Phill Schwartz started training with Eddie Bravo in 2007 and has been with 10th Planet ever since. Today he owns and is head instructor of 10th Planet Portland, a large operation with two mat spaces, 67 classes a week and around 14 or 15 people on payroll. Unlike many gym owners, Phill came to jiu-jitsu with a long business background. He started working in the music industry at 16, later moved into law firms, and ran his own consulting company for several years before going full-time in jiu-jitsu.
That mix of mat time and business experience gives him a clear view of what keeps students around. His short answer: jiu-jitsu is entirely a people business, and students can tell when an owner doesn't actually care.
Sell the "Third Space" and Hold Your Price
Phill sees the gym as a "third space": somewhere that isn't work or home, where people can belong. For a lot of adults, that place has been the bar. The pandemic made the need obvious when work, home and social life all collapsed into one room. A good gym fills that gap, whether someone wants to compete, lose weight or build confidence.
He believes in what he sells because jiu-jitsu transformed his own life. Caring owners still get asked for deals constantly, so Phill hired staff to handle sales, putting distance between the head of the school and price negotiations. His view on pricing is direct: once you decide you won't sell your service for less than $149 a month, people pay $149. If you take $89, they'll pay $89. Brian adds that every discount you hand out is unfair to the loyal student who pays full price through tough times without asking.
Learn Every Job, Then Build a Staff Pipeline
Phill's rule is that you should understand every job in the business well enough to do it yourself before you hand it off. He learned how funnels, leads and return on ad spend worked before hiring a marketing company. If you can't do the job, you can't check whether the person doing it is telling you the truth.
His staff is built the same way. Every team member came up as a student. Coaches start as assistants, then teach fundamentals, all-levels and kids classes, then rotate through the front desk handling sales and calls, and eventually teach advanced classes. By the time someone earns a black belt, they've done every job in the gym and could realistically open a location, sometimes with Phill as an investor or partner. Interested students can enter the pipeline through a coaches course for blue belts and up, which costs $300 and runs seven Saturdays. It covers his teaching method, the curriculum and how to troubleshoot on the fly.
He's also realistic about pay: three classes a day, six days a week, at $50 a class comes to roughly $46,000 a year. Making more takes revenue-generating work like sales and seminars. Phill also shares profits. He says that last year he gave 44% of the company's profit back to employees, which ties staff income to the gym's success without requiring them to be owners.
Consistency in the Schedule and the Curriculum
One of Phill's main retention tools is a predictable schedule. Each instructor owns a time slot, and slots run in blocks across the week. The 6:30 a.m. class is the same class with the same coach Monday through Thursday, not wrestling one day and yoga the next.
The curriculum is built in 10 two-week modules covering topics like back control, guard passing, side control and half guard, so the full cycle takes 20 weeks. A student who trains three times a week gets six classes in a row on the same subject, which helps them remember it. Phill thinks of the gym as three pools: fundamentals, all-levels and advanced. Each one is harder than the last, so students can find a level that challenges them without discouraging them.
Every new student starts on a lower-priced fundamentals membership for 20 weeks, then moves to unlimited, which opens the whole schedule including wrestling and Muay Thai. Phill wants most beginners rolling within two months. He thinks holding off live training for a year just delays the moment students find out what jiu-jitsu really is. Phill shared his numbers from Zen Planner: 75% of students are still training at three months and 53% at six months.
Engagement: Goal Meetings, Feedback Days and Absence Tracking
Every student gets two free 30-minute one-on-ones with a coach each year. These aren't private lessons. They're check-ins on challenges, current goals and new goals, with notes saved in the CRM. A student who joined to lose weight might now want to compete, and nobody would know unless someone asked. Coaches get paid about $15 for each meeting, so they actively remind students to book them, and the meetings often lead to private lessons. Phill figures that if all 300 students used both sessions, it would cost about $9,000 a year, money he expects to earn back through retention.
Twice a year before promotions, a free Student Feedback Day has students perform techniques from a rubric, grouped by rank, then get direct feedback. Students check in on iPads at every class, and staff contact anyone whose attendance drops.
The Gym as Community Center
Phill describes his business model as "Jiu-Jitsu gym as community center." The gym hosts holiday parties, cookouts, movie nights and promotion ceremonies with potlucks. Members can use the space for their own events, and the gym promotes those events to its mailing list. A free public open mat every Friday from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. regularly draws 50 to 60 people, and former members sometimes rejoin after showing up to one. His measure of success: "If you could get 10% of your gym population to show up to one event, that's a massive success."
Ranked by importance, his retention priorities are class quality first (good technique, safe and fun), then engagement with each student's goals, then community, and finally automated tracking as a safety net.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Set a price that reflects your value and stick to it. Separating sales from the head instructor makes that easier.
- ✓Build a staff pipeline that moves people through every role, from assistant coach to front desk to advanced instructor.
- ✓Keep the schedule consistent with set time slots and instructors, and teach the curriculum in multi-week modules.
- ✓Offer free, paid-to-the-coach goal-setting meetings and record what students say in your CRM.
- ✓Run free monthly in-house tournaments so students can try competing without the stress and cost of outside events.
- ✓Treat the gym as a community center, but remember class quality is always the first line of retention.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Phill also explains how he aligns his competition team around specific rule sets and why mental coaching matters as much as physical coaching. Listen to the full episode on Spotify or watch it on YouTube. Red Belt Software helps martial arts school owners track attendance, automate check-ins with students and build the retention systems that keep their community growing.