Happy Friday event and venue professionals!
Stylehawk Event Services is an event management company that specializes in sourcing athletic facilities and sports event venues for our clients. The concept really is that we curate a wide diversity of sports event venues in order to (1) centralize the venue search process for event promoters and (2) create additional event rental revenue opportunities for our venue partners. Along the way, we add value by providing management and operational support to both venues and event promoters. Everything we do is with mutual benefit in mind.
Conceptually… this is kind of unique. There are similar service providers in the film, hotel and wedding industries, but not so much in the sports and entertainment realm. Because of this, we are spending a lot of time tweaking the model to best solve the pain points for our two audiences. There is inherent value in the service we provide and we will continue to experiment with how to best communicate those benefits and ensure the problems we solve are most meaningful to our clients and partners. Our motto is, “Events made simple. Events done right.” This is our guiding light as the company grows.
It would be incredibly helpful, if you could spend a few minutes completing our Rental Events Conversion Survey. We legitimately want to know how we can best serve our venue partners.
And now for the reading suggestions…
Safety:
Faulty Security Practices At Your Event Venue? Don’t be Left Vulnerable
We were recently contracted to write a Clear Bag Policy for an NCAA Institution. Clear Bag Policy is becoming commonplace in sport event venues behind the NFL who created the policy that has become industry best practice in 2013. The purpose of a clear bag policy is, first and foremost a strategy to reduce risk; in the form of reducing the likelihood of weapons or prohibited items like drugs and alcohol from entering the venue. The clear bag policy does this by (1) creating more effective property searches and (2) by expediting the search process. Even though adopting industry best practices is a good first step for venues implementing their own policy, it is not a simple cut and paste situation. The NFL is a billion dollar corporation with a relatively small number of events. Staffing, budget, venue restraints will likely make it more difficult for other organizations to implement the same policy. As such, operators need to evaluate their objectives and limitations to write policy accordingly.
Courtesy:
Give Em the Pickle
I was first introduced to this video while managing the sports facilities at UC San Diego. The video was part of the guest services training the Sports Facilities Department had been delivering for years. In my time there, we revamped a lot of the job descriptions and training processes, but we kept this video as part of the curriculum because… it’s good.
In this classic customer service training video, Bob Farrell (owner of Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour & Restaurant) repeats a story of a disappointed customer who threatened to take his business from the restaurant because a waitress refused to give him an extra pickle, but rather insisted on charging him $0.75 for a side of pickles. The take- away is that “our business is not what we sell. It’s who we serve.” We hope people are happier for having interacted with us. No matter what happens in our business, we take care of the customer. Without customers, we have no business. This is true for event venue operators too. “Find out what the customer wants and give it to him. That’s the pickle.”
Efficiency:
Top 10 Elon Musk Productivity Secrets for Insane Success
Elon Musk is a interesting character. In a world filled with indefinite optimists focused on incremental improvements and risk management, Elon Musk is a definite optimist– “someone with a concrete plan for the future and a strong belief in the future being better than today.” Thinking like that yields, aerospace companies deadset on delivering mankind to Mars, automotive companies building self driving electric cars and high speed mass transit vehicles using vacuum tunnels to move people around the country. Using the book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, the author identifies 10 tips we can use to improve our own productivity. Many of these tips will sound familiar, as they correlate with ideas previously shared from readings like The 4 Hour Workweek, The 10x Rule and From Zero to One.
Entrepreneurship
Walt Disney: American Dreamer
Similar to Elon Musk, Walt Disney was a definite optimist. He had a concrete view of the future and paved his own road to create that future. Disney’s grit and vision were key determinants to his success… maybe even more than his creativity. These traits are not exclusively American, but they are uniquely American. Regardless of political opinion, during Election week we should remember that “In America, the only limit to your ambition is your imagination.” Failure and change are not obstacles but rather opportunities.
Featured Venue:
San Diego County Credit Union Stadium
Election Week in San Diego also brought approval for SDSU West (Measure G) which is the redevelopment of the SDCCU Stadium Site to include a San Diego State Campus extension, new football stadium, open space/ park and mixed use space. Voters approved SDSU West over the Soccer City (Measure E) initiative. Generally, it is disappointing that there were competing measures on the ballot, but in the end it is great that San Diego has elected to move forward with actionable plans for the stadium site and the City’s future. That being said, SDCCU Stadium, the surrounding parking lots and the on- site practice facilities are still great (and under appreciated) assets for event promoters in San Diego.
Leave a Reply