The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Learn hot to Create and Grow a Successfull Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Gym with Black Belt Andrew Smith of Revolution BJJ | PPP #8

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

In this episode, we hear about Andrew's journey to Black Belt, starting a BJJ school, and bjjpath.com.

Hey everybody, Kevin Pinnell, host of the People Process Progress Podcast. Welcome to show number eight. I had a great opportunity to talk to an early adopter of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Andrew Smith. He's the co-owner of Revolution Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Richmond, Virginia. And we'll all get to learn from his process growing to a third degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, growing a business such as Revolution Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, starting his own grappling tournament and expanding beyond that into the online world with BJJ Path, which is a great product I recommend you look up. Links will be in the show notes.

Also, some guest appearances around the 35-ish minute mark from my youngest son, who came blazing into the house, so such is life, and from his dog Molly, who lets us know whether she's comfortable or not. So thanks again, Andrew, for this. Thank you all listeners. We're over 1,000 downloads since yesterday when I put a short episode out. I really appreciate everybody's feedback, everybody listening, sharing the show. Please do so.

Let's get some more stories. Look forward to more great guests. This is a long conversation. It's almost two hours. But you know what? When folks are just having a good conversation about interesting things and if you want to learn how to grow as a jujitsu practitioner, maybe even as an as an instructor, check out the show. Thanks a lot. Good luck to you all and

Godspeed. I'm here with Andrew Smith, co owner of revolution Brazilian Jujitsu in Richmond, Virginia and many other things and we'll get into that as we talk. Andrew, thank you again for joining us on the show and sharing your story and you processes, particularly Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and other stuff we'll get into, and just helping other folks with your perspective to kind of make that progress. So thank you. Well, thank you, Kevin. I'm excited to be here.

I think that what you've done so far has been really good, and I think it's important to break down particularly the process aspects. You don't really hear very much about that when you're listening to a podcast or learning about things. The process part in particular is something that really appeals to me, especially as every business I've been involved with has grown over the years. Yeah. The impetus for this, which is really really I rebranded, I had another podcast called between the slides. And then honestly, the more folks I talked to, it was like, what? So I feel like when you have to explain it a lot, you're like, well, let me make it more obvious. But it was largely focused on that. And for the world that I came from a public safety and incident management, like special events, and then project management, it's super process heavy, sometimes too much, sometimes informal, you know, and everything in between. And in particular, you mentioned, you know, 18 months in to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is still very new, but totally getting more of the the understanding of how incremental of a process that is of like every little role, little thing a little tweak little move and it's it's kind of

mind-blowing even from being so new of how much depth there is in there so yeah part of you know in episode two I did a let me do kind of like a book report you know podcast version of of one variation and and of you know from grappling to the modern Brazilian jiu-jitsu and there's so many different variations. So I was very interested to see all those different flavors of history and people and, you know, cross discussions and things. And so for you, and I've looked up some of your background and heard some of this from when I listened to you on Dirty Whiteboard Radio, which was cool.

So, folks, if you haven't listened to that, check that out as well. But your process and about you, are you from the Richmond area? I know you've been there for a bit and went to VCU. Are you originally from Richmond, Virginia? No, I actually grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. So about 25 years ago, I just wanted sort of a change, and I ended up in the Richmond area. And it's funny, I've been in Richmond for a little over 25 years now, and it still doesn't really feel like I'm from here.

You know what I mean? There's no other place that I've ever traveled to where I think it's quite so front and center. If you didn't grow up in Richmond, you're not really from here. And it feels that way to me still. I feel like imposter syndrome or something. Even in the area, it's still, it's shifted. Now, I grew up in Chesterfield, so south side.

Now, it's kind of the old area. I remember just a Richmond thing of someone, an intern I think I had when I worked for the state. She grew up in Henrico, which is the place to be, so to speak. Just talking about, oh, you grew up in Southside. It was such an old place, and it was so different.

But the economy and the change and everything of all the different areas around Richmond, I think is pretty neat. But, yeah, there's definitely a very kind of Richmond. If you're from there, you're kind of all in as well. One thing we do share Richmond-wise is we both went to VCU. I went back to school, used my GI Richmond wise is we both went to VCU. Um, I went back to school, um, use my GI bill and stuff and went to VCU. And for you starting, um, that's where you got into judo first, right? That's right. Yeah. So I wrestled in high school.

Um, I wasn't amazing, but I got a lot better in my senior year and I was actually starting to get pretty good. Um, but then I graduated from high school and there just wasn't amazing but i got a lot better my senior year and i was actually starting to get pretty good um but then i graduated from high school and there just wasn't um there wasn't wrestling at the college i went to which was university south carolina okay um you know believe it or not there wasn't a wrestling team there at least in the 1990s and i was really bummed because i'd sort of fallen in love with grappling at that point wrestling wrestling, you know. And so, I mean, I wrestled a little bit with the high school kids after the season, you know, went to a few freestyle wrestling tournaments. But I just wanted more. I wanted to keep going. And there just wasn't anything there. And I think, ironically, there was a judo club, but I didn't think much about judo back then when I was in South Carolina. And then I moved up to richmond and in 1997 i started training judo at the judo club and uh at vcu and it was just i

was hooked right away it was a special um time for for martial arts special time for judo um in so far as there was a lot of sort of things that were coming together at the right place at the right time you know the ufc we have to kind of go back in time the ufc had been on on the air since 1993 but like nobody had seen it you know i mean like like literally probably 50 000 people saw the first ufc and then um you know there was another one i don't know like eight months later or something and that's just sort of the way it was so it was just sort of a niche underground to a degree but people that were involved with judo um they knew about the ufc they knew about uh grappling they were reading you know um martial arts magazines and stuff like that like black belt magazine was sort of the the leader

back then if you were interested in even grappling because there weren't industry-specific magazines out there. So I think the communities were a lot more interconnected. You had a lot more sort of Jeet Kune Do-type people coming involved with grappling people. Judo and jiu-jitsu were much more closely related than they sort of are today, which, I mean, as far as martial arts go, they're very, very similar. As far as like the way the arts are practiced in the culture, it's pretty different. You know, Judo is a lot more formal. Jiu-Jitsu is very, very laid back, you know, tends to get rid of a lot of the aspects of the tradition and so um maybe it's sort of

perceived as like uh incompatible to a lot of things you know to a lot of people but i was really lucky at vcu um it wasn't really like that there were people coming over from uh jiu-jitsu schools throughout town and and um you know when i started competing in in jiu-jitsu um before i actually started formally training in it, I'd had experience at the judo club, traveling around, um, training, um, going to seminars, stuff like that, but no consistent regular training. Um, and that was, you know, it was possible back then. And it was possible because of the particular circumstances that I had to actually do pretty well when I competed in some of those, uh, arenas because I had, you know, of course, judo

experience from the judo club, but also good grappling, you know, especially for the time we had people who wrestled before, but also people that were actively training in Brazilian jujitsu. And I think that was uncommon back then. So that's sort of how things got started for me when I moved to the Richmond area, I was really, really lucky fell into the right place. You know, that's awesome. Yeah. That, it seems that that mid nineties, later nineties thing was the, you know, some of the folks that have been around it for a while and it's kind of senior American wise seems like the, the kind of groundbreaking piece. And, and I just, I went back both for the other podcast I did and just,

I'm a YouTube freak for watching you know my wife's like oh another jiu-jitsu video awesome but watching like the second one and you know looking through and even you can see the commentators start to pick up more so they got different commentators that actually knew the moves or trained with the gracies or something like that and um you're when you talk about the the judo how did you find so did you find yourself combining um and and other than some of the judo like I did at revolution-ups, which was great, I haven't done just judo before. Did you find from your wrestling and then the judo that when you competed in jiu-jitsu before you were training that you kind of mashed those together? Or did judo have more ground as well so you could apply that for the jiu-jitsu players?

Or how did that go go not having started training well you know so um i think it's really not fair to say that i wasn't training at all in jiu-jitsu simply because i was very interested in going from uh going in and participating in classes like we would travel out of town and go and actually visit academies to train there. We didn't feel there was a good place to train in the Richmond area back then. So, you know, friends would travel together and go to places and also go to seminars

and things of that nature. Of course, we were studying video and books and everything that we could get our hands on in terms of the knowledge. But judo also had a little bit of a different culture back then. It's important to understand. I think that not a lot of people understand that judo is sort of, there's, if you look at sport judo, there's four ways to win and only one of them is by throwing the person, you know? So you can pin the person, you can pass their guard basically and keep them

flat on their back. You can finish with a choke or you can finish with a joint lock and those that's sort of described as the four ways to win you know when you're judo is being described to you but what's sort of happened in the um since the time that i started doing judo is that uh the ioc international olympic committee and various other organizations have sort of insisted that judo look a particular way that it sort of features high dynamic throws, they've gotten rid of being able to grab the legs grab the pants and so it's sort of the way that the sport is desired by

a certain group of people to look. I mean, I think that it's probably fair to say that we've seen some of that in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as well over the years, but maybe not quite as great of a sort of perversification of the original intent that we've seen with Judo. I think that

it's almost like a trope to say this but um you know the sport has changed so much over the last quarter of a century or so that it's almost it almost doesn't resemble what it used to be in a lot of ways um there was a great deal more grappling on the ground so like for me personally when i started judo i started started competing. You know, I was I was OK at taking people down and throwing people, you know, just from wrestling and from just having a good base. But I was really good at pinning people. And so that's sort of where I focused initially before I kind of realized, OK, well, this is judo. And, you know, it's really kind of a good opportunity to test out throws against people who understand throws. And that's what I started doing much more of. And with Brazilian j jiu-jitsu it was kind of like well this is a predominantly ground art so i should test out the stuff on the ground but of course initially when you first start

competing you want to win i was like well i could win by throwing people in in jiu-jitsu and and by beating people on the ground and judo really to kind of put a long story short so that's what i started doing but yeah there was i mean that's one of the biggest changes with um judo over the last you know um slice of time since i've been doing it is really it took away a lot of the sort of more effective takedowns i think that didn't end up with like dynamic big powerful looking throws right uh and and there's really no other way to describe it than it's a bias against wrestlers which i really don't like i think that if you can't beat somebody you should figure out how to beat them and not um complain about it and make them illegal or whatever but um so that that's

sort of been the the evolution over the years the The, the idea that, um, throwing people, uh, is the main objective. You have to, you can't really grapple so much on the ground now. And that's, so I think that's really colored the way that judo is, is taught and trained in a lot of places nowadays. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, again, having not really delved into judo on its own so to speak the the that's what i thought and then and probably i guess as a as a you know from what

you're talking about the the changes that's what you see is the highlights of the big throw and the you know that thing so you you see hardly any ground game or anything like that so it's interesting to hear the the change for the perception or, you know, for entertainment value, do you think, was part of the influence? Like, hey, this will be more popular if it's big throws instead of people grappling each other on the ground. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of for the same reason that I think maybe submission-only tournaments are not very spectator-friendly Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitions. You know, I mean, it's something that U.S. Grappling offers at least a couple of times a year. The no time limit submission only tournament. And like if you're looking at it from we want to test out who, you know, who's got the best submission offense versus defense. There's no question that's a better way to do it.

But then if you're like, well, yeah, but we want to put it on TV, too. Well, you start to putting some problems there. And with judo, I think that few people could understand really what was going on on the ground. And there's still groundwork in judo. There's still chokes, arm locks, and pins in judo. You can still win the same ways. It's just that whereas before you might get 30 seconds on the ground, now you get like five seconds, six seconds, seven seconds before they're going to stand back up and get you back up on the feet if you're in the middle of doing something like passing a guard

you're active they're going to let you keep working but i mean you know when you're doing jujitsu like you think in terms of okay i want to pass this person's guard it's going to take me i don't know a minute two minutes maybe three um no big deal i'll take my time i'll get past their guard and i'll establish my position judo is very different i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing either that they're different approaches because there's different objectives with each um martial art right like judo you know one of the great things about it is that you can throw somebody onto the ground with force so if somebody's coming at you from a self-defense perspective, you can pretty easily potentially disable them without having to go to the ground, which

can be enormously beneficial if there's, say, multiple attackers or something like that. Whereas with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, it's not that the throws aren't there in jiu-jitsu. Most academies still teach throws in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It's just that the throws aren't there in jujitsu. Most academies still teach throws in Brazilian jujitsu. It's just that the focus has shifted so much. Yeah. I'll tell you the one time you don't do a good landing when you get, you know, hip toss and you hit kind of like a sack of meat on the mat,

even, even on a mat, then thinking about that happening, you know, we're having to do that to a bad guy, you know, or somebody that's coming after you and they hit a concrete. It's just, that's a horrible, horrible thought, but good to know, you know we're having to do that to a bad guy you know or somebody that's coming after you and they hit a concrete it's just that's a horrible horrible thought but good to know you know if you learn those skills you can kind of defend yourself or whatever but

um yeah the the throws are are wild and and trips and and things are but that's something too that i see a lot is you know the doing a lot of of standup versus not a lot of standup, um, in jujitsu classes, um, or changes there and, and, uh, kind of get, get into that or coming back to that. So you're talking about other schools or maybe circling back to that, not a lot of jujitsu school. So how did you get linked up with, um, uh, Leo Fernandez and, and coming under his instruction? Well, we were introduced to Julio. I'll use the hard J. That's how he says it.

That's okay. Through Eric. Eric Berto started Richmond BJJ in January of 2002. It was January 2nd. I was there for his very first class. And I am eternally grateful that Eric had the guts to start an academy back when he did. You know, I've always been entrepreneurial, but I certainly didn't have the qualifications or the drive to start a gym all the way back then. But Eric got the blessing from Julio and Eric trained with Julio in Vermont.

And I think Eric is largely responsible for bringing good jiu-jitsu to the area. He's not the only person who did that, but I think at a time when it was sorely needed, he did. And we were introduced to Julio maybe within a a year or so kind of got to know him over time really over the last uh nearly 20 years um we've gotten julio quite well uh a lot better but if it wasn't for eric um i likely still wouldn't have met julio you know i don't know exactly what i'd be doing i'm sure that i would be doing jujitsu in some capacity, but maybe, maybe not as good at jujitsu, maybe not as far along, you know, I owe Eric a lot, you know, especially in the, in the beginning here in Richmond, he had a lot to do with those early days.

And what, what belt was he when he started the school? Was he a black belt? No, this is, Eric was a black belt no this is eric was a belt back then so this is a time when um part of this tells you a lot about how far the sport has come where purple was sort of a pretty good reasonable standard to have a school um and i mean nowadays it's it's hard to imagine starting a school if you're not a black belt it's hard to imagine possibly being able to justify that but i think there are still remote areas in the country where it makes sense um you know i've gotten out and traveled a little more than most people that do jiu-jitsu i think in terms of visiting academies and teaching at various different places and everything and so i've seen kind of what's out

there and i know that it's the gap is closed a lot but it's still got a long way to go right anyway back then you know even even a metropolitan area you know this is like you know 1993 the ufc is on television right um you know maybe uh a few thousand people know what brazilian jiu-jitsu is um you know you have to fast forward almost 10 years before you hit a sort of a critical mass where you could have schools sort of organically opening up and doing reasonably well. I think there was another giant paradigm leap upward with The Ultimate Fighter being on television, on cable TV around 2005 or so. And it wasn't until that jump that,

I mean, that's when Revolution BJJ opened up, was right after that. So, I mean, if it hadn't been for that, it would have been tough to see, say, Revolution BJJ being as successful as it is today without first having that sort of like critical mass of people, the number of people that are interested. But back then, you know, Purple Belt was – you're almost like a god. Super high, yeah. I was going to say, yeah, and part of that question as well, too, because I know where I train here, which with Tim Mannen, at his school, Tim Mannen, he, a long time ago as well, started, I think, as a blue belt.

So to your point of it's amazing the perspective of the knowledge that folks could get that early in the sports popularity in America, at least, was pretty awesome. And the stuff that you learn and you hear with other folks. I listen to Joe Rogan and Jocko Willink's podcast and they're big into jiu-jitsu. So similar themes. So it's cool to think about that starting that process of growing jiu-jitsu in America and then now looking at, to your point, going to Revolution and all the black belts that are there or here and other schools that you see.

And it's pretty awesome to think about how that's grown. So in 2005, you said, or did I totally mess that up, for Revolution opened? It opened up in Februarybruary of 2006 officially um yeah and it was inside of a karate school so um i've always been one to sort of like um put a foot in the water and not dive in headfirst so to speak um and so i saw that partnering with somebody like that would have made a lot of sense and that's what i did there was a really good guy named brian kennedy who was a karate guy ran a karate school back then called silky sandong karate um and i got to know some good people through him and brian was

a square shooter he would always um we had an agreement you know he always stuck to the agreement he always did a good job with uh with what he said he was going to do and so i really had it good in the beginning and i didn't have to really i wasn't responsible for anything other than just getting students to show up for the classes so i got to sort of learn the marketing aspects pretty early on and i could really focus on you know just just getting people to come into the gym um and teach classes you know build a curriculum and teach the classes, which was pretty awesome. A lot of gym owners sort of think that's everything and that's what they're going to be doing. But the reality is very, very different. You know, you're going to

probably spend 75 or 80 percent of your time doing stuff that you don't especially want to do. You want to be successful or have, you know, a business with doors open after a year or two. But that's sort of the way, that's sort of the curse of business ownership. You're destined for people not to really understand what it is that you're going through unless they're also entrepreneurial. All right. So you had space in an existing gym. And for you, how long have you been a practitioner at that point when you started Revolutionaire? So I started at the Judo Club in 1997. But I think it's fair to say that there was some kind of a blend between Judo and Jiu-Jitsu toward the beginning for me. And it's tough to say exactly when I started Jiu-Jitsu.

If you use that as a baseline, it probably about nine years of uh grappling with submissions yeah and I mean you know today for somebody who's been training for nine years to start a gym is it seems woefully underqualified to me you know just given the opportunities of people that are out there that have been training 20 plus years that, you know, are capable of doing that kind of thing. Right. But again, you know, we're talking about exponential growth in this industry and just, you know, watching it from the sidelines has been almost breathtaking. That's, which is great.

And one, thanks for the hard work for those of us that have jumped in there. And so how did that go in the beginning? You talk about the, you know, the rolling and the teaching, I imagine, was great, and then the administrative, the marketing, the everything else. How did it go the first few years of starting the school? And what were some of the lessons you learned there that you've carried through kind of to now? Well, it was quite a battle in the beginning just to get people in the door. And I quickly realized that that was sort of the most important thing for me to do because if we didn't have students, we wouldn't have a gym.

Fortunately, I didn't have to do all the other stuff like bookkeeping and accounting and stuff that I didn't really have much interest in doing. In retrospect, it might have been really good if I had learned how to do that stuff earlier. But you don't really get the benefit of hindsight until the time has passed. So marketing was a huge central focus. But for me, I didn't really fall in love with the idea of hustling and trying to get people to sign up and all that kind of stuff. I wasn't interested in that.

I've never really been motivated purely by profit. I always want to do something that's kind of more, I don't know, noble, more meaningful than that. Right. And so it wasn't really until I put two and two together and I said, oh, if I have more students, it actually makes the quality of training better for everybody, including me, that I became very motivated to sign people up. You know, when I finally started seeing, oh, I can have a direct impact on how good the training is for everybody here if I just pay attention to this. Gotcha. impact on how good the training is for everybody here if i just pay attention to this gotcha led me to want to pay attention more and you know build a better um uh curriculum i was always interested in education but you know it's like we're not running um we're not drill sergeants

running boot camp here right like we don't have a capital audience we at the end of the day you've got to have people coming back and interested in training and enthusiastic about training and just because i was motivated a particular way didn't necessarily mean that everybody was going to be motivated that way so that's probably one big takeaway was sort of the realization eventually that um the way that i liked learning the the things that i valued highly weren't necessarily the same things that other people valued highly in their lives. And I had to take the time to understand that and get to know them. Which is good.

So I imagine you got some perspective from the early students, from early partners. Did you and Trey Martin, who's your co-owner now, start that at the same time? Or did you guys link up soon afterwards? And the other kind of following question that I have, too, is did you find that the additional students, the variety of people, personalities, body types, the way they learned and rolled together is what helped that quality of the training beyond just volume, but you know, the variation of people in style. So I guess with with Trey, who's, you know, your partner now, how did you all link up early then? Because he is a very similar lineage, at least training, I think, right? Yeah, that's right. So Trey and I each started our own gyms. And in retrospect, it was relatively early on. But back then, it seemed like we'd had our own gyms for a long time.

They were pretty well established. Revolution VJ opened in 2006 and kind of did our thing for a while, grew a little bit of a presence. I was super enthusiastic about competing. I was an avid competitor back when I was much younger. I would travel every weekend or every other weekend to compete at a time when you had to go pretty far to be able to find anything to do. So competition was an early kind of focus for Revolution BJJ. And with Trey, I think competition was important to him as well.

May not have been at the same level of importance as it was for me back then. But we had some differences and a lot of similarities in between the two locations. But for the time, Trey actually mentioned to me at a point and we'd gotten along well.

We'd been friends. We'd worked together work together with us grappling and stuff like that i'd gotten to know trey pretty well over the years um and i felt you know comfortable with him um he made an offer like hey listen man if you know ever things don't work out just like let me know maybe we can merge together and i was like well you know things are working out okay you know i like Brian Kennedy he's a good dude well Brian Kennedy had sort of a midlife crisis and sold his business and so when the ownership changed hands it wasn't the same and so I was definitely interested in moving on and so that's when Trey's offer came to the forefront for me. And then meanwhile, keep in mind, Trey had also sort of started his own thing.

He had like a 6 a.m. class that he started and some other classes that I wasn't offering. I had some things that he wasn't offering, and so when we merged the two things together, we just had more offerings for people. Both of us were able to teach, and neither us really knew um very much about going into business or building a partnership or any of that kind of stuff so we learned it very much as we went along wow um you know and and we brought daniel on as a partner daniel frank on as a partner um years later and, we understood that process a lot better by then, thankfully. And, but it took us a long time to kind of get used to that, you know, what it meant to be business partners and what it meant to just like run a business, you know, went to college on

our own dime, I guess is one way to put it. Which, yeah, it seems sometimes just exposure and getting through it's, you know, the best teacher, although at the time i'm sure sometimes it didn't feel like it and for me as you as you talked about that and the blending of the morning class and the different aspects that you had and picturing in my head the revolution schedule um it's cool to go oh that ties to you know how you all merged and in the history of that and it's cool because there's there's just tons of offerings and i've said this before you know so folks anyone listened to this and actually have a friend who's starting in March and intro class. Um, he was a Richmond firefighter. He's doing EMS coordination with a hospital in the area. And, um, so he's, he's gonna be coming to revolution

soon, but, but check it out if you're in Richmond. Um, but, but yeah, I can picture the schedule. And so thinking about how you all came together and how you built that, which is talking about process and planning and things like that, that, you know, I've talked about and, you know, been part of to do that for that many folks and then grow the location. And that's pretty awesome. So that's a really cool kind of story to share from there. So when did you move into your own space? Was that at the same time when, when you and Trey linked up like to where revolution is now? Yeah. So Trey already had his own, um, spot and this was, um, up the road a bit from where we are now. Um, you know,

same kind of general area of town, a little bit further north along Staples Mill, if you're familiar with that area. But, you know, he had his thing going for a little while there. And my school was much further west, like the far west end. And so when we synced up, it made sense to move in with Trey because, you know, I had like an abusive relationship that had gone south basically. Metaphorical way to put it. And, you know, we linked up and we moved over there. And then it wasn't for about another year and a half that, which is, you know, comes pretty close to coinciding with the time when I had that sort of eye-opening moment where I realized that growing the gym was not just motivated by money. It wasn't just something that was going to help our bottom line or anything like that. It was

going to help improve the overall quality of everything. You know, not only could we have more students and more training partners was good, but we could probably offer more classes. We could probably pay instructors. You know, we could probably have some equipment that we purchased and maybe one day we could even get a better facility right and so that's the direction we sort of started heading in maybe in late 2010 early 2011 and then when we decided that we were gonna move you know we were it was necessitated by growth but it was more necessitated by that place was the ownership had changed there was a new owner that was moving into the building they were turning it into like a nightclub basically before that it was

a weight facility and you know where there was a jiu-jitsu school in the back corner and like that was okay the weight room thing it was kind of gross and kind of dirty and the culture wasn't but it was a whole lot better than like a nightclub you know and when it became a nightclub we were like we got to get out of here. So we started looking around and it just happened that the time when we started looking around coincided with the time when I became really interested in helping the business grow. And Trey caught some of that fever as well, though I probably obsessed over it a little more than he did.

And we grew, we started growing, we started becoming a bigger business, a bigger entity, more people. We went from like, once we moved into the new facility, I think we had like 60 members when we moved in. Wow. And within that first year, we were up to like 160 or something. It was just crazy how fast we grew once we got into a better facility and started, you know, actually paying attention to growing, attempted to grow, attempted to get bigger. That's awesome. Was a lot of that a word of mouth from the started, you know, actually paying attention to growing, attempted to grow, attempted to get bigger. That's awesome. Was a lot of that a word of mouth from the original, you know, the 60 folks you had and

then them sharing. And then did you also increase, uh, online presence or commercials? Cause you all are, have also put out a lot of great videos as well. And we'll get into BJJ path, but even on YouTube, putting videos out. Is there any one thing or a couple key things that you attribute that's pretty significant growth to? Yeah. I think Facebook marketing was a really large part of it back then.

I think I was really really really ahead of the curve um this i mean this isn't really tooting my own horn because i had many years of experience promoting u.s grappling tournaments okay so i sort of understood the idea of event promotion you know getting people to show up for events and because those were one-off events when we started doing our introductory program which is essentially a bunch of individual off events it made sense to use the same skill set over there and that's that's exactly what i did i sort of took the same skills that i already had and just applied them in a different arena um it's sort of like when i started doing um i started competing in jujitsu tournaments and i would just

apply the judo skill so that i had in juj-jitsu tournaments or wrestling for judo. It's not really any different from that. Just applying the same exact skill set in a little different arena. Getting people to show up for events with Facebook marketing, this is 2011, 2012, 2010.

The world was different back then. We were creeping into Web 2.0 maybe and that was about it. The rules are different back then. We were creeping into Web 2.0 maybe, and that was about it. The rules are all different now. Because other things are important and other things have changed with our business, you can sort of tell our Facebook marketing presence is not a very significant portion of what we do. But back then, it was really, really big. And yeah, of course, word of mouth.

Definitely, there's no better substitute for word of mouth. It's just that you hit a wall at a certain point with word of mouth and you're only going to get so many people as a function of the number of students that you have right now. And if you're looking to grow a little bit faster than that, you kind of have to go outside of the word of mouth. Now, where we are right now, we do paid advertising and stuff like that, sure. But our best students are still predominantly going to come from word of mouth. Because once you have a good culture, you just want the same types of people in there. You don't really want, let's try to get an entirely new type of person in here. You don't need to do that.

Just say, let's get the type of person that we like that's already in here. Gotcha. And so, yeah, that's sort of where we are now. But back then, also, it was pretty easy to be good at FaceTime. Sorry. That was amazing. I was wondering, I was like, can you hear that? And I'm looking at the input.

All my kids had playdates today. And so now, of course, my youngest, who's the smallest and the most loud, just got home. Well, I'm here with our senior dog, Molly. So she may also be loud at some point. She's been pretty quiet so far. But she may let it be known when she's not super comfortable with a position or something like that. How old is she? She is 17 she is 17 oh wow that's awesome and you have you have on a rash guard right I think I saw from one of your videos or some of

them on there right custom her own rash guard yeah that's awesome the was the thing of the the Facebook ad so cuz now posting whether it's like hey Her own rash guard, yeah. That's awesome. What was the thing? Oh, the Facebook ad. So because now posting, whether it's like, hey, here's a new episode or whatever you post now, automatically you get that button. It's like, do you want to boost this? Do you want to pay this much for this many listeners or anything like that?

So when you did Facebook marketing before, was it paid marketing then or just the fact that you were marketing business on Facebook that was kind of newer, just because I hadn't done, I just did the personal Facebook stuff, but now you see it, they're prompt you all the time now. How did you key into that marketing there? Was it like paid advertisement, or just you were very active on it? No, it was organic. It wasn't really anything that in the beginning

that was paid for although um when the there was something it was called something before it was called boosting a post maybe it was like sponsoring a post or something i don't know but um then when they started doing that and allowing you to pay for individual things like that as opposed to like on the campaign level i mean i was on board i was interested in it but um you know stuff like creating events and inviting people and just putting the elbow grease in there to make it a good event or make it a decent um you know post on facebook whatever it is right that's the kind of stuff that i paid the most attention to and then i thought about you know how you can do stuff like you can tag people in a photograph where they have their geo tagged as having been at the location. I mean, it's really common now, but in 2009, there wasn't a lot of people doing this.

Maybe like, you know, 2% of Facebook users understood how to do that stuff. So it's just starting out by paying attention to what other people were doing, reading up on it, learning as much as we could about the marketing aspect of it through social media. And this is back when Facebook was it for social media. Before that, it was MySpace. I was going to say, did you get into MySpace for marketing at all? That was much more personal, wasn't it? It was more personal,'t it it was more

personal but it still had its uses and um i mean yeah i got i got students from myspace for sure oh wow i got students from facebook got students from i mean everything that we've done on social media at some point we've gotten somebody from it um to come in but i think disproportionately facebook would be the all-time king. And I think that was, you know, the external marketing efforts, beyond word of mouth, really came into play. We also, we did invest in,

early on, like in 2012, we invested in Window Tent for the gym. Gotcha. Which I think gives the, you know, Revolution BJJ kind of an iconic look to an extent. We covered the entire windows with the logo, basically. So you can see it from the main road. I hadn't seen that anywhere else before, and I still haven't.

Neither in Richmond or really anywhere in the nearby area. So I don't know if that... We have had people tell us that they saw our sign and it came in because of that. So obviously it was effective to some degree. Right. Do you, do, um, so you mentioned getting that feedback. Do you, do you capture, um, that? So when someone does sign up, cause I don't remember if it's, um, you know, Hey, how did you hear about us? And you know And, you know, do you all capture that?

Yeah, we do. Okay. That's one of the things that we get. There's two questions that we ask. And, I mean, I think that I would encourage any school owner to ask both. One is how did you hear about us, you know, specifically? And that usually is a marketing question. And then the other one is what made you want to start training martial arts in the first place? And that's usually a marketing question. And then the other one is, what made you want to start training martial arts in the first place?

And that's usually a different answer. You know, people want to start because of, you know, self-defense. They want to start because of their friends are doing it, sense of camaraderie. You know, they wanted to fight, whatever it is. But then how they heard about us is, it's rarely that they heard about us and then decided they wanted to start training, you know they wanted to fight whatever it is right but then how they heard about us is it's rarely that they heard about us and then decided they wanted to start training you know so that's also kind of eye-opening to understand that there's a whole group of people out there

in the world that um know they want to do martial arts don't necessarily know the gyms in the area so they're already looking around and you know you know, to that, cause I remember when I first started looking, it was, yeah, Hey, okay. I do want to try this. I've heard about it in various places and then looking up the different gyms. Unfortunately now, unlike we talked about before, you know, earlier years, there's, there's a lot of choices. And so for me looking at and going and observing and meeting and then, you know, just doing it and signing up.

But is that something you would encourage for the potential practitioner to, you know, check out a gym, get the feel of it, meet the instructors and then decide what you're going to do if you're going to take the leap? Yeah, I think it's really important to be able to get a sort of taste the soup before you buy the whole thing you know um you know the not every gym's culture is going to be the same and not every gym is actually going to pay any attention to culture in fact so finding a gym that has a culture that um fits well with your personality is extremely important. You know, I'll give you a couple of examples. Like Revolution BJJ chooses to focus more on the individual martial art of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, uh, and Muay Thai, uh, and Judo and less on blending them together. Um, and in fact, so far to the degree, the degree of less than blending them together is that we just don't do any MMA training at all.

You know, we're not interested in that. It's not what we do. Right. There are gyms in the area that do specialize in MMA. And the person who comes into our gym to train that's interested in that would be better served going to one of those locations. Gotcha. A lot of people, of course, they don't, you know, they think they want to do MMA. You know, it turns out I really just want to do sport jiu-jitsu or really just want to learn the art of jiu-jitsu or whatever.

That's cool. That's fine. But if somebody really wants to go out there and fight, you know, trying to be all things for all people is a really dangerous thing to do, a really bad thing to do. You know, that goes to, like, specialization being something that you can offer when you have a lot more locations now. Right. So you don't have to be the right thing for everybody. You have that critical mass where specialization makes a lot of sense.

Um, but it also goes to, you know, we've chosen this route. It doesn't mean it's the right route. It's just the right, the route that works for us, you know, the route that works for, um, a gym that does blend and you know does do uh brazilian jiu-jitsu at the same time as like wrestling and muay thai they put it all together um that's their their conscious decision or maybe it was an unconscious decision but it's a decision that they made that we haven't it doesn't mean either one is right what it means is that people have more choices now and so that's a really good thing you know

you mentioned folks getting a perception, and I'll make an assumption, I know what that means, but that it's from something they saw probably online or UFC or some match, thinking, oh, I wanna do that. And then getting the eye-opener, whether it's, oh no, I don't wanna do this, or to your point, changing from, I don't necessarily wanna get elbowed in the face, I actually do wanna do this or to your point changing from you know i don't necessarily want to get you know elbowed in the face i actually do want to do this you know on purpose anyway even though it was

happening you know jujitsu but um is that something too as an instructor and you know someone that's focused on the culture that you help navigate folks through so they come in and they have this one perception and then they see what the gym's all about and what it offers and then helping them get to um you know a good decision something that would fit for them and talking them through that do you have a lot of folks that that kind of come to you and ask those kind of questions and that you help guide to you know one of the arts or even a couple because i know some folks take muay thai and jujitsu and there's different combinations but do you have those conversations often or or daniel or the other instructors as well? Yeah. You know, the intro program for us is really that taste in the soup thing, you know? Right. And so, um,

it's designed to be, um, you know, short enough so that it's not so much of a commitment that people aren't going to be interested in making it, but long enough to where I guess it's really a two-way street. The person gets to try it out and find out if the martial art itself is right for them, but we also get to find out if they're right for the gym. And so if the person is going to be a danger to the other students that are in there and mess up the culture in any way, we're not going to want to sign them up. And that's totally our prerogative. We don't have to sign everybody up that goes to the intro. We don't going to want to sign them up. And that's totally our prerogative. We don't have to sign everybody up that goes to the intro.

We don't have to attempt to sign everybody up who goes to the intro. In fact, we really shouldn't try to sign everybody up who goes to the intro. So from our perspective, we want to slow everything down a little bit in the beginning by encouraging people to walk through an intro program. You can't walk into our gym as a beginner and just try a class. You have to try a whole program. And some people are like, well, you know, you're not going to get a lot of people because of they're not going to commit. You know, they're going to want to have tried the class for free like they can try it down the road or whatever.

And I kind of disagree with that based on market psychology and what we've seen, but also based on what we're actually offering. We're offering a real experience of the gym, not just kind of a one-off that gives our best face forward. We're giving you the real opportunity to experience this martial art. So if somebody's doing both arts or is interested in doing both arts, we're definitely going to explicitly talk to them. But I think more of the conversation really happens when they actually try the program out for themselves and decide, you know, if that's the approach that they want to take, or if they're looking for a different approach. And, and for the intro, you mentioned, so did that start when the new

location opened? Or is that was that another kind of realization of uh was that an early thing where you realized hey we should do this um because i would imagine there you didn't you go you all didn't have an intro program in the 90s right was that more of a jump in and then lessons learned going you know we should we should ease people into this that's right there weren't there wasn't anything like an intro program in the 90s it was um it was very like you get thrown to the wolves and then it would sink or swim you know for me i was lucky enough to be kind of a rough kid growing up i didn't mind playing tackle football with my friends in the backyard or occasionally in the street because we weren't very bright you know we would i would i liked

wrestling i was you know i was into like physically being tough, I guess. And so for me, being tough was no problem. I enjoyed it. Part of it was kind of cool. But the thing that you did was you got thrown out there into the class, and there wasn't a beginner class and an advanced class. There was a class. Most jiu-jitsu gyms would have two or three classes a week in the beginning.

So you didn't have room for any of the other classes. most jujitsu gyms would have two or three classes a week in the beginning. Okay. So you didn't have room for any of the other classes. Again, back to that whole critical mass thing, you don't have enough people to make skill divisions in there. You might have six or seven people in a class, and so you jump in there and you train. And the thing that the instructors were thinking about was not, oh, I should coddle this person and carefully integrate them. The thing that the person was thinking about was not um oh i should you know coddle this person and carefully integrate them the thing that the person was thinking about was

this is jujitsu this is what we do if you don't if you don't like it screw you you know that's kind of the mentality that everybody had back then now that definitely changed over the years um the intro course that we do at revolution as far far as I know, nobody else in the country is exactly doing it the same way that we're doing it. There's a few things that differentiate it. But, you know, the gist of just having this kind of like trial period that's custom tailored for an individual that starts at a particular time and finishes at a particular time so that you aren't finishing it alone. You're going through it with multiple people. You know, those are the types of things that sort of differentiate it to a degree

from many of the rest of the programs out there in the country. But just the idea of having a segmented beginner program that is just for interest, is just for people walking in who don't have any experience, who have very limited experience, or maybe who are rusty or coming back after a while. Having that particular program program that's something that didn't happen for us until 2011 toward the end and that was when we got into the new facility we were actually um uh if you you know folks that are listening or whatever that have been to revolution bjj that's 20 21 25 staples mill was the first room that we had. That was 1,500 square feet.

But before that, we were down at the very end of that shopping center for about two months. As I mentioned before, we had to kind of get out of the place where we were before pretty quickly. We had to make a hasty retreat. And when we moved, we had to do a build-out. And thankfully, Trey was good with build-outs, constructions, that type of stuff. He understood the business. And he was able to navigate us through that build-out. But we still had a couple of months where we would have been essentially homeless.

But the place down at the end of the shopping center was available. And so we were able to take that over for uh just just long enough to do a little bit of business and to start our first intro programs and we started both muay thai and brazilian jiu-jitsu that year and we still have people that train with us that went through that very first jiu-jitsu program which is kind of awesome. That is awesome. Do you remember in, um, I started in 2018, September, 2018,

I think, and, was first down there, I think when construction was happening for the other parts, um, or the desk was temporarily moved down there or something. So it's, and now it's amazing to see the,

the space down there. Um, so what, what was it before you all, was it just vacant, empty space and then you ought to kind of frame out and get the pads and everything on there? Or was it a, another business before that? Um, well, so the 21, 25 spot,

the very first one that we moved into was another business, but it has been about a decade, uh, maybe a little bit longer since there had been anything in there making any money, like actually transact money. And I think it was kind of similar with the whole shopping center, although when we first started out, there was the one spot that we took, and then the two spaces next door were there for storage. So 2125 was the spot that we had.

2127 and 2129 were storage. And then 2131 and on down were taken up by other businesses and so the the two places that were there for storage um we ended up expanding into in 2014 we moved into 21 25 in 2012 went from i think i said we had about 60 when we first started, maybe 55, something like that. Blew up, got up to something like 175 before we actually expanded. And instead of just growing by one unit, we decided we wanted to go to two because otherwise we would be in the same boat after a couple of years. We were right. That was a good move. Wow.

21-25 through 21-29, we had the three units, which is 4,500 square feet. That was good. That carried us to about 400 students. When we hit 400 students, we hit a pretty solid wall that we needed more space in order to grow. We are

probably only around 450 students right now, but we don't require any additional space in order to continue to grow. That's one of the really good things. We've gotten to the point where we can continue to grow. The bigger bottleneck is probably going to be parking, which we're starting to go through the process of solving that problem. We are training instructors constantly all the time. We're really in a fortunate spot having a lot of upper belts with us.

You know, we've got like 15 black belts now training with us, which is just, you know, amazing. Quite a few brown belts that just, you know, a couple of them just got promoted. We've um quite a few brown belts that just you know a couple of them just got promoted we got quite a few purple belts too um but i mean more to that more to the point where we're actually actively trying to uh facilitate training of these people and not just saying okay well we have a black belt so we have somebody who can become a future instructor because there's a whole lot to becoming an instructor. Just because you're a good practitioner doesn't mean you're a good instructor.

There's even a level above that too. Just because you're a good instructor doesn't mean you're going to be a good owner. We're trying to crack the code on what it takes to become good at all of those things now. I saw similarities in the teaching, like incident management or project management

stuff. It is interesting how someone that's so knowledgeable, that's so adept at something, and then there's that skill set or the practice or just the learned techniques, whatever, the combination of that, they can have such a hard time translating that and relaying it to other people. Knowing you know it's in there or they have the knowledge and that's interesting so for the the instructors do you have a curriculum for them that you all have developed as well that you found have worked to build up you know how they present how they teach explaining the techniques and do you

have an instructor kind of kind of sign off and review kind of like you do for students but focused on quality instruction? Yeah, we do. We have a couple of different types of instructor training right now. One is the very comprehensive intro program training that we have people walk through. So I think, you know, I've taken inspiration from a lot of different businesses throughout the years as I've tried to grow and understand business on my own. And one of the anecdotes from learning about business that really stuck with me was a company called The Container Store. I think a lot of people that are more domestic would probably understand

what The Contain container store is. Right. But, you know, it's a little different kind of a retail outlet than the norm. You know, the normal retail stores will take maybe like a week to train somebody on how to do a job. You know, sometimes it's more like, you know, two shifts or a shift and a half or something. You can punch in stuff at the register and you you're kind of friendly, and you're good to go. But the container store takes some absurd amount of time, like 35 weeks or something, to train people. And as a result, I recall hearing that their associates tend to stay around for a really long time,

and they don't have turnover costs and stuff like that. And so that's sort of the approach that we try to use with our instructors at Revolution BJJ and in our small growing network of gyms here. Basically, if you go through a training process that's just a few weeks long, I just don't think you're going to understand what to do, how to interact with students. There's just not all the instances are going to come up that could come up where you could have a teachable moment or where you could learn. So just for that reason alone, you need more time for that. And then you need time for a system to actually work itself out.

So for us, we do kind of three phases of training. You know, I don't want to dig into too much of this stuff because it's going to put everybody to sleep. But basically, the longer the process for training and the more rigid and systemized it is and the more areas, important areas you can cover, sort of like, you know, one of the areas is addressing the whole class. One of the areas is time management. You know, one is following the curriculum, knowing the material. But notice, like, knowing the material is only a small part of what the whole process is.

Whereas, you know, somebody's like, well, the guy's a black belt. Obviously he knows how to teach. That's a very 1990s way to do jujitsu. And I think it's time for us to kind of start to creep out of that arena. Yeah, I mean, those sound like all the best practices from reading leadership books and business and things like that of all those presentation skills and are learned and reps and muscle memory are just invaluable in being able to do that. And honestly, one thing with doing a podcast, which is weird, where you sit in front of a microphone,

especially when you're by yourself not having a conversation with somebody like this, of then listening back and going, oh, how many ums and clicks and pops did I make? And I would imagine when you're trying to teach an art, particularly something like that as well, reviewing it and going back and just getting that exposure is just super helpful for the growth to and for your experience that you mentioned before you mentioned, and we brought up earlier, U.S. Grappling.

How did you get involved with that organization? And from that, you mentioned using some of those lessons learned from marketing and promotion and things like that. And how did you come about the locations that you have those tournaments? So how did you get started with U.S. Grappling, and how did that grow? Well, you know, I've always been a hustler i guess i've always been interested in um making a living doing something i enjoy i guess to a degree and also maybe like being my own boss i guess so those those things have always kind of appealed to me um i've always been very entrepreneurial as a kid too. I would always, I don't know, some kids collected baseball cards

because they liked the players or whatever, or they collected comic books because they liked to read them. I collected comic books and baseball cards because I viewed them as almost like bond certificates. This is going to be worth more at a particular time in the future because I think it will accrue value. I guess a little more like stock ownership in that regard. But I didn't really view it in the same way that other kids did.

And that's sort of the way that my childhood was. It was very different than a lot of other kids when they're kids. I was more of a collector and I was more entrepreneurial. I wanted to create stuff. And so I think that just shaped a lot of the way I did things, including jiu-jitsu. When I first started jiu-jitsu, I was in love, judo and jiu-jitsu. I loved both arts.

I wasn't interested in doing a whole lot of other stuff other than those two things. But I did have the entrepreneurial experience of being a kid you know um uh being a salesman being a hustler that kind of thing and so i thought about how to apply that to jujitsu and one of the ways that i was able to do that relatively early on was learning how to referee and learning how to work at tournaments even if I wasn't allowed to referee, because I wasn't the right rank or whatever, I could almost always help out at a tournament

in exchange for participating for free. And so, sort of through that grassroots volunteer level, or maybe not volunteer, but like trade for competition level, that I got kind of a foot in the door with some of the tournaments and like it's pretty awesome you know i could like travel from place to place and get either get paid for doing something or at least compete for free and this is back you know i might as well have been a junkie and the competitions might as well have been heroin to shoot up for free, so to speak, was really, you know, worth its weight in gold back then.

So traveling around and being able to do that was offset to a large degree by being involved with working at the tournaments. Eventually, the travel and the transportation was covered by sponsorships and stuff like that. So like none of the aspects of competition were, not all of them were necessarily paid for every single time, but it was offset enough to where it was like not such an expensive hobby anymore at the very least. So, I mean, gradually, basically, long story short, I was involved with helping run tournaments before we decided that we wanted

to run our own. Somebody approached me to ask to help with a tournament. And I said, no problem, I'll do it. Somebody else approached me later and said, will you run this tournament? And I said, that's a little bit of a different story. But sure, I'll try. I mean, I'd been to hundreds of tournaments, literally hundreds of tournaments by then. So I'd seen all kinds of stuff that worked and all kinds of stuff that didn't work.

So I thought that I understood some of the things that you could do to improve it I mean like most entrepreneurs you see something out there that somebody else is doing and you say well here's how I could do it better you know it wasn't really any different with me in tournaments I saw some areas of efficiency particularly mat efficiency where there could be a person that goes between one mat and another and moves matches around or goes to bracketing and gets additional matches or whatever. I thought about the things that would make the experience better for the competitors when they were registering the day of or registering online in advance or whatever

and really thought that stuff through. And we tried to apply those notes to U.S. grappling in the early days. So, I mean, I think it's like you take a passionate advocate who doesn't mind being a project manager and you pretty much have an entrepreneur. Right, yeah. I mean, it sounds like you use grassroots, but getting into something and just saying, you know what, I'll do whatever.

I just want to help. And then as you absorb more and get more responsibility and people recognize you and, you know what, I'll do whatever. I just want to help. And then as you absorb more and get more responsibility and people recognize you, and then you're like, Oh, let me take this step on my own, that evolution, that process of starting at the ground level, you know, for you in this, and then really for other folks listening in something that you think you want to do, you know, and particularly, I think you see it with like new college grads or folks trying to get a job or something, Hey, should I do this? And some want to jump to the big job in the corner office, which is super hard to do or some other, you know, thing of, Hey, just go somewhere and intern or go somewhere and volunteer

and put your time in. And it sounds like that really paid off. And as a, you know, having competed in a couple of those tournaments had been there and watch folks and they're super well run and it is very easy for the participant to sign up online to get there to weigh in i'll say the friday weigh-in is fantastic to then be able to have cheeseburgers and show up the next day it's super helpful and yeah the the you can tell the resource management people management that's going on between you know the briefings and the refs and the in the make use it using all the mat space so there's not kind of dead space if you will while folks are waiting is pretty apparent so that's pretty awesome to see yeah well I think you touched on something that's pretty good there too you know keep this another saying another truism that i'm borrowing from a couple of books um you often

will vastly overestimate what you can do in a year um while vastly underestimating what you can do in 10 years so like this idea of going and volunteering and doing stuff for free um in order to learn a particular skill set, if you take the long view, that's like the very best use of your time. Doing the thing that you think you should be working on in order to learn. Being mentored by somebody, learning from an experienced person who's doing it as well, seeing it done through an experienced lens, that's a pretty valuable skill to have. And if you learn those skills now and you decide that you want to do something over the course of the next several years,

you can really do quite a lot over the course of a decade. Jiu-jitsu helps a lot for me, you know, with understanding that too. It's like, you know, I wanted to be good at everything like overnight before. And now I'm just kind of like, well, okay, if this takes me until I'm 50 to get good at's okay you know it's amazing how it provides that perspective like i mean between the again the vastness and being new of you know the the vastness thing in the whole system that is you know it's hard to imagine but to your point of yeah like oh i should i feel like i should be able to submit you to do this or get out of this and

that. And then you, when you step back and think, Oh, but this person's been doing this for a decade or two decades or whatever. So their muscle memory is unbelievably better, you know, and technique and knowledge and all that kind of stuff. And, and similarly to like in the incident management world. So doing special event planning, like for the, the team that was on in central Virginia, we, um, I'm coordinating the public safety for the president and vice presidential debate and Farmville. Uh, and so when you bring new folks on the team, you know,

someone wants to be a planning section chief, which is the project manager of the team essentially. Um, but it starts with being a check-in recorder and that's sitting at a table with a sign-in sheet and saying, please sign in. Here's your radio. And like, that's what you do, which is not glamorous. It's not as high speed as being out there briefing everybody. But once you get to the point where you are coordinating the whole process or supporting the team in that aspect, it's really facilitating it. You can think back on it and build on it and understand. So you're just way better at your at your job or what you do so that that foundation is just fantastic to get in there and do that yeah there's a there's an analogy for pretty much everything in

jiu-jitsu you know it's like such a microcosm of life for all these kinds of things you know you taking your time and learning something or persistence or um you know going with the flow there are all kinds of lessons that you can get from this stuff which is why i just advocate it completely you know especially in today's world where everybody seems to just be sort of shouting at each other on social media across a chasm it's you know you can bridge that chasm you can bridge it with grappling with jujitsu you know, with actually physically touching people and stuff like that, as creepy as that might sound. There's something that's just on a primal level for us that we don't get anymore in the modern world that I do think jiu-jitsu provides better than anything else. Yeah, absolutely.

And for me, I can feel it. And I don't miss really class that often, but when you do, you're like, man, that or exercise or something like that. But the thought of going there and trying to break something or strangle someone, them do it to you, and then you're like, oh, that was great, good job. It does, I think, take special folks into your point about culture. And you can see that in different gyms or the folks that you that you do that with, but the precedent sets for the rest of your day. So like, you know, I love that the am, you know, did zero six there at

revolution and do seven here. And then the rest of your day, if you know, you're at work, or you're talking, you're like, Oh, there's no creamer left, or, you know, some little thing, or someone at Starbucks had to wait, you know, five extra minutes, because they were busy. And they get all flustered. You're like, Hey, man, like one year at a Starbucks, the life's pretty good. And then to just just take a breath. It's amazing what that that struggle, you know, as often as you go to the class it just makes everything way easier to you know just kind of echoing what you said it's it's it's pretty astounding for the the mental aspect of it as well as the physical and that's one thing too of like I was in decent shape before I

started workout regularly and even even now feeling the difference and seeing brand new folks coming in you know where, where it's like there's, there's in shape and then there's like jujitsu in shape when, when you're going, wait a minute, I just did this, you know, cool,

whatever exercise yesterday. I was fine. And then you grapple for two minutes and you're like, just, just suck and win. So it's, I think that physical piece supplementing the mental and vice versa, it's,

it's like therapy. I mean, it really can make a difference. I think for, you know, I think for folks that are having a hard time in different aspects too. And that's probably something you've seen of, you know, whether it's military folks or public safety or someone in a bad situation in life that they've come in and you all through jujitsu have helped them work through some hard times. I imagine you've seen that quite a few times. Well, absolutely. You know, I was meeting with Keith Parknell earlier today, actually.

Keith is one of our black belts. Great guy. Known him for a long time. You know, he's teaching at Revolution BJJ Ashland now consistently with Jarrett. You know, great dude. And Revolution BJJ Ashland now consistently with Jarrett. You know, great dude. And we were talking about exactly this, you know, like the people that are benefiting the most from jujitsu. You know, it's great to see somebody who finds a hobby that they love and finds a group of friends in the community. And that's extremely valuable.

But then you have people who are constantly battling mental illness. You know, many, you know, many. I've seen that suffer through depression and many other ailments that are similar and Jujitsu is able to help them just sort of get a handle on things, you know to some degree Or somebody who's comes in and they're just morbidly obese, you know, they're just really really gonna Have a heart attack and potentially die in the near future. And then maybe jiu-jitsu doesn't get them into rock-solid shape. Maybe it gets them in a condition enough to where they can become more physically active in a future time in their life.

Maybe they're only touched by jiu-jitsu for a little while, for a couple of years, and then they go away. But it's enough to where they're going to hang in there and make it to the next step in life, whatever that entails. These are the types of people that really, really benefit from what we're doing. And so we have – I think we have a serious onus to keep our culture healthy emotionally as well as physically with hygiene. I mean we make a big deal out of hygiene at Real Estate New Jay, but I think that any intelligent gym owner is going to make a big deal out of hygiene every day but I think that any intelligent gym owner is gonna make a big deal out of hygiene if they want to stay in business you know it just makes sense but like that's just the physical aspect of the health and the safety of the students is a big deal too which is part of the reason we're not really super interested in MMA training you know for us it's not compatible with

extremely safe culture but you know but I mean everybody is the arbiter of their own risk too, so there's some people who are going to want that risk more than others. But it's not for us to impose the risk on people, it's for us to make the training as safe as we can. And that's not just the physical, but that includes the psychological aspects of it, the emotional aspects of it, making it just a safe place, you know, for everybody to train and everybody to get benefits from i think i mean i i absolutely believe that there is a large swath of the population that's not currently benefiting from brazilian jiu-jitsu that could benefit from it right otherwise i wouldn't be doing this stuff that i'm doing i wouldn't be so passionate about

continuing to grow this art and continue to have an influence on it. Um, you know, beyond just the scope of the two gems that we, we have right now. Yeah. For, you know, one of the things that you'd see,

whether it's in memes or, you know, talking to people, try, try to always sell this to, you know, to folks that, that,

that don't practice it as the, well, I'm not in shape enough or, you know, you get karate chop hands or something like that. But, um, you know not in shape enough or, you know, you get karate chop hands or something like that. But, um, you know, for those folks understanding, like, this is just like, if you, as far as the physical benefit, in addition to the actual practical self-defense and, you know, those kinds of things, you know, like, but they would sign up for a fitness class,

but feel like they couldn't sign up for jujitsu, uhitsu is interesting. Or they'd go to the gym. But it's also a different, you know, to your point, there's no icebreaker. Like, hey, here's day one. This is called the guard. I know you've never met somebody, but they're going to wrap their legs around you. And you're going to get in between your legs. And then, you know, we're going to do whatever the move is. But it's the greatest icebreaker, too, that I've thought, like for a business, as a, hey, we're going to do a team development thing. And it's going to be,

you know, a few hours of jujitsu, we're going to show you some basic moves. Now, I don't know if you'd have to have HR there or whatever. But you know, it's the great thing to just, to your point, totally bond folks and go, man, that was super hard. And we all did this. So even if it was a, you know, a way to work through some practical things or something like that. But, you know, I thought of that before, because you just, you know, you could see, and I know you've seen a bunch of people's face where it's like, wait, we're getting in what position, you know, when you're starting off. But yeah, to that point, it helps you deal with people and talk to people more from all walks of life i mean talk about a swath of you know humans from different human experiences

just walk into a jiu-jitsu gym and you and you see it big time yeah we've seen more and more of the sort of uh the corporate approach to of there there there are some obvious benefits from this art and i think that um corporate america has begun slowly to wake up to that like any large group of people it takes a long time you know for change to happen but i think that it is happening we've had people have taken advantage of what we offer for exactly the reasons that you're outlining there you know they're they're looking at um team building uh kind of doing something that's outside of the normal comfort zone for most uh you know they're they're looking at um team building uh kind of doing something that's outside of the normal comfort zone for most uh you know employees for a given day right and and making some friends and we're actually starting to see um probably being one of the

bigger gyms in the area you know they're they're we're seeing people are drawn to us for that and we'll do like group group intro classes and stuff like that so it's still relatively new a new phenomenon i think right not it was in the mainstream but we also have to remember like this martial art for all intents and purposes is really 25 years old in america you know right um you know 27 28 years old it's not really fair to say that, you know, jiu-jitsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was in the public consciousness before 1993. It just wasn't. A small subset of martial artists knew what it was.

And, but I mean, like that was an eclectic, very tiny group. It wasn't until it started blowing up. So, I mean, naturally this was an eclectic, very tiny group. It wasn't until it started blowing up. So, I mean, naturally, this change is happening over time. But we have to remember that stuff like karate, you know, it took a generation for karate to enter the mainstream as like the martial artist of the public. I think we're seeing the same thing happen with Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I think it's just a matter of time before jiu-jitsu is the number one most widely practiced martial art in america um i think it's happening in front of our eyes right now we can see the exponential growth of it you know 10 times as many people were doing brazilian jiu-jitsu in 2005 as we're doing it in 93 that's probably fair to say probably a lot more than 10 times actually

probably more like 100 times and it's probably 10 times as many are doing it today as we're doing it back then. And based on just absolute numbers that I know in the Richmond area and some other areas that I know pretty well, I think the math checks out. That's probably about right. So, I mean, I really think we can see another exponential leap up, especially as kids that are raised having done Brazilian jiu-jitsu are now having kids. Oh, wow wow so we're starting to see that you know spread through a very different way it's one thing if like you um

if you're telling your kid i saw this on tv and i know it works it's another thing entirely i feel i was raised doing this right um is the martial art that is effective you know all this other stuff is a bunch of garbage. I don't want to talk about all other martial arts, because that's not really true either. That's completely overly simplistic. But, you know, there's a certain obvious efficacy to jiu-jitsu when you do it, when you're out there practicing it, that you can see and feel. That just wasn't really present as much in martial arts in America

before the influence of jiu-jitsu. Right. And with being able to do it and not give each other concussions like every other class or sparring or something. And a great point in another emphasis of when you're rolling without totally spazzing out, you're really having to use everything you have against someone like every time you go to class. And so you're practically applying it as opposed to some traditional and I did Taekwondo as a kid and a little bit with my son when he was a little bit older, as opposed to like forms or kind of touch sparring or things like that. So unless you get into the

aspect of actually, you know, fighting or, you know, competitive, it seems different than practicing the skills you just drilled or have drilled in the past regularly against other people. It just seems like an awesome, I'm sure by design, art itself, but then also to be able to apply that consistently. And so it's not as much of a question of, could I do this move if someone was actually trying to hit me or wrestle me or strangle me because you're doing it, you know? Yeah. That's a huge aspect. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. There's an immediacy with Brazilian jujitsu that you don't really get with a

lot of other martial arts, right? There's that immediacy of learning a move and then executing it against a resisting opponent, maybe that same day, or certainly doing things that you just practice that same day, working on them with somebody who's literally trying as hard as they can not to do it to them. Right. That goes to your point.

I think that's a good way to put it. And it's neat when you are both of the same level, when you both learn the same move, and you're both trying to do the same move, but also trying to stop the same move. You're like, ah, but you know, again, part of that, that build up camaraderie, I think it's a great aspect. So it's like generational growth of the art now. And I hadn't thought about that of, you know, hitting the numbers that it has now and kids coming in and doing it. And I know there's a big kids program there.

And so reaching those. And so you've been doing and other folks that we mentioned, Daniel and Trey and other folks and Keith, I think really everybody in Revolution has at some point been in the YouTube videos with the series of, you know, a whole bunch of different things. And then now reaching more generations growing on that and kind of bleeding into their or leading into the BJJ path. One kind of the YouTube, when did you all start doing that? And was it part of kind of to your point wanting to spread the art and just the quality of it and get that out there and being entrepreneurial and recognizing that? And then that's in the evolution of that seems to be the the path uh

the bjj path um so how did you all get into youtube um and was that you know the hey we've done this on youtube for a lot now let's you know get this to more folks um and as a kind of monetization or subscription service um so what was that evolution for getting online presence in addition to Facebook, but really YouTube to BJJ Path? Okay, well, the YouTube stuff, YouTube's always been kind of an extension of our gym for us. We're Evolution BJJ. So we would shoot in the beginning. This was 2011.

That's when the YouTube channel was created. Just some videos of us candidly showing a couple of moves. Um, in 2012, we shot some somewhat professional videos. Gene Byard, one of our Muay Thai instructors was, uh, was good enough to help us get some actual somewhat professional video up. And, you know, these were fun to make. And I, I was all about, I had, um, studied a lot of video over the years, you know, these were fun to make. And I was all about I had studied a lot of video over the years, you know, seeing what other people were doing, was heavily involved with VHS tape trading. And that was the way to get information. You know, there wasn't't really exactly walking in cold. But having studied what makes a good video, what makes it interesting, I understood kind of some things about length. Like, first of all, people want shorter videos, much shorter videos.

If there's going to be an intro, it needs to be a really short intro, you know. That kind of stuff sort of appealed to me right away. And then I just sort of applied the same kind of way of learning as I did with the Facebook stuff and just try to pay attention to just general best practices, you know, how to make a halfway decent video, um, how to, how to socialize it. You know, we, we didn't call it socializing it back then. It wasn't, you know, words weren't used, but, um, so that was sort of the beginnings of it. And it was just a way to supplement kind of the school a little bit, you know, put some information out there I recognize that YouTube itself was a social media platform so there was some utility and actually just having a video on YouTube and in fact I mean I think I mentioned this already

but we've gotten some students from YouTube so it's actually more than fruit and proven itself worthwhile but beyond that it's just a supplement it's a way to do videos and so what happened somewhere along the way was Rudy Fishman moved to Richmond. Rudy is a good friend of mine. He's a jiu-jitsu black belt, also a brain cancer survivor. He runs a program called Brain Cancer Diaries that your listeners might also really be interested in checking out. Because, like, when he first started it, like, he was effed up. Like, he was just having a rough time making videos and now these videos

are like really professionally well shot and like i think it's like netflix quality almost you know it's gone you know television producer really got a lot of experience with that kind of stuff but anyway when um one of the things that we wanted to do was have some video supplements for the intro program when we first started it we were like this is cool could we also have an additional layer of instruction and that layer is sort of the opportunity for people to review these videos so we would you know let's say that we had Mondays and Wednesdays where our intro time slots you would show the lesson on Monday then then it would be repeated on wednesday the same lesson um tuesday you would get a video an email and it would be um or a page of videos that would be like

two or three the techniques that we covered in class and so that was our idea and rudy helped execute that in the beginning and we called it revolution coach um so we own the domain revolution coach.info was like our our niche until we integrated it back into the regular website. It was a lot simpler that way. And so that's what we do now. So we still send out these videos for review. But sort of that was my first experience with playing around with video curriculum building. And around that same time, I was also interested in learning about passive income and revenue streams and things like that.

And one of the things that I was looking into was writing articles. And I enjoyed writing anyway. And I was like, well, maybe I can kill two birds with one stone. I started writing about jujitsu. And, you know, so the idea being maybe one day this could produce passive income. But I was really just learning about writing and journalism and posting stuff online and everything and um but also i thought okay but this could also promote you know help promote the gym a little bit um help become a marketing tool and so i was like one day i was making an article and i was like why don't i just make a video article you know like a tutorial

um so you know in the 90s you'd read magazines that would have um breakdowns of techniques and it would be like here's picture one picture two and picture three right supposed to figure out the move is based on that um but i always appreciated the description the written description and i knew that there was a certain percentage of people who enjoyed that so i thought okay well me, I'll have a video, but then I'll also write a paragraph about it because there's, you know, back then I was, I was just a, I was a black belt, which was cool, but I wasn't anybody special. You know,

there were other black belts that were out there that were making videos and everything. And I was like, well, you know, um, uh, my, my opinion of my instruction has gone up since then. I think I've, I've, I've, I've tried to constantly improve and modify it over time and everything, and I think that my video instruction is all right. It's pretty good. But back then what differentiated it was not just the instruction itself, but the ability for people to dive in with written text that they wanted to alongside the video.

And for a certain group of people, I think that was a good thing. So I made a bunch of these tutorials i made one i put it out there i was a little nervous i was like oh that did pretty well let me try another and i made another and then i made another and before i knew it i had a whole bunch and i had this sort of like online library of maybe like 100 different tutorials and so this was all just completely organic just sort of built up from the ground um and i realized at a point like i could do something a whole lot better with this you know and so the whole lot better idea was okay it's going to be a walled garden which sort of sucks because you have to pay to get there but

on the other hand it's kind of awesome because it allows me to have the freedom to do this structure the way that i want to do it. And so the first thought was structure, like was sort of like putting it into more of an encyclopedic nature where you would have, you know, text links inside the text itself where you can hop from tutorial to tutorial if you want to. Like if you're reading a Wikipedia article or something and you get through and you're like, oh, that looks interesting. Let me hop over there. Right. Or if you want to open it in a new tab and then finish the article along and then you know and then before you notice you have nine tabs open or whatever and that's that's pretty normal for me

um and i suspected it was normal for other people too but then i was also like well you know because of the structure thing i could like start it almost like from scratch and build it almost as though it was like a curriculum and say okay well here's the body of techniques for um for the everything within the guard and i said well you have to start with closed guard and open guard you know two different types of guard right it's not the only way to break that down but it's a it's an intelligent and reasonable way to do it you say all right well closed guard technique go over here open guard techniques go over here and open guard of course has its own subset of techniques you've got you know like half guard you've got spider guard you've got maybe daily heba guard you know um maybe you know you consider butterfly guard its own type of

guard you know stuff like that gotcha and start saying okay well i could categorize these a bit further if i wanted to but at what point do I stop going down this categorization rabbit hole, you know? Um, so it was really fun for me to build the system out of that, the kind of, you know, the process if you want, right. Um, of getting to the point where the structure of the tutorials themselves made it into an encyclopedia. Um, but that's not really the longterm big picture is going to be utilizing, um, machine learning, um, over time to where the user will input some information. Like you'll say, okay, my name's Kevin. I'm, um, you know, devastatingly handsome, six foot two or whatever this, you know, this

is my body type. These are my partners. Um, I like this type of guard pass. I like this type of suite. This is my body type these are my partners um i like this type of guard pass i like this type of suite this is my favorite submission what do you got for me and it gets you started down a sort of personal journey so it's got some kind of logic kind of planning for to fit your game if you will yeah there's that gamification element that's one of the spots where that pops up there are others too but you know that goes sort of back to something we were discussing earlier too like if you have a captive audience that's one thing but you if you're really an educator your your job is to get people to come

back and want to be educated again you know not just here's the important stuff to show you that's one piece of the puzzle but the entertainment aspect is another piece of the puzzle and the way to do the entertainment i think online is generally with gamification. And that's only one way to do it. You know, another way is simple stuff. Like you can have a checklist. People really like going through checklists, you know, if you have a checklist and you can see it propagating as you go through an individual video or tutorial or whatever, you'll want to kind of get through it. But right now, so because of that, you know, it's going to take some work. It's going to take a lot of data and a lot of modifying data and studying it and stuff like that. What we're going to do in the interim is create essentially paths where you have a kind of a

lesson. So the tutorials themselves are individual tutorials. That might be like one classroom lesson where you go through and it's like, you know um how to pass the guard using the kimura but it's a very specific way to pass the guard using the kimura it has a couple of different video examples maybe a couple of different techniques but it's not a totally comprehensive way to do it you know right the path would be a much more comprehensive thing or it might even be a broader thing like how to open the closed guard you know um you know and it would be like five different tutorials that are steps on how to open the closed guard. And some of them are going to be pretty wild, like a Tazi pass or something like that, where you're at the end and you sprawl your hips back and everything, get the guard open.

But it might start with a much more simple kind of a narrow way to do it. So the idea is right now we want to build these paths where how to, how to use the Kimura from the bottom, how to, um, that's, that's one that we're working on how to do a knee cut pass. Right. Um, you know, this is probably like 20 or 25 different videos throughout these five, six, seven tutorials that make up a path. Um, so sort of like mastering an area so that's where we're at right now with it um we've got like 300 tutorials which is comprised of probably about a thousand videos um lots and lots of text mountains of text in there if you're a learner if you can learn by watching a video and then reading a summary of it then there's not a better website than bjj path um that's sort of the niche that we're we're in right now but eventually the niche is going to and then reading a summary of it, then there's not a better website than BJJ path.

That's sort of the niche that we're in right now, but eventually the niche is going to be that personalized approach. And I just sort of think like an online personalized approach to learning is, is absolutely the future of jujitsu. There's not really any argument there. You know, this is the way that pretty much everything is gone over time. I was going to say it's like, you know, what is a business, but like for this, you know, for jiu-jitsu, it's like an online learning management system, you know, for jiu-jitsu.

And thinking of shorter videos, did you find that because folks are like, oh, I got caught in this or I couldn't finish that or we studied this and I can't remember. So they wanted that quick snippet and then to grab it that led to kind of the feedback on the shorter videos? Yeah, some of that. I think that being a user myself, it's like when U.S. Grappling was getting started, I put myself in the shoes of the competitors that were there. I try to put myself in the shoes of people that are watching these videos. I don't want to watch a 10-minute video when I can watch a one-minute video. Why would I want to do that?

I recognize that there's other people that might want longer videos. I think it's okay for BJJ path to have some longer videos too but we want to be sure that we let people know if they're getting into something that's more than they want to chew that they don't bite that off right at that moment so that's sort of one of the considerations as we go forward too but yeah I mean you know I've gotten a lot of feedback from people and you know one of the things that I guess it sort of surprised me about BJJ path is some of the users it really shouldn't surprise me that much. A lot of the users are either gym owners or instructors in their own right.

And so they're using BJJ Path to help with, like, lesson planning, you know. And that's something that was an unintended thing that I knew for sure that we could do video, you know, instruction and stuff like that to help instructors learn because we've done that before at Revolution BJJ. We still do. We have videos a whole lot better than than writing stuff down in terms of, you know, accuracy and everything. And people can digest it a whole lot quicker and stuff. But I didn't I didn't really anticipate BJJ path to be that, you know, for people. Um, so for, to hear that from gym owners was surprising. And then I also heard from a lot of people at revolution and at other locations that they would use the tutorials to drill, you know, for, for stuff like at home. Um, not necessarily like we have a drills class at revolution that, um, we have, I guess there's five of them now,

five a week, um um where it's just dedicated drilling time okay um but you know it might not be it might be at home it might be with a friend at home it might be at the gym it might be like during an open mat or something too that would be a pretty common time for people to drill but they're looking for for us specifically this is i'm talking about like the drills class that we have where you show up and you have something to work on for 30 minutes. The people are like, okay, well, I'm going to do this class. I like the drill, but I don't have anything to work on right now. What should I do?

One of the ideas from some of the people are to look into BJ Path and say, I'd like to work on this move. I'd like to practice this and get better at this. It's a good prompt for them to know or help them see what they want to do when they go into the drills class yeah that's basically it and then you know that was one of the surprises too because a lot of the time i think that we were framing it as people are going to go and um learn these techniques for the first time you know or and it's and i mean in a lot in the language is framed that way to where you can walk in and you don't know anything about it you and i mean in a lot in the language is framed that way to where you can walk in and you don't know anything about it you can learn it how to do it from you know from point

a to point z but that's not the only thing that people are going in there for right a lot of people are going in there for i know how to do this move um i just want kind of a tracker on the steps in the move so that I can practice it. Maybe focus on a detail or two, you know, that I need to adjust and correct. So I think it's probably more in the latter category than the former category, if I had to guess, which again, that was kind of a surprise. I'm sure people seeing some of these moves for the first time. So figuring out how to best apply, you know, those different groups of people.

And like, do we even want to cater to all the groups is another question that you have to ask, right? Right. Where you focus your efforts and things. I'll say I'm a subscriber. It is great. To your point, the write-ups, I also enjoy the what's the background? I can see to do this. I can drill it.

But what's the theory behind it or this, you know, this order of operations or, you know, it is very helpful. And I'll say help literally saved my neck a couple of times, particularly the, I think one of the recent ones you did where you kind of sit out and put someone's elbow over you when they're trying to choke you. I was like, Oh, let me try that. Yeah. So I've got a direct feedback that I at least didn't get choked as fast, but held it off. But, uh, but yeah, it is a, it is a great platform and it's, uh, bjjpath.com. Yeah, that's right. And thanks for, thanks for saying that, Kevin. It's good to hear, um, from users. I always like hearing from people from their experiences because again, I get surprised a lot, you know, by what they're getting out of it.

And, um, we actually recently did, um, you know, by what they're getting out of it. And we actually recently did, you know, user feedback. We've got some analytics at the back end of the website, which is helpful to find out how people are getting from point A to point B and stuff like that so that we can determine if our strategy is working and things like that. But actually, like, filming the screen of three people that are sort of like power users at our gym, we had them use it and just do screen capture, video screen capture.

And watching, observing how people are clicking around was incredibly helpful to understand some of those surprising things, revelations that pop up. Have you found, folks, and we talked about there's a lot more gyms around the united states but there's still pockets um where it's either remote or it's far away or something have you found folks that are using path or even youtube that you've gotten feedback that's like hey there's a gym but it's 50 miles away i can't make it with my shifts or whatever and it's kind of a you know their learning system that that way too because they don't have access yes absolutely um that's that's a pretty common thing to happen uh we've even had international users like there's um

there were a couple of users in eastern europe and um i going to screw up if I try to name the country right now, but definitely there was a person in Belgium that was using the service and there was somebody else that was further East in Europe that was using the service. So it was really cool to see and to hear their stories about how like, you know, they just don't have any access. Basically for them it was more like access to high level instruction, you know?

And so like, you know, maybe they'll have another brown belt or something that they'll see on a regular basis but they don't have like a second or third degree black belt that's training with them that's like you know i mean i think like when you get up it sounds cliche but when you get a black belt you start learning in jiu-jitsu you hear that all the time um but i mean it's it's kind of true like you get to the point where you have uh enough vocabulary to have a conversation i think is a good way to put it that's pretty much it that's what you you have when you reach black belt you don't really know um you don't have mastery of jujitsu or something like that you know which is again a year and a half in pretty astounding to hear from is it roughly a decade a little more

um for a black belt in brazilian jiu-jitsu and then go oh welcome to jiu-jitsu like which is what it sounds like when you're saying then is that also because you're you've learned kind of and you know if i screw this up you've learned you know the moves and you you're good at it and you've rolled in things but then now you're at the high level where you're, the moves and you're good at it and you've rolled in things, but then now you're at the high level where you're in the masterclass of sharing more knowledge and doing that. Is that part of the evolution where you say, okay, now you're, now you're actually kind of there or not quite there or just get ready, getting ready to start it. But how, because from, from Ryan, that seems like, wow, that that's it. But you know, you've, you've been in this for a while. And so what was that like for you as well?

Or is that a thought that you had? So you hit black belt and you're like, oh, wow, there's still so much more there. And that was years ago. So since then, you've just gotten in all the different aspects we've talked to, all the process of business growth and instructor growth and then growing other instructors and something like that. To me, it seems astounding that when you've put that much time and effort already in there that you can grow. But I guess the point is you, you're always growing and there's, there's really never a stoppage of, Oh, I know it all. I think I'm good.

Well, that's, that's definitely true. I mean, you, you're definitely always going to be learning. And I think that's true of any field, right? You know, you mentioned project management, right? There's quite a lot of different layers of understanding of project management, right? Like there's a sort of idea that's very rudimentary of, you know, I'm going to have a task and I'm going to write it down. And it's going to go into this category and it's going to be the category is either going to be it's about to happen or it's happening right now or it's completed right right and it's sort of like you can get very um big picture with it and that gives you some kind of an understanding of it um and and let me jump away from project management and move into language which i think i understand a little bit better you know um to me jujitsu i've used this way to describe

it a lot more recently i think this is my favorite um jujitsu is a lot like language in regard in this regard like if you're starting out and you're a white belt and you you reach you know blue belt or you know decent white belt level or whatever you have spent a couple of years writing letters on the chalkboard you know you've written your abcs um you've gotten to the point where you can now make letters reasonably well then you get to blue belt and it's time to learn how to put those letters together into words you know and you make some words and they're pretty words and they're good words they people understand what the words mean but by the time you're maybe a purple belt, you start making sentences from the words and you start putting them together

and say, all right, well, um, I can make full sentences now. That's pretty good. Um, you know, maybe when you're a brown belt, you're making paragraphs. And maybe when you're a black belt, you're making, you're writing entire papers. Right. But does that mean you're a writer, you know? Right. I don't know. I mean, that's kind of up for debate. I think it means that you understand at least the mechanics of how to write, but that's about as far as I think I'd be willing to take it. So for me, it's kind of like I've got the tools that I need in order to write,

right? In order to solve my own problems in jujitsu, in order to analyze the situation and come up with what a solution is, or maybe in order to understand a new style of, say, passing the guard or doing a submission a particular way. I would not have had that vocabulary 15 years ago. There's no way. I just wouldn't have had the understanding of how to learn, how to apply this new knowledge. Um, so I really think jujitsu is like writing in that regard and like using language in that regard. You want to become a writer. That's what your aspiration is when you start doing jujitsu. And so the first couple of years you start out learning letters and then you can put them together into words and then sentences and then on into paragraphs and you're still not really

writing when you're making paragraphs but you're getting close i think when you get to black belt for a lot of people um and don't get me wrong black belt is different for everybody you know it's black belts mean different things than other black belts you might get a black belt at one location after training for four or five years you know who knows um hopefully not too many locations but i mean you know whatever everybody it's a little different it's not like universal i'm only really speaking of my own experience here but you know my experience colors the way that we try to promote our students too right i really want our students to understand jiu-jitsu when they get their black belt or at least understand enough of the game so that they can write their own books you know that's really the

best way to put it you want to be able to write your own books and if you don't have that understanding and we cut you loose then you don't really uh have enough of an understanding to get started um making it your own you know and that's really what it's about it's kind of making it your own, you know, and that's really what it's about is kind of making it your own art. That's a great analogy. And, and selfishly was like that, you know, that when you went through the first was like, that's the perfect soundbite to promote this episode. Like it's a great, it's a great bite and a great philosophy to give people an understanding because it is, you know,

different from other kind of very traditional martial arts and and really to that also you know wondering your perspective for both the so that you know for both the new practitioner kind of your expectations and your advice and there's probably tons of it um but but kind of overall for folks that are getting into jiu-jitsu they know they're going to do it you know from your experience what what about the the process for them is going to help them make the most progress for for the jiu-jitsu practitioner in your eyes well you know i think um if i can go back to something we were talking about earlier um you know you can do a lot in 10 years, a lot more than you think you can get done, and you probably can get a lot less in one year done than you think you can.

So if there's any way that a beginner can sort of calibrate their expectations to say, you know, this is a long journey, I'm investing in myself here, and I'm taking my time to understand this stuff, that is a long journey. I'm investing in myself here and I'm taking my time to understand this stuff. Um, that goes a long way. And the reason, one of the big reasons for that is that that essentially colors how you train on a daily basis. So like if you're out there and you're training and your immediate objective is to win, then you're not going to get very much out of the training. Um, you know, you're just going to go out there and, and, um, somebody is going to try to pass your guard and you're going to shut them down, you know? And then that same, somebody is going to try to pass your guard again. You're going to shut them down. You know, you're going to do the same thing to

them over and over again, cause you know, you can't. And so you're going to continue to beat that person. Um, or on the other hand, you know, somebody's going to beat you and you're going to get mad and you're not going to understand why they're beating you or what's happening. You know, I should stop saying why they're beating you. But it feels like it when it, when it happens. So I, I know you mean though, as far as putting a move on your, you know, to your point though. Yeah. So, you know,, so taking a longer term approach in the beginning I think helps people more than anything else. If you can say this is going to

take a while, you are going to get good at it. The gains that you're making on a daily basis you might not feel it but you're getting better. Getting people to calibrate that expectation and understand that this is a grind and it's going to be a long time. At the same time with jiu-jitsu you do see results a lot faster than you do with, um, any other martial art I've ever been a part of like boxing. You know, you can,

you can train for a couple of years and still get your ass kicked by somebody who's brand new. Um, maybe not, maybe I'm just really bad at striking in general, but I think it's to an extent it's true that, you know, in jujitsu, you can train for a few months and you can probably beat an average condition rank beginner, you know, whereas you don't necessarily see those results from other things that you're doing. Um, but at the same time, because it's so complicated, you know, you've, you've got to stick with this stuff for a really long time in order to begin to reach that level of understanding and that's what i think that would help the most you know

there's the old adage of kind of get the ego out of the way and that's that's certainly true but i think what i'm trying to drive at is how to get the ego out of the way you know because we're all humans and we all have massive egos that that do get in the way of our progress from time to time right and if you listen to enough jujitsu podcasts, you're going to hear, get your ego out of the way, you know, leave your ego at home or whatever. That's all well and good. But what happens and how do you do it and why do you do it? Right.

What is what is the what is the mechanism for doing that? For me, the mechanism is long term, big picture, being able to see where you're going to be in 10 years or 15 years or whatever from this stuff. And understanding that being a good training partner is even more important than the other stuff. Like if people don't like training with you, they're not going to help you get better. If people legitimately like training with you, um, the sky's the limit, you know, they're going to actually help you improve. So being a good training partner,

taking care of your partners, not kicking them in the head and so forth, you know, hand in hand, like, you know, to a large degree, not kicking people in the head means you're not being super competitive,

which means they're going to like you more, which means they're going to want to train with you more. But it also means that you're not going to inhibit your own learning because when you're kicking people in the head, you're winning at all costs and not really observing what's happening and not letting the person work to an extent, feeling how they're escaping positions and things like that, you know, if you're better than somebody. So you have to kind of, you have to kind of take the long view and you have to let that describe your behavior. Right.

You know, saying that and, you know, knowing it's a partnership, it's teamwork with everybody else in your class. I know I've benefited a ton from folks that could have just ended every now. I mean, tap me out for sure, but could have done it in a much meaner way. But then go, Oh, here's, here's something you could do for that to not happen or not happen as easy or talk through it. And then, you know, with, with to your point about the brand new person compared to, you know, a few months in or a year and a half in or something.

And the difference there is, is just amazing. And actually feeling, I mean, it does feel good for someone that's, you know, equivalent for me, just speaking personally, equivalent skills been around, you know, and you have a great role and you both learn and, you know, you're going back and forth and you get the upper hand or something like that. But then also to your point of someone that's just come in, there's clear nervousness, you know, just like I had brand new nervous, it's like, man, these positions are weird, and it feels like, you know, they're way aggressive or unsure, and just kind of talking to that person

like a new person at a job, or, you know, but in this case, a new person in Jiu Jitsu, of helping them feel welcome, helping them understand, like, we're all in this, we've all gone through it together, and then knowing, and it seems to, Jiu Jitsu seems to weed out, so if you get the person that's coming and then knowing and it seems to jujitsu seems to weed out so if you get the person that's coming in there whether it's in an intro or first class or a couple classes and they're trying to win like the world championship against everybody they seem to not be there much longer right because it seems like the gym or themselves

kind of weed themselves out um And it seems like it's, it seems like that's a change from what you were describing, you know, in the earlier days of really just jumping in there to now. Have you seen that as well at revolution? So folks that come in, they're really amped up, they're going, and then, you know, either folks help them get past that or they realize, Hey, this isn't my thing. Yeah, we've, we've absolutely seen that revolution. I mean, I think that you see it more across the nation and across the world nowadays than you used to see it,

where brand new beginners and even people have been training for a year or two don't have to be cutthroat competitive in order to survive. But you don't see it nearly as much as you ought to outside of our gym honestly I think that's one thing that we do extremely well that I'm probably the most proud of out of all the things that we do I think that we get to the point where you know it's not across the board it's not universal and everybody's a work in progress myself included but getting I think that we've done a good job of helping people understand the big picture, not forcing them to win at all costs

and helping them get that, you're in this with your teammates. That's a big part of what we're doing. We're all kind of evolving together. Now, we can always do better at Revolution and we will continue to try to improve but i've seen massive improvements and i've seen you know the overall culture of jiu-jitsu across the country you know and and even in the world as i've said like it's improving it's becoming safer for people

to train and for people to take risks and make mistakes and stuff like that. But this is not happening overnight, and it's not something that's going to be a fast transformation at all. It is happening throughout the world, and we have a lot more control over what happens inside a revolution, obviously, than we do outside of the global community of jiu-jitsu. But we view ourselves as citizens of that community too. So every gym has a degree of influence over the culture of all the other gyms and so you know we have a decent

sized gym so we have a pretty good influence over the culture that surrounds us at least in our geographic area immediately but also because of you know bjj path and our youtube presence and other reasons you know we have a national presence too and even like a baby international presence too. So it's important for us to kind of continue to set that example and be leaders in the direction that we think that jiu-jitsu should head in. I think that's incredibly important. So, yeah, we have seen a lot of improvements at our gym and now at Ashland

revolution BJ Ashley, which is we started it from the from the very beginning with the culture that we wanted in mind, you know, so that was a kind of a different approach to we're definitely getting in the heading in the right direction, for sure. John Greenewald Yeah. And from, you know, being the star, I started thanks for for all that, for the benefit of your lessons learned, of your evolution. We're going on a couple hours.

Is there – and speaking of tournaments we talked about too, there was one coming up in March, right, a U.S. Grappling tournament? Yeah. So I've been a silent partner with U.s grappling now for a number of years although i talk with the partners about stuff i just am not an active participant in the events or in the event planning um uh march 7th virginia beach is the next event and um i literally had to pull up the website in order to see that i'm looking sorry call it putting you on the spot for that one. Yeah, it's, it's okay. It's, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't mind talking about that either because it's really different when you're trying to do a bunch of things, you know, you have to have people that you can trust that you let do

things. Um, you just have to have people you can trust and let them do their thing, you know? And, and I think with a U S grappling, we're very fortunate. Um, Brian and Chrissy Lindsay are my partners and their, their ethos has always been – I've never, ever questioned their ethics with wanting to do the right thing for the competitors. That's always been their best interest. So when I did step away because it was in the interest of growing Revolution several years ago, it was easy for me to make that decision because I trusted them. We've had John Bagels Telford has been a big part of the organization with planning the events and organizing them, getting people to come out for them and stuff like that. Same thing. Bagels is essentially where I was a long time ago with having competed a whole bunch. He's been obsessed with competition for a long time, and he's competed at a very high level and done quite well and as a result he's seen what

makes a good tournament happen so you know i can i can leave the the keys with those guys so to speak and i know they're going to do a good job of course the one that i'm more excited about is the april one in richmond um because it will be here and we'll have a lot of students that'll go out for that and i'll be able to coach them and things like that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's great to see the organization running well, running itself. I mean, by running itself, I mean I'm not involved on a daily basis. It's really something I feel very good telling our students to do,

suggesting to other students from other locations, if they're looking for a tournament, you know, I can absolutely tell them us grappling is a great place to compete. It's a good first tournament to do. The referees actually care about your safety there. You know, they're,

they're, they're after the customer experience more or less. That's, that's the best way to put it. Yeah, it is pretty awesome. Uh, and well run. So thank you again for all the links and stuff we've talked about.

You're scrapping BJJ path revolution. All the folks we mentioned I'll make sure to have all the contact info or links to the, to the sites. I think pretty great to hear your evolution, your story, the, you know, getting into growing yourself, growing the business, the process of joining, which is interesting how, you know, you meet folks and circumstances happen that you then join together and then grow and just really love hearing about that and hope other folks,

you know, that are listening benefit from that as well of taking the chance starting from the ground up making those relationships and partnerships. And, you know, sometimes the ups and downs of like you mentioned, not knowing if you have a home or not, listening to the customer, and just really the the love that you can hear in jiu-jitsu. And again, we'll totally advocate for anyone listening to this that is not a practitioner to go check it out wherever you are. And we'll have your contact and everything as well. So thank you very much for your time.

I really appreciate it. I think it was a good chat. It's amazing when you're just chatting about stuff that is interesting and good conversation, how fast time can go by, which is awesome. I really appreciate it. I think it was a good chat. It's amazing when you're just chatting about stuff that is interesting and, and, you know, good conversation, how fast time can go by,

which is, which is awesome to your point. So anything else happening that you want to let folks know about? No, man, I think we, we did a pretty good job of covering it. You did a really nice job of navigating the conversation,

Kevin. I appreciate the opportunity to come on here and just talk about what's going on in my brain a lot of the time. It's neat. That's one thing I've found with one discussion is podcast and sharing. That is the medium to have this and then share with folks that will hear it and benefit. And to your point, talking about things is just pretty awesome in this day and age that you know we can put that out there man thank you so much when I'm you know in Richmond again hope to stop by and train with folks there and really enjoy the experience and again everybody

revolution BJJ in Richmond Andrew Smith thank you thank you so much for your time and we'll stay in touch thanks a lot Kevin I really appreciate it man great job have a great weekend see you man