Presentation by Dave Adlard funnflipmsn'com

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Presentation by Dave Adlard funnflip_at_msn.com
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Things we have learned building and hosting a
Mega-Meet

• By Dave Adlard
• Meet Director of the
• Great West Gymfest (GWGF)
• www.funtastics.org

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Our Story

• Came up with the idea in June of 2001

• and we live in the middle of nowhere!

• Inaugural meeting with venue was August of 2001

• Their reaction was mixed, at best

• 9/11 happened, and the economy tanked. We were
  too stupid to give up.

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the dream was born

• We sent out 5347 flyers. Dave talked to 7387
  coaches, and begged/guilted/bribed them into
  attending.

• Talked the 5-star CDA Resort into removing
  ceiling tiles over the bars, and letting us drill
  in floor plates for the bars. (Ha Ha on them)

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The Story continued

• 2002 726 Athletes. 82 successful.

• At the time, we were about 95 impressed with
  ourselves, but when the fog cleared, and we
  stopped peeing blood, we were able to see some of
  the things we could have done better. We lost
  10,000. Cost 101,000.

• 2003 913 Athletes. 88 successful.

• WAY easier, but we learned a valuable lesson
  Choose your sales person carefully! We lost
  8,000. Added boys. Cost 112,000

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The turning point

• In 2004, we had to change dates, causing our
  numbers to drop to 520, but it was a real
  blessing in disguise!

• 2003 520 Athletes. 95 successful. We broke
  even, and were able to fix some of the small
  problems left. Went to a one gym setup. Got rid
  of boys. Cost72,000. Had dinner on Sunday!

• 2005 980 Athletes. 94 successful.

• Almost maxed out the one gym. Made 40,000. Added
  boys again. Cost 105,000.

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Good Times

• 2006 The fifth year anniversary. We had 10 gyms
  that had attended all 5 GWGFs, and presented them
  with special plaques. Added a second small
  venue for level 4s. Got rid of boys again. We
  were full before the deadline.

• We ran 1186 athletes, and made about 46,000. Was
  a virtually perfect meet. 98 successful. We were
  over 85 full for 2007 before the 2006 meet was
  finished. Cost 122,000

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This past year

• In 2007, we ran 1950 athletes in 2 full venues,
  and added boys back again. Many people said it
  was the single best invitational ever. Cost
  167,000(!)

• We had over 1350 signups for 2008 before the meet
  was over, and we have over 400 for 2009. The only
  real problems were our own miscalculations. 99
  happy with the meet. Hosted Westerns, which was
  widely acclaimed as one of the best ever. Hosting
  JOs soon. (Please tell Connie, this, okay?)

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And now, an important note from our sponsors

• I dont know everything about meets! I hope to
  learn more than you today!
• I DO know my strengths (Good Big Picture
  control, good on the mic, pretty good at sharing
  the vision and getting others to buy in) and
  weaknesses (too many to mention them all, but
  doing the details, no follow through, cant
  balance a check book, work on my own schedule)
  are a few to start with.

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Why is this important?

• You HAVE to know what you can contribute, and,
  more importantly, what help you need to seek out
  if you are going to make a go of this!
• Only a fool tries to do it all.
• Only a bigger fool tries to change his spots
  when there are other leopards to help!

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If I know anything, these are the Secrets
according to the GWGF

• Have a philosophy that you communicate to your
  people, and live it. Ours is in a couple of
  parts
• Is it the coolest it can be? If it isnt, why
  not? What would be cooler?
• DETAILS! Success is in the details!

• Our overriding goal is to do everything better
  than anyone else does anything.

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Whats your commitment level

• There are really 2 ways to go about starting an
  event Start small, get bigger gradually,
  improving in small steps, or

• Jump in and give it 110 from the get-go higher
  risk, but could be big guess which one we chose?

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Why does this matter?

• There are so many meets out there now, that
  coaches and parents are really becoming more
  selective with their time and dollars.
• Try to be the first destination on everybodys
  list.

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Okay go get started

• Success secret 1

GET GOOD PEOPLE!
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What do I mean?

• You dont run the meet by yourself. You are only
  as good as the people you have helping you, and
  they HAVE to buy in to your dream if you want to
  have a successful event!

• If you take care of this, you will seldom ever
  have to worry about problems!

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The volunteers are the heartbeat of your meet

• Get good people, and pay them!

• Give them a goal, show them what you want,
  convince them its what THEY want too, and then
  let them go after it. They will often surprise
  you with better ideas than you have!

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Our knowing it all evolution

• 2002, 2003, 2004 Dave and Derek (our
  Operations/Finance guy) knew basically 100 of
  what was going on.
• Dave was very hands on in providing guidance
  and setting policy AND procedure.

• 2005 Dave still probably knew about 70. Derek
  grew more specialized as the Operations end grew.

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Knew it all but it moved!

• 2006 Dave knew probably 70 of what was going
  on, but really only gave about 25 direction.
• Spent time sitting down talking to judges,
  coaches, athletes and spectators. Was truly the
  Big Picture guy now.

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In 2007

• Knew probably 60 of what went on, but the
  delegation thing was really working
• The Meet Committee met ONCE for about an hour in
  November.
• Entire time spent in planning meetings with
  directors and volunteers in the months leading to
  the event totaled less than 4 hours.

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Good people make a good event

• Your volunteer coordinator has the roughest job
  of all. Worship the ground they float over! Marry
  them, if available.

• What are your incentives for parents?

• Start an apprenticeship program.
• We had over 220 volunteers last year!

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The Key folks

• Next, you need some good chair people

• Scoring
• Decorating
• Awards
• Hospitality/party coordinators
• Front end Athletes/coachs check-in
• Ticket sales

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Other Key folks

• Raffles
• Boutique Sales
• Volunteer hospitality
• Credentials
• Data
• Program
• Setup/tear down

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More people you cant do without

• Goodie Bags
• Entertainment
• Judges arrangements
• Announcers
• Vendors
• Medical
• Procurement (getting stuff you need, and stuff
  you didnt know you needed or wanted)

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And more

• Video
• Operations
• Finance
• Transportation
• Security
• Sponsorship
• Music
• Floor/Event managers
• Marketing

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Now youre ready. What do you do first

• What are the key areas that you need to focus on?

• Marketing for athletes
• Flyers
• Word of Mouth (This is the biggie!)
• Incentives for coaches
• Cash

• Get info out early! Meet calendars are being set
  sooner and sooner!

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You need a house Here are some venue
considerations

• Square footage
• Ceiling height
• Loading access
• Electrical availability
• Internet capable?
• Available water
• Number of restrooms

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More venue considerations

• Accessory rooms
• Room for
• Awards
• Goodie bag prep
• Operations
• Volunteers
• Feeding coaches/judges
• Storage
• Athletes/Coachs social?

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Venue continued

• Availability of chairs, tables, skirting, risers,
  etc.
• AV
• Access to lifts/forklifts
• Time available
• Secure storage available
• Seating capacity
• Cleaning available?

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Even more to find out

• Can you bring your own food?
• Who runs the concessions?
• Ticket sales protocol
• Entrance control
• Floor
• Staff on hand

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Housing 8000 guests Dealing with hotels

• Number of rooms available, their block policy
  and cut off dates
• Deposits and financial terms
• Commission and other incentives
• Comped rooms policy
• Shuttle and transportation rules and costs
• Availability of space for socials
• Pools and recreational facilities
• Food/restaurant availability
• Rules about food and drinks in the rooms

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Success Secret 2

• CHOOSE YOUR SALES, CATERING AND CONFERENCE PEOPLE
  CAREFULLY!
• They can make or break your event!

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Success secret 3

• With venues, hotels and equipment
• NEGOTIATE!
• Almost everything is negotiable. It is all a
  matter of compromise and give and take, and
  youre giving hundreds of people to them usually
  in the off-season! Take what you can get!

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Success secret 4

• Select your judges carefully
• A lot of time, the judges attitudes and scores
  can make or break your event. Make sure that they
  realize what you want, as for that weekend, they
  work for you!
• Select judges you know, like and respect.
  Communicate with them about what you are trying
  to do
• Then treat them very well.

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Okay now youre in. Whats next?

• Success secret 5

Ultimately, its all in the details!
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Okay, you have a decision to make

• Are you in this to run a great event (costs
  money)
• Or are you doing this to make money (cut corners
  on the meet details)
• You also have to decide if you REALLY want a big
  meet or not Warning if you do things right, you
  WILL get bigger! Word spreads! Fast! (Careful
  the opposite also applies!)

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Pearl of Wisdom 1

• Can you be great AND make money? YES!!
• In my experience, the meets that do more for the
  athletes, coaches and parents, even at the cost
  of a few dollars (okay, a few thousand), end up
  doing better, getting bigger, and making more
  money in the long run!

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Identify your main customers...

• Number one, by a close margin, is the coaches.
• They ultimately decide where a team will compete,
  though they can be swayed by parents and athletes.

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How to influence coaches

• As a coach, I know that coaches are motivated by
  a few specific things
• Food
• Make your coachs hospitality good.
• Money
• Cash prizes or cash incentives always go over
  well!

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Bribing coaches, continued

• Provide a well-run event
• Start on time, finish on-time or early.
• Have detailed, clear info to them early.
• Make sure that all teams (including yours!) start
  on a variety of events.
• Use a FAST format (more later)
• Make check in easy, clear and concise.
• Dont start them at 800 everyday!
• Quickly posted and available results

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More bribes

• Gifts
• Dont be cheap! Be original and thoughtful. (Wine
  is always good)
• Make it something memorable and useful, so they
  see it/use it regularly.
• Make them feel special
• Make nice, personalized credentials they will
  want to keep.
• Be attentive to their little needs and concerns.
• Be light and approachable theyre pros too!

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And the biggie

• Can you spell party?
• Provide a real social many coaches appreciate
  the social time with their peers and friends
  almost as much as the meet itself!
• Dont just wing it its worth the effort to do
  it right, I promise!
• Have coffee ready the next (every!) morning!

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Taking care of the parents

• An often under-rated part of meet planning, and
  yet, they pay the bills for the kids, the
  coaches, judges, and ultimately, you!
• Certainly parents are happy when their kids are
  happy, but there are some things you can do for
  them too

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Parent tricks

• Easily accessed information on your website, up
  early and updated regularly!
• Most parents want to know whats going on without
  waiting for their busy coaches, and you dont
  want them phoning you directly, if you can help
  it.
• The more questions they have answered, the happy
  everyone will be!

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Parent tricks

• Reasonable entry fees.
• Parents almost universally hate by session
  admissions.
• Make ticket sales and will-call easy and fast.
• Have dedicated check-in for pre-purchased
  tickets.
• We use a professional ticket service now.

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Parent tricks

• Informative and reasonably priced programs.
• Reasonably priced, easy-to-access food.
• Plenty of seating
• Floor seating is lousy. Splurge on bleachers, if
  possible.
• Good viewing for awards, and lots of seating for
  awards.

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Parent tricks

• Neat march-ins that are different
• What else can you do lights? Fireworks?
• We have live singers for every session.
• Make sure your singers are good!
• A good MC who gets them involved.
• Good vendors
• A fast meet format (funny how it keeps coming up)

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Parent tricks

• Nice awards (and plenty of them!) and as fast a
  ceremony as you can do, without being cheesy or
  chintzy.
• Quickly posted results
• Information about eating spots, activities, etc.
  around your town.
• Be timely!
• Decorate the arena nicely make them feel that
  their athlete is special.

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Finally, the gymnasts themselves!

• What do kids want? After all, a meet is just a
  meet, right?
• Wrong!! There is SO much you can do to make your
  meet stand out.
• We did a survey, and the top things the athletes
  like about our meet are

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What do our gymnasts like?

• Our march-ins!
• Our awards!
• Our parties!
• Our Olympians!
• Our goodie-bags!
• Our finals!
• Our vendors and stuff!

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March-ins

• We made the commitment to invest in GREAT
  march-ins
• We have a professional lighting designer, with
  fog, strobes, smoke, exploding things, etc.
• Excellent live singers, great music, great
  excitement! They feel special.

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Awards

• We spent over 50,000 on awards last year.
• Every athlete gets an award on every event.
• Evenly divided age groups (if there are 60 kids
  in a session, we have 6 age groups of 10)
• The coolest team trophies ever.

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Awards, continued

• Have funny, well-trained awards announcers
• Do awards by event, not age groups.
• Decorate your awards area, and add something
• We play video of every athlete from that session
  during the awards.

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Parties

• We had 3 different athletes parties last year
  (one for younger athletes and compulsories, one
  for the boys and one for the optional girls)
• We had food, cool glow sticks, DJs, dancing,
  laser tag, swimming, etc.
• These were add-on events.

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Olympians and celebrities

• Kids and parents LOVE when you have
  Olympians/celebrities on hand.
• Last year, we had 9 Olympians in our Parade of
  Olympians during the finals.
• We actually hired/paid for 5 of them. Was it
  worth it? You bet!
• Someday I want to have an astronaut!

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Olympians, continued

• We offered a special Hang out with the
  Olympians Ice cream social, and had over 120
  athletes attend (at 10 each).
• They got ice-cream, a poster, autographs, and
  they got to talk to and dance with the Olympians
  it was a blast!

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More Olympic ideas

• The Olympians gave out the awards at every
  session, and hung out with the athletes.
• In the evening, they hung out with the coaches
  many can hold their own in any party situation!
  ?
• They were great inspirations to the athletes and
  the spectators.

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Our Goodie-bags

• Dont be cheap!
• This reflects badly on you and your meet trust
  me, we asked.
• Give them something nice, and hopefully something
  they will use, or more likely, wear.
• Every year we do something different, and have
  yet to give t-shirts.

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More goodies

• They like fresh food, believe it or not we
  always give apples and caramel dip, bottled water
  and granola, as well as all the sought after junk
  food.
• The pajama pants were the biggest hit.
• Start shopping and planning early to get the best
  prices and the quantities you are looking for.
• We do a 1 for all give out method that works.

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The Big Show

• Arguably the coolest thing about our meet is the
  Big Show event finals
• Imagine a sold-out, 1800 seat arena, a live band,
  screaming fans, fireworks, a 40 foot American
  flag, an Air force color guard, inspirational
  singer, 9 Olympians, giant big screens with every
  athletes routine filmed

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The Big Show

• and Im not even exaggerating!
• It really is pretty cool, and the tickets for the
  show sell so fast that last year we were sold out
  by January 8th for the Feb 23 finals!
• A spot in the finals is also the top prize of the
  weekend.

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The Big Show

• Some people question having finals, but in this
  case, EVERYBODY loves them!
• They are hectic, but it always works out you
  just have to make it cool!
• Plus, consider 1800 tickets at 14/each, against
  a session of 64 at 100 each you do the math.

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The Big Show

• We use our own Big Show format, and get through
  the entire performance with every athlete
  competing solo in about 3 hours.
• Awards are right after (every athlete gets a
  special finals medal) with, you guessed it, the
  Olympians. Pretty cool.

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Vendors and stuff

• We go out of our way to get vendors to come. It
  ups the excitement, makes you some extra money,
  and makes the meet seem somehow bigger.
• We had 14 vendors last year. Almost all said it
  was one of their best weekends of the year.

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The format is the key

• We kind of invented our own GWGF format,
  through necessity, and it has proven to be the
  best format around.
• We get through 64 optionals in just over 2 hours,
  start to finish, and as many as 96 compulsories
  in about the same time.

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Whoa, you say how did you manage that?

• Well, let me tell ya
• First, explain it to the judges, and get them on
  your side get them a spa treatment, if needed.
  Explain that they really need to go fast, and
  tell them exactly how much time you have allotted
  per judgement.
• We have a separate warm-up area, so the athletes
  do their general warm-up while the one session is
  going on.

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The Format

• Then the A flight beam group goes out and warms
  up their first competitive event BEFORE march-in,
  so that they can start immediately after
  march-in. This saves you the 18 minute beam
  warm-up lag.
• Floor does 6 athletes up at a time, with warm-ups
  in between.

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More Format

• With compulsories, we actually brought in a
  separate tumbling strip for warm-up, so the
  judges can go as fast as they want.
• The next session A flight beamers go out and
  warm-up beam as soon as the final A group from
  the previous session finishes.

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More Format

• We marshal all of the athletes in the marshaling
  area (imagine that!), and we have moved to a
  simple format that is still entertaining and fun
  we also run for march-in none of the
  artsy-fartsy marching for us!

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The Format

• We do the next march-in immediately after the
  final athlete competes, within 30 seconds or so.
  We ran 5 FULL sessions a day, and could have done
  6!
• The secret in the compulsory gym is the meet
  referee (Thank you, Tracy!)

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Floor Managers

• We also have a floor manager for every event in
  both gyms that go and get the athletes from the
  previous events and get them warming up so they
  are ready
• The goal is that the judges on floor and beam
  NEVER have to wait for athletes floor determines
  the pace of the meet.

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The poor judges

• What about the judges? you ask.
• Great question. I obviously cant work them that
  hard, so how do we do it?
• We actually bring in an extra ½ panel of judges
  per venue, complete with meet referee.

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The Judges really arent so poor

• This way, they all work 2 out of 3 sessions, with
  a good break, and we offer all of them a spa
  treatment.
• We also have roving masseuses throughout the day
  who give on the fly massages while they are
  judging.
• Our hospitality people keep up with drinks,
  snacks and chocolate covered strawberries, and
  our meet is one of the most sought after ones on
  our judges calendars, I promise!

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The Coolness factor

• Parents, Coaches and Athletes are all influenced
  by the Coolness Factor! Dont just do things
  know WHY you are doing it, and what you can do to
  make it cooler! Build the coolest, and they will
  come!

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Then, its all the little things

• We do the best we can on decorations, and it
  looks sharp!
• Invest in rope light and lots of little white
  twinklies We have rope light around almost all
  the apparatus, and twinklies in the trees (did I
  forget to mention the trees?) and around all the
  tables.

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Details, details

• Do up your front area!
• Invest in banners!
• Get a billboard!
• Cultivate good relationships with the newspaper,
  TV and radio people
• We had 12 newspaper stories, 40 radio spots, and
  6 things on TV last year.

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More details

• Get rid of dead air!
• Invest in an I-pod (like you dont have one
  already!) and train your music people well with
  a simple splitter, you can have background music
  all the time, as soon as the floor music stops.
• BTW, this is a little thing that makes a BIG
  difference!

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Even MORE Details

• Our Front end and Security people are great!
• We switched to a permanent wristband (every day
  has its own color) to make it easy. Athletes
  have their own credentials, as do coaches.
• 80 of our tickets were pre-sell last year!!

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A final note on Volunteers

• Take care of em!
• We have one person whose only job is to feed and
  look after our volunteers!

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You have to ask how it went!

• Scary, but one of the most important things you
  can do
• This tells you what you did well, and mostly,
  what you need to fix!
• Read the need to fix ones twice!

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Theres lots more, but

• I hope that this was helpful, and I will be happy
  to answer any questions you have.
• Thank you, and good luck with your event!
  Hopefully, well be there too!

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Presentation by Dave Adlard funnflip_at_msn.com