The University of Texas Permian Basin is getting organized when it comes to advertising, sponsorships and ticket sales.
It has inked an agreement with Peak Sports Management to have Peak manage and sell all sponsorship inventory for UTPB Athletics, including venue signage, program advertising, digital and web content, game sponsorships and special events, along with several other opportunities.
In addition, Allen-based Peak Sports Management will oversee multimedia rights, ticketing, enhance the UTPB marketing brand, manage all outbound ticket sales, group sales, and premium hospitality, a news release said.
The agreement with Peak became official Feb. 8. It is a five-year agreement with the option to extend it for another five years based on its success.
Athletic Director Todd Dooley said he had some information left over from former AD Scott Farmer on Peak. Dooley said he reached out to them and started a conversation.
Wesley Abercrombie, vice president of sales at Peak Sports Management, said they had been talking for about a year.
The request for proposals closed in October.
Abercrombie said the advertising helps raise money for the athletic department.
“… When you go to a football game and you see the signage on the field and those brands, our staff sells that to businesses in town, or some national and regional brands as well,” Abercrombie said.
Dooley said UTPB did not have an arrangement like this before.
“We had no … dedicated transactional giving arm. We didn’t have anything that was dedicated in this manner. We did stuff on our own, but this professionalizes it,” Dooley said.
Abercrombie said Peak offers the university a financial guarantee of over over $2 million over the course of the contract. They also offer two full-time staff members at UTPB. Interviews are currently being conducted.
He said they are looking for a general manager for corporate partnership who will be selling advertising to businesses.
Dooley said they hope to have the two new people on staff in March.
“Their primary goal is to display partnerships in the community while raising money for the athletic department. And then our ticket sales manager, their job is to increase attendance by selling tickets to the community, as well, and creating a great experience for people that do come to the games so that they come back,” Abercrombie said.
Dooley said adding two full-time staff members to the athletic department at no cost to them is a “huge benefit.”
“… Staffing is one of our major issues because we have so much of a workload on everybody. This helps diffuse some of that workload. We have somebody dedicated to selling athletics, out in the community. Somebody that’s going to go knock on doors and meet with people. … We’ve never had a dedicated outbound salesperson in the ticket office and somebody that can drive group sales and season ticket sales for our home athletics is huge. … Our goal is to expand our revenue streams and find new ones. And this speaks directly to that,” Dooley said.
Abercrombie said Peak Sports Management is in 17 states and they work mainly with 25 smaller schools such as Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, N.M., and Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kan.
“UTPB is our newest partner. Primarily FCS Division II schools is who we work with. We’re a small mom-and-pop company so that’s kind of the family feel that we like. We’re trying to make a change in the industry, of being that family company. … We have competitors in the industry and they’re a little different than us,” Abercrombie said.
FCS stands for Football Championship Subdivision. Dooley said in Division I there are two types of football playing institutions.
Dooley said there’s a template at larger institutions similar to the partnership with UTPB.
“… Probably the most well known one is Learfield and they handle very large Southeastern Conference institutions, Big 12 institutions. The business model is very similar so this is not anything outside the box from an intercollegiate athletics business model standpoint where you have somebody dedicated,” Dooley said.
“… I’ll say this, because if the state doesn’t allow us to incentivize people with pay on metrics, and so they’re able to incentivize their sales force to go out and sell at a high volume. Whereas, if you’re a state employee there’s no mechanism for that,” Dooley added.
Dooley said the revenue stream will go directly back to the athletic department’s coffers to help offset some of its operating expenses.
“… A portion will definitely go toward scholarships. We’ve got to do a better job of finding new revenue sources. … In athletics, generally speaking, you’re limited on your revenue opportunities. You’ve got ticketing, philanthropic gifts, transactional gifts, and then you’ve got some institutional dollars, so direct institutional funding, those kind of things. But otherwise, you don’t have a whole lot of opportunities. So we’ve got to maximize every opportunity we have. We’ve got a lot of work to do to catch up to where we need to be from a revenue standpoint. Sixteen sports is a lot for a Division II program,” Dooley said.
Their conference generally averages about 13 sports at each institution, “so we we’ve got to find a way to cover all of our expenses.”
Dooley said the university doesn’t have to pay Peak anything for its services.
“… That’s the beauty of this business model is they guarantee us a certain amount of revenue every year from corporate partnerships and then they carry the cost of their expenses from a human resources standpoint. Then over a certain threshold, there’s a revenue share that we both get to benefit from. … It incentivizes them to reach that upper threshold where we can all start having some fun and making a lot of money,” he added.
Abercrombie said they have to sell enough to cover their salaries and then split the revenue once they cover that amount.
“All the money that we do make is earned. UTPB is not paying anything,” he added.
Abercrombie said they wouldn’t be at UTPB if they didn’t see the potential.
“A lot of it has to with Todd’s vision. Another big part of it is the size of the market here and we think that there’s a lot of untapped potential because of that,” he added.
“I think those two things are big for us from a Peak Sports perspective. We want to work with people that want to work with us. That’s why we partnered with Todd and that’s what’s important to us. And then of course, like I said, the market is there so we know that the support is there and we know that there’s revenue to be raised,” Abercrombie said.
Dooley said the university is fortunate to be located somewhere that has the resources it does.
“I think about some of our peer institutions in the league. From a population standpoint, from a quality of life standpoint … we have a leg up in a number of areas,” he added.
Asked how many scholarships they are able to award right now, Dooley said they invest $2.1 million annually in athletic scholarships.
“And we’re not fully funded. It would be somewhere between half a million and $800,000 (in) additional expenses to fully fund all of our sports,” Dooley said.
Abercrombie said he thinks that is doable.
Dooley said the funds could be used for operating dollars and scholarships, for example.
“I think our coaches, the first thing on their minds would be scholarships and then operating because I think if you can get better student athletes you’re going to get more attention and … you’ll get better production on the field; be able to recruit a higher caliber student athlete or more of them, for that matter, and really do some special things,” Dooley added.
Dooley said he thinks the agreement is exciting for athletics and UTPB.
“… To be able to partner with somebody like Peak that is able to come in and make us better day one and they bring a certain amount of industry knowledge that we weren’t able to tap into and/or find time to get out into the community and do … (make) these asks. They’re going to bring that and so it’s vital to what our mission in athletics is to be able to generate more scholarship dollars and really help out the university,” Dooley said.
He added that the arrangement could help take some of the burden off the university.
“It may help alleviate some of the direct revenues that we get from the university if we really maximize some of these revenue streams. … Alleviate, but not shut off. I don’t anticipate that direct institutional support going away. We’re not a Southeastern Conference institution by any stretch of the imagination and self supportive. There will be a certain level of reliance on the university in perpetuity,” Dooley said.
