I’m Nic Gregoriades.

In 2003 I left Cape Town for London with a single goal: to earn my black belt in jiu-jitsu under Roger Gracie. A few years later he tied it around my waist. It was the first black belt he ever gave anyone, and I still count earning it as one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

That was a long time ago now. I’ve spent more than 27 years on the mat and coached on four continents, from tiny garage rooms to packed academies. Somewhere in there I co-founded the Jiu-Jitsu Brotherhood, one of the first real online homes for the art, and wrote a few books about it — The Black Belt Blueprint and Jiu-Jitsu: Beyond the Black Belt among them — because I couldn’t stop turning over the same question: how do people actually learn this thing?

Why I built GRADR

Here’s a truth: most academies don’t fall apart because the jiu-jitsu is bad. They fall apart because everything around the jiu-jitsu is held together with duct tape and memory.

I watched it happen for years. Brilliant coaches drowning in spreadsheets. Attendance on scraps of paper. A whole curriculum living inside one person’s head. Promotions run on a gut feeling because nobody could actually track who’d covered what. The teaching was world-class and the business underneath it was chaos.

GRADR is my answer to that. It’s gym management software built specifically for BJJ academies — billing, attendance, curriculum, grading and instructor pay in one place — so the school runs on a system instead of on you being in the room. I built the thing I wish I’d had.

Off the mat

I also write and coach on the bigger stuff — purpose, discipline, and putting yourself back together when life takes you apart. If that’s where you are, you’ll find that work over at coachingwithnic.com.

And if you want to read me on jiu-jitsu specifically, I’ve put four of my books up for free, no email required, and I write regularly in the GRADR guides on curriculum, grading, and the unglamorous systems that actually keep an academy alive.

If you run an academy and you’re tired of being the only thing holding it together, that’s exactly who I built GRADR for.

Keep reaching,
Nic