| Friend,
As promised, I'm finishing this "real talk" email series off by presenting some actionable solutions to the issues I described in earlier emails.
Yesterday I wrote to you about how depression can affect you and your dojo, and how to prevent it from creeping up on you. Today, I'm going to talk about how to avoid working those long hours for longer than you have to, and how to balance your family and work life.
Then, tomorrow I'll wrap this series up by talking about solutions for preventing burnout, as well as ways to ensure that your dojo enhances your personal life, instead of detracting from it.
Let's get started.
When Grinding Turns Ugly
When I started my first dojo, I didn't really have a vision in mind for the type of lifestyle I wanted to lead. All I knew is that I wanted to teach martial arts full-time, as a career and not a secondary vocation or supplemental income.
So, I did everything I could to make that happen. I worked several different full-time jobs at different periods during my school's growth, gravitating toward jobs that wouldn't interfere with my teaching schedule at the dojo.
For example, I worked nights as a supervisor for a security company, from 11 pm until 7 am. And, I later took a job as a home health care attendant, because the job allowed me to work from 6:00 am to 4:00 pm five days a week, giving me just enough time to beat traffic and make my first class at the dojo.
In this way I was able to reinvest all the profit from my dojo back into growing my enrollment. And later when it came time to expand my class schedule due to my school's growth, I quit my day job and replaced that income with multiple off-site classes.
Yet, a few years later when I got married, I was still teaching all those extra classes.
So, I was teaching 24 classes a week at my dojo, and another 11-16 classes a week outside the dojo, depending on the time of year. Add to that all the admin work I was doing in the school, and I was working on average 60-80 hours a week, each and every week.
The Workaholic Trap
Since I'd been doing it for years, it just seemed like the normal thing to do at that point. And, in many ways I'd become so used to working all the time, I didn't really know how to stop.
This is what I call "the workaholic trap," where you become so used to working yourself ragged that you don't know how to stop, once it's no longer necessary to do so.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working myself into a health crisis. You may recall how I previously detailed my "cascade of injuries," and how that resulted in weight gain and other issues. That was all related to overworking myself, because that first injury happened when I was overtraining and overworked... a dangerous combination.
I've spoken to other instructors who experienced the same thing. One friend was working long hours as a financial professional and running a dojo at night. After a few years of getting by on just a few hours of sleep a night, he started experiencing extreme fatigue, numbness in his limbs, and difficulty speaking.
After seeing several specialists, he was finally diagnosed with severe adrenal fatigue... or in layman's terms, exhaustion. He said it took him months to recover enough to return to work. And, he was a young man at the time this happened.
Planning So Your School Supports You, and Not the Other Way Around
So, how do you avoid falling into the workaholic trap?
When I started my second dojo, I had a much better idea of the lifestyle I wanted to lead, and how I wanted my school to support that vision. I decided a few things early on when planning that dojo: - I didn't want to work weekends.
- I didn't want to teach more than four classes a night.
- I wanted three days off each week.
So, I set up my dojo to support those three goals. Now, the standard wisdom says that you have to teach classes on weekends, that you have to be open five days a week, and so on. However, I was still able to grow my school to 120 students and make it profitable by sticking to two of those three guidelines.
In all the years I ran that school, I never taught a single class on Friday nights or Saturday mornings. And, I only started working on Fridays because I started an after-school program (which ended up being a very profitable mistake - I'll talk more about that in a future email series). Even so, I left the dojo at 5 pm every Friday night.
And, once the school got up and running, I only worked about 30 hours a week in the dojo. It's all in the planning, really--you have to decide what you want from your dojo, and what kind of lifestyle you want to have, BEFORE you open your doors.
Balancing Your Work Life and Family Life
This brings me to my next topic, which is making sure that your business doesn't intrude on your personal life. As I've mentioned previously, early in our marriage my wife and I both worked in my dojo. She ran the office, and I managed the school and taught classes.
What we soon found, however, was that our conversations were dominated by topics related to our business. This got old, quick, because we were taking our work home with us, and it was impacting our relationship.
So, we made an agreement that we wouldn't discuss business more than was absolutely necessary outside of the dojo. Once we got home, we stopped talking about "school stuff." And once we did so, our relationship improved and our stress levels decreased.
In short, my advice to you is to make your home your sanctuary. Don't take business calls at home after work. Don't answer work emails after hours, and don't take texts or other work communication after hours or on weekends. If necessary, shut off your phone and stay off the computer once you get home at night.
Setting boundaries like this helps you to separate work from your family life, and it will enhance your family relationships as well.
Dojo Orphans and Widows
There's no easy solution to this dilemma, because the nature of our business demands working in the afternoons and evenings. However, here are a few workable solutions that I've seen over the years: - Spouse/Spouse teams - If you can do it without killing each other, running your dojo as a husband-wife team can definitely be a boon to your business. You just have to make certain that you set boundaries, just as I mentioned previously, so your work life doesn't consume your home life.
- Bringing Kids to Work - Many instructors choose to bring their kids to work with them. It's not uncommon to see a school owner's kids participating in the children's classes, helping out around the dojo, and so on. The only danger to this is if your kids aren't interested in martial arts, but join in anyway because they feel pressured to participate. It happens. And if you force your kids to be involved, they're going to resent you that much more than they do for working at the dojo all the time. So, be careful about how you go about getting your kids involved with your dojo.*
- Trading Off With Staff - In my opinion, hiring and training reliable staff members to ease your work burden is the best possible solution to the work-home balance dilemma. It can take months or years to get such staff members in place, but the investment of time and resources is worth it to get some breathing room in your work schedule.
- Limiting Your Class Schedule - It is possible to run a commercial school working just four nights a week, Monday through Thursday. The trick to this is running a small, lean, profitable operation. You simply can't do this with high overhead costs; the numbers just don't work out. When you're teaching fewer classes, so you can't enroll as many students, so big footprint schools are out if you want to limit your teaching schedule. Even so, you can still run a full-time dojo following this formula.
The Bottom Line
The takeaway here is two-fold: - Yes, it's going to be necessary to work long hours when you're starting your business. But, you need to recognize when it's time to cut back, and have a plan in place for doing so, in order to avoid the workaholic trap.
- Before you launch your dojo, develop a vision for the lifestyle you want your business to support. Then, engage in thorough business planning, and set reasonable boundaries between your work life and home life in order to balance the two.
That's all for today. Tomorrow I'll wrap this series up by discussing how to prevent burnout, and how to take care of numero uno when you're running a busy dojo.
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
Quick-start Guide to My Books and Resources: - Looking for a list of books and resources I've written? Click here! - Looking for low-cost business coaching to grow your dojo? Click here…
P.S. - *I'm not a huge fan of putting kids to work in a dojo. However, I don't think school owners who do are "bad" parents -- far from it. Better that you spend time with your kids, even if it's at the dojo, than not at all. Much of parenting involves finding compromises between the ideal and the practical. Besides, if your kid is involved in your work, it might encourage them to develop an interest in the martial arts.
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