Adding Tai Chi, BJJ or Muay Thai Without Breaking Your Pricing

Adding Tai Chi, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Muay Thai can open a new market. It can also quietly wreck your pricing and retention. The rule that keeps it safe: a new program can have a different audience, but nothing else about it should be different.

How should a martial arts school structure a second program such as Tai Chi, BJJ or Muay Thai? Exactly like the main program: the same enrollment process, the same pricing, the same agreement length, a visible rank or level system with frequent rewards, and an upgrade path to a leadership or instructor track. Do not make the new program cheaper or month-to-month, and do not force students who came for one art to train in a different one.

Why do second programs usually underperform?

Because owners treat them as a side product. A school runs its core program with a registration fee, a 12-month agreement and a path to Black Belt or Leadership, then adds Tai Chi at $150 a month, month to month. The new program brings in volume and almost no lifetime value.

The cardio-kickboxing boom showed the same pattern. Many schools loved the traffic without noticing they were charging far less than for martial arts and losing most members within a few months on month-to-month or punch-card terms.

Is the 50-and-over market worth pursuing?

It is large and growing. About 4.1 million Americans are turning 65 each year in the current “Peak 65” period, roughly 11,400 a day, according to the Alliance for Lifetime Income. People in their 60s and 70s are also more active than the same age group was 20 years ago.

It is also the age group that holds most household assets: homes, retirement accounts, investments. The last thing that audience needs is a cheaper, lower-commitment version of your program. If anything, it supports premium pricing.

One operator who runs martial arts programs inside a group of daycare centers has a Tai Chi program with about 50 students at the black-sash, instructor-trainee level. They assist and run classes exactly the way Leadership students do in a karate school. Same system, different audience.

Does every program need ranks?

Yes. People need to see and feel progress. Schools look at academics for the model: midterms and finals, then freshman through senior years, all building toward a degree. Students are pushed along by grades, parents and the law. A martial arts school has to work twice as hard to make progress visible.

The progression marker can be anything that fits the art: sashes for Tai Chi or kung fu, rope belts for wushu, shirts or shorts for Muay Thai, ribbons for boxing. Grand Master Jeff Smith has set up this structure for roughly 50 kung fu schools and helped a boxing gym in Virginia adopt the same kind of ribbon system. Each program also gets its own upgrade to a leadership or instructor track, just as the core program does.

Running several programs this way is easier, not harder. When BJJ, Muay Thai and Tai Chi students all have the same pricing, agreement length, goals and timeline, the front desk sells one system.

Should students be required to cross-train?

No, and this is the most common expensive mistake. One well-known multi-location operator billed his schools as MMA and required kickboxing students to start learning BJJ about a year in, and BJJ students to start kickboxing. Many students left when the other art became mandatory.

We made our own version of that mistake years ago, when an organization we were affiliated with tied senior Black Belt ranks to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu belts. Most of our women dropped out. Many men dropped out too. Some men fell in love with BJJ and wanted nothing else. It was lose, lose, lose, and it made our Black Belt dropout problem worse instead of better.

Plenty of people, many of them men, love grappling and do not want to do stand-up. Plenty of others, more often women, do not want to grapple at all. Forcing either group across that line pushes them out the door.

Can you include some grappling in a striking curriculum?

Carefully. Foot sweeps, throws and breakfalls taught standing are a different experience from starting on the ground with someone on your chest. Show ground escapes as self-defense techniques within your existing structure; do not turn a karate program into a grappling program for students who did not sign up for one.

Sources

• Alliance for Lifetime Income, America to Hit Peak 65 in 2024, Shattering Retirement Records.