Gym Owner Interviews
Misho Ceko has a joke about his schedule.
The nine to five is the University of Chicago, where he runs business operations. The five to nine is Chicago MMA, the academy he founded in Lincoln Park in 2010, and still teaches at most nights and weekends.
He is a fourth-degree black belt under Ralph Gracie. He is also the guy who has to leave a full day at the university and go coach a room full of people who want to choke each other.
Two locations now. The second one, in the South Loop, opened in October 2025.
He's been doing the double life for sixteen years.
Alex Cuevas, Gymdesk's CEO, has known Misho for thirty years. They're old friends.
And what makes this conversation different from most gym visits is that somewhere in the middle of it, the two of them stop being interviewer and subject and just become two guys who grew up the same way, finding that out for the first time.
Watch the whole episode here:
Thirty Years and One Thing They Never Talked About
Misho's parents came to Chicago from Bosnia. They didn't have much.
"My mom was a cleaning lady for Red Roof Inn for 30 years," he says.
His dad worked the steel mill. Neither of them went to school, which is exactly why they were so insistent that their kids did.
"They never went to school. So they wanted us to go to school," Misho says.
That's the whole engine of the story, right there. An immigrant kid watching his parents grind through jobs that wore them down, internalizing the lesson that you study, you get the degree, you build something that doesn't break your body.
He did all of it. The degrees, the career, the title at a major university.
And then he spent his evenings teaching martial arts, which is the one thing his parents still can't make sense of.
"They think it's crazy," he says. "Like I'm 51 years old, 52. My dad still doesn't understand. He's like, why are you wasting your time doing this stuff? Like go get a real job."
He has a black belt, two gyms, and a university job, and his dad still thinks the gym is a phase he'll grow out of.
Then Alex stops the interview. Hearing all of this, he realizes he's been sitting on the same story his entire life.
"Dude, man, I never talked to you about this," Alex says. "I got the same exact background."
Thirty years of friendship, and they'd never compared notes. Both children of immigrants. Both raised by parents who didn't speak the language and bet everything on their kids' education. Different countries, same American story.
You can't fake two people recognizing each other, and the recognition is right there on both their faces.
Nine to Five, Then Five to Nine
People love to ask successful people how they balance it all. Misho's answer is that he doesn't.
That's not a motivational poster. It's a confession.
A full-time executive job, two martial arts schools, a competition team he's actively building, and classes he personally teaches at night.
There is no version of that week where everything gets the attention it deserves. You don't balance it. You just don't stop.
What keeps him in it isn't money. He's clear about that.
"I don't take a job for the money," he says. "It has to be something that I'm really driven by, right? I believe in the mission."
He talks about the gym the way he talks about the university. As a place people come to learn. He treats it like a school because, to him, it is one.
He's been training since the late 1990s, and somewhere along the way the art stopped being something he does and became something he is.
A real obsession doesn't care about your day job.
Where the Passion Goes, He Goes
The clearest proof of that is Mozambique.
In 2009, a United Nations contract took Misho to Maputo. New country, new job, new everything. Most people in that situation worry about housing or food or how they're going to get by.
Misho had one real concern.
"My biggest concern wasn't housing or food or anything," he says. "It was like, how am I going to train the next couple of years if I moved to a new country?"
So he went looking. He found a judo studio, walked in on day one, shot in on a training partner with a wrestling takedown, and accidentally snapped the guy's arm. Not a great first impression.
But the judo coach, instead of throwing him out, drove him to a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school across town (after dropping his victim off at the hospital). The instructor there took one look at Misho's level and did something he never forgot.
"He's like, okay, you're going to teach. And then we're going to be the students," Misho says. "That's the kind of respect that art has."
The visitor became the teacher on the spot. And when he eventually lost access to the mat space, he didn't quit. He bought puzzle mats, laid them down in the spare bedroom of his tenth-floor condo, and ran open mats out of his apartment.
A guy on a UN posting, running an underground jiu-jitsu school out of his living room, because the alternative—not training—wasn't on the table. That's the same energy that, a year later, built Chicago MMA.
A good business move was never the point. He opens a gym because he can't not be on the mat, and once he's there, he wants other people on it too.
Running Two Gyms Around a Full-Time Job
How does a guy with a demanding day job actually run two martial arts schools without it collapsing?
Part of the answer is people. Misho has a coaching staff that carries the daytime classes, a manager keeping an eye on things, and coaches like Kevin Manko building out the kids' program while he's at the university. He shows up at night and on weekends to teach and, in his words, to help build the culture.
The other part is the boring stuff. The billing, the scheduling, the waivers, the belt tracking, the two locations that both need to run whether or not the owner is physically standing in them.
For years, that was a fight. Misho started on PayPal because in 2010 it was the only thing that did recurring payments. He moved to MindBody and found it was built for a different world.
"MindBody… I think they were built around yoga," he says. "So martial arts was an afterthought… The system was very complicated. I was on tech support saying, how do I do this?"
When he opened the South Loop location, he switched both gyms to Gymdesk. He'd been on Stripe already, so the data came over cleanly, and the timeline surprised him.
"It was a very easy process. Took no effort," he says. "Your team was wonderful in terms of the transition, migrating the data over… within a month, let's put both gyms on the system. And it's been fantastic ever since."
What sold him wasn't a feature list. It was that the software actually knew what a martial arts school is.
That's the unglamorous secret of the dual life. If you're going to run a gym around a full-time job, the gym has to be able to run when you're not there.
Belt promotions tracked without a spreadsheet. Members signing up and paying without a front-desk conversation. Managing multiple locations without the owner driving between them at lunch.
The software doesn't make Misho's week any less insane. It just makes the insane week possible.
What His Dad Got Wrong
His dad wanted him to get a real job. He got several.
And the gym his dad still calls a waste of time has become the thing Misho is most clearly driven by. It runs alongside the career, in the hours most people spend resting. He doesn't see the two lives as a contradiction to resolve.
He sees them as the same person, applying the same discipline, in two different rooms.
If you've ever told yourself you'll open a school "someday," when the timing is right and the day job calms down, Misho is the inconvenient example. The "real job" his dad wanted never displaced the gym; it just ran beside it.
The day job never calms down. The timing is never right.
You just keep moving forward, and you build the thing in the hours you've got. He's done it for sixteen years, across two locations and a couple of continents, and he's not slowing down.
His parents bet everything on their kid getting an education so he'd never have to work the way they did.
He used that education to build a school of his own. Just not the kind they had in mind.
About Gymdesk Originals: Real gym owners. Real stories. We visit gyms across the country to learn how they built their communities from the ground up.
