The May Roll-Call Method: Stop the Summer Revenue Dip

Updated October 20, 2026

You prevent the summer dip by changing the structure before summer arrives. Use a 12-month Trial Enrollment instead of month-to-month, sign a freeze agreement at the enrollment folder, and talk to every family in May about their summer schedule. Time gets added to the end of the program. Tuition keeps flowing.

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I hear it from school owners every spring. “Stephen, my revenue falls off a cliff in June, July and August.” Mom or dad walks in and says they want to cancel for the summer. Billy is going to Grandma’s. There is a trip, a camp, a custody schedule. The school owner nods, says “no problem,” and watches 15 to 30 percent of the monthly draft disappear.

In my schools, I never had a revenue dip over the summer. Not a small one. None. That was not luck, and it was not geography. It was a set of decisions made months earlier, and I want to walk you through every one of them in this article. I call the whole thing The May Roll-Call Method, because the single most important act in it happens in May, when you personally account for every student’s summer before summer starts.

The method has four parts:

Structure – the agreement that makes a summer cancellation unnecessary.
Paper – the freeze slip, delivered at the right moment.
Roll-call – the May conversations with every family.
Offer discipline – how to run a summer special without wrecking your enrollment flow.

Let’s take them in order, starting with why summer hurts so badly in the first place.

Why Summer Wrecks So Many Schools

Summer is not the problem. The way most schools sell and bill is the problem. Summer just exposes it.

When a family is on a month-to-month arrangement, they have exactly one decision to make every month: “Is this worth paying for right now?” In October, with practice three nights a week and a belt test coming up, the answer is yes without thinking. In July, with a beach week, a cousin’s wedding and a camp, the answer feels like no. The parent is not angry at you. They are being logical inside the structure you gave them.

Month-to-month means the family has no big incentive to pay you if they believe they will be busy and not attend. You taught them that attendance is what they are paying for. So when attendance drops, payment drops.

That is the first thing to understand, and it ties to everything I teach about retention: retention is not something you fix with a gimmick in June. It is the result of what the family believes they bought on day one.

The belief that causes the cancellation

If a parent believes they bought “classes,” then missing classes feels like waste, and cancelling feels like saving money. If a parent believes they bought a program, a path to black belt with a start, a middle and a destination, then a two-week trip is just a pause in the middle of something they are committed to finishing.

Same family, same calendar, same trip. Completely different decision, because the frame is different.

I explored that mindset in Stop Selling Mat Time, and it is the foundation of the summer strategy. If you sell mat time, you will always be fighting the calendar. If you sell a program, the calendar bends around the program.

Part One of the Method: Structure the Agreement Properly

Here is the first rule: if you do things month-to-month, you are setting yourself up for a summer dip. If instead you do a one-year agreement, followed by an agreement to black belt, it changes the dynamic completely.

I teach the 12-month Trial Enrollment for exactly this reason. It is a school-led evaluation of fit for the full black belt program. The family is not signing a loose arrangement they can drop whenever the weather turns nice. They are making a considered commitment, and we are evaluating whether the program fits the student. I wrote about the philosophy behind it in Goals, Not Contracts. The short version: a family that has a goal in front of them behaves differently from a family that has a bill in front of them.

The two-stage price structure

The second structural piece is how the money is laid out. A structure I have used and taught looks like this:

Stage one: an initial investment, for example $897 to start, then $397 per month on a 12-month agreement.
Stage two: at renewal, a higher-level investment, for example $1,500 to move forward and $697 per month for the next phase toward black belt.

Those are examples of the shape, not rules carved in stone. What matters is the effect. When a student moves from stage one into stage two, they are moving up a ladder. They are not renewing a gym membership. Nobody climbing a ladder wants to jump off for June, July and August and then try to find the same rung in September.

Compare that with the commodity approach. Industry average tuition sits around $140 to $185 a month, and the families paying that price have nothing invested, no ladder, and no reason not to cancel for the summer. The well-coached schools I work with charge $347 to $397 a month for new-student tuition, and those families are buying something worth protecting.

What the numbers do to your summer

Let’s run a simple example using a $375 monthly tuition. Say your school has 200 students on that tuition.

Monthly tuition draft: 200 x $375 = $75,000.
If 20 percent of families cancel or stop for three summer months: 40 students x $375 = $15,000 a month lost, which is $45,000 over the summer.
If the structure keeps even three-quarters of those families paying, you protect about $33,750 that quarter.

And that is before counting the rebuilding cost. A new student costs five to seven times more to acquire than to retain, roughly $150 to $300 per enrollment in ad spend and staff time. Every student you “let go for the summer” has to be re-acquired, and half of them never come back, which is the real damage. If you want the full economics, read the Two-Lever LTV System, because the summer is simply a place where lifetime value either compounds or leaks.

Part Two: The Freeze Slip

Structure alone is not enough. You need a clear, signed, boring piece of paper that says what happens when a student has to be away. I call it the freeze slip, and it solves the question every owner dreads: “Can we pause our payments for a couple of months?”

Here is the policy I have run for years.

If a student will be gone or sick for more than two weeks, the family fills out a one-page slip.
The slip says: “I will be gone from this date to this date. I understand that my payments are still due, but the time will be added to the end of my program.”
The parent signs. The family gets a copy. You keep a copy in the file.

That is it. Nobody loses anything. The student’s program is extended by the time they missed. The school keeps the revenue it was always going to receive. And the family has a clean, fair answer when they say, “We’ll be away.”

When and where to deliver the slip

Timing matters, and this is where many schools get it wrong. Do not unload the freeze policy during the enrollment conference. The enrollment conference has one job: helping the family make a good decision about the program. Do not clutter it with exceptions.

Deliver the freeze slip with the enrollment folder. That is the follow-up meeting, usually a week later or at the next class after they have signed and started. The folder contains the rules and regulations, the student’s information, the goal-setting materials. One of the items in that folder is the freeze slip, along with a plain explanation: “You signed up for the basic program, which is an annual membership. If you are going to be gone or out sick for more than two weeks, fill out this slip. Payments continue and we add the time to the end.”

I also build the language into the enrollment agreement itself. Paper and spoken words should say the same thing.

Every owner should be doing enrollment folders. If you are not, this is one more reason to start. It is a calm, low-pressure moment to set expectations while the family is excited and has not yet formed any bad habits.

Do not turn it into a long conversation

Unless the parent asks, keep this short. A two-sentence mention, the slip, a copy in their hands, and move on. If you make a policy sound like a big deal, you plant the idea that stopping is a big deal. If you say it casually, it sounds like what it is: a standard, fair detail.

When a parent does ask later, you already have the answer.

Scripts: Answering the Pause Question

The call that used to ruin an owner’s week now takes thirty seconds.

Parent: “We’re going to be busy this summer. Can we pause the payments for a couple of months?”

You: “Absolutely, we can pause your lessons. If you’re going to be out of town, we’ll note it in the file, keep your tuition running the way it is, and add all of that time to the end of your program. You won’t lose a thing. Before you go, let’s set up a few makeup classes so you’re on track for testing.”

Notice what happened. The lessons paused. The payments did not. The student’s progress was protected. The parent got a yes, and the school kept its revenue.

If the parent pushes back and says they would like the payments to stop too, you can answer calmly: “What we’ve found is that when families keep the tuition going, we can guarantee that time is credited at the end and your child stays right where they are. If we stopped the payments, we’d have to treat it like a new start in the fall, and I don’t want that for him.”

You are not being rigid. You are protecting the student.

Part Three: The May Roll-Call

Now we get to the heart of the method. A policy on paper is passive. The roll-call is active, and it is what separates schools that manage summer from schools that merely survive it.

We would do this proactively. In May, we would be talking to all of the students about their summer schedule. Every one of them.

Here is what I mean by “roll-call.” You or your leadership team take the full roster, student by student, and have a short conversation with each family. The questions are simple:

Are you going to be in town this summer?
Are you going to be out of town at any point?
Are there any periods when you will miss class? For how long, and why?
Where is the student right now in the testing cycle?

That is all. You are collecting information so you can act on it. Do not make this a sales call. Make it a planning conversation, the kind a good teacher has with a family at the end of a school year.

Use the ID card

The best tool for this is the student’s ID card or progress record. Go through it and make sure the lessons are on track for their next test. If a student is two classes short of testing eligibility and is leaving for three weeks, you want to schedule those classes now, in May, not discover the problem in September when the child is behind and embarrassed.

The goal is that no student loses ground over the summer. Falling behind in testing is one of the biggest silent reasons students quit in the fall. They return, find their friends have tested and moved up, feel behind, and stop coming. The roll-call protects against that.

The two-week trip example

Say a family tells you they are taking a two-week family vacation in July. (I will tell you what I tell my own students: skip the big theme park in July. But if they go, they go.) Here is how you handle it.

You say: “That sounds great. That’s about four lessons he will miss. Let’s get him in for some makeup classes before you leave. When you get back, he’ll still be on top of his testing cycle.”

That’s it. You have made four lessons of attendance happen early, kept the student on track, and shown the parent that your school notices and cares. A family who hears that does not cancel. They tell their friends.

The long-absence example

Now take the harder case: a divorced couple, living in two different cities, where the child spends three months of the summer with one parent. This is real, and in my experience it is more common than owners think.

Here is the answer: we do a summer hold on the lessons. The family keeps paying tuition. We make a note in the file that we will run makeup classes when the student returns. We add the time to the end of the program. The family loses nothing.

What you do not want is a family coming in wanting to stop payments and stop lessons because they are busy. There are legitimate exceptions, a student who is literally gone for three months, but even then the answer is the same: credit the time, add it to the end, and work on getting the lessons made up so they do not fall behind.

What about Zoom classes?

If it were up to me, I would never run another online class for the rest of my life, and I think most of our parents would agree. But it is an opportunity if you want it. A student at a grandparent’s house can log in and train. I doubt you will get much effectiveness from it, but it is a legitimate second option for families who will be away and want to stay connected. Offer it, do not push it, and do not count on it to carry a student’s progress.

Be realistic about how many are really gone

Here is something that calms owners down. In most cases, outside the long-absence example above, people are not gone for three months. Frankly, how would they hold a job? Most people are gone a week. Maybe two. In an affluent area where a parent works from a laptop, a few families may leave for August. Overseas I once heard of a school where it seemed like the whole country left for the month. Those are exceptions.

The honest truth is that for most schools, the summer dip is not caused by long absences. It is caused by short absences combined with a month-to-month mindset. Fix the mindset and the structure, and the problem mostly disappears.

Part Four: Summer Offers Without the Hangover

The other half of the summer question is new-student marketing. Many owners run a summer special to fill the slow months. I have done all kinds of summer offers over the years. Here are the rules I have learned.

Rule one: treat the summer offer like every other offer

Whatever the offer is, run it exactly like the others. A new student comes in for intro one, intro two, and enrolls at intro two. You do not run a three-month offer and wait until the end of three months to see if they want to continue. They will not. A three-month offer with no enrollment decision attached is a three-month vacation from your sales process.

Rule two: shorter is easier to convert

For years I ran a three-month summer offer. Then I changed it to a six-week offer. Then I changed it to a summer special and ran the normal process we always run. Honestly, I am not sure it made much difference. But I will tell you that the shorter the offer, the easier it is to convert someone to an enrollment. A four-week or six-week offer may be the sweet spot.

A worked example of a paid six-week offer

Here is how a paid six-week offer can work, using the numbers I teach as an illustration.

The family pays $197 for six weeks, which includes the uniform.
They take the first couple of classes. You give them plenty of information. By the second class, they have enough of a sense of the program to decide whether to move forward.
At the enrollment conference, you say: “You’ve already invested $197. If you enroll today, we’ll give you a $300 credit for that, take it off the initial investment, and still give you the six weeks. The normal enrollment is $100, and since you came in from the summer offer, we’re giving you a $300 discount if you finalize today.”
Then you add the six weeks to the end of the program.

You are flipping them from a short-term purchase into the full program in a single visit, while the value is fresh. The six weeks they have already used are not lost, they are added on. The family feels they got credit for everything they did.

The offer matrix

I always think about offers as a matrix with two axes: paid versus free, and long versus short.

	Short	Long
Free	Best combination of volume and easy conversion	High volume, harder to convert
Paid	Easiest to convert, lower volume	Hardest overall

Here is how I read it. From the standpoint of how easy it is to convert somebody once they are in the door, I would rather have a super short paid offer. From the standpoint of what pulls better, free offers, especially online, almost always outpull paid offers. And a two-lesson or two-week offer is easier to convert naturally than a one-month or six-month offer.

So if I have my druthers, I prefer free and short. It is the best combination of volume and ease of conversion. You get leads in the door, and you get them to a decision quickly.

Putting the Four Parts Together: A Year-Round Calendar

Here is a simple calendar. Treat it as a checklist.

Year-round (set it once)

Enroll every new student on the 12-month Trial Enrollment.
Include the freeze language in the enrollment agreement.
Hold an enrollment folder meeting a week after signing, and include the freeze slip.

March and April (prepare)

Review your roster and flag students who are close to testing.
Train your staff on the pause-question script.
Decide whether you will run a summer offer, and make it short.

May (the roll-call)

Contact every family about their summer schedule.
Check each ID card against the testing cycle.
Schedule makeup classes for anyone leaving.
Hand out freeze slips for anyone gone more than two weeks.
Note holds and added time in each file.

June through August (protect)

Run your normal intro process on any summer-offer leads, and enroll at intro two.
Track makeup class completion weekly.
Watch the draft report. Every cancellation request gets the pause script before it gets processed.

Late August (the bridge)

Call every family on a hold and confirm their return date.
Book their first class back before they come in.

If you want a more detailed system for the full season, I laid out the Summer-Proof System, and for the return-to-class side of things, the Bridge-Back System shows you how to get families back through the door in September.

Common Mistakes That Create the Dip

I see the same errors over and over.

Mistake 1: Staying month-to-month. If you do nothing else, change this. Month-to-month is the structural root of the summer dip.

Mistake 2: Saying “sure, cancel for the summer” because it feels nice. It feels nice for a day. It costs you a student for months, and you must pay again to bring them back.

Mistake 3: Waiting for families to tell you. By the time a parent tells you they are cancelling, they have made the decision. The May roll-call gets you in front of the decision before it forms.

Mistake 4: Explaining the freeze policy in a long, apologetic speech. Short, confident, casual. Hand the slip, move on.

Mistake 5: Letting students fall behind in testing. The families do not cancel in July. They cancel in September when the child feels behind. Protect the testing cycle all summer.

Mistake 6: Running a long summer offer with no enrollment point. Decide at intro two, every time.

Mistake 7: Delegating the roll-call to someone who does not know the students. If the person making the calls does not know the child, the call feels like a collection effort. Use your instructors or leadership team, people who know the kids by name.

How This Connects to Everything Else

The summer dip is a retention problem wearing a seasonal costume. If you solve it at the structural level, you also improve your fall, your winter, and your average student lifetime. A school that holds its students through the summer starts September with its full roster, which means it can put marketing dollars into growth instead of replacing losses.

That is the “plugging the holes in the bucket” principle that Grand Master Jeff Smith has always taught. Owners love to hunt for big, flashy growth ideas. But it is usually the small details, the freeze slip, the May roll-call, the makeup class on the calendar, that stop the leaks. Fill the bucket faster and plug the holes at the same time, and growth compounds.

It also fits the point I make constantly about not copying broke school owners. If the owners around you accept a summer dip as normal, that is a norm worth ignoring. In my schools, it was never normal.

Your Implementation Checklist

Use this list this week.

Pull your current agreements. Are any of your students month-to-month? Make a plan to move them to a program structure.
Write your freeze slip on one page, using the language above.
Add the freeze slip to your enrollment folder.
Put the enrollment folder meeting on the calendar for every new student, one week after they sign.
Write out your pause-question script and role-play it with every staff member.
Schedule your May roll-call: who calls whom, by what date, and how results are logged.
Decide on your summer offer. Make it short. Make it enroll at intro two.
Build a “holds” list so every frozen student has a return date and a bridge call.
Review the numbers every month: how many cancellations were avoided by holds, how much revenue was protected.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I say when a parent wants to stop payments for the summer?

Tell them you can pause the lessons, but the tuition continues and you will add all of the missed time to the end of the program so they lose nothing. Offer makeup classes before they leave. Staying calm and specific makes it feel like a fair policy, not a refusal.

Should I run a summer special to fill the slow months?

You can, but treat it like every other offer: intro one, intro two, enroll at intro two. Shorter offers convert more easily, so a four- to six-week offer works well. In my experience, free and short brings the best mix of volume and conversion, and a paid six-week offer with a credit toward enrollment converts well.

When should I explain the freeze policy to new families?

Not in the enrollment conference. Cover it in the enrollment folder meeting, usually a week later or the next class after they sign. Put it in the paperwork too, so the written agreement and your spoken explanation match. Keep it short unless the parent asks questions.

Your Next Step

If you want me to look at your current agreements, your summer plan and your retention numbers and tell you exactly where the leaks are, book your Free Consultation (Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value).

And if you want the teaching foundation behind everything in this article, grab my free book, Extraordinary Teaching. Students who love their teachers do not cancel for the summer, and that is where retention really starts.

About the author: Stephen Oliver, MBA and 10th Degree Black Belt, is 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 school owner since 1975, he founded Mile High Karate in 1983 and has promoted more than 1,000 Black Belts. His coaching team includes Grand Master Jeff Smith and Chief Master Greg Moody, PhD.