The Three Jobs of Every In-House Event (And Why Owners Cancel the Ones That Are Working)

On our Leadership Mastery call this week, Grand Master Jeff Smith interrupted a retention discussion — which he is entitled to do — and said this:

“I’ve had people tell me, ‘Oh, I don’t do birthday parties because it’s always my advanced students and they only bring other students.'”

You have heard that sentence. You may have said it. Substitute anything you like for “birthday parties.” We dropped the nunchuck seminar, nobody new came. Movie night didn’t produce anything.

Here is his correction, and it’s the whole article in one line:

“There’s really three reasons to do all of these events in the school. It’s not just to get new students.”

That’s not a pep talk, it’s a measurement problem. If an event has three jobs and you score it on one, you will cancel events that are making you money — you just won’t see it on the line you’re watching.

Job One: New Enrollments

The obvious one, and the only one you’re already tracking. Master Smith: “What is the purpose of a buddy day or a social event for them to bring a friend? Yes, it’s to get new enrollments.”

An internal event is a good lead source — leads pre-qualified by a friend, at almost no cost next to paid media. That counts. But it’s one third of the scorecard, and if it’s your whole scorecard you’ll cancel the wrong thing.

Job Two: Make Your Basic Students Want Black Belt Training

Here is where the framing does the work. His positioning language is worth stealing word for word:

“I always said that our Black Belt leadership members have invited the basic students to attend one of their training events because these are the things that they’re learning on their journey to Black Belt. So we wanted to give you an opportunity to see what you’re going to be doing after Basic on the way to Black Belt training. And we would love to have you bring a friend so they could see.”

Notice what that does structurally. The event is not “a Buddy Day.” It is a Black Belt and Leadership Program training event, and the basic students are guests of the advanced students. That reframe gives your Leadership students status — hosts, not extras. It gives your basic students an experience of the upgrade instead of a description of it. And it demotes the friend invitation from the point of the event to a courtesy add-on. His summary: “The purpose of that is that that’s going to get them, which is the second thing, motivated to want to be in Black Belt training.”

Think about what you do instead. You sit a parent down at a renewal conference and explain, in words, that the Black Belt Program includes weapons and sparring and leadership training. Words. Three weeks earlier you could have had that kid on the floor with nunchucks in his hands next to a brown belt — and then you don’t explain anything at renewal. You just ask.

That’s an upgrade-conversion event disguised as a recruiting event, and scoring it on enrollments is how you cancel it.

Job Three: Give Your Black Belt and Leadership Students a Reason to Show Up

This is the piece almost nobody does, and the cheapest one on the list.

Master Smith: “The third thing is that we want to do something to get our black belt and leadership program students excited too. And we would always do the weapon we would be doing at that event that month — the training event would be whatever weapon we were going to be doing in the next cycle. See, we have our curriculum planned out for the year, so we know we’re working on this weapon this cycle, next cycle’s going to be this weapon. So while they’re learning the nunchuck, now we’re going to give them a jumpstart to learn the bo staff or the kama or whatever weapon you’re doing next.”

Sit with the economics, because this costs nothing. You were going to run the event and teach something at it anyway. By choosing the next cycle’s weapon instead of a random novelty, you’ve given your most valuable students — the ones paying the most, closest to Black Belt, who become your instructor pipeline — a reason to attend an event nominally for beginners. They aren’t doing you a favor. They’re getting a head start on material they’ll be graded on in six weeks.

One Saturday morning now does three things: advanced students come for the jumpstart, basic students come to see what’s after Basic, friends come because your students invited them. As Master Smith put it: “And so then all of those students want to come.”

The Ambassador Stripes: Reward the Behavior, Not the Outcome

So how do you get the invitations to happen? He rewards them through the ambassador program, and gave the numbers exactly:

“If the friend comes, they get a stripe on the belt. If the friend comes and takes an intro, they get a five bonus stripe. And if the friend signs up, they get a 10 bonus stripe. That’s how we did the stripes, and that’s how students ended up with over a hundred stripes when they were testing to qualify for the MVP awards that we did by dividing into the different groups and getting a first place out of each of them.”

One, five, ten. Most schools get this backwards and pay only on enrollment — a free month, a gift card, a trophy, but only if the friend signs. So a nine-year-old who brought three friends and got zero enrollments got nothing. Do that twice and the kid stops bringing friends. You’ve accidentally trained your best ambassador to quit.

Master Smith’s ladder rewards the behavior first. Friend shows up? Stripe. Takes an intro? Five more. Enrolls? Ten more. The kid controls the first rung completely — asking a friend is entirely within his power — so the system keeps producing whether or not your conversion is good that month. And it stacks, which is how you get “over a hundred stripes” on a belt at testing time. That’s a compensation plan for children, better designed than most schools use for adults.

Underneath All Three Jobs: You Don’t Drop Out of Friendships

Here is the one I’d put on your office wall:

“What I found is that students will drop out of activities that they are not engaged with, that they are not part of. But when they have friends there and they connect with the instructor, those are the ones that stay longer. It’s those ones on the sideline that never got engaged, that never felt like they were part of the school, and they went on to something else.”

And then: “If you made them feel like they were part of the school and they had friends there — see, you don’t drop out of friendships.”

That is why the social event, the one with no curriculum in it, is not a wasted Friday night. What he actually does at one: “The social event would be to do games and do skill drills where you have teams where they get to know each other and make friendships.” He isn’t throwing a party. He’s manufacturing friendships on purpose, because the friendship is the retention mechanism.

Then he took it to family, and gave Jason Purcell deserved credit on the way:

“It has to be a family. Jason probably has the best name of all the schools. Family Black Belt Academy. Family. You’ve got to treat it like a family. And if you had a family, people have to know their names. If you have a big extended family and you have a big family reunion, everybody, cousins and all, they come, they got to introduce themselves.”

That kills the excuse. At a family reunion, somebody walks over and says who they are. That’s the standard.

How You Actually Manufacture a Friendship

Master Smith doesn’t hope this happens. He trains it:

“I have my students trained that every time a new student comes in, everybody is expected to introduce themselves before that person leaves that day.”

Everybody. Before they leave. That day. And he builds it into class so it needs no ceremony: “We’re doing paddle drills — introduce yourself to each other. We’re stretching or doing a partner exercise — introduce yourself to somebody.”

Then he threw down a challenge, and I’m passing it through:

“I’ll tell you this right now, my students, 90% of them knew the name of everybody in class, because they were doing things like that. But I guarantee you, 90% of you guys, if you have your students stand up and say, who knows his name or her name, you’re going to get maybe one or two.”

Go test it this week. Stop class, point at a kid, ask who knows his name. Two hands in a class of twenty and you’ve found your dropout problem, and it has nothing to do with your curriculum.

Where Master Smith and I Differ — Honestly

Sherry, who runs US Kung Fu Center, asked the right follow-up:

“When I have a new student come in for the first group class, which is the second intro, I introduce them to some students and I introduce the parents to some other parents in the lobby, but it kind of falls flat. Is there some verbiage I can use to pre-frame the kids and parents?”

Master Smith’s answer surprised me. He doesn’t do it on the first lesson at all: “I don’t do it on the first intro. Now, when they’re there for the second intro, now they’re up in front of the class, I’m introducing them to the class. The orientation, that’s a little semi-private, and I try not to do that engagement then until they’re in with the regular group.”

There’s real logic there — the first lesson is controlled and a crowd of strangers can dilute it. I see it differently, and said so on the call:

“What my perspective was is you train everyone on staff, everybody on the tiers of the Leadership Program, to be introducing themselves and greeting everybody every time, regardless. And that’s where I think you and I might differ on that a little bit, Master Smith. Nothing more impressive than somebody who’s there for the first time and a 14-year-old walks over and introduces themselves to mom and dad and to the child, and then everybody else goes through that.”

A trained 14-year-old brown belt making eye contact, getting the name and introducing that family to two other staff members is worth more than anything I say in the enrollment conference.

We are not far apart. We want the identical outcome — a new person who feels known before they leave — and we differ on timing and on who does it. He waits for the group class and uses the student body; I do it from minute one with trained staff and Leadership Program students. Pick whichever you can execute well. What you cannot do is neither.

The Name Game and the Dessert Principle

Sherry also brought back something from visiting Krista Wells’ school: when a new student comes in, the class forms a circle, throws a ball, and says each other’s names.

Master Smith: “Beautiful game. Excellent game.” And then the class-architecture rule for where to put it:

“At the end of the class, we always end it with a skill drill or a game or something. I call that the dessert. The warmups are kind of the appetizer. Your main curriculum training is the main course. And then you end with the dessert. And what brings them back is that dessert.”

If your class ends with a bow and a dismissal, the last thing your students felt was the end of work.

My own version, from years of beginner classes: first person introduces themselves, everybody says the name. Second person introduces themselves, then we go back through the first name and the second name, and keep going in order — Joey, Billy, Bob, Sue — “to the point where they’d said the first person’s name 16 times, there’s 16 people in class, second person’s name 15 times.” Then: “Okay, who can tell us all the names?” And anchor the faces to the names. Four minutes, and it beats any icebreaker I’ve seen.

Why the Beginner Class Deserves This Much Attention

Keep in mind the beginner class is a bubble. The people who know each other in the beginner’s class — the people who are gold, orange, green together — are going to be the same people who move up through Black Belt. You’re not running a friendly class. You’re forming a cohort that travels together for four years.

We proved this at scale long ago. One of the primary reasons we built the Black Belt prep process many, many years ago was to bond all the brown belts from the different schools together, so the black belts would know each other before they got there. You can still see it at the Black Belt retreats — whatever prep cycle they went to was like a badge of honor, and they all knew each other and continue to train together.

Build the cohort at white belt and they carry each other to black belt. Fail at it and every student runs the gauntlet alone — exactly the condition Master Smith described: on the sideline, never engaged, gone to something else.

The Math That Should Reorganize Your Calendar

Earlier in that meeting I laid out the arithmetic that makes this urgent:

“Doubling the number of new students you get per month or cutting in half the number of students that drop out have essentially the same impact on the growth of your school. Except really the more valuable of the two is the student retention factor.”

Why more valuable? “Because what happens when you fix dropout rates, you end up getting people into year two, year three, year four. You get many more people to black belt, you get many more people into your instructor pipeline. You accelerate the path to referrals.”

And I’ll own our part in why you haven’t heard this enough: “We’re guilty of spending an awful lot of time talking about marketing and how to do online marketing, how to do community outreach and so forth. But the student retention really is the key to getting off that hamster wheel of constantly having to feed new people in, constantly meeting all these new people that never develop very far into the school, enrolling people who then end up disappearing.”

Put the halves together. Retention is worth more than marketing, and two of an event’s three jobs are retention jobs. The event you canceled for producing “only two enrollments” may have been the highest-return hour on your calendar, and you shut it down with a spreadsheet.

Build the Calendar Backwards, Then Score It Correctly

First, plan the curriculum before you plan the events. Master Smith’s mechanic only works in that order: “We have our curriculum planned out for the year, so we know we’re working on this weapon this cycle, next cycle’s going to be this weapon.” Lay out a blank twelve months and fill in the cycles first — which weapon, which sparring emphasis, which form. Then hang the events on that skeleton so every event previews what’s next. Do it in that order and job three is free. Do it backwards and you’re picking themes at random three weeks out.

Second, score every event on all three jobs. Write down four numbers, not one:

1. New prospects who attended, intros booked, enrollments.
2. Basic students who attended, and how many upgraded to Black Belt or Leadership within 60 days.
3. Black Belt and Leadership students who attended, as a percentage of that program’s enrollment.
4. New names learned — how many students can name the newest people in the school.

If an event scores badly on all four, kill it. If it scores badly on enrollments but pulled most of your Leadership Program and produced four upgrades, you don’t have an event problem. You have a scorecard problem, and that’s an easy fix.

As Master Smith said, kids want to stay active in things they can enjoy with other people. That is the entire business we’re in. Every event on your calendar is either building that or it isn’t — and enrollments are only the part you can see.

FAQ

What are the three purposes of an in-house martial arts school event?

Every internal event — Buddy Day, nunchuck seminar, board-breaking night, movie night — does three jobs: it produces new enrollments, it makes basic students want Black Belt training by previewing that curriculum, and it excites Black Belt and Leadership Program students by teaching next cycle’s weapon early. Two of the three show up in retention.

How does the ambassador stripe system work in a martial arts school?

Jeff Smith’s ambassador program rewards behavior, not just outcomes. If a student’s friend attends, one stripe. If the friend takes an intro, five bonus stripes. If the friend enrolls, ten bonus stripes. Students reached over a hundred stripes by testing time, which qualified them for MVP awards.

Why do martial arts students really quit?

Jeff Smith’s answer: students drop out of activities they are not engaged with and not part of, while the ones with friends there, who connect with the instructor, stay longer. His rule: you don’t drop out of friendships. Disengagement, not the curriculum, drives most dropouts.

Is improving retention or increasing marketing more valuable for a martial arts school?

Doubling new students per month and cutting dropouts in half have essentially the same impact on growth — but retention is the more valuable of the two. Fixing dropout gets students into years two, three and four, produces more black belts, fills the instructor pipeline, and speeds referrals.

How do you make new martial arts students feel welcome in class?

Train every student that when a new student comes in, everybody introduces themselves before that person leaves that day. Work it into drills: “We’re doing paddle drills. Introduce yourself to each other.” Jeff Smith’s benchmark: 90% of his students knew every name in class.

Come Work On This With Us

Want a straight assessment of where your retention stands? Book a call with Grand Master Oliver and bring year-to-date numbers. Related: How to Reduce Martial Arts Student Dropout, Operational Systems for Martial Arts Schools, Martial Arts School Marketing, the Jason Purcell case study, and The Martial Arts Wealth Mastery Program.

Our live meetings run three days back to back in Colorado — Quick Start for you and your staff, Leadership Mastery, and Million Dollar Schools. Dates for the next round are on the site; fly into Denver International (DEN), and RSVP through Bob Dunne so we have a chair for you and an accurate food headcount. We always have a hard time getting a good headcount and therefore a hard time being organized. If you know a school owner who’d be a real contribution in the room, invite them and let Bob know.