From MMA to Business Champ with Paul Halme

Whats your Backstory and Bio?

If you are a martial arts gym owner, I can help you build and grow your business. While my clients bask in the glory of their quickly found business success, I travel the world, grow my own gym, spend time with my family, and live a dream lifestyle of my own design. Over the years, I have built my Martial Arts gym into one of the most successful gyms in the US. With my track record of creating high six-figure online and offline businesses at the same time, I sought to teach other people how business can be fun if you set it up right. My friends know me as fun, adventurous, reliable, and a ruthless implementer. It is exactly these qualities my clients also come to me for.

Backed with years as a champion BJJ athlete, Martial Arts gym owner, and a savvy businessman, I built systems to grow and make my gym wildly profitable. Most business consultants don’t have gyms or even real businesses at all! But my business stands out from the rest as a solid testimonial of my expertise in the industry. I can take just about anyone who will listen, and guide them to making over $25k per month. I do this all the time. It’s always fun to take someone from $5k a month and double it, but there is just something about getting them over $25k so they can build the community around them. I work with highly committed business people who have worked hard to build their gym, but just need that extra guidance and strategy to take it to the next level. The most common results my clients attest to? More time for their family, more time to train, more time to travel, while having a successful gym run on autopilot making them more money than they did while stuck inside it.

My expertise lies in lead generation, closing sales, and taking your business to its maximum profit potential. And although top publications like Future Sharks, The Good Men Project, Thrive Global regard me as one of the top Martial Arts Gym Consultants to follow, things weren’t always smooth sailing for me. People might be surprised to learn that I, as a Texas-bred, college-golfer-turned-MMA-fighter, admit to having a tough childhood and my business wasn’t always so easy… Being a fat kid with low self-esteem, not having a stable father figure, and losing my sister in my twenties, I was a dark horse of sorts. Like many entrepreneurs, this success story started with a lot of pain too.

On my first year, I almost went out of business and incurred over $30k in debt. I started reading all of the business and finance books that I could to work my way out of debt. Marketing and sales really saved me; it didn’t matter how good of a coach I was if no one knew what my gym had to offer. Once I stabilized my business, I began to replicate my success by helping other gym owners, and now I am able to share my systems with those willing to learn. As of now, I have become a bestselling book author, an international speaker, and a sought-after mentor for Martial Arts and lifestyle gym owners worldwide. My book– How to Make Money with Your Martial Arts Gym—is an underground favorite, full of practical wisdom and deep insights on marketing and lead generation for martial arts gyms. I am a man on a mission. I am wanting to serve thousands of clients by year-end, host a yearly high-end lifestyle gym owners’ summit, and triple my yearly donation amount to Autism Awareness and Pencils of Promise.

What made you decide to choose this career path?

I never really imagined that I’d have a consulting business. I was having great success with my Martial Arts school. When people saw that, they started asking me how I was able to do it. That’s when I started helping out other people.

After that, I partnered with Alan Belcher and together, we’ve helped more and more people. That’s how the consulting business started building a life of its own. For me, it is really exciting to see and help people build successful businesses. That’s what I’m so passionate about.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I thought when I opened my school people would come because I taught really good classes…well that didn’t happen. Huge mistake! I learned pretty fast that I had to get out and market or I was gonna go out of business. Then I fell in love with marketing and growing my school.

What do you think makes your company/personal brand stand out?

We stand out because we put into work what we preach. We’re actual business owners, so we’re not just coaches who are teaching people how to coach. We actually have brick-and-mortar local businesses, and we practice the marketing strategies every single day before we give them out to our clients.

So we’re basically, in the same trenches, doing all the things that can be done every day to run a business. And then we teach people what works best and what doesn’t. We stand out because we’re basically giving them a shortcut to success.

What’s a quote that you live by?

I live by the quote “Keep Moving Forward” and “Treat other people the way you want to be treated.” Those are the words to live by.

– Paul Halme