Opening a Jiu-Jitsu Academy Chapter: 4 Site Selection

By Justin Hall

Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

Site Selection

Opening a Jiu-Jitsu Academy · Chapter Four

What this chapter covers

• How members actually find academies, and why that drives where you should be

• Why convenience beats visibility, and the cost math behind it

• How to size the space from the mat outward, since mat square footage caps your class size, membership, and revenue

• What to know about the area: household income, traffic, nearby schools and families, and safety

• What matters in the space itself: access, parking, ceiling height, mechanical systems, and zoning

• How retail, warehouse, and flex spaces compare for an academy

• How to run the rent-to-revenue math, and what the retail premium really costs in students

• Lease term and personal guarantee considerations at this stage

• Finding a good broker, and narrowing the options down

The capital is committed. Now we pick the space.

This is where the conventional wisdom of small business site selection gets a Jiu-Jitsu academy in trouble. Most small business advice says to pick a high-visibility location on a main road, in a busy strip mall, where foot traffic and drive-by exposure produce a steady stream of customers. For a coffee shop or a smoothie place or a UPS Store, that advice is correct. For a Jiu-Jitsu academy, it is usually wrong, and following it can be one of the most expensive mistakes a first-time owner makes.

The reason has to do with how members actually find Jiu-Jitsu academies, which is almost never the same way they find a coffee shop.

How members actually find Jiu-Jitsu academies

Almost nobody drives past an academy and suddenly decides they want to start training Jiu-Jitsu. The decision to start training is made elsewhere, for reasons that have nothing to do with passing by a storefront. Someone watches a UFC fight. Someone reads about the benefits of grappling. Someone gets recommended by a friend. Someone wants their kid to learn to defend themselves. Someone is recovering from a divorce or a layoff or a midlife crisis and wants a hard discipline to anchor their week.

Once the decision is made, the search begins, and the search is online. The prospect opens Google Maps or Google search, types in “Jiu-Jitsu near me,” and looks at what comes up. They evaluate based on what they see on the screen. Which academies appear professional, which have strong reviews, which have a website that signals legitimacy, which are within a reasonable driving distance from their home or work. They might visit two or three websites. They might call or message one or two. And then they pick one, often the one closest to them that also passes the basic professionalism test.

The storefront is almost never part of this decision. By the time someone visits your academy in person, they have already decided to give you a try based on what they found online. The visibility of the building does almost nothing to bring them in the door. The convenience of getting to it does almost everything.

None of this is to say that visibility is worthless. A retail location on a heavily-trafficked road will produce some additional inquiries from drive-by exposure, particularly if the signage is good and the academy looks active from the outside. The honest question is not whether visibility brings in any additional customers. It does. The honest question is whether the additional customers visibility brings in are enough to justify the cost premium that comes with the visible location. That is a math question, and for most Jiu-Jitsu academies the math does not pencil out.

This is the observation that reframes what site selection actually has to optimize for, and it changes the economics of the decision dramatically.

Convenience over visibility, and the cost math that follows

Even if visibility does drive some incremental acquisition, the question is whether that incremental acquisition justifies the cost premium that visible space commands. For most Jiu-Jitsu academies, when the math is run honestly, it does not.

The numbers are stark, and they should be run honestly. A retail space in a busy commercial corridor typically rents for twenty-five to fifty dollars per square foot per year, sometimes much higher in prime areas, almost always on a triple net basis, abbreviated NNN, where the tenant also pays property taxes, insurance, and common area maintenance, or CAM, on top of the base rent. A warehouse or flex space in the same metropolitan area typically rents for eight to eighteen dollars per square foot per year, on similar triple net terms but often with lower CAM charges because warehouse buildings have fewer shared expenses.

Run the math against a realistic Jiu-Jitsu academy footprint. A four-thousand-square-foot retail space at thirty dollars per square foot costs one hundred twenty thousand dollars per year in base rent alone, before NNN. An eight-thousand-square-foot warehouse space at twelve dollars per square foot costs ninety-six thousand dollars per year, on twice the square footage. The warehouse gives you twice the mat space at eighty percent of the cost. That difference, compounded over a five-year lease, is enormous, and it translates directly into the academy's margins, the founder's stress level, and the room the business has to survive a slow ramp-up year.

The rent differential is only part of the picture. High-end retail spaces in particular tend to come with the least favorable lease terms. Longer commitments, often five to ten years initial term, almost always with a personal guarantee that puts the founder's personal assets on the line for the duration of the lease. Flex and warehouse spaces typically offer three to five year terms with more flexibility, and sometimes, with the right deal and a motivated landlord, no personal guarantee at all. The total commitment a retail lease asks of a first-time founder, when you add up the higher rent, the longer term, and the personal exposure, is substantially larger than the headline number suggests.

A retail space can still be the right choice in specific circumstances. If the cost math works at the membership levels you are targeting, if the retail location offers a genuine operational advantage your specific market values, and if you have done the math honestly rather than romantically, retail is viable. The point is not that retail is bad. The point is that retail is far more expensive than most first-time owners realize, that the cost difference is rarely justified by acquisition advantages a Jiu-Jitsu academy can actually convert, and that the default assumption of needing a retail location is almost always wrong for this specific business.

This is the math you should run before you fall in love with a space. The space you fall in love with might still be the right choice. But it should win on the math, not on its appearance.

How much space you need, and why the mat sets the ceiling

Before you can judge whether a building is the right size, you have to know how much space you actually need, and that number does not start with the building. It starts with the mat. The mat is the one part of the academy that directly caps how much the business can ever earn. Every square foot of it is training capacity. Everything else, the lobby, the office, the locker rooms, is necessary overhead that earns nothing on its own. So you size the academy from the mat outward, not from the building inward.

Follow the logic all the way through, because everything else in this chapter rests on it. The size of the mat determines how many pairs can train at once. That caps the size of any one class. The class size, run across the class slots your weekly schedule can realistically hold, caps the total active membership the academy can carry. And the membership caps the revenue. Undersize the mat and you have permanently capped the earning potential of the business, no matter how good the teaching or the marketing is. You cannot market your way past a mat that is too small.

Start with the unit that actually uses the space, which is a training pair. Two people drilling or rolling need enough room to work without crashing into the pair beside them. A comfortable working area for one pair is about ten feet by ten feet, a hundred square feet, which works out to roughly fifty square feet per person on the mat. You can pack tighter for a warm-up or a seminar, but as a planning number for comfortable, safe, everyday training, a hundred square feet per pair is the figure to build on.

Run that density across a few mat sizes and the ceiling of each becomes clear. The comfortable per-class capacity is simply the mat divided by fifty. The comfortable membership is a planning range of roughly five to six times that per-class number, because the same mat recycles across many classes in a week once you split the schedule by age and skill level. And because the mat is only the training surface, the space you actually lease is larger: the mat typically works out to about sixty to sixty-five percent of the leased square footage once you add the lobby, front desk, locker rooms, restrooms, office, storage, and walkways.

Sizing from the mat outward

Illustrative planning figures at about a hundred square feet per training pair. The membership range assumes a full schedule split across ages and skill levels with healthy class fill. A thin schedule pulls you toward the bottom of each range, a full one toward the top or past it.

Use this in whichever direction fits your plan. If you already have a membership target from your business plan, run it backward: divide the target by five to six to find the per-class capacity you need, multiply that by fifty to get your mat square footage, then divide by about point six to point six five to get the leased square footage you should be searching for. If instead you are standing in a specific building, run it forward: take the mat it could give you, and see what membership ceiling that implies. Either way you walk into the search knowing the size of building that matches the business you are trying to build, instead of guessing from a listing.

Two mistakes sit on either side of the right answer. The first is undersizing: leasing a space whose mat caps you below the membership your plan needs, which quietly guarantees you can never hit your numbers no matter how well you run the place. The second is oversizing: leasing far more mat than your schedule will fill for years, and paying rent on empty training surface the whole time. The target is a mat that comfortably holds the membership you realistically expect to reach within the term of the lease, with a little room to grow into, not a cavern you heat and pay for while it sits mostly empty.

What to know about the area itself

Before walking through what to look for in a specific building, there is a different set of questions to answer about the area. The space is only as good as the market around it, and the area you choose determines the population you will be drawing from and the daily friction or ease your members will experience getting to you. Several specific data points are worth pulling on each candidate area, before you spend time inside any building there.

Average household income within a three to five mile radius

The demographic data point that matters most for an academy. The income level of your service area drives both your pricing ceiling and the participation rate in discretionary activities like Jiu-Jitsu. Higher-income areas support higher pricing and produce higher kids program enrollment, because higher-income families enroll their children in more paid activities per year. Lower-income areas may not support the pricing your business plan requires, regardless of how good your academy is. Pull this data from a good broker or directly from public Census data. Run the number specifically for the radius your members will actually drive from, not the average for the city as a whole.

Vehicles per day at the nearest major intersection or arterial

Traffic count is more relevant than storefront visibility for a Jiu-Jitsu academy, but it still matters in a specific way. Even if the academy itself sits off the main road, the access roads members use to reach it have to handle reasonable traffic counts without becoming hostile. Members who get stuck in turn lanes or who find the surrounding streets congested at the times your classes run are members who will quietly disenroll. Most commercial real estate brokers can pull traffic count data for any intersection in their market. The right number depends on the layout, but in general you want enough traffic to indicate the area is functioning, and not so much that arrival and departure become friction your members have to push through.

Schools in the area, and the families those schools serve

For any academy with a kids program, this is one of the most important data points. Count the elementary, middle, and high schools within your service radius, and look honestly at the income level and engagement level of the families those schools serve. Higher-income school districts produce families who enroll their children in more activities, sign up for longer commitment periods, and pay more for those activities. Lower-income school districts produce families who participate less and pay less. This is not a judgment about families. It is an honest acknowledgment that participation in paid youth activities, including Jiu-Jitsu, varies sharply with family income, and the school landscape in your area is a strong proxy for what kind of kids program you will be able to build.

Crime rates and safety

Pull crime statistics for the immediate area around each candidate site. Members will not drive to a location they perceive as unsafe, and parents in particular will not bring their children to one. The data has to be read honestly. Some areas have worse reputations than the actual numbers support. Some areas have better reputations than the data supports. The reputation matters because members make decisions based on perception, but the data matters because the perception will eventually catch up to reality, in either direction. An area that is genuinely safe and has a worse reputation than it deserves can work, because the perception will correct over time as your academy demonstrates its presence. An area with a better reputation than the data supports is a bigger risk, because the perception will correct in the other direction.

These four data points, taken together, tell you whether the area itself can support the academy you want to build. The space inside that area is the next question. The area question comes first, because no matter how good the building is, an area that does not support your pricing, traffic patterns, kids program, or safety profile will limit what the academy can become.

One related principle follows from this, and it is one most first-time owners get wrong without realizing they are getting it wrong. The academy should not be sited based on the owner's commute. It should be sited based on the demographics of the area it will serve. The temptation to open close to home is real and natural. The owner thinks they will save thirty minutes a day, that they will be more present with their family, that they will have flexibility their employees might not. None of this is wrong on its face. But if close to home puts the academy in an area with weaker income demographics, worse schools, or worse safety than another area within driving distance, the owner is trading their own convenience for the academy's growth ceiling. Over the life of a five-year lease, that trade is enormous, and almost always wrong for the business.

I would rather drive thirty minutes to work in an area with the strongest demographics I could reasonably find in my city than have a five-minute commute in an area that limits what the academy can become. The owner's convenience is a real consideration. It is not the primary one. The area decision belongs to the business, and the business should be optimized for the population it is going to serve, not for the founder's personal logistics.

What actually matters in a Jiu-Jitsu space

Once visibility comes off the priority list, what stays on it is a different set of criteria, most of which are easier to satisfy in warehouse and flex space than in retail.

Proximity and ease of access

Nothing drives acquisition harder. Members will not drive more than twenty to thirty minutes consistently, and many will not drive more than fifteen. The space has to be close to where your demographic candidates live or work. A space three miles closer to your core service area beats a more visible space three miles further out, every time.

Parking

A successful academy has forty to fifty cars in its lot at peak class times, and significantly more during transition windows between classes when one class is leaving and the next is arriving. The lot has to accommodate that. Tight, contested parking is a genuine acquisition and retention problem. Parents in particular care about being able to pull in, drop off, and not have to circle a lot or park a quarter-mile away. On paper, warehouse and flex parks can look worse for parking, because the lease often assigns only a handful of dedicated spots per unit. In practice they are usually better, since those lots empty out in the evenings and on weekends, exactly when your academy is busiest, so the daytime tenants' spaces sit open at the hours your members actually need them. A retail center anchored by restaurants or evening businesses can run the opposite way, most crowded precisely when your classes fill. It is a difference worth checking in person, at the times you would really be open.

Ceiling height

Jiu-Jitsu involves throws and takedowns. Standing techniques. Movement in three dimensions. A space with eight-foot ceilings feels cramped and limits what can be taught. A space with twelve to sixteen-foot ceilings feels open and supports the full curriculum without compromise. Warehouse spaces almost always have higher ceilings than retail. This is one of the most consequential physical features of a space and one of the easiest to overlook on a first walkthrough.

Mechanical systems

HVAC capacity is a genuine engineering question. A packed Jiu-Jitsu class generates enormous body heat, and the space has to remove it fast enough to stay tolerable. Many warehouse spaces are designed for lower occupant density and need HVAC upgrades to handle a forty-person class. Budget this for Buildout. Electrical capacity matters for the same reasons, plus AV equipment, lighting, and any specialized gear. Plumbing has to support locker rooms and showers, which we will address more in the Floor Plan. Each of these is solvable. The question for site selection is whether the existing systems are close enough to what you need, or whether the upgrades would consume most of your buildout budget.

Zoning

The space has to be zoned for the use. Sport and fitness uses are typically permitted in commercial, industrial, and many mixed-use zones. Verify the specific zoning code allows for indoor recreation, instructional facilities, or martial arts studios, and verify with the local planning office before you spend money on the deal. Zoning surprises are expensive and slow.

A neighborhood that matches your members

Members will not drive to a space that feels unsafe, hard to access, or wrong for the demographic. The space does not need to be in a high-end area, but it has to be in an area your members will accept. This is judgment, not formula, and it should be based on real conversations with the kind of person you expect to enroll, not assumptions about what is good enough.

Retail, warehouse, and flex space honestly compared

With those criteria in hand, the three space types deliver differently.

Retail space typically offers central location, conventional storefront presentation, and shared parking, at significant cost, with the longest leases, the most landlord restrictions, and often the smallest footprints. The advantage retail historically claims is visibility, which we have already said is worth less for this business than for almost any other. Retail is rarely the optimal choice for a first academy, but it is not unworkable. If the numbers run, the lease is reasonable, and the operational advantages of the specific location are real, retail is viable.

Warehouse space typically offers lower cost per square foot, larger footprints, higher ceilings, off-hours parking that suits an academy's schedule, and more flexible lease terms, at the cost of less conventional curb appeal and often more buildout work to convert the space to the kind of environment members will train in. The lower rent and larger space frequently absorb the additional buildout cost within the first lease term, and the result is an academy with stronger margins and more room to grow.

One more variable belongs in this comparison, and it can swing the true cost more than the rent per foot does: whether the space is a grey shell or a former business you are taking over. A grey shell is raw and unfinished, and everything, the walls, the bathrooms, the finished electrical and plumbing, gets built from nothing, which is a large and slow buildout. A space that was already a working business often comes with the bathrooms, HVAC, finished electrical, and a front and back area already in place, so your work can be as light as minor demolition and placing your rooms. A former-business space at a slightly higher rent can be far cheaper and faster to open than a cheaper grey shell that you have to build from the ground up. We cover this in detail in Floor Plan and Buildout, but weigh it here, while you are still comparing spaces, because it is easy to miss on a rent-per-foot basis alone.

Be blunt with yourself about the difference, because it is not marginal. A grey shell is a ground-up build: it will almost always need a licensed architect, the drawings alone run several thousand dollars, and the construction commonly takes six months or more. A former business you renovate can be open in about a month. The cost range is just as wide, from hundreds of thousands of dollars for a grey shell down to under ten thousand for a light renovation of a space that already works. That difference should carry real weight here, while you are still choosing between spaces, because it sets your budget and your timeline more than the rent per foot does.

Flex space, which is warehouse construction with a small office or retail-style frontage built in, is often the sweet spot. Many flex spaces come with bathrooms, break rooms, and lobby space already finished, which reduces buildout. The pricing is typically closer to warehouse than retail. The presentation is closer to retail than warehouse. For a first academy in most markets, flex space is the category I would look at first.

Office space is generally not viable. Ceiling heights are too low, floors are not built to take the live load of mats and bodies, and neighboring tenants do not tolerate the noise and traffic of an active academy. Office buildings are designed for a different use, and converting them is rarely worth the cost.

What the retail premium actually costs you

The retail-versus-flex choice is easy to make on feel and expensive to make wrong, so it is worth running the actual numbers. Commercial rent is quoted per square foot per year. Take the same three thousand square feet in each kind of space and watch what the building alone does to the business you have to build.

Same 3,000 square feet, two kinds of space

Illustrative mid-market rates. The exact per-foot numbers vary widely by city; it is the gap between the two that carries the lesson, not the specific rates.

The retail space costs four thousand five hundred dollars a month more than the flex space. Fifty-four thousand dollars a year, every year, for the same square footage, most of it paying for a storefront and a location your members were never choosing you for in the first place.

Put that gap in members. At two hundred dollars a month, covering the four thousand five hundred dollar difference takes twenty-three additional students, every month, forever, just to break even on the choice of the more expensive space. And twenty-three is the floor, not the true figure, because it treats the whole two hundred as if it all drops to the bottom line. It does not. Part of every membership goes to the cost of serving that member, so to genuinely come out even you need meaningfully more than twenty-three. Before the retail space has done a single thing for you, it has set a two-dozen-plus-student tax on the business.

But covering the gap is the wrong test. The better one is the ratio the space forces on you. A healthy academy keeps rent at or below about twenty percent of revenue, and the strong operators push it toward fifteen. Treat twenty as the outer edge of comfortable, not the goal. Run each space against that.

What each space needs just to make the rent healthy

There is the real cost of the retail premium. The flex space is healthy at seventy-five students and comfortable at a hundred, a small fraction of what the building can hold, with room in every direction to grow. The retail space is not healthy until you are carrying a hundred eighty-eight members, and does not reach the stronger fifteen-percent mark until two hundred fifty.

Now set that against the mat-capacity math from earlier in this chapter. Three thousand leased square feet nets only about nineteen hundred square feet of actual mat once you take out the lobby, locker rooms, and office, and that much mat comfortably holds somewhere around two hundred students. So the retail space becomes minimally healthy only when you are running the building nearly full, and the stronger fifteen-percent ratio, at two hundred fifty members, is beyond what a space this size can physically hold at all. The same-size flex space is healthy at a third of its capacity. The retail building does not just cost more. It only stops choking you when it is nearly full, and if the buildout leaves you even a little less mat than you hoped, it may never get there.

None of this means retail is never right. It means retail has to earn its premium with something real: a location that genuinely feeds you walk-in members a flex space could not, or a market you cannot reach any other way, and it has to clear a far higher bar to justify itself. For most first academies the honest math points hard toward flex or warehouse, and the fifty-four thousand a year you are not handing a landlord is better spent on coaching, marketing, and the reserve that carries you through the opening ramp.

Signage, and why the cost swings so much

One cost that varies dramatically by location, and that first-time owners almost never budget correctly, is signage. The requirement is set by the property, and it ranges from trivial to a serious line item. In a flex or warehouse park, signage is usually simple. The center often has a shared monument sign out front, and your own sign is typically a basic metal panel, the kind you mount above your door, which you can have made for a few hundred dollars. In a nicer retail center the requirements can be far more demanding and far more expensive, because the landlord controls the look of the property and specifies the type, size, and construction of every tenant sign.

The gap is not small. I have had a retail location that required two internally-lit LED signs plus two monument signs, and that package cost me close to twenty thousand dollars. The same business in a flex space would have needed a few hundred dollars of basic signage. That is a nearly twenty-thousand-dollar swing driven entirely by the type of location, and it is exactly the kind of expense that is easy to overlook when you are comparing spaces on rent alone. When you evaluate a location, find out what signage it will actually require, and price it, so the number does not surprise you after you have signed.

Lease term and personal guarantee considerations

The lease structure differs substantially across these space types, and the differences matter as much as the rent.

Retail leases are typically longer, often five to ten years initial term with renewal options, and almost always require a personal guarantee from the founder. The personal guarantee converts business risk back to personal risk, the same structural problem we addressed in Financing and Budgeting. A five-year retail lease with a personal guarantee is a multi-hundred-thousand-dollar personal commitment that survives even if the academy closes. Read the personal guarantee carefully and understand exactly what it obligates you to.

Warehouse and flex leases are typically shorter, often three to five years initial with renewal options, and personal guarantees are sometimes limited in scope or, with the right deal and a motivated landlord, dropped entirely. The shorter term also lets you adjust your space if the business grows differently than you expected. You can renegotiate or move at the end of the initial term without an enormous penalty.

The lease itself is the subject of Lease Negotiation. The point for site selection is that the type of space you choose largely determines the kind of lease you will be negotiating, and the lease economics are part of the cost comparison. A cheaper rent on a longer lease with a stronger personal guarantee is not necessarily cheaper than a slightly higher rent on a shorter lease with a limited guarantee.

Finding a good commercial real estate broker

Finding the right space is hard, and the difference between doing it well and doing it badly is whether you have a good commercial real estate broker working with you.

Most brokers do the bare minimum. They will pull a few listings from their database, send you the addresses, and wait to see if you want to make an offer. They are not bad people, but they are paid on closed deals, and the path of least resistance is to get you to close on something rather than to spend the time finding the right something. The bad broker will push you toward whatever is available, advocate for whichever space is closest to closing, and offer surface-level analysis of what each space actually is.

A good broker is worth their weight in gold. They are also rare, but they exist, and they will change what is possible in your Site Selection.

A good broker, working for an academy owner with a clearly stated set of parameters, will do the following. They will come prepared with the demographic information for each candidate site, knowing who lives within the relevant driving radius, what the income levels are, what other businesses in the area are doing, what foot and vehicle traffic looks like. They will prioritize the spaces that fit the criteria you have given them rather than the spaces that are easiest for them to close on. They will give honest feedback when a space does not work, even when the deal would be a quick close for them. They will spend the time necessary to walk through each option in person, will know enough about the building stock in your market to surface listings that are not currently public, and will sometimes know about spaces that are not yet on the market but could be made available with the right approach.

The best brokers will also sit with you and your lease attorney during Lease Negotiation, will help structure the deal so it works for both sides, and will sometimes negotiate directly with the landlord on points where their relationship with that landlord gives them more leverage than you would have alone. I have had brokers who functioned as a third member of the negotiation team alongside my lease attorney, and the outcomes on those deals were materially better than the deals I have done with brokers who treated the close as their only job.

How do you find one. The honest answer is that you have to interview multiple brokers and see who actually engages with your specific parameters versus who tries to push you toward whatever they already have in their pipeline. Ask each broker how many of their clients are tenants who lease specifically for fitness, sport, or instructional use, and ask for references from those tenants. Look for evidence that they have done this kind of deal before and understand what makes a Jiu-Jitsu academy different from a coffee shop. The right broker will pay for themselves many times over across the life of the lease. The wrong broker will produce a worse deal in a worse space, and you will spend the next five years inside the consequences of their inattention.

The narrowing process

The work of Site Selection, in practice, is converting a long list of possible spaces into a short list of finalists.

Start by mapping the addressable service area, the actual geographic radius your demographic candidates will drive to consistently. Within that radius, identify every commercial space currently available that meets basic suitability criteria. Your broker should be surfacing listings here, both those publicly available and those that are not. Drive the area yourself as well to look for spaces that may not be listed but could become available with the right approach.

Narrow the list by zoning and basic suitability first. Eliminate the obvious non-starters. Then narrow by ballpark cost. Get rough numbers from each remaining option and eliminate the spaces that do not fit your budget. The list should be down to five to ten spaces at this point.

Walk through every surviving space in person. Test each one against the criteria above. Ceiling height, parking, HVAC, electrical, access, neighborhood feel. Several spaces that look workable on paper will fail an in-person walkthrough. Narrow to three to five spaces that pass.

Visit each surviving space at different times of day and night. The walkthrough usually happens during business hours, when the building or center is at its busiest. That is one view of the space, but not the only one that matters. Come back at six in the evening. Come back at seven thirty when your evening classes would be running. Come back on a Saturday morning. Look at the parking lot at each time. Look at the traffic flow. Look at what the other tenants are doing. Most office and flex spaces have full lots during the day and are empty by five, which is exactly the pattern you want for an academy, because your busiest classes run when most other tenants have gone home. The opposite pattern, a center with restaurants, fitness studios, or entertainment venues that all peak in the evening, means you will be competing with their members for the same parking spaces at the exact times you need them. This is one of the underappreciated advantages of flex space over multi-tenant retail. Most flex parks empty out by early evening, and your academy effectively has the parking lot to itself.

Talk to the other tenants in the building or complex. This is one of the most valuable due diligence steps in Site Selection, and it is the one most first-time owners do not think to do. Once a space is still in contention after the in-person walkthrough, find the other businesses in the building or in the surrounding center. Introduce yourself, tell them you are considering taking space there, and ask them how the landlord is to deal with. Ask whether they have had any issues with the building, the landlord, or other tenants, and how those issues were handled. Most tenants will be honest about their experiences with another business owner, often surprisingly so. The intel you get from these conversations is information you will never get from the landlord, from the broker, or from the lease itself. I have heard horror stories from tenants that made me pass on a space immediately, and good stories that confirmed a space was the right choice. Do not skip this step.

Run a real budget against each finalist's specific costs, including the buildout work each space would require to be usable. The space with the lowest rent is not always the cheapest space once buildout is included. Eliminate spaces where the total project cost exceeds your committed capital.

You should be down to one or two finalists. Those are the spaces that go into Lease Negotiation, where the deal itself gets worked out.

In summary

Site selection is the first decision that is expensive to reverse. The right space is driven by how members actually find and reach an academy, not by visibility or a low headline rent. Weighing the area, the building, and the space type honestly, with a good broker and a clear process, is what puts the academy somewhere it can grow rather than somewhere it merely fits.

Checklist

☐ Size your mat and total leased space from your membership target before you start looking

☐ Run the rent-to-revenue math on any space, keeping rent at or below about 20% of realistic MRR, with 15% better

☐ Define your service area and how far members will travel

☐ Evaluate areas on income, traffic, schools, and safety

☐ Check each space for access, parking, ceiling height, mechanicals, and zoning

☐ Compare retail, warehouse, and flex options on true all-in cost

☐ Engage a commercial real estate broker

☐ Narrow to your top space before negotiating

Justin Hall

Co-Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu

Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source. · Chapter Four of the series Opening a Jiu-Jitsu Academy

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