Starting and Running Your Own Martial Arts School offers assistance to martial artists whose schools are struggling. It contains a troubleshooting guide to help school owners pinpoint their school’s symptoms and diagnose its problems. It gives them simple steps they can take to help turn their school around. It provides practical, proven ideas to put their school back on the road to success.
Finally, Starting and Running Your Own Martial Arts School contains insights for those who have a healthy school but who are always on the lookout for ways of making it better. It offers experienced counsel on choosing advertising methods that work. It shows school owners how to sign up a higher percentage of people who walk through their door. It helps them reduce their drop-out rates. Starting and Running Your Own Martial Arts School is packed with real-life information and ideas that school owners can use today to make their school even more successful.
Starting and Running Your Own Martial Arts School lets ordinary martial artists in on trade secrets usually reserved for business school graduates. It turns complex business information into simple, practical solutions to everyday business challenges. Starting and Running Your Own Martial Arts School takes the mystery out of business.
How Do You Use This Book?
Starting and Running Your Own Martial Arts School is a practical guide. Pull ideas and information from it. Use it to help you focus your dreams. Use it to spark new ideas and breathe new life into your existing school. Most of all, use it to spur action.
Before you start reading, get a three-ring notebook and a package of paper. Every time you get an idea for building or improving your school, write it down on a page entitled “Ideas.”
You don’t need to read this book from cover to cover. Read the first chapter to help you nail down your marketing identity. Then, dip in any place you need information or ideas.
As you work through the book, dream a little. Decide where you would like to be in a month, a year, five years. Then turn each dream and idea into a goal. Write your goals down. Compile a list of short-term goals, another of one-year goals, and still another of five-year goals.
Then determine what you need to do to make your goals a reality. Label another page “To Do List.” Go through your goals and break them down into specific tasks. Decide when you want to do these tasks. Give yourself deadlines. Put each task into your calendar. Then get to work. Start building your future today.
S ECTION ONE
STARTING
A
SUCCESSFUL
MARTIAL
A RTS
SCHOOL
CHAPTER ONE:
BUILD A SUCCESSFUL MARKETING IDENTITY
Your marketing identity is the face your business presents to the public. It contains the benefits you have to offer to a prospective student. It reflects your image, the way you project the things you believe in. It contains the things that best distinguish you from your competition. Your marketing identity is the foundation for all your advertising, for the way you approach prospective students, even for the way you decorate your school. It is your single most important marketing tool.
Focus on Your Image
Rule number one of marketing: people buy on emotion, on instinct. That doesn’t mean all consumers are irrational. It just means that if people are going to spend hard-earned money on something, they are going to want to feel good about doing so. How often have you purchased something on a whim, just for the fun of it? How often have you relied, at least in part, on instinct or “street smarts” to tell you if what you were looking at was a good deal or a fraud? Your potential students do the same thing.
Your School’s Image
When developing a marketing identity you must first ask yourself what image you want to project. What image do you want for your school? When prospective students talk to you for the first time—when they hang up the phone or walk out the door—how do they feel? Is that how you want them to feel about you? How can you get them to know in their gut that studying with you is the right thing to do?
Before you dismiss image as some artificial advertising fiction, think about the teachers you have studied with. Were they people of integrity? Did they care about the well-being of their students? Whether you answered yes or no, how could you tell? You could tell by the way they conducted themselves, the way they managed their school. You could tell by the way their “walk matched their talk.” That, in its simplest form, is image.
If you believe in honor and integrity, the individual decisions you make about your business must reflect that honor and integrity. If children are important to you, you should show that in your day-to-day dealings with them. If you value strength tempered by self-control, if that is what you teach your students, ask yourself whether you project that value in your daily dealings with people. Looking at image is a reality check: Do your “walk and talk” reflect the things that are valuable to you?
If you are both the teacher and the owner of your school, about 60 percent of your school’s image will be a reflection of your personality. The other 40 percent, however, will come from choices you make for your business. These choices will eventually give your business a personality of its own. Just as your personality comes through in your choice of clothes, the way you wear your hair, the way you speak to others, your business personality comes through in the way it looks and feels to others.
When examining your image, consider what target market you wish to attract. Your target market is the people you want to serve. Who is likely to want to study with you? To define your target market, think in terms of age, gender, marital status, and disposable income. These characteristics are called the “demographics” of your target market. Think about your preferences, but also think about the kind of people your art has attracted in the past. Talk to other martial arts school owners in your city about whom they teach. If your style has a national organization, check with them on their demographics. If your style has very few children (or adults), very few people in urban (or rural) areas, very few people with incomes over (or under) a certain level, there may be good reasons for those demographics. If you plan to attract a target market different from what your art usually attracts, make sure you have good reasons to support that choice.
A word on choosing children as your target market: if you want to teach children, your target market will be the children, yes. But it will also be the parents of those children. Specifically, your target market will be young adults with children and the disposable income necessary to enroll them in your school.
Your target market should be defined by the image you choose. If your target market is young children, you probably don’t want to present yourself as a school for serious hand-to-hand combat. If your target market includes mostly soldiers from a nearby army base, teaching playground self-defense is silly.
In your idea notebook, describe your school’s image—the way you want to come across to students and prospective students. Who is your target market? Do you want to come across as a school where the whole family is welcome? Or do you teach mostly children? Or perhaps are you directing your services at just adults, or just a certain group of adults? Look at the choices you have made for your school. Do you want to create an image of stability and permanence, or do you want to look lean, mean, and highly mobile? Do you want a large school with a dozen teachers, a midsized school with you and an assistant teacher, or a handful of students who become like a family to each other? Are you a place where people can work out at their own level and have fun, or are you a training ground for serious martial artists relentless in their pursuit of excellence? If a reporter