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The History of Bushido-Kai Videos
The Blue Box
Back in 1979, a student and friend of mine purchased an early video camera and VCR. The camera was an oblong blue box which had no viewfinder. You had to attach it and the video recorder (which was about the size of a small doghouse) to a TV set to see what you were shooting. Within a year, he had outgrown it and sold it to BUSHIDO-KAI for $800, a very good price back then considering new models were $1200. The yen was about 250 to the dollar back then, so the value of the apparatus was at least twice what a new unit would be now. Of course, the new units work better, have more features and are in color. That's right, the early video cameras were black and white only. But we were proud to own one anyway! We recorded exams so that students could learn from their own performances and we documented aiki and weaponry techniques for our parent organization. It was the beginning of our innovative traditionalism!
Let's Keep a Record!
A few years later, we still had the blue box, but a number of our students had much more advanced set-ups. Our dojo was expanding quickly and we were able to invite instructors from afar to teach seminars when seminars were just getting popular. A student suggested that we record Roland Maroteaux's first seminar at BUSHIDO-KAI in 1984. It was a momentous event for us: our first international seminar with a highly ranked aiki-ju-jutsu practitioner. I asked another student who was a news editor for a national TV network if he could borrow or rent a quality video camera for the weekend event. He came up with a state-of-the-art set up and recorded every technique religiously. Unfortunately, with a backlighting problem, Maroteaux's white gi and white hakama against the white mat came out pinkish and sometimes blurred. The attempt at archiving knowledge was a failure but it taught us a lot.
The next year, another student, Eric Bickernicks (a multi-award winning amateur videographer and now a professional), shot Maroteaux's second visit (see video A-2). This seminar joined our first video seminars with Wally Jay and Joe Cowles (video JJ-1). These records were much better even though they were shot on standard 1/2 inch, rather than 3/4 or 1 inch professional quality VHS tape. We converted to 3/4 inch format when Soke Don Angier (A-3) came for his 1986 visit.
Our goal then was simply to have a clear, detailed video record of the knowledge that was being transferred by these talented practitioners. Then someone suggested that we make them available to the public. Having had no background in either videography, advertising or merchandising, I declined. Looking at the non-martial videos being offered back then, I assumed that we needed a studio and someone to do fancy graphics in order to get a leg up on the market. But then several students commented on the quality of instruction present in our videos. Sensei, this is much better stuff than most videos offer! Have you seen some of the video out there?
Why, yes, I had and I truthfully hadn't been very impressed either with the quality of the shoot or the material taught. Video was a great way to sample other styles and arts but because many video buyers came from an outsider's point of view, nearly all the videos taught very basic techniques, meant to explain a "foreign style" one step at a time. Videos were like martial arts books in motion. "This is a fist, this is a punch, this is a kick. Now let's repeat." The producers of these videos were assuming, perhaps correctly, that their viewers wanted to learn from video instruction and therefore had to start at the beginning. They were also assuming that their viewers did not have a rewind button. At least the books, as fundamental as they were, did not go over the same thing 12 times.
A Part-Time Concern
It was not until 1990 that I was convinced our videos were marketable. I was tired of seeing 45 minute tapes with terrific special effects, but far too much repetition and far too little depth of knowledge. I really didn't know if I had the time to enter into a video business but I reasoned that I could at least start it on a part time basis. If it made a few extra dollars a year, so much the better, but if it failed, I would at least not have staked my livelihood on it. I was earning a very modest income from my martial arts school, was doing extra work on manuals and books which made little or no income and was starting a seminar sub-division which made a few hundred dollars once or twice a year (since I was new on the circuit back then). How could I make my avocation my regular vocation while providing a value and benefiting the martial arts? Many schools had become more business-oriented but seemed to do so without concern for increased benefits to their students. Many video businesses were popping up but they seemed to want to make a quick sale rather than a lasting impression. I wanted to make both a lasting impression and an advance in a student's development so that both the student and the martial arts, in the long run, would benefit.
It was Tony Robbins' Personal Power audio tape series which kicked me over the top. Instead of assuming that I did not know how to go about marketing videos, I set about learning whatever I needed to know. I sent away for packaging catalogs, called Bernie Lau (an old phone friend) and asked about mail-order information. I bought books on self-publishing, on mail-order, on advertising. I was typewriter-able and had, over the last decade, authored numerous manuals at the typewriter, illustrating them myself; but, I did not know the first thing about computers. Because a student gave me access to his Mac for two years, I got semi-computer-literate before I laid out the bucks for my own computer set up.
I called various video dubbing outfits to get prices from them. I wrote Inside Karate, Black Belt and other magazines for advertising rates and technical requirements. Then I went to my local printers and asked if they could do this or that and exactly what they needed to get from me. Back at the computer, I used a word-processing program and hand-pasted photos to create covers for the videos. Now, of course, I could do the same on half a dozen or more programs but back then, I was happy if I could find the right menu for the right function on my word processor.
Then I had to solve the numerous problems which crop up when you take on a new business. How do I get orders? Whom should I advertise with? How do I ship them out? How do I deal with records, with labeling? What sort of shipping do I use? How shall I price the videos? What will my overhead be? In what order would I address each of these problems?
The part-time business was adding 25 hours a week to my work schedule and I was not making dime. Small businesses like BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA are seldom outrageously profitable. Could it just make a part-time salary for semi-part-time work? It would make no sense to work 60 hours a week to increase income by 10%. But momentum being what it is, I headed forward.
More For Less
When I was growing up, a little slogan The Best for Less caught my attention because it said succinctly what I expected a business to be. But the best video equipment, the best studio, the best editing equipment, the best graphics, the best packaging, marketing, etc. would not always be available to me if I were to try to keep the price of each video lower than the average market price. And I did want to undersell everyone else! But how do you compete with businesses who have 10, 20, even 30 times the titles you have? You've got to start somewhere. I looked at the advantages and disadvantages of our seminar videos compared to others. Of course, I could not weigh how important any given advantage or disadvantage might be to a given customer, but at least I would have an overview of what the customer might be evaluating.
If I had tried to erase each disadvantage, we might not have gotten off the ground. I had already waited five years since marketing videos was first suggested to me. I was convinced that we had definite advantages over non-seminar videos and I would make sure the recorded seminars were worth preserving before sending them to market. Many seminar recordings were either trashed because they were just not shot well enough or put on our Unedited Video list at a lower price because, although they had valuable material, they were shot less skillfully and in my opinion, could not be edited well enough to warrant marketing at full price. What remained were well-shot, well-edited, superbly taught seminars.
You Begin With What You Have
With only six videos to market, I took out my first ad in Inside Karate. I reasoned that my articles and columns in the magazine might attract a few followers who might like to try our videos. Our titles were ju-jutsu and aiki-ju-jutsu not because that was the new fad, but because we had started recording videos at our annual Aiki Festival. I taught karate as well, of course, but previous attempts to run karate seminars ran into stylistic problems. Way back in 1974, I had started offering multi-style seminars with the whopping price tag of $5 per person. A guest instructor would show up, teach to a dozen or fewer people, and then not stick around to learn what another instructor had to teach. For some reason ju-jutsu practitioners got along better with each other than did karate-ka, at least when it came to seminars. I wrote about this once in an article called Why Karate-ka are (Too Often) Contentious. Aikido-people, however, were even less forthcoming than karate-people. Nowadays we get both karate-ka and aikido practitioners at our seminar but, at first, only the ju-jutsu seminars drew attendance.
Because we believe that every martial art overlaps into other martial arts, we have expanded our yearly summer seminar. It is now called Advanced Budo Weekend, Advanced Budo Camp (depending on the duration and locale of the seminar), or Advanced Budofest. Our goal is to bring truly advanced concepts and methods to the average martial artist. Indeed, my personal mission statement is to improve martial arts by emphasizing similarities, increasing perceived possibilities and raising standards in a positive, supportive environment. BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA's videos provide one small way to realize that mission.
Arriving at Prices
First, I looked at what most videos were selling for. It was around $59.95 plus shipping of $2.50 or more. I set my sights on undercutting this figure and giving more bang for the buck. If I could charge only $55 (our original price) and include shipping, I reasoned, I would have a viable alternative to the average video offer. Of course, this way of figuring a price was backwards. So I set about figuring expenses before actually committing to a price. What I found rather amazed me. The videos are expensive to shoot and edit but relatively inexpensive to reproduce. They are not expensive to ship, but they are enormously expensive to advertise. I found that a ten-fold mark-up was not out of the ordinary, but could not figure why someone did not simply go to market with a five-fold mark-up and undercut everyone by 50%. The answer was simple: the costly advertising cannot be figured into your total overhead until after sales are made. There have been months, for instance, in which we have done very well. There have been many others in which we have lost money. Most months we actually break even. Three months per year we get enough orders to make a yearly profit. This is a function of the cost of advertising.
Another overlooked expense is stocking. To give a simplified example, if we order from our dubbing company 10 copies of one of our videos in one month and sell 2, we still have paid for 8 and must realize no payback until more are sold. We can wait until, let's say 3 more are ordered, to break even but we may need to keep at least 10 on the shelf just in case 7 are ordered next month. So, profit folds back into stock which is not always sold. That's why many companies build in a large profit margin. I took this into account but still managed to undersell the competition.
Our books and manuals have a similar story. We wanted to make all our books around $10 but realized quickly that when you self-publish, the per volume cost is very high and there are also the shipping and stocking costs. Most books on the market make at least a 10-fold increase over costs to arrive at a cover price. Even our $35 books like Cracking the Kata Code (which has more valuable insights in one chapter than the concentrated pith of an entire average martial arts book) does not approach a 10-fold increase over cost. We could not, at that time, undersell mass market books. Once you set up the printing, books are relatively cheap to put out; cheaper if you print more. Without a method to distribute the books over a wide area, however, we cannot afford to run a large run or even an average run of 1000. If the cover price had to stay, we decided to insure that the material in the book was worth at least twice the price. I do the writing, the layout, the drawings and pose for many of the photos with students. A local printing company prints and binds our books and manuals.
Recently, however I have seen paperbacks in the bookstore for $30 and up. Ironically, we may soon undersell the big boys without even trying. So our books, like our videos, are a great deal! They not only offer more page per penny, but have material no other publisher provides!
Thr Games Competitors Play
The problem was that many people did not realize what a great deal they were getting. Look at what the other guys do. Their deals sound good on the surface, but may not be quite as good as they seem.
One company produced videos in groups of 5 or more. To get the whole picture, you must buy all five videos. To make it easier for you, they charge $69.95 per video but then give you a big $50 off if you buy all 5. That's $59.95 per video, but each video is only 50 minutes of which 20 minutes is repetition! The total is $299.75. Then they add shipping and handling of $5 for the first and $2.50 for each successive tape. That's an additional $15 for a total of $314.75, or $3 more per video. For each 50 minutes of video (of which 30 minutes is real information) you would pay about $63 or $1.26 per minute. They could have put the entire material on 2 two-hour videos at $69 each and paid for shipping but that would not seem as attractive in an ad even though it would have cost the consumer only $138 or 57.5¢ per minute even at the higher per video price! After a long stretch, this company lowered prices, probably to compete with the new guys on the block, Company Number Two.
Company Number Two charges only $39.95 for a 45 minutes video of which there are usually 2 parts. Their shipping rates are the same as Company Number One's. So for two videos that could have easily fit on one cassette, the consumer pays $79.90 plus $7.50 shipping for a total of $87.40. That breaks down to 97.1 ¢ per minute. Cheaper than Company Number One's original rates but not as reasonable as BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA!
We charge $59-$69 for a 90-120 minute video and we pay shipping. For our smallest video (90 minutes), this breaks down to 65.6¢ per minute. BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA's 2 hour videos break down to 57.5¢ per minute. And, if you wish to get an entire set, the price is even lower! You might say, But you sell video by sets as well! True, but we do not arrange to sell 5 or 10 videos if we can fit the material nicely on 2 to 4 videos. We don't put filler in, we don't repeat, we don't sell you what you don't need. We record an event, take out the non-educative stuff and figure how few videos the material will fit on.
The presentation of videos (or any other commodity) is called marketing, and I am learning more and more about it. In fact, this very catalogue is a marketing method by which we are using honest reporting to make obvious the value of our products!
Then there is Company Number Three. They charge $59.95 to $99.95 per video for seminar videos without the editing! Now since the most costly portion of making a video is the editing ($50-$100 per editing hour, not per hour of final footage), this company saves a bundle by having a student with a home video camera set up his tripod on one spot and let the camera run. Any editing that is done has to do with Joe Student shutting off the camera when the seminar attendees begin to practice. How does Company Number Three justify the prices? Secret advanced material. People will always pay more to get something someone else does not have. The more they charge, the more valuable and elite the material seems. But if it were really meant to be limited to just a few, there would be no seminars offered nor videos published. Their 1 hour tapes break down to $1.00 per minute (plus shipping costs) and their 2 hour tapes break down to 83.3¢ per minute plus shipping. At BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA we sell only edited videos and at half of Company Number Three's prices!
BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA's professionally edited 2 hour video rates are 31% lower than Company Number Three's, 40% lower than Company Number Two's, and 54% lower than Company Number One's original rates, 40% lower than their updated rates.
INTEGRATED BUDO AND INTEGRATED BUSINESS
If we are such part-time, low-profit, quality-oriented, advanced budo business people, how can we stay in business? Shouldn't we try to make more? Sure we should, but not by giving less. If we were to double our customer base, for instance, we would not have to raise prices or cut quality. Since we are loath to raise prices and simply will not cut quality, we have little other choice but to increase our customer base. In fact, this little history of BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA is offered in hopes that old customers will spread the word to new customers. But we have an ulterior motive, as well.
As previous mentioned, my personal mission statement has to do with improving martial arts. That's not just in my dojo or in my small federation, but around the world. As we expand our video and print products, we hope to gradually influence a wider and wider audience. I have already received letters of encouragement, support and thanks from satisfied viewers and readers from Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, and the USA. A very senior Japanese Aiki practitioner wrote me a note saying that he really enjoyed one of the videos his student showed him. It showed aiki in the old way he was used to. Your face is new but your voice is old. You are teaching it as it was meant to be. He thanked me for the video presentation even though he could not understand all the jokes.
I see old budo buried deeply inside the new version which I find rather superficial. There are many excellent practitioners of this new budo. I certainly don't claim to be a better athlete or a tougher dude than some of the superb practitioners of the newer budo. I just claim that they are missing a lot and, as a result, the world of budo is lowering its potential. Once you understand budo styles as just individual expressions of universal concepts, you can more easily see similarities between systems rather than concerning yourself that Ralph's system might have something yours does not. Once you see the increased possibilities within your system, you see more similarities. All budo becomes one not because of political affiliations or because of a stylistic domination, but because budoka either already do or are capable of doing the same types of things. It is not our styles that are limited so much as our thinking about them. We are not stylists firsts but budoka first. The style is just our way of learning how to be a budoka.
In short, I see budo as integrated. Aiki overlaps karate which overlaps judo which over laps aiki, etc. Similarly, I see BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA as one method of getting people to see how things can be integrated, not haphazardly combined, not pastiched, but integrated. To that end, BUSHIDO-KAI BUDOYA's products have introduced new students to our federation, BUSHIDO-KAI KENKYUKAI and to our seminars which, in turn, introduce more people to our products and help create new products. It is a nice way to integrate one's business.
We are small but we have a rather large mission. If we grow, we'll accomplish that mission sooner. If we do not grow, it will take a little longer. Of course, I am not the only teacher who sees budo as integrated. Some of the others appear as guest instructors in our videos. But even dozens of us will not change the dominant perception of martial arts in the world. The customers who buy our products and attend our seminars can influence more people. And those people can do the same.
In fact, we have already seen a change in attitude that we believe originated with us (maybe this is too presumptuous but it is at least possible). In the '70s, when nearly no one understood kata details save a very few experienced practitioners, I was advocating a deeper study of bunkai and an emphasis on the throwing and locking movements in kata. Recently, I was talking on the phone with a martial artist of less than six years experience, when I mentioned our method of bunkai to him. He took it for granted as if everyone knew that! Yet the vast majority of karate-ka still do not see their kata for what they are or can be.
In the early '70s, I was teaching aiki by principle when everyone (save Don Angier) was memorizing techniques. Recently, another phone acquaintance revealed, that principle-oriented teaching was done routinely at his school. His teacher had less than ten years experience. How can these changes have taken place? Simple. Word gets around. With videos, it gets around quickly. Even those conceps, techniques and drills that were, to my knowledge, conceived and developed by me or guest instructors, often became utilized by others and integrated into their art so fully that clients actually believe they were part of the original art! This is how an integrated business with a philosophical base in integrated budo can help improve martial arts world wide. We want to create exponential growth by offering advanced budo to everyone not just advanced techniques, but a way of looking at budo as a master might. Nothing teaches like experience! We want to give the student more high-level experience, so he or she can enjoy exponential growth and thereby raise standards around the martial arts world.
