John Graden is an internationally acclaimed speaker, author and pioneering entrepreneur. An eighth-degree black belt, Graden is known worldwide as the Teacher of Teachers and a master motivator. An 8th degree black belt and World Kickboxing Champion , Graden excels in helping people to achieve their full potential in life. He has made presentations for colleges, associations, corporations and charitable organizations on three continents. Drawing from his remarkable career, Graden inspires audiences to overcome adversity and take action on improving their lives.
Widely recognized as the man who revolutionized the martial arts industry, John Graden launched organizations such as NAPMA (National Association of Professional Martial Artists), ACMA (American Council on Martial Arts), and MATA (Martial Arts Teachers Association). Graden also introduced the first trade magazine for the martial arts business, Martial Arts Professional.
John Graden’s latest book, The Truth about the Martial Arts Business looks into key strategies involved in launching a martial arts business and includes Graden’s own experience as a student, a leader and a business owner.
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When I opened my school, I presented the exact curriculum that I was raised on. Among the many problems that created for me was that I had a lot more kids in my school than my instructors did. Martial arts forms, hyungs, or kata were designed by highly disciplined adults to be taught to other
In the 1980s, Educational Funding Company (EFC) was the first to have success creating systems to support an agreement-based school. Our industry owes a debt of gratitude to Nick Cokinos and his ability to teach, motivate, and inspire some of the most successful school owners today. Guys like Dave K
I had lunch recently with a fourth dan in Uechi Ryu. We talked about how the Eastern mind-set is so different from the Western, and the confusion that creates for many instructors. Culturally, the East is more about conformity, or as I call it, cloning, than the West, where rugged individualism and
If you can keep a steady flow of new students coming in, an ideal situation is high cash outs and high monthly billing. This is being accomplished by some schools that take a somewhat unconventional approach to their cash out and upgrade strategies. This may seem to contradict my previous suggestion
Larry Dokes’s EasyPay billing company pioneered the electronic funds transfer (EFT) in the early 1990s. Larry was an early mentor of mine and has helped me a great deal. Based in Belton, Texas, EasyPay specializes in smaller schools in smaller markets. EasyPay offered a non-contract solution t
A school is a membership-based business model. The majority of a martial arts school’s revenue comes from students’ tuition, which is normally paid monthly. A school that attracts and keeps students grows this monthly income. You will have other profit centers and revenue streams such as
I suggest you have your first color belt exam for a new student within the first six weeks. Get color around a student’s waist as soon as you can, so they can feel that they have made some progress. I use the gold belt as the first belt instead of yellow. Yellow is associated with fear and cow
As stated in one of my previous articles, I don’t feel that the movement towards character development has been bad for martial arts schools. Actually, it’s been great. On the other hand, when schools drift away from their core values, they become little more than motivational day
In consulting with school owners for more than a decade, I can pretty much predict how the initial conversations will go. I ask how many students the client wants and then how many he currently has.
When he gives me his current student count (usually higher than it really is), I ask
To illustrate, let’s use 10 percent in total fees as an easy number on the high end for tuition billing. If you could collect $10,000 without using the billing company, but the billing company could collect the same $10,000, no more or less, you might think you have a $1,000 spread. The truth
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