Open a School or Not?

[Zanshin]

I do take your point whitematt, and I am not saying that the efforts you put in should not be rewarded, of course they should.

I never said that running a part time club wasn't time consuming, but there is a huge jump from running a club on a part time level and becoming a full time professional instructor.

As bearich suggests, the dynamics change hugely as soon as you need your students more than they need you!

Also I take your point about professionals such as landscape gardeners and the like, but perhaps they offer a service that has a broader customer base than that of a martial arts instructor and so therefore work is more abundant.

If anyone feels that they can make a living out of it then I envy them and they should go for it. Whenever I have spent time thinking about whether I could do it as a job I tend to arrive back at the same conclusion: -

Karate is something I love with a passion, I would hate it to become something that I had to do because I needed to pay the mortgage and therefore grew to resent it.

[whitematt]

[Karate is something I love with a passion, I would hate it to become something that I had to do because I needed to pay the mortgage and therefore grew to resent it.]

I can absolutely agree with that statement.

[DWx]

Full time teaching can work for some people. My instructor quit his job to move into to teaching permanently, he used to teach part time before that. Now he does it 7 days a week with about 20 hours class time per week. He doesn't have any other major hobbies (that I know of) and is heavily involved in the work of the national organisation. IMO the prices and very reasonable and I have never felt like I was being treated as just a customer. As for quality of teaching I feel that its excellent. Using tournaments as an example, we have 4 internationals in the club which he has trained from white belt, 2 of whom have won medals at World Championships and our club has been top of the national medals table for several years. Of course this is bound to sound very biased as its my own club I'm talking about but I just wanted to say that full time teaching can work out for some people.

Our club's lucky in the fact that we had a large number of students anyway before the instructor decided to go full time and we are well established in the local primary and high schools as a local "sporting team" to join. We can afford to lose students if they aren't willing to train hard and students are not allowed to grade or fail their gradings if they are not at the right standard.

If you were going to go into teaching full time I would definately make sure you have a full buisness plan as bushidoman suggested in his original post. Make sure you cover all angles and be prepared for a few months hardship before money starts to roll back in.

[bushido_man96]

I use artist as an example, because I am one. I went to school for it and have spent the last 14 years in the field. It's something I love, and make an extremely good living at it.

So I do take issue when people imply that if it's something you love, you shouldn't try to earn a living from it.

I understand what you are saying here, and this is a good thing. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that not every aspiring artist gets to end up doing it for a living. Some do make it, and some don't. The Martial Arts can be the same, too.

[NinTai]

I use artist as an example, because I am one. I went to school for it and have spent the last 14 years in the field. It's something I love, and make an extremely good living at it.

So I do take issue when people imply that if it's something you love, you shouldn't try to earn a living from it.

So doctors are a bad example - so I'll try and come up with some others... photographers, carpenters, landscapers. (For what it's worth, the professionals I know in those fields make more than my doctor.)

Whitematt,

I believe the biggest difference between the occupations that you mentioned and being an MA instructor is that you are expected to meet

you customers expectations in order to get paid, where in MA its the other way around.

As let's say a graphic artist (I'm not sure what kind of artist you are) if your work is not up to the customer standards you don't get paid.

You can not say "I don't care if you don't like it. What you wan't is not up to my standards and I won't lower them"

As an instructor I have personal standards and if you don't meet them then no matter how much you pay me you won't advance.

I guess a better example would be a private music teacher.

You are payng for instruction but if you don't meet the the teachers criteria you won't move on to other material.

And unless you are highly sought after you usualy don't make much unless you become a "McStudio".

Fortunatly for people like doctors, carpenters and gardeners, they provide a service that people need and don't have the time or ability to do themselves.

MA for the most part is still seen as a "hobby" something to do with my free time.

If I'm not having a good time , or if my other life gets in the way then I'll just move on to something else.

I think that people say that you shouldn't try to make a living doing something you love because in the pressure to make ends meet you could end up loseing what it is you loved about it. It could become just another job.