Marketer of the Year Award Winner,
AJ Clingerman knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur from the time she was 6 years old. Growing up in her aunt’s dance studio and seeing her mom start her own landscaping business showed AJ that being in charge of her own business, income, and destiny was the way to go.

No stranger to hard work, AJ never had only one job at a time. She taught dance, was a stockbroker for Charles Schwab, an accountant for TGI Fridays, a real estate agent, a chiropractic assistant, a DJ, an event planner and so much more. With everything, AJ did she knew that she was gaining experience to one day run her own show.

A wake-up call came when her husband (still boyfriend at that time) was a victim of a violent crime. Life is short and it became obvious that it was time to start accomplishing their goals. Within a year, she and her husband opened their first martial arts academy. They have since built their martial arts academy into a full empire. They run the largest Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu/Mixed Martial Arts Academy in Central Indiana, put on Grappling events all over the Midwest, build custom mats for other academies, run a Jiu-Jitsu association, and have 13 martial arts info products and more in the works. AJ just published her first book and has 4 more in the pipeline.

AJ says, “I understand people’s trials and tribulations. Before I found my coach,  we were struggling. Everything we had went to keeping the doors to our martial arts academy open. We lost our home. We couldn’t pay our bills. We were drowning. Our biggest problem was we didn’t know what we should be doing. We were spending our time working in our business and never on it.  We are a true testament to how having a coach and actually implementing what they say to do, can change your entire life. Now, coaching others how to grow their business is one of my favorite things. I feel very blessed to get to be the catalyst in someone’s life that our coach was in ours.”