Students or customers??

Nick,

Read recently on the Net an article penned by Gavin Mulholland, whom I believe you know and have trained with. Contained within the article was the following:

‘When the old Masters said that you shouldn’t eat from Karate, they really knew what they were talking about. I think a lot of the erosion of standards is down to people making their living from teaching karate. With the best will in the world, if you need 30 students to pay the mortgage, you are going to ensure that you have 30 students on the mat. It’s just human nature. Once you do that the dynamics are all wrong and your students become your customers. Once you have customers, you are forced into giving them what they want, not necessarily what they need. So eventually it gets easier and easier and everybody loses out’.

In my mind that sums up just about perfectly what’s wrong with many training facilities. Do you agree?? What are your thoughts??

I pretty much agree mate.

I've been asked many times to run full time schools and make a living off of martial arts but what is the old saying?

How do you make a small fortune?
Start with a big fortune and open a dojo!!!

I went to one of the seminars here about making a 100k per year teaching karate and they'd done tons of research as to what the market wanted (black belts without working up too much of sweat, without sparring and without getting hurt).

The presenter was mad that people like Oyama had said only one in a hundred would make black belt and he felt everyone should be able to be a black belt.

I stood up and said "Isn't that like saying everyone who joins the army should be able to get into special forces?" and he said "why not?"

I bought the house down when I said "because they'd no longer be fucking special." and then I left.

There message was all about nickel and diming parents of eight year old boys (the major section of the market) to death by upselling them on all sorts of stuff.

So, I run my small club and work in a few other venues to make my money and I'm glad I have that option.

Nick

I stood up and said "Isn't that like saying everyone who joins the army should be able to get into special forces?" and he said "why not?"

Tha is exactly the beef I have wit these self proclaimed "positive thinking" types. Well done for sticking to your guns.

easier training = some benefit to many

harder training = a lot of benefit to few

striking a balance is very effing tricky

harder training is needed to keep standards and create the next generation of teachers, but has the downside of frequently just making likely lads even more likely; which as a benefit to society is minimal, as compared to taking a introverted female and making her competent / proficient.

however 99.9% of females piss off back to boxercise after their first bust nose.

oh well, 'tis our lot

cheers

paul

Well done Nick, money means jack shit if you've sold your soul. I was watching a documentary on Royal Marines on youtube the other day. The Capt(bloke in charge not sure of ranks) was saying blah blah blah about why so few people make it and that it's so tough etc...the drill serg was like 'if we let standards, beastings slip then we aint gonna be the marines.' It was glaringly obvious that this fella in charge was all about numbers.

BTW nick I also saw a doc on Legion boys training in French Guyana(I think?) Basically everything in this place could kill you!! That's apart from the training...Crocs, snakes, spiders etc!! Was this where you went? Are you mad? Cheers Rob

No, I'd have gone to Guyana if I'd stayed on - it was my next scheduled overseas tour. (Legion makes you do 2 overseas then 2 on the mainland unless you're in the REP - in which case you'll log your overseas stints with the constant overseas tours they do)

I was in Djibouti with camel spiders, scorpions, big cats etc. Mate, you forget, I'm from Australia which has more venemous critters than any other place on the planet if I recall rightly. As Crocodile Dundee said "We've got spiders that'll kill you by looking at you."

Also, I've lived in the tropics in Oz for a while...most jungles have their share of nasty crap in them.

Bryson who pops on here from time to time was in the Oz Army for yonks and serving in Townsville...I'll bet you he's run in to his share of snakes and spiders in his time.

Nick

Camel Spiders! Nasty ugly little bastards.....reminds me of why I hate survival training so much - give me a credit card and the Dorchester, that's real surviving!

The SF comment you make is almost exactly the same as I use on a regular basis - everyone these days wants to dive straight into the 'exciting' stuff, like going into an Army Careers Office and asking to go straight into SF, or be a sniper or some other specialist - there's a lot to be done before that can ever happen, if it ever does.

The seminar that Steve and myself co-taught last year is an example of this in a way - we covered the base fundamentals of dynamic positioning, power generation and violent intent - in my personal opinion probably some of the most overlooked subjects out there. We got 30 guys in attendance - but as I pointed out on the day, if we'd adertised 'advanced offensive applications of ball-point pens' or 'secret assassin combat mindset' I'm certain we'd have been over-subscribed!

Mick

Well, speaking as a guy who's an authority on not earning any money out of martial arts, for me it's about integrity. You arrive at a level of understanding, and something inside you doesn't allow you to compromise or sell shit as sugar.

It's been advised to me in the past many times that I should have a regular group, who I feed the shit to: give them grades, make it nice and simple, and then an elite group that I teach the real stuff. On the basis that the first group would give me my money to fund the second group. But when you reach a certain level, you just can't teach shit. Even if you wanted to, you can't.

But having said that, a lot of guys teaching out there haven't even arrived at a point of needing to make a decision about integrity, because they don't know enough to know that what they're teaching is shit. And that's the sad part. And the guys they're teaching, could be raised to a completely new level with good instruction.

Leaving the money aside, there are a lot of martial arts instructors with good intention and zero knowledge. Nice guys, but not able to raise their own standard, let alone that of their students. They shouldn't be teaching at all.

Mick, good points.

I was talking to Gav and he'd bumped into Bobby Breen and they were talking about seminars. Bobby said, and I think it's an awesome line, "the problem with seminars is they want us to give them candy, when what they need is vegetables."

Nick

Profit, is not a dirty word.

I don't think there is anything wrong with making a living from teaching M.arts - is it much different from being a professional boxing coach/trainer/promoter? Standards are variable in all walks of life so why should M.arts be any different?

What IS wrong IMHO, is selling something under false pretences, and this is where I think most people have a beef: seeing crap MA, SD, SP advertised as the 'holy grail' to survival. ie. Teachers claiming their 'style' as the be-all-and-end-all of 'street survival'.

However, even though I've only ever met a handful of 'honest' M.arts instructors (one of them full-time) in my lifetime, most of their students seem quite happy with what they get for their money - does anything else count other than 'customer satisfaction'?

...just a thought




Steve Rowe from Shikon made an excellent comment regarding teaching.

"There are some excellent teachers out there who simply have nothing to teach"

Worth thinking about.

Profit not profiteering.

No problem with instructors charging a fair rate for the service they provide. Martial arts is no different to any other thing that someone has that I want. It's the ones that rip the a*se out of it, and who always seem to be charlattans or very poor at what they do.

D