What Is a Martial Artist? The Martial Artist Charter Every School Should Write
Updated
- Writing it and filing it. A Charter that is not repeated is a poster.
- Making it only about you. If staff and black belts do not help shape it, they will not defend it.
- Treating success as a dirty word. Students are entitled to learn how to build a career, manage money, and set goals.
- Using lineage as the headline. Your history matters, but families buy what it does for their child.
- Over-correcting into pure business. Without character and ethics, the school is just a fee-collection machine, and parents will sense it.
This Week
- Draft your five-clause Charter.
- Run the Professional Test on your three biggest time commitments.
- Run the Three-Mile Test on your last three marketing or publicity decisions.
- Schedule a Charter review with your leadership team.
- Read clause one at your next staff meeting.
To see how a clear definition supports team development, visit our staff hub. The Three-Mile Test connects directly to local lead generation in our marketing hub, and the Professional Test connects to the economics in our school growth hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you define a martial artist for a school?
A martial artist is a person developing the highest level of character, ethics, and success, with technique as the vehicle. Write that definition down, review it with your staff and black belts regularly, and use it to guide curriculum, promotion standards, hiring, and marketing language.
Is it wrong to talk about money and success in a martial arts school?
No. Teaching success is part of developing the whole person, and a profitable school survives, attracts better instructors, serves more families, and produces more black belts. The problem is not discussing money; it is operating without ethics. Character, ethics, and success belong together.
What does the Three-Mile Test mean for my marketing?
It means your marketing should reach families within roughly a three-to-five-mile radius of your school, connect to your school’s name and location, and offer a clear next step. Publicity outside that radius, however impressive, rarely produces enrollments, so spend your time inside the circle.
Take the Next Step
Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. We will help you turn your definition of a martial artist into a program, a price, and a team that supports it. Claim your free consultation here.
Free resource: Great instructors bring the Charter to life in every class. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.
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 Grand Master Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody, have helped owners build $1M+ schools.
- Draft it this week. One page, five clauses, in your own words. Keep each clause to two sentences.
- Review it with your head instructors and black belts. Ask: what would you add? Where do we fall short of this today? The goal is ownership, not agreement.
- Read one clause at the start of every staff meeting. Then spend five minutes on a real example from the past week where the school lived the clause or missed it.
- Tie it to promotion. A student who does not demonstrate character and ethics should not be promoted on technique alone. Say this in the enrollment conference so parents know the standard.
- Tie it to hiring. Ask applicants to describe what a martial artist is. Their answer tells you more than a resume.
- Put it in your marketing language. Say what you develop in students: character, discipline, focus, and success. Technique supports those outcomes.
Scripts That Use the Charter
For an enrollment conference: “Here is how we define a martial artist at our school. We help every student build strong character, high ethics, and the habits of success. The kicks and punches are the vehicle. That is why our program is a 12-month Trial Enrollment: we want a real look at whether this is a good fit for your child and for the black belt path.”
For a staff meeting: “Before we start, here is clause two: we hold the highest ethical standard. Last week a parent asked about a refund. Let’s talk about how we handled it against that clause.”
For a parent who asks, “Is this just fighting?”: “We teach real self-defense, and we also teach what makes someone a person others trust. Our students learn to protect themselves and to be people worth protecting.”
Common Mistakes
- Writing it and filing it. A Charter that is not repeated is a poster.
- Making it only about you. If staff and black belts do not help shape it, they will not defend it.
- Treating success as a dirty word. Students are entitled to learn how to build a career, manage money, and set goals.
- Using lineage as the headline. Your history matters, but families buy what it does for their child.
- Over-correcting into pure business. Without character and ethics, the school is just a fee-collection machine, and parents will sense it.
This Week
- Draft your five-clause Charter.
- Run the Professional Test on your three biggest time commitments.
- Run the Three-Mile Test on your last three marketing or publicity decisions.
- Schedule a Charter review with your leadership team.
- Read clause one at your next staff meeting.
To see how a clear definition supports team development, visit our staff hub. The Three-Mile Test connects directly to local lead generation in our marketing hub, and the Professional Test connects to the economics in our school growth hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you define a martial artist for a school?
A martial artist is a person developing the highest level of character, ethics, and success, with technique as the vehicle. Write that definition down, review it with your staff and black belts regularly, and use it to guide curriculum, promotion standards, hiring, and marketing language.
Is it wrong to talk about money and success in a martial arts school?
No. Teaching success is part of developing the whole person, and a profitable school survives, attracts better instructors, serves more families, and produces more black belts. The problem is not discussing money; it is operating without ethics. Character, ethics, and success belong together.
What does the Three-Mile Test mean for my marketing?
It means your marketing should reach families within roughly a three-to-five-mile radius of your school, connect to your school’s name and location, and offer a clear next step. Publicity outside that radius, however impressive, rarely produces enrollments, so spend your time inside the circle.
Take the Next Step
Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. We will help you turn your definition of a martial artist into a program, a price, and a team that supports it. Claim your free consultation here.
Free resource: Great instructors bring the Charter to life in every class. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.
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 Grand Master Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody, have helped owners build $1M+ schools.
- Does it reach the families inside my radius?
- Will they connect it to my school’s name and location?
- Is there a next step, a way for them to contact me or visit?
If the answer to any of the three is no, it is vanity, not marketing. The test sends you to elementary schools, churches, youth groups, local business associations, and neighborhood events, which is where tuition-paying families actually live.
Where the Business Model Came From
You can run your school better by understanding where the professional model of our industry came from. As I understand the history, the earliest business-minded martial arts operators borrowed from the dance-studio world, which had sophisticated sales and retention systems long before our industry did. In the early days, Pat Burleson, one of the pioneers, helped bring that thinking into schools, and he later helped build the business side of the Chuck Norris schools, working in an era when Joe Lewis and others were part of that story. A few years later, Jeff Smith and the Jhoon Rhee Institute became a nucleus for business systems that spread to major organizations around the country.
The BJJ and MMA communities largely came to the scene from a different direction and missed some of that evolution. That is one of the reasons many BJJ and MMA owners are excellent athletes with underdeveloped business systems, and why they can learn quickly when they borrow what the traditional schools already built. If you are in that world, the Charter works for you as is: replace the style name and keep the five clauses.
Running the Charter in Your School
Here is a simple rollout plan.
- Draft it this week. One page, five clauses, in your own words. Keep each clause to two sentences.
- Review it with your head instructors and black belts. Ask: what would you add? Where do we fall short of this today? The goal is ownership, not agreement.
- Read one clause at the start of every staff meeting. Then spend five minutes on a real example from the past week where the school lived the clause or missed it.
- Tie it to promotion. A student who does not demonstrate character and ethics should not be promoted on technique alone. Say this in the enrollment conference so parents know the standard.
- Tie it to hiring. Ask applicants to describe what a martial artist is. Their answer tells you more than a resume.
- Put it in your marketing language. Say what you develop in students: character, discipline, focus, and success. Technique supports those outcomes.
Scripts That Use the Charter
For an enrollment conference: “Here is how we define a martial artist at our school. We help every student build strong character, high ethics, and the habits of success. The kicks and punches are the vehicle. That is why our program is a 12-month Trial Enrollment: we want a real look at whether this is a good fit for your child and for the black belt path.”
For a staff meeting: “Before we start, here is clause two: we hold the highest ethical standard. Last week a parent asked about a refund. Let’s talk about how we handled it against that clause.”
For a parent who asks, “Is this just fighting?”: “We teach real self-defense, and we also teach what makes someone a person others trust. Our students learn to protect themselves and to be people worth protecting.”
Common Mistakes
- Writing it and filing it. A Charter that is not repeated is a poster.
- Making it only about you. If staff and black belts do not help shape it, they will not defend it.
- Treating success as a dirty word. Students are entitled to learn how to build a career, manage money, and set goals.
- Using lineage as the headline. Your history matters, but families buy what it does for their child.
- Over-correcting into pure business. Without character and ethics, the school is just a fee-collection machine, and parents will sense it.
This Week
- Draft your five-clause Charter.
- Run the Professional Test on your three biggest time commitments.
- Run the Three-Mile Test on your last three marketing or publicity decisions.
- Schedule a Charter review with your leadership team.
- Read clause one at your next staff meeting.
To see how a clear definition supports team development, visit our staff hub. The Three-Mile Test connects directly to local lead generation in our marketing hub, and the Professional Test connects to the economics in our school growth hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you define a martial artist for a school?
A martial artist is a person developing the highest level of character, ethics, and success, with technique as the vehicle. Write that definition down, review it with your staff and black belts regularly, and use it to guide curriculum, promotion standards, hiring, and marketing language.
Is it wrong to talk about money and success in a martial arts school?
No. Teaching success is part of developing the whole person, and a profitable school survives, attracts better instructors, serves more families, and produces more black belts. The problem is not discussing money; it is operating without ethics. Character, ethics, and success belong together.
What does the Three-Mile Test mean for my marketing?
It means your marketing should reach families within roughly a three-to-five-mile radius of your school, connect to your school’s name and location, and offer a clear next step. Publicity outside that radius, however impressive, rarely produces enrollments, so spend your time inside the circle.
Take the Next Step
Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. We will help you turn your definition of a martial artist into a program, a price, and a team that supports it. Claim your free consultation here.
Free resource: Great instructors bring the Charter to life in every class. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.
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 Grand Master Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody, have helped owners build $1M+ schools.
- Tournament teams and demo teams: Fine as programs, but do they feed enrollments, retention, and community visibility? Count the hours and count the students they bring in.
- Instructor time: At a 12-month Trial Enrollment at $375 a month, one student is $4,500 a year. If an instructor spends 10 hours a week on an activity that retains or recruits two additional students, that activity pays. If it recruits none, it is a hobby.
- Owner time: Divide your monthly take-home by your total hours. If the result is below what you’d pay a manager, you are working a hobby, not a business. $1,000,000 a year is $83,333 a month; the question is how many of your hours you must spend to produce that, and which of them could be delegated.
The Professional Test is not anti-passion. Train for love. But when you run a school, a school must pay.
The Three-Mile Test
The second test concerns visibility, and it is one of the most useful marketing filters I know.
Plenty of owners tell me they compete or perform “to keep my name out there.” My question is: out there among whom? All that matters in running a school is a radius of roughly three miles around your building, maybe five depending on your market and the geography. Water, highways, and hills shrink it. Keeping your name out there means being known inside that circle.
I once knew an owner who was thrilled about a radio interview in a city about an hour away. I asked whether that station reached his town. It did not. I asked how far that city was from his school. Far. Then I asked what he thought the interview would accomplish, and whether he was hoping that some listeners might someday move to his town and remember him. He had no answer, and there wasn’t a good one.
Applying the Three-Mile Test
Before you say yes to any publicity, appearance, event, or sponsorship, answer three questions:
- Does it reach the families inside my radius?
- Will they connect it to my school’s name and location?
- Is there a next step, a way for them to contact me or visit?
If the answer to any of the three is no, it is vanity, not marketing. The test sends you to elementary schools, churches, youth groups, local business associations, and neighborhood events, which is where tuition-paying families actually live.
Where the Business Model Came From
You can run your school better by understanding where the professional model of our industry came from. As I understand the history, the earliest business-minded martial arts operators borrowed from the dance-studio world, which had sophisticated sales and retention systems long before our industry did. In the early days, Pat Burleson, one of the pioneers, helped bring that thinking into schools, and he later helped build the business side of the Chuck Norris schools, working in an era when Joe Lewis and others were part of that story. A few years later, Jeff Smith and the Jhoon Rhee Institute became a nucleus for business systems that spread to major organizations around the country.
The BJJ and MMA communities largely came to the scene from a different direction and missed some of that evolution. That is one of the reasons many BJJ and MMA owners are excellent athletes with underdeveloped business systems, and why they can learn quickly when they borrow what the traditional schools already built. If you are in that world, the Charter works for you as is: replace the style name and keep the five clauses.
Running the Charter in Your School
Here is a simple rollout plan.
- Draft it this week. One page, five clauses, in your own words. Keep each clause to two sentences.
- Review it with your head instructors and black belts. Ask: what would you add? Where do we fall short of this today? The goal is ownership, not agreement.
- Read one clause at the start of every staff meeting. Then spend five minutes on a real example from the past week where the school lived the clause or missed it.
- Tie it to promotion. A student who does not demonstrate character and ethics should not be promoted on technique alone. Say this in the enrollment conference so parents know the standard.
- Tie it to hiring. Ask applicants to describe what a martial artist is. Their answer tells you more than a resume.
- Put it in your marketing language. Say what you develop in students: character, discipline, focus, and success. Technique supports those outcomes.
Scripts That Use the Charter
For an enrollment conference: “Here is how we define a martial artist at our school. We help every student build strong character, high ethics, and the habits of success. The kicks and punches are the vehicle. That is why our program is a 12-month Trial Enrollment: we want a real look at whether this is a good fit for your child and for the black belt path.”
For a staff meeting: “Before we start, here is clause two: we hold the highest ethical standard. Last week a parent asked about a refund. Let’s talk about how we handled it against that clause.”
For a parent who asks, “Is this just fighting?”: “We teach real self-defense, and we also teach what makes someone a person others trust. Our students learn to protect themselves and to be people worth protecting.”
Common Mistakes
- Writing it and filing it. A Charter that is not repeated is a poster.
- Making it only about you. If staff and black belts do not help shape it, they will not defend it.
- Treating success as a dirty word. Students are entitled to learn how to build a career, manage money, and set goals.
- Using lineage as the headline. Your history matters, but families buy what it does for their child.
- Over-correcting into pure business. Without character and ethics, the school is just a fee-collection machine, and parents will sense it.
This Week
- Draft your five-clause Charter.
- Run the Professional Test on your three biggest time commitments.
- Run the Three-Mile Test on your last three marketing or publicity decisions.
- Schedule a Charter review with your leadership team.
- Read clause one at your next staff meeting.
To see how a clear definition supports team development, visit our staff hub. The Three-Mile Test connects directly to local lead generation in our marketing hub, and the Professional Test connects to the economics in our school growth hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you define a martial artist for a school?
A martial artist is a person developing the highest level of character, ethics, and success, with technique as the vehicle. Write that definition down, review it with your staff and black belts regularly, and use it to guide curriculum, promotion standards, hiring, and marketing language.
Is it wrong to talk about money and success in a martial arts school?
No. Teaching success is part of developing the whole person, and a profitable school survives, attracts better instructors, serves more families, and produces more black belts. The problem is not discussing money; it is operating without ethics. Character, ethics, and success belong together.
What does the Three-Mile Test mean for my marketing?
It means your marketing should reach families within roughly a three-to-five-mile radius of your school, connect to your school’s name and location, and offer a clear next step. Publicity outside that radius, however impressive, rarely produces enrollments, so spend your time inside the circle.
Take the Next Step
Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. We will help you turn your definition of a martial artist into a program, a price, and a team that supports it. Claim your free consultation here.
Free resource: Great instructors bring the Charter to life in every class. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.
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 Grand Master Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody, have helped owners build $1M+ schools.
A martial artist is a person developing the highest level of character, ethics, and success, not merely someone who can throw a punch. Define the word in writing, repeat it with your staff and black belts regularly, and let it govern what you teach, charge, and promote. Schools that never define it drift into competing on technique alone.
Most school owners never sit down and decide what the word means for their own building. They inherit a definition from the style they trained in, the tournament circuit, or whatever is trending online. Then they wonder why their staff is confused about what they are selling, why parents hesitate at the price, and why good instructors leave. In this article I’ll give you a framework I call the Martial Artist Charter, plus two quick tests, the Professional Test and the Three-Mile Test, that keep your definition tied to a real, profitable business.
Why the Definition Matters
The conversation about what a martial artist is should happen on a regular basis with your staff and your black belts, and then it should soak into the entire organization. It is not a one-time speech at a graduation. It is a recurring conversation, and it shapes everything else: your curriculum, your pricing, your hiring, your promotion standards, and your marketing language.
Here is the problem when you skip it. Some instructors in our industry say, “We’re not martial arts, we’re hardcore fighting and self-defense.” They are welcome to whatever language they want. There is nothing sacred about the vocabulary. But look at what happens in practice. If all a school teaches is how to throw a knee, an elbow, and a punch, then I do not perceive that to be what we do. Think about a military recruit in basic training: he learns to use a bayonet. We would not describe the purpose of the military as teaching people to stab somebody. The technique is a component of something larger.
What is the larger thing? In my view, three words: character, ethics, and success.
The Martial Artist Charter
The Martial Artist Charter is a one-page written definition with five clauses. You draft it once, review it with your leadership team every quarter, and read a sentence of it at the start of every staff meeting.
Clause One: Character
We develop the highest level of character in every student. Character is what a student does when the instructor is not looking: honesty, discipline, perseverance, respect. You can measure it. Ask parents, teachers, and employers what has changed. Track the stories you collect.
Clause Two: Ethics
We hold the highest ethical standard in how we run the school. This includes how you handle billing, refunds, promises, and advertising claims. I will be direct: an awful lot of people in our industry do not have this, and it shows. Students and parents can feel it. An ethical school does what it says on the enrollment form, tells the truth about what a black belt requires, and does not manufacture urgency or hide terms.
Clause Three: Success
We teach people how to be highly successful. There are people in our industry who consider that a bad word. They ask, “What do you mean, you teach success? You’re just teaching people how to make money.” I disagree, and so would any parent who wants their child to leave school, enter a career, and support a family. Success includes health, relationships, achievement, and income. A school that shies away from the topic is withholding something its students need.
Clause Four: Service
We use our skill to serve the people around us. A black belt who is strong and kind is a community asset. This clause is where your charity involvement, your anti-bullying work, and your volunteer programs live.
Clause Five: Stewardship
We keep the school healthy so the mission continues. This is the clause that makes the others possible, and the one most often left out. A school that cannot pay its instructors, its rent, or its own owner will not teach any of the first four clauses for long. Profit is not opposed to the mission. It is the funding for the mission.
I have said it many times: great martial arts and great business are inseparable. Profitable schools survive, attract better instructors, serve more families, maintain higher teaching standards, and create more black belts.
The “Money Guy” Story
Years ago I had dinner with one of the most famous martial artists of all time, along with a few of my colleagues. He looked at me and said, “Oh, you’re the money guy.” I said, “Really? I’m the money guy? Okay.” In my head, I was running the numbers: more than a thousand black belts promoted and tens of thousands of students through our schools over the years. I said, “Okay, I’m the money guy. Whatever you want to think.”
I said none of that out loud. He was in his eighties, and he passed away a few months after that dinner. I was glad I let him be whatever he wanted to be. But the story illustrates the exact attitude the Charter is designed to fix: the belief that business success and martial arts integrity are opposites. They are not. The larger your school, the more people you can reach with character and ethics. Being “the money guy” is how the black belts get paid, the instructors get trained, and the doors stay open.
What Unsuccessful Schools Talk About
There is a pattern in how failing schools talk. When I listen to owners who struggle, their conversations are about technique lineages, tournament results, and who trained with whom. Their language is about themselves. Successful schools talk about outcomes for students and families: confidence, grades, focus, fitness, safety, leadership.
That is not a criticism of lineage or competition. I am a competitor and a tournament organizer by history, and my own teachers were world-class. It is an observation about where attention goes. If the Charter is written in terms of what you do for people, your marketing, your intro lessons, and your parent conferences will follow.
The Professional Test
I want to share a calculation that I ran when I was young, because it clarifies what the word “professional” means.
When I was a college student, I trained daily with a ranked professional kickboxer, a top-three contender in his division. He hit a heavy bag so hard in a basement that people on the fifth floor of the office building complained about their desks vibrating. I held a medicine ball for him and went home bruised on one side every Sunday. After training we studied together, because he was working toward an equivalency diploma and I was studying economics at Georgetown. Our deal was simple: if he hurt me that day, he would not get his help with the exam.
Then I watched him spar with someone far above his level, and he could not land a clean shot. Later I watched him land one enormous punch on a world-class opponent, who grinned, acknowledged it, and went on to win the fight on points. My first thought was that if I had been hit like that, I would have been in a coma for three months. That was the moment I thought: this is maybe not for me.
But the more important conversation was about money. I sat down with Jeff Smith and asked, “What is the most you ever got paid for a fight?” The contender I trained with earned about $100 a round. A five-round fight paid $500. A title fight paid perhaps $1,500. Now do the math. A training camp lasts about eight weeks. At 35 hours a week, that is 280 hours of preparation. A $500 purse divided by 280 hours is about $1.79 an hour. Even a $1,500 title-fight purse works out to roughly $5.36 an hour. That is below minimum wage.
The answer I got was, “We used to do it for a trophy and paid our own way.” And, “You’d be training anyway because you love it.” I replied, very logically, that I would not train 40 hours a week for free. I trained about three hours a day, five days a week, 15 hours, and at 20 years old, full of testosterone and wanting to be champion, 15 was the maximum. If you are putting in 40 hours a week and calling yourself a professional, but your hourly pay is under two dollars, that is not professional. The room laughed, and then somebody said no one had ever looked at it that way.
How to Use the Professional Test in Your School
Ask yourself and your instructors the same question about every activity: what does this earn per hour of effort, and for whom?
- Tournament teams and demo teams: Fine as programs, but do they feed enrollments, retention, and community visibility? Count the hours and count the students they bring in.
- Instructor time: At a 12-month Trial Enrollment at $375 a month, one student is $4,500 a year. If an instructor spends 10 hours a week on an activity that retains or recruits two additional students, that activity pays. If it recruits none, it is a hobby.
- Owner time: Divide your monthly take-home by your total hours. If the result is below what you’d pay a manager, you are working a hobby, not a business. $1,000,000 a year is $83,333 a month; the question is how many of your hours you must spend to produce that, and which of them could be delegated.
The Professional Test is not anti-passion. Train for love. But when you run a school, a school must pay.
The Three-Mile Test
The second test concerns visibility, and it is one of the most useful marketing filters I know.
Plenty of owners tell me they compete or perform “to keep my name out there.” My question is: out there among whom? All that matters in running a school is a radius of roughly three miles around your building, maybe five depending on your market and the geography. Water, highways, and hills shrink it. Keeping your name out there means being known inside that circle.
I once knew an owner who was thrilled about a radio interview in a city about an hour away. I asked whether that station reached his town. It did not. I asked how far that city was from his school. Far. Then I asked what he thought the interview would accomplish, and whether he was hoping that some listeners might someday move to his town and remember him. He had no answer, and there wasn’t a good one.
Applying the Three-Mile Test
Before you say yes to any publicity, appearance, event, or sponsorship, answer three questions:
- Does it reach the families inside my radius?
- Will they connect it to my school’s name and location?
- Is there a next step, a way for them to contact me or visit?
If the answer to any of the three is no, it is vanity, not marketing. The test sends you to elementary schools, churches, youth groups, local business associations, and neighborhood events, which is where tuition-paying families actually live.
Where the Business Model Came From
You can run your school better by understanding where the professional model of our industry came from. As I understand the history, the earliest business-minded martial arts operators borrowed from the dance-studio world, which had sophisticated sales and retention systems long before our industry did. In the early days, Pat Burleson, one of the pioneers, helped bring that thinking into schools, and he later helped build the business side of the Chuck Norris schools, working in an era when Joe Lewis and others were part of that story. A few years later, Jeff Smith and the Jhoon Rhee Institute became a nucleus for business systems that spread to major organizations around the country.
The BJJ and MMA communities largely came to the scene from a different direction and missed some of that evolution. That is one of the reasons many BJJ and MMA owners are excellent athletes with underdeveloped business systems, and why they can learn quickly when they borrow what the traditional schools already built. If you are in that world, the Charter works for you as is: replace the style name and keep the five clauses.
Running the Charter in Your School
Here is a simple rollout plan.
- Draft it this week. One page, five clauses, in your own words. Keep each clause to two sentences.
- Review it with your head instructors and black belts. Ask: what would you add? Where do we fall short of this today? The goal is ownership, not agreement.
- Read one clause at the start of every staff meeting. Then spend five minutes on a real example from the past week where the school lived the clause or missed it.
- Tie it to promotion. A student who does not demonstrate character and ethics should not be promoted on technique alone. Say this in the enrollment conference so parents know the standard.
- Tie it to hiring. Ask applicants to describe what a martial artist is. Their answer tells you more than a resume.
- Put it in your marketing language. Say what you develop in students: character, discipline, focus, and success. Technique supports those outcomes.
Scripts That Use the Charter
For an enrollment conference: “Here is how we define a martial artist at our school. We help every student build strong character, high ethics, and the habits of success. The kicks and punches are the vehicle. That is why our program is a 12-month Trial Enrollment: we want a real look at whether this is a good fit for your child and for the black belt path.”
For a staff meeting: “Before we start, here is clause two: we hold the highest ethical standard. Last week a parent asked about a refund. Let’s talk about how we handled it against that clause.”
For a parent who asks, “Is this just fighting?”: “We teach real self-defense, and we also teach what makes someone a person others trust. Our students learn to protect themselves and to be people worth protecting.”
Common Mistakes
- Writing it and filing it. A Charter that is not repeated is a poster.
- Making it only about you. If staff and black belts do not help shape it, they will not defend it.
- Treating success as a dirty word. Students are entitled to learn how to build a career, manage money, and set goals.
- Using lineage as the headline. Your history matters, but families buy what it does for their child.
- Over-correcting into pure business. Without character and ethics, the school is just a fee-collection machine, and parents will sense it.
This Week
- Draft your five-clause Charter.
- Run the Professional Test on your three biggest time commitments.
- Run the Three-Mile Test on your last three marketing or publicity decisions.
- Schedule a Charter review with your leadership team.
- Read clause one at your next staff meeting.
To see how a clear definition supports team development, visit our staff hub. The Three-Mile Test connects directly to local lead generation in our marketing hub, and the Professional Test connects to the economics in our school growth hub.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you define a martial artist for a school?
A martial artist is a person developing the highest level of character, ethics, and success, with technique as the vehicle. Write that definition down, review it with your staff and black belts regularly, and use it to guide curriculum, promotion standards, hiring, and marketing language.
Is it wrong to talk about money and success in a martial arts school?
No. Teaching success is part of developing the whole person, and a profitable school survives, attracts better instructors, serves more families, and produces more black belts. The problem is not discussing money; it is operating without ethics. Character, ethics, and success belong together.
What does the Three-Mile Test mean for my marketing?
It means your marketing should reach families within roughly a three-to-five-mile radius of your school, connect to your school’s name and location, and offer a clear next step. Publicity outside that radius, however impressive, rarely produces enrollments, so spend your time inside the circle.
Take the Next Step
Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. We will help you turn your definition of a martial artist into a program, a price, and a team that supports it. Claim your free consultation here.
Free resource: Great instructors bring the Charter to life in every class. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.
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 Grand Master Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody, have helped owners build $1M+ schools.
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