Lately I've been reading up on minor league baseball teams, and why some
succeed and so many don't in a competitive, challenging field (no pun intended).
What's not to love about the minors?
They have off-the-wall names like The Savannah Bananas, The Pensacola Blue Wahoos, The Richmond Flying Squirrels, and even The Albuquerque Isotopes (fans of "The Simpsons" will appreciate that one) ...
Fans can get closer to the action than they can with the big leagues, and teams develop a close relationship with those fans and the community ...
There's usually a lot more than baseball going on at the games, with silly events and contests filling the time between innings ...
Besides these things, there's a big lesson for coaches and entrepreneurs:
Sell, sell, sell. And when you're done, sell some more!
The successful minor league ball teams really push the sale, and do everything they can to get people to buy tickets.
They're constantly coming up with new promotions, and doing outside-the-box thinking that you don't see in the majors.
The general manager of the (wait for it ...) New Orleans Baby Cakes, Augusto "Cookie" Rojas, says that sales is the #1 job of the whole team and staff, because baseball is a business.
According to Rojas:
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"Once a game comes and goes, it's entirely gone. You can never recoup the loss of an empty seat. If you are the general manager of a clothing store, you can sell your inventory today, tomorrow, or two months from now ...
Once a game is played, and if you didn't have a sell-out, you lost out on potential revenue gained from a sold seat, and it can never be recouped ..."
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The same goes for coaching businesses.
If you have X number of spots for your 1:1 coaching or your group program, every empty seat is gone forever.
If you're running at lower-than-full capacity for your programs, those empty seat losses are going to add up to a lot over a year/years.
You have to get them filled quickly (and for full-price, not discounted just to get the seat filled).
To help coaches with this challenge, I'm starting the first "10 Clients In 90 Days" group coaching program of 2019 shortly.
The name may not be wacky, and I don't have a mascot, but the strategies that I teach will help get butts in your business' seats.
More details here:
Marc