The business model we use for martial arts instruction in the United States, today, royally sucks. Since taking over ownership of a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym in September of '19, I’ve been fully immersed in the joys and pains of the industry. And the typical model we use has a lot more pains than joys.
After a good deal of research, experimentation, and synthesizing of past experiences and new ideas, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of the pain caused by gym ownership is a direct result of the business model almost all of us use in some capacity. In short, martial arts businesses, including jiu jitsu gyms, use a model that attempts to marry the traditions and structures of ancient Eastern martial arts with modern American business practices.
And it’s not a happy marriage.
Every gym owner I know struggles with the same issues, which I’ll detail later. But these problems inevitably cause gym owners to experience significant burn-out, lose friendships, lose interest in the art they love, and in many cases, lose money.
So what’s the cause of these problems? To fully understand WHY the system we use causes so many problems, we have to do a bit of digging into history.
How Martial Arts Used to Be Taught
Martial arts used to be taught for war (ergo the “martial” part.) It was training that would help you beat your opponent on the battlefield. As such, martial arts instructors and their training was subsidized by the military or government. If you were a soldier in the military, you’d receive martial arts training as part of the overall military training.
Martial arts would also sometimes be taught to civilians for self-defense purposes. In this case, the “business model” was somewhat similar to that which we use today in the US. You’d have an expert (a “master”) who had a long-standing, strong reputation within their communities. This may have been because their families had passed the art from generation to generation, or it may have been based on their particular culture. Because each culture only had one or a very small number of different “arts”, masters were rare.
The generic situation under this model worked something like this. If you wanted to learn a martial art, you would get instruction from a local master for a period of time. If you were really good OR had interest in learning the art to the point where you yourself would become a master some day, you’d petition your master to accept you as a “disciple.” If your master accepted you as a disciple, you’d enter into a special long-term relationship defined by trust, loyalty, and mutual obligation.
The nature of this relationship was much more involved than that of a teacher/ student relationship. It became much more like a parent/ child relationship. The master would guide and teach their disciple (or disciples) in every aspect of the art, and the disciple would in turn help take care of the master and support them by providing things like food, housing, etc. This was generally a lifelong commitment. THIS is the model that American martial arts businesses attempt to replicate.
A critically-important key to this model - the MASTER holds the power in the relationship, not the DISCIPLE. The disciple must seek and earn the approval of the master to reach disciple status and must continue to earn the approval of the master to continue their journey. The goal of this process is to essentially assure the art is only taught to individuals who have the character to use the art for noble, virtuous purposes. You don’t want to teach serial killers how to get better at killing.
So Where Did This Model Go Wrong?
When martial arts started exploding in the United States in the late 60’s and early 70’s (due to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the explosion of martial arts TV and movies), there was a sudden, powerful demand by the American consumer to learn these martial arts. So the earliest instructors (“masters”) to open schools in the United States had to adopt a particular business model that would solve a critical problem - since there is no familial or cultural knowledge of martial arts in general or instructors in particular that gave the instructors a positive reputation, these early instructors had to create their own reputations.
To accomplish that, they had to sell themselves to their prospective students. Martial arts transitioned from a cultural staple rooted in a culture’s historical warrior class passed down through deeply-connected master/ disciple relationships to a commercialized service industry. This shift, which seems rather trivial, was critically important in explaining our current problems because it shifted the power dynamic.
Instead of the well-known, well-respected master granting qualified, motivated individuals to become loyal disciples, now unknown “masters” had to sell themselves to prospective students who were free to pick and choose any instructor they wanted in any art available at any time.
Capitalism 101.
Normally this is a good thing. Competition leads to improvement as service providers battle to provide the best service value for their students. Unfortunately for the martial arts industry, the very nature of martial arts included all kinds of customs and concepts that were mostly incompatible with a system where the student controlled the power dynamic of the relationship. So this new hybrid model produced all kinds of problems.
How This Hybrid Model Brought About the McDojo Problem
The early martial arts masters in the US were selling a recreational service that competed with every other recreational service business in their area. They had to sell themselves to prospective students, then provide quality service in a way that retained the students as long as possible. For every student lost, a new one would need to be recruited. All to pay the bills.
It didn’t take long for the martial arts masters to realize the commercialization of martial arts causes all kinds of problems. The master/ disciple relationship had changed because the master was no longer the power broker. In the old system, disciples were essentially bonded to their master through good and bad through cultural tradition. Under the American commercialized system, the disciples were free to leave at any time for another master, another art, or even a completely different recreational activity. They were, after all, paying customers.
In the old system, the martial arts masters were irreplaceable cultural icons to be revered and respected. In the United States, teachers of any kind are viewed as replaceable cogs in a big machine. Even martial arts masters.
Under the threat of constantly losing paying customers, martial art school owners had to start generating revenue through other streams, like requiring specific uniforms purchased from the school owner, testing fees for belts and the creation of more belts, a lowering of standards of the art, and, because it became important to recruit as many new students as possible, deceptive advertising. This also led to the proliferation of echo chambers where really stupid ideas flourish (like “death touch” techniques.) Essentially, this commercialization of the martial arts model forced owners to make compromises that are not in the students’ best interests in order to pay the bills.
Despite the obvious problems this hybrid business model creates, the commercialized recreational martial art model has been used for pretty much every martial art that has been brought to the United States. Including Brazilian jiu jitsu.
How BJJ Adopted the Model
Back in the late 70’s, Rorion Gracie was primarily responsible for bringing a commercialized version of Brazilian jiu jitsu to the United States. It’s an interesting story, including the back story to the development of the modern day UFC mixed martial arts promotion. His primary goal was simple - bring the art here to America to make cash. Which he did.
In the process, Rorion set the tone that would shape the development of BJJ here in the US, which was the same tone other martial arts had previously followed - Jiu jitsu businesses became commercial recreational martial arts businesses.
Today, we see the effects of this on almost every jiu jitsu school in the country. There will be one “master” (usually a black belt) who is responsible for disseminating information to the rest of the school, which is often made up of students ranging from first-day noobs to gristled veterans. Dissent is discouraged; the master is assumed to have all the answers. Authority is not questioned. Collaboration with others outside the school (or lineage) is strongly discouraged and oftentimes punished. Loyalty to the master and the school is a must; people who show disloyalty are branded a “creonte” and socially-shunned. Innovation is limited to the degree of open-mindedness of the master. When students reach a certain degree of proficiency, they’re often expected to assume an instructor role. And so on.
This system creates all kinds of issues like intra- and inter-school drama, ego issues, high turnover, and the problem of students leaving to start their own schools and taking students in the process. It forces owners to spend a disproportionate amount of time generating and following up on leads for new students, teaching a re-teaching the same boring basics to the constant flow of new students coming through the door, teaching too many classes at inconvenient times, constantly having to chase students down to collect payments, and a host of other problems that make school ownership pretty shitty.
The real problem, though, is this commercialized recreational service model is poorly-designed to maximize the potential of the information age. The old master/ disciple model worked in part because the knowledge the master held was incredibly rare. Given we have the Internet, this is no longer the case. There are approximately 275,000 videos available on the Internet about arm bars alone, and many of these videos feature knowledge from the very best competitors and instructors in the sport.
Like pretty much any knowledge today, knowledge about jiu jitsu is abundant and free. KNOWING the information is now virtually worthless. The real value is being able to FILTER the information to determine what is useful and worthless. The real value is being able to synthesize the information. The real value is being able to teach this synthesized information. Anybody can now access WHAT to teach. What we need today are people who know HOW to teach. And our business model is terrible at that. Severely impedes it, even.
The Solution
Our School/ Tribe model was partially designed to remedy this entire issue. Our jiu jitsu classes (and to a lesser extent, our mma classes) are sacred in that we really need them to survive. The physical and mental benefits our team derives from those classes is one of the more important parts of our lives. As such, this was among the highest priorities in designing the framework of this plan- WE NEED A PLACE TO TRAIN.
The gist - the Tribe will essentially run the program, replacing the "Master" and "Disciples." This diffuses the weird power gradient that simply doesn't play well as a business model. Because the Tribe is already, by design, a closely-connected unit, there's no weird "loyalty" crap. The Tribe is free to use expertise from any and all sources because the entire operation clearly, explicitly benefits both the Tribe and the Students.
~Jason
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