Built By a Brown Belt Who Saw the Problem From Inside the Community
My name is Tanner Sullivant. I'm a military veteran, an international competitor, and a brown belt with ten years on the mats.
I didn't start this agency by finding a profitable niche on YouTube. I started Grapple Growth in 2023 because I was traveling, dropping into gyms, and seeing the exact same problem everywhere I went. I would find incredible gyms with great coaches and a great culture — but they were completely invisible online.
If I hadn't dug through page 3 of Google or asked around, I never would have found them. Meanwhile, the gym down the street with mediocre jiu-jitsu was packed because they had a functional website and an optimized Google Business Profile. Gym owners are too busy teaching classes and running the day-to-day to worry about SEO and lead automations. So I built Grapple Growth specifically to fix this problem from inside the community rather than as an outside marketer.
Nobody opens a gym to get rich. You open one because you love this sport and wanted to build your life around it — to teach, to build a community, to make a living doing the thing you'd do for free. Then the admin buries the dream: the missed calls, the unanswered DMs, the website nobody sees. You didn't open a gym to answer phones. Grapple Growth exists so the person who built the gym gets to be a coach again.
The Standard
My dad is a police officer in Louisiana and a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. When I build for a gym, the standard is simple: if my dad opened a gym tomorrow, this is exactly what I would build for him. Same system, same care, same honesty. That's the bar every client gets — because in this community, everyone is somebody's training partner, somebody's coach, somebody's dad.
The Philosophy
My job is to make you more than I cost, every single month. The five-layer foundation is the same for every gym because it's the same problem at every gym.
There are agencies in this space that treat gym owners like numbers on a spreadsheet — sign fast, churn fast, replace, repeat. That will never be this company. I answer my own messages, I know every client's gym by name, and my business only works if your gym actually grows. You're not a slot in a system. You're a gym owner I'm accountable to.
What You Own, What We Run
Your domain is yours. Your Google Business Profile is yours. Your reviews and your Google rankings are yours. We hold manager access to run them for you — and if you ever leave, all of it stays with you. No held domains, no hostage tactics. The website itself is part of your monthly service, like any hosting subscription: we build it, host it, manage it, and keep it working as long as you're with us. Most agencies won't put any of this in writing. Here it is in writing.
Ready to Fix Your Foundation?
If you've read this far, you're probably one of the gym owners I built this for. Watch the 90-second walkthrough to see exactly what I build. Not ready yet? Get a free audit of your gym first. Client results are here.
