THE SECRET TO DESIGNING YOUR 7-FIGURE MARTIAL ARTS SCHOOL TO RUN ITSELF

For most martial arts school owners, the ideal situation is to have the school run successfully while they can be out living the life they dreamed. Jennifer Waters, the sales and systems sensei, shares her secret formula to build your business so that it doesn’t need you every single day, and what steps you need to take to ensure your school is in good hands.

A key point to understand is that unless you have a lot of money to invest on a huge staff and their salaries, you are going to be teaching the classes, handling the sales, and doing the planning, at least in the beginning. There are, however, steps you can implement and strategies you can put in place for your business to run without you being there on-site all the time.

The first step is to have class plans. This way you can have somebody replace you on the floor and continue conducting your classes in a smooth manner without you. It helps the other instructors bring in the same energy and the same repetition on the floor as you would have. Having class plans in place allows you to step back from teaching all your classes by yourself, and you can move onto focusing on managing other things like the sales, the marketing, or the operators. The important thing to keep in mind is to make sure you do not go off to relax with this extra time, because that is not the stage of business that you are in. You need to move on to the next stage, which is to do more on the sales and marketing side, so that you can continuously generate more leads, more students, more enrollments, and impact more lives. Not doing so can make your martial arts classes go down in value, so you need to create systems to make sure the value stays the same with and without you on the floor.

The second step is to ensure that your communication is on-point. Once you have systems in place and the day-to-day operations (sales, marketing, classes) are running, you have to be communicating with all of these departments so that they are effectively implementing the vision that you have. Mastering communication includes mastering your leadership skills, so that you can communicate with your teams in such a way that inspires them to take on a certain level of ownership themselves, so that they are doing it the same way the owner/CEO would do it. An effective way to master communication is to have a daily huddle.

The third step is the follow-up. After ensuring the communication is happening smoothly, you must have somebody in operations making sure that the plans discussed with the teams are actually being followed through accordingly. This operator is going to be you yourself until you are able to bring in someone who can responsibly take on this job. Once you have somebody who is in operations, they assist you with contributing to ideas that you have, as well as taking the ideas that you do have and implementing them or bringing them up to the next level.

The final key is consistency. Your job of inspecting what you expect continues forever, or until you hire somebody else to take on that role, after which you only are a business owner that is not a CEO. At this stage of the game, you can be completely off-site, and stay out of the structure of what is happening internally. This stage comes down to just looking at data and making sure things are making sense on the bottom line. However, even at this stage, you need to have somebody driving the vision of what is next for the company. As one verse from the Bible says, “Where there is no vision, the people perish”.

Getting to the final level of just being a business owner where your business is running smoothly without you is not going to be easy, or quick. It is going to take time, it is going to require extraordinary leadership from your side, and it will need you to master your martial arts skills to the highest level; but above all else, it is going to take a no-quit attitude. So no matter how hard it gets, do not give up, and figure out how to get through it!



For more information, check out the full video.