Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we're talking with Bill Flitter from Moraga, California, where he's very passionately involved in youth basketball, helping kids gain confidence.
He sees this as the big thing basketball skills can really do for kids, so he's had a lot of involvement in various programs.
Over the years, he's developed training protocols, he's got a great name for his program, he's developed an app, and we talked about how to take all of that and package it up into an opportunity for syndicating everything he's developed for Moraga, to people all over the United States.
You're going to enjoy this episode, especially if you've got something you think you might like to duplicate or scale to other marketplaces.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 212
Dean: Bill.
Bill: Dean.
Dean: How are you?
Bill: I am awesome. What a pleasure.
Dean: Well, it's all very exciting. I'll tell you that much.
Bill: Oh my goodness. Well, I'm a fan. I'm not going to lie. Long-time listener. It's like listening to the podcast and now on it.
Dean: Here we are.
Bill: - Bucket list item checked off. Here we go.
Dean: There we go. Check mark. That's funny. Well, I'm excited. I got my evil-scheme-hatching reMarkable 2 tablet here, newly minted.
Bill: Nice.
Dean: I'm in my comfy chair. Got my fresh bottle of water right here. I'm all in on hatching evil schemes today.
Bill: Awesome. Well, yeah. I think we're going to have a good one.
Dean: Okay. Tell me what's the Bill story here.
Bill: Sure. Yeah. Like you, long-time marketing veteran. I've been in 20 years. Really, my entire career has been around marketing. I live in Moraga, California. I think you said you have a relative that lives in Walnut Creek. So we're pretty close to Walnut Creek, California.
Dean: Okay. Nice.
Bill: I've been in the, like I said, 20-year marketing veteran, a lot of startup work in Silicon Valley. And then about 10 years ago, really caught the bug for coaching youth basketball. Really started with my kids, my son who wanted to play in our community league. He said, "Dad, will you help coach?" I'm like, "Sure. Let's do it." I played. So I figured, "Why not? I know a little bit. Yeah, why not?" And then from there, it just got inside of me and can't seem to shake it. So here we are about 12 years later, still coaching, training kids, been a high school coach to one of the big programs for boys for about three years.
Pivoted a little bit, I'm now coaching girls at a local high school, and then started my own training business about three years ago. The focus of that was to help underserved youth. When I was coaching high school basketball, I noticed the need and the opportunity to serve that particular market. But what I found was there was issues that I didn't expect. Transportation was an issue. Actually getting to the gym that I had was a huge issue. So that didn't grow as quite as big as I wanted to. It was a free program for those kids. So then I had to pivot again.
I started coaching kids in my own community. What I realized was it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're a kid in an underserved area or a kid in an area where parents can afford the training, afford to pay the training. They all have some very common issues, confidence. They're growing kids. I find that's what I coach. I coach confidence. Basketball is just, it's just a way to-
Dean: Yeah. It's just the context. I get it.
Bill: It's just the context. Yeah, exactly. The name of the program is Level Up Sports Academy. We do private and small group training. I have one of the largest three versus three girls basketball leagues in Northern California. It is mainly focused on training girls. That was another pivot that I did too. There's lots of programs and what I realized for boys in our area, but servicing girls, there wasn't a lot of opportunities for them. So I decided on there and that's when my business really took off.
We do clinics, typically book, for example, I'm booked through March. We can dive into that a little bit too. Even during a pandemic, at first back in March when the pandemic, it was a complete stop. There was nothing. Everybody was trying to figure out what is social distancing? This is the shock to everybody's system. Let's pull back everything. That was the start of my league and I had to shut that down. And then the training stopped and paused for a while. And then what parents realized was, "I got to get my kids out of the house. They have to be active. They have to do something."
I did some online training with them. I still kept in contact with them. We did things over Zoom and face to face. But then what I realized also was this is something I wanted to do for a while. I should have pulled the trigger. I would have been in a really good spot a few years ago if I did this, was virtual training in general. I had to figure out how can I attract more kids outside and scale my business? Like I said, I had been in startup marketing for a while, building SAS companies. Then the personal training is like being a consultant. There's only so much time in the day.
And then I thought, "Well, if I move to online training I can reach more kids, provide a platform for them, provide my platform and the way I teach and they can access that 24/7, no matter where they are." I launched that or I'm about to launch that. It's levelupbasketball.training. So that's my online version. I still have Level Up Sports Academy. It's the personal, kind of the consulting, my B2C businesses, Level Up Sports Academy and the Level Up Basketball Training.
And then the online version, again, was a pivot because of COVID. It just made me realize that, wow, okay. I can lose the face-to-face business in the pandemic pretty easily. There it goes. So I wanted to balance my portfolio, if you will. Go ahead.
Dean: No, I got it. Following along. Yep.
Bill: Okay, sweet. And then recently I was approached by two programmers who are building out an app for basketball trainers and they wanted my advice. I started out as an advisor. I got pretty excited about that opportunity just because obviously you can see, I'm passionate about the sport and passionate about helping youth. But this opportunity came along and there's this need in the market for any sports trainers, especially in the youth market. There isn't a lot of good CRM tools.
We do a lot of training. For example, I'll train all day on a Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and then have to go back home, type all my notes up, send it out to the parents. Well, as you can imagine, 8:00 to 5:00, basically working out from 8:00 to 5:00 and then coming home and doing all my book work and things and sending notes to parents on what happened in the training. I had to remember what I told the kid at 8:00 a.m. to do. So now we create this app. I thought, "There's got to be a better way to do this than managing everything with Excel spreadsheets."
Anyway, these engineers had thought about this already, approached me with this opportunity. That's Coach Central. It's coachcentral.io just to kind of keep these things straight. That's really a B2B business. That's going after trainers, providing them a back office management system in session too. You can take live video, right away send it off to the parents while they're sitting in their car waiting for their training session to be done. It's really quick and easy. That basically saves a lot of time.
So I have the B2C business, as they classify them, the one-on-one training, the online training, and the B2B. So when I first reached out to you, this was it must have been a few months ago. One of the challenges that I was facing also is I'm also, like I said, a high school coach. Our seasons kept on getting delayed and pushed back because of COVID. I just thought, "I'm new to this particular program." It needs a lot of work. We're really starting from scratch here. There wasn't a feeder program into the high school. I'll explain that in a bit.
The challenge that we were facing was how do we get sponsors during a pandemic? We can't promise them anything because everything just keeps on getting delayed. But we know we need sponsors to help support the program, your local insurance agents and such, banners in the gym and things like that. So it's like, "Wow, okay. We have quite a challenge. How do we promise we'll give you space, but yet our season's getting pushed back?" Every month there's a change in northern California. So sports is completely off right now. So that was one challenge.
And then these pivots that I was making during COVID from the in-person to the online, really starting to struggle with my audience. What I mean by that is my audience and when I speak to them, is the audience the parent and do I talk directly to that parent about their daughter?
Dean: Yes.
Bill: Or do I speak about what I can do for the athlete in this case? The parents pay for it, so I need to appeal to them. And then really just trying to create a balance between ... and balance this portfolio of face-to-face and online training. So that's the in a nutshell where I'm at right now.
Dean: So which opportunity do you want to focus on? Or which one do you think ... What would you like to concentrate on here for us?
Bill: Let me try to explain how they all just basically the two work together. Level Up Sports Academy, the face-to-face is really going to be a feeder into the online training. So the girls that have been doing face-to-face now can go online and get that, of course, bigger than that as well. And then it feeds into the high school. So they really just tied nicely together. But I think for the purpose of our conversation is really trying to unravel the online training business because I think now ... Pre-COVID to do online training wasn't looked upon as a ... You'd have a hard time.
Now, because of COVID, it's more acceptable. Kids will be used to finding a trainer online and maybe there's some fathers doing it on their own.
Dean: I mean I've seen some apps where coaches are doing dribbling skills mirroring things where you mirror the ... make the same moves. So yeah, something handy for people to have in front of them. But of course, it's difficult. I mean it depends what kind of context. Where are they going to be able to ... Are they in a gym environment or have they got access to being able to shoot too, right?
Bill: Right. Yeah. What I always assume is they maybe have a hoop. It's basically two workouts, two workout plans, one where I don't have a hoop or you have a hoop. It doesn't have to be in a gym. It can be at a playground or-
Dean: Yeah, right. Exactly.
Bill: Of course, to shoot outside in Wisconsin in the winter, you can't really do that. So I have to take that into account too if I want to reach other communities across the United States with that.
Dean: Yeah. You asked a good question, who do you focus on? Part of the thing is what does it look like? What is the endgame that you're trying to do here? What is it that you want? If you could have it any way you want it, what does that picture look like?
Bill: Yeah. Well, do you mean the endgame for the athlete or how do you-
Dean: For you. I mean I'm talking about for you and the athlete. But mostly I want to see what's your ... Is the end winner the high school basketball program that you're running? You're developing basketball players in the local community to feed into the high school program to send them off to college and the WNBA. Are you looking to create champion basketball players? Or is it a broader thing as a youth thing to get people active in basketball? What's the end result here? Are you looking to grow a big business out of it or to help it pay for itself?
Bill: Well, I'll answer the easy question first, which is definitely want the business to pay for itself. But the dream for this online portion is to scale it nationally and create a community for girls basketball. One of the reasons why I'm focused on the girls market, even online, was you go to YouTube and search for any video on basketball drills. There'll be a male coach and a male athlete. I asked my girls that I train now when I was hatching this idea thinking, "Okay, if we go online or you do an online training and I share online videos with you, if I share a male doing the drills, is that okay?"
They said, "Yeah. No, that's fine." I said, "What if I shared a female doing a drill?" I said, "What do you think about that?" Most of the girls said, "That would be better." I'm like, "Oh okay. Why?" She goes, "Well ..." Their thought was if they see a male do the drill and I'm talking this is youth, youth from fifth grade through 12th grade. Their thought was if they see that male do it and they're not quite up to that skill level they'll say, "Well, that's a male, so he can do it or that's a boy. They can do it." Versus if they watch a girl perform the drill and my athlete couldn't do it, they would say, "You know what? If she can do it, I can do it."
I'm kind of paraphrasing a little bit and shortening that, but that was the gist of it. So the light bulb went off in my head saying, "Hm." So I started searching around for videos that I could share during the days where I wasn't face-to-face with them. I had a hard time coming up with videos that were by females. So what I decided to do was, "All right. Well, I'll shoot my own." So I got one of my star athletes. My brother-in-law is a videographer and we went to the gym for a day and shot 200 videos, basketball drills of the female athlete doing all these different basketball moves.
So that I thought, "Okay. Well, there, okay, we got the video content now. So I have that as an asset. Let's see where this can take us from here." Luckily enough, the other positive thing about the pandemic, I have a high school son who started getting into video editing, so he's editing all the videos. It just worked out really nicely.
Dean: That's great. Yeah.
Bill: Yeah. But yeah. I don't know if I mentioned this. 80% of what I do is just build confidence really. I want to be able to translate that online. I don't want the girls just to come in, "Okay, follow this routine. Here it is." I just don't think they'll stick with it. This whole online training, like Peloton and then the Mirror, if you think about why Peloton was successful or is successful is the trainers. You're seeing and getting excited about and keeping you motivated and being held accountable. That's the bit where I'm struggling with too is how do I hold the ...
It's easy to hold an adult accountable. The parent is basically helping me hold their child accountable. "It's training time. Start doing your workout."
Dean: Right, exactly.
Bill: So the struggle becomes motivating the parents to motivate the kids because likely I'm not going to have direct access. I got to walk that fine line between having access to the kids too.
Dean: Yeah. They could be playing Fortnite or whatever.
Bill: Oh my gosh, yeah.
Dean: That's the reality. That's the reality of what you're doing with ... I don't think you're ever going to be able to force motivation for something, so it's got to be internally motivated. It's got to be fun for them. There's probably a lot of ways to gamify that or if there's any way to ... I don't know. Are the girls competitive to a leaderboard or anything like that? Or is it really more of a social thing, that they're in the same place as the other girls doing the same stuff and as they get-
Bill: Yeah. Definitely there's a-
Dean: ... as they get older or higher up ... Training sounds like something that they would, the ones who are more serious about it, would this be ... When you pick the poles here, on one end you're introducing basketball to someone, but on the other end you're working with the elite players and shaping them, molding them to potentially a scholarship or the WNBA. Where do you see it on that scale or is it just in the middle?
Bill: I really think it is in the middle. That's where my program is today. Most of the girls that I train are in that middle. What I have found is there's lots of trainers who are going to train the elite athletes. Obviously, that took a lot of time and dedication to do that. At the opposite end, you have the community leagues, the rec leagues, girls and boys who just want to have fun. And then in between there there's girls who might play multiple sports. Basketball may not be their number one choice. They might do soccer and basketball and volleyball or something else.
But they still want to play and they still want to get better. The triggers, for example, I can't tell you how many times I've had a parent, "I want my son or daughter, I want you to help them with their shot." The shot seems to be the currency of if they can shoot, then they'll make a team. At the end of the day, it's not only about making the team. It's about, "You made the team, but now let's get some playing time." I don't think I've had one parent ever say, "Hey, can you really help my son or daughter on defense?" So the shot seems to be the currency in all of these, improving the shooting percentage.
Even though they'll come in with that thought, I know better. I know they need a more balance. They need a balanced approach to basketball. They need to work on the foot work and the defense and learning what a closeout is and screens and rolls, all the details of the game. It's not just the shot.
Dean: But that's those things, focusing on the ... I don't want to toot my own horn here, Bill, but just so you know who you're talking to here. I'm a three-time champion, two-time runner-up, the Knights of Columbus pass, dribble, and shoot competition in my town when I was growing up. So I got that going for me. You're right. Those are fun events. That was a fun thing where we would go through. I don't know. I grew up in Canada. But do they do the pass, dribble, and shoot competitions for kids in California?
Bill: Yeah. Actually, Knights of Columbus does a free throw contest now.
Dean: Oh okay. So that was all part of it. I mean it was free throws, then there were other shots. There were moving shots. Then there was passing drills and dribbling drills and through the pylons and all the stuff. You had to do a number of, like a decathlon of events kind of thing and you got scores in all of that and then a free throw competition as well. That's what I was saying about the gamification. I don't know whether that's something that when you think about practical things, if it's just about making something fun for them with some ...
Because now that you look at it, there's got to be some value that somebody's going to pay for.
Bill: Correct. Yeah.
Dean: That's what you're saying is that you're trying to think, "Okay. Well, in the middle of the road do parents, are they looking at paying for basketball training online?" I don't know. For girls, I mean on stuff. You look at it, but you're absolutely right. The perception of girls athletics and boys athletics is that if you look at the investment in things, there's a lot more money probably spent on male athletics.
Bill: Yeah. Without a doubt. Yep. Absolutely.
Dean: Yeah.
Bill: Well, that's again going back to that and addressing that because nobody wakes up saying, "I'm going to put this round ball into the hoop." They do sports for other reasons, for the community aspect and friends and building self-confidence and all those other things that come out of that. The messaging on this though is not ... I mean it can be part of it, but the promise that right now I've come up with is I have a way that I teach shooting that I want to translate to online as the whole framework, if you will, of going through certain steps and a certain progression to get you to shoot at a higher percentage because that's measurable.
You can see a difference. You can't see did she play good or bad defense? That's harder to measure. But you see if someone's improving their shooting percentage. So that's what I was going after. For example, I help you increase your shooting percentage by 50% or more in 90 days. And then the outcome is that'll boost your confidence in playing time. So generally speaking, that was the plot form or the message I was going to start to-
Dean: I like that. It's very specific. I like that. You've got an outcome.
Bill: Right. But then when I'm thinking about the advertisements or, again, being a marketer, I'm thinking through the emails that I'm sending to parents and such just that really generally, "Am I helping dedicated basketball parents help their daughters or am I helping the daughters in that quaint message?" Of course, you test it. But at the same time, I'm just like, "Who's my persona here? Is it the athlete?"
Dean: Yeah. Who do you want to be a hero to?
Bill: Yeah. Exactly.
Dean: Who do you want to be the hero to, the parent or the kid?
Bill: Yes. Yeah, exactly. That is where I'm struggling a little bit in this because the person that I'm going to be helping in the end is one person removed from me.
Dean: Yes. Who's the driver of the work you do now working with the kids in-person? Who's the driver of that typically if you were to say? Is it the parents coming to you saying, "Can you help me with my kid?" Or are the kids reaching out and then saying, "Okay, let me go ask my parents?"
Bill: It's definitely the parents. Now, the kids might talk and say, "Hey, what program are you doing?" "I'm doing Level up." And then they go to their parents to ask. But 99.9% of the time it's the parents who are coming to me. A lot of times it's the moms, a lot of times. I would say probably 60/40 split, it's mom initiating the contact and managing the schedule and maybe even a little bit higher than that.
Dean: Yeah. Well, my take on it initially is that we're having this conversation and we're kind of leaned towards a COVID response right now. We're talking about building something though that's bigger than that. We're not talking about an immediate, only a short-term thing because my thought is that I think the long-term of the ... If you're going to have a basketball training kind of thing, it's really got to be built around in-person stuff too. That's where the primary thing is.
We're looking at the online thing as an alternative. But I think as a support thing, it probably has the most legs as an integrated part of ... I'm wondering about what's the price point of what you're thinking here?
Bill: Right now it's really relatively inexpensive. It's basically 10 bucks a month to have the access to all the videos in this particular program.
Dean: It feels like that's not going to be easily scalable. You're in Moraga. How do kids in Poughkeepsie find out about this? How do kids outside of Moraga ... How does Michigan find out about it or these other things? So the cost of acquisition of new clients is going to seems like cost more than what the revenue will be. So I wonder in one of the approaches that I might look at for this is to develop ... If we're to look at your model for Moraga there, is there a possibility to create a full ...
You'd have a bigger footprint if you're taking it from youth basketball for girls, youth girls basketball in a marketplace in Moraga and then syndicating that model to other trainers rather than trying to you be the voice for the entire ... trying to go out to reach everybody in Poughkeepsie.
Bill: Right.
Dean: Almost like creating the total system for Moraga and almost licensing it or franchising it, that kind of model of syndicating it in all the different markets. What would the population need to be to support ... What's the population of Moraga?
Bill: We're a tiny, tiny town. But surrounding us, I'm pulling from Walnut Creek and Alameda and a bunch of other small towns that basically it's called the Lamorinda area. But quite a few kids, the two big rec programs, they have almost 1000-plus kids in those two combined. So there's a lot of kids that play basketball in our area. That's boys and girls. So yeah. But you don't need a lot of kids to ... Obviously, the Bay Area's expensive to live in. So you probably need a few more kids here than you do in Kansas City.
Dean: If you were going to make a business out of this, what could you, if you have the total package kind of thing, how much revenue can you generate with a business like that?
Bill: I'll give you a flavor of what I do, if that'll help. I'm not doing it full-time. I would have hit six figures this year. That's part-time. I have a full-time job too. This is my passion job, my side hustle, if you will. So a trainer who can train, let's call it, five days a week can easily hit those kinds of numbers. It's totally-
Dean: A viable business.
Bill: Viable business, absolutely, especially now I think. I like your concept of the total package. I didn't think about that where you could offer the online training. The trainer does the in-person training under the Level Up brand. They have this app now that they could use. I mean it really is a total package.
Dean: Yeah, right that's what I mean. Yeah. Now that becomes then you get your branded version of the Level Up app that somebody ... Yeah. So they're geo-fenced for those areas. You think about how many places are over 50,000 people.
Bill: Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Dean: That's about what you'd need probably to make something like that viable. I mean that's kind of an interesting model.
Bill: Yeah, if you think about Moraga, Moraga's 17,000 and the neighboring city is 19. So yeah, it's right in that-
Dean: So 50'd be super viable. Yeah.
Bill: Oh yeah, yeah. Exactly. It's totally doable.
Dean: Alexa, how many cities in United States are over 50,000 population?
Alexa: Sorry. I don't know that.
Dean: She doesn't know that. She doesn't know that. But there's a lot, I would guess. There's more than 1000. So you look at that, that those are now ... Imagine if you created a footprint. You got a good name. Level Up is a great name. Plus, it's progress. There's a lot of stuff. You can have levels. You can create your system. Leveling up is, along with it, some confidence training. Start with the basketball and along with it comes the confidence training. Yeah.
But anyway, I think about that. Imagine if you now have this distribution network then for reaching all the kids all over the country that way. That's pretty fascinating, right?
Bill: Yeah. No, that's extremely fascinating. Yeah.
Dean: So now you focus on creating an amazing experience for all the basketball-playing girls, youth in your local area.
Bill: I guess even at that point, I mean that's just what I focused on was girls. But obviously, it doesn't just have to be ... For other coaches it doesn't have to be that. In my market, that was the need. In Maple Grove, Minnesota, they might need a mix of both. By the way, the answer to that question is 601 cities over 50,000.
Dean: Okay. There you go. That's a viable market when you start to think about it like that is what would be the thing. How do you identify that target audience? How do you identify the kids from fifth grade to 12th grade? It could be you're saying it doesn't have to just be girls. You're just coming at it because that's where you were focused on. But if you were to take yourself out of the immediate situation that you're in, you would also include boys. It'd just be youth.
Bill: It'd just be youth. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. For the youth. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. That's a really good point. Speaking of the girl, not to change the subject too much on this. But we always talk about niche-ing down and focus. I looked at it from the perspective there was a need in the market. My business grew because I focused on the female and providing great coaching to the youth in my area. I could more than double my business, I suppose, if I added boys maybe. I guess as an entrepreneur, you always kind of, "I could go after that audience."
Dean: Right. You could run them as two separate things. You're maybe five different brands that you're thinking when you've got the young kids, the fifth to seventh graders kind of thing. That could be both. But then you might fork to the boys and girls from there, but also have a peak performance brand as well. You got to think like Proctor & Gamble, all the individual things that they do, all the different ... They've got five different billion-dollar laundry detergents that all serve a different need.
Bill: That's a good point. Yeah.
Dean: So I think if you think about the youth, like the intro, getting people involved in basketball as one thing, then the seventh grade where they're competing in junior high and then high school level and some that are then aspiring to do college or beyond.
Bill: Yeah. No, that's a really good point.
Dean: Rather than just being one thing.
Bill: In that particular case you used Proctor & Gamble as the example. How do you decide? You go from Proctor & Gamble has you said X number of laundry detergents. I don't know if Tide is one of them, but Tide came to my head if that's one of the Proctor & Gamble things.
Dean: Yeah, Tide. Well, there's the thing that they're all focused on different attributes. So some people if you say Tide, that is for people who want to get their clothes as white as possible and keep their colors bright. That's one. If you want to get out tough stains, they've got Era.
Bill: Era, right?
Dean: But if you want your clothes to smell great, you might use Sunlight. If you want to just throw it all in and not ruin it, you'd use Cheer, all-temperature Cheer. Just throw it in and you're not going to ruin it. Put it on warm and there you go. They all serve a specific element of the marketplace.
Bill: Yeah. But when you're thinking about that, so for example, why couldn't they have ... For example, why couldn't you do Era with there's the Era for cold water, Era for making your clothes white, Era for all the other things?
Dean: Yeah. That's then dilution because it's not the same thing. It's the-
Bill: Go ahead.
Dean: Yeah, it's not the same thing. When you've got a brand that the only thing that it does is addressing the one most specific thing ... Right now, if you were to go online to Amazon and type in Excedrin Migraine and then Excedrin Extra Strength, you're going to find that the Excedrin Migraine sells for up to a 20% premium over Excedrin Extra Strength even though there's not a molecule of difference in the ingredients or the pill that's actually in the bottle.
Bill: Interesting. Okay. But they want it to be seen-
Dean: But-
Bill: Go ahead. Yeah.
Dean: Exactly. It's focusing on that specific market. It's an interesting thing. Level Up is great. It has the overarching thing, but to have people know which program they're in as opposed to it just being one thing-
Bill: Level Up, yeah. You could join the Level Up Elite Program or the Level Up Peak Performance Program or-
Dean: Right.
Bill: Even just Level Up Shooting Program.
Dean: Right.
Bill: It's not just Level Up Basketball. You're giving each of those product lines an identity.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Bill: Okay, yeah. Yeah. If you think about the, and I know we're talking about the total package of things here, what's your suggestion on keeping that all ... Parents coming, "I don't know which one to pick. Too many choices." How do you balance that? How do you think about that?
Dean: Well, I think there could be qualifications or that you're looking at what do they want? It should be easy to find yourself. It could be an assessment. It could be-
Bill: And then we recommend a program.
Dean: Right, exactly. Yeah.
Bill: That totally makes sense.
Dean: Yeah. It should be that. You know what I mean? There should be the different things because there are different skills to be a point guard than to be a power forward. So learning being a guard is different than maybe learning to post up. Learning all the moves is a different thing. Be a three-point shooter, that could be a program.
Bill: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, all of those skills, I think-
Bill: I want to take the I want to learn how to dunk program.
Dean: Yeah, there you go. Yeah.
Bill: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I mean I like that. I like that, the direction of looking at this as basically a franchise or syndication model and basically giving coaches just a box, so to speak, and here you go. You're all set. You're going to have an online training program. You're going to have my philosophy of training youth. You'll have the motivation and everything else, the non-basketball stuff as part of it as well. You'll have an app. Yeah. Just be you. Get out there and coach. You focus on the coaching and here's the package that gets you going.
Dean: Exactly. Here's the calendar. Here's the calendar of events. Run the contest or run the fun things or the 3V3 tournaments or the pass, dribble, and shoot. I don't know whether Knights of Columbus is still doing stuff like that or whatever.
Bill: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Dean: Have the fun things.
Bill: Yeah. And then the community aspect of that too, I was kind of leaning in towards. What does that mean? For me, I think especially for the girls it's important. Us men are wired differently. For example, when I start my practice in-person for a girls' team, for example, we get together in the middle of the gym, do our stretching and have conversation. For boys, I get them on the line and we start doing something to get all that adrenaline out, up and down the court as fast as we can for a few minutes, as an example.
Dean: Line drills, yeah.
Bill: Exactly, right. Girls will come into the gym and talk. Boys will come into the gym and try to shoot threes even though they're three feet tall and they're at the three-point line. So it's just a different dynamic. I want to be able to translate some components of that for the female audience online in having community and having chats with professional athletes or college athletes. I have a partner in this who she was a Division I athlete and she's playing internationally now.
She's totally onboard to have conversations about her journey as a female athlete and how she felt when she was in sixth grade and awkward and going through changes in her body and everything else. I think that's an important piece that obviously I can't relate to.
Dean: Right. That's part of the thing of having a distribution network that you could do things like that at the top level, but it's all distributed through the local network.
Bill: Just make that available to the network, "Hey, we're having-"
Dean: Yeah.
Bill: Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's a great idea, just regular programming, part of the total system, right?
Dean: Right. That's exactly right.
Bill: Yeah. It's one of the perks. In that particular idea or concept, again, I don't know franchising inside and out or the syndication. But generally, you charge a coach or, in this case, you charge the trainer or coach a franchise fee.
Dean: Well, I don't know that you would go all the way to a franchise for something like this, but you could certainly license, where they may pay an upfront fee to be trained and get all of the branding and the stuff all set up to be the Level Up licensee in that city kind of thing and then pay a monthly licensing fee based on what they're doing. So you'd have to make it all sort of ... You've got to prove the model that you can build. Can you build a sustainable six-figure business on doing what you love in the youth basketball market?
Bill: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I've proven parts of it so far. You're right though. I mean I think it's just adding in a few of the ... Well, I got to add the online component to what I'm doing and just think. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow.
Dean: I think that might be the most ... It's going to be an uphill battle just trying to build the online app because on so many levels it's you hit it on the head that the parents have to like, "Okay, time to do your online training." It's not inherently the natural thing that they want to do.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you're absolutely right.
Dean: The internal motivation. It's not like playing Fortnite or watching TikTok maybe. I mean when you're talking about the youth now, that's what you're talking about. Any time on an app is going to be you're talking about taking away from TikTok time.
Bill: Yeah. That's right. I think about my daughter and who she plays. Okay. How do I get her motivated to go do her training right now? I'm the coach, right?
Dean: Yeah, exactly. Right.
Bill: I'm her dad. She doesn't listen to me anyway, right?
Dean: Right. This is where programs have, with anybody really, the most successful thing for compliance is synchronous and scheduled in your location where they're physically going somewhere for a specific amount of time to do a specific thing. That's like it's a miracle that you can get them to put their phones down for an hour.
Bill: That's a really good point. Yeah, yeah. That's the thing. That's the key. It's scheduled. It's at a particular time. You have to go, where this is you could do it ... It's just like us, right?
Dean: Yes.
Bill: If we were going to a trainer or if we were meeting a buddy at the gym, you're held accountable. You're going to go. If it was just up to us, we'd be like, "I'll do it this afternoon. I'm tired right now." Yeah.
Dean: That's right. That's exactly right.
Bill: We can't assume that kids are going to be any better than we are going to be about it.
Dean: Right. That's it.
Bill: That's a nice way to frame it and think about it. Put yourself in that position. But if they had a trainer, a local trainer who knows the kids and can say, "Hey, get your butt down here and start training. Let's go." You can look at their progress specifically online and talk to them. Yeah. It's a big difference.
Dean: That's it. What's your take? What's your wrap-up here?
Bill: One, amazing. The big takeaway for me is, okay, I have these different businesses. They're all related, but how do I sync them? How do I put them together to make a bigger opportunity and to scale this? Again, I only have so many hours in the day to do training myself. So I'm limited. So taking this model, proving the model and then syndicating it totally makes sense. I mean it really solves that problem of I think what we identified right here at the end is motivation, getting the kids to actually do the workout. I think that is the key thing, because I'm thinking about my own kids, again.
If I told them to go train, "Do your online training," eight out of 10 kids just they're not going to do it.
Dean: Yeah. We got to work towards for 18 months from now this is going to be a different ... Hopefully COVID's over. Everything's back. We're doing all the right things. Now you've got the full opportunity for the business.
Bill: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That's a really good point too, because right now most coaches aren't training face to face or doing that-
Dean: Exactly. So you got time to build your stuff, build your game plan.
Bill: Yeah. The other piece that came out of this was any athlete or parents could go online, go to YouTube, find videos. But the problem with that is they're just videos. Yeah, you can learn something from them and learn how to do a three-point shot, but it isn't a system. It isn't a program that walks you through from step one to step 101 by the time you're a senior. So you start in fifth grade and walk you all the way through it to be an elite player, all organized, all charted. Here's the path you need to do. That's really one of the pieces, the value is. Yeah. That's exciting.
Dean: I love it. I love it.
Bill: Hey. Maybe Dean, we can get you back out on the court and see if you still got it.
Dean: There we go. To defend my title, that's right.
Bill: That's right. Yeah. I love it.
Dean: That's funny.
Bill: Maybe you can shoot me a video of that and we'll put that on the website.
Dean: There we go. Perfect, I love it. All right. Awesome to chat, I love it.
Bill: This has been an amazing conversation. So nice to meet you finallY at least over the phone here.
Dean: Right, exactly.
Bill: Very, very helpful conversation.
Dean: Awesome. Thanks. Have a great day.
Bill: All right. You too. Take care. Bye-bye.
Dean: Bye. And there we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation or go deeper in how the 8-Profit Activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now you can go to morecheeselesswhiskers.com and you can download a copy of the More Cheese Less Whiskers book and you can listen to the back episodes, of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes. Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the 8-Profit Activators are part of the Breakthrough DNA process.
You can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the 8-Profit Activators at breakthroughdna.com. That's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about Breakthrough DNA, as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there. So that's it for this week. Have a great week and we'll be back next time with another episode of More Cheese Less Whiskers.