A mother on Reddit described taking her teenage daughter to a first class. The instructor said hello, and then, in her words:
"Then tells her to hop on out there and join the class. We were NOT prepared for that at all"
In the same thread, a dad had taken his six-year-old to a trial:
"What really got me was that no one welcomed him, introduced themselves, or even tried to show him what to do. I'm honestly pretty pissed off, and now he doesn't want to try anything like that again."
Read that last clause again, because it's the expensive part. He didn't lose a sale to a competitor down the road. The child is now out of martial arts altogether.
Nothing in either story went wrong at the booking. The booking worked. The reminders went out. The family found the building and walked in on time. What went wrong is that the class started and nobody in the room knew a single thing about the person standing on the edge of the mat.
A former instructor replying in that thread put his finger on exactly where it should have been fixed:
"As a minimum, if you'd notified them ahead of time they should have had forms ready to go for you well before the class."
Ahead of time. Not at the door. That gap, between the moment a family books and the moment they step on your mat, is dead air in most schools. Reminders go into it. Nothing comes back out of it.
This is about filling it with six text messages, and then doing the one thing almost nobody does with the answers.
What should you text a parent after they book a trial class?
One short question, from the same number the booking confirmation came from, as soon as you reasonably can after the booking lands.
That's it. Not a welcome pack. Not a studio policy PDF. One question, one or two lines, the way you'd text somebody you know.
The length matters more than owners expect. A message that runs to five or six lines looks like it went to two hundred people, and a parent reads it as an automation and doesn't answer. A one-line question ending in a question mark reads like a human and gets a reply. The reply is the entire point, because a conversation is the thing you can't fake with a reminder sequence.
Ask something easy. Ask something you already know the answer to, if that's what gets the first reply. The child's name, his age, whether he's tried martial arts before. It isn't a form. It's a way in.
Then, and this is the bit people skip, ask a question about their answer. "He did a bit of karate at six" is not a data point, it's an opening. Why did he stop? Did he enjoy it? One follow-up and you're in a conversation with a parent who now knows there's a human at your school.
Two other mechanics, both cheap to get right and expensive to get wrong:
Send it from the number the confirmations come from. If the first text a family gets comes from a new number, they either don't connect it to the school they booked with or they assume their details have been handed round. Either way the reply rate drops.
Keep the whole exchange in one place. If the conversation lives half in your personal phone and half in your booking system, the next message somebody sends contradicts the last one. That gets messy fast, and it reads to the family exactly as disorganised as it is.
We've written separately about why booked trials don't show up, and the show-rate case for having a real conversation is all in there. This article is about something else: what you do with what they tell you.
The six questions, one text at a time
Here is the list. Each one is a separate text. Spread them over the days between the booking and the class. One when they book, one the next day, one the day before. Drop any that the conversation has already answered.
The post-booking texts
- "Has Jack tried martial arts before?"
The easiest one to answer and usually the first one to send. Tells you whether to pitch the class at a complete beginner or someone who already knows how to bow in, and it almost always produces a story rather than a yes or a no. - "Does he play other sports or do anything else active?"
Tells you how much energy you're dealing with and what his coordination is likely to be. It also tells you what you're competing with for Tuesday evenings later on. - "Is there anything in particular you'd like me to focus on with him?"
The most valuable question on this list by a distance. Parents answer it honestly. He's shy, he's got too much energy, he's having a hard time with another kid at school. Hold on to the exact words they use. - "What are you hoping he gets out of the classes?"
Close to the one above but not the same. Question three gets you the problem. This one gets you the outcome they're imagining. You want both. - "Roughly what does he weigh? I'll get a uniform ready for him."
Sounds like admin. Isn't. It tells the parent that somebody at your school is physically preparing for their child's arrival, which is a very different feeling from being on a list. - "Any questions about the class before Tuesday?"
Send it the day before. It catches the worry they haven't voiced: what he should wear, whether he'll have to fight anyone, whether they can stay and watch.
And the seventh, which is a request rather than a question: "Can you fill in this form now so you don't have to do it at the class and we can get started straight away?"
That seventh one does two jobs. The obvious one is that the waiver is signed before the family arrives, so you're not greeting a nervous seven-year-old over a clipboard. The waiver belongs in the booking confirmation, and that post has the full field list.
The second job is quieter. Filling in a form is effort, and effort is commitment. A parent who has spent three minutes on your paperwork on Sunday night has invested something in Tuesday. People turn up for things they've already put work into.
One adjustment for adults booking for themselves. Adults are far more likely to talk themselves out of a first class than a parent is to cancel a child's, and the reason is almost always nerves rather than diary. So with an adult, spend less of the exchange on logistics and more on reassurance: say plainly that it's a beginners' class, that nobody is going to spar with them, and that there will be other people there on their first or second week. The fears behind adult intro-class no-shows are specific, and they can be answered by text before they become a cancellation.
What do you do with the answers?
This is the whole article.
Most schools that do ask these questions use them as a show-rate tactic, which is fair enough, because they work as one. But the answers are worth more than that. They are the brief for the first class.
A parent who texts you "he's quite shy, he won't join in with anything new" has just told you precisely what to do on Tuesday, and has told you in her own words. She will be sitting on your chairs at the side watching for one thing: whether anything that happens in the next forty-five minutes has anything to do with the problem she told you about.
Neil's way of putting it is that you should behave like a doctor. Ask, diagnose, then prescribe. Don't open with the prescription. Most schools do open with the prescription, because they're describing the thing they sell, the forms and the belts and the grading syllabus, rather than the thing the family came in for. The parent didn't come for taekwondo. She came because her son won't speak up in class. Neil's blunter version of the same point: people will do more to avoid a pain than to chase a pleasure, so find the pain and you've found what they're buying.
That's why the exact words matter. "Shy" is her word. Use her word back to her. Tell her, before the class, that you've worked with a lot of children who wouldn't join in at first, and tell her what you're going to do about it tonight. You're not describing a timetable any more. You're describing a solution to her problem, and a solution can't be price-compared against the school two miles away.
Then do something about it on the mat. The best version of this we know comes from one of our clients, Grandmaster Marco Sies. He finds out beforehand what the child is struggling with. Say it's confidence. At the end of the first class, the child breaks a board with that word written on it. He goes out to the car park holding half a board with "CONFIDENCE" on it, and his mother has just watched her son do the thing she texted you about on Sunday.
You don't need the board. You need the principle: whatever the parent told you, make it visible in the first class. Put the shy kid in front for one drill and have the room clap. Pair the hyperactive one with your best senior and let him work until he's genuinely tired. Say the child's name out loud in the first two minutes.
And say it to the parent afterwards, out loud, in the words she used. "You said he was shy. Did you see him in that last drill?"
What should a martial arts new student intake form include?
Two halves, and almost every school collects one of them.
The admin half is the one everybody has: waiver signed, emergency contact, medical conditions, photo permission, which class they're booked into. That's covered in the waiver post and your insurer has opinions about the wording, so take theirs over ours.
The teaching half is the one that's usually missing. It's one page, it lives on the front desk, and the instructor reads it in the two minutes before the class he's about to teach.
The trial sheet, as the instructor sees it
| Field | Why it's on the sheet |
|---|---|
| Child's name, and what he's called at home | Jack, not Jackson. Use it in the first thirty seconds. |
| Age, and the class he's booked into | Matches a face to tonight's register. |
| Previous experience | Where to pitch it. "Did a year of karate" and "never done anything" are different classes. |
| Other sports | Energy level, coordination, and what you're competing with for his evenings. |
| What the parent asked you to focus on, in their words | The single most important line on the page. This is what the class has to visibly address. |
| What they're hoping he gets out of it | The language to use when you talk to the parent after class. |
| Uniform size ready? Y/N | Either it's folded on the desk with his name on it or it isn't. |
| Waiver done? Y/N | If no, that's a problem to solve at 5.50pm, not 5.59pm. |
| Who's bringing him, and are they staying | Decides whether you have a parent to talk to at the end. |
Print it. One per booked trial. Whoever sends the texts fills it in as the answers come back, and it sits with the register, not in a CRM nobody opens while they're teaching.
If you want one rule out of this entire article, it's that one. The answers are useless sitting in a system the instructor isn't looking at while he's putting his belt on.
How do you make a new student feel welcome before the first class?
By making sure the welcome has already happened by the time they park.
Every one of the six texts is doing this quietly as well as gathering information. A family that has had a two-message conversation with a human at your school arrives as a guest. A family that has only had reminders arrives as a stranger, which is how both of the parents quoted at the top of this page arrived.
Three practical additions, all free:
- Tell them when to turn up and where to stand. Ten or fifteen minutes before the class is usually right. It gives you time to greet them properly and it stops them walking in halfway through a warm-up.
- Answer the question they haven't asked. With kids it's usually what he should wear and whether he has to fight anyone. With adults it's whether they'll be the only beginner and whether they'll embarrass themselves.
- Make sure whoever is on the mat has read the sheet. If they haven't, every text you sent was a show-rate tactic and nothing more.
What happens after they walk through the door is a separate job, and we've written it up in the first ten minutes of a trial class. This article stops at the mat door. But the two are the same piece of work, and the texts are what make the ten minutes possible.
What if they don't reply?
Plenty won't, and a non-reply is not a no. Send the next one anyway, a day later, on a different subject. Three one-line questions sent over three days will get an answer out of most people, where one long message sent once gets ignored.
And if you get nothing at all, you still turn up on Tuesday with a sheet that has a name, an age and a class on it, which is more than the school in that Reddit thread had. The sheet isn't all-or-nothing. A quarter of it still beats a clipboard.
Calling is fine too, and better than texting if they actually pick up, because a voice builds more rapport than a text ever will. The mistake, and it's common, is calling, getting no answer, and leaving it there. If you ring and they don't pick up, text them straight after.
Who sends these, and from which number
The number is settled: the one your booking confirmations come from.
Who sends them is less settled, and we won't pretend otherwise. It can be you or it can be an instructor; what matters is that it's one person, that they're the same person each time, and that they're not reading from a block of text. If you can get your head instructor to send them, there's an argument that it lands harder. Families have a lot of respect for the person who'll actually be teaching their child, and a text from him is not the same as a text from reception.
What doesn't work is splitting it. Two people texting the same family from two numbers with no shared history is worse than one person doing it badly.
For our own schools, every booking email we send carries a list of these questions, because we've watched which ones get replies across a lot of schools and there's no sense in each owner working it out alone. But the sending is yours, deliberately. We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them. The conversation between the booking and the mat belongs on your side of that line, because it's your school they're about to walk into and your instructor whose name needs to be in the thread.
Before your next booking
Three things, and the third is the one that changes your conversion rate.
- Pick three of the six questions. Not all six. Three you'll actually send every single time, and the third one on the list, what would you like me to focus on with him, is not optional.
- Put them in your booking follow-up as separate short texts, from the number your confirmations come from, over the days before the class.
- Print the trial sheet and make one rule: every answer goes on it, and whoever is teaching reads it before the class. That rule is the difference between a tactic and a system.
Do that and the parent sitting on your chairs on Tuesday watches you work on the exact thing she was worried about on Sunday. She's not deciding whether to enrol after that. She decided in the car park.
If you'd rather the finding, booking and reminding happened without you, that's the part we do, and we only get paid when somebody actually walks in. Book a call and bring your timetable and the number of spaces you can genuinely take this month.
Questions owners ask
What questions should you ask a parent before their child's first martial arts class?
Has he tried martial arts before. Does he play other sports. Is there anything in particular you'd like me to focus on with him. What are you hoping he gets out of it. Roughly what does he weigh, so I can have a uniform ready. And do you have any questions about the class. Send them as separate one-line texts over a day or two, not as one list.
What should a martial arts new student intake form include?
Two things, and most schools only collect the first. The admin half is the waiver, emergency contact, medical notes and photo permission. The teaching half is what the parent said they want worked on, whether the child has trained before, what else he plays, and his uniform size. The teaching half is the one your instructor needs in his hand before the warm-up.
What should you text a parent after they book a trial class?
One short question, from the same number the booking confirmation came from, within about fifteen minutes of the booking. Ask something easy to answer, even something you already know, just to start a conversation: the child's name, or whether he's tried martial arts before. Then ask a question about their answer. A two-message exchange beats a fourth reminder.
How do you make a new student feel welcome before the first class?
Have the conversation before they arrive. Get the waiver signed in advance so you're not meeting them over a clipboard, tell them where to park and how early to come, say plainly that it's a beginners' class and nobody will be sparring, and use the child's name. A family that has already spoken to a human at your school walks in as a guest rather than a stranger.