Florida is jiu-jitsu country, and has been for as long as most gym owners there have been in business.
Open a grappling school anywhere between Jacksonville and Miami and the market has already decided what it expects you to teach.
Shinjiro Sasaki opened a judo school in the middle of that in 2017, on a highway strip north of Orlando, and people keep asking him why.
The first thing you notice inside is how much of the floor nobody is using.
It's a commercial unit with a drop ceiling and wood wainscoting, and the walls are covered in framed photographs. The green tatami runs back far enough that there's a lot of open mat behind the students.
They don't ask it rudely.
They ask it the way you'd ask someone why they bought the house without the garage.
That's the answer to the business question. He goes on to give the closest thing to one he has: "I feel myself, like, I have a talent in Judo. So, using my talent, I wanted to live."
Using my talent, I wanted to live.
The Paperwork Came Before the Room
Sasaki started judo at six years old in Japan and never stopped. He played softball. He played soccer. Judo was the one that didn't get put down.
He's had the name Sasaki Judo for about fifteen years. The dojo opened in 2017.
He's an immigrant. The paperwork came years before the room did.
"Because I'm an immigrant. So from Japan. So it's not easy to open my business, you know? … So you need to go through visa issue. I went through the visa issue well. And then so finally, so using my name, I have my own gym now."
Advice about starting a martial arts school begins at the lease. For a good number of coaches it begins years earlier, at a government office, and nobody writes that part down.
Why the Sign Says Judo and Not Dojo
He named the school after the art and himself, deliberately, and he'll tell you exactly where he got the idea.
He has no Gracie affiliation.
He's borrowing the naming logic: put the art in the name and your own name beside it, and you have signed something.
If he stops learning, the brand stops growing.
One Sensei, a Finite Number of Names
Alex Cuevas, who hosts the episode and leads Gymdesk, asked him the standard growth question. Multiple locations? A bigger space? The thing every operator is supposed to want.
He wants a bigger business. He does not want a bigger room.
It's arithmetic, and he does it immediately: "Sensei is only one, only one, right?"
One sensei, and a limit to how many faces one sensei can hold.
And then he explains where that rule came from, which is my favorite thing in the episode.
He went to a seminar. Someone at the front of the room called him hey, you. He remembered how it felt, and then he built a business rule out of it.
"So, if I cannot remember their name, I'm not good Sensei. Because we are sharing, you know, they are sharing my knowledge. That's respect, I think."
He thinks they're giving him their attention, and the willingness to take his corrections.
Where the Money in a Judo School Actually Comes From
So how do you make a living teaching judo, if you won't take the obvious growth?
If the room is capped, the money has to come from somewhere other than more people in it.
Memberships, first. His goal for the year of filming was 130 students, and he describes 150 as the point where the room is packed.
He also gets hired by other dojos.
"Sometimes, so, like, I get contract with other dojo to help their dojo. So, like, they want to do judo class, but they have only Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu senseis. And then, so, yeah, just I go to their dojo and help for one semester or something like that."
Jiu-jitsu schools that want a judo class and don't have anyone to teach it. The scarcity that makes his own market harder is the scarcity he bills for.
Local work only, roughly a semester at a stretch. He didn't present it as a clever revenue play, which is probably why it is one.
Eric Mieles coaches the daytime class and has trained with Sasaki about ten years, and he pays his bills in real estate.
"I train like an athlete, but I'm not an athlete. Like, my life, I do judo almost every day. And I'm a real estate guy. So, I have rental properties and, you know, I had a real estate business." — Eric Mieles, Sasaki Judo
That's a real data point about what martial arts instructors earn. The coach teaching the daytime class has an income from somewhere else.
He Answered His Own Phone, and It Worked
About ten years ago Mieles was in his thirties, looking for something to train, and he searched judo in Orlando. A video came up.
"I call. He picks up. I thought maybe an assistant would pick up or someone else. And it's him."
Mieles remembers the pitch as one line, repeated until it stuck: "Just come in and do Judo every day."
No trial offer. No sequence. A man on the phone telling a stranger to show up daily.
Mieles showed up in gym shorts, took one roll, got dizzy, and sat down in the corner. He says the room privately wrote him off as a guy who'd never come back.
Ten years later he teaches the daytime class.
I want to be careful about the lesson there, because "systemize your onboarding" is good advice and I'd still give it to most schools.
But the first hundred days of retention at this school came down to a phone call from the owner and an instruction to come back tomorrow. That worked because the owner was reachable, which is the same asset the size cap is protecting.
There Are Two Sensei Sasakis
Rieko Sasaki is a co-owner, a fourth-degree black belt, and Shinjiro's wife.
She's a three-time veteran world champion, and she took first place at the veterans world championships in Las Vegas in 2024.
Rieko is also the one who runs the software.
She doesn't say a word on camera in this episode. The person holding the operational floor of a martial arts school is usually the person nobody interviews.
Sensei Beata Schwindler, a third-degree black belt who also teaches here, medaled in Las Vegas too.
The Part He's Bad At
Sasaki is unusually direct about his own limits, in a way that would make most founders wince.
"Even I am a good product, but I don't know how to sell this product. So, that's why I need somebody to sell my product. So, he helped me a lot. Not only him, so other students do. Always my students help. So, that's why I will help my students 100%."
There's a gym community here doing real work. His students market the school because he can't, and he considers himself in their debt for it.
The admin got handled the same way. Owners who survive that side of a school either hand it to a second person or hand it to a system. Sasaki did both: Rieko first, then software.
"In Judo business or martial arts business, I think there's some people like me. It is good to teach or support the students, but not good at like desk work. So, Gymdesk, that system helps people like me. Mostly, everything's automatic, so it helps me a lot."
Mieles describes the member's half of it as an iPad by the door: put in your name, one button, you're checked in.
They came to Gymdesk on a recommendation, after cycling through products that didn't stick.
Eric Mieles said so on the record, and turned to Rieko, who runs the thing, to confirm it. His words for the before times: "it was a mess."
Gymdesk's own Sasaki Judo case study is politer about it than he is.
He says he doesn't know how to sell his product, and there's a tool sitting in his account built to do exactly that. They aren't using the marketing automation, which is included in what they already pay. They didn't know it was there.
Alex says on camera that owners who've been on a platform a while often don't.
I'd treat that as a prompt to go look at your own account.
130, and Then Full
He sets a number every year because he needs one.
"Because as a judoka, I'm not a competitor anymore. So, I'm a sensei now. So, but even being a sensei, I just, I want to have some goals."
And the ceiling is what keeps the thing he retired into from turning into a different job.
A school of 150 is a school where he still knows who's on the mat. A school of 400 is a business that would need a Shinjiro Sasaki to run it, and there's only the one.
The growth he does take goes somewhere other than the roster.
Every year he takes students to Japan through his own connections, and the trip is open to white belts and to parents who have never trained a day.
They visit universities and dojos, and they see an Olympic team. Then he takes them sightseeing, because as he puts it, "it's not only judo."
I'd argue that's a strategy: pick the variable you refuse to grow, then grow every other variable around it.
He isn't the only one.
A gym in New York dropped BJJ and lasted twenty years on the same kind of decision.
Most operators asking whether to open a second location have never named the thing they're unwilling to lose. Sasaki named it years ago at a seminar, when somebody called him hey, you.
Sasaki Judo is in Casselberry, Florida, in the Orlando metro. Watch the full episode on Gymdesk Originals.
