TOP 5 HIRING MISTAKES TO AVOID IN YOUR MARTIAL ARTS BUSINESS

Jennifer Waters, the sales and systems sensei, shares the top 5 huge mistakes that you should avoid during the hiring process as you grow your martial arts school. “I’ve made all of them, in our flagship school”, says Waters, “and avoiding them will save you a lot of time and so much money.”

First mistake to avoid is when you are figuring out who to hire inside of your martial arts school. Do not make the mistake of looking into your students and hiring the ones who have trained in your academy, just because they have obtained a black belt. Take for example a restaurant business. A restaurant business owner would not hire their regular customer to come into the kitchen and start preparing the meals, no matter how frequently they visit the restaurant or how many people they have helped spread the word about the restaurant to. The same logic applies to your martial arts academy. You must not hire somebody just because they have been a regular at your school, have attained a black belt, are really invested and tell everybody about it. If you have done nothing to cultivate their leadership, and teach them how to be an instructor, and they know nothing about what the culture behind the scenes looks like inside of your business, then they are going to be one of the worst hires ever. You need to thoroughly check the qualifications of whom you hire, and you need to interview them to see what their personality is like. A person loving your business as a customer does not guarantee they will be good to hire as an instructor.

The second mistake is to avoid hiring somebody that you cannot afford. If you go ahead and hire a manager with a lot of experience whom you have to pay a lot for, just hoping that they manage and operate the business entirely and you can just own it without much hands-on involvement, it will ruin your business. You need to build an infrastructure and system that someone can follow from you as a leader, and they also have their own values that they can lean on when something falls outside of the framework or system that you created. If you just throw somebody in there just because they have managed somewhere else before, it will not work out the way you hoped for, and will end up being an absolute disaster. You need to grow this person up within your business, and you need to make sure this person knows how to operate off of your systems. In Jennifer Waters’ 7FIGUREDOJO program, they have already created these systems and their clients can slide it right into their business and avoid recreating the wheel because they’ve already got the system there in place.

The third huge mistake to avoid, which is a common one, is hiring a family member. Although Waters herself joined in on the family business her father started before she was born, and her husband later joined in the family business too, she still warns against hiring family members. It might seem like the most logical thing to do, and it worked really well for her family, however, if you are hiring them because they are family only, that is where the problems begin. You should not hire someone because they share the last name, but if they share the work ethic, or the desire and vision to achieve the dream. It will not work if you all are not in it together, and do not understand what it means to work together as a family, with equal levels of dedication to the business. If you do not have that dynamic, then it is best to rethink hiring a family member because you would have a completely different element there than what you would have for a regular team member: family drama. That is something that is not easy to deal with and resolve.

The fourth thing goes along the same lines as the previous one, which is hiring a friend. You should not be hiring people because you like them, instead you hire people because they are capable of doing the job and performing well. Just because your friend is close to you and you have trust in them does not mean that they are going to get in there and excel at their job. They may be able to do the job but they are not qualified for it. You need to hire someone based on the job description and task-list to be taken care of. This also helps you avoid hard situations where you have to fire a family member or fire a friend. At the end of the day, you have to think about your family business, and when it comes to it, would you be able to have a very frank conversation with a friend or family member and tell them their performance is not where it needs to be, and would that person be receptive to it and change their behavior and attitude and them move forward.

The final mistake that you should run from and avoid at all costs, is hiring anyone just because they need a job. You cannot create work for people and have your business be profitable. Your business is for being able to provide for you and your family, and then being able to provide for other people who work on the mission with you, not because someone needs a job.

These are the top mistakes to avoid while you are hiring for your business. The bottom line is that you must ensure you are not just blindly hiring anyone, just because you might think you really need someone on an urgent basis.

Check out this video!