OCTA Put a Jiu-Jitsu School Inside an LA Fitness. Here's the Deal.
Oakville North had been open about two weeks when the cameras got there. OCTA's seventh location, new mats, a professor young enough that people keep mentioning it.
That's the school you see in the episode.
The school this post is about is a different one, about 45 minutes to an hour away in Cambridge, Ontario. It's also one of the seven, it opened before Oakville North, and you don't see it in the episode. Alex spent the last few minutes of the interview getting Luiz Costa to describe it.
It has its own room, with its own bathroom. It sells its own membership. And it sits inside a commercial gym chain with several hundred clubs across North America.
Cambridge is a pilot, says Luiz Costa, whose multi-location scaling is a story we've told here before: "It's still going on for a few months. It's growing, it's different demographics."
He thinks it's the first time the chain has tried this with jiu-jitsu. He hedges it himself.
No, not that I'm aware of. I think they had a program back in time, but it was not jiu-jitsu at all. It was a different martial art. It didn't work very well.
How You Get a Meeting With LA Fitness
Did you call them, or did they call you?
No, we just saw a space and we called them and started a conversation with the VP. And he liked the idea. So we met and we start from there.
The building mattered as much as the call, though. OCTA won't put a school farther than about an hour out, and Cambridge sits inside that perimeter.
The rule is about keeping the schools close enough to hold together, and it decides which buildings are even worth calling about.
I don't want to have schools too far because it defeats the purpose. I want to have a community that supports each other.
Push past that radius and the newest school is on its own, which is one way second locations go wrong.
The Chain Has a Reason to Care
Most people picture this as a lease with extra steps. Alex asked directly: fixed fee for rent, or does the landlord win when you win?
No, it's a kind of hybrid. And so the more we grow, the more they benefit from it.
He didn't put a rate or a split on camera. Some of it behaves like rent. Some of it moves with the school.
Flat rent would make the building indifferent. The room costs what it costs whether OCTA fills it or empties it. A share gives the chain a stake in how many white belts show up in January.
Two Memberships, One Building
Alex, who you can hear doing the math in real time, wanted to know whether joining one meant joining both.
We do have a special membership for OCTA members. If you want to do anything with LA Fitness, they have a special membership for us, but it's completely apart. And Gymdesk is our main system.
It's fully operated by OCTA. It's independently from LA Fitness. But it's inside the facility.
Two membership bases in one building. You can join either one without joining the other.
An OCTA member who signed up in Oakville can walk into the Cambridge room and train. Alex checked, and the answer was yes. Same organization, different door.
The two sides trade people.
Because it's mutual. I bring students, they're not LA Fitness members. So we support each other's membership.
So if you bring a new student and they have a couple of kids, while the parents are working out, the kids are having Jiu-Jitsu classes. That's mutual.
And it goes the other way too.
So we do have a few students that came exclusively for Jiu-Jitsu. They end up being LA Fitness members.
What Luiz Likes About the Lifters
A commercial gym is full of people who have already decided fitness is worth paying for and already drive to that parking lot. Some of them are very strong. This turns out to be the fun part.
It's good to see those big guys that work out. They're very strong. They go into a class and they feel helpless and go, sign in right away. This is what I want.
You can spend a lot on martial arts marketing trying to find that guy. OCTA finds him because he already parked there.
The Mat Is 1,200 Square Feet
That's the training floor. Nobody asked about the size.
We have success with that little school that we have there. It's not big. We have 1,200 square feet there of mat.
For scale, the Oakville headquarters runs a kids program with almost 300 children in it. Cambridge is a room.
Growth there starts with kids, because kids arrive with parents attached, and parents watch.
You need to slowly grow it, right? So we're bringing more kids in. The parents will see what's going on, right? So the public is slightly different.
The pilot has a stated exit condition.
And once we validate our assumptions, the idea is to grow with them.
Which is notable, because OCTA is otherwise in a consolidation phase.
Now is the time to settle a little bit, consolidate what we have, seal what we've been, where we've been winning, the mistakes that we're making, fix them, and then think about growth.
Cambridge kept running through it anyway.
Your Records, Their Building
Opening a martial arts school inside a commercial gym creates a records problem on day one.
Attendance, billing, memberships, the class schedule, the website—all of it has to exist immediately.
In a shared building, whose system holds the member record is the thing that matters. The landlord's can't be the answer. Your members are yours and your billing is yours, and when the arrangement ends you still have a business.
OCTA runs everything on Gymdesk's martial arts software. Luiz brought it up at the end of the interview, mid-thanks, and then stopped to work out which lens he was supposed to be talking into.
So, by the way, where's the camera I'm looking at?
Someone off camera points him to the right one. He turns to it and pitches the software.
With one click, I open a new school and I migrate everything. I have this up and running in a couple of hours.
He picked the thread back up a beat later, about the school he was sitting in—Oakville North, two weeks old at the time.
Website is done in a couple of hours. The school is up and running. I connect my payment processor. In one day, I have everything set up. That's what happened here. I had everything done in one day.
Luiz Costa says he "would never be able to do that" without the functionality, and he's describing one day at one school.
A Gymdesk location can be duplicated into a new one, and the settings migrate with it: programs and rank structures, membership types and pricing, automations, the class schedule, the website and its lead forms, email templates.
How fast you're actually taking payments after that depends on you.
The record follows the member, so a student who joined in Oakville is a student in Cambridge. LA Fitness runs none of it. In a building you don't own, that's the whole ballgame.
Can You Run a Martial Arts School Inside a Commercial Gym?
Yes. OCTA's Cambridge school sits inside an LA Fitness on a hybrid deal: the more the school grows, the more the chain makes.
OCTA operates the room and keeps its own records. Members of either business can use the other. The arrangement started with a cold call to a VP.
Nothing about the school depends on the chain. Because the memberships are separate, a lapsed LA Fitness account isn't OCTA's to chase.
The room is separate too, with its own bathroom, and OCTA runs it. Luiz calls it a space inside the facility.
What they share is the building, and the people already in it.
The thing that got OCTA in the door was a phone call to a VP who liked the idea.
Phone calls are still free.
OCTA Jiu-Jitsu operates seven locations around Oakville, Ontario. Watch the full episode on Gymdesk Originals.
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