I opened my first school in Texas in 2007. I later opened a second, and both grew past 400 students. Most of what I learned about marketing a Jiu-Jitsu school, I learned by doing things in the wrong order first.
That is what this guide is about. Not a list of tactics. The order.
Almost every owner I talk to is doing some of the right things. They have a website. They post. Some run ads. The trouble is that the pieces do not hand off to each other, so the school climbs to a number, slides back, and climbs again.
The ceiling: why you are stuck at your number
Every school has a ceiling. For some it is 80 students. For others it is 120, or 250. You hit it, you slide back, you claw your way up again, and you never break through.
I was on a sales call with an owner in Arizona who said it better than I can. “We’re at 120. We’ve hit 120, and now we’re back down to 106, and I can’t seem to break 120.”
His next sentence was the one I hear most: “We need more leads.”
Maybe. But a ceiling is not usually a lead problem. A school has two levers. More students in the front door, and fewer students out the back door. When the number coming in each month roughly equals the number leaving, you have found your ceiling. It does not matter how hard you work. The math is the math.
Pushing more leads into a school like that is pouring water into a bucket with holes in it and blaming the water.
So before you spend another dollar on marketing, find out which lever is actually stuck. You can do that this week by counting two things for the last three months: how many new members signed up, and how many cancelled or quietly stopped showing up. If those two numbers are close, you know why you are stuck.
The scoreboard: six numbers to know
When I ask an owner how the school is doing and the answer is “pretty good, I think,” that’s not a number. That’s a vibe.
You do not need a spreadsheet with forty tabs. You need a scoreboard with six numbers on it, and you need to look at it once a month.
| Number | How to get it |
|---|---|
| Active students | Count paying members today, not your best month |
| Monthly tuition | What the average member actually pays each month |
| Average stay | How many months a typical member stays before leaving |
| Lifetime value | Monthly tuition times average stay |
| Cost per booked trial | Ad spend divided by trials booked on your calendar |
| Cost per new member | Ad spend divided by members who enrolled from those ads |
Here is how it worked for the Arizona school. Tuition was $159 a month. The average student stayed about six months. So a new member was worth $954 to the school. It cost them about $125 to get one.
Look at what that tells you. The first month of tuition covers what it cost to get the student. Everything after that is the school’s to keep. An owner who knows that can turn ad spend up with confidence. An owner who does not know it is guessing, and guessing feels a lot like praying that the ads start working.
Notice that cost per lead is not on the list. Cost per lead tells you almost nothing. A cheap lead who never books a trial did not cost you a little. It cost you everything you paid for it.
The front door: website, reviews, ads, follow-up
The front door is everything that happens between a stranger hearing about you and that stranger standing on your mat. There are four parts, and I would fix them in this order.
Your website
Follow one parent in your town. She sees something about your kids program and taps through. If she lands on a homepage and has to figure out where the kids class is, what it costs to try, and how to sign up, a lot of the time she leaves.
Each program you teach should have its own page: kids Jiu-Jitsu, adults, Muay Thai, whatever is on your schedule. Each page should have one job, which is to get a trial booked on your calendar. Open your site on your phone tonight and try to book a kids trial as if you had never heard of your school. Count the taps.
Your reviews
Most people do not sign up the first time. They look you up. What they find when they search your name decides whether they come back.
Reviews do not bring leads on their own. They make everything else work harder. Ask every member who has had a good month to leave one, and make asking a habit instead of a campaign.
Your ads
Ads come third on purpose. An ad sends people to your website and your reviews, so if those are weak, the ad just pays to show more people a weak front door.
When you do run ads, give each program its own ad and send it to that program’s page, not to a Facebook lead form. In my experience lead forms produce the cheapest leads and the worst ones, because the form fills itself in and plenty of people do not remember tapping it. You’re not buying leads. You’re buying data about what books trials.
Your follow-up
This is the part most schools I talk to are missing. Someone fills out your form at 9:40 at night and hears from you the next afternoon, if at all. By then they have moved on.
I wrote a separate guide on the five-minute text that books trials, with the exact wording we use. If you only fix one thing in the front door this month, fix that one.
The back door: the first class and the first 90 days
Here is the lever most marketing advice ignores. Every extra month a student stays makes each new member worth more. If the Arizona school kept students a few months longer at the same tuition, the same $125 would buy a much more valuable member, and nothing about the ads would have changed.
The back door opens earliest in two places.
The first class. A new student walks in nervous. What I hear from new students, over and over, is some version of “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do here.” So tell them before they arrive. What to wear. Where to park. Who will meet them at the door. What the class will look like. Then have a real person greet them by name and pair them with a partner you trust.
The first 90 days. This is when a student is deciding whether Jiu-Jitsu is part of their life or something they tried once. Watch attendance. When someone who was coming three times a week misses a week, send a personal text that same week, not a month later when the cancellation request shows up. Learn their name, and their kid’s name. Point out one thing they are doing better than they were a month ago.
None of that costs money. All of it moves your average stay, which moves your lifetime value, which decides how much you can afford to spend at the front door.
What to do yourself and what to hand off
You should keep the things only you can do. The first class experience. Knowing your students. Asking for reviews in person. Checking the scoreboard every month. Nobody outside your building can do those as well as you can.
The things that are safe to hand off are the ones that are technical, repetitive and easy to measure: building the program pages, running and testing the ads, setting up the automatic follow-up, and reporting the numbers. Whether you hand them to a staff member, a freelancer or an agency like mine, hold them to the same scoreboard. Ask for cost per booked trial and cost per new member, every month. If you want the long version of how I think about this, it is all in my book, The Jiu-Jitsu School Growth Blueprint.
And if your real question is simply how to fill the mat without paying for junk, I covered that in how to get more students without buying more leads.
What to do this week
- Count new members and lost members for each of the last three months. Write both numbers down side by side.
- Work out your lifetime value: average monthly tuition times average months a student stays.
- Open your website on your phone and try to book a trial for one specific program. Fix the first thing that slows you down.
- Ask five happy members for a review, in person, before they leave the building.
- Write down what a brand-new student should know before their first class, and send it to the next person who books.
None of this depends on working with us or with anyone else. It is the same order I would follow if I were opening a third school tomorrow. If you want to see how the pieces connect, from the ad to the mat, I walk through the whole system in the free training.