Mark Burik (00:02.99)
Hey everybody and welcome to the Better at Beach podcast. My name is Mark Burke and today we have a very special episode for you. So we are recording one of our complete coach academy meetings where we have some of our coaching members who are attending and in the previous week what we did was we discussed starting a business and how to actually run a business and what it's like to be in a facility. And if you haven't heard yet, I personally became an investor in the new
largest beach volleyball facility in Austin, Texas. It's called ATX beach and we're super excited about it. It's going to be one of our home bases for camps, which means we're going to be running three to four events there per year. you'll be able to find our links on ATX is beaches website, and you'll be able to find ATX's links on better at beaches website. So we're fired up for that. And if you're in Austin, if you're in Texas, if you're anywhere, and I know everybody wants to visit Austin now, it's like the new hot town.
Go there, ATX Beach. For our coach members, let's get back to business. For our coach members, we had a lot of business questions. And so what I wanted to do was bring on LJ Luciano, who is the owner, operator, and mastermind behind getting ATX Beach started. So we're gonna ask him a bunch of business questions, a bunch of volleyball questions, all of the problems and pickups that he ran into trying to build this.
facility and the advantages and disadvantages that he thinks he had. So we're going to do that. And then at the end, we're going to run that episode. So I'm just going to talk back and forth with LJ. And then at the end, I'm going to let the members of our complete coach Academy actually ask LJ a bunch of questions that he can answer. So we're going to leave that on the podcast recording as well.
If you do want to become a member of the complete coach Academy, where we talk about coaching problems, as well as building business just like this, then head to better beach .com forward slash coach links are also included in the podcast below, as well as our recording maybe for YouTube. If it's on there, the second thing is if you want to become a part of a complete player program, where we look at your video and analyze any skills and techniques and strategies that you have.
Mark Burik (02:22.03)
you can go to betterbeach .com forward slash coaching. I know that's confusing. However, it's all on the website. So you can find it there if you want to become a member and we can work with you personally. And then you can get the live Q and A's from masters of the mind, just like LJ. So everybody else, you guys, please keep your mics quiet if they are in a noisy environment, but LJ, you and me are going to chat buddy. Sounds good. I want to hear a little bit about.
So how did you get into volleyball? Tell me the story behind Wannabe, one of the most popular volleyball brands, and then we'll start getting into actual ATX Beach once we get a little background on you. Okay, sounds good. I appreciate it, Mark. I'm definitely not the orator you are, but I will try my best during this meeting. So I was a tennis player, basketball player, and this is how I came to the group was water volleyball.
We had a water volleyball court in college at a department complex and I moved to Austin. I started playing water volleyball with a bunch of sand players. And then I moved into a department complex that had three sand courts. So after water volleyball, I would go play sand volleyball. And it became a little community of new volleyball players that had never played sand. And we got tired of texting each other. So we created the Facebook group, the Sand wannabes.
just because we wanted an easy way to communicate with each other on who's playing where, when we're playing. And then I just started adding people to the San Juan Obis group. And from there, it kind of took off organically in ways I didn't know it would. Now we have close to 4 ,000 members in San Juan Obis Austin. We have over 2 ,000 San Juan Obis Dallas, over Houston, Corpus Christi, South Carolina, mostly Texas. I went to some other groups that were already established and I said, hey, would you mind switching to a San Juan Obis affiliate?
And so I got OKC to switch over. That's how I got Corpus Christi, Waco. And so I basically created an affiliate group. It's free. It's really just for talking anything and everything regarding volleyball. We kick anybody out that doesn't talk about things that are appropriate for volleyball or fitness. And we really moderate the group. So I think that's helped to grow them. And we've always been a Switzerland. So we grew and grew and...
Mark Burik (04:43.662)
During that time, I realized that I wanted to run a beach volleyball venue, I'm a BWB player. So my influence in the group was tournament directing, marketing, the San Juanibis. And I just took over a lot of tournament directing. I saw things I liked and didn't like about tournaments I played in. For instance, South Brighton Island had a 30 year run with this open tournament and they would not finish the finals because of lack of someone. Bobby Jones with product serve.
Ran some NBL qualifiers, but he wanted to be a player so he didn't have time to be the tournament director and Aussies needed help. So I just kind of became this person that helped run things and then I did my own tournaments. To say I'm one of these, then became kind of the signature tournaments in Austin. During this whole time, I knew that I wanted to run a venue. I talked to investors, but land in Austin was way too expensive. What kills you in Austin is parking.
You can get a place to build courts, but then you need just as much space or more to fulfill parking requirements for the county or city. And that makes it astronomical for building a venue. So I had some land deals fall through then in 2021, Austin Pickle Ranch reached out to me to run their volleyball program. They were in indoor pickleball courts, outdoor pickleball courts, and same volleyball courts.
Well, that fell through because of cost and COVID and it was in lots of permitting because there was a spring on the property. So you had to go through environmental issues. So that fell through. So that was probably my fourth attempt at owning a venue, running a venue. And then about six months ago, Austin Pickle reached out to me and said, hey, we want to come back to this volleyball idea.
but we're not gonna build from scratch. We found an existing property that has buildings. It used to have a driving range and we think we can take advantage of the fact that this has already been zoned for outdoor sports recreation. It already has restrooms. Cost savings are lower. A project that was gonna cost them $10 million down to 2 million. Do you wanna be a part of it? At this time, we don't want you to be our employee. We want you to own it.
Mark Burik (07:07.374)
And I had never raised money before. I've worked for startups. I've been a part of them. I worked for Dell and Oracle, IT sales background, outside sales background. And I just said, yeah, I can raise the money. Not knowing if I could. I watched a lot of Shark Tank and I listened to NPR is how I built this. And there's some common themes in those two shows that everybody just takes a leap of faith when they want to go become an entrepreneur. And most of the time they have to take that leap of faith and quit their current job.
pivot a few times. And so this was my opportunity to, to do that. And I said, yeah, I can raise the money. So do you want, Mark, you want me to get into how I raised the money or is this a good path? Yeah, let me, let me go back and then we'll get back to money raising, which I think is, is really scary for some people. one of the things that you did say was that we talked about, you essentially acquired.
existing Facebook groups. And that's actually something that I've been really interested in doing because Facebook has already populated itself with customers and participants and people that you want. You know, people in all different cities have already created these little pockets of really enthusiastic volleyball players. So I've always said to myself, well, okay, well, how do I incentivize? Because we have a really nice affiliate program.
which we don't get the word out about at all. And we can actually monetarily incentivize the leaders of those Facebook groups to just post a free blog and then they can start just raking in money from people who clicks on that. However, just haven't gotten to it yet, which I think is stupid. We're always working, we're always working as hard as we can, but I think that would be one of the biggest sources of the group. What I wanna know from you is,
to get somebody to change their local Facebook name, which they've kind of grown. How did you approach them to turn that into a wannabes, like another company slash brand? What did you say to them and what was the win for them that you gave them? Well, I had to come in really soft. You know, hey, I run the Austin group, we're growing. This is not a money play. That was big. I'm not trying to take your members.
Mark Burik (09:34.446)
I'm not trying to make money from your members. I feel like we can, by creating a network that's under the same name umbrella, we'll have more influence to get partnerships, to have more reach, to have pros come to town. I don't explain to them that my goal was I would compare it to a VFW or an Elks Lodge. That if you move from Baltimore to Phoenix to Austin, LA, that the dream would be.
You just plug yourself into the San wannabes group in that city. There's no membership fee. You literally just say, Hey, I was a player in Tampa. Now I'd love to be part of your group here in Austin. And it creates couch surfing, you know, opportunities when you're traveling. I know the first thing I do when I go anywhere now is look, where's the local volleyball? I did that when I went to Hawaii. I did that when I went to Seattle and it gives you something to do. And it, and it,
instant friends the day you arrive. No one ever believes you can play. You have to prove that. Of course. That's a big deal is they don't like when strangers call next. But so I would come up with a soft play that like if you become so part of the San Luis network, it'll be part of something bigger and still your group. I'm not I'm not asking to admin it. I'm not. I'm just asking to share stuff in there and change the name.
You still run in how you want to run it. That was huge. You still maintain control of your group. And that's really all I really offered them was to be part of a larger network that might get us more influence and more members. So this is one example of you built community first. And because you built community first with really good intentions as well, it made...
partying like that next step into maybe this is easier. So now that we've got a whole San wannabes crew, and then you guys, when you show up to AVP events and volleyball tournaments, I mean, you guys show up. It became something that people bonded to that they wanted to be a part of. And then you guys started with t -shirts and you started doing basically costume contests at fuzz and AVP events, but.
Mark Burik (11:54.958)
The first start. Yeah. So the, the wannabes and the San wannabes, although we're, we're, we are together, but not together. So that group, that group, the Gulf coast region with Sean and them, they do more of the dress up, show up, really go out of thread. The San wannabes is more about a collective group that comes and participates with them.
But I have to give them all full credit. They are in charge of their costuming and the way they show up and make themselves known. That is a wannabes branded thing that I, the same wannabes benefit from, but that is definitely Germany, Trottie and Sean's. I want to give them full credit. That is their thing.
We create some brain confusion because of saying one of these and one of these. But we all play nice together. Yeah. And regardless, yeah, communities were built. Yes. Right. So we've we've established that. And now that you're in multiple cities, now you have the actual ability to to grow from there. And this is something that I'm telling the guys in the Complete Coach Academy and the guys in the Player Program. Hey, if you don't.
have a volleyball group in your small town. If you're worried that all of the open players are the only ones in that volleyball group, just start posting or start your own and then have those conversations. Facebook makes it free. Meetup .com makes it free. WhatsApp makes it free. Just start with one person and ask that person to add one more person. Cause number one, you're going to get a lot more friends.
You're going to get a lot more opportunities to play. And if you ever decide like, Hmm, you know, maybe this does become a business. I'm actually meeting tomorrow with a gym owner of two blocks away who started workouts in his own garage. He invited four guys, then he invited four guys twice a week. So that's eight guys. Then he got too crowded. Too many people wanted to do his workouts. He started a gym. Now he's starting a gym in a neighboring town here in Redondo beach from Santa Monica. So it's the same thing where you, you just invite.
Mark Burik (14:15.598)
You build a community and it's so free to do it. There's really no effort involved, but it gives you so much advantage later on. And then, you know, starting now, now you've got people who know you through this and you wanted to build this facility in Austin.
And you had a couple of failures. I guess we will call them failures or hiccups or turns or pivots. But I had failures to launch. That's what they were. Failures to launch. I like that. And I do want to just mention one thing that you said was parking. Parking shocked the hell out of me too. When I started doing the plans for Chattanooga and then I actually met with the first architect slash hotelier, he was like, well, where's the parking enemy? I was like, what do you mean? He goes.
parking usually accounts for the same amount of space as whatever you're doing. So if you think, it's gonna take me, okay, I've got a quarter an acre, so maybe I can fit four volleyball courts on there, you need another quarter of an acre fully for parking. And there are zones and ordinances and permits and everything. So you need to understand that. And then you also eventually...
I don't want this to stop anybody from going forward, but eventually you just pick up the phone. You call the city website and you say, Hey, I'm trying to do this. Who do I talk to about legal permits for this? And they have the whole thing where they say, okay, that's this guy. And you talk to him, you ask him questions and he gives you the answers. but that parking thing was something that I did not realize. And then,
bathrooms being mandatory, you know, in Chattanooga, you have to have a permanent building. So I was just like, well, why don't I just set up courts just like, or in a park? Like we don't need a bathroom. We could use a porta potty. They said, you can't run a business there unless there's a permanent fixture, which is going to have bathroom facilities. That's in Chattanooga. And I'm sure Austin's probably got more stringent rules, since it's a bigger growing city. That is the only reason Austin does not, did not have.
Mark Burik (16:30.83)
a big multi -corp facility. It was because of what you just discussed, the parking, the bathrooms. So you would have people come in and think, I want to build a 10 -corp facility. And then it would fall flat because there were too many hurdles. Randy Metter, who owns District 249, it's kind of a Texas legend player. He gave me advice on weather load almost a decade ago, though. He said, find existing
space that already has a parking lot. He said look for car dealerships, look for old clubs, and that's what he did in Houston. He had a rodeo and nightclub that already had a huge parking lot, so he was able to build 10 courts there. And so that sent me looking for car dealerships that shut down, and even though I didn't find the space we're at now, his advice came through. It's an existing property, so it's already zoned, it already has the bathrooms, it already has the parking, it already went through.
everything you need to do, you just have to do the change of use. So if the key is what I'm saying is unless you have beaucoup money, you don't want to build from scratch. You want to find an existing structure that already has an existing parking lot and convert it. Otherwise, it's hard. That one sentence right there is going to change.
all of the searching that I'm doing in the places that I'm doing them. And it's also when I'm looking at campgrounds for a future place for us to run adult summer camps and set up a little family, like compound near some water so we can do this all in one cool natural place. I'm currently looking at existing campgrounds, existing resort parks, because building all of that is more expensive than buying it when it's already built, which is kind of crazy. But...
It is, and that's how it is now. And so now that I'm looking at like, these wide open grass, all I got to do is dig down. Well, now you don't just got to dig through the grass and dump sand. Like there's gravel delay, there's a soil grading, there's somebody who's got an environmental thing. There's a flood zone that requires water to pass through it in case the local river floods. There's all this stuff where you can save all of your time and thank you.
Mark Burik (18:55.15)
LJ because I'm going to ignore all of this flat land stuff that I'm looking for and say, Nope. There's nothing existing there. Let me just see if I can retrofit this into a big warehouse or use car dealership smart. Cause they got big parking lots. Don't they? Thank Randy. That was Randy's advice to me. All right. I like that. Okay. So that's your first little cheat code guys. If you are looking for a facility, take a look at something that would fit a couple of volleyball courts and has a parking lot already established and probably plumbing.
and stuff, you know? Okay. All right. Now you finally got this opportunity, right? So you got the opportunity, somebody who wanted to build with you. and this was a pickleball company that wanted to build with you. How did you get connected with them? And then if they're the company, why did they ask you for money? Why did you have to raise money? Let's get into that. Okay. So back in 2021,
Katie Lindeloe who is a LSU alum, ABP main draw player. She's now the head coach at LSU. She and I are friends and because of Sam Monabee's and she played in some of my tournaments and then Lindsay Rosenthal who runs Silver Beach here. They somehow, Tim Clitch, the owner, now the owner of Austin Pickle Branch that had this idea to partner volleyball and pickleball went to them.
And both of them said, hey, who you need to talk to is me. All because of tournaments I ran, because of the San Juan Obis Network, they're like, if you want to talk to somebody that knows the sound, I don't want to sound artificial, but really knows the ins and outs of beach volleyball in Austin and Texas and the scene, come to me. So Tim called me, didn't even introduce himself. He says, if I want to make an impact in Austin, how many courses do I need to build? And I said, well, that's a loaded question, but 10 is the magic number.
And he's like, why Tim? I was like, cause it's double digits and you could advertise to hear the largest beach and water ball facility in central Texas if you get Tim. And that started a little relationship with him and his business partner. We met, I took them on a tour of all the venues here in Austin. I took them to Houston for tours and showed them that, Hey, I can be your guide to run your facility when they want to be worked for. So three years later, Tim calls me and says, Hey, I know we failed three years ago. We're back.
Mark Burik (21:21.55)
they have a better opportunity. Do you want to do this? So it was literally the San Juan Obis network and running all the tournaments that I've ran that I got me referred to them. I was literally referred to them. I didn't find them. They found me. Wow. Yeah. Nice little advantage there. Yeah. It helps to be able to main drop once I'm on that conversation that, Hey, I ran the ABP post parties, you know, that I know you and Casey and Patterson and Chase Richmond and.
You know, not only do I know the pros, the local scene, but I also know some of the big names and some people care about names. Yeah. I mean, they want somebody who's already woven into the community if they're going to invest because smart people who are trying to put their money and we'll talk about how you raise money and who you raise it from. But when you're looking for bigger chunks of money from smarter people who are actual investors and are going to be.
frugal and not just kind of donation -based and hopeful -based, but when they're looking for it, they want to say, what relationships does this guy already have so that he can get people to walk in the door? Because if you don't have 500, a thousand, 10 ,000, a hundred thousand people ready to walk in the door, you're going to bleed money for the first year, two, three, before you start. And some people can afford that. They can afford to hang on.
Some people give up. I ran classes for three years where we had a scheduled class every week. Sometimes one person showed up and I was out there for an hour and a half with one person coaching them. But I held on to that. I held on for three years. And now we've got camps going in multiple countries and multiple cities. Not everybody would be willing to hang on to that. Not everybody's partners in life would be willing to sit through that.
while you're sacrificing money currently in order to build a future. It's like when a band's trying to make it. They play at a lot of empty venues. Yeah. And if you listen to like Joe Rogan, all the standup comedians and you're just like, you know, you hear them make $7 in a night and they try to do that every night. So, okay. You have to, you should be woven into the community. If not, it's not a non -starter.
Mark Burik (23:48.846)
But you do have to figure out how exactly you're going to get people in the door. And I do want to get into business plans. And maybe that's a good place to jump or combine our conversation where you've got a bunch of investors. How did you choose what the investment would be? What percentage people would get? How many investors you were allowing to come on?
And who did you talk to to help you out with that or did you come up with it on your own? So I pretty much came up with it on my own because I thought I was gonna be able to do this with three investors. So I came up with, I've had this working business plan, it's an Excel spreadsheet that I sent to you that I've been working on probably since 2016. And I kept on morphing it to where I would find out more numbers from other venues. And it became.
kind of my holy grail, my main template for building out a full business plan from this Excel spreadsheet that I had been massaging for best work for years. I thought I was gonna have three investors, I thought I was gonna need 750K, and I needed these three investors to agree that I would be sweat equity. Two of them started getting shaky. Could you just tell us what sweat equity means for somebody who's never done this? So sweat equity means I'm not putting in,
I'm not doing it in funds. I have literally just the intellectual property, the operations, the founder, but someone else too, many people are funding it and I'm going to get 10 % for putting in the work. So they call it sweat equity. Got it. So you don't have to put any of your own money in when you're doing sweat equity, it means, but you are doing all of the work, which definitely has monetary value, right? You wouldn't have somebody work.
for free for a year, because they gotta feed themselves, they gotta feed their family, they gotta have a house while they work. And they're hoping that the future of the company is better than the start. And so they can eventually earn that. So you're one of the people who invested all of your time upfront and investing all of your work, which means that you have to probably give up or pass up other work. While other people who might have a little extra money, they're able to give it.
Mark Burik (26:09.742)
but they don't work. That's usually what the investors give who give money. Some of them kind of like myself, I'll want to really kind of push this forward and advertise ATX Beach because the better you do, the better the investor does as well. Okay, so if you're sweat equity, you're asking people for money. If this fails, I'm effect, everybody else, my 23 investors lose money, but they had the money for this. If this fails, I put, you know, all my eggs are on this one best.
So that, I think that was part of the slowing piece. The other thing, if you do it with a slow equity angle, you have to...
provide assurance that you're in for the long haul. And the way I did that was I don't get any of my 10 % until all investors are paid back in full. So I'm showing faith in the project that, hey, yes, I did get a salary, but I don't get a dollar of that 10 % until investors are paid back in full. And that really is the main incentive hook because they know I'm all in. Because unless this works,
I don't get paid. And those investors, the people that are giving you money to start, they get money based on the profit for the life of the company. So when we're rocking and we're still the number one beach in Austin 20 years from now, I'm still collecting from the money that I gave you just to start. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the, that's the other big part of this. Getting back to the investor though, if you decide to go this route,
I thought I was gonna have three big investors, two kinda got shaky. So then I decided to go back to the, you'll hear the Sam Wannabes network over and over. So I decided to do my own version of crowdfunding and I posted what you saw. I was like, hey, if you're interested in a beach volleyball venue, which many of you have been saying we need a big one for the 15 years I've been part of this beach volleyball community in Austin, hit me up. I'll go over the business plan with you. You can visit the property. And the Sam Wannabes community came through.
Mark Burik (28:16.27)
I have 23 investors and all of them are beach volleyball players from rec to pro like more. So it, that was how I got two thirds of the funding. One big funder, a lead investor for sure. That helped me not have to get another 10 investors, but, really it was, it was a crowd. It was my version of crowdfunding and making those two promises. First of all, they love beach volleyball. So they were interested to.
I don't get any money until you're paid. And three, you get paid your percentage for the life of ATX Beach. So for 750 for starting, and there's gonna be a ton of questions, I'm sure, from our members about how you decided how much you needed. But what was the minimum buy -in for an investor then? So every 1 % was $8 ,334. $8 ,334. And I didn't care if a person bought 1%.
or my lead investor, they bought 30. I just, I wouldn't do half percents. That was the only rule I really had. So, and I treat, I think I treat my one percenters as well as I treat my 30 percenter because it would not have gotten done without the whole pie, you know, small pieces to the big pieces. And it, doesn't it help just kind of like in anything, you know, when, for the coaches out there, when you're creating groups and when you're starting to build a class.
and you tell people, hey, they're already signed up. I just need one more. I just need two more. This is maybe you know it from your sales positions, but it's one of those sales tactics that absolutely works when you have limited space, which you do when you've created a threshold for people to spend money. You say like, okay, 8 ,000 is the lowest that you can do. And we've only got.
this many more spots, even if you've got a ton of spots, it creates that need to say, hey, you need to fill one of these or you get none. And so if you're designing a program like that, you know, that's why number one, it's definitely easier for you to, if you're a coach or a program operator, for you to hire a specific number of people that are required for that specific number of spots. In the beginning, I would leave my camps open to whatever.
Mark Burik (30:40.942)
And then, you know, three days beforehand, once people realize that they ran out of time, then we'd get 20 signups. And then I'd be scrambling all day just to get a coach to be able to cover these people. Now we set time limits and we set spot limits. If we do have the space to add extra people, then you might see on our site, like, Hey, we've got three spots left. And then a week later, after those three spots are filled, I look for another coach and I say,
Hey, I know it's last minute, but we have some more people interested in the camp. Do you want to come coach? And so when they say yes, then I can open up more spots, but you saying it's 8 ,000. There are this many spots that can be filled and that's it. You know, it gives people some incentive to actually start that process when they know that there's a limited piece of the pie. And if you do have 8 ,000, like think about how much you spent in volleyball in your life.
Most of us have definitely spent more than $8 ,000 in terms of travel, in terms of pay, in terms of setting themselves up. And now that they've got a facility that they can be at kind of anytime they want, it's just an investment into their own driving less to whatever facility they're currently going to. It builds some social currency as well. There's a fear of missing out. Another key was capping it, like you said, but for other reasons, knowing your shares aren't going to be diluted.
but we have to have basically 100 % if we want to bring on any more investors. So knowing that, hey, I've heard of other projects that they went out and brought in 20 more investors and so their shares, their share value went way down. And we can't do that here. So that's another, another incentive, I think as well. Yeah, that would hurt. That would piss you off, right? Then all of a sudden you got like a bunch of negative, negative social equity where somebody's like,
Hey, you said I had this percentage for this much money and now I'm what? Like, how did it get more expensive to start this company all of a sudden? And so then that doesn't make sense. And you start, if you're successful at raising that money and you bring in too much, then you might be doing stupid things because having too much money in the bank account. And I've been there where I saw like, my God, look how much money I have in the bank account. Not realizing three months from now when I have to pay for a seven day camp, boom, I'm back to zero.
Mark Burik (33:05.262)
So that's a lesson I had to learn three or four times before I'm like, okay, let's start setting aside money and saying that there's a cap for certain things that we're spending on. Once you find the location, big, big, big key here is understanding that it's going to be, everybody told me this, it's going to be 20 % more expensive than take a little bit longer than you think. So,
Like I raised 750, honestly, I probably shouldn't raise 900. And here's another thing that I did not know, because I never raised money before. Once you get to half a million, it kind of cascades from there. Like I probably could have raised 1 million, 1 .5 million, because you, once, like you said, once you have buy -in, then other people are like, they're doing it. I want to be playing this. And because it's all beach volleyball players that are like investors, a lot of them want to be able to say, I own, I own that.
I own ATX Beach. So I honestly could have raised more, but you have to get that first group. And getting that first group over the phone or through Zoom does not happen. Whether they're your best friends, family, you have to show them the venue in person. My close rate in person was probably 80%. My close rate over the phone or through Zoom was abysmal.
I mean, it was you and a few others that actually didn't do the on -site tour. I got to a point where I wouldn't even pitch it unless you came to the site and did the tour. wow. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks for letting me in on the site unseen. I'm used to that. Like all of my investment properties, I never saw any of my investment properties before I purchased them. That's funny. The site sold a lot of people and doing group tours.
because then they all started bouncing and the energy and talking and asking questions and seeing the vision. And so group tours really were way better than one -on -one tours. But that was so I really answered. So it really became a crowdfunding. So would you say based on this experience now that it's more important to get the site before the money or.
Mark Burik (35:23.79)
start getting promises of money before you have a site. Site, site all day. Unless you know some people really wanna invest or really wanna own the site, the site has, you have to have a site. Cause otherwise it's just a fantasy that they've heard. Austin and many other cities, there's been 50 venues we heard about that never happened. And they think that in fact, one made the news twice. It was, and it was gonna be this huge complex and it never happened. And -
You know, so yeah, you have to have the site locked in. Now, how do you hold on to that site while trying to get enough money to buy the site? That's where I got lucky with the Austin Pickle Ranch. They were going to lease the facility no matter what for pickleball. They just finished their 16 indoor pickleball courts two weeks ago. So I, I got lucky and being able to jump on their train and because I would not have been able to hold on to the site.
This is a 15 acre facility with a 13 acre driving range. And so the fact that I was able to partner up with them and able to, yeah. So you would have to be able to, you need to, you, you have to be able to lease the place upfront and know that it's going to work. Okay. And so that's where I am in a unique situation. I would have had to go to people such as you and be like, Hey, you want to lease this place?
and hope we can build something here. Right. Yeah. Different conversation. Now there are small business loans and I think people are scared about this. I definitely was in the beginning, but there are banks. Remember everybody banks want to loan money. That's how they make money through loans and through interest. So you could have gone the small business loan route, or you could be on the crowdfunding route, which you did.
What was your thought process between choosing between those two things? I knew that I would have to rely on my fraternity brothers, close friends, if I went to a small business route. I didn't have the equity to get the money that I would need on my own. So, and.
Mark Burik (37:43.406)
My friends and my people that I know that are investors, they're not volleyball players. And what really helped us play was volleyball players know the volleyball world. If you're not part of this volleyball community, cult life we lead, whether you're a rec player or an open player, you don't quite understand how a venue works and how it could work. Okay. Okay. I still, I do think that there's room in there for some people who down the road, you know, if you don't want to do that, one of the things that it does do.
that were, if you crowdsource investors from the volleyball community, you generate an immediate buzz. Now you've got whatever, 23 people who are incentivized to bring people and talk about it and share it on social media. So you've got built in marketing there where it's not only on your hands, even though, you know, the blame and success ultimately does fall on you. However, there are small business loans. And if you can put together a business plan and we're going to talk about a business plan in just a second.
But if you can put together a business plan and show examples of what other people charge, show examples of what other facilities have done, tell them why it works. And right now guys, ChatGPT can do all of this research for you, which is number one for me, scary. Because it means that somebody has not put in.
the hours and days and weeks and months into actively researching it so that they know the numbers. They asked chat GPT for it, did a cursory glance and said, okay, this is good enough to show people who I'm about to borrow hundreds of thousands from. All right, so I don't love that, but if you need help writing a business plan, maybe you ask chat GPT, hey, give me the questions that I need to answer.
In order to put this in front of an investment banker so that I can do this as a small business loan, I recommend doing the homework so that you actually see what goes into it. Because anybody who looks at the front side of a business and starts counting heads and going, man, everybody here is paying $80 per team. And there's this many teams. This guy is raking it in. You have no idea what goes into a small business and how much.
Mark Burik (40:04.622)
expense there is. So you can never take a look at what the price tag is and think about how much money that is because guarantee 60 to 70 % of that is immediately wiped off the table. No matter what, no matter if you think they're just running it in a park or whatever, there are still hitting costs that you'll never see. so labor, labor, labor, labor, labor, I mean, just renting porta potties.
And do people understand how much that costs like permits cost the amount of time to spend coordinating with cities? Don't even get me started on that. But OK, let's get back to now that business plan where you now need to show these people what's going to happen. So what was important in you building the business plan? I know you said that you went into different tournaments. You've you've run it before. So you know, certain costs and you had this living.
Excel sheet. Can you talk about that and how that converted into your business plan? Yeah, so all the information is out there if you want to find it. So I went to all the league sites and figured out how much they're charging from the sports and socials to the actual venue like Aussies, Moon Tower. I even looked at Dallas and Houston venue pricing, San Antonio pricing. So you can come up, you can come up, even if they don't want to tell you, you can come up with what.
They're making, cause all you have to do is add up how many leagues are running and their costs. then alcohol sales is public. It's in least in Texas. It's public. TABC. You have to, everybody has to report their alcohol sales. So you can find out how much every venue in Texas is making on alcohol. No way. Yeah. Yeah. All public. Which is beauty. How did you find out that that's all public? I ran a sports bar in my twenties and we had to report our, our alcohol sales to us.
to the state and it's all published information. Don't know why they make that public information. Maybe I have no idea if it has religious connotations, tax connotations or what. But so I was able to find out how much all the broadball venues in the state of Texas are making on alcohol sales and actually feel like that. How much they're grossing, right? Yeah, grossing. How much they're reporting for taxes. Gotcha. Yeah. So I even think that with the grand salt.
Mark Burik (42:28.494)
If someone says they're making a hundred thousand dollars a month in alcohol sales, they're, in my opinion, they're probably doing more than that because, you know, but that's what they're reporting. so that was a large, large part of my planning. I know an owner of Kung Fu Salon, he has bars all over. He's a volleyball player, he's my survival player. He kind of gave me some insights into their food and alcohol sales that I couldn't get publicly and how much he thought I should make on a daily basis on weekends.
if you're going to do the bar with volleyball, alcohol is pivotal to your profit. You know, otherwise you're just making money off of the sweat and sand. which you can make money with the sweat and the sand, but food and beverage helps make a menu way more profitable. Sure. Also brings up a whole bunch of issues and problems too. Yeah, I would like to add that. cause because now you've got to buy a kitchen, which thousands.
to set up the kitchen. Now your layout has to be there. Now your food permitting situation has to be wild. So I know that Sandbar in Utah, they started out, they have a really nice kitchen. They ended up not using it. And all they did, they still had their closed beer sales and their kegs, so that worked for them. But they just ended up doing microwaved food and some protein bars. That way you could still have a meal there.
And it makes sense, but you don't have to hire a chef. You don't have to hire a busboy. You don't have to pay for all the cleaning utensils. You don't have to pay for the extra heat, the cleaning, the ordering food that might go bad. You need, if you're thinking you're a volleyball guy and you want to do a restaurant, you need a restaurateur to run that for you. That will slow you down. In my opinion, I don't think it's a good move, which is why I loved your setup. and I said, great.
He hasn't decided to double down on restaurant bar. It's already kind of pocketed with him and he doesn't have to spend his time learning how to become a restaurant owner. He can be a volleyball owner. And that's what I liked about ATX Beach. To extrapolate on that, the reason we're able to do that is Austin Pickle Ranch is, it's their liquor license. They're doing a food truck court. So I don't have to worry about staffing, the license, the insurance or the inventory.
Mark Burik (44:50.158)
I just provide the customer and get a percentage. Can't anybody do that? Like, hey, you own a food truck, you own a food truck, you own a food truck. Would you park outside our place every this evening for leagues? Okay. So just, so we're talking about business plan. Why is he getting all the prices from other places? Number one, part of a business plan. If you guys don't know, I didn't go to business school, so I had to figure this out in the last 10 years from 29 to 39. You have to figure out what you're going to charge.
How many people you think you will get in there in the first three months, six months, 12 months, year, two years, three years that you're gonna take to build. You have to know that you're not gonna open the doors and see a thousand people pour in. And when you charge for that, you have to know how many leagues are you gonna run? How many kids are you gonna have in your club? How many tournaments are you gonna have? What is the gross income that you're going to see for a full year, two years, three years?
And how do you get to that number? Every one of those numbers needs to be accounted for by a price tag, by what you're gonna charge. So if you're saying, I'm gonna run volleyball tournaments or I'm gonna run leagues and you're going to make, you know, 7 million a year. Wait a second. Are you charging 2000 per entry per tournament? Like, that's not gonna happen. So you have to understand how that money comes in first. And then the sad part comes where you start figuring out every expense from.
garbage bags, and this fired me up when you told me during your pitch, you said, I know the exact garbage cans that I'm going to buy. You have to know how much they cost, sanitation, insurance, what you want to pay the different roles, like a league director versus a court maintenance guy versus a website designer, how much you have to pay for various software to be able to run that, et cetera. So that's what's involved in that business plan.
And so you decided... A lot of the plan also, all that information you dive into is it gives you the competitive landscape. And that so you know what you have to do because you're going to take market share from people you know, because we all know each other by the book. One of my good friends is three and a half miles away with four ports. And we're going to be direct competitors. We are direct competitors now. The place that I used to do their social media for.
Mark Burik (47:15.566)
and run their tournaments. So competitive, knowing the competitive landscape is pivotal. It's caramel. Right. Okay. What were the most important parts or shocking parts of that business plan of knowing, learning the expenses and income? So what was the most important income things for you and what were the most, I guess, surprising expenses when you finally did them? So,
Income wise, the biggest surprise, and I should have known this, is the two's world is not where you're going to make your money. I love the two's world. It's the world that is my favorite part of beach volleyball. But if you rely on two's tournaments, you're going to struggle to fail. You need the fours, the sixes, the rec ball. I call it the family union ball. Because you need the meetup groups, your main pay the bills, consistent income.
leagues for sure without a doubt leagues number one number two i thought would be tournaments number two is not going to be tournaments number two is going to be either private rentals private events fundraisers or the juniors program they i don't know who's going to be i don't know which revenue stream is going to be second place we'll find that out over time tournaments is fourth place for revenue because you have to do most tournaments you pay out cash
If you do a two tournament, you don't bring in that much in team fees. Yeah. So that was probably going to be a surprise that tournaments are going to be my fourth revenue stream. Then probably fifth will be merch. In fact, I'll even say this clinics and camps and training are going to make more money in terms. That's shocking because I mean, coaching when I did, when you said fours and sixes, I was like, okay, he did the same research that I did. He came to same conclusions. He talked to the same people that I did.
at least some of them with the same opinions because fours and sixes leagues are just huge where you have 12 people on a court versus four. And then you parlay that into beer and food sales and maybe some merch sales. For us, merch sales still 10 years into this is a negative. Like it represents a loss for us, but we figured people want to wear some of our stuff. It's cool. We like that we get to see it at different tournaments.
Mark Burik (49:42.03)
So that's under our marketing budget, but anything, you know, when people are like, how many shirts did they sell this week? Trust me, we are just making up for a huge negative anytime you buy, which if you guys are interested, go to betterbeach .com forward slash shop and get a shirt so that our marketing budget can be a little bit recouped here. Yeah. I haven't sold merchant. You know, you need to have a designer.
You need to have somebody who's testing and feeling apparel. You need to then get pictures. You need to hang it. You need to spend the dozens of hours folding clothes, which is the bane of my existence, but I still do it. We're getting better at it. We've got another system and a new supplier now who's handling all of that shipping and stuff. But yes, I am sad to say that I spent over a hundred hours of my life folding clothes that weren't mine from the laundry. So that like.
Put that far down on your list of income because it is expensive and you don't know if volleyball players want to buy shirts. We're used to getting free shirts with whatever we sign up for. I told my merch, like I told you earlier, I'm trying to keep all, I also try to keep all the money I raised in the volleyball community. So my merchandise rep is a volleyball parent of three girls that all got scholarships at TCU. I told her, I just take, guys that take me for the ride, show me what to order.
because this is not my expertise. And you're right. I put merch fifth, merch might be 10th, and merch might run out of negative. But I just know that it is one of the revenue streams theoretically. Yeah. And if you do it well enough and everybody in town is wearing your shirt, one thing about like, is somebody going to see a shirt and sign up? No. What they're going to do is they're going to see a shirt and it's going to be one more blink in their mind from the thousand other blinks that they see during the day. And Pepsi and Coca -Cola know this very well.
Subway, Starbucks, they know this very well. If you're present of mind, people are more likely to sign up or purchase your things, which means that the more people, volleyball players, hang out with volleyball players. So if they see like, ATX beach shirt, they're not consciously saying that's an ATX beach shirt, but you're present of mind, which means they will be paying attention to next week's league signups just because like, yeah, ATX beach, yeah, ATX beach. It's not a conscious thing.
Mark Burik (52:04.526)
But if enough people are wearing that stuff or you see enough signs throughout the day, that leads to sales, which you cannot unfortunately calculate. You just have to rely on them. And that's what Slunks is doing too, by the way. And now they are crushing it. I was just gonna mention Slunks. So I partnered with Slunks, partnered with a comedian out door, talked to smack. So I'm trying to get affiliate marketing agreements.
to be a one stop shop. If you go to ATX Beach, you can buy not just ATX Beach, Gary, you can buy Slunk, Side Out, Camina. And I don't know about if this is the same way where you're at, but there's a shirt war in Austin. And when you go to league night or you go to a tournament, you go through your closet and every player consciously picks their shirt for that day. And that's who they're repping that day. And here in Austin, it's a shirt war between Sam Winnabees, 512 Beach.
Woolies Beach and product serve. And I actually count how many people are wearing which shirts at leagues and tournaments, because that tells you who that player affiliates with, who their loyalty is to. And it's an interesting little mind game there, but you'll see a person, they might only have one San Juan to be sure, and they'll wear that shirt to every single tournament. Yeah.
I talk about merch, but yeah. So the getting back to your surprises, labor. I mean, I ran a sports bar before and I've been part of labor, but when you really start making a schedule, you're like, maybe I can run that day because labor, labor, labor, labor, it becomes the biggest expense. And you start figuring out where you or one of your investors, like that's another thing. Some of my investors have volunteered to take on shifts.
Yeah, it happens 23 investors has been great for that. There's one negative and it's not a big negative and I want a negative stuff right work. When you have 23 beach volleyball players, they all think and they know how to run a beach volleyball venue because they're beach volleyball players. So I get a lot of feedback and a lot of us good feedback. But sometimes it's overwhelming to get feedback from so many voices that they do know.
Mark Burik (54:25.966)
something about which one, you know, and so I have to listen and be like, is this a nugget that I can use? Or is this a thank you, I'll take that under consideration? I get a lot of feedback. I think that's why those major companies, you know, they run their investors meetings once a year, like, hey, get all your stuff out on the table. All those ideas even holding on to great, but we see it with the AVP, thousands and thousands of people think that they can.
do it better and do this and do this. And it's like, have you paid attention to the last 40 years? Do you know every single move and you know nothing about behind the scenes. You only know what comes in front, but the main expense to run an AVP tournament is bonkers. But I will say for the AVP, they're currently at side topic. They're marketing, they're Instagram, finally they're YouTube.
Way better. They're doing it this year. I'm so proud and so happy of them making the move to YouTube, making the move to get great social media people with highlights, which, you know, my company's known for like 10 years, like people want highlights of cool plays and now they're doing it really well. So I'm pretty happy for the ABP Beach marketing team this year. Looking forward to, to some better and bigger tournaments in the future. Way improved. A good surprise. I want to tell you about sponsors.
private events coming at us. The war's not even out completely. We haven't even gone full -blown. We don't even have doors on our restaurants yet. But yeah, private events, they want to host them here. And people want to put their name on signage around the venue. So that has been a pleasant surprise that I haven't even had to go search that out. So sponsorship dollars are going to be something that is in that equation of revenue streams.
I had a talk with Nick Fusilli from Highline volleyball in New Jersey, and they've got an indoor facility up there just outside New York city. And, you know, we talked about the people who you're just trying to bring in people who want to run corporate events. So if you're running a salesperson and they're busy, you know, getting league signups, if they successfully sell one team on a league, that's 180 bucks, maybe 200, whatever your league costs. If they sell, they spend the same amount of time, but they.
Mark Burik (56:49.006)
sell a company for a corporate event on Friday night or Saturday night or a Christmas party or a Thanksgiving party. Boom. That is a $20 ,000 hit, you know, for the same amount of time and energy. So corporate events, I think have to be a major part of that business program, which sucks for a volleyball player to hear because they're thinking volleyball, volleyball, volleyball, volleyball. But it's like, well, you can throw birthday pirate parties, you know, have kids digging in the sand and then Vancouver.
Six pack volleyball. I know for a fact that they make more income on indoor archery tag with foam bows and arrows than they do from volleyball. You know, they take down the net, they put up all of their inflatable obstacles and they have adults leagues where they're going and kids leagues with archery tag. So you have to keep finding, you have to keep searching and it might not come through volleyball, but you will be able to create a place.
people to play volleyball and then the other stuff becomes a, you know, gravy on top, or maybe it just fully supports your ability to do that. But that's what a good business person has to do. You have to understand when it's time to pivot, what to look for and what to absolutely ignore and stop for us. I realized that every time we ran a one day clinic when we traveled, which a lot of AVP players currently do, we lost money.
And I didn't know that for two years because of how much time it takes to organize and send out the emails and market and get people there. So now we only do three day events as our minimum, you know, aside from our local classes. if you're not paying for all that marketing, if it's just a one -off and you're trying to, you know, pay rent for that month, instead of build a business, different story. But when we've got a team that we need to pay and limited hours for that team, we had to stop our one day events because.
It was useless to us and it doesn't provide the coaching quality. Sure. We can fill it up with 200 kids and then, you know, one highliner coach, but no one's learning there. And that's, so that's not what our company was about. I think we both use the word pivot a lot. If you could do a drinking game and be hammered off the word pivot, but it is probably the most pivotal word. It really is. because like I've been approached about beach tenants and I had to tell them that's so only four players on the court.
Mark Burik (59:16.334)
I still get more value out of fours or sixes. I understand beach tennis is becoming a thing. I understand spike balls becoming a thing. They call it round it now. But is it how much, what's the revenue per square foot on adding something that's only gonna provide four people? Now, if you're showing me a sport that's gonna bring me a hundred people on four courts, way more value.
Yeah, right. The only thing that can equate to that would be like dodgeball, you know, to a six on six volleyball. Yeah. And once you have the facility, the easiest thing now for people to do is rent. If they can't build their own, they then they just have to say, well, well, we got to rent. Same thing in real estate. Same thing in everything. So that's the next easiest move, which means you have more control. You have more ability for income. Hey, you want to run a beach tennis? Yeah.
Okay, this is how much we make for these many hours for a six's night. So I'm going to charge you double that because it doesn't support my business goals in terms of growing the volleyball community. So you have to upcharge that, not equal it when it steers away. That's why for us, you know, any partnerships or affiliates, if it's not directly aligned with our goals, we, I charge so much.
that I'm hoping that they say no, so that I don't have to spend time going in another direction, because I work so hard in the directions that I'm going in. When you like say yes to all these various opportunities, they pull away from what your main direction is. And if you're not focused as a leader to go in one direction, you're going into the ground anyway. So you use the word focus there. I think I told you this in one of our conversations. My question here on everything, every decision we make is does it enhance the player experience?
and
Mark Burik (01:01:38.894)
No more tacos. They're like, why? They were free. And I was like, because people threw them away. They were terrible. They were, that was our number one complaint about the tournament besides I didn't get an effort on my team. Right. They don't think about free tacos. They think, well, I paid for this, which included free tacos. Taco experience was terrible. Give me my money back. That's the example I always give. So, so when I make a decision here, I built this water spigot per quart. Cause I want to be able to water all eight quarts on a hot day in Austin to speed up that tournament or just to provide.
for players to cool off when they walk off the court. Yeah. And so the question I try to ask, I said it, I'll say it again, does it enhance the player experience? And I feel like you run better at beach that way. It does this, a three day camp is better than a one day camp. And so that's the way I'm trying to model ATX Beach. If it's a no or a maybe, if it's a no, it's definitely off the table. If it's a maybe, let's think about how it can enhance the player experience. And you got to deal with.
the players that can't tie their shoes even. I mean, this is a, that's where you're going to make your money is off of providing a fun atmosphere for even the people that can't get a server within it. And you have to keep that in mind. Love that. Is there going to be, so we're going to wrap this meeting up because number one, I need you to make sure that you are.
run an ATXP, getting back in time, which, you know, we'll chop this up to marketing. I really appreciate you being on, and we have to let our members ask some questions. But we are going to be there August 9th to 11th for our first three day camp in Austin. So if you are in Austin, if you want to come to Austin and celebrate my birthday weekend with me, and I'm sure Brandon will be there, little alone fact, me and Brandon share the exact same birthday four years apart.
We will be in Austin, Texas. So please come on out to our three day camp and let's open ATX Beach from the better beach side, even though it'll be already running. However, for those of people who are listening, if they do roll through Austin, is there a way for them to get involved to come see it? Where is it? And of course, listen to the website. Yeah. So atxbeach .com, ATX Beach and all those social media channels.
Mark Burik (01:03:58.926)
And if you're not part of the San Juanibes Network, ask to join that as well. That'll get you information about all the events in Texas, not just at ATX Beach, because I still want to maintain that we are the one place for all. So I'm still maintaining San Juanibes as a marketing tool, a community that also provides value to ATX Beach. But primarily at ATXbeach .com.
or ATX Beach on Instagram or Facebook. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Aljay, thank you very much. Appreciate your time. We're going to have you hang out here. We're going to officially end the episode aside from the Q and A meeting. But we guys, we hope to see you at our three day camp and take a look at better beach .com forward slash camps to see anyone's upcoming. We'll be running three, maybe four events per year in Austin. It will be our home away from home and we are absolutely looking forward to it.
And if you are in Austin, sign up for the leagues ASAP and get those tournaments going. Support LJ and support this new business, which is going to be, you know, by the players for the players. Absolutely. All right. Let's get into some questions from our members. If they have written down any, or if you guys just want to wish LJ a congratulations for having the courage to go and do this on his own. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of
nos and yeses and, and problems to get going. But, if you guys want to turn your cameras on and if you have any questions, go ahead and Mike's on cameras on blast away.
Mark Burik (01:05:42.382)
Hey, LJ. Yeah, really great work on all that. That seems like a huge undertaking. Yeah, must be very proud of that one. I had two questions that kind of came to mind. We started a grass league down in Australia and primarily it was four on fours. And right now it's pretty small scale, maybe like 60 members. And we've just been using our own personal capital. I guess my first question is whether or not it's worthwhile finding investors to build things bigger.
purchase a vehicle or continue to use our own personal capital to avoid having to work with investors and manage all that from. Do you have your own venue for the graphs tournaments? How do you, where do you rent? This is rental from council. And yeah, that's a bit of an issue on its own, right? Because we're a commercial enterprise, so we don't get the same priority as a nonprofit group. And yeah, we kind of get what's given.
in terms of the night of the week so we don't get to pick and choose as easily. I mean, I would only bring on investors, one, if you can provide an ROI that they're going to be interested in, and two, whether you can grow to the point where you need more capital to have more courts, more tournaments, more leagues, more players. But if you're running out of profit right now on your one night or two nights a week, why not stick to that model?
until maybe in the meantime, be searching out another venue that you could control your own fate. That's the ultimate goal is a place where you control your own fate. At this point, I want to go ahead. Mind if I add something to that? My sister -in -law, who's a really smart person, worked for Goldman Sachs, was a VP of a Japanese bank, and now they're running tradition coffee roasters, my brother's coffee business. Her?
standard is until we are bursting at the seams with sales of our current programs, with our current machinery, we then we don't open up or we don't spend on something new. So if you're to the point, and this is what Sandbar did as well, if you're to the point where in 30 minutes, once you release your league announcements, it's sold out, you have the opportunity now to spend more. But if you don't have the
Mark Burik (01:08:08.046)
sales ability yet, which is a skill that you can develop and you trial and error try another, until you can sell things out fast, confidently, and you can just close your eyes, snap your fingers and do it, you know, without thinking about it. Don't make a move to add on a huge extra expense where it gets like kind of dangerous. And then you're worried about that because once you start worrying about finances, then you get dumb decisions.
So I would say if it were me, I would make sure to be bursting at the seams, selling out before you decide to start a whole new program. That's one of, it's been one of my personal struggles with my company is we kept adding new programs before we knew how to sell other programs. And it looks on the surface like it's kind of cool and fun and we're a great business, but it's been exhausting and stressful. And you know, people lose jobs because you overspend.
And you have to figure that out and figure out what's best for the business. But I would say bursting at the seams first, then expansion, if I could sum that up into a sentence. Okay, I need some sales courses then. There's a lot of them out there and a lot of them are expensive, but they're also available on YouTube and on Instagram and everything like that. Mark, yeah, Mark, consider better. And plus once you expand, you have to hire. And then that's just more labor costs.
What was your other question? The other question was in terms of that actual league, we've got majority in the sort of like A and B level, but one of our struggles we started finding was the lower levels. We'd have quite a variety of those folks and a lot of them would sign up in the singles sort of department. And then they'd get paired together with other singles. And we kind of commonly came into that scenario where...
people were unhappy with the skill levels that they got partnered with. And I was considering going with Mark's sort of leveling system of like kind of grading them ourselves. But I was wondering if you had any experience in how to make a good atmosphere for those that are not at the same level, especially if we don't have quite enough of them to make their own sort of category. So that's the problem. Like I don't deal with the individual sign up.
Mark Burik (01:10:34.478)
It's a bring your own or it's a blind draw tournament. So I wouldn't really help you much there because putting single players together that never touched the volleyball is just not a fun experience for people that have touched the volleyball. So that's a hard one. But if that's what you have to do, if you have to have singles to form a league and create teams, I don't know how I feel. Sorry. I don't have the right answer there. That's hard. I will only do bring your own teams. Yeah.
I'm not gonna try to match skill levels for teams. I don't have a bandwidth to do that either. Yeah, it was a bit of a headache, but yeah, maybe I'll follow up with Mark and Matt on those ones later on. Yeah, for that, I mean, classes is a big struggle for us when that happens. So now we have largely beginner and intermediate class, and then we have a by instructor approval only above that.
And so then the people, which are very few who think they're at a certain level where they're beyond everybody else, then they'll message us personally and we'll say, Hey, yeah, you got one shot. And then we'll talk to the coach afterwards. And they'll say, if you belong in this class or not, but if they're, if they can't figure out their own teams, they shouldn't put the work on you. You know, that's not your job. You're not a team recruiter or a partner recruiter. What's sandbar again does really well. And I think,
ATX Beach is going to utilize this pretty well. They have a Sandbar Subs Facebook group. So they have leagues and tournaments and every night, because they've got hundreds of players, every night, there are no less than five people looking for, hey, can somebody fill in? Somebody's got babysitting. Hey, can we fill in? Like somebody had overtime or can't come. And that is one of the busiest Facebook groups that I've ever seen. And it's got one sole purpose, right? To replace those.
So if you want to like invite everybody like, Hey, anytime you ever need an extra player, this is the place to post. And then you have a one sentence copy paste whenever you got that question. Sure. This is the place you post that good luck. Nice. A study came out. I don't know why they needed to study for this. And it had the top 10 hardest sports to play with a beginner and the top three. I don't remember what given order with tennis, volleyball and golf.
Mark Burik (01:13:01.102)
And yeah, because in basketball, you can tell that person just just grab the ball, catch the ball, you'll provide that type of value. Football, lock that guy in front of you. If you can't pass a ball or swing a tennis racket or, you know, it's a miserable experience. And that's why it's very hard for volleyball to create beginner, true beginner leads, because it's not very fun. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's a challenge. And
Hopefully you can train, get them past that beginner level to actual rec level. And that community, once you build it, it'll find value in itself. Then you'll be able to send an email into the half or 70 % of your people who don't open emails. They're also getting this announcement about your new event, new league in that Facebook group, which maybe they pay more attention to because they'd rather sub than look at their inbox.
You know, so now it becomes this huge marketing venue, which we have multiple Facebook groups and it's like, okay, this is a place where I know is filled with our type of people that we can make big announcements along with our emails, along with YouTube, along with Instagram, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that would be my number one advice. And then you don't say like you're out of luck. You say, here you go. I have just the place for you. Yeah. That's one thing that our community does well. We have a really good beginner beach volleyball program. And that's where I'm a coach.
And so there's the primarily the players that we're drawing from are from the beach that we're just putting them on the grass. But then we do come into the moment of the relatively new, they've learned these skills from the beach and now they're ready to compete and ready and they expect that they're at a much higher level than they actually are. And they have that sort of false confidence that they're going to be punching above their weight. Yeah.
One of the fun experiences we go through in camps, because every beginner was introduced to the sport by somebody who's already playing, right? They needed an introduction or an invite. And so at our camps, if there's a beginner court, and this is something that we have to treat kind of special way, and we figure out answers and they're unique each time. But for the first time, you've got eight beginner onlys on your court. So you're thinking all these people stink. I play with open players all the time.
Mark Burik (01:15:21.806)
It's like, well, that's because there are six players in your neighborhood. Three of them are open and then there are the other three. You know, so it's the only people you have available to you. And so when you have beginners on the court, yeah, it's ugly. It's tough to get through. And so then we do super coaches. We use assistant coaches to have them like playing more and make it a little less ugly. But people will never say, man, I need to improve because this is my level. They'll say, man, all these people are on your stank.
Like I should be on a higher court because I'm used to playing that at home. So you wish you could like say, this is a mirror being held up to you, right? But you just want to make the experience as good as possible for them. And for that, we have some like really cool campers who will play with beginners consistently. Me and Brandon will walk around and do little private lessons with the beginners. And that's why we really utilize our assistant coaches and volunteer coaches who come to camps and we say, Hey, we would just love to have you. We'll teach you to coach.
and we're going to use you as a player on some of the chords that might need it.
That's some great feedback guys. I appreciate that. Well, good question, Travis. That let us down a whole thing. LJ, question for you. This is Nilo. How is your pickleball side of the business going? So the pickleball, going into that, the Austin Pickle Ranchers are my landlord. They built 16 indoor pickleball courts and they're killing it because it's hot in Texas. They have a membership option which gets you advance reservations and discounts.
And they also have, you can just rent a court with your friends. and it's going really well. Pickleball people that think that was a fad. I think they're a hundred percent wrong. It's here to stay. It's too low of a barrier of entry. It's easy to play. You go to you, you know, you can, you, it's one of the few sports that you can go play with a beginner and have a decent time as long as they ever touched a ping pong ball, you know, a racquetball, a tennis trumpet. it is there, they're, they're, they're killing it. We're talking about doing some.
Mark Burik (01:17:21.774)
cross -pollination events and maybe even try to do some like repeat points for volleyball and pickleball because there's a lot of volleyball players trying to outpick a ball. But a pickleball is definitely here to stay and still, it's crazy, it's still on the up scene. Okay, because Elsig and I were, we were just literally just texting each other. It goes, well, if you're going back to what you guys were talking about, how many people are on the court versus...
how much money you're gonna make, well then you're still gonna be making more money with indoor volleyball than you would pickleball court. But if, that's why we're asking the question. Well, it depends though, because pickleball, it's not tennis for two to three hours. A pickleball game is 10 to 15 minutes. So you're able to, it's almost like turning tables at a restaurant. In pickleball, you're able to turn courts and get more reservations to get more people on the court.
Even though it's only four people on court, you can still process through eight to 12 people in an hour by putting four new players on after each game or winner's day. So it is a unique niche, perfect sport for producing revenue for all levels, for all skill levels. And the demand right now is bursting at the seams from all populations. Like there might be demand within a volleyball community.
but that's a really small actual number of people versus like when you look at the pool of people who are interested in playing a pickleball, you will get, you will see court bookings from eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, or one o 'clock, two o 'clock, three o 'clock. Like people are gonna play maybe before work, maybe, but definitely after work and that's it. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have 70 year olds playing the beach volleyball.
Typically, but 70 and 80 year olds will fill up all of your daytime hours. So you don't have the same issues of booking as you might with beach volleyball. I'm going to get some spillover. ATX beaches and get some spillover from some pickleball players that want to try beach volleyball, but they're going to get way more revenue from beach volleyball players trying out pickleball. In fact, one of my core groups is playing pickleball from four to five today from four to six before they come over to play beach volleyball for two hours. That's a good life.
Mark Burik (01:19:46.126)
including one of my investors. Yeah. Now on the business sense, is your, are you guys splitting, I mean, is that two different payments? Like if I wanted to play beach and I wanted to play pickleball, that's two different. We are two separate companies. They are my landlord and that is it. ATX Beach is a hundred percent separate from Austin Pickle Ranch. We share the same property. Yeah.
I mean, we are going to partner up for a lot of stuff and share revenue in certain areas like the food and beverage, but, but no, we're two separate companies. Okay. Thank you. Yep. I wonder if there's more opportunity for people out there who are just looking for old driving ranges and like driving range slash mini golf courses, that are kind of run down the way you did, because we could, we converted a driving range.
to a beach volleyball court, which had built in shade already because that's what's over the golfers and flat, easy to grade soft land, which is a huge advantage. So. And already zone for outdoor recreation. That's the biggest key to the whole thing. No change of use with the city. Yeah. Which sometimes is easy. Sometimes sign a paper, make a phone call. Okay. Come into the office, sign a paper. Yeah. I don't have a problem with it.
I know that like the Chattanooga mayor, he was super sports friendly, wanted to bring in a bunch of things. So I started meeting with city council members and high level bankers and hoteliers really quick when I was there. and it just all depends on the person you talk to. And so interpersonal skills become really important. Practicing pitches become like hearing how you sound when you do presentations and everything. It'll count. It'll give you some bonus points, but,
Yeah, you just have to say, I said a council member. What is the process like for converting this C2 zoned, which is for, you know, a supermarket into a sports venue. Is it the same permit? No. Okay. What does it take to change? Okay, great. But those city numbers, which I don't know why I was so scared to call cities for so long. they're so helpful. It's so nice to actually talk and get it. And I will say everybody.
Mark Burik (01:22:04.91)
get the email response from that city person to prove that an official told you this thing is this thing. Do not rely on the phone call. Say, just recapping what we talked about on the phone call today. Can you confirm this, this, and this, and this via email? I've seen people run into it and have huge issues and like, look, I spent all of this money because you told me exactly this. So I've seen that happen. You got to get it in writing.
He talks about the phone call here because of COVID. Austin created this seminar Zoom program. I can usually get a 15 minute meeting within two days from every department with city of Austin. And yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. I've been literally next day on a lot of these departments. You only get 15 minutes to explore the topic, but it's been, yeah, but you get some questions answered or you don't get some questions answered. And they sent, they, they play ping pong with you to other departments.
But like you said, it's not that scary once you actually start having the conversations.
Mark Burik (01:23:11.918)
Alright, anybody else? Megan Carr also? You guys got anything?
Mark Burik (01:23:18.382)
All right, guys, thank you so much. Great questions. LJ, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for spending your time. I know how busy you are and how much stress comes with it. So good luck and God bless. And again, appreciate you sharing all of your knowledge and experience with our guys here. Thank you. I know I talked fast in the beginning. I hope I corrected by cadence as I got more comfortable on here, but I appreciate it. Everyone, I appreciate you, Mark. I can't wait for August. And we're going to make this place rock and roll.
Woo. All right, everybody else, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the sand.
