78 – Geordie Lavers-McBain – Living & Breathing The Martial Arts Lifestyle

Geordie's life is 24/7 martial arts! We discuss creating your own style, tournaments, optimising KPI's and more.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN:How Geordie was able to develop his own martial arts style and why he refers to it as the best styleHow he started teaching combat sports in the Australian armyThe three battles one must win in self-defenceHow to host successful martial arts tournamentsHow to optimise key performance indicators in your schoolAnd more*Need help growing your martial arts school? Learn More Here.TRANSCRIPTIONIf you can put those sorts of things together and you can work out what makes an elite athlete, what things should you focus on and you apply it to your business, OK, what makes a really good class? What makes a really good ad?And even if the ad is to a completely different thing, or your classes are a completely different style, you can just put those key factor and key components together and work out what it is that's really important.GEORGE: Hey, George here – welcome to another episode of the Martial Arts Media business podcast. This episode is going to be a little bit different. We’re busy driving in a car, we just finished an event in Sydney and I've got with me Geordie and Giorgio.GIORGIO: How's it going guys?GEORGE: Good, and I'm speaking today to someone I've been trying to interview for quite a long time and he's been hard to track down, but I'm finally in a car with him and he can't escape. So, welcome to the show Geordie Lavers McBain.GEORDIE: Thanks for having me on George.GEORGE: Cool, so just for the sound, I'm going to be passing the phone up and down. So we might sound like we’re going in and out, but here we go.So first up Geordie – thanks for being on the call. Just for everyone that doesn't know who you're, you own multiple schools, you've got a long history in martial arts – give us the two-minute take – who's Geordie Lavers McBain?GEORDIE: Ok, that's a complicated question. I'm a martial artist, I like just about all styles of martial arts. I teach my own style of martial arts in my school and I have a lot of combat sports that I also teach. I teach wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, MMA, I have guys who fight in Kyokushin, boxing – lots of different styles of combat sports, but I also have my own style of martial arts, which I've sort of combined with all the different styles that I've done over the years.I've done a variety of different things, and have black belts in different things, so… yeah, so that's what I do there. Also, around jiu-jitsu tournaments in Queensland and wrestling tournaments in Queensland and I also am a defence force contractor with the army. I go on base two times a week and teachgrappling, close quarters grappling and different things like that, so it's pretty much me I guess.GEORGE: Pretty much, but that's quite a full plate. So there's a lot of places we could start. I guess just starting – how did you get around to developing your own style?GEORDIE: Yeah, so my own style was a combination, so basically what happened was, many years ago I've trained in a lot of different styles of martial arts, so I started teaching Zen Do Kai way back in the day and my instructor ended up leaving Zen Do Kai and then he sort of went on a different path, so I started doing my own system. And Zen Do Kai was the best of everything in progression, but I really sort of took that to heart.So I started sort of thinking about, what other things I can incorporate into what we do. I looked at different ways to test that, so I bounced for about 15 years, so I sort of worked at a few things that worked in that environment. Also, I sort of was just looking at different ways that we could test things, such as like, how do we work out if body punctures were effective for multiple areas...