The Sports Business Club is our latest venture and it will be rolling out from town to town over the next 12 months. The local market is well served by dozens of networking groups but none of them have a real common interest at their core. The success of the SBN has shown us that there is a big gap in the local market for a network that openly champions the that role sport plays in building and strengthening our communities. We believe, in these challenging times, that it is hugely important to unite in our community and the sports clubs in each town have a fundamental role in this. Yet, they rarely come together to share best practice and it is even more rare for them to connect with local business. The SBC will change this. It is estimated that there are 150,000 local sports clubs in the UK and over 9m people are involved in them. They are characterised by passion, loyalty, respect, team spirit and resourcefulness and these are traits that we will carry into the SBC for its members. Set against this as a background doing business with people who share those beliefs will be easy.
So how will the SBC differ from the SBN?
Firstly, it is very much a local network rather than a regional one as it is aimed at professional businesses based within a 3-5 mile drive time of the town who tend to operate locally. It will also feature an open invitation to all of the town’s sports clubs as it is intended to bring together sport and business in that town. Although we will try and make connections on the day it will have a much lighter touch from the SBN simply running as a monthly breakfast event supported by a newsletter. It will follow the traditional networking model of people paying for their breakfast in advance.
However, it will bear a lot of similarities with its parent brand. It is very much aimed at those businesses who believe that community is hugely important and that the town sports clubs are the fulcrum of that community. From a practical point of view we won’t be asking anyone to do their elevator pitch or force anyone to swap “leads” but there will a new twist on introducing new members!
The SBC will enable us to reach out and share our message with local businesses who, perhaps, are excluded from SBN by price. It will only cost £400 per year to join with members paying £10 for breakfast and guests paying £20 – any guest can visit twice before being asked to join.
The good news is that the network is FREE of membership charges to all SBNers. All we will ask is that you pay £20 when you attend a breakfast but this will give you full access to everyone who joins. What’s more after we have successfully launched Sevenoaks SBC we will be targeting additional towns and you will have free entry to those groups too.
READ MORE about the Sevenoaks Sports Business Club HERE
