Season 26, Episode 14 - Shaun Boyce, Ashley Owens

Summary

In this episode, Shaun Boyce interviews Ashley Owens, a leader in the racquet sports industry, about the latest innovations at Court Reserve, including new booking technologies, AI integration, and strategies for club growth. They explore how technology is transforming tennis and pickleball clubs, making operations more efficient and enhancing player experiences.

Takeaways

Public booking reduces friction and increases court utilization

AI helps clubs forecast revenue and optimize operations

Partnerships and best practices are key to industry growth

Chapters

00:00 Welcome Back to Court Reserve

02:45 Innovations in Public Booking

05:53 Leveraging AI for Club Management

08:41 Best Practices and Community Engagement

11:51 Balancing Work and Family Life

Keywords

Court Reserve, tennis, pickleball, club management, booking technology, AI, sports industry, club growth, digital transformation

Full YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/kFZBc5HrqNI

Learn more about Court Reserve: https://courtreserve.com

Contact Our Hosts

• Shaun Boyce, RSPA: [email protected] | https://americanracketsportsassociation.com/
• Bobby Schindler, RSPA: [email protected] | https://letsgotennis.com/windermere
• Geovanna Boyce: [email protected] | https://regeovinate.com/
• GoTennis Website: https://letsgotennis.com/

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And now let's get into our recent conversation with Ashley Owens.

Ashley and her husband Tim have been building court reserve for some time now and have come

quite a long way.

In this episode, we discuss AI, public court bookings, and how much technology has changed

the industry.

Have a listen and let us know what you think.

I will say welcome.

I don't have to ask my first question to Ashley Owens, which is who are you and why do we

care?

We know who you are and why we care. And even my second question of why you are unique

is already covered because unless someone's been living under a rock in the Ragged Sports

World, they know court reserve at this point.

And the great things you guys have been doing and everywhere we go, we see a logo and we

see someone that's working with you and talking about you.

So we want to invite you back on the GoTennis Podcast to say hello and see what's been

happening because it has been four years since we last published an episode with

court reserve and I thought I would say hello and welcome and what's up.

Hello, thank you for having me back.

I can't believe it's been four years.

Wow, four years.

Four years of court reserve has been like 20 years in dog years or something.

It's like tracking pickleball compared to tennis, right?

Oh my goodness.

I mean, four years ago, we were literally getting into pickleball, you know, high speed, right?

The pandemic actually increased our business.

I mean, in May of that year, we brought on like 75 clubs, I believe, because everybody needed

to know who was on their courts and then pickleball just exploded after that.

So we, you know, the dream was not for sale, right?

And so, but last summer, we had a serious conversation about, you know, staying relevant

in the market as a market leader.

We don't want to just be the software, right?

We want to be the whole ecosystem of what a club needs, a facility, whether it's private

or public.

And so we partnered with a great main sale company.

I mean, it has been, you know, you, you listen to all the horror stories of like VC funds and

angel investors and all that stuff.

And I got to tell you, main sale has been an incredible partner for us.

They have come alongside of us and they have a whole group of resources that specialize

in sales, marketing engines and customer support.

And they're just, we're just some fire over here.

It's like taking gasoline, Sean and like pouring it on the rocket.

We are doing so much.

I think the most exciting thing for us is this past week.

We launched what we are calling the public booking engine.

And so if you know from being in the club industry for so long, clubs that use a software

like court reserve, their players have to create an account, right?

That player friction of going to their website, you got to sign your life away, you got to

put all your people in, you got to put your card on file.

Public booking takes all that friction away.

So now a club can create a link for booking a court or signing up for a class, put it on

their website or put it in social media.

And that player can have a court reservation paid for in less than 60 seconds.

They create the account on the backside once they get to the club and they realize they

want to stay at that club or join that club or become a member of that club, right?

So now you're taking away the friction of all that in the beginning.

You're getting more players in the door.

You're filling your empty courts.

You're signing more people up for your classes and then you create that concierge experience

at your club.

So now you can drive more revenue and bring more players in.

So it's been an incredible.

We've had it in beta for about three months.

The beta customer, Sean, 24% of their court bookings are now coming from public booking.

So would those players have come in anyways?

Maybe.

But now we can prove in the data that it's real.

How exciting is that for tennis and pickleball all over the place?

Really is.

And it's such a great concept if I can find something and not have to be a member.

Exactly.

I just want to look at the ball for a little bit.

I just want to try it out.

It isn't just the top three, right?

Meaning you have clubs that might be using this for squash and any of their courts, right?

Exactly.

And the beauty of it is people say, well, I want people to sign the waiver.

Well, they can.

Because now if you require waivers, you can put the waiver in there.

So I am basically booking the court, paying for the court.

I'm signing your waiver.

You know who I am when I get there.

And we just introduced yesterday the ability to have people pay with Google Pay, Apple

Pay.

So how easy is it for you on your mobile device to pay for something?

The next thing in the next two weeks that we're doing is if you have a Google business profile

and you are a court reserve club, now we're going to make it to where you can book the

court directly from the Google page.

So it's like open table or rezi where you book a table.

Now you're going to be able to book tennis or book pickleball through Google.

Google taking over the world.

And we're serious.

We're helping.

We love helping.

No, we just want to.

We just, if you've known us for the past couple of years, especially, we're all about just

helping people.

We're educating them.

Even if you don't use court reserve, go find the best software.

But we are making strides in this world to help clubs and even instructors, just teaching

instructors out in the public courts to be able to use data so that they can teach.

They don't want to use technology all day long.

They want to teach coach.

They want to do the things that they that brought them to the sport in the first place.

Yeah.

You mentioned the waiver and it just makes me laugh.

I sound like Bobby saying it makes me laugh.

But I remember the first time we had our when we switched to online registration and

billing.

And what we would do then is we'd show up and we'd be handing parents a physical sheet

of paper and I'm thinking, this is ridiculous.

This makes zero sense whatsoever.

And then we had the link where they had to download it and then sign it like a document.

This is as easy as a check box.

Yes.

Yeah.

You really just check box, pay.

I'll see you at the court.

These signature.

So we sign it with your finger.

Yeah.

It's so easy.

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

Of course we are behind the scenes.

We're ramping up with AI in a lot of different ways.

I mean, it's such a buzzword today, but understanding how that's going to affect the player, the

admin, your front desk, right?

Those are the things that we're doing.

I mean, I'm not going to give too much away about what's going to be coming because I think

that's like you say it is a buzzword.

And everybody says, AI is good or bad or in between, but in this case, how do we consider

using it?

I don't want you to give away anything proprietary, but how are we going to find a way to use AI?

I know what we do with GoTennis and the American Rackets Force Association and how it helps.

It's not putting me out of business.

Stop taking my job.

It's just making me no much more efficient.

Give you a sneak peek.

So we're doing something with the KPI dashboard.

Think of it as Cortezarve has 10 years, a million players.

We have over 2,000 clubs right now currently using Cortezarve and think about the ability

to take all of that data and match it up with how other clubs are almost like a health

score, right?

You can almost pull it now and see how far away are your players driving zip code base,

right?

To your club, right?

How often are they signing up to play?

How many days in advance are they signing up to play?

If you have classes that are on weight list, how many more classes do you need to throw up

on the scheduler and where on the scheduler do you need to throw those classes?

So we're taking all of the data in Cortezarve and we're not giving away like club data,

right?

But we're measuring it against other clubs that are similar and they were also taking

your own data and we're going to make it to where the club can make really good decisions.

It's less about, oh, it's this AI thing, but it's more about really logging in and being

able to see this from a bird's eye view rather than having to like download a bunch of Excel,

throw it in the chat GPC, you're called, and move on with it.

So we're doing a lot of that stuff right now, which is going to set up a club to be able

to forecast revenue.

They're going to be able to hire.

They're going to be able to plan.

They're going to be able to do so much more with the data at their fingertips now because

a lot of times people don't know what to do with the data.

They don't know how to extrapolate the data, filter the data.

What are they looking at?

So that's what we really want to help clubs do is to easily be able to make good decisions.

It'd be nice if I had a button that says, what do I do next?

Yes, that's exactly what AI is for.

It doesn't mean I'm not still responsible for making that decision.

I am.

And it's on me, but from a data perspective, I can see that's one of the things computers

are really good at data.

Now what we can do is we can fit it back out to ourselves in a way we can understand it

because most people can't look at a spreadsheet and just magically see what it is.

Like we're in a beautiful mind.

I just want to be able to look at it and click a button and say, okay, so what's interesting

here or what needs to happen or when do I get to raise my prices?

I love your idea of the wait list because that's one of the things we thought a court reservation

system should have used years ago, which is really the technology to have a court reservation

system has gotten so good that it's all the other things we care about now just reserving

a court's the obvious part.

Right.

Think about from a pro shop standpoint, knowing that your players are playing three times

a week with the tennis racket and every four months they're getting their racket strung,

what about the system intentionally send in that player a text or an email, hey, don't

forget, it's about that time to drop off your racket in the pro shop, right?

Or hey, it's happy hour.

We know that you go to the pro shop and you pour a beer on Friday nights and hey, we got

a new new tap, right?

There's all kinds of things that we can read and then help the clubs make good decisions

and drive more revenue.

I mean, at the end of the day, we still have to pay the light bill, right?

We still, I mean, it makes our job easier.

And for coaches to be able to make good decisions and stay on the court and really spend time

with their players, I mean, that's what they love to do.

That's why they got into it.

Yeah, it helps those do what they do instead of having to do all the things that we don't

want to do.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Part of the job we don't enjoy it.

Yes.

And again, A.S. not meant to replace people, but you really like in 10 years from now, like

everybody's going to need to understand a little bit about how AI works and how to make AI

work for them.

Yeah.

Even five years.

Wow.

It's like podcasting.

Yes.

You got to at this point, you got to know how to do it.

Yeah.

It's so important.

Because everybody's doing it.

Yeah.

So the other things that we're doing this year, I mean, we're going to like 40, 47 trade

conference events because they're, this is a great time to be in our industry shop.

All these new opportunities are coming up for tennis, for pickleball, for paddle, for

squash, for platform, for everything, right?

And we love that.

And we also know that having best practice sessions are really important for our clubs.

It's less about what Cortezerve can do, but more about what the instructor across the

country is doing to drive new players or adoption or, you know, how do you get your

players to come on Friday nights or Sunday afternoons or so at our own Cortezerve Catalyst

Events where we bring admins in and we spend a day with them and we teach them about how

to use and supercharge their Cortezerve platform.

We're actually this year adding a half day before each of those events at a local club.

And it's all best practices.

And it's really less about Cortezerve and more about how are you running leagues?

Our tournaments working out for you.

How are you setting up social, are you selling court sponsorships?

So we did that in January and say, no, we had over 41 people come.

That represented about 30 clubs because some people brought two people from a club.

And it was four hours and after the four hours, people said, actually, it was the best thing

I've done in the last year.

Even if tomorrow I don't get to come and learn about Cortezerve all day, this was worth it.

That's fantastic.

Now, all right.

So I have some hard hitting journalists, which I always say we're not.

Our journalism question, which is, okay, sure, you can do that as a business because you

can afford to travel the country.

How do I, I've got this business and I've got this thing that I'm doing and I'm just running

a club or whatever.

I don't have all this time to go out and meet new people and sell my memberships and

promote my new pickleball and Patel facility.

What do I do before all the money is there that I can now go out and network and be part

of the American Racket Sports Association and meet new people?

What do I, how did you get there?

Can you give me a, yeah, I know it's a lot of late nights and a lot of Tim coding in the

basement?

Well, two things really.

Right now we also do something called court side conversations.

So it's a monthly Zoom best practice session.

I have panelists specifically for the topic of hand that month that come on.

They talk a little bit about what they do and then it's full Q and A from everybody on

the Zoom call.

It's going to be really great.

So the first one's in April.

Yeah, the first one's in April.

It's all about summer camps, how to set up summer camps, run summer camps and it's really

again, it's less about court reserve.

It's just us bringing people together to network.

Now the second part of that question was how do you get to a point where you can take

almost court reserve on the road?

How do you take your business on the road?

And that's the grind, right?

It's trying to figure out partnerships with facilities that will allow you to come in and

maybe share time or share court space or you let me come in and run my best practice session

at your club and I'll let all your admins come to my full day of training the next day.

You know, it's the friendships that we've made, the connections we've made.

So honestly, it's a lot of that too, where we partner with our own friends and facilities

and networks across the country.

And then we keep it inexpensive for our admins to come.

They still got to pony up $99, right?

But it's worth it because we feed them breakfast and lunch and heck in this day and time, you

can barely go out to eat two meals for $99.

That's true.

And go where the people are.

We try and stay locally where we have an abundance of our clubs.

So we look on a map and it's a heat map of where all of our clubs are.

And then we try and go to those locations so we can draw the most people there.

The one in St. Augustine, we had a guy come from Canada from Toronto, which was amazing.

We had several people fly in from Illinois, a couple from Columbus, Ohio.

So again, it's just, it's the grind because trust me, Tim and I know the grind, ten years.

And we still, we go on date night last night at this beautiful restaurant here in St.

Augustine.

And we're talking about work.

And it's, it's a joy, Sean.

You know, you're married to your wife and you do this together.

I cannot imagine another way of doing it.

All of our kids work in our business in some capacity and it is such a blessing to be able

to do this with my spouse.

I can't imagine not doing it with him.

Talking about before recording, about traveling with family and making it as part of that.

My wife and I had date night this week and we don't get it very often.

Our daughter in town with her fiance and they said, Hey, let, let, we'll look after Giovanni.

He's three.

So we'll, we'll babysit, right?

And we actually went out and had dinner and I did not talk about work.

I didn't bring it out.

I did not.

And it was, it was hard.

I just kind of sit around thinking, well, it is because we do it together.

It isn't just honey.

Let me tell you about your day.

I had this great idea or I need to catch you up on this thing.

But we did a good job of separating that.

And just spend some time talking about family and what we're doing and what we're going through.

And that's another good thing to remember, which is you got to be able to shut it all.

Yes.

Absolutely.

And we've had to go through seasons, honestly, the last 10 years of prioritizing couple

marriage over business.

And sometimes, you know, we're both so passionate about what we do.

And sometimes, we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

And we're both so passionate about what we do.

Because that's usually what happens.

I appreciate your time again.

Welcome back.

You're one of our few guests that get to come back a second time.

Almost.

Thank you.

Almost to the day four years later.

Wow.

We appreciate the time.

Congratulations on everything court reserve has accomplished.

And looking forward to being a part of it and going with you

and what's in the future.

Thank you so much.

I'll see you in another four.

Sounds good.

Well, there you have it.

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