The Facility Playbook

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Transcript

Chicken and pickle. Oh, one of my favorite favorites to talk about. If you haven’t heard of them, you need to make sure you pull your head out of the sand because chicken and pickle is the biggest and fastest growing pickleball, eatertainmenting concept, in the country, if not the world, and it started in Kansas City, my home, sweet home. So it’s been really cool to actually watch them grow, And in this episode, I got to really talk to with Kellen Mom, who’s the director of business development.

And what’s really interesting is I actually met with him seven years ago when they first got started, and started using my league software and negotiated with him, and I haven’t really had much interaction with him since was really cool to talk to him and hear his background in his story and They really have created this in entertainment community with the rooftop and the pickleball and the bocce and, you know, one of my favorite things to talking about with Kellen was how he got the expertise to find new locations and new cities to grow chicken and pickle, check it out, chicken and pickle, and hope you enjoy it.

What’s up everybody? Do you own or manage a facility while 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 from the pioneers of the industry who have built and managed successful sports facilities, entertainment venues, and clubs. Did you know that most of those facilities I mentioned use between four six different softwares to manage their memberships, lessons, leagues, rentals, rentals, rentals, and more, FACility Ally TO THE RESCU.

FACility Ally WILL REVOLUTIONIZE YOUR POLICY Management with our all in one system. Learn more at facility ally dot com. Today, I’m with Kellen mum, director of business development at Chicken and Pickle. Before we jump in, will you tell me a little bit about your background and what led you to chicken and pick?

Sure. Yeah. So, so, Kevin Mom, my started at chicken and pickle about eight years ago now. That was when the idea was first started.

I worked for the our founder and owner previously.

In a real estate investment company.

Straight out of college, I was working for him for a couple years. He came up with this idea, and asked me if I wanted to help, figure out pickleball, and figure out how to make money with pickleball. So that was kinda my start. Had you heard of pickleball at that point? Like so, kind of, in high school, way back when, a hundred years ago, we played a form of pickleball in gym class. And Not until I rediscovered it.

Because of this is when I looked it up again and was like, oh, I think I’ve played that before. Sure. So Tell me a little about that first pitch. Was it anywhere what we’re we’re seeing today?

Nah. So I’ll give you the the the brief version. But so so Dave, our founder, has kinda You went this is a friend out in Phoenix who had a house, and there’s a a complex, and they had, you know, eight pickleball courts. And so instead of playing golf that day, they went and played pickleball.

And, you know, eight AM, they showed up at the courts, and there’s fifty, sixty people.

He aligned up to play pickleball. He played for two to three hours, first time ever, played with a bunch of different people and met a ton of people, just woomoom away at how social the game was, how easy it was for him to pick up and learn. So he came back to Ken City, and he was like, we need a pickleball course in Kansas City. Like, we gotta do this.

And then, you know, his idea was, well, if I could play pickleball all morning, and then grab some lunch to go bring it home for the wife. That’d be the perfect Saturday. Right? So that was kinda the The the birth of it, his idea for the chicken part of it was his favorite restaurant down in the Cayman Islands.

It’s called Chicken Chicken. It’s Wood Fire Road’s History Chicken, a bunch of jamaican sides and stuff, different things like that. But he loves that. He loves getting a half chicken, bunch of sides, bringing it home to the family.

And so that was his idea. Let’s play pickleball, and let me get half chicken and some sides, go home. And that was kinda how it started. So what Far part of that sold you.

Like, why were you like, yeah, I’d love to do this. It I’ve always just been kinda I’ve kinda had that entrepreneurial mindset and This is an opportunity for me to use I’ll I’ll use Dave’s one of his favorite quotes as OPM, which is the most powerful business tool you can use. Just other people’s money. And so I was able to use Dave’s money to write to start start a business.

I get to see the whole process and My thought was, hey, you know, I’m not a restaurant guy. I’m a finance guy, but I get to see how to start a business from the ground up, do everything, I’ll go from there, you know, eight years later, here I am still doing it. So So finance guy into real estate, and now now what are you doing with chicken and pickle? Yeah.

So I do a little bit of everything from the time our site selection crew, fives the site, locks it in, I I get brought in with the architects, and we work on Fitnet site with our concept. And then we go into, you know, design development stages, into construction documents, and we bring on the the general contractor.

Then I became basically the owner’s rep for that project throughout the build.

I have a little bit of hand in everything from picking furniture, to designing the AV package to every everything paint colors on the walls too. So So that’s what you’re doing today. But you used to be a little bit of all, more involved with, like, some of the day to day meetings, which you’ve done it all. Yeah.

Yeah. So starting out, right, I I was a little bit of I didn’t know what I was doing on the first one. So I did a little bit of everything, and then the store opened. And then as any new business, but us specifically because it was the first, you know, pick a ball and restaurant concept combined, we had a lot of growth, a lot of challenges that we had to learn.

So I was there I was an opening manager for six months, opening six days a week, first time ever in a in a restaurant world for me, personally. So that was a a good learning curve, but You know, definitely learned a lot in those six months. And then onward after that, as I tried to organize ourselves a little bit better And before we got to our second one, which was about two years after we opened our first one. So do you feel like some of that day to day manager experience helped you realize what the next couple facilities should look like.

Hundred percent. Because really, when you’re, you know, for me, I wanna make sure whatever I’m designing or building for the the guys that are gonna go in there and operate at seven days a week. I wanna give them as many tools they can. So they don’t have to worry about something going wrong or this breaking or my my hope is it’s the easiest restaurant for them to run, easiest facility for them to run, so that they can focus on what’s most important, which is our guest.

Right? Awesome. So thank you for all that background. I was I was more or less just interested to hear more of that from you.

But for those who maybe don’t know what chicken and pickles, what is chicken and pickle today? So chicken pickle. It’s a restaurant entertainment concept. Born right here in Kansas City.

It’s a concept that brings fast casual — Dining. — and pickleball.

In outdoor entertainment. So we have indoor outdoor pickleball courts. Usually have a large yard for yard games, then we also have multiple bars inside, outside, and a rooftop.

Lots of events, whether private or public events throughout the week, We do anything from, you know, a ten year old birthday party to a corporate outing of two hundred fifty people.

So and everything in between that. And so we’re in the Kansas City area. So we’re in Overland Park, Kansas. The original one opened up in North Kansas City, And now you’re how many of them are there and where all are you located? We are opening our Hates store next month in in Glendale, Arizona.

But we have so we started in North Kansas City, Missouri, went to Wichita, Kansas.

Then we went to San Antonio, Texas. Oklahoma City, Grant Ferry, Texas, which is the Dallas Fort Worth area, Overland Park, Kansas, and Greatvine, Texas, which is also in the DFW area.

That one just opened in January this year.

Now we’re opening Glendale, Arizona this year, Saint Charles, Missouri this year, and then Webster, Texas, which is in the Houston area. I’ll open early next year. Early twenty twenty four. How long before you can’t name them all?

Do you think? I’m already even been there. I’m already at that point where there’s we have so many in the pipeline now that there are some that I can’t even talk about because they’re not public yet. So Sure.

Well, that’s amazing. Congratulations. I I love it. We’re I’m a huge fan. I I play several days a week pickleball and actually play at the original location and I remember you you mentioned, like, you know, pickleball kinda came first, and then it was like, oh, let’s add the food onto it.

And so you even in North Kansas City built the courts first before the restaurant came later. So was that what was the reason for that?

Main reason is we don’t have patience to wait for the whole drawings to get finished. So we the core building and the course themselves, that’s that was easy to do. So we had that done, and we were like, let’s get in there. Let’s start moving dirt. And we were still finishing the drawings on the restaurant part while we were building.

So we were able to get the those courts open pretty fast. That’s a relatively simple structure and build compared to a restaurant. So that’s what we did. We opened it. It actually worked. It was six months before the restaurant opened.

We’re I was working and we had a little a little shack. It was actually a storage container, that we cut the hole out of the side of it and put a bar top on it and said, well, serve beer out of it. I remember. That’s actually when I first started playing pickleball was when you guys opened that was my first time, and I remember thinking like, why did they put this here?

And why just courts? And then six months later, the the I was like, okay. So it was really interesting for me at least to see both sides of that. So what are some of the biggest challenges you face running the facility of chicken and big?

Yeah.

The biggest thing is, right, it’s it’s it’s more of a resort that we we have. Right? We have so many different aspects of this property.

So many different spaces. There’s a lot of different spaces to manage.

So you you it’s hard for you know, just a restaurant GM to come in here and be able to manage all of it because you have your pickleball team, your events team, your your standard, you know, front of house service, the standard back house service, And then everything else that goes on top of it, we have community and different, you know, public events that come in too that we also organize. And and so That’s why I say it’s a resort because you have to think of it like that. Right? You you have the pickleball side, and you have how does that work with, you know, the rooftop event that’s coming, because what if they want courts, and then you have to train the staff on how to deal with that when that those things come up.

And so there’s so many more things that when you just have four walls of a restaurant, you’re like, oh, yeah. Well, if everything in the kitchen’s working, everything in the front in the diner is working, I’ll be alright today. Right? There’s a hundred other things that can go wrong.

So as you mentioned, you know, with eight facilities, look, what’s the secret sauce that make you figured out to create this amazing experience. Like, what do you believe it is that helps manage all that? So that you guys are as successful as you have been. Yeah.

Well, I have to give most of the credit to the people. Most it’s our it’s our day to day operations that are really making this thing run as smoothly as it best.

Like I said, I like to try and give them as many tools as possible to to be successful day to day.

But it’s really them that coming in here and taking care of our guests and giving them outstanding service on a day to day basis that keeps people coming keeps you coming back every week to to play. Right?

So do you have any sort of secret bior? Do you have anything that when you’re hiring people that you you maybe think that you guys do differently or more efficiently since it’s all about the people, which I totally agree, something you need to do differently to find the great team that you have.

You know, a lot of things I think that we are a little bit different is how community focused we are.

Everything we do has a a little bit of how how can this affect the community that we’re in?

Every employee is able to take a couple of days and go volunteer.

In the community for charity. You can submit your favorite charity to us, and we’ll enter it into either do a green cup campaign, which is, you know, yeah, when you buy a Coke and the proceeds of that cup go to whatever charity. Per month. And and that’s a rotating thing. We do that every every store.

Tuesday after Labor Day is our day of giving. Everyone, we close all eight stores and everyone goes out into the community and we volunteer for a full day. And we do that everywhere. We’re always gonna do that.

It’s just something that, you know, the when you work here, you know that you’re not just clocking in and collecting the paycheck. You’re actually making an impact to, you know, people in your community too, things you care about. Sure. Does that make sense?

So you’re very community focused so you feel you’re driving in more people who care about community and believe and align with your vision, so it just kind of works together in the same same methodology. Exactly. That’s awesome.

One of the other things you mentioned was like, it’s not just coming in here and running like a day to day restaurant. That’s one of the things I think I noticed early on from you guys that was really different Now I feel like everybody’s saying fast casual, but I hadn’t heard of it when I first saw chicken and pickle. And so maybe talk about the fast casualness of chicken and pickle where that idea came from and how it’s made you successful. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of growing pains in that as well.

So, our our concept is you come in the door, it’s all open seating everywhere. Everywhere that’s not in a closed event.

But you go up to the cashier, order your food. They’ll give you a number a little table tent. Then you go anywhere on property as you want. Sit down. A server will come over, take your drink order. Come and bring you drinks, add to that tab that you started at the cashier.

There’s a lot of challenges that We came with that because we are such a large project, and most of our stores are an acre or more from, you know, cashier to pickleball courts, So that that could be a lot of ground to cover in in a, just finding that table tent, and b, the food runner. Because we have specific food runners that are just there to grab food and run into that table. And then So then the servers are solely focused on making sure that their tables have everything they need, any drinks I need, refills, you know, silverware, whatever you need.

And so getting that kind of dance down because we want you to be able to order sit down, get your drinks, have your food, you know, ten, fifteen minutes max, and then you’re so for a business lunch, you can have your food, HAVE, YOU KNOW, YOUR MEETING, DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR OUR TIME FRIGHT IF YOU NEED TO. BUT IF YOU WANT, YOU CAN SAFE FOR TO THREE HOURS IF YOU WANT.

YOU KNOW, HAVE SOME DURINGS, PLAYING BAGS OUTSIDE OR WHATEVER.

SO WHEN WE FIRST TALK, YOU SAID IT OPEN PICK WE OPEN PIGWAL FIRST, THEN YOU OPEN THE REST AROUND LATER. NOW do you feel like it’s What are you thinking about more first when you’re building these new facilities?

NOW, it’s, yeah, it all starts in the restaurant. You got to make sure that YOU GET THAT EXACTLY DIALED IN.

YOU REALLY CAN’T HAVE ONE WITHOUT ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER.

We’ve we’ve tried we tried it again in Wichita opening the courts first, and then the and the restaurant after. And it was just it’s just a challenge to GET PEOPLE IN.

IT WORTH OUT WELL IN NORTHCAND CITY JUST BECAUSE OF HOW TIGHT THEM COMMUNITY THAT WAS. Wichita, we were new coming in, and no one knew what pickleball was. And so they’re like, well, why are we coming here? Right? Well, it’s like, well, come play pickleball. And so IT was more of a challenge to get people in.

We find now, you know, we’re able, before our open, both at the same time, you know, half our business, they come in for lunch, and then they’re like, hey, what’s going on over there? And they go, oh, well, that’s pickleball. Let me let me show you. Yeah.

And then and then they come back you know, a week later to play some pickleball. So that’s a that’s a leads me right into my next question. So with the rise of pickleball, now everybody knows what it is right to feel like. So, WHAT’S THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AND PICKLE, eight YEARS AGO AND CHICKEN AND PICKLE TODAY BECAUSE OF THIS GROTE OF PICKLE BOL.

IT’S, YOU KNOW, IT’S become less of us having to teach everybody.

You know, a lot of the markets we’ve went to, Kansas City, San Antonio, YOU KNOW, WE BUILD IN San Antonio, I THINK THERE WERE PROBABLY six OR eight COURTS IN THE WHOLE CITY. YOU KNOW, THE SIDOOM five million people. Right? You know, like, there’s no pickleball courts.

We we open, you know, we open ten courts and people are like, what’s going on? What are you doing? And, you know, now there’s a ton of courts. There’s hundreds of courts.

And so, it it it makes it a little easier because, right, now people are coming to us to play, traveling to us.

Because of Bigkelball, And we’re, you know, I we’re the premier place to play pickleball in the country.

It’s There’s no other experience like it. AND I THINK OUR SERVICE AND OUR FOOD ALLEMACE THAT AS WELL. SO THAT’S WHY NOW IF YOU ARE A SERIOUS PIGWALT PLAYER, from, you know, California or Florida and have hundreds of courts around you. They will they will travel TO A CHIGEN ON PICKLE, BECAUSE IT’S THE PLACE THAT YOU HAVE TO PLAY.

PICKLE BALL. IT’S ALSO. AND ALONG THE SAME BAYEN OF, YOU KNOW, YOU USE US OUR LEAGES OFFWET AND SO WE WOULD TALKED ABOUT THAT seven seven YEARS AGO. I REMEMBER SITTING THAT WITH YOU IN THE OFFICE TALKING ABOUT THE Software AND USING IT.

AND SO, AGAIN WITH transition. Have you guys leagues are a really big thing. It’s a big thing for my business and in this industry. Have you guys transitioned more into different types of leagues and events or Talk about maybe the transition of, like, leagues were kinda I felt like the big thing, and now maybe they’ve kinda slowed a little bit.

Yeah. So just just the public leagues have slowed down a bit, but we’ve got into other other types of leagues and other tournaments, like here in Overland Park, for example, NPL is out this weekend, which is NATIONAL LEAGUE FOR fifty five AND OLDER AND THEY TRAVELED THE COUNTRY PLAYING AT DIFFERENT VENIES BUT AND THEY’RE TRAVELING TO ALL OF THE Chicken PICKLES TO PLAY. AND SO THAT’S MORE OF THESE ARE SERIOUS PLAYERS, AND THEY’RE GOOD. AND YOU GO WE’LL GOING THERE’RE WATCH IT LATER, MANY.

THEY’RE AND SOME GOOD PLAYERS.

IT WIP US, pretty easily. I’VE HAD MY. I’VE HAD MY I’VE DEFINALLY BEEN BEED BY PEOPLE IN THAT group, for sure. That’s why I always tell people, I’m like, I play so much now because I’m trying to be the best guy in the retirement home someday. Yeah.

Cool. So you guys have grown so much over the last few years, you know, what led to choosing the first location? You said the next one was Wichita. What led to that? And then how did it grow from there? Yeah, so NorthCan City was the easy choice because that’s where Dave is headquarters. So he likes to be as close to his businesses as possible when he starts them.

So, that was the easy first BIP. Wichita was our second pick just because it is about two hours away from Kansas City.

And so it is easy to get to if there is a problem. We have some issues and we need to shift a manager around or something like that. Is easy to pull, pick and pull from a store that you already know and operate. Sure.

And, you know, we we felt authority and city was running well. And so — He didn’t. — kinda train there and then move to Wichita. So it’s and then moving to San Antonio, As our first Texas location, we knew we needed to get to Texas just because of how much outdoor space we have.

We knew we needed to utilize THE OUTDOOR SPACE twelve MONTHS A YEAR. CANADA CITY. IT’S HADER MISS. Right?

Eight MONTHS, nine MONTHS, MAYBE.

BUT WE KNEW WE HAD TO HAD TO BEEN TEXAS AND San Antonio WAS A GOOD FIRST FIRST UP FOR US. SO WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE AS THE BIGGEST OPTICAL IN SCALING FROM ONE TO TWO TO MULTUL LOCATIONS?

YEAH, YOU KNOW, IT’S GOT TO BE Keeping BEING CONSISTENT ON WHAT YOU’RE DOING. RIGHT?

IT WAS EASY FROM Ken SITTED A WHICH TALK AS YOU ARE RIGHT THERE.

People like, you know, Bill Conning, who is the head of, you know, operations of of those two stores. He can drive their if there’s a, you know, a fire, quote unquote fire, and get there and help.

When if you’re third store in San Antonio, you gotta hop on a plane, you gotta get a rental car. You gotta do all the things to get there. So it’s a lot harder. So and then and that’s, you know, the same issue why some franchise, if you franchise, you have issues because that GM or that YOU KNOW, OPERATING CRU THAT’S THERE, KIND OF TUCKED AWAY, FURTHER AWAY FROM YOUR HOME BASE, YOU KNOW, WHAT’S You know, let’s add this to the menu and let’s stop doing this old pickleball thing.

Let’s turn these into badminton courts here like, I DON’T KNOW. SO HE’S ARE, YOU CAN’T LOSE YOUR WAY AND WHAT YOU DO WELL.

Reporter: SO DOES Chicken AND PICKLE HAVE THEIR OWN FACILTY PLAY BOOK?

We have our own forms of it. Yeah. We have kind of our standard operating procedures that we we train each EACH STORE AS WE GO.

SO THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS THAT THEY HAVE TO DO, CERTAIN MEASURES THEY HAVE TO HIT.

COSSOM. SO SINCE EVERYBODY CAN PLAY PICKLEBALL, YOUNG, OLD DOESN’T MATTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE BIGGEST FOCA? WHAT SHOULD BE THE BIGGEST FOCUS GOING FOR? WHAT CHICKAN PICKLE’S BIGGEST FOCUSES OF ADULTS, YOUTH, AND HADED TO PLAY RECRATIONAL WELL YOU KIND OF SEE IT.

THAT’S HARD FOR US, COVID, WE DO SAY you know, we do think we’re kinda cradle to grave as far as our target audience. Right? We we bring in everybody to play pickleball. ALL AGE GROUPS CAN PLAY.

SO WE AREN’T REALLY FOCUSED ON ON ONE TARBING, AUD. WE’RE REALLY planting flags in every major metro. It was Anybody that wants good eats, good community and fun basically? Yeah.

Okay. Cool. So how important are the public and private events for you? So maybe is public more important or the private more important or How do you determine on how many you’re doing beach?

Yeah. So I’d say private events are probably more important, and just for the sheer fact that we can bring in, you know, big corporations like Garman and do a huge thing. And and that not only, you know, it brings in one hundred and fifty of their employees, but those are local people to that headquarters. Right?

And then they they see it, and they’re like, oh, man, this is cool. And they wanna bring your families back. So that’s our chance to show a big corporation. Hey, here’s some cool stuff.

That you can’t do elsewhere, and then it, that it brings the families back. So Sure. So, you talked a little bit about the the tour that’s here today, and I know you guys are are sponsoring the pro tour. Right?

That’s alright. Can you talk about a little bit WHY YOU DECIDED TO DO THAT AND HOW YOU PICK SOME OF THE PLAYERS THAT YOU’RE WORKING WITH? YEAH, FAMILY ARE YOU KNOW, THE PLAYERS WE SELECTED, they all kinda fit our core values as well as a company.

We have our set of set of core values, you know, based on integrity, you know, family.

Can those players replicate what we tried to do here in our stores, AND THEY’RE DOING THAT AT THESE TURER EVENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

WE’RE HAPPY TO PROVIDE THEM WITH GIR AND SUPPORT THEM AND SUPPORT THEM AND AND BRING THEM HERE TO DO PRIVATE CLINICS AND DIFFERENT THINGS LIKE THAT.

BECAUSE, Hey, WE LIKE THEM.

AND YOU KNOW, WE LOVE WATCHING THEM PLAY.

SO REMAY AS WELL, EMIL.

SUPPORT THEM.

Reporter: Sure. SO IF YOU STARTED ALL OVER TODAY, WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENT?

Yeah.

Man, I’m sure you’re already doing some of it. Right? This is always learning to move forward, but I’m just curious what, maybe one thing. One thing.

AND SIMPLIFY A LITTLE BIT OF HOW WE’RE BUILDING THESE SO AND I You know, keep it the same the same box that we’re building. You know, stores one through nine right now are all a little bit different, but you, you know, There’s a lot of things that’ll be the same. Same feel he’s still walking to it. He still feels like a chicken and pickle, but they’re different enough that that takes a lot of time.

And there’s I wish I wish we had a you know, I wish I had oval and park that I could just could’ve pulled over for sure. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Control v that one. So So what’s the next three years look like for chicken and pickle? Next three years, we’re gonna open a lot of chicken pickles.

I think, you know, twenty twenty four is gonna be a huge year. We’re gonna open five to six more. And I honestly hope we double that the year after that and and double that the the year after that. So They’re gonna need, like, five or six more of you if yeah.

They’re gonna have to control do you need to. So So, yeah, don’t forget. If you’re looking for something to help you, automate your facility, check out facility ally dot com, If you’re looking for league management, membership management, that sort of stuff, check it out. And what’s one before we get out of here?

What’s one book or podcast you’d recommend for the list? Yeah.

Actually, want to listen to this morning. Kinda answered them both. It’s a podcast called Founders, and they usually do a good summary of a book of an autobiography of somebody. So I listened to one this morning about an arm of Schwarzenegger.

Really good.

Super fascinating just to hear about founders of companies, so which resonates with me, obviously, because of I’m kind of a founder of Jig on pickles since I was here from since day one, so I like to hear what other people did and and completely different lines of work, but there’s always lessons to be learned. Let’s go off to check that out. Maybe maybe someday we’ll both get on there and that’s around that one. So What’s one last piece of advice that you’d give to our listeners for running facility?

I would say, Get organized.

Right? Make sure if you make a mistake, that’s alright, just make sure you don’t make the same mistake.

That’s gonna happen. I’m still I’m still making mistakes, but, you know, try and make sure that you learn from that mistake and do something different. Better the next time, even if we’re screws up again, try it again. Failed forward is what I like to set, sir.

Well, thanks so much for having us out here. Really appreciate it. That’s all for today. Thanks for joining us on the facility playbook brought to you by a facility ally.

We’ll see you next time.

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Transcript

So Hybee 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 Fauci’s the owner and creator of Hyvey Arena, and Chris Kaufman, who’s the general manager, ends. We were actually sitting on this amazing court, one of twelve basketball and volleyball courts at Hyvi arena has, and there was people playing and interacting all around us. And it’s this huge, amazing old arena used to be called Kember arena 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 membership the track, the the courts, the basketball, volleyball, pickleball, they have wrestling tournaments, dance, all kinds of different things going on here at Ivy Reno. 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 is able to talk us about how he makes in game adjustments and things like that. So Hope you like it. Check out Hybee arena.

What’s up everybody? Do you own or manage a facility? Well, then you’re in the right place. I’m Luke Wade, the founder and CEO of Facility Ally.

Most Borst 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 facility ally dot com. Today, I’m joined by some amazing rock stars, Chris Kaufman, the general manager of Hyvee arena, and Steve Fouts, the CEO and founder of Fouch Brothers, and the owner and investor of Hybee arena. Thank you so much for joining me today, guys.

I really appreciate it. Thank you.

So, basically, we’re here at Hyvee arena. So I’d love to start with where where are we? How did this come to be? So Steve, if you kinda wanna just walk us through the how did you first hear about Kemper arena and think of this crazy idea? Sure. We’d try to keep some of this sure, but Oh, geez, ten years ago, eleven years ago.

On the same week that a friend of mine came in and said, hey, Steve, we need a place for eight of all courts at least to try and have some big regional tournaments, can you think of anything or help us develop a property? That same week, they announced that they’re gonna 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 the Serena?

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 down downstairs, the original.

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 cords 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 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. 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 fifty year old building, this only existed for four point five five years, while we’re sitting on NOW. THIS IS THE KEY TO WHAT CHANGED THIS FACILITY IS ADDING THIS FLOR and eight more basketball courts, so now Chris can run a twelve court tournament, which is national sized 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 Soy. And so how are you able to know that you could get this done?

Talk a little bit about your back crap. Oh, I still don’t know. I still we’re still trying. But I mean, building this this like you said, this court this Florida didn’t exist.

Right? So How did you have the idea? I mean, talk a little bit about your background.

Yeah. I’m an architect and financial and engineer type guy. So we’re just always REENOVATING OLD HISTORIC BUILDINGS CONVERTING THEM FROM SOMETHING TO SOMETHING ELSE. USUALLY SCHOOLS OR OFFICE TOWERS OR HIGH RISES INTO APARTMENTS, THAT’S REL EASY, Apartments can be any shape, 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. So, we’re just looking, you know, at the heights, and the balcony level, and and where we could put a second floor, or originally, the first floor WE LOOKED FILLING WITH DERT AND BRINGING UP THAT BOL. SO AS AS THAT DIMINAL THE BOL GOT BIGGER AS YOU KEPT ADDING DURT MORE AND MORE AND MORE, YOU COULD ACTUALLY GET THESE A COURT DOWN BLOWOSE WHERE THE CONCourse AND AND THE PRIVATE Suites ARE, THAT WOULD JUST WALK STRAIGHT ON OUT ON TO THIS CUT THIS SISE BUT YOU DON’T WE HAVE THE A COURTS.

So it still cost a lot of money, and you still only had eight courts. So that wasn’t a good option. But then we looked at this, and having the two floors gave us twelve 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 wars 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, like, the the running a track stuff in here as well. So there’s changes throughout the whole facility. Yep.

And, Chris, what’s your background and how did you what was the first time you heard of this and thought it was would be awesome to do. Well, I’ve kinda I’ve been in a sports world forever. Used sports, high school sports, au sports, professional sports, and just kinda have been around her 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, like, a program manager and was gonna start some of that. And I think I came in March. So March, April, about six months before we even opened. And so as that progressed, I kinda my role progressed.

And when by the time we opened, I think I was the operations manager. And it just go over years, that kinda morphed into where I’m at now. So it’s kinda it’s been it’s been a lot of fun. Just the multifacet and the multi purpose use of this building in general.

It’s kinda been a challenge, so it’s new every day you come in here. Sure. So talk a little bit about what you offer high virena. Well, I I like to pitch it in three different ways.

So, like, we’re here on on a weekday. At eleven 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 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 a big membership base. We also host practices anywhere from volleyball, basketball. We do a lot of foot saw 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 fifty two thousand square feet up here and thirty six thousand square feet downstairs, so anything you can picture with the exception of water we’re we’re take a look at. We’ve hosted anything from concerts, obviously basketball tournaments, volleyball tournaments, wrestling tournaments. We’ve done fashion shows, 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 one hundred employees to three thousand employees.

So with everything you mentioned, you know, six lane running track, twelve basketball volleyball courts, pickleball courts, gym. I mean, conference rooms, like, what is the biggest challenge you face when running a facility this size? 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 walk in off the street anywhere from one person buying a day pass to large national events. And then we also have tenant spaces. Here too. So we’re kinda 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 a building benefit from it. So keeping all that coordinated.

Sure. So really just coordination, scheduling, things like that. A lot of planning. A lot of planning.

A lot of good teamwork too. Yeah. Yeah. So back to Steve kinda like what you’d mentioned earlier, you said a dollar.

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 wanna maybe talk about how from the second you knew you were getting it, what what was the transition? Because we bought it 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.

The city was gonna have to spend ten 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 they’d clawed 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.

But, you know, anything that’s free is not free. It 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 ten million dollars to have nothing left over. So go You know, luckily, we didn’t go down that path.

But it took 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 the people were gonna 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.

We’re gonna make it work. And the building was built in nineteen seventy four. It has some really cool stories. What are some of your favorite stories of of the arena?

There are stories around this arena, when we’re giving tours and we’re walking on the ramp, we can tell people every cow, every motor crossed bike, every monster truck, WALK ran right through here, so did Michael Jackson, so did Elvis, so did Elvis, everybody walked right on these, you know, on these floors and so forth, and they get freaked out by that. But, you know, the the building in was originally built in seventy four for thirty two million, and then in the mid nineties, they had to expand it to seating capacity to keep the big eight tournaments here, so that’s when the new structure came on in the atrium, so they spent thirty four million dollars just to add two thousand more seats.

And do some upgrades and whatever. And then we bought it and spent another forty two million dollars renovating it. So it’s had three lives, and I’m sure it’s not done yet. There’s mean next year, there’s a whole bunch of new stuff coming that’s gonna 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 gonna spend on that yet.

I’m pretty excited to talk about that too. So what do you have a a memory of you coming? Did you ever come to Kemperino when it was Kemperino? Yeah.

I mean, not as a kid, not till we moved here as adults, and I would bring my young kids here. I I know we came to arena cross once and something on ice that I fell asleep on, you know, halfway through, and the roadie or whatever. And, yeah, you’re 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 oh, wow, would it be neat to own an arena someday and stuff like that. Yeah. You were always dreaming about 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, oh, crap.

Now, what do I do? Yeah. Did you ever come as a kid or an adult?

Yeah. I came down here as an adult too. I after college, and I think my first memory was a a ringling Brothers circus. I I used to go to the circus all the time as a kid, so the first time it came through here.

And then I I played arena football in here for a couple years too, so it’s kinda it’s different now when I walk in. I’m like, was did was this the original player entrance, or was this the bar down here? Unfortunately, nobody’s cheering like they did before when you They were everything very often. I’m not backing you either.

Yeah. He’s not kidding. He 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.

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 or 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?

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 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 we have to work with what’s there. 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 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 and get rid of the obsolescence, so that the chairs, the historic, a lot of the original fabric is still here. We just added to it. And if we have to, we can rip out some of this stuff and go back to almost original condition. That’s that’s part of the historic tax credits.

Could you reverse and put it back if something happened? Chris, what is 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 return tournament directors or event organizers. So building relationship with them is extremely important, so we get as much information ahead of time as weekend. 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.

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 kinda 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 so their reputation and stuff is on the line.

You know, you take somebody like Nike or Under Armour.

There’s thirty facilities in the country that they can choose from, and getting them here is one thing, getting them come back every year is a whole another thing. So that’s kinda the secret sauce is really the relationship building because then everything else after that is just a lot of hard work in Noble Greece. There’s no secrets. Sure. Sure. What’s one solution that you found along the way that you’re most proud of?

I don’t know if there’s one that stands out, but I think it’s I’m a football guy, so we call him 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 it comes to 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 no matter what we’re doing inside, there’s no effect on their actual product, I I think that’s what we’re most proud of is that every weekend, a 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 for an event?

So unique, like, Steve was talking earlier, we have the two different floors, so getting creative in 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 the track going at the same time. And I’d say we’re bursting at the seams are probably just about ten thousand people in at one time.

We, on a regular weekend, we’ll run through five thousand people, but that’s each day, not at one time. So it’s kinda usually anywhere from twelve hundred to two thousand people in the building at a time, which feels kinda empty. But Yeah. We’re we’re close to ten thousand people that day and there are a lot of challenges.

Though after thinking you’ve maximized your facility, you’ve won. What did you learn from actually having that many people in in those three or events? Do you do it again the same way? Or is there anything you learned from that?

I’ll never do it again the same way.

We just we learn. We take a lot of notes. We take a lot submit notes and we file them away for when that event comes up the following year. What went well? 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 five thousand people show up at one time, or if it’s an event where they kinda are continuous.

I think the biggest things we we learned out of those is you can never have enough janitors.

If there’s gonna be ten thousand people in the building, we probably need a thousand to hundred.

So one of my favorite things about the arena, and that many people in here, you know, growing up, I wrestled, and we stuffy gym or the community center, and we’re eating out of the cooler in the stands, and nobody can move the whole family’s board all day long and mad. But here, you’ve got options of things 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 and how do you manage that? So food and beverage is extremely important, and we have several vendors right now. They’re all independently owned and operated.

So we really rely on them to be staffed out properly and be able to cycle through lines fast. We’ve learned when we have events that stay the whole day at wrestling or at cheerleading.

Those guys are gonna 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 missed their kids event, or they’re just out there forever, a journal rest period, or whatever. And we wanna cycle them through pretty quickly. So we 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 gonna have a lot of people. So they’ll prepare their food differently, they’ll staff differently, and We do occasionally a couple 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 etcetera like that. I’m sure.

So Steve, if you started all all over today, what would you do differently?

Not do it at all. Not do it at all.

I I Chris doesn’t like an answer because he’s done a great job here, and it’s it’s good for him.

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 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, and that other event we were trying to get had just signed a three year contract with some other 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.

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, I don’t know how you market to that. I mean, we’re marketing to almost everything.

And there’s no there’s no billboard or TV ad or or radio ad that will hit that. Yeah. You’re 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 gotta have a salesperson going after that.

You also want the locals in the everyday using the gym and using different things. So you gotta market for that. 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 owe own.

That’s how I got involved. You in the beginning is I I, you know, I was running sports leagues for adults and using ten different community centers, and I saw this one stop shop for everything I needed. And I was like, I gotta I gotta talk to that what’s going on here and 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.

You had the foresight in the very beginning to know I’m gonna 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 wanna talk about, like, why that was so important is easier? 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.

That no other software even came close to hailing 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, and then we finally, you know, 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 and adjusting prices.

So I think the the software we’ve created obviously didn’t exist anywhere else, 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 some of the next chapters coming up is it’s gonna go way beyond what we ever expected. And then just operations wise, keeping track of all the scheduling, all the bracketing, all of the the the referees that are assigned to it, what jersey colors do you have, WAS THEIR NUMBERS, ALL THIS KIND OF STUFF THAT I NEVER EVEN THOUGHT OF AT ALL OF THE TEAM DINAMICS AND JUST KEEPING TRACK OF all those moving people, the ten thousand people we had moving through here, the system just handles it, and I I don’t hear a word, I guess, you know, Chris filters it all for me, but it 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 software development. I’d already built a league system, which was using to run my leagues. 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 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 and we got a long way to go, but it’s it’s it’s to a great point now in in in both Hyvi arena and facility ally. Excited to be here. We actually are office out of this building as well. We’re one of the tenants in IB that will 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 about? Sure.

There’s The 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 the bridge that’s going in next door, facilitated the zip lines.

A company says, what if we just ziplined off your roof 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 going to start side, and we have five thousand apartments now in the neighborhood, we need to become an indoor outdoor facility. We need more mini golf, more festivals, more THINGS THAT K. C. CRU DOES AS WELL TO KEEP THOSE PEOPLE HERE TO MAKE IT A DESTINATION TO MAKE IT MORE INTERTAINMENT to give Chris’ 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. They’re And no, he didn’t say that incorrectly, zip lining 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. And thank you so much for joining us today.

If you wanna learn more, check out Hyve arena. It’s hyveerena dot com. If you wanna 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.

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Transcript

What’s up everybody? Do you own or manage a facility while you’re 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 built and managed successful sports facilities, entertainment venues, and clubs. I’ve been managing a sports league for over ten years, and through that process, I developed a software to help me automate everything I could to make my life more efficient.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved two things. Sports and organizing. I played everything from tee ball to basketball to wrestling, to football, to track. Even got a scholarship to play college football for a year before I was sent to Iraq at twenty years old.

Yes, I joined at seventeen to pay for college six months before nine eleven happened. But even war couldn’t slow down my love for sports and organizing things. While we were overseas, I helped build a soccer field and program pickup for our soldiers in the military that also got to play with Italians, Koreans, and others on base. When I got back from my rack, I was able to finish my degree as a computer programmer in graphic design.

Led me to Kansas City to find a job and be closer to my nephew. When I got here, Kansas City was talking about how cool downtown was for young professionals. And I was one of them living downtown and working downtown as a web developer at a large ad agency, which I loved working at. But I found myself driving outside Kansas City to do anything fun and meet new adults such as myself.

Playing sports, things like that are the best way to meet people, and so I decided to join a league, a San volleyball league, and a softball league, but they were all thirty minutes outside of downtown. And so after a while, I got sick of driving thirty minutes outside of downtown, which supposed to be really cool and decided to just rent a softball field and tell some friends. I called this business Casey crew. It’s been around for eleven years now, and in the first year we had a thousand people sign up, which actually blew my mind.

Three years later, I’m still leaving my full time job as a web developer every day at five o’clock to run and umpire the games every night, I was collecting paper waivers. I was handing out t shirts at every game. I created these coupons for the bars that we were working with and handed all those out. And so I was spending all of my weekends as a twenty year old single adult in downtown Kansas City, programming, building schedules in Google Docs, taking waivers and scanning them in for my insurance, and it just didn’t make sense.

And that’s not something you want to do at that point. And so, took my background as a web developer and started developing a software to automate a lot of my leagues for me. And I built this software up, and it originally was called Lee Ally.

FIVE YEARS LATER, six YEARS LATER, KIN CITY, K C CRUID GROUND INTO THIS BEHEMATH OF OF SPORTS LEAGUE, ALL THE ADULTS ARE PLAYING AND OUR MAIN FOCUS for about seven years was building leagues downtown for people just like me and my friends. Still to this day, most of my friends I’ve had met, I’ve met playing Gigball, Sam volleyball, cornhole. And now ten years later, Casey Crew has almost twenty thousand adults to play all of the city in our programming. At that time, I was also working with about ten different community centers, golf courses, bars, and I just kept getting double and triple booked. So after the hundredth time of that, I STARTED THINKING MAN IF I COULD ONLY BUILD SOMETHING FOR THESE FACILITIES TO MANAGED PEOPLE LIKE ME AS I DID WITH MY LEAGES, THEN THERE MIGHT BE SOMETHING HERE FOR THESE FACILITIES.

And since I was working with so many different community centers, it was kind of a nightmare working with different individual managers. Around this time about year seven or eight of KC crew, I’d heard of a facility called Hybia arena coming, which is where I’m sitting today.

Large, old sports arena, Kemper arena that used to be concerts, rodeos, every you can think of used to be done here, but it was becoming dilapidated, and the city was talking about tearing it down. So they held a city meeting here in the in the old building when it was all falling apart, and I came to it. And I sat there and I listened to every single person stand up one after another in front of the city council. And say, this will never work, tear it down.

There’s no way we could get a thousand people here every single day. And at that point, I’d already worked a lot with the city and built some Sandball courts and programmed most of their fields and was thinking, man, I get several thousand adults a week at my leagues. And so if we combine youth and events, there’s no way that Hyvi arena couldn’t do the same. And so I actually stood up and was one of the only people at the meeting to champion Hyve arena and say, I would love for this to happen.

I believe it’s possible and I’d like to be a part of it. After that meeting, the developer, Steve Fauci, came up to me and he said, who are you? And after explaining what Casey Crew was and what we had done, Not only was I able to secure a large lease here for Casey Crude to move our offices, but I also learned that Steve was very interested in automating this facility so that he didn’t have to manage all the things I was managing in a hundred times the size. And so Steve actually saw saw the opportunity to invest in my league platform to build facility ally to manage high v arena.

And at that time, Casey Crew then moved into high v arena, and we were able to get rid of the eleven to twelve different one off basketball courts we were using, and now we had a one stop shop for our home offices, all of our staff, and all of our programming in this area.

And that was one of the best ways that Casey crew catapulted and used the software to essentially grow bigger.

After facility ally launched in twenty twenty, COVID shut the world down. And what we saw was that most facilities were not looking for software when they’re in the middle of being shut down. But After the pandemic was over and the city started opening up again, a lot of facilities started looking for something better. They had the downtime to really think through their systems, and they were looking for something better.

And here we are today with facility ally growing and scaling across the country. After ten years of running leagues with almost twenty thousand people a year and working with fifty to sixty different facilities, I saw that there was really nowhere to learn how to do this. There’s nowhere to learn how to run a league efficiently. How do you fill a twelve court facility all day long As you can see, it’s not filled right now, all day long, all the time.

How do you drive members in? How do you do that? How do you manage your multiple bookings? You got volleyball, basketball, pickleball, track, do you manage a pickleball facility that maybe has conference rooms and different events going on at the same time?

And I just realized that after ten years, I learned it the hard way. And the grinding way and did a lot of things wrong and made a lot of mistakes, and I’m sure there’s a lot of facilities and league managers out there have done the same. So the reason I started the facility playbook is to educate people just like me around the country and to help make sure that they don’t have to make the same mistakes and failures that I did. Now, you will fail, but hopefully, with the facility playbook and our help, you’ll be able to fail smaller, quicker, learn from it, and move faster to success.

And that’s what I’m gonna be giving you here with the facility playbook. I’m gonna be interviewing and talking to facility managers and owners all over the country who manage amazing different sports venues, entertainment, and clubs, and showing you the mistakes they made, what they learned, you’re also going to get to see these amazing facilities and check them out so you can see kind of what they look like, how they operate, and learn from the mistakes that they made, and the tips and tricks that they’ve learned over their timeline. So if you are a facility manager or an owner getting started or been doing it for years, and you’re just looking for some extra help, stick with us facility playbook, you can learn more at facility ally dot com, which none of this would be possible without facility ally developing this amazing platform to help these facilities.

Did you know that most of those facilities use between four and six different softwares to manage their rentals, memberships, lessons, leagues, and more? Facility ally to the rescue, revolutionize your facility with facility ally’s all in one system, learn more at facility ally dot com. Follow along, check it out with Homefield, Hyvey arena, chicken and pickle, and much, much more. We’ll see you on the first episode of the facility playbook.