Martial Arts Marketing Expert Stephen Oliver
Exclusive Interview: Stephen Oliver, Mile High Karate & Extraordinary Marketing
Written by Hersh Sandhoo
Appeared in Webmation's MAinsider March 2003

Stephen Oliver is one of the most successful and educated martial art school owners in the country. Master Oliver has been repeatedly recognized internationally for his contributions to the martial arts industry and continues to grow the Mile High Karate organization while teaching schools internationally to be more effective in their teaching and management practices.

Master Oliver graduated with Honor’s (Cum Laude) from Georgetown University in 1982 with a degree in International Economics and later earned a Master’s degree in Business Administration. In additional to running the Mile High Karate organization and consulting other martial art school owners, he has been on the Board of Directors of the Educational Funding Corporation, worked with Chuck Norris on a number of projects, and successfully promoted a nationally recognized karate tournament called the Mile High Classic. Despite his vast success, Master Oliver is still very motivated and has aggressive plans to open at least 28 new schools in the Denver Metro area within the next 24 months.

WM: What principles do you follow that have helped lead to your success?

Stephen Oliver: I think the very first thing is to have the view that you can always expand your own perspective of what is possible. I deal with a lot of martial art school owners that when they get to 50 students or $4-5 thousand a month they think they are really flying high. As you saw at the last Bootcamp I just held in Boulder, Colorado, interacting with people who are doing 3, 4, or 10 million dollars a year it expands your sight of what is capable and what is possible. What I’ve always tried to do for myself both within the martial arts industry and with business owners external to the martial arts industry was to look at people who are really accomplishing a lot. This helps to expand my worldview of what is capable and to move me closer to their results through modeling their thinking and behavior. As you keep expanding your perspective of what is possible you continue to shift what your expectations of yourself and your expectations of what your daily accomplishments and activities should be.

Number two is just the ability to get started and take action. I think probably everybody in our industry right now, if they read my newsletter, the NAPMA material, MAsuccess, or your Webmation material they are bombarded with ideas. But I mean how many do they actually act on? And do they sit down with their laptop or pen and paper or do they go to printers and get it to start rolling? So one is having a broader perspective of what is possible and two is just taking action and getting started with something.

WM: What is the hardest obstacle you have had to face on a professional level?

Stephen Oliver: Oh that is a tough one. Back in 1988, I had a year where I went broke, got divorced, and had about 90% of my staff all quit within about a month of each other and that was when I was running 5 locations around town, so it is kind of hard to top that one. That year I lost a quarter million dollars, owed the IRS $160,000.00, was in the middle of getting divorced and selling my dream house.

The main thing is that you can dwell on failures like that or you can dwell on success and on where you want to go. It really doesn’t really matter where you are at, the most successful people I know both in our industry and other industries have had periods where they were either incredibly broke or incredibly stressed out, or having incredibly bad staff problems or marriage problems or whatever. And they were always able to bring their focus back and look at where they want to be and what they want to become and not focus on what the reality of the day to day situation are.

WM: And that was basically how you overcame your problems as well?

Stephen Oliver: Oh it was just setting goals. I tell a story often times about a Gold Rolex Presidential watch that I own. I tell the story about the watch because that is my Million Dollar watch. When I was getting divorced, broke, a quarter million in debt I went down to the jewelry store and put the watch on layaway. My rule for that watch is that I would get it out of layaway for myself if, and only if my schools did a Million dollars in revenue that year. That, by the way, seemed like a huge number at the time – I think in the previous 12 months we had only done something like $650,000 so the goal required something like a $350,000 improvement.

Anyone else I would have told that story to at the time would have thought I was crazy, you know you have a divorce going on, you are a quarter million dollars in debt, you don’t have staff, what are you talking about buying a ten thousand dollar watch. “No, no I’m not talking about were I’m at, I’m talking about were I am going to be in 12 months.” By Thanksgiving I went down and got the watch because we had done a million seventy thousand by then, but it was just having to focus on where you are going to be, not were you at, or what the problem is at that time.

WM: Its very easy for success oriented people to become engrossed into their work, often times we can be considered work-alcoholics, has this ever been an issue with you and how important do you think it is to balance your personal and professional lives?

Stephen Oliver: Well I think its important to balance it although I think there is a difference between somebody who works a lot and somebody who is a work-alcoholic. If you are doing the things you enjoy doing and you end up doing a lot of that I don’t think that qualifies as a work-alcoholic.

I read an interview with Donald Trump one time and he talked about how many hours he worked, but his comment was that some people take vacations and I go to work. I enjoy what I do and if there is an activity that is required for the business that I do not enjoy doing I’ll go and hire somebody to do it or farm it out to be done by a 3rd party company and supervise it. But the main thing is structuring your day and structuring life around things you enjoying doing and making sure all the activities that are needed to accomplish your business are done at the same time.

WM: Time management is a crucial concept in any business owner’s life, how do you manage your time? Especially Personal and Professional? Do you set specific times for certain aspects, like spending time with family or doing work?

Stephen Oliver: Stephen Convey speaks about his concept of time management, which is keeping a perspective of your goals and then focus on managing roles rather than managing the minutes or hours of your day. I know last month you interviewed John Graden, he had a wonderful article where he talked about the fact that the way you manage your time as a martial art studio owner is that you do not make a to-do list, you keep in mind that your job is to generate new students and keep the ones you got. Everyday you should be walking through your daily activities saying does this help me get more new students or help me keep the ones I’ve got. This helps you set your priorities in life pretty quickly.

I think where most people get out of whack in time management is that you are in a management role and you think if you run down to staples or office depot to pick up supplies you are doing something valuable. But as a school owner you have find students and keep students and if you aren’t doing one of those two things you are wasting time.

WM: On average how many hours a week do you work? Has this changed from when you first started?

Stephen Oliver: Somewhere between 10 and 80. It is wildly variable. On the Mile High Karate schools right now I have two staff meetings a week and they each last about three hours, so that is a period of time where I always work and if we have a week, like a couple weeks ago, were I had a bootcamp for extraordinary marketing, staff training sessions, guests in town and some other things, that ended up being an 80 hour week. This week I’ll probably work 25 hours.

It changes regularly based on what my current projects and priorities are. You know the last couple years I’ve gone from a situation where I owned all the schools 100% to where I had owner operators because I had the desire to have someone else put more labor than I was into the business and so I don’t work as hard as I did at one time.

In fact a lot of people laugh about my work schedule because I show at Starbucks with my laptop and Wi-Fi connection and that is what my workday is like. It is not really spent in a karate school teaching class on a daily basis.

When you are running an individual school you do not have much choice but to be there from 3 to 9 plus be doing the promotional aspects during the day, so your time is structured for yourself, when you move into management or in my case you have a big multiple school operation where your main job is to get the people running the schools to do their job. Then your time becomes much more flexible – and, frankly more important to organize and control.

WM: Are there any areas in your life that you are trying to improve on?

Stephen Oliver: Well with a new baby I’m trying to spend an awful lot more time just being able to watch her grow up and not fall into the trap I’ve seen lots of my friends fall into where they spend so much time working while they had young children that they didn’t see their youth. That has partly been the reason for my move toward multiple locations and some of my other activities.

I don’t do much direct consulting because I do not want to trade for hours for dollars. When, and if I do it’s got to be either as a percentage of the results we get or $650 - $800 per hour.

WM: What has been your motivation for success? Is it still the same as when you first started your martial arts school?

Stephen Oliver: Well when I moved from Washington DC to Denver I had been working with the Jhoon Rhee Institute and at the time they were pretty much recognized as the top organization in the country and my initial motivation, in a very positive way, was to out do the Jhoon Rhee Institute.

There is a point in which I think everyone becomes less competitive, instead of looking at an external result that someone else is having and trying to match it or beat it you become more introspective and concerned about manage a combination of lifestyle and income and balance the two. What I’ve been working on the last few years is the ability to go from say 100 hours a week to 20 hours a week and at the same time multiple my income. I don’t want to work less and make less, but at the same time I want to make sure I’m focusing on high leverage activities rather than low leverage activities.

Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee Awarding Stephen Oliver His 1st Degree Black Belt

WM: One thing that I noticed at the bootcamp is that you were going out of your way to help school owners who were even in direct competition with Mile High Karate as well.

Stephen Oliver: Yeah, we had several people who were either direct or approximate competitors. Right now I’m playing in two fields, I’m giving advice to martial arts school owners internationally, I’ve had clients as far away as Tokyo, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and then I’m running my Mile High Karate schools here in Colorado. But I think the martial art school industry tends to be very secretive and very worried about the martial art school down the street rather than focusing on expanding the positive prospective of what we do and getting more good schools so people will have a better perception of the industry. I believe there is gradually going to be an industry shakeout where we will be getting rid of the bad schools which predominant the industry today and having the quality schools grow and flourish.

WM: What do you think about NAPMA’s initiative with Coca-Cola?

Stephen Oliver: Oh I think it is wonderful, I was there when they made the contract with them. We were there with Evander Holyfield, Bernie Kerik, Melba Moore, and the corporate representatives of Coca Cola at the Battle of Atlanta. I think anything we can do like that lends credibility to our industry.

WM: What are the top three mistakes you see school owners making?

Stephen Oliver: The first mistake is continuing to focus on martial arts as a hobby rather than looking at what their prospective students are interested in and providing a product that their prospective students want. The industry has been rife with that over the last ten years or so.

I’ve seen a lot of martial art instructors get massively enthusiastic about the latest trend – whether it be jujutsu, jeet kune do, or whatever themselves and then decided that was what there school was going to teach and forget that just because let’s say I’m a 28 year old athlete martial artist enthusiast who has been training for 15 years, what I’m interested in doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what the mom of a 12 year old daughter is going to be interested in for having her daughter learn.

So I think that is number one, number two is not looking at their school and really running it as a businessperson would run a business. I know a lot of karate instructors are still working a day job to support their business, but I don’t think they do that because they want to, they do that because they haven’t figured out how to make their school make an adequate income for them. When you look at your school as a business then you start to prioritize expenses and set realistic objectives for revenue and make the two balance so there is an adequate bottom line.

Karate instructors seem to all want a huge facility and brag about their 6,000 sq foot facility which has very little to do with how much money they are going to make. At the same time they are very hesitant about pricing – and hesitate to charge what their program is worth. If I’m a martial artist with over 15 years experience who has really worked on being a good teacher as well as a good athlete then I should be able to charge a reasonable amount of money and that is not $40 or $50 dollars a month that is $150-$200 or even $250 dollars a month. One, I think they under value what their services are and two overspend on things that don’t make a difference whatsoever and three focus on their hobby way too much and do not focus on their school as a real business.

WM: Would you agree with this statement, compared to the other business models out there, it is fairly easy for a good instructor to become a millionaire if they treat their school like a business?

Stephen Oliver: I don’t know if I would say fairly easy, I think it is fairly hard to run any small independent business at a very high level of profitability because there are so many things that you have to deal with. I do agree that a martial arts school is a relatively simple business when it is possible on a relatively low investment to produce a high level of income. In my case I came into this industry with only ten thousand dollars and turned it into a business doing a couple million dollars within three years.

WM: How old were you when you started?

Stephen Oliver: I started when I was 23 and opened 5 schools within 18 months and I had a partner lined up who bailed on me, he had the money and I had the business plan so I ended up borrowing 10 grand from my parents and opened the five schools.

WM: That is pretty impressive at such a young age.

Stephen Oliver: You know when I did my MBA a few years after that a finance professor was talking about how much capital you need to build a business and he said what I did was impossible. I said no it was not impossible just very stressful. But I mean it was just focusing on the outcome and the focus was that I better go beat the bushes and get a whole bunch of more students so I spent every penny I could come up with and every penny anybody would loan me or bill me 30 day net on advertising and marketing and then once the students were in I had to be very focused on generating revenue. The first school paid for the second school, the second school paid for the third one, the third one paid for the fourth school and so forth. You know I think the worst startup I had was 100 students within two and half months.

WM: Why do you think many school owners are unwilling to treat their martial art school as a “real business” and invest in things like advertising, seminars, and the Internet?

Stephen Oliver: I don’t think the martial arts are much different from many other industries, it’s the same reason why the guy who’s a bodybuilder who spends all the time looking in the mirror and watching himself lift weights is killed by Gold’s Gym, Bally’s, 24 Hour Fitness and all those guys when he opens his own gym. They come into it as a hobbyist and then they get a bizarre feeling that what their specialty niche is what people should highly value and the general market does not know the difference between one style or another. They just know what the general benefits of the arts are what type of personality they want their teacher to have.

WM: If I am not mistaken you use ASF International, NAPMA, MAIA, Kovar Products and network extensively with other school owners. Do you think the money and time investments that you put into these different avenues have had a direct impact in your success and lifestyle?

Stephen Oliver: Oh its huge, its huge. You said it right, I was one of the first members of NAPMA. I was a member of Andrew Wood’s program back when he was still doing that. I have been a member of MAIA since day one. I still get stuff from EFC, Certainly the Kovars and Keith Hafner. Tim Kovar and I probably talk 5-6 times a week and I network continually with Keith Hafner, Steve LaVallee, Jeff Smith and others. I don’t think there is a limit on how much you can spend on a high quality seminar or high quality training materials – if you take action on the ideas and turn them into improvements in your business or life.

Now clearly there are some people around, not just in our industry but everywhere, who are trying to sell information whether it be tapes, seminars or audio tapes who don’t know much about what they are talking about but I just spent $3900 going to a marketing seminar and I’m pretty good at that, Tim Kovar and I just spent $5000 going to a seminar with Jay Abraham. People are silly if they try to pinch pennies on quality information.

I was amazed that there are a lot of martial artists I know that don’t think anything about dropping $5,000 to travel to Brazil and learn from a Brazilian on how to grapple but cringe about spending the same amount on business advice when their career is dependent on learning how to run their school as a business.

WM: You have taken on a different role in your martial arts career, can you give us a little insight on your goals and how Mile High Karate is now being operated?

Stephen Oliver: I’ve gone back to a very aggressive growth mode. For instance, we have two grand openings going on basically within about a month from each other. My short term objective is to grow to 28-30 locations in the Denver Metro area and then grow to 50 or more in Colorado.

I got to a point where I had 5 – 6 locations and had gotten pretty much on a plateau where I was just trying to maximize the revenue at each of those locations and maximize the bottom line. And then I shifted my thinking about the same time I was doing Extraordinary Marketing I realized I could end up in a higher leverage position by bringing in people who would be owner operators and training them effectively. We have a huge pool of instructors available, obviously 20 years later you should have a few black belts around.

Most of instructors we have now started with me when they were 7 and are 25 now. They’ve been with us for an awful long period of time so we are now having the ability to start new locations and have a career path for them. And also bring people who are 35 to 50 who will run them as an owner operator and be responsible for a lot of the marketing and sales.

WM: So the owner operators do not necessarily have to be martial art students, they could be parent of a student?

Stephen Oliver: Well they all have to become martial art students, but they don’t necessarily have to have been a 15-year black belt before we go to operate the school. There is a big difference between somebody who is a phenomenal athlete and somebody who is a phenomenal teacher. There is also a difference between somebody who is a phenomenal teacher and someone who can run a business. If you wait around to find somebody who has got capital, the capability of running a business, the interest in having a career change, and who is a phenomenal athlete and teacher, those do not come along very often. So we are kind of mixing and matching and finding people who can finance and run a business and providing the martial art athlete teachers. A lot of our owner operators are people who are very interested in education and very interested in having the kind of impact we have with kids and families but are not necessarily people who are ever going to have a vertical sidekick.

WM: So what is your role in the daily operations of the school? Are you mainly involved in the developing marketing materials and staff meetings or do you take a more active role?

Stephen Oliver: Well it depends on what you call active. When you have nine locations you are not going to personally impact the sales or teaching on a daily basis in any one of them. So I’m not going to spend my nights going over to one of the schools and to do enrollment conferences or renewal conferences or go teach a white belt class. Now I am very engaged in our black belt classes and either teach them or oversee the curriculum on a weekly basis. With that I am very engaged in class and curriculum planning on a weekly and monthly basis in all the locations. All the locations have the same curriculum, same basic class plan, very similar marketing objectives and activities going on each week.

I have a huge amount of staff training activities going on all the time. We have staff training sessions for three hours every Monday and Friday. Black Belt class for all staff and all Black Belts on Friday night and a weekly teleconference on Wednesday night. Additionally, we do staff training business bootcamps (like the Ultimate Martial Arts Marketing Bootcamp only just for staff) and teacher Black Belt University Teaching Bootcamps. I organize and run all of these activities – along with several staff trainers.

WM: Tell us a little more about extraordinary marketing and what you want to accomplish through it.

Stephen Oliver: The basic program I started selling a couple years ago has multiple pieces A. “Insider’s Secrets to Using the Internet to Market you Martial Arts School; B. “One Idea Worth Half a Million Dollars” which is basically a very effective program about going into public schools and creating that as a feeder for the karate schools; C. A book I kind of threw in as an afterthought which has gotten most of the glowing feedback which is called “Everything I was I knew when I was 22” and its 32 chapters of different things that over the years as a martial arts school owner I came to the realization that either I was doing wrong and corrected or that I had seen other people do; D. “Direct Marketing for Martial Arts Schools”; and an awful lot of support materials to help people learn how to be more effective at marketing whether its direct mail, working with public schools or referral mechanisms.

That is the first pillar. The second pillar is the bootcamps, like you just attended, I have now done three of those. Each of the three had a very different perspective, flow, outcome, and content. The next bootcamp is coming up October 25 and 26th in Breckenridge, Colorado. The place were we at this January was nice but the one where we are going to be next is absolutely spectacular, I mean you open the ballroom doors and you are looking at the ski slopes with a lake in between. I expect this will be the absolute best to date – and, to have a very high level of school operators participating and speaking.

Two of the bootcamps are available as audio and video programs now, First: “The Ultimate Martial Arts Marketing Bootcamp In a Box”, where basically I did about 25 hours without taking a break on how to use the Internet to market for new students, how to use referral mechanisms, how to use direct mail, sales processes, I mean it was really every way there is to get a new student. This program also included Chris Rappold who has some terrific Public Relations and student service programs going, and Scott Smith who’s our expert on all phases of Television and Radio.

Then the one you were just at, which ended up being the “Summit of Martial Arts Millionaires”, As you know, we had eight of the ten top school owners in the country in attendance and presenting their proprietary concepts. The focus was on student retention, upgrade systems, and how to maximize your income per student rather then necessarily learning how to go out and market with direct mail or on Television. This program includes the best of Bill Clark, Jeff Smith, Joe Corley, Sergio VonSchmeling, Tommy Lee, Terry Brumley, Lloyd Irvin, and many others. As we head at the Bootcamp – the first bootcamp helped Terry Brumley add $250,000 to his revenue last year – and, helped Lloyd Irvin add $300,000 even while spending a big portion of the year in the hospital from a grappling injury.

In addition to the Extraordinary Marketing program, the bootcamps, and the audio/video programs I have the weekly Extraordinary Marketing email newsletter I write, which is a freebie and I’ll do that until I get bored with it, but its been going on for about 18 months. It is really international and has over 7,000 school owners signed up and a huge amount of active participation (readers may sign up for the newsletter at www.ExtraordinaryMarketing.com) the readership is truly international.

WM: How many people have bought your program?

Stephen Oliver: Oh, it’s several hundred. I don’t have the number in front of me but I think it’s around 400-500. The way Extraordinary Marketing came about is when I was running the schools, I had a friend who in the nutritional product business who wanted me to do some marketing consulting for him because he had seen the operations of the schools. So I started helping him out a little bit, he was one of my MBA friends, and he was doing a whole bunch of Internet work and I was looking at the stuff he was doing and said well Tim what you are doing is wrong. He said why isn’t going to work and I said well I’m not sure I just know from my experience in marketing you are not on the right track. I ended up taking every Internet marketing seminar I could come up with, a couple of them were $4,000 to $5,000 dollars. In fact one of the guys who became a pretty good friend of mine lives here in Boulder, Jonathan Mizel, and I was in the process of doing all this stuff and I couldn’t get my friend to implement any of the stuff that I was telling him to do but every time I implemented it in the karate schools it worked like gangbusters. Well Jonathan said well geez why don’t put it in a book and sell it to other Martial Art school owners. Well okay I’ll do that.

In fact, Extraordinary Marketing started just as a book on using Internet marketing. Then I said while I’m at it I might as well give them probably the more important stuff, well not that the Internet is not important its getting more and more important as we go, but there are two or three other pieces that are more directly applicable to the average guy running the school then the type of stuff you or I are going to do with them.

WM: Where do you see yourself in the next ten years?

Stephen Oliver: Where I would like to see myself in ten years is obviously running a huge number of schools that will be joint ventures and franchise schools in my own organization and then expanding the impact I’m having with extraordinary marketing. Perhaps by still doing bootcamps and that type of thing, or by just having a lot of substantive material that is available. I think maybe the content that I’m providing is distinguished from some of the rest of the industry because there is a better academic foundation, there is very little in anecdotal information, its all proven in the market and it working by someone who has had high success.

WM: How important do you think it is for a school owner to invest in a web site?

Stephen Oliver: I think a school owner would be silly not to recognize the value of the Internet, if you look at the average karate school who has a school web site, they have some student put up the web site, it probably has this big flash intro with some kind of kick across the screen and then they have this messy menu with all kinds of stuff and its an error to send a prospective student there. There is no way for a prospective student to really get the type of information they need to make a decision whether they want to enroll in classes or not.

What I want to show my red belts that have been with me for two years is a lot different than what I want to show the mom of an 8 year old who is a perspective student. And they don’t have the sense of routing them to the right type of information. We have our main website milehighkarate.com but I have a separate url which is freekarate.com, so when I go on an infomercial or TV commercial or something like that we advertise freekarate.com and it takes them straight to a prospect site.

And the other thing, like what you are doing with email and we are doing with extraordinary marketing and mile high karate, is just because someone came to your web site once doesn’t mean they are ever going to come back and the beauty of email is that you keep giving them reasons to come back to the web site to keep in contact with them. Also if they don’t buy now it doesn’t mean they aren’t interested, you have got to continue to be able to stay in contact with them. The principles of marketing on the Internet are no different than any other direct response marketing. If I was going to do a direct mail campaign and direct mail all my prospects in the Denver metro area only once and never follow up with them ever again well I’m only going to get a small sliver of people who will eventually come around and participate.

WM: On average how many leads do you get from your websites; freekarate.com and milehighkarate.com each month?

Stephen Oliver: Well it depends heavily on what else we are doing. If we are heavily doing broadcast media like infomercials and stuff like that we will get a pretty good percentage of the respondees will go to the web site as opposed to directly calling the number.

WM: Absolutely, that is because the Internet is such a non-threatening medium.

Stephen Oliver: Exactly. In the last bootcamp and the previous bootcamp that is now available in bootcamp in a box, I talked a lot about having alternative response mechanisms that are not threatening. You can do offline, which is like an 800 number with voicemail, or online with a web site where they do not feel like they are immediately going to be talking to a sales person.

A lot of people who are not going to pickup the phone and talk to an operator right now will look at the web site to get a little more information and then if you have a way for them opt-in in your email list they’ll keep being contacted by you on an ongoing basis, you know a sequential autoresponder system. Then if they really find it interesting at that point they’ll pick up the phone and call you or a lot of our’s come from registering for an introductory appointment right there online and it gets confirmed by email.

WM: What obstacles if any have you found when trying to create your school web site?

Stephen Oliver: When we first put up are original web site it was the same old thing, some black belt of mine came up and said you really should be on the Internet and they put up what they thought was a good web site. For some reason it didn’t dawn on me early that marketing is marketing is marketing.

On a prospect site if you wouldn’t put it in an envelope and mail it to them, why would you let them see it on the site? With some of the schools, you go to their web site and they have pictures of people fighting bare knuckle, the last tournament or of someone lying on the ground bleeding and I’ve seen crazy stuff like that on people’s web sites and they let prospects see it. Now marketing to a prospect on a web site is no different than marketing to a prospect in an envelope or marketing to a prospect on a TV commercial or marketing to a prospect on an infomercial there just is no marginal cost involved.

A direct mail piece might be 8 pages and the web site could be 32 pages if it needed to be and it doesn’t cost anymore. I think the first obstacle was somehow thinking there was a difference. Once I came around to the thought that direct mail marketing and telemarketing and newspaper advertising and web site marketing are all basically the same thing. Its just that on TV you get constrained how long you can buy the time, on newspapers you get constrained on column inches and on the web site you don’t have that constraint. That is the only difference.

WM: What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Stephen Oliver: All kinds of stuff. I probably read about 100 books a year. The joke is that I spend all my time in Starbucks because I have my Internet connection there and bookstores. Which are kind of my alternative offices. I spend a lot of time traveling and doing some fun things with that. And now spending as much time as possible time with my new baby.

WM: When are you the happiest?

Stephen Oliver: Obviously when spending time with my baby, but in addition to that I think I’ve always been a very aggressive student of whatever I’m doing. My projects have been learning about education, and obviously we are in a education field, learning about marketing, Internet marketing and direct marketing, earning an MBA to learn more about business, so when I’m in an active learning mode I’m very enthusiastic and very happy and when I’m in a mode of implementing on that type of behavior I’m happy.

I don’t like trying to convince people who want fail that they don’t need to. I think the tone of my newsletter is that way to.. well here is something I know works if you want to go do it great if don’t want to do it go fail somewhere else. I don’t want to hear about it.

Stephen Oliver With His Wife and Daughter

Hersh Sandhoo is the President and CEO of Webmation, leaders in web development and online marketing for the martial arts industry. Mr. Sandhoo, a fourth degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and Hap Ki Do, has trained for over 13 years.

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