He Made the Judo Harder and the Paperwork Disappear
Danny Gutman manages an engineering team at a Fortune 500 company.
He has a 15-month-old at home. He is at the gym at least twice a week and trying to get that to four.
And the program he runs is judo, which he says is the hardest kind of school in the world to keep full.
"Judo is really tough on the body. It's really hard, which is why the retention rate is so low. There's not a lot of judo schools out there because it's so damn hard."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
The obvious move, with that much pressure on the hours, is to soften the thing. Friendlier classes, and an easier path to the next belt.
Danny went the other direction. He made the judo harder, then moved almost everything that wasn't judo onto software and into the hour after his son's bedtime.
Everything About This Program Is Working Against Him
ITC New York sits in Astoria, Queens, a block from Astoria Park. Sensei Greg Gutman opened it in a Long Island City basement in 2006. Alex Cuevas visited once already, and that first episode was Greg's younger son Mark, who runs the Muay Thai side in the evenings and practices law during the day.
Danny is the older of the two by about two and a half years. Mark went striking. Danny went the other way, "more following, I guess, in my father's footsteps."
The day job is the ceiling on all of it. Everything Danny does at ITC has to fit inside two evenings a week and whatever is left of the night.
Then there's the market, which is worse than the schedule.
"There's probably less than 10 judo schools in the same area as there's 100 BJJs. I can count on two hands how many judo schools there are in New York City, in the five boroughs."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
On top of that, the year has a shape he can't argue with. Summer empties out because people want the beach. January fills back up.
"There's always dips with judo, with Muay Thai."
The one thing judo does give him is stickiness at the far end. Christian, a black belt of sixteen years, was on the mat the day Alex came through.
"Judo's my favorite martial art... Everywhere I go, I feel like I have a home... any other city I go to, I can go to a judo mat and feel right at home."
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The Move He Doesn't Make
Under that kind of squeeze, most schools make it easier. ITC's judo program goes the other way, in two specific places.
The warm-up is the tournament prep
The first half hour of every judo class at ITC is built to wear you out. The fatigue is the teaching tool.
"We spend the first half an hour, just warming up, sweating, you know, just getting tired because we want you to get to that point where you're feeling fatigued so that you can use less muscles so that you don't rely on it because that's a crutch."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
Beginners muscle their throws. Muscling a throw hides the fact that the technique isn't there, and it's also how people get hurt. Take the strength away and the technique has to stand on its own or fall down.
Danny says the warm-ups at ITC are deliberately more intense than at other schools. He also says the program doesn't normally do much separate prep work just for tournaments, because "we're training with the intensity that every weekend is a tournament."
Which is a scheduling decision as much as a coaching one: no six-week camp to build, and that matters enormously when you own two evenings a week.
You don't get past green without competing
The other place ITC refuses to soften is the belt.
THE RULE:
"We're not going to promote you past green if you never compete, because we don't know where your skill level lies."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
Students are expected to compete several times a year. His reasoning: sparring inside your own room only tells you how you do against people who already know you.
"That's how you test yourself. Not doing the sparring over here. It's when you go to competition and see how you do with other people. Your weight, your age, your gender, you know, you have to compete."
This is rare. Across every martial arts gym in the Gymdesk Originals series, competing is encouraged, celebrated, sometimes built into a whole pipeline, and almost never required. ITC's judo side is the first one we've filmed where the rank system itself has a competition gate wired into it.
It's also the near-opposite of the policy running in the same building. Mark's line about Muay Thai in the first episode was that 95% of people who do Muay Thai are never going to step in a ring, and that's fine.
| Judo · Danny | Muay Thai · Mark | |
|---|---|---|
| Competing to rank up | ✓ | ✗ |
| Expected of students | Compete several times a year. | 95% never step in a ring, and that's fine. |
| Past green belt | No promotion without competing. | No equivalent gate on the belt. |
| Run by | Danny, engineering manager by day. | Mark, attorney by day. |
Mark's 95% line is his read on Muay Thai generally, not a count of ITC's roster.
Where the Standard Came From
In the first round of the Sambo World Championships in Russia, which he describes as the top of that sport, Danny drew a Mongolian judo champion: an Olympic bronze medalist and multiple-time world champion.
"When I found out who I was fighting, I was terrified. And then when I got on the mat, I just let it all go."
ITC doesn't teach sambo, and it doesn't teach catch wrestling either. Danny once entered a catch wrestling world championship at the Javits Center because it sounded fun, and won the thing.
Who Doesn't Have to Compete
Plenty of people walk into a judo school at 45 with zero interest in a tournament bracket, and Danny is explicit that they belong there.
"There are some people here who come who are over 40 or over 50 and they have no intention of competing and that's okay."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
They still progress. Danny points to a USA Judo non-competitor grading track, and says ITC runs people on it. "It's just slower progression."
Our judo for beginners guide says competition is optional and plenty of lifelong judoka never enter a tournament, and a post about Combat Sports Academy in Orlando centers on the hobbyists who never compete.
Danny's rule is narrower than it first sounds. A belt at ITC is a claim about you, and competition is how his program checks the claim. The non-competitor track Danny points to sits right next to the gate, for anyone who wants the mat without the bracket.
Past this point ITC's judo program runs two routes, and a student is on one of them.
Route 1—the competitor track
The standard path, and the one the rule is written for.
Route 2—the USA Judo track Danny points to
For the people who walk in at 45 with no interest in a bracket. Danny is explicit that they belong there.
Route 2 is Danny Gutman's on-camera account of how ITC grades students who don't compete. It has not been checked against a published USA Judo grading document, and this block does not link one.
What He Gives Away Instead
After the baby is down, Danny opens a laptop at the kitchen table. Protecting the hard part costs hours he doesn't have, so whatever isn't coaching goes to the software, and it gets done at night.
"I do a lot of work at home. I'm on Gymdesk all the time, you know, kind of analyzing what's going on, taking a look at leads, seeing what automations we can implement. So I do that at night after my son goes to sleep."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
The hour after his son goes to sleep
Three jobs, every night, in roughly this order.
First the leads. People who signed up for something and then never became members. "I'm going to take a look at the last hundred people that's done that and basically reach out to them with an email or with a text."
Then the roster. "I'm taking a look at my membership count, especially for judo and kind of seeing who have I not seen in a while." Anyone who has gone quiet gets a message that isn't a sales pitch: "hey, we're thinking about you and hope everything's okay."
Then the money. Last month against next month, "you know, projections."
That's the part Episode 1 didn't get to. Mark's software story was about finding a system his father could operate so Greg wouldn't quit and go back to paper. Danny's is a different job entirely: he's the one using the reporting, and he's doing it in the only hour he has.
The jobs he's handing to automations
The rest of it, he's trying to stop doing by hand.
New trials are the current project. Somebody signs up, and Danny wants the welcome email or text to fire on its own, so the first impression doesn't depend on whether he's awake. "We want to make it as seamless as possible for them to feel welcome." He describes the program as "leaning heavily into automation" right now, which in practice means building the welcome sequence so the first impression fires whether or not he's at the laptop.
The referral program is the next thing he wants running without him. "Gymdesk actually has an automated referral program that you can do with that. Just, you know, with the code."
His advice to any owner staring down a slow season is about where the effort goes:
KEY TAKEAWAY:
"You have to make sure that you're able to retain your current members and not just look for new members... Otherwise, you're kind of coasting."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
His list of what retention actually looks like is unglamorous: Instagram chats, monthly community events, a message to the guy who stopped showing up, a referral code that runs itself. None of it competes with the half-hour warm-up for Danny's attention.
If you run a school around another full-time job, the software's job is to absorb everything that doesn't need you in the room, so the thing that does gets whatever hours are left.
FOR OWNERS WITH A DAY JOB
Danny gets two evenings on the mat and the hour after his son's bedtime. Everything that isn't coaching has to fit in that hour or come off the list. Before you decide what to hand to software, it helps to know what your own week actually looks like—the Gym Time Audit Calculator walks you through where your admin hours go.
Audit Your HoursThe School That Isn't in Nassau County Yet
Danny started coming back to ITC out of obligation.
"It started off because out of respect for my dad, I've always tried to help him out with the gym because I feel like that's what I owe him, kind of like an old school mentality."
That's shifted. Greg has started talking about eventually handing the business to his two sons.
So Danny has started thinking about a second room. He lives near the Queens and Nassau County line, and by his count there is no judo out there at all.
"I would love to open up a school like closer to where I live... there's no judo schools in that vicinity. Like there's no schools in Nassau County. I don't think there's a school in Whitestone."
—DANNY GUTMAN, ITC New York
He names the catch himself, before Alex can. "It's not cheap to open up a gym... Especially when you're starting from zero members and you got to hold that rent by yourself for a while."
The plan for the next year is to fill the room he already has. Which he'll do the way he does everything else at ITC: two evenings on the mat, and an hour at the kitchen table after the kid is asleep.
ITC New York is a Gymdesk customer and the subject of two Gymdesk Originals episodes. Watch Danny's full visit on YouTube.
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