The Texas Baseball Ranch® would like to invite 20 Academy owners and their staffs to a very special, one of a kind event.
The Very First Baseball/ Softball Facility Mastermind Summit and Workshop
May 14,15 & 16 2019
At the Texas Baseball Ranch Facility in Montgomery Texas.
The Agenda Day 1- Building World Class Marketing Systems-
Differentiating Yourself From Your Competitive World
8:00 am Registration & Check in 9:00-9:50 The Art and Science of Lead Generation 10:00- 10:50 Building Lead Generation Campaigns 11:00- 11:50 Building World Class Referral Programs Noon- 1pm: Working Lunch Workshop (Catered In): Building Your Own Campaigns 1:00- 1:50 pm Email Campaigns- Do’s & Don’ts 2:00- 2:50 pm Making the Most Impact From Your Website 3:00 -3:50 pm Maximizing & Avoiding The Pitfalls of Social Media 4:00-4:50 pm Reconversion Campaigns 5:00-6:00 pm Small Working Groups 5:00-5:20 pm Create One Email & 3 Step Email Campaign 5:20-5:40 pm Critique each others Websites 5:40-6:00 pm Create a Simple Reconversion Campaign 6:00-7:00- Social Hour- Coach Wolforth: Quality of Life- Make Your Business Work for You and Not the Other Way Around/ Live-Love-Leave a Legacy / Playing The Infinite Game
Day 2- Building World Class Operating Systems-
Differentiating Yourself From Your Competitive World
9:00-9:50 10 Secrets to Making Your Facility a WOW factor. 10:00- 10:50 It’s ALL about the Experience and NOT about the Features 11:00-11:50: It’s All about the Relationships and NOT about the ‘Thing’. 12:00-1:00 Lunch (Catered In)-Coach Wolforth: Mindset & Organizational Culture 1:00- 1:50 pm The 8 Secrets To Individual Lessons Success 2:00- 2:50 pm The 5 Keys to Maximizing Group Lessons 3:00 -3:50 pm The 6 Essential Elements to Building Successful Big Events 4:00-4:50 pm Question & Answer with Ron & Jill Wolforth & Their Staff 5:30-7:30 pm Night with the Wolforths- Cook out at The Wolforths
The Wolforth Home Will Host An Evening With the Wolforth’s after Day 2
Day 3-Positioning Yourself For the Future-
Differentiating Yourself From Your Competitive World
9:00-9:30 The Future is DATA , Objective Measurement and Hyper-Personalization: How we Use FlightScope, Rapsodo and
Diamond Kinetics to Design Programing 9:30-10:00 FMS & The BRAT: Teaming up with a Physical Therapist 10:10-10:50: Sparta Science Assessment and Building Strength Programs 11:00-11:50 Next Generation Arm Care
-Tubing -Wrist Weights-Shoulder Tube -Shoulder Sphere-Weighted Balls -Connection Ball-Bell Club-Connection Club -Pummel Ball-Hand Speed Trainer -Rocket Wrap- Marc Pro
12:00 -12:50 pm How Your Academy Can Team Up with TBR in the future
Tuition & Fees
Only the first 20 Primary Academy Owners and their staffs will be accepted to attend to make certain the workshop is intimate and personal.
Cost: $ 1997 for a Primary Owner/ manager prior to April 22nd $ 497 for additional attendees (from same organization)
$ 2997 for a primary owner/ manager after April 22nd. $ 697 for additional attendees after May 1st (from same organization)
Athletes holding up cards indicating their improvements during our summer program. The average gain in this session was 4.73 mph
The Benefits: Success Leaves Clues & Small Hinges Swing Big Doors
Learn directly form one of the most profitable, well established and nationally well known training facilities in the baseball training universe.
-See how we market and advertise! Get our templates.
-See how we operate our incredible facilities on a daily basis! See our daily operating procedures and chose the ones that will fit you.
-See how we run lessons, group training and excel at running large, profitable events! Duplicate our incredibly successful processes. -See how we use technology to stay on the cutting edge! Replicate what we use to separate ourselves from our competitors.
-Learn how you can team up with TBR to maximize your revenue possibilities!Tag team with the Texas Baseball Ranch to optimize your passive income streams!
- Become an authority marketing facility and tie Into the national reputation and track record of TBR and carve out and legitimize an exalted place in the market place.
Clockwise:Coach Wolforth and Chein-Ming Wang at the Premier of ‘Late Life’ in LA; Coach speaking at the American Sports Medicine Institute’s I n j u r i e s i n B a s e b a l l Symposium; Coach’s. Client Justin Verlander using a connect ion bal l dur ing Spring Training
The Ranch Story- 3 Basic Lessons Learned
And Why You Want to Be One of The 20 Academies Sitting in the Audience
In 1992, I left the Division I college coaching ranks to begin The CAN-AM Baseball/ Softball Academy in Langley British Columbia Canada. Now some 27 years later, the Texas Baseball Ranch® is one of, if not the most well known and profitable baseball training facilities in the world today. What did I, and my wife Jill, learn in those 27 years?
Lesson #1. We learned that our first responsibility to our business, our selves, our staff, our stake holders and our customers is having a competent, safe, highly effective product/ service that actually does exactly what it purports to do. In our case, a product / service that helps young athletes develop their baseball & softball skills.
Key Point: Even if you have the very best process by far in the world today, that fact alone doesn’t guarantee that your business can keep it’s doors open. Many exceptional processes and systems over the history of business have failed miserably as a profit creator. Having a quality service is step one…the foundation…but it better not be your only step.
People in our business seem to make this mistake again and again.
Remember the old yarn by Emerson, “Develop a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”? This is simply not true and believing in to be will possibly doom your business to failure. You already KNOW that all of your competition says they are exceptional at developing
baseball and/or softball skills…Every single one of them! They ALL rave about their instructors and their facility. As you can only imagine to the consumer, we ALL appear to be very similar in our promises and our processes. We all seem to promise a lot and as we all know, most businesses fall FAR short of being exceptional at fulfilling them.
How about this next one? I promise you’ve heard it before and it’s really common mistake made in the baseball/ softball training business.
Again, implying because of YOU or your staff’s experience and background or the awesomeness of your facility…if you simply build it…you are guaranteed an awesome business.
The truth: Nope. Not even close.
I can name 3 MLB HOF players who opened a facility over the last 20 years and those three businesses didn’t last five years. Who has a better pedigree than a Hall of Famer? No one. Yet they failed miserably.
What is actually true is that ‘if you build it’ the city, county and state will regulate it and will tax you on it. That’s what you can really count on.
The Biggest Enemy to ANY Academy or Facility is Commoditization
Lesson #2. Our second responsibility to our business, our selves, our staff, our stake holders and our customers is to be exceptional at marketing…to be very good at telling our story..to be extraordinary at differentiating our service or our product from everybody else.
Just think Apple and Harley-Davidson
Marketing is simply the way we communicate our product's and/or our service’s uniqueness to potential customers. Marketing is communication. The better we are at communicating our unique value, the better our connection with our customers and potential customers.
Key Point. If two or more products or services are PERCEIVED as very similar in results and/or outcomes, the customer will then of course choose price (the cheaper product) or convenience (the closest facility). This is called commoditization and is one of the most common causes for the eventual death of a small business like a baseball/softball facility.
At The Texas Baseball Ranch, we are the MOST expensive camp in the baseball pitching world. The tuition for our extended stay summer program and for weekly classes at the Ranch for local customers is also the highest of any that we come across. Yet we are often completely sold out.
How Is That Even Possible?
It’s because we completely understand ‘commoditization’, and it’s lethal danger to our very existence and we make absolutely certain we are CLEARLY different from our supposed competition every single day.
In essence:
We aspire to be Disney…we are not Six Flags.We aspire to be Rolex…we are not Timex.We aspire to be Nordstroms…we are not Walmart.We aspire to be the Ritz-Carlton…we are not Holiday Inn Express.We aspire to be Mercedes Benz…we are not Kia.
While there is absolutely nothing wrong with Six Flags, Timex, Walmart, Holiday Inn Express or Kia, but if your company’s success is predicated on being less expensive and a higher volume of sales, you always run the gigantic risk that someone will move in close enough to you and have a similar or even lower cost. Even if you survive the initial trauma, the damage caused by you being viewed as a commodity, may prove to be the death nell of your business.
All you have to think of is Kmart, Montgomery Ward, Sears and Woolworths to get my point. These once thriving businesses are now either extinct or headed in that direction. Likewise, today Amazon is creating those same head aches for Walmart & Target.
A Trip To Phoenix Changed Everything
In 1996, my wife Jill told me she signed us up for a marketing seminar in Phoenix Arizona for ~$3000. I was truly upset. Money was tight and she spent 3K on a marketing seminar? "Good grief!”, I thought. I was so mad at her I actually spent the night in our spare bedroom.
The next day she explained her rational. She had read the book Magnetic Marketing by Dan Kennedy and explained it to me in this way:
“Honey, you are exceptional at baseball and at training athletes. But we need to be just as good in these other business related areas. Therefore I researched and found a mentor that is an expert in the areas we are not yet expert in. So all I’m asking is for you to go with an open mind and learn this with me. If we are great at baseball but mediocre at marketing, we will NEVER approach our true potential as a company. If we are great at baseball but are poor at marketing, we will probably be doing something else in 5 years.” That hit me like a load of bricks and made a ton of sense to me.
I went with an open mind. I learned. I bought in. It forever changed the trajectory of our business.
Over these past 23 years, Jill and I have actually invested over 500K in our marketing education. We are currently in Dan Kennedy’s Titanium Marketing mastermind group (15 total businesses) and is 30K a year tuition. You have to be a million plus a year business to even get an application to join. Its an elite group and we are one of the longest standing group members.
So What Coach Wolforth? So You Spend A Lot of Money on Education…Bravo. So What?
I’m not telling this to you so you’ll be impressed with our dedication to our self improvement. I’m telling you this because balancing #1 and #2 takes deep and deliberate focus, practice and application.
Operations Marketing
• If your services or products are not good enough and/or competent enough to demand premium or prestige rates, your business will almost certainly underachieve and/or eventually fail because you will be be seen as a typical training facility and therefore viewed as a commodity (if you are cheaper) or fraudulent or lacking integrity (if you are more expensive).
• If you are poor, ineffective or unsophisticated from the marketing and advertising side, even if you have a great product our service, not enough of your ideal potential customers will know about you and your story. This will tremendously inhibit or
constrain your business at the very least. The data would suggest, it will probably lead to the eventual the death of your business.
Jill and I decided 23 years ago to go all in. In this Mastermind summit and workshop we are going to take what we’ve learned in those 23 years and over 500K in education and share it with 20 Academies/ Facilities.
Lesson#3. We have designed our business to work for US. We are not slaves to our business. In our opinion, this business is about creating an exceptional quality of life for us, our family, our staff and our customers.
As world renown business strategist Micheal Gerber is fond of saying:How many of you think you own an Academy or own a business…but in reality you have a job …and in fact you work for a lunatic (yourself)?
That was Jill & I 25 years ago. Today its quite a different story ( With Steve Forbes in Dallas, With Doug and Laura Savant in LA, With the Italian Baseball Federation on their visit with us to the Alamo)
From Lt to Rt; At the Aruba ISG Clinic with Wilson Contreas; In San Marino, the second smallest country in the world; Staff picture at the Duomo di Milano; In Minneapolis Speaking to Corporate Bankers; At the world famous Sangiovese restaurant with the Italian Baseball Federation; Dinner In Waiheke New Zealand; Staff and Family Christmas Wine Tasting in Our Theatre; In Ponte Vecchio in Florence Italy; Video analysis at the Ranch with the Russian National Pitchers
It’s decision time:
The first twenty Academy owners who register will be treated to an amazing 3 days of hands on business development.
Once you register, Anna from our office will send you further information on hotel possibilities and will be sending you a welcome packet in the mail along with some homework so we can hit the ground running when you arrive.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level…this is your chance.
Hope to see you on May 14th.
Stay curious & keep fighting the good fight.
Coach Ron Wolforth
