On Education: My Advice to the Martial Arts School Owner Seeking Business Success

Education is the way to success in your martial arts school, beginning with your education. What do you know, what are you learning, and how are you using it in your life, for your school, and for your community?

Educational Warning: Through no fault of its own, as everyone involved originally intended to offer help to the industry, the martial arts business world has fallen into a rut of "make it easy." Getting a good education isn't always easy.

The martial arts industry is fat with a mass of gimmicky-promotions, a plethora of poorly designed ads, VIP pass disease, 200 "consultants" in every magazine who think this is their next meal-ticket (because the school-thing didn't work out), and 90% (or more) of promotional strategies that cater to the laziest, least skilled, dumbest school owners on the planet.

Education is the remedy to the "make it easy" mentality. Education is the new way to inspire, lead, promote, advertise, enroll, and retain. Whatever you do, from minute to minute during your work-day, in your classes, in your community, with your staff, and with your students, if it doesn't involve education, it probably isn't going to help your school grow.

After Education comes good old fashioned teaching. Teach! Teach on 10 levels, no -on 20 levels! Teach fitness, teach health, teach wisdom, teach defense, teach compassion, teach humility, teach history, teach manners, teach kindness, teach goal-setting, teach communication, teach non-violence, and teach teamwork, leadership skills, and the power of education.

Point: If fitness, health, compassion, wisdom, history, humility, manners, kindness, and all the rest aren't a part of YOUR daily life, if you do not live the practice of these ideas, then you're trying to sell something you don't really own. To teach it, you would be very wise to live it. Yes, it's a lot to ask. I'm sorry, I wish it were easier than that.

The inexperienced and uneducated teacher has a very small range of expertise and a very small range of wisdom and experience to share. Limited education and experience equals limited VALUE. If the education you have isn't getting you the students you need to thrive and survive, it is time to learn and/or re-learn something new. It's time to engage a new group of teachers and friends.

Your Computer Will Help You Be A Better Teacher

Would you recognize the future if you saw it? Here's a bit of "the future" for you:

In the future (read: now), half of the education you provide (and, essentially, "sell" your students), will be imparted on the mat -and the other half will be delivered on your member's only website.

The mat will be for TRAINING. The mat is for sweating, practicing, and polishing. Your member's only website will have all the things you don't have the time to impart on the mat; your site will have the philosophical lessons, the lessons in etiquette, the school's history, the detailed (on video) curriculum, the interviews with the master, and everything anyone needs to know that you don't want to have to say 1000 times on the mat.

Your member's only website will be where you store the information, in part, that you're SELLING to parents. It's where you'll store the video-lessons on manners, on anger control, on bullying, on healthy eating, on the value of education, and on everything a parent would want to know you're going to teach their child. Education, on and off the web and in and out of your school, is the key to your schools future and your success.

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