The beautiful game is big business. Football is loved the world over and provides many business opportunities for sports enthusiasts wishing to combine their love for the game with the chance to run a profitable business and inspire children and young people.
When football is combined with the success of the franchise industry, this winning combination provides an exciting and rewarding career, especially when partnering with a dedicated and committed franchisor.
Growth in football franchise
Based in north London, Pro Elite Football Academy was founded by Entrepreneur Ali Mustafa in March, 2016.
Since then, he has grown Pro Elite Football Academy to over 1500 active academy players weekly and a headcount of over 40.
This sparked interest from professional clubs and other academy set-ups into how he has managed to do this; with customer acquisition and retention, as-well as player development his main specialities.
“Our mission at Pro Elite is to engage with and positively influence as many children as possible through our football coaching methods,” says Ali Mustafa, Director at Pro Elite Football Academy. “There are few guarantees in life, but there are always children being born and they will always want to play football. If you want to help change those lives, you are on to a good thing.”
How to have a flourishing career in football
The success of the Academy has led Ali to franchising as he explains: “Franchising for me was always the next step. It allowed me to re-define all of our processes to ensure that they are of the highest quality and grow into areas that I would never physically be able to myself, due to logistics. Franchising will give opportunities for other like-minded individuals to have a flourishing career in football and in business. I know that it has given me so much joy already so I can’t wait to see whose life it can change next.”
The difficulty others usually find is in how to scale a “hobby” into something that can become extremely profitable. Our systems and processes, linked in with how well these processes are able to acquire so many customers, mean that this can now be easily scaled and can have individuals reaching heights that are more profitable than most traditional businesses.
How to grow your own Academy
First and foremost, you need to focus in on one thing:
- Quality.
As with every organisation, the ability to scale is down to how good the quality is of the product or the service.
In our game, you have to be able to deliver quality football sessions for kids, first and foremost. With that at the forefront of every decision made, it allows us to make the right decisions to grow the Academy and that is what you should focus in on, too.
- Systems and Processes.
Without the right systems and processes, football academies are unable to grow past the stage of coaching a small number of children.
The problem with this is; if your mission is to impact as many lives as possible, you will be limited not by your quality, but by your systems (or lack of) that are in place.
- Marketing
Without enough emphasis on marketing, it will be difficult to build a large enough database of players for you to be able to coach.
When building a brand, if you have a quality product/service in place, you need to be able to tell as many people as possible. Everyone knows this, but not many people know how to.
Spend time on your marketing and you will be able to do more of what you love; coach.
Why choose Pro Elite
With more children wanting to be part of the football community, Pro Elite is able to bring something unique to the market as Ali explains: “No other football franchise has the framework that we do at Pro Elite. We have the foundations in place to support children from 18 months, right through to 18 years. And, once established, the influx of children through the age groups means that we never have to recruit for players, only promote them from within.
“Our head office houses our Head of Football, our Head of Marketing and our Head of Academy Support – all of who will support franchisees on their journey. From session plans, to digital marketing, franchisees will have full support across all avenues so all they will have to do is enjoy the coaching or the management of coaches.”
All you need are two things, to start:
- A passion to impact childrens lives
- A passion for learning
We can teach the rest.