Episode 921 - Starting a Martial Arts Event
In this episode, Jeremy and Andrew discuss the ins and outs of starting a martial arts event, using their experience from running several successful events.
Starting a Martial Arts Event - Episode 921
SUMMARY
In this episode, Jeremy and Andrew discuss their experiences and lessons learned from running martial arts events. They emphasize the importance of starting small and not overwhelming yourself with too many tasks. They also talk about the value of leaving some aspects of the event to chance, as organic moments can often be the most memorable. The hosts discuss the significance of getting buy-in from participants and offer tips on how to incentivize attendance. They also touch on the importance of creating a theme for the event and providing unique experiences for attendees. Overall, they provide valuable insights and advice for anyone looking to organize a martial arts event.
TAKEAWAYS
* Start small and don't overwhelm yourself with too many tasks
* Leave some aspects of the event to chance to allow for organic moments
* Get buy-in from participants by providing incentives and unique experiences
* Create a theme for the event to give it a cohesive and memorable identity
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction and Purpose of the Episode
03:18 Reflecting on the All-In Weekend Event
05:29 Starting Small and Leaving Room for Organic Moments
13:03 Learning from Mistakes and What Not to Do
24:41 Creating a Memorable Theme for Your Event
29:58 Experiences Over Physical Goods
33:18 Closing Remarks and Call to Action
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy (00:01.133)
What's going on everybody, welcome back to another episode of whistle kick martial arts radio. And on today's episode, Andrew and I are going to tell you everything we've learned about running martial arts events. Don't know we host a few events, we've hosted them for several years. And guess what we've gotten better at doing it. So we're going to bring you behind the scenes on what we've done to make those events better. So you cannot make the same mistakes that we've made.
If you're new to the show, thanks for being here. Welcome. My name is Jeremy Lesniak joined by my good friend, Andrew Adams. And here on martial arts radio, we have one goal in three parts. I think it's three goals. I don't know. How do we say that? We're here to connect, educate and entertain the martial artists of the world and route to whistle kicks. Big overarching goal of getting everybody in the world to train for at least six months. Why? Because we believe martial arts brings out the best.
and the world could stand to be a better place. People could stand to be better versions of themselves. And so we're doing everything we can to encourage people to train and to keep them training. And that's why we do what we do. And if that mission resonates for you, maybe you're a passionate martial artist and you think, you know what, Jeremy, yeah, I know martial arts has made me better and I want other people to experience this. Or maybe you're a martial arts school and you say, you know, I would love to be able to connect with more students and help them along in their life's journey. Well,
head on over to whistlekick .com because we don't just do one or two things. We have Whistlekick Alliance, which is our program for martial arts schools. There's nothing like it in the world. It's pretty incredible. We have a Patreon for all of you. You could join patreon .com slash whistlekick. But we've also got apparel and protective equipment and training programs and so many other things that you can buy to support us to help us on our mission, right? Whatever your budget, there's something in there for you.
You could even sign up for All In Weekend because you could. Unless you're watching this or listening to this in the future and we've reached the point where it's sold out because it usually sells out. So anyway, anything I missed in the intro, Andrew?
Andrew Adams (02:17.659)
No, except that when you were talking about the things you can buy, I was gonna be like, end shirts and go like this, and realize, no, you can't buy this shirt. This is a special shirt.
Jeremy (02:22.701)
And shirts. You can't buy that shirt. No, the All -in -Weekend shirts are only for attendees. Now, I just want to make sure the audience knows we are going to talk about events that we host. And yeah, hopefully we encourage you to attend our events. But that's not the purpose of this episode. If you've been around for a while, when we do these episodes that are tied back to something that we make or do, we do our best to make sure that there is information in here, regardless of whether you attend or buy or whatever. Right. We're trying. We're still trying to give you.
the meat of the subject, so to speak.
Andrew Adams (02:54.331)
Yeah, the expectation is that this is not a commercial.
Jeremy (02:58.317)
Yeah, we're not trying to make this a commercial. So Andrew, just a couple of weekends ago, we had our third annual Whistlekick All -In Weekend, and it was great and exhausting and fun and good training and good people, and it took me days to recover.
Andrew Adams (03:18.427)
You know, it's funny, I don't feel the same way. Everything that you started with, yep, yep, I'm on board. It really didn't take me days to recover because we, I did not feel nearly as burnt out after this year's weekend than I did the first couple years.
Jeremy (03:19.213)
I don't know about you.
Jeremy (03:37.609)
Nor did I. Nor did I. We had some help this year and things went better because of that. I also think you function on less sleep better than I do.
Andrew Adams (03:42.907)
Yeah, one of the things we learned.
Andrew Adams (03:48.763)
Absolutely, without a doubt.
Jeremy (03:50.861)
Yeah, you've been pretty public. You've got some insomnia. So I think you've become acclimated to less sleep than me.
Andrew Adams (03:56.731)
Yeah, yeah, but that weekend, you know, we do early morning trainings. I mean, we were up and training at 630 in the morning.
Jeremy (04:07.053)
I'm not centered in frame here. I'm going to fix that.
Andrew Adams (04:09.851)
But, but, you know, I went to bed at a reasonable hour. Like I got decent sleep that weekend. And, you know, and I would think most of the attendees got pretty decent sleep as well. Yes, they were getting up early because we had class at 6 30 AM, but people weren't going to bed that I know of at two o 'clock in the morning.
Jeremy (04:26.253)
Yeah, well they were tired so they went to bed.
Andrew Adams (04:29.089)
Exactly.
Jeremy (04:31.629)
Now, of course, this is the third year we've done all in Weekend. We have hosted Free Training Day slash Now Marshall Summit. Last year was the seventh year, right, of Free Training Day? And it was your third year of being involved or fourth? Third? Okay, so you weren't there at the very beginning of Free Training Day, but...
Andrew Adams (04:44.549)
I believe that's correct, yeah.
Andrew Adams (04:48.763)
Correct? Dirt.
Jeremy (04:59.725)
We've talked about that event before on this show and what it was. And the first thing I think I want to kind of put on the table for us to talk about is how you start a thing. Because I think there are a lot of people who, whether we're talking about an event or a podcast or a book or martial arts training, they run so far past the start line.
that they get overwhelmed and they're not willing to start because it's overwhelming. It's just, it's so much pressure because you look at, you know, and honestly, we were actually just talking about this this morning. We've put out the call to say that if you have things you want to contribute on our platform of martial arts radio, reach out. We'll talk about putting an episode together with you. And we've had very little outreach on that.
Andrew Adams (05:30.203)
Yeah.
Jeremy (05:54.317)
And our speculation is that people think that it needs to be up here to start when it doesn't. Where do you start? At the beginning, when you're terrible.
Andrew Adams (06:02.105)
Hmm.
Yeah, a journey of a thousand steps starts with but a single step, right? You gotta, you have to start somewhere and, and, you know, my initial advice to anything you're going to do is to start small. It doesn't have to be way up here and you don't have to do every, like you might have these ideas on, I want to do this and I want to do this and this and this and this and this and this and this this and this. This is going to take me forever. I'm just not going to do it. Well, what if you do an event that only has this, this and this and that's it. Like that's still an event.
Jeremy (06:36.589)
When we put on events now, because we've gotten a lot more clarity on what makes a successful event, there's what you do, what you don't do, and what you leave to chance. And you might think, if you never put on an event before, that the leaving to chance is terrible. And my instinct early on was I wanted to leave nothing to chance. But what we found and...
it may seem counterintuitive, is that openness for at least some of what you do is where the absolute best things are going to happen. Those organic moments.
Andrew Adams (07:14.651)
Yeah, the things that you at every event you and I have thrown, which now at this point is six, three all in weekends and three free training days.
Every single one of them there have been things that we did not plan that made the event so much better and some of those things we Will they happened organically and we're like, well, we can't change this This was so good. Like next year we have to do this as well. And I think there's something to be said for Planning quote -unquote planning for what's unplanned?
Jeremy (07:59.501)
Yeah, and a great example of the very first All -In Weekend, we had pretty much every minute of the day scripted. There were some breaks, but we had people running with training until late into the evening, the whole time. And one of the things that you and I noticed pretty quickly was that people loved the training. They were having a great time. But by the about midday, you know, about halfway through,
these people had formed such strong relationships with each other that they wanted social time. And I remember this very vividly, you and I, I think it might've even been your idea that we stepped aside and said, you know, they need some space, they need more time. Let's cut this session off, let's extend this break and let them hang out.
Andrew Adams (08:30.211)
Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Adams (08:46.715)
Yeah, give them that opportunity to bond. Here's another example from the first year that we hadn't necessarily planned on, but it just happened, is people signing shirts being such a big thing. We're both wearing all -in -weekend shirts. It's called all -in -weekend because we thought...
If you're going to come to this event, you're going to be, you're all in, you're going to live on site, you're going to eat there, you're going to, we're all going to sleep together. Like this isn't like, nothing against these types of events, but you know, a martial arts event where you go and you get a hotel room and you know, people are all over in different places. Yeah, absolutely. We didn't want that type of experience. We wanted everyone to be all in. So we called it all in weekend. And so the first year's logo was, and I'm not going to tell you.
Jeremy (09:26.957)
It's a different experience. We wanted to create something different.
Andrew Adams (09:40.111)
you're gonna have to watch on YouTube. So here was the first year's logo, obviously has something to do with All In. And then last year's logo is this one here. Again, I'm not gonna tell you what it is, you gotta go to YouTube to watch. And then Jeremy's wearing last year, you know, this year's.
Jeremy (09:53.901)
and then this year, right? And we've already got next year's plan. Some of you might be able to guess if you're watching, there's a theme here.
Andrew Adams (09:59.643)
But what we found is with the first year shirt, it is a white shirt and we had lots of Sharpies around because people wanted to, not people, you and I wanted people to wear name tags. So there were lots of Sharpies around. Yeah. And so people were like, will you sign my shirt? And I'm like, yeah, great. And we, everybody ended up, not everybody signed every shirt. Some people didn't want their shirt signed, but we left that as an option.
Jeremy (10:13.677)
Yeah, yeah, we do name tags at all of our events, by the way. We can talk about that in a minute.
Andrew Adams (10:29.179)
And it was a thing last year and was absolutely a thing this year as well. So it wasn't something that we necessarily planned on, but was something that people really got enjoyment out of.
Jeremy (10:40.653)
Yeah. Name tags. It's something that we found pretty early on. And I think this even predates you that when someone can quickly articulate someone's name, it breaks down barriers. And it has been so powerful for us at our events that at my martial arts school, everybody wears a name tag, including me every class.
Andrew Adams (11:06.139)
Interesting.
Jeremy (11:08.877)
Makes it a lot easier for me as an instructor when I have new students, especially if I have several join at once, which happened two weeks ago. I think we had three new people on the floor at one time. I'm not great with names. Made it a lot easier. Right. So name tags, organic moments.
Andrew Adams (11:24.239)
Yeah, no, that's great.
Jeremy (11:31.997)
One of the things that, you know, let's come back to where those organic moments come from, right? It's the space between here's what you do and what you don't do. It's guardrails, it's parameters. You know, those are words that come up a lot with kind of the whistle kick ethos at not just events, but how we train and things like that. And.
If you leave things completely open, people don't know where to start.
But if you give them a starting point, I want you to do this. Right? Like the number one way I use AI is to give me a starting point. Hey, I'm going to write an article for Marshall Journal. I'm what should I write about? And no matter what comes back, it usually makes me go, I don't like any of these, but it gives me an idea to write about this as opposed to what should I write about? And I sit there for 20 minutes with nothing.
Andrew Adams (12:30.171)
Yep. Yep.
Jeremy (12:30.701)
I can write the article in 20 minutes.
So the idea of what you do is pretty obvious, right? It's, you know, if it's, if it's free training day, it's the structure of that event. It's securing the presenters. It's getting the logistics, the logistics, those things. I think everybody understands that. And they're probably on board with us about the space in between, but what about the not do? That's not, that's something that people might not be familiar with when they put together an event. You want to speak to that?
Andrew Adams (13:02.875)
Yeah, so first off, your first year that you run an event, you're not going to know what not to do. You're going to run your event. My recommendation, talked about earlier, make it small. It doesn't have to be huge. But after that event is over, that's when, in my opinion, you start to look at, OK, next year, what do we not do? Right? Inevitably,
Jeremy (13:13.517)
good point.
Andrew Adams (13:31.163)
and maybe I'm wrong, hopefully, hopefully I'm wrong. Inevitably, there will be something that didn't go the way you wanted it to in a good or a bad way. There are things that didn't run the way you wanted them to, things that could have been done better. That's when you look at for next year, what can you not do? But I don't think your first year you're gonna necessarily know what not to do unless you're planning on doing, like I said at the beginning, this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. If it's too much,
something's gonna, you're gonna drop some plates, right?
Jeremy (14:03.725)
you.
Yeah, it's a good point. When we think about a first year event, one of our goals at Whistlekick, not just for you and I, Andrew, but one of our goals overall is we break even. And that means we go as simple as we can. How do we get the space donated or as inexpensive as possible? How do we keep the cost for attendees as low as possible? How do we maybe sell some merch, some shirts or something along the side to cover some of those costs? We don't try to make money the first time.
time we do a thing. We try to break even. And Free Training Day lost money, not much, but lost money until this two years ago.
2022 was the first year free training day. Didn't lose money. The fifth time we did it. Yeah, fourth time, fourth time, fifth time. Because we've done six, right? Okay, we've done seven.
Andrew Adams (14:58.683)
The sixth time.
Andrew Adams (15:04.475)
We've done seven.
Jeremy (15:10.381)
It's hard to keep track everybody. Yeah, so it took six six tries to figure that out. And if we had tried to monetize early on, it would have been big, it would have been complicated. And the irony is it probably would have lost even more money.
Andrew Adams (15:12.411)
I'm sorry.
Andrew Adams (15:34.299)
Yeah, and that's a really good point. Now, we're not advocating throwing events that you know you're going to lose money at, but looking at ways to at least, like you said, break even would be the way to go.
Jeremy (15:50.465)
Distilling it down to, if you're in the entrepreneurial space, you might be familiar with the concept of MVP, minimum viable product.
this idea that what is the simplest version of what you're trying to ultimately do and releasing that as quickly as possible because yeah, you're going to screw stuff up regardless. You're going to have organic moments, hopefully, regardless that you hadn't anticipated. And the sooner you can put that out there for people, the sooner you can make it better and do more and make it great. Right. And.
You know, we've learned from our mistakes, so to speak, with the events that we put on. And when we put on other events, we try to make sure we don't do certain things. But we also recognize that every event is going to be a little different. If you've been to one of the other free training days, we've had free training days in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington. This year, we're bringing one to Lenexa, Kansas. They're all a little different.
Andrew Adams (16:52.351)
Absolutely.
Jeremy (16:52.717)
And that's by design. Instead of trying to force things into this box, we say, OK, let's let this event develop its own ethos culture. And so we have that, you here's what you can't do. As an example, with free training day, we call the people leading sessions presenters, not teachers. It has to be free to attend. You can't charge money, right? There are a handful of things like that. What do you do? Well, you know, there's some stuff around marketing. We call it free training day.
Andrew Adams (17:01.403)
Yep.
Andrew Adams (17:11.931)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremy (17:22.357)
You know, the logos are themed across the events, right? Little stuff like that. But there's a lot that happens in between that is kind of fun and allows those events to develop their own personality. And be unique, yeah. What else? What else if you were starting a first time event, whether it's martial arts or not, might you...
Andrew Adams (17:35.067)
and be unique to themselves. Yeah.
Andrew Adams (17:42.523)
Jeremy (17:50.413)
think about telling people. I'm thinking of something. I wonder if you've got anything.
Andrew Adams (17:53.083)
I mean, I think having a theme, depending on the event that you're doing, you know, we already talked a little bit about all in weekend and why we came up with that wordage and it helped lead us to our logos. But having a theme of your plan through the weekend or day or whatever, whether you're doing a day event or a weekend event or whatever, can really help in the future.
Jeremy (17:56.653)
Mm.
Andrew Adams (18:22.221)
continuing to grow your event. Now again, if you're doing this for the first time, the first year, you can come up with a theme, but it won't be apparent to everybody else per se. But as you can...
Jeremy (18:33.165)
That theme can be entirely internal. It can be a reference point that you use for how you plan and present.
Andrew Adams (18:40.397)
Exactly, exactly. And as you even grow, if you start holding this event in other places, and you know, I'll bring up Free Training Day as an example. The first year that we did Free Training Day outside of New England, we held an event in Atlanta, Georgia, and one in Portland, Oregon. And up until then, all of the Free Training Day events had been in the Northeast, and you and I, or...
whomever would come up with a logo that we would use. And it was a whistle kick, free training day, you know, 2019, whatever. And it was fine. But we looked at, because now we're holding the event in other locations, quote unquote, same event, but different, we wanted there to be some synergy between the logos used. And so in 2022, it was mountains because
the second most hiked mountain in the world is the next town over from Keene, New Hampshire. Like you can see Mount Monadnock from Keene and it's the second most hiked mountain in the world. Well, Mount Hood in Portland, Oregon has a very distinctive look to it. Yeah, yeah. It's not as hiked as Mount Monadnock though. And then.
Jeremy (19:57.133)
Yeah, if you've ever been to Portland, you've seen Mount Hood. You can't avoid it.
Jeremy (20:04.909)
No, but I bet more people die on it.
Andrew Adams (20:06.971)
That's true. And then in Atlanta, Georgia, Stone Mountain is a very well -known mountain in that area. So we went with mountains. Last year we went with trees. So each tree on each shirt for Northeast, Mid -Atlantic, and Pacific Northwest in Seattle was a tree native to that region. This year it's something different. I'm not going to tell you what it is because they haven't been released yet, but they're pretty cool.
Jeremy (20:35.149)
Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be fun. You know.
Andrew Adams (20:36.827)
but they are unique to each of the areas that the free training day happens.
Jeremy (20:43.981)
One of the things we haven't talked about, and I think it's really important,
And if you go back, if anybody out there has read my first book, how not to hold a martial arts tournament, which really is about martial arts events, not just tournaments, because I'm thinking, you know, a lot of the people who might be paying attention this episode might never plan on doing a free training day sort of event or a weekend event. Maybe it's rank testing. Maybe they do an in -house competition, right? Smaller sort of, you know, just for their own students. Nothing wrong with that. But.
A lot of the stuff we're talking about is still the same. And here's one that we haven't mentioned. It's the theme in that book, getting buy -in from the people who are involved. And that, if you don't do that, a lot of things can go awry.
Regards of the kind of event so for example, let's say you're having a rank testing and in your world rank testing is Something that you try to get your whole school to and families You know you want everybody to be there Well, how do you get them bought into the idea of watching that?
Well, if all you do is put out chairs and expect them to sit there for six to eight hours, you're not getting buy -in. They're going to come once and they're probably not going to come again. So how do you do that? Well, you could do things like having food. You could have you could make sure they knew that, you know what, if you're not watching your loved one testing at that point.
Jeremy (22:19.403)
You know, it's okay to go out here or maybe there's a, you know, a different, a separate area, or maybe you're telling them your loved ones will be testing from this time to this time, but we want everybody here for the celebration at this time, right? There are a lot of different ways you could do it. And what I think that really requires is temporarily put aside tradition, put aside history, put aside habit, forget about that for a moment. You can always bring it back and say, if I was going to design this, this event from scratch.
And here were the things that were most important to me. So if having Everybody in your martial arts community attend these events This particular event was really important to you. Well, you'd want to make sure that it was convenient. It was inexpensive it was entertaining and that you Avoided distractions in competition, right? You know don't don't have it on the same day as the town fair or something, right?
Andrew Adams (23:06.809)
Mm -hmm.
Andrew Adams (23:18.235)
Yep, yep. And that makes sense. Obviously, you're going to want to keep those things in mind. As your event grows, you also might want to consider how to incentivize the attendees that came your first year to come the next year.
Jeremy (23:34.989)
This is something we're still working on, but we're getting better.
Andrew Adams (23:37.977)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremy (23:40.447)
We've done a few things and it might be interesting to those of you out there to think about this that money is not the only thing that incentivizes people. It is only one of the things. And we have learned that for a lot of people, money is not the biggest driver. That, you know, an early bird discount can help.
A package deal can help, but other things that motivate people, social standing, whether that's positive or negative reinforcement, right? Hopefully you're going positive, but negative reinforcement can still apply. Exclusivity, right? So one of the things that you don't see on the back of these shirts, and I don't think we need to try to turn around and show it, but they have numbers on them.
You know, my, my shirt, the 2024 shirt has a number. What do we do for us, Andrew? Double zeros? Yeah, we have double zeros on the back and then everybody else has a number based on the order in which they signed up, which we tested a theory. We thought, you know what? I bet that will encourage them to sign up early. Guess what it did? It worked better than the financial discount alone.
Andrew Adams (24:46.541)
Yes.
Andrew Adams (25:04.751)
Yeah, and.
Yeah. And.
Jeremy (25:08.621)
because just as an aside for all in weekend, if you attend, you get the best possible pricing for next year if you sign up really early before we even release it to the public.
Andrew Adams (25:18.235)
Yeah, so what that means essentially is if you, those people that attended 2024's All in Weekend, they were given two weeks to pay for 2025, they got the best price available. The only people that will get that price is those that were there in 2024. So as of this recording right now, you can go, excuse me, you can, you know, we still have some spots available for All in Weekend 2025.
But the cost right now is, I'm racking my brain, 309, right? The people that registered that were there last year, they paid less than 309. They got a discount. And if you attend to, yeah. And if you attend in 2025, you will get the lowest price possible to pay for 2026. Now, getting back to the number thing.
Jeremy (25:53.741)
309.
Jeremy (26:01.613)
It wasn't a huge discount, but it was it was it was a discount. It was it worth doing.
Andrew Adams (26:15.375)
And I'm not going to mention his name, although he has publicly said so. There is a person that this year had the second highest number. So he was the second to last person to register. And his first year was last year.
And again, that year he registered very late. And then for 2024, he registered very late.
Jeremy (26:39.949)
Because we didn't make it compelling enough for him, because it wasn't just about money for him.
Andrew Adams (26:46.107)
Correct. We gave this two week window to purchase for next year and he was one of the 60 % of people that registered for next year, paid for it full in advance because he values the weekend enough and he made it publicly known, I did this because I wanted a low number. It's just a number on the back of a shirt.
Jeremy (27:09.677)
It's bragging rights, right? It's exclusivity. It's fun, right? We're trying to make this fun. So what are some of the other things that incentivize people? We said money. We said social standing. We said exclusivity or scarcity, right? People like things that other people don't have. What are some of the other things? Those are the biggies. I'm sure we're leaving something off the table.
Andrew Adams (27:30.875)
Mmm.
Andrew Adams (27:35.131)
I mean, getting something different. Last year, if you registered by a certain time, you would get extra perks. So you would get a water bottle. Last year, attendees got a whistle kick all in weekend, 2023 water bottle, and a notebook, and some other things themed for the event.
Jeremy (27:35.565)
go ahead.
Jeremy (27:57.037)
Yeah. One of the other things that you can do is offering, and this is something that if my students are watching this, this will, they will probably be public before we release this episode, but maybe not. One of the things that we're going to start doing is having classes for Blue Belts and Up, specific classes, right? You know, not every week, but.
Hopefully that will incentivize people because I'm finding some of my students rank isn't a big deal for them. And we've talked about that on the show and why I'm approaching that a little bit differently, but they all want to train more and they all want to learn more. Okay, well, so we're going to gatekeep this class behind being a certain rank. You could do the same thing with your event. If you have attended this event, you also could go to this event or if you've done X,
You could also participate in why we we're at this interesting point in the world where I think physical goods they've become so cheap. You know, most of us can afford most of what we want. Definitely almost all that we need, right? And if you if you can't get everything that you need, you might not be listening to the show and you might have other concerns. So let's put that aside. But if I want, you know, clothes, I can buy clothes. You know, they might be cheap clothes, but I can get them.
Andrew Adams (28:54.491)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremy (29:22.349)
So because that has happened, I'm watching people put more priority on experiences. Going to events, seeing people, things that you can't buy. But in a sense, you can buy them, right? Because you get access to them. And I think that that's a big part of what we do is we provide experiences through our events, through our content, et cetera, things that you have to spend maybe some money, but you have to spend your time.
Andrew Adams (29:31.403)
doing things.
Andrew Adams (29:38.171)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremy (29:51.693)
Because time is the one thing we can't get back.
Andrew Adams (29:54.883)
Good point.
Jeremy (29:57.645)
So we've talked about a lot of things, you know, the do's and the don'ts and the space in between. We've talked about incentivizing. We've talked about starting small, break even. We've talked about a bunch of that stuff. And I got the sense that people are probably wrapping their heads around this. Is there anything we've missed?
Andrew Adams (30:15.739)
I'm not sure, but I'm hoping that our listeners will tell us.
Jeremy (30:20.557)
Yeah, if there's something that we haven't talked about that you have a question on, please let us know. You know, we can easily do, you know, a part two of this episode. If you have a very specific question, reach out, we will help you.
If you're not in the Facebook group, martial arts radio, we can, you know, can post a comment in there. Post it at whistlekickmarshallartsradio .com. So many places. If you want this information, you know, and let's be honest, if you ever want to hold an event, we would love to offer you some advice. Maybe it's an event we can partner on with you. We've got some, some things that we, we do really well at whistlekick. And, you know, we've had the opportunity to help some folks have more success.
successful events. Sometimes there's a profit arrangement. Sometimes there isn't. Sometimes we just, you know, we trade for putting our name on it, right? Like, you know, sponsored by, right? You know, it's
Andrew Adams (31:11.163)
Mm -hmm.
Jeremy (31:20.205)
I throw back to the beginning of the episode, we said it in the intro, why are we here? To get people into training and keep them training. And if your event is gonna help people, make them excited, get them in the door, well, let's work together on it.
Andrew Adams (31:37.339)
Absolutely.
Jeremy (31:39.085)
Awesome. Last chance, Andrew. Anything else? All right, cool, man. To the audience, thank you. Reach out if you need. Jeremy at whistlekick .com, Andrew at whistlekick .com, or social media, everywhere you can think of is at whistlekick.
Andrew Adams (31:42.235)
Nope, I think we're good.
Jeremy (31:54.271)
If you want to support us, if you're a school, please check out whistlekick alliance WK Alliance dot com. If you are an individual who does not have a school, check out the Patreon P A T R E O N dot com slash whistlekick. And of course, whistlekick dot com for all the things that you might buy, including all in weekend registration, which you can't get a discount on. We don't do discounts on events, but you could use the code podcast one five to save yourself 15 % on a shirt or a training program or.
one of our cool dragon hoodies or protective gear or a whole bunch of other cool stuff that's over there. So if you haven't checked it out in a while, go ahead, check it out.
Andrew Adams (32:32.635)
And I'll tell the audience, if you go to whistlekick .com and buy a t -shirt, I will personally make sure you can get into free training day for free.
Jeremy (32:42.605)
Which one? Any of them?
Andrew Adams (32:44.955)
You know what? Any of them.
Jeremy (32:48.077)
That's such a great deal. The idea that just by buying a t -shirt, any t -shirt, Andrew, any t -shirt, and we've got some t -shirts on there that are barely $20. We do free shipping on all that stuff. Anyway, so for about 20 bucks, you could get into four different free events this year alone.
Andrew Adams (32:54.179)
any t -shirt.
Andrew Adams (33:07.355)
for free. Yep, there you go.
Jeremy (33:10.893)
I can't think of a better deal at all.
Andrew Adams (33:14.811)
Love it.
Jeremy (33:17.485)
And in case you're listening to this and not watching this and maybe you're a little distracted because you're listening while you're doing other things, that is all satire. It's free training day. It doesn't cost anything. All right. Let's wrap here. Thank you, my friend, and thank you to all of you out there. I appreciate you spending some time with us today. Until next time, train hard
Andrew Adams (33:39.419)
Smile.
Jeremy (33:42.540)
and have a great day.