Communication & Retention

The Only Response To Any Text Or Email: “Let’s Set A Time To Talk”

Why I will never again answer a text, an email, or a DM in writing — and why every message that leaves your school must come from a human being, not a company name.

Every single week on our mastermind calls, somebody asks me the same question in three different costumes. Somebody emailed me this. Somebody texted me that. How do I respond? I finally told our members I am never going to answer that question again, because the answer is always exactly the same, no matter what the message says.

The answer is: let’s set a time to talk.

That is it. That is the whole rule. It doesn’t matter if the message is a student’s mom saying she wants to quit. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dad who is pissed off about a billing charge. It doesn’t matter if it’s a total stranger who found your website and typed, “how much are your lessons?” The response is identical in every single case. You do not answer the question in writing. You set a time to talk.

Asynchronous Communication Is Not A Conversation

I use that word, asynchronous, deliberately, even though I know it’s not exactly current slang anymore. It means any communication where you are not actually with the other person in real time — you’re not on a Zoom call, you’re not on the phone, and you’re not standing in front of them. A text message is asynchronous. An email is asynchronous. A Facebook message, a LinkedIn message, a Snapchat, a Telegram, an Instagram DM — every one of those is asynchronous, and every one of those gets exactly the same response from you: let’s set a time to talk.

Here is the priority order, and it doesn’t change. In person is always the highest priority, especially if the person you’re talking to is a student — catch them before or after their class. If in-person isn’t realistic, video is next, because it is closer to a real conversation than a phone call. And if you can’t get video, you get them on the phone. Notice what is not on that list anywhere. Text is not on that list. Email is not on that list. Typing back and forth is not a real conversation, and it never will be, no matter how many paragraphs you write.

So when I get an email from a prospect who found my website and wants to know how much lessons cost, I don’t answer that question in the email. If I have their phone number, I pick up the phone and call them right then, while the interest is hot. If they don’t answer, I text them. And then I reply to the original email — not with pricing, but with something like, I’m available at this time or this time, or any time today until such-and-such, here’s my phone number, happy to answer any and all questions, give me a call and we’ll go through everything, and here’s a little more information about the school in the meantime. What I never do is put a number in writing and let them make a decision alone, in isolation, with no one there to answer the follow-up question they didn’t know they had.

Why I Refuse To Negotiate In Writing

There is a real reason behind this, and it isn’t stubbornness. It comes down to what a text message or an email actually allows a person to do that a real conversation does not: it lets them disappear. It gives them a coward’s exit.

Think about what happens when a parent texts you, “we’re going to have to stop lessons.” If you respond in writing — even a warm, well-intentioned, understanding response — you have just handed them the easiest possible way to quit. They read your reply, maybe they feel a small pang of guilt, and then they close the app and move on with their day. Nothing was resolved. No objection was surfaced. No misunderstanding was cleared up. They just quietly checked out of a conversation that never actually happened.

Now think about what happens when your response instead is, let’s find ten minutes to talk about it, before or after Thursday’s class works great for me, what’s better for your schedule. Suddenly there is a real human being on the other end of that exchange, and the parent has to either show up for the conversation or actively, visibly avoid it. Most people will take the conversation. And once you are actually talking to them — in person, on video, or even just on the phone — you can do the thing that is completely impossible over text: you can ask what’s really going on, you can listen, and you can handle the actual objection instead of the version of it that fits in a text bubble. Half the time, “we need to stop lessons” isn’t really about lessons at all. It’s about money that got tight, or a schedule conflict, or a kid who had one bad class and hasn’t told anyone why. You will never find that out by text. You will find it out in a conversation.

This is the whole game. Text and email give people a way to quit by text — to avoid an uncomfortable moment by simply not showing up for it, verbally, at all. Your job is to close that exit. Every time. Without exception. It doesn’t matter whether the topic is a cancellation, a complaint, a billing dispute, or a total stranger asking about pricing. Nothing of substance gets resolved in writing. Writing is only ever used to schedule the conversation that actually resolves it.

Every Message From Your School Should Come From A Person

There is a second rule that sits right alongside this one, and it comes from the same place: people respond to people, not to companies.

I look at contact records constantly — who a message is coming from, what name shows up on the caller ID, what name is attached to the “from” field on an email. And I see this mistake over and over again, at schools that are otherwise doing everything right. The autoresponder emails and autoresponder texts go out signed by the company. Not a person. The company.

Here is why that matters more than it looks like it does: people feel genuinely guilty ignoring a human being. They do not feel guilty at all ignoring a faceless company. If a text shows up from “Mile High Karate,” it is trivially easy to swipe it away and forget it exists. If that same text shows up from Amanda Christensen, head instructor at Mile High Karate, it is a real person who knows your kid, and ignoring her costs something emotionally that ignoring a business name does not. Every communication that leaves your school — every email, every text, and yes, even a postcard — needs a person’s name attached to it. Not admin@, not info@. A human, with a name, front and center.

And this isn’t only about the sender name that shows up in someone’s inbox. It’s the actual email address too. Both the display name and the address behind it need to read as a person, not a department. If I get an email from Grandmaster Stephen Oliver, it should say Grandmaster Stephen Oliver — not stephenoliver@martialartswealth.com sitting there under some generic label, and definitely not an address that starts with admin or info. Both halves of that equation need to be personal.

The “What The Hell Is ABK?” Problem

I’ll tell you exactly how this goes wrong, because I’ve lived through it more than once. Back at the Dunne Rein Institute, the staff kept wanting to abbreviate everything down to DRI. My guys at Mile High Karate did the same thing — they’d sign things MHK. And nobody, and I mean nobody, knew what the hell MHK meant. But if I signed something Stephen Oliver, they knew exactly who that was. That’s the difference. An abbreviation of your business name means something to you, because you live inside that business every day. It means nothing to the person receiving it.

I see this constantly from the outside too. I make a point of opting into other schools’ email and text lists whenever I talk with one of our members, just to see what they’re doing, and I get message after message from names I don’t recognize at all. My honest, in-the-moment reaction, more than once, has been: thank you, ABK — what the hell is ABK? That acronym might be obvious to the owner and every staff member at that school. To a prospect or a parent who is one distracted swipe away from deleting the message, it is just noise from a stranger.

One of our members, Christian Arias, runs America’s Best Karate down in El Paso, and after I made this point on a call he asked me directly: when I send an email that currently says America’s Best Karate, should I change that to say Christian Arias instead? The answer is always yes. Always have everything come from a person. Not ABK at America’s Best Karate — Christian Arias, at America’s Best Karate. The school name can still live in the email address or the signature line for context. But the name attached to the message, the name a parent actually sees first, needs to be a human being they can picture.

Put Both Rules To Work This Week

Neither of these rules costs you a dollar to implement, and both of them will change how your families experience every interaction with your school. Go through your autoresponders, your confirmation texts, your email templates, and even your postcards, and make sure every one of them is signed by an actual person on your staff — not the business, not a department, not an abbreviation only your team understands. And train everyone who touches a phone or a keyboard at your school on the second rule until it’s reflexive: no text, no email, no DM ever answers a real question or resolves a real issue. It only ever does one job — setting a time to talk, in person first, video second, phone third. Handle it there, where a real conversation, and real objection-handling, can actually happen.