20 Mistakes That School Owners Make-Part 2
Call-Out:
“Often we make the mistake of operating with a small-club mentality and do not grasp the fact that business professionals play by a different set of rules to become successful.”
Here are 13 more business mistakes that I’ve made in owning and operating my school. Words of wisdom: Don’t repeat them in your school, and if you already have, it’s time for you to take corrective measures.
Mistake #8. Changing too much, too soon. This is the other side of the coin, where we throw out everything in order to meet the needs of our clients and risk losing the true meaning of what we intended to do.
Mistake #9. Missing the niche. Martial arts are a niche opportunity and, often, we try to be too many things to too many people. It is better to be exceptionally good at what you do and provide a service that cannot be matched by the competitors for your clients’ time and money. I have been successful in my town because I have a reputation for what it is that I offer: judo, jujitsu and taekwondo. This reputation has real value in the eyes of my clients. I would rather do one thing well than try to open extra profit centers and compromise my core skills.
Mistake #10. Thinking that your competition is the martial arts school up the road. Your real competition is all the other sports and activities that clients and potential clients can choose instead of the martial arts.
Mistake #11. Being so specialized that you are offering something no one wants.
Mistake #12. Not engaging in enough business and leadership training for ourselves and for our instructors and staff.
Mistake #13. Failure to make the switch from being a “club” instructor to being a business owner. Often we make the mistake of operating with a small-club mentality and do not grasp the fact that business professionals play by a different set of rules to become successful.
Mistake #14. We fail to schedule time for the strategic business planning and vision development because we are busy doing tactical work every day.
Mistake #15. We think that opening a business is the vision, but it is not. We need a vision of what our business will do when it’s working at peak efficiency and effectiveness, doing the right things for the right people and giving us the life we dream of having.
Mistake #16. We don’t plan our curriculum or our lesson plans ahead of schedule. We fly by the seat of our pants way too much.
Mistake #17. We don’t look in the mirror of our clients’ eyes or hear through their ears often enough. What do they really see and hear when we teach? It’s easy to teach what I think was a great class and forget to focus on what my students think was a great class, and one that met their needs.
Mistake #18. We lose the personal touch. We fail to provide the personal services that we did when we were beginning. Our cards and telephone calls smack of mass-production, not sincerity.
Mistake #19. We can easily compromise standards to keep a client happy rather than recognize that standards are a statement of business and personal integrity. If we want our clients’ respect, then it behooves us to have reasonable standards of performance expectation and provide the tools necessary to achieve those standards. I’m sure that many of us have ranked at least one student who was not quite ready in an effort to re-motivate or to keep a student in class.
Mistake #20. We don’t organize and don’t have systems for everything that must happen in the school, which means that frequently important stuff doesn’t get done correctly, on time, every time — unless Ido it. See Mistake #2. But this does not mean that I have to reinvent the wheel. See Mistake #1!
Dr. Chris Dewey is a university professor and martial artist. He holds black belt ranks in judo, jujitsu, taekwondo and hapkido, and has been training for more than 30 years. He is the owner of the Starkville Martial Arts Academy in Starkville, Mississippi, and is Chair of the United States Judo Association Coaching Education Committee. He can be contacted at cdewey@ebicom.net.
