Shihan Michael Cote runs Cote Karate Studio in Nashua, New Hampshire, and has been doing martial arts since 1978. He also opened a second studio at his own residence, in his basement, which he reckons is about the hardest room anyone could be asked to fill.
"It's not easy to get bookings at just, they see the ad, they drive by, oh it's a residence and they're not comfortable coming in. But if Madscope can book and make this happen, they can make it happen anywhere."
Shihan Michael Cote, Cote Karate Studio, Nashua NH, in a video testimonial on the Madscope channel.
That is the part of his video everybody quotes back at us. This is the part that is actually useful to you:
"At the beginning I was calling him every day saying what's going on. It's not easy, but I said, listen, you're the professional, you know what it needs to happen, and I waited."
Same video.
Every day. To the agency he had just hired. That is not a man with a bad supplier, that is a man two weeks into something he cannot see working yet, watching a daily ad spend leave his account with nothing on the mat to show for it.
Most owners who quit an agency quit in that fortnight. Almost none of them quit because the campaign was failing. They quit because the only number they were counting was the last one in the chain.
Enrolments are the fourth number, not the first
Master Wallace Westall runs TKO in Florida and read his first month out in order:
"I started getting, I think in the first month I had 200 leads, which is just an incredible amount to try and handle as a solo manager owner. About half of those leads were set up for an appointment, and about half of them showed, and of those that showed we closed quite a few and ended up adding about 35-40 people our first month."
Master Wallace Westall, TKO, Florida, in a video testimonial on the Madscope channel, at 1:39 to 2:22.
Count the stages. Leads, then appointments, then attendance, then enrolments. Four numbers, and the one owners stare at is the fourth. His "about half" is his own estimate rather than a report, and we have left it as he said it, but the shape is what matters: by the time a body is on your mat, three earlier things have already had to happen, and each one takes days.
Master John Gartland, who runs Victory Karate Centers in New York, put the same chain in absolute figures:
"284 opt-ins, 132 booked appointments, 14 weeks to produce 132 appointments, so that averages us out to almost 10 a week, nine appointments a week."
Master John Gartland, in a video testimonial on the Madscope channel, at 2:26.
Two hundred and eighty-four people gave their name and number. One hundred and thirty-two booked. That leaves 140 who did not, and here is what he says about them rather than what a marketer would say:
"Even if they didn't book an appointment, they just weren't ready at that time, but there's an interest. We're going to continue to cultivate and nurture those leads until they are."
Same video, at 2:54.
In week two, those 140 look like failure. They are the largest asset the month produced, and they belong in your CRM with a reason to be called again in March.
Week one: count opt-ins and how fast you ring them
There is one honest number available in week one, and it is how many people put their details in. Everything else is too young to read.
The second number, which barely anyone tracks, is how long it takes you to call each of them. Cote is blunt about whose job that is:
"You just have to understand that bookings are important, but you need to call as well, and then make sure that you do a good relationship with the person over the phone. You send them a text, but the follow-up is very important."
Cote, same video.
He is right and it is worth being plain about how it works here. We are paid when a student physically walks into your school. We do not have a room of people ringing your leads for you, and any agency telling you it will ring them for you is describing a cost it will eventually pass back to you. The call is yours. A lead who fills in a form at 8pm and hears from you on Thursday is a different person from the one you ring at 8:06pm.
So week one's scoreboard is three lines, and none of them is an enrolment:
- How many opt-ins came in, and what each one cost in ad spend.
- How long between the opt-in and your first attempt to reach them.
- What proportion you actually got hold of, as opposed to called.
If those three are healthy in week one, the month is working whatever your enrolment count says.
Week two: the graph dips and nobody warns you
Gartland volunteered something in his video that an agency would normally edit out:
"We had what, maybe a week and a half, you were retooling, you were doing something, and my numbers went down. But we still averaged all those appointments over the course of a full month. And he told me, don't panic, we're doing this, we're changing our ads up. And it came back."
Gartland, same video, at 5:06.
That is what a rebuild looks like from the client's chair. Ads get changed, the numbers sag for a week or so, the month still lands. If you are only ever shown the good weeks, you will read your first sag as the wheels coming off.
The reason this matters is that there is a second pattern that looks identical for about ten days and is not the same thing at all. Westall had lived through it with other suppliers:
"They're good for four or five weeks and then they kind of drop off."
Westall, same video, at 1:06.
A dip in week two with an explanation, a change already in flight and a recovery is a rebuild. A fade at week five with no explanation is an agency that got you started and stopped working. The way to tell them apart is not the shape of the graph, it is whether anyone told you before you asked. Ask two questions when the numbers go quiet: what changed, and what is being done about it this week. You should not have to phone every day to get them, though it is a reasonable thing to do, and Cote did.
One more week-two trap, from an owner writing to us mid-campaign about who was actually signing up:
"At first, there were only girls (not our main clientele). But now they have started signing up boys."
A school owner, in a message to Madscope. Source: deck slide
s68
A fortnight of enquiries is too small a sample to tell you anything about your audience. He nearly drew a conclusion about his targeting from the first handful of names. Give it the month.
Weeks three and four: bookings, then shows
Cote's account of when things turned is his own, and it is worth reading as one owner's experience rather than a schedule:
"So the first week I wasn't getting bookings, but then after the third week [I] started to get bookings, calls, I was calling back, people were showing up."
Cote, same video. His recording has not been through our second-transcript check, so we use his account of the shape of it and quote no figures from it.
We are not going to turn that into a promise that your third week produces bookings. What his month does show is the order things arrive in, and that the gap between a booking and a body is its own problem rather than a rounding error. Gartland, asked about exactly that, qualified his own result without being prompted:
"It's not 100% show rate, but the saturation of numbers…"
Gartland, same video, at 8:26.
Keep that sentence. It is the most honest thing in his recording. Some of your booked appointments will not turn up, in month one and in month fourteen, and the lever you have is not wishing but the confirmation sequence. We have written up what actually moves a show rate separately, and what happens between the trial and the signature after that.
The failure nobody plans for: it works and you are not ready
Jessy Austin runs Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility in Lima, Ohio. He had sat at 60 to 70 members for years, already top of Google, with boosted posts returning nothing. His expectations going in were modest:
"Going into it, my expectations were, man, in the first month or so, if I could have maybe five leads a week, something like that, something consistent, maybe after it gets going eight leads a week, I'm like, we can make that work."
Jessy Austin, in a video testimonial on the Madscope channel, at 2:21.
What he got instead:
"In the first 45 days, we had signed, I think, 35 to 40 members. We literally had to hire two appointment closers. We had to hire another assistant coach just to keep up with it."
Same video, at 2:36.
He then asked us to slow the campaign down. And he closes the video with the sentence every owner in week two should read before they get to week four:
"All this was on my fault, because I should have 10 to 20 more. I just wasn't ready for it at the beginning. So when you make that call, be ready."
Same video, at 9:09.
He is saying the campaign outran his school and it cost him students he could have had. A different owner wrote to us from the same spot and reached for the other lever:
"I had no idea that we'd be this full this quickly… Our next step is to hire more coaches, which we already started on as of two days ago. For now, we won't be needing to run ads or capturing anything new. I'll pause the card on file."
A school owner, in a message to Madscope. Source: deck slide
s68
Two owners, one month in, both constrained by mat space and staff rather than by leads. If your first month goes well, this is the wall you hit, and we have written about what to do when the intake outruns the timetable.
The admin that decides whether week four counts
The least glamorous thing in this article is the one most likely to cost you an enrolment in your first month. From the owner quoted earlier about who signed up first, writing on the day his first lead came in:
"Could you send the Leads a link to sign the waiver when the booking is confirmed. This is important, as we will not be able to admit the child to training if the waiver is not filled in. It is easy to fill out online and takes 3 minutes for parents."
A school owner, in a message to Madscope. Source: deck slide
s68
A family drives over for a class their child is not allowed to join. That is a show you paid for and an enrolment you will not get, and it is fixed by putting the waiver, the medical question and the photo consent in the booking confirmation rather than on a clipboard at the door. Set that up in week one, while nothing is happening and you have the time.
Where we sit in this
We are paid when a student walks in, so a first month that produces leads and no attendance pays us nothing. That is our bias and you should read this page knowing it: we want week two to feel survivable because our own invoice depends on week four.
It cuts an honest way, though. An agency on a monthly retainer is paid the same whether your week two dip recovers or not, which is exactly why the week-five fade Westall describes is a viable business model for the people who run it. We have laid out what each payment model actually rewards, and what a marketing contract locks in if you are still choosing.
If you want to talk through what your own first month would need to look like, book a 15-minute call. Bring your class timetable and an honest answer about who is free to ring leads back. Those two things decide more of month one than the ads do.
The short version
- Score week one on opt-ins, speed of callback and contact rate. Enrolments are the fourth link in the chain and cannot move yet.
- Expect a dip and ask two questions when it comes: what changed, and what is happening about it this week. A rebuild that recovers and an agency fading out look the same for about ten days.
- The leads who did not book are not waste. One owner's 284 opt-ins produced 132 appointments. The other 140 are a list with a reason to call in three months.
- Be staffed before you start, not after. The owner who signed 35 to 40 members in 45 days says plainly that he lost 10 to 20 more by not being ready.
- Put the waiver in the booking confirmation before your first booking, not after your first family drives home unable to train.
Client quotes on this page are reproduced as written or as spoken. The written quotes come from messages sent to Madscope by the owners concerned and are transcribed from the source image named beside each one: deck slide s68, which carries messages from two different owners. The waiver request and the note about who signed up first are one owner; the message about pausing the card is another. The video quotes are from Master Wallace Westall (TKO, Florida), Master John Gartland (Victory Karate Centers, NY), Jessy Austin (Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility, Lima OH) and Shihan Michael Cote (Cote Karate Studio, Nashua NH), all published on the Madscope YouTube channel and linked above. Every figure quoted from Westall, Gartland and Austin was confirmed against a second, independent speech-to-text pass of the original recording and carries the timestamp it is spoken at. No original recording exists on file for the Cote video, so it is quoted for his account of what the month felt like and no figure from it appears anywhere on this page. Cote Karate Studio's name and location were checked against the school's own website and two further sources. Nothing has been rounded up, no timeframe has been invented, and no owner's own qualification has been removed: Westall's "about half", Gartland's "it's not 100% show rate" and his week and a half of retooling, and Austin's statement that he was not ready are all their own words and all kept. No industry benchmark, average show rate or survey figure appears on this page, because we have not measured one and will not borrow one.