How to start an indoor skatepark

As a guide I thought I would break down what a novice would need to do to start a skatepark from scratch.

1. Formulate a plan - how will it work, who will work it, how will you pay your bills, what business structure (tax and liability issues) will you have?

2.  Do some research - Do you even know where you could put a park?  What are the costs per month of the building? taxes? parking? how will people get there?  How many skaters are there, and how many of these will pay to skate?

3. Get your finances in order.  Do you have money?  Do you have enough to exist for 6 months without earning a cent?  How long will you be able to have expenses without making money before things will get stressful?  The longer you can last, the longer you will last. You will need build up time with lots of expenses and no income.  What happens too if people are slow to respond? Plan for the worst case scenario, and work for the best.  Can you spread your own finacial liability out with other investors?

4.  Market before you have anything going.  Start the buzz early.

5.  Plan for a media blitz for when you open, get all the free press you can.  Invite web, print, tv to your place.  Have an "event".

6.  Maximize your revenue.  Don't just rely on skateboarders to pay the bills.  Sell food, stuff, lessons, rentals, private park hours, party rooms, party events, christian events, before and after school events, camps, demos, advertisements, group lessons, what every you can.  There is no shame in making this business work by selling things, this is your business, you have to pay yourself, your taxes, lights, sewer, trash, etc.

7.  Keep it clean, think of the parents.  Parents want a safe place for their kids, they are the ones footing the cost of this place.  Make them happy with a nice place to watch, use the rest room, read whatever.  Sell them things while they are there.

8.  Network - skateshops, other parks, parks departments, community service, police, whomever can help you get people in the door.

9.  Keep good track of your expenses.  This takes time and effort.  Make sure you have a good system to record data for you, what sells, what doesn't, who comes, who doesn't.  Use your data to improve your business.

10.  Hire good people who are kind yet firm about helping you stay in business.  Free only means you paid, not them.  You aren't competing with free, free offers nothing but ramps and rails, you offer lights, food, supervision, air conditioning, heat, a phone, a pair of eyes that are ready to help if someone is hurt. This is worth money and people need to understand this.

11.  Free yourself to do business things - If you are spending all your time at the park, hire someone to help you do the things you need to do.  Spend some money.  Is your money better spent hiring someone to man the front, or design an advertisement?

12. Celebrate your members!  Make them want to belong!

Insurance article worth reading!

Here is an article that is worth looking at on insurance and one person's work to insure skateparks.  Check it out.  http://www.insurancejournal.com/magazines/mag-features/2010/04/05/159513.htm

March is the time to Advertise Summer Camps!

It is time to get your literature out for your summer camps!  If you don't have your stuff out there now, parents will fill their kid's time with other camps.  Get on it if you haven't already.  Summer camps are very lucrative part of your offerings.  Consider what the parents want: safe fun for their kids, part to all day experience and care.  These two can be combined for a cost.  With careful planning you can have both.

To start you need to decide on what you can do.  Do you have the staff to run a good camp.  Can you get background checks on these people to assure the parents that they can be with kids?  Can they lead kids through the daily routine in a way that is fun, supportive, constructive, and ensures repeat camp visitors?  What times do you have, can you realistically do double sessions?  Do you need to take up the whole park or can you rope off sections so others can skate too?  Don't crowd your camps, but also be aware of people wanting to come to your park.

Secondly can you schedule any fun activities into the day.  How long do you have?  Can you offer a special day with a famous skater or a demo?  Contact local pros and see if you can't get them to do a day or two - and charge accordingly.  This is value added and can command a higher price.  Can you take a dip in a pool, the lake, play basketball, end with ice cream?  Simple things help like a popsicle break at 10.

Thirdly take advantage of your resources.  If you have a van, the staff, and local stuff schedule a full day!  Do a tour of different places.  Remember that if your are teaching, you price it one way than if you are touring.  A tour is less costly, supervision, than instruction.  Tours can have a higher camper to staff ratio and less needs for the person in charge to entertain the troops.  But what is to say you can't instruct at other places?  A "learn to skate the bowl" at a different park can attract enough people to make it worth your while.  Similarly if you can work with the parks department, you can use your camp expertise to make money for your park and your people by offering camp services and organization to their parks.  This helps you generate good feelings with parents in the region and helps solidify your working relationship with other parks.  So if you have the team, staff, and organization, branch out!  Don't forget to arm your staff with special prizes like your t-shirts, stickers, decks and other stuff.  (Remember that this is advertising and should be counted as such for tax purposes.)

Work with your suppliers to offer add-ons such as helmet and pad specials, t-shirts supported by the outside company, camp sponsors!  If you have a good relationship with a product rep or a local entity why not have them sponsor a camp, provide a demo, print shirts for the camp with their info on it (cross promotion).  As an example, Company G has its factory in your town, so you get them to sponsor one of your camps, provide a pro demo, special prices on gear, help promote.

Finally get some feedback from the parents.  Did you have a weak summer last year?  Why?  Call a few parents to find out.  Then improve.   In the end add camps to your summer plans and get the word out now.  Ads, flyers, and promotions are needed to fill these.  Send your skate team out to pass out flyers, take an add out in a parenting mag, provide flyers at area skate shops.  You are providing care, education, and entertainment.  By providing for the whole experience you will make the most of your summer camps!

Low cost way of adding a service

Sometimes we all have our hands too full to add another aspect to our business.  Thank goodness for outsourcing.  You might want to expand your business to include food, a proshop, or some other service, but don't have the capital, manpower, or know-how to pull it off.  One way of dealing with this would be to outsource.

Say you have the space available for another aspect of the business that you have not yet addressed.  You could think about monetizing this area by inviting in a third party vendor, someone who won't compete with your current operations.  A food service operation might be a good fit with your weekend crowd, and only come in to work parties and busy days.  You set up a contract with this service to either take a percentage, or charge a space fee.  With the space fee, you both understand what the bottom line is, while the percentage could be more lucrative but unknown.  You want to make sure that this vendor isn't funneling money away from other operations.  An ice cream vending machine operated by an outside vendor could take money away from your candy sales.  So make sure that you are offering relatively different products and you aren't adding competition to your own operations.

Similarly if you are not selling equipment, you could bring in a local shop to set up an operation in your park.  This could have good community relations, as well it could help promote your park outside.

Bringing in outside people to help put on events and other gatherings is another way to monetize non-productive times such as nights or certain days.  An event promoter who can add energy to your park and also some revenue is a win-win situation.

So if you need to try and expand, think about bringing in outside help if you can't manage it yourself.  You can start these off as initial events and move them on to more permanent situation if it works.

Using Email for Promotions

In the recent past, there have been some chatter in blogs and other posts regarding best practices on email.  Basically there are two feelings on this, that it works, or that it is a waste of time.  Basically we all have experience with email marketing.  Now it is a ubiquitous part of our email experience.  Many of us appreciate an email now and then from groups we wish to support.  But there comes times in everyone's life where we would sooner stop deleting these messages and stop getting them from certain businesses.  In some cases, frustration with receiving emails after unsubscribing can even create resentment towards a business.  To address the email issue the business owner should take a few things into consideration.
1. Email for ads should be professional in style and offerings.
2. Give an unsubscribe link that is easy to use.
3. Provide more than just an ad, provide info, photos, events, news, new in the shop, and specials.
4. Don't send these too often.
5. Send on a regular schedule. (Some say Tuesdays are the time when we are the most receptive)

In today's internet savvy market, a good email news/marketing email is needed for the park owner.  We all know that staying in touch with our members and our patrons is important, and email is a very useful way for us to reach them.  However, we often have only the parent's email for our many younger skaters, so be aware of this when creating emails, and make sure your mail is appropriate.

In the end, getting the word out will take some time and effort.  If you can produce an excellent and informative email newsletter, coupled with sales and the like, you will probably get the best response from your market.  You can also work with your suppliers to create a campaign with them and they can help with the costs of the marketing.

Cross Promoting Your Park

In a previous post I wrote about adding value to your membership through giving member rates to other park's members to gain special rates for your members.  In a similar manner you can work with other business and entities to promote and add value to your park's programs.  Working out relationships with the YMCA, Boys and Girls' Club, Rec Departments and similar businesses can help create needed hype, PR, and entrances.  In developing relationships and programs specifically targeting these types of teen and pre-teen groups you can get a good, monitored group of kids into the park for a session and hopefully generate the type of experience that will make these kids want to keep coming back.  Fostering relationships like these with religious groups, boy scouts, or whomever is another important way that you can promote you park, and help other groups provide activities for their kids.  In reality all they need are your waiver forms, pricing, a list of "good to have" items, and times of your sessions.  They will provide the van, a staff person, and the kids.  Producing a package to meet the needs of the administration of Parks departments and other groups can make many of these events happen for you.  Everyone wants an easy sell to the kids and by finding out what the group needs to be successful, you can establish these cross-promoting type of events.  I call these cross-promoting events because the parks departments and youth groups want to look good to parents and teens.  So they need to promote programs that are safe, organized, clean, and fun.  In doing this they get more business and you get more business.  For religious groups you can even schedule after hour events where they can listen to the music they want, without bothering your other customers.  By catering special rates for return groups like this, events can be a constant flow of money.  In many of these types of events, non-skaters come as well and they usually buy food and drinks and pay into the "group price" just like everyone else.  Put in the time to produce flyers and mailers to address these groups and you'll find that it pays off after just a few groups get going.
     In a similar way you can cross promote your park with other groups at outside venues.  Many times events are looking for entertainment.  By putting together a skate/bike team, some portable ramps, and an "event" program, you can promote your park and get paid to do so.  Events like trade shows, sports expos, concerts and the like are areas that would enjoy having the entertainment and often pay for your efforts.  At the event you promote your park, give away some cheap t shirts, stickers, raffle some old inventory (tax advantage-expense).  Your skate/demo team will love showing off for the crowd.  When we did events like this for RCSP we even had an old beater of a car that we destroyed then brought to the junk yard for recycling cash.  These sort of events are time consuming, but fun to put on and create a big buzz for your park.
     Lastly you can promote your park at area skateshops.  Put together good looking and easy to manage flyers and promotional material and go to area shops and see if they won't post them up for you.  Often these parks have a table where you can put stuff like this.  By developing relationships with local skateshops, you can cross-promote with them.  In the end, while you may compete with them for your shop sales, their clientele is often very loyal, and you don't really hurt their sales.  Develop cross-promotions with them.  Get them to sponsor an event like a best of the shop rider comp, or have them sponsor some pro tour at the park with an autograph signing at their shop after.  These events can benefit you both and in the end you are both serving the same market.  What these promotions do is make you look like you are "pro skating/biking/inline" rather than a money-grubbing isolationist. Good PR is worth the money!
     You are in a business with a fickle audience.  The appearance of "in-it-for-the-money" can really hurt your business with a large portion of the skating/biking crowd.  By working with groups to help them provide services at your park you win a double victory for your business.  Not only are you generating income, but you are also promoting your park.  This promotion is building good-will in the community.  Other shops send you business, you send them business.  This may sound very socialist, but I believe you need to be seen as a force for skating and biking in your community.  You only get to be perceived as that when you are promoting for the good of the sport, and in ways that make sense to everyone involved.  By making it easy for others to promote themselves, you score valuable PR and promote yourself.

Membership Checking System

If you don't have a system for checking members into your park, then you need one.  You could take a look out at the park any day of the week and see how many people are there, but could you tell were they are coming from, whether there are up to date addresses and emergency forms on file, when their birthday is?  There are many things that your membership program can do for you including most recent visits, how often patrons visit, and linked to point of sale (pos) programs can tell your their buying patterns.  Looking into this info every quarter could really help you understand where you need to improve your marketing, outreach, or services.  Using this data is what Google and Walmart do very well.  On a smaller scale you can personalize sales to match patterns you find in the data, you can add birthday notes, send renewal membership notices, or other customizable promotions.  In many of these membership tracking programs you can have debit accounts for the kids so parents can load money onto their account for food.  You can customize them to make reporting easier so your understanding of what your patrons do helps you serve them better and in turn, make better buying decisions and sales decisions.  If every person who came to your park had info entered into your program, you would have a large pool of information and potential to work off of for your business.  Setting up the system is a lot of work, but much of it can be done by the people working the front desk or other areas of the park that don't have busy daily routines or those that have down time.  By steadily increasing what you know about your patrons, you can better serve their needs and increase what you understand about their buying, and visiting the park habits.  This way when a non-member comes in and you get their name into the computer, you could then have a conversation about how many times they have come and how buying a membership is a good thing for them.  While all this might sound daunting, taking small steps will get you a long way quickly.