· By Angela Vogel
How we made Jiu Jitsu a life, and a living.
Somebody messages us about once a month, always some version of the same thing: I want to do what you two did, I want jiu jitsu to be my whole life. We love hearing it, and because we love it, we owe you the honest version instead of the highlight reel. The truth is there was no clean, single way we got here. Josh and I took two very different roads to the same mat.
Josh, now a third-degree black belt, took the long one. He's been teaching since 2005, back when he was a blue belt with no real plan, just a mat and a willingness to show up. For years he pieced the rent together working restaurants, a stockroom at a shoe store, a moving company, teaching privates whenever he could and moving up the ranks one belt at a time, until he eventually took a sales job at a jiu jitsu school.
But that job was never what made him a great instructor. That came from the studying. Josh has spent an almost unreasonable amount of his own time on teaching methodology: how people actually learn, how to break a movement down, how to run a room. That's the reason people will drive an hour to train with him.
I spent twenty years in the restaurant industry. I started at eighteen, went to culinary school, and worked most of my career as a chef and a pastry chef. I started training in 2012, and then I got laid off about a year later, which turned out to be a strange kind of gift: a whole year of training full time, all the way to purple belt, long enough to find out who I might become if jiu jitsu were my whole day.
When I went back to work, managing the bakery department at Whole Foods, I was teaching more and picking up regular private students, and eventually what I wanted and what made sense started pointing the same direction. We decided the loss of a steady paycheck was worth the life we actually wanted. So I ripped off the bandaid: kept working toward my black belt, took a sales job at the school we trained at, and started tinkering with e-commerce on the side.
People always ask how the two of us ended up building all of this together, and the simple answer is that we were together long before any of it. Josh and I were dating before either of us set foot on a mat. We were a couple from his white belt to his brown, got married, and then I started training — two weeks before he earned his black belt. We didn't build a gym and then arrange a life around it. We built the life first, and the gym grew out of it.
Here's the part that doesn't make the reel. Walking away from a salaried job with benefits was genuinely scary in a very specific way — what happens if one of us gets hurt? What happens if one of us gets sick? We answered that fear by being careful with every single dollar for years. The old car we didn't replace. Cheap rent in a neighborhood that wasn't great. Lunches packed, no vacations. All the small, boring, unglamorous things you do to save. And then, in 2021, we opened The Jiu Jitsu Company, which we did by emptying our savings and signing our own house over as collateral on a loan. We lived off that loan for close to a year while we grew the student base to where it could cover the bills, and we didn't pay ourselves for at least the first ten months.
We didn't do any of it alone, though, and we'd never pretend we did. One of the best things jiu jitsu ever gave us is a community of people who simply won't let us fail — members with MBAs who helped us write a business plan, English majors who fixed our copy, business owners who loaned us money, SEO professionals handing us advice for free just because they train here. Every one of those friendships walked in off the mat. We got by with a little help from our friends.
That goodwill didn't let us off the hook, though. I put my head down and taught myself the parts I didn't know, online classes in SEO, marketing, and social media, until those turned into real skills instead of black boxes. And we leaned into partnerships with bigger companies in our space, Wodify especially, learning how they run things and using it to elevate the brand and set ourselves apart.
Josh went the other way, diving deeper into the craft itself. He's always trying new teaching methods, reworking how he explains a position until it clicks for more people, and he teaches most of the classes on our schedule, week in and week out. He also started competing again, because the fastest way to find the holes in your own game is to go put it on the line.
The brand side of all this started as a hobby that got out of hand. I've always needed a creative outlet, and jiu jitsu — for everything it gives me — wasn't quite scratching that itch, so I started making candles. And like every hobby I've ever picked up, I almost immediately started thinking about how to sell it. In 2018, as a brown belt, we launched Jiu Jitsu Candle Co., our first product a candle called White Belt Tears. It got a little traction, but it was pure novelty and, honestly, we knew nothing: not promotion, not SEO, not social, not marketing, none of it. The sales fizzled out, and these days we bring it back for the occasional pop-up just for fun. But I'm grateful for every mistake we made with it, because it's the whole reason JJCo Fightwear exists now. What we're really chasing with the brand is the same thing we found in the gym: something homegrown and a little bit special, made for the jiu jitsu community. The magic of the room, in a rash guard, a tee shirt, and even a candle.
So if you're the person sending that message, the one who wants this to be your whole job, here's what we'd actually tell you. You have to love it. Not like it, love it. Because on the mornings you don't want to train, you'll train anyway. On the nights you don't want to study, you'll study anyway. And on the days you really don't want to scrub the toilets, you'll be scrubbing the toilets. The love is the thing that carries you through the parts that aren't glamorous, which is most of them.
You have to want to be more than a great grappler. Owning a school means building a community, balancing the books, figuring out how to place an order and pay your taxes, and nobody hands you those skills. So take the online classes. Learn the marketing and the systems. Learn from every successful person who crosses your path, and borrow their best habits without an ounce of shame.
10 Ways to Actually Make a Living in Jiu Jitsu
and they are all a HUSTLE.
Since we're being honest, here's where the money really comes from.
Almost nobody lives on just one of these, you have to stack them.
1. Private lessons. The most direct dollar there is. One-on-one, the best hourly rate you'll find, capped only by your calendar and your body. Get results for you students.
2. Teaching classes. Getting on a gym's payroll to run group sessions. Steadier than privates, and it's where you actually learn how to teach.
3. Owning a gym. The highest ceiling and, as you now know, the one that can put your house on the line. Not a side hustle if you want to do it right.
4. Merch and apparel. Real money lives here, but so do real costs. Inventory, production, shipping, and returns quietly eat the margin you think you have. You need design skills (or a designer, social marketing, SEO, etc. But mostly you need to create something someone WANTS.
5. Brand partnerships. Get sponsored, but chase the deals that pay commission, not just free gear. Free rash guards don't cover rent.
6. Content creation. YouTube, socials, a newsletter. Slow to build and it pays in patience first, but compounds
7. Seminars and guest spots. Travel, teach a room for a few hours, get paid for your name and your knowledge. Gets easier the higher your belt.
8. Online Instructionals. Record it once, sell it forever. The most work up front, and the closest thing to passive income after.
9. Competition. Be honest with yourself, earning at competition on a real level is for the most elite grapplers. Most of us still pay to enter.
10. The adjacent stuff. Strength and conditioning, yoga for grapplers, kids programs, camps, nutrition. Diversify the mat and the calendar fills itself.
None of this is a warning, it's an invitation. With the fine print included.
Angie and Josh, The Jiu Jitsu Company