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Zen Planner and Martial Arts School Member Retention, Business!

Well, if you run or work in ANY kind of martial arts school, you've two primary focuses:

1. Sales (selling the unique benefits of your services), and;

2. SERVICE --as in "servicing your members."

One of the official sponsors of the Alabama Build Vention 2015 is ZEN PLANNER and, well...ZEN PLANNER is hosting a free webinar about member retention strategies.

May I suggest you tune in. Find details here: http://info.zenplanner.com/member-retention-webinar-0

Key topics will include:

Nurturing prospects to establish loyalty before their first class

Creating a customer journey that generates longevity and retention

Effective use of customer engagement to build community and increase loyalty

Predictive analytics to identify engagement need flags

Effective save strategies

Learning from losses

Get practical advice to increase your engagement, retention and profit.

#zen planner #alabama #tom callos #retention strategies

Tom Callos Martial Arts Business Info for Europe and Alabama, w/ Zen Planner too!

I will be teaching a class in The UK at Mat Chapman's school in London, then on to Mallorca, Spain on March 22 and 23 teaching for Stefan Billen's organization. If you're living in Europe and would like to meet me (I'd like to meet you) and/or have me to your school, I've couple of open dates.

On April 8, I'll be in Greensboro, Alabama for the Alabama Martial Arts Build-Vention 2015 with Dave Kovar, Julia Hill, Keshia Thomas, the team from ZEN PLANNER http://zenplanner.com. Amal Easton and Casey Easton ---and some of you, I hope. Come build-for-charity with Pam Dorr of www.herohousing.org and attend seminars and classes in ethical, intelligent, forward thinking martial arts school management.

Need info? Feel free to contact me at 530-903-0286 or via private message on Facebook or otherwise. The Alabama event is free, if you attend you will be responsible for crowd-funding a $1000 donation to Hero Housing.

#alabama #zen planner #tom callos

The Alabama Build-Vention 2015, a Decade of Martial Arts Teachers Working for Others. The Story (Some of It).

The Story of Why I Chose to Bring Martial Arts Teachers to Greensboro, Alabama to Learn How to Be Better Leaders, Instructors, and Martial Arts Practitioners

By Tom Callos

A Living Quarters Made of Waxed Cardboard;

A Clothing Designer for Victoria's Secret;

Hundreds of Black Belts in The Black Belt;

A $20,000 House;

An Academy Award Winning Filmmaker;

Julius Rosenwald, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King;

Environmental Activist Julia Butterfly Hill;

Pies, Bikes Made of Bamboo, and;

$250,000 in donations, 40,000 hours of volunteer labor.

For the last 10 years I've been asking my friends in the martial arts community to raise money for home construction and renovation projects in the small and rather obscure southern town of Greensboro, Alabama. Not only have they complied, but hundreds of them have actually traveled there with me and provided hands-on labor for the projects, more than 20 different projects to date.

I now call the yearly event The Alabama Build-Vention, as it has evolved into a martial arts business convention built around doing charitable design-build and renovation projects for people and buildings in need of some tender loving care.

It all got started in 2001 when I happened across a photo in an in-flight magazine about the work of architect Samuel Mockbee and his students in and around Greensboro. At the time I was working for a company teaching people about martial arts school management, flying all over the country leading workshops and seminars, while daydreaming about a simpler life and lifestyle.

The photo I came across showed a small living structure, a "pod," built by some of Mockbee's students that was made of big bales of waxed cardboard with a roof over it. It intrigued me due to its use of simple found-object materials (the bales were found sitting behind a grocery store).

The idea of a simple and inexpensive living structure appealed to me, so I started looking into the work of Mockbee to see what else he and his students had been doing. What I found, besides some really cool structures, was that Mockbee operated from a philosophy that sounded in many ways like the philosophy I promoted (or wanted to promote) as a martial arts master teacher. It wasn't much of a stretch to take quotes from Mockbee and replace "architecture" with "martial arts."

For example:

"The practice of architecture not only requires participation in the profession but it also requires civic engagement." --Mockbee

I read:

"The practice of the martial arts not only requires participation in the profession but it also requires civic engagement."

(source: http://samuelmockbee.net/quotes)

So one day in 2001 I decided to call Samuel Mockbee. Unfortunately I was not able to reach him, but did leave messages for him at his office and with the architecture department at Alabama's Auburn University. On that very same day, in the evening, I went into a local Border's Books, walked up to the magazine rack, saw the latest copy of Architectural Digest, pulled it off the rack and flipped it open --right to Mockbee's obituary. He had passed several months earlier from cancer. I felt like I'd lost a friend, despite the fact I never got to meet the man.

The next day I called Mockbee's office at The Rural Studio (www.ruralstudio.org) and was connected to a former clothing designer for Victoria's Secret, Pam Dorr. Pam had also been inspired by Mockbee's work and had left a lucrative career in San Francisco to be an intern in his program.

Pam and I started talking about how I might help with work being done there in Alabama, as for some odd reason I felt like I was supposed to, somehow, DO SOMETHING there. I was a top teacher in an industry that worshiped membership sales and upgrades, retail sales, and tactics designed to bring in "floods of new students," but something about Mockbee's efforts as a teacher spoke to me about a different approach to teaching the martial arts.

As strange as it seemed for a martial arts teacher to want to be involved in a program to mentor young architects and creatives, I kept at Pam for several years to see if there might be some way for me to participate in what was happening in and around Greensboro.

In 2004 I had started a project called The Ultimate Black Belt Test, which was an experiment in innovative black belt testing curriculum. I phoned Pam and told her I was going to bring a bunch of these testers down to Greensboro and provide labor for anything she might need help with.

"Pam, we'll dig ditches, clean up junk, and work like dogs if we have to," I remember saying. I was certain that there was no better place to bring the team to discuss creativity and out of the box thinking than Greensboro.

Typical martial arts events or conferences were held at fancy hotels in convention cities, like Las Vegas, where we would do some training and then sit in chairs for hours being pitched new products. I was so bored with that approach and sought, instead, to DO something interesting. It was my hope that the martial arts teachers who came with me would connect to Mockbee's approach to teaching, as I saw it as so applicable to what we do as martial arts instructors. What I didn't know at the time was how influential and important Pam Dorr, the former Rural Studio intern, would become to my own work and to the town of Greensboro.

That offer to help ended up becoming a house build, Pam's first, for a man who was living in a trailer that had been partially burned, had a leaky roof, and was generally just a hazard.

This film, below, shows members of the Ultimate Black Belt Test (UBBT) working on "The Bunk House," a antebellum cabin that was leaning dangerously to one side, but that we helped save with funding and renovation. The Bunk House now serves as a place to house visiting students and volunteer groups. Our first house build recipient, Henry Lawson, can be seen in the piece.

The video was produced for The Hallmark Channel by UBBT member and Academy Award winning filmmaker Nancy Walzog.

Over the last 10 years we've funded and engaged projects such as The Rosenwald School renovation. The Rosenwald Schools were the brainchild of Sears and Roebuck President Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington; they were schools built to educate African-American children who weren't being taught in the public schools of the time. We were blessed with having Rosenwald's great-granddaughter, New York graphic designer Laurie Rosenwald, make a commemorative print for the event.

As you can see in the three photos below, the Rosenwald School renovation project was a big one. The building was, literally, falling apart. The restoration brought back to life a building of no small importance to the community and to the history of the region.

At one year's event, we built a house for a delightful elderly woman by the name of Ms. Georgia. Ms. Georgia lived across the street from The Safe House Museum. From the Rural Studio's blog:

On the night of March 21, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. sought refuge from the Ku Klux Klan inside a small shotgun style home in the depot neighborhood of Greensboro, Alabama. Today that house is known as The Safe House Black History Museum. It is a site of great significance to American Black History as well as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The museum documents the struggle for equality at the local level, along with other highlights of the civil rights movement in hale county. The Safe House Museum is unique as it contains many artifacts of the struggle from slavery to equality, as well as unpublished local and state photos of the civil rights movement. There is living history at the museum as it is directed by Ms. Theresa Burroughs, a Greensboro native who participated actively as a foot soldier during the movement. Theresa and her family kept Martin Luther King Jr. safe in their home on the night of March 21, 1968.

(Photo credited to Timothy Hursley, from the Rural Studio's Safe House Museum page)

Ms. Georgia and many of her neighbors were there that night that Reverend King hid in Ms. Theresa's family home.

One year, before we restored the bunkhouse for Hero Housing, I happened to read an article in a graphic design magazine about this forward thinking graphic design and communications teacher, John Bielenberg. John mentioned in the piece that he had seen Mockbee speak at a convention and it had inspired him to incorporate some of his philosophy into his own work, such as the unique PROJECT M.

I sent an e-mail to and then called John and suggested that we might collaborate on something in Greensboro, as I explained what I had been doing there and the impact Samuel Mockbee had had on my own work.

John eventually brought Project M to live and work in there --and the result has been a number of very interesting projects, including:

Pie Lab

The Buy a Meter Project

And The Alabamboo Make and Ride Project, which is now Bike Lab.

At our 2014 event we had the good fortune of a special guest builder, Julia Butterfly Hill, an author and environmental activist best known for sitting in an old growth redwood tree in Northern California, for more than 2 years, to keep it from being cut down by a logging company.

Julia came to help me emphasize to attendees the importance and relevance of environmental issues and our notion of what is self-defense. In 2015 Julia will be returning --and this year we're delighted to have three other special guests.

Our Next Event

in 2015, Dave Kovar, Keshia Thomas, and organic cooking chef Casey Easton will join us in Greensboro. Julia and Casey will be preparing meals for the team, offering some of the young attendees to participate in the food prep and cooking. Dave Kovar, an accomplish author and veteran martial arts teacher will be explaining his national bully prevention program. Keshia Thomas will be speaking about courage and activism, as Keshia is someone who has made her life about both issues.

In 1996 Keshia, in the image above, was one of Life Magazine's "pictures of the year" when photographer Mark Brunner caught her throwing her body over a white alleged Klu Klux Klan supporter being beaten by protestors at a Klan rally in Ann Arbor, MI.

In 2015, over 4 days April 8 to the 11th, we're going to tackle some small renovation projects, perhaps a few of the team will help Pam's Youth Build program finish a house they're working on, but our main project will be to BUILD A BUSINESS for Pam, Hero Housing, and Greensboro.

We're going to help Pam design and build an outdoor bread oven to open Greensboro's first fresh bread bakery since the 1930's. This project originated from a phone call I made to Pam while traveling thru the south last year giving seminars. I was stay a few nights in Greensboro and called Pam from Jackson, MS and asked her if there was anything she needed me to bring.

"A good loaf of bread," she said. Turns out that there was no decent fresh bread being sold in little old Greensboro.

Coincidentally, I'd been eyeballing an outdoor wood bread stove built by a couple of organic produce farmers near my house. South Fork Farm and Bakery bakes these mouthwatering loaves of bread, so good that you have to buy two; one to take home and one to eat on the way home.

Pam had been, as of late, starting small businesses in Greensboro to help fund HERO Housing, so the bakery oven will not only provide Greensboro with fresh baked bread, but it will give HERO another potential income stream.

See the CBS News story below about Pam's small business success in Greensboro:

Over the last decade the Alabama Build-Vention has brought in somewhere close to $250,000 in donations for the martial arts community --and helped to facilitate more than 40,000 man hours of volunteered labor to Greensboro.

For the international martial arts community, the Build-Vention has give me --and many of my colleagues --a platform with which to discuss community engagement, volunteerism, experiential leadership training, and any number of topics previously absent from the agenda of the martial arts "industry."

Many of the black belts and martial arts students who have come to The Black Belt, this very poor region of America, have gone back to their own schools and designed community outreach projects from seeds planted in Greensboro.

For more information on the 2015 event, to offer to participate and/or to help with fundraising and donations, reach out to Tom Callos at tomcallos at g mail dot com --or by phone at 530-903-0286.

This year's co-sponsor is ZEN PLANNER Software. They'll be sending some of their staff to build with us --and has donated generously to the project.

#zen planner #alabama #tom callos #build-vention #martial arts business