I never realized that I didn’t have ALL the pieces to the puzzle.

Then one day it clicked for me after reading T. Harv Eker’s “SpeedWealth”.

It’s a short but brilliant book that points out in a flash how to turn your business into a powerful income source… if you want it too.

Basically Eker says that any business needs 3 core components to make it successful. These are:

1) A good marketing system

2) A good production system

3) A good administration system

So how can you apply this model to your martial arts school?

A Marketing System is a marketing system, you just gotta have one that works. You’ve got to know which method of marketing works best for your school. Just because something works for a friend of yours doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for you. Your situation is different to theirs and their system might work better in their environment. Or it might work better in yours!

I believe a good approach is to model other successful systems and then TRACK the results for yourself. When I started to track this information and this allowed me to focus on those things that worked, tweak the things that needed attention and avoid those that were simply costing money.

(Hint: On your student enrollement forms have a box that asks “How did you hear about us?” And then pay attention to what gets written down.)

A Production System – this is how you put your students through your school from the time they sign up as white belts to whenever they stop training (hopefully never). So this should entail business systems that deal with things like:

1. How you divide and organize your classes
2. How you promote your students
3. How you receive tuition fees
4. How you handle your staff
5. How you teach
6. etc

Another great book that’ll get you thinking how to apply this to your school is The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Highly recommended.

An Administration System – basically how you manage all the student and school data to make the production and marketing systems run as smoothly as possible.

And it’s funny – when I first started I didn’t have ANY of these systems. I just thought that because I could do karate that I’d have a successful school. I thought that I could simply teach a class and people would come to train without thought to all the processes! It’s a common misconception and fortunately for me I had some good mentors that pulled me in line quickly.

One of them is Marco Mazzanti – the author of the Martial Arts Early Learning System. I followed Marco’s system and it took care of most of the Marketing System and the Production System. I had to tweak things a little but all in all it’s worked fantasically.

How well you ask?

I started with literally nothing 4 years ago – no students, no place to train, and no start up capital. They were humble beginnings in a cold empty gym in the middle of winter 2003 where I spent many nights training solo wondering if any students would show up…

Since then we’ve moved twice, changed the timetable numerous times, enrolled hundreds of students, and lost hundreds too (and fired a few in the process!), yet the net result is we now have a strong base of about 130 active students, with 3 instructors and 7 junior assistant instructors.

But no doubt one of the most challenging things has been managing the hundreds of families and all of the student data…

At first I tried to keep paper records and receipts, plus a list in Microsoft Excel… flagging the students who had paid, those who hadn’t and those who said they would “next week”… (shudder!)

I found the bigger things got, the more difficult it became and the more often I’d drop the ball so to speak. Back then I really wish there had been an affordable system to manage my students.

There just wasn’t…

And I knew that I had to keep organized if I wanted the school to grow. So that’s why I started working on my own system a couple hours a day for the last 3 years. It’s grown a lot over time and I’ve added a whole bunch of useful features that make running my school so much easier!

I’ve just converted it to a web based, multi user system that you too can use to manage your school and take care of the Administration headaches you might currently have.

Read the full report at: www.dojoorganizer.com

Any questions you might have after reading about it, post ’em below and I’ll be happy to answer for you.

– Jason