Prepare Yourself...

[Bill Mattocks]

 

[Buka]

Bwahahaha!

Yeah, and I'm never having a cigar again.

 

[kuniggety]

I had a kid at work complaining about this. He's a body builder and was whining how packed the gym is going to be for the next month or two.

 

[Ironbear24]

I had a kid at work complaining about this. He's a body builder and was whining how packed the gym is going to be for the next month or two.

I am complaining about this too.

 

[Balrog]

This will be a GREAT problem to have!

 

[Bill Mattocks]

This will be a GREAT problem to have!

Only if they stick around. I hate investing time and energy and caring only to gave them vanish after 2 months.

 

[geezer]

Only if they stick around. I hate investing time and energy and caring only to gave them vanish after 2 months.

Hmmm. Maybe I can get a good slogan out of that, like: "Don't even start Escrima unless you're willing to stick around."

....or, how about this one "If you want to get good at Chi-Sau, you have to stick around."

 

[Rhea]

Only if they stick around. I hate investing time and energy and caring only to gave them vanish after 2 months.

It might not be a waste. They might leave but those two months might give them more confidence to try a different art/sport, encourage them to get more active or they may use the skills they learnt in the future.

 

[Gnarlie]

It might not be a waste. They might leave but those two months might give them more confidence to try a different art/sport, encourage them to get more active or they may use the skills they learnt in the future.

They also might do word of mouth advertising for you. Turnover through a club can be a good thing. Your longer term stayers are selected from a larger pool too.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

[yak sao]

Hmmm. Maybe I can get a good slogan out of that, like: "Don't even start Escrima unless you're willing to stick around."

....or, how about this one "If you want to get good at Chi-Sau, you have to stick around."

I think you're onto something here , but if you don't mind I'm going to tweak it a little bit …

" If you want to get good at chi sau, you must stick to it"

 

[Xue Sheng]

Well, the McDojos benefit rather well from this....they have contracts...for a year... come or not...you pay...... I can't stand contracts

 

[Drew Ahn-Kim]

It's all a positive in my eyes. More money coming into the gym to go towards facilities, staff, and paying for seminars etc. I definitely make it a goal to try and make it as comfortable for the new kids in BJJ class, especially if they want to jump right into rolling, just flowing and letting them feel different positions without just smashing them. You'll get the crazy frenetic-spazz blitz style newbie every once and a while, but it doesn't last long. Not sure if its like this at everyone's gym, but we definitely take it upon ourselves to try to help retain the students and we never want to be the reason any of them leave. We were all that Day 1, belt tied wrong, guy or gal in the past.

 

[Balrog]

Only if they stick around. I hate investing time and energy and caring only to gave them vanish after 2 months.

Yeah, to a degree. But if we don't invest the time and energy and caring, they won't stick around at all.

I remember reading somewhere that overall, about 50% of the people who start martial arts will quit within six months. Another 30-40% will quit over the next 30 months. Only about 10-20% will stick it out to 1st Degree Black Belt. So we have to treat everyone who walks through the door as if they are one of those 10 percenters because those guys are the future of our art.

This is kinda long, but there's an interesting article at FightingArts.com - Why Students Quit. From that article:

In talking with Christopher Caile, founder of FightingArts.com, we bemoaned the churn rate of dojos and mused aloud about the reasons why people quit training. I contended that I believed many students quit the martial arts for reasons that really don't have much, if anything, to do with school quality. After discussing this at some length, both of us decided that my company, Fairfield Research, Inc., would perform a national study and determine not only the size of the martial arts market, but also why one-time martial artists quit.

In the study, we contacted via telephone 1,000 adult, heads of household. We asked if they had ever trained or taken martial arts classes of any kind, including Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Karate, or one of the many other styles of martial arts? Twenty-one percent (21%) of the study respondents -- equivalent to 19.8 million adults -- cited they had taken formal martial arts classes. When asked if they were still training and taking martial arts classes, only 2.8% stated they were-equivalent to 2.7 million adult martial artists in America. We assessed the number of household members (children) who were still training and projected there to be 3.0 million youths in the martial arts. Hence, the total size of the American martial arts market (those taking formal classes/training) is 5.7 million.

At this point in time, 86% of the students who have gone into an American martial arts school have quit. We asked those who had quit training, "What one reason was the most important in your decision to quit the martial arts?" The open-ended answers we received were coded into a number of response categories. The following were the results from this nationwide study:

Reason Why Quit

Personal & Job Time Constraints 31%
Moved Away From School 23%
Just Lost Interest 18%
Injury/Medical Problem 13%
Classes Ran Their Term 8%
Finances/Cost of Classes 7%


So, what does this tell us? The study results prove a majority (54% conservatively) of the reasons why students quit are beyond the control of the instructor, or school owner.

Those are the first two items in the list. So that means that we as instructors control the remaining 46%. And it's interesting that the third item on the list is "Lost Interest" for 18%. Hmmmm....that tells me that if I throw some variety into the classes, keep the students moving, etc. , I can conceivably increase my retention by up to 18%. And wouldn't we all love to have that big a bump in our membership?

Okay, I'm off the soapbox now.

 

[Balrog]

Well, the McDojos benefit rather well from this....they have contracts...for a year... come or not...you pay...... I can't stand contracts

I'll have to disagree with that. Contracts are simply good business practice. Your students know exactly what to expect and they make it a LOT easier from the business aspect in terms of billing, etc.

 

[Ironbear24]

I'll have to disagree with that. Contracts are simply good business practice. Your students know exactly what to expect and they make it a LOT easier from the business aspect in terms of billing, etc.

I agree with this. As a continuing student I know I am going to need to be going for months on end. So it would make more sense for me to just pay for all of that time in one payment rather, than have to pay every lesson.

 

[Xue Sheng]

I'll have to disagree with that. Contracts are simply good business practice. Your students know exactly what to expect and they make it a LOT easier from the business aspect in terms of billing, etc.

We do not agree. What happens if they family has to move, or if the are all of a sudden unable to afford to pay due to hard ship or the student simply realizes they do not want to train martial arts. Is there a way out of the contract, or are they stuck paying for the duration of said contract? And what would one expect the length of the contract to be?

 

[Balrog]

We do not agree. What happens if they family has to move, or if the are all of a sudden unable to afford to pay due to hard ship or the student simply realizes they do not want to train martial arts. Is there a way out of the contract, or are they stuck paying for the duration of said contract? And what would one expect the length of the contract to be?

As I said, contracts are a part of business. Ours are written such that if someone moves more than 25 miles away, or if there is illness or injury where they can't continue, the contract will be cancelled. Otherwise there is a penalty of three months dues and they are out, period. If there is a financial issue, we are more than happy to sit down and rework the agreement to help them out; we've done that several times. Our contracts are not onerous in the slightest.