We were lucky to catch up with David Mitchell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi David, thanks for joining us today. Do you have any advice regarding quality control and maintaining quality as your brand grows?

It’s complicated, applying the idea of “quality control” to martial arts education. It’s a big issue in my industry, one that gets overlooked quite a bit. Most instructors are developed “in-house,” meaning they were a student of school and they’re A) enrolled long enough, B) have some skill, and C) have an interest in helping teach; so they default into the instructor roll. There’s not really like an “instructor” college to go to. Sometimes there may be an association camp…but that’s not quite the same thing as a quality control setting. Even then, it’s not often you get a QC on your own skills.

At the point you start teaching, due to the demand on time, it’s easy to fall into only instructing and no longer training yourself. Especially if you start your own school – you have the business side to think of. Writing lessons, keeping track of student progress, checking in with them…it’s time consuming.

Martial arts is one of many perishable skills. If you’re not seeking out new training opportunities and new information, how can you expect to educate someone else effectively?

Part of my personal philosophy (and one that translates to the business side) is that we should be constantly seeking to improve ourselves. In every aspect, we can. There is no such thing as a mastered skill or mastery level. We are on the path to mastery – it is not the destination. If I’ve reached mastery, it mean’s I’ve stopped trying.

David, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started in the martial arts probably like most people. I wanted to know how to fight and to defend myself. I may or may not have had a short temper and a quick tongue, so a bit of “insurance” probably wasn’t a bad idea. What I discovered instead was something I would absolutely become obsessed with: the whole training process, itself. I quickly found out just how little I understood about fighting, discipline, and even thinking. Fast forward 20 years: I’m still training and still discovering things I don’t know. A good instructor continues to train and to seek out new information.

What I do now is curate training experiences for people, mainly in the form of private lessons or very small group sessions. Large classes are great to ramp up the energy but a client can get so much more out of the individual attention. I sort work as a personal trainer for martial arts.

Some of my clients have specific topics that they want to train; for example, knife defense or ground fighting. They may have experience in other arts but feel like that art didn’t provide satisfactory answers to some key possibility. I do my best to provide answers – or if I can’t, I’ll point them to someone who can answer it.

Other clients might have to work with physical or mental restrictions. Those can be in the form of mobility issues or mental health issues (like anxieties or phobias). I help tailor the training environment which can allow them to work and progress at whatever pace is comfortable. It’s not a race to the finish line – it’s a lifestyle.

I tend to work outside a ranked or belt structure. The client really drives their own progression by asking questions. By encouraging questions and fostering curiosity skills, a client naturally progresses faster and information is absorbed at a higher level. Teaching what to question or what to look for will create a student who is self-correcting (to a point) and only needs little adjustments over time. I’m far less concerned with how many techniques you can regurgitate, and far more interested in how well you perform what you DO know.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

There is one specific lesson I had to unlearn and come to grips with, and it still keeps me up on occasion: that I don’t have to follow the typical outline that other martial arts instructors or schools have followed. When you think of martial arts training most people will imagine a matted training area, lots of students in uniform, weapons and trophies displayed on the walls. I know all my teachers did it that way…therefore I have do it that way too, right? I even tried it for a little while. After I had to relocate a few times, I eventually realized I don’t have to follow their exact footsteps.

So I started to look at how other industries operated. I looked at how, where, and what they were doing to find clients and meet their needs. I looked at personal trainers, tutors, coaches, accountants, etc. What I found was that there’s an entire subset of people who wanted training but don’t want to be in group classes. Sometimes that’s due to their schedule, sometimes it’s just simply their own comfort level.

What I ended up becoming is sort of a private martial arts instructor or personal defense coach.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Contact with clients is imperative, especially in an individually-tailored experience. I see my clients on a scale, semi-regularly to almost randomly. As life happens, the one thing people consistently set aside is self-care or self-interest activities. New job, new baby, new love interest…they’ll be gone for a while, but they typically come back.

I’m not big on writing newsletters (working on improving that one) but I’m pretty good at keeping a running list of people to message online in some format, be it texting or social media messages. I keep them simple. I never push another resell or deadline, like “time to reup on your training”. I want them to feel like family. So that’s what I ask them about: “How’s the family doing?” or “Have you seen this crazy video?” A simple “Happy Friday” goes a long way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.roninmartialartsinstitute.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/roninmartialartsinstitute
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Ronin-Martial-Arts-Institute-100997475347496
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ronin-martial-arts-institute/
• Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ronin-martial-arts-institute/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@roninmartialarts