Bring Your Staff to the Meeting | Martial Arts Wealth Mastery

My staff came back from a trip to Syracuse very excited about guest passes.

They had picked one up at another school and thought it was a terrific idea. Why don’t we do this?

I first saw guest passes during my time at 24 Hour Nautilus. I put them into my own school in August 1983. At the moment my staff discovered them, there were roughly thirty thousand of them sitting in our storeroom, unused, because I had told the team to use them and they hadn’t.

Somebody else said it, so now it was brilliant.

If you have run a school for more than a few years you have lived this. It is not a failure of your staff and it is not a failure of your explanation. It is just how people work, and it is the single best argument for bringing your team with you to a live meeting.

You are never a prophet in your own land

Here is the pattern that quietly costs owners the most.

You sit on a coaching call. You hear owners in markets like yours describing numbers that are double, triple or quadruple what you are doing. You hear exactly what is working in the field right now. You write it down.

Then you go back and tell your staff.

And they don’t believe it.

Not out of disloyalty. They have no reference point. To them it is one more idea from the owner, and they have heard a lot of those. The tuition figure sounds impossible for your town. The renewal percentage sounds like somebody exaggerating.

Now put that same staff member in a room where nine owners from nine different markets across North America are all describing the same numbers to each other, casually, as a matter of routine. Something changes that a briefing cannot produce. It stops being the boss’s theory and starts being what normal schools do.

Your full-time staff will also hear one of us say something you have told them twenty-two times, and receive it as a revelation. Let them. That is the mechanism working, and being annoyed about it — and I have been extremely annoyed about it — does not make it any less true.

What comes back with them

Chief Master Greg Moody made the point I think is actually the strongest one for an owner who feels stretched:

“My staff also kind of pushes me a little bit. They’ll say, hey, when are we going to do that thing we talked about? Because your staff is very motivated — they’re just not you.”

Chief Master Greg Moody

Read that again if you are the bottleneck in your own school, which most owners are.

A staff member who was in the room comes home with their own list. They know what was promised and roughly when. They will ask you about it. The things you would have quietly let slide get chased by somebody other than you.

As Master Moody put it, it is never a good idea to try to be the only guru of this material in your building. You want more than one.

Treat it as a cost of doing business

When I had a large staff I would regularly put twenty or thirty people on a plane to go and see something I wanted them to see. I did not treat that as a perk or a reward. It was a line item, like rent.

The alternative is cheaper and it does not work. Any full-time staff member who never attends the Zoom calls and never comes to a live meeting is being left behind on purpose, and then you wonder why execution is uneven.

If a staff member runs your floor in the evenings, they need this more than you do.

What a live meeting does that a Zoom call cannot

We run real-time calls every week and they do a great deal. There is one thing they have never been able to reproduce.

Hallway conversations. Lunch conversations. Dinner conversations.

A Zoom call is tightly directed by necessity. In a hotel corridor, somebody tells you what they actually pay their program director, what their December really looked like, what went wrong when they opened the second location. You see behind the curtain. You build a relationship with someone you can call in March when something breaks.

There is also a specific thing that happens to people who have never sat in that room. It is very easy, when you have grown from nothing to your current numbers, to assume the people ahead of you are unusually brilliant, or had an unusually good market, or came from an unusually favorable background.

Sit in a room with them for two days and that story collapses. They are not smarter than you and they did not have more to work with. They implemented earlier, or they implemented faster.

One of our members summarized the whole thing better than I did on the call: you have to get off your backside and get busy.

Or use the other fuel

Back in the EFC board era, Lorenzo noticed that my most productive stretches always followed a meeting I had come home from irritated. He was right, and I was reliably good at finding something to be irritated about.

I could be in a room where my overall numbers were well ahead of somebody’s and still leave annoyed that Buzz Durkin’s retention was better than mine. That is a useful habit, and it is available to you at every meeting you attend.

Narrow it down. Even when you are outperforming someone overall, find the one thing they do better than you, take it, and go home with it.

October 1–4, Colorado

Our next live meetings are in the Denver metro area — Golden and Evergreen — over the first weekend of October. Quick-Start Mastermind runs October 1 and 2, the first day at my home and the second at the hotel. That second day overlaps with Leadership & Mastery, so members who are not in Mastery get to sit with the larger, more established schools. Million Dollar Schools follows on October 4.

There is no additional cost for any of it. Nobody is going to charge you to attend. You have to get yourself there, and you are encouraged — strongly — to bring your staff.

Book the room and the flight now if you haven’t. Full details are on the October 1–4 live meetings page.

Your assignment

Name the person who runs your floor when you are not there. That is the person who comes with you.
Put them on the weekly coaching calls starting this week, not in October.
Book their travel at the same time you book yours, and put it in the budget as a cost of doing business.
Before you go, write down the two numbers in your school you are least happy with. Ask about them in the hallway, not from the floor.
Have your staff member keep their own list. Theirs, not a copy of yours.
Schedule the debrief meeting before you leave home, for the first week back, and let them run it.
Find one school in the room that beats you at one thing, even if you beat them overall. Take that one thing home.

Individual results vary.

About the Author

Grand Master Stephen Oliver, MBA, is a 10th Degree Black Belt and the Founder and CEO of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, one of the martial arts industry’s leading coaching and consulting organizations for professional martial arts school owners, BJJ academies, and MMA gyms. A martial arts school owner since 1975 and business coach since 1985, Oliver has spent more than five decades building, operating, and advising successful martial arts schools. He also serves as CEO and Chairman of NAPMA (the National Association of Professional Martial Artists) and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A Georgetown University cum laude graduate, he earned his Executive MBA through the Executive Program at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He was promoted to 10th Degree Black Belt in April 2026 and inducted into the Official Taekwondo Hall of Fame in August 2026. Learn more at MartialArtsWealth.com and StephenCOliver.com.