Sports - the Perfect Business

Name an industry that gets free advertising every day in every newspaper around the country? Still thinking? Here is another hint - they have web sites, radio shows, TV shows and entire cable channels dedicated to talking about them and their product? Give Up? The answer is sports.

What an incredible industry. Every morning Jerry Jones' team has articles written about it. Free color pictures on the front page promoting his brand. Radio shows talking solely about his product for hours on end.

More than 30 million people play fantasy sports. The average player in fantasy sports spends about $110 a year on their fantasy teams, and that is mainly to have "bragging rights". Some of us can remember back in the 1990's when people played "rotisserie leagues". Today ESPN, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, CBS Sportsline and others have very sophisticated online systems to manage leagues and get you information about your team, players and league standings.

They make a fortune on these sites from advertising because they know they have a market of 18 - 50 year old males earning over $50,000 a year and who spend more than two hours a week playing these games, reading the ads, and messaging their friends about the sports articles. Why are fantasy sports games so popular -because we love sports and the fantasy games feed the love.

In 2004, the CBS and Fox networks spent a combined $8 billion to broadcast NFL games for six years. In 1999 CBS spent $6 billion for the rights to broadcast the NCAA basketball tournament for 11 years. In 2006 Fox and TBS signed a combined $3 billion deal with MLB to broadcast a few games a week plus the post season. In 2001, the NBA signed a six year $3.4 Billion deal with Time Warner. Why are billions of dollars being spent to broadcast sporting events? Because we love sports they are making money on filling that love.

You get the idea. Sports are part of our lives. We have an insatiable appetite for sports. We emotionally connect to players and teams. They are our role models. Entire cities shut down when a championship game is being played or for the victory parade. Corporations invest millions and billions of dollars in sports related media because they can get a return on that investment.

Sports Marketing - Tiger Woods, Lebron James, Michael Jordan and countless others are not only great talents, but they are the stars of carefully crafted marketing plans. These marketing plans are geared towards raising their profile, creating interest in the fan base and expanding that fan base. This does not happen just because Tiger is a good guy. This happens because there are millions of dollars to be made. Thousands of hours are invested into these marketing plans - creating the images, the right words, the right message and the right media outlet.

There is a greater point here - the business of sports has successfully tapped into our emotions and our lives in a way no other business has.

Marketing 101 - When we have read the countless books on selling and marketing, we learned the best way to sell to a person is to tap into that person's emotions. The ability to create and emotional attachment from the buyer to your product is priceless. Everyone remember the tire ad where the baby was sitting inside the tire giggling and looking cute. You're not buying white-walled radials - you are buying protection for your children. No price is too steep for that.

Wouldn't it be great if we could create this type of emotion that for a furniture store? Imagine radio shows talking about trundle beds, recliner sofas and nesting tables. Well it's hard to get excited about china cabinets the same way we do about football - and we never will. The only things that tap into our minds like sports is politics and religion. Those will too quickly become controversial for the entrepreneur.

Back to selling and our emotions. The greater the emotional attachment people have to a product, the better for us. But not all of us are not going to be as successful at tapping into Joe Public's emotion-meter with our business idea like the NFL or tire manufacturers. They have a big head start and deeper pockets than the rest of us.

What is an entrepreneur to do? How can you get people loving your product as much as the Pittsburgh Steelers?

Sorry to put it this way, but you probably won't. But on the bright side, if you can't beat them join them.

Sell Sports - Sports related businesses have a big plus going for them. You are already tapping into an emotional vibe that is deep-rooted and long-living. No need to try and build that positive feeling. ESPN has taken care of that for us. All you need to do is find some avenues in sports-related business to take advantage of this fervor.

Most of us do not have 700 million sitting around to buy the next NFL franchise coming up for sale. We need to reach for some lower hanging fruit. Let's consider a couple of business models that allow you to take advantage of the sports machine that have less barriers to entry.

Sports Tickets - The secondary sports ticket market is a $10 billion a year business. Many people reading this are going to say "ticket scalping". To them we say you are buying a limited supply of a product and reselling it on the open market to the highest bidder. Exactly how different is this from buying and selling houses? If we had the same moral indignation for ticket resellers and we do house flippers, Carlton Sheets would be flipping burgers.

Not every ticket has a worthy resale value. We need to separate the wheat from the chaffe. We also need to know where to sell our wheat, metaphorically speaking. There are several places that offer a quality education on how to venture into this market. They will educate any novice or intermediate on the secondary ticket market and keep them from making costly mistakes as well as make profitable deals. Look for something that not only gives you a "how-to" manual, but also provides you with information on a moving-forward basis. Ticket sale dates and presale codes are valuable items. The cost of the course is usually recovered in a few transactions.

Sports Memorabilia - While we found no guides on the best ways of breaking into this business, there are some well known technique amongst sports collectors that can help you. Send balls, jerseys, photos to sports stars asking them to sign it. If you include a self addressed return package, the odds of a player signing it and sending it back go way up. A few samples on eBay for sports memorabilia include:

Mariano Rivera Signed Baseball $230 Mariano Rivera Signed Picture $70 Chris Carpenter Signed Picture $139 Ben Roethlisberger Signed Football $325 David Carr Signed Football $225

Not too bad of a return for an investment of a ball and some postage. Start listing on eBay and you are good to go.

For market research all you need to do is go out to eBay and look at some postings.

The perfect business will tap into people's emotions to remove price from the equation as much as possible. Sports has accomplished this goal. Anything dealing with sports will invoke passion in people. All too often people's highs and lows coincide with their favorite team. We leave the social commentary on this to other publications. For us entrepreneurs, understanding this emotional tie-in enables us to find opportunities to capitalize on these markets.