Assume They’re Telling You the Truth

Updated

A member of ours who runs a jiu-jitsu school in Fort Lauderdale pushed back on me hard this week, and he was right to.

His position was that families lie. Dad lost his job. Money’s tight. Can you work with us. And then three months later somebody on staff sees the Instagram post from Disneyland. He said it was demoralizing — his program director felt like they’d been played, and after enough of those, the whole team stopped believing anybody.

So his school changed policy. Find out if it’s temporary, sure. But nobody ever gets anything free. A hundred dollars off is fine, and that hundred gets added onto the next four or five months.

Then he said the thing that actually made the room go quiet: an amazing number of families, once they understood the bill was still coming eventually, reversed course entirely and said never mind, leave it where it is. They weren’t in trouble. They were shopping. They were going down the list of their monthly services seeing which vendor would blink first.

He’s not wrong about any of that. I’ve been on the wrong end of it myself.

What Disney World Cost Me in 1983

Back in 1983 a mom pulled up in a minivan with three kids and gave me the whole story about not being able to afford the program. I discounted it, we inked the agreement, and about a week later they left for Disney World.

This was before the internet, so it took me some effort, but I looked up what that trip would have run a family of four. They had spent more on the vacation than it would have cost to take that kid all the way to second-degree black belt at my regular rate.

So I’m not naive about this. I’ve been lied to. You’ve been lied to. You will be lied to again.

Which Way Would You Rather Be Wrong?

Here’s the question I put back to him, and it’s the one I’d put to you.

You are going to be wrong sometimes. That part is settled. The only thing you get to choose is the direction of the error.

You can assume everybody is doing the best they can with what they’ve got — that when somebody lets you down it’s capability, or training, or circumstance, and not malice. If you run that way, you’ll get burned occasionally. A family will take your kindness and use it to buy park hoppers.

Or you can assume bad intent first and make people prove otherwise. If you run that way, you’ll also be wrong — except now you’re wrong about the family that was genuinely drowning and came to you because they trusted you.

Would you rather be wrong by giving everybody the benefit of the doubt, and occasionally getting disappointed? Or would you rather be wrong by treating somebody like a liar who had the best possible intentions?

I apply this everywhere, not just with students. Bad service at a restaurant is almost never the server deciding to ruin your evening. It’s training, or it’s a bad night, or it’s a kitchen problem. Neither one is their fault. I never lied to a landlord in my life. I never lied to a supplier. And the reason isn’t that I’m a saint — it’s that the alternative is a worse way to run a business.

Skepticism Leaks

Here is the mechanical reason this matters, and it has nothing to do with ethics.

If you’re looking at people skeptically all the time, they sense it. Not consciously. They just come away from interactions with you feeling slightly worse than they did before, and they can’t tell you why.

Retention runs on exactly two things in my view: rapport and long-term goal setting. That’s it. Everything else is plumbing. So a posture of suspicion doesn’t just make you unpleasant to be around — it directly attacks one of the two load-bearing walls of your student retention.

The quickest way to burn a bridge is to assume somebody has bad intent and then treat them like they do. If they actually did have bad intent, they’re not going to appreciate being caught. And if they had good intent, they’re going to be furious. There is no version of this where the skepticism pays you.

None of that means you’re a doormat. If somebody proves to me that they’re cancerous — that they’re going to be a problem, that they’re going to spread through the school — I have zero hesitation about firing them, and I don’t care what they’re paying me. That’s a different situation entirely. That’s evidence, not suspicion.

And by the way, this is the real argument for getting good at marketing. The reason to be excellent at filling your school is so that you never have to teach anybody you don’t want to teach. If you’re afraid of losing one monthly payment from a family that’s causing you problems, that’s not a student problem. That’s a marketing problem.

The Man With the Best Retention I’ve Ever Seen

Buzz Durkin has better student retention than anyone I have come across in the history of this industry. He loses less than half of one percent a month. They practically hold a wake at the school if somebody ever drops out.

So naturally I went looking for the system. What’s the mechanism? What’s he doing that I could package?

I’ll be honest with you about what I found. His curriculum is boring. He’s not teaching all that much material. His school isn’t structured the way I would tell anybody to structure a school. If you handed me his operations manual and asked me to predict his attrition, I’d have guessed wrong by an order of magnitude.

The only variable that explains it is this: he loves everybody, and everybody loves him. He treats every student like an aunt or a cousin. He knows the details of their lives and he pays attention to them.

That is impossible to reproduce. You cannot systematize it. I’ve tried, and you can try, and neither of us is going to package it cleanly. But the closer you get to it — and the further you get from being skeptical of the people who walk through your door — the better your retention will be.

There’s one other person I’d put in that category, and it’s Stephen Hayes. Bill Clark once said that if somebody has a problem with Stephen Hayes, the problem is them. It’s not Stephen Hayes.

Where That Leaves the Fort Lauderdale Policy

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that member is doing anything wrong. Structuring a discount as a deferral instead of a gift is smart. It protects your staff’s morale, it filters out the shoppers, and it doesn’t punish the family that’s genuinely struggling.

Dr. Moody made a related point on the same call that’s worth holding onto: in people’s minds, these are different buckets. Somebody complaining about money on one end and making a lousy financial decision on the other end isn’t necessarily a hypocrite — they’re just a person. If we judged everybody by their financial consistency, most of us would fail.

Run the tight policy. Ask the hard questions. Never go to zero. Just don’t let the policy turn into a posture. The paperwork can be skeptical. You can’t be.

If you want the whole system, 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.

by