How to Fire a Student — And Why Great Marketing Buys You the Right to Only Teach People You Want

We were four minutes from ending a Zoom call on back-to-school marketing when Yanguang Shi raised her hand and said her question wasn’t about marketing.

She had a student — good kid, contract coming up, family wanting to upgrade into the Leadership Program. The mom was great, the kid was great. And the dad — the divorced dad who had tried to get the school to produce evidence against his ex, and who once wanted to subpoena testimony — had just announced in class that he wanted his black belt alongside his son.

“We just don’t want him there,” she said. “We like the son, we like the mom. We don’t want to enroll the dad at all, and we don’t know how to do that without him getting mad.”

I told the room anybody could drop off, because the last fifteen minutes were worth more than one problem dad in one school. Here it is: you really need to be prepared to fire students at any time. The reason most owners can’t is that their marketing isn’t good enough to make them brave.

Your Fear of Firing Somebody Is a Marketing Problem Wearing a Customer-Service Mask

When an owner tells me he’s stuck with a toxic family, he never says “I’m afraid of losing the money.” He says we’re a family here, we don’t give up on people, I don’t want to be the guy who kicks a kid out.

That’s the mask. Underneath it is a spreadsheet — three people on tuition, most of a term left on the agreement, and no reliable machine for replacing any of it. So he swallows the behavior, and then he swallows it again. His staff learns the rules are negotiable if you’re loud enough. So do his good families, because they’re standing right there watching.

“In my mind, the reason you want to be good at marketing is you only want to teach people that you want to have there.”

Marketing is what buys you standards.

“My rule is I want to be so good at marketing that I’m never worried about I have to keep somebody who’s an asshole.”

That’s not swagger, it’s operating math. Scottie Jackson made about 60 appointments in one two-hour window across seven Meet the Teacher nights, using volunteer advanced belts and a couple of spin wheels. Christian Arias in El Paso sat at one movie theater from noon to seven and got 35 appointments. When that’s your Tuesday, a toxic family is a decision, not a revenue problem.

Cancer Metastasizes — And Kids Come With Their Parents

My last takeaway to the room, and the one I’d tattoo inside every owner’s eyelids:

“People who are going to become cancerous — and just like real cancer, if you don’t cut it out quick, it metastasizes and it spreads. So as soon as you identify somebody’s cancerous, you want to get rid of them.”

The mistake isn’t keeping a bad family. The mistake is waiting. The dad who berates a staff member doesn’t stay contained — he talks to three parents on the bench, and your program director starts dreading Thursdays.

Here’s the test, simple enough to apply on day nine of a trial:

“If you look at a student and you aren’t going to be proud of them as a black belt, and you’re not going to be proud to support the family and everything they do, decide early and cut the cords. But do it nicely.”

Decide early. Do it nicely. Those aren’t in tension.

I hold kids responsible for their parents

“The policy I’ve had for 30 years, and it was controversial with my staff at the beginning, but I hold kids responsible for their parents.”

Every instructor I’ve employed has tried the same sentence on me: “Oh, he’s a great kid, but…” My answer:

“If we’re supporting somebody, we’re promoting them, we’re granting a black belt to somebody, that’s to the family. That’s not just to the kid.”

A black belt out of my school is an endorsement of a household. If the dad is a menace to my staff, I’m not putting my name on that family’s mantelpiece.

I’ll name my own failure here. At our last black belt test we had a father who was a pain in the ass and hadn’t been dealt with — he’s the one who told off Riley Fife. By my own druthers I’d have fired that family four years earlier. The punchline: they quit anyway. Four years of aggravation and nothing to show for it. That’s what waiting buys you.

The Script: How to Fire a Family Without Them Being Angry About It

I’ve done this at scale, not as a theory.

“I took over one of my schools to do a turnaround, and I fired 40 people. I’ve done that a couple of times.”

Forty, in one school, without a lawsuit or a scene in the lobby — because the script isn’t a confrontation, it’s an apology. Almost all of them were already complaining about something, so I gave the complainer exactly what he was technically asking for: an admission that we failed him, and a release from the obligation. Close to word for word:

“Ms. Jones, I apologize. Obviously, our program hasn’t lived up to what you expected. We take full responsibility. I took the opportunity to cancel the balance of your program. I’ve taken the liberty of looking at some of the other schools in the area. Many of them I know, some of them I don’t know, but I kind of gave you what I thought might be a priority order of some other schools that might live up to your expectations a little bit better.”

There’s no list of their sins. Itemize the behavior and you’ve handed them something to argue with, in a debate you can’t win with parents watching.

There’s a real referral. Not “there are other schools out there” — an actual short list, in priority order. That homework turns rejection into service, and keeps them from telling people you threw them out.

And I’m shaking their hand while I say it. Standing, moving toward the door, hand extended — not issuing a verdict from behind a desk, but walking a guest out.

What actually happens next

“Usually the response is kind of a stammering of, well, what do you mean?”

They came in loaded for a fight and got an apology and a cancellation instead. Nothing to push against. Some leave shaking their heads. Some argue their way back in — and occasionally they convinced me, which is fine. A parent who fights to stay has told you something useful.

Don’t burn the bridge on the way out

“The only rule is I don’t want to burn the bridge on the way out if there’s any way I can avoid it. I would much rather romance them out the door.”

Your city is a small town no matter how big it is. That mom coaches soccer, that dad is on the church board, and both get asked about you.

The hardest version is when the family likes you and you still have to end it. Yanguang asked whether she could say it this way — hey mom, we love you guys, we wish you could stay, but we just don’t want to deal with Dad. No.

“I wouldn’t say it that way. I would say, here are things that have been happening that we’re uncomfortable with. And for that reason, I don’t want to be in the middle of any of this stuff, and I think you’d be happier somewhere else.”

“Don’t say, we love you, we hate him.”

Split the family into a good half and a bad half out loud and you’ve enlisted the mom into the conflict and made yourself a participant in the divorce. Keep it on your discomfort. That’s true, it’s unarguable, and nobody has to be the villain.

If You Keep Them, Talk About Behaviors — Not People

Termination isn’t the only tool. Get both parents in a room — both. If they can’t be within twenty feet of each other, put them on Zoom, but same conversation, same time, so nothing gets relayed secondhand. Leave the kid out. Then go through a specific list of behaviors, not a character assessment.

“You want to talk about behaviors, not people. Here are behaviors that are unacceptable. I’m not willing to get in the middle of this.”

Then set the standard with no wiggle room:

“If you agree it’s going to terminate right now, we’ll consider a probationary period, but if any of this ever happens again — even in my subjective experience, I dream that it’s happening — life’s too short, you’re done.”

“Even in my subjective experience” is deliberate. You’re not building a courtroom where they litigate whether it technically happened — the standard is your comfort. Then spell out the consequence: if it repeats there’s no conversation. I cancel the agreement, we text you not to come back, and we recommend someplace else.

The hair-trigger dad who got fixed

I had a father come at me hot over a black belt test result, and I sat him down:

“You’re not allowed to talk to me that way… Black belt is optional, it’s our decision on whether they’ve earned it, it’s not your decision… and here’s the criteria for you staying here.”

I told him to sit down, shut up, and stay that way.

“From that day on, he was wonderful.”

Nobody had ever drawn him a line. It’s not to say that some can’t be fixed — but you find that out inside one conversation, not over four years of hoping.

The Divorce Problem, Specifically

Back to Yanguang’s litigious dad. When a divorce lands in your school you have two options and no third one: keep the kid and the mom and ban the dad, or release the whole family and hand them a referral to somebody else in the area.

I’ve done the first one. Here’s the honest batting average:

“I can think of 3 or 4 times when we’ve had it be where she’s not allowed in here, or he’s not allowed in here. But I can’t really think of a time when the child was there 3 years later, got their black belt, everything went smooth.”

The excluded parent doesn’t stay excluded. There’s an intramural tournament, a testing, a graduation — every one a fresh chance for the person you banned to put you back in the middle. You didn’t solve it, you scheduled it. It’s why I require both parents at the enrollment conference and at the renewal.

Grand Master Jeff Smith read Yanguang’s case the other way: don’t let the dad in, keep the boy and the mom. Legitimate call. But when two people who run a school disagree about a family, I have a tiebreaker:

“Whoever has the opinion of, they gotta go is right, and whoever has the opinion of, I feel bad about it — so what?”

Yanguang said it herself: it’s like a bomb that can blow anytime, and she has a bleeding heart for the mom. When she asked me directly whether to cancel the whole family — that’s what I would do. And it isn’t a tragedy for them:

“That doesn’t mean they won’t be fine somewhere else.”

You are not the last martial arts school on earth. I love Harvard too, and they’re not required to admit me to their law program.

“How did I get in the middle of this?”

The reminder of what you’re asked to absorb came to me as a parent, not an owner. I was at my daughter Jada’s school taking pictures of her. In the room was a divorced couple who could barely be in the same space, and the mother decided I was photographing her for the father and demanded to see every photo on my camera.

“How did I get in the middle of this? I have nothing to do with this.”

She was welcome to look at every picture of my daughter. That’s the feeling your staff gets every time a custody fight walks into your lobby — and a school that lets itself be used for evidence-gathering eventually gets subpoenaed for the privilege.

The Cardiologist, the Restraining Order, and Where the Line Is

The funniest version I lived through involved a Harvard-trained cardiologist who took classes with his son. He came home one day, discovered his wife with somebody else, and it erupted — divorce, plus a restraining order keeping the two of them out of the same room.

Then he comes to me in a panic. She’s on her way in, and she’s going to have him arrested. I said: get back in class, I’ve got it covered.

I met the police officer at the door before he got inside. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. Would you arrest that bitch? She’s not allowed to be on my property. She’s trespassing.” He trespassed her off the property. She wasn’t happy with me. But your property is your property.

Now the line, precisely, because this is where owners get themselves in trouble:

“The only limitations are if you choose not to have Black people, or white people, or brown people, or you choose not to have Jewish people, or Muslims, or whatever — that’s not okay. But if it’s a particular person who’s causing a problem, it’s your business, you have a right to choose who you’re gonna provide service to.”

Categories of people: absolutely not, and it isn’t a close question. A specific individual whose specific conduct is a problem in your building: that’s yours to decide.

One note in my own voice: that’s my operating experience across 50 years, not legal counsel. Trespass procedure and public-accommodation rules vary by state and city — have your own attorney tell you how it reads where you operate.

The Scholarship Trap

Jonathan asked what a scholarship even was, and Karl Kanthak told him it’s discounted tuition. That gave me an opening to warn him off it.

“I always found that people you put on scholarship usually didn’t appreciate it very much, and oftentimes became your biggest problems.”

Some of the people I canceled over the years were exactly those people, and the script has a variant, because the money changes the framing:

“It dawned on me that I’m paying $1,200 a year for you to participate in the program. You’re on a scholarship, but you don’t seem to be particularly happy with the service we’re providing. And I apologize — I wish we had. But it doesn’t make any sense for me to keep putting money into supporting you in the program, and you to keep putting money into something you’re not happy with. So I just thought you’d be happier somewhere else.”

Same architecture — apology, cancellation, exit, referral — with the arithmetic said out loud. Now the caveat that costs owners money:

“What I don’t want to do is let staff or me use that as an excuse to not put my tuition where it should be.”

Discounting starts with one sympathetic case and ends with a program director who negotiates every enrollment. I just talked with a member whose average revenue per student is still about $130. Our best schools — Scott and Brandy at $1.3 million with $830,000 net out of 2,400 square feet, Tim Harrison, Krista Wells — run $350 to $450. That gap is an owner who let “we help people” become “we discount.”

Put the tuition where it belongs, then be generous on purpose. There are real cases — families on my list who deserved it: households in serious crisis, with heavy medical costs or the aftermath of real trauma, where the tuition was nowhere in the budget and never was going to be. I was glad to carry them. And there’s a cleaner structure than a discount: do what a college does and set up a work-study, where they help with mat work or the front desk in exchange for tuition.

“Somebody who truly appreciates it with a special situation, I’m happy to create that for them from time to time.”

The difference between the two groups isn’t need. It’s whether the family experiences it as a gift they’re part of, or an entitlement they’ve won.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you fire a student from a martial arts school without a fight?

Lead with an apology, not an accusation: “Ms. Jones, I apologize. Obviously, our program hasn’t lived up to what you expected. We take full responsibility. I took the opportunity to cancel the balance of your program.” Then hand them a priority-order list of other schools and shake their hand on the way out.

Should you ban one parent from a martial arts school after a divorce?

You can, but it rarely holds. “I can’t really think of a time when the child was there 3 years later, got their black belt, everything went smooth.” The excluded parent resurfaces at every testing and every intramural tournament. Releasing the whole family is usually cleaner.

Should martial arts schools hold kids responsible for their parents?

I’ve run that policy for 30 years. “If we’re supporting somebody, we’re promoting them, we’re granting a black belt to somebody, that’s to the family. That’s not just to the kid.” If you won’t be proud of the student as a black belt and proud of the family, decide early.

Are tuition scholarships a good idea in a martial arts school?

Rarely, and never as a pricing crutch. “I always found that people you put on scholarship usually didn’t appreciate it very much, and oftentimes became your biggest problems.” Reserve them for families in genuine crisis or a college-style work-study — and put your tuition where it belongs first.

When two owners disagree about firing a student, who wins?

The one who wants them gone. “Whoever has the opinion of, they gotta go is right, and whoever has the opinion of, I feel bad about it — so what?” The bleeding heart is measuring lost tuition. The other partner is measuring damage that’s already spreading.

Come Build the Marketing That Makes You Brave

You get to have standards in exact proportion to how many people want in.

If firing a family would put a hole in your month you don’t know how to fill, the fix isn’t a better confrontation script. It’s after-school enrichment programs, PE teacher for the day, charitable fundraiser flyers, booths at the blockbuster movies, and Meet the Teacher nights run right — the work that makes 60 appointments in two hours a normal Thursday.

That’s what we do inside Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, and it’s what we’re doing live at Quick Start, October 1–2 — the 1st at my home in Evergreen, Colorado, the 2nd at our hotel in Golden. Leadership Mastery runs October 2–3, so come to Quick Start and you’ll overlap with most of our million-dollar school owners.

Bring your staff. Bring the instructor who keeps telling you “he’s a great kid, but…” And get so good at marketing that you never again have to keep somebody you don’t want in your school.

Related Reading

• How to reduce martial arts student dropout: retention systems that work
• How to hire and build a martial arts school staff
• How much should a martial arts school charge? The 2026 tuition guide
• No McDojos. No Belt Factories.
• Martial Arts School Marketing: How to Fill Your School in 2026
• The Martial Arts Wealth Mastery Program

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