, and enjoying doing their martial art, it is a powerful recruiting tool for your school.

Holding regular scheduled graduation celebration events where students are ENCOURAGED to invite their friends is a great way to achieve both of the above objectives. Here’s how… 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 »

Last month I wrote to you about planning your classes out for the new year ahead of time. This will ensure your classes are exciting, that you have less work and stress next year, and that you have more time to focus on enjoying teaching. In short, planning out your entire year’s worth of lesson plans ahead of time will make you more effective as a teacher. Planning for your marketing in the new year is no different, and in fact I’d say it takes an even higher priority than planning your classes. Why? It’s putting the horse before the cart… no students – no classes! So, let’s look at how you can plan your marketing cycle out for the year, based around the marketing approach that I teach all my coaching clients to use to build their enrollments rapidly.

Planning The Cycle…

Remember last month when I explained how to break your curriculum up by year, quarter, and month? We’re going to do roughly the same thing with our marketing plan, but we need to take other factors into consideration – namely:

• Seasonal swings in inquiries and enrollments -
• Seasonal “windows of opportunity” for certain markets and age groups -
• Seasonal and holiday promotions -

Now, let’s just take the first quarter of the year… we obviously have the New Year holiday to kick things off… the opportunity here is to attract adults who are looking to lose weight and get in Read the rest of this entry »

Scholarships

If you’re like me, you started teaching in order to help people, not to become the Donald Trump or Bill Gates of the martial arts industry. Because of this, even after I got some common sense on the realities of what I needed to charge to feed my family and keep my school open, I still wanted to be able to reach under-privileged kids and lower-income adults with my services. Read the rest of this entry »