Opening a Jiu-Jitsu Academy: Chapter 9 Operations Planning
By OSJJ
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
Operations Planning
Opening a Jiu-Jitsu Academy · Chapter Nine
What this chapter covers
• Writing a clear curriculum before you open
• Building a class schedule you will grow into
• Staff and hiring, starting with the front desk, and classifying people correctly
• The affiliation question, and how to think about it
• Putting your waiver in place before anyone trains, and your coverage in force before you open
• Setting your pricing against what the activity is actually worth, not the academy across town
• Choosing and connecting your software and systems
• Building the intro process and the scripts that turn a visitor into a member
• Building the KPI tracker that tells you whether any of it is working
• Writing the standard operating procedures that run the academy day to day
With the space built and the equipment on its way, the work shifts from the physical academy to the operating academy. Operations Planning is everything that has to be decided and built before the first member walks in: what you will teach, when you will teach it, who will help you teach it, what systems will run the business, and how the daily work will get done the same way every day whether or not you are in the building. This is the phase where an academy stops being a room with mats and becomes a business that can run.
Almost none of this work requires the space to be finished, which is exactly why it should happen during Buildout rather than after it. The weeks spent waiting on permits, inspections, and trades are the weeks to decide the curriculum, build the schedule, choose the software, and write the first procedures. The owner who waits for the certificate of occupancy to start this work opens late and underprepared. The owner who uses the dead time of the buildout well walks into a finished space with a business already designed to run inside it.
The first operational question is the one members will judge you on every day they train: what you teach, and in what order. Most first-time owners, especially strong practitioners, assume they will simply teach what they know in the moment. That works for exactly as long as you are the only instructor and the only person who needs to understand the plan. It stops working the moment you want a day off, a second instructor, or a beginner who needs to feel themselves making progress.
Opening an academy without a clearly written curriculum is the equivalent of opening a restaurant without a menu. Curriculum is not a nice-to-have you develop once the academy is running. It is foundational, and it has to exist before you open. At a minimum you should have a clear curriculum written out from white belt to blue belt, which is your fundamentals path, and a second one for blue belt and above, which is your advanced path. Written out means written down, not carried in your head and not improvised class to class. A curriculum that lives only in the instructor's memory is not a curriculum. It is a habit, and habits do not transfer to other instructors or survive the day you are not in the building.
The curriculum can follow whatever system or philosophy of Jiu-Jitsu you believe in. There is no single correct one. What matters is that your system is clearly defined, written down, and explained well enough that your future students can understand it. You should believe in what you teach, because over time it is what defines you and your academy. Students can feel the difference between an instructor teaching a coherent system they stand behind and one assembling techniques at random, and that conviction becomes part of your identity in the market.
There are three honest routes to a curriculum, and any of them is legitimate. The first is to take one from an affiliation, following a defined system under an instructor you trust. The second is to source one from an outside resource, such as the curriculum we publish at Open Source Jiu-Jitsu, and adopt or adapt it to your academy. The third is to build your own, which is the right path only if you genuinely understand curriculum structure well enough to sequence it properly. The route matters less than the result. One way or another, a written curriculum has to exist before you open.
A curriculum answers what you teach. It does not, on its own, answer when a student has earned the next rank, and that is the other half of the work. Your standards for promotion have to be defined just as clearly, and they rest on four things: attendance, time, technical performance, and practical skill. Attendance is whether the student has actually put in the mat time. Time is whether enough of it has passed for the rank to carry weight. Technical performance is whether they can execute the curriculum's material correctly. Practical skill is whether it holds up in live training against a resisting partner. Decide what each of those means at your academy, write it down, and hold to it. The four together are your promotion standard, and a belt that means the same thing no matter who awarded it is one of the few things a student cannot get anywhere else.
You do not need every individual lesson written before opening day, but the structure, the system behind it, and the promotion standards all need to be decided and on paper. We have detailed curriculum resources in the Library, including a full fundamentals framework, for owners who would rather start from a proven structure than a blank page.
The schedule is the operational backbone of the academy, and every class on it is a promise to be open and teaching at that hour whether two students show up or twenty. The cautious instinct is to build the smallest schedule possible and add to it later. The better instinct is to build the schedule you intend to grow into. Put the classes on the calendar that your established academy will need, then let the academy grow into the shape you have already drawn for it. A schedule that anticipates what you are building gives students somewhere to progress to and gives the academy room to fill in, rather than forcing you to renegotiate your own hours every few months.
At a minimum, build three separate classes: young kids of roughly three to six, older kids of roughly seven to thirteen, and adults. These groups are not interchangeable. A four-year-old and a twelve-year-old need different language, different attention spans, and different physical demands, and an adult beginner needs something different again. Separating them from the start is what lets you teach each group well, rather than running one blurred class that serves none of them.
Schedule each class when its people can realistically attend, which means thinking in prime times. Young children do best early, around four-thirty or five, before they are overtired. Older kids fit naturally around five. Adults come after the workday, with a class around six. Adults can begin together as an all-levels class while your numbers are small, but if you teach both gi and no-gi, separate them on the schedule so each has a clear identity and students know what they are walking into.
For the weekly shape, a strong default is a full schedule Monday through Thursday, no classes on Friday, and a full schedule on Saturday morning. Friday becomes your office hours: the day for admin, trials, prospective-member meetings, and the parts of the business that never get done when you are teaching every evening. It also gives you and your students a built-in rest day, which matters more over a long run of weeks than new owners expect.
If you offer supplementary programs, build them around the Jiu-Jitsu classes rather than letting them compete for the same hours. A Muay Thai class, for example, sits naturally at seven or seven-thirty, right after the adult Jiu-Jitsu class, so a member can train both in a single trip. And depending on your demographic, consider the parts of the day most academies ignore. An early-morning class two or three times a week at six, or a midday class twice a week around eleven or noon, can capture shift workers, parents, remote workers, and retirees who will never make a six o'clock evening class.
Build the schedule you will grow into, and then do not let small early classes discourage you. Everyone knows you are new. Two people in your noon class is not a failure, it is an opportunity. It is the chance to teach closely, to work hands-on with your first cohort, and to give them the kind of individual attention they could never get in a crowded room. That attention is appreciated, and it is exactly what makes an academy grow. Most students would far rather train in an intimate class of three with their professor than be one of forty on a packed mat. Do not worry about how a small class looks. Use it to connect, because those first few students, taught well, become the core the rest of the academy is built on.
There are two kinds of help an academy needs, and they are not the same job. The first is teaching help, the assistant and junior instructors who can run classes to your standard. The second is the front desk and administrative work: answering leads, booking intros, processing payments, following up with members, and handling the hundred small tasks that pull an owner off the mat. For most owners the front desk is the higher-leverage first hire, because it removes the work that quietly consumes you and does not require your particular skill, which frees you to do the teaching only you can do.
If you have built a staff position into your opening budget, hire the front desk employee right away, and have them fully trained on every one of their responsibilities by opening day. The goal is for the academy to open already running, with someone other than you answering the phone, greeting walk-ins, and working the desk while you teach. An owner who is teaching, selling, and running the front desk all at once during opening week is an owner doing all three poorly.
Many owners do not have that financial luxury, and that is normal. If you cannot hire from day one, plan your budget so that you know exactly what the academy needs to be earning before you can. Mark that number. Make it your first financial milestone, and hire the front desk the moment you reach it. This protects you from two equal and opposite mistakes: hiring ahead of the cash and putting the young academy under strain, or grinding on alone long past the point you could have afforded relief, simply because you never defined the trigger. A marked number turns the decision from a nagging worry into a clear event.
Assistant instructors usually arrive differently, over time, developed and trained up from your own ranks as students mature into coaches. The exception is if a few people followed you from wherever you came from, in which case you may have trusted teaching help from the very first day.
However you bring people on, understand the difference between an independent contractor, paid on a 1099, and a salaried or hourly employee, paid on a W2, because it is one of the easiest things to get wrong and one of the most expensive. The temptation is always to classify people as 1099 contractors to avoid the payroll taxes, workers' compensation, and overhead that come with employees. The problem is that many people who are paid as 1099 contractors should legally be W2 employees, and the law does not care what you call them. What it cares about is control.
The clearest test is how much the academy controls when and how the work is done. A front desk employee usually has set scheduled hours, is told when to be there, and does not come and go as they see fit, which places them squarely in the W2 category. An assistant instructor is often genuinely either, because they can reasonably be said to teach as needed and on their own terms, which can support a 1099 classification. Learn the actual requirements for each, confirm the call with the accountant and attorney you assembled during Forming the Company, and choose carefully. The rules vary by state, and the cost of misclassifying someone, in back taxes, penalties, and interest, can dwarf whatever you thought you were saving on payroll.
At some point before opening, you will decide whether to affiliate with a larger organization or to operate independently. It is a genuine decision with real consequences on both sides, and it can shape your branding, your curriculum and rank requirements, your costs, and your obligations from the first day the doors open.
It is also too large a question to settle inside a single subsection of an overview, and the right answer is genuinely specific to the owner. We have a dedicated article in the Library, Affiliation: Need or Want, that works through the decision in full. For the purposes of this sequence, the only point that matters is that you make the choice deliberately and early, with a clear understanding of what you gain and what you give up, rather than defaulting into an arrangement simply because it is what the academies around you happened to do.
Waivers and protecting the academy
Jiu-Jitsu is a contact sport, and two protections have to be in place before a single person trains, not added once you are busy. They are easy to arrange and expensive to be caught without, so make sure both are genuinely locked down before you open rather than scrambling for them later.
The first is the liability waiver, and the rule is simple: no one steps on the mat without a signed one. Not a member, not a trial student, not a friend trying a class, not a visiting training partner. Everyone signs before they train, every time a new person walks in, with no exceptions, because the one person you wave through is the one who gets hurt. Have an attorney draft or review your waiver so it actually holds up in your state, since a generic form pulled off the internet may not, and build it into your member management system so signing it is a required step of enrollment and of booking a trial. The best systems capture the signature digitally at sign-up, so a person cannot be entered into the system, or booked into a class, without the waiver on file. That is exactly where you want the gate: enforced by the software, not by someone remembering to ask.
The second is insurance, which you already researched, priced, and lined up back in Forming the Company. The work left here is making sure the operating coverage is actually bound and in force on the day you open rather than still sitting in a quote. Confirm the policy start date, get the certificate in hand, and send proof to your landlord, who will almost certainly require it and require being named as an additional insured. If you affiliate, check whether your affiliation requires proof of coverage as well, because many of them do. And if any of the coverage decisions from that earlier section are still open, particularly your limits and the additional policies a kids program or an event calls for, close them out now rather than in your opening week.
Waivers and insurance are the paperwork side of member safety. The operational side is the injury and incident response procedure in your SOPs, which covers what actually happens when someone is hurt: immediate care, who is notified, and how the incident is documented. The two work together. The waiver and the insurance protect the business, and the incident procedure protects the member and creates the record your insurer will want if a claim is ever made. Have all three in place before you open.
Pricing, and knowing what you are worth
Before you open you have to decide what you will charge, and this is the one decision first-time owners get wrong in the same direction almost every time. You are new. You have no members yet, no reputation in the market, and no track record as a business, and every instinct will tell you to price low, to be the affordable option, to give people a reason to take a chance on an unproven academy. Resist that instinct completely. Pricing low because you feel new is the most expensive mistake available to you, and it is one you can avoid entirely by understanding what you are actually selling before you ever set the number.
Almost every academy prices itself by looking sideways. The owner glances at what the academy across town charges, sees a number they recognize, and prices within twenty dollars of it, under if they want to look like a deal, a little over if they think they are better. That reference point is wrong, and it is why this industry sits at the prices it does. When two academies price against each other they start a slow downward spiral. One drops to attract a few price-sensitive prospects, the other matches to defend their roster, and the market gets trained to expect Jiu-Jitsu at a discount. Five years on, everyone in town is fighting over the same price-sensitive customer, nobody can afford the operational improvements that would actually grow the business, and every owner is working harder for less. As a new owner you get to decline that game entirely, and you should, because the comparison is wrong on its face. The person choosing between two Jiu-Jitsu academies in the same town is a small fraction of your prospective members. Most of them are not choosing between you and the academy across town at all. They are choosing between you and everything else they could do with the same money and the same hours of their week.
That is the comparison that matters, and it is far more expensive than the one most owners use. Your real competition for an adult is whatever they would otherwise do on the same Tuesday night. Pilates and reformer studios commonly run two to three hundred dollars a month. Hot yoga sits in similar territory. OrangeTheory, F45, and the studio fitness brands typically land in the mid to high one hundreds. Premium gyms run hundreds per month. Your real competition for a child is the season the parent would otherwise enroll them in. Club and travel soccer commonly run hundreds to over a thousand dollars a season before uniforms, travel, and tournament fees. Competitive gymnastics runs in the hundreds per month. Serious dance adds up the same way. Parents pay those numbers every season without negotiating and without asking for a discount, because they value what their child is getting. If you charge less per month for kids Jiu-Jitsu than a parent pays for one season of travel soccer, you have not undercut the academy across town. You have undercut the entire category of children's activities, and the parent notices. What they notice is that something must be wrong with what you offer if it costs less than baseball.
So be clear about what you are offering that those alternatives are not. The argument is not that Jiu-Jitsu is superior to other hobbies. It is that Jiu-Jitsu delivers a broader bundle than any of them can. Pilates makes the body stronger, and so does Jiu-Jitsu. Hot yoga teaches breath and mind-body awareness, and so does Jiu-Jitsu. Studio fitness provides community and accountability, and so does Jiu-Jitsu. Travel soccer teaches children discipline and teamwork, and so does Jiu-Jitsu. The difference is everything Jiu-Jitsu also teaches that none of them can. A real self-defense capability, not as a marketing claim but as an actual outcome. Resilience built under sustained physical and mental pressure with another person trying to control you, which almost nothing else in modern life provides. Discipline and humility as a weekly practice, because the mat is one of the few places left where a person's ego is handed back to them regularly and they have to choose how to respond. The quiet self-reliance of knowing you can take care of yourself. And a community that forms across years out of the trust between training partners who could hurt each other every single class and never do. Every one of those alternatives delivers a slice of what you deliver. Not one of them delivers all of it. That breadth is what you are selling, and it justifies pricing at the level of premium fitness and premium children's activities rather than below it.
Understand the length of it too. For most people Pilates is a phase and a soccer season ends. Jiu-Jitsu, for the students who stay, becomes a decade or a lifetime. You are not selling a month of classes. You are selling entry into something a person may still be doing when their children are grown, and that a child may carry into the rest of their life. Price a lifelong pursuit like a discount fitness membership and you have mispriced the most valuable thing you have.
There is one condition on all of this and it is not optional. You cannot charge premium prices in a facility that does not look and feel premium. Cracked mats, a bathroom that is merely acceptable, a disorganized front desk, and a tired room will lose the price argument no matter how good the instruction is, because the customer's eye and nose tell them a different story than your pricing does. Here is where you have a real advantage over every established owner reading this. Everything this book has walked you through, the floor plan, the buildout, the mats, the front desk, the curriculum, the intro process, and the systems, is the work of building an academy that earns a real price. You have no years of discount pricing to unwind and no tired facility to renovate your way out of. You get to open at the right number, in a place that supports it, with no legacy to undo. Earn it first and then price for it is the rule, and you are earning it right now.
What is left is confidence, which is harder than it sounds when the number feels large in your mouth and you have not taught your first paying class. Understand that your price is not a neutral fact. It is one of the first things a prospect learns about your academy and it tells them what to think. A few years ago my own academy was priced where most academies are priced, inside the range everyone else in the market charged. We raised tuition by almost fifty percent, in one move, not in small increments. Our close rate went up. We did not lose members and trial conversions did not drop. The prospects who walked in after the change took the academy more seriously than the ones who had walked in before, because the price itself told them this was a real place doing real work and worth their commitment. The lower number had been signaling something we never intended to signal. Believe in what you built and charge accordingly, because a number you are apologetic about teaches the prospect to be apologetic about it too.
There is one exception to all of this, and it is the grand opening. You will cut a deal to fill the room in your first month, and you should. Getting fifty people onto the mat in your opening weeks is worth a real discount, and Grand Opening covers how that offer gets built and run. But look closely at what the exception depends on, because it is the whole argument in miniature. A generous discount off a two hundred dollar membership still lands you at a healthy number, very likely above what the academy across town collects at full price, and the founding member walks away feeling like they got something genuinely valuable, because they did. A generous discount off a hundred and twenty dollar membership lands you nowhere, and it signals even less than the hundred and twenty already did. The room to run a real opening special is something your regular pricing either gives you or takes away from you, and you decide which one right now, before you ever open. Set the real number first. The special is a discount off that number, not a substitute for ever having one.
None of this means every academy charges the same. Markets vary, and a rural or working-class market may genuinely not support what an urban or upper-middle-class market does. The rule holds anywhere: charge what your market bears at the level of the premium activity alternatives in that same market, and do not let competition with other academies push you below that floor. The number changes by market. The reasoning does not. We have a full article in the Library, You Are Almost Certainly Underpriced, that works through this in more depth.
The academy runs on two pieces of software that have to work together. A member management system, which handles billing, attendance, scheduling, ranks, and member records, and a CRM, which handles leads and the follow-up that turns them into members. The single most important thing is that these two are tied into each other and linked to your website, so that every inquiry flows straight into your system automatically. When a prospect fills out a form on your site and that information lands in your CRM without anyone retyping it, you have eliminated the double-entry administrative work that quietly eats hours and loses leads. Build one connected system, not three disconnected tools.
When you choose, weigh four things above all. Ease of use, because a system nobody can operate is worse than no system at all. A martial arts focus, because platforms built for academies already understand belts, stripes, kids programs, and the way memberships actually work in this world. Strong communication tools, meaning genuinely good email and text built in. And above all, the ability to build automation flows, because automation is what lets a small academy run like a much larger one.
One thing that used to be a separate headache is now handled for you. Modern member management platforms process credit card payments themselves, with payment processing built directly into the software, so you do not need to set up a separate merchant account or bolt on a third-party card processor the way owners did years ago. Twenty years ago you had to arrange all of that separately. Today the billing, the autopay, and the card processing live inside the same system that tracks your members, which is one less vendor to manage and one less integration to worry about. Just confirm the processing rates the platform charges, since that is where the real cost lives now, not in the hardware.
Make sure the platform you choose actually teaches you how to use it. The best ones include real onboarding and training, and you should treat those sessions as essential rather than optional. Dive into the onboarding meetings and learn the system inside and out. The owners who get the most out of their software are the ones who understood it deeply at the start, not the ones who learned a fraction of it and left the rest sitting unused.
Then build it out before you open. Create your automation flows ahead of time: lead follow-up sequences, attendance tracking and absentee follow-up, new-member onboarding, and longer-term nurturing for prospects who are not ready yet. Build your full class schedule into the system, and enter your ranking and promotion requirements so the academy is tracking them from the first day. The goal is that on opening day the software is already doing its job, not sitting empty while you try to figure it out between classes.
One specific cost to check before you commit is text messaging, or SMS. Some platforms include it at no extra cost and some charge per message, which adds up quickly once you are sending automated reminders and follow-ups to a growing roster. Platforms worth looking at include Gymdesk, Kicksite, Spark, PushPress, and Go High Level, among others. Compare them on the criteria above and on how they price texting, because that line item is easy to overlook and expensive to discover later.
Your website is the front of the funnel, and it has to connect to everything behind it. You have two real options. The first is to pay a company that specializes in martial arts websites, such as 97Display, to design and develop the site along with a CRM that integrates into your member management system, so the whole funnel is built and connected for you. The second is to build it yourself with a tool such as Lovable, which is a legitimate path only if you genuinely know what you are doing or are willing to invest the real time to learn it. A website built badly will cost you more in lost leads and rework than you would ever have paid a reputable professional to do it right the first time.
However you build it, hold yourself to the same standard: have the entire funnel, from website to CRM to member management system, built, connected, and tested before you open. A prospect who finds you online during opening week should flow automatically from your site into your CRM, into your follow-up, and into your academy, without a single piece of information being entered by hand twice. That connected funnel is what lets the front desk, and you, spend opening week on people instead of paperwork.
The intro process, and the scripts around it
Everything above brings a prospect to your door. What happens next decides whether they join, and it is the most important repeatable process in the academy. Do not be the school owner with no intro process, the one who just lets people try a class without any context and then expects them to commit to something that for many is a lifelong pursuit, or at minimum a multiyear lifestyle change, based solely on their emotional response to a single hour on the mat. You will find your signup rate is fifty-fifty at best, and that is an insane amount of money to leave on the table because you could not get yourself to create a proper presentation of your product. The intro lesson is where the business is actually won or lost, so build it deliberately and run it the same way every time.
A solid intro does three things at once. First, it teaches. The person in front of you usually does not know what Jiu-Jitsu really is, so use the time to explain what it is, where it came from and how it developed, and how you in particular teach it at this academy. That context is what separates you from the gym down the street in their mind, because they are not comparing techniques, they are comparing understanding. Second, it has to be both fun and educational. They should leave having learned something real and having enjoyed themselves, because the feeling they walk out with is what they remember when they decide. Third, it frames the sale. A good intro surfaces and answers the objections before you ever ask for the sale, so that by the time you do, there is nothing left standing in the way. The person who says they need to think about it is almost always a person whose concern went unaddressed thirty minutes earlier.
That means three things have to be written and rehearsed, not improvised. Your intro process, the structure of the lesson itself and what gets covered when. Your sales script, the conversation at the end where you ask for the enrollment. And your phone script, which comes before both of them and decides whether either one ever happens at all. Have all three down cold.
Most owners do not have a phone script, and it costs them. Understand first what the call is for, because it is not a sales gimmick. The only goal of that call is to get them in the door, since you cannot explain Jiu-Jitsu over the phone. You can only show it. What you are selling is an experience, and no amount of talking substitutes for the person standing on your mat having one. Too many owners will spend twenty minutes or more on the phone with a prospect, patiently answering a million questions, and hang up without ever booking them into a class. That call felt productive and accomplished nothing. Your call should last under three minutes, and it exists for one purpose, to book the intro, so that you can give them a real and honest experience of the thing they would actually be paying for.
Then practice. Not once or twice. Run your intro, your sales conversation, and your phone script dozens of times, hundreds if you can, on friends and family before you ever open the doors. Have them push back on you. Have them raise the objections a real prospect will raise. The goal is that by the time your first actual customer walks in, none of it is new, you are not thinking about what comes next, and the whole thing is second nature. Your first real prospect should never be your first rehearsal. They will be nervous enough for both of you, and the calm of someone who has done this a hundred times is itself part of what sells them.
Know your numbers from day one
You have now built a phone script, an intro process, and a sales conversation. The obvious next question is whether any of them actually work, and the only honest way to answer it is to measure. Most owners run the academy by feel. Things felt pretty good this month. We signed up a few people last week. Cancellations seem low. Feel is not a strategy, and you cannot fix what you cannot see. Build a simple tracker before you open so you have real numbers from your first week rather than trying to reconstruct a baseline a year in, once the habit is already lost.
Nine numbers cover it, and they fall into three groups.
• Leads generated. Every new inquiry that came in: form fills, phone calls, social messages, walk-ins, referrals. Anyone who raised their hand. This tells you whether your marketing is working, and nothing downstream can save you if it is low, because you cannot close people who never showed up in the first place.
• Leads contacted. Of those leads, how many you actually reached and had a real conversation with. Not a voicemail, not an unanswered message. This tells you whether your follow-up is genuinely happening, because a lead you never reached cannot book, show, or close. If leads are coming in but contact is low, the problem is speed and persistence: the first attempt should go out within minutes, it should be a call and not only a text, and somebody has to keep trying rather than giving up after one.
• Booked trials. Of the leads that came in, how many scheduled a trial class. This is your booking rate, and it measures the phone script you just wrote. Under five minutes is the response-time standard to hold yourself to.
• Show rate. Of everyone who booked, how many actually walked through the door. The window between booking and showing up is where most no-shows are lost, so a low show rate points straight at your confirmation and reminder sequence.
• Close rate. Of everyone who showed up, how many enrolled. Sixty to seventy-five percent is the standard for a solid intro process. Below sixty, something is breaking inside your four walls, and this is the direct measure of the intro experience and the sales conversation you just built.
• Holds. How many active members paused their membership. A hold is not a cancellation, but it is the warning light on the dashboard, and climbing holds usually become climbing cancellations thirty to ninety days later.
• Cancellations. How many members left, and the reason each one gave. The reason is where the answer lives: schedule conflicts point to a programming problem, money points to a value problem, and culture points to a leadership problem.
• Collected MRR. What actually landed in the bank, not what was invoiced or billed. Invoiced revenue is a story. Collected revenue is the truth, and it is the baseline you measure every other change against.
• MRR growth. The change in collected revenue, in dollars and as a percentage. This is direction rather than snapshot. One month tells you very little. Three months of decline is a fire alarm, and three months of growth tells you what is working and worth doubling down on.
The first five are acquisition, the next two are retention, and the last two are the scoreboard for both. What makes them useful is that they are not nine separate numbers, they are a funnel. Strangers come in at the top, revenue comes out at the bottom, and every number in between is a gate. When something is leaking, the numbers tell you exactly which gate. Strong leads and weak contact is a follow-up problem, because nobody is reaching them. Good contact and weak bookings is a booking script problem. Strong bookings and a weak show rate is a confirmation problem. A strong show rate and a weak close rate is an intro problem. Strong acquisition and declining revenue is a retention problem. That is the whole value of tracking them. They tell you where to spend your energy instead of working harder on the wrong thing.
The tracker itself does not need to be sophisticated, and you do not need software to build it. A single spreadsheet with a row for each week and columns for the nine numbers, plus your conversion rates, is enough to start. Contact rate is contacted divided by leads. Booking rate is booked divided by leads. Show rate is showed divided by booked. Close rate is closed divided by showed. Filling it in should take a few minutes once your member management system is holding the data, which is one more reason to have that system built out before you open. Build the tracker now, start using it your first week, and review it for twenty to thirty minutes once a week: pick one number to move, take one action, repeat.
Be patient with it, because the tracker will not pay off right away. The first few weeks of numbers tell you almost nothing, and filling in a spreadsheet for a room with eleven people in it can feel like busywork. It is not. What you are building is a record, and a record only becomes valuable once there is enough of it to show a shape. Months in, and then years in, you will start seeing things in your own academy that you would never have noticed by feel: the months that always dip, the point in the year when holds start climbing, the small change you made that quietly moved your close rate, the marketing that produced actual members rather than just leads. Those patterns are invisible in the moment and obvious in the data. They are what let you fix the thing that is actually broken instead of guessing at it, and every week you fill the tracker in is another week of the record you will be glad to have later. We have a full article in the Library, The 9 KPIs, that walks through each number, what it tells you, and where to look when one of them is off.
The final operational layer is the set of standard operating procedures that let the academy run the same way every day, regardless of who is working. A standard operating procedure is simply a process written down once so that it no longer lives only in your head. None of them are complicated. The discipline is in writing them down and training people to them, rather than carrying them as habits that disappear the moment you are not in the building. This is the difference, stated plainly, between an academy that depends on you and one that can run without you, which is the whole point of building a business rather than a job.
You do not need a full operations manual before opening, but do not read that as a reason to stop at the minimum. More is always better here. Every procedure you write down is one more thing the academy can do without you, one more task that survives a staff change, and one more part of the business that runs the same way whether or not you are in the building. The fifteen below are the floor, the procedures you genuinely should not open without, and they are the daily spine of the academy. Everything beyond them is upside.
Do not keep them in one thick master manual. Split the procedures into three binders by role, so that each person works only from what is in front of them. A front desk binder holds everything that runs the desk and the member relationship. A mat binder holds everything the instructors need. A marketing binder holds everything promotional. Your front desk person reaches for one binder, your instructors reach for another, and nobody has to wade through procedures that are not theirs to find the one that is. That is the whole reason for the split. A binder someone can actually work from gets used, and one that tries to hold everything usually does not. Within each binder, start with the essentials and add the rest as the academy asks for them.
Start with these:
• Opening the gym. The full sequence for the first person in the door: unlocking, lights, climate, mats checked, music, and the front desk and payment system brought up, so the academy is ready before the first student arrives.
• Closing the gym. The mirror of opening: cleaning, equipment away, cash reconciled, lights and climate set, alarm, and lockup, so the building is closed correctly and safely every night by whoever is on shift.
• Lead follow-up. Exactly how a new inquiry is answered and nurtured: how fast you respond, the sequence of contacts, and what is said at each step, so no lead ever falls through the cracks.
• The intro or trial lesson. How a prospect's first class is run, from greeting to the enrollment conversation, so every newcomer gets the same strong first experience no matter who teaches it.
• New member enrollment. The steps to sign a new member: agreement, payment setup, starter pack or first gear, entry into the system, and the first-week touchpoints that make them feel welcome and likely to stay.
• Membership holds and cancellations. How a member requests a hold or cancellation, the notice period and terms that apply, how the request is recorded, and how billing is adjusted, so these are handled the same way every time and without disputes.
• Attendance tracking and follow-up. Marking who trains, watching for members whose attendance is dropping off, and reaching out before they disappear, since a quiet absence is usually the first sign of a cancellation you can still prevent.
• Front desk operations. How phones, walk-ins, and questions are handled at the desk: greeting, answering common questions, booking trials, and capturing every contact into the system.
• Payment handling and recovery. How payments, declined cards, refunds, and account changes are processed, including the steps for recovering a failed payment promptly so lost revenue does not pile up.
Add these next:
• Waiver collection and verification. Confirming every person has a signed waiver on file before they train, and how to handle anyone who does not.
• Failed-payment and billing-dispute conversation. How to reach out when a card declines or a member questions a charge, recovering the payment without damaging the relationship.
• Pro shop sale and inventory check. Ringing up retail, tracking what sold, and knowing when to reorder.
• Membership upgrade or downgrade. The steps to change a member's plan and adjust their billing cleanly.
• Guest and drop-in handling. How visitors and traveling grapplers are greeted, waivered, charged, and welcomed to train.
• Prospective-member facility tour. The walkthrough you give someone considering joining, and what to point out along the way.
• Phone-inquiry script. How the phone is answered and how a caller is guided toward booking a first class.
• End-of-day cash and payment reconciliation. Closing out the day's transactions so the numbers always match.
• Member complaint or conflict resolution. A calm, consistent way to handle a frustrated member or a dispute between students.
Start with these:
• Mat cleaning and sanitation. The cleaning routine and schedule that keeps the mats and facility safe and hygienic, which in a grappling academy is neither optional nor negotiable.
• Injury and incident response. What to do when someone is hurt: immediate care, who is notified, and how the incident is documented, both for the member's safety and for your liability.
• Class coverage. How a class is run to your standard, and what happens when an instructor cannot make it, so the schedule, which is a promise, is honored even when life intervenes.
• Adult class format. The structure of a standard adult class, from warm-up through technique, drilling, live training, and cool-down, so every adult class follows the same proven shape no matter who is teaching.
• Little kids class format. The structure of a class for your youngest group, roughly three to six, built around a short attention span with games, simple movements, and high energy, so the class stays engaging and safe.
• Older kids class format. The structure of a class for older children, roughly seven to thirteen, more technical and physically demanding than the little kids class but still age-appropriate, with clear expectations and a sense of progression.
Add these next:
• Belt promotion and testing. How a promotion is decided and run against your four standards, so a rank means the same thing every time.
• New student's first day. The safety briefing, partner pairing, and orientation that make a brand-new white belt's first class safe and welcoming.
• Kids behavior management and parent communication. How instructors keep young classes in order and keep parents informed and confident.
• Sparring and live-training safety rules. The ground rules for rolling that keep intensity high and injuries low.
• Visiting or drop-in student mat protocol. How a guest is integrated into a class safely, including skill and safety expectations.
• Seminar or guest-instructor hosting. How you plan and run a seminar, from scheduling to mat logistics.
• Curriculum rotation and class planning. How instructors know what to teach on a given day so the curriculum actually gets covered in order.
• Instructor development and sign-off. How an assistant earns the right to run a class to your standard.
Add these next:
• Selfie-style content ad filming. How simple, authentic promotional videos get filmed and used.
• Social media posting routine. What gets posted, how often, and who is responsible.
• Review request process. How and when you ask happy members for Google and Facebook reviews.
• Intro offer or promotion launch. How a trial offer or promotion is set up, run, and tracked.
• Referral program. How existing members are encouraged and rewarded for bringing people in.
• Community event or open-mat hosting. Planning and promoting events that bring new people through the door.
• Email and text newsletter cadence. The regular member and prospect communication that keeps the academy top of mind.
• Reactivation campaign. How you reach out to former members to win them back.
• Content calendar and filming day. Batching content creation so marketing happens consistently rather than whenever there is time.
None of these will be perfect, and they are not meant to be permanent. As the academy grows your procedures will evolve and need to be updated, and that is exactly how it should work. The point is not to get them flawless on the first try. The point is to create them, print them, put each one in the binder where it belongs, and get into the habit of using them from day one. A procedure that lives in a binder everyone actually opens is worth more than a perfect one nobody ever wrote. We have SOP resources in the Library to start from, but the habit of running the academy on written procedures, beginning the day you open, is what matters most.
In summary
Operations planning is where the academy stops being a room with mats and becomes a business that can run. The curriculum, the schedule, the staffing, the affiliation decision, the waiver and the insurance, the price you set, the software, the intro process, the numbers you track, and the standard operating procedures are what let the daily work happen the same way whether or not you are in the building. This is the phase that makes the academy repeatable rather than dependent on you.
Checklist
☐ Write your curriculum from white belt up, and define your promotion standards alongside it
☐ Build your class schedule
☐ Decide staffing and hire your front desk, classified correctly
☐ Make your affiliation decision
☐ Put your signed waiver in place before anyone trains, and confirm your insurance is bound and in force before you open
☐ Set your pricing against the premium activity alternatives in your market, not against other Jiu-Jitsu academies
☐ Choose and connect your software and systems, and build out and test the whole funnel before you open
☐ Write your intro process, sales script, and phone script, and rehearse all three until they are second nature
☐ Build your KPI tracker before you open, and start filling it in from your first week
☐ Write your core standard operating procedures, and organize them into front desk, mat, and marketing binders
Justin Hall
Co-Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source. · Chapter Nine of the series Opening a Jiu-Jitsu Academy