I had a meeting recently with 35 really smart school owners who are all involved in growth process for their businesses. We’ve been successfully helping these martial arts school operators take their school to the next level.
I’m always excited and energized by helping motivated owners grow their business. I was so charged up after our session today that I had to get in an extra workout. As I sit here composing my thoughts, it’s very late on Saturday evening and I’m still charged. I have something I really wanted to get out to you, so I’m burning the midnight oil.
Over the past several months I’ve encountered a lot of martial arts school operators who are sincerely interested in taking their school to the next level. Many of them fit into a certain model of having some similar challenges. I wanted to walk you through what I’m seeing, why that happens, and most important, how to overcome it.
First of all, let’s take a look at a typical conversation I have with a martial arts school operator. The conversation goes something like this: “I’ve been operating a martial arts school for a number of years. (Maybe its 5, 10 or 20 years.) And for a large number of those years I’ve been stuck at a certain plateau and I can’t break through.”
Let’s look at an example: One of our members at the meeting has been running a school for 7 years. He’s been operating a single location for 7 years, and for the last 5 years, he’s been at about $25,000 a month. No matter what he has tried, he hasn’t been able to break through that plateau.
Another example is an owner operating a school for 15 years, who has been stuck at $40,000 a month for 13 of those 15 years. A few peaks and valleys here and there but if you draw out the average, he’s been on that plateau for a long period of time.
If that’s the case with you, no matter where that plateau is, whether it is at 60 students and $5,000 a month, 200 students and $40,000, or 550 students and $100,000 a month, regardless of where that plateau is, it can be frustrating to break it.
Why and how does that happen to us in the martial arts business? Most martial arts school operators don’t start off as business people. We mostly start off as martial arts enthusiasts. We were students and we love martial arts so much that by some confluence of events, we end up either opening a location or taking over a location that perhaps our instructor operated. In most cases, we take on the challenge of running a business without any advanced business training or previous business experience. We go out and look for a location that seems good, where there isn’t a ton of competition in the same area. (Typically, we shy away from locations where there is competition or the perception of competition. But, that’s a topic for another day.)
We open a school at our location with zero students. What happens next is there’s a certain amount of traffic that just happens into our location. Because there has not been a school there in the past, people see it and they start to come in. There is a big influx of new students within the first several months of your grand opening. All the sudden you pop in front of them and they’re interested and for the first eight or nine months of your grand opening, you sign a bunch of new students.
After the first 12 to 18 months that influx of new students slows down. The typical maturation cycle of a martial arts school tends to be somewhere between 12 and 18 months. Meaning you enjoy that influx of new customer interest from your community and that first rush of business tends to be the largest growth period of a martial arts business. Then you’ll plateau as the number of new students coming into the school starts to equal the number that are dropping out each and every month.
Let’s deconstruct the plateau. A martial arts school operator may, for example, have the marketing sophistication and knowledge to generate 10 new enrollments a month. That’s what he’s personally capable of accomplishing. In the first 12 months or so, he’ll have the 10 that he knows how to bring in plus the location brings in another 10. Maybe he did a little marketing for the grand opening that brought in another 10. Initially, he enrolled 30 students per month.
Eventually, the new location bump and initial marketing blitz slow down. But, he still has the location and his level of marketing skills to enroll about 20 students a month. Now he’s bringing in 10 new students every month but he also has students dropping out at a rate of 10 every month. He stays on that plateau.
Now, here’s the reality in that martial arts business, and statistically, this is the best we can track. The bad news is you will stay on this plateau permanently. You may perhaps have two percent to four percent annual growth depending on your community, unless and until you do something dramatically differently.
I’m reminded of a book by Marshall Goldsmith called, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Nothing can be truer in a martial arts school. The skills and ability, and the tools and systems that you have in place that got you where you are, will be the same skills and tools that will keep you from growing to the next level. The only way to break through this plateau is to dramatically change the processes and systems that got you onto the plateau.
In our NAPMA coaching programs, we work with school owners one-on-one to figure out exactly what got them to their individual plateau, and what systems and tools it’s going to take to get them to break through that plateau to the next level. That means doing an in-depth analysis of internal systems and tracking performance numbers. The last piece is learning what to do with that information.
Grandmaster Stephen Oliver’s mission, and NAPMA’s mission as well, is to dramatically grow the martial arts industry by helping motivated martial arts school operators earn the income that they deserve. We’re committed to the school owners who are most serious about delivering high quality service and programs to accomplish this goal. When you find yourself stuck on a plateau that seems impossible to break through, remember that getting to that next level starts with acquiring the skills and knowledge required to perform at that next higher level.
