Advice for Wannabe Martial Arts Business Owners

Some people can be passionate when it comes to martial arts and business. At first, every start up entrepreneur is excited for his vision, a little bit scared, but willing to do everything to make his dreams a reality. A problem I see in this is that, it’s emotional, and when we’re emotional, we sometimes neglect some of the important things when it comes to having our own martial arts school. What I’m talking about is the basics. Before you do anything, you should master the basics first, and for start-ups, I’ll tell you what you should get right first. Hear my advice for wannabe martial arts business owners.

Get the Right Pricing

We’ve talked about this before on our previous articles. I’ve written about this and have read a lot of what people would say about pricing. Almost all of the learned men say that it’s tricky, and a bit complicated. The thing with pricing is, there is no exact formula to get the right price. Sure you may say that, you should charge 20% to 40% of what cost you to produce that service or product, but there is this thing called overvaluing and undervaluing. If you set your price low, people will think your service is too cheap, hence undervalued. Set it too high, and you’ll lose a part of the market that is looking for fairly priced products and services.

My advice is to experiment with different prices. Construct a tight survey and look into how much your competitors charge. Combine all of your information and see what works for you.

Have a Narrow Niche

I watched something on TV about a guy who had this crazy idea to have a restaurant that served every country’s specialty dish. In a perfect world, that restaurant would be great. Just imagine going to this place where you can order Italian, American, and even Chinese food all in one restaurant. The obvious problem with the idea was, his menu would’ve been so thick and his ingredient list would be so many. What we can get from this is that if you’re planning to open up a martial arts school, then narrow what you offer. I know it’s scary to have limited things, but what this does is you will have the ability to target a certain market that is uniquely your own. If you’re unique, chances are you’ll have fewer competitors and more students and customers in the end.

Be Flexible

Sometimes, our plans don’t always go the way we want them to go. But this doesn’t mean that we should give up. When your business plans don’t go well, look for other things that might increase your revenue aside from what you intended. When your idea doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure. It just means that it wasn’t perfect, and all you have to do is make some tweaks and try again.

And the last advice is to seek advice from other people. It’s not hard to ask for help from other people who have experience is start ups. Otto van Bismarck has this to say:

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”