Today’s guest op-ed is from Phil Andrews, Chief Executive Officer of USA Fencing.
We all know the thrills of sports.
For USA Fencing, that included upsetting Italy in the gold medal final of Women’s Team Foil, a moment characterized by “sticking to a strategy.”
We subbed in rookie Maia Weintraub for two-time Olympian Jackie Dubrovich in a pivotal moment. That’s a bit like subbing in a young high draft pick for your top forward in the NHL with the game on the line. It was a strategic move against a team we knew the data on, and we had invested in the analysis needed to know that was THE move Coach Ralf Bissdorf needed to make.
This moment in sport is what we live for—an evening that will live on in the memory of every fencer in the USA and beyond for a lifetime.
But how do we manufacture that kind of moment off the fencing strip, carrying forward the momentum of this breakthrough moment?
We had to set out our clear strategy, focus on our story and bring together creative ways of doing business, particularly in securing commercial revenue.
We had to be ready to take advantage and put fencing in a place to succeed as a business for the coming four years through media, marketing, influencer programs, activations and ultimately bring those people back to the sport “flame to flame.”
Given the nationwide popularity of sports, you’d think that if you have a national reach, you’ll be successful, right?
As we know in sports, that isn’t always the way it works.
I know firsthand the reality that there’s a ton of hard work and planning, especially for niche sports like weightlifting and fencing, where I have led both National Governing Bodies (NGB) as CEO.
So, how does one go out, grow a niche sport, and attract enough commercial revenue to make the business tick? The answers are two-fold:
- Knowing who you are, what you can sell and who’s going to buy it, and
- Maintaining an unrelenting focus on the things that move the needle.
Our challenge: USA Fencing is seen as a niche sport, with a membership base of a shade short of 50,000—mostly under 18. About a quarter of our members live within 40 miles of New York City. It’s also a sport with a high household income, a large Asian American population, and is among the fastest-growing sports in the USA.
The problem was that two years ago, our revenue was down, our trust from our stakeholders—including fencers —was down. We were in the midst of a governance crisis and almost all of our staff had walked away!
Our first step was getting together with our Board of Directors and working on a new strategic plan focused on growth, reputation management, and good service to our membership. In other words, we had to get aggressive!
We started with a listening tour, getting physically out to where fencing really happens in clubs like the historic Fencers Club in New York City, or LA International Fencing Center in Los Angeles, and many in-between to accelerate relationships with the base.
We then moved on to rebuilding our Foundation to drive donor relationships, offering new ways to support fencing and reintroducing the U.S. Fencing Foundation gala.
From there, we took a page out of McLaren F1’s book and created a CEO advisory council full of blue-chip, growth-focused executives who helped us open doors for growth, and for commercial relationships. No one has a fencing budget, so we need that connection and buy in!
As luck would have it, among those people was a data analysis agency who could help us truly understand who we are, from the basics like what household income looks like, right down to how many people speak Korean as a second language.
A second individual named to that group helped us acquire backgrounds on many of the folks we have in our database so we could begin to strategically target the relationships that we needed to grow, open doors, and show those contacts the value of a partnership with a niche sport.
That direct reach to the consumer is what we sell. We cannot sell eyeballs; we have to sell that direct ability to reach a very specific demographic, and at times we’ve even been confident enough to guarantee the amount of revenue back to a brand.
Fencing and similar Olympic & Paralympic sports thrive on participation because a key revenue driver for us is membership revenue, and looking ahead to the shop window of the Olympic & Paralympic Games, we needed to grow the base.
Our ongoing strategic plan calls for us to almost double our participating members by the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic & Paralympic Games.
The Olympic & Paralympic Games reach on NBC’s networks helps us, but we have to harness it, and we needed to do more.
For these Olympics, we did something no NGB had done before: bringing the Olympics experience to cities across the U.S. We called it Fencing Across America, bringing everyday Americans the ability to try fencing at 15 key sites across the country, including places like Grand Central Terminal in New York City and the Mall of America in Minneapolis, with just over 35,000 people trying the sport across the week.
What happens next?
We need training centers and clubs to take them to. That’s why we founded the Club Incubator Program—providing funding to individuals who want to start fencing clubs in their community. We’ve moved quickly to open new facilities across the U.S., with the first in Madison, Wisconsin, to add capacity and more participants that start over this whole cycle.
By knowing where we’re going, thinking outside the box, and trusting our data, we’ve introduced a seven-figure commercial program (from nothing two years ago), seen record membership, earned record medals on the field of play, achieved record revenue, and seen record customer satisfaction. And we’re not done yet!
Phil Andrews was appointed USA Fencing CEO in August 2022 and oversees the national governing body (NGB) for the Olympic and Paralympic sport of fencing in the United States. Prior to joining USA Fencing, Andrews served as the CEO of USA Weightlifting for nearly 10 years.