Lee and Lisa Kent – Chi Wai Black Belt Academy Ltd
In October 2003 I had a meeting with my instructors.
I had been running a martial arts club since 1989 and at the time of the meeting had 7 students to show for it. I didn’t have a clue why we were losing our students but most never seemed to stay around.
I sat down with my instructors and put it all on the line. I was sick of teaching students and giving them 100% just for them to leave. I had not had any time for my own training and felt that I was giving up my training for nothing. I wanted to fold the club!
My instructors talked me out of closing but I had a condition. If we were keeping the club open then we were going to do it properly. I had one of EFC’s leaflets so gave them a call and we went up to Nottingham to meet Mike Allen and Ken Robson.
At this seminar they spoke about how a martial artist can actually run a school full time.
We could not believe it and decided to give it a go and in November 2003 joined the Educational Funding Company and became “The Chi Wai Black Belt Academy”.
To begin with I only taught adults but the EFC put me in contact with the right people to organise instructing children.
They sent me the first EFC academy management book. This book was full of ideas, some great and some not so great so we decided to adopt the good stuff and leave out the rubbish. After all I had been in martial arts 1987 so I must know better (Anyone else said that??).
We began to grow so all was good. With in a few months I was ready to take the next step, I organised another venue to teach in, and the academy was really starting to take off. I was over the moon, after a couple of years it got to the stage were I could actually stop working for someone else and run the academy full time. We began to become complacent, still only running the “good” procedures and leaving out the “rubbish”, I have grown this far so why do I need the rest of the EFC systems? Right?
Wrong. My instructors and I went to a meeting of the minds, took loads of notes and spoke to loads of other academy owners, and the main thing we brought back with us was that they all ran all the EFC systems. So my wife and I sat down and started looking at the management books again, now we were further down the road some of the system rubbish made more sense and we quickly started to see how they would work.
Bit by bit we began to implement the systems, this was approximately in early 2007.
We soon grew stronger and stronger and before we knew it we had reached our first target of nearly 30 students. By June 2007 we had 28 active agreements. Cool we were finally going in the right direction. Who knows one day we might even grow to 50 active students. This was accomplished by October 2007.
By now we were starting to learn how to plan ahead and were even dreaming of owning our own full time academy. Wow what a great jump from once upon a time hoping to grow big enough just to run full time, our dreams of an academy come a lot sooner than we had planned. We found out about a venue that we thought would be spot on and had been empty for a number of years. This is because in this country all commercial buildings are allocated a certain usage, Office type, Shop Type etc and it is extremely difficult to get them to change this classification. We needed a D2 which is leisure and the building was B2 Office and warehouse.
Mean while were continued to expand our active count and by the time we had organised the change of use for the building we had grown to about 60 strong. Then came the reality, Although we had done great we were a long way off from being able to afford the rent etc on a full time academy, But the chance of being able to get a building that we could teach martial arts in was very small so do we go for it or do we play safe. We decided to go for it and moved forwards with the stressful times of organising the contract. This took for ever but we were able to keep focused on our students as well as the negotiations and finally got the keys to begin work at the beginning of December 2007 and our student count had risen to 70.
Well, we always close for 2 weeks at Christmas so the plan was to get the builders in to do the main work then over the 2 week break we would get in and paint etc. Sounds easy? As you can imagine everyone began to slow down ready for the Christmas break so getting the materials here was a nightmare, The builders were great and were coming in on a Sunday etc to try and get it done but the suppliers were not so helpful. But we eventually did it; 1 week later than planned; we opened our doors to our students and to the public. Wow what a rush. Seeing the faces of our students who were used to training out of halls, to be able to come in and training in a full time venue. Fantastic!
Now we are in June and in May 2008 we have just tipped 106 active students, and growing. We still have loads to learn and loads to grow but we are still planning for the future and planning to expand our venue by putting in a second floor. It is amazing and the only real regret I have is that I did not join and listen to the EFC team sooner. But maybe I needed to make the mistakes to be where I am today? Who knows? But all I can say is if you want to get on, then please do not hesitate to join EFC and make there life hard. Keep calling them getting as much advice as possible. If they don’t have the answer they will know some one who does. Also what is great is that everyone is willing to share their knowledge. I look forward to the day when EFC clients call me to ask to come down for me to help them grow. That will be the ultimate compliment.
I would like to thank my instructors: Mark Burrows, Matt Paine, Mark Thomas and Dan Hobbs, without them I would not be able to run this academy.
Last but not least I would like to give a massive THANK YOU to my wife Lisa for all her support and ultimately for giving up and deciding to join me in the running of the academy. She really is the back bone of the academy without her most of the paperwork would either be wrong or not done. I am good on the mat she is great with the books. Thanks Lisa for everything.
Lee and Lisa Kent
Chi Wai Black Belt Academy Ltd
