Well first off my apologies for being absent for the last month.

To say I’ve been busy would be an understatement… I’m sure you have too given the time of year.

Anyway there are a few things I want to share with you today.

First off one of the reasons I’ve been working crazy hours recently is because of the ground up rebuild of my Dojo Organizer (www.dojoorganizer.com), which if you’re not familiar with it, it’s an online software management system to help you run your dojo.

Basically it saves you time and money, improves communications between you and your students, and makes your dojo more profitable. It a nutshell it handles your administrative chores and makes things stupid easy for you. A bunch of loyal subscribers and customers have been anxious to know when it’ll be ready and I can tell you that we’re mighty close.

We’re right now in the beta testing phase with the new release coming January 2, 2011.In a couple of weeks I’ll send you a link to show you the video overview so you can check it out. More on that shortly…

Secondly, this past week I had a light bulb moment. Well actually I had the moment a loooong time ago, but never took action. Finally this past week I did. I decided to ask my students and families for their feedback with a customer satisfaction survey.

You know the type of thing I mean right? A short 2 page Q & A that’s easy to fill out asking them to rate specific things about their experience with our dojo. Things like instruction, instructor/staff friendliness, overall satisfaction, etc. Basically I asked my students and families for their opinion.

Now I know some instructors are against doing such a thing. Possibly it’s through fear of what you might discover people really think, or perhaps you believe you’ve got it perfect already? (Well if the latter is the case, why do you have a high attrition rate and only ever have a maximum of 13 students? Perhaps a survey might be the thing to help uncover what might be improved?)

Some instructors might think that it’s a sign of weakness to ask a student to provide feedback, since they are the instructor and the student is just a student! When in fact it really is a display of courage to face up to what might be discovered. Remember growth (both personal and business) only happens when you improve things. A customer satisfaction survey is a great tool to find those things requiring attention.

Plus you’ll bond more with your students and families simply because you’ve taken the time to ask them for their opinion. It’s a sign you CARE about them. Who knows you might even get a testimonial or two you can use in marketing your school.

Here’s a link to my customer satisfaction survey you can use. It’s a MS word file (.doc). Just right click on the link below and save.

Download the customer satisfaction survey here

Until next time…

Stay safe, train hard.

Jason