Geoff Cielo: Leadership Development as the Growth Lever

And that really piqued my interest because it was a business and he showed me the business side of it. So I was very, very intrigued with it and I ended up Owning a school in 1993 is when I owned the location down here in Virginia Beach. Okay, so you’re, you’re, we didn’t tell people that, but you’re in Virginia Beach now. You went to Annapolis. What year did you go to Annapolis?

Yes, I graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1989. I graduated with a computer science degree and went into the Navy shortly thereafter. After some time in the Navy, I decided that this was not going to be my career, per se, and I knew that I was going to go into business. So at that point, I went ahead and put my papers in to get out at the time allotted and started my career. Yeah, fabulous. So did you originally own a school in Maryland, or did you open originally in Virginia Beach?

Oh, actually what happened was I went to study at the main location in Clinton, Maryland, and that’s where I was asked to go to start teaching. And what ended up happening is we were going to open a location in the Rockville area, and we had gone and looked in several different places, and it just wasn’t happening as far as Elise was concerned. And so my instructor at the time had said, well, do you want to go ahead and take a look at the the place that you had trained down in Virginia Beach. And I said, sure, because I wanted to do this. We took a look at the numbers and we said, okay, well, let’s go ahead and do it. And so I’ve been here ever since. Excellent. In Clinton, who are you training with?

I was training under Grandmaster Yung Sun Lee. Okay. He owned a chain of studios up in the Clinton and Northern Virginia area. Interesting. You probably haven’t heard the story before, but just before I moved to Washington, moved from Washington DC to Denver, is I was working with Ned Muffley, who was the person who started that school in Clinton, Maryland. Oh wow. So my, interesting tie here, I didn’t realize it, but Ned had, I’ll say it as nice as I can, but he’d been kind of kicked out of the Jhoon Rhee Institute through very little fault of his own in my opinion. And I had just graduated from Georgetown and went to work with Ned under the stipulation that, one, I was going to move to Denver and open a chain of martial arts schools. And I had planned to go to work for a chain of fitness centers, worked with Neil Ehrlich, but it was a chance to work with a startup.

[04:30] Ned’s understanding was I was not only going to be there for maybe six months, and my stipulation was I got access to all the books and got a chance to do what everything costs for the startup and so forth. And so, so Ned and a partner opened the school. I had access to all the books. I saw everything was going on. And by the way, it was on their part an abysmal failure. And when I moved to Washington DC, Young Sun Lee was my replacement. So, I met and hired Young Sun Lee and I spent about a month training him. Oh wow. To take home from that location. And then he had worked with, worked for Ned Muppley and Clinton. People aren’t familiar with that area. Clinton is right by Andrews Air Force Base, so when you hear of the President flying in and out of the country, I was, I was beauty from Alexandria.

I lived right across the street from Pentagon. So when the plane hit the Pentagon, you could, you had a straight shot from my balcony to that side of the Pentagon. It was right there by the heliport. But you’re interested. I never knew we had that common connection. Yes, sir. At the end of the day. But anyway, so you started in Hapkido. I started in Hapkido. Yes, about a year afterwards, I then went under a Grand Master Kim out of Maryland under a straight tuck window. I continued teaching a blend of hapkida and tuck window. Okay, fantastic. Fantastic. But now, moving forward, so the school, the school, School has been there, what is that now?

You’ve been there over 20 years. Over 20 years. Yes sir. 30 years ago from Clinton, Maryland. Wow. I moved out, I left there in December, or, no it must have been March of 83. And so I was there from August 82 to March 83. and probably had spent March of 83 training young family who by the way was young, left behind years and had arrogance. Yes, I don’t know if any of that changed. But that aside, what ended up happening is I actually joined NAPMA back in 1994 when we separated from the other organization. We found the information that Nam was putting out very informative. However, there wasn’t a driving force behind it. And what I mean by that is it was information. So you had to be the self-starter. You had to be the person to get in there and say, okay, what can I use and what is good and what is bad.

There wasn’t any direction as far as coaching or there wasn’t any direction as far as help as far as somebody saying, okay, let me hold you accountable to this. And what I found is, is we, I know the listeners don’t know this, but I used to own two locations and we had opened the second location about two and a half years ago, three years ago. And then after some series of events, I had to downsize to one location due to a divorce. And I know there’s plenty of people out there that have had some type of situation happen to them where they’ve had a catastrophic thing happen to them. But what I found is when we had started even before the school separated, that we were accelerating the rate of growth at an exponential rate. Because we were starting to listen to the ideas that were given during each one of these conferences as one.

[08:27] And second, we were being held accountable. We had coaching sessions where we had to say okay this is what’s going on with the school right now and this is what we need to do in order to make it better and then we had suggestions directly from you that were proven that actually worked. Yeah and so you know to summarize and you know I guess I always knew this but we did a couple years ago or maybe a year ago now up to or through the United States between Toby and I, we probably ended up each talking to 200, 250 school owners, many of whom were current or former NAPMA members. But we just, we were finding a huge discrepancy between people who had gotten a lot of good information and who, and those who were really thriving.

And my favorite reference was in both owning and operating my own schools, coaching franchisees and then doing coaching with individual owner operators. My result was having a $17,000 a month school end up at 35 and 6 months and 50 in a year. And we were finding a lot of people who might have 100 DVDs stacked up on their desk but really hadn’t done much with. And the difference it seems is just like martial arts. I mean, there are people who seldom get a DVD of the Month Club to learn self-defense. We all know they don’t end up keeping anybody in defense. Versus you’re in a classroom environment, plus you have a concerned and focused and capable teacher, mentor, makes all the difference in the world. That makes all the difference in the world. Complete difference in the world.

We went from from understanding some concepts on a DVD to actually being able to implement them and having a direction. Because if we were lost, I mean, I could easily call Toby, I could call and leave a message and try to go on the forums and connect with the people that were there. In fact, I was put in such a good position because I’m being put with people that are already successful chain owners where I can… ask them any questions and they don’t look down at me at all. I mean they look at me like just another owner that’s been looking to improve themselves. Yeah, we’ve got a heck of a good group of people working together. What I’ve noticed is that you have people there that have varied backgrounds as far as martial arts, but when it comes down to business, they are one sharp group.

You’ve got people that have made their business with the adult market, you’ve got people that have made their business with the kid market, you have even somebody there that made their business with the after school program. And I was just amazed at how willing they are to share all the information. In fact, one of the ideas that I got from just one gentleman, it was the the gentleman that does the after school is… Paul Miller. Yes, Paul Miller. Paul Miller. Such a personal guy and his son is great. The one concept that I got that was absolutely astonishing was when he did the living social, because you get a lot of leads off of that, is how to introduce them into the martial arts by giving them an actual private first. And you know, we say that and typically what we would do is we would put them into a regular intro class.

[12:10] But now we’re actually scheduling them throughout the day and I understand that this is a basic concept for some people, but for us it was a concept that now we can schedule intros anytime. And that one concept has driven our numbers up. And I think it’s great to network with these type of people. Oh, absolutely. Something that I think that we’re talking about that group is we have, you know, we’ve got a million dollar a year school teaching predominantly adult men Muay Thai to a million dollar plus school teaching predominantly adult men Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to several multi-school and huge single school. I think of Chris in New York who’s doing about 80,000 a month teaching predominantly kids and families. I mean we’ve got everything from predominantly cardio to predominantly transport after school care to character development for kids and families in Taekwondo or have Keto background like yourself.

So it brings tremendous synergy into the group, whether it’s MMA schools or kids’ schools or I talked earlier today with Eric Sabarge, who is predominantly 45 years old enough, adults doing predominantly Tai Chi. And of course, as you know, I mean, he’s I think 750 or 800,000 this year, and he’s super sharp. It’s just incredible to be with this group of people. But anyway, back to your operation, Jeff. So you’ve been in Virginia Beach for almost 20 years, but really have been on a combination of a little bit of trauma but then a heavy growth curve. Yes, sir. So let’s start with two or three lessons that you picked up perhaps between the marketing boot camp and the inner circle meetings. What are two or three things that you have found that maybe you weren’t doing before that you’ve made a dramatic change in last year?

Well, one of the things in the boot camp especially was it was something you said and it was just one of those things like a light bulb moment. It was like you said, if you just did more of the things that you were supposed to do, you’d get more leads and you’d get more enrollments. And I thought to myself, that is such an easy concept that it’s not something that I would think of. And I thought about it for a little bit. And then when they went through all the different things that we could do as far as marketing, I had seen at least 80% of them, but never put it together into a plan. When you had us do that drill where we had to work with other school owners to come up with plans within a certain budget, oh my goodness, that lit a fire under me.

And it said, okay, well, here’s something concrete. Here’s something that I can take away and I can implement as soon as I get back into my school. That was one awesome concept. The second awesome concept that I received from the marketing boot camp was the immense knowledge that Toby has regarding the internet and how the internet works and how we can make that work for us. using the squeeze pages and all that stuff that he was going over. It was just amazing. Yeah. Well, and there we got fairly technical and then we were scheduling a bunch of webinars and follow-ups from there to even drill deeper in the weeds. But there’s so much of that that I think people just don’t, they don’t think about. And the mission, of course, is to generate new students, not to have a pretty website.

[16:01] And the two are pretty distinct opposites sometimes. In your current school, now that the dust has settled from the divorce in one thing or another, tell us about, you’ve had a really nice run now on you. And obviously you’ve been running a very solid school for many years now. What are two or three of the lessons that you would share with everybody from the year?

Well, the first lesson that I would share is to do what you’re saying. If you make a recommendation, do it and do it right away. Whether you believe that it’s going to work or you don’t believe it’s going to work, just do what you say. Because when you say something, it’s something that’s proven already. And it’s something that’s going to work. And if you say, and it’s happened before, we say we have to test the market, where we test the advertising to see if it works, then I’m gonna test the market. And the second thing that I got from it is that I have to do rule one, which is to do what you’re gonna say, to do. Basically, everything that you’ve told me to do to date has worked in one way or the other.

Whether it’s a home run or whether it’s not 5 to 10. And what was amazing is from that drill that we did, and I keep going back to that marketing boot camp because it was amazing to work with all those different styles and them having to come up with marketing plans for different school types. But what we came up with was amazing because I didn’t think that I would be able to stretch out as far financially when I went into marketing for the school. And just like you had said, if your price point or what you’re charging is high enough, then you’re going to go ahead and be able to go ahead and cover whatever marketing costs that you have. I was able to cover the marketing costs, which was for the rock and roll half marathon.

It’s a booth there that they have, we had, there’s supposed to be like 10,000 people coming through and, you know, out of that group we had about 200 people sign up on our list and then out of that group only about 100 were from the Virginia Beach area. However, out of that group I just needed to go ahead and justify the marketing and we’ve already had that. We’ve already had that and it’s already covered the expense. There was another idea that was out there that was the going to the open houses. Oh my goodness, I didn’t even show up to the open house. I had volunteers go. We’ve got another hundred names right there. So everything that you’ve said and everything that we’ve worked through that were plans, they were all solid plans. And I really appreciate that because it’s things that work.

I appreciate the compliment. I think the thing that maybe is perhaps for clarification on that is that, yes, so many times the answer for the guys who are failing is they say, oh, that’s great for Virginia Beach, but that wouldn’t work in Wichita. Or that’s great for Denver, but that would never work in New York City. or that’s great for kids who would never work with adult men. And as you’ve now seen, that’s just an excuse for failure. It’s not reality. Absolutely. As we’re working one-on-one and as we’re working with a group, there certainly are things we say, you know, this particular newspaper or this particular media or this particular thing, we’ve got to go check it out because we don’t know what the readership is going to be or what the results are going to be until we try it.

[20:04] But same concepts that are working just fine in Virginia Beach are also working in Bahrain and working in Frankfurt, Germany. Oliver Drexler, who was just there, is an example. And working in South Africa, all over the world, same concepts. And frankly, mostly the same advertising layout and price point. Yes, sir. So, Jeff, from a standpoint of really keeping a high level of engagement, get transitional trauma with staff. Give everybody some thoughts on how to really get the staff engaged and the team engaged and have a high level of energy and enthusiasm, especially during perhaps some trauma with everybody. one of the concepts that you put across and that you kind of taught in a backwards way, but it kind of hit me afterwards, is how to come up with plans and make the plans the idea of the staff.

And I’d seen this done before, but it had never been done to me. And when we did that during one of the conferences, Basically, we were asked to do a project together and come up with it. And when you did that, we had to put our brains together and work on it and come up with a plan. And what was interesting about it is instead of you giving us the plan, we became invested in the plan and had to make it work. And we used the resources that were around us in order to come up with a plan. and it became our own plan. Now you did guide us by telling us what would work and what kind of wouldn’t work and what have you, but it still was our plan in the end, in the end analysis.

And what I’ve started doing here and it’s worked immensely well is to do the same exact thing. Whenever we have a project coming up, we have an event coming up, whether it be Buddy Week or some type of other project that we want, done and completed in a certain amount of time, instead of me just dictating it to them, I say, well, this is the goal. You know, what is your input?

And then when can we get it done? And then we all brainstorm for a little bit, and we come up with a plan. And because they’re invested in it, because they, it’s their idea at that point, they want to see it succeed. And so they put more energy into it. just like we did during one of those conferences. Yeah, and the multi-school application of that is that, you know, I was always fine when I was running six locations or five locations is I really didn’t care how they got there. I cared that they had enough enrollments and I had enough revenue for a student and good retention. And it would be, we always had a list of 20 things, and if they did any five or ten of them, they would have enough enrollments. And it was kind of letting people in different locations pick and choose what they were going to emphasize.

Obviously, there were some things that were important for everybody to be focusing on and you give them a period because of seasonality or because they’re buying media. But the more you can do that, just as you said very elegantly, is the more they’re now invested in the outcome and it’s not you’re trying to convince them to follow your plan. you’re supporting them, coaching them and teaching them to follow their own plan. Right, that’s absolutely correct. And that was one of my biggest downfalls, is I knew kind of what needed to get done, and so I would kind of just dictate to everybody what needed to get done. And just that small, that small turn where I’m now letting them come up with the idea, letting them decide some of the things that need to get done.

[24:10] It has made a dramatic difference as far as morale and as far as them being vested in doing the work. The other thing that comes to mind that we made a change in that I kind of didn’t understand before and I know that this is another basic concept that a lot of people have done that I just never did because I come from taquando slash habkido background was the rotating curriculum. It was explained to me, I think the rotating curriculum was explained to me maybe two years ago and I’d seen it on a DVD and then somebody explained it to me and I didn’t understand it. And then finally somebody at the first conference I went to up in West Point, I was eating lunch with him and he just showed me with sugar packets how it works.

And it was completely clear at that point. That’s from one conversation from another owner that was already implementing the solution. But what that’s done, and after talking to him and talking to Jeff Smith, Master Smith, about the cycles, the testing cycles and the rotating curriculum, We’ve been able to go ahead and nip in the bud one of the problems that we’ve been having with retention, which is at a higher level, it takes longer for one of the students to graduate. We just added another belt in and we’re able to accomplish the same goal, which was to get students to learn a certain amount of material, but learn it even better when it’s split up into two month sections into one. instead of one four month section. And it was just incredible when we started implementing this.

All the parents were happy. You would not believe how much better service we are giving our students because everybody’s kind of on the same page with the same drills and it looks so sharp on the mat because everybody’s doing the same thing. Yeah, it’s a huge difference, isn’t it?

Yes, it is. It absolutely is. I tell the story on Jeff Smith, but he’s been running the school for professional change of schools probably 10 years longer than I have. I’ve been doing it for a long time, but it took me forever to convince him. But now once he finally did it, and it’s been a few years now, but he freely admits one, he was hard-headed, and two, he would never go back. And I know at the last event, there were four or five owners, I think Dave Moss and all of our directs were two of them. that the light finally went off on what we were talking about and I talked to them since and they would never go back either. So it’s just a dramatic shift, mostly a dramatic shift in quality and service delivery.

Absolutely. It is definitely something that will improve the retention of the students because they understand the material better within that time frame. and they’re going to get better at the techniques because everybody’s going over the same drills and everybody can model off of each other and they model much better if they’re seeing the same technique than instead of three different techniques in the same class. So that is definitely one of the things that came out of that. It’s just been, I hate to say it, to keep repeating myself, but it’s been such a blessing to be able to network with such high-level owners because it’s expanded my thinking as far as what needs to get done and what can be accomplished with even one location. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, and we have an interesting split between big multi-school operators and and make single school operators.

[28:11] So, you know, million dollar single schools and multi-million dollar multi-school. So, there’s both ends of the spectrum. And of course there are different issues and different challenges at both sides of it. Let’s go back to now student service and student quality. As you’ve developed your school over the years, and again a lot of people think that as you professionalize and commercialize and get the gross up somehow you’re compromising on quality. What’s your analysis of that?

How do you feel about your quality and student retention and graduation rates at Black Belt?

How has that been affected over the last two years?

Well, as you professionalize what you’re doing, that means it just means that you’re putting things in an order that people can understand. can be tracked and can be improved upon. What’s happened over the years as we’ve systematized the curriculum and as we’ve taught the curriculum in a way that the students can understand it, and as we implemented this rotating curriculum, we find that the retention now has increased. We find that the quality of the student actually increases. Then years passed when I had three, four belts in a class. And I’m trying to teach four or five different techniques, and there’s not any general order to anything. And then trying to throw all the material into one pot. One of the things that’s really interesting is that I have, I’m also studying Wing Chun Kung Fu at this point and studying under, just a seafood that I know.

And what’s interesting is that the school that he’s running, and I’m allowing him to have, well, I’m giving some space for him to run this school here, at my school, as I’m taking Wing Chun, but there is no order to what they’re teaching. I’m having a blast in the class, because I’m learning something different than what I’m teaching. there’s no order to how they’re teaching it. And maybe I don’t see the big picture. I understand that there’s a couple forms and if there’s basics and you train those basics. But as far as being a professional school, they’re definitely not bad. And because they’re not a professional school, they have 10 students maybe. And anything that I’ve said to them, it kind of falls on deaf ears and I’m okay because I’m just, help them out and that’s not a big deal.

But they’re going to keep staying at that size unless they decide to, as you said, professionalize themselves to get better attention and better students. Yeah, and you know, I’ve had the conversation so many times with, including my instructor from Tulsa who is still runs in a YMCA. And again, what I’ve always seen as a direct correlation is the more professional the school and the better they are as an educator, the higher quality students they have, the higher graduation of black belt, higher percentage of the students are ever going to truly get excellent. And in part, it’s because, you know, in your case, Jeff, you’re spending more time training on learning how to be a better educator and a better school operator than a part-timer is spending doing anything related to martial arts. Yes, sir. So if you’re going to give, let’s say that one of the school owners listening is having a little bit of a hard time getting enough new students in the door, and they wanted to go out and immediately have an impact this month.

[32:04] What are four or five things that you’ve had some good success with in the last few months that they could immediately go do?

Okay, if they are a type of business as mine, which is a children-based business, and we have an adult population as well, but it’s a smaller percentage. We’re about 70% kids and about 30% adults. The first thing that they can do is they can get involved with the Partners in Education or school talks. and they can definitely get involved with their local college. They can do those two things. The other thing that they can do is definitely start putting out their material. And what I mean by putting out their material, I mean by being out there with the rack cards, being out there with the lawn signs or the bandit signs, as we call them, so everybody knows that you’re there. And those are just a couple of things that you could do to immediately start getting calls.

Yeah. Let’s talk about the school talks thing for a second. And it’s kind of one of my pet peeves because the best of my knowledge that got started in the industry back in the early 80s, and I always called it the gym teacher for the day. Yes, sir. What, when it got repackaged as school talks and then the phone was packaged, is the key ingredient of the whole thing was the concept of using the permission slip. And the permission slip is so that you get name address, phone number, email address. We all know that I can go out and do a demo for 50 kids. and pass out flyers, I’m lucky to get one phone call. But if I go first, if I go teach a class, as opposed to do something that’s entertaining, my results improve by probably 500 to 1,000%.

And then number two, if I get their name address, phone or email address, and can follow up proactively, my results go up another 1,000%. So it’s a huge difference. Talk about that. You’ve seen that recently, I know you and I were talking before we started the conversation, or the recording about some of those programs, but what have you had to discuss with them?

Yes, sir. I’m a partner in education with currently five different schools here with the elementary school system, and we do something called Defeat the Bully Without Fighting. And basically I go into the school and like you said, I take over the gym class and I go over the Virginia Beach Public Schools Code of Conduct. and we give them five different things so they don’t get in trouble. You know, how to defeat the bully. So we give them five different areas that they can do before they get in trouble or so they don’t get in trouble. And in years past, I would do these things and then get little or no result, maybe one call and maybe just name recognition and that was it. What we did different this year is I had actually tried to do a permission slip.

It was denied at one of the schools and that was okay. But I did a different text which is to send out a letter directly after the seminar. And the letter basically stated, you know, please go over the code of conduct that involves fighting and bullying and then also go over the five action steps that you’re supposed to take. And at the very bottom of it was very simple. It just said, yes, please contact me regarding the program. Yes, please contact me, but my child is instantly involved in another program. And the last one was, no, I’m not interested at this point. And just out of that, we had 20 leads right away. They came in saying, I want more information on the program. So those are 20 solid leads that we got. just from that.

[36:13] So I’m expecting the same thing from every other elementary school that I’m going to go, that I’m going to right now. You bet, you bet. And what we found, I mean we used to do a lot of the media telemarketing behind this stuff, but if you take everybody whose information you capture, direct mail to them and email to them, you know, they rarely have anybody complain. And anybody who raises their hand and says, I mean, if they want information, you want to call them right away. But as we talked about at the boot camp and it’s an ongoing theme, almost nobody follows up with a warm prospect enough. And just because we show up at the elementary school in September or in February doesn’t mean that’s the right time for them to enroll. We’ve got to go back over and over and over by direction.

Mail and my email and my broadcast voice mail and text message and live person calling them. Do you ever have the kind of results that are possible?

Yes, sir. That’s absolutely correct. I was absolutely amazed when I looked at your follow-up system and the follow-up system that we had in place that was very anemic. Our follow-up system was just callbacks and then they would go into the newsletter. as a follow-up, but from just what you mentioned, you hit those people up, I want to say at least 20 times, at least 20 times during the month, which is so many times more, I guess 200%, 400% more than what I’m doing. And so it’s telling me what I need to do in order to grow to the level that I want to grow to. Well, and just because I ignore you or say no today doesn’t mean I’m not really interested eventually. It just may be the wrong timing. And so we lose sight of that and just stop following up with them.

And then sooner or later they end up doing something else where they probably would have come into our school. But hey, we’re going to run out of time here pretty quickly, but it hasn’t been really valuable. You had a unique perspective. We took the entire group to West Point, and I guess I should say United States Military Academy at West Point. And really the point was to focus on leadership development at the highest level and things that we could bring back into the school. Your unique perspective was you’re a graduate of Annapolis, United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Give them some lessons that, not only from your experience at Annapolis, but are being at West Point that directly is applicable to all the school owners. Excellent. Some of the lessons that I learned at Annapolis were to get the job done no matter what.

And that was another theme that I saw at West Point, is to get the job done. And in order to get the job done, you need the right tools. and the right tools are right in front of you. And if you can use them in the correct manner at the right time, then you can be successful. And the interesting thing is that the tools were there in front of me all the time in order to be super successful. I just didn’t have the knowledge as far as applying them. And to have that mentorship, of somebody that has been through it and that understands how to make it work is absolutely invaluable. And this is the same thing that gets set up at the academies. You have the plea beer that you go in and you don’t have anything and they recondition you.

[40:05] That first year they completely recondition how you do things and how your time management is. And you have it, but the way you learn it is by mentorship. You have people that are above you that are training you to do this. And so one of the big takeaways from whether it be West Point or whether it be the US Naval Academy is that you always have to have a teacher, somebody that’s going to be a mentor to you, somebody that you can look up to, and somebody that you can follow into the fire because they’ve been there. Absolutely. And it’s one of the things I’m proud of is we spent a lot of time really modeling the top organizations in the world, whether it be the U.S. Service Academies, which Forbes magazine, I think it was, recently did a top 10 schools for producing business leaders in the country, and West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force Academy were all three in the top 10.

I mean right up the site of Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, and Princeton. And obviously we’re modeling Disney and Harvard Business School for that matter. For somebody out there who’s been kind of hearing us drop hints about people, performers in a circle, but have been skeptical or just not sure if it’s for them, what would be the two points of advice you would give them?

The thing that I would tell them is to just try it. And the reason I say just try it is when we did this and we had started with, it was peak performers at the time, the just being in that environment allowed us a chance to expand our thinking as far as where the school could grow. rate of growth that it could grow. And this is something that you mentioned the last time that we talked, is that schools can grow either linearly or exponentially. And I did not understand that until I actually talked to Master Smith. When he gave me a concept, I was completely blown away, and it’s something that you guys already teach, where if you have 80% of your revenue coming from renewals or upgrades, then you’re going to be growing exponentially. And then it didn’t dawn on me, it didn’t hit me until he explained it to me.

But just that one concept right there is you don’t have to grow linearly anymore. You can grow exponentially and that can happen within three to six months. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s a heck of a lot easier. I mean, at one point, you can be doing $30,000 a month now, and then you grow 3% this year and 5% next year. And maybe it’s just my personality, but that, to me, is the sure route to burnout. But if you go from $30,000 to $60,000 to $90,000, that’s pretty exciting. Yes, it is. It’s very exciting. And it’s doable. Andy, you mentioned Jeff Smith, but at this, you know, not terribly far from you, but there by Dulles Airport. We use that as a training center for the Mylon Karate Schools. But the number there, as we were talking about before, is 87% of everybody who enrolls ends up renewed or upgraded, and close to 90% of the people who end up upgrading, upgrade into the more expensive program.

And I mean our tuition points now are $247 a month for new enrollment. I think it’s $2.99, I don’t do many of these anymore, but $297 a month for the lowest level upgrade and $497 for the leadership program. And what confuses people is the vast majority of the ones that are renewing or redoing into the more expensive banks. the life expectancy. That’s absolutely correct. And that was one of the things that was taught to us is that as somebody is committing to you more, we will extend more service to you, which would be the leadership programs. But we’re going to be doing this as a college, as if it was a college environment, where you’re going to be going through the paces and you’re going to be learning everything there is to learn about leadership. And because we’re doing that for you, we’re going to charge you a higher price point.

[44:48] And that’s OK, because we’re giving you more service. And that was an incredible concept. And it did. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that, because as somebody would enroll for a longer amount of time, I would actually give them a discount, because they’re enrolling for a longer amount of time. So they have more commitment towards me, and so I would give them a better discount. from what you’ve been saying the whole time and from what’s been shown to us, we can actually give them more as far as service is concerned and as far as quality is concerned. And then it makes sense as to why we’re doing it because it’s character development along with just physical training. And it’s something that we promised from the beginning. Well, absolutely. One of the things is people are already used to thinking that way in terms of education.

My kids go to private school, and private preschool is less expensive than private elementary school, which is less expensive than private middle school, which is much less expensive than Harvard. And so they’re used to, as the value of the instruction goes up, for there to be a higher price point. And now we’re talking about not only the same basic curriculum at a higher level, but we’re talking about a much expanded curriculum as well. So it’s not like once you explain, they’re not used to thinking. Hey, we’ve got a little over our time here, and it’s been extremely valuable, hopefully, for everybody listening to the call. I really appreciate how open and sharing you’ve been. And let me get the commitment for us to do a little follow-up, because we’ve, as you know, barely scratched the surface.

There’s so much to go through. But just give my best wishes to everybody there in Virginia Beach. And I appreciate your beautiful ocean view. And I’ve got a little bit of a mountain view here for my office. And we’ll wrap up for the day. Any last couple words of wisdom for everybody before we ring off?

I guess the last thing that I have to say is do what you say. I hate to say that again, but if I would have just done it from the beginning and just hit the I believe button, just like I tell everybody else here, I’d be so much farther ahead than where I’m at right now. So we should just get on those staples, it’s easy buttons that make it so… That’s correct. Okay. I’m not sure if we sent it out, they would have the same impact or not. but I certainly appreciate the kudos and the you two. I’m so impressed with your progress and excited to have you as part of the team. So we’ll bring off since we’re out of time and then talk soon. Excellent.