We’re back with the Black Belt Business Podcast where we bring you stories, strategies, tactics, tools and resources that will help you establish and grow your martial arts school. In this episode, we dive into everything you need to turn your school into a successful martial arts business. 

Easton’s Head of Marketing, Mike Phipps, joins Professor Eliot Marshall, along with Easton's Kids Martial Arts Program Director, Jordan Shipman. Together, Jordan, who previously ran Easton Longmont as its GM and Phipps, Longmont’s Muay Thai Department Head, break down the basics of building a successful martial arts program.

From processing leads and having a website to automation and contracts, we bring you insights and strategies for managing a successful martial arts school that puts people first.

Watch the full episode here! 

Let’s back up. Why do you want to run a school? Is Muay Thai a hobby that you want to teach on the side? Or do you want to create a profitable and sustainable business?

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ve probably noticed that along with Core Values, we spend a lot of time talking about the components that make up Easton’s operation with acronyms like DH, AOD, PD and FIS. 

These matter to us because we run our martial arts academies as a unified entity under one Team in the business of building the greatest Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academies through an unrelenting dedication to the students and staff.

Because we want to level up our business alongside our martial arts, we spend a lot of time and resources crafting and refining our internal systems, protocols and culture to support that vision. 

One of the systems we include in our approach at Easton includes that of decentralized command. Similar to what we see in military and higher level education, decentralized command allows roles like Program Director (PD) and Department Head (DH) to create and disseminate consistent curriculum and Academy Operations Directors (AODs) to help keep things streamlined while the GM navigates the ship.

However, before you get into the weeds of the systems of your business, first you need to get crystal clear on how you will add value to your customers.

Adding [value] is a verb

If you want to run any successful business, you need to think about your customer. You need to create something that solves a problem or makes their life better. Determining your ideal customer profile (ICP) from the start will help you target your messaging and offerings clearly. 

Creating a martial arts academy for the everyday person is very different from starting a school for high-level competitors to learn your specific brand of Jiu Jitsu. The sooner you discern your value proposition, the easier of a time you’ll have positioning yourself in the marketplace.

For example, when you’re creating a school for the everyday person – not someone who already loves martial arts and worships MMA icons – you need to consider the value that you can continuously add. 

You may be a huge name in the Jiu Jitsu world, but for a beginner who knows nothing about Jiu Jitsu, that means nothing. This means that while you think your name is a selling point or value proposition for your school, most of your potential customers have no idea what that means; their only concern is if the school is a good fit for them. 

It also means that you can’t expect to do things lackadaisical. If your class is supposed to start at 5:30pm, that's when class needs to start. If you’re walking into the academy at 5:45pm when paying customers show up at 5:30, your name or accomplishments don’t mean as much as you think. Think about a regular Joe trying to explain to his wife why he doesn’t know when he’ll be home to help with the kids because the instructor that he and his wife have never heard of shows up to class whenever they want. To someone completely removed from the BJJ world, paying a generous monthly membership fee to have your class start 45 minutes late sounds absurd. 

Listen to the full episode to hear all the juicy details, but for a quick overview, make sure you’re nailing these eight steps.

Processing leads. Start simple. Processing leads is a fancy way of saying, bringing people into your school. It involves following up when a lead comes into your sales funnel and selling a membership after their first class. This is the most basic way to add value to your community – make yourself available to answer questions and talk about memberships. Answer the phone! Reply to emails. Have someone friendly at your front desk. If you’re not sure how to start following up, what to say, or how often to reach out, we offer a free follow up guide to help you get more leads through the door. 

At Easton, we track our online leads through our CRM, assigning them to our First Impressions Specialists (front desk team) by creating tasks and follow-ups for each lead. This follow-up system also ensures that a contact log gets created each time, allowing us to track the lead’s life over time. This helps us understand why a lead may fall off or go cold, and helps us circle back to old leads and try again later.

Automation. Setting systems is critical for creating sustainable business practices and replicating your process, but there’s a fine line between good automation and bad automation. Whereas we want things automated on the back-end, helping the front desk follow up with leads and get people in the door, and you definitely want an automatic lead-generator button on your website, you want a human touch when interacting with potential students.

Connecting with a human gives people a sense of accountability going into the new interaction, and helps make them feel a little more comfortable in a place that could potentially be very intimidating. Ideally, you have someone who loves and believes in your school to answer questions from a first hand experience behind the desk!

Update your website. Figure out who you’re for and then portray that on your website. Not everybody will love you but it’s not about that – it’s about connecting with the ones who do. You need to get really clear about who you are, and make your website reflect that.  Consider your audience. If you’re starting a school for complete beginners, nobody cares how accomplished you are or how many competitions you have under your belt. They want to know that you can teach them even if they’ve never done it before. 

Don’t forget, most importantly – make sure to install a lead generation widget onto your website! You need to make it incredibly easy for people to give you their info. Make the button follow them everywhere they go. This is your lead net!

Get ahead of attrition. No matter how successful your school is, you will have attrition. When it comes down to it, the martial arts we teach are hard and they’re not for everyone. Out of everyone you started with, you probably only have one or two people still training alongside you now – if that. You can’t build up a great membership base and then stop trying. People move out of state, change jobs, have kids, get injured, lose income – you have to be ready for all of it. For this reason, Easton is constantly selling and marketing. Stay connected to your students through email marketing, have a top-notch curriculum, and make sure to have a great offer.

The Great Offer. You have a front desk, a website, and a way to process leads. To stay ahead of attrition and boost your marketing, you just need a killer intro offer. At Easton, we offer a free class followed by a discounted, $99 Trial Month. The goal here is to have something to get them into the door, and from there the product will sell itself. Some schools offer a 3-class intro package, or a few weeks of unlimited classes – it doesn’t really matter what it is as long as it offers a taste of your value. If you believe in your product, you won’t need a hard sell.

Get rid of traps. When you have a product you believe in, you also don’t need traps like enrollment fees to lure people into a false sense of financial security by offering to cut it in half, or contracts to keep people locked in. A contract gives you, the owner, an out not to bring your best every day. When you believe in your product month over month, you don’t need to lock someone in who doesn’t see that value. At Easton, we even offer to give you your money back if you purchase the trial month and try at least eight classes.

Teach people to move. There’s a huge difference between watching something and then interpreting it through your own body. The gulf becomes even bigger when the student lacks body awareness – which happens often if they haven’t had any prior experience in sports or athletics. One of the mistakes many martial arts schools make on the mats is that they try to teach students moves before teaching them how to move. If you want your curriculum to be effective and engaging, first teach your students the basics of movement to connect them to their bodies.

Hone your product. With a building, a front desk, coaches, and students, you’ve built the set, but you have to put on the show – every day, every time. Your classes are the product, and they need to maintain a certain degree of quality both in curriculum and in delivery. You need to make sure that every time you offer that product to your members, they come away with the same positive experience. 

In the end, not everyone approaches running a martial arts school the same way. If your target audience comprises high-level competitors, you don’t need to be as inclusive as someone training beginners. The people who train with you will already know the martial arts culture and know what they want out of it.

But if you do want to build an academy that grows athletes from the ground up, consider your audience and your presentation. Whether it’s a hobby, side hustle or your full-time job, if you want to run a successful business you need it to make it profitable, and you need to make it sustainable.