Posts Tagged ‘Martial Arts Students’
Showing Students You Care
Author: M. Massie
Simple Steps To Increase Retention While Making Your Job More Rewarding
Showing students (and parents) that you care can go a long way toward keeping them around for the long haul.
You may not realize this, but retention is a whole lot easier when you invest time in letting your students know that you care about them, both personally and as martial arts students.
Sure, you care about your students… but do they know it?
Let me be the first to admit that martial arts instructors tend to not be the most sensitive people in the world.
Admit it – you probably don’t often express your feelings toward others, and usually just expect that your feelings are “understood.”
Well, unless you’re teaching jedi knights and X-men (mind-readers, in case you’re not a sci-fi junkie like me), chances are good that no one in your school is quite sure whether or not you really care about them – personally, or otherwise.
And, even if you don’t find it difficult to express that you care about other people, you may not even be communicating it in a way they can understand. Often, people have different ways of showing and interpreting appreciation (as any married couple can attest).
So, finding ways to make certain you get the message across to your students is a prerequisite to having good relationships with your students.
Don’t Sweat It – It’s Easier Than You May Think
Communicating that you care about your students really isn’t all that difficult or complex. All it takes is a little awareness and a few extra minutes invested each day in communicating with your students.
Here are a few simple action steps you can take to make sure your students (and parents) know that you are personally invested in their well-being: Read the rest of this entry »
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“Building It” Fast Is Simply A Matter Of Following What Works In The Majority Of Successful Martial Art Schools…
Want to grow your school? Follow a proven plan.
Starting a martial art school is tough – and growing a martial art school is even tougher.
That’s why I spent a lot of time in my first school analyzing my operations and comparing them to what successful school owners did. I traveled and spent time with them, observing first-hand what they were doing to grow their schools.
From those observations, I compared what successful instructors were doing, and settled on the activities that were most common among the schools I observed…
It’s not like I kept a bunch of data tables and graphs; it was nothing so complicated as all that. Basically, if I saw a lot of successful instructors doing something, I figured it was important and made note of it.
Then, I made sure I was doing those exact same tasks and activities in my own school on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Now after 15 years of doing this, I’m able to boil down the key elements to martial arts business success into a very simple formula and very thorough checklists, ensuring that I’m hitting on all eight cylinders in my martial art school operations.
This month, I’ve decided to share that formula and most of those checklist items with you in the remainder of this article. Want to hit 100 martial arts students fast, and then continue that growth? Read the rest of this entry »
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How To Increase Your Martial Arts Enrollments in 2010
Everyone wants more martial arts students in 2010. Here's how to get them.
- Make sure your school is in tip-top shape. First impressions are everything. It won’t do any good to get a ton of people in the front door, if the front area of your school looks like a dump. Make sure everything is cleaned, mopped, dusted, and polished at least twice a day, and that all equipment is Read the rest of this entry »
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As I’ve said many times before, planning and goal-setting is crucial to your success as a martial arts instructor. Or, as someone once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going how will you know when you get there?”
The first step to developing a comprehensive plan for your business is setting goals for profits. Since the majority of our income is derived from tuition payments, we must set profit goals that are based on our enrollments, renewals and attrition.
Setting goals and adopting performance guidelines based on these numbers is one of the most basic management tasks you need to complete if you are to become successful running your studio.
Here’s how to do it… Read the rest of this entry »
When small business owners think about low-cost martial arts marketing ideas, they usually picture themselves running around a Wal-Mart parking lot placing fliers on cars (actually, sticky notes work better and are faster, but that’s for another article…), or perhaps walking up and down the side of the road in a gorilla suit with a sandwich sign over their shoulders (I actually saw a local martial arts school that did this – and yes, the gorilla was wearing a uniform).
However, as a martial arts instructor, your best low-cost form of advertisement is word-of-mouth. The thing is, sometimes you need to encourage your students to talk about your school. Guest pass programs are one way to do this; another method that has worked quite well for me in the past is to host Bring-A-Buddy nights a couple of times a year – during back-to-school time, in January, and right before school lets out for summer.
Basically, here’s how it works: Read the rest of this entry »
"Small Dojo Big Profits" way!
