Design the Month Before It Starts: The Goal Worksheet My Staff Signs

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Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. is the founder of KarateBuilt Martial Arts, an 8th Degree Black Belt, and a consultant with Martial Arts Wealth Mastery. This is the first in his regular column for Martial Arts Professional.

Two completely different positions to be in

Here is the difference between the schools that grow and the schools that just survive, and it is almost embarrassingly small.

One school starts the month understanding the numbers. The other school gets to the middle of the month, looks up, and goes: crap, I didn’t make enough money, what do I do?

Those are two completely different positions to be in. Same owner, same staff, same square footage, same town. The only difference is that one of them did about twenty minutes of arithmetic before the first of the month and the other one didn’t.

Since we started doing this in my schools, the gross has gone up a lot. Not because we found a new marketing channel. Because we stopped discovering our month halfway through it.

Grandmaster Jeff Smith writes on this site about tracking your statistics — what happened, compared against last quarter and last year. That work is essential and I am not going to repeat it here. What I want to give you is the other half, the half that happens before the month exists: designing what the month is going to be, on one page, in advance.

The worksheet

In my schools, the last staff meeting of the month, every staff member turns in a goal worksheet. Not a conversation. A sheet, filled out, handed in.

They don’t get to make a number up. They don’t get to write “more than last year” or “we’re going to do better.” Better is not a plan. What they do instead is build the month out of its actual parts, line by line, with a running total down the right-hand side so the thing adds itself up as you go.

It looks like this.

Line 1 and 2 — billing

We schedule billing twice a month, so there are two lines. Say the first half is $20,000. You write $20,000 in the line, and $20,000 in the running total. Second half is another $20,000 — now the running total says $40,000.

That is your recurring base. It is the money that shows up whether or not anybody has a good week. Everything after this line is money you have to go out and create.

Line 3 — basic program enrollments

How many are you going to do, and at what down payment? Twenty basic programs at $800 down is $16,000. Add it to the running total.

Notice what just happened: your staff member has now committed, in writing, to twenty enrollments. Not “a good month.” Twenty. That number is now a thing that can be true or false on the 30th, which is exactly what you want.

Line 4 — paid in fulls

Most of my people will tell you they don’t really want to do any paid in fulls. Fine. But if you are going to write twenty basic programs, you can reasonably figure you will get one. Put one down.

Lines 5, 6, 7 — the upgrade programs

How many black belt clubs — we call them Master Clubs — and what is the total? How many leadership programs, and what is the total? How many instructor programs? Ours run $1,297. If you’re going to write one, that’s $1,297 down.

Note that this sheet accounts for what you are going to make in the school that month. Billing already covered the monthly recurring side. Everything below the billing lines is new money you are generating.

Line 8 — compressions

For anyone new to the term: a compression is when you get somebody to pay in full on a membership they already hold. We compress thirty-six months, or sixty months, or whatever is left on the agreement, down to a single payment. Sometimes we compress it to twelve payments, or to three payments over a set period. We call it compression because we are turning multiple payments into one — or into fewer of them.

Compressions are the most overlooked line on this sheet. Every school has members eighteen months into a five-year agreement who would happily settle it if anybody ever offered.

Line 9 — merchandise and miscellaneous

In our model merchandise is usually not much, because most of it is included in the program. Testing fees are on the sheet as a holdover from the old days — we don’t charge them. If you do, put them in. Then everything else miscellaneous goes at the bottom.

The total

Add it up. And here is my honest prediction, having watched a lot of people fill this out for the first time: if you put reasonable numbers in — not ambitious ones, reasonable ones — you will be surprised how big the number at the bottom is.

That surprise is the entire point of the exercise. Most owners are not failing to hit an aggressive goal. They are failing to notice that a completely ordinary month, fully executed, is worth substantially more than what they are actually collecting.

Then somebody signs it

At the bottom of my sheet there are two signature lines. One is mine. One is the staff member’s.

They turn the sheet in on the last day of the month. We review it together. Then we both sign it — which is us agreeing that this is what the month is going to be.

I want to be careful here, because people hear “signature” and think punishment. It isn’t. The signature is not there so I have evidence against somebody on the 30th. It is there because a number you said out loud to your boss and then signed is a fundamentally different object than a number you thought about in the car.

We also keep year-to-date on the sheet, and last year’s number for the same month, so nobody is designing in a vacuum. You are not just guessing at October. You are looking at what October has historically been in this school and deciding what October is going to be this time.

Every business closes out. Yours is a business.

Here is where I think a lot of schools genuinely get into trouble, and it has nothing to do with goal setting and everything to do with the habit underneath it.

School owners take money, and take money, and take money, and never close the day.

Every business on earth closes out at the end of the day. I don’t care if it’s a yogurt shop. It used to be you had a cash register and you’d run a Z tape — the tape printed what you did that day and then zeroed everything out for the next one. That ritual existed for a reason. Every business, every day, needs to figure out how much it made and write it down.

So here is the standard in my schools, and I would make it yours: nobody leaves until the day is closed.

Total what you collected today — in-house money and retail, separate from billing.
Record your enrollment numbers and your other metrics for the day.
Add it to the month-to-date running total. Day one of the month is just that day. Day two is that day plus yesterday. Day three is that day plus the prior running total. And so on.
Put it on paper. I actually prefer paper to a spreadsheet for this, and I’m a guy with a doctorate and a lot of spreadsheets.

Do that, and something useful happens. When Master Oliver or Master Smith asks you for your numbers on a call, you have them off the top of your head — not because you are some kind of savant, but because you added them up eleven hours ago and the total has been in front of you all month.

It is not hard to know your numbers cold if you close the day. It is impossible if you don’t.

One clarification that catches everybody

Keep billing in one bucket and everything else in the other, and do not confuse contract value with money.

If you write a $100,000 agreement, you did not make $100,000. That is receivables. Your monthly gross is what you actually collected — your billing, plus everything that isn’t billing. The rest arrives in the months it arrives, through your billing system, and gets counted then. Otherwise you’d be double counting everything.

You can absolutely track how much future business you wrote — it’s a useful number, it tells you what next year looks like. Just don’t put it in this month’s gross.

Now do the same thing for the students

Everything above is goal setting for the business. But the reason any of this works in a martial arts school specifically is that goal setting is the product. It is the thing we are actually selling, whatever the brochure says.

So we run the same discipline on the mat.

Their date goes on their belt

When a student tests and gets a belt, their name goes on it — and so does the date they are going to earn first degree black belt, and the date they are going to earn second degree.

Green belt, name on the belt, first degree date, second degree date. Every time they tie it on, they are looking at the goal. We are constantly reminding them, and it costs us nothing.

The book with the dates already in it

When somebody joins Master Club we take out the curriculum book — ours runs about four hundred pages — and we fill it out with them. Every testing date, all the way to first degree. Then the dates to second degree. There is a leadership version and a basic version, and the basic one covers what their next steps are so they understand how renewal works before anybody asks them to renew.

That took me years and years to develop, and I’ll tell you the unglamorous reason it works: it is expensive and it looks expensive. When a member joins a program and receives something with obvious value, the program has obvious value.

Past, present, future

We also run a sheet that walks a student — or a parent, for the younger kids — through their goals for the next ten years. Not martial arts goals. Life goals, out to adulthood.

Do that once with a family and the conversation about whether to keep training in the spring becomes a different conversation entirely.

When somebody says they want to quit

Let me finish with the one that comes up on every call, because it is a systems problem dressed up as an emotional one.

A member messages you. They want to cancel. They’re going to play soccer, or money is tight, or the kid is only five and it’s a lot.

Rule one: never, ever respond by text, email, Facebook, or hand signals. Whatever channel they used, we don’t answer on it. We don’t even reply to acknowledge receipt. We call.

If they don’t pick up, we wait a day and call again. If they still don’t respond, we let it go — except we don’t really let it go, because our attendance system is still running and they’re still getting the attendance calls like anyone else who stopped showing up.

The goal of the phone call is not to argue. It is to get them to come in for an appointment. And when they come in, the conversation has almost nothing to do with what they said in the message. It’s: what’s going on? Tell me about things. Then you work out a schedule that lets them actually get to class.

Most of the time that solves it, because you finally find out what the real problem is — and it usually isn’t soccer.

One more thing, and this is a correction I had to make in my own head. For years, when a parent said “he’s only five, maybe this is too much for him,” I bought it. Then I noticed they said the same thing when the kid was eight. And nine. And twelve.

So I am now completely immune to how old the student is. It is never the reason. It is the sentence people reach for when they don’t want to say the reason.

What to do this week

Build the sheet. Billing (twice if you bill twice), basics, paid in fulls, black belt club, leadership, instructor program, compressions, merchandise, miscellaneous — each with a running total column.
Add last year’s same month and your year-to-date so nobody is designing blind.
Hand it to every staff member before the month starts. Last staff meeting of the month, sheets in.
Review and sign both lines. Yours and theirs.
Close the day, every day. Collected today, added to month-to-date, written down, nobody leaves until it’s done.
Put testing dates on the belts and fill in the curriculum book at the point of renewal, not later.
Write the cancellation rule on the wall by the phone: we call, we don’t type.

None of this requires new software or a consultant. It requires deciding, once, that you are going to know what the month is supposed to be before it starts — and then finding out every single evening how it’s actually going.

Design the month. Then close the day. Everything else in this business gets easier from there.

Frequently asked questions

What is a martial arts school goal setting worksheet?

It is a one-page forecast completed before the month begins, listing each revenue source as its own line — billing, basic enrollments, paid in fulls, black belt club, leadership, instructor programs, compressions, merchandise, miscellaneous — with a running total. Staff complete it at the last staff meeting of the prior month and both they and the owner sign it.

What is a membership compression?

A compression is converting an existing member’s remaining payments into fewer payments — most often paying a 36- or 60-month balance in full, but it can also mean compressing to twelve payments or to three payments over a set period. The term comes from compressing many payments into one.

Should a martial arts school close out every day?

Yes. Total what was collected that day, record the day’s enrollment and activity numbers, and add them to a month-to-date running total before anyone leaves. Every business does this; schools that skip it can never answer questions about their own numbers without going to look.

Is contract value part of monthly gross income?

No. Gross is money actually collected in the month — billing plus non-billing income. Contract value not yet collected is receivables and is counted in the months the payments arrive, or the same revenue would be counted twice.

How should a school respond when a member asks to cancel?

Never by text, email or social message, regardless of how the request arrived. Call them, and call again the next day if there is no answer. The objective of the call is an in-person appointment, where the conversation focuses on what is actually going on and on fixing the class schedule rather than on the stated reason.

How do you keep students committed to earning a black belt?

Make the goal visible and dated. Put the student’s name and their projected first- and second-degree black belt dates on the belt itself, fill in every testing date in the curriculum book at the moment of renewal, and run a long-range goals exercise covering the next ten years of the student’s life, not just their training.

Chief Master Greg Moody, Ph.D. is an 8th Degree Black Belt and the founder of KarateBuilt Martial Arts, which he started in 1995 and grew to eight schools serving more than 17,000 students. He holds a Ph.D. in Special Education from Arizona State University alongside a master’s in counseling and a bachelor’s in engineering. He was named Instructor of the Year by the American Taekwondo Association, has authored more than sixteen books, hosts the KarateBuilt Martial Arts Podcast, and consults with Martial Arts Wealth Mastery.