Nobody hires an assistant coach with spare money. You hire one out of students you haven't enrolled yet, which is why most owners settle it the same way: when the money's there, we'll hire.
That answer is sensible and it is expensive, and the clearest description of the cost we've got came from an owner who lived it.
The sentence to read twice
Jessy Austin runs Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility in Lima, Ohio. He'd been sat at 60 to 70 members for years, breaking even, already top of Google, boosting posts and getting nothing back. He expected about five leads a week off a campaign. Maybe eight.
In the first 45 days he signed 35 to 40 members, hired two appointment closers and another assistant coach to keep up, and then sent us a text asking us to slow down.
He got to about 130 members. And here's what he says about it, on camera, at the end:
"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."
Jessy Austin, in a video testimonial on the Madscope channel, at 9:09.
Ten to twenty members he reckons he could have had and didn't, and he isn't blaming the leads. He's blaming his rota. Earlier in the same video he says the same thing a second way: he had to restructure his classes on the fly, and if he'd had his people ready he'd have kept more of what came in.
That's the real shape of the hiring decision. It isn't "can I afford this person". It's "what does it cost me to not have them on the week everything arrives".
The first hire is almost never the one on the mat
Ask an owner what he'd hire and he'll say an instructor. Ask an owner who's just been through an intake surge and you get a different answer.
Austin hired two appointment closers as well as a coach. Master Wallace Westall in Florida, at 207 students against a goal of 175, ran through what he needed out loud:
"I'm going to need another master in here, we teach taekwondo, and I'm going to need somebody to help me handle the leads."
Master Wallace Westall, TKO, Florida, in a video testimonial on the Madscope channel, at 3:20. He's describing what he's about to do, not what he'd done. At the time of that recording, neither hire had been made.
A minute later he's more specific about which of the two he actually wants: someone to handle the appointments being set, because his trial runs three weeks and at the end of it somebody has to sit the family down and sign them up.
And there's a third answer, from Master Jason Wadley in Lake Jackson, Texas, who didn't hire at all. He retrained the staff he had to stop selling one person at a time and start handling four, five and six at once.
Three schools, three different reads on the same problem, and the split between them is worth borrowing. Before you write a job ad, find out where you're actually leaking:
- Trials booked, then shown, then enrolled. If the drop is between shown and enrolled, your bottleneck is at the desk and a coach won't touch it. That's a closer, or a process. We've written the process version in turning trials into enrolments.
- Classes at or over their comfortable headcount. Enrolments you're turning away, or classes where quality is sliding. That's a mat problem, and no amount of closing helps it.
- Hours in your own week. If you're the closer, the coach and the person answering texts at 9pm, the first hire is whichever of those jobs you're worst at.
Most owners assume it's the second one. It's usually the first.
What the hire has to be worth
The arithmetic is small enough to do on the back of an envelope, and it's your numbers that matter, not anyone else's.
Take what the person costs you a month, all in. Divide it by your own average monthly fee per student. That's how many students the hire has to bring in, or keep, before it pays for itself.
Fill in your own fee, because they vary wildly. One owner in our corpus puts his at about $257 a month, and he's specific about how that's built: $115 billed every two weeks, 26 payments a year rather than 12 monthly ones. Yours might be half that. Do it with your figure.
Two things that arithmetic hides, both worth knowing before you sign anything:
An enrolment is not cash. A student who signs today on a trial rate, or on a joining offer, isn't paying you the full fee for weeks. The hire is paid on Friday. We put the whole of that gap in what one student is actually worth, and it's the part that catches schools out.
Part of the hire can be paid out of what it produces. A closer on some hours plus something per enrolment costs you less when the intake is slow, and costs you more in exactly the month you can afford it. That isn't a trick, it's just a way of making a fixed bet smaller.
The cost of hiring late is a pause
Here's the part that makes waiting expensive. One owner emailed us at the point his school filled up:
"I had no idea that we'd be this full this quickly. Madscope leads, plus organic traffic, plus student referrals has us filled to capacity just about everywhere, very 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 an email to us. He started hiring two days before he wrote it.
Read the order of those sentences. He filled up, then started hiring, then switched the ads off, all in the same week. He's doing the sensible thing, and it still costs him, because hiring isn't instant and advertising is.
You can turn a campaign on this afternoon. You can't turn a coach on this afternoon. Finding the person, meeting them, watching them teach, getting them comfortable with your curriculum and your youngest class. That's weeks, and in a lot of schools it's a term. The tap stays off for the length of your hiring lead time, and every week it's off is a week your competitor's ad is the only one that family sees.
Hiring ahead doesn't remove that lead time. It just moves it to a month where it doesn't cost you anything. That's the entire argument for doing it early, and it's enough on its own.
If you're already at that point and need the near-term version, what to do when your school gets busy covers throttling properly rather than switching everything off.
What hiring doesn't fix
It's worth being straight about the limit, because there's a school this article can't help.
"Working with madscope showed me that we could grow much bigger if we wanted. But we just don't have the space and instructors required to do so"
Two constraints in one sentence, and hiring only addresses one of them. Staff you can have next month. Square footage you can't, and a lease is a much bigger bet than a part-time coach on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.
Westall hit the same wall and his answer was the unit next door — 2,000 square feet he'd talked to his landlord about and hadn't taken. Which is the honest position most owners are in: considering it, not committed.
If the ceiling is the building, the useful move isn't a hire. It's another class in a slot you aren't using, a morning programme, a different age group in the daytime, or accepting a waiting list and marketing that fact. A full class with a queue behind it is a better ad than anything we can write for you.
How to make the bet smaller
Five things that turn a hire from a leap into a step.
- Hire hours, not a job. Two evenings a week, or the three hours around your busiest classes. You can grow the hours as the students arrive; you can't easily shrink a salary.
- Look in your own building first. Your senior belts, your assistant instructors, the parent who's been there four years and knows every child's name. They already know the curriculum and the culture, which is most of the training gone. Austin's spend went on closers because coaching cover was the part he could partly find in-house.
- Train them before you need them. The lead time is the whole problem, so start it in your quiet month. Someone shadowing classes in February is useful in April, and April is when the enquiries land.
- Hire against the calendar, not the hope. Booked trials for the next fortnight is a real number. If it's climbing, staff to it. If you're hiring on a campaign that hasn't started, you're guessing.
- Decide the review point when you hire, not when you panic. Sixty days. Write down now what number would make you stop: intake below X, or the hire not covering their own cost by month three. Owners don't struggle to hire, they struggle to admit it isn't working.
Where we sit in this
We're paid when a student physically walks into your school. Which means a week when your mat is full and your desk is drowning is a week we're sending you shows you can't convert, and we both lose.
So we'll tell you the thing an agency on a monthly retainer has no reason to tell you: if you aren't staffed for it, slow it down. Austin did exactly that, and we slowed it down. Wadley paused inside three weeks, fixed his intake, and restarted. Nobody was punished for it, because we're not billing you to sit there.
The better version is the one where you don't have to. If you'd like to work out what your own school would need on the mat and at the desk before you turn anything up, book fifteen minutes and bring your booked-trial numbers for the last month.
The short version
- The cost of hiring late isn't the salary you saved. It's the students you couldn't hold, plus the weeks your marketing is switched off while you recruit.
- Find out whether you're leaking at the desk or on the mat before you decide who to hire. Most owners assume mat; it's usually the desk.
- Do the arithmetic with your own fee. What the person costs a month, divided by your average monthly fee, is how many students they have to be worth.
- Hire hours rather than a job, and look inside your own building first. Your senior belts already know the culture.
- If the ceiling is the building, hiring won't move it. Add a class in an unused slot, or run a waiting list and say so out loud.