Nowakowski's ATA Family Martial Arts

After 6 years of running a martial arts school, Mrs. Now and I have learned a ton of stuff about ourselves! Particularly, what our strengths are. As any of our students know, we absolutely love teaching martial arts. Countless new students have talked to me about my obvious passion for teaching the martial arts. I've actually have one student say that I'd make a good radio DJ because I've got the voice/wit/whatever. I believe that we are some of the best martial arts instructors in the city. Over the years I've taken a few martial arts class at other schools in the area and I can honestly say that none of them can hang with our stuff. There are a few reasons for this...

1. Our Example - Our instructors, the Niblocks, are the best in the country. I've had the opportunity to train or take class with dozens of instructors around the U.S. They are the example of how to be a martial arts instructor. Period.
2. Our Training - The ATA provides the best instructor training in the world and maintains strict standards that all ATA certified instructors must live up to. Not every high ranking student can teach! Teaching is a different skill set that must be learned.
3. Our Talent - All things can be learned.... it's just that some people pick stuff up faster than others :) For whatever reason, God has given my wife and I buckets o' talent for teaching.

There is some stuff we're not so good at yet. Frankly our customer service lately has not been up to par. Mrs. Now and I are well aware of the issue and are working on improving! Here's whats wrong and what we're doing about it:

1. Follow-up - Calling students back, following up with email, etc are very important to building a good instructor/student relationship. Historically, this has not been our strong suit. We've implemented a student relationship management system using some computer software and a little process. Every time a students makes contact with us via phone/email/in-person, it gets entered into the system so we can track it and make sure that we don't loose a single message. Each student is important to us!
2. Gear - We're not as consistent as we should be running the retail side of the school. We don't have enough gear on hand and orders take too long to come in! Gear ordering is a balance between ordering often enough to get stuff in in a timely manner and waiting until we have a large number of order to save on shipping. To improve the retail side of things, we've tied our order entry system to our accounting system so we don't have to manually compile orders. This will save time and should make orders go more smoothly.
3. Student Communication - Getting the new calendar out on time, announcing events, sending out email regarding any class cancellations are all part of this. We have new deadlines in place regarding when communication needs to be sent out.

We are dedicated to making ours the best martial arts school in Central Texas!