BMABA Celebrate 10 Year Milestone!

Today we celebrate BMABA officially turning 10 years old, having opened our first website on 5th September 2012. We’ve come along way in the past decade – from a £20 startup to a multi-thousand member leading authority in UK martial arts.

It’s been an incredible first decade, covering more ground than alot of our competitors have in more than forty years of operation. As always, we have to thank our instructors, clubs and students for our success. Without each and every member past and present, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Giovanni, then aged just 20, setting up the first website from Student Accomodation in Bournemouth.

The Beginning (2012)

Founded by Giovanni Soffietto in 2012, BMABA comes from very humble beginnings. Growing up in poverty and having used Martial Arts as a catalyst to change his life, armed with the domain name bmaba.com bought for £5 and an idea, BMABA was born. An immediate problem for the then 20 year old was where to start.

Giovanni set about securing a mobile phone contract for a refurbished blackberry with 100 monthly minutes, and this came with a second hand refurbished laptop. The laptop itself would shutoff from overheating regularly, so it couldn’t be placed on a flat surface – but it was a humble start and a platform from which everything BMABA is today stemmed from.

Our first edition, now somewhat dated certification!

The Early Years (2013)

In the very early years, in his early twenties with no financial backing BMABA was down to his ability to self-teach everything from web design and marketing through to regulatory matters, insurance and licencing. Realising very early on that a credible space in the market existed for a modern, politics-free martial arts governing body, Giovanni set about working as many jobs as possible around the still small BMABA to help raise funds to invest in technology, governance and other structural essentials if British Martial Arts & Boxing Association was to grow. It was this incredible tenacity for working hard and ‘digging in’ – which Giovanni has always credited to Martial Arts for instilling within him – that the energy to work a 60 hour working week, followed with every spare moment on BMABA, was possible.

One of many late nights spent building up BMABA.

Picking Up Pace (2015)

As BMABA crept into its third year (2015) Giovanni began to grow out a team around him, working with a voluntary committee to try and establish a credible, professional setup for the association. Giovanni also began to orientate himself toward a professional career to pick up essential tools and knowledge that would be invaluable down the line for the association. Already having worked his way up from minimum wage work to operations manager for a large distributor, Giovanni side-stepped into insurance and undertook the role of learning to be an insurance broker – something that has given BMABA the ‘best in industry’ knowledge on all matters insurance ever since.

As an organisation, we also began to pick up numerous allocolates and recognition for the work we were already putting in. This included the likes of the Home Office’s #knifefree project, as well as acceptance to the Sport Recreation Alliance, to name only a few.

Our first offices in Petworth, West Sussex

The Big Jump (2018)

By 2018 it was clear BMABA ‘had legs’  but it was beginning to creak under the ever-increasing load of instructors and clubs represented by the BMABA name. Faced with a stark decision of pursuing a lucrative career in insurance and substantially cutting down BMABA to remain as a part time venture, or to ‘throw in everything’ to pursue BMABA’s potential, 2018 was our ‘big year’.

Giovanni gave up everything and threw every last penny to his name into BMABA opening it’s first office and taking on it’s very first staff. We knew from a very early point that for BMABA to be the success it could be, we had to dream big and swim with the tide. As we became deluged by more members than we could properly service, we knew it had to be a ‘now or never’ moment so we setup our very first fully staffed office in Petworth, West Sussex. Back then, it was just a 400sqft ex-hair dresser’s salon.

BMABA picking up one if it’s many awards. This one from the renowned Sports Business Awards.

To High Places By Narrow Roads (2020)

Now with an established office, specialist technology and a dedicated team of experts, BMABA began to rocket in size and reputation. We began winning numerous accolades for the association’s core work, our charitable impact and our entrepreneurial founder’s progress. Our membership exploded, and following on from COVID 19 shutting down martial arts, we continued to invest record levels into our membership resources and clubs. During Coronavirus, BMABA more than double in size. We offered an unprecedented level of support and demonstrated to the entire UK martial arts community that we were experts at what we do, and genuinely passionate about supporting clubs. Despite most the martial arts association space hibernating to preserve cash, we instead invested in new offices and grew our team to ensure we could continue supporting our members.

10 Year Mark (2022)

Being established now for 10 years, we’ve achieved more in a relatively short timeframe than many associations four times our age have managed. We’re trail-blazers for using the latest technology and have continued to innovate insurance, membership and licencing with many industry firsts that our competitors have gone on to try to replicate. As of 2022, we are the industry leaders for martial arts associationship and support services, with the entire BMABA Group as a supporting powerhouse, including #MartialArtsDoneRight, MartialHost, MartialPrint and the Fighting Chance Foundation, to name only a few. We’ve managed to achieve sign off from Sport England to run the BMABA Club Colours with automatic Safeguarding Code sign off. We’ve unlocked technology that would cost independent clubs thousands, and can deploy it to clubs for less per month than a cup of coffee. Our journey has been marked with industry firsts following hours upon hours of work and investment by our team. We’re immensely excited to see what the next 10 years has in store for BMABA and we promise our members that we will remain as committed in 2032 as we are now, as we were in 2012.

In respect of our 10 year anniversary, we’ve asked Giovanni for his remarks on the journey so far;

I have no words to express the gratitude and admiration I feel toward all of our team, our staff and our members. Over the past 10 years we’ve survived COVID, cost of living, numerous economic issues and internal martial arts matters. We shouldn’t have – we started with nothing and have never received any support from outside sources along the way.

I was always too young or ‘too poor’ to qualify for business loans and start up funding. Sport England turned us away, as did every other organisation we approached for help. They all told us we couldn’t do it or that the UK martial arts industry was a closed-book with ‘the big boys established’.

We’ve proved the nay-sayers’ wrong. And we’ve done that together, as a community. I’m so proud of everything we’ve achieved together and I look forward to now working with those who turned their back to us in the early years, so we can make progress together as a unified voice for independent martial arts.

Today BMABA represents in-excess of 45,000 members and has amassed a multi-million pound infrastructure and setup that continues to inspire and represent martial arts clubs across the UK from more than 180 different disciplines.