When Amanda and I opened our school in the good ‘ol pre-disaster era, back in ‘17, we decided to try out a novel, non-traditional approach to charging our members for our classes. We decided a good name for this approach would be “pay-what-you-want”, and we would give everyone the option of only paying whatever they wanted for most of our classes, but especially our fundamentals BJJ classes. Other, supplementary classes would have a more traditional payment agreement, but our fundamentals classes would always be pay-what-you-want, and we decided to embark on this experimental, consumer-centric journey for a number of reasons.
First of all, I’ve been fairly broke for most of my adult life. Therefore, I haven’t always been able to afford to pay for BJJ memberships at every gym that I’ve trained at over the years. Occasionally I would have to go to the instructor with my head hung low, and ask him (always a him) if there was another way for me to pay for the classes, whether it was just helping to clean the mats, or even to help teach kids’ class or something like that. Luckily my coaches have always been understanding and we were able to work something out.
I first envisioned the “pay-what-you-want business model”, after experiencing its effect when participating in walking tours in various European cities. Occasionally, when experiencing a new city in Europe, we would go on these “free” walking tours, and at the end of the tour, the tour guide would ask for tips, assuming the participants of the tour felt like it was good quality. People always tipped quite a bit, and I think on average these guys probably made more money than their competitors who charged a nominal fee.
Of course, the tour guides couldn’t possibly just phone it in or give some sort of half-assed experience, because if people weren’t excited, and if they felt the quality of the experience was low, then of course they wouldn’t be that excited to pay. And this is the genius of this model: the quality of the product now sets its own value…
From the consumer’s point of view, I really liked the idea of the pay-what-you-want model, as at very least it affords the student some dignity and nobody has to come to me with embarrassment to ask if there’s another way to contribute. They can literally just pay whatever they are able to afford for the classes. This way, even the poorest jiujiteiros in our community can have access to high quality fundamental BJJ classes.
The second benefit of running pay-what-you-want classes is that it forces us, the gym owners, to keep it honest and to always provide a quality product.
Many times, students get locked into contracts where even if they get injured and are unable to train, or they simply don’t feel they’re getting their money’s worth, they’re still obligated to pay up no matter the level of quality of instruction their gym might be providing them. It’s not uncommon to walk into a gym for the first time, get a hard sell as you’re filling out the paperwork to take your free trial class, and then sign a contract that will obligate you to pay a prescribed amount of money every month for a fixed period of time. I don’t feel like this is an honest approach.
At the same time, I understand why gym owners go this route; most BJJ gym owners decide to go into business not in order to make a ton of money (this is really hard to do in this field) but because they love BJJ. Normally they’re athletes and aren’t extremely business minded, so they seek out “help” and pay someone who promises them that by following their method they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of their little gym in their little town.
For all I know, these claims may be true. But at what cost? Most of us have very close personal relationships with our students as we work with our students, one-on-one, and help them grow and develop as jiujiteiros and people. Many times we spend time with each other outside of the gym, we get invited on family trips, we babysit their pets while they’re gone. To me, it would be rough on my conscience if I were to inflate my rates, charge for testing for promotions and require my students to only buy my products or to limit their training outside of the school. These are just a few of the strategies some gym owners will employ in order to make a few extra bucks.
In conclusion, I’m not advocating for any specific system of economics, but rather trying to find a fair and ethical way to provide what I love to do (teaching/training BJJ) to the most amount of people willing to take the leap of faith and show up at my gym, while simultaneously paying my bills, saving for retirement and living the kind of lifestyle I want to live. I’m very happy to report that we are doing just that at our gym, and we are looking forward to inspiring others to do the same.
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