Running a full time karate school can be a challenge.

I used to think that my instructor sat around all day and casually rolled up to teach for a few hours each night, while spending the rest of the day lazing in the sun. When I started my own full time school a few years ago I soon realized there is a lot more to running a full time school than I imagined.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade it for a 9 to 5 job (Errr, I mean a 4:30am to 7:30pm with the commute! ), with 8 different bosses asking me if I got the memo about the TPS reports.

As a full time instructor although you might only be teaching 15-25 hours per week, there are other tasks you need to take care of on a daily basis. These things most people don’t realize until they start their own business.

Over the next few posts I’ll share some of these with you. The first being…

Marketing Your Karate School

Yes, you have to do it and you have to do it constantly in order to continue to get new students through your door and onto the floor. Many businesses fail because they have little idea of how to do this critical part.

This doesn’t mean randomly spending $500 on flyers and having some kid place them on car windshields, or walking around your neighborhood knocking on doors trying to get people to come to class.

It means carefully testing different low cost (and in some instances free) , time conserving marketing methods, and tracking the results. Then you can spend your effort on those things that work well for you and avoid the things that waste your time and money.

When testing new marketing methods my personal rule is I need to be able to test it for $50 or less. Then if it works, I can spend more on it. But giving $2,000 to some direct mail marketing company without a personally proven result might be the torpedo that sinks your ship.

In a nutshell, test small, pay attention to your results, and roll out the big guns when you KNOW it works….

Stay tuned for next week’s installment…