One way to generate more income from your karate school is to add more specialty classes to your schedule.

For example, I teach karate as my #1 focus which brings in around 80% of the school’s income. However I also teach other RELATED specialty classes.

On Saturday mornings I teach Escrima for an hour and have students both who are in my primary karate class and also other students who do this class only. Students who already do karate get a discount on the Escrima class and those who do it only pay the regular price. From adding this one class the school makes an extra few hundred dollars per month.

Contrast this to the old way I used to teach this with Escrima being an irregular part of my karate classes.

1) It wasn’t often enough for students to retain their knowledge
2) Was drawing away from the learning time for the number #1 reason people train at my school (karate)
3) And it wasn’t helping the financial situation as we weren’t charging any extra to learn it.

Every 3 months or so I teach a 4 week women’s self defense class on a Saturday morning. It’s right after my Escrima class and goes for 90 minutes. Again this adds an extra few hundred dollars for the month. I also run other specialty classes and seminars from time to time for both my students and also for people from other clubs. These special classes add an extra 5-10% to the bottom line without any external advertising. I know if I got aggressive with this I could easily double those figures.

The point here is that adding RELATED specialty classes can increase your revenue and help you pay your rent, buy new equipment and make a few extra dollars. The good thing is that if you do it right the reward will be worth the extra effort.

The benefits of adding a related specialty class (or more) are these:

1) It adds to your bottom line.
2) It gives your school more exposure through the extra classes available.
3) It’s a good marketing tool to bring in new students and other family members.
4) Increases your depth as a teacher and increases your perceived value as a teacher.
5) It doesn’t take away from the learning time of your core class.

Now the key point is to make your extra classes related to your primary class. For example you don’t want to add a class on yoga or gymnastics. People come to you for karate/self defense, so teach things closely related, otherwise you’ll lose focus for your school and you’ll decrease your perceived (and paid) value as an expert in the martial arts.