Hi, I'm a black belt karate instructor looking to opening a studio of my own to teach full time. I live in a large city that is already pretty densely packed with martial arts schools, so competition is a big concern. At the same time, I believe many traditional martial arts schools are struggling financially and in a slow-motion death spiral as the popularity of MMA rises and as modern tech, social media, and culture makes "traditional" studios hard to relate to, especially if run by a 1st-generation Korean or Japanese master with weak English. As such, I would like to identify and approach such struggling businesses to buy as a basis for launching my own studio. Being younger, US-born, comfortable with tech, and with broad enough experience in the world (lived abroad twice) to articulate the case for traditional martial arts to younger students and their parents, I think I can rejuvenating some of these struggling older studios, while still respecting the traditional teaching style of the old masters. The challenges: - how to identify such struggling schools - how to approach said school in a way that won't offend their sensibilities Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks! -Dave
Hi Dave, Welcome to MAP! Do you have any background in marketing or business generally? Also, I wonder if you might find it easier to start your own school rather than approaching existing schools? Why not start by building up your own school?
Turning around an already failing school by being more American but less qualified doesn't seem like a solid plan. What would be your unique selling point?
As a software engineer I've worked at 4 startups (one of which was my own, though it didn't get very far) which often involves close collaboration with sales and marketing, as well as one 6 months in business development. So while my business experience is certainly not extensive, I'm conversant and comfortable in the space - contrast to many traditional instructors who see "business" as a dirty word. More salient, I've extensive experience with organization design, mentoring, public speaking, and curriculum design, all of which I have plans to incorporated in scaling up a dojo in novel ways. And that word - scaling - is my key motivation for wanting to buy a dojo rather than start from scratch. The way I see it, the challenge of building out a brand new dojo starting at zero students up to 25 is very different from the challenge of scaling up an established school of 25 students to 50, to 150, to 250. For the former, in which a single proprietor doing all the work, provided they are reasonably competent martial artist and instructor (which I feel I am), it's really a function of time and effort. But at some point when the scale exceeds the capacity of a single instructor, skill at organization, pedagogy, tech, and marketing come into play. And I'm not just talking superficial elements like setting up a pretty website. I mean deep integration of skills like public speaking, psychology, and critical reasoning into the lesson itself. And that value-add, which I believe sets me apart from the typical Asian man-of-few-words patriarch, become more apparent with (a) scale and (b) experienced students who are positioned to absorb such advanced concepts. Hence my preference to pay for a studio that will let me fast-track the initial startup phase (where my skills are adequate but not exceptional) to the scaling-up phase (where my skills are unique).
Sounds like you'd be better taking a business plan to your bank manager. You need more than marketing skills to be successful, such as a proven track record - past students ( especially if they've competed ) are usually how instructors are judged. Have you had a school in the past ? If it's a saturated market why would people choose to stick with you if you took over their school ? Perhaps you could promote yourself with a few seminars to give people a chance to view the goods, so to speak.
As a instructor, would you be bringing in some of your own students as well as adding to an existing student base? I can definitely see the benefits to buying an established school, especially savings in regards to setting up the school with materials. Many traditional schools in my area as well have shut down as students flock to the mma gyms. I imagine like most things, it’s a fad and with time you’ll see a return to the more traditional styles. Hell, all it takes is for some karate kid like movie to come out and be a hit again and people will be running back to the traditional styles.
I had a friend from work that kept bugging me to join this Fred Villari franchise that he bought. I grew up with a brother that was a year older so we were fighting all the time. I also played linebacker in football and was on the wrestling team thru junior high and high school, so I was always getting challenged by people that were bigger than me so I got into quite a lot of fights. Anyways back to the subject. I finally gave in and joined. Within the first week, I said to myself, man this is some hoaky 5h1t, mostly consisting of everybody running around in a circle and hitting 4 heavy bags that were placed in the 4 corners of the room and the rest of the class practicing trying to jump high, as the black belt instructor put it "try to jump higher and higher", LOL. I almost called it quits, even though I paid for a month. I was reluctant to give it a second chance but decided to do so thinking that maybe they will start teaching something that seems functional. Three days later this dude named Cuda had shown up on the scene and the black belt instructor allowed him to do a demo. After I had seen what this dude was doing, I said to myself, man this is what I have been looking for. Now, I can't wait for the next class thinking this dude named Cuda was going to be there again. When I got there, no Cuda in sight. I asked the black belt instructor where Cuda was and he told me, he's gone. I said, where did he go and the black belt instructor said, don't know. So, the next day at work, I asked my friend what happened to Cuda and he told me that they caught the dude trying to steal students. So now I've went from frustrated, to excited and back to frustrated again. About a week later I was coming home from work and was sitting at a stop light on an off ramp off of the interstate. I look over in the car that is sitting next to me and there's Cuda. I honk the horn, he looks over at me, we roll down our windows and I said, man where did you go, he said follow me. I followed him and ended up that we both lived on the same circle in an apartment complex, kismet at its finest. Cuda was my first JKD instructor and I trained with him till he moved back to New York and later on became a certified JKD instructor in 1998 under Progressive Fighting Systems. Now, this might not seem a proper way to go about things but, maybe go to some other schools in the area and enroll a month and don't show who you really are, make some friends and ask them if they would like to get together and practice. Once, you get them alone, then show them what you are made of. At that point, its up to them to prompt you for tutelage and if they don't leave it at that. Go buy a house with a 2 car garage if you don't already have one and teach out of your garage. If you build up a following that gets too big for the garage, only then would I consider buying into a school and paying rent for a dojo in a strip mall. You also have to market yourself from the beginning because other than word of mouth, "even though you might be great at what you do", people will not know how to get to you.
