How The Jiu-Jitsu Company Grew to 200+ Students While Keeping a Small School Feel

About The Jiu-Jitsu Company

Angie and Josh Vogel opened The Jiu-Jitsu Company five years ago in Old City, Philadelphia. Both are black belts and full-time instructors. Josh has trained for more than 20 years, Angie for 15. And somewhere along the way they came to the same conclusion: they wanted to teach Jiu-Jitsu differently than how they’d first experienced it.

“Anytime you’re deeply involved in something, you start to develop your own ideas about how you want to present it,” Angie said. 

For her, that meant rethinking the culture around the sport. For Josh, it meant coming up with a different way to teach the training itself. And for both, technology became an important part of how the school runs efficiently and improves the entire student experience.

Old City made sense as the location for a lot of reasons that actually had nothing to do with Jiu-Jitsu. The couple had history in the neighborhood going back to the early 2000s, it sits right off the subway line, and it’s an arts hub that (at the time) had no other Jiu-Jitsu school nearby.

The culture they built started from a simple but unique idea: people need room to fail. Jiu-Jitsu can be an ego-driven sport where people win or lose, submit or get submitted. Angie and Josh made “culture forward” their number one core value instead, which meant unlearning their own instincts first.

“We had to retrain our own attitude towards training,” Angie said, “in order to make sure that was evident to the students.”

That decision turned out to double as a training method. Josh explained that when someone can see a new move on the Wodify screens in class, then try it on the mat without worrying about how they look or who taps them, they get better at Jiu-Jitsu faster. On the flip side, if someone protects their ego the whole round, they never attempt anything they’re not already good at. 

So the Vogels built a school where progress is tracked, failing is normal and everyone’s skill level goes up. This brings in people who might never have tried Jiu-Jitsu otherwise, and gives them the tools to succeed.

The Win: 200+ Students and Growing

Five years in, The Jiu-Jitsu Company has scaled past 200 members and still runs like the two-person operation it started as. Angie and Josh are still on the mat teaching skills, training their coaches, and hands-on with the day-to-day operations.

One especially unique thing to note about the culture is that 30% of the student body is female. There are four female black belts and another 10-15 women holding purple, brown, or black belts. Angie describes that number as “pretty much unheard of” in Jiu-Jitsu, and the reason is simply that women teach the advanced classes at The Jiu-Jitsu Company. They’re part of the normal leadership of the school, not a special track running parallel to it.

“I think a lot of times women come in because they are looking for something that empowers them,” Angie said. “It’s nice for them to come into an environment where it’s already the norm that women are just here training and part of the leadership.”

Another key part of the win is how they built rigor into that same welcoming culture, through what they call the 90-Day BJJ Project. Most schools have the same problem: a student decides they want to get better at a specific skill, so they drill it on every training partner they can find during open mat with no real plan or progression.

The 90-Day Project replaces that with a structured 30, 60, or 90-day cycle where students work one position from start to finish. They learn how to enter it, control it, and finish it.

“It gives them an organized thought process towards getting better,” Josh said, “and understanding specific parts of Jiu-Jitsu much better.”

For other Jiu-Jitsu school owners, the replicable part isn’t a copy-and-paste program. It’s the order of operations:

1. Decide what you want the culture to feel like before you start teaching technique.
2. Make sure your own behavior on the mat matches it before you expect students to buy in.
3. Use the right technology to improve the entire student experience.
4. Integrate women into your regular classes and your coaching staff rather than treating them as a separate audience.
5. Give students structure for skill development instead of leaving it to whatever they happen to drill that day. Culture and curriculum reinforce each other.

How Wodify Makes it Easy

Before switching to Wodify, operations and communication at The Jiu-Jitsu Company was somewhat chaotic.

Then Angie and Josh discovered Wodify through an unlikely source: a white belt at their own school named Hung pitched them on the platform. Angie remembers her first instinct was that Hung was trying to sell her something she didn’t need. What changed her mind was how genuine he was about wanting to bring a more organized, visual way of learning into Jiu-Jitsu, at a time when the school didn’t yet have any digital system of its own.

“It gave us a way to do things that we would not have been able to do by ourselves,” she said. Four and a half years later, she describes the partnership as one that’s grown alongside the business itself.

Today, members can learn new movements via the in-class screens at The Jiu-Jitsu Company, and in the Wodify app. They can also use the app to watch recordings of seminars held at the school, track their progress, and buy something from the front counter, all in the same place. Coaches and students can sign in and see where everyone stands, which is helpful with multiple curricula.

“It keeps it very streamlined for the team,” Angie said, “as far as a team of instructors, but also just the team in general.”

That organization is also what gives the 90-Day BJJ Project its structure outside of class time. Students have a system to reference between sessions instead of relying on memory or a photo of a whiteboard. At the end of the day, it aligns perfectly with the school’s culture, helping to build the foundation for people to focus on getting better, not on figuring out where they left off.

To learn more about The Jiu-Jitsu Company, visit the website here.

To book a demo with the Wodify team, click here.