{"id":12486,"date":"2026-11-13T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/martialartswealth.com\/go\/?p=12486"},"modified":"2026-11-13T07:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T07:30:00","slug":"hired-guns-vs-homegrown-martial-arts-instructors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/martialartswealth.com\/go\/hired-guns-vs-homegrown-martial-arts-instructors\/","title":{"rendered":"Hired Guns vs. Homegrown Instructors: Why Per-Class Fighters Rarely Build Your School"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On a recent Leadership call, a member who runs an MMA and Muay Thai program asked how to bring his per-class instructors into staff training. He had four of them, two on the youth classes, one on adult MMA and one on adult Muay Thai, each paid by the class for six or seven classes a week.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before I answered, I wanted to know who those people were. In MMA, Muay Thai and BJJ schools especially, I often see a fixation on the competitive record. &#8220;He&#8217;s a UFC fighter.&#8221; &#8220;She&#8217;s the top local competitor.&#8221; Then they&#8217;re brought in as a hired gun for a couple of classes. As it turned out, he put it well himself: &#8220;I&#8217;m being too nice and helping out a lot of broke fighters.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyone who&#8217;s ever trained fighters knows about broke fighters.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why don&#8217;t per-class fighters make good instructors?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I put very little premium on a competitive record and a very high premium on teaching capability. The fighter who comes in for four hours a week usually walks in believing he&#8217;s there because there&#8217;s something special about him, and you&#8217;re paying $50 an hour for it. Those people tend not to be good at retention. They tend not to:<\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Know every student&#8217;s name, and the parents&#8217; and grandparents&#8217; names<\/li><li>Notice who&#8217;s been missing class<\/li><li>Keep students on cycle for their next promotion<\/li><li>Use the character development worksheets and the leadership process<\/li><li>Teach <em>your<\/em> curriculum rather than their own favorite material<\/li><\/ul>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Grand Master Jeff Smith says it more bluntly. Most instructors think their job is teaching the kicking and punching, or the ground game on a BJJ day. The real job is the enrollment, the renewal and the retention. &#8220;If your dropout rate is bad, you&#8217;re a bad instructor, no matter how good you think you are.&#8221; You can have the best program director around, but if the instructor isn&#8217;t good, you won&#8217;t get many enrollments. We don&#8217;t sell in the office.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To be fair, there&#8217;s a counterexample, and it proves the point. In the 1970s, Grand Master Smith&#8217;s school was staffed by a stable of professional kickboxers. In the original five PKA weight classes, the school had two world champions and the two U.S. number-one contenders. Those were some of the best-paid fighters in the country. But they were well-off because they made a very good living running martial arts schools, not because of their fight purses.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What does it mean to develop instructors from within?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My strong preference is that everyone on the floor is developed internally. They come up through the leadership program, learning to teach and lead, and gradually reach the point where I&#8217;m paying them. Every generation bubbles up the next one.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The worst possible cultural fit is someone brought in from another school because he&#8217;s a good fighter. He arrives with a completely different worldview and distracts from everything you&#8217;re building.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Who should you put on payroll?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here&#8217;s a pattern that surprises people. The internally developed people I end up paying hourly tend to be high school and college students, not the 35-, 45- and 55-year-olds. The logic: I don&#8217;t want a 17-year-old having to choose between helping me and taking tickets at the movie theater. So those are the ones I put on payroll.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Meanwhile, I&#8217;ve had hundreds of adult black belts over the years, from 35-year-old engineers to 55-year-old surgeons, who spend 10 to 12 hours a week helping in the school and are never on payroll. We treat them well. We order them staff jackets. When I take a group out, we do something special for them. But they&#8217;re there because they&#8217;re part of it.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And part-timers and full-timers are different animals. As schools grow, it&#8217;s tempting to add bodies. Often a smaller, more full-time team, paid more on incentive, does better. For pay structures, see <a href=\"https:\/\/martialartswealth.com\/go\/how-much-should-you-pay-martial-arts-staff\/\">How Much Should You Pay Martial Arts Staff?<\/a><\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How do you train part-time instructors who can&#8217;t make staff meetings?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For years, our version was Friday night black belt class. Everyone, full-time and part-time, was required to be there. I couldn&#8217;t realistically expect part-timers at our Monday and Wednesday meetings, but they could give me three hours on Friday.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In those three hours, they were taking class for their own development. But overtly and in disguise, I was also teaching them everything we wanted taught in the school the next week: the curriculum, the character lessons, and how it should look. The format of the class, the flow, the mat chat. Sometimes two weeks out.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">New staff, whether internal or external, went through a six- to eight-week boot camp before they were allowed to interact with students. We force-fed them a ton of material first.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Does a script solve the problem?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A script helps. Grand Master Smith recently watched new staff at one of our member schools in Seattle who&#8217;d been there less than a month delivering mat chats from a clipboard as naturally as if they&#8217;d grown up on it. The script was there as a crutch, so they never lost their place or ad-libbed.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the script isn&#8217;t what solves the problem. Back when I first built character development into our curriculum, I took a mantra from my training at Success Motivation Institute in Waco, Texas: every staff member has to be a product of the product. My logic was that if every black belt oozed this material, anything that came out of their mouth would be on target.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hand a paragraph on a clipboard to someone who hasn&#8217;t internalized any of it, and it doesn&#8217;t come out well. Hand a script to a couple of broke fighters you&#8217;re doing a favor for, and it won&#8217;t seep through to the students and parents. They have to understand the culture, the philosophy and the structure first. Then the script works. I tell the longer version of that story in <a href=\"https:\/\/stephencoliver.com\/\">my own words on StephenCOliver.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How do you get competitive athletes to buy into character development?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Put it in their language. Fighters are often the easiest people to reach on this, because they&#8217;ve already lived it. The difference between an also-ran and a champion is mostly mental. The fighter who takes a good shot and stays in the fight versus the one who&#8217;s suddenly out of it: that&#8217;s a state of mind. Achieving at the highest level is a goal-setting function. You set the training schedule, the expectations and the timeline.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I wouldn&#8217;t frame it as &#8220;here&#8217;s what we teach seven-year-olds so the parents are happy.&#8221; I&#8217;d frame it as: &#8220;We&#8217;ve figured out how to get championship-level attainment out of all of our students much faster, and we&#8217;re going to work on the mental and emotional side as hard as the physical, starting much earlier.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Then resist the urge to turn them into motivational speakers delivering ten-minute soliloquies. You want an outline, handouts and support tools, and the ability to get students talking.<\/p>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What if your existing staff predate your new system?<\/h2>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That turned out to be this member&#8217;s real situation. They were all internal people, but they&#8217;d been there before he joined us, and they didn&#8217;t know the whole process because they hadn&#8217;t started with it.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s the biggest challenge in any change. You have to push it from the top down as well as the bottom up. Everyone thinks their black belts are the most loyal people in the school. What they&#8217;re loyal to is the way you used to do things.<\/p>\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><strong>Sit down with each one.<\/strong> Tell them plainly what their purpose is: not only to share their knowledge, but to keep students longer and help them want to be black belts.<\/li><li><strong>Give them the book and go through it together<\/strong>, every week. The reading assignments, character lessons and behavior and dress codes your students follow, at a higher level.<\/li><li><strong>Require the training.<\/strong> X number of trainings and these specific events, as part of being on staff.<\/li><li><strong>Expect some to rebel.<\/strong> &#8220;This isn&#8217;t what you brought me here to teach.&#8221; The ones who engage can become something really solid. Some won&#8217;t, and that&#8217;s information too.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Quick Answers<\/h2>\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Should I hire competitive fighters to teach classes at my school?<\/h3>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rarely as outside hires. Teaching capability and retention matter far more than a fight record. Develop instructors from your own students instead.<\/p>\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Who should be paid on a martial arts school&#8217;s staff?<\/h3>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Full-time staff and internally developed high school and college students who would otherwise need an outside job. Many adult black belts help as committed volunteers.<\/p>\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How do you train part-time instructors?<\/h3>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hold one required weekly session, like a Friday night black belt class, that doubles as next week&#8217;s lesson preview. Put new staff through a six- to eight-week boot camp first.<\/p>\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What does &#8220;product of the product&#8221; mean?<\/h3>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every instructor lives the material students are learning, so everything they say on the floor reinforces it.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Building a staff that grows your school? Grab the free book at <a href=\"https:\/\/fillyourschool.com\">FillYourSchool.com<\/a>, or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paying a talented fighter $50 a class to teach a few hours a week feels like a favor to everyone. It rarely builds retention. Here is how I develop instructors from within, who I put on payroll, and how to bring existing staff into a new culture from the top down and the bottom up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":10557,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-staff-hiring","category-teaching-instruction"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Hired Guns vs. Homegrown Instructors: Why Per-Class Fighters Rarely Build Your School<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/martialartswealth.com\/go\/hired-guns-vs-homegrown-martial-arts-instructors\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hired Guns vs. Homegrown Instructors: Why Per-Class Fighters Rarely Build Your School - Martial Arts Wealth Mastery\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Paying a talented fighter $50 a class to teach a few hours a week feels like a favor to everyone. 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A martial arts school owner since 1975 and business coach since 1985, Oliver has spent more than five decades building, operating, and advising successful martial arts schools. He also serves as CEO and Chairman of NAPMA (the National Association of Professional Martial Artists) and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A Georgetown University cum laude graduate, he earned his Executive MBA through the Executive Program at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He was promoted to 10th Degree Black Belt in April 2026 and inducted into the Official Taekwondo Hall of Fame in August 2026. 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A martial arts school owner since 1975 and business coach since 1985, Oliver has spent more than five decades building, operating, and advising successful martial arts schools. He also serves as CEO and Chairman of NAPMA (the National Association of Professional Martial Artists) and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A Georgetown University cum laude graduate, he earned his Executive MBA through the Executive Program at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver. He was promoted to 10th Degree Black Belt in April 2026 and inducted into the Official Taekwondo Hall of Fame in August 2026. 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