"Old School" vs "New School" - Can Your School Survive?

By Jim Tessman,
Marketing - ChampionsWay Inc.
 

Are you “New School” or “Old School”? I don’t mean your martial arts style, I mean in the way you run your martial arts club.

Take our brief test to find out. Once you have determined where you stand, you can decide whether that method works the best for you, or if some small changes may simplify your life and increase your student base.

• When a person comes to class, are they (A) scanned in, or is attendance (B) recorded on pen and paper?
• Do you (A) bill your students automatically each month, or do you (B) chase them for cash or checks each month or year.
• When testing is coming up, do you (A) know who has been there long enough to have learned the required curriculum, or do you (B) try to guess who’s attended enough classes to gain the required knowledge?
• When you have an event or a big announcement do you (A) announce it on your website and email your students and instructors the information or do you (B) tell everyone who comes to class and tell them to pass that information along to other students?
• To get new students do you (A) run a targeted and inexpensive marketing campaign or do you (B) run an ad in the newspaper and cross your fingers?
   

If you answered (B) to ANY of the above, you may need some help to make sure you can survive in today’s fast paced environment.

There are many schools out there that are now being dubbed “McDojos”, due to their systemization and expansion to multiple locations. Often it is suggested that these schools charge their students more and have lower quality instruction – buy why are they so financially successful?

Regardless of their size, they are well integrated with systems that you may not have ever thought were necessary. Many of the most successful schools in the world are using those same systems to increase their membership and improve student retention, so it may be worth at least knowing what your competition is using against you.

What we are talking about isn’t changing the way you teach, the way you interact with your students or teachers, or the way you run your school. We are simply discussing how some of the most successful schools operate and how they make things easy on themselves.

Consider these simple points.

Payment:

For many school owners this is the most difficult part of running a school. Collecting money can be an uncomfortable part of running the school because it’s putting a value on your teaching skills, and it can feel like a personal blow when someone doesn’t pay. Approaching students on this matter can be awkward for many teachers, as they want to assume that the student already knows and will pay on their own.

Many of the most successful schools avoid this challenge completely by using automatic billing. This forces students to take their payments and the timing of those payments more seriously as it comes directly out of their bank account or off of their credit card on a pre-arranged date every month. It also ensures that a student has to talk to you in order to quit their classes, otherwise the billing will continue.

This means that in an “Old School” system, a student may take a month off and then just decide not to show up anymore because it’s easier, and they certainly won’t drop off a check for the month that they missed. In a “New School” billing system, the student gets billed regardless and they have to speak with you to unsubscribe. This gives “New Schools” the opportunity to ask some questions and try to bring the student back without any interruption in payment or to receive valuable feedback that will help them to become better schools.

The best feedback you can get is often from a student who’s on leaving, as they will point out everything that you are doing wrong which provides the opportunity for improvement.

Attendance

“Old School” clubs take attendance on paper or not at all. “New School” clubs have their students scan in with a laser scanner and a membership card, so they always have records of who’s coming and how often. This can also be tied into birthdays, billing and other systems so a student can have happy birthday played on their birthday as they scan in, or they can have a voice ask them to approach an instructor before class if their payment didn’t go through.
 

This leaves “Old School” clubs having to do some guesswork as to who attended enough classes to advance, and it ensures “New School” clubs don’t have to spend time and effort informing students that their payments are overdue, giving themselves less stress and more quality time to teach.

Many “New School” clubs also use a combination of automatic student tracking and notes on each student to ensure that each instructor can leave information on any given student in order to collaborate information. This ensures that each student is treated equally and nothing gets forgotten or missed. It also helps by avoiding the need to sift through piles of attendance sheets, or go from memory to determine whether a student deserves to be tested, and another instructor could take over a class for you and have appropriate information on all of the students simply by looking up the class on the school’s computer, or printing up a class report before they start teaching.

Communication and Marketing:

Communication is one of the most important attributes of the “New School” clubs. This is how they get students and keep them. Offering excellent instruction helps, but communication is more important for your long-term success. If you’re “Old School” with this, you could be looking at some tough times in the future.

All of your communication should be clear and must make it to everyone necessary. Telling the class that testing is next month is good. Is that where the best schools stop? Of course not! They follow-up with series of emails and may even use an automated voice broadcast to the entire school, they invite students to bring friends and they offer a special bonus to those friends to join. These clubs are even able to track the emails and phone calls to ensure that everyone who they tried to contact was reached.
 

“New Schools” are willing to spend nickels to get back dollars. Rather than taking hours phoning every student to ensure that they know about the big competition coming up, they will use an automatic system that does it for them and sends them the results. Rather than having a prospect try a test course and hoping they come back, they have automatic emails or calls that are send two, four and six weeks after the date. This brings prospects back and can be done with no effort whatsoever on their part. This can also be used for new students who sign up in order to ensure that they feel like part of the club, get club related information and have the opportunity to ask any questions that they may have outside of the classroom setting.

“New Schools” also have the ability to track just about everything. Instead of writing an email, entering everyone’s information into the “to” column and hoping that the emails have been received, “New School” clubs use a system that tells them when the email has been opened, which email addresses are no longer valid and the names of those students so they can be updated in their next class.

“Old School” clubs are set up by people with a love of martial arts, but often they are people who are unfamiliar with how to use the tools of the “New School”, they are stuck in their ways or they see no reason to change.

This is OK as long as these school owners don’t resent the “New Schools” for fast growth and expansion. This is OK as long as the “Old School” clubs are fine with staying the same size or sustaining slow growth. But, if an “Old School” club wants what the “New School” club has, they have to consider the tools that are being used in order to get them there.

Additional Member Services:

Often, “New Schools” will offer services that “Old School” clubs had never even considered. Every school has a curriculum of moves or information that students need in order to advance. “Old School” clubs ensure that students have to do all of their learning in the class, and that anything that they want to purchase needs to be purchased at the club’s pro shop.

“New School” clubs offer these services online as a benefit to their members. Did you ever have a shy student that wasn’t comfortable speaking up if they weren’t 100% confident with how you executed a move or the series of moves in a Kata? Of course you have. “New School” clubs have members sections that have their instructors showing their curriculums online. White belts can only see the white belt curriculum and orange belts can see everything up to and including the orange belt curriculum. This ensures that they can practice the right moves on their own, to save you the effort of correcting them later.
 

“New Schools” also offer all of the items from their pro-shops on their online store, giving their students additional opportunities to buy products, and ensuring that their students know all of the products that are available from their school.

In Conclusion:

To sum this up, in order to grow today you need to have an appropriate system that saves you time and money. If you already have an “Old School” system that works great for you, that’s great if you want to remain in the same financial position. If you want to grow and share your martial art with the masses, then you need to strongly consider investing into something that decreases your manpower costs while increasing your effectiveness off of the mat.