 Hi, today I'm going to give you a bunch of ideas on ways that you can save money when starting your own three on three basketball league. But let's first start with some places that you don't want to skimp on and you do need to spend money and that first one is advertising. I mean you don't have to go crazy spending thousands of dollars advertising for your league but this is where you probably don't want to skimp on what you spend. Be reasonable but you're going to have to spend some money on flyers, on some yard signs which are effective, some social media advertising. Maybe if you're working with a copromoting group you're going to have them promote your league for you and you're going to make a donation to their program, things like that. So don't skimp on advertising because you need teams to sign up for your league in order for it to happen. Okay and another area we want to be careful on skimping is on your facility. You want to have a good facility for your league so that people have a good experience. I have a lot of people ask me can I run my three on three league outside? I don't have experience doing that I live in Minnesota and it would be pretty stupid to try to run a three on three basketball league outside in Minnesota. Too much work goes into planning it and scheduling and communicating with people and then if we had bad weather or something and we had to reschedule it or cancel and refund people that would be really frustrating and I don't want to deal with that. So we don't do anything outside I do know some people that's how they get started they have more affordable outdoor venues but eventually I would say you're just going to be able to offer a more consistent better product if you find a nice indoor facility and I do have a real story here about where maybe paying more for a nicer facility is worth it. So real quick story we had a league here in Minnesota that was at a high school it was a nice high school it's a little older and it wasn't a terrible facility but we're really having trouble getting the league to grow we were kind of stuck at like 60 some teams and you know for a couple of years we're like gosh if we don't get this to really grow are we going to just cancel this location and try to find a different location well that school district opened up a brand new school with a beautiful state-of-the-art facility but it was expensive and we thought well what if we take this league that's kind of just struggling and we we pay more money to move it to this beautiful facility and I don't remember if it was a year or two later but that league became our all-time biggest league we've ever had which is 181 teams people just love the facility so it is really worth spending a little bit of extra money to have that nice facility when you're looking at facilities depending on where you live and what the weather is like you might want to make sure they have air conditioning so that people aren't miserable if it's really hot for your 3 on 3 league make sure that you're having good lines three-point lines out of bounds lines you've got enough space and one way you can kind of maybe save a little bit on your facility price is to work with a co-promoter and I've talked about co-promoters in a lot of my other videos so I'm not going to go into that right now on what that is but that group might have a connection to that facility where they can get a better price on renting the facility and then you in turn pay them for their facility rental and maybe a little extra for a donation for their their help also when it comes to the facility cost schedule well meaning like when you're building your schedule and if you've got a couple open spaces in your schedule open courts put those at the beginning and the end of your schedule because then you don't need to pay a ref to come and be there the whole time they can come a little bit later or leave a little bit earlier and you're going to save some money on your staffing costs also the way you decide to schedule games you know how long our teams there you know is factoring into what you're spending on your facility so by that I mean what we do is teams play a 20 minute running time game there's five minutes in between before the next game starts I've seen people build their schedules where they might have 10 minutes in between which is they don't need that much time to get to their next court and now you're just paying that extra facility time where nothing's really happening so be smart about how you schedule also the way we do our leagues we don't have practices the teams just come and play games so we're not renting a facility for teams to practice okay another place where you can waste money or be smart and save some money is with your t-shirts now we provide t-shirts for every player in our league so first step with that is you're going to want to talk to a couple different shirt vendors don't just talk to one talk to a couple so that you can kind of negotiate what your price is going to be on your t-shirt I can tell you that it's pretty likely that you're going to get the best price per shirt if you just go with one color ink sometimes we do two colors and we spend a little bit more but if you're trying to save money just either go black ink or white ink depending up the shirts a light or dark color and that will be cheaper now a lot of times I talk to people and they want to do jerseys and I won't go super into detail on this but jerseys are going to be more expensive I know people want to do the reversible jerseys and just you know buy a bunch of them but we like t-shirts because they actually serve as advertising kids are not going to wear a basketball jersey to school or out and about but they're gonna wear their t-shirt I am actually a teacher and I've seen kids wear our three on three t-shirts on the first day of school and I love it because you know mom's are posting first day of school pictures on Facebook and I'm like there's our t-shirt so that's advertising and it's cheaper than jerseys but what we do do is we offer dry fit shirts for an upsell within the registration so if the team wants to pay a little bit more to get dry fit t-shirts a little bit nicer they pay a little bit more we make a little bit more so that's how we do that now we do just get one shirt per player we don't carry an inventory and I've seen people just mass order a bunch of shirts and now they've you know got all these shirts that they got a store and figure out how they're gonna use and it's a waste of money so I do teach this like how in my course how do you get one shirt per kid what if they miss the early bird date how do you get them a shirt later all that kind of stuff but we don't waste money buying more shirts than we're actually going to use and then another thing you can do to offset some of that shirt cost is sell sponsorships and then you can put you know the sponsor logos on the back of the t-shirt and we make thousands of dollars doing that sometimes we have sponsors that sponsor all of our leagues and all of our t-shirts get that and then we have some sponsors that just choose certain locations certain leagues that they want to sponsor okay excuse me let's move on to staff so that's going to be a big expense once you have your league up and running you've got a lot of people that you're gonna have to pay first and foremost though you should be the site director of your league if you're just getting started like you should be there making sure that your league is going well obviously as you scale this and maybe you're running several leagues on on the same day like we do then we train site directors and we have to pay them to go but when you first start nobody's gonna care more about your league than you so you should be the main person overseeing the league which we call a site director and you know you're not paying yourself hourly to be there now you'll need a ref for each basket and one way you could go with this to save money is see if you can find some volunteers I know when we first started we were able to find some friends and some teachers and coaches to volunteer and that works fine it's not the best because sometimes volunteers don't really care all that much and they don't necessarily do as good of a job but it is a way to get started without spending a ton of money sometimes our copromoting group that we're working with has volunteer so it's a high school program for example maybe the diversity team has to volunteer hours at our event and ref we would pay the copromoter money for their program but the players are actually volunteering and then the other way to approach getting refs is maybe you don't have certified refs the most expensive refs on all your courts maybe you know if you've got a six court facility maybe three or four of them are experienced more expensive certified refs and maybe two of them are high school kids that you're kind of training and then as a site director you're gonna kind of stay closer to the less experienced refs so that you can monitor them and help them and step in if needed you're also going to want a person who week one and week two is your check-in person when the teams show up and they pick up their shirts and they might have questions and things so the person that's greeting at your table one thing you could do is give them a little bit less of an hourly rate and then let them sell some concessions if you don't have a different concessions plan like maybe they're selling the waters and the Gatorades and the snacks at the check-in table and whatever their profit is they earn I had a couple nieces that did this for their own little entrepreneurial experience and they made a lot of money and I hardly paid them any hourly to be there and then they just did all the work with concessions we didn't actually keep any of the money they got to keep all the profit so it was a good experience for them another thing to keep in mind is if you're gonna allow coaches in your three-on-three league that will be expensive if you have to do background checks which you probably should if you're going to have coaches at your league probably you're not gonna pay coaches but or maybe you would but that would be expensive if you do so we don't have coaches in our leagues and so we don't have to pay for background checks okay another place where you're gonna have to spend some money is liability insurance so even if the facility doesn't require you to have liability insurance which I think is pretty standard now with most facilities but I would still get it to keep yourself covered or maybe if you are working with a co-promoting group who can rent the facility for you they might have the liability insurance that can name you as covered in the insurance and then you don't have to get liability insurance so you could you could save some money that way when you are looking for liability insurance shop around get a couple of different quotes and give really really low numbers on how many people you expect in your league okay you might be aiming for 50 teams and you know 200 kids or whatever but if you submit those numbers then your insurance is really gonna go up so give them a really really low number like I'm gonna have 10 teams of three kids or something and you're gonna get a better quote on your liability insurance and only say you're running one league it should cover you for 12 months and then the next year when you renew your liability insurance they're gonna ask you for your numbers the previous year to predict what your next liability insurance policy is gonna cost okay so just go really low on numbers some of the other things that when you're just getting started that you might have to spend money on you might need to create a logo or you might need some graphic design work done you know to make flyers and and help you with things that you might need in your social media or on your website so if you are able to do any of that work yourself do it yourself you could use Canva that's what I like to use Canva that could be a place you could create those graphics for yourself or if you would like to find a freelancer we use Upwork for a lot of things and you can find some pretty inexpensive opportunities with your logo creation or graphic design I actually do have somebody that I work with and he's a very very fair fairly price he does great work he's done a ton of logos for my students and graphic design so definitely reach out to me you can find me if you go to three on three hoops hub.com you can find a way to get in touch with me and I can help you get some of those graphics done for pretty reasonable price you don't want to spend too much on that okay another place where you have to spend money is on your website and I haven't done a lot of looking at this recently we used to use a website that cost oh it was maybe $600 a year or something but then I found Squarespace and I know there's lots of other ones out there I'm not necessarily here to promote Squarespace but it's less than $30 a month and again you could do it yourself build your own very simple website it's gonna slow you down if you have to do the work but if you're trying to save money learn how to make your own website or again find somebody on Upwork who can do that at a pretty reasonable price for you but you don't need to probably spend more than $30 a month on a website okay another thing that you have to look at is how you're gonna collect your registrations so again depending on what sports management tool you want to use you can shop around and we use sports engine we've been using it for decades I don't necessarily know that it's the best option it's just at this point it doesn't make sense for us to switch to something else but when you're looking to get this set up look at what their transaction fees are per registration typically they charge like I don't know $2 per transaction plus a little percentage of whatever the registration fee is so do the math and figure out like if you have 50 teams and your price for your league is X dollars how much are you gonna pay in transit transaction fees for those registrations okay so if you enjoyed these money-saving tips and you'd like to learn more from me about launching your own profitable three-on-three basketball league I'm here to help I'm here to help you I've been helping lots of people get their league started I would recommend that you register for one of my free 90 minute training sessions where I will teach you the seven steps to running your own three-on-three basketball league it'll be really well worth your time if you're just getting started you're gonna want to avoid some mistakes and and you know start off on the right foot right out of the gate or if you are running a three-on-three basketball league and you want to improve what you're doing you might want to take a look at our proven system that we've been using for 26 years so check out the information below this video to see how you can attend the next training session all right take care see you soon