Wayne Mays is the Executive Vice President of Training & Development and Revenue at Basketball Training Systems, a full-service platform that provides everything that is needed to own and operate a successful youth basketball business. In his role at BTS Wayne leads the creation and execution of scalable basketball training systems across all academies nationwide. His focus is on standardizing operations, strengthening sales processes, and building structured training platforms that ensure consistency and growth across every location. Wayne is committed to using basketball to develop confidence, discipline, and life skills in young athletes.

On this episode Mike & Wayne discuss the operational intricacies of establishing successful youth basketball academies, underscoring the imperative that basketball should be accessible to all, irrespective of financial resources. Mays shares his commitment to empowering passionate coaches and trainers, providing them with the requisite tools to initiate and cultivate their own programs. Additionally, we explore the importance of structured curriculums and the implementation of standardized operations that facilitate the growth of basketball training initiatives across the nation. Mays and BTS serve those seeking to contribute positively to the basketball community, emphasizing that the pursuit of passion and purpose can produce immense impact on young athletes' lives.

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Grab your notebook before you listen to this episode with Wayne Mays, Executive Vice President of Training & Development and Revenue at Basketball Training Systems.

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Most trainers coaches don't have the capital to find a location, rent a space, build out an entire gym.

So what we're really trying to do and what I'm trying to do personally is to find these passionate coaches, trainers, pro basketball players that want to just help their own program get started and what the tools they need to get that started and progress.

And so I'm trying to broaden.

Hey, basketball should be for everyone, not just people with capital to build an entire program.

Wayne Mays is the Executive Vice President of Training and Development and Revenue at Basketball Training Systems, a full service platform that provides everything that's needed to own and operate a successful youth basketball business.

In his role at bts, Wayne leads the creation and execution of scalable basketball training systems across all academies nationwide.

His focus is on standardizing operations, strengthening sales processes, and building structured training platforms that ensure consistency and growth across every location.

Wayne is committed to using basketball to develop confidence, discipline and life skills in young athletes.

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Grab your notebook before you listen to this episode with Wayne Mays, executive vice president of training and development and revenue at Basketball Training Systems.

Hello and welcome to the Hoopets podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel tonight, but I am pleased to be joined by Wayne Mays from Basketball Training Systems.

Wayne, welcome to the who Pets podcast.

Thank you very much for having me, Mike.

I appreciate you letting me on.

I'm very excited, absolutely thrilled to have you on.

Looking forward to diving into your role at bts.

I think what we should do before we even start is let you give an overview of what is Basketball Training Systems.

Let's get that out of the way and then we'll kind of dive into your background next.

Yeah, absolutely.

Basketball Training Systems is a company that's originally started out of St. Louis, founded by Larry Hughes.

And the whole goal of Basketball Training Systems is to create structure and help these coaches and trainers find a place to build their own brand, understand what it takes to start their own sort of basketball training facilities.

And not just that, give me opportunity to help the community around them.

And you know, we help give the structure when it comes to operations, marketing, analytics, just day to day things that you need to do to make sure that a basketball trainer can turn into something much more and help the community around him.

Because that's how, you know, Larry started the whole program was just to, you know, benefit the local youth around him.

Absolutely.

And there are a lot of people that are in the quote unquote training business that I'm sure could benefit from the expertise that you guys bring to the table just in terms of the experience that you've had, the people that are involved in your company and, and we're going to dive into all that as we go along.

Let's talk a little bit about your background.

Take me back to when you're a kid, your athletics.

What was your experience like as a kid with sports and.

And just kind of talk a little bit about your upbringing in the athletic world.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm actually from a little small town in Ohio named Miamisburg, Ohio.

Went to school in Carlisle, but very small town, Midwest vibe.

And sports was kind of everything.

And that's how it all started.

I mean, I was drawn to it as soon as I saw Baske and I was around kind of the time when MJ was everyone to be like Mike.

And so obviously I wanted to as well.

And you know, it wasn't just Basketball, it came to football, swimming, I mean, tennis, track and field.

It didn't matter.

If there was some sort of sport that I could compete in.

That's what I wanted to do, and that's how I've always kind of been.

Growing up, especially in the Midwest, that's all we had out there was sports.

Did you think at that time that you might end up with a career in sport?

Obviously, you're probably like most every kid, right?

You're dreaming that you're going to play in the NFL or the NBA or whatever it may be.

But at some point, for all of us, the reality sets in that, and maybe that's not going to happen.

So just talk about kind of how you eventually went about your career path.

Yeah, I. I'm very fortunate and very lucky in my life to be in this position that I'm in originally.

You know, when I was a kid, I was.

I was going to be in the NBA.

There was no doubt about it.

Once I started realizing that, you know, my ankles were bad and, you know, I'm tearing ligaments and all this kind of stuff, that maybe that dream wasn't for real.

And I actually joined the United States Coast Guard right out of high school.

You know, I wasn't ready to go to college or start, you know, my dad had a business.

I didn't want to do that, and I wanted to travel the world and help people.

And so that's what I did, you know, joined the military.

I was in there for six years, lucky enough to find a wonderful nonprofit in San Francisco.

That's where I was stationed in the military as well, and called the Marine Exchange.

Oldest.

It's a very small company.

One of the oldest nonprofits in San Francisco, I believe it is the oldest, to be honest.

But it was very small and there was no room to grow for me there.

And I started throwing around my resume and happened to find basketball training systems.

And I had always been involved in the military when it came to military leagues and things of that sort.

We actually went to China on one of our cutters and played the Olympic team over there.

In China in basketball?

Well, the B team, they weren't the.

We still got smoked very badly.

So I was always involved.

You know, I played every sort of intramural sport when in the military and so on and so forth, and, you know, found basketball training systems.

Didn't think I was going to be a part of it.

I threw out my resume and was brutally honest to a default about everything that was wrong with me.

What I could Do.

And luckily enough, I landed at the general manager for the Bobby Jackson Basketball Academy in Sacramento and just fortunate enough to meet some great people, great coaches, great trainers, great families, great kids, and, you know, have just worked my tail off and had a great relationship with all the people that were involved at the high level at basketball training systems and, you know, got lucky enough to be in this position to help on a much higher level as well.

We're going to dive into your exact role there and sort of the transition from military nonprofit into basketball training systems.

But I want to ask you one military related question, and that is when you think about who you are today from a personal characteristic standpoint and what's allowed you to have the success that you've had in your career, what's something that you took from the military that you still feel like you apply in your life every single day that's made you successful?

I would say more than anything, it's discipline and structure, right?

That's all it is in the military.

It's everything structured, everything's in line for you.

You follow directions, you work your way up and you work your tail off.

And that's always been my philosophy.

When I was a kid, I worked for no money until I was old enough to get my own job.

And that kind of really settled that.

And, and also being in the military and being from a small town, you get shell shocked, right?

You're seeing all these different cultures of people and realize, oh, I'm not the most important person in the world.

And other people's opinions are amazing too.

And.

But it was experience.

But I would say more than anything, it's that structure and discipline that kind of stuck with me more than anything.

Makes sense.

Again, when you think about the military experience, those are probably the first two things that for most people come to mind, right?

The discipline and the structure and what that does for your life and gets you where you're incorporating that into your regular, quote, civilian life and to be able to, to put those to work, to be able to benefit you as you move on in your career.

So tell me what you said.

You threw your resume out there.

What was the pitch?

What, what was it that you felt like you were trying to, what were you trying to sell in order to be able to get that job at bts?

I mean, you're selling yourself in every, you know, resume you throw out.

And the biggest thing is I'm not going to, I'm going to be the hardest worker person that you're going to find.

It doesn't matter in what position I am, if I'm scrubbing floors, I'm scrubbing decks on a boat, I'm going to be that person that's going to do the smallest thing to the largest thing.

It doesn't matter.

I'm going to be the hardest worker that you're going to find.

And that was always my pitch and that was always my go to, you know, I may not have all the knowledge of the world, but I'll find it and I'll make sure that I'm going to, you know, work my tail off to get the job done.

Tell me about the general manager role at the Bobby Jackson Academy.

When you say general manager, my mind goes in a bunch of different directions as to what exactly that job description could look like.

So tell me, what was the job description?

What was your day to day like?

What did you like about the job initially?

Obviously you're still there, so the job was one that you enjoyed doing.

So just talk a little bit about what you did day to day.

Absolutely, yeah.

And I so fortunate to be a part of that group.

It was, it was so much.

I'm still involved with them as well.

We work with them on a day to day basis.

But being a general manager, you know, it's finding the right team of coaches that can be out there, put the product on the floor, get in relationships with these kids, the families.

You know, at day to day is setting schedules.

You're making phone calls, you're sending text messages because people would come out to our academy and try it out for free and see if they like what they see.

And so my job was to make sure that as soon as they come in, they're already a part of the family and the coaches know what they're doing.

Our sales specialist knows what they're doing.

Everyone's on the same page and we're out there just having fun.

And it was a lot of work because there is no real hours set.

It's not a 9 to 5.

As a general manager at a basketball academy, you're taking phone calls and text messages and emails.

Any time of the day, any day of the week, it doesn't matter.

So there's no real set schedule, but it's just making sure everyone's on track.

Everyone knows what's coming up, whether it's an event, the class, what the curriculum is, what the schedule is going to be, who's got private lessons, who's in classes, all that kind of stuff.

And just making sure everyone is in the know exactly to what they're supposed to be doing each night.

Let's start with this.

I think that most people who are in the basketball business, no matter what it is, and I'll speak to this as someone who runs camps in the summertime, that one of the most difficult jobs that I have, or one of the things that I find to be the, the most difficult is to find good coaches who are reliable and are going to show up when they're supposed to show up and then are going to do a good job in doing what they do in such a way that's going to be beneficial for the kids, the way that they design what they do.

So talk about the hiring process that you use then and maybe you can even extend it into your current role.

Just when you guys are looking for coaches that you're going to bring into one of your academies, what are you looking for?

And then what's the process for actually going about from the beginning of you get someone's resume to, hey, you're actually hiring them and onboarding them.

Just talk about the hiring of coaches.

Yeah.

And I came in on a unique kind of perspective on this from most of our academies because they already kind of had established the coaching staff and what was going to be.

And they brought me on as a general manager kind of about a month into their grand opening and all that, and Larry Hughes came out and they had a big grand opening.

So I had to kind of identify who my coaches were, what's the best way to, you know, communicate with them, all that kind of stuff.

But with that being said, you have to set a culture and as a general manager, you have to find the right people.

You hit it on the head.

That's kind of the most difficult part of being a general manager is finding the right dependable people and coaches because there's a lot of great coaches out there.

They're fantastic, they have knowledge.

But the game of basketball is a game for a lot of people and it's not their life.

And they'll go, you know, there's a lot of turnover, so you gotta find the right dependable people.

So the best way that I found, and you know, we've done, indeed we've done, you know, hiring online, all that stuff.

But it's a hassle.

You're sifting through resumes and unless it says specifically on there, hey, I've been coaching for 20 years or I've been a semi pro basketball player, it's hard to sift through that.

You're not going to find the information.

So the Best way I found, once I established what our culture was at the academy, what we wanted to bring out and what my message was, it was finding the people that I knew had that same philosophy.

And it was reaching to, out to my coaches, talking to parents that were in classes, reaching out to local coaches that were nearby, coaching already.

Not so much to, hey, steal them from their teams or anything, but hey, who do you know?

You know, we're in this area, we're new, we want to find someone that we can depend on.

Do you know, you know, maybe past players, past coaches that you've had, anything like that.

I found the best way to find the right coaches is to just go out there and find people yourself, ask questions, find people that are in the same business as you and try to find those dependable people that have been doing it for a very long time because they know how it's done.

That's always the best way to go.

Now you can find I've had success from finding indeed, you know, resumes and they stuck around for a while.

But you know, when you find someone yourself, even just, you know, we worked out of a 24 Hour Fitness, I would find some, I play pickup basketball with them and see some players and be like, hey, you know, you're pretty good at this.

You know, have you ever thought about doing this part time with us?

And they're like, I never thought about it, but that sounds like a lot of fun.

And they're with us for as long as any of our coaches that we had.

So I mean that personal touch of actually communicating with someone face to face or through people that, you know, has always been the best way.

Same with what we're doing at the, you know, basketball training systems level.

It's yes, you can find a quick fix by looking online for people, but you're going to find the best people by making the connections, understanding the people around you and trusting them of, oh, I actually have someone that works perfect for this and you know, putting through the process of the interview, putting them on court to make sure, you know, you pass the eye test and all that kind of stuff.

And then of course, getting them ready for what our system does.

Let's talk a little bit about that in terms of the coach training part of it and what you guys are looking for and how you try to standardize because clearly there's one thing that I think is sometimes a challenge, right, is for an individual trainer or somebody who's trying to start a basketball business, you may have what you do, right?

And you're dynamic, and you're great at interacting with kids, and you're great at designing drills that keeps everybody engaged and all these things.

But you may not be great about hiring or training another coach, and all of a sudden, maybe you're running a class and it's going great, or you got this camp, and now you put the camp in somebody else's hands or the training in somebody else's hands, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, what?

You know, what's going on with this guy?

They're not doing the things that we talked about or that we wanted them to do.

So how do you get that coach training part of it going?

What is that?

End of the coaching, hiring, practice, slash, keeping everything standardized.

What does that look like?

Yeah, and that's really what kind of makes basketball training systems stand out from a lot of training facilities is we have so many struct, you know, SOPs and things that make sure that people are doing everything the right way before they come on.

Because some of the best coaches I had weren't, honestly the greatest players in the world.

And some coaches I had were fantastic players, but you really had to teach them on the coaching end of things, right?

So making sure the first thing right out the gate, they go through me.

My kind of role is EVP of training and development for all our academies.

So understanding the right way to communicate is number one.

Right.

Going through soft skills with them.

Not just, yeah, I know you can teach basketball.

You know the game very well, but it's going through that proper training and communication portion of how do you deal with if things go wrong on the court with a young child?

Or how do you deal with, you know, problematic parents that are, you know, getting too involved or whatever it may be, or maybe.

And kind of our biggest message is how can we make a lasting impact for these kids, not just as basketball players?

Because the biggest goal is to create something that I took away from playing sports.

My whole life is getting those life skills, that confidence, that commute, those communication skills, that work ethic.

How can we do that without, you know, shoving it down their throats and saying, you need to be more confident, work harder?

No, it's getting that relationship with them and making sure we're here for the right reasons.

And this is why a lot of coaches out there who are doing it by themselves have a hard time building their own kind of brand.

Right?

Because we already have all this set up for them.

So before they even go on the court with us, they're ready to Go.

What are some of the things when you talk about building those relationships and being able to have those interpersonal skills when you're working with a kid and when you're working with a parent, what are some of the things that you talk with the coach is about in terms of how you want them to interact with those families, with those players, so that you are building the types of relationships that not only have an impact on the kids as players, which obviously you want to do, but you're also having that greater impact on them as people.

Yeah.

The first and foremost thing is positivity and encouragement.

Right.

We're not, and especially in our academies, it's not just the top echelon athletes.

We want someone who's never touched a basketball, who's, you know, just wanting to try something new.

So the biggest thing is being positive, being encouragement.

Right.

As soon as you walk in the gate, we should be having fun.

Right.

If you're having fun, everyone's having fun.

The second thing is actually getting to know every kid on the court and that it can be hard to do, especially for the bigger academies.

For example, you know, CP3, Chris Paul's academy in North Carolina, they have.

I couldn't tell you how many members.

Right.

Involved.

And these coaches have to really get to know them.

Right.

There are so many camps and clinics that I've seen in basketball training where it's one coach, 50 kids.

There's no way you're going to remember all of them.

Right.

You got to make sure that every single day you're saying their names, you're making eye contact, you're a staff, you know, talking to them.

Not just, hey, here's how you dribble basketball.

How's your day going?

What's going on?

How can I help you?

Right.

And making sure that it's okay if you're not doing it correctly the first way.

We're having fun, we're learning and establishing who they are.

Because the more you can get to know these kids, the more you can really understand what's going to work for them.

There is no black or white answer to basketball.

You have to be able to find different avenues for every single player.

Some person, some kid might have a great reaction to one certain drill.

They're doing it perfectly, while the other is not so much.

But they can do it a different way.

So we need to find out what that is.

And that's just getting to know them.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that I always tell people one of the things that the secret sauce for me and the camps that I run in the summertime has always been that I'll have a camp with 75 or 80 kids and I'll learn every kid's name on that first day.

And maybe on the second day I'll have one or two kids that maybe they look like a past kid that whatever.

Or there's just.

You always get like one or two that you're like, for some reason, I just can't.

I just can't get that one kid for whatever reason.

But for the most part, after a day or two, I know every single kid who comes to camp.

And people always ask me, they're like, well, how do you do that?

Like, what's.

What's your trick?

Do you have some kind of secret for figuring that out?

Like, not really.

I'm like, I just.

That first day, I make sure I'm at every station when we're doing our.

Our thing.

And I'm saying, like you said, I say the kid's name over and over again.

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny.

And I just keep repeating it until I'm able to get that.

And there's so many benefits to that.

If you're a trainer or you're a coach, learn every kid's name who's involved in your program.

Because one, when that kid walks in the door with their parent and you say, hey, Steve, how you doing, mom or dad?

Look.

And they're like, wow, this guy knows my kid.

And not only is it beneficial just in terms of the relationship, but that's beneficial from a business standpoint because the parent now knows that you're invested.

And that kid.

And I think that's a huge piece of it.

And.

And then the other thing that I always think is beneficial of knowing every kid's name is when you're trying to organize things and a kid is not where they're supposed to be or when the kid is doing something great now you can use their name.

And like you said, everybody likes to hear their name being used.

And so it makes managing everything so much easier when you know everyone's name and it's.

It's so important.

And then I'll give you a story on the other side.

On the other side of this.

Wayne.

So there was a guy at a place where my kids used to go and shoot, and he would do training with kids.

And one day I was over, and there was a kid that he was working with that had done something with me, like, I don't know, six months ago maybe.

And I wanted to say something to the kid before he left and I couldn't remember his name.

And I know that this guy had been working with him for a bunch of times.

I'm like, hey, what's, you know, what's the kid that you're working with?

What's like, what's that kid's name?

And he was over getting a drink and the guy said to me, he's like, I just call him Big Dog.

He goes, I call, I call, I call.

He goes, I call every call.

Everybody I work with, I call him, I call them all Big Dog.

I'm like, I've been working with this kid for like six months and you don't know their name.

I'm like, what do you say to the parent?

Hey, Big Dog's really getting good at his layups.

So, you know, one of those things that you could kind of look at both sides of it.

I will tell you, knowing the kids names is, is a critical piece of, of anything that you're trying to do on the basketball side of it, building the business.

If you know the kids names that you're working with, it's going to benefit you in so many ways.

Oh yeah.

And plus, I mean as a coach and if this especially your job, you know, you're doing a job, it is a job, right?

It's still fun.

We're playing basketball, but it's a job.

So it's part of your day to day.

A lot of your interactions aren't as special, but when all eyes are on them, you don't know what you say to each kid.

That's going to make a difference.

Because I can look back at a time when I was just a little youngster learning to play any sport and thinking like, oh, I didn't realize my coach had a really big kind of a, you know, brought me up in the world and I didn't even realize until way later on.

So you never know.

Understanding that, hey, eye to eye, all eyes on you as a coach could make that kid's day, make their week, you know, might affect the first life.

We don't know those are all things that are not basketball related.

We didn't talk at all about the actual ability to teach the game because the first part of being a good coach is the connection with the people.

Whether that's the kid who you're coaching, whether that's the family.

I think being able to make that connection takes you a long way.

And obviously there's basketball knowledge that you have to have if you're going to be teaching and doing coaching.

And those kind of things.

But by the same token, that interpersonal piece of it is so big when you start talking about the business aspect and on getting people, getting a coach to understand that what you're trying to do is have an impact on those kids in a positive way.

And by knowing their names, by getting to know them, that's how you're going to be able to get them to come back and continue to benefit from the basketball knowledge that you have by building that relationship.

And I think that's really well said.

And I think it's an important point for anybody who's in the coaching business to be able to.

To be able to do those kinds of things.

When it comes to being a coach yourself or if you're looking to hire coaches, those are the kind of things that you want to look for.

So when we're talking about setting up an academy, and obviously as you go along in the process, you're now much more involved on that side of just getting things in line.

And one of the things that you mentioned is a curriculum.

And I think this is another area where somebody who is a solo trainer sometimes can have a hard time putting together a cohesive series of private lessons.

Classes.

What's the order?

I've got a kid that shows up here, then shows up over here.

How do I make sure that wherever they show up in my business, that I'm getting them what they need?

So talk a little bit about the curriculum development side of bts, how you guys approach that.

Where does the curriculum come from?

How do you get it into the hands of the coaches?

Just walk me through the curriculum piece.

Yeah, and that's what really makes us stand out for a lot of trainers and coaches that are trying to, you know, start their own programs is that structured curriculum.

And it all originally started from, you know, when Larry Hughes started it out in St. Louis.

He was kind of doing his own running around, finding different gyms.

And once he found his brick and mortar, we teamed up with a great company, their martial arts academy in Northern California named Kovar's.

They introduced, well, what if you created a year round structured curriculum?

And so Larry started the whole thing of just he it mean it.

It must have taken a month.

I don't know how long it took him, but it must have taken forever where he sat down and said, okay, what's a good starting building block to go off of what you need from day one?

Okay, how do we build off from there?

What's should be another drill added on that and what should be progressed and we do 10 cycles throughout the entire year and each cycle's five weeks long.

And what makes it so unique is everything is for a reason in the curriculum.

And it's, you'll see as you move along that curriculum, where it started from and how we got to that next point, how we're getting to the next point, what we're introducing next to it.

And every, every day you come out, every week you come out, it's, it's pretty much new.

You know, there are things that we're building on top of, but it's fresh every time you're out.

You're not doing the same thing over and over again, but you're still keeping the basis of what you've learned and moving forward.

And we have it set up for entire and it's always changing.

I'm not saying like, yep, we did it, it's done, you know, we have it.

This is something that Larry's still working on, our CEO Jason Fry is still working on.

It was you know, just amazing hard work and a basketball minded type of person that really, I mean he's, I couldn't tell how many years he coached.

He's fantastic.

But they're still tweaking it as they go and making sure it has the right terminology, the right progression and constantly moving and changing, especially with the game, it's always evolving, you know, and you have to make sure you have that in there.

Not just for, like I said, the top echelon athletes, but someone who's brand new to the game.

How can we coach one thing to someone who's never dribbled a basketball compared to someone who's pretty advanced.

And so you have to have those.

And that's also part of the coaching as well, is being flexible while you're teaching that curriculum.

But it's laid out for them so every coach that walks on the floor knows what you're teaching that day.

And of course you make audibles on, you know, what people can and can't do.

But there's no questioning, they know exactly what they're going to be taught.

And so we put out all to all of our academies, all of our coaches, all of our general managers, they have the curriculum set up for at minimum a week.

Most of the time we'll go three weeks at a time.

So you know what's coming up next.

You can do your research, you can look up, you know, drills on YouTube if you want.

You can ask our own, you know, trainers that have been involved like Larry and Bobby and Monte and all that Kind of stuff.

So everyone, as soon as they step on the court, they have the drills ready.

It's just a matter of what's the best way for you to teach it.

How many levels of skill do you have in terms of someone I know when I talked to Rick and Larry a few years ago that one of the things they talked about was kind of sort of, I'm going to use the word graduating.

I don't remember if that was the exact term that they use.

But you go through that five week curriculum and if you've mastered the skills in that particular area of the curriculum, then you bump up to the next level.

So I don't know if I'm explaining it right or if that's even still the way that you guys do it, but just walk me through.

If I'm a kid who, all right, I'm a kid who's never touched a basketball and I'm at this level and then maybe I'm an elite high school player, how do I.

What's the process for me moving from one level to another as I progress through the curriculum?

Yeah, so we've actually changed this quite a bit.

You know, we're always making changes as we go.

The way we structure it now is as soon as you come out to the floor, you try it out for free, see if you like the program.

But what we do is we do an actual assessment with them.

And it's a basic, you know, five minute assessment to really see what your skill level is.

And that's how we kind of get that basis on understanding where they belong in our program.

Should they be in just our skills and drills classes?

Should they do more private lessons?

Would a camp or a clinic be better beneficial for you or maybe you're ready for team play?

This is what we have to find out in this.

And if you're a basketball coach, those you get trained up on what you're looking for and there's things that already laid out for them that says, okay, this is what you're looking for when it comes to ball handling.

This is what you're looking for when it comes to your shot and the proper form and all that kind of stuff.

So you can make a quick assessment on that.

And the way we work it from here is if they join our program, you know, become a member or start doing private lessons.

What we do is we also keep up with them to make sure that we're doing another assessment.

Right.

And it's usually in about a 10 week program.

Once we start doing that, okay this is where your starting block was.

This is what we've seen so far.

Let's do this again and let's see how much you've improved and then you start progressing that assessment.

So it's not just doing the same thing over and over again.

You're adding more things that, you know, they can do that maybe they need to do next time or advance from there.

And so everyone, not just the coaches, but the players and the parents are seeing that progression as they move through.

And you know, as you age up, as you get more advanced, you know, we might bump you up to the next class, which is, you know, a much more advanced class or maybe just higher in age if you're keeping up with that level, making sure that they're progressing all throughout.

When you come in and work with BTS and you're at an academy and I'm a player and a family, I have a kid, I'm a parent, I come in with my kid and we're working in a particular area, right.

I get my assessment done by a coach and I'm coming to classes or I'm going to a camp or clinic.

How much connection is there between one coach and one player?

In other words, if I show up and I have this coach for my first five week session, am I going to keep with the same coach or is it that I rotate somebody in?

So you get different people, different perspectives.

How do you guys handle the player to coach relationship as it relates to a kid who's progressing through the curriculum?

Right.

And it's different for every academy and different for every player and different for every coach.

Right?

It depends on what they're into.

Our skills and drills, classes is what we do is our group classes.

And, and so they're seeing new coaches every night that they come out and they're going to gain different relationships with different coaches as they progress.

For me personally, I used to love when every coach had their own personal, you know, touch to every single player because, you know, maybe the one way you teach a box out drill isn't gonna be the same as another coach.

But hey, a player might pick something up from one coach and something completely different from another coach, but they're learning something new and, you know, getting a much more well rounded game.

But if they're more on the private lesson side, we try to find the coaches that are going to suit just for them.

Right?

So if they're like, hey, I want to do a five pack of private lessons and I don't know what coach I want, well, Maybe try a couple out.

Hey, what do you want to work on the most?

Okay, well, this coach is probably our best shooter and has the best technique.

We'll put you with that if that's you want to learn for shooting.

If you're ball handling, hey, we'll put you with this coach.

Or maybe one day we'll try something different, put you on a different one, depending on what they're wanting.

If they don't know what they want, we're gonna find it out.

Right?

We're going to do kind of not a trial and error, but almost an assessment to see what they need to work on and put them with the coach that's going to work best for them.

And some people have one coach that they immediately like, I love this coach.

I want to be with this coach the entire time I'm here.

And I'm like, yeah, great, absolutely.

You know, what's worked, what works for them and what the kids get the most enjoyment.

What the parents feel more confident with is what we're going to supply to them.

There's no, you know, right or wrong magic pill I can give you that says this is going to work for you.

We have to find that out.

Makes sense.

And I think again, like you said, it's not a one size fits all.

Right.

There are some players and families who I'm sure, like, I like this guy.

This is the guy I want to work with.

And then there are other families where, hey, I like to get a variety like you said, because I can pick up one thing from this coach and I can pick up something else.

And again, everybody has strengths and weaknesses.

And so I can definitely see both of those tracks making a lot of sense.

Let's jump back to your story within bts.

So after the general manager job with Bobby Jackson, what's the next step in your career at bc, at bts?

What happens next?

Right.

So I'm very excited about my.

And it's still fairly new.

I've only been doing this for probably about not even a year yet.

But my biggest role that I wanted to bring out for the basketball training system side is making sure everything is trained and structured for all development of our academies.

And because when I first started it was kind of a.

And the people we had in our positions besides Larry Hughes, of course, it was both mostly kind of like, hey, figure it out.

You know, here's what your goal is.

Make it happen.

And so I had to kind of figure it out myself and trial and error and ask questions from other managers at other Academies and you know, just do my research and dig into it.

So what I wanted to really bring out for these academies is making sure everyone, when they come on board, whether it's from a coach to a sales specialist to a general manager, knows exactly what's to be expected.

And I, it's so much more beneficial when you know what the expectations are before you go in and have to figure it out.

And so my job is to make sure that everyone's comfortable.

You may not feel comfortable in getting it all done, but this is what's supposed to be done.

This is what we can do to help you get it done.

And I also do weekly check ins with all of our general managers and you know, and training never stops.

We're always improving so there's not, hey, I'm going to train you for a week and you know, you're done.

Go ahead.

We want to make sure that I'm always keeping in contact with them and understanding what the struggles are, what we can help with.

You know, whether it's from dealing with troublesome coaches, whether it's dealing with our system that we're working with or maybe just, you know, I'm having a hard time hitting my goals revenue wise.

How can I change that?

Okay, let's talk about it.

Let's, what have you done?

What can we do from here?

And so on and so forth.

So that's my biggest thing to move forward with when I started this position.

Now I've kind of transitioned as well into kind of growth for our entire basketball training systems because when we first started it was, well, you're going to build a full program.

That's what we're going to do.

We're going to just find programs, find people with the capital and make sure that we can build these programs.

But I'm sure as you know from the basketball world, most trainers, coaches don't have the capital to find a location, rent a space, build out an entire gym.

So what we're really trying to do, and what I'm trying to do personally is to find these passionate coaches, trainers, basketball pro basketball players that want to just help their own program get started and what the tools they need to get that started and progress.

And so I'm trying to broaden, hey, basketball should be for everyone, not just people with capital to build an entire program.

So I want to get to that in a second.

But I want to go back to what you said at the beginning in terms of you've basically, from what I can gather, and you mentioned it earlier, that putting together the SOPs, right?

You're putting together an operations manual that's written down.

So if somebody comes to you with a question about, hey, how do we do X, it's not, well, I don't know, we just let, let's just figure it out.

It's now we know exactly how we want to handle that particular situation.

Am I reading that correctly?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And that was something that all of our, and it wasn't just myself doing this, by the way.

It was all of our managers that have been involved in our leadership team that we have now that have had this experience of being on the floor, being a coach, being a general manager, doing sales.

And we all have this, you know, unified knowledge of this is what's worked for us.

Okay.

This will work for them.

Because of this and obviously being from the military, I had to put some structure on it.

So we laid it out in Google classroom training and I do, you know, full sessions with them and we do, you know, post interviews with them to make sure everyone's comfortable and we're checking on with them on a weekly basis and making sure everyone knows where to find the information.

If they don't, you can give me a call.

This is what I'm here for, is to make sure everyone knows and is comfortable with what you know, can be done.

Talked about the coaching role, we talked about the general manager role.

The other role that you've mentioned a couple times is the sales role.

Talk me, talk to me about the sales role.

What is a person who's in that position?

What do they do on a day to day basis?

Yeah.

So depending on the location, we have sales specialists we call membership specialists and they're going to manage kind of all the background communication with our families.

When it comes to our system, we use a system called mindbody who sign people up, you know, do a sales pitch.

When people come in for a free trial, they give them all the information.

Here's a packet of what we do, here's how we can help, here's our prices there.

But my biggest role that I love for them is being that person as soon as you walk in the gym, which I always tried to be when I was but is being that person.

When someone walks in the gym, you're here with open arms.

I have answers for you.

Are you excited?

I'm going to make sure you're having fun.

I'm going to make sure you're happy about it and give you all the information we need to know.

So they're doing most of the Work when it comes to following up with people and making sure they're having a good time and understanding what all of our programs are and you know, what we can do for their kids.

And they're communicating directly with the general managers, they're communicating directly with the coaches.

Hey, we have this many free trials coming tonight.

We need to do this many assessments.

You know, I'm going to talk to A, B and C. You're going to do the assessment.

So they're very integral, really helping out the general manager and easing a little bit that load so they don't have to do all the back end.

Hey, did you have a good time?

I'm going to call you, I'm going to give you a text and all that kind of stuff makes sense.

And I think again, like you said, that interaction, right, that public relations of making connection like we talked about earlier, as soon as somebody walks in the door, you're being greeted, you're being told and shown what it is that you're going to experience.

And so I can certainly see the value in that without question.

How many academies do you guys have open right now across the country?

And just to give people a sense of kind of the scale of your business.

Sure.

So we have six that are open right now, full facilities.

Four of them with NBA players.

Larry Hughes, obviously, Bobby Jackson and Sacramento.

Monte Ellis in Texas and we have Chris Paul in North Carolina.

We're also talking with Byron Scott right now to be starting one in Los Angeles and then we have two others that are full programs that are not NBA based.

But of course our NBA players all kind of, you know, they're a part of it.

They.

Larry just went out to our, one of our most recent Sutton Basketball Academy and Pro Elite Basketball Academy.

Head coach for the Wildcats, Rodney.

Fantastic guy.

So it's not just our NBA players but we have six full facilities and we're also helping out with different coaches when it comes to our different programs.

Right.

So not just we called our BTS flex where you know, they're just wondering about marketing materials or curriculum materials and different things like that.

So I couldn't tell the exact number on how many we have right now on that one.

But you know, it's a constant day to day basis on what we're helping with.

Absolutely.

Understood.

All right, so let's look at the full facility piece of it.

When you think about the ideal size for a facility, I always think it's kind of interesting to look at some of the different places that I go with my own kids or that I've been involved in and see, okay, this place has four courts.

This place has X number of shooting machines.

This, this group has this.

When you think about the ideal or kind of what you've had success with, what do you think is the right size?

And again, maybe it's all, maybe it's different just depending upon what you have available.

But in your mind, from an ideal business standpoint, what's the size, type of facility?

If you could design it from scratch exactly the way you wanted it, what's the ideal size?

Yeah, when it comes to generating revenue growth, we found that the smaller facilities are much easier to handle.

Right.

And that's because the overhead, the rental space building up the court themselves.

And you can still, I mean, you'd be surprised how many kids you can still fit in a smaller gym of just one full court, you know, of making sure everyone has the space.

You're still getting one on one, you know, connections with these coaches.

You're still being able to fit them in groups.

We do have large facilities.

CP3 in particular is a very big facility and they are the most successful.

And you know, with Chris Paul involved, how could it not be right?

But there's so much overhead in this and we found that yes, they are bringing a lot, but there's also so many different expenses that go with having that big of a space.

So you don't particularly need a giant, huge facility with four courts to have success as a program.

We found that the smaller, you know, courts, I mean, Larry Hughes is in St. Louis.

It's not even a full court and that's much easier because the gym rental is easier.

Putting everything together is easier.

It's much more cost effective, especially if you're a licensee.

For us, you know, you want to find something that's going to give you return the quickest.

And that's what we're trying to find.

And we found the smaller programs tend to be the best way to go for that.

Feels like I know this is something that I talk with people about all the time and often you'll go to an AAU tournament or you'll go to this particular whatever and you'll show up on a Saturday afternoon at an AU tournament where the facility is packed and there's people wall to wall and people come up to you and be like, wow, like this place must just be minting money.

They're just.

It's crazy how look at how packed it is.

And I'm like, well, come back on Monday morning at 11am and see what this facility, it has eight courts.

Let's see what that facility looks like, you know, on a weekday at 11am and that kind of speaks to what you're talking about, right?

That the overhead and the rental and again the utilities and everything that go all, there's all this stuff filling the court time and how do you do that?

And it's, it's way more challenging, I think than people think who only see it during the peak hours where yeah, it's packed on a Saturday for an AU tournament, but there are lots of times during the week where you got to hustle to be able to fill it with whatever, whether it's your own basketball programming or a lot of times whatever you can fill it with just to be able to have people inside the facility.

So I can certainly see where from a standpoint of a smaller facility being easier to manage makes a lot of sense to me.

So then let me, let me take it a step further.

So if I have a one quart facility, let's say what's the structure in terms of membership, number of kids that I need to be coming through the door in order to make my, my business viable so that I can have not just success with my coaching piece of it, but so I can have financial success.

What does that look like?

Again, let's just use a one court facility to kind of make it relatively simple.

Yeah, it's all, you know, again, it depends on where you are in the country.

You know, what that gym rental is, what the cost is.

And we usually have a pretty structured priceline when it comes to all of our programs.

Some are a little bit higher, some a little bit lower.

California is obviously going to be a little bit higher because people can afford it in California.

But ideally, because when I was a, when I was a general manager at Bobby Jackson, my number to hit to kind of, and I was fortunate as well because we were 24 Hour Fitness, which we have a contract with 24 to you know, put these programs in where we see fit, which is what we're doing with Byron Jackson or I'm sorry, Byron Scott over in Los Angeles right now is being able to, you know, you're just paying rents and you don't have to do anything else.

But if you are owning your own facility or if you're renting from a place and building it up roughly for one court, I would say you want to get to around that 80, 90 mark of memberships when it comes to a monthly, because they're monthly memberships.

That's where you Kind of start to make that break even point right now.

Again, rents and all that and your extra costs you have to put into the factors of what that's going to be.

But usually for one corporate facility, that's usually about where you want to be.

Then you start doing private lessons.

The small groups, the camps, the clinics, the league play, different things like that, that turns into more profit and we like to base it around our skills and drills classes because it's year round classes.

We want to get those memberships in to start with, get that base level of what our break even point is and then constantly, every single month create some sort of a new revenue maker.

Whether it's just a holiday clinic or a back to school event or you know, just, you know, we have parents night out at some places where you just drop your kids off at night and you know, all that different sort of thing.

So you have to be creative at your own facility, know what your market is and understand, okay, this is what I want for my break even and then I'll add things on top of that.

What does a membership look like for the player and their family?

If I come to a BTS facility and I sign up for a membership, do you have tiers?

What do I get for my membership?

I guess is what I'm asking.

Yeah, most of our memberships are going to be.

You have your choice of.

Our monthly memberships are going to be.

Usually you pick for a one day a week program which can range anywhere depending on where you are in the country.

Could be $69 a month to $99 a month and you get to pick.

We're very flexible with that schedule.

You know, you don't.

We like to schedule for a single day a week and we like to keep you on that one if that's possible.

But we understand life is busy, you're moving all over the place, you can't make it that day, come in another day, no big deal.

We also have an unlimited package and that's where you can come in any day of the week you want, as many times a week as you want.

That could range anywhere from.

I think our lowest is around 145.

You can go up to 175 depending on where you are and just come and you're doing the skills and drills classes every single day of the week if you want.

You can come in two, three, four times a week if you want.

You know we also have our private lessons and those are kind of pay by scheduling in.

So if you just want to do one session, you kind of pick and choose when you want to do that.

Or you could do the five pack and just use them whenever you feel.

You just have to schedule them ahead of time with us and understand what you're working on.

Small groups are the same thing as our private lessons.

Just, you know, five, six, seven kids in a group with one coach.

It's a cheaper price.

Usually you can also do that as a single session or a five pack.

And so they have all the, these are our regular programs, but then we also have of course the camps, clinics, league play depending on where you are.

How many coaches do you need to staff a one court facility in order to have somebody available for, for all the offerings that you have.

So we like to do on all of our academies a very base minimum of 10 to 1 ratio when it comes to players, to coaches.

So if you know you're in a facility like CP3 when you have, you know, so many kids in one class, we want to make sure that we have the right amount of coaches.

That way each player is still getting that one on one attention.

Even if you're in a big group, you're still getting all eyes on you while these classes are going on.

So that's our baseline of what we usually like to do.

But we've had some facilities that, you know, some classes on certain days will have less than 10 kids some days depending on holidays and summer and all that kind of stuff.

So you could do it with one coach, one general manager in the gym with you as well.

I know when I first started at Bobby Jackson there was times when I was still trying to figure out my coaches.

You know, they're part time jobs so people call out and so I had to run everything and I did the coaching, I did the sales specialist, I greet them in I, you know, and that's just how it goes sometimes.

But yeah, depending on what your schedule is throughout the week, you want that 10 to 1 and you want to hire as much as you can around it.

I'm a big fan of over hiring.

So I get the right people in the right places and making sure that hey, someone calls out.

Because in today's days, I'll tell you this right now, there are so many last minute call outs and as a general manager it's frustrating.

So you have to have people ready to go, hey, so and so can't make it in today.

Who's available?

Perfect, get in the gym, let's go.

So it's different for every location, but you want to keep that ratio in the court.

Absolutely.

Tell me about the scheduling and how you go about putting together what program is available at what time, how do you balance that with the individual sessions, the group sessions, the camps, clinics?

How do you make sure that you fit everything in?

And then obviously, again, since you're dealing with kids, there's a certain time, especially during the week, where you're not having anybody in the facility at 9:30am to do a class because the kids are all in school.

So just walk me through what it's like putting together a schedule.

What's the biggest challenge of putting together the schedule?

What comes together relatively easily?

Just, again, walk me through that process of putting together a schedule.

Yeah, it depends on the location that you're at.

We have some facilities in our programs that it's their gym.

They can have it as many hours a day as they want.

They can put in programs, private lessons, any time of the day, any time of night.

Someone like myself who worked out at 24 Hour Fitness, we're renting the gym for them.

So we have to establish exactly when those days are going to be.

Ideally, you, especially for those skills and drills classes, you want to have consistent classes throughout that week in the evenings, because during school time, people get out of school, you have to make sure they're late enough that you'll have time to get out of school, go home, get change, get something to eat, then come to the gym, y'.

All.

But then you don't want it too late to where Our last class of the day, our high school or advanced level classes, you know, where you're like, oh my God, I'm exhausted, I can't play basketball right now.

I do.

And so you have to ideally, anywhere from, you know, 4:35 o', clock, you know, through 8:30 to 9:00 clock, is usually that best window throughout that week and weekends.

Obviously, depending on the availability of your facility, you can kind of schedule however you feel.

You know, me being at 24, we had to have a contract with them of, well, during this time to this time, this is going to be our gym.

And Sundays we'll have it from this time to this time.

But if you have your own facility, you can map it out, whatever works best.

But the main point would to be having that consistent weekly class to make sure people can come to the gym and you have different options.

It's not just, well, you're here one day.

This is what it has to be.

We want to make sure that people have that flexibility in their schedule to come when they can.

When it comes to our clinics, we like to build out an entire yearly, you know, kind of a roadmap when it comes to what we're going to be doing.

Obviously the holidays, what sort of specialty we do, and we try to do some sort of a clinic or specialty event once a month.

So understanding a few months ahead of time, hey, we want to try to do something on this date so we could put out the marketing, let our members know, let all of the staff know, and everyone's on the same page.

And then, of course, our summer camps.

You know, depending on what your location is and how much you have the gym, you want to make sure you map those out before the year even starts.

So that way people have time to make their summer plans and you're not just scrambling last minute of, oh, man, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.

So we want to make sure everything's mapped out for them, you know, and sometimes we have to change it depending on what's going on in our areas and things like that.

But we want to make sure we have a plan before the year even begins.

When it comes to your pro guys, how hands on are they expected to be?

How hands on do they want to be?

Obviously, every guy is different, but just talk a little bit about what it's like working with your pro guys.

It's always a pleasure working with our pros.

You know, some have more availability than others.

You know, Chris Paul obviously can't make it as much.

He's quite busy with the, you know, being an NBA player and all that kind of stuff.

But Larry, he lives down the street from his academy, and he likes to pop in and out anytime he sees, you know, Bobby Jackson, obviously, he's also coaching for the Sacramento Kings right now, so his availability during the season is scarce.

When there's a home game, you know, you're giving him a call like, do.

You have a minute?

Come to the gym.

But off time, you know, he's there two, three days a week.

Monte Ellis in Texas, man, he's there.

I think he might be there every day.

I don't know for sure, but he's constantly there.

And that's such an important part of these pros being involved, is having them in the gym, because that's.

Even though a lot of the kids don't know who they are, the parents know who they are, they want to see and feel what it's like and understand how they got there, what it took to be there.

Just having conversations with these Pro guys for these kids can make such a lasting impact.

And I gotta say, every single one of them, fantastic at.

You know, you'd think being NBA player and NBA star in some cases you'd be a little bit above, you know, talking with someone like myself.

But no, they're understanding, they want to be involved.

They, they're very smart, all four of them and understand what it takes and what we need to do together.

And so anytime they're around and they're involved, it makes our jobs easier.

Kids are having more fun.

It's just so much, it's, it's a pleasure to work with them all around.

That's awesome.

And I think again, somebody to get involved in something like this, you have to have a passion for obviously the game, but also for kids and, and wanting to in some way give back to the game that has been so good to those guys and giving them their livelihood and the notoriety they have that goes along with that.

And so I think to be able to put together and put your name on an academy and then to be able to again give back in your community and give back to the game seems like it would be something that again, there's a lot of guys out there that would be willing and want to be able to do that at some point in their either career or their post career life.

And that goes to something that you talked about a little bit earlier in terms of somebody starting their own facility.

Right.

And getting, getting their program off the ground.

And you have again, as you said, capital is required depending upon how you want to structure it.

Are you building your own building?

Are you buying your own building?

Are you just renting?

Are you at an LA Fitness?

Are you renting in a warehouse that has a cord in it?

How is it that you're going about and designing this?

So from a business standpoint for you guys, how do you go about attracting new business to get started with a new academy?

What's the strategy for you guys to grow BTS from where it is now and the number of academies that you have into at just adding more locations?

What does that look like?

Yeah, and there's different avenues that we're definitely doing a lot more of now other than just finding the academies.

But the basic that I've been trying to do from my point of view is just reaching out to most people that are involved in the game, having conversations, especially with someone like you, and being involved in something like this is being able to tell people that you don't have to be an NBA player to do Something like this, you don't have to have this giant retirement capital from the National Basketball association that can help you get started.

You can start something from the very ground level.

Get your name out there, get a brand going and work your way up.

It doesn't just have to be, hey, I have some money, I want to spend it on a basketball academy.

It's finding people that are passionate, know the game well, want to be involved in basketball throughout their lives and make sure that they're getting their name out there.

And, you know, our team does a great job of being able to find the right people that just need help.

And this is my number one job.

Besides training our already people that we have on staff, is finding people that do need that help and making sure that you're in it for the right reasons, you know, not just, well, I want to make a bunch of money playing basketball.

No, we want to make a difference in our community.

And you don't have to have a lot of money to just start training people and build a roster and find more people around you, get your own brand involved and make sure that people can find you.

Where's your location?

Are you bouncing around?

Ideally, you want to be in a single place where everyone knows where you are, and then you start to get recognized and then more people start coming, then you start to have a little more capital.

Then we start trying to find you a place and market even harder and so on and so forth.

But there's so many different paths to go besides just saying, hey, find me a location, I'm opening something.

What's the marketing strategy both for academies that have been around for a while and as somebody gets started new?

What are some of the strategies that you guys use to get the word out about what you're doing in the communities that you serve?

It's a digital world and you've already mentioned the AI and everything that's going with technology before we jumped on here.

And that's really how we have to do a lot of our marketing.

It's through our ads.

When it comes to Google, when it comes to Facebook, you know, meta, all this kind of stuff, Instagram, TikTok, doesn't matter what it is, people just have to find you and they have to be able to see you and they have to see you quick.

Because when people are scrolling, they're scrolling fast.

So you have to find something that's going to grab them, something that's going to stand out.

That's the number one battle that you have to deal with, is that's how most people are finding everything nowadays, and that's how we have to use it as well.

But you as a coach, as a trainer who, you know, maybe don't have a lot of followers, whatever it is, or don't have a lot of money to throw into an ad marketing campaign, you can do a lot of grassroots marketing of just boots on the floor.

Let's go find people.

And we have all the tools and different things that you can use to get out in your community.

Find those kids that need help training, understand who you are, what your, you know, style of coaching is, what's going to work best for them.

So there's so many different things you can do besides just putting an ad out, which, you know, nowadays that's how the world is.

But going out, putting up flyer street signs, talking to people, going to events, making sure people could see you, that's really how more people in your own personal community can find you.

Yeah, I think eventually, right, you start out with that broad general, the digital world of making a campaign that gets people aware of what you're doing.

And then eventually I would guess that what you hope to transition to is in addition to that digital stuff is it's word of mouth, right.

Hey, Coach Wayne does a great job over there at his academy.

You should go and try that.

Little Johnny's been working with them for the last six months.

If you're looking for a great place to do basketball, that's where you should go.

And what I've found for me is that again, so much of what I do just ends up being the mom of the kid who went last year tells her friend, hey, you should send your kid to this camp.

They do a really good job.

And that kind of marketing, a, it's cheap and B, there's.

It's way more effective.

Right.

Because it's a personal touch of the person actually experience working with you.

Now they're telling somebody else, hey, you're going to have a similar experience if you go and work.

And I think that again, it goes to the very beginning of our conversation when we talked about how do you hire the right people and the right coaches and put them in position if those people are doing a good job.

Now people talk, hey, you want to go work with this coach at this place?

And that's really how you start to.

Again, that gets the flywheel spinning right where it just as you do a good job, more and more people start talking.

And that's how you, how you build your, your reputation within the community.

And that's how you really go about building, building your business.

When you think about your current role right now, Wayne, what would you say is the biggest challenge within your business right now?

What's something that you're working on to.

To try to.

To try to make better?

What's, what's the biggest challenge in having the kind of success that you want to have?

I think the biggest challenge we have is getting the word out that you don't have to be an NBA player to run your own program.

Finding the right people, right?

And we're going all.

I mean, we're not just in the US Anymore, we're actually going to India and things of that sort.

It's all about making those right connection, finding the right people.

The biggest challenge is finding people that love the game enough but don't understand how they can make this something that they can make a reality of their own living as building a basketball program and putting them in the right position.

So personally, for me, that challenge is finding people who are.

Know what they're doing in the game of basketball, are passionate about it and want to find a home and make it something serious for them.

Because people think, well, you know, if I don't play pro basketball, what can I do in the basketball world if I'm not just coaching at a college level or NBA level?

There's so many different things you can do.

And just getting the word out to them and making sure that they know that is probably the biggest challenge.

And you talked about earlier that you don't just have the full fledged academy piece of beast of bts, you have some other offerings.

Can you talk a little about what those other offerings are for somebody who is a trainer in a local area that maybe just wants to see what they can do to grow their business and scale it in some way?

Just what else do you guys have available on the menu besides, hey, you're going to open up your own facility and have this whole big academy piece.

What, what's the other side of what you guys do?

Yeah, so we have a brand, actually two new programs that we just kind of started.

The first one's called BTS Ignite.

And it's pretty much a monthly membership with us and we supply you with what you're looking for.

You know, it can start as low as $99 a month, which is like you're a student at a basketball facility almost and we give you all these kind of tools.

I mean, we have a resource library that is so long and so in depth from all the knowledge that We've gained throughout the years from Larry first starting it to what we're still building right now of when it comes to any piece of the puzzle that you're looking for, when it comes to just, hey, how do I start marketing?

How do I make a structured program throughout my entire year or just six months at a time, or three months at a time?

How do I create a template for an entire days of camp, for a basketball camp, for a two hour clinic?

Different.

I mean, we have drills that I don't even think I've gotten to the end of, of just how to teach a certain drill.

And there's, you know, five or six different things just for one drill that you can.

So all this is just for someone that wants the basic level.

Like, okay, I just need some information and there's tiered levels to it.

And each one you get, you know, a once a month call with our leadership team.

You know, the more obviously that you're involved into because we have a 99, a 4 99, a 12, 99.

You know, you're depending on how much you're, you know, wanting to invest is how much time we're going to give you of our own.

So it's going to be, could be once a month, could be once a week, you know, depending on what you're looking for and what you're building.

And you know, once it gets to that higher level, we are a little bit more picky.

We want to find people that are established, know what they're doing already and we can guide them and put them to that next level.

We also have what's called a BTS flex, where for a lump sum you could just get, hey, I need a full year curriculum done.

We can set that up for you.

You have an entire year curriculum for it and we train your staff.

We still do all the training with myself and our leadership team, our CEO COOs, give everyone the understanding of what's a great way to get you started, get you moving forward, the correct tools that you need to coach and communicate and all this sort of stuff.

And.

Or maybe someone's saying, hey, you know, I just need help marketing.

How do I do this?

What are some templates I can use for online for my ads if I want to do it myself?

What are things I can do in my community that worked for you that you can do yourself without any cost to you?

And there's all these pieces of the game and training facilities that we use in our academies that are just at our disposal that people can kind of get from us a la carte, right?

You don't have to have an entire program.

I just need a piece of the puzzle.

I'm doing good in these areas.

I need help in this area.

And so we can supply.

We want to kind of be a one stop shop for any sort of trainer or coach that is trying to build something.

I think what's interesting there is that most people who start and let's just use trainers as an example.

Most people who start training, maybe they're a high school coach, maybe they're a former player and they're just kind of trying to figure it out, right?

They know some kids, they know a couple parents, whatever.

Hey, you want to train my kid?

Boom.

It's whatever X number of dollars per hour.

And I'm doing this and I show up at the gym and I work with the kid for an hour and it's going this.

And then all of a sudden they've done two, three, four, five lessons and then they're looking around like, man, I need some ideas like, what do I do next?

And yeah, making.

I'm doing two or three hours of lessons a day or, you know, a week, whatever.

How do I turn this into an actual business?

And I think one of the mistakes that people typically make, and I know that I've been running camp for, however, a number of years and during COVID I kind of put together a curriculum, I did a presentation for one of the millions of online coaches clinics that were going on at the time of how to run a youth basketball camp.

And that was honestly really the first time that I took all of my ideas and thoughts that I could just kind of run from the back of my head and put that down actually in a file, on a piece of paper, in a slideshow that I could then show to somebody else of, hey, here's how you do it.

But it took not me doing that from a business perspective.

Like, there's so many things that sometimes, Wayne, I look at that I do and I'm like, I should have better systems in place so that person X could just.

If I'm sick or I just say, hey, let, why don't you take this week that I could just hand them that curriculum and say, just go ahead and, and follow it.

And there's a part of you, right, that I think this is one of the things that.

And I could speak to myself as a quote, entrepreneur that I'm not very good at, which is delegating, right?

Which is having the systems in place so that the camp isn't just Mike's camp, and when Mike's not there, it falls apart.

It's a basketball training system where if Wayne's not there and in Wayne's place is Mike, I'm still going to get the same experience.

And that's one of the things, I think the challenges that someone who's trying to start a basketball business has.

And from what I know about what you guys do, that problem could be solved by a.

Again, if you're talking about the big facility, sure.

But if you're talking about these smaller programs, those are things that.

And resources that I know from my own experience, but also the experience of people that I see doing training and this kind of thing that if you put those systems in place, it makes it much, much easier for you to go from.

I'm a trainer who's working six or eight hours a week and doing some training versus I actually have a training business.

And to me, there's.

There's a big difference between the two.

And.

And you're helping to facilitate getting people to that next level.

Exactly.

And also, too there, you got to be able to understand how to track revenues.

Right.

That's also a big part of not just being a general manager running your own program, but how do I track all my revenue numbers, how can I put this into a system to where I can easily find it, and so on and so forth.

So there's a little bit of everything.

And, you know, a lot of.

A lot of basketball trainers may not have, you know, operational, you know, understanding it.

They may not have business understanding yet.

They may, you know, you know the game well.

How can I translate that into myself and being able to sustain it?

And that's what we're trying to help with.

All right, two part question to kind of put the bow on things.

So part one, when you look ahead over the next year or two, what are you most excited about that either you're doing right now or that is kind of in the works that you see coming that you think can be a big success.

So what are you most excited about?

And then the second part of the question is, when you think about what you get to do day in and day out working with the people that you do at bts, what brings you the most joy?

So what are you most excited about?

Moving forward.

And then what brings you the most joy?

I would say when it comes to BTS as a whole, right now I'm most excited because we're rolling out brand new tech, and it's something that I think a Lot of places are trying and brand new, but we're, you know, just getting in this kind of beta testing phase of it's not just tech for tech.

You know, hey, how many shots you make?

You know, we can track that ourselves.

It's how we're getting up personalized hands on experience with our usa, you know, certified basketball coaches with this tech and how we can make a real impact immediately with these kids.

And also our work in India, I think that is super exciting because it's such a huge growing sport worldwide now.

You know, basketball is coming for soccer or football, depending on where you are.

It's, it's coming, look out.

And so working internationally is going to be so exciting because there's so much potential in all that that can just spread like wildfire.

So I think that's probably the most exciting for us.

Coming up, what was the other question?

What's.

I'm sorry, second part, Biggest joy.

What brings you the most joy about what you get to do day in, day out?

Honestly, the biggest joy I have is the relationships that I'm gaining with all the people that we're working with.

Whether it's our leadership level, which are just fantastic people, I can't tell you.

I, you know, being from the military, I mean, I played sports, you know, in the 90s and so everyone yelled at you, they screamed at you, they cursed at you.

Then I went to the military and they kept screaming and cursing at me the whole time.

I didn't understand it.

And so being in an environment of such support brings me so much joy on a regular basis of.

It doesn't feel like work, it feels like we're a part of a family.

And it's not just our leadership team, it's our academies as well.

And making a difference in these people's lives of seeing their kind of goals coming to fruition.

It's so great to see that I can just be a part of that and give them any support that I can because that's really the most lasting impact for me personally.

That's the way it was when I was a general manager.

What were those relationships with the coaches I had, with the families I had?

I'm still in touch with some of the parents, the kids that I had, the, you know, conversations I had with them.

It's that same level with myself now, just on a bigger experience of nationwide.

That's good stuff.

I think it's a theme that's run through the podcast and run through this question is one of the answers that often get is very Similar to what you just said, which is the connection that you make with people through the game of basketball and the impact that you can have.

And not everybody gets to get have that impact with something that they love the way that you or I love the game of basketball.

Right.

And to be able to use the game to have that kind of meaningful impact, I think is kind of where the sweet spot is for basketball people that you want the game to grow, you want the game to be better and you want the people that you're impacting through the game to improve, not just as players in this case, but also to improve and as people and improve their lives.

And that's really what it's all about, what you guys are doing.

So before we wrap up, how can people find out more about what you guys are doing?

How can they reach out to you?

So if you want to share website, email, social media, where can they go to find all the information about the programs that you were talking about?

Whatever you want to throw at us, Wayne, throw it at us.

And then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you can find all the information.

If you're looking to build your own program@basketballtrainingsystems.com you can find plenty of other information on all of our facilities.

I'm not going to give out the websites on our academies, but basketballtrainingsystems.com you can reach me personally anytime at WMays.

That's ma y s@basketball training systems.com you can reach out to me about any sort of thing when it comes to growth.

You can also reach out from our learn more @basketball training systems.com that's kind of our general email when it comes to, you know, our licensees.

People reaching out or wanting to know information.

Easy remember, learn more.

People don't remember w maze.

You know, it's always at basketball trading systems.com even our website.

So it's very easy to find.

Perfect.

Wayne, cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to join us.

Really appreciate it and to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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