Redditch United Football Club

Background:

In 2011, my wife Sallie and I were keen to find a project, challenge and/or business opportunity we could work on together.

When the situation at Redditch United Football Club was presented to us, we could see it ticked all our boxes. We both loved football and with the club on the brink of liquidation, the business side of the club certainly presented a challenge, something I particularly relished!

Competing in the Southern Premier League, just two leagues below the full-time leagues, the club’s main revenue was its £30k per year turnstile income, however dubious previous ownership decisions involving the running costs and a lack of other significant revenue streams meant the club was losing £80k per year. Quite the challenge!

Operations:

With the deal done, making us owners, we knew we needed to increase turnover to survive. To do this, our proposition was to evolve the business into a sports facility that had a football club, rather than the football club being the only chief purpose. We knew if we could develop a broader offering to a wider audience, it would create the additional income opportunities we needed.

We started by looking at the facilities and researching the availability of grants to help us, and made the big, if somewhat unconventional, decision to replace the failing grass pitch with the latest 3g artificial pitch. This decision would enable us to use or hire out the pitch seven days a week.

The new pitch cost £1.2 million, which was funded by an £800k grant from the Football Association, with Sallie and I investing the £400k difference.

This decision was the key to unlocking many initiatives, which we were able to put in place, to seriously increase our audience and turnover, including:

• Development of a junior section with 1,200 youngsters using the stadium each week (delivering pitch hire income and a secondary income from beverage sales to parents).
• Setting up of an “A” level program for up to 100 seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, who used the pitch for football, as part of their sports science studies.
• Setting up a smaller degree level student program.
• Significantly enhancing sponsorship revenue because of the increased footfall through the stadium.
• Worked with disadvantaged children and adults in the area, promoting sports inclusion and well-being through sports participation.
• Obtaining grants to improve stadium facilities and user experience to promote return visits and recommendations.
• Strategically aligning the football club with other Redditch sports facilities, such as tennis and cricket clubs for shared use.

Sadly, Sallie passed in 2016 and didn’t see the maturing results of many of our initiatives. I wanted to finish the project for her.

In July 2020, I sold the club to the management team I had appointed several years before. By this point, we had achieved all the goals we set out to achieve, at the start of our journey.

Outcomes and numbers:

In my time as owner and chairman of Redditch United, we achieved the following:

• Increased turnover to around £1.5 million running rate
• Stabilised and sustainable profits of around £100k per year (while turnstile income remained static at £30k per year)
• Non-reliance on any specific single income stream
• Established the club as a leading contributor to the community (the services we provided would have cost the council an estimated £20m per year)
• Created a business model, including accession planning that ensures the club continues to thrive

On a personal note:

I think Sallie would have been very proud of these outcomes and deeply moved by the Council’s re-naming of the entrance road into the stadium to ‘Sallie Swan Street’, in her honour. I know I am!

As with most of my ventures, the success at Redditch United could not have been achieved without her.