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Creating Engaging Programming for Adult Sports Leagues
47 Plays1 year ago
Are you interested in starting your own adult sports leagues? If so, you've come to the right place. Whether you're a sports enthusiast or a facility manager looking to expand your offerings, the journey to running successful adult sports leagues can be both rewarding and profitable.
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Transcript
Introduction to KC Crew and Facility Ally
00:00:00
Speaker
This week on the Facility Playbook we sat down again with Greg and Mitch from KC Crew. Last time we talked to them it was filled with so much information we had to break it into two parts and in this episode we're talking about how to over deliver for all of your experiences from basketball to cornhole to pickleball. How do you manage those leagues? How do you create an amazing experience for the people playing in those leagues? And I hope you enjoy this episode with KC Crew.
00:00:27
Speaker
What's up, everybody? Do you own or manage a facility? Well, you are in the right place. Welcome to the Facility Playbook. I'm Luke Wade, founder and CEO of Facility Ally, and this podcast is about helping facility managers and owners learn from pioneers and veterans in the industry who have already built and managed successful sports facilities, entertainment venues, and clubs. Did you know that most of those facilities I just mentioned use between four and six different softwares to manage their reservations, memberships, lessons, leagues, camps, and clinics, and more?
00:00:55
Speaker
revolutionize your facility with Facility Ally's all-in-one system. Learn more at facilityallyy.com.
KC Crew's Unique Hiring Process
00:01:02
Speaker
And today I'm really excited to be here at the Casey Crue offices and wear two hats today, but introduce Greg Malloy, General Manager of Casey Crue, Manager of General Things, and Mitch LaMendola, League Director among many other things with Casey Crue. Thanks guys for joining me today. I know you didn't have an option, but I appreciate it.
00:01:23
Speaker
I appreciate you being here. Thanks for having us. What are some extra things that Casey Crew does to make it fun? So I'll touch on the staffing. So we've really revamped how we do our hiring, our staffing from the very beginning.
00:01:38
Speaker
High level, we essentially add multiple different steps to make sure if we get 70 people fill out the application, the next step is going to cut out 40 of those people because they're obviously not committed, they don't want to do this. The next step, that cuts out the next half of people who we don't think would be good fits.
00:01:54
Speaker
So it's a multiple-step process to get down to five qualified candidates, and out of those five, we usually get one or two. So it's not just having someone come in saying, hey, you're hired. It's adding multiple steps to find, and it's putting barriers to find people who are gonna jump through those.
00:02:11
Speaker
based on, you know, what you're going to want out of your employees. So we want people who are social, who are fun, who are active, who aren't engaging. We call them the fun answer, the fun uncles out the leagues. So that's, you know, if you look at most other leagues around town, they might just have an official who's out there to get a paycheck, make calls, go home. Our staff is out there to welcome you the moment you get to the fields, you know, check in to have a conversation with you, call the game, make it fun, make it interactive.
00:02:35
Speaker
and just put the extra care into it, because you can miss every other call. But if you're trying, if you're running out to the bases,
00:02:42
Speaker
They're going to yell at you a lot less than if you're just standing back there and they don't even know what your name is. And I think that's one of the things I focused on from day one was, you know, and that was an experience I had in another league. You know, I went to ask the official what the score was because there wasn't a scoreboard and he wouldn't tell me what the score was. And I just thought, man, why don't we have a scoreboard so everybody can see it and you're not bothering the official? And then I thought, well, why are you bothering the official? You shouldn't be a thing. These officials should want to talk to you and socialize with you. So when we started Casey Krew,
00:03:07
Speaker
It was essentially, let's not hire the officials who went to official school and all they care is about the rules. Let's hire people who are fun and social and teach them the rules they need to know to be successful at their position. And so that's, I think, made us really, really different in that we're not... and per sport, right? So now we've learned along the way, once we added basketball, we were like, we need officials that went to basketballs training. We need real...
00:03:28
Speaker
We need real referees that know what they're doing because the competitiveness of basketball, the physicalness, it's a real deal. So depending on the sport, depending on what you're offering, you can go a couple different ways. And to Greg's point, looking at hiring as a funnel is really, really important.
00:03:44
Speaker
to his point, they're going along the steps and you're funneling down your best people that are gonna turn out to be the best people for
Staffing and Relationship Building
00:03:50
Speaker
your leagues. Because at the end of the day, these two guys and an additional staff member manage 4,000, 15,000 people a year in leagues. They're not on the fields every single day talking to every single one of these players all over the city, our part-time staff are. So it's really important to find the right people who represent your business, Casey Crew, in the right way because they're the ones that everybody's seeing every week. They're the ones that they're interacting with.
00:04:12
Speaker
And so you've got to make it really important to hire the right people, train them the right way, and then support them, you know, give them what they need. And so maybe let's talk about the officials and how we kind of manage them and are making it so that they have the support that they need. Oh, touching on just a last point, we have the same officials every week at the location.
00:04:32
Speaker
And I think that's what makes us awesome is those officials get to know their players. They get to know them by name. We ask them to know at least the captain's names. And the captains and the players know the official's names. So in the weekly reviews, they can put that official as the person they know because that official becomes an actual person to them, not just a ref. So they're seeing them week after week. We have people say, hey, where's this official working this season? We want to work in their league, which to me, that's awesome.
00:04:56
Speaker
That's why people are coming back, because they love their officials, they love their monitors. I go ref a league sometimes, and someone's like, where's Joe? I want Joe. I'm like, dang, Joe. So I'd love to hear that. And one way we communicate with them is before each season, we have a kickoff meeting where it's
00:05:14
Speaker
Meeting where I can see everybody in person because like you said we have 100 different leagues 15,000 different people playing We have a part-time staff of 60. So all different locations. Unfortunately, I can't make out to every location every night wish I could But we have a kickoff meeting before each season where we can go over any updates any new procedures any problems are having anything they're seeing out in the fields because like you said there are eyes and ears out there for KC crew if they see something that needs to be fixed and
00:05:42
Speaker
I'm going to fix it, feedback from our staff. I'm always asking feedback. We ask for feedback midway through the season. Is there something that's going on? Is there a rule that you guys think is stupid that we need to change? Because you're the ones calling the rules. So the kickoff meeting is something, time for me to interact with them and also provide drinks and food and stuff like that and say thank you. Something we do for them is an on-fire program. I think it's a really cool program we do here at KC Crew where we reward great work.
00:06:10
Speaker
So we have our base pay for every sport. It varies depending on how much work is involved. If you're reffing, if you're only monitoring, if you require setup, it varies. But then on average, if you show up to your job, if you're getting awesome reviews, if you're wearing your jersey, if you're not losing equipment, you get a bump in pay, average about $3 per sport. What that means is after three perfect shifts, you get that bump up in pay.
00:06:38
Speaker
our kickoff meeting is not a mandatory meeting but you get free food and free drinks and if you show up you start the season on fire. So it's just an incentive for people to come interact with each other because like you said we have a lot of different sports where some people only do basketball, some people only do softball. Well then you may never meet the basketball people if they don't meet outside of that league so they get to meet with everybody and see oh yeah there's a lot of people who work for KC Crew not just basketball.
00:07:02
Speaker
So it's also, and someone's like, oh, I didn't know we had the sports. I'm going to go work in basketball now. We have different officials that ref everything, because they love what they do.
Communication and Incentives
00:07:11
Speaker
On the management side of officials, we use a couple different applications. Slack is what we use to communicate with them. That way it's on our phones, and we have different channels. So I like to pride myself in that we're very organized. So we have a different channel for announcements, for procedures, per sport, and things like that. That way, if I only need to talk to the basketball people,
00:07:30
Speaker
the sand volleyball people aren't getting that information as well because that's just information they don't need. Or if someone needs to find our injury waiver to fill out, if someone gets injured, it's in a specific location that way they know where to find it and they're not calling me at 11 o'clock and I'm like, hey Mitch, what's the link to this? They know where to go. They can be self-efficient out there on the field.
00:07:49
Speaker
And then to manage their time, clock in, clock out. We use, it's now called Workforce. It used to be QuickBooks Time Workforce. We put their schedules in there. They can see their full schedule in advance. I think it's one of the best things about having someone all season long. We ask them to commit to seven weeks. It's not a long time. Say, hey, when are you available for the summer season?
00:08:10
Speaker
you don't work three nights a week, great, I'll plug you in. And they see it on their phone, they can clock in on their phone. That way, at our 15 different locations on a Monday night, I can see where everybody is. At 6.15, if someone is not there, I give them a call, oh, they're just running in traffic, great, I can run out there myself and get the league started. So it's a great tool to see where people are, who's clocked in, who's working where, and then they can see their full schedule in advance as well.
00:08:36
Speaker
like, hey Mitch, I'm on vacation this week. Great, I can pull that off. I see it's unassigned a week before, and then I send it out to everybody. Who wants to sub this shift?
00:08:46
Speaker
Throw it on their schedule. So we don't like to overstaff. We like to have enough staff where people can enjoy their lives. So yes, I ask you to commit to seven weeks, but life happens. People get sick. People take vacations. If you let me know in advance, I can find someone because we have enough staff to work shifts. A lot of times I'll throw, hey, is a sub shift available next Monday at this location? Three minutes away? Three minutes after that, someone's like, I'll take it. And I think that's just building your relationship with your staff members.
00:09:13
Speaker
being open with communication with them. Yeah, and I'm gonna deep dive on two things there. I think the two biggest things, when I was managing this several years ago, I was struggling with part-time staff, couldn't find people to work, couldn't find people to show up to their shifts, backing out last minute all the time, which means we had to cover last minute. We were working every night, we were stressed out, and so two things I believe completely flipped that and changed that around.
00:09:35
Speaker
was essentially the hiring program where we funnel people down and essentially they apply, they fill out a form, we have a meeting, they do training, so it's all the way down to make sure we're finding the perfect person to work for us. That's a complete match for our entire system. And then the second piece is essentially the on-fire program. So once you find the right person, incentivizing them on how they should do the perfect job. And what we used to do was punish people.
00:09:58
Speaker
You don't show up for your league, you lose a shift. You don't clock in, you don't wear your shirt, you lose a shift. So we were punishing people which actually hurt us as a business as well because now we got to find somebody else to take their shift. So what we did was completely flip it on his head and turn it into a positive thing.
00:10:14
Speaker
Hey, what's a perfect shift look like showing up five minutes early, wearing your uniform? All these different things make this a perfect shift. Well, if you make a perfect shift three times in a row, you're committed. We want to reward you for that. So now you're paid $3 an hour for every hour you work while you're on fire. If you have an imperfect shift, you show up late, you don't wear your jersey, whatever happens, you get back knocked down to regular pay and you have to have three again before you're back on fire. So those two things, in my opinion now,
00:10:40
Speaker
created it defined what we needed from people it gave them direction it gave them incentivization and so they know that hey if I do these things I can make more money or I can you know I'm doing better I'm almost like gamifying it and making it to another level and so and note and those two things that we've done in the last three years and maybe there's another one you guys want to add I believe it's completely changed it we're not struggling with finding staff anymore we're not having to work shifts you're not having to go out there and work in the evening so in my opinion those two things just completely changed the game for us for part-time staff
00:11:06
Speaker
And I think Mitch, the last thing he said was just his relationship with the part time
Training and Community Integration
00:11:10
Speaker
staff. So thinking about it, it's funny. Like we talk all the time. We both worked for enterprise and we've taken pieces that we've learned from enterprise and brought them over and implemented them into KC cruise. So one thing is enterprise, I worked at the airport. We had VAs who were, they cleaned their cars for us. If they liked you, you got clean cars. If you did, if they didn't know who you were and they didn't like you, your life was going to be not very fun. So first thing I did when I got up there,
00:11:34
Speaker
I shook everyone's hand. I introduced myself. I got to know all them. So whenever I needed clean cars, I had clean cars. So Mitch, he does an excellent job of getting to know every single part-time staff that we have as more than just a part-time staff, you know, by their names.
00:11:47
Speaker
He knows where they live. He has their contact info. Sounds creepy, but it helps him out just because if he, you know, when he's planning out all the leagues, if he has two people that say they can each work two different locations, but he knows this person lives closer to that one, this person lives closer to that one, he just assigns them because it makes the most sense. And our staff knows that. They trust Mitch that, you know, he's going to put them in a position to, you know, make them as successful as possible. If they need something out of location, softballs, pickle balls, the volume line's broken.
00:12:15
Speaker
He's out there the next day getting it fixed, so when they show up the next time, everything's all good to go. And that's awesome. And so I think, one, get yourself a Mitch. Two, as a business owner or someone who is outside of it thinking like, well, what happens if Mitch leaves or what happens if something happens to Mitch?
00:12:30
Speaker
Well, we've started creating trainings and programs and systems so that, you know, we already have somebody that works under Mitch. We're going to have somebody that works under him so that we can train all of our staff in this manner, in this way so Mitch can take vacations. So Mitch can do different things so he can kind of move up. And one of the things we're working on is lead consulting and we're working with facilities for that. And Mitch is really starting to help us out with that. And so the systems and trainings are really important when you have a rock star. You know, one of my favorite things is he's creating the training. He's the one that knows everything. So he can help create the training for the next person.
00:12:59
Speaker
which can help train exactly the way that Mitch does things. So we're essentially making little Mitch's that can help fill his spot. So I think that's really important though. And I highly, you know, if you've got a great employee, one of the things you can do is have them essentially make their own training because they know everything. They know what should be done and you can overview it. But the best thing to test it is to give it to the next person and have them work on it as well and have them train with it. So I think that's really important.
00:13:22
Speaker
So, what's one of the wildest things we've seen in the leagues that you guys have ever seen in the leagues? What's one of the wildest things you've seen? Oh, you take this, Greg? So, it was, I think, five or six years ago. It was a dodgeball championship for a league. And I go out there to take photos of the tournament, the champions, all that. And I'm standing next to my employee, Adam, and it's the championship game.
00:13:42
Speaker
It finishes, the team wins, everyone's all excited. And he leans over, he's like, hey, just start taking pictures. I was like, what? Why? I mean, are we gonna wait for the trophies and all that? He's like, shut up, just start taking pictures. So I see one of the players get down on a knee and I'm like, oh, all right, gonna take as many pictures as I can. And it was cool. So Matt and Renee, they met playing KC crew through dodgeball. A couple of years later got married or won the championship. Matt proposed to Renee. Obviously she said yes. And then at the wedding, we actually,
00:14:11
Speaker
I got invited out, we went from the wedding, and Renee is a school teacher, so we stopped at her school, did an impromptu dodgeball game, and then went from there to the wedding reception. So that was probably the coolest memory that I've been a part of with Casey Crew, just seeing it all come together. It's a league of people coming to have fun. It's two people connecting for a life.
00:14:32
Speaker
It's a unique experience, you know, then that carries over into the wedding. So just seeing it all come full circle and being a part of it was awesome. That's awesome. I don't think I can top that. I just think the connections people make. I mean, people tell us all the time, I met my best man playing KC Crew. I met my wife, my fiance, my husband, my life partner. I made new best friends. We have a cool free agent system. I don't think we've touched on that at all, where if people come to Kansas City,
00:15:01
Speaker
They don't know anybody, but they want to do something. Well, they sign up for our free agent system, where we do free agent teams in kickball, softball, pickleball, all the sports, and put people together that necessarily don't have a full team. Maybe they're playing softball and they have a couple friends that want to play together, but we pair them with other people that have a couple friends, and then they create teams together. We have multiple teams that are playing kickball and softball and saying volleyball, where they met as free agents, fast forward three years down the line, now they're still playing together, they go out to the bars after together.
00:15:29
Speaker
and do those fun things. They've created friends for life through KC Crew and I think that's what makes our jobs awesome is seeing those things happen. Sure, and I think several things there to your point. One, I met my wife playing volleyball before KC Crew existed. Also, I've met so many friends that I'm still friends with today through KC Crew.
00:15:48
Speaker
And then the other piece I definitely want to touch on is the bar of the week before we forget. But the free agent side, one of my favorite things that happened to me as a free agent was I actually had a kickball team and I needed an extra female to play on the team due to the co-ed rules. And so I'm searching through the free agent list just inviting females to my team. And one of the females that ended up joining my team comes, plays the first week, I meet her, she ends up playing the second week, and then by the third week I saw her on the news.
00:16:12
Speaker
as an anchor, and I just started dying laughing. I had no idea she was on TV. I drafted this news anchor to play on my kickball team, and she'd been playing me for two weeks and had no idea. Still good friends with her to this day, but I just thought it was really cool. She moved in from out of town to take this job, didn't know anybody, and was able to meet a lot of our friends and through that kickball league, so that was really cool. And then, yeah, the freedom thing is awesome. It's great for the people who just need one or two people. It's great for a bunch of people who don't know anyone to meet new friends, and then you have a lot of cool experiences where you meet your wife or your friend or whatever through it.
00:16:42
Speaker
And so the next thing is Bar of the Week. Let's talk a little bit about that. So obviously you've got 24 to 35 year olds, young, demographic, they're wanting to go out, they're wanting to socialize, you know, they can do that at the games each week. But essentially we looked at how do we provide more value. So maybe talk a little bit about the Bar of the Week.
00:17:00
Speaker
It's called the Bar of the Week program, so every week we have a different bar of the week. And so I'm always finding new bars and new locations. And where it is, it's a place for people to go after. So one of our core values is building community. So build community here at KC Crew, in our office, in individual teams, people playing together. But then how can we have them stay as a community outside of the leagues? So Luke, you created this awesome program where
00:17:25
Speaker
For everybody playing KC Crew at that bar of the week, they get weekly specials. So some bars, it's $1, $2 off drafts, or it's a special on a specific product. And then for the teams that win each week, they get a double bonus. So you go play in KC Crew, you win your game, you get free chips for KSO at that bar of the week, right after your game, or up to three days after. And then the teams that go the most that week, so it's all week long, Saturday through Sunday, they check in on League Ally.
00:17:54
Speaker
they get a $100 gift card for going to the bar a week and just checking in. So I look at it as almost another funnel, is everybody in KC Crew gets the weekly specials. If you win your games, you get that double bonus, and then only one team of all 700 teams a week win the $100 gift card. So it's a way for people to keep that community outside just the games. So they go to the bar of the week, where a basketball team and a kickball team that may never interact are seeing each other at the bar, all wearing KC Crew shirts.
00:18:21
Speaker
Oh cool, it's a win-win for our community because they get to all week long a bar that may be dead on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday gets people coming to the bar.
00:18:32
Speaker
that may never heard of that bar. So marketing for them, service for our players, and then us. We also ask for $100 gift cards for our office because we want to make it a win for us. And then we go out there and patronize the bar for team outings. So we're trying to build community in everything we do and make it a win.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. And how this started was, again, me looking at other leagues and saying, you know, I'm playing in this other league for seven weeks and I can go to the same bar every week. Well, after week two or three, it's the team doesn't want to go there anymore. They want to go try somewhere else or somewhere different. And so that was the reason I was like, well, we should do a bar of the week program. And in the beginning, it was very, very difficult. People didn't really know who we were. I had to go to lunch every day at a different bar and get to know the bartenders and try and beg them to do this.
00:19:15
Speaker
Well, then the next thing you know, it's like, wait, you're driving thousands of people in during the week, Monday through Thursday when nobody was here before or Sunday through Thursday. And it turned into a huge positive once we were able to drive more people in using the double bonus system and the free nachos and free things like that, which we've learned along the way on how to exactly do that.
00:19:32
Speaker
and now the bars actually pay us to be a part of this. So it became a revenue generator for Casey Crue, and then we're also able to sell sponsorship on top of it, so the bars run specials on whatever product that we ran sponsorship on. So it became a really big win for us as a company, but also for the bars and the restaurants we work with to drive people in during the week, and then our participants get free stuff, they get to check out new places, and so I think that's a really, really big win.
00:19:55
Speaker
Some of you may be, how the heck do you manage it? Well, it's a lot of work reaching out to the bars, but once you prove yourself one season, they come back every single year, every single season, which is really, really cool. The second piece is our software. Facility Ally, League Ally manages it. You put the bars in, you put the double bonus in, you put the check-in information in, and it's automated. The staff puts in the scores.
00:20:15
Speaker
it automatically calculates the winner emails a coupon to everybody on the team they walk in the bar click a button for redeeming they can check in through the software so facility ally is really what makes this possible otherwise it'd be a nightmare which it was back in the day when i used to print the coupons cut them and hand them to the winning teams to take into the bar so the software really helped automate a lot of that stuff and i think that's a huge win so a couple more things and then we'll wrap this up you mentioned shirts let's just briefly touch on shirts because shirts have been
00:20:40
Speaker
a nightmare and we've talked many times about should we keep doing shirts so we not keep doing shirts so let's talk about the shirts yeah uh like you said it's all based on feedback uh shirts start off us ordering them and hand delivering them to every
00:20:56
Speaker
Location in a bag said hey, who
Marketing and Growth Strategies
00:20:59
Speaker
is John? Here's your large? Who's Sally? Here's your whatever Mark? Yeah And now it's growing to all I send in a list to our shirt provider and they Orla shirts print all the shirts package all shirts and send them out to our players So they arrive to each person individually in their mailbox And ready to go before the first game one reason why we require shirts we
00:21:23
Speaker
We require one shirt per calendar year. So right now if you play once with K.C. Crew, you have to buy one and then if you play again in the same season or again in 2023, you're not required to purchase a shirt. A lot of people do purchase different shirts for different colors, but it helps.
00:21:39
Speaker
advertise the league. So people wearing the shirts around town. Or if they go to another league, someone in I think Milwaukee or some other town, we're wearing a KC Crew shirt playing in the pickleball league. So that's really cool. So advertising, whenever it goes in the bar of the week, they're all wearing the KC Crew shirts. It builds that community. And then
00:21:57
Speaker
in sports where you need like kickball and softball where there's two teams that are mixing then everybody has the same color shirt. There's good positives, good negatives. We'll probably go around around for the next couple years on shirts. Best practices on them and every league, every club has their perfect thing for shirts and I think that's just listening to feedback on players on
00:22:21
Speaker
they want. Yeah and I think there's several things there on shirts that we've just gone through and one it was I didn't change the shirt design every single year so people three four five years in a row they were like we just keep buying the same shirt every year and so that was a big opening like well maybe we should change the shirt design every year and we started doing a costume or a contest to design the shirt and people love that and then we started just coming up with a really cool city focused design. We have our 10-year design that Greg is displaying right here modeling
00:22:46
Speaker
And so we try and change it every year depending on what the vibe is or the, you know, if there's something cool that year, let's make it a cool design that people want to wear the shirt. They want to wear it to Royals games, Chiefs games, sporting games, and then that gives us walking billboards, which is really cool. Again, as a business, it's really difficult to manage, especially if you don't have a shirt provider like we do, which we just switched to a couple years ago.
00:23:06
Speaker
But before that, we were literally packing every single shirt, shipping it to every person individually. That was a lot of work, but also gave him the opportunity to be like, hey, we know where every single person lives. We know the demographics. We can now sell flyers to go in these shirts to different people and became a sponsorship opportunity for us.
00:23:22
Speaker
And then once we got tired of doing it ourselves, we found an awesome local partner that can ship and manage every single shirt individually. So now we don't touch any of these shirts. The negative part of that was we did have to increase our shirt fees a little bit, but it covered the cost. We make a little bit on shirts, but at the end of the day, it's really about marketing, exposure, and trying to make it a cool design for our players. And that's how we think about shirts. Again, the software collects all of that information as everybody signs up, and we just ship it off to our people. So that makes it really, really easy.
00:23:50
Speaker
What's the best mistake you've ever made? I just let right into it from shirts. What's the best mistake you've ever made? I touched on it earlier, but leaving Casey Cruze while I was here 2014, two years part-time and then two years full-time 2016 to 2018. Then I left, went to Enterprise, went to kind of the corporate world.
00:24:11
Speaker
And like I touched on earlier, like we're pulling pieces that we learned, you know, Mitchell's enterprise to different pieces of the business. Like we started talking through how we can make additions to Casey crew and we start talking through something and then we're like, this is exactly like this was an enterprise. So it's just cool to see, you know, it actually pay off. So you go there, you see the real world, you see how these companies are, you know, expanding the structure and across, you know, nations or international.
00:24:35
Speaker
And again, training is a big piece of it as well. So what training processes do you have in place? How do you expand quickly? And then again, what processes can you have to just optimize your performance across the board? So leaving there and then coming back, kind of having, you know, taking a breath, having a fresh breath of air.
00:24:51
Speaker
And coming back in was probably the best mistake I ever made. Can I say ditto to that? You sure can. You sure can. And I think, from my end, the best mistake was letting you guys go. At the time when you guys were like, hey, we could go here and make more money, and Casey Crue was just getting started.
00:25:09
Speaker
it made sense right I was like look that that's a great opportunity for you for your lives you know it's a different vibe when you go to the corporate world compared to like working in a small startup or a small business and it really was like for me it was like man I don't want to leave these guys but I don't know what to do as a business right so you guys
00:25:24
Speaker
And then for me, coming back was one of the coolest things ever. It was like, wow, I actually did something right. They want to come back. And so that was really cool for me to be able to look at that because it was hard to do from then. But to have it come full circle and you guys come back and really take it over and make it your own and make it better has just been a really cool thing for me. To tie in one of our core values, freedom.
00:25:45
Speaker
You don't value freedom until you lose it. So Casey Crue, you know, back the first time we were here, we, you know, I'd say we had freedom. We didn't have our core values in place, but, you know, we left, went to the corporate world. I was on, I had to be here at this time. I had, you know,
00:25:59
Speaker
Had my one hour lunch break, I was off the clock here, just felt like I was kind of a cog in the machine and working on someone else's schedule. I get back here, I get the opportunity to make my own schedule, and it's so much nicer not having to worry about what time you're in at the office. You get to work when you want to, but we all work in the office as a team.
00:26:17
Speaker
Just the fun aspect. I mean, another core value, fun. Fun is everything we do. If you're not having fun playing sports, you're doing it wrong. If we're not having fun in the office, for those watching, you can see our awesome office behind us. We play beer pong. We play pickleball on the courts in Hy-Vee Arena. So we like to have fun. And we don't take it for granted now that we've been in the corporate world where things are very structured and time-wise. You only have fun when they tell you you can have fun.
00:26:41
Speaker
Not silly, but when they bring pizza party, if we're like, hey, we're bored, let's go play, or we're stressed, let's go play pickleball, let's go do something, let's go shoot hoops. We really enjoy that now that we have more work in here. Awesome. So last question, if somebody was a facility and they're looking to start their own leagues, what's the advice that you'd recommend that they start with?
Strategic Planning and Future Discussions
00:27:01
Speaker
You want to touch on that?
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it goes back to talking. If you have your own facility or are ahead of the game, you have a location you can run leagues at. So talk to the people that are coming into your facility. When do they want leagues to happen? If you run leagues on Sunday nights, but no one wants to do league Sunday nights, then they're going to fail. So talk to your people coming into your facility and running leagues when they want to play in the leagues.
00:27:24
Speaker
And what do they want to play? Let's say you have a great big space and they want to play kickball, play kickball. If you can do cornhole leagues, do cornhole leagues. So really talking with people and getting that feedback because I think that's what makes our league successful is we're always innovating, always asking for feedback and that can start from the beginning on what to offer. Great. You have anything? Yeah, I would say, you know, really before you start, do your homework. You know, is this something that we even have the manpower to put on?
00:27:52
Speaker
If not, does it make sense, like, can you do it, but would you need to outsource it, bring in a company who does know how to do it? Because we've gone to businesses in town before, said, hey, let us help you do your leagues. They say, no, we got it. They try it. A year later, they email us, hey, can you guys actually help come run our leagues? Doesn't always happen. Sometimes organizations figure it out. It just depends if you need a league. It's not a five hour thing.
00:28:18
Speaker
maybe possibly hundreds of hours throughout, you know, a couple of different months of planning, organizing, consolidating, staffing, schedules, who's going to manage the day of, who, you know, there's a lot of pieces that go into it. So do your homework, make sure you know the full extent of kind of what you're getting into of doing it the right way. And if you don't think you have, because if you try it and you fail,
00:28:39
Speaker
That's 100 to however many people that came in that had a bad experience. They're not gonna come back if you try again. So when you do it, you wanna make sure you do it right the first time. So again, just really do your homework and make sure you know everything that you wanna put into it and how much time it's gonna take.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yep, I would echo that as far as do your homework. You know, I look at the gaps. So if there's nobody running pickleball in your area and you can run pickleball, start with pickleball. Don't start a softball league right next to another softball league because now you're competing head to head unless you have a really good offering that you're coming after. And so I think that's a really big piece. Do your homework, offer what's in the gap, and then yeah, make sure you can staff it. And the other piece is marketing. A lot of people, a lot of facilities think they can just start a league and people are going to sign up.
00:29:20
Speaker
You've got to know where you're marketing it, how you're marketing it. Is it basketball? Well, where do the basketball players hang out? How do I market to the basketball players? So those two things, in my opinion, make sure you do your education, make sure it's set up the correct way, priced correctly, can be managed, and then you have a marketing plan before you get out there.
00:29:37
Speaker
use Facility Ally, check it out at facilityallie.com. If you're looking to get into leagues, rentals, those sort of things, you can do all that, manage it all with Facility Ally. Or ask us. Or yeah, or hire us, consulting. So yeah, today we deep dive on leagues. Obviously, we've been talking about leagues. Casey Crude does much, much more. We're going to have a future conversation on tournaments, corporate events, nonprofit fundraising. We got a lot going on with these guys, all using Facility Ally. So look for future episodes. Thanks for joining us today about leagues, but we can't wait to see you next time.