The Two Pieces of Advice That
Keep School Owners Broke

Roughly 98 out of every 100 martial arts school owners never get past net income three or four thousand dollars a month and many are working another job to finance their school. They work hard, they love their students, and they believe in the martial art. And they still spend years stuck at a number that barely clears the rent.

The hidden reason isn’t talent, and it isn’t the market, and it’s not “working hard enough”. It’s where they got their business information, and more precisely, whose advice they trusted.

I thought of this because I get told all the time (in fact, yesterday at the time I wrote this) “I am talking to a bunch of successful people and then I will figure out how to run my school”. This is a flawed strategy. Before you take one more person’s counsel on how to run your school, ask a single question: have they produced this result more than once in many locations at the same time?

Two errors do most of the damage.

Error A: Trusting advice that can’t be repeated

Owners find someone who built one great school, and they treat that single result as a blueprint.

Respect the success. I do. A person who builds one strong school has done something real, and there’s plenty they are doing right. But a single success is not a system. What worked for that owner was fused to a specific set of conditions you will never reproduce: their location, their demographics, their staff, their history, and the plain fact that they are a different person than you. The classes filled because of who they are in that room, in that town, at that time. Admiring the result is not the same as being able to copy it.

The indicator of something you can actually repeat is simple: the owner has produced the result more than once, in more than one place. One school can be luck, timing, or a great corner with a big market with lots of prospects walking past the window. Two schools is often a husband/wife team or really 2 schools that are similar but run by individuals. Three schools or more, in different towns with different teams, is a system. That’s the line between a great story and a blueprint. When an owner tells me they want to grow, I tell them to stop chasing the great story and start looking for replicable systems.

Error B: “I’ll pick the brains of a bunch of successful people and figure it out”

This one is trickier, and it fails more reliably.

It seems like a good idea, if you’re starting a business, to go to a bunch of different people doing the same thing and “pick their brains” until you get all the info you need and assemble it together into a business. Another flawed strategy…

Picture it this way… Imagine you wanted to learn martial arts for the first time. Would you walk into a dozen different schools, watch each one for a while, take a class here and there, put the fragments together, and call yourself a Black Belt? Of course not. You’d need a cohesive system, one where each piece sets up the next. And the key is: early on, no matter how smart you are, you won’t fully understand every piece or how it interconnects. You find a mentor and do it, and do it, and do it (remember Bruce Lee’s quote about 10,000 kicks) until it’s muscle memory. It’s just like becoming a Black Belt.

Unless you’ve spent years running the exact business you’re opening, a martial arts school specifically, you cannot assemble a working operation out of borrowed pieces. You take a marketing idea from one owner, a class-scheduling idea from another, a pricing idea from a third, and you end up holding a pile of parts that were never engineered to run together. The parts don’t fail because any one of them is bad. They fail because nothing was built to connect them.

Running a school (or any business) works the same way. A system isn’t something you shop for in fragments off other people’s shelves. It’s something you do and do and do, and one day (I estimate 10 years minimum) you’ll start to understand the way it works together. You earn it by doing the entire thing, repeatedly, long enough to feel how each part works with the others.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to cobble together a business.

Bonus Error: “I’ve got it figured out”

This isn’t for the school owner that’s just starting out, it’s a warning for a school owner who’s been doing it a long time. Ray Kroc (the McDonald’s founder) has a quote:

“As long as you’re green you’re growing, as soon as you’re ripe you start to rot.”

It means that if you think you figured it all out, often you’re really on a plateau.

The Plateau Lifecycle of a martial arts school. Nominal income vs. real, inflation-adjusted income. Source: today.mastermoody.com/plateau-lifecycle-framework

Here is my view of a business plateau. A school climbs during startup and growth, then slides into three stages most owners never name. In Phase A they are plateaued and don’t know it: a strong month reads as a trend, and the flat line hides inside the monthly variance. This can be a trap because they are early on and figure it’ll get better if they keep “plugging away”. In Phase B they finally feel it, and they start buying: programs, coaches, seminars, software, one purchase after another, and they mistake shopping for fixing. It’s often Error B: “I want to grow so I need to find the next new shiny object thing that’ll fix it.” In Phase C they make peace with it (not a good thing). They call it a lifestyle business, compare themselves to other owners who are just as stuck, and decide this is the ceiling. All of these are dangerous.

Watch the two lines on that chart. The black line is the income the owner sees on the P&L. The red line is what the bank account actually feels once inflation takes its cut. In Phase C those lines split, and the owner rationalizes the gap instead of closing it. Think of it. You only have to go back to 1999, when prices were half of what they are today. How many owners are charging double? That is the real danger of “I’ve got it figured out.” The plateau is not a numbers problem that happens to feel bad. It is a psychology problem that produces a numbers result, and the numbers won’t move until something changes.

The standard I use

Who would I listen to? Time alone or their number of students or their income? Nope! Someone can run a school for a decade and still not know how the machine fits together, because they never got it working at a high level. In fact, they are likely to tell you “Oh that’s as much as you can make in this business” and reinforce their own mediocre level of success (they’re on Phase C). A plateau held for ten years teaches a person how to survive a plateau; it doesn’t teach them how to build.

That’s the standard for whose counsel I take. I listen to people who have operated at the top of this game across time and across locations: Grand Master Clark, Grand Master Stephen Oliver, Grand Master Von Schmeling, and others who have proven it more than once in multiple locations with a wide variety of instructors. Since I have run 8 schools in multiple states at the same time, I am impressed by these systems and these mentors. They are the model of who qualifies. Set them beside the single-school operator whose result, however good, can’t be lifted off their own corner and dropped onto yours, and it’s the comparison between reliable results and “I hope this’ll work”.

This isn’t about associations or organizations, and it isn’t “don’t listen to anyone.” It’s about one thing only: the value and the repeatability of the system.

What to do with the single-school owner

The owner of one excellent school holds data and inspiration you want in the room. You may even want to know what they’re doing and use it as a source of healthy competition. Beat them and have fun doing it!

Before you take advice

Before you accept anyone’s advice on your school, ask whether they’ve produced the result more than once, and decide whether you’re being handed a real system or a bag of borrowed parts. A strategy that worked one time, in one place, for one person deserves your respect and your curiosity. It does not deserve your business commitment.

Find a mentor! Just like you have in your martial arts training. Look for the people who have built it, rebuilt it, and built it again somewhere new. Learn the whole system from someone who owns the whole system. That’s the way to start your school and the way to keep growing.