UPGRADES

ATLAS FEATURE: UPGRADES

When You Upgrade Your Curriculum, You can Upgrade Your Income

ATLAS provides a wide range of staff training resources, but one that is not used often enough is the section of the Advisor Files called “I Need More Upgrades.”

On your ATLAS dashboard you have your Enrollment Pipeline, which gives you real-time information on your enrollments for the past month. You can see how many prospects you have as potential new students, how many trial lessons you have scheduled, how many new students have enrolled (or signed-up), and how many upgrades you have made into bigger/better programs.

We believe a good school with a well-trained staff should be about 80% successful on each step up to enrollment. That means that 80% of the people who call should make an appointment, 80% of the appointments should show up, and 80% of those who show up should enroll in one of your courses.

If you do the math, that means that you should enroll about one new student for every two phone calls you get, so the more phone calls you can generate, the more new students you will enroll. Of course, if you or your staff are not getting that 80% success rate, we have lots of materials to help you improve your numbers.

In recent blogs we have been discussing what to do at each level, but for now, we are concerned with the process and percentage of students who are upgraded to a longer or better program.

The resource files in the “I Need More Upgrades” start with a discussion of what an upgrade is — and upgrades in the martial arts mean many different things to different people. We strongly recommend reading the “Start Here” article to decide what you consider an upgrade, and whether or not you believe in upgraded courses. We have seen successful schools follow a wide variety of strategies, so the choice is really up to you. The one thing we believe for all schools is that if you want to charge higher prices, you have to deliver a better product. Most people in our society are not willing to pay a premium price for fighting or self-defense skills alone, but those same people are willing to pay much more for the life-changing benefits of the martial arts (especially for their children) as expressed in our philosophies. That is why martial arts schools have a better business model than boxing or wrestling gyms: Martial arts philosophy increases self-confidence, self-discipline, and teaches the process of goal setting to improve other areas of life outside the school.

If your enrollment is relatively high but your income is relatively low, or your dashboard is telling you that you are not getting enough upgrades based on the number of enrollments you are getting, then check out the Advisor files called “I Need More Upgrades” to form a plan to improve your success rate. As always, you can call any member of our AMS team at 1-800-275-1600 for more detailed help and advice on how to train your staff in this or any other skill in your school.