3 Ways to eliminate your school's slow months:

Summer is coming and you should be prepared. Do you think it is better to do marketing and advertising when you are slow or busy? This is a question that is in our minds every time our business starts slowing down. School owners with experience do not worry about slowing down because they take that opportunity to start focusing on things they should do to improve their marketing system. But, why should we let it slow down anyway? School owners who look at the summer as a slow down time, are usually not strong planners. You should have a monthly and a seasonal marketing plan for your school that you can work on and learn to stick with. Planning to do less marketing when you are busy and do more when you are slow is not always the right attitude to run a business. There are 3 essential rules to keep your school busy all year around.

Rule #1

Write down all marketing strategies that work year round and stick to them. Doing a demo in a theater that is showing a martial arts movie is a great way to promote your school in your area and it might be something that brings great results for you. For example, by now you should know that Jennifer Lopez's movie (Enough) which is about self defense, is scheduled to be released this summer. This should spark you to have a plan to get in a theater and do a demo before each screening with a booth outside passing out the school's free introductory lessons. Whether you are busy at this time or not doesn’t matter, because by the time you are slow it will be too late to get into a theater and your competitor probably already thought of the idea.

Rule #2

Promote your school one month before getting busy. Generally September and January are the two months out of the year that we as Martial Arts Schools have the highest enrollments. There are two reasons why you need to grab the highest market share at these times of the year. The first reason is obvious; you have a chance to increase your number of students. The second reason is the fact that the more students you register in those months the less students the competition will acquire. Remember Martial Arts schools are like any other business, we are in competition of gaining the highest market share in our city, and there are always a limited number of potential students in our area.

Rule #3

Systemize, Systemize, Systemize. Just thinking about gaining more students is not the answer to your prayers. If you don’t have the proper system in place, all students you have gained from your marketing efforts come from the front door and exit out the back. The slow times are sometimes the best time to re-evaluate your system and see what works and what does not. Think about how you are going to improve your system, so you can handle more students. Trust me, the only way to reach a 500 student enrollment is to make sure you do less, while your system does more. You can not be running around doing everything yourself. Every business needs someone who can constantly think about new opportunities and future development. After all, if all you are doing is running the day to day business, then who’s working to setup the "Share The Art" promotion…?