We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Master Samuel Morris. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Master Samuel below.

Master Samuel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

I had been looking for a way to serve new student markets that other schools weren’t doing. I wanted to try something new. The service to the para athlete community in martial arts was growing, but I had no idea how to enter it. Luck was on my side, as a woman came in to my school asking about lessons for her son. While we would not be a good fit for her personally due to scheduling conflicts (she worked at a school and could not be out in time to bring her son to me) she did ask about classes for her students. Turns out she worked at a private school for autistic students. We brainstormed together a bit and determined that her school could bus students to me once per week for classes. We commenced doing so and soon we had twenty para athletes of our own!

Master Samuel, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

South Orlando Martial Arts has been around for 10 years serving children and adults in Olympic taekwondo and kummooyeh, both Korean martial arts. We always have a family atmosphere providing not just lessons but also fitness classes for parents and family events like movie nights and the occasional parent’s night out. We have never offered after school or summer camp programs as I feel these things reduce a school to being a daycare and losing focus on the art. Therefore, our families know they are here for a lifestyle and not an activity. All of our instructors are background checked and trained in Safe Sport for the safety of all of our athletes and parents.

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

We help keep our family friendly atmosphere by doing all of our communications with an app that works like other social media but is completely private. The only people with accounts are our students, parents and staff. No one can locate nor advertise to anyone in our group and I personally approve and grant access to new members, so no one outside of our school can create an account. It gives everyone a way to communicate with each other openly and directly without having to share personal contact information. This is more important for instructors. It makes them available without compromising professional standards.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

The pandemic really tested the resolve and loyalty of our students, families and staff. During the 30 day shutdown we could not hold classes in the school. The landlord was not offering to suspend rent during this time, so our cost kept on. The question was how to keep providing service so as to not lose accounts during this time. Again, our social app saved the day. It allows for live video streaming so we could still present a class and students watched and participated from home. It was a huge challenge for our staff, as they were not trained tv presenters and they were not getting immediate feedback from students (they could see/hear us but we could not see or hear them). This worked well for awhile but eventually we joined everyone else in the country with Zoom meetings for classes. Luckily, we only lost one account through the pandemic, it could have much worse and the end of us!

Contact Info:

• Website: southorlandomartialarts.com
• Instagram: southorlandomartialarts
• Facebook: South Orlando Martial Arts