Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Matt Hazzard. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Matt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How has Covid changed your business model?

In today’s environment it’s even more difficult to survive as a small/family business in the wake of Covid. As we recover as a society from Covid and its lingering effects it feels like large corporations have a distinct advantage during the recovery process. The effects on my business, Athletika Sports and Fitness, feels like we had to start over even though we were entering our third year of existence prior to 2020. After being shut down for over 9 months straight and another 90 days later that year we lost so much of our momentum and customer base we created. Our classes were decimated. We lost our entire roster of adults, our recreational ninja warrior classes went from 12-15 kids to 3-4, and our speed and agility classes went from 7-8 to 2-3. I think the most significant loss was our long time trainer, Nate. He started with Athletika before we opened in 2016 but the prolonged government shutdown forced him to move home and find other employment. Unfortunately, the current landscape left Athletika with few options to replace Nate and find a suitable trainer to fill his position. As a small business with very limited resources and struggling to recover from a post pandemic environment we had a very difficult time finding the right trainer. Even after investing thousands of dollars in recruiting companies we set up multiple interviews but not one of those candidates showed up to their appointment. Finally, in the same way we found Nate, a long time customer recommended our current trainer, Casey Watson, who’s doing a fantastic job with our speed and agility classes. We’re still looking for a long term trainer for our Ninja Warrior training classes. We’ve really never had a marketing budget so word of mouth is our most effective way of generating new business. With every birthday and team party we host and benefiting from the rapid growth of our travel baseball program we’re able to remind and recruit a consistent flow of customers to remain open. Our busiest time of the year, turf season from January to the end of March, is already expected to significantly exceed any of our previous years including pre-Covid. The future is bright for Athletika based on our superior customer service, understanding our customers wants and needs, and providing them with a quality product and service.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Athletika Sports and Fitness is my dream job. I love sports and owning a sports training facility with so many additional activities makes every day I come to work fun. I played sports all my life from toddler through college and even after as an adult. In fact, at age 49 I still play ball hockey and fastpitch baseball in men’s leagues along with coaching and training throughout the year. As my kids grew up I shared my love for sports with them and coached as many teams as I could with them, and even spent over 8 years in a leadership role with a non-profit baseball organization. After so many years of playing, coaching, and managing in the sports and recreation industry I feel like I have a very unique prospective on what players, parents, and coaches want and need to be successful. All of our products and services reflect this experience and vision. Our obstacle courses are friendly to all ages so parents can play with their kids during birthday parties, team parties, and drop-in opportunities. We encourage parents to play with them on our obstacle courses, assist their kids in completing obstacles, and compete against them as well.
Our travel baseball program combines over 40 years of playing baseball, coaching, cheering as a parent in the stands, and almost a decade managing an organization. My unique experience allowed me to build the foundation of a travel baseball program based on player development, affordability, indoor training, and programs to support and educate players, parents, and coaches. One of the most unique aspects of our Athletika Warrior baseball program is not only offering the standard indoor practices, but also including speed and agility training, arm care development programs, and instructional hitting sessions. We even offer individual training, camps, and clinics for players that play baseball for other organizations.
I am consistently studying the competition for all competing areas of Athletika to make sure we’re providing the best value. We haven’t raised our prices for any services after Covid and will continue to maintain a fair price that’s designed to far exceed it’s expectations. The combination of obstacle course racing and Nerf battles has been a huge success in providing the best birthday and team parties. Our schedule hasn’t changed in five years and the greatest compliment we continually receive is not only kids booking a party multiple years in a row but booking at least 2-3 parties with kids attending a party and insisting that they want to host their birthday party here as well.
Although we still haven’t been able to revive our Adult Training Classes our Speed and Agility classes and Recreational Ninja Warrior classes continue to grow. At some point I do hope we’ll eventually generate enough adults to restart those classes but in the meantime our training area is almost booked to capacity with team speed and agility, youth speed and agility, recreational and competitive ninja warrior classes. I believe that teaching athletes the proper running mechanics and workout techniques only helps them when they reach both high school and college when many of those activities are a requirement.
I’m most proud of how Athletika has maintained so many of the core values I designed prior to opening in 2017 and adapted to customer needs and wants both pre/post Covid. I take great pride in having a business and being a resident in the great City of Livonia, Michigan. It’s refreshing and humbling to take my kids to school or shop at local businesses and see our Athletika Warrior baseball gear and receive compliments and adulation from fans of Athletika who recognize me from parties, baseball, and other activities while I’m wearing my branded gear. I couldn’t be more excited about the future of Athletika as we continue to grow our classes, increase the number of Warrior baseball teams, and provide the best possible experiences for your birthday child or sports teams.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I spent over 8 years as a director with a local non-profit baseball organization. During that time I helped build credibility and legitimacy with their travel baseball program, developed players, managed tournaments, and so many other duties under the service of 2-3 hundred recreational and around 100 competitive local baseball players. One of the original inspirations for the indoor turf field at Athletika was inspired by my oldest son’s participation in this league and their lack of a local training facility. As Athletika grew so did the need for a more committed and higher quality of travel baseball product because this league wasn’t meeting those needs and too many of our local players were leaving the area to play with these types of organizations. Unfortunately, the commissioner at the time viewed my desire to build a more competitive program at Athletika and not only blackballed me from that organization but refused to allow the leagues 9-10 teams at that time to rent indoor space from Athletika. Despite my best efforts and proposals to work together his arrogance and lack of vision refused to accept Athletika offering a significantly more advanced product. Since that split it seems the two organizations are trending in the opposite direction as the Athletika Warrior Travel Baseball Program continues to grow and build their teams with a player development first system with camps, clinics, programs, and an indoor facility to support it all while the other organization still exists based more on reputation than substance. I’m so proud of the progress of starting with one team 3 years ago as a trial balloon to even determine if we could provide all of the resources to complete an entire season to now entering our 4th year with 10 teams and a proven program including former MLB players, experienced coaches, and multiple players playing baseball in college. Our mission is simple, to take players as young as 7-8 years old and build confidence, an understanding of the game of baseball, mastery of fundamentals, and most important an unwavering love of the game. The goal for these players is to play for their local high schools and after that play college baseball or even get drafted if that is their ambition. No matter how far our players last in their career they will not only be better players but better people and contributors to society before the end of their Athletika Warrior Travel Baseball careers.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We’ve been open for over 5 years and we’ve tried a variety of different marketing methods. The budget for marketing was definitely overlooked and ignored in the early years of the business. I think we were pretty lucky to have a built in customer base based on preexisting relationships which really carried us through the first year or two. After that, we thought that we could survive exclusively on word of mouth and referrals from satisfied customers. which provided a solid portion of our business and worked pretty good to a certain point. The goal was always to provide the highest quality customer service at a fair price for activities that were new and innovative within the industry. It worked because it was a reality. For every birthday party or team party we hosted we would typically book 2-3 additional parties from the guests. I think this success spoiled us because it allowed us to ignore some traditional marketing opportunities. In year three, we still had too many people saying that they never heard of us until they came to this party and other areas of the business needed an influx of new customers including our Recreational Ninja Warrior and Speed and Agility training classes. I attempted to do some research online and found a lot of companies offering significant increases in traffic and building a customer base. Many of these companies even promoted specialization in gyms and training facilities. I was intrigued but many of them were very expensive and required some kind of commitment. After studying what they offered and understanding the “funnel system” from my previous sales experience I hired a company to build our training classes. I committed Athletika to a three month program and paid approximately 8K (discounted from 12K by paying in full up front and receiving a first time customer discount as well). It was very disappointing and provided very little results so I canceled the service after the first 3 months. Their system was based on offering one week of free training and then it was up to us to build that value and encourage clients to continue their training, but it never really took off in our case. I don’t really blame the company but I would encourage anyone looking to purchase a “funnel system” to shop around because it’s really just a software system your paying for and you can find a lot of companies offering the same or similar systems in a price range of $500-$5,000 per month. I’ve also used email marketing companies like Mailchimp which is a fantastic system for sending emails with a free version as well as affordable payment options. If I could do it all over again I think I would have invested earlier in marketing efforts on a smaller scale and spread it out to keep the costs low and steady. There are a lot of options to participate in social media and utilize social media outlets with little or no costs but you just have to dedicate the time or hire someone to be consistent with these outlets. Athletika is growing and building from a strong foundation of success, but we’re still trying to master and adapt the best ways to market and promote all of the amazing things we do here.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.athletikasports.com
• Instagram: athletikasportsandfitness
• Facebook: Athletika Sports and Fitness: Athletika Warrior Baseball