MA Business Success 75: Planning For 2017

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Phil: Hey, what's up? Phil Britten here and...

Graham: Graham McDonnell.

Phil: As always, on the other side, not the better side of me, because, you know, the better side is this side here. But welcome to Martial Arts Business Success. And tonight, we're gonna almost flow on with our last podcast on how to finish the year with a bang with your teams, like how to plan for 2017. Like, what should you be doing now today towards the end of the year so you set yourself up for success in 2017. Graham, take it away.

Graham: Most people will leave the planning stage until it just happens to, well, be a necessity. So, two words, proactive, reactive. Reactive is coming January 1 and go, "Okay, what do I need to do?" And to be honest with you, if you haven't made that marketing calendar or if you've got no idea what I'm talking about, there's a lot in the same boat. But what you need to do is you really need to start thinking and forecasting what is next year all about? How is it gonna look?

Now, this time next year, Christmas time in 2017, who knows what the economy in the world is gonna look like? But if you got a good plan, you can work towards that. You can make some minor adjustments rather than reinventing the wheel every time you need to go through. So where do we start, Phil, when we look to do a marketing calendar or marketing plan?

Phil: Well, I think, you know, it all depends what stage you're at with your business, because if you're a very organized business, you should have a calendar of events anyway. But let's just scrape it right back. Let's just say, right now, you're a new school. You've been going for a little while. And you don't have any marketing plan, any calendar, or nothing. And you're like "What are we gonna do next year?"

So let me fast forward. If you can plan out 2017, guess what planning for 2018 is gonna be like, 10 times easier, because if you've been in business for a while, you know that marketing plan is generally a cut and paste. So you look at what we did this year, what worked, what didn't, cut and paste it, add in some different things. But generally, you don't have to reinvent the wheel so much.

But you definitely wanna get your calendar and you wanna mark out all the public holidays, all the school holidays, all the events. And you wanna say at a snapshot, without you adding anything in, what can you do that is aligning with an annual calendar? What sort of holidays are here? Like Halloween, for example, like, we all know...America celebrates that more than most, but we still do that here. What can we do in Halloween, that sort of a holiday, to make the most of it? Is it a retention building activity? Is it a new client building activity? Is it just fun or whatever it might be?

So with what the calendar has to offer, we go, "What can we plug and play?" And then we go, "How do we plan the rest of the year surround around little kids activities, teenagers, adults, so that they're all getting a chance to do something?" And once you've really done that sort of annual plan, that real mind splat on the calendar about everything, like this [inaudible 00:02:57] spaced out, then you wanna narrow it down to the three-month things, which I know, Graham, you've been doing a little bit of that lately.

Graham: Look, it is really important to think about [inaudible 00:03:02] getting into details. A marketing counter or marketing plan, you can't get all the details into every sort of area and section. I guess what you got to do is with your team, we're always three months ahead of what's coming. So we know we've got that later on. We know we've got the time to market correctly, refine the process, storyboard any challenges. But it shouldn't be a surprise like "Okay, we're in December. What's happening in January?" You should already know ahead of time. Marketing should have already been done well and surely.

So when you look at a marketing plan, if we talk about January, February, March, what happens in those months? You get school holidays. When the people are away, what are the buying habits? What are the back-to-school parties? So again, we do a lot of back-to-school party, bring a mate, bring a plate, zero dollars outlay. The only time invested is the person running the party, invites for the kids. You know, they're headed out to their brand new schoolmates because they're in a brand new class. And you're generally gonna get between 20 to 50 kids that attend that event. Half of those are brand new kids and never been to your business before.

And look, we already know that we're planning that, say, come, January 1 or January 2 or whenever the time you go back to your business after the Christmas break, we're telling people about that, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget. So come the time they go to school, you've got everything ready to go, and away you go.

But, again, it's really important for you guys to understand what is coming up. You know, you know that you've got Easter break. You know you've got all these types of things that are generally within the first six months. It's pretty chaotic with public holidays on this side of the world. So it's important to know ahead of time what you're doing, what you're attracting.

So, Phil, you sort of touched on a little bit when you [inaudible 00:04:52] get a little bit to the audience. So, kids, what's my target? Five to eight. That's the bring a plate, bring a mate sort of age group, maybe, say, 5 to 10. What about your teens? What's gonna attract them during that holiday period, all that start of school period? What about the adults? You know, New Year's resolution, everyone wants to, you know, lose a few pounds, lose a few kilos, get back into training. So what are you gonna do with January to get people to count and start actively training? And that's the stuff you got to start planning for now.

But I guess we can give you all this great information. But, seriously, this is nothing new. So that you guys on the other end whether you're listening or watching actually taking the time to do it. What's an hour or two? Planning it out will save you a headache load of, you know, troubles and worries. Or even better, if you look at the ROI, return on investment, that one or two hours time spent will have a massive impact on the bottom line and also your student numbers as well too.

Phil: I'll throw it out here, to be honest, if you're whinging about time, "I can't do this" or, you know, "It's too hard" or whatever, man, get your team, get you together. Book out time between 6 p.m., right? Go get dinner with your team or whatever it might be. Work all night until it's done, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., whatever, as long as it takes, get it freaking done in one night. Do you know what I mean? And then go, "Man, we just block that out." Hey, you might have lost some sleep. But guess what? You're gonna get that back.

But to get the time, if you gonna whinge about the time to do the calendar, "I'm too busy, I'm too that, man, this, this," 24 hours in a day, 365. So, like, don't complain about that, just get off your ass and do it. The success and anything like that comes down to the action that you take. And, you know, if you've got a limiting belief saying, "I don't have time," well, I'm just gonna call you out and say that's bullshit, because I know we've got...I'm going away, but Graham has booked in almost a [inaudible 00:06:49] at night curriculum rebuild and reframe and restructure for our whole school. Now, we don't have a time to do this during the day. And, you know, we're busy as well. But, you know, if we can lock out time from four in the afternoon to whenever, and that means from sunset to sunrise, get it done, man, that's gonna be a game-changer for the whole year of 2017 for a little bit of loss of sleep.

Graham: Guys, the importance put behind certain tasks, you know, we know that come the end of the year, we wanna start the next year with an absolute bang. We talked about in previous podcast leaving your team and having them motivated, to have your team buy in to what's coming up. Again, chatting with my team earlier today, we talked about "Hey, guys, I can book all of these events on these weekends. But if I don't have your commitment and buy-in, guess what? They're not gonna fly."

So it's important to also get some of the key players that are involved in this to get their input. Do you think this works well? Is that weekend gonna fly? Is this something I may have forgotten? And it's important to invest in actually doing this sort of stuff. Look, I can't hop on enough about the importance of planning out and then actioning all of these steps.

You know, this time next year, there's always gonna be people who are "Geez, I wish I should have done that. I should've taken that advice." Don't be one of those. Don't be a goner, be a doer. Actually get on and actually apply and do this. We've got all the tools and strategies for you. But I encourage you guys to actually apply it.

Phil: The woulders, coulders, and shoulders. If you're not careful, you'll end up shooting all over yourself. You can laugh now if you like. Hey, look, just for you guys out there, just to let you know, we actually have an online course, which is absolutely free, that has our marketing calendar template. You can have a look at it. You can use it. You can do whatever you want with it. But it's in Excel. It's got everything we did last year, this year. And you can basically take that.

So if you're interested in knowing and learning and getting that calendar for absolutely free, again, email us at [email protected], and I'll be happy to give you the link to that course. Usually, we only give this out to a certain particular client base. But I'm actually offering it to you guys out there absolutely free. And that will be to help you set yourself up for 2017.

I just wanna also give a big shout-out to Hyper, the guys over there who we've been partnering with now, so 50% off their Hyper Pro Training and Hyper Pro Fight Club. If you're interested in knowing more, it's really helped us to take our programs to the next level, really good plug-and-play stuff. We didn't have the [inaudible 00:09:23] and do it ourselves. We just had to implement it. So, yeah, if you're interested in Hyper Pro Training or Hyper Fight Club, then, again, email us at [email protected], and we'd be happy to help you out there as well.

Graham: Guys, I guess just sort of going on with that is when you've got a great product or you know some great people doing some great stuff, that is, I guess, really easy to implement, and it's not start-specific, why wouldn't you wanna do it? We talk about "I'm time-poor." Well, we've asked you to do the marketing calendar, but why not partner with somebody who's done much to the groundwork with the actual implementation of the curriculum or, you know, the parties or the camps or whatever they might be? So when we talk about our marketing calendar, we have holiday camps. We have a bully busters session. We got all that. So, guys, again, I encourage you to mark your mini-calendar, but then hunt us down and we'll gladly...

Phil: Well, [inaduble 00:10:16], we have bully buster programs, guess what we got the curriculum from? Hyper, you know? And even if you don't use the whole thing, you can use the sections of it, you know? You can do a different type of seminars. You can use that curriculum and customize it ourselves rather than starting from scratch.

Graham: Yeah. It's a great leg-up guys for you to really help you to make the next year the best year you possibly can. And, really, we keep going on about it, because we've had great success this year with everything we've done. We worked hard. But we wanna equally share that with you guys, which is why we've decided to give you that access to this marketing calendar, zero dollars. It just takes you to take action, type in that email address, send it, and ask us, "Look, guys, I want it." However you're gonna do that, let us know where you are. We'll send that to you, and we'll give you a helping hand where we can.

Phil: All right, gang, thanks for tuning in to the TIMA Martial Arts Business Success podcast. I hope you have a fantastic week and go