Pickleball Pro Pickles Profits from Persistent Practice

Notes from Chris

Episode 438

It all started in 2012, in a dimly lit room filled with highly influential local community members. Leaders were nominated, rules were set, and a new society was born… The Columbia River Pickleball Club.

Pickleball, if you don’t know, is a sport that takes place on a badminton court. A plastic wiffle ball is hit over the 34-inch net with paddles that are roughly twice the size of ping-pong paddles. It’s an accessible activity for newcomers, but it can also be a fast-paced thrill for experienced players (not your grandmother’s backyard pickleball—this sport is on the rise!).

Over the next two years, Mike took on more and more responsibility when it came to managing the tournaments around Portland, Oregon. When the 2014 (highly contested!) elections came around, Mike became the club’s president. It was not long after that Mike got the idea for his own pickleball venture—one that would be for profit.

Mike loved volunteering as a tournament manager, but he figured he’d love earning some income from the activity even more. He agreed and spent the next several months slowly creating his own business plan, website, contracts, and invoice system.

Since Mike could use his club’s supplies to get started (nets, paddles, stopwatches, coolers, and such), his launch expenses were less than $500. And in early 2016, Pickleball Is Great was born. Mike started to receive a small flow of referral inquiries over the next few months. After he received his first deposit from a client, he bought himself a two-pound porter steak dinner the next week (you know, energy for pickleball).

He offered three pricing tiers. The most basic package was a basic, well-run tournament. The next two tiers offered additional services like WiFi routers, coolers with water, trophies, equipment, and other things that hosts may or may not want to worry about.

Once a client picked a tier, he charged them on a per-player basis, which wasn’t bringing in a lot of money at the time. In 2016, his average monthly profit was just $100 after expenses, which included paying a small team of refs and organizers.

In 2017, the USAPA allowed Mike to run two “sanctioned” tournaments. Essentially, these tournaments are heavily regulated and the results go directly to each player’s official score and rank. These were huge for establishing himself as an authority and he’s looking to host at least four over the course of 2018.

And those tournaments that Mike played into a network? Nearly half of them have hired his services for 2018! The in-person networking really came through. Ace!

These days, Mike is traveling all over the American West to manage tournaments. He’s building some travel costs into the overall price, and with the rapid growth of pickleball, he’s averaging just under $2,000 in profit per tournament. His goal is to run two tournaments per month and bring in roughly $40,000 this year, but he doesn’t want to stop there.

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Pickleball Is Great: Learn more about the sport of pickleball and Mike's league over on his website!
• The Columbia River Pickleball Club: Check out the league that Mike helped found

SEE ALSO:

• Academic Advisor Creates Profitable Karaoke League: A Washington, DC man uses new entrepreneurial skills—and vocal chords—to turn a profit and cultivate community
• Quiz Master Creates Side Hustle Nobody Can Question: This expat’s local pub quiz night started as a hobby. It turned into an idea to sell his collection of 5,000 trivia questions online, earning passive income month after month
• Golfer Takes a Swing and Scores $5,000/Month Hustle: A sales agency manager transforms his frustration with online golf advice into a thriving niche website generating $5,000 in monthly income

Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work!

Yours in the revolution,