with Kristi Herold | A Deep Dive into the Most Playful Brand on the Planet

You?

Are your customers the kind who politely come and go and sometimes leave you little hearts on social media? Or are they actually obsessed with what you do? The difference between an incredible brand and all the others is how they create fans. Welcome to the Brand to Fan Show, where we unpack the phenomenon of fandom and how to cultivate affinity, loyalty and trust list to build more fans so you can future proof your business. Here's your host, Lauren Teague. Welcome back to the Brand to fan show. I, of course, am your host, Lauren Teague. I was doing some reflecting a couple weeks ago about the things that I enjoyed the most when I was five years old and the things that came to mind to me, two things really instantly came to mind. One, I was always outside doing some sort of play while my parents were working in the yard or on the property. My brother and I always found a way to play outside.

The second, probably to no surprise, who listens to this show. I also remember watching a fair amount of sports for a five or six year old. So both of those things combined no doubt shaped how I moved through my life and how I'm here. Well, today I'd love to introduce you to someone else who loves play. Christy Harold is the CEO of Jam, which is a global business that connects people through play. And it's actually one of the largest rec sports leagues across the world. And now, since 2020 and the Pandemic, jam produced 3500 different corporate team building events in over 30 countries. Christy consults and she speaks on how to move a culture from surviving to thriving.

And she wrote a bestselling book called It Pays to Play. In 2020, she was named as one of Canada's top 100 Most Powerful Women and was a Canadian Woman Entrepreneur Awards finalist in the very same year. So while the rest of us were trying to adjust to a new normal, christy was out there kicking some booty on the field. Christy, it is such a pleasure to have you join the Brand of Fan Show. Welcome, Lauren.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to join you. I've heard many of your episodes and super excited to be oh, that's so, so sweet.

So we're going to have a little fun today. We're going to do a little play in this conversation back and forth. But as you've heard, as you've listened to some of the episodes, I always kind of like to start from that beginning. Right. I talked about one of those things that I love to do when I was little. What is something that you love to do that when you were young or did you have something that you are a fan of from an early age?

I mean, like you, I have always loved to play, and sports was a big one for me. I love to play sports. I've never been much of a fan, believe it or not, of watching sports. I've always just wanted to get out there and be playing them. And I think probably because I had two older brothers, I was constantly trying to keep up with the boys. So my very first taste, I grew up in a small city north of Toronto, and when I grew up in the late 70s, there were no girls sports league. Like, there was no girls soccer. There was not even mixed gender soccer back then.

So my mom signed me up to play in a boys soccer league. My hair was cut short because I wanted to look like my brothers and everyone I told everyone my name was Chris, and I played a full season, and the boys didn't realize I was a girl until I got to the season ending banquet. My mom made me wear a dress, which was horrifying for me at the time. And that's when everyone figured out, oh, my gosh, Chris is a girl. And they invited me back to play a second season. So I was the only girl in this all boys soccer league, playing soccer for two seasons as a seven and eight year old. And that was my first taste of, I think, playing team sports. And I've just loved playing ever since.

Played every high school sport, played intermurrals through high school, and then after university, moving to Toronto, I didn't know a lot of people in the big city, and I thought this would be a fun business to start to help connect people through play. And so I started these adult rec sports leagues back in 1996 in Toronto and didn't have any thought that this would become what it has today. But, yeah, now we're connecting hundreds of thousands of people through playing of adult rec sports. And then, as you said in the pandemic, we pivoted to starting our corporate team building, connecting corporate teams through play with initially just virtual playful events, and now we're doing in person events as well, and then consulting and helping companies make their workplace a little more playful and fun to help with retention and engagement and energy of their employees. So I'm just all about connecting people through play however I can.

It's so fun to think about all the literally millions of lives that have been affected through or impacted through the work that you've done, just bringing this kind of to the world and saying, I'm a connector and we're going to connect through play and through team sports. As I think about it, it's literally I met my husband in an adult rec teague sports thing. He was a great soccer player. I was not a great soccer player. And somehow we ended up on the same team. And I think that first team party that I went to, they introduced me, they brought me into the team party.

Like, come to our end of the.

Season, and we're going to start again in three weeks or something like that. And I was like, great. And I met the guy who I became my husband, my best friend, who became my roommate for a couple of years. I was like, best ROI on a party ever, right? Just because was willing to go kick it around a little bit.

It's so powerful. I joke, but I know there's truth with it that thousands of babies have been born because of the work we do. And millions of lives, like you said, millions of lives have been impacted in a positive way, and it's the ripple effect as well. I really believe that you go out, you play your night of whatever kickball, beach volleyball, basketball, dodgeball, whatever. It happens to be soccer ultimate frisbee. You go out and you play for a night. You meet new friends like you did. Maybe you meet a special someone.

Maybe you network and find a job. No matter what. Even if you just go out and play and have some laughs, you go home feeling happier. You're a happier significant other to whoever you're going home to, or you're a happier daughter or son or a happier parent. You go to work the next day as a happier colleague because you've given that gift to yourself of social play. And we all know the benefits of physical activity. But the Mayo Clinic has done studies that have proven when we combine our physical activity with social like, when we can actually combine it with social sports, the playing of social sports like tennis and basketball and soccer, it adds 20% longevity to our lives because of the powerful mental health component we get from that social connection that we so desperately need. And we all realized, especially during the pandemic, how desperately humans need connection.

So it's a really powerful and to boot, the baby. We've had the babies and the marriages, but then we've had people email me and say, thanks to your leagues, I've lost 100 pounds. Or, thanks to your leagues, I now have a tattoo of your logo on my body because of the we have four people who got our logo tattooed on their bodies because of how powerfully the teague changed their lives. Or I had an email one time from a woman tell us that our leagues saved her life and getting that email, and she explained why, and it was pretty impactful to recognize the work we are doing. It seems light hearted and fun, but the benefit is incredibly powerful.

So you've clearly built a brand that people love, right? Because you following your passion and what you like. And like you said, we study fandom here on the Brand of Fan Show podcast, and there haven't been I don't know if anyone has ever confessed to creating a brand that someone has tattooed on their body. That is a level of commitment and beyond relationship, almost beyond identity that is tattoos are pretty much permanent.

I know I don't have it on my own body, so I love that we've been able to impact people's lives to that extent. It's pretty incredible.

Yeah, it's really fun to think about just the power of team sports and I'm thinking about, as you're saying, like, that physical activity and the social layer of that. Certainly in the pandemic, we had more time at home. But I know that kind of the solo based or the outdoor activities. Not Breck Wigs necessarily, but I know in the golf industry more people went golfing and golf got this huge boost again, because you could be outside, you could be 6ft away from people most of the time. And we had lots more time on our hands. So we know that the golf industry saw a huge boon. I would be willing to think that basketball courts across the countries got a boon and obviously the rise of pickleball as a social activity being outside. So how do you see the trends of this play and this social activity? How do you see that kind of manifesting in a time where things are still kind of hard for us?

How can we turn to play, like.

You said to do that? Where do we find that in our everyday?

That's a great question. You started off today's show talking about thinking back to childhood and how much you love to play. And I think all of us can do that easily. We all can think back to how much we played as kids. It's natural for us to play as kids. Sadly. I think a society makes us believe that when we grow up, we need to stop playing. And the truth is, I'm a big believer in George Bernard Shaw's quote, which is we don't stop playing because we grow old.

We grow old because we stop playing and that we should keep playing. And so I believe, and I think there's studies show that when we were.

Kids, you were excited to go to.

School if you knew you had friends to play with at recess and friends to play with in the classroom, even when you were doing your schoolwork. That doesn't change just because we grow up and we're adults. When we go to work, if we have friends in the workplace, we're far more engaged and excited to go to work to do the work we've been hired to do. Studies have proven that when 60% or more of your employees state that they have a friend, a close friend in the workplace, your business is 12% more profitable. I mean, those are the stats of averages, but that's powerful to think about. And how many people can say confidently, if I look at my team of employees or think of myself at work, that yes, I have a close friend at work, or yes, most of my team would say they have a close friend at work. I know I can say very confidently, well over 60% of my team would say this. And the power of being able to build a business or any organization, any workplace culture where you want to have your team feeling engaged and energized.

It's very easy to do this by finding ways to integrate playfulness into your workday. And a lot of people get confused by that and think, well, we have really important work to do. I get it. So do I. We're running a significantly sized business. I have 40 full time employees, 350 part time employees, we're running in 16 different cities and all over the world. With the corporate side, we're busy, we've got important things to do. However, we can have fun while we're doing it.

So we're not talking about stopping the work so that you can play a game of volleyball in the middle of your workday. We're talking about having the book I wrote is talking about making the work you're doing a little more playful and fun so that you're fostering these friendships inside the workplace. And so I just think that it's important for everyone to remember there are loads of ways to play. Sports may not be the answer for everyone. I know I recognize with the idea of the fan aspect, sports is an easy one to refer to and it's a big part of my business of jam in sports. But we connect people through play in all sorts of different ways and we encourage people to play in all sorts of different ways. You could have a company sports team, but you could also have a company choir or a company rock band, so you're playing music together, you can have a company book club and so you're actually talking about a book you're reading together, which is a playful reading a book is sort of a version of play, right? You get into that flow state where you're absorbing very much in the moment and doing something outside of work. So it's a form of recreation.

You can have virtual events as a team. You can have playful interactions at the beginning of every meeting you do take 3 minutes to sort of have play before production. Just a little connection point where everyone has a little laugh together, lightens the mood and then dive into your work. It's how we communicate with our customers. You can have a little bit of fun with how we communicate. So people go, well, my business is serious. Well, I'd say, look, Southwest Airlines, I'd say they're a pretty serious business. They have people's lives in their hands.

And yet every time you get on an airplane, I don't know about you, but I look forward to hearing the flight attendants announcements because they always make it playful and funny because fun is one of their core values. There's just so many ways to play and have fun in our lives and I think it's important to remember, don't stop just because we're growing up.

Now, Southwest Airlines is a great example because they're literally taking one of the most important messages that they have to communicate with their customers every day, every flight. Right? This is the safety message. Yet they've turned it away from boring, dry, and dull to the thing that people actually probably pay the most attention to of anything in the entire flight process, right? From boarding and ticketing all the way through. That's the part that people look forward to. So they've taken something that is so essential and necessary in their business and not said, oh, this is just another thing we have to do, but have transformed the way that they approach that, and then so their customers approach that. That's a great example.

And then they create fans because of that, right? Because of the way they communicate playfully and have some fun. So we looked at our terms and conditions for our corporate event contracts. Some of our events are $600 events and some of them are $10,000 events or $50,000 events, depending on the size and scope of the event we're producing. They all have a contract. They all have terms and conditions. And those are boring. Nobody likes to read them, but we all have to have them. So what did we do? We took our terms and conditions and we put in Jam English.

It's our interpretation of the legalese, and it's so silly. So, as an example, one of the lines might know it's about intellectual property, and we'll say, Jam English interpretation. We promise not to talk to Ruth in accounting about all of this because Ruth's a big gossip. She tells everyone. It's just making fun of our own legal terms and conditions so people can have a little laugh. And it will create, I believe, bigger fans of our organization when we do that. And every organization can do that. You don't have to be a business that sells Play for a, you know, Southwest Airlines or there's a company I deal with called Proposify.

They do a lot of contracts when they send their invoices out, they have playful banter around it like, no one loves to pay an invoice, but they have a playful way of communicating it to their clients. And so there's a lot of ways, I think we can be having fun with the work we're doing. It's not about stopping what we're doing to play. It's about integrating Play into the everyday to create fans for both your employees and your customers.

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So go to Video and create your first Shareable video on PICTORY AI. That link is video. Now back to brand to fan. Here's. Lauren teague. Yeah, and I know you're doing even more consulting and speaking about this because I'm listening to you and you're giving so many great examples and tips to do that. But is it a full on mindset shift? Do you need permission from the leadership at the top to say, like, hey, I'd like to change the invoice the language around the invoices that we send, but I'm only Ruth in accounting and no one's really going to listen to me. Ruth's not going to go start her own CPA firm because of that.

But how does someone kind of get the buy in from foreplay? Either from the leaders, like, asking their teams to do this, or someone on the team saying, can we try something new? Do you have a suggestion for how someone might try to get the buy in for this?

So yes, I would say it is better when it comes from the top, for sure. When leadership filters that playful energy down and encourages it, it does give a permission, like you say, to everyone to sort of go, oh, we can have some fun with our work. Awesome. I've heard from people who've said, this will never fly at my organization and I sort of jokingly go, well, buy a copy of my book and just leave it on the desk of your CEO. Don't leave a note with it, just leave it. See what happens. Or a little more candidly, say, hey, this is a great book. Look at these ways.

The book is filled with all different tactics and ideas for how to integrate playfulness into the organization and I think practice things right. There's no one right way for every organization has its own unique special sauce for their workplace culture. But when we have a playful, fun workplace culture, the stats prove that there is a huge ROI on having fun at work, because when people have friends there, they're far less likely to be looking for other jobs. They're far more engaged with the work they're doing. So productivity increases, retention stack. Like turnover is a huge, huge expense to any organization. Retention numbers improve when people are more engaged and have friends in the workplace. So there's just so many ways and we can all remember those times where we've been on the phone with a customer service person and you can tell that that person clearly is miserable in the job they're doing.

And you're just like, wow, that was the worst experience ever. Versus we've also all experienced when someone is clearly having fun with the work they do, and how much more engaged are we happier are we as the customer to have had that experience? And then we go and tell people we become fans, and we talk about the experience we had when we had fun, and we become the opposite. We tell people when we've had negative experience and say, stay away, far from a fan. Like, don't go there. So you think about that. Do you want your employees happy and having fun at work so that they're passing that along, that powerful, playful, fun energy to your customers? Or do you want to have the opposite experience? I mean, it's pretty straightforward and pretty easy to understand. The stats are definitely there to back it up. Yeah.

Those stories that your frontline employees can tell or the customers can tell based on their interactions with your employees, those stories either become invitations to join and participate and establish kind of their own someone's connection with that and or like you're saying to take that and say, no, stay away. I've heard bad things about that. It's almost an invitation to not consider what's being offered over there. I think that is really cool. You refer to the book, It's Pays to Play, and it's all about how play can improve business culture. I'm curious, do you have a true, concrete example of a business that did get the buy in or the leadership that did get the buy in and they saw that dramatic impact on productivity, on retention, or even on profit?

I have a lot of case studies in the book where organizations that are bought into making their clients of ours and that they've been know number one best place to work. Like, Glassman Wealth is a great example of a wealth management firm based in Washington, DC. I think they've been number one ranked place to work in Washington five years in a row. What do you think that does? When you try to recruit talent, it helps immensely, right. If you're ranked number one best place to work in Washington DC. And the way they do it is they're constantly having fun with the way they work. They're constantly integrating playfulness, they get important work done, and they're running. I mean, they're taking care of people's investments like it's important business, but they manage to have a lot of fun and they play along the way, and so people don't want to leave.

And it's easy to recruit new employees to come in, and it's incredibly costly. Like, retention is huge, huge expense. It costs between 50 and 150% of someone's salary. So you think about every time you have to replace them, think about 100 person team. If your average salary is $50,000, that turnover at 15%. I mean, it's millions of dollars that you're wasting on loss of employees. Like, that turnover. So a little focus on playful and fun culture costs a lot less than that, and the impact is massive.

What I'm not hearing you say is that the companies that maybe 20 years ago were being lauded for, they have ping pong tables in their office, or they offer, like, beer on tap or they have milkshake Fridays. We've moved past that. Is that even considered a perk anymore? Especially in a society now that actually doesn't want to go to the office? How do you have fun on Zoom? How do you have fun as a remote team?

Oh, so many good questions. So, first of all, I talk about ping pong table in my book, and we have a ping pong table at our office. And I have said if you have a ping pong table that has an inch of dust on it, that is virtue signaling you're not a fun place to work. Just because you have a ping pong table sitting there collecting dust does not make for fun, playful workplace culture. If you use the ping pong table every so often at my office, it'll be a Wednesday afternoon at 03:00, and you'll hear someone yell, around the world. And everyone runs to the kitchen. And a big game, you'll have 2030 people running around the ping pong table playing around the world. Everyone gets one hit, and you get one life.

And if you miss the ball, you're out until there's eventually just two people left. It's a hilarious, fun game. But that ping pong table is getting used. People are really playing on it. It's a ten minute recess break that they take from their desks, and they go back and they're energized. So that sort of to speak to your first question. Those Gooseball tables and ping pong tables and those kinds of perks are fantastic if they are used, but not if not. To your second point, how do we have fun when people don't even want to go into the office? So this is where oh, my goodness, I could speak on this.

And there's so many different ways to take this. One idea is having a company sports team, which, by the way, there are corporate sports sorry, not corporate sports leagues. There are adult recreational sports leagues in every city across North America. They exist all over the place. So wherever you have the hub for your organization, maybe people aren't coming into the office anymore. But if you have a Wednesday night beach volleyball team or a Monday night kickball team or a Thursday night softball team and you offer this up, it's not forced. No one likes forced fun. But you put it as an option, and people can sign up for a team that you're paying for.

And you're providing company jerseys. So you're getting some branding out there. You're having your people connect in person, maybe not at the office, but they're connecting one day a week to have some laughs, to play together. They're strengthening friendships. They're getting to know each other. Ruth from accounting is getting to know tom from marketing is getting to know Steve from HR, getting to know Tina from the Dev department, right? And otherwise they're working in Silos and they don't get to know each other. So that fosters friendships. It's a really powerful way to do that.

Secondly, you can have a lot of fun. As I touched on earlier, sports isn't for everybody, but there are loads of ways. Have a lunch and laugh once a month instead of a lunch and learn. Do a virtual lunch and laugh. Hire an organization like Jam or there are loads of organizations like ours out there. So I'm not just like just get a fun, playful event happening virtually. And again, make it optional. No one likes forced fun.

Make it optional and have some prizes to encourage participation. And have a virtual escape room or virtual trivia. Or a lot of our clients will do monthly events. They set up teams and they have like an office Olympics. So they're competing every month for this virtual, playful Olympics and it's a 45 minutes to an hour lunch and laugh and they're playing. It could be a scavenger hunt, escape room, a game show like Jeopardy or Survey Says. Survey says is our version of Family Feud amazing Races. There's all sorts of different things that can be done virtually.

There are also options to combine for those organizations that have some people in person and some working remotely. You can play and have some laughs together in a hybrid format. The bottom line is it's really important to put that time aside and offer that out there because when we do that, it just has your whole team feeling a lot happier and more engaged and it doesn't have to be in person. There are ways to do it virtually.

Some people might say that I just want the four day work week, right? I don't want to spend any more time at work. It's not that fun to be here. And even if I enjoy or I have some friends, I would rather have a whole day to myself.

Do you see.

The next technological revolution with AI? And things also impacting how much time we're going to spend at work? And then does that impact how much time is available to, quote unquote, to play and kind of put these things into place?

So I've looked a little bit at the four day work week for my own organization, but we haven't dug too deeply into it. And I'm not super up on AI, I'll be honest with you. So I'm not sure that I'd be the best person to speak to that. I do believe. I'm not a believer in FaceTime just for the sake of FaceTime. I see a lot of organizations that are forcing their teens to come back to the office, and I think you're going to lose great talent if you force people to come back that don't want to. And I really strongly believe there are ways to stay connected. And have a cohesive culture working remotely.

So another example that I haven't shared yet, and this is something we speak to with our consulting. Having a daily huddle can be really powerful. So this is something we have a seven minute huddle every day happens at 01:00 Eastern. So that when we have teams on the West Coast. I have some of my teammates that are living in Europe. They can all jump on that 01:00 Eastern time, and it's seven minute. It's a mandatory meeting. Cameras are on.

Anyone who's in our head office, which is in Toronto comes into the boardroom. If you're working from Palm that day, no worries, just jump on the zoom. And the huddle is the exact same agenda every day. Every single person in the organization takes a turn from C suite to interns, takes a turn leading huddle, and it's a rotating schedule, so you always know when it's coming up. You always start huddle with good news. So whoever huddle host is starts with their own good news, can be a personal good news, could be a work win, and then they do a call out asking for other good news, and then there's a couple of clear agenda items that we cover off every day. Departmental updates. Every single day of the week is a different department update.

And then we always wrap up with Leaders Choice. And Leader's Choice is some kind of playful fun, whatever the leader wants it to be. Some leaders might suggest the Huddle host might say, I'd encourage everyone to get outside and go for a 15 minutes walk today. Someone else might say, I want to encourage everyone to pick up the phone and call someone you haven't spoken to in six months, or call someone you're thankful for and tell them how much you care about them. Or someone else might say, I'm posting a picture of myself in my favorite Halloween costume from when I was a six year old. I want to see everyone's a photo in the Slack channel of your favorite Halloween costume or a picture of you from your first sports team. It's so creative. Every day is different.

The point is, it's a little bit of a playful side to you get to see a human side to every leader. You get to see everyone as huddle hosts, so you get to know everyone on a little more personal level. And that's a really powerful, playful way to actually get important information across and a human connection. Even though it's through zoom, you get to know each other as people. So it's a really powerful little thing to do that doesn't cost a lot to do. So that's a really powerful way to stay connected as well.

I think that's fabulous. And you gave so many examples of just what you could implement in that piece and having kind of that structure of like, you have a large organization and you still have a seven minute meeting, right? You have the discipline to keep it, that it's not stretching and you're not letting people interrupt and you set the rules for the meeting, yet it's a time where people actually don't want to miss it, right, because it's the time that you connect.

I think it's quite a fun meeting. People look forward to it and we, of course, have always said it's mandatory, unless if you have another meeting that is more critical, we understand because it does happen every day. But for the most part, I would say we get 97% of our team showing up every single day. And it's great touch points, great information gets cascaded out and it's a lot of little playful touch points as well. Always some laughs. So it's a really easy thing to do. Shout out channel is another thing that every organization could have on their slack or their MST chat where you're playfully shouting out great work being done, celebrating your teammates in your office for the great work that they're doing. You're being a fan of your teammates at work and highlighting them, showing a little highlight reveal of this is something that this person did today and I want everyone to hear about it.

And it's really powerful because I don't see the great work that's going on at every aspect of the organization. But I love reading the little highlight reels about the things that are being done so I can give someone else a pat on the back and say, hey, Veronica, that's amazing that you did that yesterday. I love that you did that. And also another little thing that happens at Huddle, which I love, is we have a corporate department update one day and we have a sports update one day and we always get the customer service team will read a customer. I'm a big believer that customers make the best copywriters as fans, right? So we share with our team who doesn't always know, they don't always get like the accounting team doesn't always get, they don't hear about what we're doing. And so it brings home when they hear something a customer has said from either the sports side or the corporate event side, it's really powerful to go, wow, we're really positively impacting people's lives. And it's great to share that with the people on our team so they can see what their hard work, the results of their hard work in the voice of our customers.

You're listening to Brand to fan with Lauren Teague. More after this. As you're out in the world listening to the Brand of Fan show, look up and start to count the number of team hats, t shirts, pullovers and jerseys. You see, once you start to see them, sports logos and team colors are seemingly everywhere. Well, this is exactly why I decided to build Fan Wagon, the web's recommerce marketplace for buying, discovering and reselling your sports FanWear, be it vintage or just last season's, Jersey Fanwagon aims to serve both buyers and sellers at the intersection of sustainability and fandom and create a personalized and easy experience for second fan fashion. I'd love for you to go check it out today@fanwagn.com. That's Fanwagon.com. I'll see you there.

Now back to brand to fan. Here's. Lauren teague. Let's talk about your customers for a second, if that's okay, because Jam is, like we said, one of the largest adult rec sports league bodies in all of North America. But you weren't always that way. You've grown this business from your very first few leagues in 96. So how did you approach kind of scaling and having that growth and still keeping the heartbeat of fun in play, both at the center of your employee experience and your customer experience? Did they notice that anything changed? People who have been playing with you for 20 plus years?

So when I started the organization in 96, we were initially called the Toronto Sport and Social Club. We actually rebranded to Jam during the Pandemic, believe it or not, in 2021. And I did it for a couple of strategic reasons. But in 1996, sort of from the get go, we didn't want to spend a lot of money on advertising. So we wanted to just deliver great service because we felt like word of mouth would be the best form of advertising. I didn't have a lot of money when I first started. It was just me, and I just thought, I'll just deliver great service and hopefully people will tell their friends about us. And that's what happened.

Whenever I could get a new facility to offer new sports leagues, we could fill it up through word of mouth. So for many, many years, didn't actually really work on building a brand. In hindsight, I sort of kicked myself because I realized 20 years in, people didn't even necessarily know they played with Sport and Social club. They knew they played on this Tuesday night soccer, but they weren't wearing shirts that said anything. I didn't build a brand per se. I built an experience. I built a service that people would tell their friends about, but they didn't even know my name. So in 2021, when we rebranded, I was very much more intentional about building the brand.

And actually, now all of our players wear shirts. They Jam. And I want people it makes me so happy when I see I was on an airplane going to Costa Rica last winter, and there's a Jam T shirt on the airplane. I was like, oh, my gosh, that's so exciting. Like, seeing our brand out there in the world is so fun. And so whenever I see a shirt walking down the street makes me so but and we are trying to continue, obviously, with the good service, because word of mouth is so powerful. When you have fans, they are your best form of advertising, right? So I'm a huge believer in service as well now, trying to tie it to the brand of Jam as we have, I feel like it's just a new opportunity to sort of reinvent ourselves. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think you did.

It's interesting to think, like, oh, you probably started out and you're like, I just need to get to the next six months. I just need to get to the next season. Right. And like you said, that word of mouth growth. The people who had that experience with you, with themselves, right. They're building community with themselves, and things grew organically. And so it is interesting to think this kind of scaled on its own as a founder, as the best way possible.

Right.

You got to just meet the demand as it grows. And then when you saw the opportunities to pivot or to change or they were kind of forced down your throat by the pandemic right. Then you were ready to take advantage of it and turn it into lots of other things.

Exactly. Yeah. And we realized, I think as we decided we really wanted to grow and become a much bigger organization. And around 2016, 2017, I sort of created a vision of wanting to get a million people playing every year. Then I realized, okay, we do actually need to advertise and we do need to market. And that's why the sort of the bread kind of developing more of a brand awareness became important. But I still am a huge believer that word of mouth is the best way forward. Right.

That people that are fans of your service are going to tell their friends, like, hey, I'm playing in this Jam soccer league on Tuesday night. You should come and play with us. Let's put in TV in next season, or whatever. So that's a really powerful and people who have a great corporate team building experience. So if they share it on social media and another company sees like, oh, look at that fun Amazing Race they just did. We want to do Amazing Race with our company. That's word of mouth, that's customers being the best copywriters. Right.

So that's exactly sort of to your brand to fan, fan to brand, either way.

It is, exactly that right. It starts with that invitation, which is the story that's built on the experience or the interaction, and it inspires someone else to try it out. Right. It's just will you try it? Sure, I guess. So all of a sudden, now you participate for a few seasons or whatever. Now you're the captain of a team. Now you're organizing your own team. Now you've met someone that you're going to spend your life with.

Now you're having babies. Now you're tattooing your babies.

Unfortunately, what tends to happen is people have babies and then they stop playing. But that's okay. That's our life cycle. We capture them in their early 20s when they've graduated from college, university. They start playing, they meet that significant other that have babies and then they come back after their babies have grown up a little bit. Or now that we're offering things like pickleball and cortical, there's opportunity to get even older people playing now, which is awesome, too.

Yeah. My husband and I are finally in a stage where our youngest is now six, and he's probably going to end up being the best pickleball player in the family because he started so little and we've only been playing for a handful of months. But it's something our whole family can do together or enjoy. And our friends down the street, they come up and they bring their kids, and the kids are now accustomed to playing at the playground after dark because the lights are still on on the courts. And so we'll get our time into so many of the benefits about just social and play and keeping you healthier and keeping you those attitudes. I would much rather go play and get my butt kicked in pickleball than hop on the peloton bike and get my butt kicked there.

Totally. Yeah, totally makes sense.

Yeah. So, Christy, what's on the horizon? What's coming up next for Jam and for you? You're on this mission to promote play and connection through play and how that translates into a healthy organizational culture. So how are you looking to do that next?

Well, we've been doing I've been acquiring sports leagues in a bunch of different cities. I had done a whole bunch. I think I'd done eight or nine acquisitions pre Pandemic, and I had two in the works. Right when the Pandemic hit, we were in due diligence and would have almost doubled the size of the organization. And then when the Pandemic hit, the mandates in Canada were really harsh. We lost 18 months of revenue, so we were shut down for quite a while. So we're only now now I'm ecstatic to share that this past spring and summer was our biggest spring and summer season ever. Our current fall season is our biggest fall season ever.

We've got an acquisition in the works that should close at the end of this month and a few others in the pipeline. So working to continue to grow the sports side of the business through acquisitions, as well as trying to grow the corporate side of the business, we're doing in person events, hybrid events and virtual events, helping companies connect through play. Whether it's a team of ten people or a conference for 500 people, we can bring playful, fun events virtually and in person to people. So loving doing that. Like sort of seeing this whole new I tell people I feel like I have a 27 year old that just got off of two years of life support, and I have this three year old toddler now that keeps changing its mind about what it wants to do. And so the newest thing that the corporate side of the business this B to B business that we've built is actually consulting. Now. I've had so many people reaching out and say, I've read your book and I want to understand better.

How do we integrate play into the workplace? And so we're starting to develop some coaching opportunities to help companies, as you touched on earlier, go from surviving to thriving. You've got a good workplace, but maybe you're not having a ton of laughs at the workplace. Maybe people don't think each other as friends. That's where Jam can really help create foster friendships inside the workplace to make it I'm referring to it as workplace culture. So put the word PL a y as opposed to workplace. It's a workplace culture and have a little bit of work, a little bit of play and really foster friendships in there, make it a better place for everybody and a better bottom line for the company when they support and engage with that kind of playful mentality. So just sort of trying to do a lot of that and I'm trying to do a lot more speaking as well. I'm loving getting on stages and delivering keynotes around the power of play because I'm just so passionate about it.

I don't know if you could tell, but I could talk about it for days. And I just love the idea of helping connect people to have some laughs and have some fun because life, if you don't laugh, what's the point? We got to be loving life, love the work you're doing. We spend a lot of time doing the work we do, so why not have fun doing it?

You have convinced me. I could also sit and talk to you probably all day long about this, but I think we'd probably both rather be outside throwing a softball or kicking a soccer ball or that kind of thing while we do it. Or maybe I'll meet you on the.

Golf course if you have a golf as well.

But as we wrap up here, christy just wanted to ask you the same questions we ask all of our guests here on the Brand of Fan show. And the first one is, do you have a shout out for a brand or an experience that made you a.

I have I would say three. One is Savannah Bananas, which I heard other guests I heard one of your guests on Tight talking about Savannah Bananas on the show. And Jesse Cole is a friend of mine and I got to know Jesse before Savannah Bananas really sort of took off to where it's gone now. And I'm so ecstatic for Jesse and Emily to see what they've created because honestly, where they was, they trod a hard, hard road. That overnight success. It was not overnight. They have worked really hard. And their mentality, their fan first mentality is just incredibly powerful.

They put their fans first. They're all about creating a fun fan experience and having gotten to experience a game with Jesse last summer was just such a highlight. I love what they're doing and I'm so inspired by their work. And then Peloton you talked about I mean, I love my Peloton. I hate spin classes and I was kind of surprised myself when I decided to buy a peloton. But I love it so much. I love Jen Sherman and her energy, the music she plays, like she's my favorite, or Cody, like he cracks me up. The way they chirp at you when you're on your back.

So they're making working out fun for me. And lastly, one that I love, I was introduced to the Morning Brew, which is a newsletter, a business newsletter. I started reading it, I think it was like 20, it was probably February of 2020. I have read it probably 97% of the mornings since that time. I love it because it makes me laugh, and anything that makes me laugh, I'm going to be a fan of. I just love to laugh. So at Jam, our corporate event business, we have a laughter guarantee. If you don't laugh with your team when you play an event with us, you're going to get your money back.

And thankfully, we've never had to give anyone their money back, but that guarantee is there. So I just love being made to laugh. And so I love that I can get my news from The Morning Brew with a little dose of laughter each morning. So those are going to be some brands I'm a big fan of.

What a strong statement to just put out into the world. We guarantee you're going to have fun if you give us a chance, if you engage with us and you really make the effort. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had that experience with all the things that we from our accountants to all the services and the products that we encounter, I think there's so many opportunities, like you said, to make the world more fun. I know one of these. The next question is, what is your favorite piece of fanware? And you told me a little bit about it earlier, so I'm so excited for you to share this part because it really, I think, pulls all of this together.

So my favorite fan wear, because I did tell you, I mean, I am honestly not I do not sit and watch professional sports, except I watch tennis and I watch Ultimate Frisbee because my son is a very high level Ultimate Frisbee player. So I love those two sports. But aside from that, I don't sit and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Toronto Blue Jays. So my biggest fan, my favorite piece of fan wear would be my Jam hockey jersey, which originally was a sport and social club hockey jersey. But what we do is when our teammates who work at our organization, when you've worked with us for a year, you become a veteran you get officially drafted to the team, and you get your Jam veterans jersey. So it's a hockey jersey because we're Canadian, you get a hockey jersey. The Jam logo is on the front, your name is on the back, and your number is the year that you started working with us. So my Jam jersey is a 96 because I started the company in 1996.

There's a 97 on the team, my business partner, and there's a 99 on the team, my other business partner. The rest of them are all in the 2000s. But I just love when we all get our jerseys on and rookies on the team get their Jam hoodie when they start with us. And so it's really fun for them when they become veterans to get their Jam jersey. And everyone really loves having their Jam jersey. I love seeing it behind people's desks in our zoom calls. They hang it up in their office, their home offices, or they have it on their chair at the head office. So it's just a fun piece of swag that I'm very definitely emotionally attached to.

It's so cool. It is such a cool thing to think about, like that physical memento and that story behind how somebody can talk about that. They love the company so much, they literally do put it on their back right as part of the jersey. So, obviously, I'm a huge fan of that kind of engagement and that kind of token for that. I will make sure that no GM jerseys get through fan wagon, though. We don't want people.

We want people sticking around at Jam and continuing to play and work with us and help get more people playing, for sure. Awesome.

Christy, it has been such a pleasure to have you today on Brandy fan Show. We've reached the moment where this is the too long.

Didn't listen.

So someone who's listening on a US speed or they've learned to kind of fast forward to the end. To hear some of my favorite takeaways from today's episode, you can stop right here. Here we go. Christy Harold always loved to play. Sports were her favorite, but not in the watching kind. Always in the playing kind. So much so that she once joined a Boys league soccer team and played for two seasons as Chris with super short hair. Play has always been part of your life, so it's natural that you used your superpowers as a connector to start these adult rec sports leagues in Toronto in 1996, and things were going really swimmingly well until 2020 for all of us.

But you pivoted and created a corporate program for corporate workplace engagement and rebranded to Jam as a result of all of your efforts, you know, of four tattoos and thousands of babies that have been born through people who have connected in playing rec adult sports. And you talk about how the gift of social play actually results in happier people, both at home and at work. We talked a little bit about how to integrate play into your workday from.

The comFORTY culture side.

And I love the point that you made that sports may not be the answer for everyone because there are lots of ways to play. And specifically, you called out choir or rock band or a book club or a lunch and laugh virtual event that are optional always because no one likes forced fun. I'm going to definitely make that one one of your quote graphics. We talked about how play is a connection point and it's okay to have a little fun about how you communicate, especially externally, to your customers and your clients. We called out Southwest Airlines as a company who takes their most important message and makes it fun, and they've dedicated that space for that and also how you take your T's and C's for your corporate events and add a little fun there too. Just to illustrate that we don't always have to be doing super serious business. I asked you how to get buy in, right? And you definitely talked about how productivity increases, retention improves, and it's a better investment to make in your teams to have fun and encourage play, rather to replace employees time and time again. But the warning of if you have a ping pong table that has an inch of dust on it, that's just virtue signaling.

So you must put time aside to allow your team to play. You talked about things that you do at Jam, like the mandatory daily huddle and the jerseys that your team has as examples of how to just keep the workplace fun, people engaged and, yeah, a little bit entertained there. We're looking forward to following GM and seeing what's next as you acquire sports leagues across.

Please, please come to Oregon and continuing.

To building on some of your biggest seasons ever in spring, summer and fall. Thank you so much, Christy Herold, for joining us on the Brand Fan show. It's been like we got this play back and forth in our conversation today.

Yeah, super fun. And Lauren, I did want to say if any of your listeners would like to learn a little bit more, get some tactical ideas how to integrate play into the workplace, I have a free playbook PDF for them that they can get from Christyherald Combrandtwanshow. So Christyherald Combrandofanshow. And there is a 25% savings there for them for a corporate team building event, a Jam event, if they'd like to try a Jam event, or if they're in one of the cities where we run our sports leagues to put that towards a corporate team. So would love to offer that out there for your listeners. I just want to say huge thanks for having me and I hope you will keep playing.

Yes, ma'am, I absolutely will. We'll definitely put that into the show notes and into the email for this episode. So everybody can get a copy of Ten Ways to Integrate Play at work. I think what you're doing is tremendous and I think as a founder myself, thinking about company culture, I have taken so much away from that which I would love to put into place when it's more than just me working on Bandwagon day in. And I think starting from the beginning, you've given so many great tips and tools. Get the book. If you want to read more from Christy, go to christyherald.com and grab the Playbook PDF. She is Christy Harold and I am Lauren Teague.

And this has been another episode of the Brand of Fan show. We'll see you next week. Thanks again for tuning into this episode of The Brand of Fan Show. I'm your host Lauren Teague, marketing speaker, strategist and the founder of Bandwagon. You know it means a lot to me to spend this time with you, so if you like what you're hearing, I'd love if you could drop me a note at brandtofan@teague.com or message me on Instagram where I'm also teague. If these Brand of Fan conversations resonate with you and you'd like to share this message with your audience, go to laurentigue.com to find out how I guide businesses and associations to stop chasing shiny objects and instead build for lasting affinity. Brand to Fan show is produced by Teague FC and supported by Fan. Wagon audio production is done by Brian Griggs and video editing done by Garrett Teague.

Our producers are kimberly Voorhees, Ashley Ruiz and Carrie Hobush. You can catch up on past episodes and guests and access bonus content by visiting brandtofan show.