MA Business Success Episode 62: Multiple Identities For Your School

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Phil: And today's topic and question really comes from Nigel Stubbles in New Zealand [00:00:15]. He reached out and asked us, "Why do you guys have two business names?" We have the WA Institute of Martial Arts and we also have Predator Muay Thai, which is our Muay Thai fight team. And so we thought, what better way to have a topic on multiple identities for your school should you, shouldn't you, why would you do this? But also, how and why you would name your business a certain name anyway.

Graham: I know that going back to some of the early days that we were running some fight training. And this in some of our previous martial arts schools, not necessarily in WAIMA. I guess the family-friendly and the kill-die-death just doesn't align. It just does not align. You're confusing your audience. Your marketing is all out. You've got a kid's class going on and then you've got some fighters over here. So you really do need to decide what identity you want to have and we couldn't decide when the time came to split in that sort of business. But when we started our own stuff together, we were very, very clear on having two identities. And that was definitely your family-friendly, your corporate, your professional look and then your underground fight club. So that's where the identity started as Predator Muay Thai.

Phil: Yeah, I guess we had the two stars. So let me just throw it to you now. Look, if we're at a fight night and a fighter came out and go, "From the WA Institute of Martial Arts," it doesn't quite get it. Or we're promoting to parents and kids to come down to Predator Muay Thai, it doesn't really match the theme of what we're trying to do. Our main business is family-friendly martial arts. The why and how we named that...Graham and I we're just...I think we might have been driving at the time, thinking of business names and the one thing about what are we really trying to achieve with our business? And the decision was that we wanted to become almost like an education place of learning. We toyed with the name of university and then this institute came about. All right, institute. Institute of Martial Arts.

Hmm, that's interesting. Well, we're in Western Australia, so WA Institute of Martial Arts, higher level, higher power of learning. Sounds very official. We've had some people come to us and go, "Can we be accredited at the Institute of Martial Arts?" So it just gives that higher level of learning and really professional name to that. And not only that, if you took every first letter of it, so W-A-I-M-A, WAIMAN, it was really, really easy and it's catchy. So a lot of people know us as WAIMA, WA Institute of Martial Arts. But also, from a marketing point of view, and your domain name, as a [inaudible 00:02:51] rather than having a domain name WA Institute of Martial Arts, long, WAIMA is short and more memorable.

So many things came out of why we named our martial arts business the WA Institute of Martial Arts, WAIMA. And then Predator Muay Thai was that underground fight club. Now Graham, do we market that? How does that work?

Graham: We don't at all. Going back to the old Brad Pitt movie and what not, Fight Club. "The first rule of Fight Club was don't talk about fight club." Look, when people come in to our business, we have that solid Thai boxing, Muay Thai program. It's a combat program. Yes, we talk about it but we don't advertise it. The only way to advertise is through these fight shows because the niche audience is in that space. We get people seek us out because of that environment that we're in. We've done sponsorship around that sort of stuff but that is that audience. We know we attract that clientele.

Everything that we spend a ton of money on, and mostly we have print marketing, is all about our bread and butter family martial arts type stuff. Now I guess for the guys that may be listening and viewing this, it's all good and well that we started this with the idea and the concept that when we started our schools together, we were going to start with two. Once place but two identities. What do you do, Phil, if you've got one school, and, again, going back again to talking about Nigel here, how do you separate the two? When do you do it? What's involved in that process? Where do you start first?

Phil: My answer is probably only going to suit...it's my opinion. It really doesn't matter how you do it. It's that you do it. I think there might be a wrong way or a right way of doing it depending on your environment and the community or the people you have. But I think you've just got to ask yourself, "What is my main business like?" Make your main thing the main thing. So if you are more predominantly Muay Thai fighting or MMA or brazilian jiu jitsu or krav maga, then advertise that. If you want to have all males 18 to 30 or whatever, and you want that sort of identity, have that identity. It's fine.

But don't confuse the two. And that's where a lot of businesses fail is that their marketing message is too sporadic. It's too different. It's too many things. Be one thing to one person. Speak to one and then you'll get many. And that's been one of the biggest marketing tips I've ever had, is like find your one person. Who is my one ideal client? Because if your ideal client is a mom, and the mom has kids and obviously the husband and we get that there, the message needs to be for the mother who's then going to share that message with the husband and the kids. If we're a fight school, my message needs to be to that 20-year-old guy who wants to fight and compete. And don't confuse the two.

Graham: Look, something that we do on a regular basis together, but for you guys that might be looking to split or start something that's got two identities, is test and measure. And I guess, before you put a whole lot of money in your brand, your new business, your new project, get a couple of mock logos done up, a couple of ideas of what you want it to sound like, look like, and ask some people that you trust. And, again, talk about that niche. Go and speak to those, that audience, that 20-year-old, that 20 to 30-year-old. Get their opinion on it because as a business owner, at the end of the day ,the buck stops with you. But it's nice to find out from a client's perspective or someone who wants to embrace that brand, what they think as well, too.

Phil: Absolutely.

Graham: Something that I guess is a really good one, that Phil uses often and regularly, when we throw out, we're looking to get some logos done at quite a low cost, where do we head? What do we do?

Phil: You can't go past Fiverr. If you've never seen or heard about Fiverr, just Google it. You'll find it. You can get logos, transcriptions done, video, just heaps of stuff. The quality you get back sometimes is not as good as others but it's your job to go through and just get some ideas about what type of logos are pretty cool. Get some ideas, put it together. You know what? We've had some pretty good results through Fiverr and it's real low level.

Graham: So let's just go fast forward now. We've got the logos. We've got the new identity. We're going to release it. We've got to communicate it to the staff then the students. What do we do? How do we break it to the masses that we've got this new, improved, this new identity in our school? And how do we communicate that so everyone celebrates it, not gets scared of it?

Phil: This would be the same for any change within your business. So if you got any improvements or changes within your business that's going to affect people, I would be....it's like, you just don't do it like, "Haha, here it is now." People are going to get confused and go, "What happened?" You've got to slowly introduce it. Pre-empt it. Like, "Hey, gang, we've got this exciting thing happening. It's going to revolutionize our martial arts, our business. We're looking for people to have input. This is right at the early stage, the logos. We're running a competition. We're going to provide five different logos and we're going to see what's the best logo."

So that way all the students got a lot of buy-in and when it's time to do it, everyone's had a piece of the puzzle. Everyone's had a piece of what to do and what to create. So slowly over maybe three or four months' time, and then when you have the actual launch, then have a celebration about that.

Graham: Look, I couldn't agree more. You think of a launch party, an opening. They do the champagne broken on the ship as it sails into the ocean. Really, you've got to just think about celebrating and just...

Phil: Right. Graham's a romantic, so that's why.

Graham: Well you know what I mean? It's one of these things where you got to start and everyone starts with a bang because, geez, if you get your students excited, guess what's going to happen from that branding perspective? They're going to run with it. If you use that experience, that launch party, and social media gets that brand, the new identity out there really quickly. So there's method to our madness with everything that we do. But don't just do it, guess, and just throw it out there. I would definitely have it structured. I'd definitely make sure I have a great party to it and really have a ton of fun with it.

So just as a quick recap Phil, what do we do when we're looking to set ourselves a new brand, a new identity in our schools? What's the right way to approach things? And then what do we do once we've got it up and running?

Phil: Do a lot of back-end stuff first, like make sure that you've done your research. You've checked out, is this what I want to do. Get some buy-in from your students, the community, about the logos and all that stuff. Then do the slow approach. Get buy-in from everyone as you're going to release it, and then, obviously, celebrate that here. That's probably the way I would probably do this. Again, you don't want to do the whole matador and pull the shade up and go, "Haha, it's all new." Sometimes it's also good to have this laid up and then start it in the new year. So it's like the new school that you've come into or the new idea. They've had buy-in and have a break over Christmas or whatever, come in and there's a brand new logo and all the different colors.

I would also say for the businesses that have been in business for quite some time, don't be afraid of changing your brand and changing your identity. You look at Apple, or Nike, or Ford, or anything like that, how many logo changes have they had? How many taglines have they changed? How many color differentiations have they had? So don't be afraid from change because sometimes that's all that's needed to get you from one area of your business, from where you are getting this result to the next result later after.

Graham: Just going along that line, if you think about houses and property and whatnot, what do people do when they buy an old house? They renovate it. They put a new coat of paint. They may update it a little bit. And guess what it does? It increases the value and the awareness that it's around. So same thing with your business. Don't just sit and forget and just leave your business and your logos as they were 20 years ago. Look at embracing new change because I guarantee in the last few years things have changed. I guarantee in the next five years things will be revolutionary again. So stay ahead of the curve. Be proactive. Don't be a dinosaur and get left behind.

Phil: Cool, guys. I hope you enjoyed today's topic. Big shout out to Nigel for giving us this question and I hope we've answered it very well to you. Just like that, if you have a question, have something you want us to just wrap our heads around, have a chin wag about it over the podcast, send your questions through, guys. That's [email protected].

Look, have a fantastic week and make sure you have fun. Enjoy the process because at the end of the day that's why we're here. We're at work to have fun and do something we're passionate about. So have fun guys and I'll see you next time.

Graham: Take care.