The Hidden Cost of Manual Admin Tasks in Martial Arts Schools
Bright and early to start your day. On your lunch break at your 9–5. Late at night after the final class has wrapped up. Odds are, if you own a martial arts school, you find yourself completing mundane, exhausting, yet very necessary admin tasks at these odd hours of the day. It’s not what you opened your martial arts school to do. No, you opened your doors because you love martial arts and you love teaching and helping other people.
How much time and money is manual admin work actually costing you? Are you not able to teach as many classes as you’d like because you have to manage billing, attendance trackers, belt rank progressions and so much more? Would you rather spend time with your family at the end of a long day instead of doing paperwork?
The hidden costs of running a martial arts school manually are greater than most owners realize, and automation can win that time back.
Let’s look at the various tasks that eat away at your time, but are crucial for proper martial arts school management.
The Martial Arts School Admin Tasks Quietly Eating Your Time
Billing & Payments – This is often the most frustrating, difficult and time consuming task martial arts school owners must do. Tracking who’s paid, who hasn’t paid and who’s due next week in a spreadsheet or notebook is a huge pain. Manually invoicing students and sending out messages or calls for late payments makes it even worse.
Attendance Tracking – Whether you’re making a mental note of who’s in class today and hoping you accurately remember at the end of the night or hoping every student signs up on the sign-in sheet at the front desk, either way leaves plenty of room for human error and in-accurate attendance logs.
Student Progress & Belt Promotions – How long has Jimmy worn a blue belt? Has Susie attended enough yellow belt classes to make her eligible for promotion? Now answer those questions for 50, 100 or even 200 students. Good luck with that.
Agreements & Waivers – Imagine this: Class is about to start, you have 25 students on the mat eager to begin, and you realize the new student hasn’t filled out the waiver. Do you have copies printed? How long will it take their mom to fill it out…and is mom still here? It is easy to lose track of old fashioned agreements and waivers are hard for parents to complete before they attend a class.
Lead Management – How effective is scrolling through your email and SMS inboxes? Do you accidentally miss leads every now and then? Forget to respond for a few days? Small details like the timeliness of a response can make the difference between a new student for you or your competition.
Simplify Martial Arts School Management
Putting a Number To It – The Real Cost
Take a second and think about it—how much time are you really spending each week on these tasks? One hour a day may not seem like a lot, until you start adding it up. You may discover that it is 5–7 hours per week, 20+ hours per month and 260+ hours throughout the course of an entire year.
How much potential revenue are you losing in those 260+ hours of admin work? Imagine what your martial arts school could do if you could spend 5 hours per week on personalized, intentional student retention or lead nurturing efforts. Maybe you could teach a new class students have requested?
Or, maybe you get home an hour earlier each night to enjoy quality time with your family. No matter what you decide to do, you could put that time to much better use than crunching numbers and sifting through paperwork.
The Ripple Effect of Inefficient Martial Arts School Management
Have you considered how your many hours of manual admin work are impacting your martial arts school and students? More often than not, the school owner doing the manual tasks isn’t the only one suffering.
If you have grinded away on billing and attendance spreadsheets all day, how much energy are you going to have left over for your evening classes? Or, maybe you do paperwork at night—will your students have your full focus during class or are you planning your admin plan of attack in your head? Students and parents might not actively complain, but the student experience suffers if the instructor’s mind is focused on other things.
Speaking of the instructor/owner, how are you doing? Do you find yourself questioning why you even do this? What’s the point of operating a martial arts school if martial arts aren’t always your top priority? Not having a tool to streamline the busy work required to run a business can result in burnout, and that’s not good for anyone—especially not for you!
So, your students aren’t getting your full attention and you are feeling burnt out. It can’t get worse, right? Wrong. You’re getting stretched pretty thin—that’s established—and you haven’t even addressed potential new student. If all your free time is spent in spreadsheets and notebooks to keep the school running, what’s happening to the new leads? Odds are the leads aren’t receiving consistent, timely communication and don’t feel like a priority. This will turn them away from your martial arts school and result in a big loss of potential revenue.
You need a system. Yesterday.
What Automation Actually Looks Like for a Martial Arts School
This is where Kicksite lends a hand. Kicksite is a software built by martial artists, for martial artists. Kicksite’s martial arts software has helped thousands of martial arts school owners spend less time behind a desk and more time on the mats with their students.
Billing & Payments – Easily set up recurring payments that are automatically processed and funds transferred to your account. Send new invoices via email with just a few clicks, and track the financial health of your school with reports and projections.
Attendance Tracking – Set up a simple check-in kiosk at your front desk and students can check-in for class their way—custom pin, name search or by scanning a barcode. Attendance records are updated in the system on the spot.
Student Progress & Belt Promotions – Quickly see who is eligible for promotion and and promote with just a couple clicks.
Agreements & Waivers – Completely digitize all of your liability waivers and program agreements, and send them to parents via email or text to have them completed before they step foot in your school for class. No more chasing down signatures and delaying the start of training when new students arrive.
Lead Management – Lead capture forms and customizable landing pages make it a breeze to gather contact information and funnel potential new students into your custom pipeline for further nurturing. Watch prospects become students in no time!
What You Get Back: Time to Actually Run Your Martial Arts School
Every hour you can save on admin tasks is an hour you can spend building up and retaining your current students on the mats or nurturing and converting new students to grow your school.
That’s what Kicksite is here to help you do—succeed and grow your school. Martial arts schools that use Kicksite to streamline their operations see stronger relationships on the mats, stronger retention and conversion efforts off the mats and an overall stronger martial arts school.
Ready to take back your time? Schedule a demo and start your 30-day free trial today.
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Manual admin work is just one of the hidden challenges of running an academy—explore how to improve student experience and scale more efficiently.
