Every school owner I talk to about instructors opens the same way. They tell me it is a people problem. Nobody wants to work, the teenagers flake, the good ones leave for better money.

Then I ask how long it takes a new hire to teach a beginner class by themselves, and the number they give me explains everything they just complained about.

When somebody brings me an instructor issue, it almost always arrives dressed as a hiring issue. We cannot find people. The people we find do not stick. The ones who stick are not good enough to run a class without supervision.

Look at the same situation from a different angle and it stops being about people at all. If you have 100 active students and you lose 20 of them a month, you do not have a quitting problem, you have a retention system that was never built. Instructors work the same way. If you cannot keep a bench, you are missing the system that creates one.

My grandpa had a line for this. You can wish in one hand and spit in the other, and at the end of the day all you have is a handful of spit. I can want excellent instructors all I want. Without something that actually produces them, the wanting is the whole plan.

So we start where almost nobody starts. Before the manual, before the training schedule, before the scorecard, the question is whether the thing you are asking people to teach can even be taught at scale.

I tested for my black belt at ten years old. That test had 360 self defense skills, 27 forms, four weapons forms, every basic block, punch and kick, double kicks, jump kicks, board breaking, single person sparring, and two person sparring.

I basically lived at the school. Eight to ten hours a week, which is around 450 hours a year, across seven years. Call it 3,000 hours of mat time to get there.

Now look at what we hand a kid today. Two 45 minute classes a week is 78 hours a year, and we ask them to finish in four years instead of seven. That is roughly 300 hours to learn something that took 3,000.

Most schools never do that division. They inherited the curriculum from their instructor, who inherited it from theirs, and the volume has never been adjusted for the fact that nobody trains ten hours a week anymore. We have unlimited attendance at MUV and maybe five percent of our students come four or five times a week.

Count the mat hours your curriculum actually requires for proficiency. Count the hours your students actually get based on your real attendance numbers. Divide. That number is how long your curriculum truly takes, and it is usually a lot longer than the belt chart on your wall claims.

Picture me opening a restaurant with 700 items on the menu, then trying to open a second location. How many chefs can cook 700 dishes at a high level? How many can I train to?

In-N-Out figured this out. I need people who can grill meat, stack a burger, and move fast. That is trainable in days. It is also why you see chains of that and almost never a chain of the East Coast diner with the fifteen fold laminated brochure. Denny's managed to scale a giant menu and nobody has ever accused Denny's of food quality.

Your curriculum is your menu. Every technique you carry adds hours to the ramp time of every person you will ever hire. A bloated syllabus does not just slow your students down, it puts a ceiling on how many humans on earth are qualified to teach at your school.

The question sitting underneath this is what you want to be known for. Quality, or volume of material.

My dad ran the curriculum I grew up in, and I worked for him. We hired a guy named Mike with zero martial arts background. I worked with him two hours a day. He was also taking classes on top of that.

At the end of a full year, Mike was a green belt. Which meant he could teach the beginner class and the little kids class, and that was it.

Think about what that means as a business. What other job in America hires somebody and takes two years before they can perform the basic functions of the role? You would never accept that ramp time anywhere else, and you certainly cannot build a bench on it. Every class stays chained to you or to the one other person who knows everything.

At MUV the standard is different because the curriculum made it possible. Ninety days to run a full Year One class and a Mighty Movers class. Six months to teach Year Two and cover advanced when we need it. Same job, different math.

When I took over a Taekwondo school, part of their black belt test was running three miles up a mountain and three miles back down. I asked the owners what in their weekly classes prepared a student for that. The answer was nothing, it is just hard.

That is ego wearing a uniform. We test people on things we never trained them to do and then tell ourselves the standard is high.

Our black belts jump rope for five minutes at their test. They also start jump roping in warmups at the end of year one, so by the time they test it is a Tuesday, not a mountain.

Same principle inside the techniques. Year one at MUV is jab, cross, front kick, and round kick to the leg. Year two adds hooks, and the round kick moves to the body and the head. Advanced adds the switch. To the student it feels like three new skills. What we are really doing is teaching one round kick and changing the height.

Compare that to what my dad built. He cross trained heavily and believed everything he learned had to live in the curriculum, so out of nowhere at brown belt students started learning judo sweeps with nothing leading into it. It was always the hardest material for our students, and now I know exactly why. Kids do not go from addition and subtraction straight into trigonometry. Your curriculum should not either.

If a technique in your syllabus never repeats and never gets built on, it is not curriculum. It is a souvenir from your instructor's instructor, and your new hires are paying for it in ramp time.

Here is the exercise. Strip every rule and every organizational requirement off the table, even if you are part of one. Then answer what your perfect black belt actually looks like.

Now work backward. Everything that builds toward that person stays. Everything that exists because somebody two generations up the lineage liked it gets cut, or it becomes a fun thing you play with in class that nobody tests on.

We teach jump kicks at MUV. We do not test them. That single distinction pulled hours out of our syllabus and hours off our training ramp.

What you get on the other side is a school where staff training stops being a remedial session about forms nobody remembers. Back in the day more than half of my instructor training was spent reminding people what year one even looked like. Meanwhile the thing I actually wanted to work on, how to correct a student well, never got touched.

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.

Most owners have never actually calculated whether their curriculum is teachable in the time their students give them. It feels like a two day project, which is why it never happens. It takes about eleven minutes with the right prompt.

This one interviews you, does the division, and hands you a ranked cut list. Run it before you touch anything else in your instructor system, because every decision downstream depends on the answer.

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT.

You are a curriculum engineer for martial arts schools. Your job is to calculate whether my curriculum is realistically learnable in the time my students actually train, and then help me cut what does not belong.

Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME. Wait for my answer before moving on.

1. What style do you teach and what is your advertised time to black belt? 2. How long is one class, and how many classes per week does your average student actually attend, using your real attendance data rather than your unlimited policy? 3. List every category of material a student must demonstrate to earn a black belt, including forms, self defense techniques, weapons, sparring requirements, breaking, and physical standards, with rough counts. 4. For each category, roughly how many mat hours of repetition does a student need to reach genuine proficiency rather than recall? 5. Which of these items appear again at a later belt in a more advanced form, and which appear exactly once and are never revisited? 6. Which physical or athletic requirements are tested at black belt but never trained in regular classes?

Then produce this output.

HOURS REQUIRED: total mat hours my curriculum demands for proficiency. HOURS AVAILABLE: actual hours a student receives before their black belt date, using my real attendance numbers. THE GAP: the difference as a percentage, plus a plain sentence telling me how many years my curriculum actually takes at current attendance.

CUT LIST: every item that appears once and never builds into anything later, ranked by hours consumed, with the hours recovered for each one.

EGO LIST: every requirement tested at black belt with no training pathway leading to it. For each, either propose where it enters the curriculum early and builds, or recommend removing it from testing.

INSTRUCTOR RAMP: estimate how many months a new hire needs to competently teach my beginner class today, and how many months it would take after the cuts above.

Be direct. Do not soften the numbers to make me feel better.

Run this once, then hand the cut list to your head instructor and defend every item they want to keep. Anything neither of you can connect to the black belt you described is coming out of the syllabus and going back into your training ramp. Re run it every time you consider adding material, because additions are how curriculums get fat in the first place.

A five point checklist on what makes someone worth working for, which every school owner will read while quietly scoring themselves a four out of five. Notice how many of the signs come down to the same thing, which is whether the person under you can see where they are going. Your best part timer has already rated you on this list. They just did it silently and have not told you the score.

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Rick Rubin makes the argument that doing less is what lets you accomplish more, which is a strange thing to hear from a record producer and a very uncomfortable thing to hear if you just counted your curriculum hours. He built a career on removing things until what remained could carry weight. Your syllabus is a track with too many instruments on it and you have been adding rather than subtracting for eleven years.

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Strauss Zelnick lays out what a CEO is actually responsible for, and almost none of it resembles what you did last Tuesday night. He runs a multibillion dollar company and describes a role built around people, standards, and direction. You run a school and describe a role built around covering the 5:30 class because somebody called out. One of those is a job description and the other is a schedule.

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Pew Research Center surveyed 6,627 non retired U.S. adults in February 2022, including 965 who had left a job voluntarily the year before. Among those who quit, 63% said no opportunities for advancement was a reason, the same share who cited low pay, with 57% pointing to feeling disrespected at work.

The number most owners think they already know is the pay one. Advancement landing at the identical figure is the part that gets skipped. When your best brown belt gives notice and takes something else for two more dollars an hour, the money is what they tell you, because the money is a clean answer that does not require insulting you on the way out. The thing they could not find at your school was a second rung.

Gallup's 2026 research found one in four American employees report lacking opportunities for career advancement, while 63% say their organization does provide them. Read those together and the picture sharpens. Most people can see a path where they work. The ones who cannot are a minority, and that minority is who walks. Advancement failure is not a broad workforce condition, it is a specific thing happening to specific people inside specific buildings.

I lived the other side of it. I managed a martial arts school in Illinois and helped grow it significantly. Every time I raised my future, the owners said we would talk about it and then we never did. I gave my two weeks and that is when they panicked and offered me ownership. Too late is a very cheap place to become generous. Go pull the offer letter of your best part timer right now. If it contains one number and no second number, no metric that moves them to it, and no date attached, then you already know the conversation you are going to have. You just do not know the month yet.

I collected eighty hours of class footage from school owners a few years back, schools running anywhere from twenty thousand to a hundred and forty thousand a month, and every one of them except two fell below what I would accept on my own floor. These are excellent martial artists. That is what made it hard to watch. The gap was never skill, it was that nobody had built a system to transfer the skill, and nobody had sat in the back of their own beginner class recently enough to notice. You do not get what you expect. You get what you inspect. Which raises a quiet question worth sitting with this week: when is the last time you watched a full class at your school without teaching it, without fixing it, and without anybody knowing you were watching?