| Friend,
It's one of the first things I teach my coaching clients, and it's as inevitable as rain in Seattle...
...you're going to lose students.
- No matter how great of an instructor you are -
- No matter how much your students like you -
- And no matter how much you think your students are in it for the long haul -
All students eventually leave your dojo. All of them. It's a given.
So, if you're just starting a martial art school and you've not yet fully embraced this truth, you're in for some seriously rough times ahead.
I know because I've gone through them myself due to not taking retention and attrition seriously, and I've seen a load of instructors go through similar troubles for the same reasons.
One of my buddies went from 300 students to around 100 during the recession, and he had to close his school. Another is struggling right now because he got complacent and lost half his students over the summer. And another friend of mine lost a third of his students when one of his staff left and started his own school.
The thing is, you could blame all three of these situations on other factors. The economy, the "summer slow-down", and treachery.
However, the fact remains that in each case, what it really boiled down to at the end of the day was one word:
RETENTION.
"Retention" as it relates to the art and science of running a martial art school simply refers to how well you manage to keep students around after their first month. The idea is to get them to keep handing you tuition checks, month after month.
Accomplishing that, along with attracting more students through sufficient marketing activity, is what results in growing and maintaining a successful martial art school.
"But wait Mike," you say. "Isn't it also important to teach good martial arts and to be a skillful instructor, too?"
Yes, yes it is. In fact, that's a huge piece of the overall retention puzzle. But, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. Let's back it up a minute and talk about the flipside of retention...
ATTRITION.
"Attrition" refers to how many students you lose each month in your school, which is typically a number that is expressed as a percentage of your overall enrollment.
Most instructors and school owners don't track this, and it's to their detriment. I know this because when I start coaching people, I always ask them for certain stats. One of the questions I ask is, "What's your attrition rate?"
And, typically the answers I get fall into three categories:
1. "What's that?"
or
2. "I don't know, but if I had to guess..."
or
3. "Last month we lost X students." If you were in the first category before reading this email today, don't feel bad. Most people aren't taught the importance of tracking business metrics in school, and it's certainly not something most of us learn from our parents or friends.
Unless you went to business school or unless you've spent a lot of time educating yourself on the business of running a martial art school, the chances of you knowing this stuff are minimal.
Now, if you're in the second category then you're like the majority of school owners out there who are struggling or running underperforming dojos.
And even if you think you're doing okay, if you're not tracking retention I can guarantee your dojo is underperforming. Because you have yet to understand the importance of retention/attrition as a metric, you're probably losing more business that you realize to attrition.
And if you're in the third category, unless you're tracking those numbers as a trend over the life of your school, from month to month and from year to year, you really haven't unlocked the full benefit of knowing that number on a monthly basis.
"Benefit?" you ask? Oh, absolutely.
And this is because of the following, which was famously first said by the great Peter Drucker, the guy who pretty much wrote much of the foundational material that comprises the curriculum in business schools today:
"What gets measured gets managed."
It also stands to reason that what gets managed improves. Conversely, what doesn't get measured will not be managed, nor will it be improved.
This is the entire reason why you need to track metrics in your business, and it's also why you need to track your attrition on an ongoing basis.
Now, enough for the long and somewhat boring explanation of what retention and attrition are, and why you need to track them...
...because tomorrow I'm going to illustrate in hard numbers why you MUST track and improve your retention if you want to have a successful martial art school.
Stay tuned for that email to arrive in your inbox tomorrow morning, because it's going to be an eye-opener.
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
P.S. - I know for a lot of people who are creative types (and a lot of you who are reading this fall into that category) this stuff is BORING with a capital "B". However, the truth is that it only takes about 10% more effort in your business to track and improve metrics like retention and attrition. So, even if you hate it, there's absolutely no reason not to do it.
P.S.S. - Now, think about this... if 90% of martial art school owners are putting forth only about a 50% effort in managing their schools (and believe me, this is absolutely true), then by simply working 10% harder than your competition you'll soon be in the top 10% of dojos in your area. And if that doesn't excite you, then you're either already there, or you're subscribed to the wrong newsletter. :)
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