This is the last week of guest blog posts, and I am so grateful to have a network of business owners who also really enjoy writing. My guest this week is Yat-Yee Chong of Axon Martial Arts, now you might be wondering what does a martial arts instructor have to say about marketing. She shares how her decades of experience as a teacher have transformed her approach to sales and marketing for her small business, Axon Martial Arts Academy. Frustrated by the noisy, overwhelming world of modern business promotion, she discovered a powerful solution: applying her teaching principles to marketing.
Yat-Yee reveals two key insights that have reshaped her entrepreneurial mindset: facilitating discovery and earning trust. Instead of viewing marketing as a separate, energy-draining task, she now sees it as an extension of her core teaching mission. She approaches sales with the same care, patience, and intentionality she brings to her classroom – filtering information, creating meaningful connections, and prioritizing authentic communication over quick wins.
The result is a more energizing, compassionate approach to business promotion that keeps her integrity intact and reduces the stress of marketing in a complex digital landscape. Her story offers a refreshing perspective for entrepreneurs struggling to make their voice heard amid the constant barrage of online noise.
I’ll let Yat-Yee take it from here.
Owning a small business today requires an entrepreneur to do so much more besides the core business. A friend of mine dubs himself “Hats”, as in the wearer of all of them. My preferred term is Chief Dragon.
I knew this from the piano-teaching business I owned in the nineties, yet I was still surprised by how different it is to do business today, especially in the sales and marketing space, how much noisier it has become.
To be heard above the barrage of information thrown incessantly at audiences: offers, scams, truths, lies, slime, threats, hypes, value, over-promises, ads disguised as reviews, has become the bane of my business existence, eating up my bandwidth.
And made me grumpy. A grumpy entrepreneur is not good for anything, not the business, clients, my family, and certainly not my well being
Thus began my de-grumping quest.
One thing emerged from this (still ongoing) journey: a mindset shift.
Instead of feeling unmoored by decisions on how to present my business to the public, I now guide them using the same principles that have served me well in my 30+ years of teaching career:
a teacher's goal is to facilitate discovery and to earn trust by communicating effectively.
Facilitating discovery
Passing on information is not what teachers do. It wasn’t even when knowledge was less easily available and it is certainly not true today.
What do teachers do? We
filter, validate, and sequence content
present it
observe how each student learns
find ways to lead them beyond rote-learning to experiencing, investigating, comparing, puzzling over, struggling with, and finally understanding and generalizing what they learn.
It is not a straightforward path. And it’s different in every single teaching interaction. A teacher’s mind constantly taking in information from the responses of students as a basis to diagnose, spot holes, determine readiness, sense teachability, examine our own understanding, and then figure out a hierarchy of importance for what we can do, cut out, add, so that we re-present in a more effective way.
This is the process that drives teachers. This is what we love and thrive on. This is what convinces us that we are doing necessary work.
How does this translate to marketing and sales
At the very least, it changes a set of tasks that used to zap energy to one that energizes.
Second, it brings my teacher’s heart to the fore, a heart that has much more patience and compassion than that of someone who is annoyed and sickened by phishing threats, spam, and bots set up by geniuses who think this type of automation is how to get to potential clients.
Third, I am better able to trust the process instead of feeling frustrated by not knowing how a particular ad campaign is doing. Teaching has taught me that what I do today may not yield recognizable results right away, or ever. I am not worried.
By applying this attitude to marketing, I remind myself that my job is to help the world, or at least my target audience, discover what Axon Martial Arts Academy is. I can be patient and be assured that what message I send out doesn't have to do the job of selling all by themselves, but would connect with others to create a picture that tells the right story.
Granted, this process is different in that there is no immediate feedback and therefore not always possible to determine how well messages have come through. But this is not an insurmountable problem. It requires my teacher-brain to tackle it the same way it has tackled other problems over the last 30 years.
Earning Trust
When a student starts with a new teacher, there is a level of implicit trust in that decision.
Trust, however, is not a static thing. If the teacher doesn’t live up to this trust by their actions, such as
showing disinterest,
using disrespectful language and actions,
being inconsistent,
hiding ignorance behind jargon,
being unwilling to be questioned,
resorting to defensiveness
refusing to take any stance except one of authority, trust evaporates. Sometimes very quickly.
Earning and keeping a student’s trust takes a long time of consistent actions based on integrity, humility, and transparency. Unfortunately, it can be lost with just one misstep. That trust of my students and their families is a most cherished treasure, one I will not jeopardize because without trust, learning cannot take place.
How does this shift in perspective help in sales and marketing?
When it comes to the effectiveness of our marketing, metrics such as the number of impressions and amount of engagement can have a powerful effect on a business owner.
But if they become the primary objective, there is a temptation, at least for me, to start adopting strategies, or even phrases, that have been “proven successful” in the industry.
Of course, I want my messages to be well received. The fact that these “proven to work” messages may or may not being authentic can be drowned out by such justifications as “it’s a means to an end” or “nobody takes it seriously anyway” or “ you need those keywords with long tails”.
I don’t believe I have compromised my integrity but I will say that constant weighing of decisions is one of the biggest energy- drain. By using “earning trust” as my North Star, I am reclaiming the mental energy and well-being.
Viewing sales and marketing as extensions of my core business of teaching instead of separate tasks that compete for my mental resources is giving me more enthusiasm and definitely much less grumpiness.
