Posts Tagged ‘Six Months’

Knowing and Doing the Basics is the Key to Martial Arts Business Success

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.
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Don’t Get Too Comfortable With Your Success – A Small Amount of Worry Is A Healthy Thing

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

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 »

Speed Kills…

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 »

“Building It” Fast Is Simply A Matter Of Following What Works In The Majority Of Successful Martial Art Schools…

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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Chances Are It’s What You’re Not Doing That’s Hurting Your Business…

Let me start this article by stating up front – the following may sound like one big long pitch for my stuff, but hear me out. I’ve advised hundreds of martial arts instructors over the last seven years, and indirectly helped thousands more via my newsletter, websites, blogs, and instructional materials. In that time, I’ve come to identify certain traits successful martial art school owners seem to all share, as well as traits that unsuccessful instructors share (or lack) as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, I had a guy walk into my school to inquire about our programs. After I found out where this guy lived, my curiosity was immediately peaked. Why? Well, the guy lives in a posh, upscale neighborhood about 7 miles from our studio. Typically, most martial arts schools only draw students from a three-to-five-mile radius, which made me wonder why he drove so far to check us out. Furthermore, there are at least four martial arts studios within a three-mile radius of this guy’s neighborhood. So, I asked this gentleman straight-up why he Read the rest of this entry »

The Key to Easy Upgrading – Stop Selling and Start Recruiting

It’s important to have the right mindset when you start offering upgraded student memberships. It has to be a privilege, something that a student earns the right to be a part of, instead of just a way to make more money. Remember that you are choosing students for elite membership upgrades on their merits, and they should be honored that you have given them the opportunity to join.

Once you adopt this attitude, upgrading students becomes much simpler. In fact, more often than not you’ll have students approaching you about joining, versus your having to approach them instead.

The Upgrade Process – Make Them Work For It

Here is the process we used to get students to upgrade their memberships: 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:
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