154 – My Plan To Help 100 Martial Arts Schools Scale To 300 Students, and 10 To $1m

After 13 years and working with 400+ martial arts school owners, I share my refined vision from helping school owners break the 100 student barrier, to 300, to $1M revenue per year.

INVITATION: If you’d like more info about working with me in Partners, Just message me ‘Partners’ on Facebook and I’ll send the details over in a doc (no sales call required) Send Message On Personal Profile >

IN THIS EPISODE:

  • The three-part framework to attract, convert, and retain students for long-term growth.
  • Why most martial arts school owners struggle with marketing—and how to fix it.
  • A new lead follow-up engine that automates engagement and increases conversions.
  • The one overlooked strategy that can increase school revenue by 20-30%.
  • How to scale without burnout while maintaining a balanced personal and professional life.
  • And more

 

TRANSCRIPTION

Today I want to take you through my plan to help 100 martial arts school owners scale from 100 to 300 students and help 10 martial arts school owners scale to 1 million dollars in annual revenue. I'm going to go through the whole plan. I'm going to take you through this google doc and I'm probably going to go a little off script just to give you a bit more context around how the story evolved, what got me here, what brought on this plan and all the rest. 

So, I'll start at the semi-beginning. 13 years ago I discovered martial arts at my five-year-old's first martial arts class. I'd never been to a martial arts class, and didn't know much about it. 

I saw the movies. All that I thought is, you know, for me as a first-time parent, what a great activity this looked like for my child to get into. And I was watching this class and to me the only words I could find to describe it was personal development in the physical form. 

I was seeing these kids stand six feet tall, disciplined, confident, and I thought wow these kids are learning like life-changing skills and it's all disguised as fun and they don't even know it. And that moment in hindsight was a life-changing impact for me which brought me to this life-changing journey. So I started helping the school where my son was training with lead generation.

This came about completely not on purpose. I actually bumped into one of the instructors at a kid's playground where my child was playing and got talking to the instructor and learned what they were doing. And this was the first time I sort of got some insight just on how the business was running etc.

And my marketing brain kind of just triggered a few ideas and I thought look I know a few things that could definitely help you guys. I'd love to come and share what it is. And so at this time in my life I was deep into the trenches of online marketing.

I was doing Google ads. I was mainly running online affiliate type products. Doing Google ads to landing pages and emails and I'd gotten a little bit of success.

My biggest aha moment was being in Australia at the time and selling to someone in the United States that I've never met and they bought my product and I said oh wow this the possibilities of this are endless. I know it's common now but at that time it wasn't that common. Anyway, the school was already successful.

They just started on marketing online and so I introduced them to a few things like we ran an email campaign which got surprising results and by the way we still run this campaign. It's called The 4-Day Student Scale Campaign. It's slightly modified now but it still works and it's the thing that we put on repeat for our clients all the time just with some variations but the psychology it still works.

And I became their marketing arm and shortly after that I stepped onto the mats myself. One of the instructors was asking me why aren't you training and it was funny because if I think about it now I had all the excuses that you probably hear all day right. Too old, I'm too injured from rugby etc.

But then I heard a cliche. I tried it and I was hooked. And that's just the next step of how martial arts started to infiltrate my life. So parent, son was training three times a week. I'm helping with the marketing and now I'm training and so now martial arts is slowly becoming my life. 

And this is I guess where our stories might become you know we might have a similarity in that where I don't know when you decided that martial arts is going to be your life you know you'd probably been training way longer than than me starting in my late 30s and but there was probably a moment where you decided we'll hang on I'm gonna go this route martial arts is going to be my life.

And that was it for me right and Martial Arts Media™ was born as a brand and I'd found my purpose. So, fast forward to 2016 I created the Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. At this point in time this was really a channel for me so I just wanted to learn right and if I think about it now it's like nine years doing this podcast. But that's when I did the first interview with the guys I was working with and it was really to learn.

 I thought well look I don't know much about martial arts I love everything about it but my knowledge is I need to catch up. And the podcast for me was a channel of just interviewing as many experts as I could and just learning to really soak up the knowledge. And from that point I picked up a few clients and I started helping other schools first nationally and then internationally in Europe, the States, Canada, New Zealand and we got some good results right.

The last screenshot I captured from our old shopping cart system we had recorded 7,386 paid trial students signed up through our system. Which you know in itself is a big number but conservatively now the time has ticked on our results have improved and you know we've been doing this for a long time. I mean I could say conservatively we've at least tripled that right well over 25,000 paid trials and then some.

After working with 400 plus school owners now I faced two separate problems. There I'll talk about industry first and then I'll bring it on to me. So there was a general lack of knowledge around marketing which led to the big problem: just no strategy right now, strategy of what to do.

How to market the business online, generate leads, attract the right students, how to convert them and then like retain on the back wall. Retain on the back end is more on the mat but how to build this online infrastructure that could also support the community and what to do at the right time and so strategy was non-existent. There was a clear disconnect on how operations were handled on the mats versus how the online world operated and from my perspectives strategy was non-existent.

Software tools available to the industry at the time were decades behind. I mean the struggle and confusion that still exists today was kind of real because as much as well intended as people are, if they haven't come from that space it's hard to take an offline model and try and piece it into a space where it's just not compatible. Look, today the tools are much better, coaches are in abundance but yet I see strategy is missing and I mean let's not even begin to talk about the impact of AI which I think most software applications just aren't ready for.

We get these conflicting tactics from agencies and then software tools duct-taped together which just causes more overwhelm, more bloat, more frustration and it feels like it's the 80-20 in reverse. You know if we think of 80% of your results coming from 20% of your efforts it's almost like 80% effort is being sacrificed for 20% of the results. That's a broad stroke on the industry.

The other problem was me. I burnt out after taking on everything like building websites and it's funny I remember why we wanted to build websites because we were running google ads to pages and I was just looking at what the average web developer was building which doesn't work for ads and so it was. 

And I still see this you know it's very frustrating for me when somebody says here's a high converting website and I'm like well have you run ads ever or to it no okay then it's just speculation right if you haven't put your heart and money behind a website and run ads to it and track those conversions everything is just speculation.

And so I started building the websites and landing pages just to make sure that I could actually test it, not that I could get it perfect but at least I had the data and I could make improvements through split tests and so forth.

It was websites it was ads doing the emails blogs at the time videos social and if the goal was and this is something that I really started with from the beginning is you know working with the school that I worked at they were at a high level and to maintain that level of authority.

I coined the slogan Become The ‘Go-To’ Martial Arts School because that was kind of everything how we approached the strategy of how do you become the authority that people look up to in your space that yeah that's the go-to martial art school you know if you always think of a brand there's always one that pops in your mind and that was how we framed everything from that point.

And so to do that these were the tools of authority that were needed and so I was over delivering trying to do everything for every school owner which was a big mistake and so I needed a better system and a better model too and a bit of script here but me trying to do everything for every school owner kind of robbed them from some of the knowledge that I feel is essential every business owner needs to grow a school. 

If you think of basic marketing basic sales and I see the more people you know have some sometimes, limit, what's what's the right word like there's limiting beliefs around or cringiness around sales and people just feel weird about it and they're like, oh it's like a used car salesman etc., and you know there's definitely a gross side to selling but that doesn't really apply if you're selling something of value. 

You know if you're selling something of value and it truly changes lives well you've got to do everything in your power to gently persuade people without manipulation and weirdness right but so shying away from those skills and just you know thinking you could just teach and never market. I don't feel that's always also a good strategy right, you've got to understand what resonates with your audience from an ad level and even if you're not running them but a basic understanding of knowledge is important anyway. 

Look I needed a better system and a model too to deliver make sure there's a little balance of knowledge with execution and delivery of services as well so for me look taking on the complexity of every component of online marketing that schools need to be the authority it's helped me carve a system of simplicity it's called the school scale plan and it's nine areas of accelerators that we work on as a model there's strategies and there's accelerators and then there's purpose which really sits right in the middle. 

And I created the recipe but my clients really inspired the ingredients. If I think about how many hours I've spent with martial arts school owners online every week we run, currently we're running three to four zoom calls every week for about 60 to 90 minutes.

And then just one-on-one time working with high-level school owners always approaches to learn what are the problems being faced and then going to the drawing board and creating solutions from that. 

And I think that's what's really given us an edge it's just time in the market but then also unpacking where there's where there are obstacles and where the problems are that we can draw solutions together and over the last few years it's we've created some staggering great results for a small group of martial arts school owners that we call Partners. 

And so this year and this is where the big plan comes in is this year I'm really stepping into our vision and it's to take 10 school owners to 1 million dollars per year in annual revenue plus, help 100 martial arts school owners scale from 100 to 300 students, and also through our community and through our tools support 50 new martial arts school owners breaking the 100 student barrier. 

Those numbers are metric for them. It's like a north star for me too but for me it's also knowing that the school scale plan is working and it gives us a goal that we can filter or remove any strategies around that doesn't align with that goal that's not going to support the outcome. 

So more important than the numbers is how we achieve it, and we start with purpose so if we look at our we've got a Venn diagram of our model which really attracts, increases and retains. Attract the right students to increase signups by improving conversions and automations and retain more members. 

And we all know if we don't get those things right but if we can't attract the right students well we're not gonna have students. If we can't increase signups and convert we're gonna struggle with cash flow, and if we can't keep them well there's never going to be growth and it's you're just going to be on a hamster wheel of students in and students out. 

Now those are the strategies but right in the center what we work with is purpose. So purpose is the goal so in our world and in our model purpose consists of three things: income that you desire, the impact that you want to create through your students and within your community, and then the lifestyle that you want to live. 

And you know for some and in the beginning it's eat sleep breathe on the mats and for others it's not eat sleep breathe on the mats but a life of balance travel etc.

We all probably start you know with eat sleep breathe but the the whole goal is to build a business that you can choose to work and take the classes that you want. So here's how we are rolling out the plan here for Partners.

And by the way Partners is our flagship program but there are also three levels inside Partners and that goes back down to this vision depending on where you're at with a school owner and where you are headed will depend on which level and which level of access you will need for the right tools and the right conversation to take you where you want to go. 

Here's the plan, first up I'm going to keep on doing what I do which is one-on-one kickoff calls with me to optimize pricing offers and strategy. We've got a thing a 10-step process that we call The OnRamp, I do the kickoff call so we can fast track especially on the pricing and the offers so we can unpack any obstacles or any uh any blocks on taking those right decisions to do the right things and build the right foundations that are going to build the move the business forward. 

Now number two, onboard our clients into MAM.Pro immediately and we do that this is our CRM by the way we have a CRM that we use for our clients for our marketing some are also using it to launch their schools. It's our CRM system that it doesn't replace, it doesn't need to replace what you have it can work with what you have and it's not a requirement to swap CRM to work with us but we have managed to build all our top performing Facebook ads into our CRM. 

And it means that we can launch our highest Facebook ads within 24 hours right? It's that good. It takes you three to six clicks and you gotta register, connect your Facebook account, choose the ad if you got the right offer and you can launch your ads so it is that easy. 

Number three once we got your ads running we install the new lead follow-up engine which automates the follow-ups via email phone SMS and ai and if I say ai it's AI supporting the conversation and not being the conversation I'm not into lying to people tricking people I've never liked buying from an ai bot and I don't think your customers like that either. 

So yep we use it but it's definitely a balance of keeping things authentic and real because we don't want you to break that trust with your new student.

Number four increases revenue by 20 to 30 percent with the student price upgrader a lot of what we do part in in our kickoff call. 

Number five, create Irresistible Offers that you can't say no to. Number six, cut ad spend by 25 to 40 percent while increasing lead flow. Number seven, monitor the eight core metrics with the progress tracker to keep score so we know exactly where your numbers are at and then we know where we need to do the most work if it's retention if it's getting more appointments it's actually converting appointments etc.

Number eight hosts weekly Partner Power Sessions that we would like to do right now plus we've got our Facebook Ad Marketing Implementation Sessions and Bi-Monthly Workshops. 

It is now me recording this at 12:20 at 6 a.m we did at my time, we did a Facebook Ad Implementation session and we also ran a mastermind at nine o'clock. That's typically on a Thursday for me, so that's on top of the programs and this is sort of added, as we host live events and private VIP days and that's for those who want to connect and connect in person and get results faster. 

And I say results faster just because you've got direct access in person and getting information in person it just you know you get information in just a different in that real modality you know you see experience have the conversations and I feel you can just get to process information a lot better so you want to elevate your results always good to try and meet up in person where you can. 

And number 11, hang on number 10, refine and repeat with 10 improvements at each 90 Day Growth Cycle so every 90 days we reset the plan, we reset the numbers and we commit to new marketing campaigns and new projects. 

Number 11, apply The Retention Maximizer to keep churn below five percent our record in the group i think is just below three percent and for our high level group uh which is called Partners mentor the group is gunning for one million per year.

I've partnered with my longest standing client who's a multi-seven figure school owner to help implement their 40 year proven operational systems that have scaled their school to which there are currently 1,850 active students. 

I'm working together together with them and their team and we're working with a small group of martial arts school owners over a 16 week commitment, and the whole goal is to revamp operations with direct access, it's not another course or another program it's high level direct access direct coaching to make sure you get the right answers and make the right decisions. 

Most importantly that is going to help you take your business to 1 million and beyond so that's the plan for Partners. 

Now I want to talk about probably something you know a bit more probably a bit more personal and but also more important because I did mention that you know I did go down a path like I love business and I love marketing but i also went down a path where like that became so much my life and it it burnt me out trying to do everything. 

And I want to do this business for a very long time and I want to keep working with people that I like working with and to do that I've got to be honest and real with who I am what I can deliver what I can't and what level of energy I can actually expend to commit to the business while keeping a balanced life myself. 

And so to do that, here's a plan for me to stay aligned with the mission, and that is to prioritize health, family, being a great dad and time on the mat. So, health super important for me I've had a few situations over the last couple of years just surgeries and stuff that were really set me back and it really made me appreciate day-to-day living and being healthy family my kids my wife most important to me it's kind of why I do what I do and being a great dad i like to be present with my kids and involved and whatever I can do in leadership for them to make sure that they become great adults is super important. 

And then time on the mats which is something that because of these surgeries and injuries has been very limited for me and I've just started back with back on the mats with a coach private right now but it's still jiu jitsu still one of my big passions. 

And yeah, really working on that so that's number one. Number two, say no to distractions and clients who don't align with my values. So, martial arts is you know it is a small probably niche in itself but it's also very big right. And there's a lot of people and there's a lot of different styles. 

People in different countries and continents have different ideas, which is all you know, everything in all styles and everything is all welcome to me. I just want to work with good humans, people that align with my values and you know there's going to be a fraction of the martial arts industry, right? 

Some people are just not going to gel with me, that's they just not going to like me or the things I stand for etc. And that is okay, I want to make sure I spend more time on my marketing and that's we'll discuss that later but I want to make sure that people know exactly as much as possible who they're working with and feel kind of work out for themselves.

If I am the right guy to help them achieve those goals, get to 300 students, get to 1 million per year etc. Cool, so say no to distractions. Number three, keep it real, express my weirdness, don't take life too seriously.

I can be a weirdo and yeah just have fun doing this. Number four, sink my feet into the beach sand daily, live five minutes from the beach. I moved here. It was kind of like a lifelong dream to live here on the sunshine coast. I do make the most of being able to go down to the beach. 

And number five, when I can surf, train BJJ, I mentioned that on the mats, meditate, drink coffee and have fun. All right, that's the personal stuff. 

How am I going to do this? All right, how am I going to execute the plan to make sure I speak to the right people and get the message out about Partners, so this video is step number one by the way of creating this video. 

So here's my plan of execution: increase the rhythm and expand the value on the Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. I joked the other day that I'm probably the longest standing podcast because I've been going for like nine years. Where I probably should be at like thousands of episodes but I mean I've done a good 150 60 but it's documented a long journey of you know where I've where I've been and what I've done that's going to be a big focus to really make sure I invest everything back into the Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. 

Number two part of the podcast really document and share previously private resources to attract the right school owners who value the Partners way so I've been doing Partners for I think seven years now as as a community in a group and we've shared a lot of resources and frankly I'm much happier spending the time that I do with clients than out there making a noise marketing. 

Which is kind of why I've kept it small and kept it growing the way it is I do feel however that there's so many things kept behind the scenes that can be so helpful for a lot of school owners and I'm happy to release a lot more of this content out to the public because it's a great filter right but people can see the content they get to experience what value we provide it's an easy answer if they should be working with us on this journey or not. 

Number three, invite subject matter experts to Partners and collaborate with any martial arts school owner who adds value to the mission. I feel I'm very aware of what my strengths are, where I can help and then where I need more help and the whole goal of aligning this vision of taking 100 school owners to 300 students and 10 school owners to a million dollars. 

The whole premise of this is that there's a direction and there's going to be skills and resources needed to get there. Which is why I've partnered with my longest standing client for example, because there's things that are just beyond my skill set.

I've never run a school and definitely not at multi-million dollars per year as they have. So, tapping into those resources is what brings the value to the table that keeps everybody in line and keeps everybody on the right path. 

Number four, I'll email often and make offers daily. Cap Partners at 100 people. This is a big one. So, keep it lean with direct access to me. I want to be able to know my clients, be able to talk to them and have a handle on where they are at in their business. 

I'm at this point, I'll reserve the right to change my mind but I would, I don't want to have a situation where I've got a, I cannot be able to answer the question or I've got to hand you off to this person and that person. Yep, we've got to support, help their system. My team helps with that. Yep, we've got a community where people like all the clients that have been with us for a long time and that are decades into the industry will help answer questions. 

But I want to make sure that I've got hands on things and be able to, you know, keep it lean with direct access to me. Number six, work with great humans only. What I mentioned earlier.

Number seven, sell one-time access to workshops that we host for Partners so instead of keeping all, and by the way, over the last seven years we've got more than 200 courses inside of Partners. 

I'm kind of busy refining and pruning a lot of them back but because we've got so many resources. Because we've got so many resources but I've changed our model to give access to people on a one-off basis. If people want to attend a workshop that we're hosting for Partners at times I will make that available to the public and they'll be able to access those workshops and attend and again that's a good way to assess whether I am the guy to help you to your next level or not. 

Number eight, keep running ads and focus on video content like this and that's the plan that's the big plan. Probably good to mention like what's in this for me. Like what's it for me? Well I wanted to tell you my story so that you know how I got into this because it wasn't like I bought a course, found a niche and started working like this, started from passion really. 

Love of the industry, and that's what got me here. But it's also a business right? And when my clients win, I win. And my goal is to take Martial Arts Media™ to a hundred thousand dollars per month. That number aligns and reflects the impact we're creating. 

It's kind of the yin of the yang. I love martial arts, I love marketing and I like to help the good guys, the good guys win. And that's really it, I know for me to generate a business turning a hundred thousand dollars a month, it's I've got to be generating 10 times the value with that. 

And that's just how the numbers add up for me. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be a ride, and yeah, if you'd like to join me on the journey, hit me up wherever you find a place to send me a message below. Reach out and let's have a chat and if not, all good but I'll keep you in the loop and I'll update you how it's going so until then I'll see you in the next video. Cheers!

INVITATION: If you’d like more info about working with me in Partners, Just message me ‘Partners’ on Facebook and I’ll send the details over in a doc (no sales call required) Send Message >

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153 – Increasing Your Martial Arts Students Value By $1,068 Annually

In this Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast I took Michele Ciampa from Shotokan Karate Club Tasmania through The Price Amplifier which boosted his student value by 52%.

 

IN THIS EPISODE:

  • How a simple, weekly social media post became the primary driver of student enrollment for a growing martial arts club.
  • A surprising shift in pricing structure that could more than double annual revenue per student.
  • Why leading enrollment conversations with value—not price—could be the key to better engagement and commitment.
  • A new approach that slashes the number of students needed to meet financial goals while still enhancing the club’s impact.
  • A strategic plan to engage new age groups, adding depth and variety to the dojo’s community.

 *FREE: Swipe the exact plan I use to fill martial arts schools with 200+ students within 7 months (And make sure your students are an incredible fit > Learn More

 

TRANSCRIPTION

GEORGE: Hey, it's George Fourie. Welcome to another Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. Today we're doing something new.

We're going to go with a full-on coaching call and do something a bit different and see if we can create some value, create a bit of conversation and really help one of our guests go to their next level, which we're going to discover what that is. And so somebody that I've known for quite a while, Michele Ciampa.

MICHELE: Hello.

GEORGE: Did I pronounce it correctly?

MICHELE: Yes, that's correct.

GEORGE: Michele Ciampa from Tasmania Shotokan Karate Club in Tasmania. So welcome! How are you doing, Michele?

MICHELE: Good. Yourself?

GEORGE: Good, good, good.

Cool. So if you mind just giving us a bit of a background. Yeah, just a brief overview about your karate club, who you teach, how long you've been going for, etc.

MICHELE: Absolutely. Okay. So I started teaching in 2019, just in a small community hall at first.

And then we had some renovations going on with that. So I had to find another location. So I found a place in a dance studio for a little while, and then I was back to the community hall.

And then just last year in October, I decided I'll just gamble everything and take a jump. And I opened in the main street of lovely Bernie here in Tasmania.

GEORGE: Congratulations!

MICHELE: Thank you. So at the moment, we teach very traditional Shotokan Karate.

I like to keep it as authentic as possible. Not really that many other karate clubs around. There's a few but it's not huge, like in the mainland.

So yeah, we've got a bit of a gimmick like the main street. And, you know, obviously people walk past and see the big signs every day. So that helps.

At the moment, I've got 54 students, mostly children. So my goal is now to try to get more teens and adults involved.

GEORGE: Cool. Okay, awesome. So congrats on going full time.

MICHELE: Thank you.

GEORGE: How's that been, been going full time? What do you feel has been different since you've taken the leap?

MICHELE: Obviously much busier. So once I used to only teach two days a week. I used to teach Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And then I took the gamble. I'm a chef by trade. So I'm used to those crazy chef hours. And I thought the dojo started to build and I thought, I'll put all my energy into this place and see how it runs. Definitely a lot busier.

And with more days open, it's more variety from the different people that can't make the Tuesday class or whatever, they can come on a Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or yes, I'm doing five days a week at the moment.

GEORGE: Very cool. All right.

So what's the big goal for you? Like if we had to like, let's go high level. Like if we had to have this chat like three years from now, and we were looking back over like all you've liked your progress, what would have to happen for you to feel happy about the movement forward?

MICHELE: Honestly, just the character building is the main thing. The difference you see in the students, like some people who come in, they're really shy or awkward or have some anxiety problems. And just seeing their confidence grow is incredible.

Like just helping people's lives and the same way that it's helped myself. So if I can get, you know, enough people like that, and obviously the skill level is important as well.

GEORGE: Gotcha. So, okay. So making an impact with your martial arts is super important.

MICHELE: Absolutely. Yeah.

GEORGE: What if we had to wrap some numbers around that? So you had 54 students at the moment. What would be significant for you for a number of students that you feel you are making a decent impact in your community?

MICHELE: So at the moment, I'm already seeing a huge impact with the students I do have, and they're all doing really well in putting in the effort. Obviously, the more people I can help, the better.

So probably around the hundred mark would be perfect and who knows, it might grow and grow.

GEORGE: Okay. So is hundreds like the ultimate goal? Like, you know, if you think you like the day when you started the business, you tap into this big vision and you like, sometimes we hold ourselves back in our thinking and think, well, yeah, that's not really possible.

And what was that vision? What was that, man, if I could get my business to that, that'll be the ultimate for you personally and for your community?

MICHELE: Yeah. So I can't really put a number on it, to be honest. Just the more people I can help, the better.

I mean, with the space that we have around 100 or if more, then obviously we can open more, more hours and who knows, eventually another location.

GEORGE: Okay. All right. So tell me about that. So, okay. So location and maybe another location.

Do you have a sort of ideal where you think you'd want to have X amount of locations?

MICHELE: Not really. I haven't really put much thought into it. I have had people message me saying, I wish you were in our area, this and that.

And so it's been kind of put in my head, but nothing, I'd prefer to focus on what I do at the moment and do this right before jumping out and doing other things.

So my priority now is to build this up and I'd especially like to get more teens and adults involved because at the moment they're mostly kids from seven to 12 is my main amount of students. So if I can impact teenage lives in those crucial years as well as development.

GEORGE: What is the total number of students that would both make a big impact and scare you at the same time?

MICHELE: I'd say, yeah, 150, 200 would probably be a bit, we'd be pushing it to fit everyone in. But obviously they're not all going to train at the same time.

GEORGE: Yeah, cool. Remember, we're trying to talk about a vision, right? So when we talk about vision, it's good to sort of remove current circumstances because then we get into like logistics, because then we do the what ifs in our mind.

So we're like, well, can't really do that because I don't have the space or I don't have X amount of instructors trained up. So we can't really do that. So, and forgive me for sort of probing on it, right?

Because this is sort of, if we don't have the destination, then we can't be super clear on the path. So a goal is good. Like I like to look at it always as a three-year vision, like what is the vision?

Bring it down to 12-month goals because then we can sort of work towards a goal number, like let's say a hundred. That's a good goal to work towards, right? That's a goal, but is it the vision?

So just sort of breaking the two apart. So I'll rephrase the question just to see if we can get some more clarity on like, all right, well, that's where we would like to, you know, that's essentially where we'd like to get it. 

If all things were possible, the situation was like, let's say you had all the instructors or you had, you know, the space, where would you see a vision for Shotokan Karate Club Tasmania?

MICHELE: A vision as in like the community or?

GEORGE: Yeah, like let's, if we just refine a number, right? I like to get clear on a number because then we know, like a number we can measure, right? Like what number of either locations would be an ideal place for you to get to and amount of students in total?

MICHELE: Right. So if we're talking about just this location, I'd say 150.

GEORGE: Is it one or 150?

MICHELE: 100 or 150. Okay, 100 we'll say. That's, you know, a more easy to get to goal or realistic, I guess.

 If I had two locations, then I'd be looking to probably double that. So yeah, at least 200, 300

GEORGE: Do you feel 150 is unrealistic?

MICHELE: I don't think it's unrealistic. I believe we can do it. It's just I need to get my marketing right, I guess, to the right people.

GEORGE: Okay. All right, cool. So we have a number, right? 150?

MICHELE: Yep, we'll go with that

GEORGE: Gotcha. Right. Awesome.

At this point in time, it's good to wrap sort of numbers around it. What do 150 students look like in dollars for you?

MICHELE: So I charge $80 a month. So they pay a monthly fee and then they can join as many classes as they like in that month. 

GEORGE: All right. So that's the goal. You've got 54 students.

We want to get to 150. What has been working well? Where's the bulk of your students coming from right now through marketing, word of mouth, bit of both?

MICHELE: Honestly, the local groups, Facebook groups. I did try a few ads and not many signups from the ads. I get a lot of inquiries, but not many people follow up. 

But mostly I just post and share things in the local community groups. And that's where I'm getting most people.

GEORGE: Great. Okay. Do you have a number of how many leads you get from that, give or take?

MICHELE: I'd say the majority have come from the community group. So I'd say at least 40 of those, out of the 54 that I have, have come from posting in groups.

GEORGE: Gotcha. Okay. And then what's your frequency for posting in the groups?

MICHELE: Usually once a week.

GEORGE: Once a week. Okay. All right. Cool. And then the leads that would come from that would be like a handful?

MICHELE: Usually we get about, if we're going month by month, probably we'd get eight to five new students every month. So not a lot, and obviously sometimes we have drop-offs and we need to work the retention rate as well.

GEORGE: Okay, cool. And so ads haven't worked much for you, you mentioned?

MICHELE: No. I've tried it a few times and it must be the way I'm doing it or something.

GEORGE: It could be. What we find is sometimes when ads work when you post it, it's great, but it also gives a false expectation of how ads work because in our experience, we've done ads for hundreds of martial arts schools.

You can have a super good week, an okay week, and two terrible, well, one terrible week, two weeks that are okay, and one week that's really good. And if you always look at it in that context, it helps.

It also, the strategy of how we go about it. So we use the Facebook ad formula that we use, we would be split testing about 16 variations of ads because we want to always see what is working. 

So we find ads is a little bit of experience of knowing what needs to be in the copy, how to address the actual market, what the offer is, how do they start, how easy is it for them to start, like is the risk on you or is the risk on them, and then testing the different graphics and knowing what type of graphics to test.

But even though we've tested hundreds of graphics, we still test it every time because every time something happens, we get a different result. So with your, what would be through your trial process? 

So when, how do people start with you? Free trial, paid trial?

MICHELE: So they have one, the first lesson free. I used to do three lessons for free. I found that the first lesson free works much better.

So I just started going with that. So most people will come in if they like it or not, I'll give them a membership form regardless. And if I see them next week, that will do.

If not, sometimes I'll follow up. And also some students that have left for other sports, I'll follow up on them sometimes, say how's it going, if they're interested to come back. And some of them do come back.

So I think it's always important to connect with people as well that way.

GEORGE: Gotcha. Okay. So three free classes.

MICHELE: One now. I used to do three, but now I only do the one and that's working better for me. More people have been signing up since I'll do the one class.

GEORGE: All right, perfect. And so when you sign them up, what is, how does that process look? What do they get?

Do they, they got to join? Is there a joining fee? Do they have to pay like purchase a uniform, et cetera?

MICHELE: So there's a $40 membership fee and then the monthly fee, which is $80, and then a uniform is around $60.

GEORGE: Where do you feel mostly stuck? Like what is a, where do you feel is the businesses perhaps like you're stuck or there's like, it's a bit broken?

MICHELE: So the kids' classes are all going fine. It's mainly the adults and teens class. So we are not really getting the numbers that I'd like.

So, we get some people come in and they'll try for a little bit and they decide it's not for them and they don't come back or. Yeah. So I'd really like to get more adults and yeah, just trying to get them in is the hard part.

GEORGE: Okay. I want to just move away from the adults and teens. I know that's something that you want to build and I know that's important to you for obviously for the club to have, you know, a good blend of all the age groups as well.

And I mean, we could talk more about the motivation behind that. Do you have an immediate, like sort of, there's a, there's an income goal or there's like a number that you need to get to. Obviously you've taken a lot of risk as well, because you've gone in full time.

You've mentioned you've gone full time, so you've got to pay the bills, right? It's for you to make an impact in the community. There's got to be income.

So, and our model is always, you know, we want to help great martial arts like yourself, build a business that fulfills your purpose. And for your purpose to be present, you've got to have the income you desire, the impact you want to create in your community and through your martial arts, and then the lifestyle that goes with that. And in the beginning phases, the lifestyle is, well, it's not so much lifestyle because it's easy to breathe on the mat.

You've got to make it work. So what is, what is like, is there a dollar number or a student number that you know, all right, now we're good. We're like, things are smooth.

The pressure is off. You're getting the income that you need to make the club work and you can still live a comfortable life.

MICHELE: Well, I'd say that 150 marks would be perfect. Because that would give me, you know, to cover the bills and also give me a bit more of a comfortable life.

GEORGE: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So 150 at your current pricing.

MICHELE: Yes.

GEORGE: Gotcha. Okay. What if you could half that?

MICHELE: Half the number.

GEORGE: The goal. Yeah.

MICHELE: Could do. I mean, that would still get me by. So.

GEORGE: Yeah. Instead of the target being like 150, you could get your same income goal by maybe even 75. I don't know. We've got to run the numbers.

MICHELE: I'd say around 80.

GEORGE: Okay. So here's what's important to look at. If we're going to look at anything that's going to grow your business, we've got to have the numbers dialed in.

And I think this is a, I think that's often overlooked because everyone looks at, okay, well, we've got our club, we've got our memberships, we feel the pricing is accurate for the market and let's run ads. But then ads don't really work because ads come with a dollar figure. 

Leads cost. Then there's a learning curve converting cold leads because a lead that comes in via Facebook ad, it's going to be a little different than the lead that was referred by one of your members or had some intent, meaning they went to Google and they did a search and they found you and now they're interested. That is a whole different lead because they showed intent.

Facebook lead is pretty much being interrupted from maybe doom scrolling. And so that takes a whole different conversion strategy to get them going. Now, the thing with the ads, and I know we sort of, we're just assuming that ads is the strategy because we've got a few other strategies that we can do.

But either way, we need to make sure that your fees are in alignment with a good pricing strategy that's got enough margin, enough profit. Otherwise, it's impossible to run ads because, I mean, if we were running ads for a mug, for example, what's that? Five bucks, 10 bucks.

And we're paying two, three dollars a click. To make a sale for the mug, we're going to have to sell a lot of mugs, right? So we can't just sell one mug.

We're going to have to sell the box or we might even need to get them on recurring. So maybe it's, well, you can buy 10 for a hundred dollars or get new mugs on subscription. Or we sell mugs and we sell cutlery and we sell something else.

So we've got to raise the value of the offer. So if you think of the point where you can make the biggest impact, it's re-engineering the economics of your pricing. And so I had a, we do this, this is the first thing we do in our Partners onboarding calls.

And I spoke to a member last week whose goal was 200 students to hit his income goal and go full time. And we reduced that to 67.

So it's the easiest thing to do and it's also the hardest thing to do. Yeah. And let me explain why it's the easiest thing to do.

It's the easiest thing to do because you just got to do it, right? It's the hardest thing to do because we've got mind clutter that we've got to get over and how we value our pricing. So let me ask you this.

How did you get to $80 a month?

MICHELE: So I used to be way too cheap at the start, the whole can't charge money for martial arts mentality that a lot of martial artists have. And I realized that I have to go out the door because if I want to do this, I'm benefiting the community.

And so that whole mentality of, oh, I shouldn't charge too much because it took me a really long time to be able to charge what I do. It wasn't until I moved into this new location where I had the overheads and I could have had to, otherwise I wouldn't be able to be doing what I am doing today. So yeah, I started really cheap.

I think it was, it may have been $10 a lesson or something. Yeah. It may have been even cheaper at one stage.

So yeah. And then once I got in this location, I found $80 was what I would need to do.

GEORGE: Okay. Alright.

MICHELE: And it's kind of in the middle. I don't like to compare myself to other clubs. Most kind of, we're kind of in the middle. Some are around the 80 mark, some are around the 60 mark. So I'm not so expensive that I'm too overboard, but I'm not too cheap.

GEORGE: Okay.

MICHELE: Does that make sense?

GEORGE: Yeah. Cool. I do want to challenge you on that though, because I think you've got some margin to work with.

And I feel comparison is the thief of joy compared to other clubs. It's just you're trying to be the average amongst other clubs. Whereas if you're the best, then I feel you've got a chance the best, right? Provided of course, and sometimes people take this wrong when we explore this.

It's like, you know, we can deliver low power, low quality martial arts and charge high. Your martial art is there. It's legit. You're doing the thing that we know you are doing. And you provide that impact and you charge accordingly, because pricing itself dictates value, right?

I mean, if you had to swap, you know, you get a Mercedes and you get a Kia, both great cars, one economical, one luxury. What if you swap the pricing? What if you just swap the pricing and instead of playing a couple of, you know, I don't know what I did.

I'm not that good on pricing with cars, but let's just say 50, 60 grand for Kia versus 200K for a Mercedes. Let's say you swap those. Let's say you just swap the pricing, but nothing else.

How are you perceiving the value of those vehicles? It's almost like you're automatically just saying, well, the Kia is better.

MICHELE: Yeah, yeah. Right?

GEORGE: You know what I mean? And it's without any rational other thought, it's just the price dictates the value. So if you are the best, it's hard saying that you're the best when you're the cheapest.

MICHELE: Yeah, yeah. Well, we're definitely not the cheapest. We're definitely like one of the higher priced dojo around the area.

So yeah, I think there's another couple that are the same price or a little bit cheaper, but yeah, I'm definitely up the top I think in pricing. Which sometimes does scare people off a bit. I think a lot of people screw face up when I do give them the monthly fee price, particularly the walk-ins.

When I get walk-ins, they always give them a card and stuff anyway, but a lot of them kind of screw the face up a bit. And at the end of the day, this is the…

GEORGE: How soon does that come up in pricing and the price conversation and where do you cover that? 

MICHELE: That's usually one of the first things they ask is how much.

GEORGE: Yeah. So next time somebody walks in and asks you that, I would change the posture of the conversation. Because here's the thing, when people walk into a place doing karate, the only question they know what to ask is the price.

MICHELE: Right. 

GEORGE: They've got no idea what's going on there. They've got no idea the value.

They've got no idea the impact and the impact it's going to make on them, their child.

MICHELE: Yeah.

GEORGE: And without that context, the price is just a number that I want to pay or not. Right. Because it means nothing.

So if somebody walks in and the first thing that they ask is and you give them the joy of answering that, it's kind of done them a disservice because they don't know what that means. 

And so the next time somebody does that and walks in, I would just say, sure, happy to talk about price. So you meet them where they're at and you agree with them.

And then you take control of the conversation and just say, is it okay if I ask you a few questions just to make sure it's a good fit? Okay. And most reasonable people would say yes.

If no, I just want a price, then you can revert back and say, well, price for what? Like, I don't know your needs. I don't know what you want.

We've got several programs. If I can ask you a few questions, I'll be able to tell you exactly which of our programs is a fit for you or not. So changing your posture on taking control of the conversation now puts you in the authority position to be able to diagnose before you prescribe.

Because it's the same if you had to walk into the doctors at the doctors and just say, I'm sick, give me this. And he just said, grab these. Like you wouldn't feel good about it.

And clearly he's not a really good doctor, right? So he's going to ask you questions and try to understand the symptoms before we can prescribe the solution. And so doing that, reversing those roles, it changes the posture and it shows that you are professional and that you are the authority.

Because if you know whether you can help someone or not through your program, now you can tell them about the memberships. And if you discover that it's not a good fit for them and you can tell them politely and say, look, I don't believe we're the right club for you, that really sets you above.

MICHELE: Yeah, which I haven't had to do before. I've had a few. Not so much about the money side, but about other things.

They don't want to rush their kids in and even ask how much if they can grade earlier and this and that. I'm like, we're not the right place for that. Yeah, I have had those.

I have had to knock people back, but not really for the money side. Sometimes, you know, people are struggling with that. Sometimes I'll come up with some type of deal for people.

GEORGE: Okay. All right. So I want to give you two strategies that you can try on. Now, what I'm going to suggest is not to go, it's not to rip the band aid off, meaning you're going to email all your members tomorrow and tell them that this is what's happening.

We just got to try something on. And trying something on would be trying a new pricing structure. Now, just one clarification, what do people get for 80 bucks a month? 

MICHELE: So it's unlimited classes. So they've got five days a week they can train.

GEORGE: Perfect. Okay. 

Without going into separating different tiers and things like that for now, we can talk about that at a later stage. I just want to give you a strategy for how you can change your pricing strategy and try it on like literally with a new person that walks in. Now, it's going to make you feel a bit uncomfortable. 

MICHELE: Okay. Right. Nothing grows in the comfort zone.

GEORGE: Well, exactly. Thank you. Yeah.

A hundred percent. Right. So discomfort, it kind of means we're leaning into the right direction.

And two things are going to happen. Like someone's going to not blink and just go ahead like they would, or someone's going to say, no, that's too much. Now, when you get that feedback, you might want to just revert back.

Like internally, you're going to say, oh, well, yeah, I was, you know, that little voice in your head was right. It's too much. Right.

Or you just haven't gotten comfortable enough with that pricing yourself. And so you're feeling that it's too expensive is kind of giving off that vibe that you're not comfortable with it as well. So it might take a few times of getting comfortable with expressing what that, what they get for that and what the value is and go by that.

Because if I can train five days a week for a month, divide. So that's 20 classes. I'm paying four bucks a class.

MICHELE: Yeah. Right. Yeah. I never even thought of it like that.

GEORGE: Yeah. Have you inquired at a local swimming school or maybe gymnastics and see what they charge kids?

MICHELE: No. 

GEORGE: Right. And I know and just for context for everyone listening. So Tasmania, but smaller, smaller towns, less population, but still people would pay on par, you know, good dollars for swimming and those types of activities for kids.

So if you had to compare what you were doing, the value that you're delivering, because we can obviously argue all day that martial arts is better.

MICHELE: Yeah. Yeah.

For me, more like, you know, more essential. I wouldn't say more. You know what I mean?

It's good. It's just, let's not go into the comparison war, but it provides as much value as swimming and definitely gymnastics and all the other activities. Right.

So we know martial arts make a massive impact on kids' lives.

MICHELE: Absolutely. Yeah.

GEORGE: I'll be pricing accordingly. Right. So if you're going to do a comparison, that's probably where you should be, if at all, making a comparison, right?

Because you're going to find you're always underpriced. So here's a pricing strategy that you can try tomorrow. If we can take your annual student value from $960 per year, because that's what a student pays at the moment, to $2,028.

MICHELE: Yeah. Right. Just writing this down.

GEORGE: Can we give it a go?

 MICHELE: We can try it.

GEORGE: Okay. So the strategy is to start with a smaller number. And so for you to increase your, if you stay on the same terms of $80 a month for what we're talking about is you're doubling your price to like $160 a month or more. 

Right. Which we don't want to do. We want to change the terms.

And so we want to make the number easier to get started. And so if you change your pricing terms to weekly, for example, now it's a lesser number to start with. And instead of going with an even number, and if you had to look at what's available in the market, you could find a nice sweet spot of the calculation I did was $39 a week.

Or let's just start with that. If we had to say that what you charge and what you deliver is $39 a week, how do you feel about that?

MICHELE: Yeah. When you say it like that, it doesn't sound like much at all.

GEORGE: It doesn't. Only $39 a week. And you can train five times a week.

So even if I showed up twice, you know, and we never want to work, we want to work towards outcomes. So we don't want to talk about each class. But if you think of, you know, mum walks in and what is the logical conversation?

What's the conversation she's going to have with her husband? But how is she going to explain the pricing to her husband? So it's always good to think the mum that walked in with a child has, you know, there's going to be emotion involved.

You're going to establish the value. She's going to see it. But now she's going to have to have a conversation with her husband.

And so all that emotion is gone. And so we want to have a rational strategy of what's the conversation she's going to have with her husband. And that is, well, if he trains two times a week, it's only $19 a class.

Gymnastics is $26 or whatever that is. Right. We can play around with things like that.

But if they do train five times a week, they're getting it for only like $7.80 a class. Right. So for as little as $7.80 a class. Now, I wouldn't want to just sell based on price, but that is, you know, just for rationality, you can put that into place. So let me ask you this. If the next prospect that walks in tomorrow, today, today.

MICHELE: Probably will be. There we go. Yeah.

GEORGE: So Michele, how would you feel about charging $39 a week?

MICHELE: I think that's fine. Yeah, I think.

GEORGE: Yeah.

MICHELE: Yeah. So my whole thing is just with that, like, do we still charge it the month or they pay by the week?

GEORGE: Pay by the week.

MICHELE: Pay by the week. Right.

GEORGE: Yeah. So there might be a few logistics, right, to get that going. But it is as simple as just making the decision.

The worst that could happen is one week from now, it completely bombs and we have to resort to a different number, not $80 a week, $80 a month, maybe $80 a week. But we got to revert to a different number.

Right. But for now, you've got something that you can change right now. And it just takes a decision.

MICHELE: Right.

GEORGE: And here's the impact of the decision, is you completely change the goal number of students you need to be able to make the impact that you want, to be able to pay for the full time facilities, be able for you to do, invest in your martial arts, invest in your training so that you can provide the value for your students.

MICHELE: Absolutely. Yeah, it sounds good. 

GEORGE: We're going to do it.

MICHELE:  Let's do it. 

GEORGE: All right. Perfect. All right. So I just want to, before we wrap things up, I want to give you a couple of tools and resources that you can use.

I'm going to send over the student, I'm going to send over the Progress Tracker. So the Progress Tracker is a system we have that goes over all. Helps you keep track of your core numbers, how many leads you're getting, how many trial appointments you're getting from those leads, what are the conversions like from lead to trial and then trial to member. So I'm going to share this with you.

This is something that we cover in our OnRamp, in our Partners Program. Okay. And what I'm also going to do for you just as a bonus is I'm going to give you an email strategy that we covered in one of our Partners Events, the Partners Experience.

And it's literally to go to your existing student base and create an offer to cross-promote to the parents. So your best paying customers are your existing students. They are already there.

They've already invested into the club. And so all that they have to do is just to put up the right offer for the right person at the right time.

MICHELE: Right.

GEORGE: So that's going to be an easy way for you to start. And maybe we can then look at how you can, yeah, how you can just put a different offer in front of them and yeah. Right.

Fill up a bit of your teens classes and your adults.

MICHELE: Right. Just to be clear on this. So the 39 per week, that's just for any new coming members, right?

GEORGE: Yeah.

MICHELE: It makes more sense because yeah, I wouldn't want to change the ones that I do have now.

GEORGE: Yeah, for sure.

So that is a completely different strategy for a different time. So the way we sequence these things matters, right? And this is what we found up to now, the best sequencing to do this.

Try it on first with new prospects. And from that point, we can go to your existing student base and upgrade that. That is the ripping off the bandaid, right?

MICHELE: Right.

GEORGE: That we use the student price upgrader. So it's a three part email strategy that we use to upgrade existing students.

Yep. It can, you know, ruffle a few, a few feathers, but for the most part, you'll be surprised that when you communicate your vision clearly of why you're doing what you're doing, most people jump on board and you find that the people that do tend to drop off other people that were going to drop off anyway.

Most of the people that we do this with, our clients that we do this with, they get praise from their students because they know they were being charged way too cheap.

Very interesting.

MICHELE: Yeah.

GEORGE: All right. Michele, thanks for jumping on. Thanks for doing this.

I'm really looking forward to hearing your, your, your progress, how this goes.

MICHELE: So how long are we going to run this for? And when do we touch base again to see how this is going?

GEORGE: You can shoot me a message. Okay. And let me know how you go for now. Your job would be to implement the new pricing and yeah, report back how it goes.

MICHELE: Excellent. We'll do it. Thank you very much.

GEORGE: Well, good stuff. All right, Michele. Thanks so much for jumping in.

I’ll speak to you soon.

MICHELE: Will do.

 

 

 

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152 – [Martial Arts Business Case Study] From 30 – 170 Students In 14 Months While Running A Music School

In this martial arts business case study, Evan and Erica share how they scaled their martial arts school from 30 to 170 members, boosting monthly recurring revenue by $10,000.

 

IN THIS EPISODE:

  • A unique perspective of Evan and Erica on the connection between music and martial arts
  • The business relationship when it comes to their martial arts school
  • Problems that Evan and Erica faced in their martial arts school business
  • Balancing martial arts tradition and business
  • The benefits of joining the Partners program and the influence of its community
  • What is the A.I.R. model, and how is it going to help you in your martial arts business
  • Involvement of Evan and Erica’s children in the martial arts school
  • Driven by a vision of financial independence and lifestyle flexibility
  • Breaking away from Conventional Life
  • And more

 

*FREE: Swipe the exact plan I use to fill martial arts schools with 200+ students within 7 months (And make sure your students are an incredible fit > Learn More

 

TRANSCRIPTION

GEORGE: Hey, it's George Fourie. Welcome to another Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. Today, I've got two awesome guests with me, and this is my favorite episode to be doing because it's a martial arts business case study with two amazing clients who I've known for a little over a year.

Evan Whetter and Erika Graf, soon to be Erika Whetter, welcome to the show.

ERICA: Thank you.

EVAN: Thanks, George. It's great to be here.

GEORGE: You've got a bit of an interesting story, and I want to explore both because you're long-time business owners and you're also two very well-established musicians, which I really admire because that was like part of my history for a long time in my life. Leaving school, I played drums, and I didn't want to do anything else but play drums.

And I would play in cover bands and bands, and I would travel all around, and that was my thing. Until I realized I couldn't cut it as a musician, and then life took over. But you guys have really made it work, and we're going to talk about all the martial arts stuff and everything. But you also run a music school, right?

ERICA: Yes, yeah.

GEORGE: So martial artists and musicians.

EVAN: Yes, we get that a lot.

GEORGE: You do? How does that work together?

EVAN: Yeah.

GEORGE: How does it work together? Because in my mind, I mean, what is your perspective? For me, I can see the link because I feel that when you're a musician, you've got this creative gene, call it, I don't know what you call it, but you've got this creative side to you, and then you've probably got that same thing in martial arts, where you've got that self-expression.

EVAN: Yeah, absolutely. I think with both arts. Essentially, it's like learning a language. So, you're learning a vocabulary, and then you're starting to have some basic conversations. And it's the same. Music, you're learning, you know, the technical, physical aspect of it, plus the vocabulary, and then with what we do, we actually met studying jazz, and so that's an improvised form of music.

And you know, the way we train in martial arts, there's an element of improvisation there as well, especially once you leave the kata and enter into the free-flowing. So that is the connection.

GEORGE: And jazz has got this whole different element to it, right? This freedom of expression. I can remember for the longest time, I used to drive to a friend of mine who was a bassist, and he had this woodwork. He lived at a wood—he worked at a woodwork factory, and we would set up our equipment between all this dust. And we just had this rule.

We had these ideas of music and directions we wanted to go. And we had this rule that we'll sit outside and talk about it. And then, on eye contact, we just got to play the first note, and we'll go.

It was just interesting because we just had this connection, and we would just play. And sometimes it would, we weren't recording stuff, but sometimes we would just hit these grooves, and we would like, “This is our goal.” Well, we thought it was cool, right?

It was interesting because we had this musical connection of expressing our passions, but we could never get other musicians to join the crew. Yeah.

EVAN: That's the hardest thing. People in everything; it's always people.

ERICA: Yeah.

EVAN: And I think that's why these days there's a bit of an allure to the online world and that you could actually create a large company and make a fortune but not have to deal with people. You can just do it all in your undies from your laptop.

GEORGE: Right.

EVAN: I don’t know how that’s going for you, George. I know you've had a good crack at building a great business, and yeah, it's always people, right?

GEORGE: Always people, yeah. I'm always only visible in the black shirt, top-down, board shorts, board shorts. Let's loop to martial arts. So, you guys run a school. Tell us a bit like where you're based, what you teach, and so forth.

EVAN: We're based in the Adelaide Hills, and our martial art lineage is Japanese Jiu-Jitsu.  So, it's quite a large. Japanese Jiu Jitsu is quite a large, what we would call a classical martial art. So that means it's a very old martial art and pre-sporting concept of martial arts.

So, coming from Japan, that means it was pre-modern era, pre—the, you know, the forming of their modern government. So, it goes back to some of us, yeah. So, essentially, we're talking 900 years old. But it's a fantastic art, really deep, includes weapons and unarmed throws.

Everything that you associate with Japanese martial arts comes from Japanese Jiu-Jitsu. So, strikes, kicks, weapons, throws, grappling, standing up on the floor. We even have course techniques, course archery, all sorts of stuff. We haven't done that part, but there's a lot. There's a lot there.

GEORGE: Cool. So, between the two of you, you both run the school, you both run the music school. What's the business relationship when it comes to the martial arts school between the two of you?

ERICA: We're both very much heavily involved in running the classes, teaching it, and training, obviously for our own, because you know, we are the lead. So, we love training as well. I guess that's why we started, really. But, as far as driving the business, I think Evan is the driver, and I'm very much a hundred percent his partner in supporting it and doing whatever we need to do to make it happen.

And, but, yeah, I guess, on the floor and being in there with everyone is really, I know you don't see me too much, George, but yeah, that's really where I'm working a lot. So, whatever I need to do to help clear the deck for Evan outside of the dojo is how I feel to make sure that he's got the mental headspace free to grow the, I guess, the back end, grow the business at the back end.

GEORGE: Gotcha. So, would you say that's where the divide is? Like Evan, you drive the business, but you’re all hands-on. Erica, on the mats, the relationships with the students, the parents.

EVAN: Yeah, and look, I guess we’re both kind of equal in the dojo. We both have the same rank. So, it works pretty well. I think one of the advantages that we have is like, you know, there's quite a few studios like this now that they have some fantastic women that are really skilled and that are also great role models. And Erica is fantastic, you know, asset to our business in that sense.

When I started martial arts training, it was all guys. We would get there fully dressed. It would be training in a, like a school hall or like some scout hall or something. We would essentially get changed right there in the same room that we trained in.

So, when I bought Erica into, I said, “Oh yeah, you know what? She came to try it out.” I was in my early 20s too. She walks in, and there's just a bunch of guys who's dropping their decks.

ERICA: They were all naked.

GEORGE: I guess that's changed.

ERICA: Yes, it has changed.

GEORGE: Yeah. Okay, cool.

EVAN: New environment, yes.

GEORGE: New environment, that's cool. People ask about how do I grow the ladies’ program, the women's programs. There's always got to be a strong woman leader that does martial arts. And probably I'm generalizing in a way, but typically that's what I've seen, you know, because there are ladies that are stepping up being leaders.

It's awesome to see, and it does just drive the community to, “Oh, we can also do that. It's not just male-dominated.”

EVAN: Yeah. And I think also women have, when it comes to the actual arts, women are in some, I mean, men are technically stronger, I guess physically, but women move far better and tend to be, once again, a generalization, but they're often more flexible and dynamic in their movement. So, with a martial art like jiu-jitsu, and this has been really well popularized with BJJ, is the essence is not in, you know, meeting someone head-on, strength for strength and speed for speed, but essentially being able to defeat a stronger, bigger opponent.

So, in that sense and from a self-defense perspective, women are incredible warriors when they're trained, and they bring a different type of saying to the martial arts.

GEORGE: Yeah, a hundred percent. I want to loop back just to our journey here together. So, we met, I think it was May 2020, 2022, actually.

EVAN: ‘23.

GEORGE: ’23?

EVAN: It’s just last year.

GEORGE: It's just last year. Yeah, sorry. I'm somehow thinking about the event that we just hosted with Zulfi Ahmed, and I'm thinking, yeah, okay. That was 2023. Yeah.

EVAN: That was an incredible event. That event really changed our trajectory, and yeah, we've got some great numbers to back that up.

GEORGE: That's cool. Well, let's jump into the nuts and bolts. So, we'll jump into the numbers in a minute. Going back into the journey. So, when you guys, initially, when we had the conversation and you jumped on board in Partners, can you recall what were the big things that you were stuck with or what you needed to do or needed to work on in the business?

EVAN: We had very little in the way of advertising and business systems in place. Like historically in our martial arts, what I described earlier in terms of, you know, very small dojos, male-dominated, operating in school halls was really the norm. And so, even within our art, there was a lot of suspicion around anybody that approached it as a business.

And whether it was actually possible to, I bet this is going to sound really strange, but keep the art pure and teach high-quality martial arts as a business. It was almost like, and what's interesting is, even our most senior practitioners in Japan all had day jobs. So, it was just this culture, a different culture, that we were trying to break out of.

And that was a big challenge. And that was where partners has also been a massive help because of the community that we've gotten access to. And then, you know, to find yourself in a position where suddenly you've got overheads, significant overheads, and running a full-time dojo. Yeah, there was definitely a cash flow.

Cash flow was probably the main driver for our…

GEORGE: You touch on something that I deal with so often. It's funny when you run ads to help martial arts schools. Like this case study, there's so many case studies of people running ethical, great businesses, teaching great martial arts, have upskilled their martial arts because they're now running a successful business. Yet, it's like you become the perfect target to get rocks thrown at you because you're now, wait for it, a dojo because you're simply more successful than the guy next to you.

And I feel it. It's pretty toxic, right? Now, I want to go just… I'm going to lean into that because what you're saying is actually quite a big thing. And I see it all the time that people are into art, and they want to preserve the art.

But because the culture is different that, well, my leaders never had a business, and they were never successful. And it's almost like it now you're going against everything that you stood for because somehow if you're successful, it's linked to your being unethical and not preserving the art. What's your take on that?

Because if you want to preserve the art, don't you want to have more people training in the art? Because is it going to die with the leaders? Because nobody's training it? There's no money being invested into school, teaching it, and the instructors being able to teach it. What's your take on that?

EVAN: I’m going to let you answer that, and then I'll…

ERICA: Yeah, it's spot on what you say, and it's really fascinating. I feel like in all of our endeavors that we've pursued, you know, we've had the same with music as well, coming our backgrounds in blues as well, and we're the same thing. We did the same within what you're saying within the blues scene, and, you know, the, the romantic idea of, you know, to really play the blues well, you've got to be this poor, struggling musician. And we did the…broke that.

We put our business hats on, and we saw it more logically as well. Although we still loved it with same approach. So, I guess Evan and I are a little bit weird like that, whereas we really do love these old art forms, the blues, the very old-style martial arts, but we see how it can—it really is still relevant in today's world, and it has a place in today's world.

And I do think people should keep being educated and learning about it because they can benefit from it a lot. And we feel like there's a lot of value that it still has because it has integrity. That saying, if you're a person of integrity or what you do is of integrity, just keep doing what you do and just let time prove you right over time. My mom always says time will tell.

So, you just have to study the force. And so, we're a little bit weird like that is we don't really worry about… We believe what we do, and we believe in what we pursue, and we don't really worry about what other people think too much. And we do believe it's the right thing in building a bigger audience and creating more awareness around, if I go back to martial arts, around the martial arts.

And just in the short amount of time we've owned a school, it's just coming up three years, we're already seeing the benefits in the community, how it's affecting kids. There's a real niche in our area and families. And we're seeing people change and their confidence grow, and they're actually developing real skill sets that hopefully they never have to use, but it’s there.

So, when you've got that at the forefront and that big picture, it makes it easy to think this is the right decision. I know our teachers, who we respect so much, they are still very skeptical of what we do. But we don't really mind because I feel like, since Evan and I got together, we've always pursued these things where people are quite skeptical.

Maybe it helps that we're together, because we kind of help each other–

GEORGE: A hundred percent.

ERICA: –the big picture. Surf over the crap, as they say. We just keep going and just… yeah.

EVAN: Yeah. As a disclaimer there, our actual main teacher, my teacher that I've had for over 20 years, has been really supportive. He still takes a class every Saturday at our dojo, and he comes up twice a week to give Erica and I personal lessons because he sees that out of all of the people that he's taught over the years, his ability to make impact with what he's done has come down to a certain point, what Erica and I have created because none of his other students. Although there's been many of them, and a lot of them way more qualified than what we are, none of them have been able to scale his impact like we have.

I just have to say that we've had a lot of support there in that, and that's given us somebody that also gives us credibility as well. So, we're not just out there like as a breakaway.

ERICA: Yeah, true. Absolutely.

EVAN: But yet other dojos around the country tend to look at what we do, and they justify our success like, “Oh, you just got so lucky. You just happened to be in the right place.” Like, yeah, if anybody opened a dojo there. That's going to go off, right? Or some people say, “Oh, yeah, with your music school connections, you know, obviously yeah, it's, it's, it's great for you guys.”

And what they mean is they're trying to actually make them excuse their own lack of performance in that area. And while feeling threatened by what other successful martial artists and instructors are doing, this is where it all comes from, right? It comes from them and the insecurity.

GEORGE: Thanks for sharing because there's so much to take from that. I hope that with things that you're doing and saying right here and like doing these types of podcasts that we maybe scratch and make people reflect just a little bit that's going through that same scenario and maybe look at, like maybe there's a lesson here. Maybe there's room to grow and evolve with times, and we wouldn't want to have more people impacted by training martial arts.

All right. So, you guys jumped on board. What's made the biggest impact for you, like being in Partners?

EVAN: It's being a part of a community that normalizes the struggles that you go through as a martial arts business owner, having access to some incredible tools, pretty well plug and play a lot of it, and that's been great. There's been a few great things that have worked really well for us. Ideas that we've gotten from other people in the group. It's not rocket science.

It's things like having events like an open day, for example, and then being able to use that to focus a lot of your marketing around. You might go for a period of time where you're generating a number of leads or inquiries and having a reason to reach out to those people and say, “Hey, we're having this event.” And then it brings through the people that they were interested at one time, but it just wasn't quite the right time for them.

So little ideas like that. The platform, the educational platform that you have, is just fantastic because pretty well, anything that I need to do. I can just go on there and find fantastic content that I can just steal. Well, it's not really stealing if somebody's giving it to you, right?

GEORGE: Exactly. Only to be stolen by active members, as simple as that.

EVAN: That's it. But being able to leverage all of that, and I think, I know I've listed a whole bunch of things here. Because it's very difficult to pick the one most impactful thing, it's really a holistic approach to building a martial arts business.

And so, when you talk about marketing, marketing is like, you can't really separate that from anything. And your model with attract, retain, all of that, that's brilliant because it shows the holistic view that you need. So, yeah, that's probably—hopefully, that's answered your question. It's a really difficult question that one.

GEORGE: That's cool. I get what you're saying because the model we focus on, ATTRACT, INCREASE, RETAIN, it's the things that we focus on. If we think of like outcomes, it's to give you a business that fulfills your purpose, and our definition in that is that's got three things that have got to go with purpose is: the income to make it happen, the impact that you create from martial arts and then the lifestyle that you live.

Is it eat, sleep, breathe on the mats, or do you have a bit of a balance? And that model, we've changed the nine accelerators that lived around this Venn diagram if you had to look at it, and those little levers start changing, but it's always good to see that, as months go by, we might focus on attracting it's all leads, but then realize that, hang on, there's a retention is coming up just like we had a hot seat last week with one of the members to do a deep dive on that.

So, it's always good to look at it because it's an ongoing thing, right? Business is just an ongoing organism that keeps evolving. So, it's good to be addressing those different things as we move along.

Awesome. So, thanks for sharing. What results have you achieved by implementing that? Where did you guys start, and where you're at the moment when it comes to student numbers?

EVAN: Yeah, well, I was actually just looking at that over the 12-month period.  In May of 2023, we had 53 members, but really, there was actually probably only about 30 real members paying customers.

Even some of those there was, probably 60% or 70% of them that, were only training once a week.  So, it was our turnover in May of 2023 was $2,903. Not a great deal to live on there, right?

But then fast forward 12 months, we were up around 133 members. It was probably getting close to 150, but quite a few of those that those extra ones were still in a trial period, so we didn't count them. We added an extra $10,000 to our monthly income. Our income was $12,394. That was three months ago. Currently, we're sitting around 170 members.

What's happened is, not just do we have many more members, but we have more members that are actually A students. I'll give you just an example, just to kind of tie in what we were discussing. Even the idea of having students pay a membership fee, the way that we—traditionally, in our martial art, you would come in, you would pay cash, somebody would have like a book, and they would, you write your name in and the date and the amount of money that you just paid so that they could keep track of it.

There was no obligation to rock up. And so, changing then to that subscription model where people were paying a membership, a weekly membership, that was a big jump for us. It probably took a lot of our capacity to do that. When we first sat down with you, George, that was one of the things you looked at was the fact that we weren't charging enough. I can't remember what we were charging, but it was—I think it might have been about—I can't remember what we were charging, but it was less than what we are—a lot less than what we are now.

And then, the fact that they were only training once a week was a problem. We had a huge amount of students training once a week. What's interesting is I trusted you, and I said, “Okay, we're going to make a focus of really shifting everybody to twice a week.” But my values were still challenged around that but I just went with it anyway.

It's really only been the last month that I came to the real deep-down understanding that we're not. If I say to somebody, “Sure, you can train once a week.” You know what? I'm actually doing the wrong thing because I know that that is not going to get them the results that they want, that they're going to barely struggle to actually maintain the skills that they have. Seriously, it's just a matter of time before they quit.

The reason I know that is because we've got the data. What I came to understand, and when I hear people talk about this, I want to say this, but I know they're not ready to hear it yet because they're still trying to, “I need a customer. I need to get a customer. I'll do whatever you want.” You know, yep?

GEORGE: Yeah.

EVAN: I'll do whatever you want. Can’t afford it? Let's make it half the price for you, but don't; it's just for you. All of these weird deals that you end up with, like weird mutants.

It comes down to the fact that I hadn't yet accepted that for me to do the right thing, the actual right thing, I had to ignore the fact that I needed a student and focus on what they needed. And that if I said any less than what I knew they needed, I was actually doing the wrong thing. I was actually ripping them off by taking 25 bucks a week instead of 40 or whatever and making sure they're training twice a week.

That was huge for me. It took 12 months for me to get there, even though I went by faith at first, and I'm really glad I did because it paid well.

GEORGE: That's so cool. You've just nailed it on the head with the explanation there. It's not that you're being; I mean, you still have your integrity. You feel you're being honest, but if you're standing strong to deliver a promise and an outcome, then how is that going to happen if they only going to train once a week? They never really going to internalize the skills, and one out of seven days a week to magically get the skills, the discipline, the habits? It’s not really going to happen, right?

And so, it's so refreshing to hear that you can have that honest conversation with people and say, “Well, maybe it's actually not for you. If that's all you can do, we can maybe start you here, but if you really want the result that you just said that you wanted, that is what it takes.”

EVAN: And of course, then they get sick, and they miss one, and then they school camp, and they miss the next week all of a sudden. How many times have they trained that much? Once?

GEORGE: Yeah. Very, very cool. So, by the way, sorry, congratulations. 30 students, 170 students in what? That's 14 months?

EVAN: Yeah.

GEORGE: That's like you could really just reach out and give yourself all a good pat on the back. Yeah, wow, that is truly amazing. How's business and life changed since that happening?

ERICA: Yes, it's still a learning curve for us. I was just saying the other day because we've also got a yoga program. We've put in there as well. I was saying to one of our yoga students, he's also a business owner in his own field, just say, “Yeah, it's just been a constant evolution of just trying to figure out where our rhythm is.”

I just made a little passing comment, and Evan picked up on it and said, “Yeah, it's interesting that you said that.” We're still breaking away from that norm of social pressure, perceived social expectations, and what normal people do, whereas the rhythm that you have in a week or in your life where it's like you work your job on the weekends, you have the time to do housework or whatever you need to do and recharge, and then you go back to work.

I realized that I think deep down, I'm still actually trying to fit my – I'm just speaking to myself now – my idea, my model of how to live life in that framework. But all along, I know I never wanted to do that. I've always been escaping that, but I actually still had that framework in the back of my mind and trying to break out of that.

The reason why I say that is because I've just got to look at the reality of what we've created here and the way our natural rhythms are going with our business. And you know, I've noticed Saturdays for us is a huge day. It's impossible to do anything else, and it's an important day.

We have lots of late nights with the kids. Evan has brought four kids to the mix, and two of them are training quite a lot. They're there like four days a week, and by choice, 12-year-old, he's now the day he doesn't have to be there. He's actually volunteering to catch the bus to train and to help out with the classes after school.  He’s just showing up now, which is great.

So yeah, we've got a lot of late nights, school nights, dinner at night. It's just the season we're in at the moment, and part of me was like, I'm feeling a little bit guilty about that. Gosh, are we doing the right thing here? They're working hard with us and for us.

But on the flip side, I'm seeing them grow, seeing how much they're benefiting from it, their confidence, dealing with people, their ability, their capacity to handle a lot of stuff, the pressure of performing, so to speak. It's just done them so good.

GEORGE: You've inspired them.

ERICA: Yeah, well, they're also seeing us work, that's also helping. Just really getting out of that, the normal framework of how most people in society operate. It's taken me a long, long time. It's really weird because I come from that music background as well.

Still trying to break out of it, and I was still trying to fit myself into there. I haven't really answered your question other than it's acceptance. Acceptance that the way we've chosen to live our life is different from society.

And then, just really, truly having a look at what we want and how we want to create it and just forgetting about what the rest of the world says and saying, what is it that we're creating here? What does our life look like? What truly is going to work for us based on our vision?

EVAN: Yeah. I think the way to sum that up is there's a conventional path, and then there's non-conventional paths. Everybody wants a non-conventional path for the most part. Not everybody, but a lot of people, they choose a non-conventional path, but then everything that we've learned is from somebody that's on a conventional path.

It's from somebody that has been educated by somebody that's on a conventional path. You've got this battle rather than looking at it as normal versus weird, right?  Because if you ask me wanting to sell your whole life for a paycheck, working hours and hours and hours to make somebody else's family successful, and you spend 50 years selling your whole life for that, to me, that's weird.

But then we come to this challenge because as we start to break away from that conventional path, our identity is really challenged. I think that's how I would answer your question is that I know that we're not where we need to be to be able to make the impact that we want to have. It comes down to us and really our identity. I will hold back on the marketing or close it all down because I started getting overwhelmed.

Then I need to rebuild myself and get myself going, and this is where the Partners community comes into it because this is not about nuts and bolts. This is about other martial arts school owners that are going through the same journey that can help normalize that. You don't even have to discuss it because you just know. When you're speaking with somebody, you know that they know.

You have that feeling of, “Okay, I understand.” Then, when you put a situation out or a challenge that you're dealing with in the group, there's a whole bunch of people there that have been through the same thing, and that can really help normalize that non-conventional path, which in turn gives you just that fine-tune that you need and that confidence that you need to just go for it.

Like a little bit like the two a week. Understanding that two a week is actually the right thing. I'm doing the right thing here. I'm not doing it because I'm trying to actually take somebody's money, more of somebody's money. I'm doing it because if I do less, I'm actually ripping them off.

You're not meaning to rip them off, but I’m selling them on a fantasy instead of an actual practical program that can help them achieve their goals.

GEORGE: So, you touched on vision there, Erika. What is the vision? What is next for Evan and Erika? Getting married soon? Congrats.

ERICA: Yeah.

GEORGE: Beyond that, what's the vision? Where do you see you can play martial arts headed?

ERICA: I can really only speak for myself, But I think we're on a par. I guess when I think about my life and my journey, I want to create a life where being fit and healthy is super important. Being financially independent is super important because I want to be in control of my time and how I invest my time.

And so, I want to set up a life where I don't want to have to just rock up to work to pay the bills, and that's my life. It's got to have more meaning to that. And I want to tie it into the way I just live life. That's it. I'm just living life.

I'm not out there just trying to pay the bills, which is what so many people do.  So, creating a community, I guess, because we've got a few other things going on, but specifically around martial arts, I really do love training and do see the value that it can have in the community. And I think the more people that get involved, I think just the better, really. In a way, it's a bit selfish.

So, if we can grow a successful school that we can set up and have a fantastic community around that, at that some point, it's not just a hundred percent reliant on Evan and I. We're able to step away from it and be a bit more choosy on how many classes we teach because we've got other people who have come up, just black belts, they're now qualified instructors. If they've got a vision to create their own dojo, we can help them set that. But that's just growing our community.

But just establishing that community, setting ourselves up financially so that we can live the life that we want and train when we want, but also having done that, knowing that we've really created some great value within the community.

EVAN: Yeah. I think that's essentially it. And it comes down to also the legacy aspect of that of raising up other leaders. Because there's more of what we do within the dojo, and I know this is the powerful thing about martial arts is, you can just train in martial arts, and that will improve your character. But then when you show in a character development program specifically for the kids, but also right through, you start changing lives.

You start…Dave Kovar, right? He says to his students, “How much is this punch worth?” And they're like, one says, “A million dollars.” And then another one says, “Oh, $5,000,000.” And he says, “No. You know what? This punch is actually worth nothing.  It's just a punch.  But your ability to focus, that's a six-figure paycheck in a job in 10 years for you.”

If you can build these things, you start changing society. You start filling that gap. The world is a crazy place at the moment, and we're all dealing with technology. It probably took us 50 years to work out. It would be a great idea to put a seatbelt in the back of the car. I mean, how many human?

GEORGE: Never when I was a kid, yeah.

EVAN: That's right. So, learning how to adapt to technology is huge. How that's affecting people's anxiety levels, and their depression levels, and their ability to focus and concentrate is massive for helping people to achieve the ultimate goal, which is happiness, right?

ERICA: Yeah.

EVAN: So that, in essence, is what we do at the very essence. And so, you can have everything that you want. And one mentor of mine, a business mentor, he was very well set up, then he got chronic fatigue. And he literally had a life that we talk about where he could travel; he built a large company, he had lots of investments, he was financially set, then chronic fatigue, then went through a divorce, then couldn't actually get out of bed in the morning. But he had it all, as far as what we think.

And then what I learned is I said to him, “So why do you do what you do?” And he said, “Well, for us, it's the ability to impact and wake up in the morning and be able to make a difference.” And that goes beyond, I think. Once you’ve got the money piece sorted out, then it's into the significance piece. You're creating a life that is significant to you by the number of other people that you've been able to impact.

GEORGE: Love it. Awesome. I have one last question for you. Who would you recommend Partners to and why?

ERICA: I think as we go along with what we've been talking about, if you love martial arts, firstly, you've got a vision to create a different life, and you've got the courage to, I encourage you to have the courage, just borrow a bit of courage from someone else to just really act out on that dream and that vision.

You’ve absolutely got to reach out to Partners because, like Evan said, you need that community. And if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. And having that community of people who are on that same journey is just absolutely integral because, without them, you're going to be blown by the winds, the storms of life.

Also, the resources that you provide, George, is just absolutely phenomenal. If you've just got a little bit of a dream, give it a shot.

EVAN: Yeah. And hey, it all comes down to, you won't regret the investment you make in yourself. You don't need to reinvent the wheel here. There's plenty of creative opportunity, running your business without having to reinvent the wheel. Like they say, you can borrow from what other people are doing really well.

I think that's the thing. If anybody wants to go to the next level, then this is for them. As a martial arts school owner, this, this is a great place to start. Once again, just touching on what you talked about earlier with the, what do you call that?

GEORGE: Attract, increase, retain.

EVAN: So, the genius model for martial arts school owners. That is brilliant because no matter where you are, whether you've got 15 people or whether you've got 1500 people in your martial arts community, you can plug into that genius model, and understand how to go to the next level.

It's not necessarily about just small school, struggling school owners. It's actually, what I've found is most of the people in the community may have started out that way, but they don't stay that way for very long. So, yeah, we very appreciate you, George. Thank you so much for having us on the show.

GEORGE: That's awesome. Thanks so much.

EVAN: Thank you for having us as part of your community.

GEORGE: You are most welcome. And just on that genius model, that's the model, what it's called. I call it The School Scale Plan. I've got a 15-minute video that I actually break it down in each component of how that works. I'll leave a link to that in the show notes, martialartsmedia.com/152, which is the number of this episode.

Can we make a deal?

EVAN: Sure.

GEORGE: That I have you back on the podcast when, what is the next milestone for you?

EVAN: Well, I think 200, but that's probably a bit too close.

GEORGE: We're not talking about next week's goal. We're talking about like…

ERICA: I mean, 250 is the next milestone for us.

EVAN: There's a lot to go under the bridge to go from where we are to 250 because things change.

GEORGE: A hundred percent.

EVAN: We've observed that with a lot of the other people we've gotten access to through this community. So, there’s a big difference between somebody running a school with 150 students and that next level up, that next jump, because you can't do it on your own. So, yeah, maybe we can have a chat.

GEORGE: There we go. We'll do that. Well, Evan, Erica, thanks so much. Been great having you on the show, and I'll see you guys on the calls, and we'll chat soon.

ERICA: Fantastic. Thank you, George.

EVAN: Thanks, George.

 

 

 

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151 – From Cheap To Premium: The Poison Of Low Pricing In Martial Arts

Breaking down the price barrier: Are your martial arts tuition fees simply too cheap? Are you undervaluing your classes? There’s poison in the pricing, and it might not be what you think.


IN THIS EPISODE:

  • The stigma surrounding martial arts schools that charge premium prices
  • The Myth of the “McDojo” label often given to successful martial arts schools 
  • Overcoming the mindset blocks around martial arts tuition fees
  • How to charge your worth and price your martial arts classes to represent it’s true value
  • And more

*Need help growing your martial arts school? Start Here.

 

TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, it's George Fourie. Welcome to another Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast. But today I want to talk about the poison in pricing for martial arts classes, for martial arts tuition.

Are martial arts classes just way too cheap? Are martial arts school owners charging way too much for their classes and tuition? Are they just ripping people off? Are people getting the value for what they are paying? Or are they the dreaded controversial McDojo if they charge too much? 

All right! Lots to unpack here. I will dive deep into this, probably ruffling a few feathers in my take on this, but it needs to be said and unpacked. So, let's do this.

For show notes, for the transcript of this episode, and all links mentioned, go to martialartsmedia.com/151. Let's jump in. 

If you've listened to my podcast for a while, okay if you haven't, but we talk a lot about marketing, lead generation, and getting and attracting new students for martial arts schools. That is the primary conversation because I guess in a way, I'm a little bit known for it.

People always come to me for that. But here's what's interesting: the first conversation that I had when we onboard martial arts schools into our Partners program was not about any marketing. We're always talking about offers and we're always talking about pricing.

It's probably the conversation that's valued the least, but it makes the biggest impact because when we fix this in a strategic way that's without selling your soul and all these limited negative beliefs that come up, providing good value and charging a premium, good premium rate for what your classes are worth.

It makes a huge impact because martial arts school owners come up with the idea that they need all these hundreds of students to hit their income goal to have a decent life and be able to provide their martial arts services without having to have a job, a side job to keep the dream alive, etc. 

You know, for martial arts school owners that want to do this full-time. They have this idea of all these students they need and all of a sudden, we half that by just tweaking the numbers, changing the terms, changing how we go about all this.

Now I want to address a few things that come up with us. First up, I probably want to say that there is no wrong and no judgment in any martial arts school owner who provides a great service, and loves what they do. They serve the art of what they do and they want to share that and maybe they just want to do it part time and maybe they just want to keep it as a hobby.

That is all awesome and great, but… it's always a but, right? What I don't agree with is throwing rocks at martial arts schools and labeling them McDojo or whatever simply because they are more successful than said martial arts school owner, right? 

It seems to be a common thing that schools that charge a premium get hated on and just because they are more successful than someone else, automatically they just get labeled as a scam, they're ripping people off, etc. 

Now, I've been working with martial arts school owners for 10 plus years, 12 plus years, and I can tell you that from my experience, I have yet to see that McDojo whatever people are getting ripped off, all the guys that are charging the premium prices deliver the best service, they got more time to devote to martial arts, they got more time to spend with their students, and they can provide so much more value because they are charging a premium price. So, I've only seen the opposite.

I've never seen this belt factory in all these terms that are being discussed. Do I say that they don't exist? Of course, they probably exist. Of course, some people probably water down their martial arts.

But I think it's so quick to just throw this label and throw others under the bus for them to be successful. Now, I run Facebook ads to promote what we do, and I've got a free training, a free 15-minute training, where we go over The School Scale Plan™ and this has helped a bunch of our clients achieve a lot of success. I share it, and it's a free 15-minute training.

And if I will share it below, there is also an offer for two of our best training that we've packaged together. So, it is present, but the training is not about the offer, the training is 100% free. Don't insult the training before you know, just because there's an offer, there is it's okay to buy stuff and invest in stuff.

If it is worth your while, it's also okay to ignore it if it's not right. So, I'm running ads for this training that we do. And I find the comments really, really interesting.

It's very telling why a lot of people are successful and others aren't. If this is you and it rubs you up the wrong way, you can hate on me, or you can maybe take it to heart. And maybe it's something that we should address because I'm not perfect.

I know nobody's perfect. We've all got room to learn. We've all got room to grow.

I'm a guy who invests a ton of money and resources into coaching and improving myself on a day-to-day basis, whether that's with skills for marketing, whether that's into my martial arts, whatever it is, I invest a lot of time and money to be that 1%, 2% better on a day to day basis. 

So, there's this constant evolvement of just improving myself and you as a martial artist, I'm sure you're the same, right? So back to the comments on my ads. Now, for me, again, there's a lesson in that because can I just improve my ads and word it in a better way that communicates the value and what we are trying to do?

But then there is just the poison in the pricing, and this attitude that it's somehow noble to be poor. It's somehow noble to be the cheapest. And the minute anybody charges a premium, it means that they are a McDojo and ripping people off.

I think it's a lot of garbage. I think it's a lot of lack of personal responsibility can you provide more value? Can you provide a better service by charging more fees? Because how can you have all these instructors? How can you train your instructors? How can you have the best equipment? How can you invest in it as a business if you are the cheapest? Price in itself has value. I mean, you can't tell me you're the best and the cheapest.

Nothing in the world works like that. If you go to buy a Mercedes versus a Kia, they're both great cars, but which one is better? Well, again, probably a preference, right? But the price in itself does carry a lot of value to that. 

And more price means you can deliver a better service because if you can't make the rent and you can't pay for the mats and you can't pay for your training and you can't pay your staff, then nobody's showing up 100% to deliver the best that they can. Because there are so many other commitments taken up in life.

Again, if that's what wants to be done, there's nothing wrong with it. Just don't hate on the guys who are investing in themselves, investing in their staff, investing in their equipment, and building a business so that they can impact more people. 

I mean, if martial arts is about impacting people, wouldn't you want to impact more? I mean, that's the thing that drew me to martial arts was the impact, seeing what was happening when my son was on the mats and training and seeing how much impact martial arts has for young people, for people, for me at the time as well, it changes lives.

And I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be part of martial arts changing lives. Can we get the message of martial arts across to more people? So, I see this war in the comments of “I charge $4 a class. At least I'm honest.” 

I'm like, at least I'm honest. Is this somehow a link to honesty and charging what you're worth? Are we maybe just underselling ourselves and we don't know how to value what our martial arts classes are about? I want you to think about that.

I want you to ponder on this. Now, what is the solution? I don't want to make this whole podcast about a rant and the downside. Let's flip the lid.

What if we do want to raise our prices? What if we do want to be part of the solution and offer a premium and offer classes at a sophisticated rate? Before I go there, I'll just loop back into one thing. The biggest issue, let's say we're trying to fix this issue of pricing. The first issue that we have is comparison.

I frequently hear martial arts go on to say, well, we only have the hall, etc. Bob's martial arts next door has full-time facilities so they can charge more. Well, maybe, maybe not.

But where is the true value of martial arts coming from? Where's the true value coming from? Is it the equipment? Is it the facilities? That gives a higher perceived value and it's nice to be in the owned facilities with the air con and nice mats and clean toilets versus the hall, right? 

So, there is that. But where is the true value? The true value of martial arts lives in the mind of the person who is starting. And that could be different for anyone because it could be, I want to learn self-defense, I had something bad happen and I want to learn self-defense.

So, there's a bigger urgency for me. I have a child that lacks confidence and wants to be better. Everybody wants the best for their children, right? Now, if you are the expert martial arts school owner and I bring my child to you and you discover that this is my real need because I might not tell you, but you're the expert and you realize that I have a child that I'm concerned about.

I'm concerned about their well-being, their confidence, how they're going to go through school, how they're going to go through life. And you can articulate that problem better than anyone else and then show me exactly the process that you take your students through. 

And you could tell me success stories of your other students that have gone through the same training and how they become role models in their community or, you know, improve at their school or whatever the success story is.

I'm not asking about price anymore, right? I'm not going to say, well, XYZ martial arts school charges five bucks less or only two bucks a class. No, because you're the expert, you're the authority. I want to give you money, right? Because that's where the value lies. If you want to compare, go and do a real comparison.

I live in Australia. I just enrolled my daughter in gymnastics. It was a six-month waiting list.

She gets only one class a week and it works out $280 for 10 classes, so $28 per class. My daughter goes to swimming. That's kind of the equivalent, right, for a 30-minute class.

So, if you want to do a real comparison, go look at what people are charging for essentials, well, in Australia, essential skills are swimming, and gymnastics, it's a great sport, but think how essential martial arts is for kids and their well-being. And I do feel that people should charge the equivalent. So, let me turn this into a lesson.

How can you look at improving your pricing? Well, question that voice inside. When you raise your price and you try and push up the number, how does that make you feel? What is the answer that you can come up with? How do you justify that to yourself? 

Because here's the thing, this is the real conversations we have, right? It's not about the martial arts itself. The real hard conversations that we have in our Partners Onboarding Program are the beliefs, the conversation you have about yourself, about the value that you provide to your students.

So, question that. Maybe you need someone like a coach to speak to. If you don't have one, you can reach out to me on Facebook.

I'm happy to have that conversation with you and really unpack that and see how we raise your perception about what you deliver so that you can charge a better premium. So why do we do this first? Because if you want to run ads and you want to increase your student base, we can't do that if your pricing is too low. 

If there's not going to be a return on investment because you've got charging, paying money for ads and you've got super low fees and the costs of the ad exceed your pricing it's not going to work, right? So, to make sure that ads are profitable, this is the conversation that we have first and foremost.

What can you do to fix things? Question your beliefs. You can't hate successful school owners and then expect to magically become one. You can't hate on them for making money and then somehow feel that your identity will adapt and become one, become something you hate, right? 

So, the conversation to have is about how you fix your perception and belief about money and about what value is. Change that conversation in your mind first because we can't grow into what we hate and what we despise.

And here's the beauty, you could change your price tomorrow and you don't have to rip off the band-aid, you could just start new pricing with new students, try it on, see how it feels, present it to a few people, and if you get an objection, the question to ask yourself is are you getting an objection because the market says it's not the right price or because you don't believe, you still don't believe that it is the right price and your belief is just transferring over to them. 

On the flip side, you just need one student to say yes, two students to say yes, and all of a sudden, you've changed your business, you've changed the future of your business, the profit of your business, which means you can invest more into your martial arts training. If you want to take that trip to Thailand and go train, Brazil, wherever it is, or Japan, and you want to invest in training, now you can.

You can employ that instructor instead of getting them to just be a backup instructor or assistant instructor for free now that you can pay them. You can do all these things to move your business forward with simple price economics and you know what, your students will probably thank you for it and feel that they are getting way more value in return. Anyway, hope that helps. See you in the next podcast. 

 

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88 – Darren Reece – The Art Of Crafting Muay Thai Champions

Darren Reece is the coach behind many Muay Thai champions. He shares what it takes and a snapshot of his 30-year Muay Thai career.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: 

  • How Darren Reece evolved from being a Muay Thai professional fighter to a martial arts gym owner
  • The one skill that’s helped many school owners open their first gym
  • The ‘iron sharpens iron’ strategy Darren uses to craft world-class Muay Thai Champions
  • How Darren keeps their fighters motivated and focused on their goals
  • And more

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


TRANSCRIPTION

We don't have any processes. I don't train my guys like, “You've got to say this. You've got to say that.” We are just who we are. We love being here. The guys that have jobs as trainers, Dan Skinner and Barrie Oliver work full time for me. Caley loves being in the gym. Chris “Tiger” White, who used to work for me when he finished his fight career, before he shifted away, just loved doing what we're doing. So that carries over because you're happy.

GEORGE: Hey, this is George Fourie and welcome to another Martial Arts Media business podcast. So today I'm local, and I'm live, so something new, not on the virtual face-to-face. So I'm joined today by Darren Reece.

DARREN: Hey George.

GEORGE: Hi.

DARREN: How are you?

GEORGE: How are you doing? Good good good. Darren Reece, well, long history in Muay Thai, I'm going to let him share all the stories. Depending on where you're watching this, here in Perth, there's a big Muay Thai movement. And many, I could almost say all, but most of the paths lead to Riddlers and Darren Reece. And we're sitting here in a room of… How would you describe it? Memorabilia? Like, newspaper articles, trophies, which I've added here as a separate little video. So, we're just going to have a chat, as we do. So thanks for jumping on.

DARREN: No worries George. Thanks for having me.

GEORGE: Cool. So why don't you just give us a quick round up. Who is Darren Reece?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Oh, well. My fight nickname was The Riddler, that was given to me by Michael Schiavello who used to commentate all the fights on Fox Sports on Foxtel. Well he's obviously gone on to very big things around the world commentating, chief commentator at commentating fights. He gave me my fight name. Back then all the fighters used to call one another by their names, to the point that sometimes you didn't even know the person's first name, it was just, “Hey, Riddler.” “Hey, Nugget.” “Hey, Pitbull.” Stuff like that, so.

Been in Muay Thai since 1989, I started training. In a combination of Muay Thai and Zen Do Kai. Got into it and loved it straight away. Knew it was what I wanted to do. Was actually at uni, and decided to leave uni because I wanted to be a fighter. Which didn't go down well with the parents, but eventually, especially my mom, came around and supported what I was doing, so.

GEORGE: How do you describe that sort of career path to your professors and lecturers?

DARREN: Well, university of Muay Thai, I guess I've been to, for 30 years, so it's a pretty big degree. But, yeah, it was definitely the right choice and very happy in my life and what has been created and what's going on, so I think it was a good choice.

GEORGE: Yeah totally. So we're sitting here at Riddlers Gym but before we get into just what it is about anything else that's going on, walk us through, how'd you get started? You were talking about, we had a chat earlier about you living and training in Thailand as well. Give us a bit of a background of your career.

DARREN: Well, as I mentioned, I started in Muay Thai and Zen Do Kai. Which was really a martial art that kind of blended everything, or the best of everything in progression, is what Zen Do Kai stands for. Most people in W.A., Perth, in the early days started with the BJC, Bob Jones Corporation. I chose, after training for a while, having my first two fights that I really wanted to pursue the path of fighting. My trainer back then, Sean Allen, that wasn't the path that he wanted to go, so he advised me to move on and go to someone that specializes in Muay Thai.

And from there I started to discover Thailand. Obviously it's so close to Australia, and Muay Thai was starting to become known, more and more exposure to it over here. A Thai person, Phon Martdee, famous pioneer in W.A. especially, was putting on shows and bringing over well-known world champion Thai's, just really got my interest, that lead me to Thailand training trips. 

I think the first time was for one month, and the second time was overstaying my three month visa by a month, and staying there for four months, and then another three months trip like that every year, I was making sure I was doing it. And then I lived there from '97 to early 2000, so just did that, yeah for about three and a half years straight. So went there for the Kick's Cup World Championships, which I won and stayed. Yeah, loved it, loved it.

GEORGE: So how difficult is it for someone from Australia, or from, I guess from Western society, to fit in with the Thai culture, and the whole Muay Thai scene, and actually make something of it?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Back when I was going there, there weren't the camps down in Phuket and Koh Samui. There was WMC Lamai Gym in Koh Samui, which is still around and going strong now, but back then that was pretty much one of the few Western places that you could go. In Pattaya in Thailand there was Sibutong, which was a world famous and that's where all the Westerners were going early on, that's where I went, my second trip, spent my four months.

In comparison to now, where the Thai's have realized that it can be a tourist thing, just increasing the exposure of it. It's great for the Thai economy and Thai culture and obviously the spread of Muay Thai. Now it truly is a world sport, and people from all over the world go to these training camps now in Thailand. And it's not a matter of being accepted or anything like that, it's just you go there and you train.

So very early on, as I said, those kinds of places weren't around. And the camp that I spent my three and a bit years, Sangmorakot Gym in Bangkok, a large part of that time, I was the only white person there, training with professional Thai's, it was a professional camp in Bangkok, so it was just the ultimate experience. It was obviously very challenging, there was very little English back then. I had to learn Thai, which I wanted to do anyway, living in the country. And, yeah, it was a great exposure.

GEORGE: Fast-forwarding a bit, how did Riddlers come about?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Riddlers came about in that, in the latter part of my career, where I was full-time, I obviously started to think about the future. Actually, I knew very early on that I wanted to teach Muay Thai, that it was going to be my career after competing, after fighting. So I did make plans for a very long time. I've got lots of books, still got notebooks with notes and ideas. Gym names, and systems and things that I wanted to have in place. So it was a long term plan. And then when I got to that stage of my fight career, I knew that I needed to start thinking of the future, or putting it into action, so to speak.

So I started doing a few PT's, a couple of small classes, and then the PT's started to build up. And then that lead to, okay, it's time to start the gym. So I, funny story, one of my friends that I used to go to his house to train him, I was training him in his garage underneath his house, which is in Leederville, not far from where we are now, and we'd finished the session, we were like, “Man, this is a good size for a gym.” So it was about 80 or 90 square meters, it was about a triple size carport, and he was looking to shift, so he shifted out of the house, I shifted into the house in Leederville, and that's where Riddlers started. So I was lucky enough, it was kind of a blessing that I only had one lot of overheads. I think rent and stuff like that is the biggest killer of new businesses. So all I had to do was be paying my rent and I had the gym there.

 

So Riddlers operated from there for about three, three and a half years, until I started to get too busy and my neighbor complained about parking and noise and that kind of thing. I was getting up to 20 people turning up for evening classes. I was training with fighters, Eugene Ekkelboom, Chris “Tiger” White, a couple of my novice, newer guys that I was bringing up, in the mornings, so that I was free to do PT's and teach classes in the evening time. But I had problems with the council because of the complaint, and then that pushed me again to take that next step, and find premises, which happened to be nearby.

Ran into a friend of mine, told him that I needed to find somewhere because I was having council problems. He was in the butcher's shop and a coffee shop, and he's like, “Man, come and check out this place behind me. It's not being used. We go and do some training there after work, and we've got a bag hanging up, and hit the bag and stuff like that.” So I went in there and it was 200 square meters, so more than double what I had. And it was just perfect. So that was where I started.

GEORGE: You're not the first school owner I speak to who has transitioned from really focusing on the private sector. We actually email, in our Partners program that we work on, I'm working with a gentleman on Thursday nights, and we're going to get a program called Profit With Privates. Not that that was his way of getting started, but they needed to renovate the gym. So they put all their energy in how they can use private classes to stack up the cash. A good way to transition.

So now you guys are here on the main road, huge gym, what I really want to know from you is, you've got all these champions, and all these people that come through Riddlers Gym and reach such a high level. What do you think is the edge? What do you do different that you create so many people at such a high level?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Two things. I think obviously it's my experience from fighting that has sort of experienced all situations. And in fights, seen what's going on. And being able to read it from my experience, being able to communicate that to my fighters where, very importantly, having the respect of my fighters to the point that they listen and use that instruction for their gain. So then it's like they're fighting with my experience, my time, no matter what level they're at. So that's one thing.

And the other thing is having strong fighters. I have a saying, “Iron sharpens iron.” So the more strong people that you have working together, the more and the better everyone grows. So if you're in a small gym, that's like one champion fighter and you've only got other novices and stuff to work with, you're not getting that sparring, clinching, and stuff like that, that you need. Or perhaps guidance from the trainer, because you've outgrown the trainer. Whereas when you've got lots of those people around you, then you all help one another to grow. So yeah, I love that saying, “Iron sharpens iron.” And it's very, very true.

So from those early days, when I had the Eugene Ekkelboom, Chad Walker, Kim Olsen, all those guys. And for the smaller guys, I had Caley working with Chris “Tiger” White, with “Pitbull” Aram, stuff like that. So those guys really had that common to work hard together, spar hard, clinch hard. So, yeah.

GEORGE: Right. So you've got, I mean first and foremost, you've got the right people, and the champions attract more champions. Obviously people see the success that everyone that trains here has had here, and that sends more people around. Is there anything else that you really focus on?

DARREN: Lots of technique. We're big on technique. Big on skill. But also big on strong basics. I personally don't use lots of fancy techniques and things like that. I stick with strong basics and will work those, hammer those basics, we hammer them over and over again. Everyone is, all my guys, are extremely fit, well-conditioned. And we're kind of known for that.

GEORGE: Gotcha. So tell me more about Riddlers, and you've got all the fight shows, and things like that going on?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Well I've promoted for shows actually before I even started the gym. I started promoting with a fellow group, splitting the load between us. That was when I was still fighting. So I was fighting on shows, but we were a big group promoting together. That lead to just a partnership in promoting.

I've always felt the need to promote because of the level of guys that I have as fighters. I've felt like when guys gain experience, there's obviously a lot less fights locally, and even interstate. So if you sit there waiting for the fights to come, or there's no fights, more so there's no fights, fighters lose motivation, and they're not in the gym training. These things can happen. So by having a regular schedule of fights, they have those goals. It keeps the fighters motivated if they know that they're guaranteed three or five fights per year, they're more likely to stay motivated and in the gym.

And then if anything else comes up, and this happens a lot these days because there's a lot more promotions around, a lot more going on. A lot of interstate opportunities come and you can take fights on fairly short notice. Like I get lots of calls from interstate promoters, we get lots of trips away. I mean, because with having a big fight team, the promoters also know that they're not just going to get one fighter. If they need three or four, strong chances are that we're going to be able to fit that. So they end up with three or four big fights on their card, with one trainer, so it saves a lot of money to get a lot of fights that way.

GEORGE: What's the big drive? I mean, you've built this machine. I mean obviously you've got the love for the Muay Thai and the passion for the sport. But what keeps you going? What's the big drive for you?

DARREN: I guess helping people on the path that I got to follow. Leading your guys, passing on your experience, seeing them use it to grow in their experience, and just get to live their dreams, to fight and compete. Maybe it’s achieving titles, but for a lot it's just actually competing and doing it, I live supporting and helping that. Trying to help them achieve those dreams.

GEORGE: Got you. So I'm trying to think of some things that we haven't asked, and I'm looking at something here that says, “10 things you don't know about Darren Reece.” And I don't know how old these are, but…

DARREN: Yeah, these are pretty old, so back then…

GEORGE: What's changed?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Yeah, quite a few. There's one here, “I do not have an iPhone. Don't have an iPod. Don't use Facebook. Don't use Twitter, download music or burn CDs.” I still don't do a lot of those things. But I do definitely have an iPhone, and I use Facebook, it's a fantastic business tool and just connecting with people. Good for promoting things. It's really changed the way that we advertise our businesses, as you well know. And even for fight shows, we used to get thousands and thousands of fliers and posters done up for shows now, and have to do flier drops and pay for postal distribution and things like that to try and get it out, but it was very… it didn't have a high success rate because it wasn't really a target market.

And now with Facebook, where you're promoting it through people that are in the industry, or friends of those people, or getting those fighters to share things about their fights, it just hits the target market so much more. So it really has changed how we have to do things, and we have to evolve, so I've kind of evolved too.

But having said that, I'm still not overly technical. I'm not huge on the computer. I use Facebook, a little bit of Instagram, but I'm by no means an expert on it. And the things I do right are what I feel. The same as the things with Riddlers Gym, with the business, how we treat people. Everyone always comments on how friendly the gym is, and the great vibes that we have here, in the community, and things like that. And it's nothing that we've ever tried to enforce or push or anything like that, I just got the right trainers and the right personalities, and it's just how everyone is, you know?

GEORGE: Yeah.

DARREN: You say, “Hi.” To everyone. The conversations with them and just, I guess, people can't really believe it, but it's what we love doing.

GEORGE: For sure. But you might be selling yourself short there as well, right? Because that's got to come from the top. So if that's the type of person you are, you've set the tone for that culture.

DARREN: Yeah.

GEORGE: Then that's what's going to take.

DARREN: Yeah, yep.

GEORGE: That's what's going to catch on.

DARREN: Yeah and it's been a big part of the community here. Despite all the champions that we've had, and have, here at the gym, no one's really put up on a pedestal, and so there's no egos. No one's put up on that pedestal. We promote all the fighters equally. All the members, no one's really any more important than anyone else. And it doesn't create that monster.

GEORGE: Yeah.

DARREN: That monster thing that can affect an environment or a community, so.

GEORGE: Just from having that strong culture, a lot of your marketing is actually good fun, because that's enforcing the culture, and people talk, then that's the message that comes across, how much effort. We spoke a bit about culture earlier. Is there certain things that you focus on, that really shapes the culture? Or do you really just stick to who you are, and that sort of resonates through that…?

darren reece muay thai

DARREN: Just really stick to who we are. We don't have any processes. I don't train my guys like, “You've got to say this. You've got to say that.” We are just who we are. We love being here. The guys that have jobs as trainers, Dan Skinner and Barrie Oliver work full time for me. Caley loves being in the gym. Chris “Tiger” White, who used to work for me when he finished his fight career, before he shifted away, just loved doing what we're doing. So that carries over because you're happy, and you're motivating people, and when you're teaching and pushing people and seeing them give it a crack and just loving it, plus you're getting to pass on what you're passionate about and seeing other people enjoy it, just makes you feel good inside.

GEORGE: So what's next for you? Where are things headed for Darren Reece and Riddlers Gym?

DARREN: Oh, look, I… to be honest, my focus has changed… Or, not changed but my focus has broadened in that I'm not interested in expanding the business. I don't want to work more hours. Caley and I have had two boys, so I've got two sons, which we've had in the last three years. Maddox turns three at the end of the month, Leo's nine months, and to be honest, I just want to spend as much time with them as I can. 

GEORGE: Right.

DARREN: I don't want to, in a few years, go, “Oh damn. I was busy. I wish I'd spent more time with the boys.”

GEORGE: Totally.

DARREN: Because they're only young for a period of time. In a couple of years they're going to be in school, and then they're going to be teenagers and not want to hang out with me anymore because I'm not the cool guy. So I want to make the absolute most of that. So to be honest, I'm happy with keeping Riddlers the way it is. I've got no interest in expanding, opening another premises, getting bigger. I just love where I'm at. So that I'm enjoying life. I don't feel like I have to work harder. And I'm still working hard, but I'm also working smarter. And I've got great trainers, great team around us, which keeps things the way that they are.

GEORGE: Yeah.

DARREN: And keeps me happy. And my fighters still get lots of attention and lots of focus, and I don't feel that I'm doing any less a job. Everyone's getting some really big fights and still stepping up and growing, through the state level, national level and international level.

GEORGE: Yeah. I love that, because sometimes the focus can be growth for the sake of growth. When is enough? You've reached that point in your life, and family comes first, and that's where you want to spend time. And I think the gym is awesome, you're producing great fighters, it's providing for you and your family, and you get to do what you love every day. Why change? Why complicate? What's in it?

DARREN: Yeah. I want to train every day. I want to have an hour for myself and train, whether it is hitting pads, or doing some strength and conditioning, doing some cross fist stuff. I love it and want to do that. That keeps me happy, keeps me sane. And especially with the boys, where it's go, go, go, and it's all about them, you need that sort of switch off time, and just be able to get in your own zone, and just go out and go for it, do it.

GEORGE: Yeah. I've just reached that, coolness of dad has dropped. I was cool, but 13, my son is 13 now. Yeah, I can see my coolness on the decline, very quickly, off. 

DARREN: That would be hard to accept.

GEORGE: Yeah. Hey, cool, Darren. Thanks so much for hanging out and chatting. So, just quickly, if people want to know more about you, and we run for at least the sort of time of your next fight show coming up, but tell us about your fight show because you have got a couple in circulation. And if people want to reach out to you, where can they find you?

DARREN: Yeah, well you can if you're interested, you come down and try Riddlers Gym. We've obviously got a fairly active Facebook page, we've got a website, riddlersgym.com.au, you can check us out. It's got all about the trainers, our full schedule, pricing, and everything’s on there. And our fight shows, keep an eye out for EPIC Fight Promotions, I think we're up to number 21, which focuses on our professionals and our main experienced fighters. 

And then my wife Caley Reece loves to promote her show, it's called Evolve, it's coming up this Sunday. That's focused on grass roots Muay Thai and she'll have a couple of main card fights, including the MTA State Title, which she's got on this one. And she works very hard to bring that for the fighters. It's something that she feels like she wants to do on her own, and give back to the sport that did so much for her.

GEORGE: Yeah, perfect. Hey, awesome. Darren, thanks so much for hanging out.

DARREN: Thanks very much, George. Thanks everyone.

GEORGE: Speak soon. Cheers.

DARREN: Cheers. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. If you want to connect with other top and smart martial arts school owners, and have a chat about marketing, lead generation, what's working now, or just have a gentle rant about things that are happening in the industry, then I want to invite you to join our Facebook group.

It's a private Facebook group and in there, I share a lot of extra videos and downloads and worksheets – the things that are working for us when we help school owners grow and share a couple of video interviews and a bunch of cool extra resources.

So it's called the Martial Arts Media Business Community and an easy way to access it is, if you just go to the domain named martialartsmedia.group, so martialaartsmedia.group, g-r-o-u-p, there's no .Com or anything, martialartsmedia.group. That will take you straight there. Request to join and I will accept your invitation.

Thanks – I'll speak to you on the next episode – cheers!


Here are 3 ways we can help scale your school right now.

1. Join the Martial Arts Media community.

It's our new Facebook community where martial arts school owners get to ask questions about online marketing and get access to training videos that we don't share elsewhere – Click Here.

2. Join the Martial Arts Media Academy and become a Case Study.

I'm working closely with a group of martial arts school owners this month. If you'd like to work with me to help you grow your martial arts school, message me with the word ‘Case Study'.

3. Work with me and my team privately.

If you would like to work with me and my team to scale your school to the next level, then message me with the word ‘private'… tell me a little about your business and what you would like to work on together and I'll get you all the details.

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87 – Getting Your Fight Shows Featured On UFC Fight Pass

An Australian first, Ben Vickers from Eternal MMA now gets their fight shows featured on UFC Fight Pass. We discuss the details.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: 

  • How Ben Vickers’ Eternal MMA started their collaboration with the UFC 
  • What it means to be the first Australian fight promoter to get featured on UFC Fight pass
  • The martial arts metaphor for life
  • The number of interactions needed before an individual takes action to buy a product or service
  • And more

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


TRANSCRIPTION

To be a leader. You have to demonstrate you're prepared to go. You're not just prepared to scream and shout. You're prepared to put yourself in those uncomfortable positions also.

GEORGE: At what point did you start looking at opening a school and how did you end up in Perth?

BEN: I started coaching about 2007. I really enjoyed coaching. I kind of realized that I was never going to be a world champion and… But I do firmly believe I could train a world champion. So that was sort of my focus sort of switched from being a fighter to training fighters, and I made the hard decision to quit competing myself in MMA anyway. Sorry I've got a fly harassing me at the moment.

GEORGE: It’s Perth.

BEN: I could Mr. Miyagi it with some chopsticks, but… So I made the call that I was going to cease my fighting career. I couldn't do both. If I wanted to focus on coaching, I had to fully focus on coaching. So I started to coach full time. I was actually in the fire service at the time and decided to leave the fire service to pursue MMA as a full-time career. So that happened in 2010 so I was coaching full-time and working as a firefight full-time.

It's the beauty of the shift system there that I could make that work. And then I put the firefighting away to pursue a career in what I love doing, which was teaching martial arts, MMA in particular. So see I was just coaching and then the opportunity to come to Perth came up at the right time in my life. I was just ready to make the move and there were a few circumstances at home that made it a good, good time for me to jet off to the other side of the world. So I did that.

We opened an MMA Clinic here and I was just working as the head coach. And then some things changed and I ended up running the gym. And then eight years later, the gym’s rebranded and I'm sort of sitting there as my own boss with my own school and yeah, pretty happy with that.

GEORGE: Sounds good. I do want to ask you a question to back track. You said it was a hard choice to move from being the fighter to being the coach. What was sort of the hardest part about it? Was it… I mean you mentioned that juggling the two things at once, being the coach and the fighter. Was that the hardest part or was it sort of more of giving up on a dream that that's the path that you want to take?

BEN: No, when I made the call, I realized that the dream is, is to be a world champion as a fighter, I think. And it's a hard sport. MMA is brutal. And I realized that wasn't necessarily a possibility, so that wasn't the hard part. The hard part is I love competing. I love training. I love not having a responsibility when I go to the gym, you know, it's nice just to be able to go and get your hands dirty and get out. So then I had to make that call that now I was going to become the…

As a coach, you become more than just teaching people technique. You become a life coach sort of thing for your students they become family. It's such a strange sport in that you beat the living daylights out of each other so the ego can go straight away because you know the pecking order. You know who can win and who can’t.  

So you don't need to worry about that stuff anymore. And your sort of leave all your, all your, yeah, your ego just, it doesn't need to exist anymore. The role is well defined within the gym. Everyone knows how everything stands. And in coaching, you take respect in a different way. You know, I'm 40 years old, my students are half my age. I have to understand that I can't necessarily compete with them anymore, but I have to then guide them in the right direction.

So it's a hard choice when I'm a very competitive person. So I missed… I had to make the decision to step away from competition and prepare others for competition. And to fill that hole I do stupid things like ultra-marathons and just to test myself mentally because fighting for me is all about the mental. Overcoming mental barriers and finding comfort in discomfort.

So, yeah, I did a two years or three years ago I did an eight weeks training and did 65 kilometer run and that put me in that place, which was what I just wanted to test myself to see if I still had the mental that when the going got tough, the tough get going or would the, would I, would I crack on and make it to the end or would I quit? You know? That's why I wanted to find out. And I constantly look for different ways to test myself in that regard.

So I found a home for my competitiveness elsewhere. I took up rugby so I could turn up on a weekend and be a part of the team but not have to lead it and just get my hands dirty and get stuck in. And so I found ways in that way to manage that competitive spirit and focus all my energy during the week on my guys and making them the best they can be.

GEORGE: Got it. It's such a metaphor for life, right? And that's where martial arts just is a, it's a real test of life because, you know, putting yourself in those uncomfortable positions while there's no… I don't think there's, you know, a much harder place to do it then get in the cage or to be in martial arts or have that contact where it can kind of feels like a life or death.

BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, we're only ever a split second away from absolute disaster, you know, I mean things we do, you know, punching each other, twisting each other into uncomfortable positions and stuff like that. So it takes a great amount of trust and faith in your training partners, which is what bonds are so close together, I think is, you know…

When someone has you in a choke, in a real-life situation, if they don't let go, you run out of oxygen and you die. If someone has you in an armbar, your arm's going to snap if they don't stop when you ask them to stop. That mutual respect and that mutual feeling of trust build really strong bonds with your students. And I'm very much, I lead from the front, so I do everything the guys do pretty much. I'm sure stepping into the cage, I still spar, I still do the fitness sessions with them. I still do everything that I can prove that I'm not just screaming and shouting. I'm actually putting my money where my mouth is sometimes.

I think that's important too, is to be a leader. You have to demonstrate you're prepared to go. You're not just prepared to scream and shout. You're prepared to put yourself in those uncomfortable positions also.

GEORGE: Yeah, totally. Let's just shift gears towards the business. I tell you, you're running a successful school. Just for context, so what styles, so you've got MMA, what else do you guys do?

BEN: We do all the disciplines individually, so we have presenting jiu-jitsu, our freestyle wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai, striking, which is more like kickboxing style, and then the MMA stuff as well. Plus strength and conditioning on top of that. So we run, we run the full, all the disciplines that you'd need to compete in MMA. And then my job is to put them all together. That's where MMA fighters are made, is not in the individual arts themselves, but in transitioning those arts together.

GEORGE: Awesome. So… and I'm curious, what is your process for doing that?

BEN: You have to make the best out of each art for mixed martial arts. Like for instance, in jiu-jitsu, you might be a guard player. You might lay on your back with the other person on top of you, while there are no strikes coming down, guard is a pretty safe position. When someone can punch or elbow you in the face, it becomes a completely different story.

So it's working out, taking the good from all the different arts and then putting them together in a program that works best for mixed martial arts in itself. But the key is transitioning them. So how do you get from boxing to get someone on the ground? How do you work those transitions? So it's fusing the transitions in. So my mentor is a guy called Mark Fury. He was Matt Hughes coach, Robbie Lawler's coach. He's cornered a 137 UFC fights or something like that.

And he uses the hand as the metaphor for coaching MMA. So if your hand, if these are the arts, that's easy to work. This is BJJ, this is wrestling, this is boxing, this is Muay Thai or striking, whatever. It's these parts, the parts that join the hands together. That's what we need to get people good at. So you might have good BJJ and good wrestling, but how do we create the transition to that. You might have good striking and good jiu-jitsu, but if you can't wrestle, you're not going to dictate where the fight goes. So it's working on the joining factors. So for me, that's the key.

GEORGE: Yeah, perfect. The loop that makes it flow. Probably not the best analogy but-

BEN: Yeah, exactly. It's like what makes everything flow together as one as opposed to being four different martial arts that you're good at. They all need to work in synergy with each other.

GEORGE: So that's now the gym and then so you've got the fighters and now you've got fighters competing and you've created Eternal MMA. So quick just how did we actually transition into that and then we can talk a bit more about what's going on with the fight promotions.

BEN: Yeah. I actually can't take the credit for creating Eternal MMA. I have a business partner in the Gold Coast, Cam O'Neill. He formed Eternal in 2012 and I actually used to just put fighters on it. So he flew some of my guys over to the Gold Coast. He's from the UK as well. So we sort of knew a few people, same people come up with the same sort of time in the same sea. So we got on really well straight away and he started using my fighters on all of his shows.

In 2015, we decided to bring a show to Perth and that's where I sort of came on board as a co-promoter and a co-owner of the business. And that's when we started expanding from the Gold Coast into Perth. I helped sort of develop the promotion on this side of the country and then a couple of years ago we decided we'd move into other States. So we did Adelaide. My thing was on three shows in Adelaide and we just did our debut in Melbourne last weekend before the UFC 243 card in conjunction with the UFC. So we worked together closely with them on that.

So yeah, that's how it sort of came about. I was a reluctant promoter. I didn't really want to do it. I had enough stuff going on, but Cam's very convincing and here we are.

GEORGE: Now, that's quite the… the UFC, how did the UFC come about?

BEN: We sort of asked them questions and we knew they were looking for a partner in Australia and I guess we stated our case. There were a few other promotions looking for the same deal. But I think what makes Eternal… We went into quite some depth in our, in our pitch more than just being on UFC Fight Pass and providing them a broadcast.

We want to help develop the regions. So you know, we want to work in conjunction with them to develop fighters to give them. So to become a pathway to the UFC so we can blood all the fighters, get them their experience, test them out, and then when the UFC is ready to pick the ones that they want, then they can come to the promotion and they'll have a good idea of who they're looking at. Also, if they have fighters they are looking at, we can find them fights for them and stuff like that. So…

GEORGE: I guess just an important step back is how did you actually make the connection? How did it before you actually got to give your pitch?

BEN: You just hear it, you hear things in the industry and we heard they were looking for partners, a partner in Australia, and it's quite easy to get a hold of someone's email address these days and there you go. You just, we just fired off emails and they started talking, started a more in-depth conversation. I know a few of these people from dealing with them with other things as well. So yeah, it's just a case of being diligent, sort of being in the right place at the right time, having a good product and delivering on what you say you're going to deliver on.

I think that's the key to business in general. It's having a good product and doing what you say you're going to do. Which I find is the biggest problem in business these days. I don't think many people follow through on their promises, but I live by that. If I say I'm going to do something, I will do it and do it well. Right.

GEORGE: Yeah. Tell me, I've got a question on that. So you get to do your pitch and what I can hear is you, well obviously you want to deliver on the promise, but it sounds like you really framed it in a way of, you know, it's not just what are we going to get out of the, you know, being promoted for UFC Fight Pass, but really what are they going to get out of it? You know? How could you help develop them? Can you elaborate a bit more on the pitch and how you went about all that?

BEN: Yeah, so we put a pitch together. Obviously, we provide a lot of content. UFC Fight Pass for those that don't know what it is, is the UFC's streaming platform. So it's a digital streaming web-based channel that has 500,000 subscribers in 200 countries across the world. And obviously to service those guys, they need content. So not only can we offer quality content 10 times a year, we can also offer our knowledge of the region.

They need the talent to come through to grow in each region so we can offer them fighters with the skills and qualities that they require to suit their brand. Being the brand leader, they need the best talent and I believe we have the best talent, most of the best talent in the country fighting for us.

That's what we can offer to them as well as sort of being able to give them inside information on the scene in the country as a whole. It's a very mutual relationship. Obviously, we give them all our content and in return we get exposure. That's the nuts and bolts of it. But behind the scenes there's a lot more to it than that.

GEORGE: That's great. So what does that mean for the fighters? Like how does the exposure work? Is it just that it's being promoted on the platform or is it more to it? Not that that's not enough, but-

BEN: Yeah, there's definitely more to it. So for example, we debuted on fight pass in Melbourne just before UFC 243, so we did the Friday night and then 243 one on a Sunday morning. But, obviously, a lot of the UFC top brass were in attendance. So the matchmaker from the UFC was in the crowd that day. So there's no better audition than for you to go out and apply your trade-in front of the guy that you want to impress live.

GEORGE: Totally.

BEN: So things like that, we aim to work with the UFC on dates. If they have a show in Australia, we aim to sort of create… We created a mini fight last week. So our show, we had weigh-ins Thursday, the show Friday. They had on Saturday and the show on Sunday. So Thursday through Sunday there's MMA every day and in Melbourne. Whereas in UFC Fight Week in Vegas, you know, obviously they have these big expos and stuff like that.

So it was like a really big weekend for Australian MMA and we can do stuff like that every time they come to the region. That's one benefit. Being able to display your skills in front of the people that you're trying to impress rather than sending them an email with a highlight reel, doesn't have quite the same effect. They're also readily available on that platform. So if we send a matchmaker a fighter's name, all he has to do is go on Fight Pass and look at that fighter direct through their own TV channel. 

But then also inside information. So if they have any questions or anything like that or they want some guidance on as to who, how this guy is stacking up or whatever, then we can provide that too. But also we're providing regular, if an event does three shows a year and you fight on that event, you might not get on all three shows. So you might only get two fights a year. We're providing an opportunity to fight on 10 different shows a year. Most fighters want to fight three or four times a year, so we can definitely do that for pretty much all our fighters on the frequency that we put shows for it.

GEORGE: Perfect. Awesome opportunity for any fighter, obviously, as you say, you know, direct, but then just being featured on the show. Even if you know you don't have the promoters there, what better thing to put on your portfolio? Just check my fights with them. UFC Fight Pass. Yeah.

BEN: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it provides a bit of a pathway. It's like I can fight on this show. I know that it's on the UFC, so there's more chance of us then being selected. If we're the best in the country. What we're aiming to do is if you're the best in the country and you owned an Eternal championship, then you should be sort of next in the pecking order to be moved on into the UFC. That's what we're looking at.

Obviously its early days and we're yet to sort of prove that method to anyone, but hopefully next year we signed a multi-fight deal for 2020. They'll take 10 shows from us, whereas this year was a bit unorthodox. They wouldn't normally sign a promotion last quarter, but we managed to get it over the line and they're taking two of our three remaining events this year because of scheduling. They couldn't take the last one, but in 2020 all our events will be live on UFC Fight Pass. So that would give the fighters in the platform on every show to really push and make a run for the big show.

GEORGE: Now, you had mentioned to me earlier, Ben, that you guys have done this all from self-funded 100% you're still running with no sponsors. Is that correct?

BEN: That is correct. Yeah. I sort of spoke to you briefly before, but I've transitioned from being a fighter to being a coach to being a gym owner that none of it was pre-orchestrated or planned. I've never claimed before the last few years to be a businessman. You know, like I just was a guy that had a passion for the sport and wanting to grow it and it's just organically sort of turned out the way it's turned out. So now we're at the point in and it's that corporate sort of driving sponsorship and stuff like that.

It's an area where I don't have the expertise and I've always been a guy that I stay in my lane. If I know about it, I'll do it and if I don't know about it, I'll try and get someone else to do it for me and obviously, you know, pay some… I'd much rather pay someone to do something properly than make a botched job of it myself. Trying to save a few dollars. We have some minor sponsors, you know, a couple of us, you know, they buy tables at the show and stuff like that. But yeah, nothing on a major level that, you know, perhaps some of our competitors might have.

GEORGE: Totally so if we were having that conversation, like let's say I have a product that could be mutually beneficial to what you guys are doing and obviously knowing that, yeah, the exposure is the next level for what you're getting, you know, to be UFC Fight Pass and so forth. Who do you think would be an ideal sponsor and how could they benefit potentially from?

BEN: I think you'd be surprised as to who could be a sponsor for a mixed martial arts event with big viewership. Because you think about the demographic that is one, into the sport and two, attending and watching the sport. It's mostly a male, sort of 17 to 45 disposable income demographic. So you know, it's a good demographic for most companies. You know, clothing, nutrition, tattoos, betting, all that kind of stuff all fit into the sort of the demographic that we service.

So they're the kind of people that we're looking to link up. We did some stuff with Winter Warrior, which is a show that puts on like 20-week programs in gyms around the world. So we're working with them next year, so we're going to be partnering up with them. So that's really exciting for 2020. Any company that wants to have a chance to put themselves in front of that demographic would be a good fit for us.

And also we have assets, you know, we have these champion people, you know, we have great athletes who are very humble and you know, we can come to companies and train their staff. You know, we can do talks, we can… so we can set up very bespoke packages. You know, there's plenty we have to offer with the assets that we have within the company, not just inside of viewership and advertising. Sort of team building, personal development.

UFC Fight Pass

You know, you could learn a lot from a young MMA fighter who's disciplined and sacrificed a lot to get to where they've gotten to. And also from people within the company, like myself and Cam, we were kind of self-made business people that have reached quite high with limited funds and experience, you know. So there's plenty of areas to explore.

It's just a case of like anything, it's just, it's a skill that we need to learn and get better at. I probably need to take some coaching or something like that. I mean obviously if you want to get better at something, you find someone who's good at it and you learn from them. So that's probably what we need to do. It's just, we're very time-poor. I run two businesses and I'm just about to open a third. I have a young family that I don't see very much obviously. 

So yeah, the time to go and do a course or learn from someone is not really there at the moment. But if sacrifices need to be made then they'll have to be made at some stage. So yeah, I guess it's all part of the learning experience.

GEORGE: For sure. So, and what about if like if I'm a martial arts school owner and I've got fighters and so forth, how would that benefit getting on board with you guys with Eternal MMA?

BEN: Well we can advertise your school at our events and your customers are sitting in our audience, you know, and are watching our show on TV so that you're putting your case. So we have had people in the past put adverts on the big screen in the venue of their gym and now we can put flyers or… What it is if you have a brand, I thought, I don't know the exact numbers, but it needs to be seen X amount of times before it sets in someone's head. And then when they're looking for that service, your name will be the one that they…

So it's like subliminal advertising, really. Putting yourself in front of someone enough times for them to, when they do eventually require your service, you'll be the name they type into Google. You know, so that is really where we can assist gyms and also we can obviously help getting their fighters fights if that's… Because I have a huge fight team to service them, having the promotion is great because I can get them more fights. Whereas if you don't have necessarily the connections or know the people to talk to, then you might struggle to match your guys up regularly, which might lead them to getting disgruntled and going somewhere else where they might get better opportunities.

GEORGE: Yeah, totally. On the marketing side, like in our group, our Partners group where we work with school owners on the marketing side, basically classify it as a touchpoint. I mean there's various tests, six to eight interactions. It could be typical before somebody reaches out.

BEN: Yeah.

GEORGE: I mean there are some other tests that stretch up to 43 days and you know, all the fancy stuff. But I mean for any school owner you can think of six to eight interactions with your brand before somebody says hi, let's have this conversation. But that is a perfect thing for a good touchpoint. Sometimes the touchpoint, especially if it's, you know, massive exposure like you know you're doing something on UFC Fight Pass. It could be promoting the actual promotion sometimes has value.

What I mean by that is, you know, nowadays when people have an article in the newspaper, it's kind of pointless. This big newspaper, cause nobody hears about it, but somehow it's got some credibility. So you're marketing referencing that you were featured in this thing is sometimes more valuable. Just like I see when school owners we've worked with that get featured on Sunrise or you know, morning shows.

BEN: Yeah.

GEORGE: … nobody sees the morning show, but they see the YouTube clip of them featured.

BEN: It gives you that sort of recognition that you're a legit brand. Right, because-

GEORGE: Critical work, yeah.

BEN: Yeah. Credibility. Exactly. So say Nike sponsored you for something, you automatically get that, that’s the biggest company in the world, one of the biggest sportswear companies in the world, you're sponsored by them. All of a sudden people go, “Oh yeah, these guys are legit.” That sort of thing.

GEORGE: 100%. Thanks for your time. I'll bump into you on the daycare trip.

BEN: Yeah.

GEORGE: … again soon. But if anybody wants, let's say, number one, you know like you want to get on board with us. I mean obviously there are big things in store for Ben with the Eternal MMA and the UFC Fight Pass, the exposure. So I mean if, if you're a potential sponsor or a school owner, you've got fighters that you want on board, how can people get a hold of you and have a chat to see if it's mutually beneficial?

BEN: Best bet is probably just an email. So my email would be Ben, B-E-N, at eternal MMA dot com. Yeah, hit me up on an email. Even if it's just like I love to support and advise as well. So if anyone's got any questions, you want it to start a fight promotion or gym-related stuff. I'm more than happy to sort of… I believe that sharing is what makes… Helps everyone achieve and I am very much in lifting people up. So yeah, I'm happy to offer any assistance that I can and yeah if anyone's interested in jumping on board or talking about some options and then, yeah, I'm definitely all ears.

GEORGE: Yeah. Perfect. And if you've listened to the show and you've enjoyed it and you've got some value, especially out of the fight promotions and things like that, just yeah, just shoot Ben an email and just love the podcasts and give some feedback.

BEN: Yeah, definitely a hundred per cent.

GEORGE: Awesome, Ben. Well, thanks for being on the show and I'll probably see you in a couple of days down the road.

BEN: Yeah. Maybe tonight when we pick the kids up.

GEORGE: Yeah, true.

BEN: All right mate, you take it easy. Thanks for your time.

GEORGE: Cool. Thanks Ben. Cheers.       

Awesome. Thanks for listening. If you want to connect with other top and smart martial arts school owners, and have a chat about marketing, lead generation, what's working now, or just have a gentle rant about things that are happening in the industry, then I want to invite you to join our Facebook group.

It's a private Facebook group and in there, I share a lot of extra videos and downloads and worksheets – the things that are working for us when we help school owners grow and share a couple of video interviews and a bunch of cool extra resources.

So it's called the Martial Arts Media Business Community and an easy way to access it is, if you just go to the domain named martialartsmedia.group, so martialaartsmedia.group, g-r-o-u-p, there's no .Com or anything, martialartsmedia.group. That will take you straight there. Request to join and I will accept your invitation.

Thanks – I'll speak to you on the next episode – cheers!


Here are 3 ways we can help scale your school right now.

1. Join the Martial Arts Media community.

It's our new Facebook community where martial arts school owners get to ask questions about online marketing and get access to training videos that we don't share elsewhere – Click Here.

2. Join the Martial Arts Media Academy and become a Case Study.

I'm working closely with a group of martial arts school owners this month. If you'd like to work with me to help you grow your martial arts school, message me with the word ‘Case Study'.

3. Work with me and my team privately.

If you would like to work with me and my team to scale your school to the next level, then message me with the word ‘private'… tell me a little about your business and what you would like to work on together and I'll get you all the details.

Enjoyed the show? Get more martial arts business tips when you subscribe on iTunes for iPhone or Stitcher Radio for Android devices.

***NEW*** Now available on Spotify!

Podcast Sponsored by Martial Arts Media Partners

86 – Using Facebook Messenger Bots For Martial Arts Schools

How martial arts school Messenger bots can help educate your future students when you're not present.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: 

  • How martial arts school messenger bots help with relationships
  • The power of speed replies
  • Getting conversations started without you
  • And more

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


TRANSCRIPTION

The quicker you reply, the better response you get at the end of the day. So what a bot actually does for you is it gives you the opportunity to reply instantly and start building a bit of relationship, or sharing information, or maybe even directing people to a paid trial. 

Hey George here. I hope you're well. I'm on my usual walk with the girl. So exciting stuff, in about 90 minutes from now I am meeting with our messenger bot developer. So we're busy mapping out a messenger bot for our Partner members. And so, quick couple of things about bots. I don't know if that's something that you're familiar with or not, but it's basically if you think of email automation in a way, where you have a sequence of follow up messages, well a messenger bot does the same thing. It just does it a bit more instant and looks real in a way, but obviously is an automated way of following people up. 

So there are pluses and minuses to it. I always feel that to have an optimal sales process nothing's ever going to beat face-to-face or person-to-person live contact, provided of course you've got some cool selling skills and so forth, and you know how to present your offers in the right way. But then a big benefit about having a bot is the instant reply feature. When you look at email marketing, email can sit for a day or even longer, and it's okay to take a bit longer to reply. But with messaging people expect a bit more of an urgent reply. The quicker you reply, the better response you get at the end of the day. 

So what a bot actually does for you is gives you the opportunity to reply instantly, and start building a bit of relationship, or sharing information, or maybe even directing people to a paid trial while you're busy and while you're on the mats and before you actually get to them and be able to speak to them one-on-one through the chat, or get on the phone, or however you want to do it. 

So there are two ways to do it. One is to start the conversation, which is my favourite. I prefer to use it as a conversation starter and not to be the actual conversation. And I think a lot, especially of the bot developers, get really crazy about it. They get all technical and create these long sequences and so forth. But at the end of the day, for me, the way I look at it is I just want to be able to speak to someone, start a conversation, and provide them with useful information before I could have the real conversation, and the one-to-one chat. 

That's pretty much what it's all about, for us at least. You can get really fancy with it and have all these long fancy sequences, but for me and for our members, we've got different ways of following up with chat on a one-to-one basis. So the bots really going to facilitate in helping start that conversation, and just give a bit of breathing space, or a bit of time for someone to actually soak up some videos, read up some information, and ultimately if they're ready, sign up for the paid trial. 

So anyway, that's me. I've got to jump to the meeting fairly soon. Just wrapping up the last couple of questions and things that we're going to work on and how are we're going to format the whole bot. So, exciting stuff. We'll let you know more about it once we have it up. 

If that's something that does interest you and you'd like to have a messenger bot built out for you and for your school that you can plug and play, and just swap out a couple of words and be good to go, then yeah, just hit me up with a message wherever you're watching this. Just reach out to my profile, send me a message and we'll have a chat, and see if we could help. Cool. Have an awesome day. I'm going to head back, speak soon. Cheers.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. If you want to connect with other top and smart martial arts school owners, and have a chat about marketing, lead generation, what's working now, or just have a gentle rant about things that are happening in the industry, then I want to invite you to join our Facebook group.

It's a private Facebook group and in there, I share a lot of extra videos and downloads and worksheets – the things that are working for us when we help school owners grow and share a couple of video interviews and a bunch of cool extra resources.

So it's called the Martial Arts Media Business Community and an easy way to access it is, if you just go to the domain named martialartsmedia.group, so martialaartsmedia.group, g-r-o-u-p, there's no .Com or anything, martialartsmedia.group. That will take you straight there. Request to join and I will accept your invitation.

Thanks – I'll speak to you on the next episode – cheers!


Here are 3 ways we can help scale your school right now.

1. Join the Martial Arts Media community.

It's our new Facebook community where martial arts school owners get to ask questions about online marketing and get access to training videos that we don't share elsewhere – Click Here.

2. Join the Martial Arts Media Academy and become a Case Study.

I'm working closely with a group of martial arts school owners this month. If you'd like to work with me to help you grow your martial arts school, message me with the word ‘Case Study'.

3. Work with me and my team privately.

If you would like to work with me and my team to scale your school to the next level, then message me with the word ‘private'… tell me a little about your business and what you would like to work on together and I'll get you all the details.

Enjoyed the show? Get more martial arts business tips when you subscribe on iTunes for iPhone or Stitcher Radio for Android devices.

***NEW*** Now available on Spotify!

Podcast Sponsored by Martial Arts Media Partners

85 – Martial Arts Marketing BS!

When martial arts marketing agencies make promises too good to be true, it probably is.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: 

  • Why you should avoid those ‘too good to be true’ marketing strategies 
  • Why a ‘quick fix’ does more harm than good
  • How a wrong offer damages the culture in your martial arts school 
  • How to hire the right martial arts business coach
  • And more

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


TRANSCRIPTION

Be a bit cautious. Before you just throw money at a company that gives all these unrealistic promises. Having a bit of a gut check and think is that realistic? Because if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

GEORGE: Hey George here, hope you're well. So when is too good to be true, too good to be true? So chatting to someone in Rhode Island yesterday, great martial artist and talking about getting burnt with marketing companies, and I like to keep this podcast positive, but there are some things that just piss me off, and this is one of them because whenever somebody makes promises, it's always a red flag for me. 

If somebody makes a promise and say they'll get you so many martial arts students sign-ups in X amount of time, guaranteed. I think, all right, that's interesting. Maybe that's true, but at what cost and at what expense?

There's one thing to sell a trick and one thing to actually know a strategy and unfortunately what happens is, and all respect to everybody starting out of business and trying to try to get things ahead, but when you start making money at the expense of others, that just doesn't sit well with me. It just doesn't. 

The one thing that attracted me to the martial arts industry was when you look at the things that you see on the wall of an average martial arts school and you probably have it as well. Discipline, respect, confidence, focus, depending on what type of school you have. But it's those values that resonate with me. And that kind of got me going in the industry. Because it was like, “Okay, it's the practical personal development.” But then if I see people working in the industry or maybe they're from the outside or… That doesn't gel with those values that… I'm just not a fan of that.

So here's the thing, it's really easy to sell a tactic. And what I mean by that is you get started, you figure some little trick and tactic out and it works. One part of it works. Only one part of it works and now you go shout it from the rooftops and you go post in all the martial arts groups and you tell everybody about this cool thing that you've got going. And people fall for it because it taps into the secret desire of having a quick fix. 

The secret desire of I can push this button or give this company money and they just going to do everything for me. And I've never once seen that work. I haven't. For a little bit there, I was trying to be that company, but it's not ethically and humanly possible because you can only ever serve one component.

And unless you are doing everything from the minute people engage with you to being the instructor on the mat and furthering that… Have that congruent flow of what you're doing. It's just not possible. So here's what fired me up about this is this company made all these promises and they put this ridiculous offer on the front end for people to buy. And on the front end it looks, wow, it's irresistible. So of course people take it, but what type of people are taking it? Well, the people that you probably don't want in your school because they were just bargain hunters.

They just saw something that was so good, so irresistible, so great that they went and bought it. So for the lead company, well paid, they delivered on their promise. Because they got you the signups, not the sign-ups that you wanted, but they got you some sign-ups. But for you as a school owner, you sit with the crap. And I remember speaking to Kevin Blundell a couple of years back now and on… Perhaps it's podcast number 20. If you go to martialartsmedia.com/20, it might be this podcast. But he was talking about having the wrong offer, having the wrong front end offer and the damage that that did.

It took them more than a year to actually clean out the bad students that they attracted. So be a bit cautious before you just throw money at a company that gives all these unrealistic promises. Have a bit of a gut check and think is that realistic? Because if it's too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. And it might work on the front end, but at what cost for you, your culture, your existing students and everyone in the backend? Anyway, that's all I wanted to share. I might share some other stuff that really pissed me off on another episode.

But hey, if you need help with this kind of stuff, and I'm not talking about a quick fix, but talking to real help, real help to scale your business, to grow your business with a real marketing strategy from the front end to the backend, something that's got to work with your offer on the front end, when people connect with you to something that's got to be congruent with your sales process. And super clear about that. 

Your process, not someone else's but yours. Because someone else's process might not work for you. Then send me a message. No hard pressure, no weirdness. We'll have a chat and if I feel we can help, we'll go take the conversation further. Awesome. I'm going to run off. Get some other work done. I will speak to you soon. Cheers.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. If you want to connect with other top and smart martial arts school owners, and have a chat about marketing, lead generation, what's working now, or just have a gentle rant about things that are happening in the industry, then I want to invite you to join our Facebook group.

It's a private Facebook group and in there, I share a lot of extra videos and downloads and worksheets – the things that are working for us when we help school owners grow and share a couple of video interviews and a bunch of cool extra resources.

So it's called the Martial Arts Media Business Community and an easy way to access it is, if you just go to the domain named martialartsmedia.group, so martialaartsmedia.group, g-r-o-u-p, there's no .Com or anything, martialartsmedia.group. That will take you straight there. Request to join and I will accept your invitation.

Thanks – I'll speak to you on the next episode – cheers!


Here are 3 ways we can help scale your school right now.

1. Join the Martial Arts Media community.

It's our new Facebook community where martial arts school owners get to ask questions about online marketing and get access to training videos that we don't share elsewhere – Click Here.

2. Join the Martial Arts Media Academy and become a Case Study.

I'm working closely with a group of martial arts school owners this month. If you'd like to work with me to help you grow your martial arts school, message me with the word ‘Case Study'.

3. Work with me and my team privately.

If you would like to work with me and my team to scale your school to the next level, then message me with the word ‘private'… tell me a little about your business and what you would like to work on together and I'll get you all the details.

Enjoyed the show? Get more martial arts business tips when you subscribe on iTunes for iPhone or Stitcher Radio for Android devices.

***NEW*** Now available on Spotify!

Podcast Sponsored by Martial Arts Media Partners

84 – How To Improve Your Martial Arts Facebook Ads Through Split Testing

Do this to build a library of successful lead generating martial arts Facebook ads.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: 

  • What is a Facebook ad split testing really
  • How to stop ‘flying blind’
  • Why you should always ‘beat the control’
  • Moving big rocks, stones and pebbles
  • And more

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


TRANSCRIPTION

If you're not testing and optimizing and trying to improve your ads, then what happens is, every month you're just flying blind, right? So every month, you've got to come up with a new campaign, a new idea. And if you don't have a proven track record of things that have worked previously and you know exactly why they worked, then you're always playing this guessing game.

GEORGE: Hey George here. So I want to give you a quick couple of ideas and tips on how you can improve your ads, your Facebook Ads or Google Ads. Mostly going to focus on Facebook at this point in time, but how you can improve your ads through testing, through running different split tests, et cetera. 

So just finishing up the last touches for a session I'm running for our Partners tomorrow, it's called the Ad Conversion Optimizer. Just finished up mapping everything out and just about to finish up on the actual worksheet that goes with it.

It's going to be a great session, but I want to give you a quick couple of ideas on how you can improve your ads. And I guess first and foremost, why you should be doing it in the first place. If you're not testing and optimizing and trying to improve your ads, then what happens is, every month you're just flying blind, right? 

So every month you've got to come up with a new campaign, a new idea. And if you don't have a proven track record of things that have worked previously and you know exactly why they worked, then you're always playing this guessing game and you're always trying to come up with new things and you're flying blind every single month.

Whereas if you keep track of what you're doing and you measure your different results and you test all these different elements that we're going to talk about now, then you build up this library of winning campaigns. And now when you go and run a new campaign, you know, well, that offer converts, that headline works, that element works, and you can mash them all together and the chance of a successful campaign is so much higher.

And look, there's no golden goose of… Everyone's always looking for that big idea. Well, sometimes that big idea is actually just working with what you've got and making those incremental changes until you build up this golden goose that's forever producing the golden eggs. Right? Okay. So we don't look at eggs, we like to look at rocks. I like to refer to it as balancing rocks, which is kind of why I added this slide over here.

So here's what that means. You've got big rocks, you've got little stones, and then you've got pebbles. Okay. So first let's start with the big rocks. Big rocks are testing big ideas, big ideas as in big, different concepts. So that could be targeting a different emotion, for example, or restructuring a whole different ad format. Maybe that could be like running a video ad versus a text-based ad, or a long copy versus a shorter copy type ad.

Then you've got the little stones. Now working with the little stones, with the little stones is you've got your winning concept and now you start tweaking little elements. So you might start changing the different headlines, changing the descriptions, and now you start testing different elements within that ad to see which is performing better. 

So there's a term called ‘beat the control’. Perry Marshall started, I think he started this concept. Perry Marshall was the… He wrote a book called ‘The Definitive Guide to AdWords’ way back in the day, many, many moons ago. And he always spoke about this concept of beat the control and that means that you are always trying to beat your winning ad basically. These are running ads kind of side by side. Now you're looking at the little stones, for example, and you're testing headline to headline, description to description.

And then you go down to the pebbles. And the pebbled are these tiny little tweaks. It's shuffling these little pebbles to see what type of results you get. And that is basically to maybe swap out a different word, move little elements around, small little increments. It could be different punctuation marks, really little increments to see what gets better results. And I'll tell you what, you'll be surprised what happens when you do that. If you're testing accurately and you know how to track and what to do against each other, you'll be surprised what you can actually achieve.

So hope that helps. That's just to give you a bit of a run around on how to go about it. If it's something that you need help with, really how to structure it, what those big ideas should be, how you should go about that, all those concepts, what exactly you should be tracking and testing and how you can really become a master at advertising. Because that's what it's about. 

It doesn't happen in a day. It happens by committing to the right process. There are so many things that you do anyway. You're going to do it anyway and you're going to spend the time, you might as well do the time right. And work towards building up a library of winning campaigns, winning formulas and not be in a situation where you little elements have to sign up new students every month because you've got to make the rent, the bank, whatever you want to call it?

Cool. So yeah, look, if you need help with that, shoot me a message. I'm going to run off, hopefully, get some training in and finish off the last of my worksheet. Catch you soon. Cheers.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. If you want to connect with another top, smart martial arts school owners, and have a chat about marketing, lead generation, what's working now, or just have a gentle rant about things that are happening in the industry, then I want to invite you to join our Facebook group.

It's a private Facebook group and in there, I share a lot of extra videos and downloads and worksheets – the things that are working for us when we help school owners grow and share a couple of video interviews and a bunch of cool extra resources.

So it's called the Martial Arts Media Business Community and an easy way to access it is, if you just go to the domain named martialartsmedia.group, so martialaartsmedia.group, g-r-o-u-p, there's no .Com or anything, martialartsmedia.group. That will take you straight there. Request to join and I will accept your invitation.

Thanks – I'll speak to you on the next episode – cheers!


Here are 3 ways we can help scale your school right now.

1. Join the Martial Arts Media community.

It's our new Facebook community where martial arts school owners get to ask questions about online marketing and get access to training videos that we don't share elsewhere – Click Here.

2. Join the Martial Arts Media Academy and become a Case Study.

I'm working closely with a group of martial arts school owners this month. If you'd like to work with me to help you grow your martial arts school, message me with the word ‘Case Study'.

3. Work with me and my team privately.

If you would like to work with me and my team to scale your school to the next level, then message me with the word ‘private'… tell me a little about your business and what you would like to work on together and I'll get you all the details.

Enjoyed the show? Get more martial arts business tips when you subscribe on iTunes for iPhone or Stitcher Radio for Android devices.

***NEW*** Now available on Spotify!

Podcast Sponsored by Martial Arts Media Partners

83 – Karate Club Owner On Verge Of Closure Shifts Into Profit And Revives The Dream

Ever had a close call in your martial arts business? That you'll need to close doors? That was Bob King not too long ago. Here's how he turned it around.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN: 

  • How to grow your student base through Facebook advertising 
  • Why key conversion elements are essential for martial arts websites 
  • The power of having a business mentor to guide you through your journey
  • How does the Academy program compare to other Martial Arts Business Coaching programs
  • And more

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


TRANSCRIPTION

Well, it's certainly gotten rid of that big dark cloud hanging over me, and I can see that if we continue the way we are at the very least, even if we didn't grow any further than what we are at the moment, we are now financially viable, and I'm actually putting money back in the bank account.

GEORGE: Good day, this is George Fourie, and I'm joined today by one of our Academy members, Bob King. How are you doing today, Bob?

BOB: Good, thanks George. How are you?

GEORGE: Pretty good. Pretty good. Thanks for jumping on.

So we're just going to have a quick chat just about Bob and his school and working together with our Academy program, and a couple of results and things that came up.

So thanks again for jumping on, Bob. If you don't mind, just share with us a couple of minutes, a bit of background about you. Who do you teach, a bit about your school, etc.

BOB: Okay, so I'm a member of the Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo Jutsu school. Hanshi Patrick McCarthy is the head of our school. We teach old-style, predominantly karate, but also jiui jitsu and weapons.

I've been doing martial arts for nearly 50 years, been teaching for probably 35 years. Predominantly ran schools out of school halls and community centres and that sort of thing. It was about seven or eight years ago, we had enough numbers to go into full-time premises that became available in the area where I teach. It progressed from there. Just started teaching full-time, probably five, six days a week with different classes on most days.

GEORGE: Alright, awesome. Okay, so we recently started working together and what I want to sort of getting down to, before we got to that point, what problems were you facing and what were you hoping to achieve through the program?

BOB: Well, the biggest problem that we had was our numbers had declined. When we first opened, we had good numbers. The bank account was looking healthy. The building we were in, we occupied two-thirds of it. Third of it was occupied by a funeral director who parked his hearse in it. That extra area became available and we decided to take it on. We were offered the lease on it to expand, and we took it on because we were concerned who might move in and cause us problems.

And we thought also with the extra area, we could make some improvements to our facility and that would hopefully increase numbers further. Failed to materialize. Once we'd gone into the bigger area, our rent went up but our numbers started to decline, and we got to the point where, probably for 18 months, I was losing money. We were going out the back door.

Just prior to joining your Academy program, we were at the point of we either had to do something and turn it around and actually start making the club profitable, or I was going to close down.

GEORGE: All right. Okay, so just a bit more on that. So was there anything else that was the impact that was having on the business and the situation of the students declining, etc?

BOB: Well, as I said, the bank account. After having a healthy bank account, it was slowly going backwards. I think probably over a two year period, I lost probably close to $13,000 out of my account. Obviously, I wasn't earning any income at all. In fact, it was costing me money. I also work as a personal trainer and a massage therapist, so I was basically subsidizing the dojo with that, and also my wife with her income.

So yeah, it was putting a little bit of a strain on us financially. And I guess the joy of teaching, I was losing that a little bit because you were concerned that you were losing members, and not as many students in the dojo, and the thought that you might have to just stop and either go and start teaching out of school halls or whatever again, or just completely stop training altogether. Stop teaching altogether.

GEORGE: Gotcha. And was there any other impact that it was having on you personally? You know, just with you and the family?

BOB: No, not really. I'll admit I'm not a very good businessman. I like to think I'm a reasonable martial artist, but I'm not much of a businessman. And my wife was sort of getting quite cranky with me at times because I wasn't doing the paperwork and wasn't keeping on top of things.

I also sort of took a bit of a, “It'll sort itself out.” We were doing all right for a while, it'll turn around, it'll pick up. It's just a low period, whatever. All the excuses under the sun.

But my wife has always been very supportive of me, so it wasn't a case that we were fighting or arguing or anything like that. But it was just, as I said, feeling a bit, not depressed, but lack of enthusiasm because things weren't going well. For most martial artists, I guess, opening a full-time dojo and being a full-time martial arts student, for most of us that have been in it for any period of time, that's sort of the dream, I guess. And the idea that I was going to probably lose that was not a happy thought.

GEORGE: Gotcha. All right, cool. But turning it around, you took action and we started working on a few things. Now, when we got working together, what are the two to three parts of the system that you feel made the biggest impact to change things around?

BOB: Well, I guess number one was just the fact of having someone, yourself, there mentoring and making suggestions, giving us some direction on what we were doing, was probably the number one thing. Basically, I needed you to give me a kick up the ass and get me moving… other than my wife who was constantly kicking me up the ass.

So I guess, obviously the main focus with the Facebook ads, that was our main form of advertising. Learning how to do that, which was interesting to say the least to begin with, but once we got going with that, that started to bear results. The other thing was the information that you gave us regarding our website. We had a website that we had put together ourselves, which was a bit dodgy to begin with.

And once again my wife, who is far more technologically minded than I am, stepped in and took over that and started working with that, finding her own ideas and doing some research into what to do with that, but also taking ideas that you had given us in the Academy program to improve that. And that made a big difference as well.

BOB: We started getting far more people coming to the site and more people making inquiries from that site as well. Plus we'd already put out a number of ads, I guess, or notices on various other websites around the place, “Find your local…” or whatever they're called, all that sort of thing. So they were probably, as I said, the mentoring from the start and the guidance, the Facebook stuff and then assistance with getting that website working better for us than what it was.

GEORGE: Perfect, that's awesome. So there's this sort of two-fold because the Facebook ads started working, you say that that was an interesting journey to get going. But you know, as we learned, marketing, it's not always linear. You might get the Facebook ads right, and all of a sudden your inquiries come from different directions and things start working. And so, as you mentioned, the tweaks that you've made to the website, that also helped with getting the conversions going, et cetera. Is that right?

BOB: Yeah, and I'd say there were probably people there that either saw things about us on Facebook, saw our ads on Facebook. We were also doing content marketing, which is what you had suggested. So we put a whole bunch of things together that worked really well. One of them, in particular, was a program we called The 12 Benefits Of Martial Arts, which we ran over 12 weeks, put a new one out each week and that went through the roof.

In terms of our Facebook, our numbers of people liking our page increased… God, I don't know how much, probably 1000% locally, but also obviously you get international people and that sort of thing as well, but that raised our profile enormously. But yeah, we had people that we're probably seeing stuff about us on Facebook, and then going and checking out our website, and probably the other way around too. People seeing our website and then going and seeing things about us on Facebook. So I think the two definitely probably complemented each other.

GEORGE: Awesome, so that's good to hear. So what results have you achieved up to now? How are things different?

BOB: Well, before we started the program, we were down to about 50 or 60 members, predominantly children. I run classes for what I call my junior class, which is four to seven-year-olds. The youth is the eight to 16-year-olds. And then our senior classes. We don't do separate grappling classes or separate weapons classes, we teach the Karate Kyu.

So we went from somewhere between 50 and 60, and now we're up around 80. We got a lot of… we did the paid trial, that was probably our biggest thing. We did a 39.95, three weeks unlimited training with a uniform, and that worked really well for us. We got a lot of people trialling from that, and the vast majority of those people that trialled, converted and are now training with us.

GEORGE: That's awesome.

BOB: Now, as I said, we're up around the 80. There are a few more trials and a few more inquiries that have come in that may well, within the next couple of weeks, push us sort of 85 members sort of thing.

GEORGE: Perfect. And so, how's that impacted your business now? You were saying earlier how you were fearful that you would have to give up that whole dream of running the full-time school. How's that different for you at the moment?

BOB: Well, it's certainly gotten rid of that big dark cloud hanging over me. I can see that if we continue the way we are at the very least, even if we didn't grow any further than what we are at the moment, we are now financially viable and I'm actually putting money back in the bank account, which helps pay for me to go and do seminars and train elsewhere and whatever I might want to do with, as well as just earning a bit of extra income. So the future looks good.

And also with the knowledge we now have, once I get my administration in better shape in terms of teaching, I think that the possibility for us to grow even further is definitely there. At the moment I teach all the classes, I don't really have any assistant instructors that take classes for me, but I'm in the process of getting some of my senior people to now come on board and be assistant instructors with me so that we keep good quality in our classes. And as that progresses, and as more students come up to that level, I can see that we will then have the ability to have bigger classes or run more classes and grow even further down the track.

GEORGE: Sounds great. And how has that impacted you personally?

BOB: Well, as I said, I haven't got the dark cloud hanging over me anymore. I'm more positive about what we're going to do and where we're going to be in the future. And there's not that worry that we're going to have to close down or where we're going to find the next week's rent or whatever. So from that point of view, it's certainly lifted, but certainly, I'll say this though, it wasn't a cakewalk. There was a lot of hours and a lot of work put in both by me and my good wife in getting all this happening. So if anyone thinks that they're just going to run a few simple Facebook ads and all of a sudden double their students… out of luck. It takes a bit of work. But it's been good. It's been a very good learning experience.

GEORGE: Definitely so, and I'll add to that, I mean if there was one person that would be on every coaching call and make sure you ask all the right questions, trial and error, that's what it takes. That's really what it takes. I mean it's nice to hear that the support that we've offered and help, but at the end of the day, that ambition and drive, it's got to come from you. It's going to be internal. Because yeah, there are a couple of roadblocks in the way and that's really what makes the difference, right?

Some people take the martial arts philosophy and push through, and others just find the excuse and go the other way. But you haven't, and that's what's basically adding to the success, of course.

BOB: Yeah. Well as you said, I was on every webinar and I probably frustrated the hell out of some of the other guys that were on the webinars, because I did tend to take up a bit of your time. All the modules, I went through and did the module. Sometimes if I didn't quite get something, I'd go back and do the module again. I was taking notes while I was doing the modules, while I was doing webinars. And then when my wife came home, we would sit down and I would discuss what I'd done that day in terms of the webinars or the modules. She obviously also had access to the modules, which she looked at.

So yeah, it was just that yes, we got the mentoring, we got a lot of good information from you through all of those avenues, but it was actually taking that information and doing something with it. Because you have all the information in the world, if you don't use it, nothing happens.

GEORGE: Yeah, totally, that's awesome. Bob, thank you so much. So just a couple of quick questions just to round things up. So if you had to complete this sentence, “I almost didn't join because…”.

BOB: I almost didn't join because… well, the only thing I would say is we didn't know you. We had been looking at various other similar sorts of marketing programs or that sort of thing, but I think the thing that swayed us towards you was the fact that you are specifically martial arts-oriented, as opposed to many of the other ones out there that are just general. But that was the only thing. We hummed and hawed about whether or not we could afford to do it. Not that it was a great amount of money to start with, but that was probably the only thing that made us think twice about it. But in the end, it really wasn't an issue. Long answer.

GEORGE: Yeah, that's perfect. Cool. And what's been the best part of working together at this point?

BOB: I guess access to the information was good. There are a few times where we were a bit frustrated. As I said, when we first started trying to do the Facebook ads, we were both ready to punch a hole in the monitor because we'd try and do something and it wouldn't work and whatever else. But then it was usually relatively simple to send a message through to you either via the Facebook page or even just an email or something and go, “Hey, we're having problems with this. What's the story? What have we got to do?” And usually, you would give us an answer or point us in the right direction. Plus we would then go off and do our own research on that as well, and try and sort it out even better.

So yeah, that available information, the modules being there and being able to go and look at them and, as I said, sometimes go through them once or twice to try and get that information in your head. And then, when we do a webinar, if there was something I didn't quite understand regarding the modules or anything else, you were there to sort of give that information to us. So that support was a big part of actually making things work, but again, a big part of keeping us going because you constantly ask, “What are you going to do today? Why haven't you done this? What's next? What's next?” So I suppose that's the point of a coach, isn't it, to sort of push you along a little bit and get you moving in the right direction.

GEORGE: Yeah, perfect. You were saying kick up the ass. I know I'm the lesser of a martial artist, so I can only do that by distance and feel comfortable with it.

BOB: Sometimes the psychological kick up the ass has more effect than the physical one.

GEORGE: Yeah. Yeah. True. Cool. Bob, one last question. Who would you recommend the Academy program to and why?

BOB: Well, I've already recommended it. Told people that I've done this program or I’m doing this program. We had a major training thing up in Brisbane two months ago. I had told my head instructor Hanshi McCarthy that I was doing this program and he was quite interested in it. A few of the people up there, because they'd seen our ads and saw what was happening, started asking me questions. So I told them the program that I was doing, whether or not they follow it up is not my problem, I suppose, that’s there’s to try and get motivated and do something with it.

So I'm quite happy to tell anybody that I deal with in terms of martial arts that we did the program and that we were happy with it and well worth the money that we spent. And as I said to you when we first started, that the consideration of doing the Partners program was there and it's still a possibility. As I said, we need to consolidate and see where we're going and what's happening, but I would still consider going to the next level and doing the Partners program again. But I just need to, as I said, get my act together a bit in terms of running classes and things.

GEORGE: That's awesome. Cool. Well, thanks so much. And for anyone listening, if you'd like to know more about the programs that we offer and how we can potentially help you get similar results no matter where your school is at, whether you're at that 50, 60 marks, scaling to 80, or if it's 100 to 400, we've got a vast variety of programs that we offer based on where the school owner is at.

So if you would like to know more info on how we can help, you can just go to martialartsmedia.com/scale, as in S-C-A-L-E, and just fill in the form, we ask a couple of questions. We'll set up a time to chat on the phone, brief phone conversation, see if or how we can help, and take it from there.

Awesome! Thanks so much. And Bob, thanks again for jumping on. Look forward to seeing you in the next webinar and hitting some more goals.

BOB: Okay. Thanks very much, George. You're welcome.

GEORGE: Thank you. Cheers.

Awesome. Thanks for listening. If you want to connect with another top, smart martial arts school owners, and have a chat about marketing, lead generation, what's working now, or just have a gentle rant about things that are happening in the industry, then I want to invite you to join our Facebook group.

It's a private Facebook group and in there, I share a lot of extra videos and downloads and worksheets – the things that are working for us when we help school owners grow and share a couple of video interviews and a bunch of cool extra resources.

So it's called the Martial Arts Media Business Community and an easy way to access it is, if you just go to the domain named martialartsmedia.group, so martialaartsmedia.group, g-r-o-u-p, there's no .Com or anything, martialartsmedia.group. That will take you straight there. Request to join and I will accept your invitation.

Thanks – I'll speak to you on the next episode – cheers!


Here are 3 ways we can help scale your school right now.

1. Join the Martial Arts Media community.

It's our new Facebook community where martial arts school owners get to ask questions about online marketing and get access to training videos that we don't share elsewhere – Click Here.

2. Join the Martial Arts Media Academy and become a Case Study.

I'm working closely with a group of martial arts school owners this month. If you'd like to work with me to help you grow your martial arts school, message me with the word ‘Case Study'.

3. Work with me and my team privately.

If you would like to work with me and my team to scale your school to the next level, then message me with the word ‘private'… tell me a little about your business and what you would like to work on together and I'll get you all the details.

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