It’s scary out there?

We’re in the middle of a necessary and painful “thinning of the herd.”  As you’ve heard from me repeatedly the rich get richer and the poor struggle then fade away.  Why?  Habits and Actions.

Those who “take the bull by the horns” and really study, attend events, learn from other success stories, while setting goals, visualizing success, and focusing on achievement will go far.  Those who sit and wait for something to happen will run out of steam and fade away quickly in the current market.

Question is which will you be?

All populations sort themselves into the 80 – 20 rule.  80% mediocre or worse.  20% successful.  Actually it’s usually more like 5%, 15%, 80%.  5% like our Inner Circle and Mile High Karate regional developers wildly successful.  Implementing quickly.  Learning aggressively.  Focusing on success.  15% making great strides, learning and focusing.  The rest left in the dust.

Wow!

We just got back from the Extreme Success Academy and it FAR exceeded expectations!   If you were there you know.  If you missed it, well you really did miss out on a lot!

According to Joe Lewis (speaker, contributor, vendor)

I think it was great, it was great for the ICAT program that we’re putting together and also all the instructors at the NAPMA conference, Stephen Oliver, Master Jhoon Rhee, Paul Hartuonian, incredible, just absolutely incredible seminars. Everybody here was a great speaker. I think that everybody that has a martial arts studio that really wants to see their school go to the next level has to involved with NAPMA and I think it was well worth our time bringing our new ICAT program that we’ll be back again.

What I wanted to say is I went around and talked to the vendors that were here as well as the participants. There are participants that were here that were very familiar with the Mile High program and the NAPMA program that said well, we’ve heard this stuff before, but just the new information we picked up today will definitely increase our grosses. I’ve had people I talked to and said well, you’re paying this amount of money for the Inner Circle, and he said hey, we make 10 times over that just by the benefits of Mile High as well as the NAPMA program, especially the Inner Circle benefit me. I asked dozens of black belts, dozens of school owners, no one was disappointed and I was always looking for that one person that was disappointed and he did not exist. So we’re happy.

You don’t have to spend all that money trying to figure it out yourself. It’s a lot easier to go to NAPMA, they’re going to actually save you thousands of dollars with your NAPMA membership because they do all the hard work for you and you basically just implement their program.

Shawn Harvey Small Circle JuJutsu -  Bermuda.

Extreme Success Academy was an awesome experience. There was a ton of information that I know is going to enhance my school by at least 50% profit in 6 months, I know that for a fact. The publicity stuff was awesome. Paul Hartunian did a phenomenal program. Stephen Oliver’s stuff is awesome. I have all his marketing material and I’ve actually gone from, I’ve been in business for about 5 years, I went full time this year and we were looking at, I think $8k in January and right now we’re up to $18k, and that was in like 6 months. So this is phenomenal stuff. All used by what NAPMA has put out.

The format was phenomenal, I mean everyone sat around, everyone got to mingle, we had Peak Performers, the Maximum Impact people. Everyone was asking questions to find out what they were doing. It was phenomenal. It’s awesome stuff. Awesome.

Anyway,  there’s no way to recap the incredible content from the Thursday A-Z day or the Thursday Inner Circle/Peak Performers meeting.  Or, from the incredible event Friday through Sunday.

You had to be there.  There’s nothing like being there in person for the seminars and speakers, the exercises and drills, for the round tables, and for the networking.   Plan not for Quantum Leap in March 2009 and for next fall’s Extreme Success Academy – date and location to be determined.

Thriving in a Difficult Economy!

I talked about this extensively at the Extreme Success Academy and wrote about it in more depth in the latest “Mile High Maverick” in your Maximum Impact Package.

Whoever, I’ll reiterate here.

There are THREE things you must do in a market like we are currently in.  A couple of them are not intuitively obvious:

First.   CREATE “Raging Thunder Lizard Evangelists”  To learn more see Tom Peters references in his “Passion for Excellence” or “Thriving on Chaos” books.  Or, go to the source and see Guy Kawasaki from the Apple Macintosh developmental team.

Anyway.  The gist is your students must LOVE you.  LOVE your school.  You must become the focus of a “cult-like” devotion from your students.   For a more complete description of that see your notes from my Sunday presentation at Extreme Success Academy.

Second.   Appropriately INCREASE your marketing expenditures and effort.  Stupid business owners cut back on their advertising when times get tough.  You should get better at understanding marketing, advertising placement and structure.  Use the great stuff that NAPMA provides.  Mail more and get your message out more aggressively in more places.   At the same time DOUBLE – or, more your grassroots efforts.

Third.  Appropriately INCREASE your training budget and time expended to make all of your staff (and, yourself) better at leadership, sales, customer service and all of the operations of your business.   Put in a lot more time on these core functions.  Don’t focus as much on the physical.  Do focus A LOT more on service, rapport building, as well as learning more and more about sales, marketing, operations, and exciting teaching methodologies.