Since you’ve already established the summary of your business objectives and the details of how you plan to introduce your sports facility to the community, it’s time to describe exactly how you want your facility to operate. The operational segment of your business plan should consist of two categories: the facility’s physical building and equipment, and facility’s human resources, or staff.

Part 1: Infrastructure

Describe all of the equipment you will need to run the facility and discuss how the equipment will be used. List estimated costs, both upfront and ongoing as the equipment needs to be replaced, and include all taxes and the cost of getting the equipment installed or built.

Also describe the physical building that will house your sports facility, including details such as square footage. Include a few sentences about why the facility is suitable for your needs. List the costs in both time and money of the purchase or rental and maintenance of your physical facility, including cleaning, estimated repairs, and utility costs.

Here’s an example of an introduction to the infrastructure portion of your operations plan: DNA Sports Center’s facility features an open turf field that can be split into various pitching tunnels and batting cages. It also features a weight room for strength training, an office for staff, and a wireless internet enabled waiting area for parents. Since we are operating out of a previous fitness facility, our physical costs will be kept to a minimum by taking advantage of the resources already available. The following equipment will need to be purchased and installed:

Part 1: Staff

In this part of the operations plan, describe the the staff positions at your facility. List the job titles and descriptions, including their specific duties, in detail. Discuss the hours each person will work each week and describe how each staffer will be paid.

Also briefly note your sports facility’s regular hours of operation, and describe when services would be offered to maximize revenue.

Here’s an example of an introduction to the staff portion of your operations plan: DNA Sports Center will hire qualified candidates for the following positions: Office Manager, Speed and Agility program director / Sales Director, Director of Baseball Operations, Director of Midwest Prospects (an elite baseball team). The rest of our staff, including sports-specific instructors, will be considered contractors. (list goes here.)

If you would like to consult with Mike Meszaros about how to maximize profit in your sports facility, contact us!

Now that your mission statement and summary are established, it’s time to consider how you will present your sports facility to your potential clients and make sure that it is well-known in your market.

Promotion and Brand development. How do you want your sports facility to be perceived by the public? Write a few sentences describing the words and feelings that should be associated with your sports facility, and consider which colors you want to use to help establish your brand. Your sports facility should also have a professional logo for use on your web site, correspondence and apparel. It’s worth the investment to create a quality logo with an affordable online service such as LogoBee or 99 Designs if you don’t have a logo yet.

For example: DNA Sports Center’s brand identity will be energetic, athletic and professional, and should appeal to both kids and adults. Brand colors will be dark red, gray and black. 

For example: Young athletes around the Cincinnati area are looking for an accredited, professional program for sports fundamentals, as evidenced by the high number of similar programs within 40 minutes of driving time of this facility. However, competing programs don’t have the legitimacy and professional branding that a Parisi Speed School provides. There are also no speed and agility programs within the immediate Milford area. DNA Sports Center will charge between $100 and $300 per month for unlimited access to speed and agility training, which reflects the exclusive, semi-private nature of our training. (Adding additional details about the packages available is a good idea.)

Staff / Sales Rep. If you’re planning to hire someone to help you generate new leads and develop relationships to bring in new business at your sports facility, note that here in your marketing plan. A good sales rep with established connections in the community can be your strongest marketing asset. Briefly describe the position of these employees or staff members and include how much you will pay them.

For example: DNA Sports Center will employ a sales rep that will be paid a __ base salary plus __% commission for all new memberships he or she sells at the facility. This employee is expected to generate __ leads/memberships per week/month.

Other Paid Marketing Opportunities

Consider implementing the following marketing methods. All of them can be effective to making your facility known to the community, especially if you are new to the area and are trying to establish connections.

• Email marketing – Costs for a professional program such as Constant Contact starts around $30/month and go up depending on how many contacts you store in your database. eSoft Planner, the scheduling software my company created for sports facilities, also has a more basic e-mail marketing system built in.
• Search Engine Optimization – Consider the costs to make sure you have a search-engine-friendly web site. Blogging or updating a news section on your sports facility’s web site is a good way to enhance your visibility in search engines – the more keyword-targeted pages your web site has, the greater your chances of showing up in online search results. This is a particularly cost-effective way to market your business, but you will need to consider if you will hire a professional or pay someone on your staff to handle this and note the costs in your marketing plan.
• Advertising and Sponsorships - You know your community. What are the influential media or organizations in the area that will be noticed by your potential audience? List the costs to advertise in these organizations. If you’re having a grand opening event, you can work with local media to make sure the event is covered.

Prospective sports facility owners often ask me for advice on creating a business plan. I tell them that creating a plan is essential, even if you don’t need to present it to potential investors, because it forces you think through the feasibility of what you’re about to undertake and clarify what you’re trying to accomplish.

Unfortunately, many exceptionally skilled former athletes and coaches who are interested in starting their own facilities subconsciously assume that their passion for their sport and their reputation in the community will be enough to sustain a business. Although an established network of clients is definitely key to getting started, running a sports facility typically requires a big upfront investment and plenty of ongoing overhead costs, so you’ll need a lot more than your passion for helping athletes; you’ll need a solid plan and plenty of business sense. Creating a business plan according to the guidelines we’ll discuss here will help make sure you have those things.

The first step in creating your business plan is to identify your mission by summarizing the following things:

• the business’ overall objective
• the services your facility will provide in order to fulfill that mission
• the business’ audience (or the market for your services)
• how the business will compete with similar products/services on the market
• how the business will make money

There’s no need to go into great detail or start crunching numbers in this part of your plan; a concise description is best.

Objective

Can you describe your business’ objective in a few sentences? Clarifying your main mission will be integral to marketing your facility, as well as leading your company forward and keeping your staff focused. As an example, the mission of DNA Sports Center (my sports facility in Cincinnati) is to “Develop a New Athlete” by focusing on teaching kids how to move before sports-specific training.

Products/Services

Describe the products/services you will offer, and discuss why your audience needs or wants these products/services. For example:

DNA Sports Center will offer speed, strength and agility training that focuses on building self-confidence for all athletes. Other services will include sports specific training, batting cages, and use of the facility for parties and events.

Audience

Add a few details about who will use your product. Briefly describe their age ranges, where they live, their income levels, their interests, and their skill levels. For example:

DNA Sports Center’s services will benefit kids age 6 through high school, although programs for adults and younger children will also be available. Our services will appeal to those athletes who are striving to improve their skills. DNA Sports Center is located in the suburb of Milford and is in close proximity to many sports-oriented school districts and plenty of families.

Competition

Explain why the need for your services is not being addressed by current facilities or services that are already accessible to your audience. What will make your facility better or different? For example:

DNA Sports Center is home to the area’s only Parisi Speed School, which offers a proven successful curriculum for improving speed, agility and strength.

Revenue Plan

Is there a main revenue channel that your facility will depend on? Describe it and the other possible sources of revenue you anticipate. For example:

DNA Sports Center’s main source of revenue will be monthly payments for unlimited access to speed, strength and agility training. This income will be supplemented by revenue from facility rentals, sports-specific training, and commissions from private lessons taught by instructors at the facility.

Next Step: Create a Marketing Plan

If you would like to consult with Mike Meszaros about how to maximize profit in your sports facility, please call (513) 791-4940.

The answer is yes. Although updating your Facebook page is another task on what is probably already a long to-do list, this effort is undoubtedly worth it. As I’ve mentioned before in my post on sports facility customer touch-points, Facebook and Twitter are not just for teenagers anymore. They are excellent resources to instantly notify customers of happenings at your facility in real time.

In fact, many sports facilities rely on their Facebook pages even more than web sites to reach their customers online because Facebook’s user-friendly pages are guaranteed to be updated and accessible, they’re easy to find in an online search, and they’re free to create.

Of course, your business web site should also appear updated and relevant, and has much more flexibility and space to make an impression and give clients an idea of what you offer. Your Facebook page is a necessary complement your web site. It also increases your facility’s visibility in search engines, because it shows up as an additional link in search results when potential clients are searching for sports facilities like yours. Plus, most computer savvy consumers expect business-to-consumer businesses to have Facebook pages; a well maintained Facebook page adds legitimacy to your brand.

Here are some common uses of a sports facility Facebook page:

• Allow your customers to “check in” to your facility, which displays on their own pages and is visible to all their friends.
• Announce new programs and  remind your customers of their sign-up deadlines when they’re more likely to see them in real time.
• Announce special deals and discounts, and remind users when they’re about to end just when consumers are more likely to see them in real time.
• Start conversations by letting your customers of success stories. Social media is unique because of the ability to interact with your customers. Don’t worry about negative feedback going unnoticed; Facebook offers plenty of custom notifications for interactions with your page.
• Post photos that your clients can easily share with all of their friends.

For more information on how to create and use Facebook for your Sports Facility, please call (513) 791-4940.

Rentals are a great option for such sports facilities, especially when those rentals are a part of a long-term agreement between your sports facility and an individual or team. Team rental arrangements bring in dependable revenue and take up a regular time slot, and the teams that use the facility for practices often return for other services at your sports facility, such as strength training or private instruction.

When you’re considering establishing a relationship with a team for regular use of your facility, keep the following guidelines in mind.

1. Have a contract for your agreement, and include starting/ending dates. Circumstances always change within your business over the long term, and operating under an open-ended or informal agreement is bound to lead to problems when prices need to change or when one party wants to cancel without appropriate notice. The contract doesn’t have to be complicated, but keep it on file for easy reference, and for future use for other team agreements.

2. Make sure you receive payments on the 15th of every month for use of the facility for the next month. Make sure to include this payment information in the contract, as well. When you have a comfortable relationship with a coach, it’s easy to let payments slide. But you have to require pre-payment regularly every month to protect your business and keep your books organized.

3. Make sure they don’t have a cancellation policy. In particular, if you are discounting your typical rental prices for a team based on how many rentals they will be using, you need to address how to handle cancellations due to inclement weather or scheduling conflicts. For example, if a team’s tournament schedule is changed and now conflicts with their pre-arranged rental time, you have to decide the conditions under which they will be issued a credit for another rental. To keep things fair and simple, I suggest a no cancellation policy – just make sure they understand this policy at the outset of the relationship, and that it’s clarified in the rental agreement.

4. Try to have all player waivers signed before the team’s first rental date. If you have a software like eSoft Planner, players will be required to approve the facility waiver when they first log on to your system to schedule and pay. If you’re still dealing with paper waivers and physical signatures, it’s a good idea to give a stack of waivers to the coach and require that the coach turn one in for each player before their contract begins. Trying to collect these piecemeal after the team has already started using the facility regularly can lead to legal problems and administrative headaches.

If you would like to consult with Mike Meszaros about how to maximize profit in your sports facility, please call (513) 791-4940.

This facility has created a baseball training program that consists of four weeks of hitting instruction, two weeks of fielding instruction and two weeks of pitching instruction, as well as a pre-test and a post-test for participating athletes. The program also includes speed, agility and strength training specifically customized to the sport of baseball, and the athlete pays up front for all included services.

As I’ve mentioned before, combining such services into custom memberships and packages is a great idea for athletes, and one that we’ve implemented before with DNA Sports Center’s hitting memberships and soccer training memberships.

To create an overall sports specific program for your own facility, add the following elements:

1. Sports specific training. As I have emphasized in the past regarding selling sports training at your facility, learning the skills required for any sport requires hours of effort, and to excel at any sport requires many more. Although some athletes learn more quickly than others, there’s almost always a substantial learning curve to understanding proper technique. Longer-term programs that include consistent, repetitive training sessions such as this one give the client a better chance to learn and to improve than shorter or more sporadic programs. This is essential to your clients’ happiness with their purchase.

2. Sports performance programming. Sports performance training is designed to enhance confidence, improve technique on basic athletic skills such as speed and change of direction, reduce burnout rates, and decrease injury. (Click here to read more about sports performance programs). Sports performance training can be tailored to the specific skills needed for any sport, and is often essential to the athlete’s improvement in his or her sports-specific skills. This type of programming adds variety to any sports training program, and can set you apart from your competitors.

3. Add Pre and Post Tests. It’s impossible to realistically create sports performance goals and monitor progress in athletic training without a skills assessment or a pre-test. The pre-test should also note any specific goals that the client has so that your staff can monitor their progress through the weeks of training. Noting the improvement at the end ensures that the athletes will be satisfied with their experience.

If you would like to consult with Mike Meszaros about how to maximize profit in your sports facility, please call (513) 791-4940.

Most sports facilities that offer private lessons have policies in place that pay the instructor a commission on each lesson, either by a flat rate or a percentage, based on the value of the lesson. Other sports facilities allow instructors to use the facility for the same price as they would charge to rent space there. (I always advise facility owners to take their fair share of revenue from these instructors – after all, they’re using your facility and resources, even if it’s for their own self-branded business!)

One of the facilites I work with recently shared a tip on how they increase their facility revenue from private lessons.

Balls-n-Strikes is an top-notch indoor baseball and softball training company with locations throughout the United States. Their facilities offer private baseball instruction, as well as camps, classes, clinics, and more.

The Balls-n-Strikes location in Ballwin, Missouri recently implemented eSoft Planner scheduling software to manage operations at the facility, and Office Manager Shannon Hoffman shared the following tip with me.

Coaches point the start athletes out as examples to the others, and the rest of the kids may use them as a benchmark for their own skills and abilities.

That’s why it’s important for your staff to make a conscious effort to pay attention to those in the classes who might be struggling, or who just aren’t as talented, and make note of their improvements so that they come away with a positive experience after every class session.

At DNA Sports Center, we are the home to the Cincinnati area Parisi Speed School, which makes self-confidence for kids a high priority in all of its programming. One best practice for class management that we’ve learned by making self-confidence a priority is to physically note which players need a self-confidence boost on the class roster before the class starts so that instructors can make sure that they’re noticed and encouraged.

The encouragement doesn’t have to be anything complicated or grandiose, just a call-out in front of the other kids about how the weaker athletes have improved or how hard they’re working.

If athletes in your classes start to fear that they’re not good enough, they’re likely to stop coming to class; more importantly, they might start to lose interest in physical fitness, which can have lifelong ramifications for their health. This is particularly important for sports performance classes in which kids have enrolled specifically to try to improve overall health or improve general skills required to make a sports team.

In general, kids should always feel in their element in classes. You can decrease the odds that an athlete will feel out of place by segmenting your classes by both age and experience level, but even in these cases, extra effort often should be made to make sure that everyone feels comfortable, noticed and encouraged.

If you have any questions about how you can make scheduling at your facility more efficient, I’d be happy to set up a consultation session with you. Give me a call at (513) 791-4940.

Ongoing memberships provide a dependable source of revenue for your sports facility and provide your clients with a convenient, consistent training option.

I’ve already mentioned how DNA Sports Center‘s hitting memberships are an ideal model for batting cage facilities, and promoting the long-term hitting memberships (6-months is a popular option) with reduced prices helped us ensure consistent revenue through our slow season.

We are following up on the success of our hitting memberships with Elite Soccer Training Memberships for our avid soccer players. The Elite Soccer Training Membership we’ve created is unique to the Cincinnati area. The classes are semi-private (six players max) and are led by experienced and energetic soccer trainers that use drills and games regularly employed by college-level players to train and improve technique. We believe that this combination of repeated, semi-private training will help any soccer player reach peak performance.

We are also offering a premium Elite Soccer Training Membership that will include access to any of DNA’s sports performance classes in addition to access to the sports-specific soccer classes.

(As always, eSoft Planner scheduling software is used to sell the memberships and implement and automate all of these benefits).

For those who would like an idea of what our Elite Soccer Training Membership membership offers, the following classes are available for three different skill levels.

Passing and Receiving/Turning Class
This class teaches the fundamental techniques of passing, turning and receiving the ball with all surfaces of the foot. Passing and receiving is one of the most important skills in the game of soccer. In this class, athletes work on their first touch with the ball on the ground and in the air, different ways to turn with the ball, and the correct passing technique, as well as the reasoning behind using different surfaces for passing and receiving.

Dribbling and Shielding Class (Moves in 1 v 1 & 2 v 2 Situations)
In this class, players learn the proper mechanics of dribbling using the inside, outside, instep and sole of the foot. Players will also learn how to run top speed with the ball and change direction, while keeping the ball under control. They will also learn shielding, an important skill needed to retain the ball under high pressure.

Juggling and Heading Class
This class teaches the proper techniques associated with the different methods of heading the ball. Players learn to keep their eyes on the ball and head it in various scenarios, such as for clearing, scoring, defending and possession.

Shooting Class
In this class, players learn the fundamental technique to a power shot and finesse shot through a variety of drills and games for all skill levels.

If you have any questions about how you can make scheduling at your facility more efficient, I’d be happy to set up a consultation session with you. Give me a call at (513) 791-4940.