MAT Case Study – with Gordon Burcham
Introducing Gordon Burcham, owner and chief instructor at G Force Martial Arts, Rugby, Warwickshire.
Gordon has been involved with Martial Arts for 25 years and has been teaching at his G Force Martial Arts school for 21 years. This is a full time career for Gordon, operating out of his own large scale premises.
Running a full time Dojo comes with its challenges, particularly as the size of the club grows. Being a very focused person with a clear head for business Gordon quickly identified several key areas in the day to day operation of the club that were tiresome to deal with, but needed attention nonetheless. The main areas causing pain were collection of subscriptions, insurance, visibility of the size of the club (in terms of total members), tracking attendance, gaining new members, keeping existing members, selling events and merchandise, communication and last but not least organising gradings.
“Quality teaching is key to a successful dojo, but if you want to grow and have a successful club these things need to be dealt with.” – Gordon
Having identified these issues as a problem it was clear that there were no ready-made solutions that were a good fit for the martial arts industry.
“Billing companies were the only real offering out there; I don’t like the idea of giving up control of my business to another outfit who don’t really care about me or my students.” – Gordon.
As luck would have it, from talking with one of his students about this, it turned out G Force were training a guy with an extensive background in building these kinds of software systems for large companies. The seed for a joint project was sown and work began to sketch out what the perfect martial arts system should look like.
MAT, or Martial Arts Technology was born and we worked together to eliminate the pain points one by one.
After implementing MAT into the daily running of the business Gordon has seen some fantastic improvements across the board:
- Subscription income has improved by over 15%.
- Cost savings from lower banking and other charges have seen more than a 15% reduction in costs.
- Sales of goods improved by at least 11%.
- The number of members attending the club increased by up to 15%.
- A huge amount of time has been saved every week by reducing the amount of time
needed to manage the day to day running of the club. - Gordon’s long standing members agree that communication has improved and in particular
ordering merchandise such as uniform is much slicker these days.
“This system is simple to use, my members’ orders for clothing and equipment
run smoothly now and I can see who is attending class. The automated areas
of the system are great, we can still give people the personal touch even
though we are a big club and things don’t get missed. Lastly I’d also say being
able to track enquiries through the trial period and into full members has been
so effective. I would recommend this system to any martial arts club looking to
make running their club easier.” – Gordon