David Jenkinson reveals how his BJJ school automated 50% of lead follow-up while improving conversions. The system that handles price objections.

• Why David was “worried about bothering people” (and how it was secretly killing conversions)
• The automation breakthrough that handles price shoppers better than humans
• How BJJ leads actually prefer talking to a bot first (the psychology behind it)
• The two types of prospects every BJJ school gets (and how to automate for both)
• Why 50% of leads now book trials without any human intervention
• The follow-up sequence that works while you're teaching classes
• How to balance automation with personal touches that close enrollments
• From manual follow-up burnout to systematic conversion: What changed
• The “guinea pig” experiment now transforming BJJ lead management

 *FREE: Bring 50 Enrollments Into Your Martial Arts School Every 90 Days Need help growing your martial arts school? Watch Training + Take The Assessment

TRANSCRIPTION

George: Hey, it's George.

Welcome to the Martial Arts Media™ Business Podcast.

Today, I've got David Jenkinson from Hawkesbury BJJ.

How are you doing, David?

David: I'm good, mate.

How are you?

George: Good, good.

So we talk a lot in the Partner’s call.

I wanted to bring you on.

You've been in the group for quite a long time.

I like these calls to sort of capture where progress is at, but also really get to know you better and have a conversation.

See where the martial arts came up and take it where it comes.

David: Sounds good.

George: Cool, cool.

Fill us in.

Fill in the gaps, I guess.

Where did martial arts all start for you?

And what's the journey?

How did the journey evolve to where you are today?

David: I started later in life, I guess you could say.

I started training at 22.

I've always been interested in martial arts.

Growing up in the 90s, you watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers and all this sort of thing.

Mum actually went to sign me up for karate when I was younger, but I chickened out.

So it wasn't until a little bit later when I started to get interested in mixed martial arts.

I discovered the UFC through a Smashing Machine documentary.

Not the Rock one, the original one.

I was just super interested in watching these fights.

And one thing that really interested me was whenever Joe Rogan was talking about a specific style, he'd always bring up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

That was the black belt that he held up really highly.

I was sort of curious about what it was.

I learned a lot from his commentary.

I learned about how you could win a fight from the ground.

And not just from the ground, but off your back from what would normally be considered an inferior position.

And it would just seem like in 2005, just a crazy strategy to take the fight to the ground and strangle somebody.

This is mainstream ideas now, kids doing martial arts.

But back then, it was quite a wild concept, right?

So I decided to take a class.

I took my first class at a gym in Liverpool, Sinosic Perosh Martial Arts.

And at that time, there weren't many schools.

So I was really lucky that I had those guys there, high-level black belts.

Elvis competed in the UFC himself.

I trained there for a little bit and loved it.

It was a little bit far for me to travel from my place in Mount Druitt.

So I stopped going there and then found another gym a bit closer in Penrith with the Te Huna Brothers, EFG.

And from there, picked up Jiu-Jitsu again with Fabio Galeb.

He opened his school, and I got my black belt from Fabio—sorry, blue belt from Fabio.

And then he moved up to Surfers, and I started training with Chris Sales and went through to black belt with him.

George: Very cool.

Would that be from 22 up to about now?

David: No, from getting my black belt, I started my school when I was a brown belt.

So I got my black belt while I was running my own school.

I've been doing that for 11 years.

I stopped competing when I opened the school and then got back into it about two years ago.

And now I've been doing that on and off.

George: How's that transition back, competing again?

David: Yeah, it's been good.

When I got back into it a couple of years ago, I lost 10 kilos, had some hard training, and it was really good.

I came back, got a couple of gold medals, which was fun.

And then took a break off last year because I did a uni course last year.

So it was really hard to do the training, run a business, family, and uni.

Then I got back into it this year.

Just the one competition, state titles, got gold in Gi and silver in No-Gi.

So that was cool.

And I want to get back into it next year.

So I am in the process now of dieting and getting back down to 73, which I'm not looking forward to.

But hopefully by March next year, get back in the state titles and hit it again.

George: I love that.

What prompted getting back?

Was it leading from the front for your students at Hawkesbury BJJ, or was there something else that motivated you?

David: Yeah.

So it's kind of interesting that that was a point in the business where things weren't really going that great.

And I think this is around the same time that we connected.

And at that point, I just remembered something that my dad told me years ago.

There are a lot of things that we can't control in our lives, but one of the things that we can control is our health and our fitness.

So I just decided to knuckle down and put a lot of energy into that.

Some of the things that I felt that I had control of myself.

And I felt that it could be good for the business as well and it could be good for my students.

So that's what really rekindled that.

George: I love it.

So what changes have you seen doing that amongst the students now that you're leading from the front and you're back on the mats competing?

David: Yeah, I think that definitely shows the parents that I actually do know what I'm talking about.

That I can do this thing and I've proven that I can do this thing at a decent level.

And I think for the adults as well, they get motivated to do it themselves.

And I just like to learn through competition.

I think that's the best way to learn and it's the fastest way to learn.

And I just really personally enjoy it.

Even when I lose, I'm actually quite happy.

As long as I tried my best and left everything on the mat, I'm pretty happy.

But the results I got throughout the training have really been beneficial.

George: Awesome.

So you started with Jiu-Jitsu, right?

That was what you started with?

David: I did a little bit of Muay Thai before I found Jiu-Jitsu.

Yeah, just a little bit.

And I've been doing that on and off for 20 years.

George: Okay.

So, all right.

So, a bit of Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu.

Opened a school.

You mentioned that you did a uni degree or uni course that you did last year?

David: Yeah.

One of my greatest regrets was not finishing school.

So, I dropped out after year 10.

Like a lot of people in my neighborhood, I just didn't do much with my life.

I always sort of regretted that and wanted higher education.

And I put a lot of value onto education.

And at that time, like I mentioned earlier, the business wasn't doing that great.

And I thought, I need to upskill myself.

I always upskill myself in martial arts, but I need to upskill myself in the business because something's not right here.

And so, I looked into a marketing course and I got into UTS.

The funny thing is, this is how I found you, George.

When I was waiting to start the course, I thought, well, I should look into marketing a bit more and see what's out there and just learn as much as I can before the course starts.

I Googled “martial arts marketing podcasts” and you popped up.

I started watching a bunch of your podcasts.

And that was really beneficial moving into the course because I already had an idea for the lingo and all this sort of stuff that really helped me throughout that course.

But yeah, that took about a year and I got a graduate degree in marketing and digital strategies.

But the funny thing is, it's really sort of an umbrella course.

I've learned a lot more through books and podcasts and YouTube than I really did through the course, but I don't regret doing it.

George: Interesting.

Because I was going to ask, what if you had to take a look at your takeaways from doing a uni course in marketing?

I've always wondered, right?

Because I know I started marketing from the ground up.

I actually wanted to study marketing.

Funny enough, I took a gap year and I was like, I wanted to study marketing.

And then my parents put this idea in my head.

This was living back in South Africa.

“Everybody does marketing. You can't do marketing.”

And so I go study computer programming, which is, in hindsight, been beneficial in its own way now.

But six months in, I started selling computers to everybody in class.

And so I defaulted to what I wanted to do, marketing.

And then the next thing there was a computer business.

So programming was a path back to marketing in a way.

But I've always wondered, if I actually did the thing, the actual legitimate marketing degree or course, what's that like?

If I think of the things we would do in Partners that you're familiar with, we talk about probably more direct stuff.

We talk about ads and getting students and creating the offers and things like that.

Is that something part of a university degree?

David: It is covered.

But I think what a lot of it covered was how marketing has changed after COVID.

That was a big portion of the course.

Things that are done differently through businesses.

And that was super helpful.

Just seeing how much more flexibility consumers want with businesses.

I was talking to Sinem about this very thing the other day.

We were talking about timetabling.

And I was saying to her, when we were young, if I wanted to watch Lost, I had to be home on Wednesday night at 7:30, and I just have to make that happen.

But now I want to watch it whenever I want to watch it.

And I think people are like that with everything, including martial arts classes.

You can't just say this is when training is, and if you want to do it, you have to be here at those times.

You have to create that flexibility.

And that was just one of the things that I learned through that course, just how much things have changed since COVID and what that's done for businesses.

And so there was a lot of that, and a lot of the stuff that we go into in Partners, but it was a lot more broad.

Where we dig in very specifically into what we do in martial arts.

But yeah, learning about price anchoring and all this sort of stuff, I can see I can connect it from the course to what you do.

So when you talk about it, I have a general idea.

But you go into it a lot deeper than what we did.

I didn't do a master's; a master's probably would go into it deeper.

But yeah, it's very much more specific in Partners, but I did learn a lot from the course.

It wouldn't benefit you, you might need it.

Yeah, I don't think you'd get any benefit from it.

And to be honest, you could learn all this stuff without doing the course.

If you just found the right books, found the right people, you don't need to go to university to learn this stuff.

That's all that information is out there.

George: Yeah, I guess there's specific stuff in university that 100% you need.

I think marketing is this thing that probably comes as a passion.

And when you find that, you go down the rabbit holes and you find the resources and there's just, I mean, the resources are untapped.

I personally find the best value in real old-school sales copywriters, the Gary Halberts and people that are like that.

Salesmanship in print.

And what we see as a website today, like that entire landing page concept comes from a printed letter that got mailed to somebody.

And what we call split tests of headlines and pictures in Facebook, they would literally send a hundred thousand letters with one headline to a hundred thousand addresses and another hundred thousand to the others.

And then look at the coupon that had an actual coupon in it and see who redeems it by mail.

And that would be the split test.

It's fascinating what length these OG marketers went through to uncover the things that we take for granted.

And you go to ChatGPT and all the split tests, give me five different headline variations and you hope it's good.

But I think for somebody that's a complete novice, the window is just, there's so much that you can tap into.

The danger is not understanding, not having a foundation, I think.

Because you can easily take things for granted and just take that as gospel, right?

David: I guess the psychology doesn't change, does it?

You know, what worked in the seventies can still work now, but you just adapt it to a digital age.

And that was a lot of the things that we covered, psychology.

And that was interesting.

And I really enjoyed the creative aspects.

And then when it came to the data-driven stuff, that wasn't for me.

I just couldn't deal with that.

I liked the creative stuff and the psychology, but there was a lot of it.

George: So if you can recall, cause I find that interesting, you mentioned you learned a lot about behavior and how people's behavior has changed in how they want diversity and options since the big C.

Is there anything else that sort of stood out about the behavior of what people now assess as different, that they want different in a buyer experience?

David: Yeah, I think the contract model.

I think that the 12-month contract model is a massive ask these days when everybody is so used to a subscription.

Anything can be gotten with a subscription, but you can cancel at any moment.

And I think people just expect that with everything nowadays.

So if you're asking someone to sign up for 12 months, obviously it can be done if the product is good, which most people have a good product.

And if you can sell it.

But I think the expectation for most people is flexibility in these contracts.

George: Okay.

Interesting.

I'm just trying to think of things that I've noticed behavior that's been different since that.

I can see the flexibility in that sense of what you're saying is also maybe commitment levels are a bit more shaky.

And it could be, I mean, we don't have to go down the rabbit holes of obviously where people have gone through and so forth.

But there could still be like a lingering fear of looking too far into the future.

David: Yeah.

George: So people don't want to commit that far.

But then, I mean, things that we have noticed even with commitment is if you do stack an offer in the favor of that commitment, it can be more likely for people to say, okay, well I would go the full 12 months.

Like a few people in the group have done 12-month sales, for example.

That way you could probably still capture that vision.

Okay, well, the deal feels like it stacks in my favor, so I could do that 12-month commitment as such.

David: Yeah, I feel like people at the moment are just so accustomed to subscriptions.

Everything's a subscription now.

Now I guess they expect that from their gym, from their martial arts training.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not sure.

I feel like if you sign up just because you know you can get out of it at any time, that's not a great start.

If you're already talking about how you are going to leave the contract, then it's probably not going to work out.

George: Yeah.

Contracts are an interesting thing.

And we speak a lot about it in the group.

Cause there's some people that are really firm on their contracts and like, they'll do that.

I think a contract is only as firm as if you're going to enforce it.

I think it's good to have a verbal commitment of where somebody wants to go instead of like, yeah, we'll take you to the cleaners if you decide to leave.

And I know that's sort of, but at school, most people don't do that.

David: Yeah.

I was talking to Sinem about doing a contract for the kids.

Obviously not like a legal one, but just like a commitment that they put down on paper that they say they're going to do this for three months or six months just to get them to see something through.

Because I feel like you get kids and one day they just don't want to do it anymore.

And it's not necessarily that they don't like it.

It's just because they want to watch TV or they don't want to leave the iPad.

And I think that it's really difficult for parents to show them the bigger picture with their commitment.

You know, it's like if you have your child join a football team, you're not going to let them stop going to football midway through the season.

They're committed to this thing.

You've got to keep going.

Now you have teammates who are relying on you.

You've got to go.

And so I feel like we need to do this in martial arts.

We need to show them that you can't just cancel.

You've made a commitment to this thing.

You've got to see at least to this belt or to this point, and then we can reevaluate.

George: Yeah.

That's an interesting way of looking at it because you're very right.

Seasonal sport is seasonal.

So it definitely does come in these three-month or six-month blocks, and it's easier to commit for that, I guess, for that shorter term.

Martial arts is a long commitment.

It's a lifestyle adjustment.

It's an ongoing thing.

So breaking that increment up into increments of possibly selling that next grading, that next belt.

Definitely, yeah, it's definitely something I'd find interesting is having something, and we used to have that in Partners.

We call it the Partners Promise.

It's not a contract, but it's like a verbal commitment of you'll do this and we'll do this, and we're committing to this.

And if we're going to commit to this, let's be reasonable about it.

It's going to take X amount of time.

And I think in doing that with martial arts, it really backs you up in the promise that you're selling, right?

Because if a student came for whatever the reason, maybe they're looking for an activity or whatever, or it's a serious thing and they want to boost their confidence or learn self-defense, all that's going to take time.

And if we can sell it on the outcome of what they want, and then we can say, well, look, okay, if you want that outcome, it's going to take this and your commitment from that side to get there.

We can't dip our toe in the water and do a class where we can expect miracles, right?

David: Yeah, that's right.

And I think it'd just be a good tool for the parents, just like a learning tool for the parents to teach their kids: you decided to do this thing, we've put down this amount of money, your coach is spending this much time with you, you need to fulfill an obligation at least to a certain point.

George: Yeah, I like it.

We could chat more about that in the group.

It'd be interesting to put it on, and I'm sure there's people that do it out there.

I find that there's a good way to get students to just commit and be solid about the hours and time they're going to put in for the result that they want.

David: Yeah, for sure.

We haven't done it yet, but something we'll look into.

George: Cool.

So I want to zoom back.

You mentioned there were a few, like when you enrolled with a marketing program, you said there were a few hiccups in the business, things that you were trying to fix as such.

What were the big things, if you can zoom back, what were the big things you were trying to adjust or improve at that time?

David: Yeah.

So just, a lot of people say this: you hit this ceiling and you just feel like you can't push through.

And I kind of just accepted that for a while.

I was just like, I guess this is us.

I just sort of made excuses.

You saw we're in a semi-rural area.

And I just thought, well, maybe with the population, this is what we can expect.

And then I had a conversation with a guy who came in to do a trial or brought his child in for a trial.

And he told me he lived down the street and he asked me how long we had been here.

And I said, oh, we've been here seven or eight years.

And he said, “Really? I didn't know you were here.”

And I just thought, hmm, how many of these people don't actually know we exist?

He lives just down the street.

We have a massive sign.

We have a social media presence, but he had no clue that we were around.

So it must be thousands of these people who've never even heard of us.

So maybe the ceiling isn't population.

Maybe it's just no one knows we're here.

So how do we get the word out more?

And that's what really clicked for me to try to do the marketing and really push on that.

But also looking back, there were a lot of other factors.

Speaking to other people in the Partners group, timetabling, class structure, all these things can contribute.

When your classes start getting busier, people start dropping off because they want that extra attention for their child.

So you need to find ways to scale the business in order for it to grow.

And so that was another factor that I couldn't see at the time.

George: So interesting you say that on the marketing side.

I think as business owners, we all get tired of our own marketing before anybody sees it.

And there's a story of someone who was working on this big campaign.

A company was working on this big campaign and they were putting it together and putting out the ads.

And a couple of days later, the owner walked by and said, “Hey, when are we going to change this ad? I'm seeing it everywhere.”

And he said, “Oh, we haven't even launched it yet.”

And it just speaks to that.

As business owners, we are so involved in our stuff, in our marketing, we see it all the time.

It consumes our life.

We go to bed, it's ticking through our brain.

And we think that's everybody.

Everybody's seeing our stuff.

I still hear people say: “You might have seen my thing on Facebook.”

No, it's just the assumption that you think you put something out and everybody is seeing it.

And I think it's just an illusion because most people don't.

They might be, but they're also seeing another 300 other things.

And then they're seeing your competitors' stuff.

Competitors being, it doesn't have to be a martial arts school.

I say competitors very lightly.

Anybody doing something in the time that they could be training, they'll see something else.

They might look at martial arts and they see a different activity.

And then they see this and they see that.

So people are so scattered.

And I think like with social media and ads, it's the necessary evil sometimes.

Evil in the sense that we all depend on it.

We all use it, but attention spans are just getting more and more fragmented.

And to do that, we just have to keep leveling up to make sure we have that presence.

David: Yeah.

I really just relied on Google.

And my thought process was, and it's not necessarily wrong, but the best leads are going to be the people who seek you out.

And that's probably true.

But one thing I learned from the course is sometimes you also just got to plant that seed.

You can't just wait for people to Google you, but you have to put that seed in their head.

Maybe they never would have considered doing Jiu-Jitsu or martial arts for their kid until I put that seed in front of them and let them see it.

And that was something that we just weren't doing at all.

You know, I sort of touched on that a little bit, boosting posts and things that were super inefficient or just posting stuff to my social media, expecting people to walk through the door.

But that just wasn't good enough.

George: Yeah.

A hundred percent.

Because I mean, there's no doubt about it.

The lead that comes through Google and to your website is the best lead you're going to find.

It's then, well, can you scale based on that?

Because you might, and you're in Hawkesbury, Sydney.

So anybody, I don't know if you, depending where you're listening to this, your logistics of Australia, but Sydney's like the main, biggest city probably.

And Hawkesbury is sort of on the side, but it is still a smaller area.

It's not as big as being in the mainstream part of Sydney.

So anybody relying on Google, you're always going to have the challenge of, well, how many people are doing that?

How many people are interested in martial arts?

They've done all the Google searches.

They've researched Jiu-Jitsu, karate, taekwondo, whatever they want to do.

And they've got this information and then they find you and then they look for you.

Or they go type in BJJ schools near me and now they find you.

Awesome.

That's a great lead.

But what if you captured them way back in their complete cold awareness state where they just maybe had a problem or a problem that martial arts could solve?

They didn't even know that martial arts was the problem.

So I think if we really think of, yep, that's ideal, but can we then interrupt them elsewhere?

And I think that's what Facebook does well; it does interrupt people.

You can put it in front of the right people in your area and you can interrupt them.

And yeah, maybe they actually still go to Google and do their own research, so to speak, but you've got a better angle of capturing them earlier on.

David: Yeah.

And maybe they don't even act on it straight away.

Maybe they see it two or three times and in a year in the future, they act on it.

George: So we started working together, I think it was October.

So you mentioned, okay, so there was a bit of a present thing.

Anything else that you were looking to solve?

What were the big things that you were looking to solve at that time?

David: Not that I wasn't aware of the things that I needed to solve.

In hindsight, there were a lot of things that needed to be solved, but all I knew was that I needed to get the word out more.

But through the process of doing that, I've seen all these other little things pop up along the way, but were sort of light bulb moments like, ah, this is why I can't hold on to this many students.

It's not something that we're doing wrong.

It's something inherently wrong with the business or the way we've structured it.

And I've sort of learned that throughout talking to other school owners along the way.

George: Okay.

So in that, what are the big things that have helped the most and reshaped where you're going right now?

David: Our follow-up systems we were pretty lazy with.

Maybe I was just worried about bothering people.

It's just this thing, like you try to call them once, you call them again, and maybe they don't answer, or maybe they missed a trial and you kind of go, oh, I don't want to do it.

Or I don't want to annoy them.

And then you've got to just sort of get out of that mindset and just realize that, hey, they called us.

They wanted to do this thing.

And it could just be that they're really busy right now, but they still want to do it.

And they might be super thankful that actually I persisted a little bit and got you in the door.

And so that mindset shift has really helped.

And just really tracking everything a lot better and focusing on the follow-up, focusing on getting them in the door.

And then if they walk out without signing up, just following up again, just to see how everything went.

And then following up existing members is something that we need to work on as well, because just because they've joined the Academy, it doesn't mean that you should stop following them up.

They always need that interaction.

George: Very cool.

I love the experiment.

I say experiment because you were the first, you were the guinea pig in getting it going, the chatbot that we've got running from your ads, which is still the simplest strategy that probably runs because you got ads running, they go to messenger and you just have the bot follow them up and book them into the calendar.

How's that rolling out for you?

How's that made a difference to the business?

David: Yeah, it works really well.

We find that there are two types of people, people who want to just book straight away and then people who need a little bit more information and want to talk to somebody.

And so for the people who just want to book straight away, it saves so much time.

They're booked in, they're ready to go.

The bot will follow them up without having to talk to a person.

The people who need a little bit more information, we get their details and then we follow up.

So it cuts out about 50% of the lead follow-up because a lot of them are just booking trials straight through the messenger.

George: Great.

And then you still call all of them or are you sort of selective calling new people just that haven't taken the action yet?

David: We will call everybody.

If they book the appointment, we'll call to follow up and just to confirm that they're coming.

And if they don't book the appointment, we'll still call to answer any questions and see if they want to go ahead and book a trial.

George: Gotcha.

Okay.

So a little bit of automation there and then human touch.

David: Yeah. Yep.

That's right.

George: If you look through the conversations, people are talking to the bot, they know it's a bot.

It's not like pretending to be you.

How do you see the conversations unfold?

Is there something that you've picked up from that, like just the objections that come up or does it not bring up as many objections or what's the general vibe?

David: Yeah. I'm finding that often people want to know the price.

They're price shopping.

They want to call this place, call that place.

What's the price?

And the bot does a really good job of just saying, “Love to talk about prices. The coaches are really happy to talk about the prices and give you all the information you need after the trial. Do you want to go ahead and book the trial?”

And a lot of the time they just go, “Yeah, book the trial.”

Obviously, sometimes it's going to be people who are really insisting.

And then at that point, we'll get hands-on and make a phone call.

But for a lot of the time, yeah, it gets around that question really well.

George: That's very interesting that it combats the price objection.

And I mean, cause the bot's got no emotion attached to talking price.

David: Yeah.

And I think they realize that the bot's not going to give them the answer.

So there's no point in sort of pushing back on it.

George: Yeah, cool.

So it's just justifying that we could talk about, happy to talk about price, but why don't you try it out first, see how you like it, and then we can take it from there.

No obligation.

David: Yeah, for sure.

George: I like it. Cool.

So real quick question, just to sort of document your journey and we want to, cause I want to have you back on down the line and we can track the journey along.

So when you got started with Partners, where were you at sort of with student numbers and what are the big changes you've made?

And where has that taken you to now?

David: I think when we started at 90.

I mean, we'd gotten up to about 110 and that was about our ceiling.

And then we'd had a bunch of cancellations and we were down to 90, which after eight years, it's a long time to just be at 90.

So yeah, we were at 90 and then this year we got it up to 160, peaked at 160.

George: Cool.

So what's the goal?

Like what is the vision for Hawkesbury Jiu-Jitsu?

David: Yeah, 200 by the end of next year is what we want to see.

Going by the growth we got this year, I think it's definitely achievable, especially with the things that we're looking to implement next year.

I think we can definitely scale to that level.

So that's the short-term goal, 200 by the end of 2026.

George: I love it.

And what are those things that you're implementing?

Because I think you're adding a couple more programs.

David: Yeah.

So we were at the Intensive this year and one of the big takeaways we got was from Hakan and his timetable talk.

And he actually messaged me privately because he knows my wife and he knows they gave her her black belt in Taekwondo.

And he's just like, why don't you guys do a karate program at your school?

And I just thought, yeah, I've been trying to get her to do this for years, but with our previous affiliation, we weren't allowed to do that.

But now we're on our own, we can.

And so we've started our kids' kickboxing.

That's been really good.

We've gotten people come in just for that.

And we're going to expand that next year because luckily enough, I have a daughter who's also a black belt in karate who can help.

And then just adding more classes.

And like we spoke about earlier, just creating that flexibility.

One of the things we hear from parents is that their kids have got so many activities going on and we want them to commit to two a week.

And one of the light bulb moments at the intensive was when they were talking about how they can do two classes on the same day, back to back.

And we're going to look to do that.

We're going to put more classes on the same day just to get around that.

Somebody says they can only do one day a week.

That's great.

We have two classes on that day.

George: Yeah. I love that because it's so simple, right?

They're still doing one day, but they're doing two.

Frank Cirillo in our group, they're running the karate and Jiu-Jitsu programs back to back.

And you can definitely see how it helps their growth just playing on two sides of two styles.

David: Yeah.

That's what we're banking on.

We've had this asset in karate and taekwondo black belts for all these years.

We've never used that.

And let's face it, Jiu-Jitsu is not for everybody.

Not everybody wants to roll around on the floor.

Not all kids want to do that.

Some kids want to punch and kick because it's fun and it's useful.

And it teaches them a lot of things: balance, coordination.

And now we can offer the full spectrum of martial arts.

George: Love it. Cool.

And for you, who do you recommend Partners to?

David: Anyone who was like me, anyone who feels like they've hit a ceiling in their business.

Anyone who wants to bounce ideas with other martial arts school owners.

Anybody who doesn't know the first thing about running an online marketing campaign.

You should definitely jump into Partners.

You're going to learn a lot.

You're going to have a lot of people to get feedback from, and it's going to be super helpful.

George: Awesome.

So, Dave, next couple of months and looking into 2026.

We're obviously recording this.

You might be going live early in 2026, maybe just before.

But what's the big plan going for 2026 for you, Sinem, and the business?

And by the way, sorry, before I do that, just shout out to Sinem as well.

On the previous episodes with a few of the Partners groups, we have acknowledged the wives who are the rock doing the work and hats off to Sinem as well.

David: She's great with the mums.

George: Love it.

Cool.

And so, yeah, sorry, I completely sidetracked my question.

Big plans for 2026?

David: Yeah. We want to hit that 200 mark.

We want to expand the schedule and get 200 students in.

We want to continue what we started last year.

We did the internal comps.

We want to build on that.

We're starting our gradings now.

We didn't do gradings before.

We just hand out promotions after the class, and we're doing our first grading this Sunday, and we hope to roll that out every term next year.

But yeah, the short-term goal is to hit that 200 student mark and also build up our leadership group as well, which has been going really good.

Those kids have been showing a lot of promise.

George: Love it.

Cool. David, well, thanks for sharing.

For anyone on the internet that wants to follow along your journey, where are you on social media?

I know you post a bit on your Instagram.

If somebody wants to reach out to you, where can they do that?

David: Yeah, you can find me on Instagram, davidjenkinsonbjj, or you can look up hawkesburybjj on Instagram, on Facebook as well.

George: Awesome.

Cool, Dave.

Thanks for jumping on.

David: Thanks for having me.

I'll see you.

George: Thanks, mate.

Speak soon.

Bye.

David: Cheers.

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