🥋 You Are Not The Problem. You Are The Bottleneck.

Let me describe someone I know well.

He built his school from nothing. Worked six or seven days a week. He is great at what he does and his students love him. His community respects him. His revenue is solid.

But his phone never stops. Every problem runs through him. Every decision waits on him. If he takes a long weekend, something breaks. If he gets sick, the whole team holds its breath.

Sound familiar?

That person is not running a business. That person is the business. And most school owners are living in that gap without even realizing it.

The Question Nobody Asks

I ask school owners all the time:

What is the single most crucial part of building a successful martial arts school?

They say revenue. Marketing. Curriculum. Hiring. Retention.

All valid. All incomplete.

Here is the truth I have learned after years of building schools and watching owners grind themselves into the ground:

The most crucial part of building your school is building the team that builds your school.

And if that is true, you have to sit with why you are not doing it.

Training Is Writing a Manual in Human Form

David Ogilvy said training is writing a manual in human form.

Every time you train a team member, you are not just teaching them a task. You are encoding your standards, your instincts, your judgment into another human being. You are building a version of your best self that shows up when you cannot.

Walt Disney walked his park every morning for that same reason. He wanted to feel what guests felt and see where his team was closing the gap or missing the mark. Every day was training. Every day was alignment.

Training your instructors works the same way. It is not a meeting. It is not a lecture. It is the most important work you do each week, because the more of yourself you build into your team, the less the business needs you to survive.

That is the point.

Three Things to Measure Right Now

Be honest. Not with what you plan to do. With what you are actually doing.

1. Team Training Frequency

Are you training your team weekly? Minimum once per week. If an instructor only taught classes but never trained, how sharp would they be? Your staff is no different.

2. One-on-Ones

When was the last time you sat down with a team member for a real conversation? Fifteen minutes. No agenda. No rush. What do they need? Where are they struggling? If you are not doing this regularly, you are flying blind.

3. Quarterly Reviews

Every quarter, compare scorecards. One from you. One from them. Alignment is created through honest reflection, not guesswork. If you skip this, you are hoping instead of leading.

If any of these were uncomfortable to answer, that is the gap. Not your curriculum. Not your marketing. Your team development.

The Mindset That Kills Teams Before They Are Built

Here is the pattern I see constantly.

Owner runs one training session. Nothing changes overnight. Owner decides training does not work. Owner goes back to doing everything alone.

Training did not fail. The owner quit before the reps compounded.

Think about how you teach martial arts. You do not show a student a sidekick once, watch them do it wrong, and decide sidekicks do not work. You rep it. Correct it. Rep it again.

A hundred reps. Not ten.

If you ran two team trainings and your staff is not where you need them to be, hear this clearly: you have not trained them. You introduced the idea of training. Those are not the same thing.

Stay in it.

What Bad Training Looks Like

Most school owners have never seen real training.

Bad training is a lecture. Forty-five minutes of talking at people. They nod. They forget eighty percent of what you said by Monday.

It is the equivalent of training someone to be a black belt through theory alone.

Good training is active. It is reps. It is role play. It is practicing corrections. It is the real class plan, drilled the way students will experience it.

One thing that changed everything for one of my schools: once a month, we invited a small group of parents to bring their kids in on Saturday. Our instructors taught live while we coached them. Real reps. Real feedback. Real improvement.

That is where growth happens.

Invest in the Whole Person

If you want high performers inside your school, you have to help them become high performers outside your school.

Skills

What skill must each person develop to level up next quarter? Are you helping them acquire it?

Limiting Beliefs

Most ceilings are not skill problems. They are belief problems. Part of leadership is seeing potential in someone they cannot yet see.

Personal Organization

If someone’s personal life is a mess, their performance will be too. Help them get clarity at home and watch their professionalism skyrocket.

What This Actually Produces

A school I took from $19K months to $84K months grew because of three things:

1. Systems got built and locked in.

2. C players were confronted and either grew or left. A players entered.

3. Leadership got better by spending time on the mat developing the team.

The revenue was not built by me. It was built by the team I built.

The Question You Must Answer

You started your school to change lives and create freedom. But somewhere along the way, you became the school. And now the school owns you.

The path forward is a three-year journey.

Year one: clarity.
Year two: training.
Year three: stepping back because the machine is running.

But it all starts with one decision.

Stop being the person who does everything. Become the person who builds the people who do everything.

The most successful school owners are not the ones who work the hardest.
They are the ones who train the best teams and stay consistent long enough for the reps to compound.

So let me leave you with this question:

Are you building the school, or are you building the team that builds the school?

Only one of those paths leads to freedom.

Adam Kifer

This week’s posts focus on the core of success: improving what already works, mastering your mindset, leading from your identity, and building discipline through follow-through. The common thread, results start from within, not from strategy or tools.

🔥 Alex Hormozi – The Simplest Way to Make Money
You do not need a groundbreaking idea. Sell a service people already buy. Make it faster, easier, or risk free. Tell everyone you know. Charge more than the competition. And keep going when it gets boring.

Simple actions. Relentless execution. That is the formula.
👉 Watch Here (Facebook Post)

🔥 Tony Robbins – Change Your Story, Change Your Life
If you want a different life, you cannot keep telling the same limiting story. The beliefs you repeat shape the results you get. Change the story, change the outcome. Today is your final chance to register free and watch every session from the Time to Rise Summit. When today ends, the replays are gone.
👉 Watch Here (Facebook Post)

🔥 Taylor Welch – You Are the Real Operating System
Your business is not the main system. You are. People win with messy systems and lose with perfect ones all the time. The real regulator is your identity, your standards, and the instincts driving your decisions. It is easier to blame strategy than to look inward. Business education matters. But the true ceiling is rarely external. The cap is internal.
👉 Read Here (Facebook Post)

🔥 Dan Martell – The Two CEOs Inside Every Founder
Every entrepreneur has two versions of themselves. The confident leader the world sees and the exhausted one carrying the pressure alone. Real leadership is not pretending to be strong. It is building strength from the inside out. The founders who thrive do not perform leadership. They practice it daily. Your business will only scale to the level you do. If you want to lead from clarity instead of chaos, it starts with rebuilding the CEO within.
👉 Read Here (Facebook Post)

🔥 Dave Kovar – Self Discipline Is Built on Follow Through
Every time you break a promise to yourself, you weaken your discipline. Every time you follow through, you strengthen it. The lesson is simple. Do not commit lightly. But once you do, honor it especially when you do not feel like it. Self discipline is doing what you said you would do, long after the mood to do it is gone.
👉 Read Here (Facebook Post)

💥 Apply what hits, share it with your team, and keep raising the standard in your school. 

😂 Martial Memes

These memes hit home for all of us martial artists and gave us a good chuckle. Click on the image to view the original account that posted each meme. Enjoy!

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