A Florida teenager used his martial arts skills to fight off a chainsaw-wielding intruder.

Check out the video at yahoo:
www.yahoo.com/s/674624

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!

Election 2008 is underway and the competition was heating up…until today.

Now the election is basically over.

Chuck Norris has now thrown his hat into the ring along with a list of his priorities if he were to be elected President.  This is from the man himself folks:

Chuck Norris for President
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/staticarticles/article56107.html

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!