The Business of Hometown Hockey
Trevor Georgie loves a good challenge.
And you’d have to in the sports and entertainment business. Georgie’s resume includes roles and partnerships with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Regina Pats, Toronto Raptors, Toronto FC, Florida Gators, the JUNO Awards and the PGA Tour. So when he took the job as president and general manager of the Saint John Sea Dogs, a QMJHL team, in January 2016 he knew what he was getting into – and what he wanted to do.
“I’m really someone who enjoys transformation and I saw a really good opportunity to try and bring some of those experiences to here and see how they take off,” Georgie says. “Just do some things that are completely different from the rest of the league.”
Georgie’s vision has been to make the Saint John Sea Dogs, and in turn QMJHL hockey games, not only into places for hard-core hockey fans but also for the casual fan looking for a fun and entertaining evening with friends and family. He says this is done by first having strong, defined vision and values embodied in every aspect of the business, along with hiring the right people. From there, it’s about looking at the best practices of all different sports leagues and finding ways a pro junior hockey team can make them their own.
“We rolled out the Alpine Ice Bar, which is the first ice-level bar in the Canadian Hockey League,” Georgie says. “It’s a mixture of best practices seen in other sports … taking these different ideas we’ve seen in other professional sports and organizations and bringing them here so we can say ‘hey Saint John, we’re the first ones with that’ and we stake our claim.”
“We don’t have to be the ones catching up. I’d rather be the one saying ‘you know what? We’re first to it’”
Another change the team has made over the last year is having a live DJ at all the games, another practice picked up from bigger league sports.
“You see that in basketball, the Raptors do that,” Georgie says. “I’m trying to bring those bigger sports entertainment experiences and put on that type of productions here.”
Though the main focus of hockey games is, of course, the sport itself, Georgie says investing only in that is not a viable business model.
“You have to invest on the business end. What happens across the entire QMJHL and across the CHL is teams spend a disproportionate amount of money on the hockey operation side versus the business side. Although we are all one team, they are reluctant to spend on good salespeople, marketing people, good finance people and good customer services people,” Georgie says.
“And that’s where you eventually run into problems. If you are not funding the areas that are revenue generation, then you’re not going to make money.”
Hockey is a capricious business in the sense that the players are always changing. You are bound to have some great years and some not so great years game-wise. The challenge is to focus on the other factors that keep the team afloat on a bad season.
“Your product does include your on-ice product but is also includes your off-ice product. A winning team helps, no question,” Georgie says. “But a winning team is not a magic bullet to solve attendance or revenue challenges that a team could have.”
Georgie says last year the Sea Dogs had a strong “on-ice product,” but there was little to no jump in game attendance. This year is another strong year on-ice, but with the new additions to the business side, there has been a noticeable spike of people in seats. The key is to not just focus on the hockey game, but the entire entertainment experience. By doing this, the team can weather the storm if they have a bad season.
“We’ve paired a good team on the ice, but also done all the off-the-ice work in terms of the Alpine Ice Bar to attract younger fans and a different demographic. More in-game entertainment, more marketing, more partnerships and more strategic partnerships in the community and putting manpower on the sales side,” he says. “You need to have all those things moving at once because a winning team alone does not solve attendance.”
Georgie says that what the Sea Dogs are doing is part of a bigger shift in both junior hockey leagues and the CHL becoming sources of entertainment in their own right. The leagues don’t just want to be seen as a talent source for the NHL. They also want to stop losing money.
“It has to be marketed in such a way that you’re not just a developmental league. You have to start doing things differently … I think you’re going to see more changes across the league and a shift in that direction because teams need to do that to be sustainable long-term,” he says.
In line with their new direction, the Sea Dogs will be hosting the 2017 QMJHL entry draft at the end of May.
‘When I joined a year ago I said we would be going for big events. This city deserves big events,” Georgie says. “The entry draft is our league and the QMJHL’s flagship event, just like the NHL draft. It’s a whole week-long affair. All the hockey executives, league executives, players, everyone congregates here in Saint John and injects over $1.3 million into the local economy.”
Given the Sea Dogs have a competitive team, Georgie says they also plan to bid for the 2019 Memorial Cup.
“We will certainly try for it. It is one of our ownership and my team’s goals to host the Memorial Cup in Saint John. I don’t see that changing,” he says. “We intend to put in a bid. It’s a good start to have the draft, it lets us see what we can pull off.”
Continuing to push the envelope when it comes to new ideas for off-ice entertainment will be the focus of the Sea Dog’s long-term plans.
“Our vision for our organization is to be the model franchise in the CHL, to be the model franchise for Saint John, to put our flag in and say ‘yes, we are the first.’ It’s not just on the ice, we need to look at things and new ideas that we adopt here and that adopted league-wide,” Georgie says.
“I see us continuing to try new things. I see us trying to create best practices and I see us spending every waking hour trying to fill our building and make sure there’s a product here that the whole city can be proud of and that other teams are envious of.”