Building a Profitable Events Department From Scratch

United Fray brought in Hammerton Barca to add a new business unit to its already succesful social sports business.

Hammerton Barca were engaged in 2018 with the goal of adding an events division to United Fray’s already popular social sports operation.

Fray serves over 150,000 social sports players annually in markets across the US, the vast majority of whom are affluent and active 21–35-year-olds that represent an important demographic for sponsors.

United Fray’s goals were to:

Launch a full calendar of events that would appeal to the social sports membership demographic and provide added opportunities to realize their motto of ‘making fun possible’.
Achieve profitability within 9 months of launch.
Provide sponsors with additional inventory and opportunities to reach the Fray community.
End the engagement at the 12 month point with a fully functioning, highly trained internal events team that had the tools to both run the events program going forward and build new concepts in the future.

Over 12 months, Hammerton Barca achieved these goals, and today United Fray has a profitable events department led by a highly capable team. Its portfolio of events consists of weekly social events, many leveraging partnerships with local businesses for events such as wine tastings, river tubing trips, Glow Yoga, and the ‘must be seen to be believed’ Hungry Human Hippos on Ice!

Some of our notable milestones and achievements:

Built financial projections for the new department which were approved by the United Fray senior leadership.
Conceptualized and planned more than 50 social events to take place in year.
Launched a new music & sports festival property, DC Field Day, in New Orleans, LA and Jacksonville, FL
Launched a new annual Wine event for the DC market. DC Wine Walk features over 20 local wine bars offering tastings and specials over a single day and attracted 11,000 people at launch.
Trained a team of three full time events staff to manage and grow the program post engagement. This included expert led sessions in fostering community building, managing risk, and building sponsor partnerships.
Secured deals with two large local property developers to bring a program of Fray branded events to their residential complexes.
Trained a full-time sponsor salesperson and implement salesforce CRM.

To learn more about Hammerton Barca’s expertise in Go to Market Strategy, Project Delivery and Business Operations consulting; visit our expertise page or get in contact with us.