In a recent podcast interview, Network My Club Founder, Bradley Hatchett, answers the questions we get asked most by clubs and venues considering setting up a networking club.
How do Network My Club work with sports clubs and venues?
We work with professional sports clubs and venues to connect them and help them better engaged with their local and regional business community, to ultimately create new opportunities.
The way we do that is by creating a dedicated networking club at their venue and running events in partnership with them.
For the club or stadium, that means three things: new leads and opportunities from businesses in the region, a way to showcase their facilities to decision-makers who may never have set foot in the venue before, and improved retention of existing clients, partners, and sponsors.
But the thing that brings it all together is that we take on the heavy lifting to deliver it all. The event admin, the end-to-end event management, proactively inviting attendees, the event marketing, the event delivery. The club doesn’t have to worry about any of it.
They just show up, engage with the room, and build relationships to open conversations about other ways businesses can get involved with the club or venue.
I understand these challenges from both sides. I spent four or five years at the Amex Stadium working on Brighton and Hove Albion’s commercial team, where I was responsible for running their networking club.
I saw first-hand how valuable it could be, both both the clubs and attendees. I also saw how much time, effort, and resource it took to do properly.
And this was on top of match days, sponsorships, hospitality, and everything else that comes with working in a sporting organisation. The networking club was rarely a top priority, but always a beneficial assets to generate leads and opportunities.
Clubs and stadiums have these incredible, underutilised venues that stand out from the bars, hotels, and restaurants where most networking events happen. But lack the resource and expertise to develop their own networking club.
That’s the gap we fill.
What are the most common reasons clubs and venues don’t do it themselves?
When a club or venue comes to us, they usually fall into one of three categories.
They’ve never tried it and are weighing up the options. They tried it and it faded out. Or they’re currently running something but it isn’t working as well as they’d like.
In every case, the underlying challenge is the same.
Running a networking club properly requires a specific kind of person. Someone who understands end-to-end event management, who knows how to sell and market events, who understands what makes attendees keep coming back, and who can hold the whole thing together consistently over time.
That’s a lot to ask of one person. And those people don’t grow on trees. And when you do find them, they don’t come cheap.
Then there’s the consistency problem.
It’s relatively straightforward to pull together one event. You can throw time and resource at it and make it work. The real challenge is the second event. The third. The fourth.
That’s where most in-house attempts fall apart. Either the person running it leaves, or the energy runs out, or it just gets deprioritised when something more urgent comes up.
And when it goes quiet for a few months, it rarely comes back.
What does it cost to run a networking club in-house?
The first and biggest cost is the person. You need someone full-time. This isn’t an entry-level hire.
You need someone who can manage the admin, handle event logistics, market and sell the events, and understand what makes the experience work for attendees.
That combination of skills is genuinely hard to find, and it comes at a price.
On top of that you’ve got the event costs themselves.
Catering, materials, marketing, all of it. The costs accumulate quickly, and you’re spending this before you’ve even worked out how to monetise it.
You then need to think; what’s the ticket price? Is it membership-based? What commercial model actually works?
And how do we ensure we’re delivering the best product that’ll actually work?
A club or venue without prior experience of running a networking club won’t know the answers to those questions. That’s not a criticism. It’s just not your area. You’re a sports club or a venue. Running networking events is a different discipline.
Working with us usually comes in at around a quarter of the cost of hiring someone in-house and covering the event costs yourself.
But what I’d always emphasise is that cost isn’t really the main argument. The quality of the product is.
Because the better the events, the better the outcomes for the club. More enquiries. Higher retention. More secondary sales.
The economics look very different when the thing is actually working.
What does the process look like for a venue working with Network My Club?
It starts with a meeting where we get properly aligned on what the club is trying to achieve. Is the priority conference and events? Hospitality? Sponsorship?
Usually it’s a mix, but understanding where the focus is shapes everything that comes after.
Once we’re aligned and have agreed to move forward, we look at the calendar. Our sweet spot is around eight weeks from agreement to the first event. That gives us enough time to set up the first year’s events, which is usually four to five per year, and to run a proper launch campaign.
The launch campaign is important. We don’t just open the doors and announce a first event. We build demand first. We want people excited about the series, not just the one event.
And we want that first event to sell out well in advance, because that first event sets the tone for everything that follows.
Before each event we sit down with the club to plan the day. Is there a guest speaker from the club? Is there a particular area of the venue to showcase? What commercial message makes sense right now?
Then on the day, we run everything. The club doesn’t have to worry about the operations. They can properly network, engage with the room, and use the event to promote whatever’s relevant at that moment.
Our job is to make sure it all works. Their job is to make the most of the room.
What kind of businesses do Network My Club invite and attract to events?
One of the most common mistakes I see clubs and venues make when they run networking events in-house is that they focus on volume.
Open the doors, then fill the room with as many people as possible.
Often that means making it free or low cost to attend. The result is then attracting what I call ‘tyre kickers’. People there for the free hospitality. Meaning the quality of the room doesn’t match the level of engagement the club actually needs.
We take a different approach.
We focus on directors and owners of established businesses in the region. Decision-makers. People who are running companies that have been trading for two or three years or more.
These are the businesses that could potentially use the venue for their own events or client entertainment, or that might look at sponsorship or partnership opportunities.
The right people for the venue and the right people for the room. It’s a win across the board.
The venue is in front of the calibre of people it needs. The attendees are networking with people at a similar level who understand what they’re trying to build. And for us, these are the businesses that tend to go on and join the membership.
Everyone gets more from it because the room is right.
How do key clients and partners at the club or venue benefit from the networking club?
If you’ve got sponsors or partners and the only time they come into your world is on a match day or event day, you’re leaving a lot of value on the table.
A networking club changes that. It gives existing partners and sponsors regular access to your venue, in a professional environment, surrounded by other decision-makers. That’s valuable to them. It strengthens the relationship.
And it’s a genuine benefit that clubs can build into their sponsorship and partnership packages, not just as a line on a proposal but as something people actually use and appreciate.
We work directly with club and venue partners to make sure access to events is set up as simply as possible for their partners and sponsors.
Retention is underestimated in conversations about what a networking club delivers. But in my experience, the business a club or venue can retain through this is equal to, if not greater than, the new business it generates.
I’ve seen it first-hand from the other side of the table, and it’s something we take seriously.
What is the one thing clubs or venues underestimate about doing this in-house?
Consistency.
It’s not just doing an event once. It’s not even doing it twice. The value of a networking club compounds over time.
Attendees come back and bring people they know. Relationships between them all develop.
The club and venue’s presence in the local business community grows. They become increasingly more familiar.
But none of that happens from one event or two. It takes doing this repeatedly, and at a consistent quality.
This requires the expertise to know what you’re doing at each stage, not just for one event.
The clubs and venues that have tried this in-house and seen it fizzle out almost always run into the same wall.
They do one or two events and then the person responsible moves on, or the team gets pulled in other directions, and the momentum just quietly dies.
I’m an example of this at Brighton & Hove Albion FC, when I left, then just over a year later, they outsourced the networking club to Network My Club.
Our model sidesteps that entirely by offering that continuity.
We take on the heavy lifting, keep it moving, allowing the club to stay focused on what it does best.
If a club or venue is on the fence about outsourcing, what would you say?
It depends where they’re starting from.
If you haven’t got something off the ground yet, the first thing I’d say is that there’s an option you probably don’t know exists.
Most clubs default to assuming they have to do this themselves, and then figure it out as they go.
That’s a legitimate route. But before you commit to that, it’s worth understanding what working with a partner actually looks like and what it costs, because the comparison might surprise you.
If you’ve got something running but it’s not quite working, ask yourself: is it profitable on its own terms? Is it generating the secondary sales you hoped for, the enquiries into hospitality, the conversations about sponsorship?
If the answer is no, and it’s taking up a significant amount of time and mental energy, that’s a signal.
You can put that same effort somewhere it’s already working, and outsource the networking club to someone who has built their whole business around making it work.
And if you started something, it had some momentum, and then it just went quiet because the person running it moved on, that’s probably the easiest conversation.
That’s a chance to bring it back properly, with a partner who won’t leave, won’t get pulled onto other projects, and won’t let the energy drop between events.
Whatever stage you’re at, the invitation is the same. Have the conversation, understand how our model works and see if it’s a good fit for your club or venue.
Interested in understanding our model?
Learn about how our model works, how we’re helping clubs and venues across the UK, and see if it’s the right fit for you.