The process of opening a martial arts school is gratifying. It enables you to do what you preach within the field and particular art, give back to your community and become your employer. Ownership isn’t easy, though, just like running a business. 

Being skilled in martial arts is only a small part of what it takes to run a successful martial arts school. It requires stamina, careful planning, a sturdy stomach, and a lot of devotion. This guide will assist you in comprehending the components of growing your martial arts school, as well as why automation is necessary for growth.

Automation is the key to reducing the struggle of martial arts school owners

Teachers are leaving in droves all over the world. And they aren’t keeping quiet about what’ s causing this huge influx. Stress. Stress is an epidemic, and it is having a significant negative impact on education around the world. To address the problem, a lot of things must change – and change profoundly.

Automation is one of the most exciting technological solutions. Martial arts schools with agile manifesto values are currently working hard to bring the interactive, flexible, and time-saving automation that they require. Automation has the potential to relieve a significant amount of work. It has the potential to free up a significant amount of admin time for owners and also students. Time for them to unwind, get ahead with preparation, and do what they do best.

The following are the problems that martial arts owners face and how automation can solve them:

• Enrollment process difficulties

Student enrollment is among the most time-consuming processes that educational institutions face. It typically consists of a slew of paper-based tasks that, when performed manually, are progressively vulnerable to human error. It is time-consuming to approve student application forms, validate documents, and manually confirm student eligibility for a given course. Automated school processes are the most effective way for institutions to ease this burden while remotely collecting correctly completed forms, papers, applications, and affidavits from students.

• Struggle to keep schedules

When it comes to managing educational processes, meeting planning and preparation are critical. Typically, an organizer will check the availability of students and parents before scheduling a meeting. They then notify each student and parent individually, informing them of the meeting’s date, time, and location. When something changes, the organizer must go through the entire process again.

Nevertheless, with an automation solution, the whole scheduling process can be completely automated, reducing the need for human intervention. The organizer only needs to set up a simple workflow that checks each attendee’s schedule and makes notifications.

• Attendance Issues

Another routine but necessary process that most martial arts schools must perform on a daily basis is attendance monitoring. And if you believe that attendance only affects students, you are mistaken. It is also critical to keep accurate records of faculty and school administration in order to guarantee equitable compensation for all team members.

You can, for example, collect information for your employees’ work logs by using special education automated software for daily attendance monitoring. This approach enables for more equitable evaluation and permits each employee to receive the appropriate compensation based on their presence within an institution’s routine procedures.

• Reporting difficulties

Most martial arts school owners are obligated to fill out progress reports for each student in their class in addition to supervising exams. Needless to say, that’s a lot of tedious work to keep up with. Automation can be of great assistance in this situation. After storing student grades digitally, you can utilize special education automated software to retrieve the data needed from the spreadsheet.

You can also pre-fill progress cards and send progress reports to those who are interested (e.g., parents). By doing so, you are not only eliminating this tedious task but also freeing up hours of daily time that can now be dedicated to more productive work.

Advantages of having a martial arts software

It’s crucial to have a strong management system in place if you own a martial arts school in order to make running your company easier on a daily basis. You are aware that organizing your staff’s schedules, payroll, class schedules, attendance records, and student billing takes a lot of time, effort, and hard work. Because of this, it’s crucial to use martial arts software to streamline member administration and cut down on everyday administrative tasks. 

1. Make the process

You can cut down on the amount of time you spend chasing down unpaid members by employing martial arts software. You can quickly collect one-time or recurring payments for any product purchases or membership fees using automatic billing. So that you and your employees don’t have to waste time pursuing members for past-due membership fees continually, you can quickly set up and send automated payment reminders for any upcoming invoices or missed payments. 

2. Boost efficiency

A school uses a variety of resources, including manpower, energy, paper, and fuel. During the peak season of admissions and exams, school personnel must bear a heavy workload. In contrast, the school management system can level up to boost preparation within the same resources. The scalability feature will assist school personnel in reducing workload by automating core processes.

For instance, it was discovered that the manual process of fee collection required more resources and that the staff was under financial pressure. However, automation of fee collection not only reduces workload because online transactions are completed in a matter of seconds, but it also resolves the issue of money handling because digital transactions solve it.

3. Lower operational cost

One advantage of employing a software platform is that you can immediately cut down on the amount of time you and your personnel spend on tiresome administrative tasks. You may automate your email follow-ups and reminders while automating your billing procedure, class scheduling, attendance monitoring, and financial reporting by using a software platform. In this manner, you may concentrate on expanding your firm without having to pay for more staff members to handle those regular responsibilities. 

4. Streamline member management

You can effortlessly track your member’s attendance, billing history, belt colors, and other milestones with member management software, which keeps everything in one single database. Your members will have easy access to update their financial information, schedule lessons, and digitally sign waivers with a built-in member portal. This will lessen the amount of time spent doing back-end administrative work, going through old notes, or gathering pointless paperwork. 

5. Increase your marketing activities

Make the most of your marketing and sales efforts by combining your software with potent online forms. You may easily add new website leads, member signups, and subscription information to your software’s CRM system by using the lead-gathering forms. To encourage new trial signups, membership sales, or product purchases, create personalized email campaigns to send to website leads, existing clients, or other prospects. 

6. Simplify your belt-tracking and reporting

Use your software to create thorough financial reports that will help you monitor and control your cash flow. To track your monthly sales efforts, retention rates, and future income forecasts, view reports for monthly payments collected, expiring credit cards, canceled memberships, churn rate, and product sales. 

Track your member’s past accomplishments, belt colors, and benchmarks for the highest rankings attained or earned using member detail reports. You will be able to more accurately track your members’ performances and make wise decisions about the course of your business by streamlining your reporting and data collection.

How to increase the success of your school using martial arts automation software

Running a successful school takes a lot of work, and without the right equipment, one may still fail despite having a passion for martial arts and business-savvy strategies. Automation capabilities in martial arts software are useful tools that can assist your staff in handling time-consuming and laborious duties, freeing up their time so they can concentrate on improving the experience for your students. 

Automated online registration

Giving your students the option to sign up for classes online whenever they can boost enrollment overall. It will also free up time that would have been used by your personnel to communicate with kids. Any cancellations or modifications to the class registration, whether they are for regular students or walk-ins, should be possible with good martial arts software. 

Automated reminders for payments

Martial arts software automation must automatically send out notifications at any point during the month, as opposed to personally reminding each and every student that payment is due. This time-consuming task can improve customer satisfaction by lowering the possibility of multiple or missed payments. 

Automated social media

The creation of compelling content, answering questions, and conducting outreach can take a lot of time, making social media management among the most time-consuming tools in any company’s marketing arsenal. Automation for martial arts software enables you to plan postings in advance and keep track of impending events, freeing up your attention for other daily activities. 

Automated email

If you want to keep your students informed about the newest events at your dojo, wish them a happy birthday, or assist in celebrating their anniversary, email newsletters are a terrific way to accomplish so. However, these communication methods can take a long time to complete. You may set reminders for when and who should get these messages using email automation.

Things to automate in your martial arts school

You’ll undoubtedly experience difficulty with at least one of these typical issues at some point throughout running your martial arts business: 

• You don’t take pleasure in “the business”;
• Your time and effort are not yielding a growing cash return;
• Your studio’s routine operations are tedious and ineffective.

But, don’t worry, you’re not alone. These issues are a natural aspect of managing a developing company. Also, don’t lose hope; there is a remedy. To expand your business and give you more time to do what you love: work with your customers, the key is to create and automate intelligent martial arts business procedures. Think about being able to;

• Add new members without using manual processes;
• Streamline the process of gathering all member-related data and placing it in one central spot;
• Contacting one member is just as simple and affordable as contacting 1000;
• Identify your best customers so you can sell them higher-level packages. 

These options are not only possible; they are also transforming struggling martial arts schools into successful ones on a daily basis, and your studio might be one of them. To successfully run a martial arts school, martial artists should automate the following business systems. 

• Marketing system

To attract more potential members, you require a marketing system that is operating continuously. Do you have a website that is appealing, expert, and focused on making sales? Is it interconnected with your social media? Has your email marketing been automated? If none of this is incorporated into your martial arts marketing plan, potential customers are lost. 

A marketing system is a process that a marketer utilizes to carry out their daily tasks and is repeatable and predictable. When connecting with clients, launching social media campaigns, collaborating with celebrities, or even mailing mailers to present to customers, marketers frequently use marketing systems to recreate routines. 

In order to avoid starting from scratch each time a campaign or marketing activity needs to be launched, each of these marketing activities can be improved by developing a set of instructions that the marketer can use.

• Selling system 

To turn prospects into members, you must have an effective, automated sales strategy. Are your follow-up emails effective at converting? Selling systems refer to the practice of offering linked products or services as a unit for sale as opposed to offering them separately or independently. Products that are combined under systems selling are typically complementary products. As a result, a manufacturer can sell more goods, and customers can buy similar products simultaneously. 

Businesses frequently produce a single core product that benefits the consumer. However, in order to use the single product effectively, some add-ons or complementary products are needed. In order to provide a comprehensive benefit, the maker sells both the primary product and its accessories in a system. However, both products can also be bought separately. The selling system produces a win-win situation for both parties because it increases the number of things sold while also saving clients’ time.

• Delivery system

You must be able to quickly set up new students, handle payment arrangements, and receive alerts when an issue arises or an upsell opportunity presents itself. The numerous methods a product is made available to the client are referred to as delivery systems. Direct mail, online, and physical stores are all options for doing this. 

Different approaches are needed for each of these techniques. With the help of these techniques, you can make sure that the product is delivered on time and that it satisfies the expectations of the client. 

Delivery is crucial because it contributes to the success of your company. You cannot deliver things to customers without them. The finest possible delivery of your product is your responsibility as a business owner. Your company will be able to expand and better serve clients as a result.

• Payment system

All businesses are in operation to generate revenue, so it is unacceptable to allow that revenue to be lost due to subpar payment processing. You require a system that monitors and collects payments automatically. 

Organizations can use payment automation, an integrated system, to make wire transfers as well as check and ACH payments. Sending payments to the suppliers after invoices have been received and processed automates processes beyond the “ok-to-pay” that purchase-to-pay (P2P) solutions offer. 

Accounts payable automation makes it easier to complete tasks like verifying that billed amounts are accurate and notifying all necessary parties. This reduces the need to search for missing data, and if a hiccup occurs in the process, you are aware of the exact cause and solution.

• Retention system

Who are the clients completing their plans? Who hasn’t recently visited a studio? A robust attendance tracking and member retention system enables you to stay in touch with your customers during key moments to ensure their loyalty. 

The power of integrating these five functions into your own business is considerably greater than automating them for your martial arts enterprise. 

Here is where we can support owners of martial arts schools. Spark Membership Software offers clear and user-friendly martial arts administration software that enables you to develop and automate these processes. Get in touch with us right away, and we’ll help you make your martial arts studio profitable so you can rediscover your studio’s charm.