Posts Tagged ‘Martial Arts Industry’

Marketing Summer Programs

Although it’s a commonly accepted fact in the martial arts industry that schools often experience a slump in business during the summer months, let me make one point clear to you:

Slumps are for school owners who don’t plan ahead.

This is something I wised up to early on in my career of starting and running martial arts schools. Whether we’re talking summer slumps, holiday dry spells, or spring break blues… if you plan ahead you’ll often find hidden opportunities that you never knew existed. Read the rest of this entry »

Honesty And Integrity As A Central Approach To Customer Service In The Martial Arts Industry

Many years ago when I started training in the martial arts, customer service was definitely not a closely examined issue. You paid your tuition, attended class, practiced at home, and that was enough. From the student’s perspective, as long as the school was open and classes were held as scheduled, all was well. And, from the instructor’s perspective as long as the students paid tuition on time and showed up for class, he or she was satisfied with the arrangement. However, for better or for Read the rest of this entry »

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Management Videos

Strategic Planning for 2010 and Beyond Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Massie

Quantitative Retention Strategies

Quantitative retention strategies consist of concrete actions that can provide a directly measurable increase in your enrollments. In other words, you do retention strategy “A”, and you a measurable increase in your enrollments numbers for the following period that you can directly attribute to that strategy.

I suggest that you don’t experiment with these one at a time, but instead that you implement them all at once. The reason is that singly they may not make that much of an impact, but cumulatively they will make a huge difference in your retention.

Without further ado, here are three tried-and-true quantitative retention strategies you can implement in your school. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Massie

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The biggest challenge new and established school owners face is getting new students. The thing most martial arts instructors fail to realize is that, once they open their doors, they are no longer just in the business of teaching martial arts. Now that they’ve decided to open a studio, they have an added responsibility to keep their doors open by attracting new business.

Although many instructors fail miserably in their marketing efforts, it’s often more due to a lack of planning than a pure lack of marketing know-how. Instead of going over the basics of marketing (you can read that by picking up any good marketing book), instead I am going to tell you how to plan your efforts so you get the most from your hard work and money. Here’s how: 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 »

As a martial arts school owner, it is important that you understand the “why’s” and “how’s” of hiring and training staff. I don’t want you to make the mistake that many school owners make and hire people that you don’t need.

For some reason, the martial arts industry has gotten the notion that a martial arts studio has to have a lot of employees with fancy-sounding titles in order to be successful. This is simply not true, for a variety of reasons… Read the rest of this entry »