Ken Babby, a good friend, owns Minor League Baseball teams in the United States, and brings families in to the ballparks on destination trips. Here, Ken talks about the value of marketing and events. I'm sitting in my office at Canal Park in Akron, Ohio, home of the Akron RubberDucks. We're the Double-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians. Here in Akron you're probably thinking like, "Who is this crazy guy that owns these Minor League teams with these wacky names?" The reality is that these teams are fixtures in these smaller to mid-size communities. You would never name a Major League Baseball team, the RubberDucks or the Jumbo Shrimp. These are unique community institutions where 5,000-6,000 fans at night over the course of a year come out to the ballpark, and have a great time with their families, right? Five-dollar tickets, two-dollar hot dogs. Some people come for the baseball, but a lot of people come for the entertainment. Though, there's so much going on at the ballpark, promotions in between innings, I mentioned the giveaways, and discounted beer, and all these kinds of fireworks, all these kind of fun things. That's really what drives people to be coming back here night after night after night. One of the things that we do try and be conscious of is that we're serving families. So, this is a fascinating stats, and I would challenge you to find another sports industry that can claim this. More than 52 percent of our fans are women, and Minor League Baseball, you really think the traditional baseball fan, and going to a Major League game, it is probably the old crotchety guy. Minor League Baseball fans are young. Mom is the decision-maker at home. Guys, they're perfectly willing to go to a game anytime, but when mom makes the decision to go, she has a great time. The family's going to keep coming back again and again. What really works is a mom coming with their kids to the ballpark, and then going home and telling six of her friends or being in a group text with her bodies, and saying, "Yeah, we're going down to the RubberDucks game," or talking about it at church, or at the grocery store, or at work, or wherever. For a fan, a family of four that comes down to the ballpark on a weekend parking's free in downtown Akron. They come into the ballpark, they get in for 20 bucks, hot dogs are two dollars every single game, and these are really good hot dogs with say joking two bucks even includes the bun and the condiments, and you get a soda, and you're sitting pretty, and you can actually have a great time at the ball game with your family, and have a great experience, and actually lose some money in your wallet. When we got here in 2012 and I bought the team, the team was known as the Akron Aeros, A-E-R-O-S. When people said, "What's the Aeros?" Like, "Well, there were some early aeronautic quirk in Ohio," yet everybody knew this town about rubber, and that's what made the town really quite popular. So, when we started having conversations with fans and people in the community, and started talking about what made Akron special, everybody talked about, "Well, this is still the rubber capital of the world." So, we put our heads down as a group, and our senior team here and said, "Boy, if we were to rebrand this thing, we will sort of hit the reset button." It's not the kind of thing in sports that you can do all too often, but we felt like there was an opportunity here to really rethink the business, and relaunch it. Then, we got to this last name the RubberDucks. At first, I heard it, and I thought it was sort of silly, sort of Ernie and Bert, Sesame Street kind of RubberDuck goofiness who would want to name a sports team that, and then I received this in the mail that showed up in a FedEx box in my office here in Akron, and I fell in love immediately. This is our guy. You can see the tire tread in his neck, the grit and the teeth, the fierce eyes, and fun. The success of the team is one certainly a function of the community that you're in, the ballpark, and the fans, but the real magic that makes these operations work and special is the management. So, with 350,000 fans at the ballpark here in Akron last year, it's up about 27 percent from when we purchased team five years ago, which has been a great run. I don't know if we'll be able to keep it going forever, but we're on a great upward swing. We sold several $100,000 of merchandise in Akron in our first year, which was, I would say, at least the two or 300 percent increase over the previous year. This industry is very much alive and growing and strong. I think very much a great business to be in. As I said it's a lifestyle, you sometimes don't get out of here at 11 or 12 O'clock at night, you're working a lot of weekends between April and through September, but if you have a deep burning desire to be in sports, and comes to the ballpark every day, and be in an environment like this, there's nothing quite like it. For me, it's an absolute dream come true.
