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.

Sarah opened Girls Gym as a co-ed school in 2005. A staph infection that put her in the hospital changed that within a year. Since then, G.I.R.L.S. (Grappling in Real Life Situations) has run women-only, seven days a week, out of Portland, Oregon, training students in jiu-jitsu, MMA, Muay Thai, and kickboxing.

Sarah talks about starting in Jeet Kune Do as a 15-year-old in 1996, getting knocked out by future UFC star Miesha Tate in 2009, and why she walked away from fighting to focus on coaching. Twenty-one years later, G.I.R.L.S. Gym trains over 150 students with five homegrown black belts on staff, and Sarah is still the one checking class cameras on her anniversary dinner.

Hilary has been one of Oregon's first female black belts in BJJ. She's competed against Cyborg, gone to war at purple belt with a Polish judo national team athlete who's now one of her best friends, and fought Gabby Garcia at Fight to Win. She also works as a paralegal during the day.

In this episode, Alex visits Unicorn Jiu-Jitsu in Portland, Oregon—a gym Hilary and her husband Brian built deliberately around a culture filter: the name alone weeds out the people they don't want. 

The result is a gym where noon classes run 80% women, world-class competitors like Dominika Stranková show up to coach and paint murals on the walls, and purple belts teach classes because they're better at certain things than the black belts are.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• How Hilary went from competitive equestrian to college basketball walk-on at TCU to training alongside active UFC fighters at Team Quest, and why jiu-jitsu is the one that stuck
• Why she named the gym Unicorn, what it means to her personally, and how it became the most effective self-filtering tool the gym has
• The "think street, train sport, practice art" philosophy she built the gym around, and why she believes more women leading at the front of the class changes the culture of the sport
• How a supportive landlord who waived rent during COVID shutdowns is the reason Unicorn survived, and what happened when he sold the building
• Why she lets a purple belt teach the no-gi class, and what that says about how she thinks about ego, expertise, and building a team
• What she's learned watching kids transform on the mat — and why one shy, homeschooled kid who's now leading the line makes all of it worth it

If you've ever thought about what kind of gym you're actually trying to build—and who you want walking through the door—this one's for you.

Unicorn Jiu-Jitsu is based in Portland, Oregon. Hilary is one of Oregon's first female BJJ black belts and has been competing and coaching for over 15 years.

When Lisa's boxing gym closed during COVID, she didn't stop training. She paid a coach to work with her in the playground across the street, on concrete, in masks—until more and more displaced members started showing up. A year later, she had no choice but to open a gym.

In this episode, Alex visits St. John's Boxing in Portland, Oregon, where Lisa—a former roller derby athlete and community justice worker with no business background—built an inclusive, mixed-level boxing gym from scratch out of a closed dance studio, a rented hourly space, and eventually a neighborhood landmark that had been a men's clothing shop since 1940.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• How a year of training on a concrete playground during COVID turned into an accidental gym — and why Lisa was the last person who expected to open one
• Why she built St. John's around the middle ground between fitness boxing and competitive boxing — and why that niche is almost completely underserved
• Her "social entrepreneur" philosophy: how boxing creates bridging capital by pairing strangers who'd never otherwise meet
• The real cost of rising rents for small gym owners — and why being in a neighborhood for 30 years doesn't protect you from a building sale
• How she inherited a community from a closed gym and has kept those coaches, members, and relationships alive four years later
• What she's still figuring out with Gymdesk — and what she's found most useful for managing a growing, diverse membership

If you've ever wondered whether you could build a gym around community first and competition second, Lisa's story proves it can happen.

St. John's Boxing is based in Portland, Oregon, and has been operating for four years. Lisa trained at Sweet Science Boxing and coaches alongside a team of six independent contractor coaches.