A Bigger Vision for the Martial Arts Industry

NAPMA’s leadership team declares a powerful new vision for NAPMA and the martial arts industry. In this article, we reveal NAPMA’s “unstoppable mission.”

Having worked with some of the most successful millionaire business visionaries in the world, the NAPMA team now brings this knowledge exclusively to our members. In this article, we discuss the lack of vision plaguing the martial arts industry for many years, speaking out about plans to energize and empower a new generation of visionary entrepreneurs who are ready to take the industry to new levels of growth.

We bring the unique insights and lessons from different industries and their leaders who didn’t understand the meaning of the word “limitation.”

Read more about the exciting new direction and vision for NAPMA and how your school and your future will benefit.

Is Your Vision Limiting You or Empowering You?

One of the greatest limiting factors to the growth of the martial arts industry today is a wholesale lack of vision among its operators and far too many of its leaders. The martial arts school industry is a very small niche, and one of the primary reasons it’s struggling to break into the big leagues is there are too many folks who simply think too small. The industry needs more people with a grander vision of what’s possible and the desire to make that broader vision a reality.

What I mean by that is that the overwhelming majority of martial arts school operators in the nation believe that the full extent and realization of their career goals is running one single school with maybe 75, 100 or 150 students and maybe grossing $5000, $12,000 or if they get lucky, $17,000 a month. That’s all they believe to be possible, either by being surrounded by the wrong example, or being taught to think “small.”

A few years ago Stephen Oliver invited me to join him on an inspiring quest to study many different business models that closely parallel the martial arts school industry. These industries included private tutoring facilities such as Sylvan Learning Center, Huntington, Kumon and Math Monkey. We also studied the chiropractic industry, dance schools, gymnastics academies, cheerleading facilities, private schools, associations and many others. Over the past few years, we’ve compared our industry to these parallel business models and compared the entrepreneurs and business owners that run them with the intent of using this knowledge to expand the martial arts industry. One of the things this comparison revealed was the mainstream acceptance and brand development that many of these other industries have accomplished, that we in the martial arts industry have yet to achieve. Let’s consider the private tutoring industry that’s dominated by several national and international players such as Sylvan, Huntington and Kumon. If you’re the parent of a student who needs some private academic help, you instantly think of Sylvan. Why have they been able to accomplish such market domination, and how might we in the martial arts industry accomplish the same thing?

The greatest tragedy in the life of the entrepreneur
isn’t that they set their goals too high and miss them. Rather,
they set their goals too low and accomplish them.

One of the driving forces behind the growth of these businesses is the expansive and vibrant vision of the most successful CEOs and industry leaders. This vision drives its industry to reach for greater heights and to grow beyond what one single business can accomplish on its own. Banding together often helps supports and grow an industry to everyone’s mutual benefit.

NAPMA aims to be that driving visionary force for the people in the martial arts industry. By joining together the schools, businesses and organizations that serve our industry, we can empower thousands or tens of thousands of students, clients or customers, and create enormous career opportunities for owners, staff, managers and investors.

Just as others have done in parallel industries, together we can create hundreds and thousands of individual locations, develop thousands of qualified staff members and have a tremendously positive impact on the communities we serve, our country and even the world. Our primary mission at NAPMA is to empower school owners with a supportive envi-ronment, tools, systems, and strategies to accomplish this type of business growth. Combined with a more expansive vision, our industry is heading for an amazing future.

Visionary Leaders

The first and most important realization is that no one is created with this vision. Donald Trump wasn’t born with the skills and ability he has today. Richard Branson wasn’t born knowing about the airline industry. Bill Gates wasn’t created with the vision he has today. This is a skill that can and must be learned and develop to create an expansive organization.

If you take an example such as Donald Trump, he doesn’t know anything about clothing or retail, but he knows a lot about business. Yet he has a very successful clothing line in Macy’s. He has successful golf and country club resorts, commercial and residential real estate. It’s not that he has the fundamental institutional or operational knowledge
of running retail clothing establishments. He has a vision and has surrounded himself with the right people to help him accomplish it.

Richard Branson has Virgin Airlines, cell phones, music stores and retail locations. He doesn’t really have a lot of experience in those specific industries operationally, but what he has is the ability to translate his vision into reality.

We have our martial arts business visionaries, like Y.K. Kim, Bill Clark, Jhoon Rhee, Tiger Shulman, Andrew Wood, Mike Dillard, Jeff Smith, Nick Cokinos and Stephen Oliver, to name a few. These are people who realize that there is much more opportunity in our industry than just running a single location with a hundred students. They are visionaries, not necessarily because they’re running the big, multi-location operations that they own, but because they’ve been able to translate their vision into something bigger than what most people think is possible.

Who are the People Surrounding You? Small business owners in virtually every category have a common problem. According to the late, great Jim Rohn, “You’ll become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” We at NAPMA truly believe that, and this is why Stephen Oliver made possible the opportunities we’ve had the past few years to meet and work with dozens of millionaire and multi-millionaire business owners and entrepreneurs in this and many other industries. These are people who are at the top of their game in their individual fields.

One commonality among these highly successful people is that they always seek out other people who are doing really well and surround themselves with those people. They choose to spend time with people who inspire them and who have expansive visions as they do. Small business owners, unfortunately, often do the opposite.

If you think about the day-to-day life of martial arts school operators, they get up in the morning and kiss their spouse goodbye. They go to their school where they deal with their staff members, parents and students. Of those four or five people that they just spent their entire day with, none of them are entrepreneurial visionaries, big thinkers or people who can really help them grow to the next level.

Most of our students are children, and we’re there to serve them. We can certainly learn from them, but they’re not going to help us look at our business strategies and help us grow. We can’t have frank, honest, open business discussions with our clients. Our vendors, the people who serve us, are often too busy doing what they’re doing to have in-depth business strategy discussions. Our spouses can be very supportive, but are either busy with their own careers or the family. If your spouse is also your business partner, he or she has the same problem you do!

Top performers find other people who have accomplished what they want to accomplish, and deliberately surround themselves with those people. They do this because they know that anything that isn’t growing, whether it is a business or an individual, will die.

Finding the Right People

There are an awful lot of industry consultants who have a low opinion of the opportunities available for a martial arts school operator. I’ve even heard some so-called industry experts make the statement that you shouldn’t listen to anybody who says you can be a martial arts millionaire, because it’s not a realistic goal. That indicates a dramatic lack of vision and a lack of accurate thinking. That’s just the sort of limiting belief system you should block out as you actively work to surround yourself with people who have expansive ideas.

There are many in our industry who are running schools grossing a million dollars a year or more. There are many more martial arts entrepreneurs operating successful multi-school organizations with tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

NAPMA’s CEO Stephen Oliver is a prime example. He and others like him, such as Jhoon Rhee and Y.K. Kim, have created a huge opportunity for themselves, their colleagues, their students and their staff.

I just had a conversation the other day with one of my favorite people, Brian Tracy, who is also one of my business mentors. He’s such an inspiration to me. His mission for 2011 is to help five million people build a better business for themselves. Now that’s an expansive vision that gets people excited. Part of Stephen Oliver’s vision is to create a martial arts brand in the United States and abroad that rivals Sylvan Learning Center. This kind of inspiring vision can dramatically grow our industry. That’s the kind of expansive thinking that school owners need to embrace to drive the industry forward, and that’s the new vision of NAPMA. Our mission is to create an environment that surrounds members with people who are at the top of their game like Brian Tracy and Stephen Oliver. We want to help you be at the top of yours.

There’s an awful lot of noise in the industry from some well-meaning organizations, consultants and school owners who have never actually run a particularly successful school, a multilocation operation or a million-dollar school. One of my favorite pieces of advice comes from Tom Hopkins, who says “never take advice from someone more screwed up than you are.”

What we really want to do at NAPMA is take the whole industry to the next level. We want to help everyone who really wants to grow get to 200, 300 or 500 students at a single location. Perhaps you dream of running a multi-location operation or even expand internationally. Whatever your vision is, we are creating an environment that gets you there.

We are empowering our members with the tools to solve the problems that they’re going to have along the path to reaching their vision — proven, successful marketing systems, retention systems, renewal and upgrade strategies, classroom management processes and much more. NAPMA’s vision is to create that breeding ground for exceptional success — not just the “get-by, survival” mentality that has been so pervasive in the martial arts industry. We want our members to kick the lid off of their dreams and achieve their goals.

Decision-Making Systems

As I look at other industries that have accomplished what we are aiming to accomplish, one of the things I notice is that they implement plans very fast. They’re very good at making quality decisions based on their return on investment. CEOs and industry leaders are good at analyzing a situation, considering all the options and making a decision based on the impact to the bottom line and the growth of the organization. How will it affect sales and revenue, the brand and product, and the customer? They make a decision quickly because they know what to look for. They have a system for making decisions.

In the martial arts industry, what I often see is that the “hem and haw, gosh it’s quite a risk” style of decision making. Each decision is a struggle.

We need to learn how to make good decisions and speed up the implementation of our plans. This is usually a key predictor of success.

General Patton said, “I’d rather have a half-baked plan today than a perfect plan two weeks from now.” In most cases, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but you’ve got to get it done. Brian Tracy says the most successful entrepreneurs are good at one thing: taking the first step. After taking the first step, the next step will appear.

Entrepreneurs who are less successful are often paralyzed by fear and never take that first step. It’s like they’re waiting for all the lights to be green across town before they go through the first intersection. The most successful business owners are the ones who know that there will be some red lights along the way, but they prepare for them and take the first step. Then they solve whatever problems are in their way to the second step, and whatever problems are on their way to the third step.

I’ve seen many school owners ignore opportunity, or who have hesitated when it required action, and it’s cost them dearly in lost opportunity and real money. In this economy, many schools are closing just because they don’t have the skills to make decisions quickly enough to generate more students or to serve their  students better.

You must have a plan, but you also have to have a system to make decisions. Most business owners don’t and they try to avoid making decisions. They put themselves in a position where they just stall and stagger in bewilderment. You have to make a decision based on the impact it will have on the bottom line and the direct impact on the customer. In our industry, that’s the student. Overcoming a “Conditioned”

Failure Mechanism

People have a conditioned failure mechanism that is always looking for a reason to fail. It’s always looking for an out, an excuse to not try. It’s looking for a reason not to take action, to just be good enough and not do anything that makes you step outside your comfort zone. All breakthroughs in your business come from changing something by stepping outside your comfort zone.

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Many people will go to a seminar or business conference, visit the NAPMA website or open a NAPMA package and take pages and pages of notes, then promptly go back to their schools and do absolutely nothing differently. Unapplied knowledge is an even greater sin than ignorance in terms of business success. You must manage how you input new knowledge and information into your brain. If it’s just information maybe you take action, maybe you don’t. No big deal. It’s kind of like this in weight loss. If a man or a woman is 30 pounds overweight, they might say to themselves, “I’m going to try to lose weight.”

The “try” is an escape hatch. It’s an open excuse not to do it. You didn’t say you were going to do it; you just said you were going to try. The people who are successful say, “Look, by November 30th, I will lose nine pounds and this is how I’m going to do it.” Those are the people who are much more likely to actually accomplish it. We at NAPMA want you to declare to yourself, to your staff, everything you’re going to do to accomplish your vision. It’s a useful technique to make a declarative statement that your brain remembers and you have a much higher likelihood of actually accomplishing now you’ve put positive pressure on yourself to get it done.

We want you to succeed to your fullest potential and achieve more success than most believe is possible! We are here with the resources to help you get there. We are available with monthly membership support materials, online support, educational and inspirational conferences monthly teleconference, and personal coaching. We have online classrooms and discussion forums and the Mastering the Martial Arts Business, and the new NAPMA TV

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