Nick Cokinos, 1921-2014: The Man Who Built the Back Office

Every other person in this section could throw a kick. Nick Cokinos could not, and it did not matter. He is arguably the most consequential figure in the history of the martial arts school business, because he is the one who worked out how the money comes in.

Born: 1921
Died: 2014
Full name: Nicholas P. Cokinos
Educated: George Washington University
Founded: The Educational Funding Company, 1967–68
Known for: Creating third-party tuition billing and business consulting for martial arts schools

He came out of the dance studio business. He had worked with Arthur Murray studios and operated seven Art Linkletter–Fred Totten dance studio locations around Washington, D.C. That is the whole key to the man: dance studios in the 1950s and 1960s had already solved problems martial arts schools had not yet encountered. Recurring tuition. Enrollment conversations. Programme upgrades. Retention as a measured thing rather than a hope.

In 1967 he began working with the Jhoon Rhee organisation in Washington, at exactly the moment Rhee was going from one school to eight.

What he actually did there

He was not a student. He was the business architect. Grand Master Jeff Smith, who was inside the Rhee organisation in those years, put it plainly: “Nick Cokinos [the Educational Funding Company founder] helped Grandmaster Rhee initiate the [business] systems, although they had a falling out a few years later.”

Both halves of that sentence matter. The systems that made the Jhoon Rhee Institute the largest martial arts school group in America were built with Cokinos. And the relationship did not last. Nobody has ever documented the terms of the arrangement or the nature of the split, and this journal is not going to speculate about either.

What came out of it was a company. He had established a billing operation for dance schools; in 1968 he pointed it at martial arts schools across the United States and called it the Educational Funding Company.

EFC was an educational organization disguised as a billing company.— Stephen Oliver, Publisher

That is the accurate description, and the trademark he filed on February 1, 1991 says the same thing in legal language: “providing tuition billing services and business management consulting services to martial arts, fitness and dietetic planning.” The billing was the delivery mechanism. The consulting was the product.

The systems

EFC credits Cokinos personally with originating a set of named procedures that its own materials describe as having been adopted uniformly across the world in the thirty years since:

The Seven and a Half Magic Questions — the enrollment interview.
The Famous Extension Conference — the upgrade and renewal conversation.
The ABC Theory.
The Half Moon Theory.

The Extension Conference is the one worth stopping on. It is the direct ancestor of every long-term agreement, every Black Belt Club, every “let’s talk about where you’re headed” conversation that happens in a school office. The mechanism that converts a beginner’s twelve-week commitment into a three-year one was formalised, given a name, and taught to thousands of school owners by a man who learned it selling dance lessons.

Around those sat the rest of it: lead generation and appointment tracking, recurring tuition management, instructor payroll analysis, rent and expense monitoring, retention metrics, multi-location operations, children’s programme development, and formal key performance indicators — decades before this industry generally adopted any of them.

The scale

By the early 1990s EFC served roughly 700 martial arts schools. The company’s own accounting of its peak puts it at approximately 250,000 students and more than $200 million a year flowing through it. Its current materials claim more than 5,000 schools supported across seven countries over the company’s life. International expansion began in 1993; the United Kingdom operation dates from 1997.

Those figures come from EFC and should be read as EFC’s, not as audited. But the shape is not in dispute: for a long stretch, a substantial share of all the tuition paid to martial arts schools in America passed through a company in Chevy Chase, Maryland, run by a man who had never earned a belt.

What he told school owners about money

His advice on personal wealth was unfashionable and, judging by the letters, deeply felt. Own your business. Buy your own building — EFC helped seventeen school owners do exactly that in a single year. Invest in rental real estate. Hold blue-chip stocks.

He was flatly against the 401(k): “We do not subscribe to this concept, nor do we recommend it.” On staff pay, he preferred incentive tied to output: “We have embarked on an attractive pay incentive closely tied to productivity.”

Agree with him or not, the underlying position is coherent and it is the one his whole career expressed — that a school owner’s wealth should come from assets he controls, starting with the school itself.

What a school owner should take from Nick Cokinos

He is the proof that this industry’s hardest problems were never technical. Nobody’s enrollment collapsed because their front kick was wrong. Schools failed because tuition was collected in cash by an instructor who would rather be teaching, because nobody had a script for the conversation at the end of a beginner course, and because nobody was counting anything.

Cokinos took the answers from an adjacent industry that had already solved them, adapted them, named them, and then — this is the part that made him rich and made the industry viable — wrapped them inside a service school owners were willing to pay for anyway. He did not sell consulting. He sold billing, and taught the consulting for free, because a school owner who will not buy advice will absolutely outsource collections.

That is still the single best distribution insight anyone in this business has had.

The rest of it

He ran an annual EFC Summit and published a school-owner newsletter, EFC ALLSTARS, that reached its twenty-second volume by 2008. Late in life he launched the MPower International Association with his son John, out of the same Chevy Chase address.

The mission he stated for the company never changed and was not modest: to raise the standards of martial arts.

EFC did not die with him. It is still operating, still family-held. His son John Cokinos is Chairman; Brian Simpson is chief executive.

He was inducted into the NAPMA Lifetime Achievement Awards posthumously in 2015.

Disclosure. This journal’s publisher, Grand Master Stephen Oliver, worked under Nick Cokinos as head instructor at the Jhoon Rhee Institute in Washington, D.C., served on the EFC Board of Directors from the company’s inception through 2001, was one of EFC’s first high-profile clients and a national speaker for the company for roughly twenty years, and holds an Educational Funding Company Lifetime Achievement Award. He is also the source for the birth and death years given above. Readers should weigh this piece accordingly.

Sources, and what we could not confirm

The birth and death years, 1921 and 2014, rest on this publication. We searched Legacy.com, Find a Grave, Dignity Memorial, Washington-area funeral homes and general news archives and found no published obituary, death notice, funeral record or memorial page for Nicholas P. Cokinos anywhere on the open web. The dates here come from our publisher, who knew him and sat on his board, and we have said so plainly rather than implying a source we do not have. If a family member or EFC can supply a full date, we will add it.
Exact date of death, place of death, cause, birthplace, parents, and any military service are all undocumented. We have not guessed at any of them.
EFC’s founding year is given inconsistently by EFC itself — 1967 on its current site, 1968 on its executive-team page. Its UK arm reconciles the two: 1967 is when the Jhoon Rhee work began, 1968 when the company expanded to serve martial arts schools generally. We follow that reading.
The scale figures are EFC’s own — 250,000 students and $200 million annually at peak, 5,000+ schools across seven countries cumulatively, and roughly 700 schools by the early 1990s. None is independently audited and we have attributed rather than asserted them.
“EFC created the third-party billing industry” is EFC’s own claim — its materials describe it as “the first provider and still the leading tuition management and business consulting firm for professional martial arts schools.” We found no independent history adjudicating the priority question.
The Black Belt Club concept is not attributable to him. The analogous innovation of continued training beyond black belt is credited elsewhere to Jhoon Rhee. The defensible line from Cokinos to the modern long-term agreement runs through the Extension Conference, which is documented as his.
The falling out with Jhoon Rhee is reported by Jeff Smith and by nobody else. No source describes its cause, its timing or its terms.
No books, courses or seminar products under his own byline were findable, and no hall-of-fame recognition beyond the 2015 NAPMA award appears in any public listing.
A note on a near miss, recorded so the next researcher does not repeat it. A Maryland appellate opinion documents the 2014 death of another member of the Cokinos family who held Educational Funding Company stock. That is a different person, and any future account of Nick Cokinos’s dates should be checked against it rather than conflated with it.
Principal sources: EFC’s corporate and UK sites and its executive-team and blog pages; the U.S. trademark register (Serial 74135376); MAIA’s interview with Grand Master Jeff Smith; and this journal’s own reporting.

Corrections and first-hand recollections are welcome and will be added with attribution — particularly from anyone who worked at EFC or was billed through it in the 1970s and 1980s.