Gymdesk Originals

Pulled from a Gymdesk webinar and re-cut for the feed between seasons. Chris Wojcik is about to open his first gym, so he interviews someone who’s already done it: William Watts, co-owner of East Austin Jiu Jitsu Parlor, which was cash-flow positive before it opened its doors in one of the most competitive jiu-jitsu cities in the country.

William shares how he approaches presales (and the mistakes he sees other gyms make), why the Parlor never ran a single ad, and why he built the beginners program around no-gi. Chris has visited about 50 gyms this year, and he shares what he notices in the first five minutes, from the mood in the lobby to the odd rules that quietly send people packing. They also take on the “do I need to be a champion to open a gym” question, plus the boring but essential setup list: LLC, insurance, a separate business bank account, a lease, and a system to run it all.

William’s new book, The Jiujitsu Gym Operations Manual, is out now.

Links

Watch the Webinar Replay

More with William Watts
The Jiujitsu Gym Operations Manual
East Austin Jiu-Jitsu Parlor
Gymdesk Originals episode on the Parlor

More with Chris Wojcik
 A Grappler’s Diary
The Grappler’s Diary (newsletter)
The Grappler’s Almanac

Big news from the mat: Gymdesk and Smoothcomp are now one company.

Alex heads to Smoothcomp headquarters in Sweden to hear how it started. In 2006, two black belts ran their first tournament with registrations by email and a spouse checking the bank account for transfers. Later, a tournament run on badminton software collapsed under a pile of paper results, and one early attempt at software crashed so badly a co-founder had to walk out of the venue. Those failures led to the the platform that now runs 200+ events every weekend.

You'll hear why every decision starts with the athlete, how one organizer got his weekends back, and why an in-house tournament may be the best retention move you're not making. 

Alex also shares what happens when your training records and competition records finally live in one place. If you've ever wondered what's next for your gym, your students, and the tournaments they compete in, this is where it starts.

This one's a little different — pulled from a Gymdesk webinar and re-cut for the feed while we're between seasons. 

Alex sits down with Ricard from Smoothcomp, Jorge Britto from Jiu-Jitsu for Life in Toronto, and Jennifer Lujan from Montrose BJJ in rural Colorado to break down what most gym owners get wrong about in-house tournaments: they think it takes a stadium.

George has been running them since 2008 and now holds one every three months for kids only. Jennifer's students live five hours from the nearest city competition, so her in-house events became the practice run that gets them ready for the real thing. Ricard walks through setting one up on Smoothcomp in minutes—brackets, weigh-ins, a scoreboard on a TV—and the panel gets into what nobody warns you about: how small is too small, how to calm a nervous ten-year-old, and why the gyms that compete in-house keep members longer than the ones that don't.

As we wrap up season 2 of Gymdesk Originals and prepare for the launch of season 3, here's a special episode for you!

This started as a live webinar walking through Gymdesk's first industry benchmark report, built from data we collected across 4,594 gyms. We cut it down for the feed because the findings are too useful to keep stuck in a recording.

Alex digs into six areas—billing, trials, retention, operations, economics, and kids' programs—and finds the same root cause hiding in every one: gyms doing by hand what a setting was already built to handle. The biggest one? Nearly 6% of revenue disappears not because a card gets declined, but because a card was never collected at signup. He also breaks down:

• The real trial conversion window (it's shorter than you think)
• Why attendance is the earliest warning sign of a member walking
• Why gyms running kids' programs are pulling in nearly double the revenue per family. 

The episode has no pitch, no gimmicks—just the numbers and what to do with them.

At Guardian Peru, some of the same kids who used to bully each other now train side by side. "I was bullied, I came to Guardian, I got better at jiu-jitsu, and life's better," one kid told founder Salvatore Sanguinetti. Another said the opposite: "I used to be a bully. I came to Guardian and I stopped." Now they surf together.

Salvatore and Guardian executive director Calder Powers talk about building that culture from a living room in Piura, Peru into 36 free jiu-jitsu academies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and why Salvatore insists jiu-jitsu itself isn't the point. It's just the reason kids show up long enough for that kind of change to happen.

Nick Gullo was about to co-open a gym with his boss when he got fired instead — the boss told him it would be the worst thing that ever happened to him. The next day, on a hike for his five-year anniversary, Nick had a moment of clarity on a boulder at low tide and decided to open his own place. Three years later, Monarch Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Malverne, NY is thriving.

Nick, a student of Jason Rau in the Matt Serra lineage, talks about the leg-lock era he helped pioneer as a training partner years before it went mainstream, a nine-month "vision quest" through Southeast Asia that convinced him to come back and commit to jiu-jitsu full-time, and why cutting his chaotic toddler program to make room for more classes for older kids doubled his kids program in a single month.

Marcos Duarte found jiu-jitsu by accident: broke, high, and driving home from a job interview, he spotted a martial arts school from the van window, memorized the phone number, and showed up two days later still wearing the look of the night before. He went on to become a 4x No-Gi Pan Am champion and the head instructor who mentored a teenage Abe Awad into the man who'd eventually buy the school they both trained at, after the retiring owner offered Marcos the sale first and Marcos turned it down in Abe's favor.

Abe and Marcos talk about building "Show the Art," a BJJ highlight-clip page that hit 45K-plus followers years before Instagram jiu-jitsu content was common, why Subforce runs BJJ, Muay Thai, and Judo under one roof as much for the business logic as the love of the arts, and the "new town" roadmap Abe uses to keep first-time students from feeling lost on the mat.

Danny Gutman runs the Judo program at ITC New York, the Muay Thai-Judo hybrid gym his father, Greg Gutman, opened in 2006 (brother Mark carries the Muay Thai side). A second-degree Judo black belt, Danny has competed in the Sambo Worlds in Russia, a catch wrestling world championship he'd never actually trained for, and full-contact fighting in Peru.

He also works full-time managing cybersecurity for a Fortune 500 company, coaches Judo two to four nights a week, and is raising a 15-month-old son. Danny talks about the punishing physical cost of Judo (fewer than 10 real Judo schools are left across all five boroughs), why ITC trains like every class is a tournament, and rebuilding the program's retention and automation from his kitchen table after his son goes to sleep.

Luis Costa just opened Octa's seventh location, this one run by his son and longtime competitor, Michael. Luis and Michael talk about building a multi-location school on one shared curriculum, tracked in Gymdesk across every site, so students can train at any Octa and pick up right where they left off.

Michael also gets into life as a Type 1 diabetic competitor, cutting nearly 30 pounds for a fight while managing insulin on his own, and the moment his dad untied his own decades-old brown belt and wrapped it around Michael's waist.

Jorge Britto grew up training in Rio de Janeiro's Gracie dojos, competing alongside Saulo Ribeiro and Megaton Diaz (father of UFC's Mackenzie Dern) before moving to Toronto in 2008. He built Toronto BJJ, co-founded the Jiu-Jitsu For Life Team association with business partner Josh Rapport, now 40-plus affiliate gyms strong, and opened Etobicoke BJJ three years ago.

Jorge talks about his 20-plus professional MMA fights, including a broken arm mid-fight that got no insurance and no follow-up call from the promoter. He also breaks down NextGen, the tournament he grew from hand-drawn brackets into a sold-out, 1,000-plus person event now celebrating its 10th anniversary, and why he still tracks every missed class and promotion himself.