Executive Summary – 2024 to 2029

The Bob Mann Basketball Academy (BMBA) is a business that I founded in 2016. I decided to embark on this business after I had built two basketball associations from the ground up over a twenty-six year period, only to be frustrated from them reaching their full potential through internal politics. Through that experience of building and developing basketball associations, I have developed innovative ideas and concepts on how to operate Basketball Stadiums and their competitions in a unique and efficient business manner. These concepts deliver product quality to users while returning a generous profit when a stadiums capacity begins to fill and is ultimately reached.

About the BMBA.

Through my time in basketball (34 years) I’ve decided that the only way for me to build a basketball program to its fullest potential is to go through the private business route. Through doing this, I can have full control of developing and building my vision for the basketball program and it participants.

A part of that vision is to establish a Basketball Stadium that conducts these unique basketball programs and competitions that no other Association offers. This stadium and the basketball programs that we will deliver with it will provide the following –

1) Programs and competitions that cater for all standards.

2) Competitions that provide longer game times, better officiating and professional and independent coaching, all for similar costs compared to other Associations.

3) A representative program that not only builds better players but mentors those youngsters to be better people and citizens

4) Within the stadium, we will create an environment that inspires not only our players but every person that enters it.

Through this business plan, we intend to demonstrate how we will deliver these programs, how we can build the usage of the stadium towards it’s capacity and how it can generate profits year in and year out when it does reach that capacity.

Our goal is to develop high-standard junior domestic competitions and from those competitions elite-level junior representative teams. We intend to do this by establishing feeder programs for the BMBA via primary schools that facilitate a stadium that the BMBA manages and controls. We have identified several regions with adequate primary schools and demographics exist to develop these BMBA feeder programs and in achieving this, it will ensure our ability to finance and develop our own facility.

The key component to this vision is the Basketball Stadium itself.

Investors and community benefits.

We have compiled this business plan to attract investors for this stadium project, where we can either build our own stadium from the ground up or lease an appropriately sized warehouse to convert into a stadium.

Once a plan is established for a stadium we also believe that we will be able to recruit businesses, companies and individuals who are motivated to be involved in something like this because of the benefits that it will generate for the communities that they are involved in, especially for our youth.

These benefits to the community will include:

♦ Provision of a positive recreation for our youth, which is especially important after the COVID-19 years.

♦ Provision of a positive recreation also for our adult population.

♦ The ability to keep kids off the streets, and to help motivate them to stay away from drugs and alcohol.

♦ The ability to help in the fight against childhood obesity which is becoming an epidemic in our society.

♦ Leadership opportunities for our youth and adult members.

♦ Employment opportunities, especially for our young.

♦ Bringing the community together in a positive and cooperative way.

♦ The ability to teach participants the benefits of healthy competition and trying to excel in it.

♦ The provision of opportunities for elite athletes closer to home.

♦ Pride in the community via the accomplishments of our representative basketball teams when they compete at the elite levels.

♦ The provision of support structures for families in times of crisis and need because of the friendships and relationships they promote through their

families’ involvement in our BMBA competitions and programs.

About me

I have had 30 years of experience in building Basketball Associations from the ground up. Most notably the work I did in building both the McKinnon Basketball and Oakleigh Basketball Associations. At the McKinnon Basketball Association, I took five boys who were using my backyard in 1990 as a basketball court and turned it into a professionally run association that competed at the most elite levels of the sport. This was completed within ten years of forming my first team on a part-time basis. The McKinnon Basketball Association now operates out of fourteen courts and employs a significant amount of full-time and part-time staff while servicing thousands of particiants.

During my time at the Oakleigh Basketball Association what we achieved was even more impressive than what we had accomplished at McKinnon. Even more impressively we did it in half the time. At Oakleigh, we inherited an Association on the verge of collapse and within six years we had grown its membership from zero to over five hundred members. We achieved this by winning an expression of interest process for a modern three-court stadium through the City of Glen Eira. Through this stadium, we developed domestic competitions and programs unique to basketball that developed and built teams and competitions season on season and year on year.

From those competitions and programs, we built an elite representative program that saw six junior teams over five years reach Victoria’s top level of competition, the elite Victorian Championship division. Three of those teams ranked in the top ten teams in the state. As far as I know, no other Association had achieved this so quickly.

Sadly, at both Associations internal politics and interference from the sports governing body stopped me from realising my ultimate vision for the sport that I have dedicated most of my adult life towards. It is now my ambition that through the BMBA and this stadium project to finally realise this vision to develop a stadium that enshrines the best basketball program in Melbourne. Once established I fully intend to outdo what I achieved at both the McKinnon and Oakleigh Associations and in a quicker timeframe. Just as importantly I want to establish a structure that cannot be interfered with by internal or external influences.

With my thirty years of experience, I have a great network of people to recruit staff that will ensure our BMBA programs and competitions are high quality and administered and run professionally. More importantly, they will be conducted by people with the necessary basketball experience and passion required for their roles.

Summary

Finally, the BMBA needs to raise substantial funds to be able to obtain the finance for the implementation of the stadium project.

On top of the stadium development we will need to recruit an administration and development staff that will develop domestic competitions both senior and junior that will be able to fill the stadium to its capacity so it can run at a substantial profit as early as possible. To establish this we are seeking an investor or group of investors to help us finance this stadium project secure in the knowledge that they will see a return on their investment.

Once achieved, the BMBA will not only secure a facility, but a venue it can call its own and one that will ensure its future as an organisation that will serve its community and provide opportunities for our youth with pathways to reach their potential, the development of friendship groups and the motivation to go on and achieve significant things with their lives.

We hope you can also see our vision and decide to become a part of this initiative to help us make our communities better, help us mentor and inspire our youth, and help us establish an organisation that serves our communities long after we’re gone.