| Friend,
Last week I shared the story of how I used service-based community education programs to grow my first school.
To recap, "service-based community education programs" is just a fancy way to say that you offer free classes in your local community.
The benefits to offering these classes are as follows:
1. It introduces you and your programs to people who would never set foot in your dojo. So, these programs can act as a sort of "feeder" for your other paid programs.
2. It helps you build goodwill in your local community.
3. Every time you teach one of these classes, it gives you an excuse to contact the local news media for press coverage.
However, there's a right way to do these programs and a wrong way. Today, I'm going to start sharing the right way to do them, starting with...
How To Avoid Giving Away The Farm
Your business is offering martial arts instruction as a service provider. And, as a business owner, if you give away your services all the time you'll never make any profit.
So, when you decide to do some good in the local community by teaching free classes, you have to make sure you don't shoot yourself in the foot by doing so.
Meaning, you have to make sure you're not giving away the farm every single time you teach a free class to the community. And to avoid hurting yourself by losing income, you have to set some guidelines and boundaries.
Basically, this means that before you ever teach a free class, you decide that you will offer "A" for free, but not "B." This could amount to simply limiting the amount of time you will deliver any free program or presentation.
Or, instead you might come up with one specific program that you teach for free to the community.
How I Did It
For me, I decided that I would offer to speak and present to local community organizations and groups for up to 45 minutes for free. I also limited the topics I would present on to rape and assault prevention, crime safety, and child safety/anti-abduction topics.
Since these seemed to be the topics that I received the majority of requests for from local orgs and groups, it made sense to make that my focus.
And, by limiting the length of time that I would present, it allowed me to let the groups I spoke to know that I also offered programs through my school that went into greater depths on the subject matter.
This resulted in extra income for my dojo while I was helping the community and getting positive press for my school. It created a win-win situation all the way around for everyone involved.
Tomorrow I'll talk about how to structure your presentations and how to get to a point where you can actually present a 45-minute talk or mini-workshop, without boring your audience to death.
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 one-on-one coaching to grow your dojo? Click here...
P.S. - Many of these local groups were accustomed to paying a fee for speakers to come in and speak to their groups. So, they were happy to find out that I wouldn't charge them a dime for my time.
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