"We feel that allowing remote work to continue helps moral and helps with employee appreciation."
Meet Zack Nicholas, the dedicated martial artist, fitness enthusiast, and founder of HeavyBJJ.com.
With over six years of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) experience and a purple belt under his mentor Richie “Boogeyman” Martinez, Zack is on a mission to provide in-depth information, guides, and resources for those interested in martial arts, fitness, and self-improvement.
By combining his passion for personal growth, goal setting, and self-learning, Zack is transforming the BJJ community and beyond with his expertise, knowledge, and dedication to helping others reach their full potential.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Zack Nicholas: I’m Zack – I have a lifelong interest in martial arts, fitness, and self-improvement. I have been training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) for over 6 years and currently hold a purple belt under Richie “Boogeyman” Martinez out of 10th Planet San Diego.
I can’t imagine my life without BJJ.
Our mission at HeavyBJJ.com is to provide useful, in-depth information and guides for anyone interested in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, martial arts, and fitness. By providing fully researched and detailed information on common martial arts, and fitness topics, we want to give back to the martial arts and fitness community since it has given so much to us!
Personally, I’m a big fan of improvement, goal-setting, and self-learning. Hopefully, we can impart some of our basic knowledge, guidance, and passion to those interested in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, fitness, martial arts, and self-improvement.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffet, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Zack Nicholas: Our company, HeavyBJJ, is entirely focused on helping you improve just a little bit every day in your martial arts and fitness journey.
We believe that if you expect to reach your goals, you have to actively work by taking steps toward them every day (no matter how small those steps may be).
Brazilian jiu-jitsu teaches you this in the plainest and simplest terms. The more your show up to training and the more you learn on your own, the faster you will improve.
We want to be there to help you with the latter part of your BJJ journey and help you learn more on your own. We do this by breaking down key concepts, and ideas, and providing technique guides to those who are motivated to learn and improve as quickly as possible.
What Makes Our Company Different from Others?
HeavyBJJ is different from other companies that are focused on martial arts and fitness because not only are we extremely passionate, but we have nearly a decade of martial arts and fitness experience. Our goal is to provide concise, practical, and useful information.
We believe in the 80/20 rule – that 80% of all growth and learning comes from 20% of the info.
We make it our goal to focus on delivering that extremely effective 20% of info to our readers in the form of guides, breakdowns, and product reviews. Over our years of experience, we have come up with the most effective and practical info when it comes to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, martial arts, and fitness.
What Is Our Biggest Strength?
Our biggest strength is our experience and our ability to break down martial arts and fitness-related info into the most important ideas and principles that can be understood and applied practically to your martial arts and fitness training today.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, are an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle keeping talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are adapting to the current shift we see?
Zack Nicholas: What keeps employees happy, in my opinion is two things:
- Appreciation
- Being Heard
Being appreciated, in our opinion, is the number one thing that can make someone stay at their job. For most employees, it’s rare that they receive a “thank you” or a “good job” from their boss.
While some bosses incorrectly think that managing with a large stick, will keep their employees in line. However, by providing positive feedback as often as possible in whatever form this may be (this may be in a thank you email, a paid-for lunch, monetary bonus, or yearly raise), employees will begin to feel more competent and appreciated for all the hard work they do.
Being heard, can often be miscontrued or mixed up with appreciation. Being heard means you are making it a point to get the opinions of your employees as often as possible and then taking those opinions to make real changes. To get the true opinions of your employees, we believe in providing 360-degree, anonymous, optional surveys for all our employees.
This means the employees will be able to review management, those at their level, and those that report to them. These 360-degree surveys will be able to easily expose any faults in competency, behavior, and cooperation. Once these opinions are collected, making it a point to make real changes based on them should be the ultimate goal in helping your employees be heard.
We are adapting by following the two items we mentioned above, by providing detailed, specific praised to work done well and by receiving 360 degree employees feedback with a special consideration to their opinions and feeligns on management or those that they report to.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Zack Nicholas: My expectations for the year to come are to continue allowing remote work whenever possible. The truth is if there are structured tasks, goals, and timelines to meet for work, a good employee will work to get it down whether they are at home or at the office.
We feel that allowing remote work to continue helps moral and helps with employee appreciation. Since our company, HeavyBJJ, is website based, we believe we are capitalizing on this by providing rich, structured content in digestible chunks for our readers.
Additionally, we are capitalizing on the change by always allowing employees to freedom to work remotely whenever possible. With structured tasks, duties, and goals we have full trust in our employees that they will work to meet the companies needs within those roles.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Zack Nicholas: The real challenges for us right now are:
- Creating the Best Content
- Scaling
Since our company is website based, we are always looking to create the best and most rich content out there on Brazilian jiu-jitsu, martial arts, and fitness. Not only does this pull from our years of experience on these topics, but we have to make them easily understandable and practical for our readers.
Next, scaling is always a concern for us since if we want to continue to grow, we have to continue to hire more researchers and writers. This takes time since we only hire those who are very experienced with fitness and martial arts and who have a strong background in website content creation.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Zack Nicholas: The most underestimated part of running a company is the communication between management and employees and creating an ideal work environment.
These two should be the main focus for any CEO or anyone in a management role. Making sure communication is clear, open, friendly, understood, and direct is sometimes a tightrope employers and employees to walk. Duties are aimed to be met but communicating properly is always a requirement.
Next, creating a work environment that draws in and keeps good employees is often missed by CEOs or bosses. We believe this is done by showing appreciation whenever possible and making sure employees are heard.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Zack Nicholas: If I could pick a business superpower, it would be to know when an employee is not satisfied in their position.
With the boom of “quiet quitting,” having the ability to know when an employee is struggling with motivation, productivity, and communication with others in a role would do wonders for hiring and keeping quality employees.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Zack Nicholas for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.
