Things You Must Do To Grow Your Martial Arts School

There are 3 things you must do every week – and sometimes every day in every class – to make sure your martial arts school thrives. Those 3 things are:

Bring in new students
Retain the students you have
Get more from your students

It is critical to the survival of your school that you block off time every week to focus on these 3 things. This might be 1 hour or 1 day. It might be to create a new class, new marketing program or for education in martial arts management to make sure you are growing as a martial arts school owner.

Marketing
You should be setting aside time every week to work on growing your school. This does not mean you have to create a brand new marketing plan every week. One week each month you can focus on education. Just like learning martial arts – you are constantly learning new things, right?

The same applies to marketing. Pick up a book, read a blog, read the business section of the newspaper. You have to learn the basics and continue to learn and grow in marketing as well.

Student Retention
Student retention is vital to any martial arts school. If you get 3 new students but 4 leave then you have not just gone back by a count of 1 youve actually gone back by 4 because had you retained those students you would now have a total of 7 students.

Each week you should be doing things to ensure your students are going to stay in your program as long as possible. This could be sending out birthday cards, writing a school newsletter, offering special workshops, learning more about the student and their family to build a stronger relationship, the list is almost endless.

Internal Marketing
The last item, internal marketing, is one that is often forgotten. Yet it is critically important.

What most small business owners, and most martial arts school owners, fail to understand is that it takes a whole lot more effort and money to find a new client then it does to sell again to an existing client.

To get a new student you must spend a lot of time and money finding them and convincing them that your school is what they are looking for and need.

It takes much less time and money to sell your current students on a Saturday workshop, or sell them a T-shirt, or get them to take private lessons.

You Are Not Alone
You do not have to take on these tasks all by yourself. There are many places you can get information to cut down your learning curve or save time and money by using existing materials.

You can get books on marketing, you can ask other martial arts school owners what they do, you can join online forums in places like LinkedIn, or fan pages on FaceBook, you can purchase materials from martial arts business or management companies.

International Martial Arts Management Systems, (IMAMS) is one such place. We offer a system that is created of training modules that consistently brings in 4, 5, maybe 10 students every month. We have modules for student retention and many many ways to help you with internal marketing.