Great Student Service Part 1

How do you keep students in a bad economy? Due to economic times people are cutting back on unnecessary items. With this in mind, you must make sure that the parents of you students view your school as a necessary item. How do you do this? With OUTSTANDING Student Services!

Are you going to lose some students? Yes, some people will just not have the money to pay you. That is OK, you need to marketing to the ones who can pay, and take care of the ones you have!

So lesson number 1 in students service (and retention for that matter), lets talk about belt testing!

Belt testing or grading is one of the most important things in your students life as a martial artist. Is your belt testing a positive, recharging experience for the student? Or is it something they fear and find as a negative experience. Belt testing for me when I started was anything but positive!

Here are some guidelines to help you improve your Belt testing experience for the student.

1. NO TEST FEES! This is so very important I cannot over state it. Whatever you are charging for classes do not charge for testing. Parents feel like they are being nickle and dimed to death, or worse being ripped off!
2. Test each student, every three months. This means you have a monthly testing or graduation. Even if it is for 1 person.
3. They get a new belt each testing. Do away with stripes for rank! We have 14 belts in our system to Black Belt. The money you pay for the belt is worth the motivation of the student!
4. Black Belt in 4 years. There first Black Belt needs to be 4 years from the start. Gifted students are no exception.
5. Tips on belts. You need to tip each student, each month to show progress! Assign a tip week, the week before the belt testing or graduation! This will help keep attendance high!
6. Send out a Testing Package for each student who tests. This is similar to an invitation to an event. This helps make the student know they are not just a number. Include invitations they can give friends to come and watch.
7. Give a certificate for each belt colour change. Ours are printed on the school laser and the students love them!
8. This is also a great time to promote events, honour any student or parent that you feel should be hononed (Jimmy won the speech contest etc)
9. Have your Demo Team perform! (Showcase!!!)
10. Start on time and end on time!!!! (try to do it all in 1 hours on Saturday morning if you can)

If you would like more information on this or other marketing issues for martial art school owners visit our website at http://www.karate-marketing.com

Will my business survive? Bad Economy 101

I watch the statistics for this website each and every morning at the start of my day. It has been fascinating that the traffic here slows down, the worse the economy seems to get. Got figure! You would think that smart marketing would become more and more important as the problems get worse.

It has been several weeks since my last article, why? My school has been very busy! November has been an excellent month for us for enrollments, despite the bad news everywhere.So why are we growing when so many other schools are going out of business or just surviving? two reasons, #1 is student services. We are always striving to make the student experience better and better. Then when Mom and Dad look to eliminate unnecessary things from the budget, we are not one of them! But I will do specific student service articles later.

The second reason, how many students do you actually need to do well?

I live in an auto town. The unemployment rate is up 30% and 2 plants are closing in the next little while. There are approximately 200,000 people in this town, not to mention the surrounding area. There are also about 20 commercial martial art schools.

The area (5 square miles) that my school is in has about 30,000 or more people in it. How many people out of this are going to be affected by the current situation? Let's face it there are a lot of people still out there with lots of money! But, lets put this figure high at 50%. That leaves me 15,000 unaffected.

How many of those are prospects (age etc). Ok how about 5000? This will exclude older people, people with no children etc. Again I am giving a high figure!

Now, look at your current situation, would another 100 students change your life? With the above figure I would need .02% to move to enroll 100 new students. See my point?

So, stop worrying and bitching about the economy, and start doing smart marketing. Start with your current flock of students. You will be amazed at what you see happening!