The Customer Who Inspired Gymdesk Originals: Inside Cast Iron Jiu-Jitsu

Cast Iron Jiu-Jitsu is an independent, jiu-jitsu-first academy in the northeast Kansas City metro, about fifteen minutes from the airport. Coach Josh opened it in 2014—going on twelve years—after coming up through taekwondo, high-school wrestling, boxing, and MMA before settling on jiu-jitsu, which he started in 2006. He founded the gym to fill a gap: at the time, there were no stand-alone jiu-jitsu gyms north of the river in Kansas City; the only straight jiu-jitsu school he knew of, KC BJJ, sat south of it, and everywhere else was "in the back of a karate studio, in someone's basement." His mission, then and now, is simply to spread the art.

Josh trains under Renato Tavares (Vero Beach, FL), collaborating two to three times a year, and competes regularly—he went to the Pans in March in the masters black-belt featherweight division. (Per the gym's site, Josh is a third-degree black belt under the Renato Tavares Association; he founded the gym in 2014.) The academy runs adult gi and no-gi, a kids and teen program, and a standing women-only class, and it's grown from three members in Excelsior Springs to a peak of around 107—a deliberately slow climb Josh is proud of, on the theory that a gym should grow only as fast as the quality of the jiu-jitsu can hold.

📍 Address: 6603B Royal St, Pleasant Valley, MO 64068 (greater Kansas City metro)
📞 Phone: (816) 520-1764

This is the episode that explains the whole series. Years ago, when Alex was a new CEO just visiting customers to hear how they were doing, he stopped by a Kansas City jiu-jitsu gym and got to talking with the owner while the man cleaned his mats. Coach Josh's reason for doing what he did—"I just want to spread jiu-jitsu"—stuck with Alex so completely that, six or seven visits later, he asked if he could record it. That was the seed of Gymdesk Originals, now 50-plus interviews deep.

Josh's own story is a slow-burn the same way the series was. He spent fifteen years as a union floor installer, training jiu-jitsu after work—off the clock at 3:30, a nap, then on the mat until 9:30, up at 5 to do it again—because those two hours were the one part of the day his boss couldn't call him.

He came up through wrestling, boxing, and MMA before jiu-jitsu hooked him on the one thing he didn't expect: how hard it actually was. Laid off from his trade, he took two gym offers at once, sold his tools after a year, and opened what would become Cast Iron, starting with three people in Excelsior Springs because there was nowhere north of the river to train straight, high-level jiu-jitsu.

Twelve years later, sitting across from Alex, Josh lays out a philosophy of patient, quality-first growth—"focus on the details and the quality of the jiu-jitsu, everything else will come"—a "friendly, competitive" culture where the pros sharpen the hobbyists, and an expansion plan that's almost boringly disciplined: grow to a size, open a second gym one town over, and walk in twenty or thirty members so the bills are paid on day one.

He also explains, plainly, when a gym actually needs software: he ran everything on paper until he was around forty members and started "losing money by not keeping track of people." That's when he switched to martial-arts-specific software.