Paid Classes for Daycares, Agencies and Nonprofits: When to Say Yes

Updated October 29, 2026

Every so often a member brings me what sounds like good news. “The local daycare wants to pay me $200 to come down once a week and teach their kids.”

I don’t want any of those deals. And I’d rather you understood why before you say yes to one, because the same logic applies to the behavioral-health agency, the youth nonprofit, the city program and the private school down the road that all want to pay you to teach their group.

That doesn’t mean the answer is always no. Sometimes it’s a very profitable yes. But the yes almost never comes from the fee on the table. It comes from what the relationship can do for your school.

Why is a $200-a-week daycare contract a bad deal?

Look at what you’re actually selling. It’s an hour of your best instructor, plus the drive there and back, plus the planning, plus one more thing on the calendar for somebody to manage. In return you get a small check and a room full of children whose parents never see you, never meet you and never walk through your door.

That’s the trap. It feels like revenue. It’s really a part-time job that pulls your best people away from the one thing that pays the bills: enrolling students into your school.

What about the big contracts that pay an instructor’s salary?

Years ago I helped a friend grow his school from zero to about a million dollars a year back in the ’80s, which would be three or four million today. Later on he got into placing instructors in school systems, where he’d be paid $60,000 or $70,000 a year per instructor to run classes.

I never had any interest in that type of thing at all, for two reasons.

1. The return. I always knew we could get tenfold more return financially by focusing our effort on things that directly feed the school.
2. Complexity. The more complicated you make your operation, the harder it is to keep all the pieces in balance. Every outside contract adds staff to cover, schedules to juggle, invoices to chase and a customer who isn’t a student.

Does “multiple sources of income” apply to a martial arts school?

The common idea of multiple sources of income, I think, misreads what a martial arts school is. Our primary source of income is tuition, and I’d much rather you got good at that than started collecting side businesses.

Income source	How I treat it
Initial tuition	Primary. This is what enrollment is for.
Monthly tuition	Primary. Retention protects it.
Occasional paid-in-full	Primary. A tuition decision, not a side line.
Retail / pro shop	Not a particularly useful source. Don’t build your plan around it.
Belt, testing and similar fees	Roll them into tuition.
Outside group contracts	Only when they pass the checklist below.

If your tuition is healthy, a $200 contract is noise. If it isn’t, a $200 contract won’t save you, and the hours you spend on it are hours you didn’t spend fixing enrollment.

So when do I say yes?

I’m not a purist about it. If some agency wants to pay us $15,000 to do 10 lessons for their group, I’m not going to turn it down.

What I’m always looking for, when a government or non-government organization wants to pay me to come to them or bring their group to me, is the win-win outside of the fee. Where’s the part of this that feeds the school, builds the school’s reputation or turns into something bigger?

What does a win-win look like with a behavioral-health agency?

Here’s a real example from one of our coaching calls. A member’s student works as a counselor at an agency that serves kids with behavioral challenges. She asked whether the school would run a paid class for about 10 of their clients. Each child has to have a counselor with them, and the agency employs somewhere between 150 and 200 counselors.

Those kids aren’t really the school’s demographic, and the member knew it. So what do you do with it? I’d look at it as two separate opportunities.

Opportunity one: the client class as community service

Don’t look at the client class as a feeder to load your school up. Look at it as community outreach. If nothing else, it’s something you can use for public relations. Thirty kids and thirty counselors on the mat learning life skills, focus and confidence is exactly the kind of story a local TV station likes to run. Do it well, do it for a fair fee or even at cost, and let the goodwill do its work.

Opportunity two: the counselors

The bigger benefit is the staff. I’d say to the agency: “We’d be happy to do the class for your kids. Where I think we could really help, though, is an introductory session for all of your counselors, and then an ongoing program for them.”

What these staff need isn’t street self-defense. They’re not preparing for a knife-wielding attacker in a parking lot, and they certainly don’t need to learn to strike the people in their care. What they need is:

• Non-violent verbal conflict resolution, the “verbal jiu-jitsu”, as Grand Master Jeff Smith put it on the call, that tones a situation down.
• Non-violent physical skills. Passive and active control that lets them manage someone who’s irrational in the moment without hurting them.
• Confidence. If staff don’t know what to do, either the counselor gets hurt or the person in their care does. Staff who’ve trained feel far more confident in those moments, and confident people make calmer decisions.

A group of 150 or more working adults who train with you regularly is a very different proposition from ten children once a week. Those counselors have families, too.

What should you check before pitching to a care agency?

Be careful here. Agencies like this often require their staff to be trained and certified in a specific crisis-intervention curriculum, and they usually have written policies on which holds and restraints are and aren’t permitted. You are not there to replace that, and you should never teach a technique that conflicts with their policy.

Position your program as complementary: body awareness, balance, falling safely, staying calm under pressure, verbal de-escalation practice, fitness and confidence, all inside the framework they already use. Ask for their policy in writing before you plan a single session, agree the scope in writing, and check your insurance covers teaching off-site to an organization’s staff.

What’s the pitch?

Keep it short, and lead with their problem rather than your school:

“We’d love to do the class for your clients. We see that as community service, and we’ll treat it that way. But I think the bigger help to you is your staff. Every counselor you have deals with people who can become irrational in a moment. We can run an introductory session that works alongside your existing crisis training, focused on staying calm, verbal de-escalation and moving safely, and then offer an ongoing program for staff who want more. Who would be the right person to talk to about staff development?”

Paid outside classes: the decision checklist

Run every offer through these questions. If you can’t answer yes to at least a few of the important ones, pass.

Question	Why it matters
Does it pay more than the same hours would earn if you spent them enrolling students?	That’s your real cost. A $15,000 contract can pass; $200 a week rarely does.
Does it put you in front of people who could become students, or parents of students?	If nobody in the room can ever enroll, it has to earn its place on fee or PR alone.
Is there a bigger, ongoing relationship behind it?	The counselor program is the prize. The client class is the door.
Is there genuine community-service or PR value?	Worth doing for its own sake, and a story the local press may want.
Can you get contact details or permission to follow up?	Without it, the goodwill evaporates.
Does it pull staff away during your peak class hours?	Your own students come first.
How much complexity does it add?	Extra staff, travel, billing and scheduling have a cost that never shows up on the invoice.
Are there policy, liability or insurance issues?	Especially with care agencies, schools and anything involving restraint.

What outside programs do I say yes to every time?

The ones built to feed the school. An after-school enrichment program promoted by a PE-teacher-for-the-day visit is my absolute favorite thing to do. In a school of 500 kids I’d typically expect around 400 permission slips back, about 100 kids registered for the program, and roughly a third of those, 33 to 35, enrolling. That’s a program designed from the start to turn into tuition. Read the after-school enrichment program playbook for how it works, and community scholarships for how to turn goodwill into enrollments on purpose.

Quick Answers

Should a martial arts school take a paid weekly daycare class?

Usually not. A $200-a-week contract takes your best hours, puts you in front of children whose parents never see you, and doesn’t feed the school.

Isn’t more income streams safer for a school?

Not really. A school’s primary income is tuition: initial, monthly and the occasional paid-in-full. Roll testing fees into tuition, don’t count on retail, and keep outside contracts rare.

When is an outside contract worth it?

When the fee is substantial (I’d take $15,000 for 10 lessons) or when it opens a bigger win, such as PR or an ongoing program for an organization’s adult staff.

Can I teach restraint techniques to care-agency staff?

Only in a way that complements their required crisis-intervention training and written policy. Get the policy and scope in writing, and check your insurance.

If you want the whole system rather than one fix at a time, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com, or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.