Posts Tagged ‘School Owners’

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 »

Although most of the martial arts school owners and instructors I have coached don’t want to have a huge mega-studio, many of us would like to earn a comfortable living teaching between 150 and 200 students. While for some that may seem like an easy goal, for many others reaching 150 students seems near impossible.

The biggest hurdle to most school owners in hitting their enrollment goals is that they tend to look at different aspects of their business in isolated terms. Over here we have “curriculum”, here we have “advertising”, here we have “retention”, here is “billing”, then there’s “scheduling”, “pricing”, etc.

The problem with this is that it leads to a skewed sort of thinking – that is to say, you start to think that one part of your operations won’t affect the whole. And that can be hazardous to achieving your goal of having a small, profitable studio.

Let me explain… Read the rest of this entry »

”Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
- Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

Marketing is the Lifeblood of Your Studio

How important is marketing for your success? Without any reservations, I can tell you that it’s the lifeblood of your business. As I emphasize in the manual, no matter how good your product or service is it doesn’t matter one bit unless people know about it.

When current and aspiring martial arts school owners contact me for help increasing their enrollment, one of the first things I inquire about is their marketing. How and where are they advertising, how do they track their advertising results, how much is their advertising budget, and so on. Read the rest of this entry »

Every week or so I get an email from someone who is starting a school and wants the low-down on how to do it right.

It’s a pretty tall order to sum it all up in an email, which is why I wrote a book about it. However, there are a few things I’d like to share on the topic – kind of a quick and dirty list of tips and suggestions for prospective school owners:
Read the rest of this entry »