“Do You Think What You Teach Has No Value?” Jhoon Rhee and the First Martial Arts Business Seminar

By his own account, Grand Master Jhoon Rhee ran the first martial arts school business seminar from July 4 to 6, 1985, at Pat Burleson’s studio in Fort Worth, Texas, for about thirty owners. Saturday ran from 6 a.m. to midnight, and the whole weekend alternated business sessions with training, with philosophy taught alongside. His argument to owners who were proud of teaching for free was a question: do you think what you teach has no value? The industry’s seminars, coaching programs, associations and trade journals all descend from that weekend.

Disclosure: Grand Master Jhoon Rhee awarded the author his 1st Degree Black Belt in 1978 and his ranks through 6th Degree, and the author was head manager of the Jhoon Rhee Institute in 1980. Quotations from TRUTOPIA are brief and attributed.

I have a personal stake in this one. TRUTOPIA lists the people Rhee remembered from that first seminar: Pat Burleson, Al Garza, H. K. Lee, George Menshew, Steve Oliver, Ishmael Robles, Jose Santamaria “and other notables.” The Steve Oliver is me. 1985 is also the year I began coaching other school owners, which tells you how much that weekend shaped what came after.

No independent record of the seminar has turned up, so its exact dates and attendance rest on Rhee’s book, and this journal has said so in our history of Jhoon Rhee. What is not in doubt is what followed it.

Why did Jhoon Rhee start a business seminar?

Because he thought the industry was dying of a bad idea. In the 1980s, according to TRUTOPIA, martial arts were losing popularity and owners were struggling, and nobody had thought to teach them the business. The book blames a habit inherited from the old Asian masters: the feeling that making money from martial arts was somehow a crime. Instructors said, with pride, that they taught for free.

Rhee’s response, as the book records it, was to ask them: “Do you think what you teach has no value?”

That question is still the best place to start any conversation about tuition. If you believe your program turns a distracted eight-year-old into a confident, disciplined twelve-year-old, then charging a professional fee for it is not greed. It is a statement about value. Charging too little is the opposite statement. I make the long version of this argument in the case for professional tuition.

Did Rhee practice what he taught?

He did, and he was unusual for it. He opened in Washington in 1962 with two small ads on the sports page of The Washington Post, and TRUTOPIA says the phone rang all day with questions about tuition and class times. He kept advertising heavily through the 1960s, in the TV listings section of the Post and then on television, which produced the “Nobody Bothers Me” jingle that Washingtonians of a certain age can still sing. Within five years he bought a house in Arlington for $60,000. He was, as the book puts it, one of the few who made teaching taekwondo professional and was proud of it.

He did not separate marketing from teaching, either. The same man who bought television time also gave away free classes to reporters and to members of Congress, because he understood that public image and paid attention were two halves of one job. The publicity side of that is the subject of a separate piece on Jhoon Rhee’s Publicist and the Local Celebrity Model, which this journal publishes on November 2.

What was the 1985 seminar actually like?

Brutal, by modern standards. TRUTOPIA reprints the schedule under the title “Born To Be Healthy, Wealthy, & Happy.” It started at 2 p.m. on Friday and ran to midnight. Saturday ran from 6 a.m. to midnight. Sunday ran from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Each morning began with the Jhoon Rhee Daily Dozen, his twelve stretching exercises. After that, the day alternated hour by hour between martial arts business and martial arts training, with named sessions on:

• the Seven Qualities of a Champion (see Part 2)
• six steps of martial arts business
• the universal purpose and values of life
• the American Founding Fathers
• the power of vision
• a membership campaign he called the 10021 Club

A note under the schedule adds that five hours of philosophy were taught on top of what was printed. The ratio tells you how he thought about the problem. He did not believe an owner’s results came from tactics alone.

What happened after Fort Worth?

The seminars became monthly and ran for several years. The book’s later list of attendees still active in the industry in 2010 includes Pat Burleson, Dennis Brown, Tom Callos, Joon Chung, Jim Harrison, David Kovar, Soojin Lee, Ernie Reyes, Simon and Phillip Rhee, Jose Santamaria and Don Wilson, among others. The book claims that many graduates went from under $100,000 a year to a million or more. That is the book’s number, not an audited one, but anyone who knows the names on that list knows the claim is not far-fetched.

More important than any one school’s growth is the template. The idea that a school owner needs business education, delivered by another owner who has done it, in an intensive format, with philosophy and training mixed in, became the basis of everything our industry built afterward: the seminar circuit, the coaching programs, the associations and the trade press, including this journal. The longer version of that story is in our history of the martial arts school business in North America, and the systems that came in from the dance-studio world are traced in the dance-studio lineage.

What did Rhee think made the difference?

Character, which will surprise anyone expecting a sales trick. TRUTOPIA states that the business success of his seminar graduates was directly proportional to how far they were motivated to live an honorable life. Rhee cited Tom Callos, who wrote that he had not learned much business technique at the seminar but had been fired up by the philosophy.

After more than forty years of coaching owners, I think Rhee was more right than wrong. Techniques are easy to copy and most owners already know more of them than they use. What separates the schools that grow is whether the owner shows up early, keeps promises to families, tells the truth about money and does the uncomfortable thing today rather than next week. Those are character habits. Rhee taught them in the same room as the business, for the same reason.