Your Best Fighter Is Probably Your Worst Hire

Updated October 29, 2026

In forty-plus years around this industry I have known a great many exceptional fighters and a great many exceptional school operators. I can think of exactly one person who was genuinely both.

That’s Jeff Smith. One.

I don’t say that to be cute. I say it because school owners keep promoting their best competitor into a teaching role and then wondering why the beginner classes are hemorrhaging students.

Why the Traits Don’t Transfer

Think about what it actually takes to become a champion-level competitor. You have to be willing to organize your entire life around your own development. You have to be able to tune out the needs and opinions of everyone around you for years at a stretch. You have to believe, at a level most people would find uncomfortable, that you are the most important person in the room.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s the job description. You have to be somewhat narcissistic to get to a championship level in anything — the same way you have to be somewhat narcissistic to run for president. The people who don’t have that trait don’t make it that far, so the pool of people who made it that far is not a random sample.

Now put that person in front of eight six-year-olds and a nervous mom on a folding chair.

Great competitors are frequently self-centered, frequently low on empathy, and frequently unable to notice that the person in front of them is struggling — because noticing that was never part of the skill set they built. The traits that got them the trophy are actively working against them on your floor.

The Trait That Actually Predicts Performance

There is nothing worse than a staff member who is high-talent and low-empathy. They look great in a demo, they’re a nightmare on the floor, and they’re expensive to keep because they know what they can do.

What I want instead is high empathy. I want somebody people like within about eleven seconds of meeting them.

There was an old Nightingale program on charisma that I’ve never forgotten, and its central finding was that most of what we experience as charisma is simply people sensing that you are genuinely interested in them. That’s it. Not stories, not jokes, not presence. Interest.

If you want to see it done at a professional level, go watch how military recruiters operate. I first noticed it in a scene in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, and whatever you think of the film, the recruiters in it are doing something remarkable. Those people get some of the finest rapport and sales training available anywhere, and it doesn’t look like sales training at all. It looks like a guy who’s really interested in what you’re doing after graduation.

The John Travolta performance in Primary Colors — the one where he’s doing Bill Clinton — is the fictional version of the same thing. The character isn’t persuading anybody. He’s just fully present with whoever is standing in front of him, and people find it almost impossible to resist.

That’s the skill. And here’s the good news for you as an owner: you can teach a person with high empathy to throw a decent front kick. You cannot teach a person with low empathy to care.

Rule Number One

Anything that breaks rapport is a bad thing. That’s the whole rule.

If rapport is strong, almost everything you say is fine — including the awkward stuff, including the fumbled explanation, including the moment you can’t remember the kid’s name. If rapport is weak, your script can be perfect and nothing will work.

I bring this up because a lot of what got taught as sales technique in this industry was rapport-breaking dressed up as closing. Bob Wall used to carry a dart pistol with a rubber tip that he’d shoot into a prospect’s chest during the close. He had a line he’d use on men who wouldn’t sign without their wife present — something to the effect of “who wears the pants in your family?”

Frankly, that stuff didn’t work then. It certainly doesn’t work now.

“I’m Not a Salesperson”

The objection I get from instructors — and from owners — is that they didn’t get into martial arts to sell things.

Dr. Moody’s read on this is that the anxiety comes first and the philosophy gets built afterward to justify it. Somebody is uncomfortable asking for money, and rather than sit with the discomfort they construct a principled-sounding reason why asking for money is beneath them. He traces the bad connotation back to health club tactics in the eighties and nineties, and I think he’s right about the origin.

But here’s the thing that should end the argument.

Zig Ziglar used to say that sales is a transference of enthusiasm. He probably didn’t originate it — Tom Hopkins credits his own mentor with a version of it — but the definition is exactly right, and look at what it implies.

You cannot be a great instructor without being a great leader. You cannot be a great leader without being inspirational. You cannot be inspirational without genuine enthusiasm. And enthusiasm that stays inside you is worthless — the entire job is transferring it to somebody else.

That is the same skill. Not a similar skill. The same one. The person who can get a scared eight-year-old to break a board is executing the identical function as the person who gets a hesitant parent to commit to a black belt program. Both of them are transferring belief across a gap.

Dr. Moody put the standard bluntly: he doesn’t think anybody is a very good instructor if they don’t get people to do things they never imagined they could do before. If you can do that, you can enroll. If you can’t do that, your enrollment problem is the least of your worries.

Where the Sale Actually Happens

Jeff Smith has always said that ninety-nine percent of the sale happens on the floor. I’d push it further: ninety-nine percent of it happens long before anybody sits down in an office.

It happens in how the school looked when they pulled up. It happens in how the phone was answered. It happens in whether the person at the front desk looked up. It happens in the content and professionalism of the introductory process, and in the enthusiasm and empathy of every single staff member the family brushed past on the way in.

By the time anyone is talking about money, the decision is mostly made. Which means the hiring decision you make this month is a pricing decision, a retention decision, and an enrollment decision all at once.

So when the tournament team’s best competitor asks you for a teaching slot, watch him with the white belts first. Not with the demo team. With the white belts, and with their mothers.

If you want the whole system, grab the free book at FillYourSchool.com — or call or text 1-720-256-0208 and ask Bob Dunne about a free evaluation of your school.