Winning the Fight: Using Target Mapping to Leverage Fixed Costs and Meet Customer Needs

Winning the Fight: Using Target Mapping to Leverage Fixed Costs and Meet Customer Needs

Executive Summary

The owner of a martial arts club located in Bellingham, Washington, felt the club wasn’t utilizing its full capacity or running the place effectively to start offering classes of Muay Thai, wrestling, Brazilian Ju-Jitsu boxing, and other forms of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Co-author, Tristan Saario and the owner decided to start identifying features that could be included in their club to strengthen the club goal, also known as Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), “to grow to the point of opening a full-sized ‘super gym’ while furthering the sport and remaining a positive presence in community.” Target mapping was a technique introduced by Saario to improve the goal congruence of the club. The first action of the target mapping is to develop an obstacle list that prevented the club from achieving its goal. Next, determining what actions needed to be achieved in order to clear the obstacles and finally adding a metric system to monitor the progress to its goal.

The owner and Saario determined the obstacle list: people’s doubtfulness of trying something new, lack of diversity of the classes offering, public stigma against fighting hampers the diverse growth of the student base, and quality classes will become hard to oversee as the club becomes bigger. Top management began the process by stating issues they thought prevented the club from reaching its BHAG because lower level managers are probably reluctant to address any negative feedback from the beginning. They then found intermediate objective conditions that must be present for the obstacle to disappear. Usually the objective is done by the person that gives the obstacle.

The team listed the specific actions required to achieve these objectives. Some of the lists included creating a survey, offering smaller class package deals, inviting friends from current members, advertisement, getting current...