Martial Arts Professional Magazine

Jonathan Metcalf It’s clear that the proverbial bright light has flashed in Jonathan Metcalf’s mind-because he understands the BIG IT: owning a martial arts school is an extraordinary opportunity. He has discovered that you can continue to honor the traditions of your art as you change people’s lives and serve your community, which just so happens to result in substantial revenues and personal income.Another important trend that Jonathan Metcalf represents is that you don’t have to own a mega-size school to be recognized in your community for what you teach and reap the resulting rewards.You’ll learn a number of the changes that Jonathan made that have led to a 5,000-square-foot school, with 300+ students and a starting tuition that recently increased from $99 to $157 a month.What is most revealing about Jonathan’s story is that he has been able both to initiate various events, promotions and community activities on his own AND learn new ideas and information as a NAPMA Inner Circle member. In fact, after learning about Internet marketing from Toby Milroy and other Inner Circle members, Integrity Martial Arts’ owner Metcalf suddenly knew more than the Internet professional he had hired to improve his school’s Web site!

Jonathan Metcalf discovered what you must discover: that success starts with you making the decision to be successful.

Toby Milroy: Jonathan Metcalf is one of NAPMA’s Inner Circle members, from Enfield, Connecticut, where he runs a highly successful martial arts school. You can learn much from him about how he has reached his current level of success and his goals for the future and how he will achieve them.

Let’s start with a little bit of your background, style and school and its location.

Jonathan: I started working in the Enfield, Connecticut area through United Studios of Self-Defense, a franchise martial arts organization, and then I opened an independent school in 2000. I started martial arts in high school, which is much later than most students, but I was very serious about training during college when I started doing Kempo, which has been my style since then.

My current school uses a rotating curriculum, with a traditional Kempo base; but we’ve broadened that base with additions to the curriculum and character development programs.

I took a year to study in Asia-Taiwan, China and Nepal-because Buddhism is what turned me on to martial arts. I lived with Tibetan refugees in Nepal. The Tibetan people are very interesting, in terms of their discipline and meditation, and I learned just about every high level martial arts system they follow.

It makes you really appreciate the martial arts we have in America because what I was experiencing in Nepal, in particular, but also in Taiwan, was that the number of martial arts masters and quality teachers we have in the United States is at least as good as anywhere else in the world.

After about seven months in Nepal, I decided I wanted to expand my learning opportunities, so I went to live in Taiwan and stay with my Kung Fu teacher; that was an incredible experience. That school was intense and the instructor was very talented and skilled and didn’t really hold any degrees in anything or teach a particular style.

Toby: Your school is very much like the current trend in the industry, which are smaller schools. I think it is instructive for our readers to know that you don’t necessarily need a 10,000- or 15,000-square-foot warehouse to be very profitable and successful. In fact, you can be distracted by the expenses of a 15,000-square-foot facility, which tend to increase as profitability decreases. How many students do you have and what is the composition of your student body?

Jonathan: It’s rather diverse; I have a large variety of programs and just a bit more than 300 students. My enrollment has been fairly stable during the last few years and the growth has been in the expansion of programming, price increase aside. I have fairly typical programming, in terms of the split between adults and children. Seventy of my 300 students are adults.

We have separate programs for 3- and 4-years-olds, 4-and 5-year-olds, 6-to 10-year-olds, teens and adults. In addition, we also offer Chanbara, XMA, Tai Chi and leadership programs that expand on the basic martial arts program.

Toby: I want to talk about your interesting marketing approaches and your community involvement.

You’re running a very profitable school, and, obviously, as a NAPMA Inner Circle member, you’re looking to be even more profitable and grow your revenues and student quality at a more substantial rate. What have been your big breakthroughs during the last two years to grow your school to 300 plus students with your diverse curriculum. What have been the one or two keys elements that have driven your success?

Jonathan: It’s usually not one thing, but half a dozen small things that make a difference. My retention rate is better. During the last year, it was just over 96% on a monthly basis and that helps. That was about a percent better than it was the previous year. An improving retention rate makes a significant difference in growth, especially in large schools. One percent of my total student count is 3 students a month, or 36 students a year, so if I can make that much of a difference in a year, then that really helps. That was accomplished through better communication with the students and better customer service, and tweaking the curriculum to make it more accessible, more comprehensible to our young students.

 ”That specific knowledge [use of Internet marketing] has been so helpful and is above and beyond the general information that you find inother martial arts professional memberships.”

We redesigned our 4- and 5-year-olds curriculum to be more effective for that age group, rather than trying to teach them the same things we were teaching the 6- to 10-year-olds. Another thing that may be different about my school is that approximately 6 years ago, I hired a part-time employee whose primary purpose is to market the school. That employee now works 30 hours a week and 10 of those hours are spent as an assistant instructor, but the other 20 are focused on marketing. Janice is actively engaged in setting up community demonstrations and parks and recreation programs, so we’re the designated parks and recreation martial arts program in Enfield and the towns to our north, west, east and south.

Those kids come to our program, every spring, winter, fall and summer, and some remain. We host demonstrations at the local mall, distribute flyers to the local schools and hold free seminars every month at the school that we advertise in parents’ magazines. Next week is National Poison Prevention Week [March 2008], so we’ll have a free seminar on poison prevention; and we’re trying to convince some pediatricians to promote that to their patients as well.

Toby: That’s a brilliant idea that all readers should note. Time and time again, we see chief instructors or school owners with marketing issues; they aren’t generating enough leads and student appointments, not converting enough enrollment, and sit on their hands, not knowing what to do.

An idea like poison prevention training is so simple. How difficult would it be for you to join with three to five family practitioners in your area to host a National Poison Prevention Month activity at your school? That’s a real easy sell and attractive to family practitioners and/or pediatricians. They should be ecstatic to mail flyers to their patients that announce a National Poison Prevention Safety Seminar, giving them something of value that doesn’t cost physicians anything.

Jonathan: I suggest that your readers go online, where they can find other health-related opportunities. Every season, we have a CPR First Aid training course on weekends, when it doesn’t interfere with classes. We have abduction prevention training and bully prevention training; and, February was Dental Health Month, so we had a special offer that we gave dentists to distribute to their patients. We plan a promotion like that every month. We’re in the Relay for Life for cancer. We try to do community outreach because (a) its fun and (b) its good marketing.

Toby: We always try to focus our members’ thinking on four primary components for school growth: enrollments, renewals, retention and higher student quality. Most likely, a poison prevention class or similar events won’t help with your student quality that much, although, those events or special classes will result in better educated students. Such events do help with the other three: enrollments, renewals and retention.

Your students are involved in the community; therefore, they’re visible to other potential students, so that’s your enrollment factor. Number two is renewals. Now, you have a story to tell about leadership that’s very applicable and congruent with your message in the school.

I know your leadership team, much like ours at Mile High Karate, is very focused on teaching significant leadership skills to students. Your events provide them with opportunities to lead other people, to serve them. These community activities are teaching your leadership students the lesson of service, and putting people’s needs above the students. The fourth component is retention; and the more your students are engaged in such activities, the more likely they are to remain students longer. It’s a tried and true fact.

Jonathan: There’s one other factor that really makes a big difference for my school. After listening to Master Oliver and other experts saying that I should raise my tuition, it wasn’t long ago before I went from $99 to $157 a month, with the intention to increase it again in August.

When you’re teaching punching and kicking as your primary focus, even if your marketing other benefits, such as respect, discipline, self-control, etc., which are common in martial arts school marketing, and the parents recognize what you’re doing, they’ll be hard pressed to pay much more than another sport or activity. When they start to view what you’re doing as character education, then that has a much higher price tag than sports. Parents understand that concept, so it’s really helpful to educate parents on the benefits of martial arts beyond what looks like just punching and kicking.

Toby: Absolutely right. You mentioned a point that can’t be over-emphasized. It’s not lip service. I’ve seen it happen in the industry a few times with some major organizations. They introduce this new concept, Black Belt Club or Master Club, and, all of the sudden, students are attracted to it, and it becomes anecdotal. Instead of the instructor or school owner, who’s implementing this program, really understanding its components and goals that must be in place to be of high value to the customer, the school owner hears the words “Master Club” or “Leadership Program,” and thinks, “Oh, great, I can charge more money and my students will be happy; great, let’s do it.”

You said it must be about more than just punching and kicking, not just in the words, not just telling the story once in class. This is about actually learning these skills. I think that’s a huge misstep that schools can take that can be disastrous for them.

Aside from your community involvement activities, what are your other major lead-generating activities during the last couple of years that have helped you reach the 300-student level?

Jonathan: We generate leads through two programs, both involving the local academic schools. We’ve developed such a reputation that schools are allowed to partner with us, with minimal objection from the attorneys and accountants at the schools, who sometime balk at the fact we’re a business.

Now, we can distribute flyers throughout the school system, which was incredibly effective, and run after-school programs at the schools. Our most successful is at an elementary school with 400 kids, and 140 of them registered for the program, which resulted in 35 becoming students at our school. We were running seven or eight after-school programs a year with results in that same ballpark.

Remember, it’s not one or two promotions; it’s ten of them. For example, I recently spent an hour and a half with someone who’s tweaking my Web site to try and capture more of the traffic that’s coming to it. What I discovered is that I had plenty of traffic on the Web site, but it wasn’t converting enough of that traffic into solid leads and enrollments, so if I can increase that ratio from 2 to 4 a month to 4 to 8 a month, that’s 50 a year, more or less, of additional students.

Toby: Effective use of the Internet has been a topic that we discuss in the Inner Circle group. Members of that group are pinpointing their Internet objectives and how to attract customers. The two primary keys are capturing data and converting that data into enrollments. The Internet is certainly an underutilized media in the industry that deserves much more time and attention.

Jonathan: I want to return to something you said about the value of the Inner Circle group. When I met with this Internet professional to tweak my site, I discovered that I could present him with ideas and resources with which he wasn’t familiar because I had learned so much from you, Jason Yi and other Inner Circle members. That specific knowledge has been so helpful and is above and beyond the general information that you find in other martial arts professional memberships.

The other significant value of being a member of the NAPMA Inner Circle group is the masterminding. I’ve been writing so much and I am so enthusiastic about developing new programming. One of the exciting things for me is that, at this stage, I’m the most successful school in the area, so it’s great to talk to school owners of similar size and success as well as those who are ahead of me.

Now, when I create something new, I’m not creating it from thin air; I can actually model it on another member who has a similar program in place that’s working better than what I’m doing at my school. The result is that my school is on track for a really big month, and I think much of that has to do with being a member of NAPMA’s Inner Circle group.

Toby: You identified both of the components very articulately. Number one is expanding your circle of influence. Tony Robbins presents this idea throughout his materials. His major contribution has been the power of modeling and association, so his circle of friends is obviously much different than the average person’s circle of friends.

Your circle of friends greatly determines your outcomes. As Peter Tucker states in one of his books: If you hang out with nine broke people, then you’re likely to be the tenth. I think a more eloquent way to say that is you’ll become the average of the sum of the five people with whom you surround yourself.

As entrepreneurs, business owners and martial arts school owners, in particular, unfortunately, we don’t tend to surround ourselves with people who will challenge us intellectually or from a business perspective very often. Most of our days are consumed with elementary schools, daycare centers and police and fire departments and community organizers, which are all phenomenal and fantastic people. How often, however, do you find yourself in a room with other school owner entrepreneurs who know what it’s like to work 70 hours a week? How often do you have the opportunity to learn from people like that and be motivated by their enthusiasm and success?

Your second point was mastering specific skill sets, such as the Internet. That is where I was three or four years ago: I had a fascination with the Internet, but I didn’t know what made it tick and how Web sites worked. I went and learned from some of the best Internet marketers in the country, and discovered it doesn’t take long to be way ahead of the masses on the uses of the Internet for business.

Both of your points, expanding your circle of influence and mastering specific skills, are phenomenally applicable to all MAPro readers.

As you so eloquently stated, it’s not the one big promotion or home run that grows your school, holding your breath and hoping something happens; it’s the 20 little steps you take that generate those 20 to 30 enrollments a month. What does your school’s monthly calendar look like? I think it would be very instructive for our readers if you would share the number and type of activities you schedule during any month.

Jonathan: I’ll use March 2008, since that is when we are recording this discussion. On the first Saturday, March 1^st, we have a community CPR and first aid course and a Relay for Life meeting. There’s a parent forum on the 3^rd, which it’s an opportunity for me to present any new programs at the school and discuss them with parents. The next day, we have a meeting with a local health club to discuss programming, and we do a demo on the 5^th.

Saturday the 8^th is an in-house tournament for 3- to 5-year-olds and then another in-house tournament on the 9^th for the rest of our age groups. We’ve scheduled a park and recreation program for the next three Mondays and Wednesdays, which include the first-aid module. On the 14^th, we had a St. Patrick’s Day party, which was a buddy event. We also had a nutrition seminar because March is National Nutrition Month. I hired a nutritionist to give a lecture, which was only $100. We ran some ads and attracted people from the community. We’ve also scheduled an adult competition seminar and we’re involved in an annual tournament that’s approaching.

I have a women’s self-defense program tomorrow night, with approximately 20 women. It’s a fundraiser for a cooperative preschool in a nearby town. Wednesday will be the largest belt event in my studio’s history. I have four tests running that night and one of them has 60 people in it. The schools are closed early on the 20^th and 21^st for Good Friday and an in-service day for local academic teachers, so when local schools close I open a camp. This camp will have a tournament training theme; and we also open that to the public, so kids, whose parents don’t have after-school care, can come, learn some martial arts and have a great time and a fun experience at our school.

Toby: Those are phenomenal activities. You also have a birthday activity for one of the instructors.

Jonathan: Yes, Phil’s birthday party is scheduled soon. We host birthday parties for all the instructors; it’s just an opportunity for the kids to give the instructors cards, which light up the instructors and help forge that bond between instructors and students, which is critical to retention.

Toby: Your list of monthly activities can be the solution for those readers who are frustrated about their enrollment levels, retention rates, upgrades, etc. It’s not one big event or marketing campaign that will produce results. It’s 20 events, promotions, etc.

Those members who are trying to grow from a $10K or $15K school to a $50K school should immediately fill their calendars with 20 events, campaigns, etc. that they can do this month to generate enrollments. Some will produce a big goose egg and some will be gangbusters. Those activities that are brutally unproductive can be scratched from your list. You don’t repeat those very often, but those that are productive, you can continue to implement, until they aren’t productive anymore and you replace them with others. The key is very simple: you must do enough of them. It doesn’t take much effort or creativity to list 20 events, promotions, etc. on your calendar because so many schools have already used so many that are productive that you only have to follow their lead.

Your calendar, Jonathan, is extremely robust and that’s one of the primary reasons you have such a strong retention rate and good financial numbers.

Jonathan: Another point I’d like to make is if you had shown me a calendar with 20 events in a month a few years ago, then I would have responded that it looks like too much work. I won’t say my calendar doesn’t take some work because that would be a lie, but I would also say that only two of those events were scheduled during other than regular business hours: one on a Sunday and another on a Friday night.

I have a slot on Wednesday nights for “event” seminars, without affecting my schedule at all, and many of them are integrated into our regular business schedule. It doesn’t take extra time, but it does creates a shift in what I’m doing, so rather than teaching a class, I might be working with 20 students I’ve never met before to teach them about an important safety topic and try to enroll them into my school. That’s a good hour spent.

Toby: That is a good point that too many school owners have a hard time conceptualizing. You have classes from 4 pm to 9 pm, and don’t think you have time to schedule the types of events we’ve been discussing. Wouldn’t your adult students, who normally work out from 8 pm to 9 pm anyway, be more motivated and happy, if they had the opportunity to participate in a new activity on a given night? I think the answer is yes; that would probably stimulate them.

Schedule a special event or seminar, such as a nutrition and headlock seminar. It’s not disruptive or has a negative affect if this and similar events occur during class once a month or one Tuesday night. School owners sometimes think they must cancel classes to accommodate these kinds of events, but you don’t. I think it is a positive to welcome 10 new adults students for a special event, who work out with your regular adult students, but they are all learn something new.

At my school, we always have a Mother’s Day promotion in May, a Father’s Day in June and then a family month during July. During one of those adult sessions, we merge a couple of adult classes together and add new prospects, many of which are parents of our students, and conduct a knife-defense seminar or a women’s street self-defense seminar. Knife defense is probably not a part of your regular adult curriculum, so this special event benefits them as well. They won’t mind having some non-students in their class, working together on new techniques that your regular adults students have never learned before.

In fact, the correct way to pre-frame it is to address your adult class the week before the event, “We will have some new people in our next class for a special knife-defense seminar. I need you to help me teach them some of those techniques, which we’ll preview during tonight’s class, so you can help them next week. I’ll show you some advanced techniques the following week.”

Your regular adult students will be extremely ecstatic to participate and help you. That’s a paradigm that you just have to shift in your thinking and, trust me, your adult students would be more than happy to welcome the one-time-only students and assist you. It’s not an impact on your school, other than improving your enrollment numbers.

Your point about the birthday party is well taken. I think that’s a big issue. What can you do in your school every month or at every possible opportunity, so your students can build strong and lasting rapport with your staff or your school? The birthday party is a great example. During instructors’ birthday parties at my school, we make it a buddy event. Any student who brings a buddy is allowed to throw a water balloon at the instructor. It’s very funny, but it’s also a great anchoring opportunity.

I don’t think we’ve had this discussion yet in the Inner Circle group, but if you think back to your career as students, before you became an instructor and school owner, then you probably don’t remember the 150 push-ups or the 65^th time we did form #3. It’s likely you do remember when your instructor took the time to help you with a specific technique.

I remember when I was 7, 8 or 9 years old, and I was learning spinning hook kicks. I worked on spinning hook kicks at home for hours and, then, a few weeks later, I demonstrated real slowly the spinning hook kick. I remember the instructor’s wife, who was one of the 4^th-Degrees at the school say, “Wow, that was really good, it’s very hard to do a hook kick very slow. That’s very good hip control.” I still remember that until this day, and it’s 20 plus years later.

Students also remember when they were allowed to throw a water balloon at an instructor on his birthday or the holiday party where everyone had bad fish. It’s not the everyday kicks and punches they remember for 30 years, but the activities and special occasions when they developed a relationship with another student or an instructor.

Jonathan: Let me add to what you said: It’s your relationships with your students that really drive them, and that’s also true for instructors. It really is rejuvenating as instructors to experience those moments when we have personal contact with students and we can sense and feel their appreciation for what we do.

One thing that’s made a big difference for me has been receiving those occasional notes from students, “Dear Sensei Jonathan, thank you so much for your training.” I think all instructors receive those kinds of notes from time to time. Someone suggested, “If you like receiving them so much, then why don’t you ask your students to write those compliments in a note.” Boy, that made such a big difference for me. Now, I receive one every week, and I ask them to write it.

As successful school owners, I’m sure many Maximum Impact members receive similar compliments, regularly, so I suggest that you start to ask your students to write them in a note. You’ll then have a large collection of notes you can share in your marketing pieces and with your staff, or you can bring them home to read when you’ve had a long day and you must return to work tomorrow and you want to make sure you’re psyched up.

Toby: Those compliments can be very valuable, but, as you said, you must collect them in written form. In too many cases, school owners collect them, but don’t realize how to use them.

Share them with your other students and prospects. Include those compliments in the email or mail sequences, flyers, letters or other printed materials that you’re sending to your students. Compliments are also great content for your Web site. It’s virtually impossible to overuse social proof in your marketing program. Almost everyone sees the world through everyone else’s eyes, but his or her own. People question their own decisions. They don’t feel comfortable making decisions for themselves, in many cases. If 500 other people just like me have made a decision to attend a special event or enroll as students, and have a great experience, then that will help me make my decision about participating.

Let me move to another topic. Many schools have demonstration and competition teams, and their conception, in many cases is, that those teams usually perform and compete external to the school, at tournaments and community events. I know that you also use your teams, internally, inside your school. Please tell us about the value of using demo and competition teams in the school.

Jonathan: First, these teams are valuable as role models, not because they are attractive like cheerleaders, but because they perform good-looking martial arts. I view them just like the Leadership Team, which we also put in front of our other students because they’re great role models. For Suzie, the Orange Belt, these are advanced students to emulate, “Oh, wow, I want to be on the demo team someday.” She knows, however, that you must be a Black Belt and be in the Leadership program to be on the demo team. That’s really helpful.

Even an external appearance of the demo team has an internal value. For example, we did a demo at a University of Connecticut basketball game, with 10,000 people in the audience. Now, in terms of a marketing event, it’s nice to say you did it, but, with a bunch of college kids in the audience at a university that’s 40 minutes from the school, I didn’t expect to enroll any of those 10,000 people. The internal value is that the members of my demo team are so excited and our parents are so proud that their children and our school performed during the half-time show. They’ll tell their friends that the school’s demo team just did a demonstration at the UCON basketball game. Sometimes, an external demo team appearance is not a direct marketing promotion and doesn’t generate much revenue, but it does say something positive about your school.

I didn’t expect any enrollments from the big, all-night demonstration we did at The Relay For Life, the cancer fundraiser event, but it will definitely create a deeper connection among the students who spent the whole night together for this important cause.

I had my leadership team members talking at a big belt advancement event about the benefits of martial arts training, rather than me speaking, and sounding like a salesperson. I want my students to tell everyone how their training has benefited them. They can speak sincerely because these kids really appreciate what they’ve accomplished and we’ve discussed it during class, so they know how to express the benefits. That will really drive home the message about the value of what we do to parents, who maybe aren’t clear on why martial arts is such a great choice for their children.

Toby: Having your demo team perform during halftime at the University of Connecticut basketball game certainly has a direct effect on your retention. It may or may not generate enrollments, but it’s a worthwhile event if it helps you to facilitate the four primary goals of any school: enrollments, renewals, retention ratio and student quality.

The biggest motivators in the multilevel marketing (MLM) industry, Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, etc., is pride of affiliation, pride of association. One of the primary retention tools in MLM is to offer incentives to salespeople, early in their careers, to win prizes and earn recognition, based solely on participation. The salesperson takes pride in being the rep for a specific geographic area and part of the larger organization.

Jonathan, you’ve created that same pride of affiliation with your demonstration team at the basketball game and other events. Students can say they are part of the team, while parents and friends and your staff and other students can say I’m part of that school. Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, that’s a very powerful retention factor for students and parents because they will think this is such a great school.

Jonathan: I often think, if I wanted a parent to brag about my school, then what could he or she say that would be completely different than the parents across the table whose kid goes to the school down the street? What could that parent say that would sound really impressive, about an activity that’s not available at another school or non-martial arts organization?

Toby: This is the second or third time you referred to school culture, without using the word. When I talked with Charles Dudley, another member of our Inner Circle group and a very traditional martial artist, he explained that he is very focused on honoring his instructors and maintaining the integrity of his culture.

Charles is also great example to counter the major misnomer in the industry that highly successful schools, financially, have very low student quality. The truth is that it is almost always the opposite, almost, not always, but almost always the opposite. School owners, such as you, Steve LaVallee, Stephen Oliver and myself, are very financially successful and maintain extremely high standards of quality for their students.

I can tie these thoughts together because Charles and you both revealed, without stating explicitly, that you made some decisions about what you wanted your business to be and how you wanted to be perceived in the community.

When a local elementary school principal, the mayor, city council members or other local leaders think about my school and me (or Mile High Karate), I want him or her to know that I’ve given away thousands of free child identification kits and all the other activities that allows my students and I to give back to the community.

Charles is very deliberate about how he integrates that culture with his students; he puts these elements in his environment and maintains the high standards that he requires for his students, physically, because of the culture. Obviously, you’re very involved in many activities and want to have deep roots in your community. Tell us how you systemically make the students understand how that works and how parents and students understand your motives and the culture of your school.

Jonathan: That’s exactly the point I’m developing in my school; and it’s not just providing value, but the perception of value. The name of my school is Integrity, and integrity is the way I’ve defined it. It’s when what you say you do and what you do align. I often find that I’m not the best judge about whether what I say I do and what I do is the same. If I think I’m really nice and everyone around me says, “Oh, you know, Jonathan is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met,” then I have integrity. On the other hand, if I say I’m really nice and half the people who know me think I’m a jerk, then probably my integrity is out of whack.

It’s really important, in terms of personal integrity, to make sure that your self-perception, self-commitments and what you’re contributing in the real world, to your community and within the walls of your dojo match. That takes plenty of sincerity, open communication and education of the people with whom you work, so they really understand your commitments. You must be sincere and as frequently and as directly as you can.

Toby: A final point I’ll add to what you’ve said is that you can never underestimate how little someone is paying attention. As a school owner, you and I and many other professionals, choose to be very involved in our schools.

That’s great, you need to be involved and your integrity in yourself will reveal itself to everyone who is paying attention; but remember, there are some people that aren’t paying attention, but we need their attention too. Don’t think your community involvement is shameless self-promotion when you communicate your involvement with everyone at your school.

People are very engaged in their lives and overcoming day-to day-obstacles, so, in most cases, they aren’t paying too much attention to anything else. A great example is the hundreds of school programs my school does and the thousands of child I.D. kits we distribute throughout the community. My students would never know about that program outside the school. They’re not usually at those activities where we distribute the free child I.D. kits. Our students received those kits and 10 or less of my students work in the program outside the school, but the other 200 students are not aware of the program.

Again, it’s being congruent with what you say and what you do and your goals and values, and you must communicate that with your students and parents. Let them know that these are your values, let them know that these are your goals because it has huge dividends in retention and financial results; but, more importantly, it has to do with the culture of your school, what you’re all about and what parents and students in your community perceive you’re all about.

Every school owner that reads this MAPro feature story should be able to implement five or six ideas that we discussed and generate 10 more enrollments this month. It’s not three big promotions or events, but 15 or 20 smaller efforts that will make the difference as it has for Jonathan Metcalf, NAPMA Inner Circle member.