Back-to-School Enrollment Playbook

Your September Enrollment Window Is Already Open — Get Your Price, Your Staff, and Your Ad Budget Right Before the Blitz

Done properly, September, October, and even mid-August are your peak enrollment months of the entire year — but only if you set the table correctly before the rush hits.

Ask yourself what today’s date is. If you’re reading this anywhere near late July, you are two to three weeks out from Labor Day, and for most of you running a kids’ program, that means your local schools are about to go back into session. That single calendar fact changes everything about how parents and adults think for the next ninety days, and if you’re not already moving on it, you’re leaving the single best enrollment window of the year on the table.

Why September (and Mid-August) Is Your Real Peak Season

Here’s the pattern I’ve watched play out year after year. Once Labor Day passes, people shift out of vacation mode. They’re not planning the next trip to the lake anymore — they’re thinking about what the fall looks like. Parents whose kids just went back to school start asking themselves what activity their son or daughter is going to do this year. Adults come out of what I call the midsummer doldrums and start looking for something new too — whether that’s a cardio kickboxing program, an adult BJJ program, or anything else you offer.

That means done properly, September and October — and even mid-August — are genuinely your peak enrollment times. This is the moment to go back through your entire database: every lead you generated over the summer that didn’t close, and honestly, go back a year or two if you have to. People who weren’t ready in June are a completely different prospect in September, because their whole mental context has changed. If you treat this stretch like just another few weeks on the calendar instead of the single best selling season you have, you are giving away enrollments to schools that understand what’s actually happening in their market right now.

Reallocate Your Ad Budget Before the Season Turns

This is also the time to get deliberate about where your marketing dollars are going, because your channels don’t behave the same way in July as they do in September. Google traffic tends to be pretty weak in July and gets a lot stronger in September. So if you’re running pay-per-click marketing — and everybody should be — this is exactly the time to make sure you’re not capping your budget and leaving clicks on the table. As search volume climbs back to life after Labor Day, you want your PPC spend positioned to capture every one of those clicks, not sitting on a budget cap you set back in the slow part of summer.

Meta and Instagram run on the opposite curve. People tend to be more receptive to that kind of advertising over the summer months, so that’s when you want to pump up that budget rather than pull back. The mistake I see owners make is treating their ad spend as one flat number all year instead of shifting it to match how each platform actually performs across the seasons. Get this reallocation wrong and you’re either overpaying for weak traffic or underfunding the channel that’s about to get hot.

Don’t Forget Direct Mail and Local Print

Digital isn’t the whole story here. This is also the time to get direct mail out the door and to be focused on all the different local media sources available to you — Marriage Mail if it’s available in your market, and if you have local newspapers that people in your area still pay attention to, ads or inserts in those papers. Back-to-school is a media event in most communities, and you want your name showing up everywhere a parent or a prospective adult student might be looking, not just in their Google search results and their Instagram feed.

Retrain Your Staff Before You Need Them At Their Best

One of the things I’ve always done with my own staff, right as we headed into back-to-school, was schedule intensive training on the lead call, the info call, the first intro, the second intro, and the enrollment conference. I built that in every single year with the assumption that over the summer, people forget how to do this stuff well. Now, if you’ve had a busy July and a busy August, the argument is that your team has stayed sharp the whole way through summer — and great, if that’s true for you. But even then, when you’re about to hit your peak selling window, it is still worth running a refresher on every one of those pieces. You wouldn’t send a team into the biggest sales stretch of the year without a walkthrough of the playbook, and enrollment season is no different.

The 3-Month Rotating Training Cycle

The way I’ve always structured this is a three-month rotating cycle that runs continuously: January, February, March go through the full training cycle; April, May, June go through it again; July, August, September go through it again, and so on. Inside that rotation, I always scheduled a burst of intensive training right before each key moment in the business calendar. The first week of January gets an intensive push to bring people back up to speed after the winter break. Late August gets an intensive push to get everyone back into back-to-school mode. October gets its own intensive push focused on renewals, to get the team ready for the renewal blitz that runs through November and December. And mid-spring gets the same treatment again.

The point of all of it is the same: whether your staff is just you, or fifty people, look at the calendar right now and, within the next couple of weeks, run a refresher on everything — lead follow-up, outbound calls, first intro, second intro, and the enrollment conference. Get your team highly motivated and sharp on every one of those touchpoints before the leads start pouring in, not after.

Raise Your Prices Now — Not After the Blitz

Here’s where I want to be blunt, because I’ve seen this mistake cost owners real money for years afterward. If you haven’t already raised your prices to where we’ve been telling you to raise them, do it before back-to-school, not after. There is nothing worse than running a big enrollment blitz, adding a hundred students between now and Christmas, and locking every one of them in at some outdated price — $150 a month, or $247 a month, or whatever number you settled on years ago and never revisited. What you want going into this season is to be at $397 a month or better, with a full initial tuition collected on the way in the door. Get all of those pieces in place first.

The reason this matters so much is timing. If you run your big back-to-school push and enroll a wave of people at a low price, you don’t just lose the revenue on those particular students — you set yourself up for a problem that follows you for years. Owners who raise their price slowly almost always look back and kick themselves for having been too timid about it. And when they finally do have a big enrollment burst, they often get anxious, even resentful, toward the students who are locked in at their old, far-below-market price. I hear it constantly: “Well, I’m not too worried about losing this green belt, they’re still on the old pricing anyway.” I never want you thinking about a student that way, and the only way to avoid it is to not build that problem into your business in the first place. Get your pricing right before the blitz, and you never have to have that conversation with yourself.

So that’s the first message heading into this season: make sure you and your staff are up to speed on every process, and make sure you’re at the right price point, so that when you blitz back-to-school, you’re building a real, solid base of enrollments — not just a bigger version of the same underpriced problem you already have.

Collect Full Initial Tuition, No Exceptions

There’s a second piece I want to flag, because I see it constantly this time of year: owners will do the work to get their monthly tuition up to where it should be, and then wimp out on the initial tuition collection. Here’s how I want it structured — whatever your specific presentation looks like, you should be collecting a registration fee of $500 plus the first month, which at $397 comes to $897 up front. That’s the number, and that’s what should be hitting your account at the point of enrollment.

I have heard every excuse in the book for not doing this. Some schools run every-two-week billing schemes instead — I hate that approach, and frankly I view it as marginally unethical. The justification is usually something like, “Well, I don’t need the full initial tuition because their payments start in two weeks anyway.” No. That’s not the deal. I want the $500 plus the first month collected up front, full stop. Occasionally you’ll have to break that up for someone because it genuinely doesn’t fit their budget right now, and that’s a legitimate exception you make case by case. What I don’t want is you giving yourself a built-in excuse — something like, “Well, I enrolled them in the middle of the month, so their payment just starts on the first.” That’s not what we’re talking about. That’s wimping out on the number, and it compounds across every enrollment you do during your busiest season of the year.

Putting It All Together

None of these pieces work in isolation. You can have the best-trained staff in your market and still leave money on the table if your pricing is stuck in the past. You can have your pricing exactly right and still underperform if your ad budget is misallocated across the channels that behave completely differently in July versus September. The owners who get the biggest results out of this season are the ones who treat it as a system: reallocate the ad spend to match how Google and Meta actually behave this time of year, get direct mail and local print moving, refresh your team on every step from the lead call through the enrollment conference, lock in your price increase before the leads start flowing, and collect the full $500-plus-first-month on every enrollment without exception.

You have roughly two to three weeks before Labor Day changes the mindset of every parent and adult prospect in your market. Use them. Get your pricing right, get your team sharp, and get your budget pointed at the channels that are about to come alive. Do that, and September and October will be exactly what they should be — your best enrollment months of the year.