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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Andrew Tellijohn
February - March 2010

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20+ 10: Banking & Finance

Chris Guertin,
Sport Resource Group:

612.584.30303
chris@sportresourcegroup.com
www.sportresourcegroup.com

Profits trump sales,
believe owners of
Sport Resource Group

by Beth Ewen

SALES ARE DOWN by 25 percent for 2009 at Sport Resource Group in Minneapolis, says President Chris Guertin. But he’s actually happy about it. That’s because gross profit margins are up by about 20 percent.

The changed numbers came about after Guertin and his wife, Maria, general manager, studied the books in late 2008. They had won a high-profile project for the city of Fresno, California, supplying the boards that surround an ice arena.

“We completed it and the customer loved it and it was a PR success,” he says, “but we looked and saw a dramatic dropoff after the city of Fresno job.” Because the job was so desirable and high profile, “we bid it at our lowest margin, and it took the most time.”

The two vowed to quit competing for such high-profile, low-margin projects. Instead, they started attending selected trade shows and building their Internet presence through Google Adwords, to go after under-the-radar projects where the customer was encountering some problem.

“2009 was our best year ever by far, because we concentrated on profitable work, not the ritzy, glamorous work,” Guertin says.

They’d help a residential customer build a rink in the backyard, overcoming site or zoning problems, for example. They’d work with organizations wanting a multiple-use arena.

One coup from last year: A man from Long Island met them at a trade show, wanting to build what he called Ultimate Gaga, a half-handball/half-dodgeball game played in an octagonal pit with eight 45-degree-angle panels. “We sat down and worked with him. He said ‘if you can build the panels I’ll place the order,” and he offered money up front.

“We probably sold 35 to 40 gaga pits in the last year and a half, and 18 months ago I had never heard of it,” Guertin says.

Guertin spends about $400 to $700 a month on Google Adwords, the service where the advertiser pays per click from customers. They used to survey customers to learn how they found out about Sport Resource Group, but just about everyone said the Internet. Now they instead ask what keywords the customer used to find the company, in order to fine-tune their search engine placement.

They’ve also spent money to build a robust Web site. “Customers say, we got your quote before your competitors got back to us,” Guertin says.

“It was definitely a big risk. It makes you nervous because you’re going against the grain,” Guertin says, to get rid of the high revenue/high cost projects. “But if you can get rid of the 5, 10, 15 percent margin projects, and go after the 20, 25, 30 percent margin projects,” you win.

They’ve begun paying close attention via their accounting software package to the percentage profit on every job, which of their eight to nine products are most profitable, and what kind of customer is the most profitable.

This isn’t the first time the company has changed direction. Sport Resource Group started four years ago as a distributor for a large Plymouth-based maker of  hockey rink boards and other products. Then they started making their own and competing against their former employer. Time spent duking it out against giant competitors convinced them to change once again.

“Just because everyone else is taking a left doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take a right. If you take a chance and it doesn’t work out, you can turn it around quickly,” Guertin says.