In January 2021, Grandmaster Jason Purcell’s Family Black Belt Academy in Seattle was down to barely 50 students and about $15,000 a month. Two years later, in January 2023, the same school had 273 students and cleared over $86,000 in a single month. Annual revenue climbed from roughly $143,000 to about $487,000. This is how he did it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want to tell you a story about a school owner I’m proud to call a member, because it’s one of the cleanest examples I’ve ever seen of what happens when a great martial artist finally decides to run a great business. His name is Grandmaster Jason Purcell. He and his wife own Family Black Belt Academy in Seattle, Washington, and they’ve been at it since 2003 \u2014 well over 21 years in business. He’s a real asset to our program, and he gave his story on camera so other owners could learn from it. So let’s actually learn from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because here’s the thing. Jason is a phenomenal instructor. He’s a Grandmaster. His school survived 2008. His school survived the COVID shutdowns that wiped out so many of our colleagues. But for many, many years \u2014 in his own words \u2014 he was making “maybe five to ten thousand dollars a month, just barely scraping by.” A Grandmaster, two decades of skill, a real school full of real families, and the business itself was on life support. That gap \u2014 between how good he was on the mat and how broke he was in the office \u2014 is the single most common tragedy in this industry. And it’s completely fixable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I call what Jason did The Premium Turnaround<\/strong>. It’s not a marketing trick and it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme \u2014 Jason said that himself, and I want you to hear it from a member and not just from me: “This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, not at all. You need to work your ass off.” The Premium Turnaround is the deliberate decision to stop competing as a commodity and start operating as the premium provider in your market \u2014 and then to back that decision with pricing, enrollment structure, retention, leadership, and marketing that all reinforce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are five pillars to it, and Jason executed all five. I’m going to walk you through each one, tell you exactly what Jason did, and then teach you the underlying system so you can run the same play in your school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Jason first came into the program, he and I had a conversation that I have had hundreds of times, and it always goes the same way. He was charging $85 a month. I told him to raise his prices. And he was terrified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And he had what looked, on the surface, like an airtight reason to be terrified. There was an Aikido school in the same building, literally one floor below him, charging $60 a month. So in Jason’s mind the logic was obvious: “If I raise my prices, people are going to walk downstairs and pay $60 instead of paying me.” That fear is real, and almost every owner has some version of it. Mine is the dojo across town. Yours might be the big franchise with the inflatable arch out front. Jason’s was a flight of stairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s what I told him, and it’s the most important idea in this entire article: price IS the perception of value.<\/strong> The number on your tuition agreement isn’t just what you collect \u2014 it’s the first and loudest signal you send about how good you are. I gave Jason the analogy I give everyone. If you need surgery, and one surgeon charges $5,000 while another will do the exact same procedure out of the back of his van for $100, which one do you believe is better? You already know. You didn’t even have to think about it. Nobody shops for the cheapest brain surgeon. And nobody who truly values their child’s safety, confidence, and character is shopping for the cheapest Black Belt instructor either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The $60 Aikido school downstairs wasn’t Jason’s competition. It was his proof. It demonstrated, every single day, what “cheap” looks like \u2014 and it gave the discerning parent a contrast that made Jason’s premium program look exactly like what it was: the serious choice. Cheap competitors don’t steal your premium families. They sort the market for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what did Jason do? He raised tuition. Not to $90. Not to $110. His basic membership today, when a new student signs up, is $250 a month<\/strong> \u2014 up from $85. That’s nearly a 3x increase. And I want to be clear about what did not<\/em> happen: the families didn’t flee down the stairs to the Aikido school. The school grew. The exact thing he was terrified of was the exact thing that saved him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me put Jason’s number in the context of the rest of the industry, because this matters. The industry commodity average sits somewhere around $140 to $185 a month \u2014 that’s the trap, the race to the bottom, the place where schools die slowly. The top, well-coached schools I work with charge $347 to $397 a month<\/strong> for new-student tuition. Jason at $250 is well clear of the commodity trap and climbing toward true premium. He has room to keep going, and he should. But the point is the direction: he stopped pricing like the cheapest option in the building and started pricing like the best one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to go deeper on exactly how to do this without losing your existing base \u2014 how to grandfather current students, how to position the increase, how to handle the one or two complaints you’ll get \u2014 read my full breakdown on raising tuition and premium pricing<\/a>. It’s the highest-leverage change most owners will ever make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raising your price is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. If you triple your tuition and then enroll people on a loose, cancel-anytime, month-to-month arrangement, you’ve just built a more expensive leaky bucket. The second pillar of the Premium Turnaround is the enrollment structure itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our top schools, we don’t sell “a month of classes.” We enroll new students on a 12-month Trial Enrollment<\/strong>. And I want you to read that phrase carefully, because the framing is everything. It is not a contract you’re trapping the customer into. It’s a school-led evaluation \u2014 a trial period during which the school and the family determine whether this student is a good fit for the full Black Belt program. The power dynamic flips. You’re not begging someone to stay another 30 days. You’re inviting a committed family onto a multi-year journey toward an extraordinary goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why does this matter so much for a school like Jason’s? Because a Black Belt isn’t a one-month outcome. It’s a multi-year transformation. When you enroll someone month-to-month, you are quietly telling them \u2014 and telling yourself \u2014 that the goal is the next class. When you enroll them on a 12-month Trial Enrollment toward Black Belt, you are telling them the goal is who they will become. Parents understand journeys. They sign up for piano lessons, for braces, for college funds \u2014 all multi-year commitments toward a meaningful outcome. The month-to-month dojo down the street is implicitly admitting it doesn’t expect you to stick around. The premium school assumes you will, and structures the relationship accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also what makes premium pricing emotionally fair<\/em>. $250 or $375 a month feels like a lot if you frame it as “a month of kicking and punching.” It feels entirely reasonable when you frame it as the tuition for a 12-month, then multi-year, character-and-confidence program led by a Grandmaster. Same dollars. Completely different decision in the parent’s mind. Pricing and enrollment structure are not two separate levers \u2014 they’re two halves of the same lever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now let’s talk about the pillar that quietly does the heaviest lifting, and the one most owners ignore because it isn’t as exciting as a new ad campaign: retention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s a piece of math every owner needs tattooed on the inside of their eyelids: a new student costs five to seven times more to acquire than to retain. Depending on your market, you’re spending somewhere between $150 and $300 in ad spend and staff time to enroll one new family. So if you’re bleeding students out the back door at the industry-typical 3% to 5% per month, you are running on a treadmill \u2014 sprinting to enroll new people just to replace the ones quietly drifting away. The well-coached schools I work with target below 2% monthly attrition<\/strong>. That single difference changes everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Watch what it does to Jason’s numbers. He went from roughly 50 students to 273 students in two years. If those 273 families were churning at 4% a month, he’d be losing about 11 students every single month \u2014 over 130 a year \u2014 just to stand still. At sub-2%, he’s losing five or six, and almost everyone he enrolls actually stays long enough to progress, to refer their friends, and to keep paying premium tuition for years. Retention is what lets a price increase compound instead of evaporate. It’s the difference between a school that peaks<\/em> and a school that builds<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Retention isn’t a gimmick or a loyalty punch-card. It’s the natural byproduct of everything else done right: a genuinely great class experience, a clear belt-progression path, consistent communication with parents, recognition of milestones, and a culture where quitting feels like abandoning a goal rather than canceling a subscription. The 12-month Trial Enrollment we just covered is itself a retention system. So is great teaching. I’ve written an entire deep-dive on building this engine \u2014 start with my guide to martial arts student retention<\/a> if your back door is wider than your front door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most telling lines in Jason’s story comes when he describes where the school is now. He doesn’t just talk about money. He says: “Now we have extra instructors in place… we are actually expanding the school by an extra 2,000 square feet, and we’re at a place right now where we can add another two, three, four hundred students.” Read that again, because it’s the sound of a business that has outgrown its founder’s two hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A school that depends entirely on the owner being on the mat for every class has a hard ceiling, and that ceiling is roughly equal to one person’s energy and calendar. You cannot build a million-dollar school as a solo act. The fourth pillar of the Premium Turnaround is leadership: developing instructors and staff so the school can deliver an excellent experience whether or not the owner is in the building, and so the owner can finally spend time working on<\/em> the business instead of being trapped in<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is also where premium pricing pays a hidden dividend. Profitable schools can afford to hire and retain great instructors. Broke schools can’t \u2014 which means broke schools either burn out the owner or settle for cheap, unmotivated help, both of which degrade the very teaching quality that justifies premium pricing in the first place. It’s a flywheel: better pricing funds better staff, better staff deliver a better experience, a better experience justifies and protects the pricing. Jason’s “extra instructors in place” aren’t a luxury he bought with his success \u2014 they’re part of the machine that created<\/em> his success and now lets him scale it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The fifth pillar is filling the school predictably. And here’s where Jason did something I want to highlight, because it speaks to how he thinks. He recorded a video review of my book, Six Simple Steps to Add 100 Students<\/em>, and called it “absolutely phenomenal,” “easily five stars,” and said he now requires all his staff to read it and has handed it out to dozens of other school owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the most important thing he said about that book is also the most important thing about marketing in general. He pointed out that he used these principles to go from 50 students to 273 students before the book even existed<\/em>. How? Because, as he put it, “these aren’t just theories \u2014 these are principles that work.” They’re the same principles I ran in my own schools for over 40 years, then taught to other owners, and only later organized into chapters. The marketing isn’t the secret. The execution of proven marketing principles, consistently, is the secret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And notice how marketing connects back to pillar one. Premium pricing actually makes marketing easier<\/em> and more profitable. When you’re charging $250 instead of $85, every new enrollment is worth nearly three times as much, which means you can afford to spend more to acquire each family, outbid the commodity school for attention, and still make a healthy margin. The cheap school can’t compete with you on ad spend because every student it lands is worth a fraction of yours. Premium pricing doesn’t just raise your revenue per student \u2014 it buys you the firepower to dominate your local marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me lay Jason’s transformation out as a timeline, using only the figures he stated himself, because the sequence tells the story better than any single number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That last point is worth dwelling on. Jason said he’s looking at becoming a million-dollar school “very, very quickly here, hopefully within the next year.” Let’s make that target concrete, because most owners have never actually done the arithmetic. A million dollars a year is $83,333 a month.<\/strong> Jason hit over $86,000 in January 2023 \u2014 meaning he has already, in his single best months, touched a million-dollar run rate. The job now isn’t a miracle. It’s consistency: holding that monthly number every month, which is exactly what the five pillars are built to do. The expansion and the extra instructors are him building the capacity to make $83,333 a month his floor instead of his ceiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you take nothing else from Family Black Belt Academy, take these three things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One: your price is a statement about your value, so stop apologizing for it.<\/strong> Jason was terrified of the $60 school downstairs and raised his tuition anyway, almost tripling it, and grew. The cheap competitor you’re scared of is not your competition \u2014 they’re your contrast, and they’re doing you a favor by making the difference obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two: this is a system, not a tactic.<\/strong> Jason didn’t just raise prices and hope. He raised prices, restructured enrollment around the Black Belt journey, kept students longer, built a staff, and marketed consistently \u2014 and the pillars reinforced each other. Pull one lever and you’ll get a bump. Pull all five and you get a turnaround.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three: it is work, and it is worth it.<\/strong> Jason said it plainly \u2014 this is not a get-rich-quick scheme, you have to work hard, and if you have that willingness and that desire, you will succeed. He took an old name, an old price, and a school down to 50 students after COVID, and in 24 months built something on the doorstep of a million dollars a year. He did it as a Grandmaster who finally let himself become a great business owner too. You can do the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more case studies, frameworks, and the full playbook behind schools like Jason’s, explore the Million-Dollar School hub<\/a>, where I keep the deepest material on pricing, retention, leadership, and scaling to seven figures.<\/p>\n\n\n That’s exactly what Jason Purcell feared \u2014 there was an Aikido school in his building charging $60 a month while he charged $85. He raised his basic tuition to $250 anyway, and rather than losing families, his school grew from about 50 students to 273. Price is the perception of value. A cheaper competitor doesn’t steal your premium families; it provides the contrast that makes your serious program look like the obvious serious choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faster than most owners believe, but only with consistent work across all the fundamentals at once. Family Black Belt Academy went from a post-COVID low of ~50 students and ~$15,000\/month in January 2021 to 273 students and over $86,000 in January 2023 \u2014 two years. Jason was emphatic that this is not a get-rich-quick scheme; it required hard work applied to proven pricing, enrollment, retention, staffing, and marketing systems simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A million dollars a year is $83,333 a month \u2014 a number Jason has already touched in his best months. Getting there reliably means premium pricing in the $347\u2013$397 range, enrolling students on a 12-month Trial Enrollment toward Black Belt, holding attrition below 2% a month, building a staff so you’re not the bottleneck, and marketing consistently. It also typically means adding capacity, which is why Jason is expanding by about 2,000 square feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Pillar 1: Premium pricing \u2014 the single decision that changed everything<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Pillar 2: The 12-month Trial Enrollment \u2014 selling the journey, not the month<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Pillar 3: Retention \u2014 where the real money actually lives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Pillar 4: Leadership and staff \u2014 getting the owner out of the bottleneck<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Pillar 5: Marketing and enrollment \u2014 the system Jason endorsed by name<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The numbers, in order, so you can see the compounding<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What Jason’s story should change about how you run your school<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Related Reading<\/h3>\n
Frequently asked questions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Won’t raising my prices send students to the cheaper school nearby?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How fast can a struggling school actually turn around?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What does it take to become a million-dollar school?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Get your own Premium Turnaround started<\/h2>\n\n\n\n