When I was a much younger man, I started my first martial arts school by teaching after-school in several elementary and middle schools and at a health club or two. 25% overhead, no matter how little I made, which was great. At one school I had over 50 kids, at another I had 15. No matter how few or how many I had, I was getting paid and not upside down on rent. I did that for a couple of years before I decided it was time to name the school. I had friends at the time who said I should call it Boon’s Taekwondo. I didn’t like that idea.
Firstly, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to just teach taekwondo for very long, since my martial arts experience was very diverse, and I wanted to teach it all. Secondly, in the early 80’s the name “taekwondo,” was relatively new. People at the time tended to just call all martial arts, “Karate,” even though my Korean friends found that incredibly offensive. I remember wishing the public knew what the term, “martial arts,” meant, but they didn’t. When I used that term with people, invariably I’d have to explain what it meant. Thankfully, MMA has since fixed that problem.
Secondly, I didn’t want to name the school after myself. Humility is not necessarily a part of the bushido code, but it is a part of the code of the knights of old Europe and that was my original warrior background, in Italian and German style fencing. To me, naming your school after yourself is self-aggrandizing, self-centered and egotistical. I just couldn’t do it.
So, I thought for months about the name and decided I wanted to honor my Celtic background as well as make a statement about what my school was all about. At the time, I was fighting…a lot, I went to tournaments nearly every weekend, I did some amateur kickboxing matches, and fought in a lot of backyard stupidity. And since I was working at a psych hospital as a recreational therapist, if a patient decided violence was the best course of action, I was requested. I loved to fight and decided that this was going to be the focus of the school. So, the name was born, Sun Arts Fighting Academy. I opened my first facility on State Road 64 because everyone said, “it’s going to boom out there.” I was about a decade, or two, too early. I was foolish and thought all my after-school students would start going there, but they were only training with me for the convenience of it being at their school, right after school. Some parents just don’t want to put that much effort into their kids, we see this today too. I charged too little, scheduled badly, had no real structure or system for running the business and struggled for years. Eventually I moved the school to US 41, thinking it would work better there, but again, foolish young me, thought students would follow, but they didn’t. It was like rebuilding from scratch and I didn’t know how to do that.
I believed if you had a nice sign, handed out fliers to people on the street and had a yellow page ad, you would get students, and it just isn’t enough, but I didn’t know enough. Not knowing enough is one thing, but being too young to admit this fact and then learning more is a problem at that age. I was full of myself and never listened to older, smarter, more successful school owners. I didn’t have the humility to ask questions and when given unsolicited advice, I didn’t listen because I, “knew what I was doing,” or worse even, I “knew better than them.”
Eventually, I needed to pay bills and not just pay for the studio, so instead of doing what I should have done, I went to work in the IT industry, shut down my retail location and kept teaching at a health club, then dwindled that down to teaching in my garage. I got married and then had kids on the way. I decided not only did I want my kids to grow up in the martial arts world, but I realized many times over that I was not suited for the idiocy of the corporate world, no matter how lucrative it was, so I opened Ancient Ways in 2002. This time, naming was easy. I wanted to focus less on the external “fighting,” and more on the internal growth of the individual, the inner battles we all face day to day. So instead of the sun as our logo, we use the moon. In Celtic traditions, it is like Yin and Yang, with the moon being Yin, and the sun being Yang. Right away I sought out a mentor to guide me. With his help, we grew from 1 student to over 350 students. We are one of the top 2% successful martial arts schools in North America. That isn’t really all that impressive when you find out how many schools are run like my first one. There are 10’s of thousands of really terrible schools in this country, many, dangerously bad.
Over the years I’ve adjusted the curriculum to be much more practical as well as making it flexible so it can provide what is needed for every student, not just the super athletic young person that I was when I started. We accommodate and teach students up and into their 80’s. We don’t teach martial arts, we teach people and I think that’s one of the biggest differences that has helped us to grow and help so many people over the years.
If I were capable of going back and telling my younger self anything, I would probably have to get violent with him since he was so stubborn about not listening to anyone but himself. He was so stupid, not that I’m smart now, but I have wisdom that comes from the passing of time and the observation and experience of failing. I would try my best to get him to stop being so stubborn, to listen to the smart older people who came before him, to get a trusted mentor. To actually listen to him, do what they tell you to and say “Yes Sir,” like a good student is supposed to do. Humility may have been in my code, but I sure didn’t listen well.
I can only imagine how big my school would be today if I did listen and grew Sun Arts instead of starting over in 2002. I can only imagine how many more lives I could have positively impacted had I been better at running my school and not just teaching fighting.
Young people, take this as a lesson. Listen to the people who came before you. I know how you are about your distrust of the “Boomers” or “Gen X’ers” like me, but you know what, the only thing worse than a “know it all” old person is a “know it all” young person. Oh, and for all ages, there is a distinct possibility that you could be wrong. Always be a “white belt,” empty your cup, be a student of life and allow yourself to learn and grow.