| Friend,
Honestly, I've never been a big fan of having a lot of staff in a martial art school. Reason number one is that I like teaching, I like being hands on, and I like having face time with every single one of my students each week.
Secondly, I don't like the overhead... and we'll talk about that more soon.
But first, let's talk about the benefits of having a large staff at your dojo. As far as what I mean by a "large" staff, that varies depending on how many students you have.
Consider that you can pretty much handle everything yourself until you get to about 75 students. At that point you'll need to hire someone (or two someones) to help you out.
You can more or less double those numbers with minimal staff (two people). But after roughly 200 students or so, you can expect to hire one full-time staff member or two part-time staff members for every additional 100 students you want to add to your enrollment.
Granted, this is just a guideline, but it's a fairly accurate one based on my experience. Can you get by with less? Yes, but customer service (and possibly student retention) will suffer, and you're going to be working your tail off as well.
So, let's just say a large staff is four or more people on payroll. In my first dojo, I started off with just me, and later brought on my wife to help out in the office. After that, I decided to hire more staff, both to have more time off, and so I could add programs like more fitness classes and an after-school karate program.
When all was said and done, we ended up with myself, my wife, one full-time staff member to run the after-school program, a part-time person helping in the office, and two or three part-time instructors assisting on the floor.
I can tell you without a doubt the benefits to having that many people working for you are as follows: - Less work - When I decided to go back to school to complete the degree I put on hold when I started my dojo, my staff were able to pick up the slack. Despite the fact that I was in class two nights a week and every Saturday for roughly two years, our enrollment remained constant year-round and our income never faltered. I credit that to having well-trained and loyal staff members.
- More time off - I stopped working (teaching) on weekends after I hired and trained my first two assistant instructors. And, they approached me about teaching classes on Saturdays. Go figure. Accordingly, I had the benefit of offering even more classes to my students, and I never had to teach a single one. So, my weekends were free to do what I liked, and having time to recharge the old batteries each weekend was a definite plus.
- More time to focus on high-ROI activities - As a business owner, the activities that provide the greatest return on investment revolve around high-level planning in your business. That includes strategic growth planning and marketing. When you are doing everything yourself, it's difficult to devote a lot of time and brain power to strategic planning and launching new projects and services. By having adequate staff on hand, you'll be freed up to focus on areas of your business that will multiply your profit and growth.
- You can handle more students - Granted, this doesn't always work out to be to your advantage (more on that soon), but if you want to grow your school past a few hundred students you'll need staff to do so. Those of you who want to boast $50k to $100k a month gross profit numbers, take heed (net is a different story though and we'll talk about that soon).
But, having a large(r) staff isn't a complete bed of roses. There are some drawbacks to having more staff in your dojo, and I'm going to cover those in an upcoming email.
Until next time,
Mike Massie MartialArtsBusinessDaily.com
P.S. - I don't regret having hired all those staff members in my first dojo, but there's a good reason why I set up my second dojo to be minimally staffed and low maintenance. I'll share my reasons for doing so with you over the next couple of emails...
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