Mike Massie is the author of Small dojo, Big Profits and a long-time instructor of Japanese and Korean martial arts. He resides in Austin, Texas where he runs a studio and teaches full-time. Martial Edge caught up with the business guru of the martial arts.
Martial Edge: How did you get started in the martial arts?
Mike Massie: When I was about 8 years old my family went to an air show where a Shudokan school put on a demo. I was hooked after that, and spent many a night staying up to watch “Black Belt Theater” on KPLR TV in St. Louis. However, I didn’t start taking lessons until I was a young teen, first in “backyard” lessons with a couple of family friends, then in formal classes about a year later. The two styles I studied most early on were Chang Moo Kwan Tae Kwon Do and Shotokan Karate.
Martial Edge: What have been some of your highlights of your career to date?
Mike Massie: Going from making near the minimum wage to earning a nice yearly income doing what I love. When I first started teaching, I had always been poor and didn’t expect to earn much more than $30,000 USD which was a lot of money to me back then. After I figured out how to run a school successfully, I was surprised at how profitable starting and running a martial arts school could be.
In addition, every time I run into a former student or parent and hear a success story that is attributed to their experience in the martial arts, I realize that I’ve been blessed to be able to help people through my vocation. There’s no better feeling than that.
 Martial Edge: When did you make the transition from student to teacher?
Mike Massie: The minute I earned my brown belt and became the sempai at our school… my sensei started having me teach the beginners, and I think I was only 15 or 16 at the time. It always came natural to me, and I ended up teaching or assisting at just about every school I trained at.
However, I didn’t start teaching as a black belt until I got out of the service at age 22. My old tae kwon do instructor had stopped teaching, but one of my seniors was teaching a few people out of his garage. I offered to find us a place to train, and he agreed to head it up if I found a location. A week later we started running a school out of a local fitness center, and I ended up teaching most of the classes because my partner travelled a lot due to his job.
Martial Edge: Operating a school, how do you find time to maintain your own level of ability?
Mike Massie: It’s a challenge, but not because I run a school – I keep my school operations streamlined, so I actually only spend 25-30 hours a week running it and teaching classes. However, I am so busy with other projects that I have to be creative in finding time to train. I have a small training facility in my home, so I work out alone or with a training partner at home a few times a week. I train with my classes if I am working with advanced students, and I also take private lessons in Kali and the grappling arts whenever time permits.
Martial Edge: For those potential instructors out there thinking of setting up a martial arts school what would be your key advice in getting started?
Mike Massie: Smaller is better, especially when you are first starting out. There’s this mentality that is pervasive in the martial arts industry here in the States, and it revolves around having a large facility and many hundreds of students. Somewhere along the line, the billing companies figured out that they made more money for less work by having clients with larger schools; and by large I mean 300+ students.
So, they got into the consulting business, an obvious conflict of interest due to the fact that they are making money off the gross income their clients bring in, instead of the net or take-home profit that each school owner ends up with.
Let’s be honest here – short of you closing your doors, that billing company doesn’t care how much money you take home each month. All they care about is how much they bill for, because they are paid an average of 7% to 10% of their clients’ gross tuition collections.
Now, taking that into consideration, do you think these billing companies are going to be telling instructors that they can have higher profit margins and less headaches by running smaller schools? The answer is obvious, but I think it’s one that is overlooked or ignored by many school owners who for whatever reason refuse to admit they’re getting taken to the cleaners by these billing companies.
Martial Edge: Tell us about some of the obstacles or difficulties you have faced in setting up your own school?
Mike Massie: I failed three times before I opened my first successful school. The first time, it was due to a disagreement with my partner; the second time, I was undercapitalized and didn’t know anything about bootstrapping a business, so it never got off the ground. The third time I chose a location with sub-optimal demographics, at least at that point in time. Years later a young lady opened a successful school in the same area, but at the time I was teaching there it wasn’t the ideal location and to this day I wouldn’t consider opening a school there.
It wasn’t until I started figuring out how to choose good locations that I met with some success in opening a school. On a friend’s suggestion, I started scouting out a town about 30 miles away and found it to have all the makings of a successful community in which to locate a school. Six months later I was in a 2,000 square foot location and in profit to boot.
Location counts.
Martial Edge: How do you market your school? Do you have ongoing marketing?
Mike Massie: Marketing is a subject that few business owners understand and that even fewer can implement correctly. I’ve always had a knack for promotion, but it wasn’t until I started studying some of the legendary advertising and marketing minds that I began to understand how vital good marketing is to the success of any business.
To answer your question directly, we use a combination of print ads, direct-to-consumer advertising, internet marketing, and grass-roots promotion of our services. And yes, it’s a constant in our school – marketing is something that never stops for us.
I’d like to mention that there’s no magic bullet in marketing. You test a method, and even if you only meet with some limited success you then refine how you’re using that marketing channel until you have maximized your return every time you run a campaign using that method. Then, you continue running that campaign while moving on to test other methods.
Martial Edge: Student retention is difficult. How do you deal with it?
Mike Massie: Student retention is much easier when you are teaching quality martial arts. Do I need to repeat that? If you teach junk, you’re going to have difficulty keeping students. The only schools I know that are able to retain students while offering a sub-standard curriculum are those that promote a cult-like atmosphere in their schools. I think we all know who those organizations are, and we know what they turn out. I don’t know about anyone else, but I couldn’t sleep at night if I ran a school like that.
You also have to be sure that you are offering what people want. For example, teaching MMA in a retirement community might not go over so well, but opening an MMA school in South Beach or anywhere where there is a lot of successful and bored 18-35 year old men would make sense.
This goes back to the location issue as well, and ties in with marketing… figure out what you have to offer, and find a market that is hungry for it. If there’s one piece of advice I’ve given in this interview that’s worth $100,000 a year, it’s that.
You’re falling into the trap of suggesting that someone with specialized skills and knowledge does not deserve to be paid well for sharing those skills and that knowledge with the rest of society. I would say that most every free society values our most knowledgeable and skilled professionals, from scientists and doctors, to judges and (God help us) attorneys, to plumbers and carpenters.
Martial Edge: Some commentators in the martial arts state that the ‘martial arts school in America is becoming the McDojo.’ Would you agree/disagree with this?
Mike Massie: This goes back to the previous question, however, it deserves elaboration. When people start talking about “McDojo this, McDojo that,” my first question is “what’s your definition of a McDojo?”
If your definition has to do with how much money they charge, you’re lumping in a lot of good instructors with the bad. Also, you’re falling into the trap of suggesting that someone with specialized skills and knowledge does not deserve to be paid well for sharing those skills and that knowledge with the rest of society. I would say that most every free society values our most knowledgeable and skilled professionals, from scientists and doctors, to judges and (God help us) attorneys, to plumbers and carpenters.
I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here in the States I couldn’t get a plumber to come to my school and fix a leaky faucet without expecting to pay him more than I charge for a month’s tuition. So, the money argument fails logical scrutiny.
Some of the digital warriors out there would like to label every martial arts school that offers programs to children a “McDojo”. Once again, by doing this they are grouping the good with the bad, and also denying two very important factors:
- Martial arts training offers many positive benefits for children.
- In many areas, especially suburban areas where both parents work and disposable income is limited, children will be a primary source of revenue for a full-time martial arts school.
If you have separate rank, curriculum, and standards for both children and adults, then you can maintain your standards and preserve your martial heritage while still offering a valuable service that generates extra income to help keep your doors open.
However, if you go back to the previous question and judge a studio on the basis of their standards and the quality of student they turn out, then I believe you are making an assessment on the basis of at least some logical reasoning. When I read an article or interview on a school owner who boasts they’ve turned out 1,000 black belts over the course of ten years, I immediately assume their standards must be low. That may be an unfair assumption, but in ten years at our previous location I turned out less than a dozen adult black belts. Some instructors will read that and say I must have poor retention, poor teaching skills, and so on, but what it really boils down to is that I believe not everyone is meant to be a black belt, and that’s that.
 To answer your question, now that I’ve qualified my position, I would say that there are quite a lot of instructors who have a profit motivation that have not developed a strong sense of what is ethically and morally unacceptable. However, I meet more hard-working and dedicated martial arts instructors who just want to teach good martial arts and get paid well for it than I do the former. So I think it’s endemic but not epidemic.
Martial Edge: Where do you think the martial arts industry is heading?
Mike Massie: I’ll be honest, despite what I just said I’m not always thrilled with the direction I see things headed. I network with some very talented and knowledgeable business consultants from other industries that parallel ours, and they are nearly always shocked at the advice that is routinely taken as gospel in our industry.
But, unlike some other individuals in my position, I give enough credit to the average instructor out there (and I count myself among them) that they will make the right choice for their students and their business by holding firm to virtue and character in their business decisions, despite whatever junk is being fed to them by certain industry sources.
The greater part of my unease comes from the ever-increasing abandonment of traditional values and customs in the martial arts. I think we’re stripping the heart and soul out of the arts when we abandon our roots, and I hope it’s a trend that reverses itself as time goes on.
Martial Edge: What plans do you have in place for the development of your martial arts school?
Mike Massie: I started teaching full-time because I wanted to work with children. I was what you would call a “troubled kid” and martial arts helped me tremendously as I was growing up. So, I wanted to share the same benefits I gained with others.
Now, as I get older I am becoming more selective about the type of student I will accept in my school. I won’t just take any child anymore; they have to show me they really want to learn, and they have to continue to earn the right to stay. So, I plan to make our school a bit more selective and exclusive over the next few years.
In addition, while I continue to enjoy teaching kids, we are working on making our school much more adult friendly. This means we are revising everything from our layout to our schedule and class offerings to appeal more to adults. I love working with kids, but as I get older I would prefer to spend most of my time teaching adults.
Martial Edge: Anything to add before we conclude?
Mike Massie: Just that I encourage anyone who is struggling out there to stay the course and start learning as much as they can from people who know what they are talking about. Stop taking advice from people who don’t know or don’t care. Find a mentor who has reached the level of success that you aspire to and learn everything they are willing to teach you about how they got where they are. Also, find information from experts outside our industry that applies to what we do; don’t just rely on sources that are exclusive to the martial arts. For more information on Mike Massie, visit his website: Starting A Martial Arts School.
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