Dean Chin's Jow Ga Kung Fu Federation

There is an elephant in the room, which we so often ignore in the martial arts–and we cannot ignore this anymore. It is the fact that many people believe that the Chinese martial arts is dead, at least in America. Ask around and you will hear a lot of opinions why that is. Everything from Kung Fu being useless in combat (usually they mean in MMA), the 70s is over, to Kung Fu is outdated, or Kung Fu is too difficult to teach large groups, or my favorite: today’s martial arts student is “trash”. As the philosophers would say, we seem to want to blame everyone but the man in the mirror.

There are, however, too many successful, good kung fu schools for this to be true. One could make the argument that Tae Kwon Do is easy to learn (it isn’t, really) or that grappling and kickboxing arts are all the rage these days, but there are still thousands upon thousands of students studying traditional Chinese arts. They aren’t all Wu Shu or San Shou students neither. I have seen on social media, seminars and other events with hundreds of participants who paid quite a bit of money to learn traditional Kung Fu, and the teachers are rarely celebrity teachers. I’m sure you’ve seen it too. There are Kung Fu franchises and chain schools full of hundreds of students and they do just as well as your local McDojo–and those students are too good to be considered McDojo students. So let’s put the lie to rest that the only way to make it in the martial arts business is to sell out. It simply isn’t true.

Allow me to propose a novel idea: Perhaps the reason your school is small (or out of business) is because you haven’t learned how to do business as a traditional martial artist. It isn’t an insult or implication that your skill at the martial arts is poor. It’s quite the opposite. I know you are authentic, skilled, and well-meaning. We are simply suggesting that there are things you can do to ensure the success of your school. You see, when our teachers certified us, they made sure we learned the proper mechanics of our technique. They taught us the correct way to execute our forms. They taught us to fight. They may have even taught us etiquette and ethics as a martial artist. However, very few of us learned from a teacher who taught us how to open, operate, and grow our commercial schools. It’s nothing to lament; that simply was not their focus and if you’re over age 30, the chances are pretty good that you learned from a teacher who did not have to learn the business of the martial arts. Pre-internet schools only needed a good location and halfway decent martial arts skills to succeed as a teacher. Today’s student has the power of Google, YouTube, and social media and walks through the door knowing much more about the martial arts than those of the 90s. 90s potential students call and ask how much lessons are, and possibly what style we teach before coming in. Today’s student researches us, looks at reviews, investigates many schools, styles, and maybe even you on the internet before calling or messaging. They might even contact you and tell you the exact system they want to learn, and only if it is from the specific lineage they read about. They also have options of online teachers, study-at-home courses, and not to mention at least double the number of schools to choose from.

The best you can do is maximize the options and potential you do have, and when you get the students enrolled in your school, keep them. Let’s cover the basics today and perhaps at a later time we will discuss each item in more detail.

• You don’t have an active marketing plan. Most schools that struggle, and I might argue that it is more than 95%, lack an active marketing plan to increase traffic through their doors. This means, everything you must have, must do, and use should be written down and executed intentionally. It should be detailed, too. How many flyers do you put out by hand every day. How much time will you spend online increasing opportunities to be seen. What marketing campaigns will you run each month to target a specific type of student. What schedule you will keep for sales and marketing tasks from day to day, week to week. How many people do you need to talk to in order to meet your sales quota for the month. (What? You mean you haven’t established a sales quota for yourself?) They say that those who succeed have followed a plan for success, and those who failed, failed to plan altogether. If you don’t have a marketing plan, visit your local library and read up on how to create a plan and do it asap. You must have in mind the number of students you need to feed your family and keep the school open, then have all the activities you need to sign up that number of students. Too much to discuss now, but trust me, we will very soon.
• You lack a tracking system for those who have expressed interest in your classes. At a minimum, you should keep a planner and record the names and numbers of everyone you have talked to about joining your school. Many of us have left money on the table because potential students who are clearly interested in Kung Fu have called you, left a comment on your social media, maybe even walked through your doors–and never heard from you again. A very familiar phrase we have all heard in this field is, “I’ll go home and talk to the wife/I’ll think about it…” We hope they’ll call back, but we rarely follow up with them to get them to think about it again. Of course, you don’t want to be a nuisance or pushy salesman. But you should give them a nudge or two, even if only just to remind them of their interest in training. I have lost the interest of potential students by being too passive in pursuing new students, just to run into them one day and be told that they joined the school down the street. Closed mouths don’t get fed, and it should always start with proper “inquiry tracking”. What this means is you capture contact information for each inquiry, whether phone number, email address, or social media account. Regardless of what device you are on, record that information by hand in your planner. Then you must keep a file on everyone who you’ve talked to in one master list, which should have contact information, age, date you met, dates you followed up, and notes that you will need to know–like if they had experience before, or what you discussed with them. I would recommend putting out a newsletter, both hardcopy and soft copy, that will be read by active students, ex students, and potential students alike. Keep contacting them occasionally until you know that the inquiry simply is not interested in learning from you. How frequent is up to you, but I would limit direct contact to no more than four times per year, and email blasts/newsletters/etc., to no more than once a month.
• Poor teaching practices. This one is painful. Many of us learned from teachers who taught us bad habits. At least, many of us have learned things that may have worked in our teachers day but will kill a Dojo in the modern day. Hold on to your seats, folks! Too often we treat students like subjects or pledgees for a college fraternity. Sometimes we bark orders like a military drill sergeant and call that “discipline” to impress parents. We pride ourselves in making students drop from exhaustion in class because the training is old school and authentic. We engage our students in system politics, or we encourage them to dislike the students of a teacher we dislike. We bad mouth other systems, other teachers, sometimes even old students. We gatekeep information, making students grovel to learn the next form or wait months to learn something new. In recent times, we talk about our biases and bigotries in class–which alienate students that we may not know hold opposing views. And you know what I mean… if they know what political views you hold or where you stand on sensitive issues like race, religion, ideology–you are guilty of this I’m sure. And something that many, possibly most, of us do–we push our likes and dislikes onto the students. This will be covered in another item, but basically what it means is that if we prefer one area of the martial arts, we will teach that area more often and neglect another area that might be better suited for many students. I know a teacher who disliked forms, and didn’t teach them although he knew them. I’m sure he lost many students who may have joined his school hoping to learn them. I’ve heard him preaching to students to convince them that forms were stupid, and this was after they had expressed a desire to learn more. This is where the tracking matters. How many students have you lost in the last 12 months, and why? You should know the answer to both questions, then work to resolve the reason so that you don’t lose anymore.
• Failing to monetize your school. This is another sensitive topic. One thing I know about my Kung Fu family… we take pride in *not* monetizing our schools. We don’t charge for promotion exams, we don’t like to mark up prices for equipment, we don’t even “lock our students into contracts”. In doing so, we can say with confidence that we have not sold out. However, at the same time we also make considerably less money than our karate counterparts and therefore must hold full time jobs and teach on the side–even if we have a commercial location to teach in. First, let me remind you that you are in fact a businessman, if you own a school and charge for instruction. If you fail to truly monetize your school, you will always struggle financially which adds stress to you and robs your students of a full-time teacher who isn’t showing up for class already exhausted from a 9 to 5 job. Never feel ashamed of incorporating commercial ventures within your commercial school. You don’t have to sacrifice quality of instruction or squeeze blood from a turnip to monetize. What you can do, what you should do, is explore options to maximize your income potential with the customer base you have. Charging a promotion or exam fee gives your school a small additional boost each month. Only students who are ready take the test, and the fee will cover a new sash, possibly new uniform (if you issue separate uniforms for higher ranks), certificates, and most of all–your time in hosting the examination. Host seminars, where you can bring in guest instructors from other styles, giving your students the opportunity to cross train into different arts. You can also teach additional course material that students would otherwise have to wait years to learn, perhaps an introduction to various weapons or skills. Hold in-house competitions between your students and those of a few schools you’ve invited to come and exchange. Here is another one you may not have thought about: Holding fundraisers. In my school, we held Lumpia/Eggroll sales much like you sold candy or cookie dough in grade school. We rolled lumpia each weekend which was then frozen and delivered a week after the orders were placed. This allowed me to teach underprivileged children for free, and gave me additional income for equipment, paint, and school makeovers. We will surely return to this subject at a later time, to discuss in detail.
• Students may lack excitement, motivation, and worst of all–progress. I perhaps should have listed this item first, as it is possibly the #1 reason schools lose students. Students who are doing well stay engaged, while students who are not are almost always guaranteed to quit. I heard in quite a few sales seminars that we should promote students who have not fully learned the material (that isn’t how it was explained, but it is what was suggested) and call it “self-esteem”. The idea is that as long as students are achieving the next promotion, they will be excited because their self-esteem is building with every new belt or new form. Naturally, I don’t have to say it, because we are all probably thinking of it. This is not self-esteem or self-confidence, this practice is what they call false confidence. The same people who preach this also preach not allowing students to compete because they will compare their skill with kids from smaller dojos who may be getting more attention. In other words, promoting easily leads to students getting mopped up at tournaments and quitting anyway. Well, rather than that, how about if we ensured that students REALLY learned the material, and not just that, but excelled at it? Novelty idea, huh? In my opinion, doing all you can to ensure that every student reaches his or her full potential is the #1 thing you can do for the economic health of your school. We have all seen schools that put out excellent martial arts students. Those schools aren’t always small, hole-in-the-wall schools. Many larger, seemingly commercial, schools consistently produce championship students. The key is to tweak your style of instruction so that you don’t just end up with a few really good students–you end up with a school where most of the students is really good. How is that, you ask? Well, I’ve written a book, which is dealing mostly with the fighting aspect of the art, but addresses just that. Visit my other blog and use the donation button to order a PDF copy of “Dominant Fighter” if you’d like to read it. I’m also writing a book as we speak on teaching which will give you the blueprint to teaching successful students. Projected date of release is January 2027 so watch out for it! In a nutshell, we want to make sure that we find a balance between strict discipline and empathy for the limitations of our students. We need to be tough on them to make sure they learn, but not so tough that we discourage students, especially those who have a harder time learning than others. We should be using carefully structured lesson plans that follow a carefully written curriculum. We should find the medium between constructive criticism while saving our students from becoming frustrated and insecure. We should be patient, encouraging, detailed, and motivating. We must also become student-whisperers, who can reach the most difficult of students, and develop almost a sixth sense to detect frustration in students who don’t pick things up easily. Lastly, we must have in our schedules, enough time to schedule one on one sessions for the students who need them to catch up or to move forward if they are more advanced than the rest of their classmates. And we must do all of this without leaving students feel like we are picking on some while favoring others. Quite the tall order.

There are several other “Dojo-Killers” that hinder our success, but these are the main ones. In upcoming articles, we will discuss some others not on the list as well as expound on those already covered. If you have a small school–whether in a subleased space, your own lease, a community center, or even teaching in your garage or backyard, I have a book you might find useful. It is available on my other blog, entitled “Backyard Dojo” and it was written specifically for the small martial arts school owner. It costs less than a tank of gas and just might help you give your school a new life. As always, Dean Chin’s Jow Ga Federation is at your service, and if there is anything we can do for you–Jow Ga or any other style–please don’t hesitate to ask. Thank you for visiting the DC Jow Ga Federation, and I hope this article was helpful.