How to Run December: The Five-Decision Stack for Your School’s Holiday Schedule, Staff and Renewals

Run December as five decisions in order: map the actual calendar, pick one of three legitimate schedules, tie staff time off to earned numbers, close every renewal before the break, and book January’s outreach while doors are still open. Done in that sequence, December sets up your best first quarter.

The video above is a marketing and operations call I ran with school owners, joined by Grandmaster Jeff Smith. Owner names, school names, cities and individual figures have been removed — what is left is the teaching, plus the worked numbers I use with the owners I coach.

December Is a Setup Month, Not a Dead Month

Every year I get the same question: should we just close for the holidays? An owner asking that has usually already decided December is a write-off.

That belief is expensive and it is wrong. December is one of the two highest-cash months of the year in a well-run school, and the work you do in December is the work that produces your January surge.

And the honest version of the problem is not the one most owners think. You are not fighting a marketing problem. You are fighting a calendar problem. A meaningful chunk of your student body will not be in your building no matter what schedule you post — with the other parent, at grandparents’, at holiday concerts and blockbuster movies. Theme parks close their gates at capacity that week. That is a real headwind, and no clever scheduling makes it disappear.

So the decision is not “how do I get normal attendance in December.” It is what do I do with the two weeks I am not going to control, so they cost me as little as possible and buy me as much January as possible. That is five decisions, made in order, because each constrains the next.

For the wider context these December moves plug into, start at the School Growth pillar.

The December Decision Stack

#	Decision	The question it answers	Deadline
1	The Calendar Map	Where do the holidays actually fall this year?	Nov 1
2	The Schedule Choice	Close, consolidate, or run special classes?	Nov 7
3	The Staffing Rule	Who gets time off, and what did they do to earn it?	Nov 7
4	The Renewal Close	Which renewals get signed before the break?	Dec 20
5	The January Booking	What outreach is on the calendar for week one?	Dec 20

Four of the five are done before December even starts, and the fifth has a hard deadline of roughly the 20th. By Christmas Eve, December should already be finished as a decision-making month.

Decision One: Map the Calendar Before You Form an Opinion

Owners argue about December in the abstract when the right answer changes materially depending on what day of the week Christmas lands on. Before you have an opinion, take a calendar and mark it.

A midweek Christmas is the worst case. If Christmas Eve and Christmas Day fall Wednesday and Thursday, they cut through your prime teaching block, and the same happens the following week with New Year’s — an orphaned Friday and Saturday, a Monday and Tuesday, then two more days gone. No student holds a rhythm through that. A Christmas on a weekend is a different animal; you may lose two or three teaching days and a normal schedule works fine.

Write out every date from December 15 to January 5 and mark three things: the days you will definitely be closed, the days your local district is out of school, and your own family obligations. Now you are looking at the actual decision — and in a typical midweek-Christmas year you are deciding what to do with four or five specific days, not two whole weeks.

Decision Two: Choose Your December Schedule — Three Legitimate Answers

This is where reasonable, successful people disagree. Grandmaster Jeff Smith and I have argued it for years and land in different places, and we are both right — because the correct answer depends on your staffing model, not your philosophy.

Option A: The Clean Close Block

You finish December hard around the 20th, close from Christmas Eve through January 2, run one big re-entry event on the 3rd, and return to full schedule on the 5th. Staff get eight to twelve consecutive days.

This is what I ran in my own multi-school operation, and the logic is staff economics. A full-time professional on commission does not work a tidy 40-hour week — some weeks are thirty hours, some are seventy. If your team has just worked every movie-theater promotion, every holiday community event and a full renewal push, they are running on fumes. A real block of time off, with real money in their pocket, brings them back sharp.

The trap in Option A is doing it without the money. Closing for ten days and sending a burned-out staff home with a normal paycheck is not a reward, it is a gap. Option A only works when it is attached to Decision Three.

Option B: The Consolidated Combined Schedule

You stay open but collapse the schedule. Instead of eight or ten classes a day you run one class each evening — say 5:45 — split into two age groups taught simultaneously by two instructors, plus a weekend morning class. One postcard goes to every family with the exact holiday schedule and their exact return date.

This is the middle path, and for owner-operators and small-staff schools it is frequently the right one. It preserves the habit — the most important asset you carry into January — without asking one or two people to staff a full schedule for a quarter of the attendance.

Option C: The Special-Class Open

You keep your regular schedule and turn the week between Christmas and New Year’s into the most attractive week of the year. Every day is a special class: nunchaku, bo staff, board breaking, forms, throws and takedowns, knife and club defense. Publish the whole week as a printed schedule and teach each special at three levels — basic, intermediate, advanced — so everyone can attend everything.

This is Grandmaster Smith’s approach and the evidence is strong: schools that do it well see higher attendance that week, because students come three and four times instead of twice. December stops being the lowest-attendance month and becomes one of the highest active months of the year.

He holds that position hard because he has run the other experiment. Closing for two weeks broke the attendance habit, active count collapsed, and it took roughly two months to climb back to the November number. That is the true cost of a long close — not lost December revenue, but the January and February you spend re-recruiting your own students.

How to Choose in Sixty Seconds

1. Do I have full-time staff who have hit their numbers? If yes, Option A is available and probably deserved. If no, Option A is just a closure.
2. Is my active count fragile — under 100 students, or attrition already above 2% a month? If yes, do not do a long close. Option B or C protects the habit.
3. Can I staff the specials without burning my key people? If yes, Option C produces the best attendance number. If no, Option B gets most of the benefit at a fraction of the load.

There is a fourth question nobody asks: whichever option you pick, more of your students will be gone than usual, which means more of the work shifts to making sure they do not simply stay gone. That is Decision Four, and it does not care which schedule you chose.

Decision Three: Staffing — Make Time Off Something They Earn

Here is the mistake I see in nine out of ten schools. The owner tells a new hire, “You get two weeks of vacation.” It sounds professional. It is a landmine. If everyone gets two or three weeks to use whenever they like, they will ask for it in September, or April, or the second week of January — the peak windows where losing a key person costs you enrollments you never get back.

Organize the Year Instead of Granting “Two Weeks”

Never grant vacation as a floating allowance. Instead, identify the two windows in your year that are naturally slow no matter what you do — for most schools the week of July 4th and the stretch from Christmas to New Year’s — and make those the windows where time off is available. Then make availability conditional on performance. Staff still end up with roughly three weeks a year. They just take it when it costs the school least and when they have earned it.

Said plainly: if the team hits big numbers in December, I do not care that we are closed for a week or two. If they do not, we are not closed.

The Two-Bucket Bonus

Do not run one bonus. Run two, tied to two different metrics, because cash and time off motivate differently.

• Cash goal earns cash. Set a December cash number. Hit it and there is a bonus check on top of the normal 10–12% commission. The point is that your manager walks into the holidays with several thousand dollars and a trip booked, not a week of sitting at home.
• Renewal count earns days. Set the renewal target as a headcount, not a dollar figure. My benchmark is 75% of available renewals. If fifty students are eligible, thirty-seven or more earns the full holiday block. Thirty-two does not.

The cash bucket drives the enrollment and event push; the days bucket drives the renewal push.

The Accrual-and-Approval Model

Grandmaster Smith runs a more formalized version of the same idea, worth copying if you have three or more full-time staff. New employees accrue nothing for six months. From month seven they earn one day of leave per month worked, so year one produces about a week. Critically: leave must be requested in advance and approved. Staff do not tell you when they are off; they ask.

That one word — ask — protects your calendar. You can decline the week of a black belt graduation or the first two weeks of September without a policy fight. Accrual builds the entitlement, approval controls the timing, and the two-bucket bonus buys the December block.

The Bench Is Home From College

Here is the resource almost nobody uses. Your black belts who went off to college are home for three or four weeks over the holidays, and most of them want hours and want money. So do your high-school part-timers.

You could triple your staffing over the Christmas break if you planned for it in October. Suddenly Option C is staffable without asking a single full-timer to give up a day. Career staff take the block off; returning black belts run the specials, get paid, and become your warm bench for summer hiring.

Decision Four: Close the Renewals Before the Break

This is the decision with the most money attached and the one most owners defer. Do not defer it. A renewal conversation that slides past December 20 does not get held in January — it gets held in March, or never.

The December 20 Deadline

Set the last renewal day at roughly the 20th and work backward. In my schools we worked the final Sunday before the break specifically to get renewals in, because that was the day parents were available. Every eligible student has a conference scheduled by December 10.

Why the hard deadline matters: the value of a renewal is not one month of tuition. At $347–$397 a month, a student who renews into the full black belt program instead of drifting out at the end of the trial year is worth $7,000 to $9,000 in lifetime value. Miss ten renewals and you have lost $70,000 to $90,000 of future revenue — and you will spend five to seven times more to replace those students than it would have cost to keep them.

Killing “We’ll Just Go Year by Year”

The most common objection on a December renewal call is some version of: we’re going to take it year by year and see if he wants to continue.

The objection is not the problem. The problem happened months earlier, at the enrollment conference. If a parent believes they are on a “basic program” that renews annually, the program was not framed correctly at the start.

Which is why I insist on the term trial enrollment rather than basic program. The language does the work: we enroll you on a twelve-month trial enrollment so we can evaluate whether you qualify to train to black belt and beyond. It is the school’s evaluation of the student’s fit, not the family’s evaluation of the school. The trial enrollment is not a track — it is a filter.

When the objection comes, make it binary. There are two outcomes, not three: train for a year and stop, or decide to train to black belt and beyond. There is no wait-and-see — and I thought you had told me he wanted to be a black belt.

Then the practical close: I’d hate to see you pay an extra four or five thousand dollars. There is an advancement credit available at white belt that will not be available later, and a price increase at the start of the year.

Then the line that does the most work in the conversation, because it happens to be true: people who earn a black belt decide they are going to be a black belt at white belt. They do not decide it at brown belt. Deliver it warmly — said flatly it lands as rude, and a parent who feels cornered says no to protect their pride.

Renew the People Who Are Actually Showing Up

Long before I owned schools I ran a fitness center for a chain. Their sales team worked from what they called day sheets — the receipts journal — cold-calling everyone who had signed up. I refused. I stood at the front counter checking ID cards, and when someone on a one-year agreement walked in I sat them down and upgraded them on the spot. In one month I wrote more upgrades than three dozen other salespeople combined. That was not talent. It was that I would not try to renew anybody who wasn’t using the club.

Apply that to December. Your renewal list is not everyone eligible. In priority order it is everyone eligible who is on the floor this week. Work the mat, not the spreadsheet.

Decision Five: Book January’s Marketing in December

The last decision turns December from a defensive month into an offensive one. Everything you want to happen in January has to be booked in December, because the decision-makers you need are gone the first week of January and catching up the second.

Give Every Student a Return Appointment

Start with the cheapest, highest-return activity of the season: ninety seconds per student. Before they leave for the break, every student gets a quick progress update — not a thirty-minute sit-down. In that ninety seconds you establish four things:

• How long they will be gone, and where.
• Their next testing date and whether they are still on track for it.
• The specific date and class they are coming back to — not “after the holidays,” an actual date and time.
• A note in your system to follow up on that exact date.

Never leave a conversation without the next appointment set. That is sales rule number one and it applies to a nine-year-old orange belt exactly as much as to a prospect. Anything open-ended dies. This one habit is the difference between an active count that dips 3% in January and one that dips 15%.

If there is one time of year a virtual class option earns its keep, this is it — not as a program, but as a tether for the student who is away for twelve days. Martial arts training is far more social than technical and remote training does not hold students long term, but for two weeks it is worth having.

The Employer Channel: The Play That Sets Up January

The biggest untapped lead channel for most schools is local employers, and Christmas is the perfect moment to open it.

The holidays make it easy. Every HR department in your market is trying to give employees something of value at year end without spending money they do not have. You can hand them exactly that: a certificate for one month of training plus a uniform, presented as a $397 value, courtesy of the employer, distributed with the payroll run, the year-end newsletter, or the company holiday card.

The employer distributes a valuable gift at zero cost and looks generous doing it. You get your offer into the hands of hundreds of pre-qualified local adults with a trusted third party’s endorsement attached — a far better deal than paying escalating cost-per-lead into a social platform for the same three-mile radius.

And it is not a kids play or an adults play. It is both. You will not find a 25-to-40-year-old in an elementary school. You will find them at work, in apartment and condo communities, and in the organizations built around those two.

Translate Into Their Language, Not Yours

This is where most owners blow the meeting. You walk in and start talking about your program, your style, your instructors. They do not care, and they are pitched by wellness vendors constantly. Lead with their problem, not your product. Every large employer in your market — hospital systems worst of all — has the same three issues:

Their problem	Your program, in their words
Employee burnout and stress	Structured stress management and a physical outlet
Low productivity, poor teamwork	Focus, discipline, conflict-resolution skills
Soaring healthcare claims	A healthy-lifestyle and fitness program at no cost to them

That is the same list you use with parents — focus, discipline, confidence, healthy lifestyle — translated into an HR director’s vocabulary. Notice what is not on it: your style, your lineage, your competition team.

Then make the ask small: We’d love to work cooperatively with you. We do this as a contribution to local employers at no cost. Realistically, out of every hundred of your people we work with, maybe five or ten will want to continue with us long-term — and that’s fine. You are not selling a wellness contract. You are asking for access.

How You Actually Get in the Door

Three routes, easiest to hardest.

1. Through your own student body. Always fastest. Find who among your current students, former students and acquaintances already works there, ideally in a senior role. Some of the largest employer relationships I ever built happened because an executive’s child trained with us.
2. Through the professional networks. Search the employer, identify the HR director and senior leadership, and open a conversation there.
3. Walk in. The ballsiest option and my own preference: assemble the packet and go. When the receptionist stops you — and she will — say: I wanted to drop off some information for the HR director about a few things we might do cooperatively, around stress management, productivity, and overall employee health and fitness. I’d also like a few minutes on her calendar. Every word in that sentence is one of their words.

Once in, run the same playbook you would run in a school. “PE teacher for the day” works with adults too — go on-site, teach a class in their conference room, and instead of permission slips collect a signed waiver on the way in, which gets you their contact information. Because they are adults, you book the follow-up on the spot. Large employers also run family days and benefits fairs where you can staff a booth exactly as you would at a community festival.

The Booth Benchmarks That Tell You What Broke

Hold every live activity — employer event, mall booth or community festival — to the same standard:

• 75–90% of the leads you generate should book an appointment on the spot.
• At least 50% of those appointments should show up.
• At least half of those who show should enroll.

Fifty appointments should produce roughly twenty-five intros and ten to twelve enrollments. At $375 a month with a $7,000–$9,000 lifetime value, twelve enrollments from one event is $84,000 to $108,000 of future revenue.

Use the chain as a diagnostic. If you are not booking 75–90% on the spot, the problem is your process and scripting. If you book well but the show rate is poor, look at three things in order: how the conversation went at the booth, how much material you left them with, and your follow-up sequence between appointment and intro.

The most common cause of a bad show rate is the laziest booth habit there is: handing someone a business card with a time written on the back. Hand them twenty-four pages about the program instead. Twenty-seven leads and one show is not bad luck; it is a materials-and-follow-up failure. The same logic governs referrals — guest passes are impotent, while a substantive pass-along piece a student is proud to take to work actually produces. If you print one, write it as an extended sales piece with a call to action, and build separate versions for kids, adult men, adult women and families.

The Time-or-Money Rule

The reason most owners never open the employer channel is the reason they never open any channel: I don’t have time and I don’t have staff, so I’ll just do it all online.

That fails structurally. Plot every marketing activity against time cost and money cost and almost everything lands in one of two corners. Broadcast media, direct mail and paid advertising cost a lot of money and very little time. Community outreach, employer programs, school programs and referral systems cost a lot of time and very little money. The corner that is cheap in both is nearly empty. So you have two levers: spend money, or spend hours. What you cannot do is pour more money into a three-mile radius and expect it to scale.

Your Enrollment Source Portfolio

Which is why a real school runs a portfolio, not a channel.

Source	Typical monthly enrollments
Paid social	5–6
Search	4–5
Internal referral systems	3–5
Employer, school and live-event bursts	Variable — the big spikes

The first three are your floor: steady, predictable, capped. The bursts are where growth actually comes from. That is what December buys you — December opens the relationships, January fires them. A $1,000,000-a-year school is an $83,333-a-month school, and at $375 a month the floor sources alone will not get you there.

The Reload Week

One more item belongs in December’s plan even though it happens in January. In my schools, roughly January 5–9 was training week: every day, ten to one, the whole team working the full sequence — marketing plan, information call, first intro, second intro, enrollment conference.

That week is the reason the close block works. Staff come back rested and get three days of sharpening before the January surge instead of a cold Monday. Schedule it in November so it is not optional.

Two Rules That Save December

Rule one: do not wreck your December stressing over one family. Every year an owner burns a week of emotional energy on one difficult cancellation. Have the conversation, be fair, offer a reasonable resolution rather than a refund, and move on. You cannot enroll everybody. The opportunity cost of that week — the renewals you did not close, the employer you did not call — is many multiples of the agreement in dispute.

Rule two: never leave a meeting without the next meeting. That applies to the renewal conference, the difficult cancellation, the HR director and the parent in your lobby. Send a family home to “think about it” with no time to reconvene and you have closed the door on yourself. Related: do not run enrollment conferences with one parent when two are making the decision. If one works evenings, ask what hours — a second-shift parent is usually free Friday or Saturday morning.

Related reading: The Calendar Flip System: How to Engineer Your Best Month of the Year and The OUTPOST Method: How to Turn YMCAs, Rec Centers, and Community Programs Into Enrolled Students.

What the Stack Is Worth

Take a 200-student school at $375 a month — $75,000 in tuition, on pace for $900,000 a year.

The write-off version. Close for two weeks with no return appointments and no renewal push. The habit breaks, January active count comes back 12% down — 24 students — and attrition runs 4% through the first quarter instead of the sub-2% target. Fifteen renewal conferences slide into “we’ll talk in the spring” and eight of those families never renew. Cost of those eight alone, at $7,000 in lifetime value: $56,000. Add 24 students to re-recruit at $150–$300 apiece and you spend February and March getting back to your November number.

The stacked version. Calendar mapped in early November. Schedule chosen and communicated by the 7th. Staff bonuses tied to a cash number and 75% of eligible renewals. Renewals closed by the 20th — thirty-seven of fifty. Every student leaves with a return date in your system. Two employers agreed to run a $397-value certificate with their January payroll. Reload week booked January 5–9.

The gap between those two Decembers is not effort. It is five decisions made in the right order, four of them before December starts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I close my martial arts school between Christmas and New Year’s?

It depends entirely on your staffing model, and there are two defensible answers. If you have full-time staff who have hit their December cash and renewal numbers, a clean eight-to-twelve-day block from Christmas Eve through January 2 is earned, and it sends people back rested for the January surge — provided the block comes with a real bonus check attached, not just an empty calendar. If you are owner-operated, have fewer than 100 active students, or are already running attrition above 2% a month, do not close for two weeks. Breaking the attendance habit for that long typically costs a school two months of rebuilding to get its active count back to the November level. Run a consolidated schedule instead — one combined class per evening — or a full week of special classes. Either way, the non-negotiable is that every student leaves with a specific return date.

How do I answer a parent who says they want to take it year by year?

That objection is a symptom of a framing failure at enrollment, so fix the source and then handle the moment. The framing fix is calling it a twelve-month trial enrollment rather than a basic program — it is the school evaluating whether the student qualifies to train to black belt, not the family evaluating whether to keep going. In the moment, make it binary and warm: there are two outcomes, training for a year and stopping, or deciding to train to black belt and beyond, and there is no wait-and-see track. Then add the practical reason to decide now — the advancement credit available at their current rank and the price increase coming at the start of the year, which together can be a four-to-five-thousand-dollar difference. Close with the truth that people who earn black belts decide at white belt, not at brown belt.

How do I get a local employer to distribute my school’s offer?

Lead with the employer’s problem, not your program. Every large employer in your market is dealing with burnout, productivity and rising healthcare costs, so your language is stress management, focus, teamwork, conflict resolution and healthy lifestyle — never your style or your competition team. The holiday offer that works is a certificate for one month of training plus a uniform, positioned as a $397 value given courtesy of the employer and distributed with payroll, a year-end newsletter or the company holiday card. It costs the employer nothing and makes them look generous, which is why it gets approved. To get in the door, start with your own student body and alumni to find someone who already works there, then the professional networks to identify the HR director, then simply walk in with a packet and ask for a few minutes on her calendar.

Your Next Step

If you are reading this in November, you still have time to run all five decisions. If you are reading it in January, put a note in your calendar for October 15 — that is when this planning actually starts.

First, get the free book: Six Simple Steps to Add 100 Students at FillYourSchool.com. The employer channel, the community outreach system and the live-event benchmarks in this article are laid out there in full, with the scripts.

Second, book a Free Personal Evaluation — a $1,297 value at no cost and no obligation. Grandmaster Jeff Smith and I will look at your actual numbers, tell you where your December and January plan will leak, and map the fastest path to your next revenue level. Request it through the School Growth hub.

Most owners spend December hoping. The ones who grow spend November deciding.

About the Author

Stephen Oliver, MBA and 10th Degree Black Belt, is the Founder and CEO of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, CEO of NAPMA (National Association of Professional Martial Artists), and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A martial arts school owner since 1975, he and his coaching team — including Grandmaster Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody — have helped school owners across the world build $1M+ schools.