The Front Door Check
Not whether your website loads. Whether a message actually reaches a person, and whether the buttons a parent taps on a phone still work.
You do not need me for this part. Pick up your phone, not your laptop, because a parent looking for a school at nine at night is on a phone. Work down the belts. They get harder as you go, and there is one more at the end that did not exist a year ago.
Google › type your school name › look at the panel on the right
Does it say open, and is there a Directions button and a list of hours? One school I checked was showing a red "Temporarily closed" banner to every parent in its city. It was open, five days a week.
Your site › tap the number › does the dialler open with the right digits
Tap it, do not read it. The printed number is usually right. The link behind it often is not. Nine of the thirty schools I checked had a call link written so that some phones will not dial it, and one was still carrying the demo number its website template shipped with.
Your site › footer › tap each icon in turn
Each one should land on your page, not a login wall, not an error, not somebody else. Three of the thirty had an icon that went nowhere. One pointed at an address that was never a web address at all, so it simply failed.
Google Maps › your school name › count how many results are you
There should be one. Two schools I checked had two listings each, and their reviews were split between them. One had a single review on one pin and seventeen on the other. Google could not tell which was real, so it showed neither in the panel.
Ask a friend your staff do not know › your own contact form › Saturday night › start the clock
This is the one that decides the others. Ask them to use a real question a parent would ask, and then wait. Most of the schools I tested had no human reply after seventy two hours. One answered in under a minute with class times, what to bring, and a question back. That school will win the enrolment every time.
One more, and it is new
Last year six people in a hundred asked an AI assistant to recommend a local business. This year it is forty five. That is BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a thousand US consumers, and it is the fastest change in how people find anything local that I have seen in five years of this work.
ChatGPT › "best martial arts school for kids in [your town]" › then ask Gemini the same thing
Two things to look for. Are you named at all? And if you are, is what it says about you right, the address, the ages you teach, the price? An assistant that has you at the wrong address is worse than one that has never heard of you.
Nobody can edit these answers directly, which is why the question sounds hopeless and is not. They are assembled from your listing, your reviews, and whether the directories agree with each other. All three of those are ordinary work, and they are the same three things the belts above are testing.
Two weeks, thirty independent schools across the United States and Australia, every door opened by hand. These are the ones that were costing somebody an enquiry.
None of this is about how a school teaches. Every one of these was a small thing nobody had happened to check, on a site that was built once and then left to run. That is the ordinary way it goes.
I build the path a parent walks from finding you to paying you, and every piece along it. Most of my work is the part nobody sees, which is why I notice when it is missing.
Before they contact you
When they contact you
After they contact you
So you can see it
The largest thing I have built is a complete platform for a coaching business, running live: twenty six thousand lines of code, twenty six pages, thirty four endpoints, eighty three email templates, e signature, card subscriptions, and eight scheduled jobs that run every day without anyone opening a laptop. Five years of this, fifty eight client systems. A martial arts school needs a small corner of it, which is the corner I am offering.
Martial arts schools are what I have been looking at all month, so I already know where these break and I am not learning on your money.
The booking, payments and follow up side is quoted separately, once I have seen what you already run on. No calls unless you want one. No contract, no retainer, nothing to install. I work from Manila, which is why I answer overnight your time and why the price is what it is.