The sorry state of the MARTIAL ARTS!

The Martial Arts as we have know it for over 40 years no longer exists!
FACT: Today, 80% of all students in the Martial Arts are under the age of 10! With a high percentage under the age of 8!
If you are going to run a fulltime Martial Arts studio and survive you will have to like it or not if you do not you will have to run enough kids to pay your studio expenses!
In the past the theory was: you needed enough kids to pay the rent. That usually worked out to about 20%-25% kids. To survive today you must run 60%-70% kids.

Rules for survival for a full time studio!

1. Keep your overhead low!
2. Do everything yourself!
3. Replace most of your Yellow Page adds with a properly designed and maintained web site!
4. Supplement your studio income!
5. Understand the difference (and relationship) between Gross Income and Net Profit.
(You can Gross $1,000,000 and have 1000 students and still go broke)!

1. Keep your overhead low!
Take on your biggest expense first: Rent

FACT: you do not need a big studio (3000+sq ft) with 200-300 students!

FACT: when we were at the peak of our Franchising (200+ studios) our average studio only had 80-110 students!
Our Franchise advertising ran: Gross $50,000 a year! No other studios were doing that. How?
Our basis course was $500. 100 students at $500 each came out to $50,000 a year.

FACT: $50,000 in 1970 is now equal to $265,580 in 2006! How many of you or any studio Grosses $265,580 today?
Not only that most of our studios would net at least 50% that left a profit for the studio owner of $25,000.
FACT: a net take home pay of $25,000 in 1970 is now equal to $132,790 in 2007!

What went wrong?
 There is a limit to how much the average person will pay for Lessons! Just to keep you with inflation, the yearly cost of $500 - $42 a month in 1970 - in 2007 would be $2600,00 a year or $216 a month! Just to keep up with inflation!
Today (2007) he average studio get between $80-$120 a month! A few $150-$160!

Our secret back then and still holds true today!

1. Keep your overhead low!

Start with you biggest expense: Rent - average building size 1200 sq ft - Rent average in 1970 $250 - today $1325. There are a lot of 1100 -1300 sq. ft buildings available for $1000-$1300 a month. You just have to look for them and keep within your price range.
How can you get by with only 1100-1330 sq ft? Private instruction! 
How are all health spas making most of their money? Personal Trainers!
This is what has always made the Tracy Business system different from our competitors!

    The number on reason for failure of our competitors; Large 3000+ sq ft - with rents of $3000-$5000 a month - plus triple net with usually adds 20% more cost to the total rent.

TO BE CONTINUED