There is a kid in your school who got noticeably better this month. His hands stay up now, his balance is cleaner, and he stopped tearing up every time sparring gear comes out.

His mom watched all of it from the bench with her thumb on Instagram. When she cancels in the spring, the form is going to say schedule conflict.

Every one of you made a student better last week. You fixed a stance, calmed a kid down, maybe helped a parent get through a meltdown in the lobby. That work is real.

The question I care about is whether anyone who pays you noticed.

A parent renews based on how much improvement they saw with their own eyes. We call the space between what you produced in that kid and what the parent actually witnessed the value gap. The wider it gets, the closer that family is to leaving, and they will leave the same week the kid says he does not feel like going. That is the moment mom looks at the calendar, sees soccer on Saturday, and makes the easy call.

We recently sent a survey to every family at MUV. It was about class times. We were trying to fix the schedule, and none of the questions asked for praise. The most common positive comment we got anyway was parents loving when an instructor pulled their child aside at the end of class and worked with them one on one where the parent could watch.

Nobody prompted that. It was the one moment in the week where parents could see exactly what they were paying for.

Flip it around. If parents at your school keep telling you classes are getting too big, I would bet the class size is fine. What they are telling you is they cannot see their own kid getting better, and the only explanation they can come up with is that the room got crowded.

Our definition of a correction at MUV is simple. I give the feedback, the student fixes it, and I watch three clean reps in a row before I praise and move on to the next athlete. Anything short of that is a suggestion.

A few years back one of my coaches came to me frustrated. He had an athlete who would not turn his hip over on a round kick. Every class, same angle, same fix. So I watched the next class. The coach walked up, told him to turn the hip over, watched one decent rep, and walked away. Two reps later the kid was right back where he started.

That is what I call a drive by correction, and almost every instructor does it until somebody shows them. It is how coaches end up making the same correction every week for a year. It is also how progress quietly disappears before the parent ever gets a chance to see it.

When your team corrects the kid in the back row by yelling across the room, the improvement lasts about as long as the yell. Get in close. Put a hand on the shoulder. Stay for the three reps. If you want parents to see growth, the growth has to survive long enough to be seen.

Watch the audience next time Jadi teaches at your school. You will not find a single parent on their phone. Same thing when Dave Kovar has been at MUV, and the same thing the day Ernie Reyes Sr. popped in unannounced. Every one of them talks to the parents almost as much as they talk to the kids.

The easiest version of this is two words. Hey, parents. Say it before you teach something and every head in the lobby comes up. Then give them something to do with that attention. Ask a question they can raise a hand for. Challenge them to give a standing ovation if the kids empty the tank on the last drill. Pull them onto the mat. Turn to one mom in front of the whole class and tell her to get her phone out, because her son's side kick just got good and she is going to want it on camera.

Then do it for the parents themselves. We have a dad, Mr. Saya, whose son just earned his black belt. I do not think he has missed a class since his son was a white belt. So at the end of class I called him out on the mat and gave him a stripe in front of everyone. Every other dad in that lobby wanted one. Parents are no different than the kids.

A lot of instructors act like there is an invisible dog fence at the edge of the mat. They cannot step into the lobby without getting shocked. When they finally do cross, the conversation is how was your weekend.

A real progress talk has a shape. Ask permission first. Hey Mr. Smith, is it cool if I go over Johnny's progress with you for two minutes? That lowers the defenses if the news is hard, and it makes sure he is not sprinting to the car.

Then tell it as a transformation. At first, Johnny kept falling over on his side kick. We put a little bend in his base leg. By the end, he was rocking the wave master and standing there like a statue. If you have the time, grab a pad and have Johnny show dad right there in the lobby. Saying the progress out loud is the minimum. Putting it in front of the parent's eyes is what closes the gap.

Our standard is one parent per instructor per class. Three instructors on the floor means three families get a progress talk that night. The accountability lives in the end of shift debrief, where every coach names the parent they talked to and what the talk was about. Johnny's side kick. Rico's front kick. Brandon's jab cross. If a coach cannot name one, we both know it.

We run the same logic on testing. Week six of every cycle runs like a testing week, and every family gets a slip telling them whether their child is on track. A parent who finds out at the end of the cycle that their kid is not ready got ambushed, and a shocked parent at test time is a gap in your system far more often than it is a bad parent.

Every school has them. The parent who pulls up, drops the kid at the door, and comes back fifty minutes later. Internally we call those kids orphans. Nobody says that to a family's face.

At the first school I ran out here there was a kid named Jordan. I met his mom the day they signed up. After that he rode his bike to class every single day for about three years, and I never saw her walk in once.

Jordan was the first kid I ever sent what we now call the orphan text. When class starts, the front desk walks the mat and compares who is training to who is sitting in the lobby. Any kid without a parent there gets a quick photo or video, and it goes to that parent while class is still running. I am so proud of Jordan today. He was struggling with this, we worked on that, and by the end he was doing this. The last line never changes. I wish you could have seen the smile on his face.

That last line carries the whole text. If my son's soccer coach sent me a clip of him scoring and told me he wished I could have seen how proud of himself he was, I would move whatever I had to move to be at the next practice. Jordan's mom started coming to every class after that first text.

We just added one more piece to our 90 day onboarding. On a new student's first class we film a ten second clip on the mat. At week six a task pops up to film the same kid doing the same thing, and both clips go to the parent side by side. Six weeks in, that parent is holding proof nobody had to explain.

"Every family in your building is deciding whether to stay based on the progress you showed them, which means everything you kept to yourself counts for nothing."

Your instructors already see the progress. What they are missing is the words for it at 7:40 on a Tuesday while the next class is lining up on the edge of the mat. So the talk never happens and the text never gets sent.

This prompt turns thirty seconds of coach notes into a lobby progress talk, an orphan text, and a week six caption, all built from what actually happened on the mat that night. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and answer as it asks.

You are a retention coach for a kids martial arts school. Your job is to turn an instructor's quick notes about one student into parent communication that lets the parent see progress they missed.

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

1. What is the student's first name, age, and current belt? 2. Was a parent watching class today, or is this a drop off parent? 3. What was the student struggling with at the start of class? Describe what it actually looked like. 4. What did you correct or change? 5. What did it look like by the end of class? Be specific about what you saw. 6. What is one thing you know about this kid or this family that matters to them? 7. What do students call you (Coach, Sensei, Mr. or Ms.) and how do you sign your texts?

Then produce this output.

PROGRESS TALK: a 60 to 90 second script I can say in the lobby. Open by asking the parent's permission. Tell the story as "at first" followed by "and then." End with a line inviting the student to show the parent the skill right there.

ORPHAN TEXT: under 60 words, written to send with a photo or video during class. End with "I wish you could have seen" completed with a specific detail from my answers.

WEEK SIX CAPTION: two sentences to send alongside a side by side clip of the student's first class and today.

Write in the parent's language. Do not use the words discipline, focus, respect, confidence, or character unless I used them in my answers. One exclamation point per message, maximum. Make it sound like a coach who actually likes this kid.

Hand this to every coach on your team and have them run it for the parent they named in the end of shift debrief. Once a week, read a few of the outputs out loud at your staff meeting. The coaches whose texts sound like a real person are the ones who should be training everyone else on this.

Adam Kifer Everybody is teaching school owners how to hand more work to AI. Far fewer people are drawing the line on what should stay in your hands. This one breaks down when to use it as a martial arts business owner and when to keep it out of the parts of the business that need a human. If the orphan text in this issue has you itching to automate it, read this first.

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Alex Hormozi on why business owners feel stuck and what to do about it. If you read last week's issue, you know where I spent two days, and this lines right up with it. Watch it with your P&L open. The honest answer to feeling stuck is usually sitting somewhere in those numbers.

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Rick Rubin on whether or not you can be born great. Worth hearing from a guy who has spent his career in rooms with people the world calls naturals. Then ask yourself how many assistant instructors you have written off as not having it, and how many reps you actually gave them before you decided. Pairs well with the three clean reps section above.

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Jim Rohn, the man who mentored Tony Robbins, with some sage advice on how to have a great life. He has been gone since 2009 and his clips still outwork most of what gets posted this week. Advice tends to hold up when it was right the first time. Worth a watch before you walk into the lobby tonight.

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From the Aspen Institute's Project Play national youth sports survey, run with Utah State and Louisiana Tech, covering 3,827 kids ages 10 to 17 and published this April. Among kids still playing a sport, 86% have parents who attend their games or practices. Among kids who quit, 58% had that same support.

Read it carefully. The survey shows the two travel together. It stops short of proving the empty chair caused the quitting, and some of those parents probably stopped coming because the kid was already drifting. Whichever way the arrow points, the parent in your lobby is the earliest warning light you have, and most schools never write down who was sitting there.

Now the number this industry loves to quote. Seventy percent of kids quit organized sports by age thirteen shows up in retention talks everywhere. In April, USA TODAY reported that Marty Fox at Aspen and Joseph Janosky at Lasell University went looking for where it came from and found a chain of secondary sources with no clear primary study at the bottom. The same Aspen survey puts the average age former players stopped at 12.93. When those former players named their least favorite part of the experience, the top two answers were feeling "I'm not good enough" at 29% and bad coaching at 21%. The famous number turned out to be folklore, and the real ones point a lot closer to the mat.

Pull up tonight's roster. Next to every kid, write down whether a parent was in the lobby for any of their last three classes. The names with blanks next to them are on nobody's retention list yet, and those families are making their decision with zero evidence from you.

Sources: Aspen Institute Project Play, National Survey of Youth and Sports; USA TODAY via Arizona Daily Star, "70% of kids drop out of sports by 13? Why the ubiquitous stat is wrong"

Most of us are in this industry because somebody on a mat saw something in us before we could see it ourselves, and we still remember exactly where we were standing when they said it. The parent on your bench has never been handed that moment about their own kid. They are sitting fifteen feet from the one person in the building who could give it to them. You already did the hard part out on the mat. The walk into the lobby is the part your ego keeps filing under somebody else's job.