One of the biggest challenges that your professional martial arts school will face, will happen when you have one or more employee. Solve the problem from the start and you will grow. Don’t address it and you will never grow to where you want, and you will go crazy constantly putting out fires.
Employee training seems simple. Put them in a room and tell them how to do their job. Every once in a while, get them all in the same room and tell them how to do a better job. This is a good start but you will fall far short of running a professional and meaningful martial arts school of this is the extent of how you handle staff training.
Your students will quit for one of the following reasons. First, they quit when they stop making consistent progress toward a well identified (by you) goal. This means they need to know how to get to the next level, where they are now, and where to get help. Second, they quit because they don’t feel welcome in your program. They need to be greeted every single class by name and get smiled at and thanked for coming to class, at a minimum. Third, they quit because they do t feel heard. They are struggling and feel like you don’t acknowledge or care when they seek your help, or their parents have unanswered concerns that you have not addressed to their satisfaction or at all! The answer to all three problems is a great system that runs your school, great people who run your system, and you holding your people (and yourself) accountable to the system.
You have to start creating and documenting the system from the very start of the school when you are doing everything yourself. As soon as you get an area of your school’s operation systemized, you hire and train a smart and nice person how to run that part of the system. Then you have to regularly, as often as possible when that system as direct contact with members (meaning your front desk, enrollment, and teaching staff,) less often is ok with the system that cleans and runs the back office.
This is a very general and global concept. How you do it is important and if you need help, just reach out to me at pasquinilli@hotmail.com I would love to help you! No matter how you do it though, you will get stuck hard and fast if you don’t build a system to run your business, hire people to run the system, and become the accountability coach for your people.
Matt Pasquinilli – Written on the treadmill