The Definitive History of the Martial Arts School Business in North America, 1946–2026

The modern North American martial arts school — the karate and taekwondo studio, the kenpo and kung fu school, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu academy, the MMA gym and the kickboxing-fitness studio — runs on a business model that did not exist in 1955. It was assembled in the United States between the late 1950s and the mid-1990s from borrowed parts: the dance studio’s enrollment system, the health studio’s membership, the retail chain’s multi-location logic and the finance company’s tuition agreement. Then a small number of billing companies, operator networks, consultants, associations and, later, software platforms carried it to tens of thousands of independent owners who never met the people who invented it. This is the history of that business, from 1946 to 2026: who built it, what each of them actually contributed, how the knowledge moved, and where the record is thin or disputed.

Contents

1. The short version
2. Before the business, 1946–1959
3. Era I: Inventing the commercial school, 1956–1975
4. Era II: Professionalization, 1975–1993
5. Era III: Associations, consultants and suppliers, 1990–2008
6. Era IV: The Brazilian jiu-jitsu academy
7. Era V: The MMA gym and the kickboxing studio
8. Era VI: Software, online marketing, private equity and the pandemic
9. The industry in 2026
10. Canada
11. Where each part of the model came from
12. Business bloodlines
13. Register of innovators
14. Timeline of record
15. Disputed claims
16. Frequently asked questions

The short version

• The first business innovation was retention, not marketing. When the Tracy brothers began training under Ed Parker in 1957–58, first-month dropout reportedly ran as high as 90 percent. Will Tracy’s three-month membership, borrowed from the health-studio industry, reportedly reversed it. The claim is the Tracys’ own, but it marks the start of the membership model.
• The sales system came from ballroom dancing. J. Pat Burleson said Fred Astaire dance-studio licensees taught him their enrollment system in the mid-1960s and that he passed it to Jhoon Rhee and Ed Parker. Nick Cokinos, a former Arthur Murray and Linkletter–Totten dance-studio operator who never earned a black belt, began working with the Jhoon Rhee organization in 1967 and founded Educational Funding Company (EFC) in 1967–68.
• Third-party billing was the industry’s first scalable infrastructure. EFC (1967–68), American Service Finance (1973), Amerinational Management Services (1983) and Member Solutions (1991) made long-term tuition agreements collectible for small operators. In 1992 EFC’s chairman told The New York Times his firm managed finances for 500 schools in the United States and Canada.
• Franchising was tried early and failed first. Tracy’s claimed 93 franchises in 1971, while Ed Parker’s CoPar schools in Denver were reportedly bankrupt by 1970. The durable large networks were built instead on licensing, association membership and standardized curriculum: the American Taekwondo Association (1969), Villari’s (123 franchise studios by 1992) and later Gracie Barra, Premier Martial Arts and the kickboxing-fitness franchisors.
• Business education became its own industry after 1985. EFC’s seminars and operator board (1987), Greg Silva’s United Professionals (1990), John Graden’s NAPMA (1993) and Martial Arts Professional (1996), Kovar Systems (1994), Century’s Martial Arts Industry Association (2001) and a long tail of coaching groups turned private know-how into subscription products. In 1992 The New York Times could still write that the industry “lacks formal associations.” Within a decade it had several.
• BJJ and MMA reset the product, not the underlying mechanics. Rorion Gracie’s free-class-and-referral garage (1978), UFC 1 (1993) and the affiliation networks of the Gracie, Machado, Barra and Alliance families created a new kind of academy, with month-to-month adult memberships and rank authority tied to lineage. MMA gyms grew first as fight-team brands and later as franchise and platform concepts.
• Demand arrives in pop-culture waves; systems decide who keeps it. Enter the Dragon and Kung Fu (1973), The Karate Kid (1984), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Tae Bo (late 1990s), the UFC (1993 onward) and Cobra Kai (2018–2025) each produced an enrollment surge. The 1973 boom became the 1974 bust for schools without retention systems.
• The scale changed; the fragmentation did not. In 1992 estimates ran from 4,000 to 7,000 schools. IBISWorld’s 2026 industry profile counts 72,029 U.S. martial arts studio businesses and $21.0 billion in revenue, with no company holding more than 5 percent of the market. That fragmentation is why this is, above all, a history of how knowledge moved between independent owners.

Prologue

How was martial arts taught in North America before it was a business?

Mostly as a club activity. Judo clubs, Japanese-American community dojos and military combatives programs date from the early twentieth century, and after World War II the early karate market was, in Black Belt magazine’s description, largely limited to veterans returning from the Pacific. Instructors taught in YMCAs, church halls, garages and college gyms, charged little, and rarely thought of what they did as a trade.

Robert Trias opened what Wikipedia describes as the “first public karate school operated by a Caucasian in the United States mainland” in Phoenix in 1946 — a small private dojo with a modest annual fee for daily instruction — and formed the United States Karate Association in 1948, the first mainland karate organization. In Hawaii, Adriano Emperado’s Kajukenbo Self-Defense Institute, founded in 1950, became the islands’ first chain of karate schools.

The 1950s produced a scattered map of instructors rather than an industry: Ed Parker teaching in Provo, Utah, from 1954; Cecil Patterson’s Wado-ryu club in Tennessee from 1957; Robert Fusaro in Minneapolis; George Mattson in Boston; Peter Urban in Union City and New York from 1959; and Mas Oyama’s affiliates. Several later built regional chains — Dan Ivan and Fumio Demura’s Shito-ryu schools in Southern California, Bruce Terrill’s studios in Portland, Philip Koeppel’s Midwest schools — but none is documented as having created a business method that spread beyond its own organization.

Who opened the first commercial karate school?

Black Belt describes Ed Parker as “generally acknowledged as the first person to open a commercial karate school,” in Pasadena, California, in 1956, after his earlier classes in Provo. According to Al Tracy, when he and his brothers enrolled in 1957 there were “fewer than a half dozen karate schools on the Mainland U.S.” The count is impressionistic, but the point stands: in 1957 there was no business model to copy. Our full profile is Ed Parker, 1931–1990.

How did school owners learn from each other before the business press?

Through the martial arts magazines. Black Belt was founded by Mitoshi “Mito” Uyehara, with its first issue in April 1961. For three decades it and its sister titles — including Karate Illustrated, whose competitor ratings later fed into NASKA — were the only national channel through which most owners saw what other schools were doing. The business-specific press would not arrive until the 1990s. (The story of the tournament press and ratings is told in our series From Karate Illustrated to NASKA.)

Era I · 1956–1975

Era I: How was the commercial martial arts school invented?

Between 1956 and 1975 a first generation of operators produced every core element of the modern model: the introductory lesson, the enrollment conference, the prepaid or financed program, the multi-level membership, the salaried instructor, the multi-location chain, the franchise, the association, the tournament as a marketing platform and third-party billing. Almost none of it was invented from scratch. It was borrowed and fitted.

Where did the martial arts school business model come from?

From two older American industries. The first was the franchised ballroom-dance studio. By the 1950s the dance chains had perfected a system for selling lessons to adults who arrived with curiosity rather than commitment. Arthur Murray began building his chain around 1920; Fred Astaire Dance Studios was co-founded in 1947 and franchised from 1950; a smaller network, Linkletter–Totten, traded on the broadcaster Art Linkletter’s name. Their system had every element a school owner will recognize today:

• advertising that generated an inquiry, booked into a free or low-cost introductory lesson taught by a senior person;
• a structured enrollment conference after that lesson;
• written agreements with a total program price, a down payment and installments, often financed;
• program levels (Bronze, Silver and Gold at Fred Astaire) that gave students goals and gave the studio a reason to offer the next program;
• instructors trained both to teach and to sell;
• children’s divisions, and in some studios a service that collected children from school; and
• a short list of numbers reviewed every week.

The second source was the postwar health studio, which sold prepaid memberships rather than individual lessons. Will Tracy had managed an American Health Studios location before he came to karate.

Two channels carried the dance-studio system into martial arts, independently and from different sides of that industry: J. Pat Burleson in Texas, through Fred Astaire licensees, and Nick Cokinos in Washington, D.C., through Arthur Murray and Linkletter–Totten. Both ran into the Jhoon Rhee organization. The founding lineage is told in more detail in our companion history, The History of the Martial Arts School Business in the United States.

How did Ed Parker and the Tracy brothers create the first system and the first franchises?

The first documented transplant happened at Parker’s Pasadena school in 1957–58. According to Al Tracy’s account, first-month dropout ran as high as 90 percent. Will Tracy replaced pay-as-you-go with a free private first lesson, taught by a senior instructor before the student joined a group class, followed by a three-month membership. By the end of 1958, Al Tracy writes, 90 percent of new students were still training after three months. He reports that the school was bringing in $400–$600 a month at the end of 1958 and, when the brothers ran it in late 1959, “never brought in less than $1,000 a month.” Jim Tracy’s autobiography credits the brothers with multiple white-belt levels, expanded belt colors and stripes and tips — the first documented use of fine-grained rank as a retention device.

Parker’s own contribution was the network and the stage. He built the first national karate association through his Kenpo organizations and made the Long Beach International Karate Championships, first held in 1964, the most important event in American karate. His schools were a weaker business than his reputation.

The Tracys opened in San Francisco and Sacramento in 1962, San Jose in 1963 and Phoenix in 1964. By Jim Tracy’s own account, the first four “franchises” were accelerated black-belt programs sold for $4,500 cash with the right to open a Tracy’s school attached. The brothers then hired Hal Bowen, described as Arthur Murray’s top sales closer in San Francisco, to train their instructors; within months, Tracy’s schools were opening throughout California. In January 1971 the champion Joe Lewis told The New York Times he was “touring the nation… promoting a franchise karate school called Tracy’s,” which he said had 93 franchises including four in New York. Our own estimate puts the chain at about 70 studios at its 1969–73 peak; the 93 figure came from a paid spokesman.

The cautionary counterpart was Parker’s own franchise venture. Tom Conner and Parker opened nine Denver-area schools as CoPar; by 1970, in Al Tracy’s telling, CoPar was bankrupt, and most of Parker’s franchises had failed by 1971. The pattern — rapid expansion on the strength of a sales program only the founder could execute, followed by collapse — recurs across the next fifty years.

Why does the industry’s institutional history start with Jhoon Rhee?

Grand Master Jhoon Rhee (1932–2018), the “Father of American Taekwondo,” arrived in Texas in 1956. His college classes there produced Allen Steen, his first American-trained black belt, and J. Pat Burleson. He opened his Washington, D.C., studio at 2035 K Street NW on June 28, 1962, with 12 students; by August he had more than 125. His launch marketing was unconventional — letters to embassies promoting character education and two small ads in the Washington Post sports section — and within a decade the Jhoon Rhee Institute was the largest school group in America: eight schools by 1970 and, by the mid-1980s, 11 studios with more than 10,000 students and about 25 black-belt instructors.

Rhee’s business contributions are unusually well documented and unusually broad:

• Public relations as marketing. The Congressional Taekwondo Club began on May 6, 1965, after Rhee read that Representative James Cleveland had been mugged and offered him free lessons. It ran for decades; more than 350 members of Congress trained with him.
• Broadcast advertising. Rhee was the first taekwondo master to advertise on television. His “Nobody bothers me” commercial, with a jingle by his former student Nils Lofgren, ran for about twenty years in Washington, and Rhee credited it with a 20 percent increase in business.
• Character education as a product. Rhee tied black-belt eligibility to school report cards and built a philosophy of character development that became the template for the children’s market.
• Safety equipment as a retention device. After a student, Pat Worley, broke a cheekbone in 1969, Rhee developed foam Safe-T gear, manufactured by Rheemax, which reached roughly 90 percent of American instructors. Allen Steen’s February 1974 championships were the first tournament documented to require it. Jeff Smith’s summary: it reduced “the injury but also the student drop-outs.”
• Instructor equity. Rhee gave Jeff Smith company stock, which Smith later exchanged for ownership of two schools — an early version of the instructor-to-owner path that dozens of later chains copied.

Our full profile: Grand Master Jhoon Rhee.

Who was Nick Cokinos, and what was Educational Funding Company?

Nicholas P. Cokinos (1921–2014) is the most consequential figure in this history who never earned a black belt. West Point and Georgetown educated, he built his career in the dance-studio industry, first with Arthur Murray and then with Linkletter–Totten, eventually operating seven studios around Washington. In 1967 he began working with the Jhoon Rhee organization as it grew from one school toward eight. Jeff Smith, who was inside the organization, recalled that Cokinos “helped Grandmaster Rhee initiate the business systems, although they had a falling out a few years later.” No source records the terms of their arrangement or the cause of the split.

Out of that work came Educational Funding Company of Chevy Chase, Maryland. EFC’s own materials give its founding as both 1967 and 1968; its U.K. arm reconciles them as 1967 for the Rhee work and 1968 for opening its services to schools generally. EFC combined three things that had never been combined in martial arts: third-party collection of long-term tuition agreements, a consulting curriculum for owners, and a national peer network. Its best-known teaching tools — the enrollment conference and the Extension Conference (the ancestor of the modern renewal), the “Seven and a Half Magic Questions,” the ABC and Half Moon theories, and weekly statistics on inquiries, appointments, shows, enrollments, retention and payroll percentage — became the vocabulary of the profession. Its trademark, filed February 1, 1991, describes “tuition billing services and business management consulting services.”

In February 1992 Cokinos told The New York Times that EFC managed financial operations for 500 martial arts facilities in the United States and Canada, and estimated industry revenue at $720 million to $900 million, “primarily from monthly tuition fees.” Other published reports put EFC’s client base above 700 schools in the early 1990s; those figures are the company’s. My own description of EFC, which I have used for decades, is that it was “an educational organization disguised as a billing company” — read that as the view of a long-time board member and speaker. Profiles: Nick Cokinos and The Man Who Helped Turn Martial Arts Into a Profession.

How did Texas become the most copied operating model?

J. Pat Burleson (1936–2021) rented his first Fort Worth building for $45 a month in 1960, earned his black belt in 1963 and won the black-belt division of the first National Karate Championships, hosted by Jhoon Rhee in Washington in 1964. In a 2009 interview with this magazine he said that in the mid-1960s local businessmen who held the Fred Astaire license for his part of Texas taught him their sales and enrollment system, after which “the number of new students and dollars in the bank just exploded,” and that he taught it to Rhee and to Ed Parker — and from Parker it reached the Tracys. He trained or influenced Chuck Norris, Bob Wall and Joe Lewis. By his own account he ran his schools on the front end, leads and enrollments, and neglected the back end that keeps students training, which is part of why his influence ran through others rather than through a large chain of his own. Read the full interview and his profile.

Allen Steen (1940–2025), Rhee’s first American-trained black belt in 1962, built the Texas Karate Institute into nine company-owned schools and 37 affiliates. The American Karate Black Belt Association records four structural ideas that became standard: separating instructors from sales staff, using program directors as the sales team, running separate programs with separate payment schedules, and building showcase facilities with wall-to-wall mats and glassed-in offices. In 1970 Black Belt profiled him as a pioneer of “big business karate.” His Southwest Karate Black Belt Association (1964) became the American Karate Black Belt Association in 1972, and his 1973 U.S. Karate Championships drew about 9,000 spectators and ABC Wide World of Sports coverage. His principle, still worth quoting, was that the person who signs the lease should control the pricing.

Steen’s organization was also a management school. The AKBBA records that Richard Jenkins served as TKI’s program director, responsible for business, financial, recruiting and advertising programs, and that Texas-trained operators opened five schools in St. Louis in 1970 with Fred Wren and Mike Anderson, three in Oklahoma City in 1971, and moved into Florida in 1974. Anderson later co-founded the Professional Karate Association, whose first championships were held in Los Angeles in September 1974 (see The PKA and Joe Corley). Profile: Grand Master Allen Steen.

What did Chuck Norris and Bob Wall add?

Chuck Norris opened in Torrance in 1962; Bob Wall and Joe Lewis opened the Sherman Oaks Karate Studio in 1966, and Norris bought Lewis’s share in 1968, building six Southern California locations by the early 1970s. Wall, known as the chain’s businessman, documented the sales system many professional studios later used. Norris’s more durable business contributions came later: the United Fighting Arts Federation (1979), which certifies rank and schools in his system, and Kickstart Kids, founded on August 16, 1990 (originally as Kick Drugs Out of America) and launched in four Houston-area schools in 1992, which put character-based karate inside public schools. Norris died on March 19, 2026, on Kauai, Hawaii, aged 86. Profile: Chuck Norris.

How did the American Taekwondo Association solve the franchise problem?

Haeng Ung Lee began teaching in Omaha in 1962 with Richard Reed, and they founded the American Taekwondo Association in 1969; the ATA moved to Little Rock in 1977. The ATA is the most important alternative lineage in this history because it solved the franchise problem differently. Instead of selling territories, it standardized a copyrighted curriculum (Songahm, copyrighted in 1983), licensed instructors and ran national events, so that thousands of independently owned schools taught an identical product. The ATA has reported 800 schools and 120,000 members in North America and more than 300,000 members worldwide; those are the organization’s figures.

Reed’s second contribution was financial. According to ASF Payment Solutions’ own retrospective, in 1973 Reed “developed a billing and loan program for martial arts schools across the U.S. that in turn pioneered a new industry in the health and fitness world.” The company, American Service Finance, later introduced electronic funds transfer, card payments and a DOS-based attendance system in the early 1980s. If that account is accurate, both of the industry’s first two billing companies were born inside martial arts organizations within six years of each other.

Who built the first style-based franchise chain?

Fred Villari founded Villari’s Studios of Self Defense in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1968, teaching his own Shaolin Kempo system. In 1992 The New York Times called Villari’s “the largest chain in the nation with 123 franchise locations.” It is the clearest early example of a franchise built on a proprietary style name, and its affiliates still describe more than 75 locations in the United States and Canada.

Who were the other regional builders of the first era?

Several of the most durable regional chains were founded by Rhee-trained operators. John Worley joined the Jhoon Rhee Institute in 1970 and moved to Minnesota in 1973 to found what became National Karate; Larry Carnahan joined in 1977 and has served as NASKA president since 1988. Dennis Tosten’s American Karate Studios (later Amerikick) opened in the Philadelphia area in 1967. In Canada, Cezar Borkowski founded Northern Karate Schools in Toronto in 1972 (see Canada). Joe Corley’s Battle of Atlanta and his PKA work, and Jim Harrison’s first World Professional Karate Championships in Kansas City in 1968, turned competition itself into a business that gave schools champion instructors to market.

What happened in the 1973 boom and the 1974 bust?

Popular culture delivered the first national demand shock. Black Belt dates the first national proliferation of schools to 1973: the Kung Fu television series, Billy Jack, the Hong Kong “chopsocky” imports and above all Enter the Dragon, which opened in the United States on August 19, 1973, a month after Bruce Lee’s death. “In the summer of ’73,” Black Belt writes, “self-defense schools began to open in every major city and suburb.” The boom lasted about a year. The oil embargo, the recession, Lee’s death and the end of Kung Fu turned it into “the bust of ’74, catching many instructors off guard.” The lesson — that demand created by media is rented, and only enrollment and retention systems turn it into a business — became part of the industry’s folk wisdom.

Era II · 1975–1993

Era II: How did the martial arts school become a profession?

The second generation did not invent the core methods; it made them repeatable. Between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s the industry moved from founder-dependent selling to written systems, from single-city chains to national billing networks, and from adult-heavy enrollment to a children’s market that, by the 2020s, accounted for roughly 80 percent of customers at a chain like Tiger Schulmann’s. The late-1970s revival was driven, according to Black Belt, by Chuck Norris’s films and by ESPN’s broadcasts of full-contact karate; “some enterprising instructors discovered they could make significant profits.”

Why was the Jhoon Rhee Institute a training ground for owners?

Because it was the largest school group in America during its peak and it was run as a business. Grand Master Jeff Smith joined the Institute in 1970 and spent 15 years there as instructor and executive, rising to Senior Vice President and running training and operations across Rhee’s network, while also winning the PKA World Light-Heavyweight title on September 14, 1974, at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and holding it until 1980. Smith worked alongside Nick Cokinos to build and implement the Institute’s business systems. His significance here is less as a founder than as the operator whose staff became a pipeline of future owners: John Worley and Larry Carnahan (National Karate) and I all came through the Institute in those years and went on to build our own organizations. Smith received NAPMA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and was promoted to 10th Degree Black Belt in 2016. Profile: Grand Master Jeff Smith.

The Institute’s general manager in my years there, Ned Muffley, a retired Navy band conductor, is the least-known member of that team and one of the most important to how the schools actually ran (profile).

What was the EFC Board of Directors, and why did it matter?

By the mid-1980s EFC had become the national meeting place for high-performing independent owners. A letter from Nicholas Cokinos, Chairman, dated April 22, 1987, confirms the election of EFC’s first Board of Directors for the 1987–88 fiscal year: nine school owners chosen from 17 nominees — Dennis Brown, David Deaton, Keith Hafner, Steve LaVallee, Will Maier, Jim Mather, Stephen Oliver, Greg Silva and Don Southerton. The board’s significance is that it institutionalized peer benchmarking. Owners compared weekly statistics, tested methods in their own schools and taught what worked at EFC seminars. It was not an honorary board where everyone had lunch and congratulated each other; it was a working laboratory.

Three members left independently traceable operating legacies:

• Steve LaVallee (Liverpool, New York; died 2012) became the industry’s reference case for density — by our own reporting, more than 500 students in 1,800 square feet at $600 rent, with receptionist-driven appointment confirmation and follow-up during prime time.
• Keith Hafner earned his black belt in Ann Arbor in 1977, bought his instructor Edward Sell’s school in 1979 and built one of the largest single-market operations in the Midwest; AnnArbor.com reports more than 20,000 students trained over the school’s history.
• Greg Silva built United Professionals and the Universal Curriculum (see Era III).

What is Mile High Karate’s place in this history?

I will tell my own part in the first person, because most of it rests on sources I control, and the reader should weigh it that way.

I began training in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1969 under Bob Olinghouse and Gran Moulder, black belts teaching the Jhoon Rhee Institute system. I began teaching in 1974 and opened my own school in 1975, at 15. I trained at the Institute’s Washington headquarters from 1976 and earned my 1st Degree Black Belt from Grand Master Jhoon Rhee in 1978; he later awarded my ranks through 6th Degree. While at Georgetown University, from which I graduated cum laude, I worked as a head instructor and then a branch manager for the Institute under Jhoon Rhee, Nick Cokinos, Jeff Smith and Ned Muffley. That was my real business education.

On August 6, 1983, with $10,000, I founded Mile High Karate in Lakewood, Colorado. The first school passed 150 students in its first 90 days. Applying the Institute’s branch-school model and EFC’s systems, we opened five schools in 18 months, and by the time I was 25 the organization had more than 2,500 active students and over $1,700,000 in annual revenue (approximately $5,200,000 in today’s dollars). It then grew to six locations and more than 3,500 students, and kept growing from there, including international franchise locations from 2000. From 1989 through 1999 the Mile High Karate Classic held NASKA World Tour status (that story is here).

I began coaching other owners in 1985, while opening those first Denver-area locations. Mile High Karate was the first “Success Story” profiled in Century Martial Arts’ client newsletter. As a founding member of EFC’s Board I referred inbound owners to EFC, keynoted its first convention and every one after it through 2000, taught its systems in seminars across North America, and served on the board from its formation through 2001. Those are the facts of the role. How much influence it had on other consultants is a question on which the only detailed sources are my own publications, and I leave it there.

What did West Coast World Martial Arts contribute?

Ernie Reyes Sr. and Tony Thompson met at San Jose State in the mid-1970s and founded West Coast World Martial Arts in 1978. It grew into an association of roughly 32 to 43 schools, depending on the year, linked by a common curriculum, shared events and the high-energy West Coast Demo Team. Its business contributions were the demonstration team as a marketing and retention asset, and the association model in which member schools are independently owned but share brand, curriculum and belt standards. Thompson died on July 24, 2025 (profile).

How did The Karate Kid create the children’s market?

The Karate Kid (1984) was the decisive demand event of the era. It grossed about $90.8 million in North America, and Esquire credits it with helping to “create a thriving under-eighteen market.” A San Fernando Valley owner who had run his school for four decades told the Los Angeles Times: “Our business just blew up… The kids thing became bigger than adults.” The New York Times in 1992 traced the chain of demand from Kung Fu to The Karate Kid to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a 1990 Los Angeles Times report quoted Frank Dux saying Bloodsport had helped revive a flagging industry. By the late 1980s, in one retailer’s phrase, karate schools “seemed to appear in every shopping center.” The children’s program — age-segmented classes, character education, report-card incentives and the parent as the buyer — became the economic core of the traditional school and has remained so.

How did Tiger Schulmann build a vertically integrated chain?

Daniel “Tiger” Schulmann opened in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and began his New Jersey expansion in 1984, according to NJBIZ and Esquire. Esquire‘s 2025 investigation is the most detailed independent account of any chain’s economics in this history. It describes marketing by live demonstration (including breaking baseball bats with a shin), $9.50 two-for-one trial offers, Saturday-morning television ads with a 1-800-52-TIGER number, weekly Tuesday owner meetings at the Paramus headquarters, and a model of developing black-belt students into partner-owners — early owners, it reports, received 49 percent of their schools after a 10 percent management fee and bought equipment from the company. Esquire estimates mid-1990s gross revenue at $15 million and reports 54 schools grossing more than $35 million a year in 2025. The chain later moved from karate to MMA branding and, by Esquire‘s count, had placed 10 fighters in the UFC.

Who invented the Black Belt Club?

The Black Belt Club — a premium, pre-enrolled advanced program sold before black belt — became one of the most widely adopted upgrade structures in the industry, and its origin is contested. In my account, it was developed at the Jhoon Rhee Institute by Jhoon Rhee, Nick Cokinos and Jeff Smith; this magazine’s Cokinos profile likewise credits the continued-training concept to Rhee. Karate America credits Bill Clark with designing the ATA’s Black Belt Club program in the 1990s. Both can be true: on the evidence we have, the ATA program was a later, and very influential, version of an Institute idea. What would settle it is a dated Institute enrollment document, and we have not yet found one.

Bill Clark himself is a major figure. An ATA pioneer who began in Omaha in 1968 and founded Karate America in Jacksonville in 1971, he built more than 30 schools in five states and, according to his organization, authorized instructors in more than 2,000 schools. Tiger-Rock Martial Arts, meanwhile, traces its origin to 1983 as the International Taekwondo Association and today reports more than 100 locations.

Who wrote the first mass-market school business manual?

Andrew Wood built Martial Arts America from a single school in San Marcos, California, to a chain of about 150 in seven years, and sold business systems to about 275 more schools through his Masters Club before leaving the industry after 2000 (see our interview, Andrew Wood: A Legend in His Own Mind). Black Belt identifies Wood’s manual on earning a $100,000 salary teaching karate as a widely known book of the late 1980s, while noting that serious implementation of such methods “did not take place until the 1990s.” Wood is the bridge between the private seminar world of EFC and the association-and-magazine world that followed: he packaged operating advice as a product for sale to strangers.

When did tuition billing become a competitive industry?

By the end of the 1980s. Amerinational Management Services (AMS), founded in Orlando in 1983 “by martial artists for martial artists,” began with billing and collection and expanded into software, marketing, staff development and after-school programs. Member Solutions opened in 1991; its own history recalls a market of “handwritten receipts” and “checks sent by mail,” and it reports more than 11,000 schools and studios served since. By then the long-term tuition agreement was a regulated consumer product: New York’s health-club services statute, General Business Law § 621, expressly covers “martial arts and self-defense schools.”

What did the industry look like in 1992?

The New York Times‘ February 16, 1992, business feature is the best independent snapshot of the end of this era. Estimates of the number of schools ranged from 4,000 (Fred Villari) to 7,000 (Peak Performance, which reported an 11 percent rise over two years while health clubs were flat). Estimates of revenue ranged from $720–900 million (Cokinos) to $2 billion (Villari). And, the paper observed, “anyone can establish a martial arts studio by renting space in a shopping center or urban storefront and displaying a sign. The industry lacks formal associations and has few regulatory bodies.” The next era was an answer to that sentence.

Era III · 1990–2008

Era III: How did business education become an industry of its own?

Between 1990 and 2008, methods that had moved privately — through EFC seminars, Rhee alumni and personal mentorship — were published, packaged, licensed and sold by subscription. The vehicles were consulting firms, trade associations, a trade magazine, supplier-sponsored programs, licensing systems and conventions.

Who invented the rotating curriculum?

This is the most important disputed credit in the business, and we print both accounts.

Greg Silva, a 1987 EFC board member, developed his Universal Curriculum in early 1989. His company reports that it took his school from zero to 500 students in under a year and that some version of it is used in about 2,000 schools. The idea is a rotating curriculum: instead of teaching belt-specific content in separate classes, every student in a class works on the same monthly or cyclical module, so a new student can join any class and a school can run fewer, fuller sessions. Silva founded United Professionals in 1990 as a combined consulting, billing and marketing company, and launched the Cornerman coaching program in 2008. His company presents the Universal Curriculum as his invention.

My own account is different, and I give it as testimony. The rotating curriculum was developed independently by two people: Bill Clark of the ATA and Karate America for beginner and intermediate ranks, and me, at Mile High Karate, for black-belt ranks, where it made multi-rank black-belt classes workable. On that account Silva was an early adopter and by far its most important disseminator, not its originator. All three sources are affiliated, and no dated curriculum document from any of us has yet been located to settle priority. Until one is, the fair statement is that the rotating curriculum emerged in the ATA and EFC networks in the 1980s and was spread nationally by Silva from 1989.

How did John Graden and NAPMA open the association era?

John Graden, a Tampa Bay school owner and black belt under Joe Lewis, founded the National Association of Professional Martial Artists (NAPMA) in Clearwater, Florida, in 1993. (Some secondary sources, including Wikipedia, give 1994; NAPMA’s own records give 1993.) In 1996 NAPMA launched Martial Arts Professional — Volume 1, Number 1 was the Winter 1996 issue, monthly by July 1996 — the industry’s first business journal for school owners. Graden later founded the American Council on Martial Arts (1997), an instructor-certification program, and the Martial Arts Teachers’ Association.

NAPMA’s products — customizable advertising, the “Little Ninjas” preschool program and other children’s curricula, business plans and monthly member shipments — were designed so an owner could buy a working program rather than invent one. NAPMA reported about 1,800 subscribing schools in 2001 and more than 2,000 member schools worldwide by 2004. Critics date the moment when schools across the country began to look alike to those standardized monthly marketing kits.

Ownership changed twice. NAPMA passed to Century Martial Arts in the mid-2000s (NAPMA’s records date Century’s ownership from 2005; other sources say 2004), and on August 1, 2007, I acquired NAPMA and Martial Arts Professional through Martial Arts Marketing, Inc. In my recollection, Graden was an EFC member who learned much of his early model at EFC seminars taught by Jeff Smith and me, and he credited me with the industry’s first how-to manual on marketing a school online, in 1999. Both are my recollection, not the documentary record. Profile: John Graden, founder of NAPMA.

Why did an equipment supplier become the industry’s educator?

Mike Dillard founded Century in Oklahoma City in 1976, working from his garage; it became the largest martial arts equipment supplier in the world. In 2001 Century created the Martial Arts Industry Association (MAIA) as its consulting arm, with Frank Silverman — a Silva student — as executive director from June 2001, and in 2002 MAIA held the first Martial Arts SuperShow in Las Vegas, which became the industry’s annual convention for two decades. MAIA’s consultants included Mike Metzger, who reports owning nine Orlando schools and 151 licensed Championship Martial Arts locations. Black Belt credits MAIA with leading the arrival of business organizations in the industry. The supplier-as-educator model had a structural logic: every school that grew bought more uniforms, belts and gear.

What did Dave Kovar change?

Dave Kovar began training in 1978 and founded Kovar Systems in 1994 to teach owners that “being an exceptional martial artist didn’t automatically translate to business success.” His distinctive emphasis was instructor development and teaching quality as the drivers of retention, rather than sales process alone. His organization reports serving thousands of owners on three continents (a company figure).

How did the coaching organizations develop?

In the EFC tradition of peer groups built around real numbers, working operators began selling coaching directly. I have coached school owners since 1985, first as a founding member of the EFC Board of Directors and its lead keynote speaker; in 2000 I formally founded the coaching organization as Stephen Oliver’s Inner Circle, later rebranded Martial Arts Wealth Mastery — one continuous body of work, not two separate starts. In 2002 I launched NAPMA Squared, later called Maximum Impact, an advanced program for professional schools. NAPMA gave me its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, four years before I owned it. Other consultants and groups — Kovar Systems, United Professionals’ Cornerman, MAIA’s programs, Championship Martial Arts licensing and many smaller firms — built parallel practices. This history does not rank them.

How did fitness kickboxing open the adult market?

The late-1990s adult market was reshaped by Billy Blanks’s Tae Bo. Blanks developed the routine in 1976; in the 1990s it was mass-marketed through infomercials, and about 1.5 million video sets had been sold by 1999. Because Blanks trademarked the name, gyms offering similar classes had to license it or call them something else. Martial arts schools answered with their own branded fitness programs: Jim Graden, John Graden’s brother, launched Cardio Karate in 1996 and wrote that it “attracted students with completely different needs.” Cardio kickboxing became the most common way traditional schools sold to adults with no interest in rank — and, a decade later, the product the kickboxing franchisors took out of the martial arts school altogether.

How did martial arts get into schools and after-school care?

Two models took martial arts into schools. Chuck Norris’s nonprofit Kickstart Kids, launched in four Houston-area schools in 1992, now reports operating in more than 59 Texas schools. In Ontario, Karate Kids has run fitness, character education and karate in more than 250 elementary schools in the Greater Toronto Area since 2001. Commercially, the more consequential model was the school-run after-school program with van pickup — a direct descendant of the dance studios’ school-collection service — which billing companies such as AMS began supporting as a product line. For many schools it became the largest single revenue stream.

What licensing and franchise systems arrived in the 2000s?

• Krav Maga Worldwide was founded in Los Angeles in 1998 and built a licensing network that brought the Israeli self-defense system into gyms and martial arts schools.
• Mile High Karate began international franchising in 2000.
• Premier Martial Arts was founded by Barry Van Over in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2004 and began franchising in 2018, marketing ownership to investors who were not martial artists.
• Tiger-Rock converted its network to a franchise model in 2008, according to one critical genealogy of the industry.

What were the criticisms of the commercial school?

As systems spread, so did criticism. An anonymous 2026 working genealogy, the McDojo Lineage Project, traces what it regards as the over-commercialization of martial arts through the EFC and ATA lineages, pointing to practices such as testing fees (late 1980s), “guaranteed black belt” contracts, camouflage belts and leadership programs (late 1990s) and child black belts. A paper in The Sport Journal examined the effects of modern marketing on traditional martial arts culture. Black Belt framed the tension as an owner forced to be both a “compassionate, trusting, and humble master” and a “strong-minded, fast-talking, and hard-toothed entrepreneur.” These critiques belong in the history. They record the real cost of standardization and the reputational risk every successful system carried, and anyone who has spent fifty years in this business has seen both the good and the bad versions of every method described here.

Era IV · 1978–present

Era IV: How did the Brazilian jiu-jitsu academy become its own business model?

BJJ arrived in North America as a family enterprise and grew into the most distinctive business model in the modern industry: month-to-month adult memberships, rank authority tied to lineage, and global affiliation networks that sit somewhere between a franchise and a guild.

How did Rorion Gracie build the first academy?

Rorion Gracie came to the United States in 1978. Gracie University’s history records that he asked several martial arts school owners to let him teach at their facilities and every one declined, so he put mats on the floor of a rented two-car garage in Hermosa Beach. His enrollment model was a free private introductory class for every new student and another free class for every referral — “Bring a friend and I’ll give you another free class, ten friends, ten free classes!” “Solely by word of mouth,” the organization reports, the garage grew; Royce Gracie joined in 1985, and by 1989 the brothers had 130 active students and 80 more on a waiting list.

Media drove the next stage. Rorion was a technical adviser on Lethal Weapon (1987), produced the documentary Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action (1988) and was the subject of Pat Jordan’s 1989 Playboy article “BAD,” which popularized the “Gracie Challenge.” The Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy opened in Torrance in 1989. A five-volume home-video series, Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Basics, followed in 1991 — the first large-scale use of instructional video as a revenue line for a school.

Why was UFC 1 a marketing event?

Rorion Gracie and his student Art Davie created the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a pay-per-view single-elimination tournament first held on November 12, 1993, in Denver, with Royce representing the family. Whatever its later significance as a sport, UFC 1 was in its origin a demonstration of one school’s product at national scale. It created demand for ground fighting that existing karate and taekwondo schools could not satisfy, and it opened the market that BJJ academies and MMA gyms filled over the next three decades.

How did the Machados use celebrity to fill an academy?

The five Machado brothers, cousins of the Gracies, helped at the Torrance academy before Chuck Norris encouraged Carlos, John and Rigan to open in a Tarzana mall he co-owned in 1991. A Norris demonstration and a full-page Los Angeles Times article “kept the phone ringing for a month,” and the academy soon had more than 150 students; a second school opened in Redondo Beach in December 1992. Norris’s UFAF conventions gave the Machados an annual seminar platform, and Carlos Machado later ran an academy on the set of Walker, Texas Ranger in Dallas from 1995. Eddie Bravo, a Jean-Jacques Machado black belt, opened the first 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu school in Los Angeles in 2003, one of the first American jiu-jitsu brands built around no-gi training.

What is a BJJ affiliation, and why does it matter to the business?

The BJJ affiliation is the industry’s most important organizational innovation since the ATA. What an affiliation provides, in one software vendor’s 2026 summary, is “ranking authority and external legitimacy,” brand, curriculum and community; what it does not is day-to-day management — “every affiliation on this list leaves the day-to-day business management to you.” The major networks:

• Gracie Barra. Carlos Gracie Jr. opened the original academy in Barra da Tijuca in 1986 and systematized class structure and competition as a growth engine. Gracie Barra Franchise Systems, based in Irvine, California, was established in the mid-2000s and began franchising around 2010 under chief executive Flavio Almeida; franchise-disclosure data list several hundred North American locations, and the organization reports more than 1,300 schools in more than 45 countries. It is the clearest case of a lineage converting into a registered franchise.
• Alliance was founded in 1993 by Romero “Jacaré” Cavalcanti, Fabio Gurgel and Alexandre Paiva; its global headquarters is in Atlanta.
• Renzo Gracie Academy opened in New York in 1996, the anchor of an East Coast network.
• Gracie University Certified Training Centers. Gracie University arranged more than 600 techniques into a linear curriculum and exported it through licensed centers, combining in-person classes with an online curriculum that mirrors the live program.
• Competition as infrastructure. Carlos Gracie Jr.’s federation held the first World Jiu-Jitsu Championship in Rio in February 1996, and the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation (IBJJF) was formalized in 2002, giving academies a ranked tournament circuit and a belt standard.

How did BJJ change pricing and instruction?

BJJ was the first martial art whose knowledge market moved substantially online. Gracie University’s subscription model and BJJ Fanatics, founded by black belts Bernardo Faria and Michael Zenga, built a large direct-to-consumer instructional business that academies both compete with and use. Software vendors report typical adult unlimited BJJ memberships in the United States in the mid-$100s per month in 2026, reflecting a model built on adult month-to-month memberships rather than the prepaid, program-based agreements common in karate and taekwondo schools. For the traditional school owner, that is the most consequential difference between the two businesses: the BJJ academy sells access, the traditional school sells a program.

Era V · 1985–present

Era V: How did MMA gyms and kickboxing studios become businesses?

How did fight teams become gyms?

The first MMA gyms were fight teams that later monetized their reputation with public memberships.

As the UFC moved onto mainstream television after The Ultimate Fighter (2005), fight-team names became consumer brands that could sell public memberships. The last regulatory barrier fell in 2016: the New York State Assembly passed professional MMA on March 22, and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it into law on April 14, making the sport legal in all 50 states.

How did MMA become a franchise and platform product?

UFC Gym launched in June 2009 in Concord, California, in partnership with fitness entrepreneur Mark Mastrov, applying the promotion’s brand to an MMA-inspired fitness club, and later franchised internationally. Tiger Schulmann’s moved from karate to MMA branding. By 2026 the model was shifting again, from gym to platform: this magazine reported in September 2026 that MMA.INC had opened its TrainAlta program at 27 UFC GYM locations in seven states (our report).

How did kickboxing-fitness franchising take the product out of the martial arts school?

Three franchisors took the cardio-kickboxing product out of the martial arts school entirely:

• 9Round was founded in 2008 by Shannon and Heather Hudson, who were, in the company’s words, “busy parents running a karate school.” It describes itself as the world’s largest kickboxing-fitness franchise.
• TITLE Boxing Club opened its first club in Overland Park, Kansas, on January 2, 2008, and began franchising around 2010.
• iLoveKickboxing grew from Michael Parrella’s martial arts schools and his online-marketing firm; the franchise company was formed in 2012 and had about 170 locations by August 2016. In March 2024, 9Round acquired it.

The central idea of the kickboxing franchisors — a single-program adult studio fed by centrally managed online lead generation — was a direct descendant of the martial arts school’s introductory-offer funnel, stripped of rank and curriculum. The investor-franchise era also brought martial arts and kickboxing franchises under the same regulatory and legal scrutiny as any other consumer-services franchise: disclosure documents, earnings representations and state registration became part of the business. Disputes between franchisors and franchisees that have not reached a final judgment are not described in this history.

Era VI · 1999–2026

Era VI: How did software, online marketing, private equity and the pandemic change the school?

How did school marketing move from the Yellow Pages to the web funnel?

Until the late 1990s most school advertising was local and physical: the Yellow Pages, newspaper ads, flyers, demonstrations and, for a few chains, television. Esquire describes 1980s school marketing as often “a Yellow Pages advertisement, an intimidating photograph of the owner” and a list of obscure disciplines. The move online came in three phases:

1. Websites and manuals (about 1999–2008). Associations and consultants began teaching website design, search listings and email follow-up.
2. Paid search and social ads with web-only trial offers (about 2008–2018). Specialized agencies sold search optimization, lead generation and “new-customer membership processing” to schools and franchisees, typically around a low-priced online trial.
3. Integrated platforms (about 2015–2026). Software vendors absorbed marketing: Kicksite added website services in 2015; Zen Planner bundles CRM and automated lead follow-up; Spark Membership combines software, payments and marketing. By the mid-2020s AI features — automated text follow-up, review requests and generated class descriptions — were arriving in school software, and new ad surfaces were opening (see ChatGPT Ads and Apple Maps Ads).

How did school-management software replace the billing company?

Software moved the billing company’s functions onto the owner’s desk. ASF claims the first DOS-based attendance system in the early 1980s and early electronic and card billing. RainMaker was founded in 2003 and began mainly in martial arts schools. Kicksite launched in 2007, “born out of Taekwondo.” Spark Membership was founded in Tampa in 2017 by school owners Grand Master Cheong Park and Ron Sell; when Bregal Sagemount announced a growth investment on September 2, 2025, Spark reported about 2,000 customers and more than $750 million a year in payments processed. The arc from EFC’s paper ledgers to Spark is the arc of the whole industry: the methods stayed; the cost of running them fell toward zero.

When did private equity arrive?

Institutional capital arrived in the 2020s. On January 4, 2022, Unleashed Brands announced its acquisition of Premier Martial Arts, which then reported more than 560 licenses sold. Premier remained in Unleashed Brands’ seven-brand portfolio in the company’s first-half 2026 report. With it, the martial arts franchise became an asset class, subject to the same investor expectations and the same scrutiny as any other franchise concept.

How did COVID-19 affect martial arts schools?

The pandemic closed in-person classes across North America in March 2020. Schools that survived did so by moving classes online, keeping staff and billing through the shutdown; one Illinois owner told the Chicago Sun-Times her team stopped paying themselves, kept instructors on payroll and bought kicking bags and smartphones for online instruction. IBISWorld describes a profit dip followed by recovery as restrictions eased. One software vendor’s reading of the same data is that post-2021 growth was “in supply, not demand” — more studios competing for a similar pool of students.

Did Cobra Kai bring students back?

Yes. Cobra Kai, which premiered on YouTube Red on May 2, 2018, moved to Netflix in 2020 and ended in February 2025, produced the first nostalgia-driven demand wave. A San Fernando Valley owner whose school had close to 1,000 students before the pandemic told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 that “’Cobra Kai’ and ‘Karate Kid’ made it real… the two biggest things that drew martial arts students to our schools.” Unlike the 1973 wave, it reached an industry that already had the systems to keep the students it brought.

What does the industry look like in 2026?

Larger, more fragmented and more technological than at any point in its history, and in the middle of a generational handover:

• Scale. IBISWorld’s 2026 profile counts 72,029 U.S. martial arts studio businesses and $21.0 billion in revenue, with no company above 5 percent market share. (IBISWorld’s separate business-count page gives a higher figure, 76,364; definitions differ.) Against the 4,000–7,000 schools of 1992, even allowing for different definitions, the industry has grown roughly tenfold in establishments.
• Losing the founders. Tony Thompson died in July 2025, Allen Steen on December 30, 2025, and Chuck Norris on March 19, 2026. Of the architects named in Era I, almost none remain. Their stories are collected in our In Memoriam section.
• The convention changed. Century announced there would be no 2026 Martial Arts SuperShow after more than two decades, directing owners to MAIA’s JumpStart Live event in Orlando instead.
• Capital and platforms. Private equity owns franchise brands and software companies; UFC GYM and its partners are testing platform models; software absorbs marketing, billing and increasingly AI-driven follow-up.
• Regulation. Tuition agreements, background checks and safeguarding are increasingly the subject of state law, a trend this magazine now covers in its Legislation & Regulation section.

And yet the enrollment sequence in most North American schools — lead, first visit, introductory lesson with a senior person, enrollment conference, program choice, weekly numbers, renewal — is recognizably the one the dance studios handed to Burleson and Cokinos sixty years ago.

How did the martial arts school business develop in Canada?

The Canadian story runs parallel to the American one and was frequently integrated with it through billing, associations and chains.

• Integration with American systems. By 1992 EFC reported serving schools in both the United States and Canada, and AMS describes serving schools “nationwide and in Canada.” NAPMA, MAIA and the major coaching groups have always counted Canadian members.
• Northern Karate Schools was founded in Toronto in 1972 by Cezar Borkowski and grew to 15 Greater Toronto locations serving, by its own account, more than 10,000 participants a week — one of the largest single-owner school groups in North America.
• Villari’s operates Canadian studios, including in Toronto.
• Karate Kids built a school-based model in more than 250 Greater Toronto Area elementary schools from 2001, descended from Tallack Martial Arts in Kingston.
• BJJ and MMA. The major affiliation networks and MMA brands expanded into Canada on the same pattern as in the United States. Provincial combat-sports regulation, which varies widely, is a distinctly Canadian feature of the business.

A full Canadian history needs provincial business records and Canadian trade press that were not available for this edition; it is on the research agenda below.

Where did each part of today’s school business model come from?

The eras above follow people. This section follows functions — the specific operating disciplines of a school — and names who introduced, systemized, scaled or spread each one.

Sales and enrollment

Billing, contracts and pricing

Tuition collection is the function in which the industry’s history is most continuous. The progression ran from monthly cash dues and pay-per-lesson (1950s), to prepaid three-month memberships (the Tracys, 1957–58), to financed multi-level agreements (the dance-studio model, late 1960s), to third-party billing (EFC 1967–68, ASF 1973, AMS 1983, Member Solutions 1991), to electronic funds transfer and card payments (from the early 1980s), to integrated software-and-payments platforms (Spark, 2017). Along the way the industry acquired consumer-protection obligations, and BJJ academies largely adopted month-to-month adult pricing instead.

Curriculum, rank and programs

Advertising and public relations

Rhee’s letters to embassies, Washington Post ads, Congressional club and “Nobody bothers me” commercial remain the benchmark for an independent school’s local marketing. Tournaments functioned as marketing platforms from Parker’s 1964 Internationals and Steen’s televised 1973 championships to the NASKA circuit, founded in 1986 by the promoters of major events including the Battle of Atlanta, the Diamond Nationals and the U.S. Open (see Who’s Who in NASKA). Celebrity endorsement drove enrollment for Norris’s schools, for the Tracys through Joe Lewis and for the Machados through Norris. Demonstration teams (West Coast World Martial Arts) and live stunts (Tiger Schulmann’s) made the show itself the advertisement.

Business systems and management

Weekly statistics — leads, introductory lessons, enrollments, renewals, attendance, drops and receivables — entered martial arts through Cokinos and EFC and were refined by EFC’s operator board after 1987. Steen’s organizational chart (program directors, separate instructors, showcase facilities) and LaVallee’s density model defined the high-performance single school. Tiger Schulmann’s weekly owner meetings are an early documented chain-level management cadence.

Staff development and ownership paths

The industry’s most important staff-development idea is the path from student to instructor to manager to owner. It appears in Rhee’s grant of stock to Jeff Smith, in the Tracy and Steen organizations’ expansion through trained operators, in ATA licensing, in Tiger Schulmann’s black-belt partner model and in the BJJ affiliation, where a black belt opens under the team’s name. Formal instructor certification was attempted by John Graden’s American Council on Martial Arts from 1997. Kovar Systems put teaching skill at the center of its consulting. Esquire‘s account of Tiger Schulmann’s ownership terms shows how much the model depends on the terms being fair to the new owner.

Franchising and licensing

Trade associations, media and events

Demand booms

What are the business bloodlines of the industry?

Business methods, like techniques, have lineages. Arrows below mean a documented or strongly attested transfer of operating methods, not rank.

Who are the most important innovators in the martial arts school business?

The register applies the test set out at the top — what did this person introduce, systemize, scale or spread? — and notes the strongest kind of evidence behind each core claim.

Considered and not yet placed. Joe Corley (Battle of Atlanta; PKA), John and Pat Worley and Larry Carnahan (National Karate; NASKA), Mike Anderson (PKA), Jim Harrison, Fred Degerberg, John Sharkey, Dennis Tosten, Richard Jenkins and a number of Canadian operators were all considered. Corley, the Worleys and Carnahan appear above as event and chain builders; the others need primary sources establishing a transferable business method before they can be placed. Readers with documents are invited to send them.

Timeline of record

Which claims in this history are disputed?

Frequently asked questions

Who started the martial arts school business in North America?

No single person. Ed Parker is generally credited with opening the first commercial karate school, in Pasadena in 1956, and the Tracy brothers introduced the first membership system at his school in 1957-58. The institutional lineage that produced today’s professional school model runs through Grand Master Jhoon Rhee, who opened his Washington, D.C., institute on June 28, 1962, his Texas black belts Allen Steen and J. Pat Burleson, and Nick Cokinos, who founded Educational Funding Company in 1967-68.

Where did martial arts school business systems come from?

Mainly from franchised ballroom-dance studios such as Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire, which had developed the introductory lesson, enrollment conference, prepaid and financed programs, program levels and weekly statistics by the 1950s, and secondarily from postwar health studios, which sold prepaid memberships. J. Pat Burleson learned the Fred Astaire system in the mid-1960s and passed it to Jhoon Rhee and Ed Parker; Nick Cokinos brought Arthur Murray and Linkletter-Totten methods into the Rhee organization from 1967.

Who was the first martial arts franchise?

The Tracy brothers’ kenpo schools are the first national karate franchise on record. By Jim Tracy’s account their first franchises were sold in the 1960s, and in January 1971 Joe Lewis told The New York Times the chain had 93 franchises. Villari’s Studios of Self Defense, founded in 1968, was the largest franchise chain in 1992 with 123 locations.

What was Educational Funding Company (EFC)?

A tuition-billing and business-education company founded by Nick Cokinos in 1967-68 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It collected tuition for schools on long-term agreements and taught owners enrollment, renewal, retention and weekly statistics. In 1992 Cokinos told The New York Times it managed financial operations for 500 schools in the United States and Canada. In April 1987 it formed a Board of Directors of nine working school owners.

When did martial arts schools start billing tuition through third parties?

In the late 1960s. Educational Funding Company began in 1967-68, American Service Finance followed in 1973, Amerinational Management Services in 1983 and Member Solutions in 1991. Software-and-payments platforms such as Spark Membership (2017) later moved the same functions onto the owner’s desk.

How did The Karate Kid affect the martial arts business?

The 1984 film, which grossed about $90.8 million in North America, is credited with creating the children’s market that became the economic core of the traditional karate and taekwondo school. Owners told the Los Angeles Times that after it, the children’s business became bigger than the adult business.

How is a BJJ academy’s business model different from a karate school’s?

Most BJJ academies sell month-to-month adult memberships and derive rank authority from a lineage-based affiliation such as Gracie Barra or Alliance, while most traditional karate and taekwondo schools sell program-based agreements to families, with children as the majority of students. In short, the BJJ academy sells access and the traditional school sells a program.

Who founded NAPMA and Martial Arts Professional magazine?

John Graden founded the National Association of Professional Martial Artists in 1993, and NAPMA launched Martial Arts Professional in 1996, the first business journal for school owners. Century Martial Arts acquired NAPMA in the mid-2000s, and Stephen Oliver acquired it on August 1, 2007; he is CEO and Chairman of NAPMA and Publisher of the magazine.

Who invented the rotating curriculum for martial arts schools?

It is disputed. Greg Silva’s company credits his Universal Curriculum of 1989. Stephen Oliver’s account is that it was developed independently by Bill Clark of the ATA for beginner and intermediate ranks and by Oliver for black-belt ranks, with Silva as its leading disseminator. No dated document has yet settled priority.

How big is the martial arts school industry in 2026?

IBISWorld’s 2026 industry profile counts 72,029 U.S. martial arts studio businesses with $21.0 billion in revenue and no company holding more than 5 percent of the market. In 1992 estimates ranged from 4,000 to 7,000 schools.

When did MMA gyms become a business category?

Fight teams such as the American Kickboxing Academy (1985), Lion’s Den, Miletich Fighting Systems (1997), Team Quest (2000) and American Top Team (2001) began selling public memberships as the UFC reached mainstream television after 2005. UFC Gym launched as a franchise concept in 2009, and New York’s 2016 law made professional MMA legal in all 50 states.

What is Stephen Oliver’s place in this history?

Grand Master Stephen Oliver trained in the Jhoon Rhee system from 1969, opened his first school in 1975 at 15, earned his black belt from Jhoon Rhee in 1978, served as a Jhoon Rhee Institute branch manager, founded Mile High Karate in 1983, sat on EFC’s first Board of Directors from 1987 to 2001, and has coached school owners since 1985. He founded the organization now called Martial Arts Wealth Mastery in 2000 and has led NAPMA and Martial Arts Professional since 2007.

Related reading

• The History of the Martial Arts School Business in the United States — the founding lineage in depth
• Grand Master Jhoon Rhee (1932–2018)
• Nick Cokinos (1921–2014), founder of Educational Funding Company
• Grand Master Allen Steen (1940–2025)
• Grand Master J. Pat Burleson (1936–2021)
• Ed Parker, 1931–1990
• Chuck Norris
• Tony Thompson, co-founder of West Coast World Martial Arts
• Grand Master Jeff Smith
• John Graden, founder of NAPMA
• From Karate Illustrated to NASKA: The History of American Sport Karate Tournaments
• The PKA and Joe Corley: How Full-Contact Karate Reached Television
• Elvis Presley and the Birth of Modern American Karate
• The NAPMA / Martial Arts Professional Lifetime Achievement Awards
• In Memoriam: the people who built the martial arts industry