The People Buying Your Industry Have Never Taught a Class

By Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt

On September 1, a company listed on the NYSE American exchange put out a slide deck about the jiu-jitsu business. I read the whole thing, which I suspect makes me one of a very small number of people who both read investor presentations and have swept a mat.

Here is what it says. Mixed Martial Arts Group Ltd. — ticker MMA, owner of BJJLink, MixedMartialArts.com, TrainAlta and Hype — has 15,326 published academy profiles in its database. Of those, 996 are verified. Of those, 389 are paying customers. The platform processes $21 million a year in payments on an annualized run-rate basis. Paying academies are up 260% since January 2025. The company just raised $4 million at a dollar a share, a 160% premium to where the stock closed on August 19. And the chief executive, Nick Langton, said the quiet part into a microphone: “We’ve spent nine years building the platform. Now the focus is monetizing it.”

Now do the arithmetic, because nobody in our industry ever does the arithmetic.

Twenty-one million dollars divided by 389 paying academies is about $54,000 a year per academy. Call it $4,500 a month. I want to be fair to the company here — they don’t claim every dollar a school collects runs through their rails, and some of those academies are surely putting only part of their billing through the platform. Fine. Even if you double it out of generosity, you land at nine thousand dollars a month.

That is the going concern of the most-wired, most-modern, most-venture-backed corner of the martial arts business. Four and a half thousand dollars a month. In my world that is not a school. That is a hobby with a lease.

This is not a knock on them. It’s a knock on us.

Don’t get my statement above wrong. I am not attacking a software company for having small customers. They are doing exactly what a rational operator does: they found a fragmented industry with no infrastructure, built the plumbing, and are now turning the meter on. That is good capitalism and I’d have done the same thing.

What I’m telling you is what those numbers reveal about us. Fifteen thousand academies in the database. Three hundred eighty-nine paying for the system that runs their money. That is a two-and-a-half percent conversion rate on a product that automates billing — the single most important administrative function in a school. Fifteen thousand academies and the overwhelming majority of them are still, in 2026, running some combination of cash, an app on a phone, a spreadsheet, and hope.

I have been in this business more than fifty years. I opened my first Mile High Karate school in 1983. And I can tell you definitively: the thing that separates a $5,000-a-month school from a $40,000-a-month school is almost never the martial art. It is almost always the four or five business systems the owner refused to install because installing them felt like admitting he was in business.

Now put that number next to the other two numbers from this week

Two other things happened in the same ten-day window, and the three of them together tell one story.

PwC told Britain it has room for 850 more budget gyms. The high-value, low-cost segment — clubs charging under £27.50 a month, roughly thirty-seven American dollars — sat at 884 sites in January and could support 1,750. It has already grown from 489 clubs in 2018 to 857 by March of this year, and membership went from 2.2 million to 3.5 million. Here is the figure that should stop you: those clubs are 17% of private clubs and hold 42% of private gym members. PureGym is adding roughly 59 net locations a year, and — pay attention to this part — they are not putting them downtown. They are putting them in retail parks and suburbs. Which is to say, in your plaza.

And a survey found that a specific segment of the consumer market is voluntarily spending $449 a month on fitness. Consumer Collective surveyed 500 American adults; the ones on GLP-1 medications reported $449 a month against $120 for everyone else, with 81% carrying gym memberships versus 43%. It is a small sample and I would want a bigger one before I built a business plan on it. But the direction is not ambiguous, and it lines up with everything I have watched for four decades.

So here is the industry in three numbers, all reported within ten days of each other:

• Somebody is scaling a business that teaches the public fitness costs $37 a month.
• A measurable slice of that same public is already spending $449 a month on their bodies.
• And the average academy on the leading jiu-jitsu payment platform is running about $4,500 a month, total.

The money is in the market. It is not in our schools. That gap is not an economy problem, a location problem, or a demographics problem. It is a decision problem, and the decision is being made by people who have never taught a class.

The quick list: five ways outsiders are setting terms in your business

1. They are setting your price anchor. Every £27.50 gym and every discount treadmill barn is a free education campaign teaching the mother of your next seven-year-old what “a place we go to work out” is supposed to cost. She does not distinguish between a fitness membership and a professional instructional program with a curriculum, a rank structure and a named instructor — because nobody ever taught her to. That is not her failure. It is our marketing failure, repeated ten thousand times.
2. They are setting your billing terms. If your tuition runs through somebody else’s rails, they own the schedule, the fee, the failed-payment logic, the dunning email your student receives in your name, and the export format. Read your agreement. Find out today what happens to your data if you leave.
3. They are buying your instructional layer. ABC Fitness bought an AI coaching platform on September 4 whose selling proposition is that a single coach can carry two to four times the clients. For a big-box club with brutal churn, that math works. For a school, “fewer humans per student” is a direct assault on the only competitive advantage you have.
4. They are buying your Tuesday at 5:15. Shoot 360 is installing machine-vision basketball courts inside LA Fitness and City Sports Club locations. A parent already paying a family membership can now leave a ten-year-old in a gamified, data-tracked training session in a building she is already standing in. That is the same child, the same hour, and the same discretionary dollar you are competing for.
5. They are underwriting your competition and not you. Four million dollars went into a platform for jiu-jitsu academies at a 160% premium to market. European capital opened a club in Dubai Marina this week. Nobody is raising a round to help you fill your 4-to-8 p.m. block. Nobody is coming. That has been true for fifty years and it will be true in fifty more.

We’ve been here before, and the trend never killed anybody

Every ten years or so somebody tells me the thing that is finally going to end the martial arts school.

It was going to be Enter the Dragon filling the market with people who only wanted kung fu. Then it was The Karate Kid flooding us with kids who’d quit in ninety days. Then the Ninja Turtles. Then Tae Bo was going to take the fitness market away from us permanently. Then the mixed martial arts boom was going to make traditional programs obsolete. Then the big-box gyms with their free cardio kickboxing were going to eat our lunch. Then online video. Then the app.

The trend never killed the schools. The trend has never once killed the schools. What killed schools, every single time, was owners who responded to the trend by cheapening what they sold. They saw a competitor at $39 and went to $49. They saw a punch card and printed a punch card. They watched somebody else define the category and then hurried to fit inside somebody else’s definition.

Ries and Trout wrote the whole book about this in Positioning and our industry still hasn’t read it. You do not win a category by being a worse version of the leader’s offer. You win by being the only thing in a category you define. A budget gym cannot define “a professional instructor who knows my child’s name, tracks his progress, tests him for a rank every three months, and calls the house when he misses two weeks.” They structurally cannot deliver it, and they cannot even describe it in their marketing without sounding like they’re describing us.

What you actually own

Strip the week’s news down and there are exactly four assets in a martial arts school that nobody can buy out from under you. Everything else is rented.

One: the relationship. Not the “community,” not the “brand” — the relationship between a specific instructor and a specific family. Michael Gerber’s whole argument in The E-Myth was that the technician who becomes an owner has to systematize himself out of the delivery. He’s right about the paperwork and wrong about the mat. Systematize the billing. Never systematize the phone call after a kid misses class.

Two: the list. Your students, your former students, your inquiries who never enrolled, your parents’ email addresses, your five-year-old leads. Dan Kennedy built an empire teaching business owners that the list is the business. In our industry, most owners could not produce a clean export of their own list this afternoon if you offered them a thousand dollars. If your vendor just told its investors that the focus now is monetization, understand what you are: you are the thing being monetized, and your list is the reason you’re worth something.

Three: the price you have the nerve to charge. I’ve said it in these pages and I’ll keep saying it: average student value should be $250 to $300 a month, and the only way to stay employed is to be worth twice what you’re paid. There is a documented consumer segment spending $449. The constraint is not the market. I have coached owners through the tuition increase they were certain would empty the building, and I will tell you what happens: a handful leave, the ones who stay value it more, and the owner’s spine grows back.

Four: the finish line. A belt every three months, a black belt at the end, and a short-term goal a nine-year-old can actually see. No gym chain, no app, no machine-vision basketball court has this. It is the single most powerful retention mechanism ever built into a consumer business and our industry treats it like decoration.

The part where the Bozo Explosion comes in

There is a version of this column that ends with “so buy better software.” That is not this column.

The industry is full — and I mean full — of people selling advice, platforms, funnels, “AI lead handling,” and done-for-you marketing to school owners, who have never personally enrolled a hundred students in a month, never made a payroll on a bad February, never sat across a kitchen table from a father explaining why the program costs what it costs. I’ve called it the Bozo Explosion for years and it has only gotten worse, because the tooling got cheap enough that anyone can look credible.

Software is not a strategy. Automation is not a system. A platform that processes your payments is a utility, like electricity, and you should buy the best one and then stop thinking about it. What it will never do is answer the phone at 9:40 on a Tuesday morning when a mother finally works up the nerve to call — which, as I have documented for twenty years, is exactly when she calls, and exactly when most schools are dark.

Grand Master Jhoon Rhee did not build the largest chain of schools in America with a CRM. He built it by being the most professional operator in every market he entered and refusing to be cheap. Grand Master Jeff Smith and I wrote a whole book on the teaching side of this, and not one page of it is about software. The tools have changed a hundred times. What works has not moved an inch.

Do this before Friday

Not a summary. An assignment. Three things, this week.

First, log into whatever system holds your students and export everything. Names, emails, phones, addresses, enrollment dates, rank, payment history, cancellations. Put it in a spreadsheet on a drive you control and a second copy somewhere else. Then find the clause in your vendor agreement that covers what happens to that data if you leave, and read it out loud. If you cannot find the clause, that is your answer.

Second, calculate your average student value. Total monthly gross divided by active students. Write the number on a card and put it where you’ll see it every day for a month. If it’s under $200, you are not being beaten by a budget gym in a retail park — you are pricing yourself as one.

Third, pick your ten highest-value families and call them personally this week. Not a text. Not an automated check-in. You, on the phone, asking how the kid is doing. Ten calls. It will take you ninety minutes and it will do more for your retention this quarter than every platform mentioned in this article combined.

The people raising capital around our industry are betting that martial arts schools are a fragmented, under-monetized, under-managed asset class waiting to be organized by somebody else. Looking at the numbers, they are not wrong. The only question on the table is whether you intend to be one of the fifteen thousand profiles in somebody’s database, or one of the operators who owns his list, sets his own price, and never has to care what anyone’s slide deck says.

P.S. — Somebody will read this and conclude the lesson is “don’t use software.” That is not the lesson. Use it. Pay for it. Automate every dollar and every reminder you can. Just never confuse the plumbing with the building, and never let the plumber hold the deed.

Sources

• MMA.INC corporate presentation figures — GlobeNewswire, September 1, 2026
• PwC report on UK high-value, low-cost gyms — Athletech News, August 28, 2026
• Consumer Collective survey on GLP-1 users and fitness spending — Athletech News, August 28, 2026
• ABC Fitness acquires FitMetrics — Athletech News, September 4, 2026
• Shoot 360 courts inside LA Fitness and City Sports Club — Athletech News, August 31, 2026
• Urban Gym Group opens in Dubai — Athletech News, September 3, 2026

Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt, is the founder of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, author of The Way of the Mile High Maverick and Six Simple Steps to Add 100 New Students, and co-author with Grand Master Jeff Smith of Extraordinary Teaching.