Following up on Episode 155, Hakan Manav shares martial arts staff development strategies to build a high-performing team – giving you the freedom to scale and grow.
IN THIS EPISODE:
- How to transition from solo instructor to building a scalable team
- The first hire that can make or break your martial arts school's growth
- Why letting go is essential for business expansion and instructor success
- A proven framework for training and promoting instructors from within
- How to turn parents and adult students into valuable team members
- And more
*FREE: Swipe the exact plan I use to fill martial arts schools with 200+ students within 7 months (And make sure your students are an incredible fit > Learn More
TRANSCRIPTION
George: Hey there, it's George Fourie. Welcome to another Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. So, this week I've got Hakan back on the call. Good day Hakan.
Hakan: Hey George.
George: In the previous Episode 155 and you can check that out if you haven't, martialartsmedia.com/155. We spoke about the four obstacles that Hakan and his family overcame over the last 43 years to build their 1800 student strong academy.
And so this week we thought we would dive deeper into these obstacles. Thanks for jumping on again, Hakan.
Hakan: Pleasure to be here. Thank you
George: We spoke a little bit about the product. We spoke about staff development, personal leadership. Let's loop into staff development for this call. Let's just dive a bit deeper and look at the things to watch out for.
Why should we even be doing it? Which direction to take when scaling your school?
Hakan: Absolutely. Once the product is nailed and you've got a great thing people are coming back for in terms of the actual martial art that you're teaching. The next step we want to think about is how we can deliver this at scale. For a number of reasons?
First of all, we love what we do. But there are days that we might feel ill or we might want to go on holiday, or we're going to be away for various reasons. So you need the classes to be running at the same acceptable standard.
So we've got those obvious reasons, but I want to touch on a personal experience that we went through as an academy. I'm going to say about 25 years ago now.
This is back when—in our culture (which I'm going to touch back on in a moment)—our culture of the school was heavily predicated upon how many people we could have represented in the Australian Taekwondo team, and then having those individuals go overseas to represent our school in the country.
One of our athletes back then made the Australian team, and we went overseas to the world championship. So this was a big kind of family success achievement for us.
And while we were overseas, the classes were still running, and that little trip turned into a family holiday. And so the athlete went overseas, and it was a great tournament, and then when we returned back from this holiday, we had 13 students left; we had left the classes with one of our students.
When I said “we,” my father did—I was a really young boy—and we came back to almost zero school with 13 students active.
So all the students had just disappeared, and so my father had to then make a choice: Does he just focus on his secure day job at the time, or does he then focus on rebuilding?
And it was like a fork in the road moment for him, and thankfully he kept it up and he went down that path, and he kept going. So it was a big learning curve for us at that point.
It's number one, which was about the culture of the school determining what success was—and did we want to be focusing on a small minute of people who actually want to compete in tournaments, or do we want to adapt the way we do things to be more approachable and be more inviting for people who want to attain the benefits of martial arts.
So this was a big kind of learning experience back then. We made that mindset shift around what we wanted to do.
Then the next realization was we needed a team in place to be able to continue running the classes at the acceptable standard that we wanted to run at.
The other big learning that we had in our 43-year history here is that, the academy name—and I'm not saying this is a bad thing—but the academy name was called Red Vans Taekwondo Academy, which was after my dad's name.
Which also meant that any time my father was not around for whatever reason or was not on the mats, people would be asking for him, and he would be the person they'd be coming for.
So we made changes around what it meant to run an academy, and we made changes around placing the importance away from certain individuals into the theme and product that we have today.
Those were the key initial shifts that we had back then.
So why is staff development important, in addition to all these reasons is that over time, these things are going to happen.
But what else is also going to happen is that the cost of living is going to increase, our supply costs are going to increase, and so in order to stay afloat, growth should always be something that we strive for.
And while teaching is a passion for most of us who get into the industry, maintaining that high level of energy when you're focusing on all the other facets of running a business can be a challenge.
What has to be considered is that, in order to maintain that optimal level of energy when you run classes, you're going to make sure that your energy level is sustained around everything that's involved in running a business.
It can be challenging because, as you grow, you find that you're putting out lots of different fights, switching from one thing to the next, and going from a negative situation into a positive situation can be a challenge.
In order to grow, in order to scale, in order to reach more people, and to share the thing that we love, we need a team of people around us who can continue and deliver at the same level—or, if not better than what we're doing at the moment.
That then brings us to our first hire. Who do we want to bring on board, apart from us as instructors (assuming that we're the ones running most of the classes)?
Some instructors are actually wonderful salespeople—and I don't mean that in the sleazy car salesperson way; I mean that in the purest sense that they're wonderful in translating the benefits of what they do to the general population.
However, for most instructors, their strength is delivering the content on the floor, delivering those techniques, and having those connections with the students and building that rapport on the mats.
In my opinion, the first hire should come from a position that's going to complement what you do on the mats, and often this is a sales or admin/administration type position to handle all the leads and inquiries coming through and to help with the operational side of running everything that we do on the mats.
George: Are you looking, when you say sales, for a person that's good with sales? And by the way, I value—I always feel true salesmanship is definitely not sleazy; it's actually taking a person from one situation to a better alternative.
Are you looking for someone that's just a salesperson, or an instructor plus sales, or instructor plus xyz?
How do you define, how do you fill that role?
Hakan: Yeah, absolutely—as you are growing. So if you're a one-person team at the moment, the model that's worked well for us is having that next individual focus on being a salesperson as well as potentially teaching kids' classes.
Because that job description comes with a certain personality type. Oftentimes in our experience, instructors who are wonderful with the kids' classes also have the ability to be great with communicating with those parents and handling all the leads and sales that come through.
Initially, it's grouping them together. It may be required. Now, if we think about the different areas of running a school—in terms of running classes, leads, running gradings, ensuring that your finances are in check, ensuring that you have a staff development system in place—all of this may be initially done by that one person.
But then, as your team grows, you want to start to be able to delegate those positions to have role-specific, focus-specific areas for each and every one of those.
So initially, that next person you could bring on might be great to run classes as well as take care of the sales, but then as your team grows, you'll look at dividing those up so you can have highly specific sales positions.
So, why this is important, is because all of these need specific roles and requirements. They all need their evaluations and check-ins, and they all need their key performance indicators to determine whether they're doing a great job, so you can go back and track those stats in terms of how well they're converting and so on.
So initially, start small; you're going to have multi-discipline individuals first, but then as your team grows, look at delegating individuals who are exceptional in those areas.
George: 100%. Sales being the lifeblood of the business, you've got to be bringing people in. The one way we have mitigated that, we've got a few jiu-jitsu guys who are great on the mats, but sales is just not their thing. This is where changing the marketing really makes a difference as well.
It's important to get those people in for a role, but if that's not possible at the time, it's good to look at your actual sales cycle: How do inquiries come in? How do they join? What is that conversation?
We found that changing the marketing angle and maybe having a great paid trial where people come in that flows into the membership can compensate for the lack of salesmanship.
Hakan: Absolutely. Absolutely
George: If someone else is not in that position.
Hakan: Yeah, absolutely. The landscape has changed over time, where a lot of you can go as far as purchasing memberships directly online—completely eradicating that sales position role.
However, as we're in the service industry, building rapport and having that connection with your clientele is critical in terms of how long they'll stay with you.
The other area that's beneficial as well is that, initially, if you're a small team, you might have some downtime in your class timetabling schedule to account for times when you may have to deal with enrollment. So, maybe having a 15-minute gap initially between classes might need to be put into place to make sure you have time available to handle these types of situations.
But as your team grows and you can focus on running back-to-back classes, you'll be able to fit more classes on the map and have dedicated salespeople focusing on nurturing leads and making sure all of those areas are covered.
George: Perfect! So, let's talk about letting go, right? You mentioned your academy's name was Red Vans, and there's no escaping that, right? Because you're the guy?
Hakan: Yes.
George: Which is obviously also part of that is essential because you being the guy is what gets you to a certain level, but then there's that point where something's got to give, and so you've got to get some people on board. How do you make that shift—from “it's all me” to “now it's us”?
Hakan: Absolutely. There are still some fantastic brands and businesses out there that are based around their founders. They still operate successfully.
It can be done. But what has to be considered is building the team around empowering the team and showcasing the team's strength so that your current members and the parents in your network can see the benefit of these individuals.
In our case, what happened was that as my father changed the name of the organization and as we started to onboard new instructors, a lot of these instructors—including myself—had university degrees that they were able to bring to the table along with the qualifications in martial arts.
That deepened what we could offer our members. So it's all about highlighting and showcasing what you can do for your team and to your members.
George: We need staff, we need to let go. Where do we—what are the nuts and bolts? Let's get a bit practical. What are the things that we need to be doing to develop our staff?
Hakan: Absolutely. The first thing we have to start with is actually building a strategy—building a strategy with where you want to be and having a strong team culture around the values you want to deliver.
There's no point growing if your team isn't clear on where your academy is going and the type of delivery systems you want to have in place in and around the actual martial arts itself.
Having a clear direction around that is critical—your vision, your mission, and the values that you stand for—that’s the first thing to get clear, especially if you have a team of your own or you have a small team around you.
The next thing you want to do—and I feel like there's two ways to look at this—is to be mindful of the types of staff onboarding that you have available to you.
You have the in-house staff onboarding systems and the external staff onboarding systems, and both have their place in the martial arts school.
When we're looking at the external staffing positions, this is where we put a job. It could be targeted to a member database, or it could be just out to everybody on the internet.
And where we found this to be the most successful is that, when we have a majority of our team from within and we sprinkle upon certain staff members from outside. We feel like that's where it works best.
These people may not necessarily speak the language and the jargon that you offer within your school—like someone who's come through the ranks—but they absolutely bring a skill set that may not be necessarily available in front of you.
So there is a place for that, whether you want to go part-time, casual, or full-time. And maybe this is the kind of sales position role that you want to make available within your organization.
The other external space to consider is, I guess, the contractor type, where you can just sprinkle upon maybe a videographer or a photographer who comes along and captures that content for you that’s required. Or you can have someone help you with your marketing, like yourself there, George.
So, bring those external areas of people who have expertise that can help with your organization, even if they haven't necessarily come from within.
But a majority of what we've done over the years is develop staff from within, and this is where we're talking around the teaching space. And so, what we like to do here is we like to hire for attitude before talent.
So, we want to make sure that we spot those individuals early. Those individuals who just have that knack of being infectious around others. Extremely positive and passionate around what they do, and that can be as young as 10 years old. Right? All the way through to adults.
And so, what we have in our organization is clear structure from someone who's a volunteer all the way through to a school manager and two different levels in place there.
And so, we start with what we call our leadership development modules. These are four categories, which we take our candidates through.
And at the end of this module, when they get through and complete the four levels. They then receive a leadership certificate.
And this is great because not everyone who comes through this module is going to be a wonderful instructor. You either may not have the position available or they just may not be the right fit for you.
But at the end of the day, they're receiving something because you've helped build their confidence and given them the traits that's going to then help them in life.
And so, what we do is we have two kinds of systems. We have a system where we charge for it, and this is where parents want to put their kids through this system and develop their confidence in becoming a leader.
And we give them the skills and drills to be able to empower them to become a leader.
On the flip side if we feel like there is a wonderful student. They may be relatively early in their martial arts journey.
We tap them on the shoulder and we provide a scholarship to them in this program. We tell them the value of the course and we help them and give them all the tools available through this course to then become an instructor.
Now, what's entailed in this course—but what we actually offer in this—is basic skills such as meet-and-greet, basic skills such as showing new members how to bow and giving studio tours, tying belts, and just showing those few techniques to help them become a buddy in those first few steps on one's martial arts journey.
So, amongst those four levels, we equip them with the skills necessary. We provide regular training to upskill them, and then what they have to do is complete a minimum set of hours at that level.
Okay, so those minimum hours for us. We've set it at 25 hours that they need to complete to go through all four levels.
They also have minimum age requirements and they also have quarterly checkoffs that we do. And these quarterly checkoffs are great because we do them during our school holidays.
In our school holidays in our organization. We run school holiday camps that run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. This is before our classes kick off in the afternoon.
We bring these instructor development module candidates into our holiday camps and we give them skills and drills to develop them and assess them in an environment that's not necessarily a high-pressure environment like a class.
So, they're the quarterly check-ins that we either progress our team into the next level of staffing or we give them things they need to continue to develop and work on in order to get to the next level.
They also have mentors at that level in which a higher level instructor can help guide them through. They have a booklet that they need to complete.
Once someone has gone through to instructor development level 4 then they're in a position to then apply for becoming a paid instructor.
And so, when they get to a paid instructor level, we then have a look in our organization and go.
Okay, what's opened up here? What can we do? To add another class or in terms of whether our location is growing and we want to boost the on-the-floor team. We look at our pool of instructor development for Instructors and then we get them to apply for that position.
We go through a formal onboarding process. We go through a formal kind of process where we interview these people and then we give the ideal candidate that job.
So, all of this has developed over time to be able to have enough people ready to fill in a position when it becomes available. That then takes them to becoming an instructor position.
Once they've become an instructor, they're given an instructor shirt and then they go through the instructor progressions in the paid position roles.
And all of these paid positions are in line with the fitness industry award that we must follow here in Australia.
So, that's the system in a nutshell. Hopefully, it's clarified and simple enough. But it's basically a set of requirements and minimum time levels to be able to progress in terms of becoming an instructor.
So, they're developing the skills to become an instructor, like tonality, voice, appropriate touch, breaking down techniques properly, using teaching terminologies, and strategies like ‘praise, challenge, praise,' and so on.
All this stuff is then taught and assessed to them. And so, when they do become an instructor, they're ready and equipped to go.
And what we found is that tinkering with this model over the years has helped us bring on instructors that are far better than what we were when we came through.
So we're doing something right here. We're proud of what we've done within our organization there.
George: I love that! So, when are you trying to identify, you mentioned? Like from day one you're doing an assessment. It reminds me of our mutual friend Grandmaster Zulfi Ahmed.
Hakan: Yeah.
George: I visited him in Pasadena, just watching him address all the students from day one—”Future instructor!
Hakan: Yes.
George: Bringing attention to all the other instructors and just pointing—”Got a future instructor right here!” And it's just seeding that from day one, all the time.
Hakan: That's exactly right. And you'd find that a lot of the old-school instructors like that from that generation are wonderful at doing this. Think about how empowering that is as a student, hearing that from someone like Grandmaster Zulfi Ahmed.
Right, so it's all about creating that leadership culture within the organization, and a great leader is determined by how many further leaders they can create.
It's just about keeping that front of mind, being a school owner, and then creating that culture from within—creating more leaders. And as you do this, more people around the organization will be witnessing this.
And so, what we've had is parents seeing kids on the floor, saying, “We love the confidence of that person,” or, “I want my kid to be in that position one day.”
So you're laying down the foundations for this to become a seamless process in your school. Because of the frameworks you put in place.
Yeah, and then adults are much the same. So, you could do this for kids, and they can be relatively early in their journey. They could be just a few belts in because you're not necessarily getting them to take classes or lead portions of classes.
You're getting them to feel the ambience of the school. Do those meet-and-greets and do those high-fives.
Just further reinforce all the values that your organization is all about and all of this early on is at that voluntary capacity. So you want people to walk into your school and go?
Wow, this is such a positive place. Look at the vibes these instructing teams here have created.
George: We're talking about leadership.
Hakan: Yeah.
George: We're talking about something that sits above any style of martial arts. But if I think of guys that might take a little longer to enforce this, would be the jiu-jitsu guys.
Because just the journey it takes to black belt is longer. And again I think it's a lot easier for them to get stuck into being the professor that everybody's there for them.
And getting staff to take the different classes. For you and you guys are taekwondo based but you also have a jiu-jitsu program. You train it.
If anything, is there anything that you would do differently for that path as a jiu-jitsu Academy.
Hakan: It would be the perfect school because the classes and the techniques are structured in a clear way. If we look at a class structure, you might have a warm-up, you might have a stretch, you might have two or three main areas of focus that you want to cover certain techniques, certain positions and you might tie that in with a bit of a match at the end or a values component.
So when you break down your typical class structure into those categories, you then can start looking at inserting certain people to give them the ability to take those areas. And so whether it's a technique or whether it's a warm-up component or a stretching component.
Regardless of the style that you're in, if you're providing consistent class structures, which you should be anyway. Providing those clear expectations so that when students walk in they know what structure to expect, you can definitely change the structure up.
So change within the structure, but keep the overall structure the same. Inserting certain individuals and then providing their flair works perfectly. Especially in the jiu-jitsu space because.
I've actually seen this work where, let's say a purple belt is a master at a certain position that they've really honed in on. I've seen black belt instructors and professors give them the opportunity, but it's all about empowerment. Yeah, right.
It's all about empowerment building that instructor up so that your students are absorbing that information because you've given them the green light as a professor or school loader.
So, I've actually seen it work really well in that capacity, and that's the first mindset shift that has to happen. In order for me to grow and scale what I do, I need to empower people in my network to take on more of those classes so I can focus on strategy.
George: Are there any real practical steps you take to transfer? Think of it as a transfer of authority from you to your instructors and to make sure that they represent the same language and represent the same values.
Hakan: Yeah, absolutely. This is where regular staff training is critical.So outside of the running of the classes.
Making sure you have the right measures in place to be able to deliver upon that is critical. So for us if you look at it on a quarterly basis.
Every quarter we bring everybody in and we'd really dissect the quarter that was. And why that works well for us is, we operate through a grading cycle.
So we're able to complete one grading cycle, determine the level of success in terms of the front end and the back end. And then dissect that for the next quarter.
We have our monthly staff training. Everybody comes together. There are physical components. We share some of the statistics of each month.
Share some of the focus on what's coming up in the future, but we also tap into certain areas of teaching that we want to hone in on in that month and that could be the meet-and-greet component.
It could be running small groups within classes. So we focus on a teaching skill that we really want to hone in on the month going forward.
Well, we boil it down to a weekly component. This is where we have our head instructor team where we meet every week and this is where we dissect the running of each and every week.
So, this is where we boil down to, how many new enrollments we had, were there any kinds of areas of concern, were there any issues that came up, what worked really well and what can we do better going forward.
So, making sure that the week by week is running smoothly. Then we boil it down to each and every day.
And this happens at all of our locations where before, we opened for our members. We get together and we discuss who we are expecting as brand new people.
We discuss the curriculum of the day, we discuss maybe certain kids that we want to highlight or be mindful of so boiling it down to communicating with the team to ensure that the focus is clear for the day through to the quarter all the way through to the year.
In and amongst this we have role specific meetings that happen sporadically. So there could be a Little Dragons teachers meeting.
So, all of our Little Dragons and instructors can get together and work through an update that the coordinator has felt is necessary.
There might be an administrative change, like the one we're going through at the moment, and they're having regular meetings, ensuring the CRMs are updated, and providing regular training around that.
We often have sales specific training so just going through our sales systems and overcoming certain objections that they face. And there's also communication channels that are live throughout each and every day amongst these groups.
So, in a nutshell it all boils down to, putting in the time to develop your team. Give them the teaching tools required to be able to deliver on the mats.
George: Excellent! And you were talking about class structures and things like that. I guess that we could leave that for a different episode and perhaps look at all.
Well, where do we start with the curriculum? It depends on where you're at. Maybe you already have it in place, or you're just starting to put it together and have to unpack everything you've done over the years to fit it into a specific class structure.
Hakan: Absolutely. Mr. Mark in our organization, a head instructor, is brilliant in this space. So, I know he'd be really excited to share this with your listeners.
George: Yeah, perfect. It’d be good to have Mark on, and we can do a deep dive on that. Perfect. Before we wrap it up, is there anything else on staff development that we didn’t touch on?
Hakan: Yeah, one small area is the adult space. I feel like sometimes the adults in your ecosystem could be overlooked. Tapping into instructors young, great.
There are also some adults directly in front of us. They may be perfect for what you do and a great way to do this in your school if you haven't done this already is run a parents bonding week or a parents as teachers week.
And what this will enable you to do is not only share the mats with the parents of the kids that you teach or vice versa, that the kids of the parents that you teach.
Which then can translate into new members in the organization. But it also demonstrates those parents who are just really keen on sharing their love for the martial arts.
You can absolutely tell those parents who are just holding the pads correctly who are really getting into the activities. So those people are directly right in front of you.
And by running these kinds of weeks, you're able to take a look and say, ‘This guy's got it, right? This guy could really help on the mats.' And we've had some successful hires that way.
So it's about doing all these little things to be able to create future leaders in your school. Provide mentors to certain instructors that may be below you.
So, give them the ability to mentor the next level of instructors and give them the tools and keys to create further leaders as well. So it's just that systems driven culture that we need to create more instructors within our organization.
George: Great Hakan. Thanks for jumping on. Thank you for doing a deep dive.
Hakan: No problem.
George: “Let's catch up again. We've still got a few things to unpack regarding leadership and the actual product itself. It'd be good to also chat more about things like the meet-and-greet and other practical examples.
I think that's such a—if you think of first impressions that last—it's such a small thing. But I think that ten, five seconds of doing it right could set you up for hours of smiling faces and people feeling welcome.
Hakan: Absolutely. Yeah, I just, a little while ago. One of our parents came to the wrong location and they were quite disappointed. They got the address wrong, so instead of going to our Sydenham school, they went to our Marrickville school.
When they went there and then they came to my class after they were so impressed with how the Marrickville team had handled that. And so, that first impression when someone walks in through your door actually goes a long way.
And putting the necessary measures in place to be able to greet people as soon as they walk in, is fundamental to what we do given that we're in the people's business.
George: Thanks again Hakan. If any of you are curious about Partners Mentor and what we are doing. Shoot me a message that you could go to martial arts media.com forward slash one five six. That's for this episode and just look for a link below the video and reach out and we'll chat there. Awesome. See you in the next one.
Hakan: Thank you
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