Somewhere tonight an owner is texting a brown belt's mom to ask if he can cover the 6:00 class, and the kid has never once been taught how to run a warm up.

Next spring that same owner will tell a room full of peers that good instructors are impossible to find.

Most owners start recruiting on the worst day of the year. The head coach gives notice, the schedule has a hole in it by Thursday, and suddenly the whole hiring process has to happen in two weeks. You fast track a kid who is not ready, he walks onto the floor without confidence, the parents can feel it, and now you have a bigger problem than the empty slot you started with.

Picture deciding nobody is testing for black belt this cycle, so you point at an orange belt and tell him he tests in three months. Every owner reading this knows how that test goes, and plenty of us run our staff hiring exactly that way.

When I was working for my dad, he hit one of these moments. He had no team. He had me. He told me he just needed a body, and he did not care whose. I had a friend who was available, and I would never have hired him in a hundred years. My dad hired him anyway. It was a disaster, and I have more stories from that hire than I could fit in this newsletter. What sank that hire was a pool made up entirely of whoever was free that week.

Recruiting has to happen in calm water. At MUV, invitations to our coaches in training program go out at every level up party, which is our graduation, every 90 days, whether we need anyone or not. Ask yourself one question about your last hire. Was it planned on a calendar, or was it forced by somebody leaving?

We do not even look at a student for instructor training until they turn 14. That is when they are employee eligible in Arizona, and that is when they will take the training seriously. Put an 18 year old in a room full of 10 year olds and tell him it is a professional development program. He won’t want to stay there long, and you wouldn’t either.

Plenty of owners hear "start at 14" and realize they barely have any 14 year olds. That usually traces back to the brand. If everything on your walls, your website, and your feed is designed to delight a six year old, teenagers will never walk through the door, and the bench stays empty forever.

I spent a past life in the music industry, and that industry writes songs for 12 year old girls on purpose. The 12 year old boys follow the girls. The younger girls want to be the older girls. The whole funnel gets fed from one carefully chosen age. When we built the MUV brand, our money is still made on the 5 to 7 year old, and the messaging speaks to that child's mom. The look, though, was built so a teenager would walk in and think the place was cool. We get a steady stream of teens without spending a dollar on teen ads, and every one of them is a future coach candidate.

This one I took from Dave Kovar, and it is the most powerful sentence you can say to a future coach. When a kid is leading well, walk over, ideally with the parent in earshot, and tell them you can already see the leadership in them and they are going to make a great coach someday if they want it.

I will say that to a 12 year old all day, because when he turns 14 I want coaching already on his mind. Last week a seven year old was encouraging his partner through a drill and I told him that is exactly what coaches do. He is seven years away from eligibility, and the seed is in the ground anyway.

We run it as a simple chain. If an athlete leads well with a partner, we plant the coach seed. If we see the trait again, we name it out loud again. If a kid is technically great with no leadership yet, we future pace black belt or our upgrade program instead.

Every Thursday my head coach and I print the full roster and talk through every single student. Who needs more attention, who is ready for the upgrade program, who is a coach candidate, who needs a private lesson to get their momentum back. We have a 12 year old right now whose parents attend every class and volunteer for everything, and we have been speaking life into her coaching ability since she was nine. She has started asking us how to become a coach. That conversation took three years to arrive, but that was the plan.

On invite day the athlete gets a physical 5 by 7 card with their name on it and a sealed envelope for their parents. The letter explains what the program is, what it asks of the family, and that a parent has to attend the preview and stay for the full first hour. (WANT THE LETTER? SCROLL TO “WORTH STEALING")

Then we treat it exactly like a new student intro. Confirmation call. Nurture texts and emails. A call the night before. You already know how to do every one of those steps. Most owners just never point that machinery at their own future staff.

The preview is our regular Saturday instructor boot camp. Hour one is teaching skills, role plays, communication, and leadership drills. During hour two, my head coach takes the group through next week's class plans and I sit down with the parents. No slides. I tell them it is a 90 day sprint. Ninety percent attendance at Saturday boot camp, the full online instructor certification finished inside 90 days, and at least two classes a week of their own training, because that requirement continues after they are hired.

Then I tell them the part most owners skip. If their child is at 89 percent on day 90, we will not hire them. If they hit every standard, the job is guaranteed, starting at one hour a week at minimum wage, with hours and pay reviewed every quarter and earned through performance. Parents trust that conversation far more than any recruitment pitch, because it sounds like a real job with a real standard.

Our current head coach joined the program as a brown belt. He was not the best martial artist in the building. He showed up to every boot camp, went all out in the role plays, and finished a 90 day certification in under a month. His first job on the floor was holding pads, which is the first job for everyone, and from there he moved to warm ups, a section of class, multiple sections, and eventually a full class. Each step was earned by performance at the current level, never by time served. Some coaches move up in 30 days. Some lead warm ups for three months.

He also ran our off the mat outreach without being reminded, which for us means phone calls, personalized videos, and handwritten postcards. He started outperforming our head coach at the time, so we demoted the head coach and promoted him. This month we are having our best month since we opened in both enrollments and attrition, and every coach on our team came up through this system.

Two questions for your own building. If an assistant was outperforming your head coach right now, would anything in your system catch it? And if it did, have you explained your culture clearly enough that you could make the move without a mutiny? A school that cannot answer yes to both is handcuffed to whoever happens to hold the whistle today.

"The best hire you will make next year is a kid holding pads in your 5:00 class tonight, and the only open question is whether anyone has told him."

Not sure where to start when it comes to inviting a student to your instructor training team?

Steal MUV Martial Arts CCT Invite Letter and Invitation. Throw these in your favorite AI software and have it rewrite the invites for your school.

Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and answer each question as it comes.

👇 DOWNLOAD OUR PARENT LETTER BELOW 👇

Get your list of students ready, hand out your invites every 90 days and start building your bench today!

Adam Kifer on the Value Gap, the distance between the progress you produce in an athlete and the progress the parent actually witnesses. Every owner has lost the kid who was right on track, and the reason is usually that the coach saw the growth and mom did not. Watch it, then count how many parents in your lobby this week could name one specific thing their child improved at.

Watch the reel →

Martial Arts Business Coach (@hernandothola) asks why gymnastics, cheer, and hockey get to charge a premium while jiu jitsu schools act like $150 a month is a law of physics. His answer is that the owner decides, and the comments section is a live focus group of owners explaining why they personally cannot. Read the replies slowly. A few of them will sound uncomfortably familiar.

Read the full post →

Jason Goggans (@black.wolf.leadership) lists the things a leader cannot tolerate from a team, and adds the part most owners skip, which is that the same list applies to the person signing the checks. Read it with your current staff in mind, then read it again with your future coaches in mind, because every habit you let slide this month is the standard your next hire learns on day one.

Read the full post →

Adam Kifer on connect first, correct second, the rule every MUV coach gets trained on before they lead anything. Get to eye level, help the kid name the feeling, then teach the lesson. It is framed for parents at home, and it doubles as a Saturday staff training topic for any team that still runs the room on volume.

Watch the reel →

Wharton professor Matthew Bidwell studied promotions and hiring in a U.S. investment banking division from 2003 to 2009 and found that people hired from outside were paid roughly 18 to 20 percent more than internal employees promoted into similar jobs.

The premium bought less, too. Those outside hires received significantly lower performance evaluations for their first two years and had higher exit rates. Most people hear that an outside hire costs more and assume the extra money buys proven talent. In Bidwell's data it mostly paid for the two years it took a stranger to learn how the place actually worked.

Then add what it costs when someone walks out. Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee at one half to two times that person's annual salary, and in its 2019 analysis 52 percent of people who voluntarily left said their manager or organization could have done something to keep them. Bidwell's bankers are a long way from a dojo, and his work also found that outside hires who stayed past two years got promoted faster, so the full picture is more complicated than "never hire outside." Both numbers still point in the same direction for a small school with no recruiting budget.

Picture the day your best coach gives notice. You are sitting at the front desk with the roster open, scanning for someone who could cover the 4:30 class, and you are paying a premium in either money or chaos for every year you did not spend building that list. The coach you need has probably been training in your building for three years. You just never told her.

Sources: Knowledge at Wharton, "Why External Hires Get Paid More, and Perform Worse, than Internal Staff"; Gallup, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion" (2019)

Almost every owner I know was once the kid somebody pointed at and said you are going to teach tonight. Most of us survived it, and some of us turned it into a career, so we quietly assume the next generation will figure it out the same way we did. Survival is a terrible hiring system. The coaches who carried you probably never knew how close they came to quitting in their first month, and the ones who did quit never came back to tell you why. Somewhere on your mat this week there is a kid waiting for an adult to notice something in them, and the only thing that decides whether they become your next head coach or somebody else's is whether you say it out loud.