The Adventures of owning a PDL team – Part 1
For those of you that aren’t familiar with the Premier Development League (PDL) in the United States, it is the 3rd division of football. The league is run by the United Soccer Leagues and consists of around 60 teams nationwide that play in 8 different conferences. Sound confusing? You have no idea.
For 3 years I was part of an ownership group that ran a PDL team in Los Angeles called the San Fernando Valley Quakes. From the beginning I spearheaded the effort to create a business plan, talk with potential investors, present the project to local corporate sponsors and much more. It was a labor of love for me and from the beginning I thought that I went in with my eyes wide open. For me the numbers just made so much sense and I thought that with the support of the community we could at the least break even.
Needless to say, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I managed to get together a group of investors that were excited and there was enough of them that the risk was quite manageable. Let’s face it, when you own a team at this level you are not really breaking the bank. You basically need to come up with the franchise fee and the first year of operating capital.
Well about three weeks into the whole endeavor my partner in the project decided that it was too much work for him and he decided to just back out and not pick up any phone calls from anyone. Yes, he literally disappeared off the face of the earth. After a few weeks of trying we finally got in touch with him and he just said he couldn’t do it anymore. It was an awful thing to do to another person and I was pissed off to say the least. At the same time I really didn’t have time to cry about it, there were things that needed to get done and we had to keep the ball rolling.
Fortunately I was lucky to come across an amazing GM that helped pick up the slack as best he could. Now you have to remember that myself and my GM both had day jobs. In fact at the time I was running my own company and he was helping to run his family’s accounting firm. At the beginning he got paid a small monthly salary but I did not make a cent, ever. As I said before, this was a labor of love, it was my passion and I wanted the community to have a team.
Right away we realized that the team needed more funding. Luckily I have an extensive sales background, so I went to work and started to hit the pavement and call all of the connections that I had. At the time that I started the crusade for sponsorship dollars I literally had a sponsor packet that I made at Kinkos and no business cards. Walking into some of these meeting was a little uncomfortable as I was always used to being very prepared and organized.
I am not sure how I did it but I was able to raise around $150,000 in a matter of about two months. It definitely helped that the team was founded during the Real Estate bubble and companies were flush with cash, but it also came down to straight hard work and determination. Again, if this was not my passion and didn’t have an extremely strong place in my heart I never would have survived. It turns out that all of that money was actually what kept us afloat for the three years that we were in business.
So we are off and running? That’s what I thought.
Part II will be posted in the next couple of days, stay tuned!
