NAPMA SQUARED LAUNCH

Teleconference

6/9/04 – 2:00 p.m.

Rob: Okay. Sorry about the delay. This is Rob Collasonti. I'm here at NAPMA headquarters in Clearwater, Florida in our studios. We have Stephen Oliver.

As you know, we have developed this program called NAPMA 2 . It's kind of like our black belt club. It's an advanced level of membership. It's really a phenomenal, fantastic, ground-breaking program. And there is a little bit of confusion about NAPMA 2 . A lot of people really don't know what it is. Some people are calling it NAPMA 2, NAPMA Plus. What the heck is it?

Well, today, folks, we're going to go ahead and give you the lowdown on what NAPMA 2 is and, in many ways, what NAPMA 2 isn't. And I think a good place to start is by talking a little bit about the NAPMA package. Because I know that for the last decade, NAPMA has been the world's largest professional martial arts association. We still are. And many of you out there, I'm sure, are NAPMA members who are familiar with the professional package.

NAPMA 2 is dramatically different. Let me give you some examples.

The regular NAPMA package, as you know, has segments on the DVD now, which we just switched to last month; 20 minutes on kids instruction, 20 minutes of Frank Shamrock or Joe Louis or Kathy Long, or somebody teaching you adult material, adult drills.

You're going to see business segments where Jeff Smith or Stephen Oliver or somebody will come out and give you some tips and pointers.

That package contains things like full-color posters and camera-ready ad slips and student newsletters, and mini strategic reports and audio interviews.

And, you know what? All of that stuff is great. That really lays down the groundwork and helps you with the pure, essential fundamentals of running a successful martial arts school. And the fact is it's a successful model. Many, many, countless instructors for that matter, have benefited dramatically from the NAPMA program.

But after a decade now, we have realized that it is prime level. And that's exactly why we've created NAPMA 2 . And we chose Stephen Oliver to be the pioneer of that program, because he is, without question, one of the sharpest people I've ever worked with. He's one of the most brilliant minds in the martial arts industry. He's going to be the guy that's going to be actually delivering that material to you in the NAPMA 2 program.

So what is NAPMA 2 ? Here's a little bit of an overview.

Instead of taking that shotgun approach, which is really what the NAPMA package is, each month we'll blast you like a seasonal marketing report and camera-ready ads and all that stuff. NAPMA 2 doesn't have any of that stuff. There's no posters, there's no real mini-reports. There's no ad slick, no student newsletters.

NAPMA 2 is really a very, very focused educational support system for your school, where 6 times a year we provide you with a package that's focused completely on one single subject.

So again, it's not a shotgun approach, it's more like focusing in on something with a laser beam.

Now, the first NAPMA 2 package was called “Social Proof And Why That's Important.” And we put a lot of work into that package. And I've got to tell you, when I was done reading the social proof material, when it was all complete, I was absolutely convinced that anybody that read that material and watched the infomercials on the DVD and watched the television commercials and understood the essence of what we were trying to get across in that package, they would be virtually an expert on social proof. This package was on one single, solitary topic.

Whereas when you look at the NAPMA package, it's on a whole bunch of different things each month, which again is very, very, helpful.

Now, the NAPMA 2 package will have in it primarily 3 items. Whereas the NAPMA package, the regular NAPMA package, has a lot more than 3 items, as you know. But the NAPMA 2 package has just 3 things in it. Let me tell you what they are.

For starters, there's a DVD. And on that DVD, you're going to see a bunch of material that's specific to one single subject matter.

Secondly, you're going to get an audio CD. And again, that audio CD is going to be on one single subject matter; the same subject matter that coincides with the material that was on DVD.

And third, there's some printed literature – a high volume of printed literature. And those reports and all that strategic material is centrally focused on the same subject matter.

So all 3 components of the NAPMA 2 package talk back and forth between one another. And this material is created by, again, one of the most successful school owners in the country and someone who has a peer group of some of the most successful school owners in the world.

The first package, as I said, was “Social Proof And Why It's Important.” Social proof is testimonials. And basically, your students and people in the community say that your school is great, rather than you saying your school is great. It's a lot more believable when other people say it.

The second package is going to be on grass roots marketing and why it's important. And Stephen Oliver is going to tell you a lot about the future of NAPMA 2 and what the outline looks like for probably the next year.

But I think what I wanted to get started with here is to let you guys know that the NAPMA 2 package is a very different package. And really, the 2 work best in coordination with one another; because a school still needs ad slips, you still need the motivational pep talks, you're still going to need the great audio interviews we bring you with people like Jay Abraham and Tony Robbins, and so forth. But you're also going to need the focused material that Stephen's going to bring you in NAPMA 2 . It's focused on one single subject matter, that's designed to just make you a black belt in that particular subject.

Steve?

Stephen: Thank you, Rob. Let me go back and give a real simple outline of what's coming up for the next year.

As Rob was talking about, the initial package is “Social Proof And Why It's Important.” And we're going to talk about that for 10 or 15 minutes, to give you an overview.

The package is coming out the end of this month, in June. It's on Grass Roots. One of our main topics today will be applying the lessons in that package to June, July, August. And many schools have kind of a “Whoa is me, I can't do any enrollments over the summer” attitude.

But the reality is we should be very focused on this being a marvelous opportunity to do 2 things: fill the school in June, July and August with new students, and create activity that's going to help us with back-to-school and for the fall promotions as well. And we'll talk about how to do that.

But the overview for the coming year, from there, is we're going to do, in August, direct mail A to Z. Direct mail is an activity that's poorly used by most martial art schools, if at all, and improperly used in almost all cases.

What we find, oftentimes with schools, is they generate and discard it. They fail to develop a database, they fail to properly market to a database. And frankly, the quality of materials they generate in order to go out to that database isn't very good.

So we're going to thoroughly and completely and extensively cover that topic in August.

In October, we're going to do 2 segments that basically covers the same topic. And one is organizational growth. ___ the single school, how you effectively start to deal with management of staff and priorities and financial management; and then how do you move to the best format and structure for a multi-school operation, if that's ___.

In December, it's selling A to Z. And selling A to Z is from the phone call to the introductory, to the enrollment conference, and how to effectively close a sale, how to handle it in detail and in depth ___.

Then we're going to start off next year with using the internet effectively. And frankly, by this time next year, there will probably be a lot of changes in the internet, it's moving so fast. But also, effective publicity and public relationship. So many schools do not use that free tool to get the millions dollars – potentially – of free press that are available. And we're going to really work on that.

And then we're going to move through ___ and renewals, improving revenue per student, and we're going to work through student service and improving long-term retention, as well as continuing to focus on ___ advertising and how to be effective at that and grass roots type of effort that ___ sometimes a little labor-intensive, but how to fill your school with those types of efforts as well.

What I want to do is go back now and at least 200 schools have gotten the first social proof package, hopefully have had a chance to go through that, and there's a bunch of bonuses in that initial package. If you don't have that and have ordered it, you'll have it anytime now.

And if you haven't ordered it, you really need to get that because it's free. $24.59 shipping and handling. It's free, otherwise. And in that are 2 bonuses. One bonus is my book, Everything I Wish I Knew When I Was 22 . Those of you who have already gotten my Extraordinary Marketing package, the old version digitally, this is the new version physically delivered.

And then there's 5 CD's called “Teleconference Raw,” which include Joe Corley and Jeff Smith and Chris Rappold, Tommy Lee and myself, and a bunch of other really high-quality people, Lloyd Irving and Terry Brumley, discussing student service and community outreach activities, and how to have a higher-quality, more effective school.

But the social proof package, let's talk about how you apply that.

The concept of social proof goes way beyond testimonials, although testimonials is one aspect.

The concept of social proof is this: all of us look around to what everyone else is doing to decide whether we're making the right decision or not. And some of us who perceive ourselves as leaders, not followers, try to avoid that tendency; but still, we have a tendency to follow the pack and we have a tendency to follow what other people are doing, especially we have a tendency to follow opinion leaders, whether they be celebrities or professionals or experts of some sort.

What very few martial art schools do is take that standard phenomenon that happens in our society and apply it effectively to their school. And it can be applied effectively to your school at each of these stages.

It can be applied at going out to the market and getting people to raise their hand and say they're interested in exploring your school; taking the people who've raised their hand, who are interested in exploring your school and getting them to be an actually new enrolled student.

It can also work towards taking that new, enrolled student and getting them positive about having a goal to be a black belt and joining your black belt club or leadership or whatever you have as an upgrade.

Frankly, it can also be very effective at retention. What you really have to be taking a look at is if somebody is in your class, you want them to be constantly seeing reinforcements all around you, of all the wonderful things that your school does, and be seeing it in written form, in audio form, in video form, in any type of form, as well as person-to-person, to have other people giving credibility and credentials to your school.

The reason that's important is that what somebody else says about you is at least 1,000 times as believable and credible as what you would say about yourself.

That's why publicity is effective, because the newscaster is more credible about talking how good your school is. That's why a parent ___ newspaper ad is so much more effective than you saying the same words.

In fact, a parent saying something is 1,000 times more credible, even if you're 100 times more articulate in getting the message across.

The very fact that they aren't totally articulate adds credibility and lends a sense of reality to it. And this isn't something that we just discovered. All the major advertisers in the country understand and know this. That's why there's so many people on the street interviewed. You remember the Blu-Blocker commercials with Joe Sugarman? “Put on a pair of sunglasses. What do you think about it?” It's very credible, because it doesn't look staged and it doesn't look scripted, and it feels very believable.

But that concept, in this initial starter package, is explaining how to use that on the internet. And you can use that with pictures, you can use it with audio, you can use it with text, or even with video. How to use it in advertisements, ___ direct mail, how to use that concept internal to your school.

In my schools, we're very focused on using that concept internal to our schools, to give credibility to the concept of being a black belt and give credibility to the upgrade, and using other people's feedback and responses to the process ___ through the system.

So I hope, in that starter package, what you'll do is you'll bet at least 5 clear implementation strategies that will help you 1) generate more intros for your school, 2) create a tighter conversion ratio, those intros to enrollments, with less sales skill needed, obviously, because they're more sold by the testimonials or the social proof than they are by you trying to talk them into it. It's much more powerful.

And then, to take that to the next step, and use it to help people make the decision that they want to train to black belt and help to reinforce the decision they've made and help keep them as an active student. You want to keep reinforcing that many other people decide it's the right process, many other people are giving credibility back to you and the school and the system. And if they feel frustrated or different from that, it's something that's unique to them, it's not unique to the school, and maybe they should think about it differently.

Then we're going to have the June package out at the end of this month. The topic of the June package is grass roots marketing.

Now, I use the term grass roots, because it's meant to imply that it's not high-budget type of stuff. When I work with schools, a lot of times they say, “Well, but you have a $300,000 or $400,000 marketing budget and why does what you can do apply to me?”

Well, the reality is even with that budget, we get a majority of our enrollments through sweat equity, through local community activity, through outreach to public schools and private schools and church groups and other community activities.

So the grass roots element of our marketing activity really is the most important. Plus, it's the equalizer. A school with 50 students and a school with 2,000 students has pretty much the same opportunity to get out into their local community. And it's ___ a necessary force.

So in this package, we're going to be exploring many, many, many different ways of doing low-cost advertising, and then ways to apply other advertising and marketing concepts, through those grass roots activities, to double, triple, exponentially improve the results that are generated from that.

What I want to talk about today is grass roots marketing as applied to the summer. So we have a topical topic. We're coming up on the second week in June right now. We just had a holiday. We have July 4 th coming up. And I think summer is an exciting time for marketing and promotional activities for a karate school.

I think it's exciting because most people have shut off and think that there's nothing that they can do.

But the reality is we have some of our best time of the year in the summer. We have 2 distinct points of focus that we have for my schools in the summer.

Number one is activities that are outreach into the community they're going to create new enrollments in, June, July and August.

But number 2 is building a database of people who have raised their hand, interacted with us in some form, ___ that even if they don't enroll in June, July or August, are fine prospects in back-to-school.

So we're greatly using the summer 1) to develop that database and have people that we can send mail to, that we can call and we can focus on, to get them back in. And, again, in a very timely fashion, the August package is going to tell you exactly how to do that, how to do that follow-up.

But then, the other thing is getting people in right now. One of the things that is easy to forget is the fact that just because kids are out for the summer and just because adults are in play mode, doesn't mean that you can't get them into the karate school. It actually means that people are out into community activities more than they would be in October, November, December.

If you think about it, if you drive through your neighborhood and hit a 3- to 5-mile radius, the local pools are just packed with people. The movie theaters are prime season right now. The bowling alleys, all kinds of outdoor sports activities, whether it be baseball or soccer or rafting, all of the sports activities and the groups that cater sports activities are just packed right now.

Plus, you have every daycare, many elementary schools, you have church groups who all run summer camps for the kids. So now you have the kids, they're not in elementary school with a structured curriculum, they're in a summer camp of some sort.

And, guess what? The summer camp leaders are desperate for something to do with kids. Because after the first week or 2, a lot of their fresh ideas have run out and they're looking for somebody to come in and help them out.

And the kids are now a captive audience because the elementary school may be a little skeptical about letting you, as a commercial business, come in and interact with their kids, for the day camp could care less. In fact, you're a free resource base for them. So therefore, you're very, very likely to get in there.

Some of my schools, that have had 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 kids actually come through the school, being bussed to the karate school to have an introductory lesson over the summer, every one of them, we have name, address and phone number.

So what happens is it's a huge database, maybe in a little lower ratio than usual but can be enrolled in July; but then, a huge database has been exposed to us and are interested, that in September and October are just phenomenal prospects. And we can have very, very focused activity.

What I'd like to do is come back to this in a minute. But we're going to work on opening the lines up a little bit here. And if you're not going to ask a question, stay on mute. But I'd love to hear from some of the people who have gotten the first starter package, had a chance to go through some of the materials, and have some questions on application or just some feedback on what you thought was valuable for your school.

So let's see if we can get this to happen. We're going to open up the lines here.

Anybody who's gotten the social proof package and has some questions about it or some implementation ideas?

Caller: I'm still getting lots of beeps. It's hard to hear.

Caller: One of the things I've found with the social proof is we were trying to put together a ___ and we found that, in 30 seconds, it's real hard to get those in and still have anything else to say.

Stephen: Okay. You're trying ___, you're saying?

Caller: What we did is we put a 30-second television spot together and we wanted to work those testimonials, as social proof, into those. And what we found was that a 30-second commercial, by the time you show anything that looks like martial arts and give your contact information, it's hard to get those testimonials in there.

Stephen: Well, what you end up with on that is 1) you're seeing the limitation of spot size, whether it's on radio or TV. ___ effectiveness, typically, with long-form than with short-form.

The infomercial or long-form could even be a ___ spot rather than a 30-second spot.

I've had some success and I have some friends who have had some success with a 30-second spot being an intro, a parent talking about their kid's ___, then an offer and a phone number.

You have to keep in mind that the selling isn't ___ doing a sidekick. Telling is the parent talking about all of the wonderful benefits and opportunities that their child is getting from the program.

So what you might think in terms of doing is cutting out the action and sticking with the conversation with the parent. If you feel like you need the action, keep it in the background.

If you've seen our videotape, much of our videotape is a class going on in the background, and we literally just grabbed a parent off the side and said, “Tell us about your kid.” You can do that in a short-form version. At the same time, you have enough of a graphic of the class going on in the background, that you can get a sense of what things are like.

Any other questions on social proof?

Caller: Stephen?

Stephen: Yes, go ahead.

Caller: I haven't ordered social proof. Is there a number we can call to get that, for those of us who haven't ordered it yet?

Stephen: Certainly. What it is, is you can get the starter package for free. The starter package is going to be the teleconference live or teleconference raw CD's, which are 5 one-hour teleconferences, my book ___ package, which will be the ___ format from now on, which is the lessons on social proof, also a newsletter called Mile High Maverick, and a DVD – in this case of social proof – of examples of how we've used it in long-form and short-form TV.

And then an audiotape. And in this case, it's got Smith talking about how to apply that in radio and TV.

To get that starter kit, you can call 800-973-_734. You can talk to Melissa. She'd be happy to get that out for you right away.

Caller: I didn't get the last 4 digits. It's 973…?

Stephen: 6734. Or, if you're online, you can go to martialartsresources.com.

Caller: I had tried it there about a month or so ago. And, for some reason, I couldn't get it to come up. I think one of your employees had called me back and I just couldn't, for some reason, access it. But that was about a month back.

Stephen: The internet is not fully reliable yet.

Caller: Can you repeat that formula one more time?

Stephen: Yeah. You can call now or as soon as we get off the call.

Caller: Okay.

Caller: Mr. Oliver?

Stephen: Yes?

Caller: Mr. Oliver, I had a question about the social proof packet. Basically, where do you find this to be the most effective? Is it in your mass media, like TV spot-type of a thing?

Basically, kind of the root of my question is that we were considering developing introductory videos that we showed a client, when they come in and want a tour of the school, that kind of thing. And using the social proof in that way seems to be pretty good.

But we already have them in the school. We should be focusing our time on talking to them and building rapport that way, rather than having them sit and watch a video.

Do you have a thought on that or an idea behind that?

Stephen: Well, yeah. I have several thoughts on it.

First is there's certainly no reason why you can't develop the video and send it home with them or use it as a mailer.

We've got the video that's in this package. We use that as a mailer, we use it as an introductory package that goes home with them, and we have a 6-minute clip that they see prior to the first intro.

Caller: And they see that inside your school?

Stephen: They see that in the school. They come into the intro, they actually have a little 6-minute clip. I don't want to sit them there very long.

And frankly, I'd rather have it be where they walk into the school and 4 parents surround them and tell them how great ___. That's hard to orchestrate every time.

Caller: I try to schedule my intros to come in during class times, so that they can do that. I have them sit in ___ minutes before I bring them back, so that they can do that. They can kind of eavesdrop and hear what the parents are talking about.

But I think my objection was – of course, it's a great idea – I just didn't want to have that client sitting down, too much down time watching a video, when I could be sitting there conducting the enrollment conference or interacting with the child, or whatever it was.

But I did want to get those common objections out there.

Stephen: I think you're absolutely right in your concerns. The right place to use it is everywhere. One of my instructors ___ poster up to put on the classroom, and the poster was a kid in a cute pose. But I'd much rather the poster be ___ on the wall.

Star 6 to mute yourself.

The right way to use it is literally everywhere. ___ Unless somebody's coming in ___ the program, it's a real plus. I wouldn't say it's essential, but it certainly is helpful.

<lots of beeping>

___ the renewal is the thing to do, and the school is having huge benefits for other people. If I'm a parent.

Star 6 and you mute yourself.

Caller: If I can put a little ___ at the end of that. Basically, one of the systems that we've just implemented in our school is to have a parent's letter of recommendation for all of our testing first degree black belts.

I think it's basically I did it for a lot of different reasons, and I started getting these papers back in and I couldn't have paid the parents to write anything any better than they wrote. It was just brilliant.

I'm considering putting those into our student newsletters, maybe every couple of months or something like that. And I was kind of 50/50 about the thing. I think it would be great to get that kind of feedback in our newsletter for our other students to be reading, but then I didn't want it to look too much like it's just all roses and things like that. I didn't want to kind of cross that line.

Do you have an idea about where that line is? Are you there?

Stephen: I wouldn't worry about that at all. What I would do is I would take all of those letters that you've gotten ___ a renewal, and tell them to go home and look at it. I would have the book available in the lobby and I would pass them around. I'd have those letters framed on the wall, so when somebody's standing around with nothing better to do, they're reading the letters.

A child has ADD and he's not learning very well, and you give him a ___, how frustrated they were and how excited they were ___.

Caller: I think that's a great idea. That's a great idea.

Stephen: Absolutely every way you can think of to use that, I wouldn't hold back on anything.

Now, that doesn't mean you don't give people meat. If you're sending out a newsletter, you probably don't want the newsletter to be 100% that.

Caller: Right. That sounds great. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Stephen: And, by the way, when we first did that ___ create a book ___.

Caller: Stephen, we haven't heard a thing. You're blanking out.

Stephen: Okay.

Caller: We're getting about every 7 th word, I think.

Stephen: That's not good. Let's see if we can do something about that. Do you have another question?

Caller: You know what? I really appreciate it. I think I've listened to those audiotapes about 5 times apiece now, the CD's. So thank you very much.

Stephen: Why don't you give us some feedback on the package, since you've gotten the entire package. What did you like about it?

Caller: Honestly, I think the social proof material was very good. It's not something that we were completely unfamiliar with, but it's always good to have a refresher and reinforce some of those things.

I really personally enjoyed the audio CD's, just to listen to Jeff Smith and big guys in the industry share ideas, and see the things that maybe ___ situation where ___ ahead of 50% of the ___ in the country, but maybe behind the top 20%, let's say. We're at maybe 200 or 300 or 400 students, between the schools, and maybe we're grossing $20,000 and $30,000.

We have a lot of improvement to do, and I think to hear those guys like yourself, of course, and Jeff Smith, and all of those guys, sharing some really powerful marketing concepts and community involvement concepts is really great.

I would love to be able to make it out to one of your conferences in Colorado . I've seen you at NAPMA now, a couple times, and it's very motivating for me. And then, of course, that energy goes into my staff. I think that was probably the most powerful for me.

I'm sorry it's not very specific, but I think that the audio presentation was probably the strongest in that package.

Stephen: Great. Thank you for your feedback. It's always good to hear, especially when we're launching a new program like this.

The audio on the CD's is considerably better than the audio on this teleconference today. Everybody, rest assured that you are able to hear those a lot better.

Do we have another question on the starter package?

Caller: We ordered it about 2 or 3 weeks ago, and I was wondering how long it would take to get here. Should we be receiving it in the next week or so?

Rob: I can answer that question. What happened was we got bombarded so heavily with requests for this kit, because it's just an unprecedented offer. This is a $795 kit that we're basically giving away for free. ___ help with the shipping and handling. ___ so many requests, that we flat out ran out of material. And that's just the honest truth of it.

Everything has been reordered. Everything is in. We're fully stocked, and the packages have been shipping.

So there's a strong possibility that your package has already been shipped.

Caller: Great. We look forward to seeing it.

Rob: Coming your way.

Stephen: And anybody on the call who hasn't ordered it, that means you'll be getting it shipped out right away.

Rob: Yeah. It should go out, most likely, within 48 hours.

Stephen: Fantastic.

Caller: Does that mean future kits are going to cost $795?

Rob: No, not at all. In fact, NAPMA 2 is really a bimonthly membership. You get 6 packages per year, whereas with the NAPMA program, as you probably know, you get a package every month.

The NAPMA 2 pricing is $___ per package, if you are a NAPMA member. And it's $399 per package if you aren't a member. So it's definitely not $795.

The startup kit for NAPMA 2 had so many different bonus items, we had ___, teleconference raw, 5 CD set, the custom NAPMA 2 binder, plus all the social proof materials and the Mile High Karate book, and all that kind of stuff. That had a $795 value. ___ $24.95. If you do call our phone number, we will send that to you for just the cost of $24.95, which is the shipping and handling.

Caller: Mr. Collasanti?

Rob: Yes?

Caller: I don't know if I'm touching on a bad subject or not, but is the recent Century issue, is that going to change any plans for NAPMA 2 or Mr. Oliver's involvement, or anything like that? Is it looking like clear sailing ahead?

Rob: ___ and open blue waters. In fact, if anything, it's multiplied our potential. Now we've got Century, which is the largest company in the world of martial arts, really, that's helping us to promote and support this program.

So really, if anything, it's helped us, not hurt us.

Caller: How is MIA and NAPMA connected now?

Stephen: Maybe I can leapfrog off of that.

Many of you are on the call because Century was in the call. And what we end up with is we end up with it being launched on a much bigger scale and with much funding. So I think the quality of the contents and the access to resources is going to be much stronger.

And maybe to reiterate what Rob said, somebody had asked about the pricing. It's about $149 a month, with a timelier delivery, if you're a NAPMA member. And it's about $199 a month if you're not a NAPMA member.

What, frankly, that means is you're much better off to be a NAPMA member and to get this, because you basically get the NAPMA membership for free.

Any other questions about the program or the contents so far?

Again, I apologize for the audio quality, the technical snafus.

Caller: The other guy had a question earlier about I think it was is there a relationship between MIA and NAPMA, particular differences, because MIA certainly assails us for our business. It's kind of confusing, which is which and what the differences are.

Rob: Let me see if I can address that for you. NAPMA will remain NAPMA and MIA will remain MIA.

When Century purchased our company, they kept me as the president of NAPMA. And I run the organization with the same team of people that we've had here for years. Nothing is different, with the exception that our company is now owned by Century, which is in Oklahoma , and we're in Clearwater , FL.

MIA, on the other hand, which is primarily run by Frank Silverman, they've got their own independent staff, their own team of content creators, and their own people that essentially build that package.

Really, if you look at the 2 organizations, they really are quite different. This is somewhat of a personality-driven business. In the NAPMA camp, you've got people like Dawn Barnes, who's – in my belief – the most successful female school operator in the world. ___ and she'll be the new director of children's education here.

We've got Stephen Oliver. Without a doubt, one of the best school owners in the world, one of the most brilliant guys I've ever worked with.

On the MIA side, you've got people like Senior Master Clark and people like Sergio Von Schmelling and folks like this. Tom Callas is over there on that side, nowadays.

So really, what we see is material that's being created by some of the industry's finest content providers and sharpest minds. But really, they're both very ___. It's no different than pizza. You go to one pizza place and another pizza place, somehow it tastes different, but it's both pizza.

Side-kick is the same thing; 2 guys teach sidekick, it's the same kick, but somehow they present it differently.

I really think that's how I look at these 2 organizations. Yes, we both provide content, but the subject matter is different and the overall presentation is very different on both organizations.

Stephen: Rob, maybe I can give an outside school owner's perspective. And we're obviously cooperating effectively on NAPMA 2 . But since day one, I've been a member of NAPMA. And then when MIA came along, I was a member of MIA as well as NAPMA.

I think it's Benjamin Franklin's quote. He said, “If you empty your pocketbook into your mind, your mind will fill your pocketbook.”

What I find that is a truism among all the martial arts millionaire school operators, is they spend more money educating themselves. I know for me, I'm going to a $3,000 internet marketing seminar tomorrow, in Chicago , and I probably spent $150,000 to $200,000 over the last 2 or 3 years, on education seminars, books and training materials for myself.

It's really a false economy to try and choose one or the other or choose among material that's good.

Now, you always have to edit good advice from bad advice, but you don't want to scrimp on quality information for your school.

For me, I might get a great picnic idea or a great camp idea from the MIA box. And if I got just one idea like that a year, it makes it worth the membership. If I get one great videotape a year from NAPMA as a good staff training tool, it's worth it for that.

I know anytime I sit down to create an ad, I pull out all of my ad slips from NAPMA, which I like those ad slicks much better, and I either use the ad or I use a picture from the ad or I use a concept from the ad. But it gives me a huge resource base. The direct marketing people call that a swipe file. But it gives me a huge resource base of material I can either use as-is or I can clip and paste, and put that together.

And as a school gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you end up finding that you develop staff and try to teach the staff member everything you know, which takes years. Or you can give them snip-its of a video tape from NAPMA and give them a clip of Dawn Barnes or a clip of this month it's Steve LaValley, I think, and give them a clip of one of the very best people in the world.

To me, if I only did that once every 3 months – and, frankly, I do it about once a week, but if I only did that about once every 3 months, it would be worth the membership costs.

So I think that's perhaps another way to look at it.

As far as NAPMA 2 , NAPMA 2 has been in development for about 2 years. It's been a project of mine for longer than that.

But now that it's finalized, we're going to be in great shape, well-funded, and ready to roll at a huge level.

Caller: Sorry about that. Should I expect the social proof and grass roots marketing and these types of materials coming from NAPMA 2 hugely different than from Extraordinary Marketing? Or is there going to be a lot of common materials? How would you define that?

Stephen: There are some commonalities, of course. What NAPMA 2 is designed to do is to be an ongoing ___ that educates somebody to a level of mastery in each of the subject matters that we cover.

So the Extraordinary Marketing program is a wonderful digital book, and the boot camps are marvelously intensive learning ___. Either one of them are ongoing, continuous learning experiences.

So it gives it a chance to really explore one topic at a time, get to a high level of mastery, ___ use all the resources of NAPMA and Century to bring in support people for the materials, to teach it well, to use multi-million-dollar video editing equipment and so forth, and really put together a package that I couldn't do on my own, and frankly didn't want to even try.

Did that answer that question?

Caller: I think so. Thank you so much.

Stephen: You're welcome. Any other questions? No? Okay. We're going to go ahead and wrap up. Again, I apologize for the technical difficulties today.

The June package on grass roots marketing, I want to reiterate a couple of things before we completely finish up.

One is I would divide the summer for yourself up into at least 3 chunks. For my schools, I think one of my schools had 13 enrollments last month. I mean last week, the week of Memorial Day.

We have a huge list of intros and enrollments right now, and we're focusing on bringing people in for summer special type of programs. But we're getting a lot of volume last week, this week, next week, probably through the third or fourth week of June.

Caller: Steve, you cut out at the beginning, when you said that. What area is this?

Stephen: In Denver , Colorado .

Caller: I mean what are you concentrating on? The first step you were concentrating on.

Stephen: We're concentrating on everything. Last week, we ran our infomercial ___ NAPMA 2 package ___ info calls from our infomercial. Our cost per call was about $35, which means our cost per enrollment will be $80 to $100 per enrollment.

Caller: When and where do you run those infomercials?

Stephen: Well, last week we were running them at 6:00 a.m. , 9:30 a.m. , 11:00 a.m. , Saturday mornings at 9:30 . We're running on a PAX affiliate, which is a broadcast channel that gets picked up the cable channels.

And in one of the later NAPMA 2 packages, we'll talk about infomercials and how to use that effectively, and have a special report.

But I'm saying we had 158 info calls for summer, just in 6 days. So right now is a very hot time to ___, whether it be direct mail, telemarketing, advertising, anything at all.

So that's the one-third chunk that I would chunk the summer.

Then you have July to mid-August. And July to mid-August is when you can be out in summer camps and daycares and pools and movie theaters, and you can be having booths at the water park. And everywhere where there's a community activity that draws people in for the summer, whether it's kids or ___, you can be out there getting to them.

An example is we're doing 3 or 4 Girl Scout camps the next couple weeks, and 3 or 4 Boy Scout camps in the next couple weeks, and those have intersession or summer camp.

And all of those type of activities, if you get out there and you teach a little introductory class, the important thing is get a permission slip, name, address and phone number, preferably even e-mail address, and then go to them right away to try to get them in to enroll for the summer, but also ___ database. And if you set a goal for yourself to develop 2,000 new leads over the summer, guess what your September and October are going to look like? They're going to be phenomenal.

And coming up in they August package, we're going to teach you how to follow-up with those, with direct mail and with other technologies, to really expand that.

And then you start getting the third quadrant of summer would be August. And in August, you're building up that back-to-school momentum, building up marketing before kids get back into school and after they get back into school.

For the adults, they go through the same syndrome, because they hit Labor Day and all of sudden they're back to work and back to their normal routine. ___ predominantly adult clientele ___.

And that is a time when you're focused on the direct mail and the telemarketing and ways to go back to leads you generate over the summer, but with probably a much higher conversion rate than you'll have in July.

Really get emotional, really get aggressive, and focus on that.

Caller: I wanted to implement telemarketing, but then they passed this Do Not Call . For a small school like mine, we probably couldn't afford to purchase this list. Could you give us some information on how to telemarket to our local communities, and invite them down for a free introductory or whatever, without crossing wires with the FTC on this Do Not Call list?

Stephen: Keep in mind, the concept of the Do Not Call List – and there's a variety of companies that were doing ___ one thing or another, that's what the Do Not Call List is ___, to get rid of that.

Caller: I'm sorry, I only heard about every fifth word there. It cut out for a second.

Stephen: Keep in mind, the concept of the Do Not Call List is to get away from cold-calling.

Now, if you have somebody who was a student and isn't a student anymore, or who came in for an introductory program and didn't enroll, or came in to a demonstration and gave you permission to call them by giving you their name, address and phone number and checking a little box on the form, then you don't have a problem with Do Not Call.

Caller: Right, because we have a relationship.

Stephen: Right.

Caller: ___ local people ___ a free introductory lesson, something like that.

Stephen: ___ pretty much dead now.

Caller: That's dead?

Stephen: Broadcast fax, unsolicited e-mail ___ telemarketing are very difficult ___. You can buy a list, and it's not very expensive, that has been merge-purged against the Do Not Call List.

But frankly, we don't do much cold-calling. We try to get out and collect leads and collect data from people who are interested, and then go to them from that perspective.

Caller: So they're hot, not cold.

Stephen: That's exactly right. And if you get 1,000 hot leads over the summer, you're going to have plenty of enrollments in September, without ever worrying about going to anybody else. That's fairly easy to do. If you did 20 summer camps with an average of 40 or 50 kids each, you've got enough people to last you all through Christmas, marketing to those guys.

Between the strategies we're going to talk about in August, on direct mail strategies with telemarketing follow-up to direct mail, you'll be fine through Christmas, just from the activities you did in July and August.

We're going to have to wrap up.

Rob: I think the most ___ that our consultants have received ever since the launch of NAPMA 2 , was how is NAPMA ___? And in the beginning of this call, we really talked about the minutia of that, the difference in actual materials. But a little story came to mind I want to share with you.

Caller: We're hearing about every fifth word.

Rob: It wasn't too many years back, when Joe Louis came out to our school and did some seminars. He taught 2 seminars. The first one was for all of the students, and the second seminar was for all the black belts.

And I remember the first seminar was just incredible. The sweat pouring. He worked on blocks and counters and footwork and defensive strategies, and all of Joe's techniques. It was just incredible. We thought it was the best seminar ever.

But then, when we got into the second seminar, which was for just the black belts, he worked on one thing. He put our backs against the wall and he pretty much worked on head movement drills; head movement drills for about an hour and a half.

When we got done with that, all of us felt like, “Man, that was the best seminar we've ever had on head movement.” It was like a eureka phenomenon.

And I really think that it sums up the difference between NAPMA and NAPMA 2 . All of the things that NAPMA teaches you are core, essential, fundamentals of running a successful commercial martial arts school.

NAPMA 2 takes that to the next level. It's kind of like the finesse training that many NAPMA members were looking for.

I hope ___ understand what the differences are.

Stephen: To just wrap up, again, if somebody has not already gotten the starter package, you can call 800-___-6734 to receive that. Or, if you're online, martialartsresources.com, and register for that, and that will be shipped out right away.

And then, be looking for the June package. It's going to be all kinds of grass roots marketing activities, which are very appropriate to focus on for the summer, because it's really prime-time for those types of activities.

We've got to sign off now. Again, I apologize for some of the technical glitches with the sound. But I hope you'll enjoy the package. And everybody ___ and give us some feedback on what you like or what you've been applying from that.

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