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62 – Robin DePalma-Rowe from MA1st – Opening & Operating Multiple Martial Arts Schools

March 29, 2018 by George Fourie

Robin DePalma-Rowe from MA1st shares key preparation strategies when preparing to open multiple martial arts schools.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

How Robin learned the ropes of running multiple schools
The advantages and challenges of running a family martial arts business
Robin’s tips for martial arts school owners who are planning to open multiple schools
How to develop a strong team of workforce to achieve your school’s growth goals
How to prevent the common risks of entrusting your business to others
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

We have it set up with the high performance stay skill. We set this up as a career job. Where they’re going to make more working for us then if they went out on their own, because we do all the business side for them. They get to do all the fun side of just teaching, but we pay them well for it. And they see that. They see it, they appreciate it, they see the value and why would they go?

GEORGE: Hi, this is George Fourie and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast. Today I'm speaking with Robin DePalma Rowe. And Robin is the wife of Kyoshi Fred DePalma, who's from DePalma's Karate and MA1st, also hosting The Main Event in San Diego in April next month. So we’re going to have a bit of a chat and we had a bit of a laugh before starting this conversation. How would you refer your position in the organization Robin?

ROBIN: I call myself the vice president of the organization. And my husband is the president and then, we all know that the vice president is the one who does all the work, so we laugh, we say he married well.

GEORGE: Married well, all right. All right, and Fred's of course in Thailand right now, so he has no way to defend himself in this conversation. So this will be fun! All right, look Robin, I guess we should start right at the beginning – who is Robin DePalma Rowe?

ROBIN: So, I started in this company or in this business 21 years ago, that was actually when I met Fred. A month before we got married, I thought, you know, I don't know anything about martial arts. I should probably start training and at least have an idea of what martial arts is all about. And when we got married, he didn't want me to have anything to do with his school, he wanted to be able to come home and when he came home, he could leave work behind, dinner would be on the table, house is spotless – you know, that perfect fairytale wife and the joke was, within the first two months, he married the wrong person.

So I think it took about two months to start working at the school, but I started as janitor and gopher. And so I was cleaning the school and running errands, go for this, go for that. And then I think what made us both realize what my potential was, was when I started the cardio kickbox program. So we’d been married… it was within the first year of being together and I’d been training martial arts, I think I was a purple belt at the time and Tae Bo had just come out. And I was always into fitness, I wanted to be a personal trainer, I was on the fitness side and I said, you know what? I think I could do that cardio kickbox thing. Would you let me try it? And he was like, OK, give it a shot. He knew I had the fitness background for it and could run with it. And boy did I run with it!

So within… I don't know how long it took, but not too long, I had 700 cardio kickbox members training under me. And I was teaching 2-3 classes a day, run in different locations, teaching them all over the place. And I think that's where we both saw that this is kind of fun working together and what I'm capable of doing and then all of a sudden, he went from one school to six schools, and we have a lot of young guys running the schools, so we needed a strong program directors. So I got to then go be program director at six different locations. It was at two different locations every night, doing intros there. Doing enrollments over the phone, doing follow-ups with people in all the locations, from wherever I was from. And so I don't know how many people can say that they've been the program director of six schools all at once, but that was fun.

That was kind of my working up and then I moved up to assistant instructor at our biggest location, while still doing program directing at one location, as we started to get the other schools established. And then a few years, I don't know, I believe I was a black belt when I started to run my own school. And so we had a location where a manager needed to move on to other things, so I got to go fill in the head instructor manager position and at that location. That was our most profitable location ever, besides what my husband had done.

And so I ran that school for about 5-6 years and then built it up and at that point, sold it to my head instructor and then that's where we decided multiple locations, we’re going to start franchising. And I moved to a corporate office then to help them run and oversee everything.

So it's kind of, I had to work my way up, I worked every job on the way up. Learned how to do everything, did everything alone, then moved up to running my own school and then worked up to the corporate position. It was kind of the same thing you'd do in any career: start at the bottom and then work up to the corporate position and then that's where I got to help oversee everybody. It’s been fun, in addition to us doing it together, we have our boys who work it with us. Our oldest son manages one of our schools now and so it's fun to watch him excel and watch what he's developed into and what he continues to develop into.

So overseeing all the schools right now, oversee the marketing, the staff training, putting the events together, activities. I watch their numbers, deposits, the pro shop orders – everything. And I think the biggest thing I've learned in the past couple of years is watching the different dynamics at each location and how different personalities work together. My biggest thing now has been how to put proper teams together to get the best results. Quick summary there!

GEORGE: Quick summary. Ok, so that sparks a lot of questions. Just to start: how do you handle the family dynamics, as you mentioned it wasn't a planned thing to keep it in the family like it did, but that's what it's really grown into. Obviously, it works by the results that you're getting. So how do you manage the whole family dynamics within the business?

ROBIN: It was kind of trial and error as we came up through it. I don't like to stay at home, so I don't think it would have worked for me to be a stay at home mom anyway. But as the kids were growing up, I started to realize, you work at a karate school at night, well that's when your kids are home from school. So how do you mesh that to where you actually see your children? And number 1, I always had helpers. Part-time nannies, that would come and help when they were little and then when they got to be about the age of 8, we’d let them actually come work in the karate school with us.

So we'd give them little jobs, we'd have them run concession stands at belt exams and tournaments and let them earn money doing that. And taught them how to… we made them purchase their inventory and then taught them about profit and loss, you know? And sometimes they wouldn't sell enough and it would be upside down in their sales and then other times, they'd make a profit and they'd be excited. And then it got to where they’d actually hire staff to run their store for them and they'd pay their staff a few bucks, so they'd still get to make their money and then give the staff a little bit and have people run their store for them.

But we were really fortunate that our boys wanted to be part of this and I think what helped with that was that we never just said, well, you need to just help out, because it's a family business. We always gave them specific jobs and assignments and pay them for it. Let them earn things, work towards things. So that's why it's just been a lot of fun, doing this as a family. You know, it's a family environment anyway and then raising them up with a strong work ethics, they know how to count money, they know how to work the cash register, they know how to talk to people, they know how to talk to adults, they know how to be respectful to adults. I just look at all of the attributes that they have that they're way beyond the other kids their age with doing that. It’s been a real blessing to do that.

GEORGE: Wow, that's awesome. So that's got to be a lot of knowledge, getting passed on in a very systematic way and I like how you gave them control in little increments of handling their own stock and handling their own money. Obviously, the interaction and learning how to deal with people, that's fascinating. So Robin, you mentioned you went from one to six schools; now, I'm assuming there was a lot of progression and obstacles within that one to six. Do you mind elaborating on that a little more?

ROBIN: This is another funny one. So, my husband and I only dated four months before we got married. And lucky we were the right ones for each other, we've been married 21 years now. We dated four months, I met him, he had one school. By our first anniversary, we had six schools and a baby. And I just looked at him and I said, you either loved me or hated me – I don't know which one! He's from Connecticut when he originally opened in Connecticut in 1986, he had four schools in Connecticut and realized, probably five years into it, this is a good profession, this is what he was going to do, but he'd rather live in a better, warmer environment. And so, he traveled the country for a year to figure out where he wanted to live and ended up here in Arizona, where the weather is nice. And decided he was only going to have one school when he moved here.

And so, he opened his first school in Arizona in 1992 and then we got married in 1997, so from 1992 to 1997, he did really good with just that one school. But I think it was just eating at his brain that whole time. And then, I don't know, maybe now that he was married, he thought he had support or he needed a reason to get out of the house again, I don't know which one. But he opened five schools, five more schools in that first year, all at once. And really, I think the real reason behind it is by, now being out here five years, he had staff developed. Like, he had people developed that were ready to do it. And one school can only offer jobs to so many people and so by opening multiple locations, that gives a lot more people the opportunity to do this as a job.

GEORGE: Got it. So what's the biggest step you got to take transitioning from the first school to the second school?

ROBIN: First thing is, it's hard to own two. You really need to own three, if you're going to have multiple schools. Because that's where a lot of people go wrong, they think they're going to duplicate what they do in the second school, but you're only one person. So you can't be at both places. And so you'll end up leaving the one school to go and put all your energy into the other and then the original is going to drop. And then you put the energy into the other, and that one grows. But then you see the original drop, so you run back to save that and then the other one drops and so, really, the best way to do multiple schools is to be able to step out of it altogether and not be a key employee at any of them. And be able to oversee all of them, so that way, you can continually train the staff and oversee them, which helps you better duplicate your results.

GEORGE: Ok. So, the first step would be to really remove yourself from your first school?

ROBIN: Right. To get a strong team there and a good head instructor and a good management team there.

GEORGE: Ok, and what would you advise people, someone trying to do that? I mean, especially if you are the star of the school? So you're the main attraction and everybody wants to train with you, how do you step back and not be the center of attention without disrupting your entire student base?

ROBIN: Right, and that's the tricky part, but this is how you do it. We had to do this several times when we moved the head instructors and then I had to do it myself when I stepped out of my main school, you bring in your assistant instructor, who works alongside you and you start to move them into the more leadership role of the school. So you have them start to run more drills and be in charge of more things, while you're still on the floor with them.

But you're slowly transferring that power over to them. And then your students start to get used to that person being in charge, but you're still on the floor, so they don't even realize anything's going on. And then as that person starts to run things, you start being involved less and less and less, and eventually, you just kind of disappear and the students are now already set on your replacement and hardly even realize that you left.

GEORGE: All right. Now, during that, do you have sort of like a set timeframe that you go by, or you just judge it on the feeling within the class?

ROBIN: It's important, a lot of times you have to have a timeframe you have to have it done by. You can do it within three to six months, you could even do it in three as long as you have… the whole key is having a strong person that's taking your place. If you're going to replace yourself with a brand new instructor, who isn't very good at teaching, it's not going to work very well. You've got to have that team member that you've already built up, who can pretty much run things very similarly, or at least just, it’s going to be their personality, but can run things just as strongly as smoothly as you did, to make that easy transition.

And I think that’s the whole key. We always say, anybody who says they want to open multiple locations, we always tell them not to. It’s a lot of work! But we love it, I mean, it's fun, but my husband and I, we don't like downtime, we don't like to not be busy, we like to work hard. And we love seeing the growth of our team and seeing the results and watching their progression as we go through it. And we just feel, we like that we can affect so many more people through multiple locations.

But you've got to be ready for it. Don't do it without people ready, or it won’t work. You have to have people ready. And you have to be good at training your staff to do that.

GEORGE: Awesome. Ok, Robin, so let's just look at the devil's advocate position. So, you invested all this time into this instructor to take your place: have you ever felt the risk of that person could just say, hey, I've got all this student base – and I hear about this all the time happening with schools, that they've put all this focus on this one instructor and then the instructor just decides, hang on: I'm just going to go run off and open my school next door or, within the same reach and there goes all your student base. Has that ever happened to you, and if not, how do you combat that scenario?

ROBIN: I’m glad you asked that question. Has it ever happened to us: yes. And that's why we know how to do it right now, so it doesn't happen again. It happened to my husband, it was when I first met him. He had gone away to China for a month to train at the Shaolin temple, and while he was gone, he had a businessman whisper in his head instructors’ ear, hey, you can do this on your own. And when he came back from China, his student had moved a quarter mile down the street and solicited all the students. They didn't all go, but a handful of them did. Of course, because the head instructor is who they're used to, they're going to follow their head instructor, that's who they're connected to and who they want to train under.

And so, the way we prevent that from happening – we haven't had that happen since. So it's been 20 years now since that’s happened. So what do we do differently? We pay our guys well. We have it set up with a high performance stay skill, we set this up as a career job, where they're going to make more working for us then if they went out on their own because we do all the business side for them. They get to do the fun side of just teaching, but we pay them well for it. And they see that. They see it, they appreciate it, they see the value and why would they go?

We allow them to purchase their school and own it, anytime they want, they can run it and our top guy right now, we said, why don't you own your school? You can own it now, and you'd make more owning it, but you'd have more responsibility. And he said, why would I want to do that? He said, I'm perfectly happy with my pay, I'm getting paid well and you guys do all the hard stuff, while I get to do the fun. That's the key, is paying them well and making it a career, a career paying job for them, it’s a high paying career job. We actually have, my brother in law is an engineer – our top manager is making close to what an engineer would make.

GEORGE: Fantastic. Let's explore the hard stuff. So, the instructors got the easy part to take over the school and run the school, but you are doing the hard stuff. Now, what do you classify as the hard stuff?

ROBIN: The hard stuff is marketing, putting the marketing plans together. Our main marketing are festivals, getting into all the community and school festivals. We actually work with 80 elementary schools between our organization and my job is to research all of their websites, and see what events they have going on that we can be part of. And getting those booked for everybody. We run the Facebook ads – well, we hire a company to run those for us, but we’re getting those going and any of the marketing, we set up for them.

Their responsibility for the marketing side is following up with the people that we send in. So we send them in, you sign them up. So they're in charge of signing them up. But we give them a real easy six-week, quick start program, to try to make the sign-up process really easy. And I apologize, I just got a low battery warning on my phone. So hopefully, we’ll get this done before the battery dies!

GEORGE: Awesome!

ROBIN: We do all the payroll, all the bills, we’re responsible for all the leases, they aren't responsible financially for anything, they can just up and walk away anytime they wanted and we've got the responsibility of all of that. We put their calendars together, all the staff training. We put together the inventory orders, we put together the list that tells them what to order and how much to order of everything and how often to order it. We do all the numbers and the stats, I know a lot of people don't like doing those, so we do those for you. Those would be the main things I would classify as the hard stuff.

GEORGE: OK. So, to combat the battery life: as a last couple of questions. Firstly, let’s just chat about the Main Event. I’ll be heading over to San Diego in April, depending on when you listen to this or watch this episode. What can people expect at a… I mean, there are always events happening in the martial arts space. I guess some good, some bad, or I’d rather say good and not so good. What would you say is different from the Main Event to other industry events?

ROBIN: I would say there are two main things that are going to be different: our top one is that it is a smaller event, it's not over packed, which allows you to network more with people. So it's a more personal intimate event, where you're going to have time to actually interact with people and get to know people and you develop those connections and those friendships. And you actually have time to talk to the speakers and the speakers will talk back to you.

So you can ask them questions outside of their seminars. And I think that personal interaction, that's been their top takeaway, where they all say they really enjoyed that. With it being smaller too, our teams that we take to get to interact, they develop friendships. So they develop friendships with people all over the country, who do the same thing that they do. And I know they really appreciate that and building those friendships.

And then number two would be our speakers. The big thing we tell our speakers: whatever you're talking about, make sure you give all the information about it. You can't just be trying to sell something. And then we’re very particular on who the speakers are and what their content is, to make sure it's really valuable content and that you'll walk away with things you can actually implement when you go back to your school.

GEORGE: Alright, cool. And what can we be expecting from you, Robin?

ROBIN: I can do anything! I think one of my main topics this year has been leading your team to excellence or leading your students to excellence. And working both of those, so leading your team to excellence and leading your students to excellence. And I'm talking about what it takes to do that and how you have to really pull it out of them. You can't just tell them to do something; you have to get in there, get in their face and pull it out of them and lead them to that excellence. And that's going to create that passion in the martial arts that they need to have to want to give it their all as they are training to their black belt. And the same with our teams and our staff is, teaching them how to be excellent, continuously training them and teaching them how to get the most out of their students as they're teaching those, so it's a domino effect.

Those have been my big topics this year, trying to think of the… I can't think off the top of my head what the business one has been this year. But we always talk about marketing, that's a big one for everybody, how to get a student in the door. I think even more important than that is how to keep the students and that's been a big thing. We just talked about it in our manager meeting Monday. If you're not keeping your students, it does no good to keep them in the door. To get them in the door, you need to keep them and how do you keep them? They've got to want it. They've got to love how they feel when they're in class. They have to leave every class and go, man, that was the best thing ever! You know? That was an awesome class and if you leave with that feeling every day, then you're not going to quit. And so really, the feeling that they get when they're in class, it's that simple. The feeling they have when they're in class is what's going to keep them training and not quitting the training. Keep them training to black belt and beyond black belt.

GEORGE: Fantastic. Awesome – Robin, it's been great speaking with you. Are there any last words? And maybe going back to the beginning of the conversation, any last words about running the show, anything you want to add?

ROBIN: Yeah – I love my life, I love my job. I feel we’re really lucky to be able to live in this positive little bubble, with everything bad going on out there in the world. We are not a part of it, we don't have to be a part of it. We get to offer anybody who wants to, to come into our walls and experience the same positive and – I hate to say happy place, but this is a safe, positive environment, where you feel good about yourself, where you're accepted, where you're loved. And we just get to be a part of that all the time and we get to completely keep ourselves isolated from all the bad that's out there.

And I just feel so blessed that we get to do that and as we go around and meet these other martial artists, I feel we get to meet the best people in the world and become friends with the best people in the world. And having these events just help us to grow that network and helps all of us to join together and have that same type of relationship, the same type of feeling. To protect us from the bad that's out there and we get to just focus on the good.

GEORGE: I like that, fighting the good fight.

ROBIN: Yep!

GEORGE: Making the good difference. Awesome – Robin, thanks a lot for speaking with me today and for anybody that's interested in the Main Event, you can head to the-main-event.com and get some tickets there. And if not, if you're listening to this later, you know where to go find, you can get more information about the future events and things going on with the DePalma's and everyone else. Awesome – Robin, thanks a lot, I will see you in about a month.

ROBIN: Sounds good, all right! Thanks!

GEORGE: Thanks, see ya!

Awesome – thanks for listening and thank you, Robin. If you're getting great value out of this show, please give us a review, a 5-star review would be, of course, more than awesome. If you're listening on iTunes, you can go through the podcast app, which is the purple app button. You can access through there. Any other device would be the Android type of device, probably through Stitcher – the same thing. And then, if not, if you're watching this through the video or anywhere else, just leave us a review any way you can.

Cool! If you need any help with your marketing, digital marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO, websites, all this technical stuff that most people hate and we eat for breakfast, you can visit us on martialartsmedia.com and we’re happy to have a chat. Send us a message and we'll see if we can help you grow your business!

Awesome – have a great week, I’ll speak to you soon. Cheers!

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

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61 – Cat Zohar – Simple Member Engagement Tips For Martial Arts Student Retention

March 21, 2018 by George Fourie

Cat Zohar shares simple martial arts student retention tips that any school owner can master.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

Cat Zohar’s martial arts life, being an innovator and a visionary
How to establish rapport on the online platforms
The benefits of relationship marketing
The challenges in building relationship within large martial arts schools
Cat’s proven techniques for improving customer retention
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

Of course, you can. If you can take your hand, putting it in front of you, look at it and then give yourself a direction to smile – smile. And be able to do that, you can great somebody when they walk in the door, I promise. You can train anybody to do that. If you are able to handle that little interaction right there, you can train someone to be friendly.

GEORGE: Hey, this is George Fourie and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast. Today, I'm joined by Cat Zohar. I didn't check – Zohar, am I pronouncing that right?

CAT: That's correct!

GEORGE: Alright, awesome. So Cat will be joining me and about 11 other also martial arts instructors and business leaders at The Main Event and that's in San Diego, 26th to 28th of April, so that's next month. Depending on when you're watching and listening to this. So we’re going to have a bit of a chat and Cat has some amazing things going on in the industry. She got started when she was a 6-year old and I'm here to learn about what Cat does and have a great conversation and of course, bring great value to you. So welcome to the show Cat!

CAT: Thank you so much for having me George, I'm happy to be here! And hello everyone!

GEORGE: Awesome. So, let’s start right at the beginning – who is Cat Zohar?

CAT: Well, I think Cat Zohar is a martial arts innovator, martial arts visionary for the industry. I started martial arts practice when I was 6 years old in Cleveland, Ohio where I grew up. And it's something I've been most active in my entire life, so this is just the continuation and the next chapter of Cat Zohar, I guess you would say.

GEORGE: All right. So you mentioned innovation and visionary – can you elaborate a little bit on that?

CAT: I've done a lot of firsts in the martial arts industry. I started girls only martial arts program, designed just for young girls between the ages of 3 and 10 and we set up the Karate Princesses Program, which was designed specifically to teach real martial arts techniques and skills for protection – princess protection more appropriately referred to. But actually, giving them a base to take part in martial arts. When I was a young girl starting in my martial arts classes, my mom used to be like, girls don't do karate. So our motto and our tagline was, girls do karate too and that was really a big focus.

This was actually pre all of the pink belt stuff that you see today, so we actually had to make our own karate princesses belts out of cool princey pink fabrics and things like that. So we had a whole bunch of ways for the girls to earn bling for their belt by participating and doing princess like behaviors around their community as well as their household too and school.

So there was a bunch of things like that I've done over the years that have been… well, innovative for the industry and I've seen many different trends come and go over the years as well, but a lot of the things that I like to visually express to the people that I connect with is we’re taking what it is that they want to see happen and sometimes giving them the steps to be able to make that happen and how to be able to market what that is. Or maybe help guide them a little bit where I could see the direction developing or progressing fast for the people that they service.

GEORGE: Ok. And you mentioned you've seen a lot of things come and go: what's been the cool thing that you feel has stuck around over the years?

CAT: Well, here's another way where I feel that I bring that vision to the martial arts industry, where I actually coined the phrase that came into the industry is member engagement and one of the big things that I really focus, the most part of my recent career on has been developing and building those relationships with our students and parents. And if it comes down to it, the one thing that I feel will always be here, the personal connections and the relationships, despite the era of digital, websites and connecting and not answering phones and stuff like that. I still believe that that personal element and that interaction has got to be there. And not only does it have to be there, there are so many ways to be able to make it by design, so it works.

Not just for a school owner of multi-locations, but also a single school owner, or a single operator. And a lot of times, that's something that they have but they don't necessarily recognize what they have. They want to try and make your marketing, make them look super big, whereas their greatest marketing effort is actually just harvesting and nurturing those relationships that are small or that are intimate to them and that's some of the greatest ways that they're able to grow. What's interesting to me is, you'll see a lot of great big organizations trying to appear smaller, so that way they have that personal bond and connection. So it works both ways.

GEORGE: Very true, because that's been, just looking at the shift of the internet over the last few years: I think it really came to a point where everybody wanted to automate. Automate and how can you separate yourself from being connected, where now it's becoming, you can see all the changes happening in Facebook, especially – the focus is really, how do you facilitate more relationships? How do you facilitate more one to one type of relationships and connections? So how would you go about that? So if you wanted to create member engagement and you wanted. I assume you're talking through online platforms, right?

CAT: Yeah, it could be anything though. I mean relationships that I specifically refer to though is the actual connections that they have with the parents in the martial arts school and the kids that take part in their program. Or breaching that gap, it's for me what takes place. A lot of parents will drop their kids off to the martial arts program and then for a lot of times, they have even nannies or sitters that bring them to the classes and the parents don't actually get to see what their child learns, or what they do. Maybe it's with the exception of when they come to a belt promotion, or testing or grading.

So these are the types of things that when they do show up, they're like, oh, I didn't even recognize this was here, but the interaction with the instructor and the parent may not be that strong. But how can we actually make it that even an absentee participating parent is still involved with the school, where they feel like, oh, yeah, that's where my kid goes to martial arts, this is what we do. And where they feel a connection with it as well too. Which is not that foreign thing, my kid does that, it's his activity, it's whatever. It’s Tuesday night at 6 o'clock – no, it's more about how they actually can make that relationship grow stronger with the parents, so that way their parent is the ally. I hear so often martial arts school owners say, oh, it'd be great if it weren't for the parents.

Well, it's because they don't build that reform with the parents! They connect with the kid or they get the kid to like it and then they get hurt when the parent says, we’re going to pull him out, or we’re going to do another sport or we’re going to do another activity. Where one of the biggest things then that I see from a martial arts school owners perspective is, why would you do such a thing, you don't know! It’s because the school owner didn't communicate with them, or I told them, or it's because the parent doesn't see. Well, if the parent doesn't see, how do you show them? How do you tell them, how do you get them to be able to recognize that? How do you get them to see something bigger than just your sport, or your martial arts school as an activity for them? So these are the kind of things that I like to dive in on.

GEORGE: All right. And I can hear you're really passionate about that and it gets me thinking, that's really the.. It’s sort of the elephant in the room, right? Because you've got the student and you see the student every day, so you're building a relationship with the student, but the student is not the one that's paying the bill. So it's much easier for the parent to say, well, soccer is cheaper. Or easy to make that shift, because they're not part of the relationship. And I mean that most transactions, people might get started with the idea and for the skill set, but then they hang around because of the community. So I can see the value in that really involving them in the community and getting that happening. So the question is, do you have sort of a checklist or a process that you go about to facilitate that?

CAT: Yeah, actually there are several different tactics that we use, but the strategy that we overall build is developed on day one, is actually sitting the parents down and when we have our first lesson, letting them understand just how important it is to keep that communication going, but more importantly, to actually stop, take a minute, have a one to one conversation with them – not just, fill in this form and I’ll be right back, but instead, hey would you mind filling our permission slip to get them started and then we can take an interview together and see if this is a good fit and actually discuss what they want to see their child gain from the program.

And get them to open up about some of the things that they've seen or experienced in their child's behavior or mannerisms that may be concerning to them. And probe a little bit to actually get them to expand a little bit on why they feel for themselves their child needs either things that we deliver: better focus, better confidence, better self-esteem, stronger relationships with their classmates, better friendships – any of the millions of things martial arts can provide. Get them to actually have an experience, where you're discussing this with them and then from that, actually deliver that to them through your lesson.

And a lot of it just comes down to listening and most of it is that the processes and the things that we use really come down to just communication. You know, so often, we’ll hear a parent wants to pull their kid out and typically, not listening to the reasons that they say at that point is the reason why so many people don't return back to martial arts. I was always in the unique position, because I've had so many former students come back to the training after three months, after six months, after six years, after breaks or periods of time that they wanted to return back and it's because I never stopped treating them as a member, even after they weren't there. So we continually kept in contact or connection or random phone calls here or there out of the blue, where I wasn't doing anything more than just being like, hey what's going on? Missed you, how have you been? You know, or getting to be able to keep that contact going.

And now with social media, so we talk about what are some of the strategies we could specifically use. If you're using a closed space group for your members to be able to communicate anything that goes on in your classes, stop communicating so damn much about your classes! Nobody cares about the curriculum videos of the week and the month and posting all the videos and all the pictures of all these silly things, it's Greek to them. But instead, host conversations that actually spark a discussion, that get them to say, hey, this is what we do, this is how we handle this, or even as simple things as what's for dinner on Tuesday night? You know, giving them the chance to actually open up and build connections, so they feel they're connected to your martial arts school in a greater way than just that place they drop their kid off two days a week.

GEORGE: Alright, cool. That's perfect, that's awesome. So what do you see as the biggest obstacle here? Because I mean, there's this big transition right, if you're a small school, then it's very easy for you to facilitate this one to one relationships. Also, obviously, I mean, things like Facebook groups and so forth make it a lot easier, which is a real soft way to build that community feel. But then what if you start to scale and you're in the position of, all right, school number two, number three is opening up – how do you facilitate that through your staff and making sure that they are on track with the same strategy?

CAT: They have to be trained. People say, oh but I'm not a people person, or they use excuses like that, like, I can't teach charisma or anything like that and I think all that's bs! Of course, you can! If you can take your hand, putting it in front of you, look at it and then give yourself a direction to smile – smile. And be able to do that, you can great somebody when they walk in the door, I promise. You can train anybody to do that. If you are able to handle that little interaction right there, you can train someone to be friendly.

They might not have the personality of highness and warmth but you can condition them and practice through training and rehearsal and performance and reality and videotaping them and getting them to actually see themselves. And get them to be able to say, hey, welcome to our martial arts school! I'm so and so, I'm so glad to meet you and actually get them to learn these processes. And when we follow different types of pre-written scripts or material that we’re able to actually rehearse in training with our staff members and our coworkers and things like that and go over these things, well then, when we actually do it for real, it's not as awkward.

It might be a little bit at first, but here's the truth: everybody at first has awkwardness. It's like a first competition in the tournament, then by the time you've done a hundred of them, it's no longer awkward. In fact, you're like, can we get this stuff over with already! You know, I mean, I competed for 18 years, I know what that game is all about. So I mean, when the repetitiveness at first, you get that anxiousness, but the more they do it, the more comfortable they get at it, the more second nature it becomes. So you don't have to be a people person, but you have to at least care. And I wouldn't hire anybody that didn't care.

GEORGE: Awesome, I like that part. I was speaking to a client last week. We run a program called the Martial Arts Media Academy, where we help with marketing and facilitating all the connection, but I also really try to simplify the online space and really leverage programs. And it's something that came up in the conversation was, really trying to scale and having this problem where you're talking about member relationships and engagement, but the problem was that they found that most of their instructors are introverted. And they just don't have that very outgoing personality to really connect. And that was a big obstacle, or is currently a big obstacle for them is, how do they take that introverted personality to scale and be that outgoing person, or do they need to completely shift gears and train someone else, get someone in from the outside to take that front enroll.

CAT: You know, it could be both. One of the schools of thought that I subscribe to is, not everybody is engineered to do everything. Some people just naturally gravitate to certain areas. Bunny rabbits will never be able to swim, OK? That's just the way that they've been engineered and made, they're not going to be climbing trees either. So I mean, if we’re going to ask a bunny rabbit to climb a damn tree, he's going to fail. He's not going to do very well with that. You ask a monkey to climb a tree and then be, oh my god, you're a black belt at this stuff, how did you get so good? Oh, he's natural, right? Well, yeah, because some of us are actually naturals at certain things.

As far as communication, I believe with training, if they're able to get up in front of a group and be a martial arts instructor, they can just as easily be the martial arts instructor to the parents in the lobby and build those relationships the same way. When there's a disconnect is that they think that the parents are no longer their students too.

So when they take a different approach and a different lens through which they're seeing their martial arts school crew and actually recognize that the parents are there to support their children, so thus, the parents need the training to be able to better endure that role. The parents don't know how to do that necessarily unless they're taught and trained how to be able to do that.

So the person to teach them, who would that be? Well, the martial arts instructor, because what's their job? Their job is to teach! So if they see it not so much as, this obstacle or this barrier, but put it in terms of what they're already naturally selected and gifted for, hey I want to be a martial arts teacher, understand though that who we teach isn't just the person on the classroom floor, but it's everyone within the walls of our school.

And I think when we start viewing our martial arts school not just as a place that begins when we bow on the mat, but instead actually from the front door for whoever walks through, it's no different then. If you say you want to help people, or you want to change lives, or you want to be a martial arts instructor, we can be picky and choosy about the people… let me reshape that: yes, we can be picky and choosy about the people we take and the people we help; however, we have to recognize who are people that need our help.

And sometimes we think, well, the parents don't need our help – sometimes the parents need your help more than that kid on the mat, you know? They're the ones that actually are signing up, not just to be able to give their kid an activity, but also to learn how to better handle and parent their child. And to be able to do that, a lot of times it just comes down to better training and better practice with communications and drilling scenarios, both on the practice floor and how to be able to handle those announcements with the parents too. So making sure that the lobby is never a part of their martial arts school that isn't under their control. If that makes sense.

GEORGE: Yeah, for sure. I think to make it really practical, I like what you said, if you can look at your hand and smile, that's a really, really good start. Just a smile can do wonders. And I think I'll add to that, it's just really being present. Really being present in a situation is, if you can do those two things, and really smile and be present, understand where people are at, I think that's a good stepping stone. What would you add to that?

CAT: The only thing that I would add specifically is when they are given an opportunity to build a connection or a relationship with a student, understand that the student in front of them isn't just maybe the child for the class, but it's the parent or the guardian or whoever brought them to this practice as well. And be inclusive when you're teaching and let them recognize, let the instructor specifically recognize that being able to teach martial arts is part of the job, is also being able to enroll them and being comfortable with talking to them and having that connection.

Because if they want to help that kid that's going to be doing their classes, they have to have communication with that parent. Because if there's ever going to be a situation, that kids going to tell their mom or their dad first. And if the parent has enough respect for you and the program and what it benefits them with, they're able then to go back and relay that information to the instructor. Because the first person that's going to hear about the kid wanting to give up classes, or stop or runs into a challenge, maybe because they stubbed their toe in sparring or something silly like that, that we don't even give consideration, but could be very much a factor of why somebody doesn't want to take part or continue – if that's explained from the beginning, parents are heck of a lot more prepared for it when it does happen.

And we just kind of have to stop hiding the fact that there might be a time when they're going to say, I don't want to go to karate tonight, or I don't want to do martial arts or anything like that. Or I'd rather go out and play with my friends when the weather gets nice and that kind of thing that it's going to make a huge difference if they understand that and they know how their job as the parent is to support their kid in becoming a black belt, or becoming a martial artist I prefer to say, as opposed to just setting an end goal on it. Like get your black belt and then everybody wonders why they got one. They did it, that's what you told them they had to do! But yeah, get the parents to recognize. The first person they go to when there's a challenge is going to be that martial arts instructor to help them with it and see it through.

And the job of the instructor is to teach the parent that that's what they have to do. If that means they have to call them when they first get started, or if they have to keep that path of communication flowing – text messages are great right now, because if a parent wants to shoot you over a message about something that took place. But more importantly, if you want to shoot over that parent a video or a selfie, or something going on from class, especially if they're not present – it's the best way to be able to interact, engage and connect.

GEORGE: I like that, I like that. Quick selfie. This really reminds me – and I don't know who I'm quoting yet, it could either be Dean Jackson or James Schramko, but the story comes from experiences, customer, experiences. And the stories about, if I walk into a coffee shop or a restaurant for example and they treat me bad, I get bad service and I just feel bad about the experience – that's 100% of my experience with that company is negative, 100%. But on the reverse side, if I'm a regular and I walk in there every morning to get my coffee, I get treated with respect, smile, all these things that we just spoke about and about my 10th trip to the coffee shop, they slip up and make a mistake – that's 10% of my experience with them that's bad.

So when it comes down to that, you have a bit more understanding and you feel a bit more, OK, well, they slipped up, it's OK. Because you've got that relationship and understanding. And I think that relates to a lot of what you're saying here because a martial arts journey is going to have its ups and downs. And it's coming, the bad experience is coming, the “I don't know if I want to do this anymore” is coming. So if you have the relationship to back all that up, chances are you're going to be able to save that relationship, save that student and keep them back on their path.

CAT: George, amen – that was exactly it! One of the big things they say is the difference between customer service and member engagement, because people say, oh, it's the same thing, it's customer service, and I'm like, you're so wrong, I want to say something else, but I remember I'm a martial artist and I don't do those kinds of things. Instead, though, I say to myself, well, you know, customer service is dealing with problems. If you ever have a customer service – I laugh when somebody says customer service department is going to return the martial arts student calls, and I'm like, you have a customer service department? What do you need that for? That's like where, what does that mean? That means problems and that you're just expecting to have lots of problems to have to deal with if you have a whole ton of staff doing customer service.

Member engagement though is pre-empting that, recognizing oh, we've been doing this for this many years, we recognize it – hey, this is a common occurrence and it's going to happen. It's not if it does – if you're the unicorn that this doesn't happen to, no! It's not going about it that way, it's expecting that, hey you know what, this is part of the game, this is just what happens. It's going to come in time, and when it does, this is what we're going to do about it. But member engagement is recognizing that. The kid who has floods and you don't teach an Okinawan system of martial arts, where their pants are up to their knees.

Their parents are not buying them a new uniform – you think that's because they have plans and aspirations for him to stick around another 5 more years? I mean, I probably would disagree. But giving that kid a new uniform, making the kid feel more comfortable then, forgetting about the $30 or the $20 or the $50 or the $100, I don't care how much your uniform is, but whatever that amount is, and saying, I care more about the relationship than I do about the uniform and I want to see this person stay – you make that gesture, you push that forward, hey: if we can give a new uniform to a new guy that we don't even know, why can't we give on to a kid who does practice in our program and doesn't have a proper fitting uniform.

Talk to the parent, it might be a budget thing. It might be not a high priority thing, but I’ll tell you who it's going to make a difference for that kid on the mat. That's member engagement, that's recognizing, man, that kids got to be embarrassed by the way he's getting a wedgie in the middle of his class. And it doesn't allow him to do anything because his mom won't buy him a new pair of pants, I mean, let's be real here, you know? I mean, this is what's going on, I mean, in the day where we have over… I don't even know what the correct word is, but just so much abundance of bullying going on, throughout the world.

This is real life crisis, it doesn't matter where you're at, but that's definitely something that… let's make sure that this doesn't become a zone where the kid is going to get bullied because some other smartass kid says something to him and says, your uniform is too short, or doesn't your mom love you enough to buy you new pants or whatever. Give them the respect of saying, hey, I recognize this. Because any parent is going to appreciate that, so it's just a matter of saying or recognizing where you see a situation, let the light bulb go off and say, that isn't right, let's do something about it.

I mean, everything gets triggered. We know this, right? Somebody misses a class for two weeks, chances are, you're going to get a phone call, or you're going to get a notice from the billing company, or you're going to get some kind of information, or a credit card payment isn't going to go through. And then another two weeks, so you know what's coming. So you can either pick up the phone or here's something better: what if we knew that was coming right on the same day they were supposed to be there and they weren't there? If I would date somebody and they say, oh, that was a great first date and then I don't hear from them for like a week or two weeks later and they send me a text, hey – they're not getting a response! Please! If you want to actually build a relationship with anyone, you have to have communication.

You've got to show that you care, you've got to recognize that, oh – this person actually does have my best interest in mind. And if you can convey that, you're not going to have a problem then when that parent has a situation they want to… or like you've mentioned: when you drop the ball. I ordered you the wrong size belt, I got you your belt, but unfortunately, it came in 5 sizes too big and all this. Well have another one for you in the next 4 or 5 days, but here – use this one for now. They're going to overlook those kinds of things. It's definitely in our benefit as martial arts school owners and operators to make sure that we get to know our people and connect with them and recognize when these things happen. Because customer service is too late, that's overcoming objections and that's like, it's such a buzzword. It's such a sad way of trying to build things around something that's already gone, so see it before it happens, you've got to catch it before it happens.

GEORGE: I like that. Awesome. What I really like about that is really, you eliminating the objections. And looking for the opportunity to build relationships is really what it is. And I like what you mentioned about the bullying part because there's always so much focus in advertising, we’re always fighting the bullies and build the confidence and build the fun, but then sometimes there's a disconnect on the actual mats. That was the ad, but is that what you're really doing in your school? Are you really paying attention to that, because as you've mentioned, bullying is a big thing and in Australia right now there's the no bullying week, so there's a lot of promotion and things going on about that. And I don't know if that's in the States as well, but a big thing about that is, is there an opportunity to be bullied right there in front of you? Or just feeling adequate, or not in place? Because of the social pressures.

CAT: I think it's more responsibility than ever. Any teacher, any teacher, any educator, not even in martial arts; a dance teacher, a music teacher, a school teacher has to recognize those things and recognize why someone might be getting singled out, or pushed out the same way and making sure there's a stronger connection with them, because you might be that only connection with them.

GEORGE: Awesome. Cat, it's been awesome speaking to you. And I'm looking forward to seeing you speak at The Main Event.

CAT: I’m looking forward to it!

GEORGE: Yes, and that's going to be awesome. Just a few last words: if people want to connect with you, find out more about you, how should they do that?

CAT: Send me a friend request over Facebook. I love to be able to connect with people, especially if you're in Australia or some other part of the world where I want to travel to one day and get a chance to vacation, I would love to connect with you and be your friend.

GEORGE: Is that what this podcast is really about? All right, awesome.

CAT: Find me on the Facebook, that's the best way to connect with me. And send me a PM if you have any questions about what we talked about today, I'll be happy to talk to you more.

GEORGE: Fantastic. Cat, it's been great speaking to you and I will see you in San Diego soon.

CAT: Pleasure is mine, thank you, George. Have a great day mate!

GEORGE: Thank you.

Awesome – thanks for listening, thanks, Cat Zohar. Great energy, great content. If you're enjoying the show and you're getting great value from it, please, let us know! A good way to do that would be to give us an awesome review, like a 5-star review on the iTunes platform, or Stitcher if you're listening to this on an android mobile device. So for the iPhone, I know you can go, there's a little purple icon, the podcast app and you can just go through the show there and give us a review. Stitcher, probably just follow the instructions, or wherever you're listening to this – just give us a feedback. We’d love to hear from you, I can see you are listening because I see the numbers, but podcasting being a very one-way communication platform, it's hard to get the feedback.

So it would be great to hear from more guests – that would be awesome. And if you need any help with your marketing, with marketing your school, especially on the tech side, the digital platforms that are forever going and changing, then get a hold of us. Get a hold of us on martialartsmedia.com we would be happy to chat with you and I look forward to bringing you another interview, another lady! And it's kind of ironic, four ladies in a row. It’s just pure coincidence. It's not because it's been a women's week, or anything like that, depending on when you're listening to this. It’s been pure coincidence and I'm hoping you're enjoying the change in perspective and change in energy and viewpoints, which is what this show is really about. How can we create good content, good things, good insights that you can apply to your business and that way we all learn and grow.

Awesome, well that's it from me. I will be back next week with another show and speak soon – cheers!

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58 – Chris Nott – Family, Knowledge And Action Through Teaching Martial Arts

March 7, 2018 by George Fourie

Chris Nott lives his passion through teaching martial arts. Here's how he got the business guidance that made that possible.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

How martial arts business owners can benefit from martial arts events
The struggles Chris Nott underwent while starting his martial arts school
The importance of having a mentor for martial arts success
How Chris Nott was able to turn his passion into a career
Why it’s not yet too late for you to live your dreams
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

CHRIS: I think you, like any event that you go to, but especially for me The Main Event, because again it's run by people that already run successful schools … So there's a lot of events going on in our industry, and I like to go everywhere because that's where you learn, but specifically, if you run a martial arts school … An event run by somebody that runs multiple martial arts schools is for me a good thing already.

GEORGE: This podcast episode is the audio version of a video interview I had with Chris Nott. To get the full episode, access to the video, and to download the transcript, please go to martialartsmedia.com/58, that's forward slash 5 8. Here's the episode. Enjoy.

Hi, this is George Fourie, and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast. Today, I am with Chris Nott, all the way from Mount Margate, Florida. How are you doing today, Chris?

CHRIS: I'm doing great, George. Good morning, buddy.

GEORGE: Awesome, and from FKA Martial Arts, and we're going to have a bit of a chat. We also are going to be meeting Chris officially at The Main Event in San Diego, so depending on when you're listening to this podcast episode, that is between the 26th and the 28th of April.

That's going to be a lot of fun, if you're a business martial arts school owner or instructor, you want to learn a little bit more. Going to be a great event to attend to. We'll probably speak a little bit about that, but first I guess we got to start right from the beginning. Who is Chris Nott?

CHRIS: Well, hi. So like the rest of you guys, martial arts is my passion, always has been. When I came to the US, I turned what was I guess a hobby in the UK, because I think back in the day that's more how martial arts was perceived, at least in England, but it's obviously changed now, but in America it was already run as a structured professional business, it was a way to, I guess, do something that you love, but also make a living at that and support your family at the same time.

So I'm very fortunate to do what I do for a living. My passion is teaching anybody, kids, adults, doesn't matter, but I would say mainly I really enjoy teaching children.

GEORGE: How did this journey all begin? You immigrated from the UK, came to the United States, where did it all sort of originate?

CHRIS: Yeah, that's a great question. As a kid, I dabbled in martial arts at different clubs, or youth clubs, I guess, in England. Played a lot of other sports, as well, you know. Football, what we know as soccer, but martial arts was always a passion. I think, I guess like everybody else around my age, when you once saw a Bruce Lee movie, you were like that's it, I want to be Bruce Lee. That's I guess kind of what drew me to martial arts.

And to the states in '87. I trained in a couple of different styles and systems, and kind of settled on a school up here and managed to find an instructor for Jeet Kun Do, which was my passion. That's where I started looking at the opportunity to, I guess, get involved in martial arts more as a career than something as a hobby.

At the time, actually my background, I was a French polisher. I went to London College of Furniture, so when I first came to the States that's what I was doing for a living. I actually worked down here on the yachts and boats, refurbishing, doing that kind of thing.

Eventually, when I got married and had kids, I kind of looked at that career path and said, you know, do I want to be around all those chemicals and dust and all that kind of stuff? Looking at my young family, I kind of want to grow up in a healthier lifestyle.

I got the opportunity through my training to go on to become an instructor, and then just decided to make a complete career change. That was I was probably, I came to this a lot later than most people, I was probably 29, 30 when I started. Most people have been doing this since they were children, at least involved in schools or living in the US.

I started my school, I stayed with that instructor for a while teaching, and eventually, I guess like we all do, you have a sort of yearning to jump out on your own and give it a shot, you know… I actually opened my school ten or twelve years ago in a community center located in the City of Margate.

I started with two students, and over the course of three or four years, we grew that to about 100-150 students in the school, and I'm like hey, man, I could actually make a living doing this thing, you know? So I did a couple of Hail Mary’s, and we invested in the facility and the school. Be careful what you ask for because the first few years were a little harrier than I thought it was going to be. With perseverance and time, and studying and learning from people in our industry that have been there before us, we I think now got a really solid school, a good system. We have a good business.

My wife now works at the school. I have a few full-time employees. We run an afterschool, a summer camp program, a pretty strong kids martial arts program, and a good adult class at night. I guess that was the 100-mile-an-hour overview of how did I get involved with where I am now.

GEORGE: That's cool. What were those early obstacles? You say you started late. I mean I'm a complete latecomer, 36 when I finally started training martial arts because my son was training, so I thought it was a cool dad-son thing to get going. That got me into in super late, what I think is super late, although it's now my full-time passion. If you look at those early stages, what were the biggest obstacles you faced to really make that switch from taking your career into making that shift into full-time martial arts school?

CHRIS: I think always when you give up one career… I mean the career I was actually in was a career that generated very good revenue, so I mean I won't be cliché, but yes by giving up that kind of revenue that I was making to go into a business that I didn't have that at the time, I was lucky enough to have a wife that was super supportive. She had a good job, so that definitely, I guess, was like a good insurance policy, an umbrella for us, while we made that transition.

But yeah, you know, man, like everybody, when you start out, you struggle. There are some hairy months. You're like, oh my God, are we even going to be able to pay the bills? We went through all of that stress. But again, I think if you're able to do something in your life where you can line up your passion, and also turn that into something that generates a revenue, come on, man, that's the greatest thing, right? You get to wake up and do what you love. Again, not to sound cliché, but I guess the finances, in the beginning, were the obstacle and realizing maybe I didn't have all the tools to execute and do what it is I need to grow the school.

I think a lot of that comes down to if you, probably, if you start martial arts at a young age, and you're in a school, I don't know, I use Fred as an example, but if you're in a school like that where they're already successful, they have systems in place, the kids are going to come up through that structured system, and so they've already got all the tools to succeed.

You know what I'm saying? Versus you talk about you and I’m coming to the industry later, yeah, super passionate about martial arts, I think very lucky to have some awesome martial arts instructors, but maybe not the best business coaches in the world. So here you are like man, I got this great martial arts skill program I want to teach, and now how do I get the students, what's that all about? I'm sure people can relate to that.

GEORGE: That's an interesting topic because it's something that's been coming up a lot. Actually, I was writing an email about this about an hour ago, about advice within the industry. I think there's, I guess, and you see this in business and then you see this in martial arts, people get this superhero syndrome thing, that because you're successful in one thing, you assume that that advice applies to everything else.

I think because especially in martial arts when people reach such a high state of martial arts, that often we share business knowledge and things that they might not be that on top of, and people buy into that, they go the wrong way, get the wrong advice, and there's a lot of repercussions, of course.

CHRIS: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

GEORGE: How did you sort of getting to finding the right people to listen to, and the right business advice to move you forward?

CHRIS: First of all, by making lots of mistakes, unfortunately, I have to say. We learn I think more often, a lot more, from our mistakes than we do from the things that we do right. Then just sort of coming to a point where you're like oh, but I just don't know how to do this, or I don't know how to do that, I'd a better study. Right? Education is how we improve anything we do. If you don't know how to do something, you need to read or study. I guess in this day and age, Google it and watch it on YouTube. But even then, it's a good start.

I think at the end of the day, whatever kind of coaching you're going to get, my advice would be just simply this. Take a good look at the people you're about to go mentor and study under and look at what they've done. If they've been successful with that particular thing, there's a pretty good chance as long as you pay attention and listen to them and do what it is they ask you to do, you're going to have that same success, because it's proven. Does that make sense?

GEORGE: Yeah.

CHRIS: Versus hey, my friend told me this chap over there is doing this, let's try this, and now you're kind of just pissing in the wind, and you really don't know what kind of result you're going to get.

GEORGE: All right. Awesome. What sort of developed as your strength in the martial arts space?

CHRIS: Let's see, that's a good question. I mean I'm super passionate about teaching. I love to teach. If you're going to be doing your job, you better love what you do, you know? So I love to be on the mat, impart knowledge, see people learn and grow, and be a part of people's lives. I like to think I'm a pretty good people person. I wouldn't say accounting and bookkeeping is my strong suit.

God bless my wife for taking care of that side of our business. I enjoy, I guess, building our business, like day by day looking at what can we do next. I love the challenge of what are we going to do for our marketing this month, how are we going to grow the business, how can we impact more lives in our community by getting more students into the school. I would say those are my strengths.

GEORGE: Cool. I'm going to change gears. This just is a question I picked up looking at your website, fkamartialarts.com, but before we get to that, I think I just want to, I don't want to lose track from where we are…

CHRIS: Actually the site is familyknowledgeaction.com.

GEORGE: Family, Knowledge, Action.

CHRIS: Dot com. FKA, that's what it stands for, is Family, Knowledge, Action. So when we chose our school name, our philosophy is basically embracing families in our community and imparting knowledge through an action philosophy, and that's what became the name of our school.

GEORGE: Okay, because there's two. There's fkamartialarts.com.

CHRIS: Yeah. We actually for marketing, we have like a ton of different websites…

GEORGE: Right, okay.

CHRIS: Websites, but if you really want to kind of get a feel for who we are as a school, familyknowledgeaction.com will give you a good overview of all the different programs. I don't say that as a plug. I know you can edit that out, just so that you have the right address if people are looking at it, you know?

GEORGE: Okay, that's good, because that's the website I was looking at. I did because we develop websites for martial arts schools, so it's obviously always one thing I look at, and always look at just what people are doing.

CHRIS: Yeah.

GEORGE: Internal critique, is that good, could we do better…

CHRIS: Yeah, oh. Yeah, for sure, all the time.

GEORGE: Just I found it very cool, and I don't want to get into a big technology talk, but I found it very good the way, the style that you had on fkamartialarts.com, just with using the sort of WordPress blog type template, but really good strong headline, really talking to your audience, parents and kids. Really good keyword structure and so forth. Is that something that you pay a lot of attention to with your school marketing?

CHRIS: I really can't take credit for that, the websites. I'm involved in many different groups in our industry. I consult … Again, I basically like to think we have two companies running out of one location. We run a martial arts program for children and adults, and as I mentioned earlier we also have an afterschool and a summer camp program. Well, I think the confusion for a lot of people is they try to run them like they're the same business. They're really not. They're two separate companies, I have two separate staff teams, et cetera, et cetera, and therefore you need two separate kinds of marketing strategies for those programs.

I'm not trying to plug here, but I do mentor with an afterschool and summer camp program called Mast, and actually Dwayne, Dwayne Spries is the chap that runs that, and he's the one that I have to credit for the website. I can tell you that for us they work. We generate lovely. They may not look like the fanciest website on the planet, you know what I mean.

I know there's a lot of other sites out there with many more bells and whistles, but sometimes I think less is more, right? Simplistic. As you just mentioned, big, bold headlines, hit you in the face. Looks more like a newspaper with some cheesy pictures on it.

GEORGE: Yeah.

CHRIS: It gets the job done. At the end of the day, our websites are … You know, I think we used to think that they were like oh, we got to show who we are, and all of our cool stuff, and look at all … No, we don't. They just want to know who you are, what are you going to … exactly, what.

GEORGE: All the bling at the back.

CHRIS: Yeah, but what do people really care about? What's in it for them, what are you doing for them, what services can you offer them. They don't care about your history, and I was born on the top of a mountain, and whatever that nonsense is. Anyhow, the sites work well for us. Yes.

GEORGE: Yeah. It's something we always talk about because we're always talking about conversions and websites. I just noticed that it really ticked the boxes, which was really good in the simplicity of it, which I think vouches for I think people get way too carried away with technology, and that's really web developers' fault because most web developers don't understand marketing and strategy, so they come to the party with the design aspect, how can we make this look flashy, and it actually just distracts from the user experience, which means not easy, people leave, get frustrated, they're not getting the actual message to fulfill their need, what they're actually looking for.

CHRIS: Yeah. I think, George, I 100% agree with you, mate. You know, at the end of the day, we look at our schools, and we have these opportunities, what we call our pillars of marketing, what do you have that's going to help you grow your school. Well, that's what your website, in my opinion, for whatever it's worth, should be, something that's going to help generate or explain who you are with a good sort of lead capture to get people interested, and as you said a good hook to get people to jump on and say hey, let me check this place out, man. For what it's worth, that's what I think, but what do I know? I'm no expert on websites and all that kind of stuff.

GEORGE: That's awesome. Cool, so getting back to I guess The Main Event. You're going to be speaking about a few things. If people had to come down to San Diego, which I think I'm travelling 25 hours to get there, so I think anybody in America could definitely make the trip, but what would you be … Sorry to cut you off there, but what are you going to be speaking about? What can people expect from your perspective?

CHRIS: Actually, I'm not speaking. I mean I will speak, but I'm teaching, so I'm not speaking so much as standing up there to give a dissertation or a speech about any particular topic. I wouldn't say speaking is my strong suit. Again, I love to teach, and I've been lucky enough to teach at The Main Event for the last three or four years, and again I just enjoy it. I'm going to teach a seminar. I know Fred said last year it might be an hour or two hours.

I'm not quite sure how long it's going to be, but I'm going to do my best in the time I teach to just share some of the core weapons-based drills that we do at our school, give a value to some of the instructors that come train, and if they have a good time that's awesome. Also, if they can take some of that information back and apply it to their schools, so whether they use it to help a weapons class, maybe a seminar, can use it in a birthday party, buddy days, add it to a little bit of the self-defense classes for adults, I'm going to try and quickly touch on a lot of different topics, and just give some value, I guess. That will be the goal. Make sure everybody has a good time, work out, and learn something.

GEORGE: Awesome. For you, as you have mentioned you've been to The Main Event the last four times, what do you feel as a school owner, what do you feel a school owner and an instructor would get out of going to an event like The Main Event?

CHRIS: I think like any event that you go to, but especially for me The Main Event, because again it's run by people that already run successful schools, so there's a lot of events going on in our industry, and I like to go everywhere because that's where you learn, but specifically if you run a martial arts school, an event run by somebody that runs multiple martial arts schools is for me a good thing already, because you know the content that you're going to get is going to be super relevant to what you do on a day to day basis, I guess, in your own school.

So whether you're looking to learn more about the business side of your school, learn a little bit more about the marketing side of your school, get some great tips on how to teach better classes, student retention, I've found that all of that is packed into the event, and again it's being given to you by people that have already done this over time. That to me is, again, you're going to learn, go study from people that already do it and have been successful with it, I would say.

GEORGE: Good point. Awesome. Hey, Chris, been great speaking to you. Is there anything that I should have asked you that I haven't asked you? It's the cliché question, but I'm asking it.

CHRIS: Would you like a pint, mate?

GEORGE: Well…

CHRIS: You didn't ask. You're an Aussie, that's just so rude.

GEORGE: It's twenty to eleven. I could probably pass. If you said yes, I would have some concerns.

CHRIS: Yeah, think of coffee, mate, it's too early for that. Maybe when I see you in San Diego, definitely we'll grab a beer together and chat. That would be awesome.

GEORGE: That'll be fantastic. All right, awesome. Chris, great speaking to you. If anybody wants to find more details about you, you mentioned the website that you corrected me on.

CHRIS: It's familyknowledgeaction.com. That's our school website. If not, people can message me on Facebook or whatever. I'm pretty accessible most of the time, so there you go.

GEORGE: All right. Awesome. Good stuff, Chris. I look forward to seeing you in San Diego and see you soon.

CHRIS: Alright, brother. Thanks, mate. Have a good one. We'll talk soon, okay?

GEORGE: Cheers.

CHRIS: See you.

GEORGE: Fantastic. I hope you enjoyed the interview. As mentioned, Chris and I will both be at The Main Event, so depending on when you're listening to this interview that is between the 26th and the 28th of April, and that will be in San Diego. For more details, you can go to the-main-event.com.

Otherwise, if you need help with your marketing, if you need help growing your school, if you are begging to get moving with your online campaigns, whether that's Facebook, Google, if you need to know how this whole search engine optimization thing works, it's one thing to hire a company, the other is to actually have the understanding yourself, and have a bit of a strategy before you hire someone.

That way you're a bit more in control of your business, and know what the right things are to do, and save a lot of money just on wasting time with people that might not be onboard with your martial arts business.

If you need any help, reach out to us. You can find more details, get in touch with us at martialartsmedia.com, or if you want to inquire about our martial arts academy program, you can go to martialartsmedia.academy. Thanks. I'll speak to you soon.

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

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56 – If Your Martial Arts Website Developer Can’t Answer This Question… Run!

February 23, 2018 by George Fourie

The term ‘high-converting martial arts website’ is often spouted amongst web developers without the expertise to back it up. If your gut check spells doubt, this question will reveal if they're worth their salt.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

The one ‘traffic test’ question that every martial arts website developer should pass
Why a high converting martial arts website can make or break your marketing
Your real problem beyond marketing
How to get the BONUS PDF – 20 Questions To Ask Your Web Developer Before Investing In A New Martial Arts Website

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, this is George Fourie, I’m doing a quick Facebook live experiment. I want to talk about the one question you should ask your web developer and if they can’t answer it, I reckon you should run.

And I’ve put together 20 other questions, a bit of a report – I’ll explain how you can get a hold of that, but I just want to talk about this one thing, because one thing I noticed, especially talking to a lot of web developers, and I guess just paying attention to things happening in the martial arts industry is, there's a lot of advice that just gets thrown around.

Thrown around like it’s knowledge, like it’s something that people actually know and they know what to do, but then, when it actually comes to the crocs of doing it, it’s just being heard from somewhere, or it’s just been read in a book, so it can't actually be applied.

And it costs you money at the end of the day. And it comes down to conversions and look, if you've listened to a lot of my podcasts or videos, I'm always going on about conversions, because the truth of the matter is, most school owners that I speak to don't have as much as a marketing problem, they’ve just got a conversion problem.

They're doing a lot of things: they're putting stuff out on Facebook, they're putting stuff out on YouTube, on their websites, but they're not getting the results. So it’s not really the marketing as much – look, obviously yes, marketing can be fine tuned and strategy and all that, but it really comes down to the actual conversion.

And the reason I carry on about conversions is the numbers make such a big difference. If you think of – and I always refer to this: if you get a 100 people going to your website, and you get 2 students from that, that's a 2% conversion. And depending on what the students are worth for you, let’s say your lifetime student value is $1500, or $2000 – let’s say it’s $1500: that's $3000 from a 100 website visits.

So if you had to double those conversions to 4% – it seems like 2%, but it’s 4%, that means an actual $3000 for every 100 visits you get on your website. And that's from a 100 visits to your website, or to one page.
So think if you start optimizing all your pages and everything that you do and you just make these little conversion improvements on your website. So that's… let’s say you push it from 2% to 4% – that's an extra $3000 this month, that's times 12, that's $36,000 over the year, times 5, that's another $150,000. So you can see where I'm getting at: it’s all about the conversions, right?

So the question you should be asking your web developer is: have they spent their own hard earned cash to drive traffic to their own martial arts website?

Because if they haven't done that, then how the hell are they building you a high converting website? Right?

Because if you haven't felt that pain, that pain of putting together your website and going to a place like Google, which is probably the biggest reveal of them all, and start spending money and sending people to your website and watching your dollars, your wallet get bruised and watching zero results – so watching no results and no results and you don't know what's going on. And if you haven't done that, then there's no way in hell that you can be building somebody a high converting website.

So getting back to the conversions side: if you haven't actually spent money and driven traffic to a website, then how can you actually optimize it and things that we are seeing right now, it’s not normally the first take.

And I think this is where people get it wrong is, I mean, when we build a website, we go to the point of interviewing the client, talking to the school owner, what's their strengths, what's their values, what's the market like – and then we go and we write out the copy. We do that first, before we do any design. Because it’s about the sales message, it’s not about the design.

So the problem is that you get web developers and they focus on the technical aspect and the pictures. And they don’t understand the sales proposition and they don't understand the fact that there's got to be a conversion element.

So that's what it really comes down. If somebody is not doing that themselves, then they can't be giving you the advice, or be copying other people and other designs, which people do and giving that off as their own expertise and think that you're going to get a result. Because chances are – and we do this all the time, we build a website to the best of our ability and then as soon as we start sending traffic to it, we realize that we've got to make adjustments. So that's when the real work starts, the real work is not actually developing a website that converts off the bat; the real work is, now that it’s built, now that traffic is going to it, all right: now do the numbers talk and do we need to optimize it?

I hope that helps in any way. Like I said, this is a bit of a Facebook live experiment.

I am walking off an injury in the middle of the bush. I've got another 20 questions. If you are looking at getting a new website, or you've got questions for a web developer, I've got a PDF with 20 questions that you can ask a web developer before you go ahead. It will give you a good idea of where their mind is at, OK? Are they somebody that studied programming, that I did initially and did not actually go to the lengths of understanding the conversions afterwards, or are they coming from a marketing perspective, thinking about strategy and then doing all the tech side.

VIEWER QUESTION: Greg, what if you do it yourself?

Greg, I guess that really depends on the level of skill you have with web development. If that's what you've got to do, if it’s because of cash flow, then by all means. But you will have to put in some time to learn about conversions, to learn about what makes a website convert and be prepared to spend a lot of money on the testing.

That's where you could probably save in the long run, is it’s probably the one thing where people try and take a big shortcut right off the bat, because it’s a lot easier to pay $300 a month for a website, then it is to pay 3,4 5 grand. But then, I'm not saying that the 3,4,5 grand is always the best route, because I see people charging that and then again, what we just spoke about is they're not considering the conversion; they're considering the flash. The flash stuff that makes them as web developers feel good, but sucks for the client, because the client can't get results from that.

I hope that helps. If you want the PDF, wherever you're watching this, just drop the number 20 in the comments and I’ll send the PDF to you, it’s just a bit of a write up. 20 questions that you can ask any web developer, it will give you a bit of an insight. Also, perhaps if you're doing it yourself, it will give you some feedback on what you need to be looking at for yourself in your own development.

Awesome – cool, thanks for watching, speak soon – cheers.

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

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55 – Bogdan Rosu – Personal Development Through Martial Arts

February 10, 2018 by George Fourie

When you combine personal development through martial arts, the goals achieved become tangible. Bogdan Rosu's vehicle for this is Wing Chun.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

What led Bogdan Rosu to use martial arts in reaching out people.
The potential of martial arts for personal development combined with hand-to-hand combat.
Using concepts of Wing Chun to improve your life.
Being selective about the students you can and cannot help.
BONUS PDF DOWNLOAD: 11 Goal Setting Questions to ask your students to reveal their real emotional reasons for starting martial arts.

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

The problem with just doing personal development, for example, is that you just don’t get keeping it in your head. Imagine just reading books, or doing courses or attending seminars – that's great, that information eventually trickles down into your body. However, if you do a concept with your body and you're not just repeating it over and over again. You do it and you integrate it into every cell of your body, that’s totally different.

GEORGE: This podcast episode is the audio version of a video interview that took place on martialartsmedia.com. For the full video interview and to access the questions that we discussed: we discussed questions with Bogdan Rosu, we discussed questions that you can ask your prospect in regards to personal development, but what this does for you? It really helps you get a clear idea of what your prospects’ goals are. And if you know what their goals are, you can tailor make your presentation about your martial arts program based on what their needs are and not just about what your program delivers – big distinction. It will make more sense in the interview.

So to download those questions and the transcript, please go to martilartsmedia.com/55. Here's the interview – enjoy!

GEORGE: Good day, this is George Fourie and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast. Today, I have with me – and I’m 100% confident I’m going to say this 100% right: Bogdan Rosu.

BOGDAN: That was actually pretty good.

GEORGE: Bogdan Rosu – did I get the “R” right?

BOGDAN: Yeah, yeah, actually the -su was like, it’s a bit unusual. Hi everyone, thanks for the invite.

GEORGE: Awesome. So quick introduction – and while I’m going to let Bogdan do most of the introduction, but Bogdan invited me to his podcast a couple of weeks back, Personal Development Through Martial Arts. And you can find that on addicted2wingchun.com. And it’s addicted with the number 2. So we’re going to touch a bit of that, on the personal development side within martial arts, within martial arts training as well, and just going to really have a chat, have some fun and learn more about Bogdan and what happens in the wonderful world of Romania? So officially – welcome!

BOGDAN: Thanks for the invite and like I mentioned earlier, it’s very nice to see you again. I’m excited to sit down and talk martial arts, personal development and marketing. Yeah.

GEORGE: Sounds good, all right. So first and foremost – who is Bogdan Rosu?

BOGDAN: I’m just a guy, you know, I’ve been doing martial arts since I was like 13 and the primary reason was because I just wanted to be a bit more self-confident and learn a bit more about people, I was horrible with people. Because for example, in the 5th grade, I was voted as being the most annoying, obnoxious kid in class and that was a bit weird for me because I love people so much and I just didn't understand why this stuff was happening.

But somehow I felt that it was because of me feeling really insecure. So I started my martial arts journey when I was 13 and in my 2nd year of college, I discovered personal development and I noticed that there was a really interesting connection between the two, in the sense that, what one was missing, the other can provide. So that's how this thing got started.

GEORGE: So – on personal development, right? So what actually led you to personal development? I mean, you're saying that you were feeling labelled most annoying kid in the class, although you're thinking you were probably just trying to reach out and connect. And then you said you discovered personal development, so, is that what sort of was the path to get you to say, well, there are some things I need to improve myself.

BOGDAN: Somehow, I mean, when I discover personal development, I had been doing martial arts for seven years. I started with this acrobatic style of martial arts and it was funny because the flyer said, “Learn karate, ninjutsu, judo, aikido…” and three or four other styles of martial arts and they were all taught by the same guy. And you can imagine the level of expertise. But he was good, he was a really good fighter. We ended up doing a lot of ground fighting, which was fun and a lot of flex, you know, a lot of acrobatic stuff. But I still don't know how to defend myself and I was so scared of the idea of confrontation, of physical confrontation, especially in the street.

And three years later, I switched to Shotokan karate and that's where I learned the values of working really, really hard. And reaching that point where you say, OK, I can’t do it anymore, I just need to go beyond that. And after three years of doing that, I felt a lot stronger. My posture changed, but I still felt very insecure. I still felt that my self-worth was close to nothing, I was still comparing myself to other people. And personal development came in the form of network marketing. A friend said, dude, you need to do this, you need to start doing this and I did it more for just having a side income, just to make a bit more money. Which did not happen of course. But I really got passionate about personal development when I started reading these books and these concepts, these ideas, really shaped me in the following years.

GEORGE: Interesting that you say that because network marketing was my stepping stone into the online business world.

BOGDAN: Really?

GEORGE: Yeah, that's what got me started. I know there are many perceptions about it: it’s a scam and it’s this and this, and there’s definitely a lot of that, and especially now that the bitcoin phase is happening and cryptocurrency, it really sticks out and it’s annoying. But I was part of the network marketing industry for a long time and what I find is – and this is what happens with a lot of people that get into that is, it is their first stepping stone into business. They normally try it, achieve a little success, or nothing, but it opens the mind to, Hang on – I can provide for myself, I can create this business. So it does leave a good groundwork for business skills, the start of business, being in business.

BOGDAN: Absolutely.

GEORGE: And then, of course, the personal development that goes with it.

BOGDAN: Absolutely, absolutely. And this whole idea of sitting down with someone and making an offer is hugely intimidating for a lot of people and yeah, you know, the problem was back then that I wasn't really aware of the fact that when you're making an offer, you shouldn't really be pushy. I was super pushy with people. But now we know better.

GEORGE: Cool, so let’s define, OK? I get to the personal development with martial arts. But let’s fill that gap in between that first. So you got into personal development – what exactly did you start doing that had the biggest impact on your life?

BOGDAN: From personal development or from martial arts?

GEORGE: Personal development, yeah. Because you were already in martial arts, right? So martial arts was there and your next thing was to start developing yourself, so how did that sort of transition I guess and then what did you actually do?

BOGDAN: To be honest, it actually started making more sense years later, because you're getting all these books, you're getting the information, but until you have also the experiences to use that information and consolidate them, it’s really not worth much. So I didn't see any kind of change in terms of my self-confidence, until I started teaching it, to be honest. And that's… it may sound weird to a lot of people, why do you teach stuff that you don't 100% own? Well, that was exactly the reason why, because I wanted to learn these concepts and own them, so I felt that by teaching them, it would really help me do that and it did. And that's when all of these concepts made sense. I’m still teaching stuff that I want to learn and master, or at least get better at it.

GEORGE: Yeah, for sure. Because that's the progression of life, right? I think it’s always important to pay credit where credit is due, there's nothing more frustrating or me when intellectual property just gets passed around like… you learn something and then you pass it on as your own, but I think for the most, people can see through that. But I mean, content creation like what we’re doing here with podcasts, a lot of that is actually educating yourself on the go. Sometimes it’s from experience, but as you say, the other part of it is, it’s something you want to be better at. So the minute you start articulating it into words, you actually start getting the better understanding of what it is that you do.

BOGDAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And a huge turning point in my life was actually learning… I started teaching, I started teaching Wing Chun. That was actually my third martial arts style, I discovered Wing Chun when I moved to Greece to study. And I got my instructor certificate and started teaching. And you probably know, like, working with your clients, the challenges of opening a school when you know nothing about marketing and you're handing out flyers and you're just dealing with all this frustration.

And I sat down with the person who would become my marketing mentor and he asked me about what I was doing. And I told him, look, we do teach martial arts, but we focus a lot on the mindset and on the tools that you can use to better your relationships, to actually have a better relationship with yourself. And he's like, yeah, but you're not just teaching martial arts, are you? You're also teaching personal development. And that was like, that actually makes so much sense. So he was like, why don't you just be open with that in your marketing efforts? And yeah, that made a huge difference. I just put myself out there the way I was and the way that I wanted to help people out.

GEORGE: So can you give an example? I mean, if you're doing a personal development within your martial arts teaching, how do you go about that?

BOGDAN: Mhm. Well, usually we have 5-10 minute discussions every training session. And what I've learned to do now is to allow everyone to speak and I speak at the end. I offer my opinion at the end. And then I ask them, what concepts did you use, or did you find in the Wing Chun training today? What idea is it that you feel you can apply in your life directly? Wing Chun is interesting, because it’s not a technique based on martial art, in the sense of, OK, you do step one, you do step two and you do step three. It’s based on ideas; it’s based on concepts.

So in Wing Chun, we say that you can do an idea with your hand, you can do the same idea with a stick, you can do it with your car, you can apply it in your life, in terms of your relationships, in terms of your work, in terms of business development. One example would be, we use the straight punch, right? When we do the first film, we do a straight punch. For us, it’s not just a straight punch, it’s a way of thinking. Instead of going around, right, to get to my target, I choose the fastest way, all right?

Sometimes the straight line is not always the best solution, sometimes you do need to go around, right? But if you can go straight to the point, just do that, right? So you're learning to be a bit more direct, you're learning to be more assertive with your way of thinking and with who you are as a person. So we normally do that, I get my students thinking of how they can apply these ideas, these concepts to better, not just their lives, but also to share them with other people.

So that's how we basically include the whole personal development. And then in the end, I share some of the stuff that I've learned, some of the books that I've read, the videos that I post on my YouTube channel, there's, the Wing Chun, the specific way we focused on the martial arts and there is the mindset and personal development aspect of the channel.

GEORGE: So if you say you're sharing the same stuff on your social media channels and so forth, is that sort of your leading theme as everything… you tie it in with your marketing, you tie it in with the whole concept of how you deliver everything. Would you promote yourself as a martial arts school or a martial arts school focused on personal development, or vice versa?

BOGDAN: Personal Development Through Martial Arts school.

GEORGE: Right, of course – as you wrote it. So now, bringing it back to… in the class, you say you get people really involved: do you find that it creates some discomfort, or that it presents some confidence issues, I've really got to step this up, that type of thing?

BOGDAN: Are you asking for the students or for the instructors?

GEORGE: The student.

BOGDAN: For the student? Mhm, mhm, that's a great question. Well, they kind of expect it in the sense when they walk in because it’s a whole new concept. So they would expect something a bit different from a traditional martial arts training program, so the people that usually come to the school, actually, they do feel a bit uncomfortable at the beginning, sharing their experiences and talking with the group. But slowly, slowly… the school is very welcoming to new people. So slowly but surely, they get out of a state of a, What should I say, or What if I say something silly. And we just start having a conversation. Usually everyone in the group contributes, says something.

GEORGE: Cool, something silly like swapping martial arts for personal development, instead of personal development for martial arts.

BOGDAN: Yeah, yeah, that's it.

GEORGE: Alright, awesome. Ok, cool, so anything else that you can add with the personal development side and how it’s sort of working for you and I guess results that the students are getting that they might have not expected. You know, the whole thing of, sell them what they want and give them what they need.

BOGDAN: Indeed, mhm.

GEORGE: There we go.

BOGDAN: Well, I personally think that all martial arts schools should include a personal development curriculum in their teachings, in their training. And if you love martial arts and you don't know where to start, a great aspect would be just to have a personal development specialist come once in a while in your school and holds an event, holds a workshop. Maybe somebody who specializes in communication skills, somebody who specializes in performance and productivity. Somebody who specializes in psychology, or something like that right? Or motivation.

I feel that martial arts are like when you're doing martial arts, you're really building a very, very powerful engine, upgrading your engine from, I don't know, an old car with a very powerful Ferrari. And I'm referring to your willpower, you’re really tapping into that, you know, I'm actually stronger than I thought and I can actually take on more than I thought. You're learning hard work.

However, you're not really learning what to do with that engine once you've got it. So by learning about personal development and what are the actual techniques, or how to communicate a lot better or more efficiently with people, you're getting the best of both. The problem with just doing personal development, for example, is that you're just doing it, or you're keeping it in your head. Imagine just reading books or doing courses or attending seminars – that's great, that information eventually trickles down into your body. However, if you do a concept with your body and you're not just repeating it over and over again; you do it and you integrate it into every cell of your body, that's totally different.

For example, confidence: you might learn about confidence, you might hear a very inspirational YouTube video about believing in yourself, but unless you do something with your body and change the way you use it, change the way you use your hands, change the way you use your spine, and the way you use your face, right? He's not really going to understand it.

So, in my crazy opinion, I think all personal development programs should include a physical aspect, more of a physical aspect, be it martial arts, be it fitness, be it, Tai Chi, be it, you know I'm saying that as if Tai Chi were not a martial art – sorry all the Tai Chi instructors listening in. Yeah, so, at the same time, all martial arts programs I think would benefit very much from including a personal development program. And yeah.

GEORGE: I think you hit it there in a huge way because that's really what it is, right? And I mean, you've got your different learning styles, you've got someone might be visual, someone might be auditory and then kinesthetic. So the movements, when you tie it into martial arts, then you're tapping into all the senses. So by turning your, and it could be really subtle, but I guess you've got to have, as an instructor, you've got to have that personal development goal in mind, or a syllabus or something that you follow with that in mind. And then you can apply it in a way that it sinks in and it really becomes part of your body. Body really, as in, yeah.

BOGDAN: Yes, yes.

GEORGE: And I think that's probably, that's the biggest failure in most personal development things, because as you talk about, I think it’s Tony Robbins that actually drew out the statistic, that if – and this is why they've got it, I mean, he's really the guru of gurus when it comes to personal development and they've also got the process down to knowing, obviously when people fall off in their behaviors and when they don't follow through. There's a statistic, and don't quote me on this because I might get it wrong, but I think it’s 21 days, if someone doesn't take action, enforce the habit in 21 days, it’s pretty much gone. And then I think it takes 21 days to actually enforce a habit of day to day before it’s an actual habit. But that's the biggest danger, if it’s not physically applied, then the habit is just easy to let go.

BOGDAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually the biggest job of any personal development seminar, workshop or whatever you say. You do it once – if you just do it once, you're never going to integrate all the lessons that you got, right? You might have a notebook full of facts and ideas, but if you just put it somewhere and forget about it in your drawer, it’s not going to work. And I'm saying that to remind myself as well because I attend UBW two years ago, I still have the notebook. But if you don't have the environment, if you don't have a group of people who are all together striving for the same goal, or reinforcing those specific habits, it’s going to be very difficult for you to do so.

GEORGE: So for me when I started martial arts – and this was really like, if I dig down to the deeper things of why I started, this was a big thing, because I've always been striving for that self-improvement thing, doing personal development and then, for me it was really backwards. When I started martial arts training, I immediately made the link, which is what hooked me, because I've been studying, doing all this personal development stuff and now I'm applying things in a physical manner, and now it’s like aaa! This is great, this is coming together for me.

BOGDAN: Yes, yes.

GEORGE: But what happens when the mind is not ready? Because a lot of people aren't open to personal development. Do you just not hammer it in, but you just subtly actually apply it in the way you go about your teaching?

BOGDAN: You know, usually, the people who say that they don't need personal development are the people who need it the most. So I tend not to work with people who don't see the value of personal development. I did that in the past and it just felt weird for me, because I felt I couldn't give my all in the interactions with my students and I actually chose to say, you know, maybe this is not a good fit and let’s find a different solution.

So yeah, not everybody will need or want what you have and that's great, but the people who do see the value, you tend to see like a very, very interesting evolution. Not just in terms of their self-confidence, you see it in your lives, yeah. Yeah, some people became… Since they started training with us, they became their team leaders, they got promoted at their jobs, people are making more money. People who were not in relationships actually, they're happily married now. People who were in miserable relationships have cleaned that out of their lives, so these are some of the results that people are getting through the program.

GEORGE: So would you, you were mentioning that you don’t work with people that aren't on that mindset, that don't want to go down that route, which is obviously a good thing, saves you a lot of time down the line – how do you go about filtering people out before they get started?

BOGDAN: So people usually fill in a form. It’s a pretty long form, it’s like a 12 question form. And they're very personal, very deep questions, like, what do you need and why do you need that? What's holding you back? What would your life look like if you keep doing the same things that you’re doing and that's a filtering process in itself? And people go through this form and then we call them up for a phone interview. If we feel that they're a good fit and we do and we can help them out, we schedule them for a trial period for a week, where they can see the whole training sessions, we can get to meet them. And then, at the end of the trial period, we decide if we want to take that person on and work together.

GEORGE: So I'm going to put you on the spot.

BOGDAN: Mhm?

GEORGE: Which means I might have to end this podcast. If you're still listening, then… Bogdan said yes. So are we able to take your questions and actually include them in this podcast? As part of a download, with the transcription?

BOGDAN: You could, but I would have to translate them into English. It’s not a secret or anything, you can find this process anywhere. You can use this process for selling very high tech procedures as well or programs as well, it’s the same thing. Yeah, yeah, sure, you can include it as a PDF.

GEORGE: Awesome. And if you are listening to this and you are not focused on personal development, the reason I want you to have something like this is because, whether personal development or not, if you tap into your persons’ real – let’s take the martial arts out of it, we've talked about this. Martial arts is the vehicle to get them where they want.

BOGDAN: Yes.

GEORGE: You're not selling the martial arts training; you're selling the result that martial arts deliver.

BOGDAN: Yes.

GEORGE: So if your questions are provoking their thoughts of understanding what people really want, even if personal development is not your focus at all, but understanding what the real motives are for what this person wants to achieve, could be something that you could use in your own school and really benefit from the way you go about customizing your presentation, or your introduction. Because if you talk about a person's’ needs, then they're going to be more likely to respond than the logistics of, “We have a class Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday – 20 pushups, 30 push ups, fitness…

BOGDAN: Yeah. Most people go about this the wrong way, in the sense, they start talking about themselves. Oh boy, you know, our school is the only one that teaches breaking bricks and my teacher was the world champion in China – nobody cares. If you start focusing on your potential clients, or just the people who are interested in what you're doing and you're talking about what they need and really being honest whether you can help them or not in that sense. And if you cannot help them, to recommend something else, or someone else.

For example, I remember someone filling in the form and saying, I need help with my money, with my financials, because I can't find a job. I got on the phone with that person and recommended someone who teaches personal finance. I recommended finding a mentor because I can’t help them. It wasn't the right time, and this is also important: if somebody can't really afford your program, don't give it to them. All right? Give them the tools that they need to be better off, but don't push to sell if it’s not the right time.

GEORGE: For sure. But I guess there's a flipside to that as well, right? Because sometimes – and obviously, what I'm about to say depends on the context of when this happens, if you’ve gone out of your way and you presented something to them and they can't afford it – by all means, at that level, yeah. Don't push the sale.

BOGDAN: Mhm, mhm.

GEORGE: But I think it’s important to not confuse that with the smokescreen of, “I can't afford this.”

BOGDAN: Ah, yes.

GEORGE: Because it’s very surprising what people could afford when you tell them that this is going to deliver the result that they want.

BOGDAN: Yes.

GEORGE: People make changes. People cancel stuff, they'll cancel their satellite networks or whatever they need, and if something is going to give them the result and the confidence and change everything about them, they will afford it.

BOGDAN: They'll find a way.

GEORGE: They find a way, yes.

BOGDAN: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I feel that people tend to say that, “I can't afford it,” when you're talking too much about your school and about Wing Chun and you're like, you're being pushy again. But if they fill in the form and they're looking for you and you're taking them through this filtering process, just like you would for a job interview, they're already qualified, right? So they kind of expect to invest in themselves in that way.

GEORGE: Good point. And it takes me back to olden days’ sales training. I can see now how hard it might be for a martial arts school if you started a martial arts school and you haven't been in that type of training of sales training. When people say, when people tell you they can't afford stuff, it’s easy to just accept that as true. But what we’re always taught in sales is that it’s more than likely just a smokescreen.

BOGDAN: Yeah.

GEORGE: I mean, if they're engaging, if they're actually in your school, talking about martial arts and they tell you they can't afford it, then what were they doing there in the first place? I mean, they knew it was going to cost them money, they knew it was not going to be free. So I think it’s the hardest part of communication is, I guess looking in the mirror, and I know I'm going a bit off topic, but I think it adds context to what we're talking about.

If you're having that conversation – and that's something that everybody tells you, then maybe, unfortunately, you've got to be able to look in the mirror. And it’s the hardest thing to do, you've got to look at, what is it that you're saying that is causing that? Because you're missing a point here maybe, like what you were saying, you're talking too much about yourself and you're not focused on what their actual needs are.

BOGDAN: Yes, yes, absolutely agree on that. I think we’re very conflicted as martial arts teachers in this aspect of charging what we’re worth and what most people teaching martial arts don't realize are that the same person that says, ‘I can't afford you, pays a therapist more than they will ever pay you for therapy. But you need to realize that you're not just teaching martial arts; you're giving people a chance to live healthier and happier. Why should somebody who is helping them cure the problem be paid more than you who are helping them prevent the problem, right?

So I'm not saying, OK, raise your glasses so that nobody will come to your school anymore, but just be aware of the value that you're really giving. You're not teaching people to punch other people in the face, like less than 1% of the people that you teach will get into an actual fight. You're teaching people to know themselves. By knowing themselves, they learn to say yes to more of what makes them happy and say no to what doesn’t make them happy and doesn't bring more of that satisfaction in their lives. So you're cancelling their medical bills, you're cancelling their psychotherapy pills and you know, you're just helping them thrive.

GEORGE: Definitely so. Hey Bogdan, this has been a very insightful conversation. I want to ask you, if you're new to this personal development thing, I mean, I probably have a few preferences myself, but for you as a martial arts instructor and you run a school and you do this: if I want to get into personal development, what do you think is the best place to start?

BOGDAN: Well the internet! The internet, it’s full of personal development quotes…

GEORGE: Facebook?

BOGDAN: Videos… Facebook, yeah, as well. The problem that internet, the advantage of the internet is the huge quantity of information. The disadvantage is the huge quantity of information. So whatever we recommend, if you're teaching martial arts and you want to tap into personal development, it’s actually to start listening to the Personal Development Through Martial Arts podcast. There you go. There's a plug for you.

GEORGE: Yeah!

BOGDAN: And absolutely, go ahead and check the interview with George. We talked a lot about marketing and growing your school, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah, I basically recommend the podcast, because we’re having very, very powerful inspiration from people who are experts in this field of fitness, personal development, communication. I’m interviewing Florin who is a personal finance expert who teaches that. And also, of course, martial arts masters that you can learn and get insights from. Yeah.

GEORGE: Fantastic. And so, your podcast is for direct access, that's addicted2wingchun.com.

BOGDAN: I think the best would be just to Google Personal Development through Martial Arts podcast. You can find it on iTunes for now, Google play is not available in Romania yet, but I'm still looking into that and making it available on Google play as well. But yeah, the fastest way would be just to Google the title.

GEORGE: Sounds good. Bogdan – it’s been great speaking to you, and I'm going to round this up with one last question.

BOGDAN: Sure.

GEORGE: And that is, what is the one biggest reason that I would want to come and visit Romania?

BOGDAN: Uh, well, to come to our school. That would be the number one! Romania is awesome. You know, we’re very welcoming people. I think that if you came to Romania you would immediately feel like you're at home. And the people, the people, 100%. And you know, you can check out the mountains as well, the sea, there's a lot of stuff to do and a lot of fun, but 100% the people.

GEORGE: And your school, of course.

BOGDAN: And my school.

GEORGE: That's a given!

BOGDAN: Awesome.

GEORGE: Awesome. Bogdan, thanks, thanks again. Great chatting with you and it was great being featured on your Personal Development podcast as well. Personal Development for Martial Arts and I look forward to catching up again soon.

BOGDAN: Awesome, thank you so much for the invitation guys, thanks so much for listening in.

GEORGE: Awesome – cheers!

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

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54 – Damien Martin – Risk Management Planning in Martial Arts

February 10, 2018 by George Fourie

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.

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 student up and you get sued.

And that's certainly an element of that but other risk factors that people don't tend to take into account in our industry is a risk to reputation. And I'm not just talking about social media and how many reviews you get and all those sorts of things. But, for example, if there's an accusation made of inappropriate behavior within your school that goes to the media, your school is destroyed.

Whether that allegation is baseless or based in fact. There are several instances in the recent past where similar things have happened to people in the entertainment industry who were later exonerated but they've lost their job, they've lost their marriage, they've lost their reputation. Now can't work in the industry based on, you know, false accusations.

And to be sure, there have been instances in the past where the accusations have not been baseless. And schools have been found and reported to be lacking in the recent Royal Commission into Child Abuse in Institutions where abuse happened within organizations and yet there was no child protection policy, there was no policy of checking when working with children or any of those sorts of things.

So those are some of the other issues. Then you've got your risks related to untruthful advertising and prosecution from the ACCC or Fair Trading in individual states. Like, for example, I've seen schools claim that they can cure autism. That's a pretty big claim and that is one that is likely to result in negative media attention. That negative media attention can destroy your own school but it can also negatively impact all of the other schools in the industry.

GEORGE: Okay. So, I mean, because I haven't really seen anything big in the media. Is this something that's sort of it's covered up before it sort of blows up type of thing? Or are there things going on in the underground that are just it's going to cause some obstacles and problems down the line?

DAMIEN: Sometimes things don't come to public light because there's out of court settlements with gag orders attached. So things like defamation or if someone sues for something. If there's a pre-trial settlement, the details are not made public.

Whereas if it goes to trial, the details can be found, for example, on the AustLII website, which is the Australian Law Library Index which catalogs all of the various cases that have gone to trial and come to a conclusion.

What insurance companies will often do is settle out of court. So if they settle out of court, that's usually based on there's a confidentiality agreement that you, you know, can't say what happened or what the accusation was or those sorts of things. You just take your money and shut up.

If you look at the AustLII library for things in relation to martial arts, there's a lot of disputes over contracts, there's a lot of disputes over trademarks. But a lot of stuff doesn't make public light that way. The other way that it can become public is if it goes to criminal trial. So like an instructor has perhaps, as has happened in a number of cases over the years, sexually assaulted students.

Other ways it happens is if it ends up on A Current Affair, and I can think of a couple of big instances over the last few years. One, in fact, in Melbourne actually led to a change in legislation relating to knives and martial arts weapons. A Current Affair ran a big story. It was a beat-up about a particular school and the particular instructor who focused particularly on knife fighting. And the next thing you know, the Victorian Government has changed the legislation based on that particular story.

The White Paper that was released on that, rather than a regulatory impact statement, gave the specifics of why the legislation came into being and how that was influenced by certain members of the industry who perhaps overstepped their authority to represent.

GEORGE: So where does the problem really start? You know, 'cause I guess the first thing I always … Like when I stepped into helping martial arts school owners with the marketing and so forth, I guess a big attraction to me was the ethical side of it. You know, like if this is what you practice as in an art, then I'd assume that's the way you live your life as well. Which I'm kind of shocked to see sometimes is completely not the case. But-

DAMIEN: Yeah. And I found that there's a direct relationship between the number of times an instructor mentions ethics and the amount of ethics they actually demonstrate themselves. Particularly some of the instructors I've met and worked with over the last sort of 35 years. There's been a lot of them go on and on and on about concepts like Bushido and loyalty and honor and justice and courage and these sorts of things, and yet that's lacking in their own lives in every way, shape or form.

They use the martial arts to feed their own egos. Now, there's a lot of those but it's a huge industry. I mean, the martial arts industry in Australia, nobody can really put a finger on how big it is. The Australia Bureau of Statistics varies, depending on which question is asked. And the Australian Sports Commission only looks at sporting bodies. It doesn't cover all of those martial arts organizations, some of which are quite large, that don't participate in Australian Sports Commission approved sporting activities.

So, you know, if you're not doing sport taekwondo or sport karate or sport jujitsu or sport judo, if you're doing recreational karate in a school hall somewhere, you're not in the figures. So, you know, no one really knows how big the industry is.

So it's broken up. Some people are really, really good. Some people are really, really bad and they tend to color it for the good people. But most people are just pretty much happy amateurs stumbling along, not deliberately meaning to injure anybody or cause anybody any grief. But they do so out of ignorance.

Martial artists tend to be quite credulous so they believe what their teacher told them without fact-checking and those sorts of things as a general rule. So if someone's teacher told them that a particular technique is invincible, then they've got no reason to check. That is the way a lot of people think.

Likewise, you know, I had a person who ran in the 1970s a large martial arts organization in Australia, probably the largest for about 20 years in this country, tell me that direct debit would never work because nobody would give you their bank account details. He was talking from a position of ignorance rather than being a professional business owner in the 21st century. That level of credulity, it just is a problem.

GEORGE: All right. So even if your instructor does these, what is it, these, what's it, yellow bamboo? I think it's called yellow bamboo. You must have seen that video. I think it's yellow bamboo, yeah.

DAMIEN: Yeah. Look, there's an awful lot of martial arts schools out there where the instructor's built up this reputation for being awesome at what they do because they only ever do it against non-resisting students. The real world is a different thing altogether.

So if they're not constantly testing the techniques against a resisting opponent, which is not the same thing as sparring. Sparring is, generally speaking, quite well-mannered and predictable. If they're not constantly pressure testing through scenarios and those sorts of things, or even combat sports application, then any claim that a technique is invincible is probably not true.

There are no absolutes. You know, martial arts instructors often tell their students, you know, if someone pulls a knife you run away. But you can't always run away and what if you can't run as good as the other guy? Again, the absolute of just run away is not true in all of that. You know, you can't always run away.

GEORGE: Yeah. So, I mean, what's the solution here? Because, I mean, if we look at the sort of evolution of this path, right? So let's say I'm an instructor and I'm training martial arts and I get this urge that I've got to create a school. You know, maybe it starts in my backyard and I get a few students, and then that sort of, you know, builds on itself. And then I'm like, “All right, I've got to get into premises.”

So where's the big gap and how do you fix the gap of where all these problems occur with risk management?

DAMIEN: Well, the same thing happens in a lot of other industries. You know, you get a lot of people, like they might be a very good craftsman at what they do. They might be a very good carpenter. They make wonderful chairs and tables and their things are well sought after. So they go out and they start and they set up a little shop, a little factory, to try and sell their wares.

That shop might not be zoned correctly. So they might set it up, you know, in an area where it's too noisy and finds themselves in trouble with the council. So martial arts schools, same sort of thing. They might not be insured for manufacturing things. Somebody sits on one of the chairs or does something with one of the chairs that they've built and it causes an injury, they might suddenly find that they needed insurance.

You know, it's no different really with the martial arts sector except that the martial arts sector is selling services based on, in a lot of cases, fantasy from what people have seen on TV. So there is no central body. Various countries and organizations have tried over the years, from the Dai Nippon Butokukai back in Japan pre-war and post war trying to coordinate all Japanese martial arts. That didn't work.

The Japan Karate Federation, the World Karate Federation. There have been so many organizations over the years try and bring all martial artists together, but martial artists are as diverse as language groups and cultures. You know, it's like saying that everybody's the same. And they're not. The martial arts themselves are not homogenous. They're very diverse.

People practice martial arts for different reasons. Some people want self-defense, or they think they do. Some want to get fit. Some for cultural reasons. Some do it because their friends do it. There's no one reason why people do martial arts.

So, you know, we're not all covered by the sporting bodies, for example. We're not all covered by international organizations and bodies because of the politics that are associated with those. It's a hugely diverse industry. And that's one of its strengths but it's also its biggest weakness.

GEORGE: So let's say I was a school owner and I'm not covered in any way. What do you think are the first steps that need to happen?

DAMIEN: Usually Google to start with, and do a basic business plan. You know, most small businesses fail in the first five years. They fail 'cause they fail to plan. You need to do a basic business plan. That basic business plan will ask the questions that you need to look at and address in relation to planning, zoning, insurance, accounting.

Like, you know, what's the best business structure for you? Are you going to be a sole trader, are you going to be part of a club or an incorporated not-for-profit association? Are you going to be a company? Is a family trust required? You know, you need advice from experts in the martial arts and the martial arts business sector, like you do in any business sector.

So I'd start with Google and a business plan. The business plan will set you on the right track for asking those questions.

GEORGE: Sounds good. So let's just touch on advertising. And I actually want to, you mentioned Japan and I know you've done some extensive traveling there the last couple of months. But let's talk about advertising because, you know, you mentioned that there's misleading advertising. And right now, at the time of recording this, there's a big shuffle on Facebook. A big change in structure in valuing more one-to-one interaction, valuing more local news.

So there's a lot of changes happening. And the first thing that marketers always do is they shut. Do they? This is the end? And marketers destroy everything. It's normally marketing becoming easier and people pushing boundaries, doing advertising and just it's becoming too easy. And because it becomes too easy there's not enough control.

And, I mean, I've seen this over the years in different platforms. Google being number one, known as the Big Google Slap where everybody lost all their AdWords accounts. Search engines being slapped. I mean, it's just a trend. It's a trend of the platform gets popular, there are eyeballs. Too many advertisers come onto the platform, make silly errors, it devalues the actual platform. And because the platform gets devalued, peoples' eyeballs go elsewhere and they've got to protect what they obviously own. Like with Facebook and such.

So, I mean, that's the things I'm seeing like in what's relevant right now with advertising, is there's a big cleanup happening. And I would suspect that if a lot of school owners had to lose their Facebook accounts, which happens, ad accounts get suspended on a day-to-day basis, their business will go with it. Because that's their one lead generation source. So your take on advertising and being within the boundaries?

DAMIEN: 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.

To have all of your eggs in the Facebook market or the Facebook basket, so to speak, is a bit short sighted. You need to have those other methods out there. You've still got things like referrals, signage, people just knowing where you are. You know, there's a lot of other methods.

Some things don't work anymore. Yellow Pages, for example, doesn't work for us at all. Because we test and measure just about everything. Flyers in the letterbox don't work anymore. Again, we know that because we test and measure. We used to do the first four weeks of every year we'd do 10,000 flyers a week around our local area and then watch the associated web hits go up as people type in the web address and looked at our website and everything. That just stopped. It's not like it dwindled. It's one year it worked, the next year it did not. Or the year after.

So if we were putting all of our eggs in that particular basket, that would have been disastrous for us as an organization. You've just got to be somewhat diversified while staying on trend for the more current ways that people shop and think. You know, maybe Instagram will work for you in your area. Maybe it won't. Maybe Facebook is good in your area. Maybe it's not. Maybe Google AdWords works better.

Maybe you're in a country town and the newspaper advertising still works. You know, there's a lot of variables. You've got to know your own marketplace, your own client base and who comes to your school and who buys your services. A lot of people don't. They try and take a cookie-cutter approach. And, you know, for years everyone was buying their ads from organizations in America. MASuccess, those sorts of things.

And one thing I found early on in the '90s was that if there's an American flag on a uniform in an ad, that ad doesn't work in Australia. It might work in America but it doesn't work here. So you learn what your individual market requirements are and you've always got to be testing and measuring.

GEORGE: Yeah, so true. I mean, we've seen that with the same franchise, same marketing, same everything. Two different locations, two different results. Everything the same. And, you know, we always talk about, in my presentation I talk about five levels of awareness. I call it The Five Stages of the Student’s Signup Cycle. You know, there's your marketing but there's always the message that was received before and leading up to actually seeing your marketing. And that's going to also affect the actual response at the end of the day.

So, Damien, tell me about Japan. Tell me about your trip. Just to change gears here. Tell me about your trip to Japan and what did you get out of that experience?

DAMIEN: Well, we go to Okinawa, which obviously is part of Japan, every year to train with our Goju Sensei and with our Kobudo Sensei. Two different organizations but closely related. We just love the place, we love the people, we love the training. And we like, or I particularly like, those lightbulb moments that you get where practices within the martial arts that are remnants of where it came from, suddenly their purpose becomes apparent.

So, for example, a lot of the stories and things that are passed down, in martial arts schools in Australia at least, come from publications from the 1960s that were written by people that actually had very limited exposure to what they were writing about.

So these stories took on a life of their own. So there was, you know, the old Okinawan practice, for example, of practicing their training or their martial arts at the tombs of their family. So family tombs are a big thing in Okinawa and it was an even bigger thing pre-World War II.

And the theory was that they were, you know, spiritually connecting with their ancestors and all those sorts of things. And when we spoke to the Okinawans about it, apart from the sort of raised eyebrows to work out whether we were taking the piss, it was, “Well, the grass is cut short there. There are no snakes.” Everywhere else you could get bitten by a snake. And it's like, “Oh, that's very pragmatic.”

There's a lot of those sorts of things and, being a bit of a karate nerd and amateur historian, I really appreciate those moments. But the people are the main thing.

GEORGE: The people. So what are the sort of key things that you learn that you come back and you take a different approach in your school?

DAMIEN: Well, our journey with the Okinawan karate deal, like I was doing Zen Do Kai up until 2008. But in 1999 I started with Okinawan Goju as well. And my idea was to refine the Kata. Make them better, make them more practical, make them more understandable. Because if we've been doing this particular template of movements for the last 100, 150 years, it must have had a purpose.

So trying to find the purpose, trying to find the applications, was what sort of drove me down that path. So this year, on the way to Okinawa, we also went to China. To Fuzhou, which is where Kanryo Higashionna, who was Chōjun Miyagi, the founder of Goju's teacher, trained. And we found the or had found through a couple of years of research, the school where he trained.

And we wanted to go there and see what they were doing and why they were doing it, and how closely related it was to what we were doing. And I was pleasantly surprised that what they were doing was not that far removed from what we were doing. Some of it looked different but the applications were the same. The hip movement, the arm movement, the actual applications in different forms was the same.

Which for me, as a martial arts teacher, was good. I quite enjoyed that connection. So we're still fact-checking some of the things that they told us and we'll hopefully be publishing some information. It's a little bit of a historical addition, if you will, to the current sort of communal knowledge on origins of karate in Okinawa and the origins of Goju-Ryu in particular.

GEORGE: It sounds like you have a book coming out.

DAMIEN: I wouldn't say a book. Maybe a couple of articles but, I don't know, I don't think it's exciting enough for most people to justify the costs of publishing.

GEORGE: I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

DAMIEN: Well, based on the reaction I've had from some quarters on the Blitz article that was done about this for the December/January issue, what I found is by saying certain things it challenges people's beliefs to the core. And people's beliefs about their martial arts is very akin to people's beliefs about their religion. So we need to make sure that all our ducks are in a row.

GEORGE: Yeah. Yeah, I could see it opening a big can of worms. Yeah, especially if you touch on things, like you mentioned, with the tombstones and just things that people base their entire martial arts career upon, and now it sort of gets challenged. Yeah.

DAMIEN: Yeah, I think the Kung Fu TV series in the 1970s and then, you know, the later, the Ninja phase and all of those things that have been trends through the martial arts over the years have all left their little remnants in popular culture and the way people perceive martial arts and what they can be.

You know, like there's this common perception that karate is an antique and is not street effective. And if you're not doing Krav Maga then, you know, you're not doing the right thing. Or even in the MMA circles. But the core of a lot of Krav Maga technique came from karate. Krav Maga is a mixed martial art or a hybrid martial art. It forgets where some of its core techniques come from.

The MMA people that talk about, you know, the dominance of MMA fighters or this, that and the other forget that guys like Georges St-Pierre or Lyoto Machida and those guys were karate practitioners primarily. You know, everything has its place. So it's just another trend.

GEORGE: Yeah, so how do you … I mean, let's say I'm a prospect and I walk into Southern Cross Martial Arts and that's my thinking. My thinking is I've come from, you know, I'm looking at UFC and I've got this certain perception and that's sort of what I see as what I want. Or maybe what I don't want. How do you have that conversation?

DAMIEN: As much as possible, we put them on the floor and they start to train. And it's more about feeling and moving than it is about talking. The only way to change people's perceptions is to show them. You can tell them till you're blue in the face but people are so used to marketers lying to them now that they don't believe you.

So we get 'em on the floor and show them why we do what we do. We don't beat anybody up or anything like that, don't get me wrong. But get them on the floor to train, to feel their body moving and take it from there. And, look, what we do is not for everybody. Some people, some younger people want to spar more, for example. I did when I was in my 20s.

Now we're fully cognizant of the fact that people have jobs to go to and an income to make. They don't all want to live like, you know, karate hobos like we did with broken bits and pieces all the time. It's a different world. And we know more as well.

GEORGE: Awesome. Damien, I'm going to ask you one more question and now that I think of it, this could actually probably spur on a whole different episode, as such. But you mentioned that you work with kids with autism.

DAMIEN: Yep.

GEORGE: Now, this could probably be a much longer conversation but I just wanted to touch on it. What advice would you have for people that work with kids with autism or special needs?

DAMIEN: Well, we have a saying in the world of those that work with kids with autism. Basically, once you've met one autistic kid you've met one autistic kid. Meaning basically that they're all different. While there are stereotypical behaviors, each child is different, is motivated differently, works differently, mentally, physically, and so on.

But don't make assumptions and don't jump into conclusions. And the first thing that people need to do is get educated. There's plenty of programs out there on what autism actually is. Don't rely on memes that you read on Facebook. And actually, to be blunt, get a clue.

There's a lot of people now claiming that they specialize in teaching autistic kids. And we pick up the pieces. Yelling at them, screaming at them. You know, it's ridiculous what some people are doing. And it's, “Oh, this is the tradition.” Really? You know, it's not.

GEORGE: You mean, I can't believe all the memes I see on Facebook?

DAMIEN: No. Facebook is a wonderful way of connecting the world and so on, but it can also do so much harm. And some of these memes that are floating around. You know, like there's a correlation being found between gut flora and autism. Now, correlation does not indicate causation. All right, it's just something that they need to investigate further.

But you've got people out there that are advocating parents with autistic children get them to drink bleach, for example, because it'll kill the bad microbes and so. And it's horrendously harmful. But if you've worked with some of the parents that are so desperate to help their child, some of them try it. Based on some crap they see on the internet. It just…

So, yeah, I've seen martial arts schools advertise that they can cure autism. If that's not a potential A Current Affair episode, I don't know what is. You know, martial arts is good for children on the spectrum if they're working with caring and educated instructors. Because it has its consistency. Things are done pretty much the same way each class, as in your warm ups and those sorts of things. There's a predictability about it that makes them feel comfortable.

And we've had some amazing successes with some of our autistic kids. With one of our junior black belts now, he's 12, he's been with us for eight years. You know, his whole persona has changed based on the lessons that he's learned for dealing with other people. Just out of counting out loud in class and things like that.

GEORGE: Fascinating.

DAMIEN: Yeah, so I'd say that my main advice would be to get educated and get a clue rather than getting your education by getting on, say, Facebook. And I see this on a daily basis, and I've started deleting these groups. But they'll get on a martial arts business group, for example, and say I've got an autistic kid who's just joined my class. What do I do? And you'll get all of this stuff. It will be regurgitated by people.

And it all tends to be very stereotypical. It doesn't take into account that every autistic child is just as much an individual or unique as every other child that we teach. So, you know, we need to get to know them. A lot of kids with the autism spectrum have sensory processing disorders. So the idea of kiai, or kiai-ing in class, if that child is sensitive to noise, is going to be a major barrier.

Or they might have sensory processing issues with things touching their head. So if you wear helmets in class for sparring, that might be the issue and you need to work a way around that. There are so many different things.

GEORGE: Well, yeah, it seems like really putting aside everything, your practice and your tradition of what you do, and really customizing it to what's going to be the obstacles with this child and really playing a real close ear on the ground.

DAMIEN: Yeah.

GEORGE: I mean, a close ear on the ground to really understand what their needs and what their obstacles are in how this tradition is going to affect them.

DAMIEN: Yeah. And it's not a matter of lowering your standards. It's a matter of lowering your time expectations and having more patience. But just because somebody processes information in a different way doesn't mean that they can't do a front kick the same way as everybody else. It just might take them a slightly different way to get to that point.

There's just so many variables. And we've built up somewhat of an unexpected expertise with autism. It wasn't our goal. And we've spoken to our parents on a number of occasions. Do they want separate classes for the kids on the spectrum? And the overwhelming answer is no because they need to learn to deal with regular people.

GEORGE: Definitely.

DAMIEN: So by segregating all the autistic kids into the one class, all they get to deal with is other autistic people. And to be quite honest, most autistic people don't want that.

GEORGE: Yeah. That's awesome. Damien, that can probably spark a whole new episode. And I'm happy to have you on again if anyone's got questions about that. I know, you know, for I always mention this in our Martial Arts Media Academy program. You've just got to be so careful where you get advice from. It's easier, you know, Facebook has made it easier for everybody to connect but some people should not have an opinion verbally.

It's just a fact. You know, I mean, and Joe Rogan actually says it the best. You know, if you get a million people, there's going to be a hundred thousand assholes that don't know what's going on. Out of every hundred thousand or thousand? And those are mostly the most vocal ones. So it's very easy to just take advice because every comment looks equal. But you don't know the background of that person, what they've done, their ethics, their education. So, yeah, you've got to be so careful.

DAMIEN: One of the ones that comes up regularly is the link between … No, actually I'm going to rephrase that because there is no link. But the purported link between autism and vaccinations. Now, the doctor, who's no longer a doctor because he lost his medical license, who did that study had a financial interest in another vaccination. He fabricated a report and a link to no evidence whatsoever so that he could sell his vaccination.

Now, he got caught and it was all redacted and the Lancet redacted the report and so on. But that myth, since then, since Wakefield's report, has perpetuated itself and the internet is making it worse and worse and worse and worse to the point where diseases like a polio and whooping cough and so on are making a comeback. They were all but eradicated. Because people don't want their children to catch autism. It's not something that you catch.

But there are some good organizations out there that are doing training. I'm doing a presentation, or my wife and I are doing a presentation, for the Titan's event in May on working with kids on the spectrum and would just like to get more information out there so that people are not traumatizing these kids with something that should be profoundly helpful.

GEORGE: Fascinating. Awesome stuff. For anybody, there's a … And, you know, just we'll close, probably close it off here, but there's a book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, by Ryan Holiday. If you ever want a true perspective of how media can get manipulated, he was a self-confessed media manipulator. His job was to plant rumors, spread them, create the media behind it. There would be rallies.

Until they saw the consequences of people dying because of fake news spreading in such a way that the consequences kick in. It's a brilliant read, just to get a perspective of don't get all your information from a Facebook post. Because that article was probably written with intent or paid by someone to write. And they did their own research with whatever they could find, and they wrote it and put it together. And it creates a perception where the intent was really just to disrupt. So, yeah, probably a good way to end that off.

DAMIEN: No problem.

GEORGE: Awesome. And Damien, thanks again for coming on. If anybody wants to get in touch with you and learn more about you, where should they go?

DAMIEN: The best point of contact would either be via our website, which you mentioned earlier, www.southerncrossmartialarts.com, or Facebook is probably the easiest way. I'm not good with telephones.

GEORGE: Skype video, it works.

DAMIEN: Yeah.

GEORGE: All right. Awesome. Thanks, Damien.

DAMIEN: No worries.

GEORGE: Thanks for being on. I'll speak to you soon. Cheers.

DAMIEN: Cheers. Bye.

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53 – [Case Study] Mike Fooks – Doubling Your Part-Time BJJ School With One Successful Campaign

February 2, 2018 by George Fourie

Martial Arts Media Academy member Mike Fooks from Auckland is on a marketing roll! And if his new student signups stay, he's doubled his BJJ school.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

How Mike Fooks has managed to balance his martial arts and corporate life
The benefits of online advertising services such as Facebook Ads and Google AdWords
How a single Facebook campaign doubled Mike’s student number
How the Martial Arts Media Academy program has helped Mike implement his campaign correctly
The one thing that Mike could have done differently before he launched his Facebook campaign
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

So already from one two-week campaign. I'm going to, if not hit my goal, I'm going to be at least halfway towards it. In effect, the only reason I've pulled back on the campaign a little bit now is because we ran out of the free uniforms, or close to it. So I've got more on order. When they head, we'll be back into it. Their goal, which I thought was, these people are audacious to try and double. I have a suspicion we're going to hit that fairly quickly.

GEORGE: Hi, this is George Fourie and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast! Today I'm with Mike Fooks and we're going to do a bit of a combination here. I got to know Mike through one of the online communities that I'm part of and we've built a new website for him; which you can check out at groundcontrol.net.nz.

Mike's based in Auckland and we got started with helping him with the Martial Arts Media Academy Program where we help martial arts school owners with lead generation and so forth. Besides that, Mike's got a very interesting story with things that he does in the corporate world and how that overlaps with the martial arts school. This is going to be a fun conversation! So welcome to the podcast, Mike!

MIKE: Thanks, George! Thanks for having me on!

GEORGE: Awesome! So, based in Auckland. Probably going to come and visit you September this year. So, I guess just to start things off. Who is Mike Fooks?

MIKE: Okay, so I spend my time doing a number of different things. Obviously, I'm a martial arts school owner. We run an academy called “GroundControl” where we focus on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts. That's been going for about 11 years now under that name. Been training for a little bit longer than that before we named the school, but that's not my full-time gig. During the day I spend most of my time doing corporate training.

So, working with sales teams and leaders and various people. Primarily on face-to-face persuasive communication whether it's sales or influence in negotiation or even internal communication and conflict management. Those sorts of things and also a lot on mindset and resilience. I'm trained at university in Psychology and then went on and got qualified in neurolinguistics or NLP over a number of years. Then, based on that, my partner and I have a private practice where we do individual work with people one-on-one sort of coaching, counselling, therapeutic type stuff.

Obviously whether it is therapy or coaching just depends on how messed up they are when they walk in the door but hopefully, it's all the same by the time they walk out. And so that's another thing I spend my time doing.

Sometimes people say to me, wow, Mike, well that's a lot you've got going on but to me, it's actually really simple. When people ask me, “What do you do?” I'm a coach. You know? My job is to bring out the potential in others. And I just do that in various formats. Sometimes I do that in the boardroom, in the training room. Sometimes I do that in my coaching room. And of course, sometimes I do that on the martial arts mat.

GEORGE: That's an interesting philosophy. Yeah. It sounds like many things happening but as you mentioned, you're kind of trying to achieve the same result with the people that you work with, just through a different medium.

MIKE: Yeah, that's right. There's often a little bit of leakage between the two things. I get frustrated when I'm teaching corporates, for example, because I'm going, “Look, there are so many great examples of what I'm talking about if you just knew jiu-jitsu.” And certainly, on the jiu-jitsu mat, you know, there are concepts that I will teach corporates about communication or how to problem solve, which make it into our coaching sessions at GroundControl. There's a little bit of leakage involved.

GEORGE: So have you ever then cross-promoted if you feel. Do you cross promote between the corporate training that you do and jiu-jitsu?

MIKE: I have to be a little careful on that because the sponsors that get me involved too, you know, I’m with the sales team would probably take a dim view if they thought I was using that as a platform to cross-promote jiu-jitsu. Having said that, inevitably I tell a couple of jiu-jitsu stories or metaphors and it's not unusual for somebody to tap me on the shoulder afterwards and say, “Hey, have you got more information on that? I'd be keen to have a look.” So that certainly happens.

GEORGE: Alright, alright. Interesting. Now, how did you get started in jiu-jitsu, first and foremost?

MIKE: If we go all the way back, as a kid I did the standard dabbling in martial arts, I think a couple of lessons in judo when I was about six. And two lessons of karate when I was 13. But I got started, seriously in my martial arts career in another style, Aikido. Which I started in 1993. Had always been interested in martial arts, watched all the movies. But got intrigued by this idea of Aikido, based on a conversation I had with a friend of my brothers who was into judo and karate. And showed me a basic kind of immobilization arm lock. And then talked about how Aikido guys, that's what you do in anything like that, just immobilize, wow that sounds cool.

So I did some research and got involved in Aikido. Now, of course, 1993 was an interesting year to start in the martial arts because it was the same year of the first UFC. So I started in April and towards the end of that year, the first UFC came out and, of course, that just rocked the entire martial arts community as most of your listeners will be aware.

At the time, I was at university. And I was working in a video games parlor to earn some cash, part-time. So I would sit on the desk and just load myself up with five martial arts magazines every shift and just devour as much information as I could. And so I was kind of got a front-row seat. We didn't have access to any of the footage or anything like that in New Zealand but I started to read all of the stuff coming out about the UFC and what does it mean that it seems like the stand-up fighters aren't doing so well. Got curious about that.

And then I got onto Usenet. Onto the old newsgroups. You know, before we had online forums or anything like that let alone Facebook. And there were all of these debates that sprung up about my style is better than yours. And I started out 100 percent in the traditional martial artist camp. You know, “Well, a true Aikido master would never debase themselves by entering such a competition.” You know, that kind of thing.

Over time I noticed something really interesting. When people were having these debates about what works, what doesn't what I consistently noticed was the BJJ guys that were saying, well, where are you? Let's get together, let's find out.

And not necessarily in an overly aggressive way although there's always a little bit of that sometimes but for a lot of them it was just a “we can show you.” I'm completely confident that I know how this will go. And over time as I sat there, by now about I think a second degree black belt in Aikido I was thinking I'm not sure I've got that same level of, “I definitely know how this is going to go confidence that these people seem to have.” So I got really curious about that.

And then in 2001, after the first time, New Zealand showed MMA on TV. Sky TV over here ran a weekend where they played back-to-back Pride and King of the Cage events. Old ones. I was on a honeymoon that weekend. Overseas. So I had my new brother-in-law set up in my living room with a VCR player swapping tapes over. And so when I got back I just devoured it and found a BJJ school within a month or two after that. Which, at the time, was not easy in New Zealand. Because there really wasn't a lot going on. Certainly no black belts around. It was early days for sure.

GEORGE: What an awesome and interesting journey. So now you've got the school, and I guess, let's backtrack a bit. Before I met you and sort of what is the school up to at this point in time?

MIKE: Yeah. So we gave ourselves a name in 2006. Up until then, it had been, you know, the standard thing. A bunch of people train in my garage. Most of those, my Aikido students who I'd said, hey have a look at this. And then, hey, let's do more of this and come to the garage. Because I was training them consecutively at the time. That was something that we knew as my club. What we called it because we weren't supposed to talk about it outside of my club. And then over time that grew and grew and grew. We started to get more and more professional. My coach, John Will runs a competition every September called, “The Gathering.”

The first time I went to that, one of the things he had done for the school owners got a bunch of Australian school owners together, I think it was about five of them, to give us some tips. I remember, you know, Fari Salievski was there. And a few other people. Frank was there. And so I come over with like, 48 action items about how do we make this thing more professional. And then over time, we got more and more so by the time we hit kind of the end of 2017, I'm running a school which is muddling along alright. You know? It's a part-time school. I'd got to the point where I had realized that look, I'm only part-time in this, it is never going to be a huge money spinner for me. If I can, you know, break even and get a little bit of pocket money but keep the thing going, that's pretty cool.

So 30 students on contract, and then with the various people coming through, beginners trials and various sorts that we had. I was probably content to leave it sitting there. Except for a conversation that I had with a guy, Trent Rice. Who some people know as Bear in the jiu-jitsu community. He was over from Australia to do some work for his day job. And he said, yeah, I want to come train, can I come along? I said, sure.

So we met each other on the ferry from town back to where I live. And we had a chat and he was just in the process of looking at going full time into martial arts and he mentioned, you know, one of the online communities that he was involved with which is, you know, where we hooked up. And it started to occur to me that, hey look, I don't have a full-time brain to put on this.

But if I can start to connect with people that are thinking about this full time and have figured out what works and what doesn't, and just do what they say, maybe I can actually start to make some gains I'd kind of put away on the shelf. In terms of ambition, for a little while. So I started to get quite excited at that idea and over the last, even just last month or so since we've really started firing, it's really starting to get quite exciting.

GEORGE: Fantastic. And full credit to the community that's Paul Veldman's Martial Arts Business Community.

MIKE: Yeah, absolutely, yeah I've seen various things like that throughout my Facebook feed from time to time and I was always a bit suspicious about, you know, there's a lot of people out there making money off telling people how to make money. But don't usually make money any other way.

So the fact that Trent knew Paul personally and he logged in and he showed me some of the stuff that was going on gave me a lot of comfort that, hey this is going to be worthwhile. And, you know, the investments I've made around things like that community, the website, the Martial Arts Media Academy are paying themselves back very, very quickly and very, very easily.

GEORGE: Cool. So let's have a look. We made some changes with, first and foremost, got you set up with a new website. I mean, I'm a fan, obviously, of all the websites that we create but I'm really a fan of the GroundControl website, just how it came out in the end. I mean, it took a while for us to really fine tune and get through the obstacles, but it really, for a jiu-jitsu website it really, it brings out a lot of color and I'm using it as an example within the BJJ community, for websites that we are developing.

So we got you set up with the right tools. And then you got started in the Martial Arts Media Academy. Before you got started, what type of lead generation were you doing on the internet?

MIKE: Yeah, not a lot to be honest. Most of our stuff came through word of mouth or, you know, maybe they'll find us in a Google search. I had dabbled in Facebook so I had done the odd promotion here and there. Start of the year, come at half price or come in and your friend trains for free or something like that. And they would bring in maybe four or five people two of which might hang around and we thought that was a pretty good job.

When I did those sort of promotions I wasn't throwing too much spend at it. Very conservative. Because I wasn't quite sure how much they'd pay off. So I dabbled but it hadn't really amounted to too much.

GEORGE: Alright. So you got started in the training. So what part has helped the most? And then we'll talk about what you're doing right now that's really working as well.

MIKE: I think, in terms of what part has helped the most, I mean it's all helping but I think just starting to feel like I can never get in my way through things. So when I had dabble before, you know you go into the ad manager on Facebook and there are all these different options, you know, what's the objective of your campaign, this that or the other, and so I was kind of like, click, click, click, click. That'll do.

So to be able to kind of sit down and have you kind of work me through some stuff live and go, oh, okay, so I want interaction and I know the reasons why I want interaction now. And actually being able to figure out how those consoles work and why I would make certain decisions when we have those sorts of choices that was a huge help. Because the ability to be walked through your first time is where you get your understanding from. People can throw theory at you all day, but when you actually start you know, I literally had you on one screen while I had the thing on the other screen going, “and now what? I'll click on that? Okay, now I'll click on that.”

And so and with the content creation as well in terms of, here's how you design your ad and this is what your copy should look like, all of that stuff made me much more focused, I think, in what I was doing.

GEORGE: I guess this is the biggest pain point for me or frustration. It makes me want to rant, and I don't really rant. But it makes me want to rant, is a theory without substance.

MIKE: Yup.

GEORGE: There's a lot of, this is, you should do this, but there's not “here's how to do it.” And a lot of the times, the people who are talking the ‘what’ are not actually doing the how. So you can buy into a concept of coaching where you kind of can be shown how to do it, you should get another guy to do it. Us.

MIKE: That's right. You know, when I think about it, as you talked just now, that's exactly how we teach martial arts. I don't show a bunch of beginners a move and then say, good luck, go and try it out, right? I show them the move and then I talk them through each individual step to make sure they're on the same path. So it kind of felt like that. That I was being given, hey here's what you should do and why, but now here's the bit where I'm going to talk you through each step and then I can play along. And before I know it I've got an ad campaign running.

GEORGE: Of course, it's one thing to be walked through, but then that's where, and the same as in martial arts, now you know how to do it, but now you apply it, and it doesn't work the way you were … actually experienced it. And then, that's I guess where the key part comes in. You know, what we really try and focus on in the academy is, alright, you've implemented, now let's correct. Let's see if we can fine-tune, let's see if we can fix things and get them working in the end.

MIKE: Yeah, that's right and that's where I think the value of those. We've got a lot of content about here's how to set up Facebook and here's how to develop content and AdWords and all these sorts of things but the coaching calls are really, really valuable as well. Because you know, you come along and go, well this is what I'm doing right now, that's what's relevant for me, and ask you questions and there's always really good content generated either it's from my own questions or other people's. So I think that's why coaching calls are really valuable. And really valuable to get on live. Rather than just watching the recording sometimes as because you come up with questions that you wouldn't have asked, you know, other people don't necessarily ask so that's really cool.

GEORGE: Awesome. You were having some good results with your campaigns in the beginning of the year, where are you at with your campaign?

MIKE: When I first signed up to Paul Veldman's group, you know, the first thing I saw him say is, you set some goals. I thought, well, yeah, I know about setting goals. I teach people about that so I better do one and so it's been, what on paper sounds fairly ambitious, even though we're starting from a small base is to double membership and it's been done relatively quickly.

So I have 30 people on contract, this takes that to 60. That would be good. So once the website was up and I started the Facebook campaign, I ran that campaign for about two weeks. No more than that. And at last count, I think we've got close to 35 paid trials. So over the next two to three weeks, we'll start to see how many of those paid trials tip over into full membership. But certainly the feedback I'm getting from the people on the trial is that they're loving it. So we should convert a reasonable amount of those.

Already from one, two-week campaign, I'm going to if not hit my goal, I'm going to be, you know, at least halfway towards it. And, in fact, the only reason I've pulled back on the campaign a little bit now is that we ran out of the free uniforms or got close to it so I've got more on order when they head we'll be back into it. That goal which I thought was, you know, these people are audacious to try and double, I have a suspicion we're going to hit that pretty quickly.

GEORGE: That's awesome. So you've gone from, so you started up with 30 students although you've got them in the trial so you've kind of doubled but not, obviously, proved down the line where things are at. Yeah.

MIKE: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I'm fairly confident because our retention rate from trial into full membership tends to be pretty good. Having said that, I have redesigned how that whole thing works based on the advice I've got from you and Paul and various people like this is the first we've used paid trials. Which I think there's a lot of hesitation about for people that are used to going, hey, a free week. To go to paid trial, certainly in New Zealand, I don't see a lot of that going on. But it's worked really, really well for us.

So the fact that they've got that skin in the game and I know we can give them a really good experience over four weeks. It's going to be really interesting to kind of look back in four weeks’ time or so and go, okay, what was our conversion rate? But I'm expecting it to be pretty solid.

GEORGE: That's awesome. That's really good going. Well done. That's awesome. So, and I'm thinking, though, that the fact that you've run out of uniforms, I'm like, alright, those create perfect conversations for your marketing campaigns as well. You know.

MIKE: Yeah.

GEORGE: You've sold out, here's a waiting list. We'll let you know when the next batch comes in. And then that creates a whole new urgency campaign for your next follow-up because, yeah. People missed out, now they've got to jump on board and they've only got, you know. They missed out the last time. They better jump on.

MIKE: That's a really good point. Literally, just before we came on this call, I got a message pop-up from, because we had, like, over 200 people message us with an expression of interest so I've got all those leads that I started to go back to and say, hey, are you still interested?

But one of them popped up and said, hey, is this thing still on? So I was about to go back and say yes and just, I really hope you're not a size 5. But yeah, that's a really good point. We can go, “Well, actually we've sold out but you know, over the next two weeks we might launch it again so just look out.”

GEORGE: Yeah. Waitlist. Awesome. I like that.

MIKE: Nice.

GEORGE: Good stuff. Okay. Just a couple of things. And just for, you know, as part of the case study of course, of the Martial Arts Media Academy program, who would you recommend it to? And why?

MIKE: Pretty broad. Martial arts school owners that want to grow. Because I think there's a lot of people. So my school, for example, we've tried this on adults, I notice a lot of the schools around have got real kids focus. But that hasn't made any difference to me in terms of the quality of the content, it's all completely applicable.

By the standards of some schools, we are relatively small so I know a lot of people look at the initial outlay and go, oh, that must for really big professional schools. But that's not us. In some ways, I think it's even more useful for people our size because, you know, I don't have time to really think about this stuff and figure it out so I was kind of groping in the dark a little bit. And in terms of, you know, what it costs to get on the program, you know, you make that back with a couple students pretty quickly.

So I'm really interested, as I look around the New Zealand scene, there's not a lot of people taking a sophisticated approach to this. When I look at the results that I've had, part of that may be that my competitors just aren't doing it this way. So I think anyone that really wants to grow and stay up with the game or enter the game, it's really worthwhile. You do have to put some time commitment into it. You know, the financial investment is probably the easier thing. The time investment is the really important thing. There's so much great content in there that you're going to have to go through it a few times you know, I've got notes scrawled everywhere and then go back to the recording as I'm doing a particular campaign.

So as long as people are free to put the time investment in, I struggle to think of a school that wouldn't benefit from it unless the person themselves is already pretty sophisticated in not just marketing, but specifically online marketing. But I don't see a lot of that it martial arts.

GEORGE: Yeah, thanks, Mike. And you bring up a good point on time because there's time spent and then there's time well spent. I mean, either way, you're going to have to spend the time. You're going to have to spend the time to do the marketing and I mean, you can take an hour to do an okay or really mediocre job at your marketing, get frustrated, not a way to ask for help. The biggest danger of that is reaching a level of frustration where you just, this online stuff is crap or, you know, just, I don't have time to deal with this. I'm not going to do it. And you abandon the whole thing. And your business suffers.

Or, what's worse is, you know, people get a call from a company that says, hey, we can get you on the first page of Google and they have no sense of an actual overall strategy that you need for your school and again, it could be the easy way out, because you can just pay money, but if they don't know their overall strategy, they're just catering for one touch point. Which is search? The search engines. When you've got to cover for all six to eight interactions that are going to happen before conversion.

So you've got to be covering all the steps. If you get educated, get a bit of a strategy, it's easy to spend money on getting the hands to get people to do stuff, as long as you actually know what to do and what to look out for at the end of the day.

MIKE: I think that's really right. I think, if I had decided, look, I really want to put some focus into growing the school, I'm going really spend some time over generally to do that but I want to do it myself. What probably would have happened if I would have sat down with my partner Carleen and we would have spent, maybe even as much time, maybe even more time. But we would have spent it on completely the wrong stuff.

You know, there's design, there are ads, and you have to get really finicky over how the image looks and really kind of tweak that to the nth degree. Within actual fact it was much better just to go, let's just blast out five images, three for BJJ, two for MMA, split test them, see what works. And after a couple of days, we know what the winner is. And as you had indicated, it's always the one that surprises you. You know? It's not the one I would have picked. So a lot of those sorts of things but sort of sacked a lot of our time trying to finesse stuff that could have been done a lot more simply and then that time spent put back to more things.

What I like about the academy is, as you just kind of alluded to, is the comprehensiveness of it. What I'm excited about is, we've got these results already just from one Facebook campaign. Now, we've got some professional videos that have been done which are going to land sometime this week so I'm already excited about how we're going to introduce them, let alone through email campaigns and content strategy and AdWords working properly. We've got this much growth but we've really just scratched the tip of the iceberg.

GEORGE: That's exciting. Yeah, I look forward to seeing the videos and really looking at a few things that we're trialling right now with all the new changes within Facebook and how to really get that message out. Hey, Mike, it's been great having you on, is there anything I should have asked you? That I haven't covered?

MIKE: Is there anything that you shouldn't have asked me?

GEORGE: I know, it's sort of that question that people ask when they think they haven't asked enough questions.

MIKE: The only thing I guess I would add, thinking about the most recent campaign that we've done, it comes back a little bit to the commitment thing, is it's one thing to throw up an ad, and I kind of came into both Paul's group and your group hoping for, look, you can tell me how to automate everything so I can just press go and walk away and the club will just go boom. And of course it doesn't work that way so you know, we aim for interaction which means that I was, every day, once or twice a day, sometimes three times a day, having to log in and go, oh look, there are another 30 responses here, I've got to go back and respond to each one.

Now the response was pretty easy, ones I cut and paste into a PM but just be really disciplined about that. Because it's one thing to put up a shop front and say, this is a really great shop, come and look in the window but if you're not providing something quality in terms of experience when they get there, then it's all for nought.

So, the Machado brothers had an expression in jiu-jitsu, “Swim, swim, swim, die on the beach.” You know, you don't want to have to do all that work and then just follow over the last hurdle through, not doing you're follow through and your responsiveness and those sorts of things really well.

Probably the one thing that I would have done differently if I went back, and even though I had heard warnings about this from yourself and Paul, I don't think I had got my admin geared up well enough to handle the sudden influx of people. So we've given them a pretty good experience signing in but there are just a couple little things I've seen fall through the cracks. Only one's got their membership card or they haven't all been given the beginner's manual for some reason. So, looking forward, next time my site's running campaigns I'm really going to make sure that all that stuff's locked in and ready to go. Because it kind of caught me by surprise how many people signed up so quickly.

GEORGE: Very good point on a few things. The messaging, I see a lot of people want to automate too quickly and I hear, I see in communities, people get frustrated about the mundane responses that they've got to give but there's a big lesson in those mundane responses and yeah, look, sometimes people are just ignorant but you always got to look at your marketing and your message and say, alright, why's this coming up all the time? If everybody is asking what your location is, hey then just put at the end, “Conveniently located in the suburb.” That might just cover it.

o you've got to pay attention to what people are asking and those are the objections that you can turn into better marketing next time. It's all about learning and I see people too quick to want to automate it. And I always say, you can't automate something that's not working manually. If you can't sell your membership face to face or in a text message then no chatbot or anything is going to do that magically for you.

Your conversion is going to go down. So master that first, and then you can go and add all the automation but you've got to get the conversion right first. And I mean, if the … when the offer converts, everything else works. You know? You can go and you can go tweak everything else, but getting that offer to convert first, that's the real art. And that's the real work. And if you can focus just on that, then you can get fancy. And then you can start taking your campaigns to a higher level if that's really what you want to do. And really scale it up. For the next school, opening multiple schools and so forth.

MIKE: Absolutely.

GEORGE: Awesome. Hey, Mike, it's been great chatting with you. So people can find out more about you at groundcontrol.net.nz and anywhere else people can find more info about you?

MIKE: There's a little bit about my corporate stuff on my other website which is kineticpotential.co.nz. So the stuff about the individual coaching and the corporate work I do there is on there. So, yeah, those are the two places to find me.

GEORGE: Awesome. I think we could probably do a round two and go really, really deep into some psychology stuff and things that you do in your day job and how that connects with your martial arts. And if you are interested in the Martial Arts Media Academy where you watch this you can just send us a message or you can go to martialartsmedia.academy and find out more about that. Mike, great speaking to you face to face for the first time. And I will see you in Auckland this year.

MIKE: Looking forward to it. Thanks, George.

GEORGE: Awesome. Thanks, Mike.

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51 – How To Run Your First Facebook Ad For Martial Arts

December 15, 2017 by George Fourie

The one thing to master with your first Facebook ad for your martial arts school.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

The biggest mistake martial arts school owners make with Facebook advertising.
How to avoid marketing frustration and simplify.
The one thing you need to get right before getting fancy.
How conversation leads to conversion.
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi, this is George Fourie from martialartsmedia.com and in this video training, I want to share with you a few tips to really consider if you're starting to run paid advertising, especially if you haven't run any paid ads before, particularly I want to base the concept here on Facebook ads.

Now, when it comes to optimizing for things like Google, it can definitely, the logic still applies, but the framework here – I just want to apply this on Facebook ads and the reason this came up is, you know, Martial Arts Media Academy program, we're running a bonus for our members over Christmas and New Years, where we are helping our members structure a campaign, structuring a Facebook ad campaign and structuring campaigns for the New Year. So we're working with our members to really get stuck in and venture into this world of paid advertising.

So, a few things have come up where I see a lot of people are getting stuck, so I wanted to share this training not just with our members, but with everyone because I felt that it’s an obstacle that a lot of people run into and I think if you focus down and you really simplify, then your chances of succeeding is a lot better and the minute you're going to get some results, it’s going to give you some confidence to run more ads and it will keep you going. Because I know when you start running paid advertising, it can be very demotivating, right?

Maybe you're not really tech orientated and you struggle with the technology part and then you don't really know what you're doing, so you're trying to piece all these things together. And it can be really hard, really frustrating and this is why a lot of people just give up and stop trying.

So I want to give you a few simple things to look out for, what you should be doing first, what you should be doing last. Not so much what you should be doing last, but what you should really do first. And then you can go on and get all fancy with everything else, OK? But most people don't get to the fancy part because they're trying to get all fancy in the beginning and then they lose money, their campaigns don't work, they get frustrated and move out.

All right. So we want to turn that around here. I want to show you how you can get your campaigns up and running, get a result fast and then move on and really start scaling your campaign. All right, so let’s see how this works on the iPad, I'm going to draw this out.

So let's typically look at the whole process here, so if we're going to break it down into the simplicity of all this. So we're obviously looking for, we've got a prospect, we'll give him an average male face and ideally obviously, we're working towards a student, let's throw in a little kick there. All right, and a smiley face. Ok, cool.

So the first thing we've really got to get right is, we've got to start with who's the target, so who we are actually looking at, who’s the demographic, who’s going to see this ad. And it’s important to have this linked up because you want to show the right ad to the right person at the right time, obviously as well. Right time for them, that the ad is actually applicable to them. So who's the target?

And then we've got to look at what's going to be the offer, all right? So let's just do that for the offer, OK? So what's going to be the offer? You've got your target, so you've got the right target and then we want to show them an offer that's going to be a message to market match for them, all right? And then what we've got to put in front of them obviously is an ad, OK? So we've got to have some ad copy, OK? Very neglected art skill to learn, writing copy can be a hard thing and the easiest thing to get it going is just using a simple language, don't get fancy, just think of simplicity.

And then, with Facebook obviously, you're also going to have to have a bit of a picture, all right? Maybe we've got our happy students in there doing this thing. I know that's not going to be the best-looking thing but the picture and then we've got a call to action. All right, what do we need these people to do? And the call to action can be many things, right? It can be, they've just got to leave a comment, or try and make somebody that's that's a guy speaking, hurray! Or we've got a message, we can send them a message. And then, obviously you can have your website link, you can maybe use the phone, etc. OK, so you can use whatever to compensate for your call to action. OK?

But here's when I see people really get stuck. They try and get fancy in all these little steps in the funnel, OK? Which means every little step here, every little column has a different obstacle that needs to be optimized that it can work. So what's going to be happening is, you've got a lot of work to do. And your chances of success are going to be so slim because it’s your first time that you're running an ad, then you've got to get your targeting right, you've got to get your offer right, you've got to get the ad copyright, the right image.

And then which call to action? Which call to action are you going to use? Are you going to send them directly to your website? If it’s not congruent with this offer here, then I definitely wouldn't do that. Are you going to send them to a landing page? Awesome. Was your landing page professionally designed, with professional copy, with the right call to action and conversion elements and all that in place? Awesome.

Then you stand a chance, but at the end of the day, you've got to look at what's the lowest form of, what is the easiest thing for people to do and how can you get your result the quickest? And the quickest way you're going to really get the result would be this part over here. Hang on, let me just draw this properly here. It's this section over here, OK? Because if you can get the offer right, then all the hard work is done. Yes, it’s got to go to the right target audience, OK?

Yes, you're going to have to have the right copy. But if you have awesome ad copy and the wrong offer, it’s not going to work. Or you can have the perfect call to action, but the offer is wrong – and it’s not going to work. So yes, your targeting has got to be spot on, but you've got to have an offer that converts. If the offer converts, everything else is going to work, OK?

So what if you break it down and you just think of removing everything else, what can you do to get the student to sign up and put the right offer in front of them and remove everything else? What are all the obstacles that are going to be in place? Because if you don't have an offer that converts, then you can have the best ad copy in the world, you can have the best landing page in the world, you can have all the tools, the call to action, the bots that reply and do all the things for you. But you've never made a sale, but you're trying to implement a bot. So, getting the offer, getting a sale online and making sure that your offer converts and people actually buy it – that's going to be the core part.

So, break it down further, then what can you do to actually facilitate that, right? Well, you've got an offer that converts, now what do they need to do to get it? Well, they need to engage in a conversation. Your easiest way to get there is to start a conversation. Conversation is going to lead to the conversion. So how can you get the conversation started? Because if you can get the conversation started, then you can lead to the conversion.

That means you've got to pick up the phone and talk to them and really get to understand their objections, their needs, their wants and what it is that you were missing in your ad, then do that five or ten times, because I can guarantee, the next time you create an ad, you are actually going to earn, you're going to get results.

All right, I hope that helps. If you need help with your Facebook ad campaigns, or your Google ads, especially if you're running, at the time of recording this, running into sort of the Christmas season, running into January which is the peak time here in Australia and New Zealand and most parts of the world, then leave me a message where you watched this video and we’re happy to help.

All right, thanks a lot, speak soon – cheers!

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49 – Martial Arts Websites vs ClickFunnels & Page Builders

November 1, 2017 by George Fourie

ClickFunnels and Page Builders can be great, but is that what you really need instead of your martial arts website? Here's my take.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

Do you need a hole or a drill (and a driller)?
The myth about what you need to create a sales funnel
Doing the ‘Richard Branson Test’ for your martial arts business
What a basic martial arts business sales funnel looks like
The difference between an internet marketing funnel and martial arts school funnel
The important factors that influence customers’ buying behaviour
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, this is George Fourie from Martial Arts Media, and in this video, I'm going to give you my take on websites versus ClickFunnels, or what I'm going to refer to is real martial arts websites, I'll explain why in a minute, versus ClickFunnels, Leadpages, and other page builders. I think there's a bit of confusion in the marketplace about what a funnel actually is, what part of a funnel you actually need, and for what type of business? Do you need the same type of intricate sales funnel structure for a martial arts business versus if you're selling digital products, or you got an e-commerce store or something like that?

There's a bit of confusion, and I was on a webinar yesterday where the guy I was referring to doing a comparison between a website versus a funnel, a sales funnel, and kind of saying, “Look, the website model is dead. You need sales funnel.” But I think that creates confusion because why does it need to be different? It doesn't need to be different. It's the same thing, it just means one website model was developed with an old mindset, with the sales funnel was not. It doesn't have to be different.

Do you need sales funnel? Absolutely. Does it need to be separate to your website? Definitely not. There's a bit of confusion with that, so I'm going to be as diplomatic as possible here, and want to give you my perspective on the difference between ClickFunnels, websites, martial arts websites, really crappy websites, good websites, and other types of page builders. And look, we've used them all, and I'll give full disclosure, martialartsmedia.com, my company, we develop martial arts websites, we help martial arts school owners with online lead generation. That's our focus.

We've used a bit of some page builder tools for some clients, but the majority, we build out our websites on Wordpress, because it's a platform that you own, we don't have to keep your login details, you don't have to pay a monthly fee for it. That's our preferred way but I want to give you both, all the facts, and you can make the decision for yourself because maybe a tool like ClickFunnels is for you, but maybe it's not.

The first thing I want to really look at here is to look at the old situation. Do you need a drill or hole? Well, you need the hole, right? How are you going to get the hole through a drill? Now, what type of drill you need? Maybe you need a certain type of drill? Different brand? Do you need to actually be the driller, or can you actually hire a person that's an expert at drilling the hole, and get that person into drill the hole for you?

My comparison analogy is, are you the right person for the job? Are you the person who should be doing drilling the holes in your business? Should you be building your own website? In 2017, I don't think it's necessary that you need to be touching any tech whatsoever, and a mental model is just to do the Richard Branson test. The question is, would Richard Branson be doing this in his business? I want to ask you that. Are you the right person to be doing drilling the holes, and putting up websites?

You know, my expertise is computer programming, I've adapted to marketing over the last 10 years, but I can put a website together, and I've got a web developer on staff, he's pretty busy with developing websites at the moment. Yesterday I was putting together a report for this actual video, and I'll actually show you, and because he was busy, I didn't want to bother him, so I put together a landing page myself, and for me, I thought, “Hey, this looks pretty cool doesn't it?” So I put this together, and I showed it to my developer, and five minutes later, he brings me this, which looks 10 times better, and I think the danger in a lot of these types of tools is it does what happened to me. It creates false confidence.

Now this is both on Wordpress to a different editor, but it creates false confidence that you think you are actually really good, where maybe you're not, and maybe somebody else could do it much better, do a professional job for you, and you get a better result at the end of the day. Keep that in mind. Are you the right person for the job here? Do you need to be drilling the holes in your business, or should you hire someone else to do that for you? Let's just remove the marketing hype for a minute, and let's look at the actual facts.

I'm going to draw out a sales funnel here for you, just to give you a bit of an idea, but this happened to one of our members in our Martial Arts Media Academy, where we teach martial arts school owners about lead generation, and the member said to me, well we were running through Facebook ads, and the member said to me, “Well, yeah, I'll get the ad up, but I've just got to figure this ClickFunnels thing out.” And I was asking, “Why? What are you going to need to do with ClickFunnels?” “Well, I was told I need ClickFunnels, so I bought this thing.” And I told the person, “Well, you've got a perfect landing page. We developed a landing page for you, it's professionally designed, we interviewed you for the actual copywriting to get your perfect message, to get your values, and put it down in writing into a structured sales message.”

And we'd done all this for the person, and it was ready to go. All that they needed to do was actually commit to the Facebook ads, but instead, they bought ClickFunnels and got sucked in by the tech, and started buying products that they thought they needed, which they didn't need, and that's what I've got a problem with. Not that actual tool, but that the wrong people are buying the tools thinking they need it, where they actually don't.

I want to show you this quickly, and just for, I guess, if you don't know anything about me, just for a bit of credibility for my end, I guess, but our landing pages that we've developed and I pulled this report just before I created the video. Since the last 10 to 11 months, our landing pages have generated 964 paid trial students, so in monetary value that's $30,000, but that's not really what's important.

What the real value is, is the lifetime student value, and from based on our numbers, the average that we normally find is $1,500 is a good lifetime student value. If you calculate it on that, yours might be more or less, that's $1.4 million. $1.455 million worth of students. Look, our landing pages convert. They convert, we create a custom copy from that, we design it, we put it on your website and we don't use ClickFunnels or any fancy page builder, and it gets results.

I want to break that down for you quickly, and let me just fire up my iPad here quickly, and use this as an example. Let's have a look. If we look at a sales funnel. Now, for the most part. Right now, let's do a comparison. In the internet marketing space, and this is sometimes a problem when you buy into internet marketing hype because there's a lot of internet marketing hype out that there. If you look at, let's do this and we looked at internet marketing.

A lot of the models that people follow would be, you've got your page here, and they call it a let's say like a trip wire, and the tripwire might be like a $7 product. You're trying to create this sort of value letter. We try to do the same, but I'll show you a different way in a minute. So, you've got this $7 product that you create, and then that goes to what's called a one-time offer normally. You only see it now, there, never again. You gotta buy it there, and let's say that's $47 or $97. That's the up-sell once you've bought the other one. Then, that page might take you to another one-time offer, OTO, and let's say that was $297. Excuse the handwriting. That's if you said yes, and if you said no, then you might go to a down-sell of, let's say $197. That's sort of an internet marketing model. You've got all these steps that you follow, and you want to bulk up a real funnel of all these different aspects.

Now, let's look at a martial arts school. With a martial arts school, you don't need that much right? You might, look, there can be variations of this, because for some of our clients, Facebook ads, they send them directly to the landing page. Just a straightforward sales page, as is. It could be, let's call that the rate offer. That'll be the paid trial page. People can go there directly, but you might have another page here. This could be the homepage on a website, but it's basically like a, we're going to call it a lead magnet page, or an inquiry page. It's kind of where something free is happening. This could be an online inquiry, it could be downloaded lead magnet, a lead magnet, something of value, for the purpose of getting a lead. It's basically a contact and inquiry page. Your funnel could be something like the free thing, and then people see the paid trial after, and then all that you really need after that is a thank you page.

This is a really, really important page. We don't have time to go into that into detail, but the way we do our Facebook ads is we track each of these elements so that we know how we can advertise to people based on the action that I've taken. That's going a bit off course, so I won't go into that right now, but that is the basic funnel. That is a basic funnel for a martial arts school. Free offer, paid trial offer, and the thank you page.

Do you need a funnel building tool that's $100-$300 a month for that? I don't think so, because why can't your website do the same thing? Your website can do the same thing, and you don't need 20 funnels, or 30 funnels or 40 funnels to do that. If you got one funnel that you optimize and that converts, and I'll show you the ways we go about that in a minute. Again, do you want to get your hands dirty with those types of tools? It's good to have the knowledge, but should you be the person doing it? I think you can do better things in your business, better things in running your martial arts school, in running the classes, running the schools, training your staff, running a better business, and get somebody to do this type of thing for you.

Back to the funnel. This is the basic funnel. If you optimize that one funnel, then you've got a working model. Then you can just drive traffic to that because here's the problem. The problem is this. If you have an awesome funnel, but you're not respecting the customer journey, then what's the point of people seeing your awesome funnel on a Facebook ad? Then when they actually decide to do some research on you. People do that, they go to Google, they check you out, and they land on your website, and your website sucks, and you lose the lead. They click the back button and they go to your competitor.

What does that help you? Does this mean you need to have the funnel, and then you need to have the website, and then you need to have 20 funnels, and multiple pages, multiple websites? I don't think so. If you actually know how to develop a website properly, then you know how to segment the people on that website. That means that your pages are independent. I'll go back to that in a minute because I want to answer something else, just on multiple websites, which I also believe you don't need. We'll cover that in just a minute.

Let me not jump around. Back to the customer journey. Customer journey. What we need to know about our customers is people take 6-8 interactions before they reach a point of conversion. That is the customer journey. 6-8 brand interactions, that's salesforce stat. That can be they check their mobile phone, they drove past their phone, they checked out your website, they saw your Facebook page, they saw a social media post. There's a lot of interactions that can happen before a conversion.

Conversion doesn't need to be a paid trial. It can be just a phone call, it can be just an email. This customer journey is happening, and it's happening at multiple times, different times, different devices. Those are steps that we just got to know that this is what's happening. So, why don't we base our marketing on these facts, and make sure that we got all the conversion points covered? Because I can guarantee you, if you're running 20, 30, 40 funnels, that's going to be really, really hard to optimize, and really, really hard to track people. Unless that is your full-time gig, or you got a very, very deep pocket to cater for that, it's going to take a lot of work.

Let's get back to the website. Does this mean if you're running multiple styles, that you're going to need multiple websites? Look, there's different ways of doing things, and all respect to how everybody does their way of business. The way we try and look at it from the start is leverage. How can you do the least amount of things, for the maximum amount of effort? Because look at this online world, it's crazy right? Do you ever feel that you're getting everything done that you need to get done? Why not just structure things that you work on the core basics, the core fundamentals, and you structure them right that your marketing becomes easier, and you don't have to spend all this time and all this tech, stuff, and everything. Let's get back to, I want to get back to the iPad here.

Let's take a quick look. Here's the thing and this is if you're running multiple styles within your school. If you're running multiple styles, for us, this is how we structure the website. We start off with the homepage. We got the homepage. Then the homepage is really where people land. It's really also just a landing page because people are going to land there, they are at different stages in their buying cycle, something else I will explain in a minute as well. The homepage really serves as a place to put people in the right place to have the right conversation.

What might happen is they are interested in style 1. Not a dollar sign, hang on. Style 1 might be kids' karate, for example, or they are interested in style 2, kickboxing. Or maybe they're interested in style 3, Krav Maga, or something else. These are three different conversations to be had. That's what the homepage is doing, it's acting like a chooser to send people where they need to go. These pages then do the specific copy for the specific audience having this specific conversation. It's no brochure, it's actually understanding the design concept, and knowing your market, and knowing how to segment it properly to send people to the right place.

One thing that we focus on because we do Google advertising, we make sure that all these pages have all the relevant information that you need to make a decision because we advertise them independently. We don't send people to the homepage, ever. People land there because they might be following your brand, or they heard about you. They google you, so the first page they're going to land is that homepage. That happens, but when it comes to the structure, we want to make sure that the homepage is just a chooser to send people to the right place. All these pages have a conversation that was self-targeted.

Do you need multiple web pages for this? No. How many signs do you have in front of your school? Do you have a different sign for each style or page? Do you segment your school like that? If people come for kickboxing, do you hide the kids? You know what I mean? There's always going to be this bit of overlap. You're much better off, in my opinion, and I've had this conversation multiple times in high-level mastermind groups. It's much better to have your one website, one brand, simplify things, and make sure that you're segmenting at the right place. I guess I should say this because segmentation is important.

Being specific is important, but are you doing it at the right place? Do you need to do it on a Facebook level, so that every Facebook page is different? I don't think so. Why don't you keep it under your same brand, and segment at the right place? Because this is where the conversion really is going to happen most of the time, depending on your marketing strategy of course again, is on the website. So why don't you segment people there and have those separate conversations? This can easily be done on one website. When people land on the kids' karate, they don't see the kickboxing, they see kids. They see kids' pictures. They see all that. So you can segment this according to that. I hope that helps.

The way we go about this when we’re creating a website. Look, it does take work, there's no doubt about that. We focus strongly on what's called A/B split testing. That means that one website might have a separate headline to the other one. We're fortunate enough that we develop websites, so we do this on a larger scale, and that way we can track different elements, and we do take it a step further. That is with heat maps.

Heat maps are really, really revealing, because you go based on not what people say they do, but what they actually do. You can see what people are clicking on your website, and the advantage we get from this is invaluable because we can see exactly what people are doing, what they click on, what they do not click on. This takes the A/B split testing to another level because what we gain from the one, we can use on the other. It becomes an invaluable exercise to really check our different websites for what we do for members. So, that's the one thing.

I should talk about the other side. Does this mean that all websites are created equal? Definitely not. This is the other, and this takes the conversation to a whole nother ball game. One thing we can establish, you need a sales funnel. Does it need to be on ClickFunnels or Leadpages or one of these tools? No, it doesn't. You can build that out on your website, preferably get a professional person to do it that understands sales and marketing.

Here's the problem with most web developers. Most web developers don't focus on sales and marketing, and I understand that really clearly, because I started out as a computer programmer, and tech and gadgets was my thing. It was only until I started learning about online marketing, and marketing and sales, that I really started to see how the two actually linked together. The problem is, it's two very, very different skill sets generally. A person that's focused on technology and analytics, or a person that's focused on graphics, is not necessarily focused on sales and marketing. When your development team consists of a technical person and a graphics designer, there's absolutely zero sales strategy on that website. So, you got to watch out.

What I've put together for this video is a report, and you can download that. This will help you. It's called “20 Questions to Ask Your Web Developer Before Investing in a New Martial Arts Website.” This is the top 20 questions that I've pulled together of what you should be asking a web developer. This is very, very quickly going to tell you where their mind is at, and if they're going to deliver with what it is that you need. What do you need from your website? You need leads, and you need paid trials. You need someone with that understanding. If you're watching this video on Facebook, just type 20 in the comments, and we will send that through to you. Otherwise, just check it out on martialartsmedia.com and it will be available for download in the show notes of this episode. Something else for you to consider.

We've covered your website can be your sales funnel. You need someone that actually understand the sales and marketing process to facilitate that for you. A big thing of why we focus on building things on your website, and this will be covered a bit more in the report, is having an asset. When you look at the online world, there's one place where you actually build out an asset, and that is in your domain name. So your .com, .au, .co, .uk, wherever you are located.

Your website address is your one and only asset. The problem that can happen is you own the domain name, but somebody else actually owns your website, so it's kind of like you own the house on a piece of land, but somebody else owns the land. Somebody else can just take the land away from you, and you're just stuck with the house. Or, you own the land but somebody else owns your house, so somebody can just go break the house down if they want. Something to check out for.

So, when you're building out things on the internet, and you're looking at the long term, what's going to last the longest for you? Then it's a wise move to build things out on your website. It's maybe not always the quickest, and maybe not always the easiest, but long term, it's going to benefit you, because all your prime content, and if I say content, videos and articles, that stays on your website.

A few things for you to consider. Now, look, if you're doing things yourself, and you're at the point in your business that you've got to do absolutely everything, then maybe a tool like ClickFunnels or Leadpages can help. But you got to be careful because you might get sucked into a lot of things from top marketers, that'll make you buy things. Probably won't make you, but you'll feel that you need to buy these things, and you don't really need them. It's something for you to consider.

If you are hands-on with the tech, and you feel that you're 100% clued up on all the stuff, and nobody can do a better job, then hey, commit to it, do your thing. It could be good to just sometimes test things and get an offer out quickly. But if you want more specifics, and you want to be a bit more in detail of getting a sales funnel done for you, or website done that's yours on your domain, in your structure, then reach out to a professional, whether that's us or not. Go for it.

All right, I hope that helps. I hope that clarifies a few things. If you want to download that report, go to martialartsmedia.com, or if you're watching this on Facebook, just leave a comment with the word 20, and we'll send that through to you. Thanks, and I'll speak to you soon. Cheers.

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

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48 – How To Create Martial Arts Training Videos With Jack Leung

October 23, 2017 by George Fourie

Jack Leung is capturing attention with his martial arts training videos. We discuss frameworks to create your own.

.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:

How video marketing can help boost your martial arts business.
Step by step framework for making engaging martial arts videos.
How to grab attention in the first 30 seconds.
Why Jack Leung ended his career in graphic design and pursued martial arts instructing.
How to overcome the one thing that stops martial arts school owners from creating videos.
And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.

TRANSCRIPTION

George: Hi, this is George Fourie, and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast. Today, I have another great guest with me, Sifu Jack Leung. And Sifu Jack Leung has, I'll guess I'll start off with the video side of things, has an awesome YouTube channel. You've got to see the videos to appreciate it, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And look, a video marketing, doing video in general, is something that, it's a big component. We're always talking about it in the Martial Arts Media Academy with our students, of really leveraging it. And Jack claims he's not an expert, but I'm sure you're going to disagree when you watch his videos. So, first and foremost, welcome to the show, Jack.

Jack: Thank you for having me, thank you.

George: Awesome. So, let's start just in the beginning, to give people a bit of an idea, who is Jack Leung?

Jack: Hi everyone, my name is Jack Leung, and I teach Wing Chun in Queensland. I currently run two full-time clubs, and four different small clubs at different locations, at school halls and community centres.

George: Alright, cool. So, going a bit further back, how did your whole martial arts journey evolve?

Jack: I started out training in Hong Kong, and I'm from Hong Kong. I started out training with Karate first in high school. And I went to, let's just say a rough high school, and we get to test a lot of things before there were videophones and that kind of stuff. So sometimes, a lot of instructors don't say … they only tell you the good stories. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you lose badly, and that's when I started looking into martial arts.

In the beginning, I like to tell people, and this is what I tell parents, I want to be stronger, to be able to protect myself, but that wasn't the case. I just wanted to be very good, to protect myself and beat up other kids. But that's very different 20 years later, that's very different 20 years later. So, that's how I started. And I started training Goju Karate first, for five or six years, and in between, I trained some different types of Kung Fu. Some Southern Praying Mantis, different lineages of Praying Mantis, and then I met my Sifu in 1996 when I walk past on the way to school. And then, I started, I just walk in and say, “Oh, what is Wing Chun?”. And that got me interested in training Wing Chun.

George: Awesome. So, how long have you actually been in Australia, then?

Jack: I've been here, I think, roughly 20 years now, I think 20 years. Yeah, let me think. Yeah, 20 years now.

George: So your whole family moved over to Australia?

Jack: No, I came over to study, first, and then I went back and forth. In the beginning, I didn't know if I liked this place, and then, so I came over, I studied, and I went back and forth. And, yeah, that's how I stayed behind.

George: So what made you really see Australia as a way to obviously further your life, and stay permanently?

Jack: I would like to say, I like Brisbane, I'm from Brisbane, and I love the weather here. It's the Sunshine State, I love the beach, and outdoor living, it's great. I'm not saying Hong Kong's not great, but it can be a crowded places, and just a lot of conflicts, a lot of people. Let me rephrase this, there's conflict everywhere, but it's easier when you have to travel every day, you go on train and there's lots of people in and out. A big city like that, I prefer Brisbane. And now I like Australia, that's why I'm here.

George: Awesome. Cool, so you started your journey in Hong Kong, and then you moved to Australia. So, how did this evolve to then actually going on the teaching journey?

Jack: So, I never thought I would teach Kung Fu, or any martial arts. Before I teach Kung Fu, I had a graphic design company and printing company. I was doing that for the past 10 years before that, and in terms of business-wise, it's not bad, it's not bad, but I just have to always work over-hours. Just imagine if you need business card, or flyers for your events, for your next event. People always come in and say, “I need it.” “When do you need it?” “I need it yesterday.” It's always a rushed job.

And when you're a boss, it's hard, because when other people, your employee, leave and finish work at 5:30 or 6:00, you're the boss, and you have a client, and they want it urgently, so who's going to stay behind? Your job. If they're willing to pay extra-loading, as in they pay extra $60 for extra time who's going to stay behind? You will have to stay behind. I will have to stay behind. Meaning, every night, lots of time, I stay until 9:00, and very late, yes, that's right.

George: Yes, I was at a business conference on Monday in Sydney, and it was a joke that came up: you're the business owner, then you've got the staff, and it was kind of like, It was said in a sarcastic way, “How can these bastards not want to work the hours that we want to work as the business owners?”. So, we always expect them to obviously give that output, but yes, I understand that pressure of, your clients … And you always feel your reputation is at stake, so even if it's the littlest thing if you love your job and your business, you always take it to, “I've got to stick to this deadline whether it's impossible or not.”

Jack: It is true. So that's how I decided, after 10 years of doing the same thing, I decided to just start something else. I first got into fitness training, I was doing that. And it was hard, it's never easy. To all martial arts business owners out there, for those who are interested in going full time, I'm telling you, it's not easy. But if you do what you like, you don't have to work a day in your life anymore, and that's my favourite quote.

George: I love that quote, that's fantastic. So, let's go into our topic that we're going to talk about, focus on a little more, and that's video marketing, and just doing videos. So for starters, why video, for you?

Jack: Why video for me? Because I come from a creative industry, print and graphic design, I like the visual aspect: what draws attention? And this is very different, and interesting, how this compare to 10 years ago. I remember when Facebook first started, it was a lot of posts, a lot of photos, pictures, and then became YouTube videos. There was no Facebook videos. And that's when people start sharing videos. And I think (a slight sidetrack), I think that's the best time to do it, to do YouTube videos.

But now, it's easier. The platform seems like it's easier to share videos. And the technology change, and now we all have smartphones, so it's very easy to just shoot something and spread your ideas, what you do, online, and showcase how you train, or training, any tips. And that's why I started doing videos.

George: Okay. I don't know the stats, I don't know how many. Yeah, I'll try and get the stats for the transcript, but there's, I don't know how many billions of videos that get, I think it's just uploaded, on a daily basis, and then watched. And internet connections are getting faster, it just becomes a lot easier for people to just watch videos. So, you mentioned a key thing there, about attention. So, that's really the key of video, because everybody always talks about, “Hey, we should do video,” and then they go shoot a live video of them fumbling around and procrastinating. And then, two minutes in, you've watched nothing. And that's obviously the wrong way of doing it. So, if you focus on the attention aspect, how would you go about that, to really capture people's attention?

Jack: So, from my experience, I'm not an expert, but I just try to learn from different people's videos. I watch a lot of YouTube videos and try to learn from them. And this is from my research, is that people just have very short attention span, unfortunately, and if you don't capture them within the first 30 minutes, some even say, hang on, I said 30 minutes, I mean 30 seconds. If you can't capture, Facebook videos, in 10 seconds, you can't really get them. So first of all, like you said, you have to really have a topic, and what the video is for. Is this to showcase your techniques, or is this to spread some self-defence, or even the culture of your school, marketing for your school? You really have to work out on a topic in order to showcase your video and make it better for your business.

George: Okay, cool. So, you start with the topic, and then really communicating that really clearly, that the person that's going to watch it, that they know immediately, “Alright, this is what's in it for me, I'm going to get this.” Then, how do you transition from that?

Jack: Sorry, I can't hear you again, sorry.

George: So, how would you transition from, so you've done opening, then what becomes the focus in the video from there?

Jack: It really depends on the individual topic. So, if this video is to showcase our school, and we put it on a website for marketing, then what sort of image would you want to display yourself? If you're a fight gym, and you have a lot of fighters, I would say you would put different types of fighting videos in there. And if you're a family-oriented gym, or school, then you would put different topics, how you could actually give confidence to the young children, young kids. And if you're focusing on self-defence, or if it's just a general awareness video, then you have different topic-specific videos.

So then, you go into … I see a lot of times that people just do a video and just randomly shoot, like what you said earlier, just shoot around. “This is my school, and this is what we're doing.” And there's no lighting, audio is really bad, and … I'm not saying my video's good, please don't get this wrong: I'm trying to learn, it's more than just an iPhone or a smartphone now, it's more about lighting, it's more about getting a good mic. If you're trying to explain your concept, you need good audio, you need good … It's all together in one package.

And sometimes, it's interesting too, some normal videos that people shot by their phone would go viral, too. It's the content, too, it's also the content. You have everything in the right place but you don't have the right content, it won't work.

George: Yes, because there's so many ways to go about that. One thing I always try to speak about to our members in the academy, is, to get over the initial.. There is a fear element to it. Which is almost strange for me with martial arts instructors, because it's nothing different to what you would do on a day-to-day basis, you are teaching. So, looking at the, just to break down the layers of, what are the obstacles to overcome to do video? And that being, do you really need the flash video camera, or can you just use the iPhone? Do you need the fancy lighting? So, you prefer the lighting. And you work with, what type of equipment do you use, then, when you go about your videos?

Jack: It depends on what sort of videos I do. So, sometimes I get a team in, a video-photographer in. And they're good at what they do, you have to respect those people, and that's what they study and that's what they, give credit to them. And they can produce some really high-quality video. But sometimes, for a technique workshop, so I'm going to introduce, so, what happens when people grab me, choke me, grab my neck, what do you do? Those kind of short videos, it's about the content.

So, you need a proper, you can't just shoot it with a really old VHS camera or video camera. It has to be HD, the light has to be good. And if you don't have good lights, you can always shoot under the sun, just not facing the sun, it's under the sun. And also, audio has to be good. The problem with the smartphone is, you don't have a good mic to it. What I'm saying is, when I'm shooting, for example, if I'm holding a camera here and the person's way is usually, you want to showcase the entire body, how they stand. So, it's actually at least four, five meters away. And when you're trying to explain things that far away with a smartphone, it's really hard.

George: Yes.

Jack: So I got a professional Røde mic, from the store, and so I can hook it up, and it gives better. But it's never going to be as good as a professional video-photographer. But, it really depends on what sort of video you're producing.

George: Yeah, and like you said, the content. My, and I can't reach it now, it's a little lav mic, so it's the little mic that, you can just clip it on your shirt, and then it just goes in the iPhone. But I've got this long lead, that if I need the distance.

Jack: That can be a little tricky because I used to have one of those, and it can be really tricky when you're demonstrating. For normal use, if you're presenting the idea, that's perfect, but if you're demonstrating a martial art move, just imagine a ground fighter with that, to explain. It's very hard, you tangle them all up. Okay, I'm joking about, I'm just saying. So I recently, I keep buying toys every week, if my wife is watching this she's not going to be happy. So, I bought a wireless mic, so I'm testing it out. So, I can wear it on me, I can put it in my iPad or my SLR, and then, the audio can go across. And hopefully, that will work for me.

George: Yeah. So, just on the, because you said you had a Røde mic, that's the premium brand with mics. So, you have it on a boom stand that it's just above you when you?

Jack: And or you can always do this at a lower cost. The Røde mic that I bought isn't too expensive, it's under $100, and when you were saying, the boom stand, I didn't get that, I just tangle it on a stick, on a training stick we have. It's the same idea, but someone will have to hold it, hold it up high. Or, you can somehow just attach it over the top, and that's a cheaper option for good video, audio if you do.

George: Alright, great. So one thing I really try and get across to martial arts school owners is to really embrace the idea of video because it's the one platform that you can leverage. You can create one video, you can transcribe the actual audio, you can turn it into a blog post, and you can email it to your prospects. Then, you can start your social media, and you can just place it everywhere. So, if you can look for a leverage point for your marketing, then video is really it because it's the one modality that you can just convert into all these multiple modalities.

So, what advice would you give for a martial arts instructor that's hesitating with the whole doing the video thing and just the real, core basics of what they should do to get started?

Jack: I would say, always give it a try. When I first started, it's the fear of facing a camera, looking at a camera. It's like you're talking to someone, but there's no one there. And you get nervous, and I think you have to start doing a little bit mini test videos, and work around it, the fear. I think the fear is the most important thing. Most martial artists, most martial art business owner knows their own stuff. If you don't know, then I would be worried about it. So, most people know their own stuff. But to present it in front of a camera, my advice is, you don't have to do it in front of your students, just set up a tripod, put a camera, or put your iPhone on, face yourself, and try to do some simply, try give it a shot. One minute video.

And have a look at it. If it's not too bad, you can always work on it. This is a very different day to before, we can always shoot and re-shoot. If it's not good, just delete, redo it again. If the audio's not good, I'm going to work on the mic. And lighting. You can do it outdoor, or just grab two lights that's facing from behind the camera, like you were saying earlier, and facing towards you, and that would work. You don't want to have it, I'm not expert, but you don't want to have it above you. Above you, the shadow's coming down, won't make you look too good. But if it's facing in front of you, have the audio on. Try to get a tripod, tripod is a good idea. You don't want to shake your video unless you're trying to do some action video. But I'll leave that to the video-photographer.

So there is all my advice. It's not too much about the technology itself. The mic itself is under $100, tripod, a cheap one is 30. It's about the fear of talking to a square-shaped object, and continue talking, and showing your technique, or displaying your school. That's the hard bit, I think.

George: Yes. You're so right. I think it's also the fear of being judged. Is it going to be good enough? What are my peers going to say? How are people going to perceive this? Am I going to get backlash? People love to hate on martial arts videos. Everybody always knows something better, or, “You could have done this.” That's just in the bigger scheme of things. But I think there's that fear element, of obviously getting over, “How am I going to be perceived by the community,” as such.

Jack: Yes. It's also the fear. But, remember one thing, it's just like everything else and including martial arts: the more you train, the better you get. You remember your first day when you walk into a dojo? You know nothing. And then, you get better at things, and then you're down the track, like for example you get your black belt: you realize you only know little. But that's how it is. So same with video, it's the fear. “I don't know how to set this up.” Try to learn. There's lots of videos online, you can educate yourself. Educating yourself. But not going in, and not willing to educate yourself, that is the big problem with a lot of martial artists, and general business people, and that's a big problem.

So, my tip is just give it a go, video yourself, lighting. If you're already videoing yourself, see how you can improve it. Can you work better on the lighting? What about audio? Have you got those, video and audio? What about your transitions between? Are you good at editing? If not, you can always find people who are good at editing online, places like fiverr.com. You can get someone to do your intro logos and things like that.

And also, another important thing is, I think, it's also not just one video. You've got to think, plan ahead. What is your goal? Is it a series of video? Are these videos trying to help you promote your school? What are you trying to showcase? Are you just trying to showcase a self-defence move, where there's 10,000 people showing it already on YouTube? What make your video better than the video next door, than the person next door? So that's what I think.

George:Definitely so and I think that's probably the most important part, is, what is the point? Why are you actually doing the video? Is it to speak to the prospects? Is it to speak to somebody in the community? Is it to speak to an existing student? And I know there are people that go as far as, write that, just like in marketing when we write sales copy, we try and create this avatar, this person. His name's Bob, 35-year-old, has two kids, and wanting to start training martial arts but he's not sure. He's got these injuries, he's never done anything, and he thinks he needs to be fit.

So, you have this mental image of this one person, and then base it on that. And I've heard a lot of people actually put a photo of someone behind the camera as well, just to take away that awkwardness, of their perfect prospect, whoever they're trying to talk to. And now it becomes more real because you're having a conversation with someone.

Jack: Yes, yes. When I first started doing the videos, and a lot of interviews, I actually need someone to sit behind the camera, so I can actually look at that person, and explain to that person. And that helps a lot, too. That helps a lot. And I was saying earlier that there's online website that can help you edit your videos. I forgot to say that there are a lot of apps these days, which you can actually put your videos in together, a few clicks, like iMovies on your iPhone, and different types of apps. Adobe apps and they can put your … If you're looking at putting a marketing video for your school, that will help, definitely help.

Obviously, getting a video-photographer is the best, it's the best. But sometimes, I put in a bigger production, and sometimes I do little production in between. What I tend to do is, I try to put out a video every week, so there's always a video. It can be a big production, it can be a small production, it can be talking about techniques, how I deal with things, or it can just be fun.

When you were saying earlier, I know this is a little bit different to how business-minded people, where they write out programs and what they do, I like fun. I enjoy being with my students, I enjoy videoing things, I do things sometimes I don't … It's not always about money for me, but there's no limit for me. Sometimes, I blow my video budget, I just go, “Oh, cool, add in the drone. How much is a drone? 500? Oh. Add in the drone, don't tell my wife.” And then it makes the video look cool.

And we went with a bunch of our student, we went to Glass Hill mountain, we shot at 5:00 AM in the morning with the drone going up, and it looks beautiful, I love this. And at the same time, does it help? I think it helps. It helps my potential, people who are interested in training. “Hey, this instructor seems fun, this school seems fun.” Maybe it's not a direct marketing or direct business mindset, I'm not trying to build this fun because I am fun, and we are fun. And this is what we're trying to showcase, rather than, “Come join with us, we are the fun school.” No, it's not like that. It's what we do, make us who we are.

George: That's excellent. So you're really using it as a way to express your personality. And I'd probably add to that, then, because I think that's when you're starting out, that's probably the biggest obstacle. Well, once you've actually started doing it, the biggest thing is to really just find your voice. That place where you're comfortable with the camera, and the way you portray yourself. For me, the rule I put in place with face-to-camera video, is just be comfortable messing up. Just be comfortable making mistakes.

If we're having a conversation, I do it in the podcasts all the time, I fumble on a word, or I say something and I'm like, “Oh, okay, I shouldn't have said that” but I just laugh it off. I just make peace with it. Because, if I was having a conversation with someone, that's my personality, that's the way I am, so I'm going to make these mistakes. Now it's just on video, there's nothing really different.

Jack: Yes, that's right. But there's one thing, I forgot to say, is when you put it out there, when you put yourself out there, there will, like everything else in the world, there will be people that like you, and there will be a lot of people that don't like you. And to present yourself out there, there will be people leaving not so friendly comment. And you just have to ignore them. And this is what you do, and then … So that might be something a martial arts business owner will have to think before they present themselves, put themselves out there.

George: Yes. And my filter for that is, when I get backlash, then I'm obviously doing something right. That's the justification I have for myself. But it's really true, because when you start speaking to a certain audience, and the right audience that connects with you, then this polarizing thing almost happens automatically. Because you're connecting with a certain profile, which means you are upsetting other profiles, or they just don't agree, or they have never done a video, and they're jealous, and they're not getting over their own fear, so their defense mechanism is to run you down, because they're just not doing it, so yeah. But definitely, get comfortable with the backlash that comes with any form of content marketing, as such.

Jack: That's right, yes.

George: So to wrap up, we can put together a bit of a framework. I really like production style video for the big things you're going to do. I see, you had an awesome promo video on your YouTube video for the events, with music, and it was really just, it had the suspense feel to it, which was really good, with the opening, just the music in the background. But then again, I'm a big fan of also, just videos on the fly. Because, if you're doing video as a method for content marketing, then it's good to not have barriers, that you get it done. And that would be, maybe it's the iPhone and the mic and the boom, and you've got light coming into your dojo on the mats, and now you can do something. Or hand the camera to a student to do the filming.

So, I guess if we had to look at a checklist, we've talked about finding your voice, having the lights pointed at you, try and get a good mic. If you don't have a mic, just start, because it could take you 10 takes of a video to actually feel that comfort of, okay, this is something that I actually want to put up. So you've got that. Make sure that you cover the topic, be very clear on the opening because we want to grab attention. And then start your content, what it is that you're going to do.

And then I'll add, for a little framework, something that we've … And public speakers have always spoken about this, that you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, and then you tell them what you just told them. And it does really add to the video framework. Because now you can just say, “Hey, this is me, this is what we're going to do, this is,” maybe, the situation, how it will happen. And then you do it, and then you do the recap, and then you can close off, obviously, with, “Check us out on YouTube,” or your website, wherever you want to go.

Jack: You're good at this, exactly what you just did. That's exactly what you just said, I think you went through all the point list, for which you said.

George: There you go. Awesome. Before we wrap up, just with, where people can find you, because you've got to … And we'll add a lot of videos to this episode, so you can just check the show notes for that. Is there anything that I should have asked you that I did not get to?

Jack: We didn't get to talk about the positive energy, which is another … I said, we are happy, we're a good club, we're fun club, but I also believe we're a positive energy, and that's the culture of the club. So I did say earlier, about people marketing their videos towards different point of view, and why they do their videos, but also, showcase your school, so people know who you are, what you do before they come in and see you. And that's very important, too.

George: Very good point. And with that, it would help that your videos don't, you don't have to be the hero. This is actually, I remember this now, I added this as a slide in one of our training module in the academy, but the whole thing was, don't be … You don't have to be the hero. If you want to showcase, as you say, why not get your students involved?

Jack: That's right, that's right. I'm not always the centre of the spotlight, and a lot of my videos are my students, and why they enjoy training here. And the events, we had events where we dress up in Star Wars costume, and we order lightsabers in, and we had some duelling. And then we did some training workshops, and all the donation money goes to children's hospital. Things like that, it showcase who you are, and what you do, and what you enjoy, and what you believe, and that’s the most important. That's what I think.

George: That's excellent. And we can tie that back to marketing as well, because, at the time of recording this, Halloween's coming up, and that's an ideal … How can you turn that into a fun event? Doesn't have to be marketing video, but you showcase the fun environment and the positive energy that happens at your school.

Jack: Yes.

George: Alright, awesome. Well, Jack Leung, it's been fantastic speaking to you. Now, for anybody that wants to check out Jack's website, it's practical-wingchun.com.au, did I get that right?

Jack: That's right, yes.

George: And your YouTube channel, if people want to find that. What is your YouTube channel called?

Jack: Practical Wing Chun Australia, and then you can find me on the YouTube channel.

George: Alright, awesome. Any other links that we need to mention, where people can find you?

Jack: Practical Wing Chun Australia on the Facebook link, and you can find me, yeah.

George: Alright, awesome. Jack, it's been great speaking to you, I will speak to you soon.

Jack: Thank you, I'll see you soon. Take care, buddy.

George: Awesome, cheers.

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