Discounting an Active Agreement

Read this only if you will not get greedy and sabotage your monthly cash flow for the lure of quick cash.  You can use this same strategy on a few students each month to boost your gross. Be careful that you don’t offer it to more than just a half-dozen students. This...

Cash Outs. Good or Bad?

There are different schools of thought about having students pay in full (PIF) for their classes versus monthly billing.  Let’s establish the fundamental difference between PIFs and monthly billing. When someone PIFs a program, you owe them the unused portion of their...

Congruency in Values

A personal brand works best when it is an authentic, congruent, and consistent representation of you. In this context, congruency means that your actions reflect your values. If you value honesty but are prone to gossip, exaggeration, or lying to protect yourself,...

“My Kung Fu is Better Than Yours”

At some point while you were dutifully teaching classes for your instructor, I bet a few students and/or parents let you know that they preferred your classes to those of your instructor. At first, you thought they were just being polite, but then you began to notice...

Black Belt Scandals

Here in the Tampa Bay area – the 12th largest TV market in the U.S. – the local CBS TV affiliate did a three-part series called “Black Belt Scandals.” The series exposed a local instructor who had White-Out® on his rank certificate. You could see a 3 was replaced with...

Black Belt Eyes

Black Belt Eyes are natural and good. I have them to this day. It’s just important that we be aware of when they might be getting in the way of what we are trying to accomplish, which is to attract and keep students.  In the early months of MATA, my art director Scott...