Somewhere tonight there is a school that opened to teach kids martial arts. Now it is running Krav, jiu jitsu, fitness kickboxing, and a weapons class on Thursdays.

The owner would tell you he built all that because the kids program plateaued. What actually happened is he stopped working on the kids program.

I spent last weekend in a room with Alex Hormozi and his team. Some people in there were doing $200,000 a month. One was doing $24 million a year. Plenty were under a million, which is where most of our industry sits.

Different revenue, different industries, and the same problem kept coming up all weekend. Everyone's attention was split across too many places.

I've been guilty of this one myself. At one point I was running four businesses at the same time, and part of why I sold the agency is that you just can't get any of them to a hundred percent when your energy is cut into quarters.

Here's what Alex teaches about the under-a-million group, and it fits us almost perfectly. At that level the constraint is usually your money model, which is really your pricing. You're probably underpriced. We've all heard that before. What we do instead of raising the price is keep adding value, because we're scared of what happens when somebody quits. So we live with the fear and we go looking for revenue somewhere else in the building.

That's how the second program gets born.

A school I worked with a few years back had kickboxing running seven nights a week. I did a site visit and counted four people on the mat.

I asked the owner what the program was doing in terms of revenue. He said three or four thousand a month. I asked what he charged. A hundred bucks. So he had thirty or forty people paying for it and four of them showed up that night. I asked who taught it. They had a kickboxing coach, because he wanted nothing to do with running it himself.

We dug into the numbers and that program was profiting about five hundred dollars a month.

Five hundred dollars. On four thousand in revenue, with a time block every single night, a coach he couldn't replace, marketing spend, and a chunk of his attention. He was also getting held hostage and didn't know it, because that coach understood the program didn't exist without her.

He got rid of it. He put that same energy into his core program and made the five hundred back instantly.

There's a reason this keeps happening, and it's worth sitting with for a minute.

We're creators. A lot of us came out of a bad situation, built something, and had success show up right after. So somewhere along the way we decided that building something new is what success feels like. Now any time we're not feeling successful, we go build something.

You see it with the owner who won't hand off the flyer design even though he isn't great at it and Claude can do it thirty times faster. You see it with the guy who learned AI in June and is now building a tool that's going to change the industry. It isn't going to change the industry. Everybody learning to build with AI is already building for themselves.

We're building a CRM for MUV right now. I've had people tell me I should sell it to the industry. Hell no. We built it to make our own business run better, and the second I sell it I've started a software company I never wanted to run.

Same thing with licensing programs. Somebody asked me about them a while back, and my answer is they only make sense when the licensed thing is your main thing. If you're paying someone every month for a program that's your third priority, you're paying a subscription for split attention.

Bezos got told this before Amazon existed. One of his mentors said you have enough good ideas to destroy your business. If you're a visionary, and my mentors have told me for years that I am, you need blinders on or you'll end up with forty-seven things going and nothing moving.

When somebody tells me they can't spend more on marketing, there are really only three honest answers underneath it.

First one is I don't know my numbers. That's a metrics problem and you can fix it in ten minutes with a calculator.

Second one is something would break if I doubled the volume. That's actually a good answer, because it tells you where the real constraint is. If more students would break you, the work is in your instructors, your schedule, and your mat capacity. If you could take more students today and they aren't walking in, the work is in your marketing and your intros.

Third one is that you see marketing as an expense instead of an investment, and you see it that way because you have no idea what your return actually is. This is the one that shows up on the P&L. When a school owner tells me he can't afford marketing, I ask to see the profit and loss statement, and on maybe nine out of ten of them I find personal charges and expenses the business doesn't need. Dinners out. Subscriptions nobody uses. Stuff that got run through the business because it was easier. That's five hundred dollars a month sitting right there in black and white, and it's returning nothing. Move it into your ads at a 14 to 1 ratio and watch what happens to your enrollment over the next ninety days.

Here's the part nobody wants to hear. Most owners are certain they have a demand problem. A lot of them are supply constrained and have been running ads for a year to avoid the harder conversation about fixing their operations. Others are the opposite. They're writing class plans and tinkering with systems while nobody's walking in the front door, which means they have no way to know if their systems are broken in the first place.

The questions is, what are you avoiding in your business because you don’t feel skilled at it? The reality is that you are probably only one skill acquisition away from growing your business to the next level. So what is the skill you need to develop?

The most repeated piece of advice at that whole event was a question. Why can't you do more of what already works?

A guy in my group wanted help launching paid ads. Three organic videos a day were already driving his entire pipeline. The advisor asked him what would happen if he just went to six a day.

I had almost the same conversation with a school owner whose best channel was daycare mass intros. Ten new students every time he ran one. I asked if he was in every daycare in his area. He wasn't. He still wanted help with Facebook ads.

So here's the question I want you carrying into this week. If you woke up tomorrow with twenty times the qualified leads you get now, and it held for the rest of the month, would you still be thinking about a second location? A new program? A side hustle?

I'd bet almost every one of you says no.

Be the place that sells cheeseburgers. Different kinds of cheeseburgers, really good cheeseburgers, but cheeseburgers. Too many of us are trying to be the Greek diner that also serves Mexican food, a couple Japanese dishes, and a really terrible steak.

November 5 through 7 in Gilbert, and we are close to full.

Thursday is at MUV. Randy Steinke, a UFC striking coach, is running pad holding, because pad holding is a skill and most schools have scarecrows standing there absorbing kicks. Jadi covers classroom drills. Josh, our head coach, walks through exactly how we train our instructors. Stay after and watch our classes if you want to see the standard live.

Friday and Saturday move to Gilbert and turn to business, with staff breakout rooms running alongside the owner sessions and a couple of guest speakers we are not announcing.

CLAIM YOUR GILBERT SEAT

Most of us write ads to parents, like there is only one kind of parent. Facebook does not let you filter your way to the right family anymore, so your content is your targeting now. If your copy is not calling out a specific parent with a specific problem in their own words, you are hitting one slice of your town and paying full price for the rest of it.

This prompt builds your callout list from the families you already have, instead of from guesses. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and answer as it asks.

You are a direct response copywriter who specializes in local martial arts schools. Your job is to build a library of ad callouts based on my best existing families, not on assumptions about the market.

Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME. Wait for my answer before moving on. Do not summarize between questions.

1. Describe 5 to 10 of your best families from the last few years, the ones where you thought I wish every family walked in like this one. For each, give me the child's age at enrollment and anything you remember about the household. 2. For those families, what stage of life were the parents in? New parents, established in their careers, two parent household, split household, anything you noticed. 3. What was the actual problem each of those parents described when they first called or inquired? Use their words, not yours. 4. What does your school charge per month and what is your core program? 5. What city or radius are you advertising into?

Then produce this output.

PATTERN READ: the 3 to 5 patterns my best families share. Be specific and name the pattern I would have missed.

CALLOUT LIBRARY: 12 ad callouts, each written in the parent's language and never in industry language. Do not use the words discipline, focus, respect, confidence, or character unless a parent actually said it in my answers. Group them into 4 distinct parent segments and label each segment. Each callout must be a single line that could open a video or sit as the first line of ad copy.

THE THREE I WOULD RUN FIRST: pick 3 and explain in one sentence each why that callout reaches a slice of my town my current ads are missing.

Be direct. Do not soften the language to make the callouts sound nicer.

Run this once and keep the output somewhere you can pull it up on a filming day. The benchmark on the Hormozi side is ten creatives in rotation for every $10,000 of monthly spend, and nobody in our industry is spending that. If you are at $2,500 a month, shoot for ten variations and remember that a new hook on the same video counts. Same footage, different first three seconds, different callout.

@opusathletic posted mindset rules written for athletes, and every one of them would survive being said out loud to a room of nine year olds. Most of us write mat chats the night before out of whatever we half remember from last week. Save this, pull one rule per week, and you have a quarter's worth of material that is actually about something.

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@growthmindwave on sitting in silence with yourself, which hits differently now that AI is doing the first draft of everybody's thinking. We wrote about this a couple weeks ago and it keeps proving itself out. The ideas that actually changed your school did not show up while you were scrolling.

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Jim Rohn makes the case that income and personal development move together, which is encouraging or uncomfortable depending on the last book you actually finished. Ninety seconds well spent, and a fair question to ask yourself before you blame the market for a flat month.

Watch the reel →

Two numbers we barely talk about in this industry.

Lifetime value is your average monthly tuition times how many months they stay, then knock off your payroll percentage. Charge $229, keep them twelve months, run 30 percent payroll, and you're at $1,923. Ours at MUV is around $2,400.

Customer acquisition cost is everything you spent to get students, including what you pay your agency, divided by the number of people who actually enrolled. Not leads. Not booked intros. Enrollments. For example, if you spent $2000 on marketing and enrolled 20 students, you would have a CAC of $100. Essentially, it costs you $100 to buy a new student through marketing.

Divide the first number (LTV) by the second (CAC) and you've got your ratio. Mine's around 14 to 1. A guy on our Monday call ran the math live and came out at 59 to 1.

If you had a slot machine that gave you fourteen dollars back every time you put a dollar in, how long would you sit there? I'd sit there until they threw me out. That investment beats the S&P 500 and it beats real estate, and a lot of you have that machine sitting in your school right now and you won't pull the lever.

The number that keeps us blind is cost per lead. When we moved our ads off Facebook lead forms and onto our own website, our cost per lead went up and our lead count went down. At first glance, the ads looked like they were failing but what we ended up seeing was a higher intent lead that converted 75% of the time. While our cost per lead went up, our cost per acquisition dropped from $240 to $140. If I'd been watching cost per lead I would've killed the best change we made all year.

The hard part here is not the math. It is that the second program, or the side hustle, or the new avatar, gave you something real when you started it. It gave you that feeling of building again. Walking away from it feels like admitting you were wrong to be excited. You were not wrong. It just cost a lot more than you were tracking, it costs you your focus and time. Watch what happens when you put all of your energy into building the main thing.