Gretzky Couldn't Do It Either...

I have spoken in rooms of hundreds of people - to 200 business owners in Paraguay, to training hundreds of instructors on a bullying prevention program, to an auditorium of hundreds of educators as well as seventy-four 3 to 6 year olds (that's the most scary for some of you) at the same time. When I read about a stand up comedy class where you write jokes and perform I figured "I'll be awesome at this - I speak in public all the time and make all those guys laugh!"

Then I learned about jokes and writing jokes and oh yeah you have to memorize the jokes and they need to be making fun of people but not making anybody mad and they have to be performed and you have to time every pause and you have to keep going when a joke gets nothing but silence… (that was a lot)… and the first time I went up and performed….I was more terrified than any tournament, test, dissertation defense, anything! My hands were shaking like I was going into a live warzone.

(Side note - my 12 year old son Alden also started this class with me and he killed! “Killed” in comedy is doing excellent) - you can see our comedy at MoodyComedy.com)

That first show was November 1, 2013, at the Tempe Center for the Arts. I'd spoken in public for decades. I had never written or performed a joke. Speaking in public and doing stand up turned out to be completely different jobs.

This is the companion to The Two Pieces of Advice That Keep School Owners Broke (Moody, 2026). Error A was trusting a result that can't be repeated. Error B was picking a bunch of brains and stitching the pieces together. This third one I call the I'm-Smart Error: believing you're smart enough to invent a business system that works.

Before you build one more piece of your school from scratch, ask one question: have I actually DONE this job, or have I just been around it?

Smart Is Not the Problem

Most of the school owners I've worked with are smart. A lot of them are very smart. They learned a martial art at a high level, they can teach, and they can run a class full of kids and keep every one of them with them.

Why is the I'm-Smart Error so easy to make? When you're good at hard things, it's natural to assume the next hard thing will work the same way.

It usually doesn't work. The skills that made you a great student and a great instructor are real (and you'll use them every day), but they aren't the skills that make a business profitable.

The Player Who Buys the Team

Picture a football player. They played for years, they know the game cold, and the day they stop playing they buy a football team… and decide to be the head coach at the same time.

Now they're the accountant. The marketer. The coach. The mentor. The one managing everybody's personal psychology. Operations. Even the lawyer.

They were AROUND all of that for their whole career. The accountants, the lawyers and the marketing people were in the building, and being in the building is completely different from doing all of those jobs yourself as the owner.

Wayne Gretzky, maybe the greatest hockey player who ever lived, was a managing part-owner of the Phoenix Coyotes (who should still be in Phoenix!) and then coached the team for four seasons without making the playoffs, finishing 143-161-24 (Mastey, 2024). Michael Jordan owned the Charlotte Bobcats the year they went 7-59, the worst winning percentage in NBA history (Inskeep, 2012).

Neither one of them was short on talent, work ethic or intelligence. What they didn't have was years of actually doing the owner's job.

Five Versions of the Same Mistake

The marriage one I can speak to. My first set in 2013 opened with, "My name is Greg Moody and besides being a stand up comic I also have a degree in counseling. I'm an expert on marriage. Not because of my degree but because I've been married three times." (I got married after that.)

Being married didn't make me a counselor. The training, the supervised hours, lots of experience and the license did.

Same with the Black Belt. It makes you a martial artist and (often) a great instructor. It does not make you an owner.

Why Smart People Try to Invent It

In a series of studies, people rated how well they understood everyday things like a zipper, a toilet and a lock… then tried to write out how each one actually works. Their confidence dropped once they had to explain the steps (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). Watching your instructor run a school for years is a LOT like looking at a zipper. You've seen it work a thousand times, and you still might not be able to explain how it works, step by step.

Researchers found that people with higher cognitive ability were no better at spotting their own biases, and the bias blind spot was actually a little larger in the more cognitively sophisticated people (West et al., 2012).

Add Kruger and Dunning's finding that the people with the least skill in an area tend to overestimate their ability the most (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), and a brand new owner may be the most likely person to overestimate how well they'll run a school (they've never actually run one).

Ericsson and his colleagues found that experts (usually) got there through years of deliberate practice in their specific field (Ericsson et al., 1993). Your years on the mat were practice at teaching. Running payroll, negotiating a lease, marketing, sales takes its own practice.

Michael Gerber wrote a whole book about this situation. He describes the technician who knows the technical work cold, opens a business around it, and assumes that knowing the work means knowing the business (Gerber, 1995). He argues it's why most small businesses don't work, and it's a lot like what happens when a great instructor opens a school.

What the new owner says: I've never run a business, I've just watched one. "I've got a pretty good idea how this works."

Before you invent a system for enrollment, renewals, pricing or staff training, ask: have I actually DONE this job successfully, more than once? If the answer is no, don't invent it… find someone who has.

Your Instructor Is Often Part of the Problem

The person you trained under may be an AMAZING instructor. They may have changed your life. They taught you discipline, confidence, and how to teach… and you owe them a lot.

Now look at the industry. What does the average school actually make? As I wrote in the first article, roughly 96 out of every 100 school owners never get past three or four thousand dollars a month in net income. If your instructor's school looks like most of the industry, then odds are (not always) they aren't making a great living from the business side either.

You didn't just learn their kicks and their curriculum. You also picked up their pricing, their renewal conversation (or lack of one), their marketing and their idea of what "normal" looks like. The teaching may be great. The pricing, renewals and marketing you picked up alongside it may be the same ones keeping most schools at three or four thousand a month.

Further, even if they are doing better than average, does that mean the training in the business systems was as good as the martial arts training was… that’d be unusual if it was!

What to Do Instead

Use your intelligence to EXECUTE a proven system really well… not to invent one from scratch while the rent is due. Do that a long time (Bruce Lee: “I fear the man who has practiced 1 kick 10,000 times).

That's the standard, and it still holds. Look for someone who has built three or more schools, in different towns, with different staff. Look for ten SUCCESSFUL years. That's someone who has actually done the owner's job.

Summary

Write down the ten biggest jobs in your school – enrollment, renewals, pricing, staff training, marketing, scheduling, billing, retention, leadership and the books. Next to each one, mark whether you've DONE it successfully (different discussion to define successful) before or were just around it.

If more than half say "around it," you're not behind… you're normal! You're exactly the person who benefits most from a system that's already been proven. You can always reach out to me, and I'm happy to talk it through.