The Dimmer Switch System: Grow Your School Through Any Shutdown

When a shutdown hits your market, most school owners hunker down and hope to survive it. That’s the wrong move, and it’s the difference between schools that shrink and schools that set record months. Here is the five-stage system I call the Dimmer Switch Growth System, built from real member results during a nationwide shutdown, for protecting your student base, marketing while your competitors go dark, and reopening without losing momentum.

Watch the original video above — a members-only training I recorded with Grandmaster Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody during a nationwide shutdown, distilled here into a system you can apply the next time your market disrupts.

Why “Hope You Survive” Is a Losing Strategy

Every time a disruption hits — a shutdown order, a natural disaster, a local economic shock — I watch school owners make the same two bad assumptions, and both of them cost real money. The first is believing that because the state told you to close your doors, your business actually closed. It didn’t. You moved. Think of it exactly the way Jeff Smith frames it for our members: you didn’t go out of business, you relocated from a physical building to a virtual classroom a few miles — or a few clicks — away. If you moved your school down the street and only sent one email announcing the new address, you’d expect to lose most of your students. That’s precisely what happens to owners who send one lifeless Facebook post announcing “we’re going virtual” and then wonder why only 20 or 30 percent of their students show up.

The second bad assumption is that everyone is suddenly broke, so marketing and full-price enrollment are somehow in poor taste. This is almost always false. If a family was affording $150–$400 a month in tuition before the disruption, they are very rarely a minimum-wage household living paycheck to paycheck — martial arts tuition at any real price point is a household that has already chosen to spend discretionary income on their kids’ development. In many shutdown periods, government relief and unemployment benefits actually put more short-term cash in some households than they had before. The lesson isn’t to ignore that some families genuinely struggle — it’s to stop assuming an entire market is suddenly unable to pay, and to stop making decisions based on a panic narrative instead of your actual numbers.

I’ve coached school owners through enough disruptions to know the pattern: the ones who freeze, cancel contracts out of sympathy, and go quiet on marketing are the ones who are still digging out a year later. The ones who follow a system are the ones who post record months in the middle of a crisis. That system is what I want to walk you through.

The Dimmer Switch Growth System

I borrowed the core metaphor from a public health official’s press conference: recovery from a shutdown isn’t a light switch — instant, all-or-nothing — it’s a dimmer switch, gradually turning back up over weeks and months, sometimes flickering backward before it goes forward again. I’ve built that metaphor into a full operating system for school owners, because the schools that win are the ones who treat every stage of the dimmer — fully dark, partially lit, fully bright — as its own distinct phase with its own playbook. The Dimmer Switch Growth System has five stages:

• Stage 1 — Protect the Base: Keep 90%+ of your existing students fully engaged during the disruption.
• Stage 2 — Market Where Everyone Else Went Quiet: Exploit the marketing opportunities that only exist during a disruption.
• Stage 3 — Hold Your Price and Structure: Never discount your way through a crisis.
• Stage 4 — Reopen on a Dimmer, Not a Light Switch: Bring students back in stages, exceeding safety expectations.
• Stage 5 — The Re-Grand-Opening: Use the reopening moment to add students aggressively, not just recover what you lost.

Let’s go stage by stage, because the owners who skip a stage — especially Stage 1 — never get the payoff from the stages that follow.

Stage 1 — Protect the Base

Before you spend a dollar on new marketing, you have to lock down your existing student body. Industry-wide during a shutdown, we see schools that manage this well lose only 1–2% of their students beyond normal attrition — essentially holding to the sub-2%-per-month attrition target we coach at well-run schools anyway. Schools that manage it poorly lose 50% or more in a matter of weeks. That gap is not luck. It’s execution.

The “You Just Moved Your School” Principle

Everything about your program stays the same during a disruption — the schedule, the curriculum, the belt progression, the character lessons — except the delivery mechanism changes. If you started class at 4:00 and finished at 8:00, you keep that exact schedule. If you tested stripes and belts on a cycle, you keep testing on that cycle, just with video verification instead of in-person. The families who feel like nothing fundamental changed except the room they’re standing in are the families who stay. The families who feel like the entire program dissolved into “watch some videos on your own time” are the families who quietly stop showing up and eventually cancel.

Beyond holding the existing schedule, the schools posting the best retention numbers during a disruption actually add value rather than just maintaining it — extra morning workout sessions, midday leadership lessons, additional textbook assignments, one-on-one check-ins on technique. Parents notice. We had members collecting spontaneous testimonials from families saying the school was providing more value during the shutdown than before it, specifically because the owner used the disruption as a reason to over-deliver instead of an excuse to under-deliver.

Overcommunicate Through Every Channel, Not Just One

I coached one school owner during this exact period who was baffled that only 20% of his students transitioned to virtual class. When we dug into it, the entire communication plan was one email per week. One channel, one touch, seven days apart — that’s not a transition plan, that’s a rumor. Compare that to the members who hit 90–95% participation: they called every family personally, they mailed a physical letter, they texted reminders the morning of class and again ten minutes before it started, and they emailed on top of that. Multiple channels matter because people miss things — an email lands in a spam filter, a text gets buried, but a phone call and a piece of real mail in an actual mailbox get through. During a disruption, response rates on every one of these channels go up, because people are paying more attention to their phones, their inboxes, and their mailboxes than they normally would.

Don’t stop at “here’s the new class time.” Walk families through the mechanics — how to open the meeting app, how to position the camera so the instructor can actually see and correct technique, how the assistant instructors will run breakout groups. One thing I noticed working with our members: they were literally getting on the phone with parents to walk them through downloading the app. That extra ten minutes of hand-holding is the difference between a family that gives up after one confusing login attempt and a family that shows up every day for the next two months.

Stage 2 — Market Where Everyone Else Went Quiet

This is the stage most owners get completely backward. Their instinct during a disruption is to pull back on marketing because it feels tone-deaf or wasteful. In reality, a disruption is one of the single best marketing windows you will ever get, for three reasons: advertising costs drop, your prospect list becomes dramatically more responsive, and entire categories of organizations suddenly need a partner they never needed before.

I teach what I originally borrowed and adapted from Jay Abraham — the idea of a “Parthenon” of marketing pillars, a wide base of different lead sources rather than one single column holding up your whole enrollment pipeline. During a disruption, several of your normal pillars disappear (you can’t run a booth at the movie theater or the Easter event that isn’t happening), but the pillars that remain — paid social, community partnerships, prospect reactivation, and press — become dramatically more powerful, not less.

Reactivate Every Dormant Lead You Have

During a normal month, a cold outreach to your old prospect list — the intros who never enrolled, the students who dropped out, the people who filled out a form at an event two years ago and never came back — might get you a 1% response. During a disruption, that same list can respond at 10–20%. People who normally have a packed calendar of competing activities — youth sports leagues, gym memberships, other extracurriculars — suddenly have those activities canceled entirely, and they’re looking for something structured to do with their kids. Pull every list you have: former students, past intros who never enrolled, birthday party attendees, buddy-day guests, anyone who ever gave you contact information. Reach every one of them by phone, text, email, and real mail — not once, but repeatedly, because a message that goes into a spam filter the first time often gets through the second or third time.

Partner With Every Organization Whose Routine Just Broke

Churches, daycares, elementary and middle schools, Boy Scout troops, youth sports leagues, and summer camp operators all have one thing in common during a shutdown: their normal activities are canceled, but they still want to serve their community. Offer them free virtual classes for their members or students in exchange for access to their list, or simply ask them to forward your offer to their people. One school in our coaching group generated twenty leads from a single flyer that one partner school sent to its families — a single partnership, one afternoon of leads. Another member generated 300 intro registrations from a single elementary school partnership, off a student body of only a few hundred kids. These are organizations that would normally never have the bandwidth to work with you, because they already had a full calendar of their own programming. During a disruption, that calendar is empty and they’re looking for exactly the kind of positive, structured activity you provide.

Get Inside the Story the Press Is Already Telling

Every disruption dominates the news cycle, and local and national media are constantly hunting for human-interest angles inside that story. The lesson I’ve taught for decades — find the story that’s already being told and figure out how you fit inside it — has never been easier to execute than during a widely covered crisis. Reporters covering “small businesses struggling” are actively looking for the counter-narrative: a business that’s thriving, adapting, and serving families better than ever. A martial arts school teaching kids discipline and structure over video during a lockdown, or running socially-distanced classes with a member wearing a mask during a gradual reopening, is exactly the kind of positive local story a TV producer wants. Members of our coaching group picked up newspaper, radio, and TV coverage during this period simply by reaching out and offering their school as that story.

Stage 3 — Hold Your Price and Your Structure

The single worst piece of advice circulating during any market disruption is to change your program structure or discount your price until you’re “back to normal.” I’ve seen owners drop to a bargain monthly rate for virtual-only classes, or switch from a 12-month Trial Enrollment to loose month-to-month, assuming that’s what a struggling market needs. It’s backward. During a disruption, our best-performing members were enrolling new students at $497–$697 to start and $197–$297 a month on the same 12-month agreement they always used — no discount, no restructuring. The only thing that changed was the delivery: a camera and a screen instead of a room.

I want to walk through an anonymized case, because it illustrates the point precisely. I was coaching a school owner in a small town — a market with over a dozen competing schools serving a population of roughly 30,000 — who had shrunk from about 120 active students to under 50 and was charging $49 a month. His instinct was to blame the competition and the local demographics. Neither was the real problem. I had another member in a comparable small-town, modest-income market who had grown to nearly 100 new enrollments in a single month at a real price point. The difference wasn’t the town. It was that one owner was “marketing in a vacuum” — a phrase I picked up from Dan Kennedy — reaching prospects before they had the idea to train, positioning the value, and building a pipeline, while the other was waiting passively for the phone to ring at a price too low to fund real marketing or real staff. At $49 a month, you cannot afford enough advertising to reach the market, and you cannot afford to pay great instructors, which is exactly why that owner was stuck. The fix wasn’t a better zoom setup. It was a price point that could actually fund growth, and a marketing pillar aggressive enough to fill the calendar.

Run the math yourself. At $49 a month with 50 students, you’re generating roughly $2,450 a month in tuition — not enough to sustain a facility lease, pay staff, and fund marketing. At $197 a month with 100 students, you’re generating almost $19,700 a month. At our recommended premium range of $347–$397 a month (I like to model $375 as the representative figure), 100 students generates $37,500 a month, or $450,000 a year — before you’ve added a single extra revenue stream. The price point isn’t a detail. It’s the fuel tank for everything else in this system, including the marketing budget that gets you through the next disruption.

The same discipline applies to your enrollment and renewal process — don’t reinvent it because delivery moved to video. If you were closing 80% of your intros in person before a disruption, you should be closing close to 80% virtually, once you get comfortable with the mechanics. Run the same sequence: a first appointment (in a group setting or one-on-one video call), a placement into an appropriate class, and then a private conversation — a breakout room works exactly like pulling someone into your office — where you present the same offer and the same 12-month structure you always present. New students I coached during this period had their enrollment agreement delivered curbside, initialed on a clipboard through a car window, or emailed for a signature and a photographed return. The channel for signing paperwork is flexible. The offer, the price, and the structure are not.

Stage 4 — Reopen on a Dimmer, Not a Light Switch

When restrictions start to ease, resist the urge to flip everything back to “normal” overnight. Your student body will not move as one unit — think of it as roughly three groups. About a quarter of your families will be ready to come back into the building the day it’s allowed, comfortable with contact drills and full class sizes. About a quarter will remain cautious for a long time, unwilling to send a child into any group setting until they’re fully confident it’s safe. The other half sit in the middle — willing to return, but only if they can see you’re taking real precautions.

Your job during this phase is to serve all three groups simultaneously, not force everyone onto one track. Keep virtual classes running in parallel for the cautious quarter and for new intros who aren’t ready to step into a building yet. For the students returning in person, take whatever your local officials, health authorities, and governing bodies are recommending, and visibly exceed it — temperature checks at the door, marked floor spacing, required masks (ideally school-branded), visible disinfecting between every class, and capped class sizes that guarantee distance between students who don’t live in the same household. The goal isn’t just compliance. It’s giving your most anxious families a visible reason to trust you specifically, ahead of the gym down the street or the youth sports league that’s cutting corners.

Overcommunication matters just as much here as it did during the shutdown itself. Send a detailed letter — genuinely detailed, multiple pages if needed — explaining exactly what precautions you’re taking and why, mailed in a priority envelope so it doesn’t get lost in the pile. Follow it with texts, emails, and retargeting ads showing your current student base that you’re open and operating safely. Some of the strongest personal-touch moments during this period were the low-tech ones: a drive-through belt graduation with tables of trophies and belts staged for pickup by time slot, or a family arriving curbside to receive a uniform and sign an agreement on a clipboard through the car window. Don’t underestimate how much trust those small, visible, human touches rebuild after weeks of distance.

Stage 5 — The Re-Grand-Opening: Add Students, Don’t Just Recover Them

The biggest mistake in the reopening phase is treating it as a recovery project — trying to claw back to exactly where you were before the disruption. Treat it instead as a re-grand-opening, with the explicit goal of ending up bigger than you started. Set an aggressive, dated target: I coach owners to aim for 100 new students inside six to eight weeks of reopening, using the same Parthenon of marketing pillars from Stage 2, now amplified by the pent-up demand of families who’ve been isolated for weeks and are actively looking for structured activity for their kids.

Run the lead economics honestly so you know what to budget. During this period, members running paid social campaigns were generating leads in the $7–$10 range, converting roughly 60–70% of leads to a scheduled appointment, and closing 60–70% of appointments to enrollment. If you need 100 new students and your intro-to-enrollment close rate is a healthy 60–70%, you need somewhere in the neighborhood of 150–170 intros, which at $7–$10 a lead and reasonable show/close ratios is a real but entirely fundable marketing budget — not a mystery, a spreadsheet. If your instinct is to spend $50 on Facebook and expect a full school, recalibrate: real advertising on Facebook, Google, or YouTube is a paid, professionally-run channel, not the same thing as posting an event and hoping people show up organically.

As you fill back up, reconsider your class structure rather than defaulting to exactly what you had before. One structural fix I coach constantly: build more family classes where parents train alongside their kids, rather than segregating every class strictly by age and rank. It solves two problems at once — it gives you fuller classes even in a smaller facility, and it builds a stronger, stickier household relationship with the school, since now two or three family members are personally invested in staying enrolled rather than just one child.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I lower my prices or switch to month-to-month during a shutdown or slow reopening?

No. Discounting your price or abandoning your 12-month Trial Enrollment structure during a disruption sends the signal that your program is worth less right when families need the structure and consistency most. Hold your price point — I recommend $347–$397 a month for a premium, well-coached program — and hold your enrollment structure. The only thing that should change during a disruption is the delivery mechanism, not the offer.

How many students should I realistically expect to keep during a full shutdown?

With a disciplined communication and program plan, you should be able to hold 90–95% of your active student body, keeping monthly attrition near the sub-2% target we coach at well-run schools generally. Owners who lose 40–50% of their students during a disruption almost always trace it back to thin, single-channel communication and a program that visibly shrank instead of simply changing rooms.

Is it tone-deaf to keep marketing aggressively during a crisis?

No — it’s often the single best marketing window you’ll get. Ad costs on platforms like Facebook can drop as advertiser competition falls, response rates on dormant prospect lists can jump from roughly 1% to 10–20%, and organizations with canceled programming become newly receptive partners. Going quiet on marketing during a disruption doesn’t protect your reputation; it just hands the pent-up demand to whichever school in your market kept marketing.

Your Next Step

If your school is navigating a disruption right now — or you want a system in place before the next one hits — the fastest path is to get a second set of eyes on your specific numbers: your retention, your price point, your marketing pillars, and your reopening plan. Schedule a Free Consultation and Personal Evaluation (a $1,297 value) and we’ll map exactly where you’re leaking students, what a real price point should be doing for your revenue, and which marketing pillars will move the needle fastest in your market.

If lead generation and enrollment growth is your biggest gap right now, grab my free book, Six Simple Steps to Add 100 Students, at FillYourSchool.com — it walks through the exact marketing pillars referenced in Stage 2 and Stage 5 above in far more depth than I can cover here.

For a deeper library of growth strategy beyond this system, visit the School Growth pillar hub. And two adjacent areas worth exploring while you’re building out your own disruption playbook: Marketing, for the full breakdown of the Parthenon approach to lead generation, and Retention, for the systems that keep your attrition below 2% a month even outside of a crisis.

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.