MA Business Success 47: How to Create an Engaging, Compelling & Concise Rotating Curriculum

Watch the video below Listen to the podcast below Phil: We're coming at you with another podcast with great tips, tools, and strategies on how you can transform not just your business but your life also. Because, you know what? Isn't that why we're in business, Graham? Graham: Oh yeah. Phil: So we can get the results that we want. I nearly cut you off there. And getting the results that we want in business so we can have the life that we want. That's what we're here to help you with. Graham: Today's topic comes from one of our viewers, one of our listeners, Jack O'Valley, who actually we do some personal coaching with. He was wondering all about curriculum, creating curriculum and class plans, and how to do that. I know that we've had the pleasure of sharing with Jack a little bit on how we operate, but geez, what a monster of a task if you are looking to get what's in your head, get it out, and have your team be able to follow. The real reason behind it is to be able to start your business, to be able to get yourself out of the engine room, onto the ship, and it's not just being reliant on yourself. So Phil, where do we start? Phil: I'll tell you what. I wish when we first created lesson plans and curriculum, we had the facility or the capability of doing what people do now. I know that we, at the moment, have various styles that we do but we also have different businesses where we go and actually teach different corporates or the Defense Force, for example, things that we've created. We don't actually have lesson plans for them already to go, because if we just sat down and tried to type all that out, it would take forever and we're not the best typers or spellers in the world. The thing is, what we do now, and this is probably the best way to leverage your time is after a class is voice record, what you've done, maybe in a roundabout way, it doesn't have to be exactly, but if you said, "White and yellow class, Tuesday, 3:15 class, on this particular month, date, and we did XYZ, we did this, we did that, etcetera, etcetera. We did this, this, this. This worked well. That didn't work well..." Stop. If you did that with every class, what then you would do is then send that audio to someone maybe on Fiverr, or again, leverage someone's time who is ready to write that out, transcribe it pretty much, and there you've got your audio into text form and then pretty much all you need to do is then formulate that into an actual lesson plan. That would be the best way if you don't have lesson plans and you're feeling swamped. Because I know a lot of people we deal with are like, "I don't know where to start. I don't have time. By the end of the day, I don't want to write anything or type anything." I know that sort of stuff. If we'll always going to start again, which we are for certain curriculums and lesson plans, I just voice record and then get someone to transcribe that and then I convert that into a lesson plan. Graham: Beautiful. I know that's something we've been doing recently. Again, it's creating a whole curriculum, not just lesson plans but curriculum. That sometimes is a whole monster in itself. I know there's a really great tip that myself and Phil have done is, and you hear us say this often in podcasts, begin with the end in mind. That's something that's not only from a business perspective but now we're going down the rabbit hole into curriculum and creating syllabus and lesson plans. You need to know what your outcome is going to be, what you want them to look like at the whole end [SP] into that level. So, for example, if we use the generic level of black, black shirt, black singlet, black slacks, whatever you want to call that and then work backwards and think, "All right, what about brown? What about green? What about blue? What about orange? What about yellow?" Then we've got white, not the other way around. Because often I can see people who are writing these great lesson plans or getting started and excited are doing things at a beginner level that really probably should wait until the intermediate. Or, what happens is, they end up having a very, very low end heavy and then there's not a lot in the upper ends, which the challenge with that is retention. Students will stick with you six months but then realize there's nothing else for them to learn or enjoy or no excitement further on and you'll lose a student. So, when writing this stuff out, really, really, really important for you to understand where the outcome is in four years' time, three years' time, two years' time, one year, and then obviously deploy the technique Phil talked about, voice record. Even videotape yourself doing the stuff and then again you've got that ability to use that video, transcribe it into audio, then you've also got the written that can go along with that. If you've got any questions in regards to that thing, don't forget to email us [email protected]. Phil have got quite a few resources that we can share with you there. But it's a starting point. Phil: Just a quick shout out to one of our buddies, Matt, who's been working on a curriculum for us and he started at the beginner level, worked his way up, got to about intermediate, and was like "I don't know, I've run out of stuff." So we just said, "Begin with the end in mind. What is the end purpose? Just write that and then go backwards." He's like "Oh, man. Why didn't I start like that?" So, real life experience creating curriculums is definitely begin with the end in mind, work your way back, and you can always pop your light out as you see fit, but what's the end goal? Graham: Phil, we hinted on it a second ago. But why is curriculum, lesson plans, syllabus, so important? What does it do for a school or a business owner? How is it going to benefit them and why is there a need for them to get their act together and start doing that right now? Phil: Consistency. It comes down to consistency. We all want the desired skill level met and requirement taught. But if you want to scale your business, scale your school, if you want to go from teaching all the classes to no classes or the classes that you choose, you want to make sure that the people below you, who are taking those classes, are following your system, your procedure, your way of teaching. So that's why we want to have a lesson plan and a curriculum. It's pretty much everything you know in a format that someone else can replicate. Now, again, Graham touched on it before. You can only replicate it so much in text forms like a written lesson plan or a written curriculum. We've gone at next level when we curated all our curriculum, all our lesson plans both for our students to watch and see, and even on the back end for our managers and instructors to see, an online training portal, where members get access, they see the skills done, they can have 3D graphics and hover around their fist to make sure they get their posture right. Instructors can go back and look at all our back-end procedure systems and making sure that they're teaching it correctly as well. As business owners, especially multiple business owners, we can make sure that if there's one portal, one Bible of skills being delivered to multiple schools, it's the same thing, not black Chinese whisperers, where I teach it to Graham, Graham teaches it to you, you teach it to someone else, and then the next thing you know, and I've had this happen, you're going down, watch you're grading, or suddenly something going, "What the hell is being taught? How come they're doing that? I've never seen that." Because that evolved their process. I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's not the system of the school. It's not the system that we require to get the results that we want. So, consistency is key. Graham: Oh yeah, for sure. Something else just to add in there. I know that we always re-say the same thing. If you want to scale and grow your business or get out of the engine room onto the deck of the ship and steer it, you need to have clear lesson plans and a good solid curriculum to help. One, with retention and two, to make sure you're able to then teach people how to do what you do. Because without that, it's in your head and God forbid, something happens to you, you're sick, you're unwell, somebody steps in, has a different personality, different way of doing things and suddenly your business is majorly affected. This is a must have. Do not neglect this if you're a smaller school. Even with 20, 30, 40, or you're part time, I don't care, you need to build for the future and this is probably one of the most important places to start, guys. So let's just fast forward a little bit. There's someone that we're talking to now has already got a curriculum in place, Phil. Maybe they've inherited through the style that they've been doing. When do you change it? When do you review it? What do we go around that? Phil: We're consistently reviewing our lesson plans, our curriculum every month. Whenever there's a change in curriculum, we'll first go, "What works? What didn't? How was it taught? Is it easily taught? Did you have any troubles?" So that way, if there needs to be any tweaks, now there's not going to be complete remodelling for our stuff because we know we got our stuffs down packed. But if there needs to be any tweaks to the techniqu, or how it's taught or how it's delivered on lesson plan, we can do that quickly right then and there. So that next time when we come around to it, next year, it should be good to go. But we're always consistently rehashing over what we've done and making sure that it's a level that the instructors and the students are getting it. But for those guys who maybe inherited a curriculum or lesson plans, maybe a linear style, which is completely out of date, depending on your system and how you run things, but I would say that most people would...most businesses need a rotating curriculum. I'm just a little boss because I know, when you're using our thing, it gets the results that you want. But at the end of the day there will come a point where you go...I always say this. If you can't explain how your belt system works and how the tips work to a complete stranger who doesn't know martial arts, if they can't get it, without you having to really, really explain it, then the odds are it's too complicated. I want someone who comes in off the street to just get it, to know that there's this many belts, we do this many tips, and it takes this to get that. That should be as easy as that. Now I'm sure there's more things behind it, but someone will walk in and just get our system. It's got to be simple to follow. It's got to be simple to follow for us, the instructors, and simple to follow for student off the street. Graham: Couldn't agree more. Phil, I'm just going to do a shout out to some of the guys who are probably listening that come from a very traditional background. What we're talking about with reviewing your program and modernizing it to a point is not to forget about your roots and your heritage. Just sometimes, the delivery method, the way that things are presented, the way that people are engaging. Because whether you like it or not the world is changing and the young people of today will be the older students and the older parents of tomorrow. You better embrace modern ways of thinking, not forgetting your heritage and the traditional aspects, but you do need to stay current. I know this is something we say probably on a ton of our podcasts, innovate or die. If you don't stay ahead, unfortunately, you might find yourself with the information you're delivering, which is well and truly outdated. It doesn't mean that the skills being taught are outdated, it just means the delivery method. That all comes down to your class plans and being able to have your instructors understand about that dynamic presentation. It's a completely different podcast. I know we spoke about that, but this is about you guys understanding you got to be able to scale your business. I guess, one final thing, what else is there to consider when creating or reviewing our curriculum, class plans, syllabus, that sort of stuff? Phil: Just before we go there, I'm just going to reiterate, because I've been helping a traditional school redo their curriculum. Initially their fear was, "Oh no, I'm bastardizing all my traditions and the roots that I've come from." Actual fact, it's not. It's actually putting it in a much simpler format to follow and deliver. We still used all the skills that they had, but I was able to lay this out in a easy way, easy to follow. Insert some simple things that are more apparent in this day and age while also keeping the traditions. It's like keeping the traditions as almost a treasure in a box and teaching it that way is like, "This is an ancient technique, dates back so many years. We have all these other things we do but we're keeping this secret in the curriculum." It's really changed the way that he viewed how he was teaching his curriculum. It wasn't that we got rid of anything, it's just basically repackaged it in a way that he got excited about his curriculum again. Also, the students were getting it a lot more and he was finding more students joining because, again, it came back to that simplicity of being able to follow it. Graham: Geez. I don't that we've opened Pandora's Box with this one. We tend to do that, the hard talking, deep topics. But if something myself or Phil has resonated with you or your school that's struggling to create a curriculum, we've got a ton of tools to assist and help you get that head start. Because really, that's what we're about. We've tried, tested, we've gone through the pain. We're continually revisiting, redoing, and creating new curriculum, syllabus, class plans. We are definitely at the forefront of innovation in this space. If we can help you guys out, really kind of leap frog you ahead, supercharge your processes, and the time it takes invested into it, please hook us up guys. We'd love to help you out. Don't forget, we have some special offers going on for the podcast listener, $99. What do they get for 99 bucks, mate? Phil: Access to our Silver Level, which is really a school level kickoff. We use that Silver Level really for either the people who are around 50 to 200 members, who are wanting to break through to that next level, startup schools, but also the schools who have been in the game for a while but hit that glass ceiling. Silver Level's really where to go back and make sure your business plan's down, your marketing's cool, your branding's down, your location's correct. It's really good to go back and check with all those things. Then we open access to Gold Level, which is really the engine room of a business, where it has a lot of the systems, procedures, checklists, etcetera, all the things that we're talking about. It's pretty much plug and play. If you're at the level and you want that information, let us know, again, [email protected], and we'd love to have a chat with you. If you have any questions, we have a segment called Ask the Boys. If anything comes up, let us know, but we'll be happy to give you anything and everything we know to help better you and your business. Guys, I'd like to finish with our quote which is, "Believe, begin, become." What does that mean, Graham? Graham: Believe in yourself, believe in the processes, begin that journey, and become the person, and have the business that you are born to be. Phil: All right, guys. That's us signing out. We'll see you on the flip side. Ciao. Announcer: TIMA, innovating the martial arts industry.