Today we’d like to introduce you to Andres Franco.
Hi Andres, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
It all started in May 2017. I was working for a Fortune 500 company in a corporate marketing role that had me traveling three weeks out of the month. My daughter Lola had been born a couple of months before, and I felt I was missing all the big moments and wasn’t being able to spend time with my family at all. To add to that I was working long hours and I couldn’t think of one thing that I enjoyed about my job.
On one of our weekends together, my wife encouraged me to resign and do something else, find a new purpose, and find something that made me happy. I didn’t exactly know what to do so I thought teaching tennis could be something I do while I figured out how to earn a living. Tennis had always been a big part of my life. I started playing continuously when I was ten years old, became a competitive tennis player in high school and went on to play college tennis. I had also taught tennis throughout college, so I felt excited to have tennis back in my life when I started teaching again.
In June 2017, I started teaching tennis out of the HOA tennis court of my community, by July, I had a busy calendar, and managing my travel and teaching tennis while I was home was becoming complicated. I had also gained enough customers that I felt comfortable taking the jump. So in August of 2017, I quit my corporate job and started teaching tennis full time. By the end of the year, I was so busy with tennis classes that I thought there was a business opportunity there and I started hiring someone to help me teach.
In 2018 I hired our first coach, and since then, it has been a learning experience of continuous improvement. We are currently focused on helping families improve their quality of life through tennis in the DFW by offering tennis programs in cities such as Little Elm, The Colony, Murphy, Forney, and Frisco. It has been a big change for me professionally. I feel there is more purpose to what we do. I love knowing we are adding value to people’s life through what we do and knowing we are improving the tennis program experience for people.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has been a tough road. There are so many times I felt like I wanted to give up. However, I have a very supportive family and my wife, Natalia, has always found the words to encourage me on bad days. I also have an amazing team, without which I don’t think I would be where I am today.
The two toughest tasks have been managing people and operational efficiency. Learning how to manage people and have them provide the level of service that we expect of them to provide has been a long learning curve, and we have gotten significantly better over time. From an operational standpoint, it has its unique challenges, our business model is so unique its impossible to replicate any single one operation and there is no one answer, so it has been a process of finding what processes, applications, software work best to provide good customer service while being efficient.
One of the first challenges that we had was that we started operating out of Frisco ISD courts and although they issue a permit its a mission to get a court, a permit is not enforced to everyone as it is a very difficult task to do, so many times we would schedule a lesson at a court and then we would get there and the court was busy or there was a school event going on that we hadn’t been communicated of, that affected our level of service and discouraged coaches.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Franco Tennis Academy?
Franco Tennis Academy is a company that provides recreational tennis programs for different areas and cities of the DFW with the purpose of improving the quality of life of families. We are very good at getting new students to fall in love with the sport of tennis. Tennis should be a fun learning experience until the student is invested. Once the students is invested, you can be more strict and demand more, and that is what we do to drive interest and advancement.
We are known for our small groups. While the typical tennis academy or program has 10 or 12 students to a coach, we have an average of four students to a coach. I think nothing turns away parents and students quicker than being in a court and spending most of the time chatting and wandering around that engaged in activities or hitting a tennis ball. Hence why emphasize the small students to coach ratio.
We are different from everyone else in that we provide a group of services that ensure the tennis advancement of students. In addition to group and private lessons, we provide a service called matchplay in which students of the same level play each other at a convenient day, time, and location for a fraction of what it would cost to play in a tournament. We also provide and strength and agility class focused on improving the fitness, strength balance and coordination of students so that they can become better tennis players. We are always trying to innovate and come up with services that can help students improve.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts, blogs, or other resources you think our readers should check out?
Yes, I am a big podcast person. There are three podcasts that I listen to consistently and that help me in different ways in business and life. Remarkable People by Guy Kawasaki which speaks about very different topics and provides interesting insights for business and life, Champion-minded by Allistair McCaw, which has sport oriented motivational and mental energy and fitness tips, and finally The GaryVee Audio Experience by Gary Vaynerchuk which has interesting entrepreneurial insights and advise.
I love reading and have a long list of books that I want to read. Too many to mention but mainly focused on business, sales, marketing, self-improvement, and biographies. The other big resource that I use is networking. I love to connect with people, help people out and ask for help.
Pricing:
- Private and Semi-Private Lessons: $60 – 85
- Group Lessons: $19 – $22.50
- Matchplay (5 Matches): $19.99
- Agility: $14.99
Contact Info:
- Email: info@FrancoTennisAcademy.com
- Website: FrancoRacquetSports.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/francotennisacademy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FrancoTennisAcademy
Image Credits
Photography by Leah Hardy
