Marketing Career and Pop-Up Pickleball

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hi, I'm Shelley Maurer. And I'm Cher Emmerich. Welcome to Life Lessons from Pickleball, where we engage with pickleball players from around the world about life on and off the court. Thanks for joining us. Welcome, everyone. Oh my gosh, how fun it is for us to have Jacob Eliason with us today from Memphis, Tennessee. Jacob, You are a marketer by trade. You've built a career partnering with innovative entrepreneurs to help them market smarter and uncover new growth.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And you are the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Pickleball Pop-Ups, a startup company that has become the world's number one provider of temporary pickleball experiences in less than 12 months.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

And we definitely want to talk about that. But before we do, let's just start at the beginning. How did you even get involved in marketing in the first place?

SPEAKER_03 0:58

How did I get involved in marketing? That's a story that goes back at least a decade. I was actually... Weirdly enough, I think just part of being in between millennial and Gen Z, kind of on the cusp of those, you're just kind of born into the internet. And so I've always been kind of chronically online, which lends itself towards social media and content and things that have really become popular in the last 15 to 20 years. And so I was always interested in that and very tech-savvy. And with computers and things like that. But it wasn't until I was in college and I changed my major like three times until I was like, you know what, I'm going to stick with marketing. And it turned out to be a really great fit. It was just exactly the lane in business that I was most ideal for. And so the unfortunate part is things about marketing were changing so fast when I was graduating college that the marketing jobs out in the marketplace weren't really the type of marketing that I wanted to do. I didn't really want to be a social media manager, but also didn't want to be like a salesperson's assistant making PDFs and stuff. And so that is kind of what college prepared me for. And that wasn't the route I wanted to take. So I went into sales to kind of get the other side of that equation. And did corporate sales and then did some banking and like selling financial products and stuff like that. And finally got the opportunity to take the leap. And in 2019, I just left and dove straight in headfirst and said, I'm figuring out how to do marketing as my career. And I'm going to be in control of it instead of, you know, finding a job within some company and ended up finding a really close friend of mine now who was He had just started a marketing agency and it was just like the perfect opportunity to jump in and help. And then we built that into something pretty cool and he's still running it. I've stepped away from a lot of that over these last 12 months. But yeah, I just finally got in and said, I'm not going to wait on anybody to figure out how to build a career in marketing. I'm just going to go do it. And it was perfect timing right before COVID happened. I just left my job and I had like a full year to figure it out, really a full year and a half without too much crazy financial pressure. So yeah, that's how I, it was a really, it's been a long journey to get from like wanting to be in marketing to like really finally being in my lane, but that's where we are now.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

That's brilliant. I bet you're really good at marketing and at sales.

SPEAKER_03 3:37

Yeah. And they, It helps when you're good at both. My philosophy on marketing is that it should make sales easier, whether you're selling a product or whether you're selling a service. Marketing should make the salespeople's job easier. In a lot of companies, that's not the case. But because I've been looking at it that way, that's one of the things that we're reaping the benefits of today with Pickleball Pop-Ups is the marketing has significantly made sales easier. And so I hope I can make everybody look like a rock star salesperson because if the leads come in hot, then it makes that their job a whole lot easier.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Yeah. Well, how did you first get involved in pickleball?

SPEAKER_03 4:16

So I, this, you probably heard this kind of story. I played pickleball for the first time, like an eighth grade in PE.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

And so like

SPEAKER_03 4:24

this was 2008. early two thousands, but I played and it was like the, you had the strap around your wrist with the wooden paddle and they just had lines taped down in like the gym. And it was a bunch of eighth graders playing pickleball. I was like one of the sports they rotated us through. Right. And so after winning that tournament in eighth grade, I never picked up paddle again until like I was 30 years old when it started getting hot again. And, you know, I, I, My business partner plays a whole lot more pickleball than I do. He lives right by Lifetime Fitness, which is like the only place to play pickleball indoors in Memphis, which is kind of where our story started. And but he started inviting me to play last year. He's lost a ton of weight. He's lost over 100 pounds. And pickleball was kind of the catalyst to that. I wish he could be on here, but he's in the Bahamas. right now with his family, taking a much deserved vacation. But yeah, he started inviting me to play because I would invite him. We'd go play golf and he was getting tired of golf because he was like never getting any better. But he was like pickleball was so much more fun. And so we started doing that instead. But it became a chore to get across town and drive 45 minutes to go play. And that's really where our story like the Pickleball 901 part of this started was just trying to build and bring more courts, more pickleball to the community here in Memphis because it was kind of a desert.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

So what do you mean by pop-up pickleball?

SPEAKER_03 5:56

I mean, it's so descriptive, like dangerously descriptive, like it's temporary pickleball activations. We started talking to people in the market about what they called it and that's what they were saying. People were saying, yeah, we're looking for a pop-up pickleball. We love this pop-up pickleball thing y'all are doing. And so we were like, there's our company name. And we just ran with it. And that's what it is. It's we bring pickleball in. We set it all up. We bring a court. We bring nets. We bring barriers. We can brand the whole thing. We bring custom paddles. We bring people to manage the whole event. And then we leave and we clean up. And within like three days, it was like there was never pickleball there in the first place. And that's a pickleball pop-up.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

Get a little more drilled in. Shelly, did you have something else I was going

SPEAKER_00 6:41

to ask? Yeah, I was just going to ask him to explain more

Pickleball Events at Local Breweries

SPEAKER_00 6:44

about Pickleball 901 and kind of go from there, like how it all evolved.

SPEAKER_03 6:49

That's the best part of the story. So Pickleball 901, which you can see here on my shirt, 901 is the area code. And so there's a lot of affinity for that here. So the major league soccer team is 901 football club and you've got 901 grill like you've got all these different yoga 901 and volleyball 901 and like 901 just carries a lot of affinity around here. And so that's what we named. We came up with an idea. Lifetime at the time was the only indoor pickleball opportunity. Really, there was only two other places to play outdoor. So still for most parts of the year in Memphis, it's either really hot or really cold. And so we just, Adam called me one day and said, Hey, I want to open a pickleball facility. I want to bring more indoor courts. There's all these retail bays. Like what if we could build a concept that there was three or four indoor courts by every sports clips in America? That was the original idea is how do we take these empty retail spaces and just bring pickleball. We already knew that it shouldn't be a massive overlay if really all you're doing is painting the ground. We had this vision of a network of these things that weren't really a franchise, but it was just a public place to play around the corner. We could bring them to every community and they'd be indoors and pay-to-play model. It was a very simple vision that nobody was doing yet. and we started down that path to figure it out in memphis and we started pickleball 901 and so we got the holding company created and all we formed all the llcs and all that stuff and we brought in a team of advisors to like help us figure it out from real estate from just business law and some consultants that had been in the like a gym like the fitness center space and after a know a couple months of down this road and seeing some drawings and talking with the con like architects and stuff like we realized that this was going to be an 18 to 24 month endeavor to get these doors open with all the permitting and then you've got to do the build out and and all the landlords want like five to ten year leases and so it just turned into this like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. especially now looking at it, looking at our financial modeling and like what this events business looks like, it was, it didn't even compare. Like when we finally compared the two, it was like, this is a no brainer. We're going this direction with the events every day of the week because we were looking at, you know, multiple seven figures of investment to get the thing open and build it out. And they want you to do the food and beverage. And then you're, you know, then, then you've got all this other stuff in there other than pickleball. And that's not what we wanted to do.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

And

SPEAKER_03 9:44

so, um, everyone kind of looked at me and it was like, Hey, marketing guy, we've already told the city we're going to do this. We announced everything prematurely. And so because the way pickleball is like it caught on, everyone was like excited and waiting. And you know, I've gotten a couple angry Instagram messages like, Hey, you guys said y'all were doing something and you're not doing it. And I'm like, well, we've actually thrown like 12 events around town that are all totally free. So come to one of those. That's what we're doing. And that was the marketing plan. It was, Hey, if we've got nine to 12 months, before this thing opens, what is our strategy to acquire customers around town, to like build an audience in Memphis and to keep this brand alive and growing it. And I got, one of my friends was just like, I think we're going to go out to the brewery this weekend and I'm going to like tape down some lines or they've got like a little, you know, little kits that are just the lines and like unfold them and then you tape them down. They were going to set those up with a little cheap flimsy net and they were just going to play out in the parking lot. And I just, my brain just clicked. And I said, before you do that, can I talk to them? And within like seven days, I'd talked to four different breweries and then one other location. I'd pitched the idea of doing a pickleball party in their parking lot. They had no idea what I was talking about. I really had no idea what I was talking about. I just knew that that would be the thing. Like if there was something to gather all the pickleball folks and non pickleball folks in Memphis, it was throwing a party outside a brewery and having a great time with our brand name all around. Like that was the whole idea. All four breweries said yes immediately. Then I was like, okay, well now these can be like an

Corporate Sponsorship and Event Growth

SPEAKER_03 11:20

event series. So we wrapped it up and called it the summer series, which is like the most exciting. Simple name ever, but it's turned out to be great. And so we had the Pickleball 901 Summer Series, and then we sold that to a sponsor. And it didn't pay for everything, but it was kind of like a validation that there is demand out there from the corporate side to be involved with Pickleball. And so we sold a sponsorship, and we put their logo on everything. It was Orthopedic Hospital.

UNKNOWN 11:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 11:48

And we put their name on everything and did an event in their parking lot as part of the series as part of their sponsorship. And it was just great. We did five events around town, like 500 people showed up at every one of them. We did them at breweries so you could walk inside after you played and grab a cold beer. We had food trucks out there. We had music playing the whole time, like total opposite of the experience of going and playing at a pickleball facility. Right. Where there's not party hits playing and blasting, like people stopping and dancing on the court, you know, like midpoint, you know, like that's what they're doing. They're having a great time. And what that did is it allowed us to build a database of like 3000 plus people. We've got, you know, I was just checking a minute ago. We've got well over 2000 Instagram followers, probably close to 2000 on Facebook now. TikTok too. Like we just started building this audience that the goal was when our doors open, we can, communicate with this audience that we've built now. And we have all of our members. We can fill up our club. Like we have, you know, the marketing plan led to making selling easier when we opened it. That was the whole goal. But what really happened was after about the third event, we said, we're onto something because we started getting requests from businesses to come and do it at their place. And that started with like, you know, places like breweries where budgets are pretty tight because they don't have big budgets like that. But then it kind of escalated and then Beale street in downtown Memphis, which just is full of bars. It's where Elvis and BB King and all these guys used to hang out and play. Um, and it's just an iconic street. Then they hired us to do a, We put six courts down the middle of Beale Street, and it was an all-day party. It led up to a Grizzlies game. A Grizzlies NBA game was that night. And so it just was this spectacle. It was just this fun, positive event in downtown Memphis that brought out probably over 1,000 people. But, yeah, we started getting these requests. Like, we want to pay you to come and bring this here. What does it cost? And we're like, I don't know. This was a marketing plan. And so we go back in with our advisors. and our, our, our entire team. And we start looking at what that business would look like. And we, we look at it a couple of different ways. We look at it like the bouncy house model where we're just renting courts, like, Hey, it's this much a day and we'll bring it out and set it up. And then you deal with it. But then my background in marketing and in B2B, and then my business partner, Adam's background in B2B sales, it really just lent us to focusing on the corporate market. Like that's what we do. We've always done that. And, um, we started looking at corporate events and we said, okay, what if we find the corporate event lane? And then what do corporate events want? Like they don't want to mess with it. They want it turnkey. They want everybody to show up and it be managed. And so we added on the layer of like programming and like running the event. Like how do you get 250 people to play pickleball in three hours? We've figured that out. And so, yeah, we started getting interest. And then we spun up a website called Pickleball Pop-Ups in the middle of our event series. We didn't tell anybody. We didn't announce it. We just set it up. And the strategy was we're going to see if search engine optimization works here because the name Pickleball Pop-Ups is what we expect them to be searching. And it turns out that worked. And so we have gotten... In 2024 alone, we've gotten well over 100 inbound leads straight to our website that we haven't. They just found us and they request us to come and do an event. And so that's been kind of the story. And five events in, we said, let's abandon the permanent club idea and let's go all in with this. And that's what we've been doing. So we raised money. We raised some money. We did a little friends and family round, but we're booking events left and right. We had 40 inbound requests last month. And we've got

SPEAKER_01 15:37

a

SPEAKER_03 15:39

three-person full-time team. And we're growing pretty quickly as far as we've got contractors that are helping that we're trying to get to full-time. People want to leave their big corporate jobs to come jump in with what we're doing. And that's a process. But that's how it evolved. It was a marketing plan for the club. that ended up getting recognition outside of memphis then we got asked to do an event outside of memphis then we did that then we published that stuff and then now we've just continually every time we do an event we bring a videographer he videos he builds a hype video around it we push that out on the internet um and it's on the home page of our pickleball pop-up site so you can see every event

SPEAKER_00 16:16

that we've done yeah

SPEAKER_03 16:17

yeah and so that just kind of the marketing is making sales easier people see it they know exactly what they're going to get um and then they can see exactly in their mind where that could be on their property. And then they see the trade show video and they're like, or it could be inside. And so now they're able to just start doing a lot of that work on figuring out what type of event they want and how many people without talking to us. Right. And so then, then they can fill out that form and they're ready to go. And that's kind of what we've been experiencing now is people filling out the form ready to go. And so, well,

SPEAKER_00 16:49

So describe, like, if I'm thinking I want to have one of these events, right? Like, now, what are you bringing for the court? Like, what do I need to have? And what do you bring? Try to visualize it.

SPEAKER_03 17:03

Yeah, we need flat concrete space. A question I get a lot is, can you do this on grass? The answer is, we could, but neither party wants to, right? Like, for us, it's probably double the price to bring out stuff to put it on grass. But for the actual consumer, the player, the experience... The playability of the courts, if you do it on grass, just diminishes drastically. And so we try not to do grass events. So really just a patch of concrete and a pickleball court is 20 by 44, 30 by 60 with the out of bounds. And so you're looking at 1800 square feet of concrete space and that's the minimum. Right. That's that's really a flat concrete. We've got we've got multiple different types of courts. We work with all the different court manufacturers. And so depending on what the surface looks like, that will determine what kind of court we bring out. But we bring a physical pickleball court and it's sometimes it's colored, like just depending on what time we get or what kind we get. Like we've got blue ones, we've got some green ones. And then we've got two other different types of courts that are like a rollout mat. And so like, we just show up in your parking lot and roll it out like a big piece of carpet. And it's a pickleball court. Like it's gritty. It's got that, that acrylic paint on the top of it. It's, it's unbelievable technology that they are developing for professional uses to be able to like take in and convert these tennis centers into pickleball things without having to repaint everything. And so we just jumped in with that and yeah, so we bring court or courts. Um, we bring nets, we bring barriers to go around the nets. We bring tents, like shade tents, like 10 by 10 canopy tents, nothing like massive yet to like cover the whole thing. We bring music and we bring people. And so the whole gamut, like the whole A to Z of the event from like setting it up and putting branding and logos on the court, on the barriers, on the net, on the paddles, all of that stuff we handle. And then we show up. You tell us where we can load in. And we load in and we set it all up within a couple, just depending on the size of the event. It's usually a couple hours, sometimes like four or five hours. But we've got a crew that goes around the country setting stuff up and then we run it. And so.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

What about paddles and balls? Do you take those as well?

SPEAKER_03 19:14

Yep. We bring all depending on the event and like what the client is paying for. We will sometimes do custom paddles. I'm doing a custom paddles for an event in San Francisco next week. Um, but other times we have great relationships with all these paddle brands. And so I've got Selkirk and Yola and Gamma and, uh, Valair and, uh, What is this one over here? I've just got all these different types of paddles that we can take with us too. And pickleballcentral.com has been coming with us through the last few events with a pop-up pro shop. So that helps us even more. They've got demo paddles. So our goal is not to... have our own paddle brand that we're pushing. Our goal is to work with all of them. Like we, we see value in, you know, I have a six zero paddle and Adam plays with Yola. And so like, we don't have the same paddle. So why would we have the same, just 75 of the same paddle at our events? We're just trying to be, you know, neutral on that side, but we bring paddles, we bring balls, everything you need to literally just show up. Even like instructors, people on our events team know how to play pickleball. They know how to teach people how to play pickleball. They know the rules of pickleball and they can just teach and play and engage with people the entire event.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Wow. Wow. This is so fun. So my question I was going to ask you was so far that you've gone, but you just said you're in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

Been in San Francisco twice. So we're going back for the second time. We're doing quite a bit in Vegas right now. Vegas is a hotspot. We're starting to penetrate Chicago. There's just lots of corporate events that go on in these places.

Expansion Strategy for Pickleball Events

SPEAKER_03 20:48

And then last month, we were in Greensboro, North Carolina. So kind of on the other side. But we've got Salt Lake City coming up. We've got Huntington Beach, California coming up. We've got... boston massachusetts like right outside of boston coming up and so yeah we're just it's all over the place and um our strategy is to be a little bit reactionary we're getting a lot of inbound stuff so can we get leads and close deals and then when we go do those deals deploy our inventory and leave them so like in vegas i don't bring it back with me after the first one that we did i left everything there and so we have relationships with logistics and warehousing and stuff that we can leave all of our inventory in like hubs across the country.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Do you mean you leave the inventory in storage for the next event? Yes. Not with your client. And entrepreneurs or new companies generally are not profitable for a few years. Are your expenses being covered right now? Oh,

SPEAKER_03 21:52

yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

And profit?

UNKNOWN 21:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:54

Oh yeah. Yeah. We're, we're, we're definitely, things are definitely a little bit more expensive right now than they're going to be in six months. Like we know that. But we're testing some things, but yeah, we're.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Why, why, why are expenses going to be different in six months?

SPEAKER_03 22:10

Well, cause right now we're like, we're starting to grow. And so we're like part of our, you know, maybe we have to buy a brand new court for an event and ship it to that area. And so there's, there's, Equipment costs that are on the front end right now while we're building these hubs. Maybe we're shipping something from Memphis to Vegas instead of shipping it from Vegas to Vegas. As this year progresses and we have hubs of inventory with four or five courts in cities all across the country. the America, then our shipping will get easier. Um, and then after we can knock the shipping down, then the next strategy is localized event and set up teams. And so for example, San Francisco, imagine that there's a pretty solid pickleball community there. And imagine this even more, there's people who want to take off work to come and help me in my events and play pickleball people all day. And so we're, we're, that's the next phase too, is okay. If, if I've got a crew leader and, and I've got an event leader, can we find, you know, event team members all across the country that we can plug in when we're in these areas? Cause for me, it's full time for my crew leader, it's full time, but for, you know, Jim and Sally in San Francisco, like it's the best three days of their life. They ain't got to do, but once every month and a half, you know? And, and so, and so it's pretty easy right now to start finding those people, but that to answer your question, we just, we, we have a path that we know we're walking, but right now I'm, flying everybody from Memphis, you know, like we're just flying people around the country and that gets a little bit, that's more expensive, but we're also learning the value of our events. And we think that not only will we be able to reduce costs, but we're going to be able to really increase the value of them, which will increase our price point and what we can do. And so it's just, we're in a great position to be this early in the company and to already see positive cashflow for the most part with every event. Like, yeah, we're excited.

SPEAKER_02 24:05

Yeah. Very impressive. And how interesting you started by what, at the first brewery, you just taped the, the lines down on the, or no, did you actually have

SPEAKER_03 24:15

all in? Yeah. We

SPEAKER_02 24:17

were all in with the very first one.

SPEAKER_03 24:19

Yeah. When I called the four breweries, this is a funny story. Actually, I called all four breweries while Adam was in California with his family. They were on vacation last March. Yeah. Last, no, it was last June. And I just said, Hey, here's the plan. And he's, and he's, he's the guy who always goes way big on stuff. Like I'm the guy who's like, let's keep this lean. If you would have asked me, we'll take them down. Like we'll do it. But he was like, Nope, already found a court supplier where I'm buying for right now. So he like got on the phone and bought four courts right there. Um, and they shipped them to his house. They just showed up like this massive semi truck with these, you know, 12 pallets on it, showed up in his house. His wife was like, what in the world is going

SPEAKER_00 25:02

on?

SPEAKER_03 25:03

We didn't have any storage unit yet. Like we just knew that it was a good idea. And so we bought the four courts and we figured it all out in four weeks. We figured out how to set them up. We figured out how to find a partner that could help us ship them. We figured out storage. We did it all in like less than 30 days. And our first event was July 21st of 2023. And it was on grass. It was the first and last grass event we'll ever do.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Was it the, were the first formats, the roll, roll out mats? Nope.

SPEAKER_03 25:32

They're titles. So snap courts, flex courts, flex company that we work with. They manufacture in the USA. They don't do any, they don't like buy it from overseas and get it shipped. And so we liked that. We went with them directly and we still, we still use theirs. I'm using some flex court interlocking tile in San Francisco. The playing like for, for people who play pickleball all the time, it's, you're going to get out there and you're going to be like, Oh, this isn't like a pickleball court. It's plastic. It's kind of got some dead spots on it, but doing it at a trade show where you don't have a full 20 by 44 or like in some small room where they just want to do some, like, like they just want to activate it. Being able to rip those tiles up and resize that court right there in the middle of like right there as we're setting it up. Like that's, there's value there. Way more value in that than there is in like dead spots on the court. So we try not to use those at events we know are going to be a lot of, you know, um, more advanced pickleball players. Like if we're doing a tournament, like we're doing a tournament this weekend that we, we don't really do those, but we're doing one here in Memphis and we're trying it out. And like for that, we could never, cause we'd never asked anybody to pay or anything like that to play on those, but they look great. They don't do the footprints that easily. And they're just like, it's, plastic tile. So it just visually, it looks awesome.

SPEAKER_01 26:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:49

Playability is a little difficult, but we had, we had flex cords and we were setting and clipping these big four by four tiles together, sweating our tails off in the heat at 6.00 AM. Cause we were setting up at 6.00 AM for events. It started at 11. Like this was, yeah, we built an operation last summer and now we're able to do all these bigger ones much easier.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

Yeah. So in all of this experience that you've had, um, What life lessons have you gleaned?

SPEAKER_03 27:19

Life lessons. One that I'm learning right now is that bringing really awesome people in around you is just a growth hack. Because every time I bring somebody that's talented in and just get out of their way, things get better. Like whether it's an event MC or a project manager. You know, like either way about it, like I'm learning just how valuable, good, smart, intelligent people are to a growing company. But also I think that I've learned that there's nothing like pickleball. Like there's nothing

Pickleball's Social and Marketing Impact

SPEAKER_03 27:58

on earth. And there's a couple of different ways here, right? It's like one I've, I've never seen or been a part of something that accelerates community growth. the way that this does, right? Like you get out there, you don't know these people. You shake hands before the game. That's the first time you met them. You go through 11 points with them, maybe quick, maybe not quick. And then you shake their hand at the end and now you've got a friend and it's

SPEAKER_01 28:19

like,

SPEAKER_03 28:21

what? And so, and I think you can probably see how my mind's working on the corporate side. Cause you get like vendors, suppliers, customers, employees, all those people together at the same event. And they're just like speed dating on the court by the end of it. Everyone that didn't know each other knows each other. And so that's a huge part of it. Like it just accelerates this social community thing that is so important right now. Like so important. And it, because of that, like, You just bring positive energy everywhere. There's joy in the air at all these events that we do. And that's what we try to bring. We want people to be happy and come out and play and have a good time and let their hair down a little bit, even at the trade shows or in suits. It's like they take the suit jacket off. It's like, are you sure? I don't really want to get sweaty. And we're like, get out there. And then they come back drenched in sweat. And they're like, I just had the best time of my life. Thank you for being here. I've been in meetings all day. And this was like the best thing that I did today. And so accelerating that social process and community piece is a huge part, but also like from marketing, it seems unfair, right? Like I'm looking at it. I'm like the entire world is my target audience. That is not a normal marketing thing. Normally it's, especially in B2B, it's like, you know, you've got an ideal customer profile and it's very kind of targeted, but here it's like age 18 to 88, you know, like male, female, every like socioeconomic status possible. Like it's difficult, but it's amazing. Cause like, we're able to like just get this out to a lot of people. And then you get people from all walks of life showing up at our events. And that's incredible. That's like Memphis is a melting pot as it is. And lots of cities, lots of big cities are like that. But to see that actually like to see it, to be a part of something that creates this melting pot of people coming together and having a good time and experiencing the joy of pickleball, like that's, I'm just learning how many just benefits there are to, to playing. Like it's not just being good at it and having fun. Like there's just so many other things that come out of it. Um, and yeah, it's, there's probably a lot more, but to save us time, I'll, I'll

SPEAKER_00 30:29

keep it. Well, and I think you just came up with a new, uh, business speed dating on the pickleball court.

SPEAKER_03 30:36

You know, we've talked about that. There's, we've got some, um, some kind of tentative events like reached out to like that. That's kind of the concept is just like, because I mean, we're, we're, we're asked is people don't know what they don't know for the most part. Most of these event planners book and pickleball stuff are not pickleball players or, you know, even like they probably never played at all. And so they don't know, like, A lot of times they're like, we want to do a tournament. We're like, you do not want to do a tournament. You want to go the opposite direction. You want to go social fitness and not competitive sport. And so that's, we try to stay in that social, social fitness category as opposed to competitive sport. And so we kind of have to walk them through a lot of that. And so we, that's why we design a lot of the programming because they don't know how to get 350 people through four, two pickleball courts in eight hours. And we've kind of already figured a lot of that out. And so we, but it just kind of happens naturally. Like if they just let us run with it and they give us a list of people that are playing, we create the speed dating without telling them, you know, like just like, well, you're going to play with this person this time. And then that person that time, and then you're going to play with Johnny last and you're going to play three games. You can play three different people. And they're like, okay, they don't know. They just get out there, they play. And then now they had fun. And you know, our, one of our most recent testimonials that we got was that it was the best networking event that that company had ever done.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

And we went to Tucson, Arizona to do it. Oh, wow. That is so cool. So you and Adam thought at one point you were going to do these terrestrial buildings and you pivoted. And we need to do that on the court too. We're, we're doing something and it's not working and it's not working. And then we need to pivot and we need to try something new. So there's another life lesson, how you pivoted when you saw, wait a minute, there's something that brings us a lot more joy. That's not so heavy lifting and it's a natural, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:34

That's a good lesson. And thankfully I've learned that lesson before this. And, and honestly, like taking it in a different direction, approach like everything is a test to me i love it because when you test and you test and you test then you can pivot because you see the results and you've tried it a couple times and not just it's not an irrational decision it wasn't just like oh this isn't making money let's try something new we we really were intentional about what we tried and how we went about it

SPEAKER_02 33:04

well for those who want to reach out to you how do they find you what's the best way

SPEAKER_03 33:09

So to find me, probably the best way to find me is on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active. And Jacob Eliason. But if you're interested in learning more about it and you've got an event you're thinking about, definitely pickleballpopups.com.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

Wow. I wish we had another half hour. This has just been so amazing. Jacob, we're really excited about what you're doing. And we agree with you that it's, you know, changing the world. There's been nothing like it. Pickleball is unique unto itself. And thank you for spreading the word and making it available to people all across the country and around the world.

SPEAKER_03 33:45

Well, thank you guys for having me on so that I could share more about what we're doing, because that's all we're trying to do is we're trying to get the joy and excitement of pickleball in places where there is not pickleball.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Well, we appreciate you taking the time because we hear how busy you are.

SPEAKER_03 34:01

Hey, I'm just glad that my two-year-old hasn't been screaming. and interrupting this whole thing. So I think judging by the silence from downstairs, I don't even think that mama and two-year-old are in the house right now. So they deserve the thanks as well for giving me some time to record

SPEAKER_02 34:20

this. Well, tell them thank you for us.

SPEAKER_03 34:23

I will. I will.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Thank you so much. And thank you, everyone. What a joy. And if you want to have a pickleball pop up near you, contact Jacob Eliason. Awesome. Thanks so much. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_00 34:36

If you love our podcast, we'd be so grateful if you'd take a few seconds to follow or subscribe to Life Lessons from Pickleball. This ensures you'll never miss an episode and helps us continue these wonderful conversations.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

On Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, go to the show page and tap the follow button in the top right corner. And on YouTube, click the subscribe button under any of the episodes. Thanks so much. Hope to see you on the court.

UNKNOWN 35:06

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