Business Lesson from Mixed Martial Arts

I just got back from KL, Malaysia, where every year I and my martial arts group (crazymonkeydefense.com) has a yearly retreat to review our martial skills as well as setting new direction for this business. Interesting discussion with my coach at that time was about how he developed his brand that now is represented in more than 20 countries around the world.

If you don’t know much about Mixed Martial Arts, let me explain a little. Mixed Martial Arts Sports tournament was invented in 1993 by Martial art family called Gracie Family from Brasil with its own brand called Gracie Jiujitsu and the tournament is called Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) for short. In 1993 it was a success where Rorion Gracie’s brother, Royce Gracie, fought in the cage to the death against many different martial artists. Since then, the brand UFC has been the trendsetter of every fighter athlete to make become the ultimate champion as well as making the most money in the business.

As time went by, the tournament has been evolving where it was used to be an individual vs individual into family and teams vs another team, and this is where Rorion Gracie was in trouble. See, Rorion did not have good relationships with other family members within both the Gracie famiy as well as the Machado family (from his mother side). This made him incapable to create tournament team within the UFC, which made him to sell his UFC rights to someone else.

After the sale, he went back the drawing board to create brand new niche for his brand of Gracie Jiujitsu. What he discovered was that he did the opposite of what everybody is doing in order to create his new blue ocean niche strategy. What Rorion did was that he took his Gracie brand to focus on self defense skills developments for military, police, civillians, women and children (often times children get bullied). He was critized by the industry that he was diluting the quality of the training and that his business would not survived. Now, run by his two sons, Rener and Ryron Gracie, Rorion’s Gracie Torrance Academy in California is one of the most successful martial school in the world.

What Rorion did was a genius marketing moves where he created his own niche in the crowded industry of martial arts. My martial art’s coach, Rodney King, was the same. He realized that there were many early adopters in the martial arts industry, especially in the area of Mixed Martial Arts sport. Therefore; when he developed his brand, Crazy Monkey Defense Program, he could not lable it as another MMA program, because it would not be able to compete with the successful early adopters in the MMA industry, the early adopters that successful has winning competition team, and their clients are serious athletes that make a living in the industry. Most of Rodney’s clients in over 20 countries are every day guy who has a job, career and family. So how can he thrive in hs business, where many early adopters are already leading this crowded market? He did exactly what Rorion did, he listed everything that the market did and did the opposite of it. He positioned his martial arts business as a new niche that he created based on the opposite of the industry.

Like what Seth Godin said that Small is the New Big, Changing the Way Martial Arts is Viewed, Coached and Experience was his new mantra. He told me that he wanted to be known as an inventor of a program that is Life Transforming and Changing Experience that happens to use Martial Arts. The results, CMD business and guys are known as great coaches that help every day people to become champion in their life using martial arts as its vehicles.

As you can see from these 2 stories, by playing with the law of polarity (the extreme opposite of the trend) is another way to create your own business niche that can be very succesful. Another ideas of making niches can be achieved by specializing, by becoming the leader, by designs and by pricing.

To know more on how to escape competition in your business and create your new blue ocean strategy (niche), please contact Coach Yuri Amadin at kingdombizcoach.com

How Can I Lower my Business Overhead?

In running a small and medium businesses, the ability to sustain carry on costs for business, overhead, can be challenging. Many small businesses I worked and saved often times are inthe brink of bankrupt because of this. Some of them made mistakes due to overcommitted in spending money on franchises, equipments, systems as well as people. Continuous mistakes that happen with this is usually because the business owners forgot to put its attention in bringing qualified leads to give them new businesses, so that when they open their business, they realize they have no customers to justify their initial investments and their ongoing overhead.

So again the question is: how do I lower my business overheads or how do I lower my debt? The answer to this, what I usually did is to set up a Break Even Plan. With Break Even Plan, clients can start to budget their expenses and relate that to their marketing plan to cover their ongoing costs and depriciation. What are the steps in creating this? The steps are:

• Start to develop a Break Even Calculator, within this break even calculator, you can fill them in 2 ways: if you already have an existing business, you can start filling your generic profit and loss statements and from here you can start filling your fixed costs breakdown . From here, we have ways for you to know how much sales you need to generate to cover the expenses. Futhermore, marketing wise, we can also help you set how to many leads at minimum you required to get so that with your existing sales closing rate and its average sales amount per customer, you will know definately how much minimum work that needs to be done and generated to cover your fixed costs.
• By looking back at your past profit and loss and cash flow statements, we will start breaking down the components that are making these 2 statements. By using universal rule like Parretto rule (80/20), we will work backword on figuring where and how did you drive your sales and incurring debt and expenses? How does this process relates to your current cash flow and how to improve your cash flow so that you can lower your debt and start to work sustainability in your business.
• We will also look at your balance sheet in relation to your profit and loss and cash flow statements, we will look at structures of your assets, liabilities and your net worth, what is the real portrait on your finance and how can we improve your picture? What are the components of the balance sheet that needs to be restructure, and how does this relates to your profit and loss statements and your cash flow. All of these will relate to your ability to compete in the industry and will give you enough reasons to resturcture your whole business for growth.

There you have it, the overview on what we are going to work on to lower your business overheads and paying back your debt/lower your debt. All these process are coordinated with each other with one goal to create sustainable growth within your business. If you would like to know more on how to do this, please contact us at www.kingdombizcoach.com and ger yout free Complimentary Coaching Session valued at $250.

How Can I Get More Results with My Sales People?

In the process of growing the business, in my experience coaching many companies, this question is also one of the crucial question that many business owners are suffering. What I usually find out when I started to dig out the problems, I realize that many business owners do what I call abdication, instead of delegation.

Sales in my understanding is the process of converting prospects or leads into a new customers. Many business owners do not want to deal with the headache of finding the right ideal prospects, but throw the whole responsibilities to their sales department and their sales force to do their work for them. This will just not work.

In maketing and sales, they are only 3 things that we need to get and have: getting new customers/clients, keeping old customers/clients and having a unique selling proposition to escape price wars. Therefore here are the steps that need to be taken to produce results with your sales:

• Having a good tactical marketing plan system that can bring you a steady hot qualified prospects for your sales department to convert to new clients.
• Having a strong Unique Selling Proposition that communicate your ultimate advantage in the market, communicate your sensational offer and communicate your powerful promise so that you can escape price wars in your industry.
• Having a strong Sales Management System that will create a high performance sales force by scripting their approach, coordinating their activity with the right CRM software solution and measuring their performance activity that relates to their paycheck.
• Hire your Kingdom Business Coach to help you to implement all of the above and hold you accountable for the results.

There you have it, 4 basic things that you need to do to deliver results on your sales department. To know more and start getting results fast, please contact www.kingdombizoach.com and ask us about our Marketing Mastery Class.

How Do I Grow Business and Improve My Marketing?

Many business owners that I and my fellow business coaches coach often times are faced with this question: how do I grow my business and improve my marketing? This question is usually 80% of the problem that my clients face and its their yardstick to measure their Return Of Investment in whether it is worth it to take our coaching program or not.

Although the ultimate growth of the business comes from profit, true profit is derived from increasing sales that comes from effective marketing. So in this case, producing steady increasing sales is the starting point or the scoreboard to know whether our marketing and sales are working or not. In coaching process, we usually have very deep session on how to make your business transforming the market so that you can have the unfair advantage compare to that of your competitors. That way you can escape price wars and not considered as a commodity anymore.

What we can do to help you in our coaching program is to develop your tailor made Tactical Marketing Plan. Within it, these are the steps that need to be taken in creating that plan:

1. Identifying 4 areas of your business growth that include: Attract more new customers, Increase the average sales amount, Make your customers buy from you more often and Hold on to your customers for life.
2. Identifying your ideal market well, then creating and impelementing strategies to acquire new leads aggresively.
3. Creating and implementing Sales Process Steps to convert your qualified prospects into becoming new customers.
4. Choosing, creating and implementing ways to increase your customer average sales amount and increasing the number of times your existing customers do business with you.
5. Creating and implementing Test and Measuring system to track the ROI of your marketing investments vehicles.

There you have it, the part context on what we are going to work with you in developing your tailor made Tactical Marketing Plan. Once its created, it needs to be turned into a marketing system that will increase your profit and bring growth to your business.

To know more on how Kingdom Business Coach can help you, find out about our Marketing Mastery MasterClass at www.kingdombizcoach.com, our staff will help you.

How to Use Guarantee to Promote Your Business?

In my career helping business owners to earn more business, I found out that many of them do their business process unconciously to please their new and existing clients. From the process of getting qualified leads, converting them to be new clients and servicing clients, they do specific things routinely, but did not realize that what they do can give them tremendous leverage in promoting new business and creating growth. What I meant by this, what I mean is using guarantee and communicate it to your market and use this to get new businesses.

Many potential leads and potential new customers often times do not want to do business is because they are afraid to risk something, in my experience, the 80% risks are:

1. Risk of making the wrong the decisions.

2. Risk of losing money.

3. Risk of Not Receiving What They Pay For.

4. Risk of not Being Satisfied or not enough ROI from the purchase.

Now yours might be the same or different, but in my experience, one way to make our marketing efforts more effective in getting qualified prospects and prevent objections are by addressing what we can guarantee. Like I mentioned above, many businesses already did stuff like money back guarantee, replacing broken products with the new ones, but many of them do not communicate it to their guarantee statements. Do it ! It will bring you more business. Here are some of the steps to do it:

• Identify 3 biggest frustration that your target market experiencing and ask yourself whether you can remove that frustrations and use that as your guarantee.

· Create a step by step sales process system to remove customers risk and objections.

· Answer the three important questions about your business which are: what is your business ultimate advantage to the customers benefit compare to that of ther competitors? Whats your sensational offer? And what can you promise to the customers.

· Use the answers above to all you marketing efforts in all marketing medium.

· Hire Kingdom Business Coach where we will help you making your Solid Guarantee using our 6 Steps to Creating Rock Solid Guarantee Process in your Business.

There you have it, some preliminary steps that you can use right away to create your guarantee to promote your business and differentiate yourself with your competitors.

To get the most of our help, please check out our Marketing Mastery Master Class Program at www.kingdombizcoach.com where our staff will email you with its detail on how can this program benefit you tremendeously.