George Fourie speaks with Damien Martin about Risk Management planning in martial arts, training in Japan and instructing children with special needs.
.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:
How risk management applies to martial arts marketing.
The risk factors in martial arts schools that some school owners overlook.
The necessary steps in identifying, assessing and controlling threats in your school.
How Damien changes a prospect’s perception about his school.
Working with students with special needs and autism.
And more
*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.
Download the PDF transcription
TRANSCRIPTION
Well, I learnt very early on that you don't have one advertising method that tries to bring you 20 students a month. You have 20 that try and bring you one. That way if one fails or one changes, you've still got the other 19 acting as a redundancy. Again, it comes back to risk management.
GEORGE: This podcast is the audio version of a video interview that was done on martialartsmedia.com. For the full interview with video and to download the transcript, please go to martialartsmedia.com/54. That's the number five, four.
Good day. George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com, and welcome to the Martial Arts Media business podcast. I have an awesome guest with me today. Damien Martin, all the way from Brisbane. How are you doing, Damien?
DAMIEN: Gold Coast, actually. But…
GEORGE: All right. Well, got that. It's close.
DAMIEN: Yeah, yeah. It's close enough.
GEORGE: It's close enough. All right. Well, that's a good way to start the podcast interview. So let's adjust from here on. Awesome. So we've got Damien on today and Damien is a wealth of knowledge in the industry. We're going to touch on perhaps some sensitive topics in regards to risk management and a few things.
And I met Damien quite a while back, officially face-to-face, at The Main Event in Sydney. That was last year. And we'd just finished building his website as well, which looks pretty cool, southerncrossmartialarts.com. So you can check that out.
So we're going to get started. So welcome to the call, Damien.
DAMIEN: Thank you and thanks for having me.
GEORGE: Cool. So to start right at the beginning, who is Damien Martin?
DAMIEN: Well, that depends on who you ask. But I've been training since 1982 when I started judo as a 12-year-old. Have been continuously training ever since. Been running teaching since 1987 and currently running the Southern Cross Martial Arts Association on the Gold Coast with my wife, Hannah. So we're a full-time center in Helensvale.
Primary focus these days is Okinawan Goju-Ryu and Okinawan Kobudo. So weaponry. As well as just the practical self-defense applications and things that spring from that and the other training that I've done over the years.
GEORGE: And when did you get started with Southern Cross Martial Arts?
DAMIEN: We started that in 2008. In 2008 I left the organization I'd been with since 1984, which was Zen Do Kai. We left there after some disagreements on future direction and not wishing to take advice on how to run a full-time school from people that don't run a full-time school.
At that point we were also running an RTO, delivering training to a bunch of government departments on risk management, self-defense and those sorts of things.
GEORGE: Alright, cool. So risk management, that's a topic that we've discussed in brief. What do you see, how do you see risk management and what do you see the effects of, I guess, the dangers of running a martial arts school?
DAMIEN: Well, just to back up where I'm coming from, I'm an OH&S consultant and have an advanced diploma in security and risk management. I worked in that particular space for well over 20 years. So most people tend to look at risk management from a physical point of view and think of risk as, you know, someone falls over and you get sued or one student beats another …
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