In this article we will try to transmit, share information and tools for the organisation and management of padel clubs.
Welcome to another PadelMBA article.
My name is Dani Fernández and I am head of the Club Manager area. In this article and the following ones, we will try to transmit, share information, tools, theories, and we will show practical examples related to the organisation and management of padel clubs.
I hope they can help you to become a better or new professional if you already manage some kind of area, activity or set of them in a padel club.
In this first article we are going to start with a strong topic, with a subject that I am sure will interest you all. How to promote, how to design the school activity within a padel club.
You will agree with me that the school activity can become a very profitable activity that occupies a high percentage of the income within a padel club, but it is not always like that, we are sick of seeing schools where there is no space, there is no room, they are very busy and in high demand, and others that are not so much.
What I am going to try to do is to give you some guidelines, which in my experience have worked for me, on the one hand, in the design of the activity and, on the other hand, in the promotion of the activity If we look at the design of the activity, let’s start with information technology.
Mastering a software that helps us to perform tasks such as payments, communication with students, with coaches, keeping an orderly record of class recoveries, or designing the products that are going to go into the school activity. We will talk about this last point throughout this article.
The second point of the design of the activity is to form a work team consisting of coaches and a coordinator. This work team must maintain common goals so that the school is unique and has an identity. To do this we will take into account the methodology to be used, the trimester goals that we set, the continuous training that the group can receive, or the design of each session; how we distribute the times, etc.
This will give our school an identity and our hallmark.
Point number three is a bit more complex to explain, I will try to do it in a simple and schematic way. It refers to the public I am addressing. If we look at it, depending on the club, depending on the situation, we are going to have different types of clients in the school, we can classify them according to age, for example, pre padel, junior, adult, veteran… or according to groups, for example, companies, schools, sports tourism..
If you look at each type of client, there will be common needs. For example, within a group of adults or veterans you may find that there are clients who can adapt to a fixed timetable of lessons and there are others who may need this type of lessons to be a little more flexible.
To this extent, we can and should design as many products as possible to attract as many customers as possible, if and when it is possible from an IT and operational point of view with our staff.
It is very important that once we have designed the products that suit our school, we make a policy that explains how to register for the school, the important sections, and rules that the student must comply with once in the school and how to leave the school to unsubscribe.
This regulation must be properly signed and understood by each student.
The fourth and last point, but no less important, which I would advise you on in the design of the activity, is innovation. We must make our school different, unique, our identity, as I said before.
We can think about it and we can approach it from different points of view:
For example, it occurs to me that we can create new products that are related to a video analysis, this on the other hand can expand the average ticket, we can also have a “planning” of sessions that is perfectly detailed, we can maintain a relationship with the student through “mailing“, WhatsApp, etc … with the contents that will be given, that have already been given, keeping a review or a preview of content.
We can establish a recovery policy for lessons in which the student feels comfortable, etc.
In the end, the aim is to innovate in order to make our school unique.
Once we have designed our school, taking into account all the points mentioned above, we move on to the promotion phase, advertising the activity and all its products. For this it is very important to have a clear “slogan“, an argument that helps us to design all this publicity based on the strong points of our school or our facility.
From there, having this clear, we are going to design our activity thinking about three types of advertising. The basic advertising, which is posters, banners, or billboards that we can design to show our activity.
On the other hand, we are going to think about dynamic advertising, which brings the student even closer to the school and we are going to do this in the form of photos and videos of our students in lessons, or even of the training that our trainers may receive.
Both basic advertising and the dynamic advertising that I have just explained, logically we know that they must be channelled through “mailing”, web and above all social networks. This will bring the student closer to the school experience, although even more so will be point number three, which I like to call practical advertising or hook advertising.
This type of advertising takes the form of invitations to classes through posts, giveaways on social networks, tournament prizes, “clinics” of six people, eight, ten, companies, groups, school trips… This will bring the client even closer to the experience of being able to receive lessons at our school.
Before I finish I would like to make one note, and that is that the group of students is a recurrent visitor to the club, and sometimes becomes a large group of clients within the facility.
That is why it is worthwhile to make them feel part of the community, to make them loyal and to achieve a feeling of charity within the service that we can offer them. To do this, it is important to improve their experience with some advantages or special treatment that we can give them within the facility.
For example, we can offer them some kind of discount within a time slot for court rental, or simply give them a few days more in advance to be able to reserve courts, organise some kind of event on special dates, or simply treat them with the love and attention they deserve from the reception and the club management.
