Do you have these problems in your school?

Over the last two years I have seen a lot of things change in the martial arts world. The popularity of mixed martial arts has helped push the martial arts into never before seen popularity as we saw with movies like the “Karate Kid” in the 80’s. The industry around us changes almost as quickly as the weather and we’re always looking for the new fad that will last us until the next one is invented. It has been said that the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement, but most of the people I see in the industry change the house every year, rather than the room. The problem with this is that it gives you no time to settle down on a foundation and eventually you are going to run out of new houses to buy!

I have moved into the financial services industry and in a short amount of time I have become one of my firms’ top personal producers. My heart and soul is still with the martial arts and I’m still active with the west coast association as well as many other school owners across the country. My involvement with the martial arts pertains more to the business and administrative side of running a school and sharing my success secrets with others. I recently had a conversation with one of my friends who owns a school here in California. He expressed frustration with a declining student body and a decrease in student enrollment. He also seemed very disappointed in his current program director and his ability to enroll new students after the introductory lesson. He was also getting gray hair by the second because in these uncertain economical times the amount of cash outs coming into his school was almost none existent. Since I’m a financial professional who advises people on a daily basis about money, you are better off growing your residual income, which is your monthly billing accounts rather than relying on the big money in cash outs. As we have seen with both real estate and mortgage professionals, one bad year of business can wipe out five years of growth. This is a story for another time.

During our conversation he was working on ad cards for Valentine’s Day and the result from distributing these cards in local schools was less than satisfying for his business. I’d like to stop right here and focus on an often overlooked fact of new enrollments which is, controlling the point of contact. When you put out an ad, commercial, or ad card you don’t control the point of contact. You are in fact resting your hopes on a, “if you build it they will come” theory much like the internet entrepreneurs did in the early 2000’s and you all know how that worked for them. I will say that all the business you need is all the business you already have. If you turned your focus towards building a referral based business then most your business problems will be solved overnight. Whenever you use one of the methods I mentioned above you are in fact cold calling and focusing on a cold market. You ask any business person and they would rather have ten warm market referrals over one thousand cold market referrals any day of the week. Some firms will pay thousands of dollars for a warm market list. Why you ask? Well this is why. The warm market has one big advantage over the cold one, are you ready? CREDITABLITY! When someone in your school refers you the name and number of someone they would like to see join the school that referral joins mostly based on the creditability they have with your student and not necessarily the school. Most of these new students will quit on everything else in life but their friends, and guess what? Their friend is a loyal student in your school, so you can see where this is going to lead your school in the future. You need to train your program directors to constantly ask for referrals from your brand new students. This should be done in the first lesson after you enroll them into your school. You also need an ongoing incentive program for your new student to give you referrals. I would go as far as to offer cash or something else that highly motivates them to give you warm market referrals. I would personally ask for the names and numbers of three of their closest friends who have kids on the very first lesson. If you want big results you have to play big numbers.

So that solves his problem of a declining student body and the drop he is experiencing in his enrollments. I also asked him how many phone calls and how many prospects his program director and staff were making and getting every single day. He seemed confused at this point and looked very puzzled. Before he could respond I explained the importance of both and how crucial it was to turning his school around. I explained the 10, 6, 3, 1 rule to him that I use. Out of every ten people his program director prospects, six will confirm intro appointments, three of them will actually show up and one will join. So based on this, he will know how many people his PD and staff will have to prospect every month to get ten new students into the school. The numbers of enrollments will probably be higher but I do know that if you want to reach the moon you have to shoot for the stars. I also told my friend that his program director needed to be making about thirty phone calls a day to new prospects. I told him that if his PD and staff all prospected ten people a day then his PD would never run out of people to call. I also warned him about the differences between activities and results and how he was focusing too much on the activity and not on the result. The activity would be getting names and phone numbers of new prospects and the result would be signing them up. Unfortunately, he was accepting activity as his result and I can see the direct result of that. So my entire conversation up to this point was all about changing his mentality. Of course, his whole staff is going to complain and some might be resistant to these new changes but whatever he is doing right now is not working. I can prove it because numbers don’t lie!
The final problem we had to talk about was his program directors enrollment ratio from the introductory lesson. This was a simple fix for me, he just needed to teach him the 5 C’s of his intro lesson and teach him how to close. I will go into detail about both of these in a later article because I don’t want to wear myself out on my first article in a while. The 5 C’s are pretty simple, they are Curiosity, Credibility, Concepts, Crusade, and the Close. These are extremely important when sitting knee to knee at the table with a parent. It is a proven fact of a solid presentation that will increase any program directors close ratio. It also abides by the most important factor of any successful system, it’s duplicable. There is a reason that McDonalds’ always have the fries on the left and the soda on the right: DUPLICATION. I know that most schools that I walk into don’t have a structured duplicable presentation and that is the reason the school suffers when a PD leaves the school. Most schools have personality based presentations (1st Intro), rather than duplicable presentations that anyone can learn in a short amount of time. Another mistake is that owners don’t require the entire staff to know the presentation and because of that the enrollments rely on one person. That is like having an army with only one general and no lieutenants, sergeants, or other leaders. It makes no sense.

Next, teaching your staff how to close can be broken down to three simple steps; they have to ask the right questions, take it away, and give people options. The most important in the three is the take away. When you take something away from somebody they only want it more. The most valuable word that you can use in closing a deal is the word “Qualify”. Get used to saying this word a lot because closing is all about understanding peoples mentalities and when you get down to it you are in the people business. I will show you how to correctly use this strategy in your business another time. You see, I just took away from you and naturally you want to hear about it more. These simple changes in your presentation can help your staff achieve the results that you desire.

Operating a martial arts school can be very fulfilling and exciting as long as you have the right tools to fix your problems. As part of the Championsway team, the other columnist and I are dedicated to your improvement as an owner and a martial artist. I realize that some of you are hesitant to use some of the things that we recommend to you because you may feel like a copy cat. That’s okay because that is a natural feeling. I’ll tell you that it is okay to be a copy cat as long as you copy the right cat! Over the next couple of months I will be talking about different system and concepts that you can implement into your school that will help you grow your business to levels that you have never imagined. If you meet us half way, we will take you to the top.

Darren Gaitan