Best Practices for Sports and Social Organizations

Out of nowhere, I grew a sports and social organization to over 20,000 participants and $750,000 in revenue in less than four years.

The club is known for its customer-friendly attitude, a unique array of fun and exciting events, provides value for each person they touch, and operates a valid stream of revenue.

We have run sports leagues, tournaments, clinics, camps, and competitive games for children up to adults in their 40′s and 50′s. We’ve planned social entertainment, parties, concerts, and more.

The point of the following white paper and how to guide is to share the culmination of my successes and failures and the sports and social organizations we have been fervent with. The honest of providing you with this information is that you become better at what you do and how to succeed in the sports and entertainment industry.

Why Do People Play?
To understand the customer and vendor landscape of the sports and social world, you must understand the underlying principles of why people “play”.

Play is amusing interaction with people, animals, or toys, often in the context of learning or recreation. In theory the concept of play if difficult to tightly explain. Some people use the word play as a contrast to the other parts of their lives: sleep, eating, washing, work, rituals.

As Johan Huizinga defines in Homo Ludens, the notion of the Magic Circle as a conceptual space in which play occurs. It’s the region in which the various actions in play have meaning such as kicking (and only kicking) a ball in one direction of another, using physical Force to impede another player (in a way which might be illegal outside the context of the game). A good book to check out on play theory is Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois.

What it takes
A successful sports or social organization or business cannot exist without locations to play. Venues such as facilities.

Location! You must first research and analyze every venue within a 30 to 50 mile radius. Ogle demographic information, traffic volume, and accessibility. Analyze who who is in your station (ages) and what they are doing. Utilize tools such as VirtualEarth, MapPoint, Google Earth, or Demographics Now.

In order to to fill the locations you are able to play, you must have participation. You must analyze your space and offer a range of unique activities. The best place to initiate is by offering something new that no one else is doing or that hasn’t been done in a long time. In 2004, I had already realized two years of success on an emergence of kickball and I was considering starting a dodgeball league. It made it a cinch when I heard the news of an upcoming movie starring Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller about . The league launched to wild success, and not there are thousands of people playing dodgeball across the nation and over 40 teams per season in Denver.

How it Begins
There are various ways to start a successful business in sports, entertainment, charity event planning, party promotion, or Travel.

Personally I know objective one way to start your future: no funding and grassroots.

Before anything you should do your homework and practice. I practiced my organizational skills in college at Ohio University. I juggled full time classes in business communication, manged 150 rental properties, various side gigs, fraternity social chairman, and working on marketing projects for various campus groups. I had the hunger to diversify, learn, ask knowing questions, and talk to everyone possible.

Once I graduated in 1999, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I wanted to meet people since I knew no one in a city of a million plus. After I settled into my job selling Web sites and database development services, I began looking for active things to do. There were few adult leagues, and I discovered from a client that Sports Monster was the largest provider of adult recreational sports in Denver, so I joined a flag football team. Long story short, the flag league didn’t live up to anyone’s expectations. There were nights with no referees and a lack of web site that communicated rules, rosters, standings, and schedules. There were no social specials, Bar sponsors, discounts, or prizes for the winners.

You must write a business plan, even if it’s only 2 – 3 pages long. The key points that you must interpret in your business plan are:

What is the unique value proposition of your business?
Who will run the business and how many people are needed?
What are your goals?

Once you have an established idea, domain name, identity and brand you can go to market.

Franchising is an interesting option for businesses, because it can be a lucrative stream of revenue if you have a unique enough understanding. We have looked into franchising with various firms. The bulk of the cost is the upright costs to file various paperwork in the states you want to offer franchises. The shopping and selling a franchise license is even more difficult than the legal aspect. This is a viable option with the right system and technology. The costs can be $50,000 – $150,000 with FranCorp, arguably the nation’s leading franchise firm. Examples of successful sports franchises are Velocity Sports Performance and i-9Sports.

Save Time and Money!
The beauty of an organization focused on sports and entertainment is that you can start one with little or no capital. I started Denver Sports and Social with no capital and one park permit that cost $15. One day of pre-season football was enought to get 8 teams to sign up. Then, an 8-week Saturday morning permit cost $350. I covered this cost by selling a sponsorship to a real estate broker who wanted to meet original people. Then I moved onto covering the cost of equipment such as flags, balls, field paint, and jerseys with a mortgage broker to who also wanted leads. The cost for entry was $400 per team and I got 8 teams to play, profiting $3,200 which I spent on getting a business license, bank account, software, and used the remaining $500 or so and hit the town, buying beers for active looking people. My pitch was “join my kickball tournament”. In 2000, not many people were playing kickball. Today there are thousands, if not millions of people playing kickball. As you can imagine it caught fire. The first kickball tournament with 10 teams, the next year with 16, and eventually growing to leagues with over 80 teams in one season in Denver.

Between 2000 and 2004, the club achieved steady growth to 1,500 people in 2004. I was becoming so busy at my full time job during the day, that I was working each night and all weekend maintaining the club. I realized a need for a favorable technology as I was managing everything by paper, pen, and Microsoft Excel. I had to take each registration manually.

To run a successful sports or social organization you must save time in all the areas you can so that you may focus on your customer and vendor relationships.

Obtain access to the best automation tools and management technologies. Use a service that gives you free access to its tools such as PlayCoed. You also get paid once you get over 5,000 registered participants in your organization!

Other services include Thriva and Active, both of which have raised their rates substantially over the last few years.

Remember the age old adage: The customer is always moral. Track your customers via Salesforce, which will run you $90 every quarter.

Rely on Google for most of your business needs. Set up your email on gmail. Use picasa for photos. Use the Docs and Spreadsheet functions rather than primitive Word or Excel docs.

Mitigate Risk
First you must avoid danger and lawsuits by blocking every notion in your head that you might want to manage uncertain activities such as beer pong, flip cup, and extreme sports. Don’t take these sort of activities on because they may sound fun, but are not money making activities and are highly dangerous and set yourself up for lawsuits.

There are numerous ways to mitigate risk in any business, but in the sports and entertainment business you are exposed to more risk of failure, pain, or lawsuits.

Invest time or money in a staff training program and CPR certification and follow guidelines such as emergency procedures, and incident reports. Accomplish your participants sign an automated online release and waiver.

No matter what sports you decide to run, you will need to have both general liability and accident / medical insurance policies, listing venues as additionally insured. I’ve used K and K Insurance, Philadelphia Insurance Companies, and Westpoint Insurance Group, all of which offer similar rates.

It’s not recommended that you ever provide alcohol at events. Typically you need a license. Instead get alcohol donated and hire a catering company with a liquor license to pour your booze.

Staffing and Bookkeeping
Hire dedicated, friendly, and knowledgeable staff. Typically interns will do the dirty work for and you can entice them with a respectable, structured co-op program. Offer to pay them a stipend at the end of the internship. In my experience I do not like working with recent college graduates, however as they are calm in that lazy, fantasy land Phase.

Instead of giving a higher salary, in turn incentivize your staff. Work with independent contractors and have agreements in dwelling. Make obvious you get a W-9 form filled out for independent contractors and enter their information into your vendor list in your Accounting Software. For accounting you must set up a good chart of accounts, and use Quickbooks online version which is well worth the $15 per month.

Collections can devastate a business. The best policy is to make all monies due ahead of time. Make it required that your participants pay online with a check or PayPal account.

Get Everything in Writing!
Have agreements in writing for all that you do, including the following:

1. Independent Contractors and Employment Contracts
2. Venue License Agreements
3. Partnerships
4. Sponsorships

A list of all of these documents can also be obtained by signing up for free as an organizer at PlayCoed.

Venues and Equipment
Find the best locations and figure out what they need (rental hours free, need better technology). Get a license agreement in writing. Try to get storage space for equipment at the facility to reduce time for hauling equipment around. Take this part of the business seriously because your survival as an organization relies on it.

Equipment is an easy one. Get the right stuff and look for deals. We order a lot of items for sports and social clubs across America and have obsolete everything from S & S Worldwide to Amazon. We simply know the right products to use for games (quality and size) and then notice for the deals.

Marketing
Don’t lose focus and don’t waste time on frivolous marketing efforts. One of the worst things you can do is know which marketing works and what doesn’t work. I spent a lot of time and sometimes money on running ads in magazines or newspapers and trying a lot of different advertising options such as Google AdWords. Viral Marketing is the best technique you can exercise by talking to to captains of teams and asking them to spread the word. Free online services such as CraigsList, Backpage, Sportsvite and PlayCoed are also vast for getting more people to hear about you.

Other social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook are primarily a waste of time in regards to marketing your organization. Instead, take an hour or so to set up a page on both sites to make or fill some connections.

We spent a year requesting and messaging friends on MySpace to obtain 11,000 friends. Now we send event invitations for to promote events, discounts, and contests and usually regain a 1% response rate and some of those people don’t even live within 150 miles of the event we are putting on (which means they probably responded just because). The sites are cool, but not worth the time and effort.
Signs and banners can be nice, although expensive and are often times stolen or lost.

Sigange can be nice, but expensive. We spent over $1,000 on signage in 2005 and by the slay of the year had nothing to exhibit for it. Instead of buying signs, ask your sponsors to make them for you. The staff at PlayCoed can back you get these Printed through their national sponsors.

Use simple, professional graphics that bag your point across. I have spent countless hours designing fliers, logos, and marketing material for events, clubs, organizations, businesses. The thing I finally learned was to exercise less time on the search for and more time on the content.

Plan First, Play Later
In 2001, I attended a leadership and event planning conference for alumni leaders across the nation. The event planner from USA Today taught us how to simply residence up a method and systematic approach to putting together an event. First, she presented many templates and checklists, which I later have added into a “shapely spreadsheet”.

Sports and Seasons are part of the initial and ongoing planning process. Take holidays off. Take a poll or survey of your members to determine if you have enough interest in positive sports. PlayCoed can tell you what the top 10 sports are people are involved in, but sometimes there is that unique or new sport that catches on like wildfire in an dwelling.

Days of the week are crucial to the success of certain sports, such as kickball. Because kickball is usually a sport where players over the age of 21 enjoy drinking heavily before and after their games, a Thursday night league is more conducive to people’s work schedules.

For organizations with members in the mid to late 30s and 40s there sometimes is more demand for leagues on Friday or Monday nights.

Plan for weather updates and cancellations. Traditionally you need a dedicated phone line for participants to call, or direct them to the home page of your Web site.

Communication is Key
You must communicate daily with participants and vendors and traditionally phone calls should be the preferred means of communication. Emails are great for completing dinky tasks, but when it comes down to it the phone call is the personal touch you need.

Rulebooks are crucial to sports activities and you will need a set of rules, policies, and procedures that are updateable on the fly. You can get pre-populated rulebooks from PlayCoed for free.

Partnerships
The key to your growth is to leverage as many partners as you can. Areas that are not the focus of your business nor the strength should be filled with a partners. You must first identify the ideal partner. What industry do they fit in or what is their niche?

The next step is to catch up the phone and call the partners and ask questions. Find out what their value proposition is, who is their target market, and what are the challenges they are facing today? What do they need most? Most partners need more customers or an additional value proposition. Partner with as many people you can find a win/win relationship with.

Visualize Your Success!
In order for you to succeed in this like a flash paced sports and social entertainment industry, you must have vision and dedication. You must know exactly what your value is and what your longterm goals, strategies, methods, and practices are. Don’t be distracted by anyone attempting to deter you from this vision.

There are a lot of things that I have not touched so feel free to write me back with questions or more advice.