Tony skinner
Hi and welcome to podcast my business at podcast my business.com.au and today we have Adam from canberramartialarts.com today you and huh Are you in canberra Adam?
Tom
It’s Tom. And I’m actually Yes, definitely. I’m sitting in Canberra right now in the cold weather.
Tony skinner
Wow, how do I get the name wrong?
Tom
Because I have four first names and they’re all first names like it my middle names are all first names. My last names the first name it confuses everyone. It doesn’t matter my whole life. I’m used to it. But it’s all good. You can call me Tom.
Tony skinner
Oh, why would his to his Tom Adam. Oh my god. Okay, sorry about that. I will. There we go. 
Tony skinner
It’s Tom. Adam. There we go. Wow, that must be Yeah, you’re right is confusing your whole life. Okay. All right. So one of the main reasons I wanted to get you on is that I did martial arts. years ago and what have you. And certainly there’s all discipline, a lot of things in common with martial arts and running a business. And what I was curious about is the answer to the question of how can you do martial arts online when you got nobody to beat up?
Tom
So it’s a great question. And then that’s like, that is one of the questions that we ask ourselves. So, before this all happened, we were actually I spent probably a good five weeks telling people what my plans were, and we were planning to go online and use an online solution video solution. And a lot of people thought, wasn’t that important, and I kept busting my butt. And we got it tested the two days before we actually got the marching orders from the Prime Minister, to go completely into lockdown. And I was grateful that we had all the computers set up and we went through the variations it was actually more it was actually more difficult setting up the technology in a short time, then actually switching the learning across because with all martial arts, there is a necessary part of it that is about your, your body. So, a good colleague of mine, really well known BJJ instructor, he, john will he likes to talk about he says, What is your left foot doing what’s right for doing what is your left hand, your right hand, and where is my weight. And so those five things that you can break down and you can do a contact sport that needs another person to practice right through to sports that are more solo and so we really just unpacked the programs and looked at what elements of the programs could be done and the footwork around things that needed pair work and, and really sort of went through and actually just focused on on that. So a lot of it was that you know, the warm up at the start isn’t is generally solo so you know, working through those different things and, and breaking it down. It was really interesting. And I’m glad that we could go back to face to face though I’ll tell you that.
Tony skinner
Yeah, it does make a difference. You know, online and of course, martial arts. You need a lot of space.
Tom
No, not at all. No, no, no like so that my own kids, my own daughters were doing it at home. And they had a two meter by two meter space. And what we did is we all ordered in a whole lot of mats and we felt like a bit of a dealer handing maps out the door to people coming in to get them in that space or at home. A lot of people have just a small two by two meter space, which is normally the gap between your TV and your living and your couch. And my two daughters were training on that space the whole time.
Tony skinner
Okay, well, there you go. So you up for the challenge and made the challenge. So do you think online was something you thought as I like you mentioned before the event occurred as something in the future anyway, so even without the crisis, you realize that it was worth pursuing?
Tom
Oh, yeah, look, I’d already been doing some online training with people in the state that just couldn’t travel as much as they wanted to. And it does have its like, it doesn’t Has IT pros and cons. I mean, you know, you can train with people that are unwell and keeping them at distance. Because obviously martial arts you do a lot of close quarters stuff. So if I have a customer who’s sick now we have the solution to be able to train them from home and work on some of those elements. But definitely there are some parts of the business that it just doesn’t lend itself to some some martial arts that just does not work for that other ones. It’s It’s It’s a completely suitable interim measure. I wouldn’t say that would be a permanent measure. There is just something about teaching people like I made I made a joke I got sick of teaching TV presenters, because a lot of the time you can only see people from the waist up.
Tony skinner
And when you’re looking when you’re talking about legwork, and balance away and everything else and you can only see half the equation.
Tom
Well I got really good at telling with telling the kids that I could tell that their feet weren’t pointing the right direction based on which way their hips were pointing, which drove them nuts, which is quite cute. Like, how can you tell us the bomb name? And I’d be like, well, because your hips if you strike, look at your back foot, and they turn the foot like, Oh, wow. So yeah, look at the kids that were engaged with the program. We’re Uber engaged. For a lot of them. It was literally the only physical outlet during the week. And we took normally we have kids that come once or twice a week, we took all those restrictions off and we just said, just get into it. go nuts to as much as you can. And then as they went back to school, the parents started coming back to saying, oh, they’re tired. They don’t want to do it three times a week. And like, you don’t have to do it three times a week, go back to once you know, and then the kids genuinely were really excited for them though. It was a great opportunity for them to see a lot of their training buddies on on the screen because he could put on the grid. You can see all the other kids there. But I was definitely grateful to be able to meet some of the kids that would come up to the camera and talk really loudly in the microphone.
Tony skinner
Well, I almost tempted to try that on you now. But I’m not going to. Okay, that’s good. So, I, you’re right about the routine, like, I just got back into gym myself two weeks ago. And what I’ve realized is that, like, I would have been twice as you, I gotta force myself to go that third time, because I have to get back into the routine. So how important is it to get back into that routine? Even? Not just the gym, but business practices?
Tom
Oh, look, absolutely and and I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t really till we actually reopened that I was actually sitting down and really interrogating the numbers again, and identifying a lot of the mistakes and the problems that we had with it when everything fell apart, it was difficult psychologically and that you talked about that, you know, the connection between Martial Arts and Business and then having that longer term thinking because to get your black belt isn’t a you don’t just walk up and do a class and then go home. It You know, that’s how he stopped but eventually You’ve got to start thinking, Okay, if I want to go to the next level, if there’s 10 levels to your belt, for example, what are the things I need to do? What do I need to learn? What do I need to enact? What do I need to practice? How do I need to behave to get to that first level, and then so on and so forth. And I realized in my own business that I had really sort of taking my foot off the pulse, my finger off the pulse foot off the gas, and, and coming in as everybody came back online, because we’ve been reopened for five weeks now two weeks, allowing contact. And I’ve been able to see a lot of wherever there was a mistake or where people have been like, errors and things and data and looking at the revenue gaps where and I was looking at the top the total number, but looking at right into the detail, where we actually it wasn’t until we reopened that we realized where our losses were from three months before that. Mm hmm.
Tony skinner
Yeah, and this is the thing about again, I don’t want to keep drawing on the analogy of martial arts on the focus. I think a lot of people in business they disagree. Do the day to day, and that I do the due diligence on a discipline to keep an eye on what’s coming in on what’s going out. And if they’re progressing on it.
Tom
Yeah, well, and that’s, that’s, that’s a frightening thing. And but I mean, look, I mean, I’ve spent a lot of money in the last four years, educating myself, from a business perspective, to be a business to be a better business blackbelt because I know the martial I know how to teach, I can get on the mats. And I can I’ve taught many, many people up to black belt and beyond in my martial art, which is have Kido and, and that, really looking at the business and reinvestigating what we need to do, like I’m even employing a guy to come in and actually do a business audit and see what we can do better. And, and on a local business later on the president of the local traders group. And I’m actually really worried about those businesses that are solely relying on the government support, which is so beneficial to us right now. But it’s got a finite end date. And if they’re not planning, I know what I need to do to buy it by the end of September. I need To be, you know how fluid I need to be financially, I’m really worried about those other businesses that aren’t planning. I’m thinking three months ahead. I know what I’m going to be promoting next week and the week after. And I know what events I’ve got the next six months worth of events planned. But how many businesses are actually going? What do we need to do to to generate the revenue that we need to sustain our business beyond the government support? And, yeah, it’s an interesting prospect.
Tony skinner
You know, and it is an interesting prospect. I’m taking a slightly different viewpoint of that is that it’s the old survival of the fittest. So if this drives 20% of poor performing businesses that shouldn’t exist anyway, out of business. Actually, that’s a good thing.
Tom
Well, I mean, we can have, we can have the philosophical debate and the political debate on that as from a philosophical point of view. I totally agree. I think that there are there have been some businesses around me that are close that were they weren’t viable beforehand. Or if They were viable, it was only just but in the same breath, what happens often from a an economic standpoint when smaller businesses go out of business is that the larger businesses take up the market share. And they tend to over time drive the prices up, because they are profit driven, whereas small businesses don’t tend to have that. They should have that. But they don’t have tend to have that ever increasing revenue and profit growth model mindset. So there is some pros and cons and that’s the one of the things I’m advocating here is saying that we need to have a lot of small businesses that are in those niche areas, because they employ more people overall as an average. And they tend to return a lot more of those profits back to the economy than a larger businesses do.
Tony skinner
Yes, interesting. I, you’re right, unless push that a little bit further. So those smaller businesses go out of business. The larger businesses take over the market share. clients get sick of the larger businesses. Therefore the demand for the smaller businesses comes back. That’s so potentially, it’s that virtuous, virtuous circle, where it all comes back to where it was. And those smaller businesses, a fitter, and more lean and more able to be profitable.
Tom
Yeah, look and look at it from a martial arts business perspective. And I’m part of it. I’m part of networks, obviously, business owners. I’ve noticed that some of the ones that have grown too big have really suffering through this crisis through this event, whereas the smaller operators are a little bit more nimble and agile and it look it’s it’s, it is an insane moving face. This is something that I managed to get. I was running a different business during the GFC. I managed to get that business through the GFC by completely changing the business model, how we did things and how we approach the market and the types of clients that we attracted in the end. And the margins that we made to make sure that we could sustain ourselves. But how I’ve adapted this business so now our fitness programs are a vert hybrid so they’ve virtual online as well as in in the club. And we had this morning we had a handful online training at home and some people here. But how many other businesses out there? were prepared to dig deep and and throw? Rather than they love them? How many will throw their hands up in the air when Oh, god, this is too hard. I can’t take 
this, you know, and just fell into a heap. And how many of us like myself or a colleague of mines or restaurant that just went berserk and went, Okay, how do we get through this and, and make a model that has a whole lot of really insanely loyal customers that have written some amazing feedback. And that, uh, you know, a really loyal when people new customers walk in, they see all these people and they go, Hey, what do you think of the classes and, you know, and that people just dumped on and off. It’s been fantastic. These guys are great. You know, there’s a lot of goodwill. It’s been just Generate, if we hadn’t been so productive and so confident to push through, would that ethos have gone through our customers? Would that continue? And I can see it as some of the other ones is depressed, you know, you go into their shop and they’re sad and you’re like, Man, look really busy. And I’m like, Oh, it’s not enough. And I’m like, yeah, it’s not enough right now, but bust your butt to make it. So it is.
Tony skinner
Exactly. Now I was asked for tips and I’m going to tell you straight up, I’m going to call this podcast, kick business. But, sir, do you have a tip for kicking business? But
Tom
yes, I would say if you don’t have a recurring revenue model, so memberships and things like that, explore it. Make sure that you have multiple revenue streams. So make sure that you have more than one way of generating money so that if one stops working for whatever reason, that you have the other one to tap into, that would be my biggest tip.
Tony skinner
Absolutely. And that’s 100% And I’ll mention everybody. Yes, I am developing an online podcast training course. So there you go. That’s exactly. To help with that. And actually, I’ll get on the business anyway, as digital marketing. So yeah, I hear you, I hear you. It’s very important. Okay. Look, thanks very much for your time. And anything else you’d like to add? 
Tom
No, I just say to all those small businesses out there that if you feel like you were down in the dumps, and you your heads down, and you just feel like he just can’t get out of it. Take the opportunity to get someone else to look at your dirty laundry in the business and tell you all the things that you don’t want to hear and just take it on the chin and look at what you can do better. Because if you if you let your ego decide that you your business is good, nothing you don’t need support. You are completely and totally wrong. I would be the first to admit that the biggest problem in my business is my own opinions and getting other people in To fix that and say, Look, I this could be better or this needs to be changed and just don’t take it personally. It’s that would just a really, really good advice is to just get somebody else in with a fresh idea. But get someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Tony skinner
Yeah, look, that’s so true. Every every business needs support. It was just marketing, if it’s financial, whatever it is, every business needs support, join business networks. I’m a member of bx there’s others out there as B and I and so on and so forth. So join those organizations. They are fantastic for that and it’s good way to reach new people. Okay, Tom, Tom. Adam. There we go. From camera martial arts calm that are you. Thanks for your time.
Tom
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Tony. Have a