There’s a school near where I used to train. They’ve been slowly growing over the last decade or so and now have a fairly successful school.

300+ students, a full schedule of classes in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Their mats are packed. They’ve recently expanded and added a striking program.

Recently, they lost their best student who was also one of their main instructors.

He’s headed across town to open his own school.

Now they’re minus a great student and instructor and plus one new competitor for students.

They’ll most likely lose a handful of students who follow him to the new school.

You’ve heard this story before.

It’s one of the primary fears of school owners we speak with and one of the big reasons we hear that owners don’t want to train new instructors.

Why would you build someone up who is just going to leave you in the future and take your students with them?

Let me offer you a different perspective:

If you can’t give your best people real opportunities, they will absolutely leave if their goal is to make a living in the martial arts industry.

Create Opportunities

One of our guiding principles at Easton is to create career opportunities in martial arts for our best people.

This principle is why we’re so focused on growing our schools, packing the mats, and opening new locations.

If we want to give people real careers, we have to have the opportunities available for them.

It doesn’t always work. Sometimes there aren’t opportunities available when a great employee is ready for them.

Sometimes we lose people anyway.

But that doesn’t stop us from continuing to create more opportunities.

Choose your finish

Just like with a submission on the mats, how you choose to play your hand in leadership is up to you.

You get to decide what will yield the best results, long-term.

Many academy owners we know don't value growing their employees because people tend to leave to start their own schools or work for competitors.

No matter what you do, this is going to happen.

Yet, it’s also something you can help to prevent with an intentional approach to your staff and their growth.

You can either help grow people into amazing employees and that improve your academy (and business) by providing them opportunities to level up, or you can watch them leave for a different job where they will find those opportunities.

In any company, including a martial arts academy, there are going to be staff that tend to stand out.

They have a high capacity for their job, they’re capable and they want to do more at the academy. They get what you’re trying to do and how their position places into the bigger picture.

Once we locate these employees, we do our best to give them more opportunities in the school. Sometimes this means taking on additional front desk hours or duties. It could mean managing the coaches in a given department and making sure everyone is putting on great classes.

We try to feed our all-star employees small opportunities to grow and show that they’re capable, and as they prove themselves we look to elevate them further.

Ideally, we are able to train and build an employee to the point where they’re ready to take over their own school as a GM or help run the school as an Academy Operations Director.

Both of these positions are full time and have plenty of room for financial growth as the school grows and becomes more successful.

Instead of assuming employees will leave you in the future, approach each staff member like they could potentially be integral to your academy's success today and in the future, and start building them toward that future.

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go

We’ve created online courses to develop our employees.

We try to elevate as many high-performers as possible to the next level in the company.

Along the way they gain management experience, administrative skills, and the type of knowledge that will make them a great GM or head coach at an Easton academy.

They could easily take that knowledge and leave, either going to a company in a different industry or striking out on their own to start a school.

With our best people this hardly ever happens.

The reason why is that, like most of us, the people who work for us have dreamed of having a career in martial arts.

They get that opportunity through us while also being developed and empowered to go even further.

We could hoard our secrets and refuse to develop instructors and employees.

Ultimately this would hurt our ability to grow and create great martial arts schools.

So we take the risk, which to us isn’t more or a no-brainer than an actual risk.

As the owner, you can’t do it all (unless you want to spend all day, every day in your school) – that’s why you bring others in.

When you invest in your employees’ growth, it becomes very clear who begins to naturally stand out as a leader and who is willing to go the extra mile to grow with you.

These are the people you need to do everything you can to keep around – including sometimes creating a position just to give them a reason to stay.