UFC coach Syndicate MMA owner John Wood interview

For Fresno, California born and Texas and Las Vegas raised John Wood, the road to success has been a long one that has led him to being nominated for coach of the year and his gym, Syndicate MMA, for gym of the year by the World MMA Awards.

The mixed martial arts coach and business owner of Syndicate MMA fell in love with the fight game after watching UFC 1 on pay per view over at a friend’s house back in 1993. His first job, at a grocery store (which he hated) led him to realize early on that he never wanted to work for anyone other than himself.

He then became a fighter, notching 18 fights under his belt, then a coach, then a business owner, and is now leading one of the most successful mixed martial arts gyms in the world with a roster of professional fighters, including UFC Bantamweight champion Merab Dvalishvili, light heavyweight contender Khalil Rountree and has worked extensively with UFC women’s strawweight champion Zhang Weili, among others.

Currently, the gym has about 70 professional fighters under its Syndicate banner and usually somewhere between 15 to 25 UFC fighters at any given time. The gym also has an extensive list of classes for children and adults alike, including Muay Thai, Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, wrestling and women’s only self-defense classes. Syndicate also currently has more than a 1,000 paying members and Wood spearheads the whole thing with his wife and former UFC star Joanne Wood, who is now Syndicate’s co-owner and manager.

Wood sat down with the Las Vegas Review-Journal to talk the business of the fight game, what he’s learned in the decades past and what he might say to his younger self if he got the chance.

Do you remember your first fight and what it taught you?

I fought a lot, especially in middle school. I loved it. We would do the backyard fights on the playground, and it was more pro wrestling orientated. It would start as tag team, but it always turned into a real fight. We did that every day at recess from basically second grade on. And I think in second grade is where I also had my first real fight on the playground and I choked the kid out. It’s funny now that I think about it that was kind of my go to. I would get into you, wrestle you and then grab you around the neck and choke you out. And back then it was known as the Brutus Beefcake Sleeper Hold.

And I remember the kid’s name, his name was Ken and he was like the school bully and the school tough kid.

When did you transition from fighting to coaching and business owner?

It took a really long time. I started my own gym when I was 23 years old as an investment. I’d left Vegas for awhile, went to Arizona for a little bit, started training out there actually and then I wanted to come home. That’s when the UFC was really starting to pop off, and so I moved back here in 2001 and I started training heavily and started the Las Vegas Combat Club with Frank Mir and Ricardo Perez and all those guys.

And Frank had just gotten into the UFC, so it was a massive deal, and I just fell in love with it. At the time all the gyms were in the industrial parts of town, and I got into a car accident and got a little bit of a settlement, about $20 grand and had started teaching and coaching a lot of ju-jitsu classes. I went to my coach and said asked if I gave him this money could we open a gym somewhere nice, somewhere kids and families can be exposed to ju-jitsu and MMA and the whole deal. And we did. At this time I was still heavy into fighting and we got a 20,000-square-foot space and demo’d it and renovated the whole thing.

What’s one of the first things you learned as a business owner?

If you have a gym you have to run it like a business. If you don’t run any business like a business, it goes away pretty quickly. There was a lot of turmoil in the first year, my original coach and partner left after three months, thankfully I found somebody else, and got it going again and did that and was successful for a couple of years, and then we ended up expanding and growing and then got a major sponsorship from Xyience. It was about 10 to 15 years of just trying to find any company who would give me money to put their name on the door to keep it open.

It started as the Combat Club, and then it was the Xyience Training Center who were a massive UFC sponsor at the time, and then I had a buddy who had a clothing company called Warrior and so it was the Warrior Training Center, and then it was the Throwdown Training Center, and then finally when I got secure enough and got everything taken care of it became Syndicate, which was always my fight team name.

What’s one thing you would tell your younger self about running a business?

Educate yourself. Read more books, learn the business. These last couple years I’ve really started educating myself in how to not just run a business but run my own life, and how to do things better and how to be accountable for everything and how to realize that no matter what happens good or bad, it’s my fault and it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, it all falls on you. You are the leader and expected to lead, it’s all on you so take that accountability. I wish I would have gone more in and figured that out earlier, because the first 15 years were a struggle, and the last five years have been a little bit better and the last three years have been great because I started investing in myself.

Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.