Martial Arts Industry
Business Lesson From Mixed Martial Arts
I just got back from KL, Malaysia, where every year I and my martial arts group 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 ciritized 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.
Coach Yuri has been an active business coach in Indonesia for the last 5 years and has helped hundreds of business owners in Indonesia. To know more, please click http://www.business-life-coaching.org
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