The National Post: A Killer Program
 When he could not find the right business software, Farid Dordar wrote his own.
Financial Post
Monday, March 10, 2003
CREDIT: Geof Wheelwright, Nick Didlick, National Post
KICK-ASS SOLUTION: Champion kickboxer Farid Dordar now sells his software program to other people who operate martial arts schools.
When 21-year-old champion Farid Dordar decided to leave his native Iran in search of greater fortune, he had a hard time persuading anyone he could earn a living from his sport. In fact, when Mr. Dordar moved to France in 1986, his goal was to build a business teaching martial arts somewhere in the West.
He first tried to obtain a visa to the United States, but found U.S. immigration officials a little nervous about allowing someone from Iran into their country. So he considered Canada and got a quixotic response from the Canadian immigration counselor when he said he intended to make a living in Canada as a martial arts instructor.
"He said, 'That's not a job,' and asked me if I could do anything else," Mr. Dordar recalls with a smile. "He said if I put martial arts as my intended occupation on my application, I wouldn't be let into the country. I explained my professional background was in electronics and that's what he put on the form."
Seventeen years later, the 38-year-old Mr. Dordar and his wife, Ingrid, run a successful Martial Arts school in North Vancouver, with four full-time and 30 part-time employees. The school has more than 600 students and has enjoyed healthy growth every year since its establishment in 1992.
The irony is that the Canadian customs official ended up being prescient in his suggested occupation for Mr. Dordar. For the past five years, Mr. Dordar has been running a software company in conjunction with Champions, his martial arts school ( http://www.championswayoflife.com ). The software firm grew directly out of his frustration with the inadequacies of the software he tried to use to run his school.
This new direction began in 1998, when Mr. Dordar and his wife took a much-needed holiday to Mexico. He relaxed on the beach with a pile of computer magazines bundled beside him.
As he read through them, Mr. Dordar says he decided it would make more sense to try to write software for running a martial arts school than it would to retrofit existing contact-management or database software to his needs.
One of the magazines included a cover disk that contained an elementary course on teaching yourself how to program and Mr. Dordar dove into it with the same passion he had in developing his martial arts school and pursuing his many kick-boxing championships. He was awarded the title of best martial artist of the year in 1994 by the World Kickboxing Association (WKA) and has won a number of international titles ranging from Canadian Kickboxing Champion (1988) to North American Kickboxing Champion (1988), and World Shootboxing Champion (1988 in Tokyo,) to World Free Style Champion (WKA, 1993).
This is not a person who would be defeated merely because he did not know how to develop software. So he started teaching himself, spending every spare minute in a backroom at the martial arts school hunkered over the computer, pounding out the code he thought would create the kind of martial arts school management software every school needed.
After writing his own scheduling software to track classes and teachers, Mr. Dordar decided to bring in some help. He hired a programmer on contract to create the contact-management piece of the application -- and soon realized he could turn his hobby into yet another business. This one had as much to do with electronics as it had to do with martial arts.
With the application up and running, Mr. Dordar started selling it to other martial arts schools. He soon realized he could no longer run the software business as an adjunct to his school.
That is when he moved the software company -- now known as ChampionsWay Inc. -- into its own offices and concentrated on developing a product he calls MAS (Martial Arts Standards).
In the company's first year, Mr. Dordar sold 60 copies of the application, running the firm on his own with a small amount of outside help. He now has 12 employees and more than 2,000 users of the software, making it one of the leading applications in the niche market for martial arts school software.
He is now working on expanding the application of his school management software, developing versions that can be used for dance schools and online learning applications for martial arts schools and academic distance learning.
businessedge@nationalpost.com
© Copyright 2003 National Post
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