All the World's a System

Does your martial arts school run using systems?

I was unfamiliar with this approach until I attended the Martial Arts SuperShow earlier this month. I participated in several excellent business-oriented seminars designed to help martial arts school owners and instructors improve the quality of their operation and offerings.

I took pages and pages of notes, and here I will begin converting them into coherent posts that I hope you will find valuable, either as a martial arts school owner, instructor, or student.

The term "systems" refers to methods of conducting business or offering services to prospects and clients. In my military and corporate lives I've heard the terms "playbooks" or "standard operating procedures" (SOPs) as synonyms. The idea is to define sets of actions that you purposefully implement in order to maximize your chances to accomplishing a desired and explicit goal.

For example, your school could establish systems for any or all of the following aspects of school operations:

  • Demonstrations
  • Booths
  • Phone contacts
  • Adult "birthday parties"
  • Child birthday parties
  • Buddy weeks
  • Enrollments
  • Private lessons
  • Evaluations
  • Coach's days
  • Community involvement
  • Breaking boards

For each of these events, the school executes a playbook, or system, designed to attract, retain, and/or otherwise improve the experience of the student and family, and/or improve the business prospects of the school.

Although it may not seem revolutionary to those familiar with business practices, I learned a lot from the seminars that introduced these concepts. In fact, I plan to elaborate on all twelve of the systems listed above in future posts! Stay tuned for more.

Are there other systems you know? What did you learn at the SuperShow?

Stay informed of new blog posts by following me on Twitter @martialvitality.

If you like martial arts history, be sure to check out my Martial History Team project.

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