Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Baer Kenney. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Baer thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea
So many people have great business ideas that never come to life. Things that would change their life and many others around them, but they never take that leap from great idea to great accomplishment.
That was me. I had a million ideas and even half heartedly tried a few of them, but never really went for it. Then I was on vacation with my wife in the small town I’d grown up in. We were talking about how many people wanted me to train them and how could I find a place to do it. So she says why just find a space. Let’s make a school!
Her dream was to run a business well, but she didn’t at the time have a direction, so we dove into the whole school idea with both feet. Started Baerswords school and we’ve never looked back. Today we’re a large school with hundreds of students. This year we were voted by the Pitch Magazine as the Best Martial Arts school in Kansas City!
And what did I need to get started? Just someone asking me, why not go for it?
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Baerswords School of Western Martial Arts is a place where people can come to learn how to fight with swords! Not the lightweight little bendy swords you’ve seen, but real swords! Longswords and Sabers, Rapiers and Spears, Broadswords and Shields.
So why? Why would you want to learn sword fighting? Because it’s both an amazing workout, and more fun than adults are usually allowed to have. When I ask my students why they come to Baerswords, the overwhelming response is “Because it’s so fun!” Imagine a way to stay active, trim up, meet wonderful people, and then get to hit them!
The first thing people always ask is, does it hurt? The short answer is no. None of the swords are sharp, and we wear face masks, gloves, and jackets to protect us. We do get the occasional bruise, but it’s one of the safest sports around today. Far safer than softball or basketball where you typically see two or three injuries on the court a month. In my 17 years of actively fighting I’ve seen one person injure his knee (he was just walking, but it was at the school). That’s it! Lots of sore muscles and a few light bruises.
And the joy of fighting someone who doesn’t want to hurt you, but just wants to pit their skill against yours? Indescribable. I teach sword fighting because I wanted to have people to fight with. Now hundreds of people share that dream with me.
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
You know… one of my biggest pet peeves with typical Martial Arts studios is the idea of loyalty to your dojo and your sensei. It’s a very strong concept rooted in eastern philosophy and often doesn’t translate well here in the west. It often becomes unnecessarily confining and demanding of people and can easily lead to dissatisfaction and outright anger.
Conversely, one of the things that I love about Western Martial Arts is that we can be far more laid back and relate to our students as equal partners in the learning and growing process. Ironically, this is one of the things that helps foster loyalty! I make it clear to my students that I support and encourage them to explore other schools and clubs to find what meets their needs most, and I have lost a few students over the years to that. It is this freedom to explore, though, that many of my students claim is the reason that they don’t need to. Many have even tried to go to other schools and been turned off by the possessiveness there.
So the moral of this story is, in order to keep your students loyal, give them the freedom to choose that loyalty for themselves. Then simply be the best option anywhere around. We find that virtually all of our students come to us and stay because we make it a place that is welcoming and fun. In the end, the loyalty we get from our students is extremely high, and we don’t have to do anything to get it.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Like so many people and businesses, the pandemic caused an unprecedented shift in the way we had to conduct business. In the spring of 2020 we had to close our doors because of a citywide lockdown. We were really scared that the growth that was just beginning to blossom would whither and die if we didn’t come up with some creative options. We also had no idea as to whether it would last days or months, so we had to remain flexible enough to handle anything that came at us.
Sword fighting is, by it’s very nature, a very interactive sport. We shifted to online Zoom classes and had to totally redesign our entire curriculum. We normally warmed up by tossing small medicine balls around the group, and that obviously wasn’t going to work, so we shifted to teaching people how to juggle.
We didn’t have each other to hit, so we taught people how to build pells (posts that you can swing swords at) and loaned out our practice swords. We taught people how to do solo drills so they could continue to work out and not lose all of their skills.
Kids classes were SO much harder. Keeping kids focused is a challenge at the best of times, but doing it when you’re competing with all of the things going on at home is really tough. We had to make our kids classes much more verbally interactive and far more playful.
When we finally came back into the gym several months later, many of the changes that we made stuck! For instance, we still juggle as a warmup some of the time, and we do individual drills far more than we did before the break. We ended up a better, more creative school because of the changes we had to make, but boy I wouldn’t want to go through it again!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://baerswords.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baer_swords/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Baerswords
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BaerLlc
- Youtube: @baerswords
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