By Grandmaster Jeff Smith — from the Wednesday coaching call, September 2026
A member opened our Wednesday call with a question I get some version of every single week.
He’d hired a man for $125 a week to distribute flyers — a thousand to fifteen hundred a week, on houses, on cars, at businesses. He’d been running it since early June. It had produced three calls, two appointments and one enrollment. It had also produced a one-star review with a photograph of the flyer and the words “don’t put your trash on my car.”
His question was whether he should stop.
I asked him to answer it himself, and to his credit he already knew. But I want to spend a minute on why the answer is obvious, because this one mistake quietly kills more marketing programs than any budget ever has.
One Out of Fifteen Thousand
He had put out something in the neighborhood of fifteen thousand flyers. He got one complaint.
Honestly? He was lucky. If he’d had five hundred complaints, now we have a problem — now the piece is wrong, or the neighborhoods are wrong, or the guy is doing something he shouldn’t. That’s data. One is not data. One is a Tuesday.
We never make a decision to stop doing something because of one or two people out of a thousand. Look at the percentage. Always look at the percentage.
And this rule is not just about flyers. It is exactly the same rule as the one about pricing. A prospect says your tuition is too high, and the owner comes to the meeting asking whether he should lower his prices — over one person. It’s the same error wearing different clothes: taking a single loud voice and treating it as the market.
Your critic is not your customer. Your customer already signed up and is on the mat.
One Hundred Leads Is the Floor
Here’s the number that ends most of these debates before they start.
You need at least 100 leads a month. If you are not getting 100 leads, you are not doing enough marketing. That’s it — that’s the diagnosis. Not the economy, not your town, not the fact that everybody’s kid plays soccer now.
But — and this is the part that gets skipped — those hundred leads cannot all come from one source. One source never works forever. It works, and then it doesn’t, and you never see it coming.
That’s why we run three:
- Internal. Referrals, family add-ons, buddy days, birthday parties, parents’ night out, referral contests. Everything that uses students you already have.
- External. School talks, bandit signs, rack cards, chamber of commerce, churches, community events, local business cross-promotion. Everything that happens off your mat.
- Internet. Everything online.
You do all three every month. Not one this month and a different one next month. And I don’t mean one idea from each — I mean three or four activities from each category, every month.
There’s a second benefit that owners underestimate. When your hundred leads come from three sources instead of one, your show rate goes up, your closing rate goes up, and your enrollment number gets more stable. A hundred leads from one channel and a hundred leads from three channels are not the same hundred leads.
Low Cost Means High Labor. Pick One.
Every marketing activity costs you money or it costs you work. There is no third option, and anybody selling you one is selling you something.
If you’re a newer school without much of a marketing budget, that is not a reason to do nothing. It’s a reason to do grassroots — the low-cost, labor-intensive end. School talks. Walking into local businesses. Meeting the chamber. Setting up events with churches and community groups. It’s free. It just costs you your afternoons.
One of our newest members had been with us about a week when he reported in. In seven days he’d asked for a $375 tuition, met with the chamber of commerce on his side of Houston, and sat down with two churches to set up events. One week. That’s what it looks like when somebody actually does the thing instead of studying the thing.
The Calendar Rule
Now here is the mechanism that makes all of it real, and it’s the least glamorous part of this article.
Get a marketing calendar. Any calendar. One from the office supply store, one of the plastic wall ones you write on with a grease pen — I don’t care. What matters is that it shows the next three months at once and that it hangs where you have to look at it.
Then here’s the rule, and it’s the whole trick:
You do not put something on the calendar when you intend to do it. You put it on the calendar when it is confirmed.
You keep a list of things you’d like to do. Fine. But the calendar is for committed dates only. If you’re running a buddy day, pick the week and put it down. If you’re doing rack cards, put down the date you order them and the date you distribute them. Two separate entries, because those are two separate jobs that fail separately.
The reason this works is brutally simple. When it’s written down, you can see it. And when you look at September and there are two things on it, you have your answer about why you’re not getting a hundred leads. You don’t have to wonder. It’s on the wall.
Left in your head, marketing floats. On the calendar, it either happened or it didn’t.
Your Rank Is Not Going to Save Your School
I want to say something that may sting a little.
You have spent your life becoming a great martial artist. Your martial arts is way up here. Your business training is way down here. And no amount of the first one fixes the second one.
I have watched eighth, ninth and tenth degree black belts run schools that were falling apart. And I have watched first and second degrees — people who are not half the martial artist you are — do three times your gross, because their business side is way up here.
I still train. I still want to get better. But I know which one of those two skills pays the rent, and so do you, or you wouldn’t be reading this.
Train Your Marketing the Way You Train Your Fighting
The last thing, and it’s the one I care about most.
Nobody ever became a good fighter by training until they thought they were good enough. That’s not how it works and you know it isn’t. You go spar. You enter the tournament. You get your mistakes handed to you and you correct them. You get better by doing, not by waiting until you’ve decided you’re ready.
Your school is the same. Don’t sit back thinking you have to learn everything before you go run a school talk. Go run it. If it doesn’t work, bring it to the meeting and we’ll fix what went wrong. But bring me something you tried.
So write this down and ask yourself every week:
What have I implemented this week that is different, that gets me closer to a million-dollar school?
If the honest answer is nothing, no article and no meeting is going to help you. And if the answer is one thing — one calendar entry, one chamber meeting, one price increase — you’re already ahead of most of the people who read this.
Grandmaster Jeff Smith is the first PKA World Light-Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion and a seven-time world champion. He earned his black belt under Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee in 1969 and served as Senior Vice President of the Jhoon Rhee Institute from 1970 to 1985. From 1981 to 1991 he coached the WAKO World Champion United States team to ten consecutive world titles. He is Director of Instruction for Mile High Karate and a coach with Martial Arts Wealth Mastery.
