We've spent the majority of our time in this email series becoming familiar with various martial art school business models, and understanding the markets that a martial art school might pursue or specialize in serving.

Now it’s time to look at specific strategies for growing your dojo. But before we begin, we need to define the difference between goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics.

So, what's the difference, and why does it even matter? It matters because whether you're making a business plan or training for a fight, you need to know the difference in order to effectively plan for battle.

Let's briefly define each of these terms, so we can better understand what we're really talking about when we discuss strategies for growing your dojo.

A Goal is your broad intended outcome. Your goal for your business might be, "To become the recognized brand leader in martial arts instruction in the central Texas area by 2020." The key to a good goal is that it should be something that challenges you to shoot high and dream big, and it should include a deadline date. 

Objectives are specific steps you take that bring you closer to your goal. An objective for your business might be, "To achieve a 50% market share in our local market by reaching an active enrollment of 300 students." The key to a good objective is that it should be specific, measurable, and easy to understand.

A Strategy is the approach you use to achieve your objective. Strategy explains how you'll do something, while tactics are what you're actually doing to achieve a goal. Strategies are like a GPS app that tells you where to go, while tactics are actually driving the car to your destination.

A broad strategy for growing your school might be, "Convince consumers in our local geographic area that our programs are superior to those of our competitors through a focused local advertising and PR campaign." (Note: I'm going to name a few key strategies for growing your dojo shortly, so you'll see more specific examples of those in the next section.)

Tactics are specific tools or actions you take to achieve an objective. Typically, you organize your tactics around your strategies. A tactic might be, "Run a pay-per-click ad campaign targeting moms in our area who are looking for a summer activity for their children."

Now that we understand the difference between goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics, let's take a look at specific strategies for growing your dojo.

Whenever I launch a new school, I have a very specific strategy that I follow in order to grow that school as rapidly as possible. This strategy is actually a combination of three sub-strategies that focus my efforts, allowing me to achieve the maximum benefits from my efforts in minimal time.

Here is the three-part strategy I use to achieve my goal in record time when launching a new dojo:

1. Attack Your Market - And not the entire market, but a specific sub-segment that you've selected through careful research and planning. Remember when I wrote about specializing? This is where your decision will come into play, and where it will make or break your school.

The thing is, you simply can't attack the entire local market. Well, you can... that is, if you have unlimited resources of time, money, and labor. But no small business is ever so blessed when they are first starting out. 

So, you need to focus your marketing efforts on a specific segment of the market, to maximize your results with the limited time, resources, and labor you have at your disposal. When you attack your market, you focus all your marketing efforts there, with the goal of cornering that market.

This is also how you'll develop your brand, the specific concept and identity your business will be associated with in the minds of local consumers. Brand is what makes you unique and memorable amidst your competitors. 

So, choose your target market wisely, because it has to be large enough to support your dojo, and it will be your primary business focus for the foreseeable future.

2. Grow Your Weakest Link - After you've sufficiently cornered your selected market in that area (or when you've filled your primary programs to their capacity), it's time to move on to the next strategy, which is growing your weakest link. 

Growing your weakest link simply means singling out the program in your school with the lowest enrollment, and refocusing your marketing efforts on filling that program until it is overflowing with students.

A common mistake I see school owners make is that they'll kill a program that serves a market where there are tons of potential clients in their area, simply because they aren't making much money with it. 

Folks, if you offer a program that serves a large market in your area, and that program isn't full, it's not the market that's flawed—it's your marketing. Granted, it could be that you need to tweak the program a little, changing the curriculum or schedule or instructor to better suit what the market wants. But those are easy fixes.

The bottom line is that when you're offering something that you know people are buying in your area, and they aren't buying it from you, that means your marketing is weak or ineffective, or you simply aren't doing enough of it. And cutting that program instead of growing it means you're cutting off part of your dojo's overall potential for growth.

So, once you've determined that yes, there is indeed a strong local market of willing buyers for a floundering program, fix whatever is broken with that program and then market the living hell out of it until it's your new strongest program.

Then, go to your next weakest program, and do the exact same thing. Do this until all your programs are thriving in your school and filled to capacity.*

3. Cycle Your Marketing - After you've gone through the process of growing your primary program to capacity, and then attacking your weakest link until every program in your dojo is thriving and bursting at the seams, it's not time to sit back and rest on your laurels.

Uh-uh. Nope.

Now, it's time to go back through that process again, cycling your marketing to ensure that your programs stay full, all year long. This means focusing on specific markets and programs during the most opportune times to attack those markets.

For example, focusing on filling your kid's programs during the back-to-school season and early summer, and focusing on filling your adult programs during the New Year resolution rush and pre-summer, when every adult is looking to get in shape.

Of course, these are merely general guidelines, and you should always adjust and adapt your marketing plan based on your current program enrollment and which programs are lagging behind.

3.5. Fix Your Systems - Also, at this point you are going to discover that certain systems are broken in your school, or that you've outgrown certain ways that you used to do things, and that old systems need to be replaced or upgraded in order to handle all your growth.

This is when you create more efficient class scheduling, when you streamline your intro and enrollment processes, when you find better and more efficient ways of hiring and training staff, when you implement technological solutions for tracking attendance and billing and belt testing...

In short, it's where you fix all the things that are causing you to have growing pains. A great explanation of this is found in Tim Ferriss' book Tools of Titans, where Evernote co-founder Phil Libin expounds on Hiroshi Mikitani's "Rule of Threes and Tens."

Mikitani is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese internet company with nearly 90% of the internet user market share in that country. Mikitani's rule of threes and tens states that everything breaks in your company roughly every time you triple in size, and when you hit multiples of ten in your company's growth.

So according to Mikitani's rule, when you are running your business by yourself with just a few students, the systems you initially developed will work fine. Then when you reach three employees and 100 students, you're going to need new systems to handle that growth. And when you reach 9 or 10 employees and 300 students, you'll need entirely new systems again to handle that level of growth as well.

This is where the law of diminishing returns comes into play for most martial art schools, which is the principle that describes the point in a business' growth at which the profits gained from their expenditures become greater than the investments of time and money necessary to produce those gains.

And, it's why you see large martial art schools that are making zero profit, even though they might have 300 or 1,200 students. This happens more often than you think, because when a business triples in size or they grow by a factor of ten, and they're still running with the same systems in place they had when they were a third or a tenth of the size, it limits their growth and profits.

So, fix your systems to sustain your growth. Upgrade, adapt, and modify your systems to overcome the challenges represented by your school's growth.

4. Rinse and Repeat - At this point in your school's growth, it's likely going to be time to repeat these strategies. You probably need to refocus your marketing on your primary, brand-defining market at this stage, because chances are good that while you were growing you slipped a little in your market share, or a new, hungry competitor moved in and snagged up a chunk of the market.

And, you're going to need to repeat those steps involved with growing your weakest link and cycling your marketing, because it's a never-ending process. So, you need to cycle back through those steps, modifying your processes based on the changes that previous levels of growth have produced.

I can tell you based on personal experience that things tend to break at the 100 student level and the 300 student level. At 100 students, you need to implement new technology, scheduling, and staffing solutions to accommodate that growth. 

Then, at 300 students you find that the systems you had in place when you were a 100 student school don't work that well anymore. So, it's time to figure things out all over again.

For me, in my first school when we neared 300 students I decided that I didn't want to make the changes necessary to take the school to the next level. That would have required me to become more of a manager than an instructor, and I personally prefer being a teacher over managing people.

So, I actually downsized my school, cut out a lot of the programs I had in place that were boosting my enrollment, but without much increase in net profit. This resulted in a reduction in students from around 250-275 (depending on the time of year) to around 160-180, which was where we held steady thereafter.

It also resulted in a reduction in my personal work schedule of about 50% less hours each week. I found that I was happiest at that level of growth in my school, and that it was where I could maximize my profits based on the amount of effort and overhead required at that level of growth.

This is going to be a personal decision for everyone, and there is no right answer to this conundrum. You have to decide for yourself how big you want your business to grow. And, you have to discover whether you have the tools, skills, and resources in your personal inventory in order to achieve and maintain that next level of growth.

Here's my advice: Never, ever, ever base your own professional goals on those of another entrepreneur, because their goals may not serve the lifestyle you desire. Set your goals based on the outcomes you desire.

This is how you achieve happiness and contentedness in business and life.

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Whew! That was a huge info dump. I hope I didn't hit you with too much info at once. Tomorrow I'm going to wrap this series up with a final recap of what we've covered. Stay tuned!