In the first post, I outlined the historical roots of the modern martial arts schools in the United States, and how commercialization has caused a litany of problems. Read that post before diving into this one. In this post, I'll outline how our model solves these problems.
The Brief Summary of Our Model
Our gym offers two programs right now -Brazilian jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts, which includes an adult program and a kids program. We have about six coaches and somewhere in the ballpark of 25 students. The model we're building will eventually expand beyond martial arts into teaching other classes, such as primitive survival skills (among others), which is how we will expand to generate greater revenue.As such, I will refer to the gym as "The School."
The School, instead of being run by a "Master" as we see in the typical martial arts school model, will be run by our Tribe. The Tribe will replace not only the Master, but also the Master's Disciples. While we haven't actually set up the framework yet, the Tribe itself will likely use a shared ownership model for the School. This diffuses the responsibility of running the School among a group of people, which allows us to leverage individual expertise to tackle the different roles needed to run a successful school. The School won't rely on a single Master acting as a jack-of-ass-trades, which will improve the health of the business. Got a Tribe member who's an exceptional salesperson? They recruit new students. How about a marketing expert? They sell the School to the community. Is there a Tribe member who's a financial geek? They handle the books. And so on.
The real advantage of the Tribe, however, comes from the diffusion of expertise. In the Old Commercial Model, the Master was THE expert. They were expected to know all the "secrets" of the martial art and slowly passed those secrets to their loyal, dedicated disciples. That model doesn't work when the entire operation is commercialized, which I discussed in Part One. The Tribe assumes this role, so expertise no longer resides within one person, but rather the collective. Different Tribe Members have their own areas of expertise, which can then be shared with other Tribe Members and, importantly, the School's paying Students.
This is kind of like the typical MMA gym is organized, where different coaches teach their different disciplines. Our model differs in that the Tribe is a closely-bonded social group, which will allow for a far more collaborative approach. In essence, the Tribe will have a vested interest in making each other better, thus increasing the sharing of knowledge while simultaneously decreasing the intra-team conflict that can sometimes occur among coaches.
This model creates a clear divide between the Tribe and the Students, where the entire Tribe benefits from the financial success of the School and the Students pay tuition to learn from the School. This clear divide solves the litany of problems with the Old Commercial Model, which monetizes the Master/ Disciple relationship.
Adopting the University Structure
In our model, the Tribe's collective knowledge is taught to Students in the form of classes offered through the school, but the classes offered would be limited to the knowledge base of the individual Members of the Tribe. This would limit the breadth and depth of classes offered to the collecting knowledge of the Tribe. We solve this limitation by also crating a group that would be analogous to university Professors.
University professors generally serve two roles within the university setting- they teach classes and they do research to advance their field of expertise. In our School model, our "Professors" would teach any classes that would appeal to members of the Montrose community. If someone knows what they're talking about and there's a market to learn those skills, we provide the space to bring those "Professors" and Students together. Initially, we'll probably focus on primitive survival skills because they're in demand, we have people who can teach them, and they're tangentially-related to martial arts.
Our school would also embrace the "research" role Professors fulfill by encouraging our Professors to collaborate with other Professors, conduct experiments, and develop their field of expertise. As an example, let's say we have two Professors who have knowledge about building shelter in survival situations, but have two differing philosophies. We would provide the physical space to give them the opportunity to collaborate to develop the best survival shelters possible.
Another example - let's say we have three jiu jitsu coaches who each have very different philosophies on teaching jiu jitsu. They could collaborate and experiment with different teaching strategies to develop better methods of teaching jiu jitsu. Because this model is inherently collaborative in nature, we also eliminate a great deal of the ego-related issues typically found in the Old Commercial Model.
In this model, the Tribe and the School get qualified expert "Professors" for classes to deliver to our Students, the Tribe attracts more Students from a wider cross-section of our community (thus making more money), the "Professors" get an opportunity to develop their own expertise through collaboration and experimentation, and the "Professors" would make extra money teaching what they love. It's a great model for proving a mutually-beneficial environment for all parties involved AND will provide a clearinghouse of sorts for important knowledge within our wider community. In short, this will make Montrose a better place to live.
The Real Benefit to Our Tribe
This model creates a lot of benefits for a lot of people, but the most important benefit is it provides a safe, secure, well-equipped physical space for our Tribe to train and socialize. If we relied on the Old Commercial Model, as we have since we bought the gym, we're perpetually teetering on the brink of financial collapse. This is especially true given the realities of COVID.
If we were to continue with the Old Commercial Model, we would have to spend a great deal of time and money marketing to an ever-shrinking pool of potential students just to pay the bills. This also forces us to accept students who may not be a good fit with our culture (we project kindness, open-minded acceptance, and compassion, but also love hard, smashing, violent training... and also dick jokes.) Or worse, it might force us to accept student who are a danger to our current Students, which is ethically, morally, and financially unacceptable.
This model prevents this by giving us near-unlimited potential revenue streams, gives us the ability to really leverage cheap-but-effective word of mouth advertising, and allows our Tribe to make important connections with key members of our community who have specialized knowledge in a wide range of topics. And it allows us to maintain our physical facilities for training and socializing for the Tribe.
Conclusion
This model is still in the development phase and is mostly a collection of theories and ideas. Ergo the somewhat fractured nature of this post. :-) In the coming days and weeks, our Tribe's Founding Members will begin discussing the ins and outs of this model with the goal of officially launching it by the beginning of March. As the ideas evolve, I will continue to post the details as they evolve.
If you want to learn more about the structure of the school, check out this post. And this post about the underlying theory.
If you dig this project and are interested in helping develop the ideas, consider joining our Think Tank Facebook group, which can be found here.
~Jason
***
No comments:
Post a Comment