Posts Tagged ‘Tendency’

Not good enough any more...

The Way Successful Businesses Handle Client Contracts

I’d imagine by this time most of you have received tons of these sorts of requests:

• “We’re going out of town on vacation and we’d like to freeze our membership…”
• “I can’t make it the next two weeks because my job is sending me out of town – can you extend my membership for two weeks to make it up?”
• “Johnny is going to be at his dad’s all summer, so we’re going to drop out and come back in the fall…”

And so on. These sorts of requests from clients are quite common, as you know.

But, have you ever asked yourself why that is? Read the rest of this entry »

Why It’s Not Always Good Idea To Try To Build A Better Mousetrap

Learning the business of martial arts is a lot like working your way up through the ranks. You take things in sequence, learning new skills that build on those you learned in previous stages.

One thing I’ve observed since I started offering business coaching to martial art school owners is that we have a tendency to want to do our own thing.

Take for example the numerous styles and systems that exist today. There are as many styles and systems as there are instructors who believe they have something unique to offer. As one of my students once put it, “It seems like every instructor reaches a certain level, then they want to create their own system.”

In similar fashion, I’ve observed that martial arts instructors seem to want to create their own systems for starting and running their businesses as well…

Creating a unique expression that bears the mark of one’s individual personality and preferences is fine in the context of artistic expression. But in the context of running a martial art school, this often has disastrous results.

Mastery In Martial Arts Does Not Translate Into Martial Arts Business Mastery…

Think about it… by the time an instructor decides to codify their unique expression of a martial art style or system, they typically have decades of martial arts experience, study, and training under their belt. Thus, their unique approach is based on decades of trial, error, and experimentation. Read the rest of this entry »