The Loneliest Job in Jiu-Jitsu
By Justin Hall
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
The Loneliest Job in Jiu-Jitsu
Most academy owners spend their entire careers solving the same problems alone, in private, convinced the struggle is theirs to carry by themselves. It does not have to be this way, and it should not be.
Most academy owners run their schools convinced that the problem keeping them up tonight is uniquely theirs. It almost never is. The problems are structural, common, and almost completely unshared, because the things that actually matter, the numbers, the systems, the problem that scares you, are exactly the things owners protect from each other. This piece is about how we got there, what it costs all of us, and why the academy across town was never the real competition.
The wheel, reinvented ten thousand times
Somewhere right now, an academy owner is sitting at a desk after class, trying to solve a problem. Maybe it is a pricing problem. Maybe it is a staffing problem, or a retention problem, or a problem with a parent, or a problem with their own exhaustion. Whatever it is, they are working on it alone. They will figure out something, eventually, through trial and error, and the solution they reach will be roughly the same solution that several thousand other owners have already reached, each one of them also alone, each one also believing they were the first to face it.
This is the quiet tragedy of the academy business. Thousands of owners, separated by geography and by habit, all solving the same small set of problems in isolation, none of them sharing what they learned, all of them reinventing a wheel that was invented a long time ago and has been reinvented every year since. It is an enormous waste of human effort. And almost no one talks about it, because talking about it would require admitting it.
Sixteen years, and not one phone call
I should be honest about my own part in this, because I was as guilty of it as anyone, and for longer than I would like to admit.
I opened my first academy as a blue belt in 2007. For the next sixteen years, I ran schools. I solved problems constantly, the way every owner does. And in all of that time, across all of those years, I never once picked up the phone to call another academy owner and ask them how they handled something. Not once. The thought barely occurred to me, and on the rare occasion it did, I dismissed it.
The easy explanation is competition. I viewed the other academies in my city as competitors. Their wins were my losses, in a low-grade, unspoken way, and the idea of calling one of them to compare notes would have felt absurd, like handing my playbook to the shop across the street. That explanation is real enough, and it is the one I would have given you at the time.
But it is not the true explanation, and I know that now. The true explanation is that my insecurities would not let me do it. My insecurities would not allow me to open my books to another owner, because I did not want them to see my numbers and find them wanting. My insecurities would not allow me to say a real problem out loud, because I did not want to hear it judged, or worse, to learn that it was an easy problem everyone else had already solved and only I had not. It was easier to call it competition. Competition is a respectable reason. Insecurity is the honest one.
And it reached further than the strangers across town. I had friends in the business. Guys I came up with, back in Atlanta, owners I had known for years and trained alongside long before any of us had our own schools. Even with them, I was never fully candid. We would talk, we would catch up, but we never really opened the books to each other, never really said here is what is actually going wrong, here is the number that scares me, here is the thing I cannot figure out. Some of that may have been a kind of internal competition that never switched off, the residue of having measured ourselves against each other on the mat for years. But underneath that, again, it was the same thing. My insecurities did not allow me to be that exposed, even with people I trusted, even with people who would have helped.
Sixteen years. Some of the smartest, most generous people I knew were in the exact same business, facing the exact same problems, and I never once let them all the way in, and they never once let me.
What two and a half years inside an association showed me
The thing that finally broke the pattern open for me was going to work for a large Jiu-Jitsu association. The role put me in contact with academy owners constantly, dozens of them, across many different schools, and for the first time in my career I was looking at the business from above instead of from inside my own four walls.
What I saw was the same thing, over and over, in school after school. The same handful of problems. The same struggles with pricing, with staff, with retention, with the owner's own burnout. The same quiet conviction, in nearly every owner I spoke with, that their version of the struggle was uniquely theirs. The same isolation I had lived in for sixteen years, lived out by almost everyone, all of them certain they were alone in it.
It was an ah-ha moment in the truest sense. I had spent sixteen years thinking my struggles were mine. From above, I could see they were everyone's. The problems were not personal. They were structural, common, predictable, and almost completely unshared.
I spent sixteen years thinking my struggles were mine. From above, I could see they were everyone's. The problems were never personal. They were just unshared.
Why owners share their vendors but never their problems
Here is a pattern worth noticing, because once you see it you will see it everywhere. Academy owners are perfectly willing to share certain things with each other. Ask a room of owners what software they use, what marketing company they hired, what mat supplier they like, and the recommendations will flow freely. That kind of information moves around the industry without friction.
But ask those same owners to share the things that actually matter, and the room goes quiet. Their real numbers. Their close rate. Their retention rate. What they actually pay themselves. The systems they use to run the place. The problem that has been keeping them up at night. The mistake they made last year that cost them dearly. None of that gets shared. An owner will tell you their software in a heartbeat and will never, ever tell you the number that scares them.
It is worth sitting with the question of why. Vendors are safe to share because recommending a software company says nothing about you. It cannot be used to measure you. But your close rate can. Your retention number can. What you pay yourself can. The systems you have or have not built can. To share those things is to be measured against every other owner in the room, and to risk discovering that you come up short. So owners share the things that are safe and protect the things that are revealing, and the result is an entire industry of people who will happily tell each other which mat company to call and will go to their graves before admitting they do not know their own numbers.
I am not going to pretend I do not understand this, because I lived it. The instinct to protect the revealing things is human and it is strong. But it is worth naming plainly what it costs. It costs every owner the chance to learn from every other owner. It keeps thousands of people struggling in private with problems that the person across town solved years ago. The thing that feels like self-protection is actually the thing keeping everyone stuck.
Even the places built for connection
You might think that associations would solve this, since bringing academies together is part of what they exist to do. And in some ways they help. But it is worth looking honestly at the shape of how an association actually connects people.
In most associations, the structure is a hub and a set of spokes. Every member academy connects to the central figure or the central organization. The owner has a relationship with the head of the association. What is usually missing is the connection between the spokes. The owners do not really connect to each other. They each have their line to the center, and the center has its line to each of them, but across the membership, owner to owner, the candid relationships are rare. The structure connects everyone to one point and almost no one to each other.
This is not an attack on associations. It is an observation about a shape, and the shape has a consequence. An owner can belong to an association for years, can feel part of something, and can still be just as alone with their actual problems as an owner who belongs to nothing. The isolation survives inside the very thing that looks like its cure.
We have been fighting the wrong war
It took me nearly twenty years in this industry to see the thing I am about to describe, and once I saw it I could not unsee it. It reframes the entire problem.
The academy across town was never my competition. It only looked that way. The real competition, the actual thing pulling potential students away from the mat, is every other way a person can spend their time and their money. It is the commercial gym and the yoga studio and the climbing wall. It is youth soccer and travel baseball and dance. It is the couch, the screen, the thousand easy comfortable nothings that fill a life. That is the competition. That is what we are all actually up against.
Look at the real numbers behind this. In any given town, the percentage of the population that trains Jiu-Jitsu is tiny. The overwhelming majority of people have never tried it, have never seriously considered it, and in many cases have never had it explained to them in a way that made them want to. The market is not a fixed pie that academies must fight over slice by slice. The market is enormous and almost entirely untouched. The people already training are a rounding error next to the people who could be.
Which means that when two academies in the same city treat each other as the enemy, they are doing something close to absurd. They are two fighters throwing every punch at each other while the real opponent stands off to the side, untouched, unworried, winning. They are spending their energy, their attention, and their competitive instinct on each other, when that same energy aimed at the real problem, the world's general unawareness of what this art offers, would grow the whole sport and leave both of them better off.
The academy across town was never the competition. The competition is every other thing a person could do with their life. We have been aiming at each other and missing the war entirely.
This is the part that should change how an owner thinks. If the market were genuinely small and fixed, then guarding your systems and viewing the other school as a threat would at least make a kind of sense. But the market is not small and fixed. It is vast and barely tapped. In a market like that, the other academy succeeding does not cost you anything. If anything it helps you, because every good academy that introduces more people to Jiu-Jitsu grows the awareness and the credibility of the whole thing, and a rising sport lifts every school in it. We have been shooting ourselves in the foot for decades, treating allies as enemies, fighting over a small pool while ignoring the ocean.
That is the mindset shift the whole industry needs, and it is the mindset that makes everything else in this article possible. Once you genuinely understand that the other owner is not your competition, sharing with them stops being an act of generosity that costs you something. It becomes the obvious, strategic, self-interested thing to do. You help the other academy get better because a healthier sport is a bigger market, and a bigger market is more room for everyone, including you.
What we are trying to build instead
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu was named the way it was for a reason. The name is a statement about exactly this problem.
In the software world, open source means the code is shared. Anyone can see how it works, anyone can learn from it, anyone can improve it, and the improvements flow back out to everyone. The opposite, closed source, means the code is hidden and guarded. The whole industry of Jiu-Jitsu academy ownership has, without ever deciding to, operated closed source. Every owner guarding their own code. Every owner reinventing what the next owner already built.
What we are trying to build is a way for owners to operate open source instead. A place and a culture where owners share with each other. Where the real things get discussed, the numbers and the systems and the problems, not just the safe things. Where an owner who solved a problem passes the solution to the owner still struggling with it, and where doing that is normal, expected, and free of judgment.
This is an intention more than a finished thing, and I want to be honest about that rather than overpromise. We are still building it. But the direction is clear and it is not complicated. We want to take an industry that has operated in isolation and give it a way to operate together. No judgment for what you do not know. No shame in the numbers. Just owners helping owners, on a shared path to making the whole industry healthier, lifting each other as we go.
A fair question, answered plainly
Someone reading this might reasonably ask a sharp question. If Open Source Jiu-Jitsu is a paid consulting business, why would it want owners sharing everything with each other for free? Does an open, sharing community not work against what the company sells?
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer. It does not work against it, and here is why. Sharing solves the isolation problem. It does not solve the execution problem. An owner can learn exactly what another owner does, can understand the system completely, and can still need help actually building it into their own academy, with their own staff, their own constraints, their own time. Knowing what to do and getting it done are two different things, and the gap between them is where hands-on help earns its place.
So there is no conflict. The free community and the paid work are not competitors. The community ends the isolation. The paid work helps those who want a hand with execution. We would rather operate this way, in the open, than be one more closed-source business guarding its information, because the closed-source approach is the exact problem this whole article is about. We are not going to solve isolation by being isolated ourselves.
The hand, extended
If you are an academy owner, you have almost certainly lived some version of what this article describes. The desk after class. The problem you are sure is yours alone. The other owners you have quietly treated as competitors or kept at a careful distance. The numbers you would not say out loud. If you are honest with yourself the way I had to be honest with myself, you may find that the reason underneath all of it was never really competition. It was insecurity, the simple fear of being measured and found wanting. None of that makes you unusual. It makes you normal. It is how nearly all of us have operated, myself very much included, for a very long time.
But it was never the only way, and it does not have to continue. The owner across town is not your enemy. They never were. They are the person most likely to understand your week, and they are fighting the same real opponent you are. The problem keeping you up tonight is, almost certainly, a problem someone else has already solved. The fastest way forward for all of us is to stop guarding our code, stop aiming at each other, and start sharing what we know so we can grow this sport together.
That is what we are building, and that is the invitation. Not a pitch. A hand extended. Come help us make this industry one where no owner has to figure it all out alone, where the academy across town is an ally instead of an enemy, and where the market is big enough, finally, for all of us to succeed.
Justin Hall
Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source.