Financially Successful Schools Can Still Produce High Level Students

One consistent line you will hear from us is that having successful martial arts schools does not mean you must sacrifice the quality of your students and instruction.

Yes, we are committed to making our academies inclusive and open to anyone. We do a lot to make students' early experiences with us as painless as possible.

We don’t let Jiu Jitsu students train live until they get two stripes on their white belt.

We don’t let Muay Thai students spar until they receive their orange shirt (think “3 stripe white belt”), which takes about 6-8 months for most students.

In fact, our striking students only do bag work for their first 3-4 months.

And yes, we use a curriculum for all of our programs. Every coach, no matter what Easton school you walk in to, is teaching similar techniques in similar ways.

Which means we often have blue and purple belts teaching fundamentals and intermediate classes.

Our schools are very successful financially, and we have thousands of students.

Yet we make sure what we teach works in real life. No one at Easton is interested in diluting the martial arts we teach to make more money.

And we have the record to prove it.

Mission & Vision

If you’ve ever worked with us in the Academy Accelerator Program , you know we put a huge emphasis early on in developing your school’s Core Values, Mission, and Vision.

Without these things in place, it can often feel as if your school is rudderless and headed nowhere–even when you’re growing.

At Easton, our mission is to create careers in martial arts for our best students and staff.

We do this by working toward running the greatest Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academies around through an unrelenting dedication to the students and staff.

But with this focus also comes potential traps.

If we lean too far into building the schools and getting more students, all to increase revenue and pay staff more, we run the risk of degrading the quality of our martial arts.

For the people who own and operate Easton, this is not an acceptable trade off.

These are people who came up training hard, competing hard, and pushing themselves to the limit.

None of us are here to operate McDojos.

Battle Tested

To us, if what we’re teaching doesn’t work in real life or competition, it’s not worth teaching.

We believe that everything about being an Easton student should be easy, except the training.

But how do we know if the martial arts we teach work or not?

We Battle Test them.

That means sending our students out to compete with people from local, national, and international programs to test our teaching.

When we compete, we don’t just look to show up. We want to win.

Do we win every match or fight ? No. That’s not realistic. But we expect to win more than we lose.

Proven Track Record

(Easton Muay Thai Competitors at TBA World Muay Thai Expo, 2026)

In June 2026, we sent a team of 9 athletes to the TBA-SA Muay Thai Expo (TBAs) in Des Moines, Iowa.

If you’ve never heard of TBAs, it’s the biggest Muay Thai tournament in the country, and one of the biggest in the world.

Usually 1,000+ competitors from multiple countries show up to compete over 4 days at TBAs.

This year, Easton achieved a record of 18-3, crowning 6 division champions across multiple classes and weight divisions.

Very few, if any, teams at the tournament can say they achieved similar success.

We expect similar success in Jiu Jitsu as well.

When the IBJJF came to Denver in late April, Easton won both the Gi and No-Gi team trophies.

To us, this is what we mean when we say we teach “Battle Tested” martial arts.

(IBJJF Denver Open Team Champions, Gi & No Gi, 2025-2026)

Success Doesn’t Mean Sacrifice

The common belief in the martial arts industry is that you can be hardcore and have the toughest students around…

…or you can be financially successful and have a ton of students.

You can’t have both.

Maybe the “hardcore” approach won’t get you there, but you don’t have to sacrifice tough, skilled students to run a financially successful school.

You can have an academy that runs on systems and structure.

You can have multiple coaches on the schedule besides yourself, even if they’re not black belts.

You can use simple, repeatable curricula to ensure students are progressing at a consistent and predictable pace.

You can have a school that caters to everyone, not just the toughest people around.

And you can do all of this while still producing highly skilled practitioners who can prove it in real life.

Ultimately, you don’t have to value battle tested martial arts the way we do at Easton. You can define a vision that fits your school.

You can set a mission that gets you and your staff up each morning and ready to attack the day.

You should take the time to define your vision and mission.

Just don’t fool yourself into believing that you can’t have a large, financially successful school in order to have high level martial arts.