I watch the statistics for this website each and every morning at the start of my day. It has been fascinating that the traffic here slows down, the worse the economy seems to get. Go figure! You would think that smart marketing would become more and more important as the problems get worse.

It has been several weeks since my last article, why? My school has been very busy! November has been an excellent month for us for enrollments, despite the bad news everywhere. So why are we growing when so many other schools are going out of business or just surviving? two reasons, #1 is student services. We are always striving to make the student experience better and better. Then when Mom and Dad look to eliminate unnecessary things from the budget, we are not one of them! But I will do specific student service articles later.

The second reason, how many students do you actually need to do well?

I live in an auto town. The unemployment rate is up 30% and 2 plants are closing in the next little while. There are approximately 200,000 people in this town, not to mention the surrounding area. There are also about 20 commercial martial art schools. 

The area (5 square miles) that my school is in has about 30,000 or more people in it. How many people out of this are going to be affected by the current situation? Let's face it there are a lot of people still out there with lots of money! But, lets put this figure high at 50%. That leaves me 15,000 unaffected.

How many of those are prospects (age etc). Ok how about 5000? This will exclude older people, people with no children etc. Again I am giving a high figure!

Now, look at your current situation, would another 100 students change your life? With the above figure I would need .02% to move to enroll 100 new students. See my point?

So, stop worrying and bitching about the economy, and start doing smart marketing. Start with your current flock of students. You will be amazed at what you see happening! Feel free to email and questions to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .