Have you ever struggled with marketing your studio without any money? If you’re reading this, then I’m sure you’ve at some point tried to get your head around how you’ll market appropriately and stay in budget. Or do you even maintain a ‘budget’?

The old way of looking at this question is pretty stoic,

“Why did you start business without enough marketing capital to begin with?”

Justifiable question, but shit happens. The speed of smart business today is as fast as a click making brick and mortar rapidly becoming more ethereal as each day passes. Every small business is now global and crowd influenced. Fork tongued sales tactics inside brick and mortar are losing their bite.

We’re in a place now where your ability to market your product or service has very little to do with how much you pay an artist to mock up some shiny full page ad to make people think you’re the best. While coupon books and local periodicals...

I read a wonderful quote from an old Japanese sensei, I believe he was an aikido instructor.

'In the Japanese martial arts, anyone who calls himself a master, isn't.'

I love this quote. It says everything about what separates us from so much of the martial arts garbage out there.

Anybody who is creating stories, lying to their students just to fill some self serving need; it's garbage, it needs to stop. We (as teachers) need to be protectors of something that's honorable, that involves integrity and something that in many ways a treasure.

There's no more important belt in your dojo than the White Belt. There's no more important student than the Mukyu level.

To me, someone who earns their white belt has fulfilled a much larger goal in their life than any shodan or black belt.

Here's why; I want you to take a step back to when you first stepped into your martial arts classes. Can you remember when you first started, when you had never experienced martial...

There is no script here, I'm not reading from any type of teleprompter. I am doing this entire project in my dojo, from my dojo and it is about my job. My dojo has been reasonably successful over the last 12 years. My measuring tool for success is based on the development of my students.

My school we has about 200 family members and many of my students travel to Japan yearly, spending time training. But this course is about you and how the functions of my Dojo, and the different systems that I've developed work.

Many people tell me that martial arts shouldn't be commercialized. People would tell me about their teacher, teaching out of their garage in exchange for breakfast on Sunday mornings. That's all they would accept for training, on and on and on.

I've seen so many people martyr themselves to the martial arts here in the United States. We have this enormous sort of stigma of 'if you don't bow when you walk in the door, then you to drop into, push-ups, on your knuckles, on...

Data Scorcher and Coming Trends

Today I finally took a moment to read through the 117 pages of the Kleiner Perkins Internet Trends 2013 with some good music playing and a cool drink.

I’ve been watching their reports since 2010 and they’ve been dead on, but more importantly for me is their accuracy for current trending in the social space.

Looks like Ms. Meeker lays down some current facts that the many business owners looking to better leverage their marketing dollars must to take notice of. Her report points out that (get this!) all social space has seen strong growth over the last two years except Facebook – where people are spending most of their wasted time. So what does this mean? I think that when it comes to quality of life or business improving initiatives, which is an ideal environment for martial art school owners and it means Facebook may not be the ideal place to spend your dollars.

Learn how I run my Dojo on one system....