The lessons I learned in coaching martial arts school owners and running a school of my own boil down to 3 buckets you need to crush to be successful. They may be obvious to you but they are not to many and even if you know them already you probably aren't succeeding in them all. You're busy and no one expects you to be an expert in everything.

Bucket 1: New Student Attraction

Getting new students to come in and try some classes can feel like an uphill battle and turning them into paying customers often feels like fighting that battle alone.  This is way we need to have a process in place.

No matter how you are attracting, selling, and converting new people, if you are doing it without a process in place, you are going to take a really long time to become a master. It would be like trying to become a black belt without a teacher.  It might be possible, but why would you want to try?

Your process should include an offer (the way you are packaging your product), advertising (referrals, social media, paid ads, or flyers), and some sort of sales process. The better your offer is the more persuasive you have to be in your advertising and sales, but if your offer is amazing your ads and sales can be less fantastic and still work.

Bucket 2: Student Retention

Getting students to sign up isn't enough if they are only sticking around for a little while. Many gyms call this churn and is usually represented in a percent of your students that are likely to leave each month.

If your school is signing up 10 new students every month but you also have a 10% churn rate, you will never be able to get past 100 students. You will either have to attract more students (bucket 1) or keep them around longer (bucket 2).

You can improve how long a student stays at your school by making them feel like they are part of a group and that you care about them, not their money but them. This is a section that most school owners do well but they do it by accident so when they start teaching less often their students suffer.

Bucket 3: Operations and Profitability

This is kind of a catch all, but it is the systems and processes you use to do most things. Billing, training new employees, tracking attendance, the list is endless, the gist is that after you figure how to do something well, you write it down so anyone on your staff can do it too.

I know they won't do it as well as you, but you want some time away from your studio some times, right. That means that you need to have a way to teach people who aren't you to do the things only you can do. Does that sound impossible? I'd argue that turning those awkward, bratty kids into respectful, skillful martial artists is just as hard and you do that all the time.

The other part of this bucket is making it so you actually make money of your students. You need to make money so you can teach others. Stop giving your knowledge away for free and pay yourself enough to go on vacation every once and a while.

You may have noticed that these buckets have a lot of overlap and that is because your business is complicated and your facing complicated problems. Thinking about them in one bucket at time will make those problems easier to solve.