A dad whose five-year-old does judo wrote this on Reddit earlier this year:
"for the last 4 months twice a week, I been driving and staying at the dojo for 1-1.5 hours (so he can hang with his buddies). In my head do I really need to do this for the next 10+ years?"
Read that as the school he's sitting in. Four months, twice a week, an hour and a half a time. That's better than thirty visits. He's not bored of martial arts. He's bored of the chair. And in thirty-odd visits, nobody has offered him anything to do with that hour.
He's the cheapest adult student that school will ever get, and nobody has spoken to him.
Why do parents sit through class for years and never join?
Because nobody asks them. That's almost the whole answer.
Children don't come to your school on their own. Somebody drives them, waits, and drives them home, which means for every child on your mat there's at least one adult in your building on a schedule. Neil's book makes the point in one line: children are "usually going to be accompanied to your school by at least one adult, so you can enroll those adults because of your children's program."
Those adults have already cleared every hurdle a cold adult lead has to clear. They know where you are and where to park. They've watched a full class, so they've seen that nobody gets carried off, seen beginners fumble a form, and seen what people wear. They know you. A stranger who books off an ad has done none of that and is sitting at home on Thursday evening deciding whether to bother.
What's missing isn't interest. One parent of four boys, writing to another parent on a forum, put it as a warning: "you'll be surprised how many parents join after watching their kids." Another commenter, talking to owners about their own kids programme, was blunter: "Get the kids in and then start inviting the parents. They are more vested and likely to refer you to friends and family."
And some of them want it for themselves rather than for the family. One adult wrote about getting into sanda purely because his son was taking kung fu. Another put the appeal plainly: "Sometimes when you're a parent, you give up your life for your kids, having a thing you can do for yourself with other adults is a breath of fresh air."
A sign on the wall doesn't reach any of them, because nobody is spoken to by a sign.
How do I get more adult students at my martial arts school?
Work the list you already own before you do anything else.
The owners we talk to who want to grow adult numbers usually start by asking about a second campaign. Fair enough, and we'll come back to what advertising should be pointed at. But there's a one-off job sitting in front of that, and it only exists once, because it's a back catalogue.
Everybody who enrols a child gets offered the adult trial on the day, if the school is doing it right. The ones who were never offered anything are the families who enrolled before you started doing that: six months ago, two years ago, five years ago. Nobody is going to raise it with them now, because the moment passed and the moment is when it normally gets said.
So count them.
The bench count, on one sheet of paper
- List every family with a child enrolled. Not leads, not trials. Current paying families.
- Mark the ones where an adult stays in the building. You or your instructors know this without looking it up. Some drop off and come back, some sit through the whole hour. The sitters are the list.
- Cross off anyone already training with you. What's left is the number.
- Write that number at the top. That's how many adults are on your premises every week who have never been asked.
This is not a forecast of enrolments. It's the size of the room you've been walking past.
An owner told us on a call that the parents at his school who started stretching at the back of the kids' class went on to grade, and pulled other parents in behind them. That's what this list turns into when somebody actually works it.
Should a martial arts school run parent classes?
Run one session before you give a slot on the timetable to a class that might have two people in it.
One parents-only session, this week, invitation only. It does two jobs. It tells you how many of your bench parents will genuinely stand on a mat, which is the only way to find out. And it answers the thing actually stopping them, which is not fitness and not money.
The nerves are the obstacle, and adults have them worse than children do. Neil's book says it directly: people, "especially adults", will be nervous about going to a martial arts class. The specific fear is being the only beginner in a room of people who already know what they're doing. A parents-only session removes that in one move, because everybody in the room is in the same position and they already know each other from the bench.
Keep the first one easy and short. Forty-five minutes, no sparring, no uniform required, and run it at a time they are already in the building so it costs them nothing extra in childcare or driving. If you run it while the kids train, say so in the invitation, because that is the single biggest objection it removes.
The invitation, texted to the parents on your bench count
To the ones who don't reply, three days later
At the end of the session, to each person, individually
Send it from the number your class reminders already come from, so it reads as the school and not as a marketing message. Only promise what is true: if the adult class doesn't run alongside the kids' class, name the night it does run.
What do I offer the parents who enrolled a year ago?
The same offer you'd make at the desk, with a date on it.
The desk version is the easy one, because at the moment a child enrols you're already standing there talking to the parent. It's written out with the words to say in what your adult intro-class no-shows are actually afraid of. Don't change it. These five rules are the ones that matter when you're reaching back to families who enrolled long ago. They come off Neil's own method.
- Make it genuinely strong. Neil's wording is "something like two free weeks or even a free month, some kind of a very strong offer". One of our schools gives adults two free months and does very well with it. A ten per cent discount isn't an offer, it's a shrug.
- Put a date on it or it won't get used. His book is explicit: "make sure you also have a timeline in which they need to use the trial (use urgency), otherwise they probably won't." On a call he put it as the parent thinking "yeah, I better try it now." Two weeks from the session is plenty.
- Enrol them at the end of their first class. Not at the end of the free period. In his words, "you don't just give them the offer and let them try" and hope. Add the free weeks onto the front of a regular membership, so the free part is a reward for signing rather than a trial to be run down. Neil's own example of how to say it: sign up today and you get a year for the price of eleven months.
- Stack cheap extras. A nutrition plan, a pair of gloves, the uniform. "The more things the better", and "often they don't cost a lot."
- Point the extras at what that parent wants. This is the part most owners skip. If they said weight loss, the extra is the nutrition plan. If they loved hitting the pads, it's gloves. Ask them at the session what they'd want out of it for themselves, write the answer down, and use it an hour later.
One more thing on the arithmetic, since you already know it for your kids programme and may not have run it for this. A parent who joins isn't worth one month's tuition, they're worth whatever they stay for, and the same lifetime-value sum you'd use to judge a campaign applies here with no ad spend attached to it at all. If you haven't done that sum, what one martial arts student is actually worth over 24 months walks through it.
What if the whole family can't afford it?
Some of them can't, and you should expect to hear it. A mother who trains herself wrote that she'd like her husband on the mat too, "but that would practically be a second mortgage."
That's a real feeling, and worth taking seriously, because the parent saying it is already a customer and already sold on the thing you do. What to charge a second or third member of the same family is your call and not ours, and we're not going to hand you a number for it. Neil has no rule on family pricing, and he'd rather you sold the value than cut the price, which is the same position he takes on the kids' side.
What the free period does is let the parent find out what it's worth before any money is discussed. That's the whole reason the offer is strong rather than small. By the time you're talking about tuition, a parent who has trained for a month is not comparing your rate with the gym down the road. They're deciding whether to keep something they've started.
And either way, you don't need both parents. Neil's book puts the realistic outcome as "you could get one or both parents enrolled as well." One is a good result.
Does a parent training actually keep the child longer?
Yes. It's Neil's first argument for doing any of this, ahead of the adult tuition itself.
Neil makes the case in two places. In his video on growing an adult programme, the parent offer "helps with the retention of the child because the parents will be bringing the child in when they're going for classes." In his book: "it helps to enroll and retain the child (if the parent starts classes and it becomes a family thing to do, they are much more likely to train for longer)". On a client call he put it in a sentence: if the parent starts training, it's really good for retention of both the parent and child, and it's actually making you money.
Look at what changes for the family. Before, one person is a student and the other is a driver, and the driver is doing an hour and a half of nothing twice a week. The judo dad at the top of this article is counting those hours forward over ten years and not liking the sum. After, both of them are going training. It's an outing, not a chore. Nobody is sitting in a chair resenting it.
It also changes the conversation in the car on the way home, which is a conversation you never get to be in. A parent who trains has something to talk about other than whether their child wants to keep going.
It works at the other end too. The parent offer isn't only a retention tool, it helps you get the child enrolled in the first place, because a family deciding to start something together is weighing something they want rather than a cost they're taking on. And the pitch for that is already in Neil's own words, for use at the desk: martial arts "is something that parents and children can train together and it's a great way of building a strong relationship with your child."
His conclusion is the whole reason to bother: "if you make your school something the whole family enjoys you could have them as students for many years to come." Families enrol together. That's the version of a family you want.
Doesn't this mean advertising to adults instead?
No. Keep your paid advertising pointed at children, and run this alongside it.
That's a performance decision, not a retreat. Neil's ruling is plain: focus the ads on kids, because adults bring them in the door, the show rate is almost always higher, and when the adult comes in the door you can make them an offer too. His book says the same about the money: for a school that teaches both, "the show rate and profit are almost always higher for children than adults." Adults who book off an ad on their own are also more likely to change their mind and need more work to get through the door in the first place.
And the adult programme grows off a kids campaign anyway. Jessy Austin runs Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility in Lima, Ohio, and had been sat at 60 to 70 members, split just under 40 kids and 30 to 35 adults. He ran kids only:
"And also, we just focused on the kids... And we've actually grown our adult class. So even though it's dialed in for the kids, just by people seeing it in the reach, we've expanded our adult class."
Jessy Austin, Lima's Total Revolution Training Facility, Lima OH, 6:04 and 6:19 into his video testimonial. He went from 60 to 70 members to 130 over the campaign.
So the full picture for a school teaching both: the ads fill the kids classes, the kids bring the adults into the building, and the bench count and the parents' session turn those adults into students. The ads do the hard part, which is reaching families who have never heard of you. Everything in this article runs on top of that, off families the ads already brought you. Which bracket to advertise to, and how to count your seats before you switch anything on, is in which age group should your ads target.
If your school only teaches adults, none of this applies to you and nothing here says you need a kids programme. We work with adults-only schools, though most of our schools are mainly children's schools and most of what we've built is aimed at children and parents. The method for an adults-only gym is the same method without this chapter: fast replies, a strong offer, and a timetable that can take the intake.
And don't stop at the parents. The siblings sitting on the same bench are a separate and equally short list, covered in siblings and referrals from new students.
Where we sit in this
We find the families, get them booked and remind them to come. You welcome them, run a great first class, and enrol them. We're paid when a student walks into your school, which is why we'd rather you worked a list you already own than paid us to go and find adults who are already standing in your building.
Everything above is yours to run on Monday with no agency involved. If you'd like to talk through the other half, book fifteen minutes. Bring your kids timetable and the number of seats you could genuinely fill this month, and if we don't think we can fill them we'll say so on the call.
Do this Monday
Do the bench count. One sheet of paper, every family with a child enrolled, a mark against the ones where an adult stays in the building, and the ones already training crossed off. Write the total at the top.
Then pick a day this week, text the first copy-paste message above to every name on that list, and book the room.
The short version
- Your cheapest adult students are in the building twice a week already. They know where you are, they've watched a full class, and most have never been asked.
- The back catalogue is a one-off job. Families who enrolled before you started offering the parent a trial were never offered one. Count them.
- Run one parents-only session before you give it a timetable slot. Beginners only, 45 minutes, no uniform, while the kids train. It removes the real fear, which is being the only beginner in the room.
- Make the offer strong and dated, and enrol them at the end of their first class. Two free weeks or a month, a deadline so it gets used, extras aimed at what that parent said they wanted.
- Keep the ads on kids. Higher show rate, higher profit, and the adults walk in with them. This runs alongside the campaign, not instead of it.
Questions owners ask
How do I get more adult students at my martial arts school?
Start with the parents of the children you already teach. They are in your building twice a week, they have already met you, and most of them have never been asked. Make a list of every family with a child enrolled, invite the parents to one parents-only session this week, put a deadline on the offer attached to it, and enrol them at the end of that session rather than letting a free period run out on its own.
How do you get the parents of your kids students to start training?
Ask them directly and give them a reason to act now. A sign on the wall gets ignored because nobody feels spoken to by a sign. A message naming their child, naming one session this week, and naming a date the free period expires gets answered. Neil's rule from his book is to put a timeline on the trial, because without one they will mean to use it and never do.
Should a martial arts school run parent classes?
Run one session first before you commit a slot on the timetable. A single parents-only session tells you how many of your bench parents will actually stand on the mat, and it answers their real worry, which is being the only beginner in a room of people who know what they are doing. If eight turn up, you have the start of a class. If two turn up, you have two new adult students and you have lost an hour.
Is it normal to start martial arts as an adult?
It is common, and a large share of adult beginners arrive through their own children. Owners hear it often: one adult wrote that he got involved in sanda because his son was taking kung fu. The nerves are normal too, and adults feel them more than children do, which is why a parents-only first session works better than an invitation to join the regular adult class.