Posts Tagged ‘martial arts school’

First, if you haven’t read the manual yet, then read the following article before you start implementing this marketing plan.

“Marketing Basics for Martial Arts School Owners”

What follows is a marketing plan I wrote for July, but it will give you a good idea of how to write your own 5 x 15 plans throughout the year.

Once you read it, it should be painfully obvious that you don’t need a billing or consulting company to do this for you. You can easily come up with a workable, effective marketing plan that is customized to your needs, just by setting aside 30 minutes once a month to do so.

5 x 15 Marketing Plan: July, 20__: Read the rest of this entry »

…And It’s When You’re On Top Of Your Martial Arts School Marketing!

It’s a fact: in martial arts business, competition doesn’t matter if you’re marketing-savvy.

I have clients who have schools right across the street from them, or down the block, etc. Many times these styles and schools are very similar in what they teach.

However, if style mattered, then it would also follow that all the businesses in other industries that sell exactly the same thing would be putting each other out of business.

Think about it – when you have a McDonald’s on one corner, a Burger King on another, and a Jack in the Box on the third, why don’t they all fail?

It’s because competition can actually be a good thing. When the big chain school down the street advertises all over town, they are raising the awareness of your product in the community. And if you can ride on that wave, it can help you tremendously. Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Being Consistent Will Pay Off In Huge Dividends for Your School’s Success

Just as it took consistency in training to reach an advanced level of skill, it takes consistency in your business activities to achieve the financial success you desire.

How important is consistency in your martial arts business? I believe it is of the utmost importance.

Honestly, this is your financial future we are talking about – how could anything less than consistent daily action toward your goals be acceptable?

Yet, more often than not I find martial arts school owners are highly inconsistent in their management and marketing activities. And, it’s not just their consistency in taking action that is in question; it’s also the type of actions they take.

You see, both are extremely important to your success, because taking the wrong actions consistently can be just as devastating to your business as taking no action at all. You must understand first what the right actions are to take, and then take those actions on a consistent and daily basis to succeed.

Let’s examine what this looks like “in action” so we can have a better understanding of what proper consistent actions are, as well as the sort of impact they can have on your business. Read the rest of this entry »

When You Start a Martial Art School There Are Things You Should Know…

If you could teach in a gymnasium 40 hours a week, your space and time issues would be mostly solved...

Most instructors start a martial arts school knowing they are going to need 100 students or more to support themselves at a living wage while paying the overhead on their facility. However, there are some other things you should know when you start a school that no one likes to talk about…

For example, your two greatest enemies – space and time.

Now, I’m not talking about space and time in the sense that say, a quantum physicist might refer to them… and not in the Rod Serling sense either (if you don’t know who he is, it’s before your time). No, I’m talking about it in the “square footage and hours in the day” sense. 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 »

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 »

Want to know how to make sure your martial art school fails miserably?

Want to know how to tank your martial art school? Here's how, in just ten easy steps...

If you ever wanted to know how to tank a martial arts school, here’s a list of the top ten ways to fail in your martial arts business…

The Top Ten Ways To Tank Your Martial Arts School

1. Start Your School By The Seat Of Your Pants – Business plans? Business mentors? Business education? Who needs ‘em? Just wing it and you’ll be sure to end your career as a professional martial arts instructor before it even begins.
2. Put Pride And Ego Before Profits - If you want to fail big and fail fast, let your ego make all your business decisions instead of your common sense. This will lead you to rent a facility before you have any students, and you’ll also be likely to rent a lot more space than you really need. Sure, you’ll have the biggest nicest facility in town, but you’ll likely only have bragging rights until the first month’s rent is due…

Read the rest of this entry »

Is Bigger Better When It Comes To Martial Arts Schools?

Do you need a huge school and 500 students to be successful financially? Not by a long shot!

When it comes to running a martial arts school, size is an important consideration. Of course, everyone wants to have a lot of students and nice, spacious facilities. But how big is too big when it comes to running a martial art school?

To answer this question, first we have to determine exactly what our end goal is or starting our school. Then, once we can “begin with the end in mind”, we can determine how large we can get without hindering our progress toward our goal.

What Kind Of Lifestyle Do You Want?

This is perhaps the most important question to ask ourselves when we first set out to open a martial arts studio. You see, your lifestyle as an instructor will be largely determined by the size of your facility.

Now, this speaks not only to the amount of money you can potentially make, but also to the number of hours you will need to work to manage your school and staff. Obviously, the more students you enroll, the more gross income your school will generate.

However, at some point the law of diminishing returns will kick in; this is an economic principle that basically states that, when work output increases beyond a certain point, the relative return will begin to decrease. In other words, after a certain point in growth your profit margins will get more and more narrow.

That’s why size deserves careful consideration when you’re doing your initial business planning before opening your school. Let’s look at this topic in a bit more detail to see how size impacts profit margins in martial arts business. Read the rest of this entry »

Save Money Doing Your Own Electronic Billing -  It’s A Cinch With New Technologies

Did you know you can do your own martial arts billing electronically in-house? Here's how...

It used be that here in the States, most martial arts schools would use a martial arts billing company to collect payments for them.

The student made their first payment at the school, and the billing company took over after that, collecting payments by mail, credit card, or electronic funds transfer (EFT/ACH).

This seemed like a great deal… Except for the fact that martial arts billing companies charged martial arts school owners 5 or 10 times more in our industry than businesses were paying for billing services in other comparable industries.

New Technology Creates A Power Shift In The Martial Arts Billing Industry

Once school owners started wising up, they began looking for alternatives to expensive martial arts billing companies. Some of us started using the same companies that businesses in other industries (fitness, for example) used.

I did this for a while, then I figured out that with advances in credit card and checking account billing technology, I could easily do the same thing myself using a merchant credit card acceptance account and an online payment gateway. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Are you a white belt in sales? Learning what makes people buy will go a long way toward getting you out of the beginner's class in sales skills.

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 »

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 »

A Built In Retention Program

While black belt is the pinnacle of achievement for most students, black belt club can be a way to reward your most dedicated students and improve retention.

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 »

Unrealistic Expectations…

I often receive emails or field messages on the forums asking me how long it takes to grow a martial arts school to “x” number of students.

In addition, I sometimes receive similar messages from new and would-be school owners who are ready to quit because they think their school isn’t growing fast enough…

Sadly, this is an all-too-common occurrence which I blame in part on the mainstream industry magazines, who are more than willing to print story after story about Master XYZ’s overnight martial arts school successes.

Unfortunately, this sort of irresponsible journalism creates unrealistic expectations in the minds of those who are unfamiliar with the way business growth typically works in the real world.

Reality Versus Confabulation

Certainly, such wild stories sell consulting packages… but what you’re not reading in those articles is how Master XYZ already had a substantial business in place in a neighboring community, or how they had an extensive marketing budget and experience in martial arts school promotion to help them get off the ground fast. Granted, I’ve personally coached school owners and showed them how to enroll large amounts of students in a relatively short period of time. But, they were, Read the rest of this entry »