Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian Simpson.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in Oregon and got started running sports camps for a company called Skyhawks. When I went off to college, in San Diego, I continued, throughout college to work for them. While in college I was a PR & Marketing intern for the San Diego Padres & San Diego Chargers.
After college, Skyhawks offered me a full-time job in Southern California, and I worked my way up to becoming the Regional Manager of all territory from Santa Barbara to the border of Mexico. In 2002, I opted to leave Southern California and take the Regional Manager job in Texas, so I could afford to buy a house.
Upon arriving in Texas, I visited my church that I would end up becoming a member at, FBC Keller. They walked me around the church and showed me that they had a GYM. I had never seen a church have a GYM before, this isn’t common with churches in Oregon or California.
So for the next two years, I continued thinking about leaving Skyhawks, who runs camps for Parks & Recreation and School Districts, to open my own business and work entirely with churches. I did research and realized that a lot of other churches also had GYM’s and were running this new church basketball league called Upward.
In 2004, I informed Skyhawks that I would be leaving their company and in 2005, with about 10 DFW churches and two churches in Houston, I formed Triumph Sports. Our first summer we had about 900 kids, and it went really well. However, before our first summer, I had also begun getting my teaching certificate.
In the fall of 2005, I started teaching at Ferris High School and was their Speech & Debate Coach as well as a coach for football, soccer, and baseball. I really loved the Speech and Debate part and over my ten years of teaching, won 6 UIL State Championships and one pair of students finish 6th in the Nation (2012).
In my ten years of teaching, I taught four years at Ferris High School, five years at Byron Nelson High School, and then one year at Argyle High School. However, after 2005 with Triumph, I realized that I had something and that if I could continue to find more churches, I could continue to grow.
So each summer, when I was running camps, I would also approach new churches. Each summer added a few more. Also started adding other programs like birthday parties, Christmas camps, and Saturday night out for parents. By 2014, I left teaching at Byron Nelson HS and grew Triumph by devoting myself full time.
However, I really missed the classroom and in 2016, went back to teach at Argyle. It was an incredible experience, however, I just couldn’t balance running the camps, teaching, and with four kids at home, our lives were incredibly busy. So I left teaching again in 2017 and have continued to grow Houston, added San Antonio, and Atlanta churches.
In 2016, when I was at Argyle, my wife, Jessica (yes, Jessica Simpson), ran the operations part of the job and did an amazing job. She did that in 2017 too as I focused on growing our camps externally. We grew so much that this past offseason, we hired Regional Managers for our areas in DFW, Houston, and Austin/San Antonio, to help with hiring and training staff and running operations during the summer.
This summer we are working with around 150 churches and expect around 9,000 kids to attend our camps. We would eventually like to grow Atlanta to be the hub similar to DFW. Once that happens we would like to get into cities around Atlanta like Charlotte, Nashville, Birmingham, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Where ever churches have gyms and a need for programs to reach the community.
Has it been a smooth road?
Running a business is never easy. However, having teaching as a main source of income, as we grew, really took the pressure off. It allowed us to grow slowly, create a process for things, automate certain parts of what we do, and to create a system for just about everything.
One of the main challenges we faced was having effective Bible lessons to kids ages 5-12 years old at many different denominations. God placed people in my life, all along the way, to provide guidance here. Lance Crowell was my Sunday school teacher and good friend, and he worked at Southern Baptist of Texas Convention in Colleyville.
Together, we worked on Bible lessons that could cross denominational boundaries and that were fun and entertaining to kids. We always have hired a lot of seminary students from Dallas Theological Seminary and Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth. When we would have them get up in front of the kids to preach, I was riveted, I thought they were great.
However, our 5-year-olds were not so engaged. So Lance and I created Bible story skits, that our Head Coach could read and talk about and our coaches could act them out with costumes on. We really found this to be an incredibly effective way to get kids engaged and to remember these different stories.
Our business is somewhat complicated in that all of our camps are run satellite. They are run simultaneously in many different locations. So training staff to arrive early, be ready for traffic, and not to get lost on their way to the church were some of the critical ways we had to train our staff. In addition, once a staff arrived at these massive churches, where was the GYM?
We had to create systems for our staff as well as our parents. We have found that about 70-80% of the people attending a camp are not members of that host church. So for many parents, it was their first time to ever set foot on this huge church campus. We found if we placed a sandwich sign with a Triumph Sports logo outside the door where we wanted parents/coaches to enter, it simplified the process for everyone involved.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Triumph Sports story. Tell us more about the business.
We run outreach based sports camps for churches so that a church can run additional programs with us and not take any of their time or money. We supply everything to make this a turn key program. The participants who attend the camp are the ones that pay to register with us and a church basically just has to reserve their GYM and then pass out promotional material that we provide for them.
Other camps in our market have a different approach with churches. They want the church to pay an upfront deposit on the camp, guarantee that their camp gets a certain number of kids, the church has to provide lots of volunteers to help at the camp, and many times these camps want the church to host/feed their staff.
Many churches just don’t have the time to do all of this. They are busy with planning their own programs (VBS, Fall Festival, Christmas, Easter, etc.) as well as the tyranny of the urgent which is to make sure Sunday mornings run smoothly. This is understandable for other camps to do this because they are traveling their staff in from some other area and to not make the camp impossible to afford, need these things to keep the costs down.
Many of these camps are, for a full day, are in the $250-$350 range. With Triumph, our staff are all hired and trained in the area where they already live. So there isn’t any housing or traveling costs. Because we hire like this, we can keep our costs much lower than other camps and in turn pass that savings on to the consumer.
Our biggest camp success has been ours After VBS Sports Camp. This idea was brought to us from Bob Couch and Cindy Cook at FBC Garland in 2006. VBS goes from 9:00-12:00, Bob and Cindy wanted a sports camp after VBS, to go from 12:00-4:00 PM and would give parents the ability to drop off at 9:00 AM and not have to pick up until 4:00 PM. These programs are so popular that right now as I’m saying this, many of them are already maxed for the summer. They fill up incredibly fast.
Birthday parties are also something we really never expected to be a big hit. But because kids love things like Dodgeball, Flag Football, Kickball, and many other games, parents can hire us to come in and run a party for their kids, and we supply two coaches and all of the equipment. We run the party “tournament style,” meaning everything gets points and we play with four teams. This party idea, again, was brought to us from a parent whose child loved our camps.
Finally, our Christmas camps, especially in Dallas and Richardson, have become wildly successful. Its December, Christmas is over, the kids are climbing the walls, and the weather is terrible outside. Offering a Sports Camp from 9:00-12:00 PM and a Dodgeball camp from 12:00-4:00 PM, allows parents to send their kids for half of the day or for the whole day. It has also provided us a revenue stream at a time where we hadn’t had income in the past – definitely great from a cash flow perspective.
And for churches, they don’t want to have to run this themselves, outsourcing this to us allows them to have more reach into the community without taxing their time or their money.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Yes, we see our growth into the Southeast Region starting in Atlanta, then branching to cities like Nashville, Tampa, Birmingham, Charlotte, Jacksonville, and Orlando.
Especially because VBS continues to be a big hit, our after VBS camp can be run with lots of churches. At last count, about 80% of our churches run a Sports Camp tied in some way to VBS. Another thing we are getting asked for is “In VBS Sports Camp.” So some smaller churches have had difficulties with recruiting enough volunteers to run their VBS. So they outsource just the recreation portion of their camp to us. This works great with evening VBS program. So if a church has 100 kids attending VBS, we may only have 1/3 of the program at a time, so we staff the program for around 30 kids, and the church gets a really fun Recreation station, and their other volunteers can focus on the Bible lessons, music, arts and craft, snacks, etc.
Finally, we have been asked by churches to run leagues for them. We will be launching that with a few churches this year. However, very scaled down leagues, no weeknight practices, just once per week practice/game run at the same time. So for instance, if your time is 9:00 AM on Saturday, you would practice from 9:00-9:30 AM and then your game would go from 9:30-10:15 AM. We are only planning on basketball & indoor soccer, and we will run them at times of the year when the weather is bad, like winter & summer. This will be a whole new adventure for us.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.TriumphSports.com
- Phone: 817-205-9311
- Email: Brian@TriumphSports.com
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