Running a successful martial arts school can be HARD.
As you know, I and my team work with a LOT of school operators in my various duties at Martial Arts World News Magazine, spearheading ATLAS Martial Arts Software, facilitating AMS Full Service Billing, and much more. We encounter quite a number of schools that are struggling to ‘break through’ to the next level of success, and we’ve been honored to help so many operators get to the next level.
After a detailed analysis of their business processes and results, I find quite a few commonalities.
Perhaps the most ‘common’ problem that I encounter, when you REALLY dig in and strip away all the extraneous complexity of a given scenario, is that the operator is simply too ‘busy being busy’, and not focusing on the core fundamentals of ‘growing’ the school.
The Martial Arts School business is pretty simple. (Simple, but not always ‘easy’.)
There are really only 3 ways to grow your school.
Get more new enrollments, generate more renewals/upgrades (thereby increasing your average student value), and increase student retention. Focusing on these 3 things it the ‘secret sauce’ to getting to the next level fast, even better if you can boost all 3 at the same time! This is a technique the legendary Jay Abraham calls the “Power Principle of Geometric Business Growth”.
In these conversations with owners, I’ll often hear things like, “I’m so busy with “X”, how can I work on getting new students?”, or “I don’t have time to run that marketing system you’re describing, because I’m so busy doing all the bookwork for the school”, Or “I’d love to add more value to our programs by integrating a Leadership Program, but I don’t have time to build out all the curriculum”.
When I then drill into the ‘reasons’ they are so ‘busy’, I nearly ALWAYS find that they are spending WAY too much time on ‘low’ value activities, and those lower value activities are crowding out the time to work on things that can actually make a difference in their business results!
You have to make IMPORTANT choices about how you invest your time! YOUR time is the most valuable asset to your business. You should focus on the HIGHEST return activities, and delegate, systemize, outsource or simply ‘kill’ everything else.
You can NOT spend you time on $10 an hour activities, and expect your business to generate $200, $500, or $1,000 an hour results. If you SIMPLIFY your focus, eliminate some of the ‘noise’ you’re being bombarded with, and invest your time on 3 most important things: Get more new students, add more value to your program to command higher revenue, and keep your students longer, ALL the rest of the problems can EASILY be solved!
If you need any help with specific strategies, tactics or tools to help you in these areas, give my team a call at 1-800-275-1600, and we can help!
