Comments(0) For you school owners who are starting up a martial arts school, I just came across the site www.starting-a-martial-arts-school.com that’s run by a long-time owner Michael Massie. It has a ton of great information that’s definitely worth a look.
Comments(0) For those of you running martial arts schools, managing your students, classes, belt ranks, marketing materials, contracts, tournaments and monthly billing can take quite a bit away from your passion for teaching martial arts. There are a ton of companies out there you can turn to that have been in the market for a long time and a lot of other schools use…but they’re getting outdated. Installing software on a computer isn’t effective for managing schools, not to mention the constant upgrades and exposure for having credit card or bank account information in your school.
You also have to consider your target market. Most schools receive the bulk of their income from younger students who have grown up with the internet, text messaging and video games. They want some way to interact with your school even when they’re not training. You will attract a lot more interest and students by taking advantage of some of the technology available today…not to mention how much easier it will make managing your school.
ExperienceMartialArts.com has put together a complete suite of services that we can offer your Martial Arts School to give you everything you need with a super-simple way to manage it all.
We’ve created a way for all 4 of these pieces to work together in a seamless fashion, giving you everything you need to run your school and allowing you to focus on doing what you love…teaching Martial Arts. Come take a look at our services and feel free to contact us with any questions you have.
Comments(0) For quite some time the Martial Arts industry has offloaded the billing of their students to professional billing companies. The main reason was that school owners wanted to focus on teaching martial arts and not on printing invoices, creating envelopes, mailing, collecting checks, going to the bank and following up with students who don’t like to pay. Kicking things is just a lot more fun…so owners paid to have this done.
Times have changed and electronic payment options are becoming the standard way for people to make payments. Let’s face it, checks and cash are a dying breed. Don’t fight it…the change is actually much easier than you think.
We posted an article on Martial Arts Billing Companies in our site, but we’ll get right down to what we’ve learned about these electronic payments.
There are companies out there now, such as PaySimple, where $20/month will get you the web-based software to set your students up on recurring billing (at your school or on your website), run all your reporting, auto-retry if a payment fails, use a backup method of payment, and even run one-time transactions for any sales you make in your school. Plus, their rates for credit card processing are 5%-7.5% lower than just about all other billing companies. Think of the time savings of not having to chase each non-paying student down and be the “bad guy” as you make them fork over money they may not have…not to mention the money savings! No school owner wants to kick out a hard-working but slow-paying student. But the fact remains that you need to run a business. We’ve found these auto-billing systems to be a perfect medium.
What’s even more amazing is that we know school owners who actually see a better rate of return on their student dues by using PaySimple than they did with a (much more expensive) billing company. The tools to run an effective school with minimal costs are out there…you just need to go find ‘em!
Comments(0) In our never-ending quest to find and retain more paying students, I came across this forum posting that has a few quality articles.
http://www.fightingarts.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=15850076&an=0&page=0#Post15850076
I really liked the “Ten commandments of running a successful martial arts business”, although I wish they had gone into a little more detail. I also feel these articles are a bit outdated with the power the internet is bringing to potential students who are researching the arts.
Stay tuned, I’m sure we’ll have some information to tag onto all of this!