Every summer I have some version of the same conversation. A school owner is staring at a slow month, worried about “quality,” debating tiny tweaks to an offer, and somewhere buried in the numbers is the real issue: they generated eight leads. Eight. For the whole month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When that happens, the debate about lead quality<\/em> is a distraction. You don’t have a lead-quality problem. You have a lead-volume<\/em> problem. And volume problems get solved by massive action, not by tweaking the edges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Picture my old Monday-morning staff meeting. I was not known for being gentle, and neither was Jeff Smith \u2014 though compared to a few others in our world, we were the kind and gentle ones. We’d be looking at the stats and I’d ask a simple question: “How many leads do you have this month?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the answer came back “eight,” the meeting was effectively over. Not because I was going to spend an hour dissecting those eight leads, but because there is nothing to dissect. My response was always the same: Why are we even having this conversation? Go get 200 more, and we’ll sort them out as we go.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s the math that matters. From the beginning of summer to the end of summer, a healthy school needs something on the order of a thousand leads. If you’re sitting on eight, you are not 20% short \u2014 you are 992 short. That is not a problem you fix with a better headline. That is a problem you fix by going after big volume, immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeff put it even more bluntly in a recent meeting: you could get eight leads with the doors locked and a box bolted to the front of the building that says “drop your name in the slot.” Eight leads a month is what happens when a school essentially waits for something to happen and never schedules anything. It is almost impossible to get only<\/em> eight leads unless you’ve disconnected the phone and unplugged the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s harsh. It’s meant to be. Because the fix is completely within your control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you commit to volume, the very next danger is misallocated focus. Your mental energy is a finite resource, and if you’re not careful you’ll pour it into activities that have almost zero impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So make a list. At the top go the things likely to bring you 50, 100, 175 leads at a time. At the bottom go the things that bring you one, two, three, four at a time. Then go to work at the top<\/em> of the list. Attack the sources that deliver 175 and 50 and 25. If you eventually get around to the trickle sources, fine \u2014 but you never start<\/em> there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve had this exact conversation with members who proudly generated 500 “leads” by being a PE teacher for the day, then got tangled up in whether a form filled out in a gym class is “really” a lead. Wrong conversation. When you need massive volume, you don’t sit around interrogating the definition of a lead. You figure out: what’s the fair, the carnival, the movie-theater opening, the farmer’s market, the big live event that feeds you a stampede of traffic? Where can I get in front of 50 people at once instead of one? Better yet, where’s a business that has already rounded up a couple thousand of exactly my audience?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Birthday parties are a perfect example of a “big fish” source most owners underuse. A party brings in a room full of people who have never had a single thought about martial arts \u2014 and now I have them for an hour to plant the idea and impress them. That’s gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades I’ve told staff and members the same thing: if you don’t know anything else to do, get out of the school. Sitting in the school will not generate a single lead. Take a ride out the front door and start knocking on doors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is the most labor-intensive, least glamorous way to generate traffic ever invented \u2014 other than the fact that it works<\/em>. Bill Clark built his first dozen locations sending staff out with clipboards and guest passes, tapping people on the shoulder, booking VIP classes and making appointments. When I opened schools with zero money, I walked door to door to door putting flyers on every door in the neighborhood, and the moment money came in, I funneled it into advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my schools had a building that came in four months late, and I already had two full-time staff on payroll. So I put them on clipboards: We’re going to knock on every door in this neighborhood, and this one, and this one. If they don’t answer, we leave a door hanger, make a note, and come back when they’re more likely to be home.<\/em> Even the retired couple with no kids and a grandchild 300 miles away got a friendly knock: “We just want to be a good neighbor and let you know we’re here \u2014 when the grandkids are in town, they’re welcome to a couple of free classes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you’d rather talk to businesses than households, the front door still works. Walk into the shops around you and you can put rack cards on counters, flyers on pizza boxes, and 11×17 posters in front windows. One relationship can multiply your reach dozens of times over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Domino’s built a multi-billion-dollar business on this. Their early growth was door hangers \u2014 in the dorms, in the surrounding neighborhoods \u2014 plus flyers on their own pizza boxes. Door hangers, door hangers, door hangers. Labor intensive. Wildly effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeff Smith has a phrase for the discipline that separates the eight-lead schools from the growing ones: put your marketing to a calendar.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s the exercise. Go through our A-to-Z grassroots marketing videos \u2014 there are three one-hour sessions covering 50 or 60 different things you can do. On your paper, draw three columns: internal marketing<\/strong>, external marketing<\/strong>, and internet<\/strong>. As you hear each of the 50-60 tactics, write it in the right column. When you’re done, highlight every one you know how to do in green, and everything you’d need to learn in yellow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then \u2014 and this is the whole point \u2014 every green item goes on a calendar. You schedule the actual event, somewhere, somehow. Not “I’m going to do something.” A specific thing, on a specific day. The yellow items become your learning list.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe “eight leads” wake-up call<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Prioritize the big fish, ignore the trickle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When you don’t know what to do \u2014 walk out the front door<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Put your marketing on the calendar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n