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Transforming Hy-Vee Arena: Revitalizing a Historic Sports Facility
81 Plays1 year ago
Welcome to the Facility Playbook Podcast, where we delve into the world of facility management. In this episode, we explore the inspiring story behind the transformation of Hy-Vee Arena. Luke Wade, the founder, and CEO of Facility Ally, sits down with Chris Coffin, the general manager of Hy-Vee Arena, and Steve Foutch, the CEO, and founder of Foutch Brothers, to uncover the journey of revitalizing this iconic venue located in the heart of Kansas City.
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Transcript
Introduction at Hy-Vee Arena
00:00:00
Speaker
So Hy-Vee Arena was such a great episode. I feel like I could talk about this arena over and over again for a long time. But I got to record with Steve Fouch, who's the owner and creator of Hy-Vee Arena, and Chris Coffin, who's the general manager. And we were actually sitting on this amazing court, one of 12 basketball and volleyball courts that Hy-Vee Arena has. There's people playing and interacting all around us. And it's this huge, amazing, old arena. It used to be called Kemper Arena.
Kemper Arena's Transformation
00:00:28
Speaker
that was actually redeveloped into a sports complex that it is today, but it's had everybody from Elvis to Prince and even Owen Hart from the WWF fell to his death in this building. So the fact they were able to take this amazing historical building and turn in this awesome sports complex is just one of my favorite things about it. And we were able to dive in deep and talk about all that history and their experiences there and then what it looks like today. And today, you know, they've got the memberships, the track, the courts, the basketball, volleyball,
00:00:57
Speaker
pickleball, they have wrestling tournaments, dance, all kinds of different things going on here at Ivy Arena.
Managing a Multi-Use Sports Complex
00:01:02
Speaker
One of my favorite parts of the recording was some great, great advice from Chris on how he manages such an amazingly large complex with so many different things. So the flexibility also creates many challenges and Chris was able to talk us about how he makes in-game adjustments and things like that. So hope you like it. Check out Ivy Arena.
00:01:26
Speaker
What's up, everybody? Do you own or manage a facility? Well, then you're in the right place.
Facility Ally Introduction
00:01:30
Speaker
I'm Luke Wade, the founder and CEO of Facility Ally. Most sports facilities use between four to six different softwares to manage their facility, and Facility Ally can help you replace that with an all-in-one system. Check it out at facilityally.com. Today, I'm joined by some amazing rock stars, Chris Coffin, the general manager of Hy-Vee Arena, and Steve Fouts, the CEO and founder of Fouts Brothers, and the owner and investor of Hy-Vee Arena. Thank you so much for joining me today, guys. I really appreciate it.
00:01:56
Speaker
Thank you. So basically, we're here at Ivy Arena. So I'd love to start with where, where are we? How did this
Redevelopment Vision and Challenges
00:02:04
Speaker
come to be? So Steve, if you kind of want to just walk us through the, you know, how did you first hear about Kemper Arena and think of this crazy idea?
00:02:11
Speaker
I would try to keep some of this short, but oh geez, 10 years ago, 11 years ago. On the same week that a friend of mine came in and said, hey Steve, we need a place for eight basketball courts at least to try and have some big regional tournaments. Can you think of anything or help us develop a property?
00:02:27
Speaker
That same week, they announced that they were going to tear down the building to create more parking for some of the space next door. So the historic people in town said, hey Steve, can you think of any idea to do with this arena? So those two supply and demand showed up at the same week. So I started looking at the arena and it's just the one floor downstairs, the original.
00:02:47
Speaker
And so obviously with creativity and architectural background and so forth, we're like, okay, what else? How can we do this differently? So after lots of different schemes, lots of different ideas, lots of pricing sensitivity, we came up with in the bottom floor, just removing all that retractable seating and getting four courts down there. So you wanna have seating down on the court like you used to have, but you actually have a nice seven foot buffer of a drop from the regular bowl down onto the regular floor, which actually a lot of coaches like that to keep the separation between the players and the parents and so forth.
00:03:17
Speaker
And then we put in this floor up here that we're sitting on now. We're on the second floor. This is brand new. The 50 year old building, this has only existed for four and a half, five years while we're sitting on now. This is the key to what changed this facility is adding this floor and eight more basketball courts. So now Chris can run a 12 court tournament, which is national size tournaments. This was the key to changing the whole facility, but is also the key in the whole financial cost and the financial revenue model of how you operate the facility.
Architectural and Financial Strategies
00:03:46
Speaker
And so how are you able to know that you could get this done? Talk a little bit about your background. Oh, I still don't know. We're still trying. Like you said, this floor didn't exist, right? So how did you have the idea? I mean, talk a little bit about your background.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'm an architect and financial and engineer type guy. So we're just always renovating old historic buildings, converting them from something to something else. Usually schools or office towers or high rises into apartments, because that's real easy. Apartments can be any shape, size, layout, whatever, and people generally are okay with that. But in this building, it was how do you monetize, even though it's a free building, as we bought it for a dollar, that doesn't monetize the revenue that you have to come up with to keep it operating.
00:04:31
Speaker
So we're just looking at the heights and the balcony level and where we could put a second floor. Or originally the first floor, we looked at filling with dirt and bringing up that bowl. So as that diameter of the bowl got bigger, as you kept adding dirt more and more and more, you could actually get these eight courts down below. So where the concourse and the private suites are, that would just walk straight on out onto this court this size, but you'd only have the eight courts.
00:04:59
Speaker
So it still cost a lot of money and you still only had eight courts. So that was a good option. But then we looked at this and having the two floors gave us 12 courts. And I don't know where the idea came from. We just, we kept looking at sections and plans and just what ifs and what ifs. And so we even have four floors here. You still have the first floor below everything. And then we added the fourth floor for the running track because I wanted to have the running a track stuff in here as well. So there's changes throughout the whole facility.
00:05:26
Speaker
Chris, what's your background and what was the first time you heard of this and thought it would be awesome to do?
Chris Coffin's Journey to GM
00:05:31
Speaker
Well, I've been in the sports world forever. Youth sports, high school sports, AAU sports, professional sports, and just kind of have been around it for a while. When I heard of Steve's idea, I knew some folks that were involved in the project and we started having some conversation. I think I originally came in as a program manager and was going to start some of that.
00:05:51
Speaker
I think I came in March, so March, April, about six months before we even opened. And so as that progressed, my role progressed. And by the time we opened, I think I was the operations manager. And as I go over years, I kind of morphed into where I'm at now. So it's been a lot of fun. Just the multifacet and the multipurpose use of this building in general, it's kind of been a challenge. So it's new every day you come in here.
00:06:21
Speaker
So talk a little bit about what you offer Ivy Arena. Well, I like to pitch it in three different ways.
Activities and Events at Hy-Vee Arena
00:06:27
Speaker
So like we're here on a
00:06:29
Speaker
On a weekday at 11 o'clock, we got a volleyball camp going on downstairs. We got a youth summer group in right now. You can hear in the background a little bit. So during the week, during the day, I say, you know, it's more for the working guys downtown and get in over lunch, get a workout in, get some open gym basketball, stuff like that. Then in the evening, we host a lot of our members. We have a big membership base. We also host practices anywhere from
00:06:54
Speaker
volleyball, basketball. We do a lot of foots all in here now as well. And then we also host obviously all the KC crew leagues in the evening. And then weekend events are just limitless. We have 52,000 square feet up here and 36,000 square feet downstairs. So anything you can picture with the exception of water, we'll take a look at. We've hosted anything from concerts, obviously basketball tournaments, volleyball tournaments, wrestling tournaments. We've done fashion shows.
00:07:24
Speaker
drumline competitions, high school graduations, we're looking at some college graduations this year. And we also do a lot of corporate events, meetings, trainings, anywhere from 100 employees to 3000 employees. So with everything you mentioned, you know, six lane running track, 12 basketball, volleyball courts, pickleball courts, gym, I mean, conference rooms, like what is the biggest challenge you face when running a facility this
Operational Challenges and Coordination
00:07:48
Speaker
size?
00:07:48
Speaker
I think it's extremely unique in that a lot of big facilities are just sports oriented and they might have a couple of kiosks where you can go get a drink or something but here we have our membership base, we have our our clients, customers, people walking off the street anywhere from one person buying a day pass to
00:08:08
Speaker
large national events and then we also have tenant spaces here too so we're kind of we house a lot of different businesses and and retail businesses and office spaces and then just being able to manage each individual type of business and then tying it all together and one when we have a major event because our major events drive a lot of our traffic and a lot of people in the building benefit from it so keeping all that coordinated. Sure so really just coordination scheduling things like that.
00:08:34
Speaker
A lot of planning. A lot of good teamwork. Yeah. So back to Steve, kind of like what you had mentioned earlier, you said a dollar.
Purchasing the Arena for $1
00:08:42
Speaker
You bought this entire building for a dollar. People at home who don't maybe understand what that means are probably like, how the heck did he do that? So you want to maybe talk about how, from the second you knew you were getting it, what was the transition? Because you bought it from the city of Kansas City, correct? Correct. Yeah. That was a long process. That was five years of politics and city hall and legal battles and so forth.
00:09:04
Speaker
the city was going to have to spend 10 million dollars to tear it down so they knew they at least had to give me a shot to see if I could make it work and if I couldn't then they'd claw it back and they'd tear it down anyway so so the dollar was just sort of a yeah here you go try it see if you can do it or not if if not we'll just tear it down anyway
00:09:21
Speaker
But, you know, anything that's free is not free. It comes with a lot of liabilities, a lot of, you know, they might have actually had to make me tear it down if I couldn't do it. So I buy it for a buck and then have to spend 10 million dollars to have nothing left over. So, you know, luckily we didn't go down that path.
00:09:37
Speaker
But it took five years, like I said, of politics, a year of engineering, architecture, legal fees, historic tax credits, syndication, all that kind of stuff, just to put it together, just to have a huge mortgage and open up and hope that people were going to show up. Sure. And so it's a historic building. You've got some experience there. You also were in sports as well, right? So you were just like, this is a great opportunity.
00:10:02
Speaker
We're gonna make it work. And the building was built in 1974. It has some really cool stories. What are some of your favorite stories of the arena? There are stories all around this arena. When we're giving tours and we're walking on the ramp, we can tell people every cow, every motocross bike, every monster truck walks, ran right through here. So did Michael Jackson, so did Elvis. Everybody walked right on these floors and so forth, and they get freaked out by that.
00:10:29
Speaker
But you know the building in was originally building 74 for 32 million and then in the mid 90s They had to expand it to have more seating capacity to keep the big eight tournaments here So that's when the new structure came on in the atrium So they spent 34 million dollars just to add 2,000 more seats and do some upgrades and whatever
00:10:49
Speaker
And then we bought it and spent another $42 million renovating it. So it's had three lives and I'm sure it's not done yet. There's, I mean, next year there's a whole bunch of new stuff coming that's going to completely change the building again. So that might be its fourth life for all I know. And I don't know how much we're going to spend on that yet. I'm pretty excited to talk about that too. So.
00:11:06
Speaker
What do you have a memory of you coming? Did you ever come to Camp Arena when it was Camp Arena? Yeah, I mean, not as a kid, not till we moved here as adults. And I would bring my young kids here. I know we came to Arena Cross once and something on ice that I fell asleep on, you know, halfway through and the rodeo or whatever. And yeah, you're sitting in some of the seats going, wow, this is so cool. I wish I could be in one of those private suites. You know, and all, wow, wouldn't it be neat to own an arena someday and stuff like that. Yeah, you were always dreaming about
00:11:34
Speaker
could we ever achieve this kind of magnitude? You know, don't, you know, be careful what you ask for, because now you own it, and now you're like, ah crap, you know, what do I do? Yeah.
00:11:42
Speaker
Did you ever come as a kid or an adult? Yeah, I came down here as an adult, too, right after college. And I think my first memory was a Ringling Brothers circus. I used to go to the circus all the time as a kid, so the first time I came through here. And then I played arena football in here for a couple of years, too. So it's kind of... It's different now. When I walk in, I'm like, was this the original player entrance, or was this the bar down here? Unversally, nobody's cheering like they did before when you left. They were everything very often.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah, he's not kidding. He didn't watch Arena Football. He was the quarterback for Arena Football, so he was the, you know, the thing everybody was here to watch. It takes on a whole new meeting from coming in here day to day for sure. Some good hiding spots that we still use to this day. Yeah, so Steve, your motto is respecting the future, respecting the past as we build the future. What were some of the ways you were able to do that, honor that in this project?
Balancing History with Modern Updates
00:12:35
Speaker
One of our architects coined that phrase a long time ago when we were doing a lot of historic properties, and that just really fit our company. Like I said, we get a lot of weird or properties that people don't really want, so we don't change them as much. I mean, we have to work with what's there.
00:12:54
Speaker
We use historic tax credits, so we have to revitalize it to make it look very similar to what it was. There's certain areas we have some latitude. So we are respecting what used to be here in every way possible, but we had to modify it enough to be up to date and get rid of the obsolescence. So the chairs, the historic, a lot of the original fabric is still here. We just added to it.
00:13:15
Speaker
And if we have to, we can rip out some of this stuff and go back to almost original condition. That's part of the historic tax credits. Could you reverse it and put it back if something happened? Chris, what is one of your secret sauces to running a facility? A lot of planning. A lot of planning. So fortunately, a lot of our events are returned.
00:13:36
Speaker
tournament directors or event organizers. So building a relationship with them is extremely important. So we get as much information ahead of time as we can. A lot of their stuff stays the same from year to year. And just in communication with them and that good relationship for when you're hosting major events, there's bound to be some things that aren't going well or something will happen or everything's going really well.
00:13:59
Speaker
For that tournament director or whoever's in charge to be able to come to you and go hey We need this fixed or this isn't going right It's so you can be able to turn around and get that fixed immediately so everything stays kind of Seamless for the show a lot of stuff happens behind us and people in the seats or whatever don't really notice that but I think the first year was Establishing those relationships and just building trust, you know, we have a lot of like Steve was saying national events come through here They're really trusting us to know what we're doing and
00:14:29
Speaker
So their reputation and stuff is on the line You know, you take somebody like Nike or Under Armour there's 30 facilities in the country that they can choose from and Getting them here is one thing getting them to come back every year as a whole nother thing So that's kind of the secret sauce is really the relationship building because then everything else after that is just a lot of hard work and elbow grease There's
Hosting Major Events: Relationships and Adaptability
00:14:50
Speaker
no secrets. Sure. Sure. What's one solution that you found along the way that you're most proud of? Um
00:14:59
Speaker
I don't know if there's one that stands out but I think it's, I'm a football guy so we call them in-game adjustments. So like sometimes the parking lot will just get super packed or somebody will park wrong and it just really throws everything off. Being able to recognize that before comes a major problem and make adjustments. Same thing inside. If we're starting to feel something shifting inside where it's not gonna go right. Noticing that stuff early and being able to make those adjustments where it doesn't have any effect on
00:15:26
Speaker
no matter what we're doing inside, there's no effect on their actual product. I think that's what we're most proud of is that every weekend, the tournament director of whoever was in charge leaves here and goes, hey, this was awesome. We had a great experience here. That's great. I know that being said, you got a lot of people in the building. What's the most you've had in front of it?
00:15:45
Speaker
So unique, like Steve was talking earlier, we have the two different floors, so getting creative and how we use those. Early on, we had a cheerleading event downstairs, and we had a youth wrestling event upstairs, and a track meet up on a track going at the same time. And I'd say we're bursting out the scenes of probably just about 10,000 people in at one time. We, on a regular weekend, we'll run through 5,000 people, but that's...
00:16:10
Speaker
each day, not at one time, so it's kind of usually anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 people in a building at a time, which feels kind of empty.
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah, we were close to 10,000 people that day and there were a lot of challenges. So after thinking you've maximized your facility, you've won, what did you learn from actually having that many people in in those three different events? Do you do it again the same way or is there anything you learned from that? Never do it again the same way. We just, we learn, we take a lot of notes, we take a lot of post-event notes and we follow them away for when that event comes up the following year. What went well?
00:16:42
Speaker
what didn't go well, what could we do better, you know, stuff like that. And stuff with major events, it all depends on timing, where if it's one show, like a graduation, where you have 5,000 people show up at one time, or if it's an event where they kind of are continuous. I think the biggest things we learned out of those is you can never have enough janitors. If there's going to be 10,000 people in a building, we probably need 1,000 janitors.
00:17:08
Speaker
So one of my favorite things about the arena and that many people in here, you know, growing up, I wrestled and we did the stuffy gym or the community center and we're eating out of the cooler and the stands and nobody can move. The whole family's bored all day long and mad. But here you've got options of things to do. You've got food and beverage. You've got a bunch of different things with the whole family. So how important is food and beverage and how do you manage that?
Food and Beverage Operations
00:17:28
Speaker
So food and beverage is extremely important and we have
00:17:32
Speaker
several vendors right now, they're all independently owned and operated. So we really rely on them to be staffed up properly and be able to cycle through lines fast. We've learned when we have events that stay the whole day of wrestling or cheerleading, those guys are going to eat several times throughout the day, probably two or three times minimum and then a couple of snacks. And we just have to have really short ticket times. The worst is if somebody's standing in line for an hour and then they miss their kid's event or they're just
00:18:00
Speaker
out there forever, during a rest period or whatever, and we want to cycle them through pretty quickly. So we try it again. Again, we try to get the food and beverage folks as much information up front. This is when we expect everybody. This is how many we expect each hour, or this is a different kind of event where we're going to have a lot of people. So they'll prepare their food differently. They'll staff differently.
00:18:23
Speaker
We do occasionally a couple of times a year, we'll have food and beverage meetings where we all just get together, brainstorm, come up with some ideas. What changes can we make and et cetera like that. I'm sure. So Steve, if you started all over today, what would you do differently? Not do it at all? Not do it at all. Chris doesn't like that answer because he's done a great job here and it's good for him.
00:18:47
Speaker
I don't know, there's lots of answers. Obviously we're talking about our software here soon, that that couldn't have come soon enough that we needed that way earlier.
Marketing and COVID-19 Impact
00:18:56
Speaker
Marketing here is very hard if nobody believed we could do it. So I think our first year or two was just proving that we were good, we were up, we were running.
00:19:06
Speaker
And that other event we were trying to get had just signed a three-year contract with some of the facility. So we had to wait and wait and wait. So we didn't really hit the ground running very well. And then by the time we did get moving, COVID hit.
00:19:19
Speaker
Then we're completely shut down and we start all over from scratch again. Now we're just about back up to break even. So I think marketing and somehow social media and, you know, we're marketing all these different sports across local, regional, national and international, then your potential partners.
00:19:40
Speaker
I don't know how you market to that. I mean, we're marketing to almost everything and there's no billboard or TV ad or radio ad that will hit that. Yeah, you're definitely, you have so many different demographics, right? You want the big camps and clinics and the big tournaments from all over the nation. So you got to have a salesperson going after that. You also want the locals in here every day using the gym and using different things. So you got to market with that.
00:20:02
Speaker
You guys definitely have a lot of unique challenges there. I know we talked a little bit about Casey Crew, which is actually a company I own.
Luke Wade and Facility Ally's Role
00:20:08
Speaker
That's how I got involved with you in the beginning is I, you know, I was running sports leagues for adults and using 10 different community centers. And I saw this one stop shop for everything I needed. And I was like, I got to, I got to talk to that, see what's going on here. And I actually showed up at a city council meeting in the basement of this building. And that was my first introduction to it. So you guys are definitely marketing to a lot of different avenues, which makes it really challenging.
00:20:28
Speaker
And you had the foresight in the very beginning to know, I'm going to need something to manage this. So you're actually an investor in Facility Ally, which manages the rentals and reservations of the facility. So you want to talk about why that was so important to you? Well, so we started out looking at various facility software systems. And there's a lot of good ones out there. But when you get to how big this is and you can do a single pickleball court or the whole basketball court or half of it or half the floor, the whole floor, the whole building, there's just too many permutations. There's too many options.
00:20:56
Speaker
that no other software even came close to handling this. And we even tried another company before we teamed up with you and they still got, they couldn't understand it. Even the programmers couldn't understand what they were trying to build.
00:21:09
Speaker
And then we finally got another partner in here and they finally got it all pulled off. And still, I think there's still lots more we could do with scheduling, booking, payments, reserve scheduling, ahead of scheduling, AI type stuff. And as we get closer and closer to a vacancy date, how do we keep marketing and adjusting prices? So I think the software we've created obviously didn't exist anywhere else.
00:21:32
Speaker
is robust enough. It's handling everything we need right now, but I think there's a lot more we can do. I think that's some of the next chapters coming up is it's going to go way beyond what we ever expected. And then just operations wise, keeping track of all the scheduling, all the bracketing, all of the referees that are assigned to it. What jersey colors do you have? What's their numbers? All this kind of stuff that I never even thought of at all of the team dynamics and just keeping track of all those moving people, the 10,000 people we had moving through here.
00:22:03
Speaker
the system just handles it and I don't hear a word I guess you know Chris filters it all for me but it seems to all be handled autonomously. Yeah and to your point you know the person that couldn't understand how to build it for you the only reason I really you know having a background in software development I'd already built a league system which was using it to run my leagues.
00:22:21
Speaker
And then I worked with so many different facilities, I just saw the lack of management and double bookings and all these different things that were happening that by the time I talked to you, I had the idea of like, I think I can build something. And I think it was just the years and years of working with so many different facilities and seeing the issues there plus the software development. So it was a great time when you were like, hey, I need this. I'm like, I got the idea, I can do it. And so, like you said, it took a long time to get here, but we got a long way to go, but it's to a great point now in both Hy-Vee Arena and Facility Allire.
00:22:49
Speaker
excited to be here. We actually are office out of this building as well. We're one of the tenants in IB that work with Chris every day and appreciate to be here. So what's the future? You talked a little bit about more things coming down here. Is there anything you can share with like what's coming or some of the ideas that you're excited
Future Projects and Community Expansion
00:23:03
Speaker
about?
00:23:03
Speaker
Sure, there's the west bottoms in Kansas City is starting to grow. Other areas downtown are filled up, so stuff is moving down here. So there's apartments going up all around us. There's a lot more commercial activity, I think, coming down here in the future. And so we have some big things going on with the bridge that's going in next door facilitated the zip lines. A company says, what if we just ziplined off your roof?
00:23:28
Speaker
across the state line into Kansas, across the river, land on the other side, come back across the bridge, go back up to the roof, do it again. All these different zip lines, all this different aerial park. And if all of that activity is gonna start outside and we have 5,000 apartments now in the neighborhood, we need to become an indoor outdoor facility. We need more mini golf, more festivals, more things that KC Crew does as well to keep those people here to make it a destination, to make it more entertainment.
00:23:57
Speaker
to give Chris's people that are here for a tournament something else to do besides food and beverage. So we're making it way bigger, way more exciting for his visitors as well as the local visitors. Now we just have to figure out parking and logistics of getting people in and out of here.
00:24:14
Speaker
And no, he didn't say that incorrectly. Zip planning over a river from one state to another state, Missouri to Kansas, hopefully coming very soon. Shout out to our friends at the Rock Island Bridge, which is right across the street. One of a kind, never been done before as well. Bridge concept that's really unique and food and entertainment space. And so a lot going on down here. We're excited to be a part of it. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to learn more, check out Hy-Vee Arena.
00:24:39
Speaker
It's hivierina.com if you want to connect with Steve on LinkedIn or Chris go ahead and do so Thanks again for joining us today guys, and we'll see you next time