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Kovar Systems
Student Retention Staff Development Instructor Tips

Understand Your Students: Build Your Retention

By Kovar Systems

It can be difficult to remember important details about each one of your students. The more you know your students the more likely it is that you'll be able to keep students dedicated to training longer. To build a better understanding of your students, we recommend remembering the POGO theory.

POGO stands for "People, Organizations, Goals and Obstacles." You can use this theory in your martial arts school to better understand your students and why they enroll, continue training or stop training.

Remember these key elements of the POGO theory:

  1. The better you know your students, the longer they'll train with you.  If you take a genuine interest in them, they will be more invested in a relationship with you and will be more likely to continue training.

  2. Begin as soon as you can, ideally at the enrollment interview, and take notes.  Find out about what a person likes, does for work, their hobbies, training goals, and even possible situations in their life that might interfere with training.  The more you know now, the better you can follow up in the future.

  3. An additional benefit to knowing a lot about your students is that you will know if they have valuable skills that you may be able to draw upon for your business: a carpenter can help you remodel a bathroom, a teacher can proofread a flyer, and so on.  Also if a student belongs to other teams or organizations, you can offer to give a self-defense clinic or other presentation, and perhaps find some new students in the process.

So remember POGO to keep students training for as long as possible.

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by Kovar Systems