The 30-Page Marketing Plan Trap: Planning for a Two-Person Staff

Updated November 4, 2026

A member of ours recently sent me his marketing plan. Actually, he sent me three things: a 10-page presentation, a 15-page implementation plan, and a detailed how-to document, all written for his small staff.

He’d since turned it all into a spreadsheet of tasks, each assigned to a person.

I told him, as kindly as I could, that all of that is exactly right if you’re running General Motors, and the wrong tool entirely if you’re running a small martial arts school with a couple of people.

Why do big marketing plans fail in small schools?

When you’re managing staff, especially a small number of staff, the surest way to make sure nothing happens is to hand them an overwhelming stack of documents.

Three things go wrong:

• Everything looks equally important. Thirty tasks on a spreadsheet all carry the same weight on the page. The door-to-door flyers sit next to the live event that could produce 100 appointments.
• Planning replaces doing. The plan gets refined, formatted and discussed. Meanwhile, nobody’s standing at a farmers market with a clipboard.
• Two people can’t execute thirty things. Big companies have departments. You have a front desk.

My advice, and I’d give it to most owners who come from a corporate background, is to drop the administrative habits, get used to taking massive action, and stop over-analyzing things.

What should a small-school marketing plan look like?

One page. Ranked.

Put the thing that’s likely to be the biggest win at the top and the smallest win at the bottom. Then work from the top down, and don’t touch item eight until items one through three are running.

Here’s how I think about ranking. Say one of your 30 possible activities is putting out flyers door to door. It has a very low return and takes an awful lot of labor. If I have a fair, a carnival or a farmers market available, I’ll do that first, every time. But if I’ve got four assistant instructors sitting around the school with one person in class and no leads for them to call, I’ll hand them a box of flyers and send them out. Low-value tasks are for spare capacity, not the top of the plan.

How do you decide what goes at the top?

Picture a simple grid with cost on one axis and effort on the other.

Cost / effort	Low effort	High effort
Low cost	Referral activities: buddy days, parties. Great at 400 students, not much opportunity at 40.	Live events, a PE-teacher-for-the-day, after-school enrichment. Labor-heavy, close to zero cost. A small school’s sweet spot.
High cost	Paid advertising: Meta, Google, the modern equivalent of TV. The leads tend to be expensive now. Better for bigger schools with conversion dialed in.	Mostly avoid.

For a small school, the top of your page lives in the low-cost, high-effort box. It’s where you have the highest leverage, the lowest expense and the biggest head start. I go deeper on this in the cost-versus-effort marketing matrix.

Grand Master Jeff Smith puts it simply: get the low-hanging fruit first. Not the things that are hard to do, but the things that are easiest to train and produce the most leads and enrollments for the least work. From years of watching members, that’s the live events in your area. You only have to learn one line: “Would you like to spin the wheel and win a prize?”

What does re-ranking a real plan look like?

Here’s roughly how I went through that member’s list. His school was well under 100 students, which drives most of these calls.

Item on his plan	My verdict	Why
Referral campaign	Drop for now	Under 100 active students there isn’t enough critical mass.
Former-student reactivation	Depends	With 500 dropouts over two years, there’s real value. With four, it won’t get you far.
Follow-up on old inquiries and leads	Keep	Always useful, low cost.
Graduation guest invites	Drop for now	Referral activity. Not the priority at this size.
Personal phone, text and email follow-up on every new prospect	Keep	On every prospect, every time.
Live events	#1	Find 10 to 20 events in the next 90 days. Buy a prize wheel.
Local business networking and rack cards	Keep, done properly	300 rack card placements, and target businesses that serve your audience.
PTA and PTO relationships	Keep	Go to the meetings. Have your students walk you in.
Character lessons for new students	Start now	Begin with every new student so it gradually permeates the school.
Buddy days, guest passes, pizza events, family add-ons	Later	None of these moves the needle at this size.
Summer camps	Forget it	Don’t staff a school 9am to 9pm for ten kids.

How do you find 10 to 20 live events in 90 days?

Jeff says the biggest obstacle he hears is, “I couldn’t find any. There’s nothing going on in my area.” On the same call, we typed this member’s area into an AI tool and asked for family-oriented events. Within minutes we had a fall festival happening that same day, three farmers markets and a farm’s harvest fest nearby.

Here’s the routine:

1. Ask the AI tools, and keep pushing. ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude and Perplexity each draw on different sources. Ask for family-oriented events in your towns through the end of the year, then push: “Find more Halloween events. More Thanksgiving events. More holiday shopping events.”
2. Go to the sources directly. Community and rec centers, your city’s website, the big churches, local parent social media groups, the Nextdoor app and Eventbrite.
3. Drive around and look. Banners at the parks, bulletin boards at grocery stores and coffee shops, flyers at the rec center.

For the full routine, see how to use AI to find local events.

Then buy a big prize wheel. Most people spend $250 to $300. Get one with LED lights and sound if you can.

Don’t wait until you know how to run a booth. One of our members did his first movie-theater weekend with a bare table, no tablecloth, a small prize wheel with no lights, one banner and a brochure holder. He’d never practiced. He got 200 leads that weekend.

The script has four parts: come spin the wheel and win a prize; fill this out; congratulations, let’s schedule a time for you to pick up your prize and take your first lesson; and, when they need to check the calendar, “Let’s pencil something in tentatively.” A good event runs something like 120 leads, 100 appointments, 50 intros and 25 enrollments. Your ratios will vary by event, but that’s the target. The booth details are in the event booth script.

What’s the birthday-party fix?

A lot of owners tell us their birthday parties bring in 20 kids, everyone has a great time, and nobody enrolls. For a small school, parties are near the bottom of the list, but the fix is quick.

The mistake is running the party and then huddling the kids to pitch free lessons at the end. After the party it’s a zoo, everyone’s leaving, and you end up chasing parents on the phone.

Instead, get the invite list and contact details before the party. At worst, talk to every parent on the way in the door while you collect waivers: “Mrs. Jones has kindly arranged a couple of free weeks of lessons for everyone, so the party comes in two parts. Today, and then a regular class on Monday at 6:15 or Tuesday at 7. Which works better for you?” And never let the kids come without a parent. Done this way, I end up with 75 or 80% of the guests scheduled.

How should small schools use rack cards and PTAs?

Rack cards aren’t a relationship tool and they aren’t trackable. They’re a volume game. It takes something like 200 to 300 locations to produce 3 to 5 enrollments a month. Order 10,000 cards and 300 cheap holders, walk out the front door, and hit the dry cleaner, the ice-cream shop, the orthodontist and every shopping center within five miles. Offer to co-promote. Place 100 on day one and 100 on day two, and check and refill them monthly. Don’t drive yourself crazy printing a different QR code for every counter. (See the saturation threshold.)

PTAs: most of my elementary-school work went through the PE teacher or the after-school director, but go to the local PTA meetings. Find out where your students go to school and have them walk you in and introduce you. Then follow the five-gate permission pipeline.

A one-page plan template

Rank	Activity	Why it’s here	Owner	This week’s action	Target
1	Live events	Biggest win, near-zero cost	Owner plus one helper	Build a list of 20 events. Order a prize wheel.	10 to 20 booked in 90 days
2	Follow-up on every new prospect	Protects every lead you pay or work for	Front desk	Call, text and email every new lead the same day	100% contacted
3	Old inquiries	Leads you already have	Front desk	Work the list from newest to oldest	Every lead touched
4	Rack cards	Steady low-level flow	Assistant instructors	Place 100 cards on each of three days	300 placements
5	PTA and school relationships	Door to the kids’ market	Owner	Attend one meeting. Ask two families to introduce you.	One school contact
6	Character lessons for new students	Retention and culture	Instructors	Add to every new-student lesson	Running for all new students

Pin it by the front desk, review it weekly, and don’t add a line until the top ones are running. For a deeper version when you’re ready, read the SORT method.

Quick Answers

How long should a small martial arts school’s marketing plan be?

One page, ranked from biggest likely win to smallest. A small staff can’t execute a 30-page plan. They’ll execute a short list.

What should be at the top of a small school’s plan?

Usually live events: low cost, high effort, fast results. Grand Master Jeff Smith calls it the low-hanging fruit.

Should a school under 100 students run referral campaigns or summer camps?

No. Drop referral campaigns until you have critical mass, and forget summer camps. The staffing cost outweighs the return at that size.

How do I fix birthday parties that don’t enroll anyone?

Book every guest’s follow-up class before the party, or at the door. Never pitch at the end.

If you want the whole system rather than one fix at a time, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com, or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.