We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Josh Vogel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Josh below.

Hi Josh, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

I think two things we do differently are organizing our instruction with an eye for long term student development and treating bjj school ownership as a hospitality business.

Organizing instruction is more common than it was before, in the sense of schools having curriculums, but I don’t think it is common yet for schools to design their curriculums with long term student development in mind.

This means that we teach our students from day 1 in a way that gives them a high ceiling to grow into when they reach advanced levels by instilling good mental and technical training habits, good team work habits, and specific technique selection in our fundamentals program that makes learning advanced skills way easier down the road.

Treating Bjj schools as a hospitality business means approaching our school like it’s a nice Mom and Pop owned Bed and breakfast or restaurant. This shows in how we work to make new students feel at home from day 1 by being welcoming personally, having a clean, comfortable and safe facilities, and creating a warm and inviting school culture.

This means we (Angela and I) as owners of the gym try to connect personally to all the students and trust our staff to apply that same welcoming feel to the students. We want everyone to feel valued, respected and at home. The balance we try to strike is giving upscale service while being fun and friendly.

Josh, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I got into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu 21 years ago after a few years of doing other martial arts and instantly fell in love with it. I started working full time as an instructor and program director 18 years ago and gained a ton of experience figuring out how to and how not to operate as a professional in this industry.

I don’t mean this in a cynical or negative way, but one of the things I am good at, and think helps me a lot as a professional in Jiu Jitsu, is learning from my own and others mistakes. There are lots of examples of what not to do as a practitioner and business owner and sometimes studying the negative example bears a lot more fruit than studying the positive example if you frame it the right way.

So, when Angela and I opened The Jiu Jitsu company in 2021 and later our Jiu Jitsu Co fightwear brand this year, we started with our positive vision of what we wanted to do, but we paid a lot of attention to avoiding the pitfalls we have seen many schools and brands fall into.

The biggest pitfall we work hard to avoid is making sure we don’t stop “eating our own cooking” and being honest about the quality of our products.

We are students at our own school and customers of our own merchandise. We take classes along side our students and I compete regularly to show my students that the techniques, philosophies and training practices I and our staff show them are the same ones that we use. When I win, its because I’m doing the same stuff they do and when I don’t, I get back on the training floor just like they do and fix my mistakes the same way we teach them to.

When we get shirts we like the quality of, we wear them and when we get a batch that isn’t up to standard, we stop wearing it and stop selling it until it is right and something we are excited to wear.

If you eat your own cooking and are your own honest food critic, you stay connected to the things your business offers. If you stay as connected as possible to the experience of your students and customers and operate from a place of trying to do your best by them, then people will see and feel that and you will have something special.

I think the other thing that I am proud of, that Angela and I both share is work ethic. Neither one of us are afraid to work hard and put in the hours to do our best. I love being in the gym, training with the team and I’m on the mat with them as much as humanly possible. There is only one day of the week that one of us isn’t at the school and even on that day we are still ignoring whatever series is on Netflix because we are obsessing over some new way to clean the mats, or some new shorts design for the merch.

My step mom always tells me that we need to find ways to work less, but when I’m not at the gym, I’m always doing something that I enjoy less than being at the gym haha.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I love this question. My business partner is also my wife, and we met 22 or 23 years ago at my brother’s apartment.

My brother was living in Philly and I had moved to New York a year or so prior. My mom was visiting my brother so I came to Philly to hang out with them and it just so happened that his upstairs neighbor, Angela, was a professional Chef. As they were buddies, she offered to cook a nice meal for all of us, which was amazing, and we hit it off right away. When I got home I asked my brother for her number, and I used to call her and talk for hours when I was painting apartments.

My apartment painting skills plummeted, but I ended up getting to know the love of my life. Totally worth it. I moved back to Philly asap to be with her!

Fast forward many years of dating, marriage and later her falling in love with Jiu Jitsu and leaving the restaurant industry to work in Jiu Jitsu. She gets her black belt, becomes an exceptional teacher and we decided to open our own school together and more recently start The Jiu Jitsu Co fight wear!

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

I had been making about $25,000 per year for about 16 or so years before opening a school and Angela was making more than that, but not much, working in the restaurant industry for many years. Our income was pretty low when we were both working in Jiu jitsu at the same time but we were lucky to not have any crazy debt and to have fairly responsible spending habits so we managed to save some money. We also worked very hard to build up our credit scores which was very helpful.

When we decided to open our school, the time line got cut short and we had to move quicker than expected so we basically spent our life savings, put a big dent in our credit cards and took out a sizeable loan to get started. That was a super scary, but exciting time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Jiujitsuphilly.com
• Instagram: TheJiuJitsuCompany
• Linkedin: Josh Vogel
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@thejiujitsucompany5792?si=v-BWKBJizgYAP73E
• Yelp: https://yelp.to/A2ls7tqYpo
• Other: https://Jiujitsumerch.com

Image Credits

Thomas Sim