Episode 1011 - Martial Arts School Management Software

In this episode Jeremy and Victor are joined by Brad and Allen (of Martialytics) to discuss lots of varieties of martial arts school management software.

Martial Arts School Management Software - Episode 1011

SUMMARY

In this episode of Martial Arts Radio, the discussion revolves around the importance of martial arts school management software, the personal relationships that martial arts practitioners have with their schools, and the challenges faced in running a martial arts business. The conversation highlights the significance of community, the aversion to financial discussions, and the role of automation in alleviating these challenges. The guests share their experiences and insights, providing valuable information for martial arts school owners and enthusiasts alike.

In this conversation, the speakers discuss the critical importance of establishing boundaries in business, particularly in martial arts schools. They explore the challenges of financial management, scaling operations, and the necessity of data-driven decision-making. The discussion also highlights the genesis of a software solution aimed at improving the operational efficiency of martial arts schools, emphasizing the need for better tools to support school owners in their passion for teaching martial arts.

The speakers discuss the evolution of martial arts schools and the importance of continuous improvement in business practices. They explore the transition from manual processes to technology solutions like Martialytics, highlighting the benefits of software in managing schools effectively. The discussion also covers the evaluation of software options, key features that enhance school management, and the pricing structure that makes Martialytics accessible to various school sizes. The speakers emphasize the need for martial arts professionals to remain open-minded about business practices, just as they are with their training.

TAKEAWAYS

• The martial arts industry has evolved significantly over the years.

• Financial aversion is a common challenge for martial arts business owners.

• Automation can help streamline administrative tasks in martial arts schools.

• Personal relationships can complicate financial transactions in martial arts.

• There is no one-size-fits-all solution for martial arts management.

• The importance of software solutions in managing martial arts schools cannot be overstated.

• Imposter syndrome affects many martial arts instructors and business owners.

• Effective communication about pricing can enhance business relationships.

• Compromising boundaries can lead to confusion and mismanagement.

• Empathy for customers must be balanced with self-care in business.

• Financial mismanagement can lead to the downfall of martial arts schools.

• Data collection is crucial for making informed business decisions.

• Retention is as important as recruitment in martial arts schools.

• Automation can alleviate administrative burdens in school management.

• Software solutions can streamline operations and improve efficiency.

• Continuous improvement is a core philosophy in martial arts and business.

• Technology can solve unseen problems in school management.

• Aligning interests between software providers and schools is crucial.

• Effective software can lead to increased profitability.

• Open-mindedness in business practices is as important as in training.

• The pricing model of Martialytics is based on student numbers, not features.

• Key features of Martialytics include student management and communication tools.

• Transitioning to software can free up mental resources for growth.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction to Martial Arts School Management Software
01:00 Personal Relationships with Martial Arts
03:48 The Importance of Community in Martial Arts
8:02 Challenges of Running a Martial Arts School
11:46 Overcoming Financial Aversion in Martial Arts Businesses
16:01 Automation and Software Solutions for Martial Arts Schools
19:25 The Importance of Boundaries in Business
23:15 Financial Management in Martial Arts Schools
26:48 The Challenges of Scaling Martial Arts Schools
32:42 Data-Driven Decisions in Martial Arts Management
41:32 The Genesis of a Software Solution for Martial Arts Schools
49:59 The Continuous Journey of Improvement
51:02 Transitioning to Technology: The Benefits of Martialytics
57:38 Evaluating Software Solutions for Martial Arts Schools
01:04:41 Key Features of Martialytics: Enhancing School Management|
01:10:00 Pricing and Value: Making Martialytics Accessible
01:14:04 Final Thoughts: Embracing Change in Martial Arts Business

To find out more about Martialytics:

Spend less time running your martial arts business and more time doing the martial arts parts of your business! Martialytics provides easy to use and versatile tools for well-established school as well as ones just starting out.

If you sign up through us, they will DOUBLE your free trial to 60 days! Check out more at www.whistlekickmartialartsradio.com/partners

After listening to the episode, it would be exciting for us to know your thoughts about it. Don’t forget to drop them in the comment section down below!

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Jeremy Lesniak (02:03.325)

Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome. It's another episode of a whistle kick martial arts radio and on today's episode we're talking about martial arts school management software. It's a subject that I think it's pretty important if you have a school you either have software and you're thankful for it or maybe you don't have software. But anyway, we're going to dig we're going to dig into this and I'm glad that you're here.

If you're new to martial arts radio, please go to whistlekickmarshallartsradio.com for all the things, all the things that we've got going on. We've got a email list. You sign up for it. You get a bonus book. There's all kinds of great stuff there. And of course, all the things that we do as an organization to support, to connect, educate and entertain to get everyone in the world to train for six months. You can find that at whistlekick.com. Now on today's episode, I'm joined by three people. One of them you might know, Victor. Welcome back to the show.

Vic (03:00.515)

always happy to be here.

Jeremy Lesniak (03:02.089)

Victor and I talk like every day about something or other. And of course we have two other gentlemen joining us. Brad, welcome to Marshals Arts Radio.

Brad C. (03:12.227)

Thanks Jeremy, happy to be here.

Jeremy Lesniak (03:14.098)

And Alan?

Allen Carey (03:16.095)

Hey folks, happy to be here.

Jeremy Lesniak (03:17.947)

Awesome. Glad you guys are here. Now, if you've been around for a while, you know that we sometimes do episodes that are about a subject, but they involve people who work in the subject. And that's what's happening here. Brad and Alan have a company and why are we here talking to them? Well, we're going to talk a lot about you're going to find out why as we go through this episode. But

Standard disclaimer if you've been around a while you've heard me say this this is not a sales pitch This is not a commercial our effort with this episode is to give you objective actionable information from people who work in the industry and Yes at the end. We're going to talk about their solution to the industry. It's not the only solution But there are we think it's a good one and that's why we're talking to them and not other folks The reason I say that is because I don't want you to tune out right now. I want you to say okay, you know

I'm going to listen. Maybe you're reluctant. That's OK. But. This is going to be a good episode and those of you out there with schools, I think you're really going to dig this. Even if you don't have a martial arts school, if you have a business, you're going to learn stuff about this because we're going to be talking about things at that level. So I think we before we get into the technical side of things and the subject, I think we need to. Speak to everyone's relationship to.

martial arts and martial arts schools because that's how we get to the software piece and Victor I'm gonna have you come in at the end but Alan how about you what's your relationship to martial arts?

Allen Carey (04:56.351)

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I'd say it started as, I mean, purely a, you know, investing thesis, you know, where I looked at the industry today versus what it was like when I was a little kid.

And just seeing the sort of the secular trends in the market and looking at how popular it is today and there are martial arts celebrities and you can watch it on television and everybody's talking about self-defense. It's just a very different ecosystem now than it was say 30 years ago. And that's kind of where it started. And then, you once I got involved in martial litics, it, you know, it's become amazing. I talked to, you know, martial arts business owners almost every day.

Jeremy Lesniak (05:17.577)

Mm-hmm.

Brad C. (05:33.762)

you

Allen Carey (05:42.201)

and it's an amazing community of people and I really enjoy being part of it.

Jeremy Lesniak (05:48.669)

Yeah, one of the things I think is really interesting about what we do as an industry and the people on the outside of it is I don't think there's an industry that people without direct experience have a more positive opinion of. Right. People generally think very highly of martial artists and martial arts schools. And yeah, there are exceptions, but I love that we've cultivated that perception in the general public over time.

Allen Carey (06:16.673)

Totally true. Yeah, I agree with that.

Jeremy Lesniak (06:19.049)

Brad, your relations with commercial arts.

Brad C. (06:21.456)

Yeah, I agree with that as well. I mean, I talk to martial arts owners every day as well, and we're talking to people from every single market around the world. And it's similar across the whole spectrum. Everyone wants to build their community, teach their art, just get fit and have fun and share their knowledge. And it's sort of a universal trade across everything. But you asked about my

Jeremy Lesniak (06:29.929)

Hmm.

Vic (06:32.673)

Thank

Brad C. (06:47.038)

background with martial arts, but I'd sort of been doing martial arts since I was, I think six. I started doing taekwondo back in the day. At least nine years ago. Thanks for that. I'll put that to the back. 42. No, yeah. So started back then and you know, you're doing all the forms and things like that. I'm actually acting at people that are listening. But yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak (06:52.169)

Which is like what like nine years

Jeremy Lesniak (07:11.713)

And yet another reason those of you out there who only listen, which I get it, I'm listening to the most recent episode in the car right now, but you miss stuff when you don't watch, right? And it's the fun little bits, but please keep going Brad.

Brad C. (07:25.941)

Yeah, no worries. When I was a bit older, I started getting a bit more serious into just doing a Chinese Kung Fu style called Chua-Lai-Fat-Buck-Sing, which is kind of a niche long range striking style. And I got really into that and was teaching as a junior instructor and worked my way up to being sort of a senior instructor and then a disciple of the Sifu there at the time. we had something like...

Jeremy Lesniak (07:35.561)

Mmm.

Brad C. (07:53.248)

three to four hundred students at any given time in two locations, which is quite a big school, but we were using paper to track everybody, like cards for attendance and paper for billing and things like that. And I could see from the admin people how just frustrating it was. And we had no idea how many kids were there or how many students were there. Yeah, so it's just madness.

Jeremy Lesniak (07:59.645)

That's a lot of space.

Jeremy Lesniak (08:15.689)

Yeah, and that's, I want to leave that part on a cliffhanger, right? Because that experience that we're cards or spreadsheets or whatever, it's a common thing. And we're gonna come back to that. that Chinese martial art style, what was the name of that?

Brad C. (08:38.096)

fut boxing. So there's three different toilet fut styles. And that's that's one of the it's called Northern Victory.

Jeremy Lesniak (08:39.921)

Okay. Okay.

Jeremy Lesniak (08:44.805)

My brain is really trying to hear Chow Yun Fat when you say that. But maybe we should acknowledge you because most of our audience is in North America.

Brad C. (08:49.344)

That was the accent.

Jeremy Lesniak (08:59.365)

You are in your Aussie. Are you still in Australia? You're in the UK now? Okay. All right. Okay.

Brad C. (09:02.592)

I'm Ozzy, I live in the UK. So my accent goes in and out. So it might be confusing for people, especially the Americans.

Jeremy Lesniak (09:12.623)

I work really hard. am from Maine, again, living in Maine. I try to make sure my Maine accent doesn't come through because even 25 years in Vermont, when my Maine accent came through, my friends would say, what? So this is my radio voice. If you know me in person and we're out in the world, you might get a little bit different flavor. Speaking of someone who has traveled a bit and

might have picked up and put down some accents at times. Victor, of course, you've been on the show a whole bunch of times, so we're not going to do your whole relationship to martial arts, but let's set the scene. Give us the brief on you opening a martial arts school.

Vic (10:02.071)

Yeah, well, at the time of recording this, are a little less than a month from our second year anniversary for the school that my wife and I started back in 2023 when you asked the fateful question of, why aren't you teaching yet? And here we are. And it's going great. This is the second school.

Jeremy Lesniak (10:21.353)

For those of you out there who think I only poke at you, because there are some of you out there who maybe you get on the phone with me or you email with me and I push everybody and Victor's a good testament to that.

Vic (10:40.421)

yeah, and for good reason too. I am very cautious by nature and so I need people to push me a little bit into that uncomfort. And it is going great. We're still, we still have lots of things that are uncomfortable with people and things, but this is the second school that I have run. The previous one was in Florida.

by myself, which already made it, like already having my wife as my partner is amazing. But also the one in Florida was two different locations with a health and fitness facility where parents dropped their kids off while they went and worked out. And then a church, so that's two entirely different demographics of students that I was merging together, tracking everything.

Jeremy Lesniak (11:31.145)

Mm-hmm.

Vic (11:34.915)

on my phone via Venmo PayPal and those things and Checks, I think I still had one parent who paid via check when I taught in Florida yeah in and It was just yeah, that's I mean my everything that I do kind of is related to martial arts It's a weird question for me Because I'm always constantly thinking I substitute taught yesterday

Jeremy Lesniak (11:56.329)

Right.

Vic (12:00.615)

And during my planning periods where they normally send me to another classroom to cover someone's lunch break, I was working on a complicated schedule revamp that we're going to do on the other end of our second anniversary. So I was lesson planning, but for our school, not for anything having to do with the public education system.

Jeremy Lesniak (12:11.817)

Mmm.

Jeremy Lesniak (12:16.797)

Yeah.

One of the things that I think is important to acknowledge is that martial arts businesses are businesses, the needs of all businesses, while they differ in the detail.

at a macro level are the same and there is no one size fits all. If there was, that would be the size. If there was one martial art style that was the best for everyone in all situations, that's what we would all do. Clearly that is not the case. So we do have options. Now, Victor, you've run 47 businesses in different industries.

Vic (14:40.995)

worked for 47 businesses.

Jeremy Lesniak (14:43.175)

Alan, I know you've been involved in a number of things. Brad, we heard a little bit about your story and we'll go into that in a moment. I've been involved in a variety of businesses over the years. when I take a look at what is, because I also consult with martial arts schools and other businesses. And I want to get all of your feedback on this. The thing that is the primary killer.

is in aversion to collecting money.

How many of you would agree that especially in smaller businesses, it's that, I don't like the money part of it is the first thing that kills them.

Allen Carey (15:30.889)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've seen that a million times in different software companies. It's, it's, it's an aversion to the whole subject matter because especially in like smaller companies, because you feel so close to the customer and there's often a personal relationship that blends into the business relationship. You know, if I'm, you know, selling widgets, to, you know, sort of nameless faceless

Brad C. (15:30.934)

the first hurdle to overcome.

Allen Carey (15:59.223)

corporations, then I don't really care. But when a family comes in with their children, it's a very different dynamic. And there's also, you know, not just an aversion to kind of talking about money with people that you're close to. It's also sort of a shyness about, you know, charging a fair market value. Like you feel like you almost are obligated to do favors for people.

Jeremy Lesniak (16:27.449)

Yeah, because you like your people, you like your customers, you want to help them, you get to know them, you know that, you know, they just had this massive car repair or whatever else and, and I just want to help them.

Allen Carey (16:28.599)

And it's okay, you know?

Allen Carey (16:38.038)

Yeah.

Allen Carey (16:43.861)

Yeah, right. it's tricky and it's a hard thing to balance. I'm not saying that there's necessarily like a silver bullet for that, but certainly, automation and sort of like, disassociating yourself from some of those things can help. And then also just being comfortable and confident in the value that you're providing to people.

At those are the things that I've kind of seen that have worked as like a mindset change almost more than anything else.

Jeremy Lesniak (17:16.143)

Yeah, that there's.

Brad C. (17:16.571)

it comes down to that imposter syndrome, doesn't it? Like if you feel like maybe you're second guess you are in value and you feel the last hurdle to overcome is that putting a price on it and asking for money.

Jeremy Lesniak (17:29.675)

The thing I remind all of my clients is that they are not their target demographic. You do not value what you do the way other people value it because you have it and they don't. One of the things that I tell all of my, clients is that you were not your target demographic by definition, you know, enough or, or value enough or have the experience or whatever that you're able to.

serve other people. And if you treat them as equals, you break the value exchange. And you have to be able to separate from that. Well, what I do isn't that special. No, it is because that's why they want to come to you. That's why they want to pay you. That's why they want the thing that you make the service that you provide. Right.

Jeremy Lesniak (19:28.708)

Victor, what do you got to add on this pile?

Vic (19:32.097)

Yeah, the imposter syndrome thing is, Karen and I talk about that all the time, I was sitting at home just the other day and one of my families, they're a homeschool family and they have a daughter who's in high school and she messages the business, not about martial arts, but she's like, hey, I'm writing a research paper on different styles of martial arts and I was wondering if you could give me some background on...

Jeremy Lesniak (19:37.35)

Hmm.

Vic (20:01.379)

karate, jujitsu, and the specific style of kung fu that we teach Bagua. And for a moment before I started responding, like, why is she coming to me for this? because to her, I'm Shihan, I'm the expert. And you have said to me multiple times that I am not my demographic of audience, because there's so many times where...

Jeremy Lesniak (20:18.747)

right.

Vic (20:30.455)

trying to think of prices and I'm like, can't I ask people? I used to hate the first of the month, which was the day that I sat down and went down my student list and sent payments. Well, one, most of my students, when we started the school, this school with my wife, they were either friends of my children,

Jeremy Lesniak (20:39.322)

Why did you hate that?

Vic (20:55.595)

or they were classmates or schoolmates of my children. And my previous experience with that was with people who, we'll just say, thought that because we went to the same church, they should get a discount. I gratefully...

Jeremy Lesniak (21:11.652)

What I'm hearing is you hate it and I'm hitting this point because you're not alone. huge portion of people out there, and I know people who don't run a martial arts school that want to run a martial arts school because they don't want to have to deal with this. It's the idea that when I go through and I look at the first of the month of who has and has not paid, it means I have to have awkward conversations with people. And I don't want to have those awkward conversations.

Right. Am I right.

Vic (21:42.339)

Oh, % and then like three weeks after the first or three days after the first of the month you have to like go on Venmo and like hit send reminder to all those people and other text messages. I hated it.

Jeremy Lesniak (21:55.076)

Absolutely. Brad, you mentioned, let's go back. you kind of started to serve it up and it's time for us to come back to that point. You'd been training a while and started to get involved in the back end of the martial arts school that you were at. And you said three, 400 people across a couple of locations. Victor and I are talking about, you this is a painful point at 10, 20 students, 30 students. It only gets worse when we get up, you know.

10x.

Brad C. (22:26.467)

Yeah. It's interesting because that's generally how people tend to start schools. They start small when they start with who they know, people they've worked with before or trained with before, and then they're friends and friends of friends. And it's only until you get that arm's length point where they're not immediate, sort of close to either you or your kids, that it becomes more comfortable to ask them for the money. So it's kind of like this, you're really pushing things up a hill and then it gets a lot easier when you get over that little hump. I think it sort of hits around 80.

students tends to be the sweet spot. But yeah, it becomes difficult, but that's sort of almost where you need to sort of take a step back and sort of remove yourself from the equation a little bit and just sort of rely on some automation there. And then you can sort of be like, well, that's just automated. The computer just does it. It sends out those reminders. It sends out if you've missed a payment or something like that, it's not me chasing you. It's just the system I use so I don't have to worry about that stuff.

Jeremy Lesniak (22:56.956)

Hmm.

Jeremy Lesniak (23:25.372)

I'm gonna make a statement here and I'm curious if you all agree with me. To me, boundaries are really important. In a martial arts school, as a martial arts student, as a martial arts instructor, drawing and holding people to boundaries is really important. Because if the boundaries are flexible, they don't understand their role and thus it can become really difficult to understand where success is in their efforts.

And I've got decades of experience running businesses and looking back early on in my professional career. That was the thing that I did most wrong. I was like Victor's talking about, well, you know, we had this prior relationship. had this other thing. I knew they had a difficult time going on. So I would compromise the boundary, the boundary being you're going to come and consume this service, purchase this product. I'm going to charge you this amount.

and they expected it was going to be this amount and now it's that amount. And it broke the boundary or at least bent the boundary for them. So they didn't quite know how to act. Alan, you've gotten involved in a number of businesses in a number of different ways. What do you think of that observation of mine? Would you agree?

Allen Carey (24:44.509)

Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I would say that it's most common to see that among business founders and owners. And generally speaking, I've come in in, you know, after that stage.

Jeremy Lesniak (24:53.02)

Yes.

Allen Carey (25:00.023)

And it's one of the things that I'll, I I Brad probably tell you this, like that I've often kind of, you know, talk to people about and encourage them on is like, Hey, we've got, you know, a really good product here, or there's a really good service we're providing. Like, let's not be shy about, you know, because you can always look at a lot of these same problems from the other direction. Like, you know, I come in and I have great empathy for my customers, but I also have great empathy for, for Brad and my partners.

Jeremy Lesniak (25:22.438)

Hmm.

Jeremy Lesniak (25:28.507)

Hmm.

Allen Carey (25:28.617)

And it's like, work really hard. We try our best. And sometimes, you know, being a great service provider or, you know, sort of a, yeah, a great business person often involves intense empathy for your customers and their needs. And that's really important and you shouldn't fight it. But you also have to consider yourself as well. Not in a selfish way, but in a sort of dispassionate, disconnected way, if you can, just try to, you know, put, you know, sort of put yourself on the

in an out of body experience and sort of just look at the situation dispassionately if you can and you know am I being rewarded or am I treating myself fairly honestly and sometimes the answer is no you're treating your customers extraordinarily well often you know or at times at the expense of treating yourself unfairly and that doesn't help anybody because that doesn't scale forever right then your business goes away and it doesn't work right and now the customers are getting

Jeremy Lesniak (26:20.772)

Right. And that I I want to I want to underscore that because again we're in an industry where not only do most people start martial arts schools for reasons other than making money. Right. Most people open a business they're like yeah I'm going to get rich. Most people who open martial arts schools think

Brad C. (26:25.003)

That's the, yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak (26:47.692)

This is a continuation of my journey, which is good because a martial arts school is probably a opening one is probably not the best way for you to invest your time, energy and money. If financial return is the only thing you're looking for. There are probably lots of other things you could do now doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. In fact, I encourage you to do it.

But if you do not charge adequately, if you do not manage the money piece well enough, at some point, your school will go away. And I've known a number of schools that have fallen victim to this. Victor, you're nodding your head. Brad, I'm sure you've met some, know some school owners that...

Brad C. (27:34.856)

especially in this economy.

Jeremy Lesniak (27:37.36)

Yeah, yeah. If you don't get this part of it right, nothing else matters. And I know people who stretch it out or they build a school such that they don't need to charge. You know, it's in their garage. They have limited number of students and that's great. And if that works for you, by all means do that. But that is not what most people set out for. Most people say, you know, it would be awesome if I could have this school make my living.

and do this dutiful thing that I feel really positive about. Brad, how were you at your school managing hundreds of financial collections?

when you started working on that.

Brad C. (28:23.062)

See, I wasn't doing that. I was more interested in teaching, it was, I was sort of supplementing the main teaching staff and being a part of that and sort of helping with curriculum and that sort of thing. But I did spend a lot of time at the front desk and watch how the admin staff were really scratching their heads. If there was an issue with someone missed a payment or trying to sign somebody up to a new plan, I had to fill out paper forms and send them off and then.

Jeremy Lesniak (28:26.49)

Okay.

Jeremy Lesniak (28:37.657)

Hmm.

Brad C. (28:49.717)

They were locked into contracts and if something didn't work, trying to get someone on the phone if you're halfway around the world or something like that. was just compounded things that you just don't want to have to deal with. And that's only if you're lucky enough to have some admin staff to help you. If you're a school owner, often you're teaching as well and you're just a one man band or one woman band. And that just compounds even more in that sort of situation.

Jeremy Lesniak (29:16.347)

So what you're talking about here is a in almost universal experience, right? How do most martial arts schools start one person? Maybe they have an assistant Maybe it's their wife right their husband their senior student, you know, whatever from from another school and they find a space and they have a handful of students and they're doing some marketing and people are showing up and

Jeremy Lesniak (29:45.423)

What I notice is it tends to reach this critical mass. 20, 25, 30, 40 students somewhere in there where somebody says, okay.

The pain side of this is too much, right? Every business, right? Ellen, would you agree every business has this dip where you don't want to be? Where it's too big to be easily manageable but not big enough to hire the help? Yeah, so, and different people are gonna draw that line differently depending on how they manage their school. For me, I observe that in that like 40 to 50 range. Not to say that...

Allen Carey (30:16.629)

Yeah, absolutely. 100%.

Jeremy Lesniak (30:29.337)

you know, a 20 person school isn't painful, not to say that, you know, managing 100 person school isn't painful. The pain is just different, but on the other side of that dip, you usually have the resources to get some help to make those things a little bit easier.

Brad, paper, we're back in the paper days, right? A lot of people watching or listening to this episode remember filling out paper forms for everything, not just martial arts, but didn't you guys have a transitional point where you started to move in a direction?

Brad C. (31:08.242)

Yeah, we started looking, I think there was a company called Champions Way that they were using, the school was using at that point. And they started to use that for billing. think it's usually the first step for people is just trying to automate their billing. Because billing is obviously a necessary evil. If you don't bill, you don't exist. But that's where the headaches also come in. Because if there's everyone knows, if a card detail, a card expires, for example,

You need to chase someone up to update their card details and you only know when it fails the payment and then just creates this knock-on effect. So then we're using that and then we're still using cards to track people's attendance and I have a background in design, web design and I was working in advertising at the time. So I thought I could make something that was just to track attendance so we can get rid of these cards and at least see who's there, how often they come. Like a literal...

Jeremy Lesniak (32:03.2)

What do you mean by cards? People were coming in and they're pulling their card out of a file or?

Brad C. (32:07.796)

a of cardboard that's got your name on it. have to go through it and find your name. And then you put that in the I'm here pile. And then the admin person would have to go through that pile of people that were there and tick a box and put the date on it. So for hundreds of kids. it took a long time. And obviously it was prone to human error and things like that. But there's quantifying that either. So you've just got a stack of cards. But how do you visualize that information? How do you know if someone's coming?

Jeremy Lesniak (32:24.197)

Yeah.

Brad C. (32:35.476)

unless you really go through it all the time. I know it's got time for that. So that was the idea of just building something to track that attendance. So you just check in, I'm here, tracks the date and time, and then you've got something you can graph and then maybe get some insight into from there.

Jeremy Lesniak (32:45.723)

Hmm.

Jeremy Lesniak (32:54.183)

And no, because for me in the martial arts space, there are three Rs. There's revenue. We've talked about that. There's retention. And then there's recruitment. Right. And honestly, those are the order in which I recommend schools focus on them. But we're talking about retention right there. If someone hasn't shown up in a few weeks and you don't recognize that they haven't shown up in a few weeks, you're missing the best opportunity to reach out and say, hey, is everything OK?

because the moment they go to a non-renew,

Brad C. (33:23.443)

It really is. Yeah. It's too late by then. It's the first indication is if a student's regularly coming every sort of two or three times a week and then they start dropping down to just twice a week and just then to one or that sometimes they just don't show up at all. They might not send you a message but then that's your first sign that they're either unhappy with something or something in their personal life has changed. it allows you, if you know about it, you can reach out and talk to them about it.

Jeremy Lesniak (33:51.317)

Victor, you know, because you've worked 197 jobs and yes, I'm going to continue to increment that number because it's funny to me when I do that. Victor, because you've worked in so many different jobs, this thing that we're talking about catching people when their behavior changes, that's a core component, I'm sure of a number of businesses you've worked in.

Brad C. (33:57.151)

You

Vic (34:12.099)

for sure. And it's interesting because it's always something that has been tracked in a lot of different jobs. Like you always have regulars, right? Like I can still remember some of the specific coffee drinks, a venti chai latte with no water steamed to 180 degrees that a truck driver would get every single morning. And if it was not the exact temperature, right, yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak (34:36.13)

That is some specific memory.

Brad C. (34:38.576)

just had to remember you talking in Fire Hight then because that sounded dangerous.

Jeremy Lesniak (34:42.171)

What once a day Victor tried to kill someone with a hot cup of coffee that's how that's how resilient this this truck driver was. Yeah.

Brad C. (34:49.234)

That's gonna melt your face.

Allen Carey (34:52.597)

tracks yeah

Vic (34:55.683)

So you have your regulars, in the realm of gym type memberships, you have, I've worked for some fitness locations that were more chain styled and we loved the people whose billing would go in, but nothing else. Like they wouldn't go in. We called them bill payers.

tracking behavior on on this side of things especially because I barely know what date it is. I always know what day of the week it is because you know it's whether or not what class I'm teaching in the dojo but there are some days where I'll feel like I haven't seen someone in months but then I'll go back and look at look at our our system for

Jeremy Lesniak (35:38.459)

Mm-hmm.

Vic (35:51.639)

for checking in and be like, no, they were just here last week. Or conversely, I'll be talking to people and I'll be like, so yesterday when I was showing you this and Karen will nudge me, she goes, Victor, that was two months ago that you were teaching this. well, yeah, yesterday. So like, I have no concept of time.

Jeremy Lesniak (36:12.811)

Life is busy when you're head down, when you're focused, when you're trying to run your business and you're inevitably going to focus on the parts you're passionate about, which for the martial arts space, if you're a martial arts instructor, you don't start a school to do the other things. You start a school because you want to teach. You want to share your information with other people as they come along. then, you know, just to acknowledge this, this is what we're doing. We're trying to set up for those of you out there a problem that you

probably have. The question is how severe is this problem in your life? Right? That's that is the question. And only you can answer that. Are you at a point with with your financials where you're going, man, this is a pain in the butt. I've got 40 students in every month. I'm chasing two or three or five people or I recognize I have really good recruitment. I'm bringing a lot of people in, but I have a hard time understanding time.

And my retention could be better because I don't quite see where they're dropping off, right? Like that can happen for a lot of people. so we've been, I don't want to say we're dancing around it, but we've been presenting the problem without saying, know, there are software options available to you. And I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to anybody out there. There are a variety of software options out there. If you have a martial arts school and your martial arts school has made it onto a

email list, you have likely been solicited by somebody to say, hey, we have a solution to a problem that I'm sure you have. you know, whether or not you chose to explore that, or maybe you have software, right? The question really becomes how significant, how impactful is this? And I'm working on bridging a subject here because, you know, you might have noticed.

Alan hasn't said anything in a minute. I'm going to, I'm going to bring Alan back in because it's really, it's where, where the two of you, Brad and Alan started working together that I find super interesting. So, but Brad, I'm going to, I'm going to give it back to you because there's a little bit more in this story that I think we've got to say for the audience. So, you got a background in, in marketing and web design and you started turning your head towards this problem that

Jeremy Lesniak (38:36.653)

You had.

Brad C. (38:38.331)

Yeah, I think I'd sort of just naturally look at the tools and try to blend the two really two different passions. See if I could just make something just for curiosity sake, if nothing else, whether the school owners at the time would use it or not. It was more just I wanted to see what the frequency was. I just like data. So yeah, that was really the driving force for me. I just wanted to play with it. There was no business

Jeremy Lesniak (38:49.125)

Mm.

Jeremy Lesniak (39:04.283)

Hmm.

Brad C. (39:07.96)

reasoning to it.

Jeremy Lesniak (39:10.367)

What was the response? Because I assume since we're here and we're talking now, you produced something that was viable enough that you were using it internally at this school, right? I don't imagine you hit a wall and then you said, this didn't work. I'm gonna go start a software company, right? Like, can't see that story. So what I'm curious about is, as you got this first version,

Brad C. (39:24.367)

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Lesniak (39:38.351)

put together, I'm gonna use the word hacked and you know, right? My degree is in comp sci.

Brad C. (39:41.366)

Mm. Accurate.

Jeremy Lesniak (39:49.529)

What was the response of of other staff school instructors front desk staff at your school when you put that up?

Brad C. (39:59.344)

Well, it was really quite transformative. Obviously, we talked about imposter syndrome a lot. I probably suffer from that greater than everybody. once you put something out there, you sort of put a piece of yourself out there a little bit, even if it's hacked together. But we got it out there and we set up a little iPad at the front desk and people were checking in on that. And every time they come to class, you check that in. It's the same as putting a card in except all you're doing is tapping, tapping your picture or typing your name in. And then

We had suddenly had all this data that we could look at and go, okay, well, Monday nights is quite popular. Why are people coming in here at this time instead of a bit later? We want them to come in and warm up. And then it was more about, okay, we can use this information and start changing our messaging a little bit. Maybe we should have another class on a Tuesday to sort of bridge the gap between Monday and Wednesday. And it starts to give you insights into things that you just otherwise wouldn't have because you have all this anecdotal data of.

your experiences but then you focus on teaching. But this is actually just, okay these people checked in at this time and this is their habits that are starting to form and over time you get more more insight into that.

Jeremy Lesniak (41:09.563)

Running a business with data is always better than running a business without data. Now, not all data is relevant. And here's an example.

Years ago, this is probably 20 years ago, Walmart was able to say that when hurricanes were coming, they sold more strawberry pop tarts.

that probably doesn't help Walmart make decisions. But if you can get that granular on your data, if you can dig in at that level, you can find all kinds of things that you can take action on. And Brad, I heard you, said, we saw there's need to adjust some scheduling stuff here because of the way, I think you said it was Tuesday operated versus Monday and maybe some of the other days. But what I heard was

You didn't realize that. Nobody realized that prior to having the data.

Brad C. (42:07.502)

And it's really about the context as well. You're saying context is king for data. It's having the right sort of data and being able to look at it from the right angles as well. But with something that's as simple as attendance, it's really how many people are checking in at what times. And then you sort of know, okay, well, I've got 50 slots available in my space. And we're only half filling that on these days, but double, we're sort of oversubscribed on other days. We bridged that up. So you can start working with it then.

Jeremy Lesniak (42:34.863)

Now there are lots of ways you can get data. And I think what it really comes down to is how much time you want to invest in it. If you want to run your business, any martial arts school is a business, if you want to run your business as effectively as you can, you need data. Now you can build your own system and track it and have lots of spreadsheets and Google Sheets and there's value to that.

Spoiler alert. If you look at my Google Drive, you will see that whistle kick has dozens of Shared documents that we use among the team. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that But there are also some things that we do with specific software products that work a lot better Because we don't have to invest the time because they are more purpose-built and this is where I want to start to shift and talk about things being being more more purpose-built.

Alan, I'm going to throw it to you in a moment, but Victor, want you to talk about, because you and I were almost on this parallel journey. I started my martial arts school not long after you did. And we followed roughly the same track. We managed things in roughly the same way. So you can tell my story as well as yours. When you opened April of 2023,

Vic (43:52.416)

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Lesniak (43:54.073)

How were you tracking everything?

Vic (43:56.139)

Google Sheets. Well, not really. Microsoft Office, I use Excel spreadsheets to track all of that. used Gmail as far as email lists were concerned. I created, here are the list of the students. And then I had a big old folder of hand-signed waivers with all of the original student information.

Jeremy Lesniak (44:21.327)

Yeah. I bet.

I bet there are hundreds of people out there nodding their head or at least acknowledging their mind. That's how I was or am doing it now.

Vic (44:34.773)

Mm-hmm. yeah. I mean, it just like that's how I did it at the previous school and comparatively to other martial artists that I know who have run schools who use graph paper to, you know, track attendance or I've been a part of a school that used the card method and I didn't really understand it at all because a lot of times I'd forget to pull my card and class would just start. I seemed like I was ahead of the game.

Jeremy Lesniak (44:59.739)

Right, right. So.

Now we have to take a small detour before because before we we've talked about here's the problem and we are going to talk about a solution here. I don't want you in the audience to think that this is where we switch gears and it becomes sales pitch. It becomes because there's still a lot of information about how you can approach these problems as we talk about. The solution a solution and so we're going to detour Alan.

How did you meet Brad? How did you guys get going? And bring us up to, you know, just take a couple minutes now and talk about the history of martial arts.

Allen Carey (45:44.949)

Yeah, so the genesis of our relationship was kind of along the lines of what I mentioned earlier with my involvement with martial arts in general, right? Just sort of like developing an investment thesis. And that's kind of what I've been doing for the last several years is with a partner.

investing in, you know, kind of small growing businesses that, you we talk about different inflection points in a business's life that I think might be able to, you know, use our different experiences or expertise and capital for business and personal purposes, basically, like just, you know, finding businesses that are at a certain inflection point. And everybody's got a different style of doing that, but that was sort of what we've been doing. And

looked at everything in the market and, you know, frankly didn't think the products in general were that great. Except for martial arts, I thought it was great. I'm, you know, I was an, you know, a totally unbiased spectator to this three years ago, right? So at that point in time.

Jeremy Lesniak (46:53.915)

There's a point where in the story in a little bit where you're going to hear I agreed with that wholeheartedly. Keep going.

Allen Carey (47:01.719)

Okay. Yeah. So, mean, basically looked around and, you know, talked to a bunch of people and looked at all these different products. And I just thought Marshalllydix was the best. then, you know, that's part of it, obviously, but you you can't do a good deal with a bad person. And so when I actually talked to Brad and his cousin, Glenn, who is another co-founder, is still involved in business every day.

Jeremy Lesniak (47:16.571)

Hmm.

Allen Carey (47:25.943)

I was like, these are great guys. I'd love to work with them. And I think we could do a nice job and have a good time. you know, that was sort of, you know, it worked out and that was the start from there. Um, and it's gone great so far. mean, I think we, you know, there's, there's value in, being, there's no, put it this way, there's no value in sort of preemptively patting yourself on the back. It's nice to.

you know, take pride in what you do and try your best. But, you know, we're not done and nobody's, you know, we're not going to be done probably ever. You know, we think that we can make the best products in the world for this and we don't want it to be 10 % better. We want it to be five times better.

Jeremy Lesniak (48:13.791)

And there's a bit of a martial arts philosophy there, right? Martial arts is never done. Our forms can always be better, our sparring, our basics, everything can always be better. And there's something I don't want to say unique because there are certainly other businesses, you know, not even in this space, but there are plenty of businesses, whether they realize it or not, they take that philosophy to their business. But I think it makes all kinds of sense that, you know, here we have a martial arts related business approaching business with martial arts philosophy.

Allen Carey (48:42.027)

Yeah, thanks. I mean, it's definitely something that we're really passionate about. And I know it's kind of a niche industry and, you know, these businesses aren't necessarily, you know, multinational, you know, public corporations or anything like that. But the business problems are real and far reaching. Right. I mean, you talk about, we've talked about payments a bunch, but we've talked about attendance. We've talked about

grading, like there's all these different little things interacting with parents. How do you communicate? How do you communicate with students? There's all these little facets of the business that matter. they matter to do right. And, you you talked about sort of what inspires most people to start these martial arts businesses. And none of what you said was, I just love doing admin or I

you know, I'm passionate about, you know, bookkeeping. That's just not involved, right? And our kind of ultimate vision for this business is how much are we able to restore people and founders of these schools and gyms? How much are we able to restore them to their, not just their total passion, but also their skill set? Generally speaking, it's like, I love teaching martial arts and I'm really good at it.

So how much can we restore them to the staff?

Jeremy Lesniak (50:08.219)

Here's an important data point I want to throw in because you're setting me up for this one and I don't know that everyone out there knows this. 51 % of martial arts schools lose money or break even.

Jeremy Lesniak (50:22.949)

Please continue.

Allen Carey (50:23.479)

Right, yeah, and so, you know, and that's kind of where we come in, right? It's like, if we can, you know, part of the equation to restoring people to kind of what their passion and what their skill set is, is taking all of the other stuff, or as much of it as we can, off their plate and...

you know, theoretically doing it better, right? So we're going to do this better, faster, cheaper. Normally you only get to pick two of those, but we can do it better, faster and cheaper. And you can do more of what you love and more of what you're good at and your school will grow. Like that's the intent, right? That's what we're passionate about. And that's the mission, I would say of the business. And so when I say we're not done, it's like, you you've described, you talk about data, right? So like all the time,

Jeremy Lesniak (50:46.949)

No.

Allen Carey (51:12.971)

you know, almost every little aspect of running a business involves data collection. So where does it go? Does it go into a cave somewhere or what do we do with it? Right? So now we're talking about, you know, data exhaust. So sometimes it's meaningless and you can't do anything with it. Like for example, you know, at salons, you know, there was data recorded for many years or there were data, whatever, there were data recorded for many years about

you know, sales of certain hair sprays or shampoos or nail polish, doesn't really matter. And it wasn't going anywhere. And then somebody had the bright idea to package it up and sell it to the CPG companies. And now they've got sort of end user data. Well, we need to stock more of this stuff. We need to change the price on this and blah, blah. The same sort of thing happens when you have digital composition of data.

you actually can use the data exhaust in much more productive, productive ways. And I'll give you one more thing, just an idea of what we're doing with that next, which is around grading, which I think is an area that is heavily ignored across the industry. When I say the industry, I mean the industry of software providers. And there's, I would say a lack of detail around skills and assessing skills.

Jeremy Lesniak (52:18.459)

you

Allen Carey (52:31.391)

Right. so, you know, it's pass fail mostly in terms of all these things.

Jeremy Lesniak (52:34.267)

It's subjective. What we do as an industry is that there's a strong subjective component. And because of that, a lot of people just went, let's just let it be subjective, but please continue.

Allen Carey (52:43.765)

Yeah, these pass fail things. And I think that's okay, but you have to break it down into its sub components. Because when you're looking at somebody who's coming in for a grading, and I've heard this a million times from school operators, you're not just being like, yep, looks good. I need to see this skill or this form or this technique, and I need to see it displayed to a certain level. That part is very much subjective, right? And so you're going to take a look at that and that's up to you. You as the expert need to determine that.

But once that's all done, what if I can look at my class and say, OK, the pass rate of these people on skill A was 95%. The pass rate on skill C was 40%. Now I have data that informs my curriculum. So now I can alter my curriculum. So we can go on about that forever, as you can tell. It's something that I am interested in. But it's

You know, as we can get better and take more and sort of take more weight off of people, the value that we can provide and that we, the insights that we can glean should also grow. And there's just more avenues for expansion and improving the product basically.

Jeremy Lesniak (53:51.291)

Absolutely. Victor, up in a moment. got a question for you. Brad, did Alan leave anything out? Did he?

Brad C. (53:59.112)

No, it's spot on. 100%. Just the fact that he said that we're never done is 100 % true. We've been doing this business, well, I've been doing this business for nearly 12 years now. This is our 12th year. And I could easily see another 10 years worth of just upgrades and additions and new features and different things we can tackle. And it's all about, it all comes down to that jobs to be done. when you've got your...

your business and you're running it as your school and you've got all these different things you want to do. You've got maybe you've got tournaments you want to run. You might have TVs in the lobby that you want to have content on. You've got all these sorts of things. You've got merchandise and other ways that you can sort of grow your business to that sustainable level so that your business doesn't disappear when times get tough. And it's just about building it and sort of using those little synergies in a smart way. And if we can help do that.

using technology, then that's really where we step in.

Jeremy Lesniak (55:02.692)

Victor, again, you and I are sort of on these parallel paths with our schools and, spoiler alert, we're both using martiallytics. We're gonna talk about how we got there shortly.

Jeremy Lesniak (55:16.923)

Has switching over from Google Sheets and other manual processes been a good thing for you as it has been for me?

Vic (55:30.171)

Yeah, I mean to say, to that it has been a good thing is such an underscoring of everything. been, it has solved problems I knew I had. And.

Jeremy Lesniak (55:31.521)

You only use martial itics because we know and like these guys or are there are there additional benefits?

Vic (55:53.697)

Because when, when, and again, I know we'll get there in a second. Like when, when we were talking about, when we first stumbled upon martiallytics and by we, I mean you, and then you had a conversation with me about it. I had already been looking for things. I actually had already had a meeting for my school lined up with a software company the day that you texted me about it. but it also has solved problems that I didn't even know that,

that I had. it's funny that you talk about, Alan talked about how we do gradings and things like that. And every other software company has been running off of what I call the fitness facility model of time in class. And we don't do that. I have a student in particular who

Jeremy Lesniak (56:33.851)

Mm.

Vic (56:49.571)

He'll disappear for weeks on end because he has family things and for him, training is very important, but for his family, it's not the number one priority and I get and respect that. Under any other school that I've ever been a part of, this would vastly put him behind in his martial arts progression, but he shows up and...

Jeremy Lesniak (57:13.119)

Let's acknowledge why, because a lot of us recognize the subjectivity of what we're doing and time spent in rank is one of the ways that people try to create some objectivity or pseudo-objectivity in that. Okay, so we think once you've earned your yellow belt, it's probably gonna take you around this long to earn your blue belt. We need to make sure that you come to this many classes, because how else is this gonna work? So back to you.

Vic (57:43.243)

And, and, and yeah, and, that for, for this, like for, for this student in particular, and there are, there are other students that, that are newer that have just started with us that I see this, like I tell them, Hey, we don't do belt ranks by, you know, by time. If you know the three parts of your first test, you can test. If you know the three parts of your next test.

you can test because it just and it's not just like they just have to get through them and you know they they have to know them well but you have a kid who he's still taking bill you know he's still paying for his for for his tuition but he just can't make it to classes but then he'll show up to class and it's like he's not even skipped a beat and that's because he's diligent kid he's a hard working individual he's got talent but also he utilizes another feature that

was a problem that I didn't know that I had that the software that these guys made, solve for me is the fact that my students have an app that they can go open, they can click study. Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Lesniak (58:51.533)

Yeah, I want to press pause on features, Victor, because we're going to shift into this. yeah, but we're not quite there yet. So here's what happened. I need this. This is an important part of this story, because if you've been around a while, if you know Whistlekick, you know that one of the things that's really important to me is we don't put our logo on anything that sucks. We don't.

Vic (58:58.859)

I figured.

Jeremy Lesniak (59:19.013)

bring out products, don't bring out services, we don't bring out events that we don't think are a very good value, right? If you take a look at the history of our product lines, you will not see all of the products being claimed to be the best, right? Our sparring gear, our foam sparring gear is by far the best, but some of the other things we made, we were able to do something really good that was a better value. It cost less than other things that were also really good.

And that's really where we go. It's about value. And so there was a time, and Victor alluded to this day, where I knew it was time for me to start looking for software. Because I saw I was having the same frustrations that I would advise my clients, okay, it's time for you to go look to a solution to this problem, right? So it wasn't tracking attendance, because we also don't have attendance for grade, but I wanted to know when people were missing classes.

Did they miss last week? And I wasn't great about doing the spreadsheet for that, but there was also the money problem. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna pretend I don't know what options are out there. And I did a ton of Googling and I had 47 tabs open and I started looking through and attritioning off because I knew about a lot of these products from working with martial arts schools. And I was left with about half a dozen and I knew all of them.

Except martial itics. So I spent some time, you know, making sure that I wasn't forgetting something and looking at these other products And I took a look at martial itics and I went there's just something different about this. There's a refinement to it There's a polish that I don't see elsewhere. There are There's I've gotten pretty good at evaluating online things because it's been my career for close to 30 years and I Said there's something here

There's something different. can't put my finger on it. Hey, Victor, you're up. And for those of you who don't know, Victor is director of ships at Whistlekick. So I put it on his plate. I said, I need you to go figure this out. I need you to. It seems like these are this is a company that we should at least be talking to. And. Victor, back to you for that next part.

Vic (01:01:38.221)

Yeah. So like I said, I already had another company that I had been thinking about because it just makes sense. like we work with school owners, school owners are a big part of a lot of the, the, the close orbit of whistle kick audience. And I was like, why aren't, why aren't we working with one of these software companies? And there were a few of the ones that probably come to mind, which, you know, I reached out on behalf of

Jeremy Lesniak (01:01:42.383)

Mm-hmm.

Vic (01:02:07.553)

whistle kick for, but for me as a school owner, like, I'm just, not even in a, in a place yet where I can start thinking about possibly.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:02:15.043)

because a lot of the offerings in this industry are, they're not inexpensive. I'm not going to call them expensive, but they're not inexpensive.

Vic (01:02:21.431)

No, they're not inexpensive. and, when you, you put this on my plate, like I looked at it, but like I said, I had a meeting already with, with a company that I had done my own vetting of. I was like, I'll put a meeting on the books for a week next week because then you know, tomorrow. And I had a conversation with a company and they were like, they were the standard I would say. but then they got into the cost and the cost was not

You know, it was either I'm paying a lot for things that I don't need or I'm paying what I can afford, but not getting the one thing that I need. And

Jeremy Lesniak (01:03:00.155)

They were segmenting futures by price.

Vic (01:03:04.067)

And then after I had already told them that and this was the nail in their coffin, so to speak, when I told them like me as a private school owner, I'm just not there yet. But I was like, hey, I represent this company. I represent Whistlekick. I don't know if I talk to you or do I talk to someone else. I think that a lot of our listeners could benefit from you. And the response that I got from them was just the equivalent of

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll mention it to someone. Never heard back from this company. I heard back from them of, what if we discount your price for the first two months and then it's going to go up to this thing that you already told us that you can't afford? So then a week goes by and I get on the phone with Alan. And the first thing that I noticed is that when he starts walking me through the features was that his mock-up school was all Star Wars themed.

And if you have listened to me talk at any given moment, I am locked in now at this point because I find that hilarious. And I say this as Karen and I are getting ready to run our space Katana seminar session number two, starting this Saturday.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:04:20.195)

Are you a Star Wars fan too?

Allen Carey (01:04:23.681)

That was honestly nothing to do with me. Yeah.

Brad C. (01:04:24.995)

Yeah, that's all me. Yeah, sorry.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:04:26.211)

that's you. That's you, Brad. OK. All right. All right. You guys are not allowed to take a detour into Star Wars right now, please, because I know I know this can't be a nine hour episode. All right.

Vic (01:04:26.957)

Ha ha!

Brad C. (01:04:31.971)

You

Vic (01:04:32.986)

Yeah.

Allen Carey (01:04:35.158)

me.

Yeah.

Vic (01:04:38.231)

Right. so, and so as, as I was listening to Alan, I honestly was listening solely as whistle kick ears. I had, cause I had resolved. Yeah. Yeah. I had, I had resolved myself to, I guess we're not there yet. I will live in the purgatory of Google sheets for another year to two years or so. And then as.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:04:48.097)

Why? Was it because you assumed that it was going to be too much, too big, too expensive?

Vic (01:05:05.763)

Alan kept talking. I was like, okay, but where's like, where's, where's this, where's the, the upsell? Cause in my 147 jobs, uh, most of them had to do with upselling people, you know, Oh, you definitely want almond milk instead of regular milk with that, or you want to get the black card in, you know, instead of just the standard membership. I kept waiting for the upsell. And then he started talking about the student app.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:05:13.445)

Where's the catch?

Vic (01:05:34.507)

And I was like, right, but for that I have to pay what? And he goes, no, nothing. Like, no, he's like, he's like, all right. And then he skipped to how they structure their pay by number of students. And I started for the first time in our conversation having this thought of, okay, well now Wolf Martial Arts Victor needs to start thinking about this because this looks really good.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:05:56.963)

Yeah. And I want to, I want to press pause on you there, Victor, because I think this is an important point. And yes, this is where I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the features. What I really want the audience to do is, is check out martial Linux because you all have different needs. And if you're evaluating software, you you're probably evaluating more than one option, but this is a really important thing. And it, again, it lines up with.

what most of us do as martial arts schools. The differentiator in the pricing, and correct me if I'm wrong, you guys didn't change this in the last six seconds, that it's not based on features, it's based on number of students. So as you help me grow and I have more students and I can afford to pay a little more, I'm paying you more. Is that right? Okay.

Brad C. (01:06:50.571)

That's exactly right. Goals are aligned with yours. it's,

Jeremy Lesniak (01:06:54.127)

Bulls are aligned, our interests are aligned, and that is such a critical aspect. For those of you out there who have done consulting work with me, you know, this is one of my core business philosophies that interests of the two sides doing business are not aligned. It's inevitable that something's going to fail because it's unsustainable. So, what, Brad, why, why is that the way you, you all charge is as simple as I just laid it out.

Brad C. (01:07:24.705)

Yeah, it's mostly because my background's in a small traditional sort of art and a lot of them are dying out to sort of the more popular gyms, BJJ and MMA schools and things like that. The traditional schools tend to be smaller. They have those old school senseis and sifus that just don't want to dodge too much and their students are getting older and that sort of thing. I really don't want to see those sort of...

styles die out really. So it was more about helping those smaller schools and sort of almost not subsidizing them, but having it so that they had the full feature set, but was also able to pay less in a way that sort of made sense to them.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:08:11.565)

So here's what I want to do because I don't imagine that people out there are going to sit and We're not we're not gonna do a Demo where we don't show things. We're also not gonna do a demo. I think we've done a really good job here talking about the why and the what but What I want to do now Victor I know you mentioned one of your favorite features is a student app. Okay, honestly mine is

I can so quickly know who's missed a couple classes so I can reach out to them and find out what's going on. But let's do this. Brad and Alan, I'd like each of you to pick your favorite two or three things about martiallytics, especially if it's something that isn't across the board in the industry. And then let's tell the audience what they can do, where they can go to find out more and...

the thing that we're doing for them because of our relationship with you guys.

Allen Carey (01:09:14.783)

Yeah, our favorites are probably going to be pretty similar. So Brad, you go ahead first and I'll follow up.

Brad C. (01:09:19.329)

It's hard for me to say because my favourites are always the next thing that I'm building.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:09:24.421)

What's the next thing then? What's coming down the pipe that people might be excited about?

Brad C. (01:09:27.337)

The next thing is what Alan was talking about with the gradings, having the curriculum management feature where you can get the data from your gradings and then work out what you should do with your curriculum based on that. I think one of my favorite things about the software is, so I was on a road trip through Scotland with Glenn, my cousin and business partner who I founded this with. So he concentrates on all the backend, the development side.

and I'm more design side. And that's we've worked together for 30 years basically since we were kids doing little software projects and things. So it was inevitable that we ended up working together. But we were on a road trip through Scotland and we were somewhere near Glencoe up near Oban on the coast there. And we just started thinking about what if we had more power on our student list? Because really the heart of a school is students.

How could we recut that in lots of different ways with filters and sorting and adding tags and having search lists and all that sort of thing. And just sort of packing that into sort of what is a really prominent part of our software. Cause it's on the screen all the time. And then we just had this idea and before that it was just a list of students and you can click on them and it was great, but you could, you could search them and click on the students. But now you've got this really powerful feature.

limiting things so you can filter it down to any different way you want, any different tag, age ranges, all that sort of stuff. And then export it or just email all those people in one click. So that's probably my favorite part.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:11:08.571)

It's there's a granularity here in the software. That's that I'm not used to seeing I've spent a lot of time again email and social media and marketing things and The way you all built that works kind of the way most people's brains seem to work for these things I want all the students that are this rank in this age and you can do that And you can go so much further go ahead out

Allen Carey (01:11:08.895)

Yeah, that's interesting.

Allen Carey (01:11:33.206)

Yeah, I I remember actually that's one of the things that Vic and I talked about when we were chatting, you know, all those months ago. And I kind of just showed him like a student list a little bit and I was like, okay, you know, say you want to grab, you know, I want everybody between ages of seven and 10 that is, you know, in this particular club or doing this particular style. And I want to send them an email and it's like,

You know, doing that historically, I don't know, Vick, this is, you know, ballpark, right? But it might have taken 30 or 40 minutes. You got to find everybody and, know, and you can do it in 10 seconds, right? Like you literally just click the two toggles on this little rectangle, you know, column we have on the left side of the home screen. And then you can put the filters on it there's an email button. You click the email button and boom, you send them. It's like little stuff like that. We can kind of forget about a little bit as we're kind of building these.

you know, whatever, sexy or new features. I think probably one of those favorites for me would be the one touch signup. And if you want to talk about like differentiation, like that is definitely something that, you know, you don't see out there. And the way that I kind of describe that. Yeah. Okay. So the way that I described that is like, you know, people talk about the admin headache of

Jeremy Lesniak (01:12:42.107)

It's life-changing for me. It really is.

Allen Carey (01:12:51.521)

collecting student data, payment data, waivers that are signed, and the contact data, basically, next of kin, all this other stuff, emergency contact, right?

And just having that all be in one single flow where instead of me being involved every single time somebody signs up, it's like go to this link or scan this code and you can do it. You can fill everything out and all you have do is you create it once and then you can do 200 signups or one signup or five and it takes you no additional time. And that's a cool thing I think too.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:13:26.595)

Yeah, regardless of the software company that we were talking to, right, if we were talking to someone else, we're not, again, we're not gonna sit here and go through all of the features because you guys have resources for that and you can do a demo and everything. But I will say point blank, and I think Victor, can say this for you too, moving to a software option,

is the reason my school is now profitable.

Is that fair for your, okay. And so the reason that I'm able to say that is because of the pricing. And of course this pricing could change because who knows when in the future people are watching or listening to this. But Alan, what's the cost on martial lyrics right now?

Vic (01:14:01.877)

fair.

Allen Carey (01:14:18.679)

Yeah, well, like we talked about earlier that we were all happy about is that it varies by the number of students you have. so starting out, if you have less than 50 students, it's $69 a month.

And there's some discounting if you want to pay annually upfront. Sometimes we have people that do that, right? They'll do it. They'll, you know, it'll be members for two or three months. And then they'll say, look, I love this. I'm going to use it for years. And so they'll just pay annually and there's some discounting and things like that. So it scales up. You know, if you have 200 or more students, there's a cap. It's 199 bucks a month. And so that's the cap.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:14:57.343)

Cat, that's the most you can pay, which, okay, if you think that's a lot comparatively, one, do the math on how much revenue that is at 200 students, and two, I want you to check out the rest of the competitive landscape, the other options that are out there, because that will help you understand how aggressive this pricing is.

Brad C. (01:15:17.854)

That's only active students as well, so if you've got leads or inactive students, if they're students that have left for a while, they're free, you can store that data forever as well.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:15:20.77)

I'm so pleased with that.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:15:27.162)

Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:15:32.729)

Before we tell people what the offer is, what we're doing, right? And full disclosure, we have a financial arrangement with Marshallitics. I'm not going to give you the details of it, but you know, what I think is really important to underscore is we went to them. That's why Victor and I needed to talk about that, because we did. This is not, they didn't just come to us and wave a bag of money and say, hey, you know, we want you guys to help us out. That's not at all what happened.

We went to them, we spent quite a bit of time in conversation and we feel that their business ethics line up with our business ethics, that their interest in helping the martial arts world lines up with our interest in helping the martial arts world. And that's why we've been talking and it's why we're talking today. But Brad and Alan, before we tell everybody what we've worked out with you, we hit you with sticks to get you to agree with, as it offers, there anything, are we missing anything big for them?

For anything we've left out.

Brad C. (01:16:30.91)

I don't think so. think jump in and find it for yourself. There's a 30 day free trial so you can access every feature and start adding students and getting paid before paying us a cent. So that's the best way to do it.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:16:42.137)

But wait, there's more, right, Victor?

Vic (01:16:46.307)

Yeah, yeah, I mean if you go to our sponsors page, I think it's, it's, it's got it. Whistlekickmartialartsradio.com. And if you sign up for the trial through there, you guys give 60 day trial through us. So that's two months of you growing your business. And it will, it, like it will grow your business if, if even for the simplest fact that.

Like I know for myself, I was giving so much brain power to things that I didn't realize I was giving brain power until all of a sudden I was freed up to think about, what if we do this marketing thing? Because I wasn't chasing people for billing or I wasn't using time.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:17:30.331)

And this is the takeaway here, folks. This is what I really want you to recognize is that you've got two months to figure out if this is a good fit for you. And whether you're using something else or you're not using anything, I think you owe it to yourself to check out martiallytics because what you your worst case worst case scenario is that you will find that what you are doing is the best choice for you. And that is a very martial arts.

philosophy, isn't it? We continually test what we do to make sure that it still is good, whether we're talking about that in terms of competition or sparring or some freeform self-defense stuff. It's important that periodically we go back to the drawing board and say, are my assumptions correct? If your assumption that you're using this other software product is the best thing for you, just at least check out some of the materials here because you may find I didn't know that that was something I could do.

And that's a really important aspect here. And like Victor said, whistlekickmarshallrchradio.com. Go to the sponsors section at the top and you'll get threaded through everything. And if they do reach out, Alan, they end up talking to you, right?

Allen Carey (01:18:45.291)

Yeah, depending on sort of the time of the day that they're looking, it's either going to be myself or Brad. Yeah.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:18:50.381)

Okay, so it's one of the two of you. So the audience has gotten to know you a little bit. You seem like nice guys. You've always been nice guys with times that I've talked to you. So at the very least, you're not evaluating a software product put together by a couple of jerks. The worst thing we could say is that one of them has a strange accent. And depending on where you are in the world, depends on which one has the strange accent.

Brad C. (01:18:59.696)

We try to be.

Allen Carey (01:19:09.623)

You're very kind. Thank you.

Brad C. (01:19:14.684)

You might like that.

Allen Carey (01:19:17.825)

Yeah, am I the one with the strange accent then?

Vic (01:19:21.345)

Yeah.

Brad C. (01:19:21.468)

Definitely,

Jeremy Lesniak (01:19:21.691)

I mean, if, if, if, they're, cause we, we do have a global audience. So, you know, if they're in the UK or they're in Australia, yeah, you're probably the one with the strange accent. So, Victor, anything that we should add before we, we turn the audience loose to go check out martiallytics.

Allen Carey (01:19:30.763)

Yeah.

Vic (01:19:31.671)

You

Vic (01:19:40.011)

I would say, you know, I like what you said when you keep correlating it back to martial arts. There are so many martial artists that I know that are so open-minded when it comes to technique, when it comes to training, but the second that you offer them a different way to do something that could help them, no, not gonna do it. Be as open-minded about your business as you are about your training. That's what I would add.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:20:04.505)

That is a lovely succinct way to put it and I'm so proud of you. That's amazing. Brad, anything else that you want to say to the audience before we wind up here?

Brad C. (01:20:16.825)

Victor has absolutely summed that up, so I don't want to ruin his note.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:20:21.518)

Or Alan?

Allen Carey (01:20:23.691)

All it says that we're here to talk to you, right? Everybody's businesses needs are different. And so come check it out. And if you want to schedule a demo and talk to us about what you've got going on, you know, we'd love to help.

Jeremy Lesniak (01:20:39.513)

I think highly of Marshallitics not just because of the product but because of my efforts to get to know these folks and their business and I hope that that carries some weight with all of you. If you go back in the history of Whistlekick you know a lot about me and how I do business and this pass is muster and that's the only reason we're talking to them today. Whistlekickmarshallartsradio.com hit that sponsors link up top. They're gonna give you two months to check it out instead of one. That's the big thing that we bring you.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here today. Appreciate your time.

Brad C. (01:21:13.263)

Thank you guys.

Vic (01:21:13.571)

Thank you.