I’ve gotten this question so many times and it really makes my blood boil. Not so much at the question itself, but at the underlying psychology behind it.

And the question is: Should I raise my rates?

My answer: YES! Stop over thinking it. Stop it. Just raise your rates.

Here's why. You are worth more. In fact, 95% of you reading this right now are UNDERCHARGING!

The first digit in your monthly tuition price should be a 2. As in $200+ per month.

You owe NO ONE an explanation... (unless your plan is to raise current active paying member rates-which I'll discuss below)

As you already know, everything else in our world increases in price every year, heck, some things even increase every month. Yet, too many martial art school owners don't increase their rates.

Seriously, think about it, gas, milk, electricity, dry cleaning, beer, wine. water, airline prices, gymnastic lessons, health insurance, college tuition, gym memberships, rent, mortgage, payroll, internet, cell phones,...

Last week in one of our coaching groups I came across a question from an owner about some push back that he was experiencing from his staff about some forward changes he wanted to implement in his business.

Far too many of us struggle with this same issue of trying to keep everyone on our team happy while we trying to keep our business successful, so I felt it was important to share this with all of you.

As the leader of your martial art business there are some hard realities you have to learn to accept.

Reality #1. You will NEVER please everyone. You make decisions for your business based on the best information that you have and that you feel are in the best interest of YOUR business. The most successful people in the world today were once though of as "crazy" and got resistance at every turn. (ELON, JEFF, STEVE, BILL,)...The difference is, they BELIEVED in what they were doing and they KNEW that their idea would be for the better in the long term.

Reality #2- Humans are creatures...

When you see my videos you can watch them on YouTube, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter, you might see them on Reels, Tik Tok, Snapchat or LinkedIn. The point is, you can see and consume our content almost anywhere. Your potential customers are no different than you, they have a preferred platform that they consume content on.

As a business owner of any kind, it is in your best interest to make sure that your customers can find you where they are, not where you want to be. And this is the flip that we continue to help business owners change their mindset on so that their business can continue to grow and prosper. And of course we want to do the same thing for you.

Its also very important to understand that, love it or hate it,  Social media is not going away anytime soon. You can romanticize about the past and be like, well, we used to do it this way. We used to do it that way. But eventually when you spend time dwelling on the past and how “it used to be”...

As a Mastermind coach and a full time martial arts business owner, I've been getting this question asked to me a lot lately by other Martial Art school owners. The question is: “Should we raise our rates on our existing members?”

My successful high level coaching clients already know the answer, however, I wanted to take a few moments and clarify my opinion on this topic for all.

The short answer is no. Absolutely not.

It is my professional opinion, that raising rates to your current members is probably one of the single worst things that you could do in your martial art based membership business. There is a far better solution to make raising rates a win-win situation that I will explain in a moment.

But first, allow me to expand on why I say no:

…..Imagine you are a customer at a service based business and you've been there for awhile, you've been a loyal customer, you're mostly happy. Then, one day, the owner of the business comes to you and says, ...