Grow Your Martial Arts Business

What does it take to run, operate and grow a martial arts studio? We know that many folks heading to the MA SuperShow this coming weekend will have these types of questions top of mind as depart for Las Vegas.

As I reflect on this question and after speaking to some of Zen Planner’s martial arts’ customers, a few things come to mind.

Maximize the time you spend with students by decreasing the time you spend on administration “stuff”

You started your studio or dojo so you could share your love of martial arts with the community. If you’ve been spending a bunch of time on administration-type tasks, you’ve gotten pretty far away from your original mission.

You may be thinking “but if I don’t do all this admin “stuff” it won’t get done. The way I look at it, you have two choices. You can either hire someone to take care of this kind of activity or you can look at what you do today and whether it can be automated through the use of martial arts software. If your goal is to spend more time with your students, then you have to figure out how to give up some of the administration work.

Create a friction-less purchasing experience

If you force your students to pay you by check every month, it makes sense that they would reevaluate that payment each and every time they write a check. Statistics from a recent study by Fiserv found that there is an average of 15% less churn when a customer utilizes automatic payments with electronic billing. For a dojo with fifty clients and an average bill of $100 monthly, that amounts to $750 in monthly revenue with automatic payments. (Aspen Marketing Services, 2010) Make it easy for your students to pay you by enabling them to use automatic payments.

Communicate relevant information consistently

Are you adding new classes? Do you want to give a shout out to a particular student for the reaching his or her next belt level? Are you attending a particular competition? If you are doing these kinds of things, make sure that you keep your student community up-to-date. And, make sure you don’t send info out as a one-off, but send consistently. I’d even recommend putting together a calendar so that you send newsletters out on a regular basis, either monthly, bi-monthly, etc. The important thing is consistency. Need a few more reasons to send out newsletters? Check out these tips.

Looking for additional ways to grow your martial arts school? See what leading schools around the world are doing to create success for themselves. Get your copy of our free Martial Arts Benchmark Report today!