Black Belt Banter: Martial Arts Business Podcast
Welcome to Black Belt Banter, the best martial arts business podcast for instructors, school owners, and entrepreneurs who want to master both their craft and their cash flow. Whether you're running a single studio or scaling a multi-location empire, we break down the strategies, stories, and systems behind profitable martial arts businesses. From student retention and marketing hacks to leadership, curriculum, and community building—we cover it all. Tune in for weekly insights from Master Chan who’ve been in the trenches and come out kicking.
Black Belt Banter: Martial Arts Business Podcast
#3 | Crack the Code: 20 New Students in 30 Days!
Want to rapidly grow your martial arts school? This episode delivers a masterclass in strategic enrollment growth from someone who's done it consistently across multiple locations.
Master Lee breaks down his exact formula for enrolling 20 new students in just 30 days—a system built on proactive marketing rather than passively waiting for inquiries. The mathematical breakdown is refreshingly straightforward: you need 120 leads to book 60 appointments to conduct 40 intros to enroll 20 students. But the magic lies in how to generate those 120 monthly leads through strategic events and community presence.
Birthday parties emerge as the enrollment secret weapon, with each party bringing approximately 15 potential students into your facility. Master Lee reveals how some successful schools dedicate entire Saturdays exclusively to hosting parties, creating consistent lead flow and exposure. Beyond parties, internal events like themed buddy days, belt celebrations, report card recognition ceremonies, and specialized seminars create compelling reasons for current students to bring friends.
The conversation shifts to crucial mindset changes required for growth. "Marketing is F-word hard," Master Lee admits, recommending school owners dedicate 40% of their time to marketing activities. He emphasizes speaking "benefits language" to parents (focusing on confidence, discipline, and bully-resistance rather than technical martial arts expertise) and putting the right people in appropriate roles based on their strengths rather than titles.
Whether you operate a small neighborhood dojang or aspire to multi-location growth, this episode provides immediately applicable strategies to transform your enrollment process. The systematic approach to marketing through community engagement and targeted events, coupled with meticulous follow-up processes, creates predictable growth that any school owner can implement.
Ready to transform your enrollment numbers? Rate and review our podcast to help more school owners discover these proven strategies!
Contact Black Belt Banter
- Email us at jimmyhong@blackbeltbanter.com
- Tweet us at @bbbanter25
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ASAmartialarts
- Website: https://blackbeltbanter.buzzsprout.com
Please rate and review our podcast! Thanks for listening!
In this third episode, we will crack the code how to enroll 20 new students in just 30 days. Welcome to Black Belt Banter the best podcast to help your martial arts school increase in profits and generate substantial revenue. I'm Jimmy Hong and my co-host is Master Chan Lee. Master Chan has over 2,100 active students with multiple locations. He is well-renowned and highly respected by his fellow peers for his business acumen in operating martial arts schools. Master Chan, let's get straight into it. How do a school owner achieve getting 20 new members in just a month?
Speaker 2:We talked about this in our last podcast, so I just want to do a quick overview before we get into the nitty gritty of how we do this, and essentially there are two types of advertising. The first advertising, which I talked about before, was what I call reactive advertising, where you put a flyer, billboard, right, internet, your Google ads, whatever, your internet advertising or anything that you put out there in the world, and then you just kind of wait for the phone to ring. That's one aspect of advertising for the martial art industry. But what I believe in is something called proactive marketing, and proactive marketing is where you just go in front of the people that may be interested and it's in your demographic. Like, obviously, if I went to a senior center and did a demonstration and helped out and whatever which we've done on behalf of some grandparents and whatever, I'm not going to expect a lot of those seniors to take classes with me. I want to go into my target market, which is the kids between the ages of four and 13. 12 is actually probably better. So four to 12 is really where I'm looking at and I want to know where all the four and 12 year olds are at, and I also want to go and make sure that I have events that are fun for four and 12 year olds to come to my academy and try out things and so forth.
Speaker 2:So if I have to look at my numbers, if I want 20 new students, let's assume that I have a 50% closing rate, so that would mean that I would need 40 introductory lessons. I would need 40 people to come onto my floor and try us out. You could be better than that. And if you are great, but let's just for this fake dojang that we're working on that, we're assuming that you're doing 50%. We do better than that, but I'm just trying to make it realistic for everybody. That means you got to book 40 intros. That means you need roughly 60 appointments and let's assume roughly 70% of the appointments that you book on your school calendar to come in for classes, that only 70% will show up. But if you need 60 appointments, then how many leads do you need to have to book 60 appointments? And once again I want to say it's the 50% rule. It could be 60 appointments. And once again I want to say it's the 50% rule. It could be less or it could be worse. You just got to adjust it. In my experience it's been 30%. But for just this analogy to help people, let's go 50%. And obviously I talked about this in the other thing other podcasts is that it's based on the event too. Certain events have a higher rate of return than that. But anyway, for this example, let's go 120 leads. So I need 120 leads a month and if you think about it, if you break down a month into four weeks, you really need 30 leads a week. So how do we get 30 leads a week? I want you to go wear your dobok and go on a street corner with a giant sign and say come to my dojo. I'm just kidding, you wouldn't do that. We see tax people do that, but that is not probably the best strategy to do so in order to get 120 leads.
Speaker 2:I really believe in face-to-face marketing, going in front of prospective people and making sure that they get a chance to taste and try your classes, try your teaching style, try all the energy that you're going to really inspire people to do this. Bad analogy, but I remember watching UFC 1, 2, and 3 and just seeing the Gracies kick some butt, and you just saw it on a videotape. For me it was a videotape. I wasn't able to get the pay-per-view and I was like, man, I gotta learn this stuff. This is really cool. And I learned some brazilian jiu-jitsu, but it was all based on the things that I saw in the ufc. I said this is really cool stuff that we need to do. What kind of effect like that can you do that you inspire people to say you know what, I got to get my kid involved with this guy or girl. I need to have my kid involved with this and be inspirational and have the kids, literally whatever event you do, tug on the parent's shirt and say, hey, mom, dad, I really want to do this, making sure that really motivate and really have an inspirational type of event that everybody goes. I got to do this, I got to do this. So let's start with. What events can you do that I think every martial arts school should really work on.
Speaker 2:To me, one of the biggest lead generating events that you can do in your academy is just doing a birthday party. Everybody has a birthday party. It's something that you should advertise internally in your school and one of the things that we do is we look at everybody's future birthday party. So if it's the month of January, I am targeting all the kids in March and April and I'm talking to those parents so they can plan their child's birthday party and that we are one of the things that they would consider to put their kids in a birthday party. Just making sure you mark it and send an email and a phone call to all prospective people in your academy to do the birthday party in those months.
Speaker 2:The other secret thing that I do is I get one Groupon party at least a month. So I'm a big proponent of Groupon. People go. They may hate Groupon because of past experience, but I put my Groupon birthday party at kind of a high dollar amount because that price sets the kids and the people that you know may not be the right type of clientele that wants to come into the classes or whatever. So if they're willing to spend X amount of dollars on a birthday party, those are the kids that you look at and really make sure that you're filling one birthday party a weekend right, just at a minimum, and if you do that you're going to get 60 leads right there.
Speaker 2:Let's assume that each birthday party has about 15 kids in it. They could have more, they could have a little bit of less, but I'm just saying let's average that out at 15. Number one really be a birthday party school. It really makes a huge difference. I know a super large organization and I asked them what their number one marketing tool. They don't even have classes on Saturday. What do they do? They've booked their whole Saturdays just on birthday parties.
Speaker 2:So you know, if there's one thing you get out of this podcast right now, you should be in the birthday party business. Why? Because it's the friends of your current students. It's just a natural thing that causes that. Yeah, other things that you should do internally is buddy days, and you can. You know one. There's a general buddy day. You can say bring a friend to class or whatever. You don't want to hit that well too hard. But one of the things that we've done for I'll give you an example we did a January huge buddy day referral event and it happens to be the ear of the snake. So we I don't know if, but it's Master Hong, it's the ear of the blue snake and we created these blue shirts with a snake logo on it, with our logo, and anybody that brought a friend to our taekwondo class got a chance to get the T-shirt, along with them and their friends and it was an investment into the lead. And I know you're spending money, but it's one of those things where I think it's money well spent. We didn't do the white snake logo because it was a band in the eighties and it was taken already. Sorry, that's an old man joke, but anyway, no one's going to get that. No only, in fact, the people that are listening to this are way younger, because a lot of the older people don't listen to podcasts, but anyway, that's how we ran our buddy day and it was one of those things where we got 20 solid leads per location and we converted 10 of them to students and so forth.
Speaker 2:Right, something that naturally occurs is what we do a new belt party. So every time, have a belt promotion. You should have a party that goes with it a week later so everybody can celebrate their successes balloons, a backdrop, people can take pictures, have their friends break a board and make it a little bit of a fun celebration when that's something you can do. Other things we do that naturally occur we do something called a report card party. So we hand out these really nice medals are for kids that got a good report card and we celebrate that every quarter. And we have a report card party and they're asked to bring friends to the event so they sign up for it. We have some refreshments and things like that. We do a mini Taekwondo lesson for everybody. That's in the in the in the party. Um, we have boy scout, girl scout events. We're huge partners with the boy scouts and the girl scouts and so they have a self-defense badge that they can get. Um, so we do things like that that they can come into the school and bring their whole troop. In fact, we have 50 kids coming in a couple of weeks here at one of our locations and the den leader happens to be one of our black belts, so they're really helping us with that.
Speaker 2:You can also run what I call seminars, seminars that are appropriate for your age demographic. So, for example, we did an anti-bullying seminar that's open to our students and then they can also bring their friends and we bring. We really make sure that we can affect the community with some of these anti-bullying party is that confidence is the key that you are. If you have a high level of confidence, then you won't be a victim of bullying or you'll have the confidence to withstand anything that happens. That's bullying as well. And then things like women's self-defense. So we have a women's self-defense seminar that we do once a quarter or whatever, and we want to bring the moms back into Taekwondo class. We want to also have them bring their friends and so forth.
Speaker 2:So doing just these internal events that you know, you can constantly think of something for them to do a board breaking seminar with their friends. That's another thing you can do. So, just like I said, just anything, even though I say buddy day, you want to wrap your buddy day into some type of event or some type of seminar or some type of reason for them to want to bring a friend. And every time you run an event you can't think everybody's going to do it. Some of them are like, oh man, we're out of town, we have a soccer game or we have this and so forth. You know you're not going to get everybody, but it's just every weekend you should have something that's going on. The other thing that I recommend is really working with your school systems having us go to the schools and teach gym classes and teaching I know May is Asian Pacific Islander month and having them talk about the culture. Having us talk about the culture of martial arts and Korea, because I'm Korean and Taekwondo is Korean and whatever martial art you're in, it just brings a little flavor of that culture to the school.
Speaker 2:I'm a huge proponent of community talks. I talk to the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the local Chamber of Commerce. I'm a guest speaker and I do at least three or four of these a year. And just going out and just talking to the community about what martial arts is about and so talking I have a great PowerPoint on the history of a program and what we like to do with them. And then community demonstrations we go to churches, synagogues, temples and our demonstration team will go and do a demonstration and then we do an anti-bullying seminar throughout the community. I just gave you 20 different types of things that you can do in the community that you should put on your marketing calendar.
Speaker 2:A good friend and mentor of mine, master Merton, says and it's a great quote I can tell you how successful a school is based on their event calendar and I'll tell you that that is such a true statement is that you can really see how great a school is and how successful they are and the size of them based on the business of what they're doing.
Speaker 2:And when we run our martial arts school, what we tend to be busy with is just we're busy running classes and getting people ready for testings or tournaments or events or demonstration and so forth, and sometimes you miss out on this marketing, and I think I said this in the last podcast Marketing is hard, in fact. I don't like to swear, but marketing is F word hard. It's so hard In fact. I don't like to swear, but marketing is F word hard, it's so hard. And the more you work on making sure that you are spending a fair amount of your time marketing, I'd have to say that 40% of your time running your school if you had the percentage out where you spend your time in your school, 40% of it should be focused on marketing. So let's also look at lead collection, master Hong.
Speaker 1:Well, I just want to chime in real quick. This is why keeping stats is so important. If you don't keep stats with these events, you're not going to know which events are effective, you're not going to know which events draw in the leads and appointments. Leads a week, 120 leads a month. If we just for an average single school owner that's I don't know 60 to 120 students, it seems like a lot of leads. Maybe not for multiple school owners with hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of active students, maybe not. But as a single school owner, 120 leads seems like a lot. Bringing down 30 leads a week seems a lot.
Speaker 1:But if you go through all these events that you mentioned birthday party, group time, buddy day, not even including social media, report card party, boy Scouts, girl Scouts events, seminars, women's self-defense, anti-bullying class, board breaking day, working with schools and you're making sure that you leave these time slots open for these events, whether it's Friday night, saturday morning, you could easily get 30 leads if you're doing all these events every weekend, every month. So it depends on how you view. If you're just sitting in the office and you have 80 students, you're like how am I going to get 120 leads this month? You're not going to get it because you can't visualize it, but if you go and make sure you schedule an open Saturday morning for one of these events every weekend, then it's a lot more achievable. That's great Community talks with your local church and organization that's priceless, master Chan.
Speaker 2:I know, and you talk to a lot of school owners and you go, oh, what time do you get to the dojang? And a fair amount of them will say I don't get there till 3.30 because my first class is at four. What did you do in the morning? You know, I want to sincerely point out you will get results in where you spend your time and making sure that I'm going to run my school and I'm going to spend 40% of my time on some marketing and making sure that I'm working with my school systems and things like that. Or I'm at a school and I'm running gym classes that day and so forth, and we're in this weird social media phase where people are, hey, relax at home and have this income that just comes in and you don't have to do a thing, and so forth. We're in this weird generation and I think it's just back to like the basics. You got to just work hard and you've got to promote your brand and this is stuff that I've been doing pre-internet. This is the stuff that I had to do with my dad as we're running our academies is that this is the quickest way to grow your school is to do a lot of internal marketing and then going out into the community as well, and it's just critically important that you do that. You can obviously adjust your numbers If you're getting five students a month. Naturally, obviously, the walk-ins it's a referral that it's a neighbor of a student that happens to walk in and so forth. But I don't count on that. I really make sure that let's use this formula 120 leads a month. Let's work hard to make sure that we're able to collect as much names, numbers and info of many people that we can. And then we have to make sure whatever presentation we're doing is rock solid. It's got to make sure that. It's one of these things where people go. Man, I really got to make sure I get my kid involved with this. Man, I really got to make sure I get my kid involved with this.
Speaker 2:Two of the primary things that you have to understand is that parents are not interested in a good sidekick or the style that you did, or the number of tournaments that you've won or number of champions you produced. It doesn't mean anything to them. What they do want to do is you got to speak the benefits language. If my kid does this, he will turn into. And what is that. What is that? That's every. These are your universal things like having your kid become more confident. What parent doesn't want that? Having your kid be resistant against bullying, that's a confidence thing. Having your kid become more focused in school, having your child become more disciplined in their work habits for school, and so forth, and making sure that you deliver. You could have a great intro, but at the end of your intros, if you're not having that kid be loud or that kid is not standing straight and listening, it's a hot mess.
Speaker 2:One thing that I think makes me different a little bit than everybody else is that I still love teaching. So this morning I went to one of our locations and I taught this beginner class. I had a four-year-old rolling on the floor and licking the mat, doing all this crazy stuff, and I talked to the kid, I tried to inspire him to do this and so forth, and I talked to the parent. I'm like you've hired us to have him become more confident. So if he doesn't listen, he's going to have to sit out. It's a safety issue and it's one of those things that you know he's got to grow up a little bit. I can't help that kid Right now. He's not doing anything. I'm busting my hump trying to get this kid to do something. He's just a little bit too young at that point. He doesn't have the maturity level.
Speaker 2:Same class I had a three-year-old. This little girl did everything was loud, followed directions the best she can. She did not roll around on the floor. That's something I can work with. So just making sure that you are promising what you delivered. Obviously the kid that's rolling on the ground. I'm not going to be like, hey, listen, come in my office, I'd love to talk to you, and time to enroll. That's not going to work unless I start getting this kid to comply with what I want to do on the floor. And that's an incredible talking point in making sure that.
Speaker 2:And if you don't have a good call script to call right to have them come in, then it doesn't matter. Here let me just do a call script for you. Let me give you my birthday party call. It's super simple but it is really effective for us, a family and I'll call and immediately I'll go. Can I speak to the mother or father of Johnny? Hi, this is Johnny's father, hi, and usually when they go, the mother or father of Johnny? Hi, this is Johnny's father Hi, and usually when they go, the mother or father of Johnny, what did Johnny do Then? Right off the bat, I go hi, my name is Instructor Chan Lee. I don't call myself Master because it sounds weird. I'm Instructor Chan Lee with JK Lee's Blackfoot Academy. Hey, I met your son. Three days ago he came to a birthday party for Joey. Three days ago he came to a birthday party for Joey. Did he have a good time? Regardless of the answer, I go. All the kids that came to the party got a free two weeks of lessons at our martial arts school and in those lessons we want to help kids become better, focused in school and also become confident against bullying. And the reason I'm calling is to schedule his first introductory lesson and we have time Thursday or Friday. Which one is good for you? I just assume they're going to say yes and at that point, once I go through my spiel, they are going to either have a question or they'll say you know what, we're not interested, or whatever, maybe later on, or whatever, and so forth. And I'm telling you you're going to have a 50 to 70% return based on the quality of the birthday party and the quality of the lead and super important that you're able to whoever's calling should you know, script this out, sit down, practice it, and that they have the right type of mindset and attitude to do the calls.
Speaker 2:I used to put this at an instructor he was still with me. Instructor Paul Loved the guy. He's still with me. Instructor Paul Loved the guy. He's been with me for 20 years and when he was in college I didn't want to do these calls so I'd give it to him. I would go in the room I called the sweat box here's 100 leads from this weekend. Call and don't come out until you get me at least 10 appointments. And then one day I just kind of listened to what he was saying and he's okay, are you interested? We saw you and I had the wrong person doing calls. I did. The guy didn't want to do it, He'd rather be teaching on the floor.
Speaker 2:You know this could be a non-instructor, someone with a very bubbly personality, in fact one of the people that's in our organization. In fact, one of the people that's in our organization. She is a marketing director for a church and she is the most positive person I've ever met. And I asked her about doing calls. She said, sir, I'd love to do the calls and we just I give her a script, we practiced and I'm like winner chicken dinner, here we go and she is the right person to do that.
Speaker 2:So, just making sure you have the right pieces and the right people to do these things, and if you don't have someone to do that, you're going to have to do it yourself. You need to set aside a time on a Saturday afternoon, right A day that maybe you're not teaching classes. You need to get on these calls and if you're a smaller school, it's probably you in the first place, but you need to make sure you practice your phone scripts and make sure you sound super high energy and so forth. By the way, calling is dead. No one answers their phone. You're going to leave a really good, positive message.
Speaker 2:Texting also is working.
Speaker 2:So one of the things we do is we do a text text and then we call, so letting them know we're about to call, and then I also give them a text offer as well. You got to use multi forms of communication and then we also follow up with an email as well. So just making sure you're hitting up all these different types of things and, once again, this is a lot of time, right. There's a lot of time that you have to spend curating leads and talking with them and so forth. I don't want this to say, oh yeah, you get 120 leads, you'll get 20 students. There's a process making sure you're calling your leads properly, you're setting the appointments. Once the appointment's made, you're confirming the appointment of the day and that you're texting them in the morning and saying, hey, looking forward to seeing you today at four o'clock or five o'clock or whatever. It is making sure your intro procedures are rock solid, right, that the class itself sells itself and that you're getting a high number of those people to sign up for your programs.
Speaker 1:That's a great point about your. Okay? So let's say you're a two-man school, You're the master instructor, and then you have this instructor and his strength is on the floor. Why pull him out of his strength to make a less percentage-based appointment from these leads? There are plenty of people that support you, the families that support you. Get somebody who is extroverted, who's comfortable talking with strangers and making cold calls, and have them do it and don't take time out from your instructor on the mat to go out and make these calls. You got to think outside the box here and that's a great point. Everybody just assumes, oh, because my instructor's on the floor, he's got to make the call. That's not his area of expertise. That's not if it's his strength. Keep your staff on the strength of what they do best and look outside the box. I know for a fact that you, Master Chan, you have a lot of the parents volunteer and help as well.
Speaker 2:And that's another great thing. Sometimes you have I have some head corporate people or some. I actually have a woman at another one of our locations and she used to be the McDonald's corporate trainer. She really trains a bunch of 14, 15, 16 year olds to work at McDonald's and she's great at onboarding and calling and so forth and she even gives me ideas. And so one of the things you can do in lieu of tuition or in lieu of testing fees or in lieu of gear, you can also ask volunteers, someone with a good disposition that doesn't mind calling right, and give them a script and practice with them and have them do it as well.
Speaker 2:I one of my head instructors, who he's a great guy. He's Marine Corps veteran, you know, served and went into some war-torn places and also did two years of professional kickboxing. So he, he knows his stuff, he's a good, he's a great guy. But if I ask him to ask a mom for $20 because she had to buy a headband or something like that, he can't do it. He has a lump in his throat and he's like, sir, do you mind, can you have someone else do it, or whatever. But if I go hey, listen, that guy came from a different martial arts school and he wants to freeze for us and fight to see if our system works, he goes. Oh yeah, no problem, just to have him come in and I'd be happy to freeze. He'll fight anybody, but if just to ask him to ask for money, it's just quite comical. So just make sure you are able to identify the right people in your organization that can help you out and having you help you grow your operations in your school.
Speaker 1:There you have it, folks. That's the code Master Chan cracked to achieve 20 new students in 30 days. We need to conclude here. If you're enjoying our show, go ahead and rate and review our podcast or YouTube channel. Our goal is to get our show as successful as possible, and your review will help achieve that. Have a great week and I look forward to our next episode.