Let’s say you finally made the leap to hire your first Front Desk associate. If you checked all the boxes in the hiring process, most likely your new employee is organized, personable and quick to learn the systems. Now, finally, you hopefully get a couple hours to yourself in the afternoons to get some work done.

You’re probably in your element when you’re on the mat or the floor of your academy, talking to the students, greeting the parents, and joking with the kids. On the other hand, holding space in the academy sets a rhythm which makes accomplishing any other tasks (even thinking) all but impossible, with sign-ins for multiple classes, membership sales and sometimes walk-ins to tend to. 

Now that you have someone you can trust to manage the afternoon and evening rush for you, you can close your office door and work on the business side. (Making sure you let your front desk know you’re available for them, of course.) 

You finally have time to look at the bigger picture: What do you want for your academy? How do you make it happen? Do you want to restructure the curriculum? 

As you begin carving out time to work on your business rather than just constantly in it, you’ll begin to see things from a different perspective. Just like working on techniques – if you get too caught up in the weeds of one component, you could completely miss the whole picture. Stepping out of the daily academy flow to see it from a higher level (like reflecting on your rolls after training) can help you reach smarter decisions with more objectivity and clarity.

It also gives you the space you need to start putting your new plans into action.

Maybe you know the front desk gets too crowded as dozens of people sign in for three different classes happening at the same time, sometimes overwhelming your staff. Now that you have time to think, maybe you can push one class back 15 minutes and save a lot of headache. 

Learning how to “float"

When you’re running your own business – especially a martial arts academy – there are going to be a lot of components at play. Initially, you might find yourself doing all of it simply because it has to get done. As you build up a membership base and hire more people to help, you can begin to step back and spend more time working on the business itself.

In order to make decisions like how to find more coaches for your kids program, or what sales promotion you want to run for the summer, you first need to have your thumb on the pulse of the academy and the time to step back and look at the whole. 

It's essential that you can entrust the tasks of daily operation to your team so that you can work on the bigger picture. While it takes a group effort to run the academy, as the owner you must lead the vision. 

Sometimes this means knowing how and when to “float” – move seamlessly back and forth between a high-level perspective and getting right up in the grit of it. This means you’re never too far from one or the other, and can pop into action wherever you’re needed. 

This mentality usually comes into play as you begin to approach leadership from a place of service, taking on any role necessary at a moment’s notice to keep the show going. No matter how hard you try to compartmentalize your time, you might have to step away from your payroll spreadsheet and right onto the mats to instruct a class last-minute for a coach caught in traffic. 

This sort of switching back and forth isn’t easy, and definitely takes getting used to, but when you can master this skill, you can learn to effectively work on the larger aspects of your business while staying aware that you may need to jump in at any time.

This means you also need to know when to step back and delegate the small[er] tasks. When we shed our egos and connect to the heart of our role, it involves building a sustainable community. 

We need to be ok removing ourselves from the spotlight and letting other people take charge and run the ship while we go plot the course.

If you can’t hire someone to help you take on some of your routine tasks, then you need to work extra hard to put up non-negotiable time boundaries around when you work on your business. This requires discipline and really strong time management, but the sacrifice you make now will come back to you tenfold in the long run.

If you never take a breath to step out, you could miss the wider opportunity for what your business could be if you spent a little more time developing it.