Abe Bought Subforce JiuJitsu, the School Where Marcos Still Teaches

When Abe Awad took over Subforce Jiujitsu & Muay Thai in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, most of the members found out by asking.

What they noticed on their own was small stuff: a new check-in system at the front desk, a fresh coat of paint on the walls.

Most stories about buying a martial arts school start with a broker.

This one starts with a teenager who lived for the Friday visits of an instructor from somewhere else.

It ends with him holding the keys to the school where that instructor still teaches.

Alex Cuevas got there by way of a bad no-gi session. So he dug out his trusty Gymdesk gi and headed to Ridge Road in Lyndhurst to see if a gi class could get some of the mojo back.

There was a kids' class when he walked in.

Abe and his head coach, Marcos Duarte, sat down with Alex to explain how a student ends up owning the place.

The Friday Visitor

Abe wanted to do martial arts from the time he was about five, mostly because of the Ninja Turtles. He got five months of Taekwondo as a kid before his parents pulled him out.

At 15 he started paying for his own training.

A couple of years later, he and a training partner were at a school they liked well enough. Then a visitor started showing up.

Marcos tells it from the other side of the mat.

He added, after a beat, "Low key." (Which is about as low key as anything else he said all night.)

What followed was a small conspiracy.

Marcos would teach them something on his Friday visit and send them off to try it on specific people in their home gym. Abe was in on it.

Eventually the two of them just started following Marcos wherever he taught. That's how Abe got to Lyndhurst.

The Mats and the Business

Marcos found the Lyndhurst school while picking up teaching jobs around the area.

He was offered a Saturday class, and it went well enough that he got Sunday too. Eventually he replaced the previous instructor as head of the jiu-jitsu program, teaching and assisting the kids' classes on the side.

Then he did what he'd been doing since the Friday visits.

Abe's version is shorter. "I was taking his class from day one."

That was at the school's old building. Later the school moved to a bigger space on Ridge Road. Over time Abe went from kids' classes to adult classes to two or three classes a day, and he learned to sign people up along the way.

He also picked up a second mentor: the school's founder, who had stopped teaching adults by then but still taught kids.

It went past customer service. Abe says the founder taught him how to present himself, how to get out of debt, and how to pay his bills, the stuff nobody had taught him in school.

The Offer

Then the founder decided to retire.

He went to Abe, told him he was fit for the position, and offered to sell him the school. What he wanted was someone who'd been there, someone the members already knew.

Abe said yes.

Abe wasn't the only one the founder asked.

Marcos had been teaching there since the old building, and he knew what carrying the whole place would cost him.

Other schools keep the handover inside, too.

At OCTA Jiu-Jitsu, co-owner Luiz Costa gave the newest of its seven locations, Oakville North, to his son Michael, which we covered in OCTA's succession story.

The Subforce founder offered his school to his head coach and to Abe, and Abe took it.

Alex asked Marcos what it's like when your student becomes your boss. Marcos talked about how the two of them went from teacher and student to best friends.

Then, in case anyone missed it: "That's just my brother."

Business as Usual

Abe wanted the takeover to feel like business as usual.

The members did catch a few things.

Beyond that, he kept things the same, coaches included.

He calls buying the school you trained at "the perfect scenario," and he's thought about the other version, the one where the founder sells to an outsider.

One Building, Several Businesses

Jiu-jitsu shares the building with Muay Thai, MMA, and judo. Muay Thai runs in the basement. Judo, the newest program, runs Monday, Wednesday, and Friday under head judo instructor Steven Santos.

New people get a free week to try all of it.

Some come in looking for judo and sign up for Muay Thai. Some come in for Muay Thai, try jiu-jitsu, and find it's way more useful than they expected.

Shopping for Software

One change Abe did make was the software behind the front desk. The school had been running on a system he describes without much affection.

He compared a few options and landed on Gymdesk.

His list was specific to a martial arts school: waivers, check-ins, memberships and class passes, and a place for ranks.

‍"I need to be able to put somebody's belt rank on there."

Then there was the marketing side.

He has one test for software.

‍"If I can't figure it out in five minutes, it's too complicated, right?"

Day one, he wanted to build a membership and sign up a student by himself.

He also says it helped to have someone guide him through the rest.

Before signing with Gymdesk, Abe got on a sales call with another company.

They didn't answer his questions.

Then came the schedule: an introduction meeting, a data meeting, a check-in four weeks out, a meeting four to six weeks from launch, another at three weeks. Abe was buying a school that was already open, with members already walking through the door.