Despite having only opened in September 2023, the team at Sure Shot Pickleball is eager to expand their potential revenue streams and find ways to better serve their members. Located just outside of Chicago in Naperville, Illinois, Sure Shot began offering gift cards to their indoor facility just about a month after their opening. Their facility includes 27,000 sq. ft. of space consisting of 11 dedicated pickleball courts with outdoor surfaces. The facility also features state-of-the-art lighting, ventilation, and fans to ensure year-round comfort for players. Mark Murman, one of the four co-founders of Sure Shot, notes that their goal was to “create a really nice community and pub feel” throughout the club, offering a lounge area at the front of the space in addition to an event room and maintaining a liquor license to serve alcoholic beverages to guests.
The decision to offer gift cards is related to their pro shop marketing efforts as they realized being able to offer gift cards would be a great facilitator to pro shop sales. To the team at Sure Shot, gift cards seemed like “one of the best options” to bolster sales as well as respond to the desires of their members who were already asking if they had gift cards. Moreover, as the Christmas season approached, “it became evident that [gift cards] were a desired product to have.” In addition to more traffic through their pro shop, Sure Shot saw a significant increase in gift card sales during the 2023 holiday season. Currently, Sure Shot offers gift cards increments of $10, $25, $50, and $100 which are only offered in the form of a physical card that are printed, laminated, and cut down to size.
While the club is still in the early days of assessing the specific financial benefits of offering gift cards, one of Murman’s favorite things about them is that it provides an opportunity for one player to give somebody a thank-you present and add money to their Sure Shot account with ease. At this time, gift cards have not become a “huge revenue generator, but [they] facilitate somebody giving a nice gift of pickleball.” Court offerings remain Sure Shot’s primary revenue stream, however they certainly expect gift cards to help increase their revenue as more people learn of them and join the club.
Murman highlights that “there are not too many risks” associated with offering gift cards. The primary risk Sure Shot is concerned with is the duplication of cards. To mitigate this risk, each Sure Shot gift card is printed numerically and when sold, a staff member will record who purchased each code in a logbook and whether or not it has been cashed yet. This system has worked well for them so far despite it being done by hand.
One thing the team at Sure Shot plans to do in the near future is to track how much is spent in total via gift cards at their facility. Right now, they have other more pressing matters to attend to because they are a new business, however it is something Murman believes they “should dive into and will dive into” soon. Nonetheless, they know a good number of gift card users are existing club participants who have money loaded on their account by a gift-giver. Additionally, the club hopes to be able to offer a virtual option for gift cards in the future as the club matures.
Murman believes gift cards are a “good vehicle to bring new people” into the club and even create internal community by allowing members to gift other members additional opportunities to invest in their passion for the sport. Gift cards allow others to share their appreciation for someone else as well as their love for pickleball, all the while promoting the brand of Sure Shot.
