Martial Arts Business: What's Changed About Teaching and Owning a Martial Arts School (and how to use it)

What’s Changed About Teaching and Owning a Martial Arts School

(and how you can use it all to your benefit)

By Tom Callos

I started helping my first martial arts teacher with his classes when I was a yellow belt, which would put the date somewhere around 1974. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t a whole lot of real ”help” (more like a handful I think), but I already had it in my head that I was going to teach the martial arts --for a living. I’m now writing this in the year 2011, which puts 37 years between my start as a teacher and today. 

Some things about the martial arts, teaching, and owning / operating a school have changed dramatically, while others haven’t hardly changed at all.

Bruce Lee is still on the cover of Black Belt Magazine. A side kick is still a side kick. Century Martial Arts Supply is still selling uniforms and safety gear. Instructors still have bills to pay so they can keep their facilities open. And while general knowledge of the martial arts is far better than it was in the 1970’s (for example, it’s rare today to have someone walk into a Taekwondo school expecting to order take-out), we still have schools struggling to build healthy student enrollments, struggling financially, and struggling with the basics of sound business management.

The Biggest and Most Important Change for

The Martial Arts Teacher 

Of all that has happened and with everything that has changed in the last 37 years, the most profound and important change is our access to information and our ability to explain, demonstrate, and broadcast what we do with what we have learned. 

Today we can go to the web and take a lesson from Rigan Machado or Royce Gracie. We can instantly --and with no cost involved --take lessons in boxing, watch Bruce Lee talk his philosophy, send an instant note to someone we’d like to study under, and /or join on-line schools that teach their martial arts from top to bottom in lessons you can replay until your eyes cross. 

You can watch years of judo competition, kendo practitioners taking their 8th degree black belt tests, Wushu competitions held in Beijing, and you can see fighters like BJ Penn, Mohammed Ali, Rickson Gracie, Ray MacCallum, and Rocky Marciano go toe-to-toe with some of the greatest fighters of all time --and until the fricking sun goes down (and then some). 

The most successful and skilled teachers and school owners in the world can be reached within 15 minutes of your search to find them. Today you can study philosophy with amazing teachers, Zen masters, Nobel Prize winners, scientists, activists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and brilliant artists. The Smithsonian is at our fingertips; the greatest library and resource center every created (on our planet anyway), sits on a device you can buy for the price of pair of glasses. And Mister, if you don’t have a dime, you can still access all of these tools for free at most public libraries. 

On the flipside of learning is teaching, communicating, and broadcasting the things that show and tell the world that the martial arts --and specifically what you know and teach --are worth someone’s time, energy, and resources to study. Your ability to communicate your benefits, convincingly, has changed in the last 27 years, Oh I don’t know, maybe 10,000-percent?

In a single day I can build a website to communicate my school’s benefits to my community that has brilliant and emotionally charged images, that has perfectly crafted text telling the story of what I do for people, and I can post videos (made with a camera costing under $100) that show my school, my classes, and the collective genius of my teachers doing what they do on the mat. 

I can show students laughing with the fun we’re having, I can show people who have made brilliant progress, I can post testimonials from parents, and I can talk, almost face-to-face, with prospective students before we ever meet in person. Instead of potential students walking into my school with visions of what they are going to see and learn crafted by television shows and the movies, I make my own show, on-line, that tells the story of what I know, what I teach, and what that teaching produces.

For those of you reading this who are under the age of 25, maybe this doesn’t sound like any big deal, but let me tell you, this ability to instantly learn from the greatest teachers in the world, to access the best in seconds, and to be able to genuinely show and tell people what our teaching is about, it’s as big a change from “how it used to be” as was the car from the horse.

How A School Owner Can Benefit from All of the Above

First, you have to get connected. You have to be able to walk into this colossal library and know how to use it to learn what you need to learn. You can’t, as many people do, walk in, see the endless stacks of “books and magazines,” and walk out feeling like it’s all just too overwhelming and too much to absorb. You need to be able to use the library’s “card stacks” (search engines) to find the information that you need to fill the gaps you would like to fill. 

If you fail to become proficient and confident with using the Internet as a educational resource, you lock yourself out of the most profound learning tool of all time. It would be like sitting outside of the library on a bench, as people walked in past you, while you stubbornly and ignorantly profess that you don’t need or don’t understand or that you can’t figure out how to use the resources inside. 

Saying “I don’t do the Internet” is like saying, “I don’t do books.” Letting the Internet’s junk keep you from finding new teachers and information is like letting the books on a library’s shelves that have nothing to do with what you’re interested in keep you from the tools you’re looking for. 

Second is you have to learn how to use modern technology to write the book of what you do, who you are, what you teach, and what that teaching does for people, for the community you’re in, and for the world. In fact, you won’t just “write the book” of what you do, you must learn to make the magazine, the TV show, the theatrical production, and the movie of what you do for a living. You are your own media company. 

Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you use the abundant and mostly free tools to show and tell why you and your classes, your school, are worth the money you ask for? There’s no good reason, except that you’re not living in the present day. If you fail to believe that you can --and will --learn what you need to learn to tell your story better, then you might as well step aside, because the up and coming generation won’t have that problem. 

An Added Benefit of Being Your Own Media Company

When you start showing, in near-real-time, what you do for a living, when you start telling the story of your work, it causes you to look deeply at what you really do. It’s hard to tell a good story without the ingredients that good stories are made of. When you start looking at what you do the way people who don’t know you will look at you on-line, it makes you pay more attention to your methods and your outcome. 

What This All Means and What to Do

OK, so lets say you now know, perfectly, how to find any information you’re looking for. Learning whatever it is that you want to learn is now at your fingertips and so education isn’t any sort of obstacle to your success and or plans. And communicating what you do, to your community, to potential students for your school, is no longer difficult, because you have your own magazine, you’re writing your own “book of knowledge,” you have your own TV show, you make your own movies, and you even have your own photography department, and all of this allows you to show and tell what you do that’s worth the money you charge.

So what do you do? How important to the world is your teaching? What can you show us that proves you’re not full of hot air? Where’s the evidence that you are what you say you are? That you do what you say you can do? 

Do you have one piece of evidence? One example? Two? Ten? Two hundred? A thousand examples, stories, testimonials, and films showing the wonders of you applying your knowledge to help students, your community, and the world? With the near-complete freedom you now have to tell your story, and tell it well, where is it? Show me. Show us. 

Because if your martial art and your martial arts school is really, genuinely important, powerful, and valuable, We'll see it. If you don’t tell the story, if you hide or otherwise don’t show what you do, how will we know?

How can your community know what you really do, when the rubber meets the road, if you don’t show and tell your story? How can prospective members sort through the sales pitches, the hyperbole, the time-wasters, and the ego-maniacs if they can’t find you --and if you can’t “show them the money” of what you actually do?

There are no obstacles to your ability to use modern technology to be a better communicator, a better teacher and leader, except your unwillingness to learn the tools of today. It’s a magic time for martial arts school owners and teachers, because all of the cool tools that used to be out of reach are now at our fingertips and ready for us to use. All we have to do is learn to use them. 

This has changed the martial arts world (and THE WORLD, of course) more than anything else in the last 37 years (or 370 years). Now the way we learn, the way we teach, the way we post and communicate our curriculum requirements, the teachers available to us, and the resources we have for training up-and-coming teachers, the way we advertise our wares, and the way we set our own personal limits and goals, it has all changed --and for the better.

My work, all of it, is now about teaching martial arts teachers HOW to learn what we need to learn to be more important and relevant in today’s world.

What is self-defense today? What’s hurting us, what’s causing people to suffer, what’s killing people? What do we sell that has enough value for people to invest the $4 or $5 a day we want to charge for lessons? Can we prove that what we do is worth 10 or 20 or 100 times what we charge? And how well do school owners today use the abundant resources we have to tell our stories?

The martial arts world is sitting on the precipice of a golden age of learning and teaching. There’s a new generation of instructors coming up who are, right now, enrolled in the school of “I can learn anything, so what am I going to do?”

There’s a generation of teachers who are learning to use modern technology to show they’re actually worth far more than the cost of their lessons. They own their own media companies --and they’re learning how to communicate benefits of the martial arts that few people knew how to verbalize 5, 10, 20, or 30 years ago. 

All of this is also creating a new role for the martial arts teacher and the martial arts school in today’s world. With no barriers to education and communication, martial arts teachers are starting to investigate topics like environmental self-defense, anger management, health education, dietary self-defense, and a level of community involvement that stands as proof that the practice of the martial arts does, indeed, affect ones character, goals, skills, and attitude. 

The school of the near future won’t sell its lessons on promises of advertised benefits, the tired rhetoric of the 1960’s, from the ad copy they bought from their franchise, or from text and images they copied from the marketing guru who told them they had the formula for school success.

They’ll sell their lessons from the evidence they have written and put in videos that show what their work produces. Hundred of examples, maybe thousands, of martial arts students taking what they learn on the mat and putting it to work in the world.

That’s what’s changed in teaching and owning a martial arts school in today’s world. It’s wonderful, it’s powerful, and it’s now.