Always looking for ideas to get new students and retain current ones. I did an attendance challenge for the kids last month. Thinking of doing a posting challenge for adults and parents. Winner will probably get $100-200. Still working out the logistics. Let’s work together and crush the new year! 👊

This is awesome. Even as a student, I’ve learned how much consistency and engagement matter for keeping people training. When I was in college, I did a paper on gym membership and saw some of the numbers behind gym retention, and most places, including BJJ academies, will naturally lose around 20–35% of members each year just from life changes, injuries, or motivation dips.

That’s why, I think, challenges like the one you did for the kids are such a smart move. They help people stay connected and show up more, which makes a huge difference for long‑term retention. A posting or attendance challenge for adults sounds like a great way to keep that momentum going.

Really excited to see what you put together and what others suggest. This kind of energy is what keeps a team strong going into the new year.

I've worked with several organizations over the years and the 75% rule seems to apply pretty well to all of them. There are two parts to the 75% rule: 1. If you aren't keeping 75% of your membership every year, you need to focus more on retention than recruiting. 2. If you aren't seeing at least 75% of your membership regularly participating you are probably going to be on the wrong side of part 1. Related to part two is that the percentage of membership that participate regularly is pretty close to what you can expect to retain the next year. If you see 50% of your membership on the mats every week, you'll probably keep 50% of your membership next year. Bottom line: If you aren't meeting the 75% threshold there's a good chance you need to do some reflection and introspection about why you aren't meeting it. Did your membership grow to the point you couldn't adequately serve them all? Did a new school open up that you now have to compete with? Are you not fully engaged in the school and its success? Have you made changes that people publicly agreed with, but privately didn't like? The number of questions here is endless.

At our old academy (we are in the process of changing right now) there were awards for the child and adult with the best attendance for the year. They basically got their tuition covered for the year. That is/was a great incentive to the top 1% of the students to come to class. But what about the 99% that aren't in the discussion for that award because they can't come twice a day every day? You've got to provide a reason for them to train as well. Probably the most important thing is they need to feel like they belong and there needs to be some kind of comradeship that makes them feel needed and wanted in the gym.

Thank you guys for your input! Great advice! I have good retention rate with kids but struggle with adults. I was more focused on making bad ass competitors for adults. I have since changed the class format and it is going well. The key is to keep evolving 👊

Have a survey for existing members and get their input and change stuff of needed to cater to your members better. To get new members our club focus on online ads, mostly short movies and active posting of content on the clubs social channels

I‘m not very experienced with sports clubs or the BJJ community as a whole but I thought I‘d throw in a naive white belt female opinion as of now.

What I found crucial in all sports clubs I‘ve been part of (not only BJJ) is a certain cohesion regarding the people that train there.
Clarifying what kind of gym you want to offer as well as what kind of BJJ you offer shouldn’t branch out too much or else the diversification creates factions inside of the gym. A kind of family spirit wether in the name of competition or rather family-friendly / hobbyist BJJ (whatever it is that you offer) seems to be important.
And consequently so.

I think this plays into the 75% thought mentioned above. After all, every club sells a product / specific learning opportunity and not only in a technical, but also emotional sense.
There should be clear and consistent „art direction“ governing important decision.
I think this would also inform as to how to recruit new people that stay:

E.g.: 1. You want to be a competition gym? Try to invest into bringing in newcomers who are interested in competitions and / or are starting out on an advanced athletic predisposition. Supporting these tropes may come through goodies for public transport, investing in a bus / bigger car / transportation or hosting in-house tournaments.
2. You want to offer BJJ for everyone free of class, pressure, gender roles, strength, experience, etc.? Try to focus on a friendly training environment that won’t push anyone away or past their comfortable limits, as well as connecting the group as a family via BBQs, fun events without pressure, gamified training methods, …
3. You want a strong core group that will show up regularly? Find out what makes people show up that often and keeps them coming back, f.e. a survey to gather information, setting up opportunities for anonymous feedback, etc.


Regardless of these approaches, I would like to point out that I‘ve noticed a big hurdle seems to be the fact that a lot of new people have difficulties wrapping their heads around the fact that you generally have to be in it for the long run, if you really want to ‘git gud’.
This then correlates with a certain amount of skepticism whenever you are new somewhere or training as a guest. This I can’t understand up until now because of how hands on and mercilessly you can find out what kind of wood someone is carved from when rolling.
I think this makes BJJ both more appealing and structurally supporting once you are rooted in the community but also much harder to get a foot in.
I don’t have a solution or suggestion for lowering this entry hurdle at this point in time but from what I‘ve gathered by watching all the different tryouts during my few months, is that most of them may feel incredibly insecure and shy.
Maybe a kind of open day, public get together, demonstration situation, or straight up assigned gym buddies to ease them into this fun „sport sect“ would make sense.

I got into this sport a few months after my husband did and especially in the beginning the safety of always having the same training partner was comforting because getting to know the people and their quirks wasn’t as daunting like that.
We could watch and train in our own tempo without at the same time having to juggle human interaction, different learning paces, etc.
I guess this taps into the general (idealistically speaking) goal of finding at least one or more training partners for years to come in order to have consistent training.
The sport is already daunting as it is, put a new teacher, new people, new friends, new training processes, new philosophies etc. on top and it all becomes overwhelming quite easily.
Reducing that overwhelm would seem like a strong opportunity to create a more open space. Strategically structuring training sessions accordingly and once again having a strong and clear direction will most likely be a big pull-factor in getting new people in.

Lastly, I would like to mention how little women I have seen in gyms I trained at, on photos of other gyms I researched, as well as stories from higher belts and other women.
Considering how male-focused fighting sports still are in general and how much misogyny is present in all that I have noticed, I would say that most gym miss out on trying to even attract women at all. This reduces the amount of people you can get to train there by a large margin.
A few points that come to mind that are as a woman a pain to deal with:
1. Being constantly steamrolled by men who can’t keep their ego in check and don’t realize that they are in fact almost always stronger and heavier.
2. Weird gazes and comments when women don’t quite cater to the male gaze. (Which is absurd regarding the fact that fight sports attract a very specific kind of person / alternative people for BOTH genders).
3. Macho-type men with straight up misogynistic views on women as well as women practicing fight sports in general.
As well as some men seemingly trying to tread the line between physical and sexual domination during a roll by how they smile, touch.
4. The fact that most cutting and sewing patterns for the Gi are still heavily and mostly influenced by the male form (millennium-wide shoulders and almost no ass at all, with a different chest shape), making most women look ridiculous in any sizing combination, even female sizes. Alongside the fact that women are often socially forced to cater to the male gaze creates a huge barrier because you feel even less welcome/ accepted when you know you may be looked down upon.
5. Straight up disgustingly explicit mirror placements in dressing rooms which sometimes enable outside gazes and makes a safe space feel unsafe.
6. Toilets without sanitary products for women as well as piss stains and drops on shared toilets by men who can’t get over themselves and need to pee standing up.
7. A ton of sexual harassment accusations and verdicts regarding top and lower level BJJ gyms and practitioners, once again making a safe space disgustingly unsafe.

I‘m not sure if female-only classes are the solution to this because it factually limits the skill pool in both directions, but I did notice how almost every woman I talked to has agreed with at least one but largely with all of these points mentioned above.
Alas the ~free way~ isn’t as free after all. It seems some gyms are actually only interested in half the population joining them. 🤷🏻‍♀️
(PS: None of these points albeit the weird mirror placements applies to my gym, which is the reason why we have quite a few women training there (not only BJJ, but also striking, etc.) and why I am staying there too.)


That’s all I got and can contribute to this.
Hope it helps :)

To build on the lady's comment above, you have to be careful trying to please everyone. This is often where surveys lead. Obviously you need to cater to enough people to keep your doors open, but at the same time you have to be true to yourself. You have to decide what you want the gym to be and make it that or it will be more difficult to be personally invested in it. One of the youth organizations I used to work with was partially intended for military prep for the kids. I had two brothers join and both were gung ho. After a year or two the mom called me to tell me one of them was quitting because it was "too military" and he didn't like it. I took that as my hint to soften things up a little bit. A few months later the mom calls me again and tells me the other brother is quitting because it wasn't military enough. At that point I decided to just make it what I wanted it to be and those who wanted the same thing would be on board with that. From then on it was very successful with everyone on the same page. Trying to be everything to everyone often leads to being nothing to anyone.

I can sympathize with the challenges women face training in BJJ. My wife and I have trained together for 14 years, so I've seen some of what goes on. But I also know that a lot of people find exactly what they are looking for whether it's there or not. There were numerous women kicked out of our old gym because they went out of their way to claim victimhood. Unfortunately there were some men kicked out because of their false allegations along the way. The normalization of women in combat sports is a generational undertaking. It's not going to happen in a week, month, year or decade. Until there are enough women involved to financially support good female specific equipment it's really difficult for a company to justify developing that market. So do we get the chicken first or the egg?

Totally agree with this. I split my time between a couple of gyms and one of them is falling into the trap of trying to be all things to all people at the moment. They were gi-heavy and recreational, and decided they wanted to capture the competitive no-gi crowd. Now the gi players are frustrated because there's nowhere near enough gi on the timetable for them to feel like they're progressing, and the no-gi players won't stick around long either because it's not really a competition gym.

In the short term it looks OK, but people do a couple of months and move on, and I'm convinced that will harm the gym's reputation.

I think a lot of established gym owners are feeling the pain of a saturated market now, and instead of just investing in good marketing and carving out a niche, they're panicking.

@Leslie. I had a similar issue. Decided to make a gi class at 6:30 and no gi at 7:30. Nobody shows up. If I didn’t have a big kids class, I would be out of business.