Gym Owner Interviews
The BJJ boom is the most important commercial event in American martial arts in the last two decades. Jiu-jitsu went from niche to default, and a generation of gym owners pivoted hard.
But every trend has a survivors' bias problem.
We hear from the gyms that rode the wave and are still open. We don't hear from the ones that bet the business on it and got caught when the curve flattened.
When Alex visited ITC New York in Astoria, Queens, he found a gym that did neither.
ITC opened in 2006—Sensei Greg Gutman's vision of combining world-class judo with world-class striking—and has run continuously ever since. They used to teach jiu-jitsu and dropped it on purpose.
Mark Gutman, Sensei Greg's son, manages and teaches at ITC in the evenings. By day, he's an attorney.
He had the clearest articulation of the anti-trend playbook Alex has heard on camera:
We're not just chasing trends. BJJ was very popular for a long time and is still very popular. But that doesn't mean that we drop all of our classes and now we're 100% BJJ. And then when that trend might end up dropping, we're a little bit screwed.
This post is what we took from that conversation.
Mark says BJJ is still popular, and ITC respects what it is. The argument is that your gym has the right to its own discipline, and that "staying in your lane" can be a longevity strategy in its own right.
The Temptation Every Martial Arts Gym Owner Faces
If you own a martial arts school, you've felt this.
A trend builds, competitor schools start advertising it, members ask about it. The gravity of the local market starts pulling you toward whatever is hot.
The honest version of the decision is rarely "do we love this art?" It's "will we lose members to a school that offers it if we don't?"
It's a real question.
The common wrong answer is to say yes to everything. You add the program because you can. Your schedule cannibalizes itself. Your culture blurs. Instructors get spread thin.
Then the trend rolls over. The original culture is gone. The borrowed one never took root. You're a generic multi-discipline gym competing on price.
Mark grew up watching the opposite at his dad's gym.
What ITC Did Instead
ITC's program list is short and specific.
Muay Thai runs seven days a week. Judo lands Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Sundays are Sanda (Chinese kickboxing).
There's also a Muay Thai Strength & Conditioning class Sensei Greg himself teaches twice a week—at 67.
I don't think there's one person I can think of that can keep up with him. Because whatever he tells anyone to do, he's going to do it first to show how to do it.
The hiring standard is equally narrow. Mark put it plainly:
The big thing at ITC is anyone who's going to be stepping on the mats and teaching, you're going to be a world-class fighter. We don't have anyone come in and teach unless they themselves know what it takes to get to that level.
That's not a marketing claim. Mark trained Muay Thai as a kid under Egersen O'Byrne (UFC middleweight title contender, family friend) and Armin Lekanovic (IFL competitor, WBA featherweight champion). The bar was always world-class. Twenty years in, it still is.
ITC only added curriculum they could deliver at the founder's standard. Then they ran it for two decades.
Why ITC Dropped BJJ
ITC used to teach BJJ and dropped it. The reasoning is a clean articulation in the GDO dataset of the discipline-focus philosophy:
By sticking to what we know, what we know well — which is training judo competitors and training Muay Thai fighters, and also teaching people proper self-defense, real self-defense — that's what's allowed us to really stick around.
The decision was about ITC's standard for what they're willing to put their name on. They couldn't be world-class at BJJ while also being world-class at Muay Thai and judo.
Pick what you'll be great at. Run that.
Greg holds the same line on "self-defense" seminars. He won't run them, even though they'd be easy to sell:
Why ITC Stays One Location on Purpose
Almost every successful gym Alex visits gets asked the same question: when are you opening a second location? More locations means more revenue and more reach. ITC's answer is no, and they treat it as a feature of the business:
We're not interested in moving anywhere. And it's also very difficult to think about adding a second location, because we want to be very involved in the community that we create.
The dojo culture Mark is protecting is specific and load-bearing.
ITC runs a Japanese-style dojo mentality, imported via judo and extended across every class. Members clean the mats together after class. Sparring stays controlled because the culture sets the safety norm at intake.
That culture doesn't transfer to a second location the way a brand does.
It transfers through the owner being on the floor. Sensei Greg, Mark, and his brother, Danny, who helps lead the judo program can't be in two places. So ITC stays one place.
Mark's question is the one to sit with: what part of your culture would not survive if you weren't there to enforce it?
If the answer is "nothing," scale away. If the answer is "a lot," you might be running a gym that's worth more concentrated than spread.
What "Staying in Your Lane" Actually Requires
Pure focus also means small. It means turning down revenue, and watching some members walk to schools that offer what you won't.
What makes ITC's version work is two operational habits paired with the focus.
First, they adapt on everything that isn't the core.
Mark's reading of why ITC has lasted is, in his own words, "in large part due to our ability to adapt." They've tried roughly twenty gym management software systems over most of those 20 years, moved locations three times, and they're currently experimenting with chess boxing.
What doesn't move is the standard for what gets taught and who teaches it.
Second, they make room for the non-competitor path inside a fight gym.
ITC's sparring classes are packed with members who never intend to fight. Mark's framing closes the most common gap between fight gyms and beginners:
95% of people who do Muay Thai are never going to step in a ring, and that's totally fine. I didn't step in a ring until I was 34. I've been doing Muay Thai for 20 years.
And the line he gave Alex was the rebuttal to the most common excuse he hears from prospects—I need to get in shape first:
A gym that holds the standard high and welcomes the casual practitioner is a gym whose retention math actually works.
You don't have to chase trends if the door is wide enough.
When You're Lean, Your Software Has to Carry Weight
Picture Sensei Greg stepping off the mat to sit at the front desk because a member needs to cancel or update a card.
That's the moment the focused, single-location model starts to break.
ITC is, by Mark's description, "a lean operation. We got my dad who runs the place, and we have, like, instructors, and that's it."
Mark spent roughly two decades and about twenty different platforms looking for software that wouldn't force his father to the front desk. He found it after Greg was, in his words, "very close to" giving up on software entirely and going back to pen and paper.
The features that ended the search were ordinary:
- Editing the calendar on the fly to cancel a single class
- Seeing past-due accounts with diagnostic detail (declined card vs card removed vs uncharged)
- Letting members cancel online without an in-person visit
- Changing a member's price when they're standing in front of you—a thing a previous platform had blocked because the member "signed a contract on this price."
If you run a lean gym (owner-operator, family-run, single location), lean gym software has to give you the floor back, not eat into it.
If you're evaluating, Gymdesk's martial arts software is built for the lean, owner-operator setup ITC is running—same self-service patterns Mark walks through above.
What 20 Years of Staying in Your Lane Proves
Chasing the trend looks smartest at the peak. Staying in your lane only proves itself after the curve flattens.
ITC has had two decades to compound on a discipline focus most of its competitors couldn't hold. BJJ wasn't wrong. The lesson is that you don't owe your local market every program it asks for.
Your members deserve the best version of what you actually teach, in a culture that doesn't get diluted every time the wind shifts.
If you have a martial art you know cold and a community that shows up because of it, the boring answer works: run that, well, for a long time.
That's the playbook ITC has been quietly proving since 2006.
