 What's up, it's Ben neighbors from make money coaching sports now in today's video I have a special guest her name is Christy hilly and Christy is world-class at teaching basketball coaches and other coaches and other sports how to start local three-on-three leagues in This video she's going to teach you kind of the basics on how to get started And the reason why I partnered up with Christy is because she is legit She's been running three-on-three basketball leagues since 1997 she's run over 350 leagues since she started and in 2019 she hit seven figures in sales Right. She knows what she's talking about She knows this business inside and out and over the next couple of videos on my channel She'll be posting Different tips different ideas about how to get started about how to grow your business And if you want to take the next steps and learn from her directly You can click on the link below in the description That will take you to a webinar full disclaimer if you purchase through the webinar that helps support our channel here And I only partner with people that are legit, right? I have a lot of people that reach out to me all of the time that has to be on our YouTube channel and When I talked with Christy, I knew from from the very beginning. She knows her stuff. She is the real deal She's already helped a lot of other trainers In basketball start and grow their own three-on-three leagues So sit back watch this video and again if you want to learn more go click on the description under the video To take a deeper dive. That's it and enjoy the video and if you're thinking about Starting something like this for example a three-on-three league in your sport I think it's an excellent idea and I can help you get started with this and really grow your three-on-three league So my name is Christy Hilly and I run three-on-three basketball leagues. I also run three-on-three basketball tournaments. I'm not gonna really Talk about that right now because what we really focus on is our three-on-three leagues And the reason for that is that may be surprising to some people that we're not just focusing on three-on-three Basketball tournaments, but when you focus on the leagues, you're really throwing a lot broader net as far as Who is going to participate in it? Okay, more people will participate in leagues over the tournaments Which I think maybe surprises some people The other thing is nobody else is really doing that nobody else is really offering three-on-three basketball leagues And so we're able to really own that space here in Minnesota where we live So I want to talk to you about how to go about Getting your three-on-three business setup doesn't matter what sport you're in We do basketball, but this would work for other sports as well Okay So the first thing that you want to do is establish a business and if you don't already have Some sort of business of setup for your sport that you're working in then you're gonna want to register your business You know name your business first of all and then register it with your state and maybe make an LLC and you can just simply go to your Like Google your state and find out what business names are available I would recommend that when you name your business you name it something that When people see it on their credit card statement, they're gonna know what it is and they're not gonna be Disputing a charge or something because they don't recognize the name on their their statement So choose a name that actually talks about what your business does. So we're Midwest three-on-three You're also gonna want to get a logo And if you don't already have a logo created and that's not really something that you can do yourself I use Upwork you can just find freelancers on Upwork that are really reasonable They do great work and in fact I have a graphic design Artist that I use and a bunch of my clients who are also running three-on-three basketball leagues Have used he does great work on logos So if you're struggling to find someone to make a logo for your business reach out to me because I can hook you up with him He does great work Also, you're gonna want to get a business bank account You don't want to start running your business and then using your personal account or your personal credit card It gets really messy at tax time. So get your own business bank account your own business credit card Okay, once you've set up your business the next thing that you want to do is secure a facility for your league Since we run basketball leagues. We I guess we have the choice of being an indoor or an outdoor league But I we live in Minnesota. I personally don't really want to deal with weather issues and having delays or Rescheduling and then having to refund people if the weather made it so we couldn't have our league So we do all of our three-on-three basketball leagues indoors And all you have to do is contact a facility that you would like to use and find out what their procedure is for securing the facility Most likely you're gonna need Liability insurance to rent a facility and if they don't require it I would still recommend you're covered with liability insurance I have a local agent here in Minnesota who covers all of our events. He's good at the sports Liability insurance, but a lot of the people that I'm Consulting a lot of my clients. They are doing this online. They're setting up their liability insurance online And I'm not endorsing either of these companies. I'm just sharing with you two companies that I know My clients have used so one's called e sports insurance Com and then the other one is K and K insurance So I know some of my my clients have used those two services to get their liability insurance set up Now when you are looking for dates for your facility I'm gonna recommend that you're looking at dates that are at least three months out from now or at least three months Out from whenever you are ready to start promoting your league okay, you want to have plenty of time to promote and Sometimes people like want to try to run their league in four weeks or five weeks And that's it's not a good idea because people really need plenty of time to know about your event And and sign up for it before they have all kinds of other conflicts on their calendar because they're gonna be Signing up with other kids to be on a team and and you want to give them plenty of time to be planning for this And they're not already signed up for a bunch of other things on that date. So three months out I would also recommend You run your league for four weeks, and I know the surprises people I've worked with people who want to run their league for six weeks or two months, and that's just really too long What's gonna happen is you're going to reduce the number of teams that are gonna register because they can't commit To an eight-week league so they won't even sign up to begin with or what's gonna happen is Teams are going to get bored with it or they're gonna start playing the same team too many times And they're gonna stop showing up and now you've got four fits and it kind of gets to be a mess So what you'd rather do is do a four-week league do it really well Have people be bummed out that it's over already and then they're gonna sign up for your next league Okay, so instead of an eight-week league. Why don't you do two four-week leagues? Okay? Now you've got your facility set up You've got your dates figured out the third thing that you're gonna want to do is make sure you have a Website and an online registration system. There's lots of tools out there Sports management tools you just Google it. I know there's league apps. There's sports engine again I'm not gonna endorse any one product on this video If you don't have the skills or the time or the desire to make your own website for your three-on-three Business if you need to make some sort of a website for this reach out to me I can get you hooked up with a three-on-three basketball Website template it'll be ready for you in live in two days and It's only gonna be it's in Squarespace and it's gonna cost you about 18 dollars a month to maintain that website So don't let that stop you from making progress. Okay, you can have that ready in two days if you want After you have your website and your registration set up Now is the time to start promoting and marketing your league You don't really want to start marketing it without a place to send traffic to okay So you want to be able to mark it and say hey go to this website And then get your team signed up So so many different things you can do for marketing and promotion and a question that I get a lot is how many teams Do I need now obviously the more teams that you have the better, right? But what do you absolutely have to have as you get started with your first league and there's not really a magic number? I mean if I had to pick a number, maybe I'd say you want to get at least 25 teams But really what matters is How many teams you're getting in each division and by division? I mean teams that can play each other Okay, so we try to keep the same grade of players playing each other We would not do something where you have six graders playing eighth graders or something like that Occasionally they might play one grade up or down usually based on if the the competition level is appropriate for that but What you want to make sure is that within a division teams that are going to play each other That they're not going to play each other too many times and for us that means two times max is what we would like So if you're running a four-week league And you're having teams play Two games per night or week That means you have to have five teams in a division that can play each other And then they won't have to play anybody three times Okay, so that's really the minimum when you start looking at your registrations You need to have five teams within a division and then you're good to go Obviously the more teams you have the better, but that's like the bare minimum. Okay now What do you want to actually grow this to eventually you'd love to see 70 teams in your league? And that might not happen right away because this is going to be new and it's going to need some people to Try it and experience it and then go out and tell other people all about it And then it's going to really snowball and take off So if you could get your league to 70 teams that would be fantastic The leagues that we run on average have 90 teams and the largest league that we've ever run Was a hundred and eighty teams was amazing Okay, so big tip for you is start with one league Do it really really well Like just really wow your customers put out a great product a great experience Listen to the feedback talk to people talk to the players talk to the parents talk to your staff Find out things ideas that they have about what would improve this what would make this better? And just keep working to make your league better and better and better and this is going to grow naturally That's exactly what happened to us. It just snowballed. I think our first league we ran We had like 32 34 teams and within a couple of years We had over a hundred teams people were coming from quite a distance away And then what happened was people started to ask us to run three on three leagues in their community And that's just really how it just grew for us like crazy I would love to tell you a lot more information about how you can bring your own Three-on-three league whatever sport you're doing whether it's for kids or adults I'd love to help you do this and I am offering a free training So in the links are in yeah in the description below There's a meal link to sign up for my free training So go ahead and click that save your seat And I'm gonna tell you all about the seven steps that you're gonna want to follow We'll get into all the details of everything that you need to do to get your three-on-three league up and running Okay, so I hope to see you there. Bye