Eight Places to Look Before January
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Key Takeaways
- Eight Areas, One Sitting Facility, your own focus, staff execution, members who are drifting, what members understand, people who left, recruiting and retention. Four honest questions each.
- Find the Bottleneck First The audit is deliberately shallow. The job is working out which area is actually costing you, not fixing any of them on the page.
- Answer It Honestly A yes you had to argue yourself into is a no. Mark it and keep moving rather than stopping to fix things.
- Then Cut It to Three Eight sections generate more than anyone can act on, and a long list is how audits die. The second page is the part that makes the difference.
About this Resource
Dave Kovar has spent his career inside martial arts schools, and today runs eight academies in Sacramento alongside the coaching business he started in 1994. Every year he runs the same eight-part audit of his own business before the new year starts, on the theory that January is when you want to be dialled in, and October is when you still have time to do something about it.
In September 2026 he walked us through all eight areas. This checklist is that audit, compressed to something an owner can fill in once, at a desk, in twenty minutes.
It is deliberately shallow. Four questions per area is not enough to fix anything, and that is the point: the job is finding which of the eight is actually your problem. The second page is the part most audits skip, which is taking a page of honest no answers and cutting it down to the two or three things that will genuinely be finished before January.
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