Episode 869 - whistlekick Alliance
In this episode, Andrew chats with Jeremy about the new whistlekick Alliance program and how you can get involved.
whistlekick Alliance - Episode 869
In this episode, Andrew chats with Jeremy about the new whistlekick Alliance program and how you can get involved.
There are 4 things you get for being a part of this new program, so listen in and find out what they are!
Learn more about whistlekick Alliance by going here:
Show Transcript
Jeremy (00:00.61)
There we go, it's not blurry. Right? Not blurry. Okay, just checking. All right. Hey everybody, on today's episode of Martial Arts Radio, Andrew and I are gonna talk about Whistlekick's world, latest, there we go, words are difficult, Whistlekick's latest offering for martial arts schools called Whistlekick Alliance. As always, if you've...
Join us for one of these sort of commercial episodes. Know that we are, as always, going to inject plenty of relevant information beyond simply offering up a commercial. So stick around. If you're new to what we do, please consider checking out whistlekick.com where you can learn more about Alliance beyond what we're going to talk about here. But you can also do things like purchase a sweatshirt or a t-shirt or learn about upcoming events or jump out to the Patreon or go to whistlekickmartialartsradio.
from it, you can also go direct. And one of the things you're gonna find over there is every single episode we've ever done, that's not one that's 860 something, that many episodes because we don't hide them, we don't take them down, we just leave them out there for posterity. If you like what we do, please consider supporting us through any way that seems to make sense. So I kind of want you to ask.
I think it's gonna be better that way. Yeah, and it's will be well risk. It'll be This well It makes sense because I have nothing to do with alliance and I know a bit about it But not a lot, you know, you know the high point. Yeah, we've talked about it, but this really is My brain child. It's come out of my head. Yep. Yep, and it is a program that you're offering to school owners people that own
or run their own. Yeah, it's available. I mean, anybody could buy it, but the value is going to be really for school owners. And so here's, if we go way back, you know, what are, what are the things that we know about my business philosophy? It's about value. How do we communicate and deliver overwhelming value in everything that we do? This podcast is free and you get a lot of it and you get value and you listen and watch and learn and such. So, right. That's a good example.
Jeremy (02:21.91)
So if we're gonna charge for something, there has to be tremendous value there. I started working on Alliance six months ago.
The root ideas for Alliance go back years. I knew when we started this company that we would eventually find a path to profitability.
But like a lot of businesses, especially businesses that are involved in content, I didn't know what that would be. I didn't know how we would get there. And yeah, we started selling gear, but it was very quickly clear that was not going to be the thing that brought us forward. And one of the things I coach my clients on, like I try to do myself is, what are you really good at? Well, we're really good at delivering content and we have good reach.
for people to prominent people in the field. I'm good at marketing, et cetera. So you throw all that stuff against the wall and then you say, okay, who can you get to spend money? Well, we do a lot of stuff for the individual. We don't do a lot of stuff for the school owner. We put out some stuff for the school owner, but not a lot. I said, okay, how did those things converge for something for a school owner? I said, okay.
something that helps them.
Jeremy (03:47.102)
Make more money, attract more students, retain more students, right? All the things that one would imagine. And there are a lot of programs out there that do that. And as we talked about just a few minutes ago for another episode, yeah, the episode was a couple of weeks ago. Okay. Um, most martial arts schools are not huge. And if you run a small martial arts school and you want to become a larger martial arts school, most schools seem to hit this tipping point. You know, it's.
Two nights a week.
four to five hours of classes a week. It's not enough for the owner slash head instructor slash everything to quit their full-time job. Yeah, yeah. But they don't have enough time to help it grow. And so they end up in this whole, this limbo. And I've seen plenty of schools go out of business from that point or pull back to reduce the time in. I've seen some take out loans and mortgage their house to try to take that next step. And I said, those are the people we need to help. I want a program that is for them.
Because the programs that are out there, even if they can afford some of these other offerings that are significantly, significant expense, they don't have the time to implement it. They don't have the staff to make it happen. So they're buying things that they really can't do. I said, okay. So we, internally, a couple of us worked on some ideas, and then we started testing it with people, what might be of interest. And here's what we ended up with for...
the core four launch offerings that are Whistlekick Alliance.
Jeremy (05:26.09)
Webinars, what's a webinar? It's basically a podcast episode on a very specific subject for a specific audience, right? Most of what we do on this show is not for a specific audience, it's fairly broad. Fairly general. It's by design, right? But if we combine all the things that we've already got, we have a tremendous amount of information. Yeah, absolutely. So that was an obvious one, there's number one. Number two, the marketing piece. Well, as Whistlekick.
we can help promote the martial arts schools that are part of the program. Oh, okay, easy. So we take some of the money that comes in and we put out some ads, done. And let's face it, when a third party says something, that usually carries a little more weight. The marketplace tends to respond better to, hey, they're great rather than I'm great. That's why reviews are so important. Yep, absolutely. So there's number two. Number three.
We have found that when we get people together and they get to work together, cool things happen. So what if we did some sort of online competitions, not necessarily online tournaments, but what if it was a online formatted and promoted.
Jeremy (06:46.21)
fight scene choreography, you know, and all the member schools could participate and we could, I don't know, make the voting public or whatever, right? Like you see there's a structure here, not specifics. Okay, so online competitions and then that would help the students feel engaged and gives them something different to do. And the school don't doesn't have to run it all. They just have to say, go do this. And that gives them something.
cool to talk about in their local area for marketing. Okay, there's number three and what was the fourth one? Hold on, I had them before we launched. Webinars, marketing, conversations. I don't know. Hold on one second.
Jeremy (07:33.27)
That's how raw this is, right? Like this is, this stuff is just starting to happen and I'm missing a piece and it's really interesting. Cause I had a feeling this was gonna happen. And so like, before we started, I was like, nope, get them all in your head, Jeremy. And they were in my head.
Jeremy (07:50.318)
Dun dun dun.
Jeremy (07:55.719)
Andrew, say words please. Words, words, words. I feel like the adults in the Peanuts comics. Wah, wah, wah
There we go, there we go. We're probably gonna trim this a little bit. Uh-huh.
Jeremy (08:19.662)
Oh, and the support group. A non-disclosure protected school owner support group. So instead of having a general social media group or chat that anybody can join and seems to inevitably turn into a complaint fest, this is a group of people and if we end up with too many we'll make several and segment them out. But
If you want to participate, you have to sign a non-disclosure. And that way people can feel more comfortable being a little more open and honest about what's actually going on. So those are the core four things that we're doing. Now you can see that they have similarity to some of the other things that are happening, but they're different. They have the whistle kick flavor. Yeah. So the, of those four, the first one webinars is probably the, the
The one that everyone can wrap their head around. The easiest to understand. You'll get seminars from, or webinars from who? Probably gonna be some overlap with folks who have been on the show. But it also gives us the ability, let's say we're talking about, one of the hot subjects in the martial arts world these days is, Andrew's watching this phone because we're doing a call with someone.
for the show shortly. How much time do I have? 10 minutes. 10 minutes, okay. There's a lot of discussion and sometimes disagreement around how to teach certain youth demographics, right? So if we're talking about autism spectrum or something. Within the context of martial arts radio, we're probably only ever going to bring on a martial arts instructor. But for these webinars, we could put together a panel of
autism spectrum experts researchers, right because That we get so niche there That it's really relevant to the school owners. But if you don't know no school, that's not only is that not really relevant You're probably not gonna watch that we don't we try not to put out episodes and nobody's gonna watch Yeah, or that a very small percentage of people will watch So that takes care of number one number two
Jeremy (10:37.414)
is probably the one that people will understand the least. So I definitely want to make sure to touch on that, which is the marketing. What I'm a school owner, I'm going to sign up for Alliance. What marketing are you going to do for me? And why is that beneficial for me? So here's the short of it. Your students come from a certain geography, few miles down the street, 10 miles, 20 miles down the street. We will place ads in that local area for you and run them entirely.
And what we do is we will funnel those ads, not to your school, but to a certain segment of our page, our website, whistlekick.com that says, these are schools that have passed our standards, that have filled out certain paperwork, that have had conversation with us. And you know, the details on that are get a little bit too involved here, but bottom line, we vouch for them. Not the quality of their instruction.
but the quality of their character, right? We talk about that. This is very much in line with what we do here. And it comes down to the six freedoms, if you're familiar with the six freedoms, and we did an episode on that, it's on the website. And that allows us to say not, this school is better, and schools that are not this are not good. It allows us to say the character of these schools is of importance to them, and that's important to us.
So someone sees an ad saying, you should check out martial arts. And they click on the ad and it brings it to this page. And lo and behold, there's a school in their area. And all of this is not extra, doesn't cost extra. No, we are carving out a portion of the revenues that come in to put those ads back out. And it's not a small portion, it's 20%. So being an Alliance member gives you essentially free marketing. Free marketing, yeah. And if you look at the way...
Experts value third-party recommendation versus first-party recommendation You're basically getting at least a hundred percent back Yeah in what you can and what and you mentioned it earlier I if I were to say my school is amazing some people will listen to that but a lot of people be like, of course They're gonna say that it's yours. It's your school. But when someone else says That's a good school that means and this is why getting ratings and referrals and recommendations That's like all of those things are so
Jeremy (13:04.942)
incredibly important for any business, including a martial arts school. So the last two, the competitions and the.
Support group, support group. We'll touch on that in a little bit. Yeah. That'd be great.
Jeremy (13:26.402)
Perfect
Jeremy (00:02.446)
All right. So let's get into that third piece, which is the competitions, right? Because when I think competition and when this happened during COVID, I think online, I do my form, I do a competition. That's what I say. Yeah. But obviously you outlined a second ago something very different from that. So let's talk about that. Sure. I think one of the...
downsides the way a lot of martial arts groups, schools and wider approach competition is we limit it to some style of combat and some style styles of forms demonstration. Yep. And what we do in our training is a lot more than that. And especially if we're putting together a competition that doesn't require people to pay money.
we don't have to worry about the economics of this because it becomes very simple, right? So let's say there's a competition that is, and I'm going off the cuff, I'm not saying this is something we're going to do. Let's take the example of, what was the one I gave before? Like a fight scene, like choreographing a fight scene. So how could that run? Well, we put out some parameters to all of the Alliance schools that say,
You've got to submit video of this long, between this day and this day, in this format, on this website, and as many of your students that want to participate can. So maybe it's groups of three or groups of five, or maybe we don't even say. So you might have one school that puts together, there are a bunch of groups of three and four. Maybe there's another school that all gets together and puts together one. And those come together and...
you know, maybe we appoint a panel to vote on them. Or maybe the schools themselves vote, everybody gets a vote. Or maybe we put it out publicly to whistle kick on our social media and people vote that way. I don't know that it necessarily matters because what happens? People are practicing a thing, they're getting together, they're building community, they're submitting stuff and there's some manner of winners and non.
Jeremy (02:25.386)
And maybe there are awards that we send out. They're probably not gonna be super significant. We're not gonna be mailing six foot trophies, but bragging rights. Maybe there's a fight scene belt or cup, right? That goes to you for a year and then we do the next one. I don't know. But there's a fun element there. And it also becomes something that the school can talk about internally and externally. And that's a big part of this, right? If it doesn't help the school retain students and bring in new students,
We're not gonna do it. And this does that because tell me that those videos wouldn't look really cool on social media. Hey, here's a video that person A, B, and C just submitted for the Whistlekick Choreograph Fight Scene Championship. And you mentioned earlier as well that leads to a press release that you could, if your team won, that you could easily send out. And as I understand it, you're gonna provide the press. Yeah, we're generating the press release drafts so the schools just have to.
Say, okay, my school here. Names of people that are relevant. Contact info. And send to the newspaper. And we're even gonna include, because again, marketing is a big part of this, a constantly updated recommendation on how to handle press releases, because there are ways to do press releases that get included in ways that are very much unlikely.
And then the last aspect, the fourth one, was the... Of what we're launching with. What we're launching with, yeah. Absolutely... We'll talk about what I'm hitting at in a moment. But is that the social gathering of instructors that are in the Alliance Program. What we're calling the school owner support group. Support group, okay. And that doesn't mean that it's a... Hi, I'm Andrew and I'm from Marshall Arts School. Yeah, it's not that, there's no 12 steps involved here.
It's it's online and yeah, it's gonna start on Facebook because that is the best place for that But we are looking at doing some things that start to break out of that typical social media mold But we're launching simple and inexpensive because that's how we do things. Yeah and again protected by a non-disclosure agreement if you don't know what that is it basically says if You are found to have disclosed information and there's an actual form that you have to sign if you're found
Jeremy (04:46.838)
that you have disclosed information that was shared within this under these terms, you are liable, you are legally liable. So it's optional, people don't have to do it, but it means that if you're going to be part of it, you probably have more confidence in sharing things that are a little bit more detailed than you might if it was completely public. And the reason for this is I see a lot of martial arts groups where people ask genuine questions.
and the quality of the answers that come back are poor. Now internally for Whistlekick, we have not just internally, but we have been testing a group like this that has more oversight for probably six months now. And the quality of what has come back out is, are you in that group? I am.
Would you agree the quality of what's coming back for responses is much better? Yeah, way better. Yeah, so, and that's with maybe a couple dozen people. So what happens is this starts to scale. It ends up being in the same way that when we all get together to train, really good stuff comes out of it. What happens when we all get together to support each other in our schools? Right. Yeah. I think that ability to be, to feel safe.
is important to be able to talk about things is really important. Now we talked about these are the four things that you're launching with. The program is ultimately gonna grow. What do you, as a school owner, what can I expect once I join in the future? So there are two really, really important things about this program as we look forward. The first one is the price will go up, but your monthly rate will not.
Whatever whenever you get in you are grandfathered However as we add things you get access to those two it's not gonna be well You know you bought these in it at this price you get these but if you want this to you know It's it we're keeping it simple. So it's not like my internet bill that goes up every couple of months No, or my recent internet bill where I was given a They tried to claim it was some ridiculous
Jeremy (07:05.242)
And I called and I'm like this is the first time you've ever done this and they're like actually that's a mislabeled fee for giving me a paper bill Was like wow that is shady Oh very much so shady $4.95 so you buy in whatever it is Whatever it is when you watch this That's the price you pay as long as you remain
That's gonna be a really good deal over time. Yeah. A really good deal because you watch everything that we've ever done at Whistlekick. Does it continue to grow and get better? Yes. I mean, there's a reason why this is episode 860 something as opposed to episode two, right? We're gonna continue to grow and keep going. And if you are a member of the Whistlekick Alliance and are a school owner, it would be a tax deduction.
Correct? Yeah, it's an expense for your school. So that's coming right there off the top. And there are things that I will not talk about yet that I am looking to add that will be exclusively available to alliance schools whereby you might be able to make, not might, where you can make.
And then my plan for this long term is That this membership makes you money Interesting and this This episode is coming out early November in a couple weeks We have Marshall Summit where there are events open. We we've got a few things at Marshall Summit that are Either discounted or exclusive to Alliance members. Yeah
and we'll be making a push for this program because this truly is the intersection of all the things that we do well and provides overwhelming value to the schools because that's what we do, because we wanna make sure that we crush it. And as we rolled this out in conversation, as I sat down with a number of school owners and said, this is kinda what I wanna do, let's run through it. And without fail, not without...
Jeremy (09:25.63)
In a single exception, the probably eight or nine people that I brought this to, what can I send them? Okay, you don't have to keep going. I see where you're going. This is amazing. Yeah. So when this episode comes out, when you're listening or watching to this, you can go to... You can go to whistlekick.com and under the school section, you will see a link for Alliance.
and all the information in incredible detail is in there. There's videos, there's sample documents. You'll be able to see everything you're signed up for. And.
I'm gonna break kind of a rule. We usually have a rule on these episodes where we don't put information out in such a way that it expires, right? And so the obvious thing that we have not mentioned is how much this costs. Yes, and partly because it's going to change. It is going to change. And we don't know when you're listening or watching this. We don't know when you're listening. And I'll admit, we've got it corralled in, but I'm gonna ballpark it. If you're watching this, when this comes out, it's $100 a month.
Jeremy (10:38.35)
Show me something that gives you more for $100 a month for your school. I would argue there is nothing. And I don't just mean other options from other organizations. And by the way, I'm not saying you cannot or should not participate in those organizations as well. This is meant to be other stuff that you may find valuable. Yeah.
All right, I think that pretty well explains what you got going on. Whistlekick lives. So thank you. Go to whistlekick.com, check it out. And if it's not for you, I would love to know why. If you care about what we do, if you care about our mission to connect, educate and entertain, I would welcome your feedback. If this is not something that works for you, please tell me why, because maybe that means...
we're gonna offer something in the future that changes that for you. Or maybe it means that we're looking at other things that might be more up your alley because we want to help every school because we want to get everyone to train. And given that Whistlekick is not a collection of martial arts schools that, you know, oh, we're gonna open a school here. No, we have to do that through you. We have to empower you to bring in students. And that's what we're doing. Connect, educate, and entertain. On the way to getting everyone in the world to train for six months.
So message him if you're a school owner. Don't message him and say, Whistlekick Alliance is not for me because I don't own a school. Don't do that. You can do that, but it's silly and a waste of both of our time. Jeremy at Whistlekick.com or social media is at Whistlekick, Andrew at Whistlekick.com. Until next time, train hard, smile, and have a great day.