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Introduction This page is full of useful information to develop your business skills that help you develop your martial art classes professionally. There is nothing more irritating than knowing your good at martial arts but only ever having minimal numbers of students and constantly advertising to make up numbers. Scroll down and explore many different ways to develop your martial arts club.
Your own mind set A mind set is where you know something needs to be done but you are so set in doing what you do you find reasons not to change. The answer is to try to understand as much as possible realise you are a market choice and if people don't choose you your numbers will suffer. Looking to be a strong choice and create a successful recruiting and retention campaign means testing different ideas and finding out what works for you.
Success is different things to different people as we all have different interpretations and priorities. Success is a combination of numbers of students, quality of teaching, student retention and creating a linage that will keep your martial arts developing in to the future.
Understanding Choice & Value People will be attracted to train in your classes with different things which will differ from person to person. To list some of the things that could attract new recruits like self-defence, weight loss, competition, health & fitness, joining a friend who is in your class, inspired by kung fu movies or a television series has an interest and wants to find out more. The choices that you offer add values to your academy and you will find a variety of prospective students some who by because of low cost and others for taste or quality and the trick of course is to try and be attractive to all of them. To make a parallel look at the most successful supermarket and ask why does a store so big put so many different brands of the same product on its shelves? The truth is they know their customers are made up of smaller groups who have different choices and the reason the supermarket is a large success is because it provides for the smaller groups. Effectively many the smaller groups make up one huge group of customers. It is the same for martial arts classes your classes will be made up of smaller groups with different interests including self-defence, competition, health & fitness etc and any group you don't cater for will go elsewhere.
Set to Go When all is set up and your running classes, they may be the best thing since sliced bread, you may be the best instructor in the world, the highest grade too, but if you haven't any students you don't have a class. Your martial arts skills will need to be accompanied by some business skills which include PR and Advertising and if you get it wrong it will cost you dear. There are many different ways to access media from knocking on doors, paid adverts and free advertorials (Cause Marketing), the trick is keeping a continual media presence for next to nothing.
No One Thing Everything you do will effect your academy, no one thing brings over all success. If you can get your head around having lots of small success's with smaller issues and projects it will amount to an over all bigger success. Martial arts and sports suffer from massive student losses over a 12 month period of over 85%. Dismissing the smaller issues as they are not worth it contributes to failure and not success.
Have you ever looked other clubs in your area and seen busy classes and you know that they are not as good as you? In reality its not how good you are martial arts that draws people to your club it how good you are at marketing your classes. Success is just around the corner, if your willing to acquire marketing knowledge, be open minded and add a new range of professional business skills to develop your martial arts school in to a real asset with loads more students B.B.I. is the place to network.
The best choice Attracting the lions share of the market means good advertising and offering appealing choices with value. To do that you need to see what other clubs offer including your competitors. Networking is the answer politics is a negative and works against what you want to achieve. Have you ever seen any one outside Tesco's turning away any customers with Sainsbury's bags or carrier bags from competitor shops? It just don't happen it is illegal because it is a form of discrimination. All supermarkets know they are a market choice and to gain your customer they compete with their competitors on value they don't stand in their doorways slating each other. You are providing a market choice to for people who want to learn martial arts and like the supermarkets you to need to look at your competitors in the same business. Networking allows instructors to get together from all over the world and share their ideas and highlight how they achieved success. Markets are constantly changing which shows as your class numbers fluctuate up and down and its so important to change with the market to continue your success.
Vote with their feet Students vote with their feet, failing to meet their requirements or what they are looking for means they look elsewhere. Convincing the student they want to train with you means offering the particular area they are interested in and providing a professional image and quality to inspire confidence. People make a market choice, they want to join and choose, they cannot be made to join your group. Because it is always a choice the market effective takes what it needs and many products and services fail because they don't meet the market needs. Networking allows you to work with others that shows you other peoples success's and allows you to develop and apply your ideas.
Moving the goal posts for continued interest and effective recruiting things must continually change, it seems like the goal posts are always being moved just as you get their. When we create a poster or advert after a while the people who see it become blind to it and ignore it, so adverts need to be changed to stop this from happening. When we first start training it is new and interesting, over time it can become repetitive and boring and students move on so numbers drop. Offering a variety of choices bringing in new things, exploring new ways of training in your groups generates interest and important which are tools you need to combat bad student retention. If things stay the same for to long interests slide and numbers drop as your students move on to other more interesting pursuits.
As good as me even if your a good instructor some students will have the skills to be better others will never be as good. It makes sense to provide a professional regime that allows the students to develop to their full potential, they will become as good as they can be which may be better or worse than their instructor. Your classes need to be about the student as the student is interested who good they can be not how good anyone else is.
You can't teach that martial art market manipulation relies on tactics to scare you into what someone else wants you to do or not to do. Anyone can create a martial art and be a master of it the instant they come up with the idea, that is democracy. No one can tell you you can teach your martial art this includes all the martial arts Judo, Jujitsu, Karate and Taekwondo. The only thing you cant do is use a trade name or logo from another group teaching it. For example you can teach Taekwondo but you cant teach WTF Taekwondo unless you belong to the WTF.
That martial art is rubbish your personal opinion if its negative could sound unprofessional, being judgemental of other martial arts and styles could be deemed slanderous in the worst case scenario. There are no bad martial arts just good and bad instructors. Every martial art provides a different route to learning a syllabus through some sort of disciplined training regime, and just because some people don't like it doesn't mean its rubbish. Respect is a fundamental in all martial arts and should be considered before judging anything including other martial arts. To gain confidence from potential students concentrate on what you know, tell them the strengths of what you offer and how you train, this inspires them to train with you. Negatives about competitors puts them off of martial arts, although they may not train with a competitor they may decide not to train at all because of what may seem like sour grapes etc.
Black Belts Your syllabus is the core of your training, all your grades are assessed on how much of the syllabus your students know. The more techniques they know from your syllabus the higher their grade. That means its not about sparring who they can and cant beat. Your students belt reflect their knowledge and most students value their grade and are motivated by them acquiring their BLACK BELT. B.B.I have an excellent grading ratification system online for you use. You have complete control and can allocate, ratify and register as many students and their grades as you like.
Contracts and Agreements If you have instructors working for you you may need professional documentation for students and instructor running satellite groups. This is free for full B.B.I members
Online newsletters Cheap marketing on line the ability to display club or association newsletters to all your members is free to all full members of B.B.I.
Bulk email marketing facility Using the newsletter facility with some innovative software you will be given the option to email it instantly to ALL your members with a press of a button.
Auto update calendar Full B.B.I. Members can use a calendar which once set up auto updates showing and details of gradings, singular events, lessons, directions to your lessons and is ongoing through automated software.
Web rankings The B.B.I. website has background software that helps raise profiles of members through their B.B.I. online membership it is a free part of the full membership package.
Free Profile Online B.B.I. offers a free profile for all martial artists. This available under the free membership package and allows you to be a part of the worlds largest martial arts community. Note this will not appear in the search engines unless you fill in the details about your martial arts school.
Free Recruiting B.B.I. has its own martial arts search engine fill in your martial arts school details and upload your profile and photos and the best bit is its free.
Online Photo Advertisement for your School: Free membership allows you to create a complete online tour of your martial arts school with photos. Its brilliant when people use the B.B.I. Find a club or search engines and land on your entry you can really impress them and images work better than words alone.
Add Featured Students and Instructors As a full paying member you can add students and instructors details including photos to your B.BI. .School Membership listing.
A free website for every one of your members Full paying members can offer give a two page website to everyone of their members to use for their profile. Its unlimited so it doesn't matter how many members you have.
B.B.I. Accounts and Shop We can set you up with an account giving your students direct access to your membership or equipment online. The setup is free.
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