A friend of a friend is a purple belt and is considering coaching BJJ full time. He's moving to a town with about 20,000 people and no BJJ school. I've read before that BJJ coaching isn't well paid, and even someone like Kurt Osiander has commented that "Jiu Jitsu doesn't pay (expletive)" i.e. he isn't well paid for teaching BJJ. The start up costs alone where he is going would be a lot. There is no MMA gym or Judo club, so he's going to need to for out for mats and rent for a space, plus insurance etc.... As he is a purple belt, he will need to get affiliated with someone, that costs money too. He's got a young family and I've said I don't know how wise it is? Anyone any solid info on how much teaching BJJ actually pays or is there anything I haven't considered? I don't want to be too negative with the guy but from a pragmatic point of view, I wouldn't if it were me.
He's a fool. 20k people is nothing. His pool of potential students (discounting 90% of women, very old and very young men) is maybe 5000. Even assuming that 5% of the population is interested, grappling arts have like an 80% drop-out rate. So that means, optimistically, he might get 50 students training. More likely 15-20 max. You're friend needs to do less training and more math.
The obvious choice is to grow the club by coaching in the evenings after work and only contemplate full time coaching if/when the club has a solid staple of long term students and a good rep (attract out of towners etc). Anything else is seriously inadvisable.
My advice: Take care of family first Get a career Earn and save If he is not going into actual MMA on a national competitive level for recognition, opening a school without a decent background in a small town is not prosperous
I blame the whole "BJJ Lifestyle" crap. Certain people get too carried away. Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks it's kinda crazy. In fact it's inspired me to add a sig.
Unless there are other population centers very near by that support it, 20k people is very very few and I wouldn't even try it, as your friend will never make back his startup costs.
I've met very few people who are living off teaching. Met none who are living in comfort off it. If he wants to teach for love of the sport then crack on. If he wants to make money he needs to find another job. If he has a family definitely needs to find another job.
It takes time to build a successful school from scratch, the best option is like knee rider says, evening classes renting space for a while, and get a real job the rest of the time. It's also important to avoid the trap of teaching more then your training. It's like writing more books then you've read, not a good sign.
An extremely small portion of the martial arts schools in existence offer a return that supplies a sole source for income. That includes people with way more experience in their art in much larger cities. As mentioned, he needs to get a career going outside of BJJ to support his family. If he wants to teach on the side, he needs to look at it as a hobby that he takes very seriously. He's going to have to eat start up costs for mats, he may have some luck in finding a social hall or something that would be a low cost space to use, but he's probably going to have to eat most of that cost as well. And he needs to make sure that his family are ok with the commitments, operating a club can be stressful on relationships.
I used to train American kenpo in a garage, it was fully equipped for contact karate and kickboxing. The owner probably had about one thousand into it, and about 20 paying students, evenly split between kids and adults. This was also in a small town in Idaho, I would recommend something similar if living space is available to retro-fit into a dojo.
Two brown belts I know are opening schools in a major metropolitan area and both are sweating bullets wondering whether their business will be able to take off or not. They're opening their places in areas where they're not in direct competition with other local schools and tens of thousands of potential students to tap into if not more, but still no guarantees. Even if their schools eventually flourish, it's a very slow build and a long time before they'll start making money. 20000 is a tiny target audience. Unless there are other towns around to tap into, I'm at best not optimistic for your friend.
I teach in a leisure centre in a town of around 7000 according to Google, though there are surrounding villages too. I have between 60 and 100 students, but then TKD is probably much more popular than BJJ and also costs half to a third as much per lesson. There are other costs such as gradings of course. I've been running the club for over 10 years, and it has grown over time of course. I've never earned enough to make a decent living from it, depending on your definition of decent of course. I make pocket money so I can be a stay at home dad but not ask my wife for any money, plus buy armour for self defence tuition occasionally, etc etc. In my former job I would earn in a couple or three days what I now get per month, and I couldn't provide for my family on my current income at all. Teaching is great, I genuinely love it, and it keeps me in armour and equipment, but it would be very difficult to make a proper living at it. A nice supplement maybe, but not a good living. I'd advise your friend to go for it, but expect to grow over time, and expect to work to pay the bills for a long, long time. I wish him every success Mitch
