Joey Imperatori re-enrolled 10 families in 10 minutes — and rebuilt a studio that COVID nearly erased
After COVID cut his student count from 500+ to under 100, Joey Imperatori used MyStudio to rebuild his database, re-enrolling 10 lapsed families in 10 minutes from a single text and turning two snow day camps into 50+ new families each, 80% of them brand new to the studio.
The challenge
Imperatori Martial Arts is a karate school in Sandy Springs, Georgia with roots going back to 1967 — the year before its current owner, Joey Imperatori, was born. Joey grew up training there, became an assistant instructor as a teenager, and eventually purchased the school as a young adult.
At his peak, Joey ran a thriving school with over 500 active students and a word-of-mouth engine that largely ran itself. "When you have that many happy families, they're constantly bringing in new people. You don't really have to work very much on marketing — it helps itself."
COVID stopped everything. Group classes shut down for nearly a year, and by the time Joey reopened, his active student count had fallen from 500+ to under 100. At the same time, his studio management software — a file-based system — corrupted, and the backup had overwritten the corrupted file before anyone caught it. He lost his front-end system entirely.
He went back to paper: a paper calendar for scheduling, paper enrollment contracts, and old-school attendance cards. "It was tedious. It was a lot of work."
The deeper problem wasn't just the admin — it was the loss of the compounding effect that comes from a large, connected student base. Without that critical mass of families, the referral engine that had powered his growth for decades stopped working. He was, in many ways, starting over from scratch.
What they did
A friend with six schools in North Georgia called Joey and told him there was someone he needed to meet. That was Tu Le, co-founder of MyStudio. What caught Joey's attention wasn't a feature demo — it was a number.
Tu shared that before MyStudio, he ran three schools each grossing around $500K. After building and using the platform, he grew to six schools each grossing over $1 million. "When I heard that, I thought: okay, there's a lot to it to have that sort of growth. Double the number of schools, double your gross income in each one. That's pretty remarkable."
Joey started a trial. The first thing that hooked him was the automated follow-up. He submitted a fake inquiry about his own studio and watched the automated responses come back.
The results
The results aren't about one feature. They're about what happens when communication becomes effortless and every family who touches the studio lands in a usable database.
Snow days became lead generation events. When local schools cancelled for snow, Joey had a text and matching email out to his entire database within 15 minutes, offering a snow day camp. Result: 50+ kids each day, 80% of them brand new to the studio, all captured automatically in MyStudio for future outreach.
One text re-enrolled 10 families in 10 minutes. Setting up his after-school program, Joey updated a list of lapsed members, made it live, and sent one text with a matching email. Ten families enrolled within 10 minutes.
"Within 10 minutes I had 10 different families enroll for next year. It was just that easy."
— Joey Imperatori, Imperatori Martial Arts
Camp attendance keeps climbing. Post-COVID camp attendance dropped to 13 campers in 2023. Since MyStudio: 13 → 18 → approaching 20, which Joey credits to his growing database and easy targeted communication.
Asked which feature made the biggest difference, he didn't hesitate: "It would be the text message and email to either everyone in the database or being able to piece it out and send it to specific units... if I had to pick one thing, it's just the ease of communication to very specific groups, or to everyone that's ever touched my studio."
He expects that database to keep compounding: "Let's say I have 200 families that have purchased something from me in the past since I've started using it... that number is only going to grow. When we do this again a year from now, that 200 people will probably be closer to 400."
Asked what he'd tell another studio owner considering MyStudio, he pointed straight to support: "Every time I've been able to get someone either on the phone or somebody through a chat to help me work through that issue immediately. So, the customer service is as good as the physical product or better."
"I just hope that you're not too close to me — I don't want one of my competitors here in Sandy Springs, Georgia using the same software and getting the same advantage."
— Joey Imperatori, Imperatori Martial Arts — Sandy Springs, GA