Martial Arts Business Podcast Ep 33: Interview With Tom Whitaker

In this week’s Martial Arts Business Podcast Mike interviews an old friend of his, Tom Whitaker from Collinsville, Illinois. Tom is a longtime martial artist and a former professional kickboxer, and he runs a very successful school in a town of just under 25,000 people.

Yet, despite operating in a small town he and his wife Missy keep their lead funnel full and have an active student enrollment of around 300 students. So how do they do it? Well, you’ll have to listen to the interview to find out.

Also, in this episode Mike explains why learning to run a successful martial art school is a lot like learning how to box, and he also provides some great advice in this week’s Tip of the Week on how to be prepared to invite people to your martial art school.

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Resources and Products Mentioned In This Podcast Episode:

Link to my book, The Profit-Boosting Principles on Amazon.

MAbizU.com – Link to MAbizU.com, Mike’s private martial arts business coaching group.

And, here’s a link to Tom Whitaker’s Facebook Page for his martial art school (please don’t post to his page – friend him and message him if you want to get in touch).

Podcast Excerpt:

“So, I’ve started teaching these Krav Maga classes in our new home town, and my students are just getting to the point where they’re ready to do a Fight Class, which is an intro to sparring class for beginners. So we started doing that on Wednesday nights, and we’re having fun with it.

I mainly have women in my classes, and they are coming along really well, but what I find interesting is that these ladies continually get frustrated because they feel like they’re not able to grasp the material as quickly as they think they should…

But what they don’t realize is, they’re learning at an accelerated pace. The way that I teach that class is allowing them to learn the basics, the fundamentals of sparring, very very quickly…

…I was talking with them last night in order to encourage them, and we’re just working on boxing skills right now. I told them that boxing is a relatively simple sport or art. There are very few techniques; you just have a few punches, some footwork, some head and upper body movement, and then learning how to put that together in combinations…

I told them that, because it’s so simple, it’s actually very deceiving because it’s really a very subtly complex pursuit…

It occurred to me last night, as I was on Facebook looking at some posts from members of our MAbizU.com community, that running a martial art school is similar to that learning experience…”