We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brandi Barr a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brandi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Business #1: The mission of Baseball Paaralan and BP GRIT is

A. To operate a non-profit baseball association.

B. To ensure our youth have the opportunity to play baseball throughout their school years, subject to limitations of facilities and size and number of teams.

C. To encourage youth to develop good baseball skills to the best of their abilities and desires.

D. To promote fun and team spirit as well as good sportsmanship to all players, coaches, parents, and fans.

Our organization was created after experiencing and witnessing the current youth baseball culture and environment. This includes but not limited to coach and parent extreme behaviors (unsportsmanlike conduct), over pitching usages that lead to long-term injuries, and non-professional experienced and trained coaches.

Business #2: The mission of Above Barr Marketing is two-fold. (1) create a place where creative talent is valued and (2) to support companies be the best version of themselves.

This organization was created after I spent 25 years in a corporate and male dominated industry. When I first started out, I was asked things such as “Did your dad bring you to work” or had a perception of being hired because of my youth and physical appearance. After advice from peers, I would try things such as wear glasses every day or wear slacks with button-down shirts and avoid dresses or skirts. I was also told by a supervisor that having the ambition to be an Associate or more with the firm was not realistic for someone in my profession (non-technical). I fought hard regularly to be taken seriously, earn promotions or raises. Calling my early career challenging is an understatement. Therefore, when peers or colleagues could think I was at the top of my game, I decided to start my own firm. I wanted to create a place for marketing professionals to be their individual self. Be valued for what they bring to table and not have to feel like they have to fight for everything or change who they are when they are great at their job.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a native of the Phoenix metropolitan area. When I was growing up, I was always athletic, artistic, good with computers, and considered an extravert.

I grew up at the softball fields and played baseball/softball from the time I could walk. This continued all through elementary school where I played in recreational leagues, club softball, and on to the middle school and high school softball teams. When I was 19 my father asked me to be one of the coaching assistants for his Major’s Little League team. He had a couple of girls on his team, and he thought it would be good for them to have me to relate too. I had always helped with my brother’s teams, in addition to supporting them so I thought why not. I was fortunate during this time to be a part of a coaching staff for the Tournament of Champions team and a Major’s All-Star team. As I got older and started to have my own children, I took a step back from coaching. It wasn’t until my youngest son started to play baseball that I really got reengaged. I did not coach him when he played t-ball and machine pitch (I thought I was too competitive). But for the past three years, I have been his Little League Manager – player pitch (AA) to minors (AAA) to majors. In addition, to being the 9U TOPS and 9-11U All-Star Coach. As he began to play club baseball, I also continued to help from time to time. Then in May 2022, my brother, who is a Varsity Head Coach at a local high school, decided to take on baseball club team. This would eventually form Baseball Paaralan and BP GRIT.

This brings me to my artistic, good with computers, and considered an extravert background. Growing up, I was always into art coupled with an act for public speaking. For example, from the time I was in 4th grade and later 5th grade, we had a Toastmasters program. I was selected to give one of my speeches in a competition (on my pet hermit crab) where I won 2nd place in the state. I learned how to type at an early age, I dare even to say on a typewriter. This led to taking different computer classes in middle school (worked on the first school planner) and high school. From this experience, my aunt offered me a job when I started college. She thought I was good with computers and because of my personality I would end up in marketing. This job is where I learned a lot in Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint; Adobe Pagemaker, and Corel Draw. This would be the start of my now 25-year marketing career, all while attending college at Arizona State University (ASU). Here I went from working part-time and school full-time to working full-time, school part-time. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications Studies. When I graduated, I had 6 years of marketing experience and realized I didn’t want to move to another profession and start over.

With Baseball Paaralan, strive to offer an overall better experience for the families and players in our programs. We are competitive, but we focus heavily on education of the game and sportsmanship. This is why we hire coaches with backgrounds playing and coaching at high levels (college play is the minimum, many are former major league players). We also look for individuals with high school level or higher coaching experience. We have a board approval process and have regular training and coaching meetings throughout the season to verify they are operating in the Baseball Paaralan way. What we are most proud of is hearing the feedback from parents/players that they are happy to be a part of the program and their validation we do things differently in a positive way.

At Above Barr Marketing, one of the unique services we offer is staff augmentation. This service offers companies an ability to hire a professional if they (1) can’t afford a regular marketing professional, (2) have a team in-house but the Director is going on extended leave, or (3) need additional resource support. How this service is unique is that we strive to function as if we are a full-time employee to this client. We’re not a consultant the flies in and out, we invest our success on the client’s success. What I am most proud of is the amount of repeat work from clients. The majority of my work has come from my network established over the last 25 years. This provides me with the testament to work and experience I provide my clients.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

I was working with a client who was perceived as the underdog. We were shortlisted on a submission and had to formally give a presentation to a set of questions in an allotment of time (20-25 minutes) in one week from notification. The two key presenters could not have more different personalities. Presenter 1 is introverted, finds presenting uncomfortable, struggles with sight is a form of color blind, and focuses on very technical information. Presenter 2 is very extroverted, a dynamic speaker, focuses on the big picture. In presentation rehearsals, we were faced with making sure we stayed on time, answering the questions for an entire panel to understand (technical and non-technical professionals), and how to have these two presenters work together to bring the best versions of each other out.

Our initial strategy was traditional with a PowerPoint, and each presenter discussing specific components of the agenda. Creating the content was not the issue, as we had a lot of good graphics and information from our initial proposal. We had already prepared a 3D printed visual of the final product. Then came rehearsal day 1, it was disastrous. Presenter 2 was so polished it made Presenter 1 seem unprepared. Then Presenter 2 tried to tone down his personality which made him seem out of character. After four hours, the team was feeling defeated and didn’t know what we were going to do as the presentation was in three days.

After everyone left, with exception to Presenter 2 (my supervisor at the time) and myself. I mustered up the courage to tell him I didn’t think we were heading in the right direction. Luckily, he agreed but didn’t know how to fix it. I told him I had an idea, but it was really hard to explain and asked him to give me until the rehearsal in the afternoon the next day. I said if it doesn’t work, we can focus on trying to do what we can with the current presentation.

The idea/inspiration… I had seen an infographic the Arizona Cardinals put together to describe their team. I roughed out a 4-foot by 5-foot infographic summarizing the project and had the 3D model in front of the two main presenters. The team loved it but had some ideas on how to enhance the experience. We ditched the board and had the graphic in PowerPoint to be on a screen behind the presenters. The infographic design was built into four quadrants, when the presenters discussed one of them, we zoomed into that quadrant to allow the panel to see the visual larger.

We then moved on to practicing the question-and-answer session. This is where the presentation took another unexpected turn. During the session, since I was the facilitator, the presenters talked at a technical level to me but at a high level with enough technical even I could understand. Presenter 2 then suggested, what if we change our interview presentation to be similar to a TV interview with me as the host. The thought was this would help Presenter 1 keep the technical discussions at a good level and that could control the time and ask follow-up questions if they missed components from rehearsals. Luckily. the number one critical issue for this project was public outreach. We thought this would showcase how the presenters would do in that environment.

We all agreed this would alleviate our initial concerns. However, this had never been done before, that was a major risk. Would the panel get it? Our presentation commenced and was better than we could have expected. Between our proposal and presentation, we finished first and a head of the competition by more than 80 points.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

This is extremely important when making the decision to start your own company. For both of my companies, it’s the years I spent working for different companies and building my network. I wouldn’t be able to build Baseball Paaralan or Above Barr Marketing if I hadn’t the time previously discussed in each of those industries. Building a network isn’t enough though. Its building the network through the experience individuals have working with you or competing against you. To create an environment or collaboration people want to be a part of, only comes from experiencing it first-hand. There are no shortcuts.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.baseballpaaralan.org and www.abovebarrmarketing.com
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/baseball.paaralan/ and https://www.instagram.com/above.barr.marketing/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/above-barr-marketing/

Image Credits

Dave Ritchie