Tag: marketing automation

Transparency spooks! From ghosts to football, an economic shift to the apocalypse.

Transparency spooks and how it’s moving forward in football, business and life. Apocalypse now?

If you’ve missed me of late, I’ve been blogging about the latest sponsorship news and best practices.  We also took a quick “secret shopper” trip to the thriving metropolises of Nephi/Ephraim/Nebo, Utah, stopping at one of the more said-to-be haunted destinations of the area in Leslie’s Family Tree where the Mormon pioneers of yesteryear clashed with the Native Americans.  I’ve done the research and I’m a believer in transparency – which goes beyond unexplainable paranormal phenomenon, but is increasingly and readily applicable in the sports business and our collective impending future.

“The Game” & Beyond

I just got off the phone with a friend and client of mine in Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler, son of the legendary Michigan coach Bo.  Bo learned everything he knew while coaching under Woody Hayes, who would later become his biggest rival.  Both Michigan and that one state school in Ohio largely played the same way for many years.  Everyone knew that both teams were most likely to run the ball on 1st and 2nd down and throwing if need be on 3rd down.  No frills or surprises, they’re going to rely on brilliant strategy and execution to beat you with tough, talented athletes who believe in their schools’ and coaches’ native credos.  Stop it if you can (sorry, the numbers say you likely won’t as both schools are at the top of the alltime recordbooks).

Shemy, who soaked in all that football leadership along the way and utilized it as an NFL scout, has launched GES Advisory Company, designed to utilize the aforementioned institutional knowledge to benefit aspiring high school football players.  His goal is to give high school athletes the chance to play the sport they love in college (he can be reached at: gesadvisory@gmail.com).  Compared to other recruiting services, he goes much deeper when it comes to taking athletic measurements, gauging mental “make-up” and academic interests, and finding a scholastic fit from the “Power 5” schools on down the collegiate chain. 100% success ratio.  To maximize effect from both a hand-to-hand combat success coupled with today’s demands of information transparency, he’s partnered with Sport Testing, a Canadian company with hockey (including NHL) success stories to build on, patent-pending and coming to you soon.  Sport Testing, “the leading provider of sport specific player testing and a developer of athletic assessment technologies,”has developed equipment shown to be the most accurate in gauging athletic performance. It also has created a database to share this data, serving both the athletes and properties.

Man, I wish it existed back when I was playing!  I was always in-season playing a different ball sport and wasn’t taught the right track technique to run a good 40.  My recruiting service was my grandfather with our team highlight VHS tape knocking on the doors of his alma mater to get me a meeting (not that I would’ve made a different school choice).  5 Star football players who get a verbal offer don’t realize that it has no legal binding, nor does that official offer they received. Now, the gap is being bridged.

The Interview

I just mustered the best 30 minute phone interview perhaps I’ve done to date with Project FANchise to be President of the Salt Lake Screaming Eagles football team by mapping out and checking off what I deemed were the success criteria necessary for the position of my dreams. With the CEO in call 1 before he had seen my resume.  I didn’t do it to work with just another minor league team – this is the 1st ever fan run team.  Everything has been voted on by the fans from the city (they’ll be playing at the Maverik Center, where I worked and of which I had the endorsement of the President I was under) to G.M., head coach, logo and even play calls.

This group (an entrepreneurial mix of tech entrepreneurs, digital, NFL and sport business vets) has crowdfunded opportunities for fans all over the world to get involved with the Screaming Eagles.  Yes, the opposing team might know what’s coming, but can they stop it?  The point is, it opens up the dream of getting involved in what you were/are most passionate about to the masses, where the barriers to entry are the most extreme of perhaps any industry.  Typical sports jobs field hundreds if not thousands of resumes per open position.  This doesn’t even touch on how hard it is to become a professional athlete nor begin to speak to the struggle to excel once you get in on the business side when you’re making peanuts while competing with the hopes of countless others to be G.M., etc. someday let alone keep your current job.

What Project FANchise is doing is to utilize digital transparency that social media has provided us all to develop a competitive advantage – it’s giving live “recruiting tape” to not only to the players, coaches and G.M.’s looking to make a pro impact and move up the ranks, but also to Joe Schmo the fan as well (who can be G.M. for a day for $500).  As the Bo’s of the world have stated, “those who stay will be champions.” Brilliant execution can open up big doors of opportunity.

 

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Salt Lake Screaming Eagles – brought to you by the fans

Apocalypse Now?

All over the place, transparency has become apparent and the effects are rampant. It’s what went into the food we eat and the companies making it.  It’s social media.  It’s the manual processes in life that are being replaced by automatic processes that can share valuable data seamlessly.  We’re starting to realize that sitting in traffic for an hour to commute to shuffle papers and sit in abusively boring meetings all day isn’t always the most productive or efficient way of doing business.

According to the Martin School at Oxford, 47% of today’s jobs in the U.S. will be replaced by artificial intelligence and robots within the next twenty years.   Like the farmers of yesteryear, collaboration will likely create new opportunities.

Or, maybe Terminator was correct and machines are coming to bring about the apocalypse.

Maybe I wasn’t named the 1st President of the Salt Lake Screaming Eagles (someone else got the gig who had been a Minor League Baseball CEO).  I know where I align when it comes to complaining vs. solving come the next apocalypse.  How about you?

Maybe you’ll become the next lost soul tragically left behind to walk between worlds.

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The Terminator fighting the apocalypse with automatic weapons

 

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“The Woman of Bachelor’s Grove”

 

New Salary / Overtime Rules: Ramifications Faced in Sports, Sales & Life

The state of our economy has pivoted in a big way. My story and strategic recommendations.

After a happy holiday season back on the home front, I returned to the office and found myself suddenly unemployed and lucky I didn’t pull the trigger on buying my first place. Despite contributing millions to the company’s bottom line, I was sent packing in preparation of a major recent legislative decision: the United States Department of Labor’s changes in the Fair Labor Act (FLSA) basically doubling the salary required for exemption from overtime pay requirement.

What the U.S. government initially intended to have benefit the employees of the country proved quickly capable of doing the opposite. The legislative decision will have profound effects for employers and employees in every sector. I gave up the chance to follow in my grandfather’s steps in playing collegiate football at his alma mater, instead choosing to go to the University of Michigan and get involved in the business side of the sports industry, which has largely operated on a pay / volunteer to play system – especially for those looking to get an initial foot in the door and possibly a salaried job. 13 years, three degrees, countless unpaid internships, and five sports later, I have seen all sides of the system that capitalize on a huge surplus supply of candidates hungry to sacrifice for the sake of experience in pursuing a life passion. Operating budgets outside of player-related expenses are shoestring.

Our shared economy had already been skewing towards the freelancer, intern, or (fill in the blank) way to avoid paying a minimum annual salary of $47,476 of which up to 10% of that can come from commissions. The game has now changed in a big way especially for those regularly putting in 40+ hours per week or tied to commissions and lofty revenue goals. In sports, this affects everyone in a big way by threatening profits. Yes, winning may be the goal, but it is still a business.

Gone are the days a salesperson would pick up a phone book to sell. The NBA’s consulting arm, Team Marketing and Business Operations (TMBO), launched in 2000 by the likes of Bernie Mullen, Bill Sutton, and others under the direction of commissioner David Stern.  16 years later, it is still setting the industry standard for best practices by compiling, analyzing, developing, and communicating winning ways to generate results to all teams.  Despite convergence, when it comes to sharing and training, the standard and disparity between leagues are still vast along with revenue disparities largely due to differences in media rights,another dynamically evolving area of concern for organizations.

Collegiate athletic departments have even more of an issue because they are oftentimes public institutions that cannot legally pay commissions and operate under uniquely governed legislative circumstances. Where will those hundreds of thousands of extra dollars come for those hundreds of small schools? The answer is grim: more sports will be cut while scholarships and jobs are lost.

Sports and sales in general will have to pull best practices of training, onboarding, and technology from other industries to become more strategic.  Proven practices include maximizing the number of two hour blocks without distractions or diversions.  Prioritizing one’s day with the most important tasks early, check email twice per day at 10 and 4 and schedule 2 hour blocks to get in rhythm on calls.  Schedule outside meetings on one day or early/late in the day in coordination with commute.  Eliminate/trim meetings and being on the clock on game day unless necessary.

“Frankenstein” solutions involving a mishmash of workflow technology will no longer work because the returns for the employees and organizations will be inefficiently surmised. Knowing this, one company I have chosen to get involved with is Sponsorship Buddy, which pulls best practices of marketing automation, cloud services, and project management to rights holders and clients alike into one intuitive platform. Such a solution has proven to take staffs from reactive and day-to-day to strategic saving thousands of hours while providing process transparency and great calculated ROI / ROO.

On the surface, average salaries are sure to rise in correspondence, however, the ramifications will be widespread and force us all to become more calculated and strategic.  How will you adapt?   

Here are a few more takes on the matter:

USA Today: “A new expense looms for college athletic departments”

FanGraphs: “Major League Baseball and the New Overtime Rules

The Migala Report: “Did this cost your salespeople money?”

If you have caught on to any outside or developing trends, tools, or techniques to best capitalize on the circumstances, I encourage you to share them here.