Most sports businesses are still operating like it's 2019. The competitors who move first will compound their advantage every quarter the others delay. Here's the playbook for moving first — and how I help you ship it.
Sports — and especially youth sports and children's activity — is one of the last large sectors still substantially operating on 2019 playbooks. Email-and-spreadsheet ops. Front-desk staff catching inbound during coaching hours. Founder-driven content posted whenever there's a window. Marketing built bespoke per business, agency-by-agency, with nothing that compounds across a portfolio.
None of that is wrong. It's how the sector got here. But it's also why the next two years are going to feel discontinuous.
The businesses that move first on AI aren't winning by automating away their humans. They're winning by doing the same operational work with a fraction of the drag — capturing every inbound, qualifying leads in seconds, producing content at the volume their audiences actually want, and freeing their best people to do the high-judgement work only humans can do.
That's the thesis. The harder problem is how to act on it without falling into the two traps that catch most teams: pilot purgatory (six months of demos and proofs-of-concept that never reach production), and vendor theatre (paying for AI features that look impressive in a sales call and disappear by month three).
What I do, and what this page lays out, is a method for getting past both. Diagnose where AI moves the needle for your specific business. Architect a sequence that ships something real in weeks, not quarters. Build the deployments alongside your team — so they actually own them at the end. Then keep compounding.
The work is sector-specific because generic AI advice is everywhere and worth nothing. What's worth something is knowing where the bodies are buried in a youth sports ops stack, how a vertical SaaS founder's roadmap actually gets unblocked, where a PE-backed services business loses margin to operational drag, and what AI actually does about each of those. That's the work.
The 24/7 inbound capture system most sports businesses are quietly missing.
Missed calls when staff are coaching. Slow weekend email responses. Manual lead qualification eating front-desk hours. The conversion leakage that quietly suppresses every revenue forecast.
Voice agent personality and prompts tuned to your brand and pricing. Qualification logic. Calendar and CRM integrations. Escalation rules. Transcript capture, dashboards, and continuous-improvement training data.
Zero missed inbound. 24/7 lead capture across phone, SMS, WhatsApp, social DM, and web chat. Faster speed-to-trial. Coaching and admin hours reclaimed for actual coaching and admin.
Systematic content production for founders who can't post consistently — built around your voice, not against it.
Founder-bottleneck content (you film when there's time, post when you remember, then disappear). Agency-driven content that doesn't sound like you. The credibility cost of going dark for two months at a time.
Content category framework specific to your business. AI-assisted ideation and scriptwriting workflows. Format-specific templates for Shorts, Reels, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Distribution calendars. Analytics and iteration loops.
50+ scripts produced and published per month. Sustained presence across 3–5 channels. Founder time spent on filming and judgement only — not on the blank-page paralysis that kills most content systems.
Bespoke AI assistants embedded into operating businesses, products, and member experiences.
Scattered ChatGPT use across the team with no consistency. Tribal knowledge trapped in senior heads. Generic AI features that don't differentiate. The missed product opportunity of an AI add-on you could be charging members for.
Specialised prompt and tool architectures. Knowledge bases drawn from your real content and SOPs. Conversation flows mapped to user intent. Deployment surfaces (web, app, Slack, email). Evaluation and iteration loops.
Differentiated product features that retain members and lift NPS. Internal AI tools that 5x specific operational workflows. Defensible AI assets competitors can't quickly replicate or commoditise.
The end-to-end automation stack for active acquirers, fundraising founders, and outbound sales operators.
Bandwidth-limited deal teams. Generic cold email that gets filtered before it's read. Slow qualification cycles. CRM data that's three weeks out of date the moment it's entered.
Enrichment workflows pulling signal from web, social, financial filings, and news. Personalisation engines that read like a human wrote them. Multi-thread cadence management. Reply parsing and routing. Pipeline scoring. On-demand founder and exec dossiers.
10x outreach volume at higher response rates. Qualification cycles compressed from weeks to days. Deal team time redirected to relationship work and judgement calls. Pipeline data that's actually current.
A cross-portfolio marketing framework that makes new acquisitions productive on day 30 — not month 6.
Bespoke marketing per business eating budget every time. Agency dependencies that don't compound across the portfolio. Slow GTM on every new acquisition. Founder-driven marketing that breaks the moment the founder steps back.
Brand and positioning playbook templates. Content production stack with templates, tools, and prompts. Distribution calendar templates. Attribution and reporting dashboards. Onboarding sequences for new portfolio companies.
New acquisitions onboarded to a working marketing engine within 30 days. Consistent brand language across the group. Lower CAC across the portfolio. Agency spend redirected to high-leverage strategic work.
An immersive, AR-driven youth sports media platform building next-generation viewing and engagement experiences for parents, players, and clubs. Engagement covers AI roadmap architecture, content engine deployment, and Claude-powered features integrated directly into the core product layer.
A multi-location US youth soccer school capturing inbound demand 24/7 and modernising lead-to-trial conversion across high-volume seasonal cycles. Multichannel AI voice and messaging deployed across phone, SMS, and web — qualification and trial booking automated end-to-end.
A US youth dance startup scaling from zero. Engagement focused on the Marketing OS — positioning, content production, distribution calendar, and AI-augmented creative workflows that let a small founding team punch well above its weight on output and consistency.
A youth sports media network producing podcast and short-form video content at scale across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Engagement covers content engine architecture, AI-assisted scriptwriting and distribution workflows, and a custom Claude-based research assistant for episode prep.
A done-for-you marketing agency serving youth-focused businesses across sport, fitness, and education. The Marketing OS deployed as the agency's productisation backbone, plus multichannel AI voice and messaging running both as an internal ops tool and as a deliverable feature for the agency's own client portfolio.
Discovery calls are 30 minutes. No pitch deck. We talk through what you're trying to do, where you think AI fits, and whether one of the engagement formats above is the right shape for the work. If it's not, I'll say so — and where possible point you toward someone who is.