When partnerships go wrong - Sportsbase.co.uk
Former school friends Rob Taub and Nick Kenton started a free online directory listing all the sports clubs in Britain. They hoped it would make money by attracting advertising.
They had obtained an unsecured bank loan of £12,500 from Barclays and had combined savings of £12,500 to get the business going. They planned to employ an agency to sell advertising and last August launched an additional service on the site, Sportsmate, an online interactive community to enable people to find players in their area.
One early casualty, however, was Taub and Kenton’s business partnership. Four months after launch, Kenton withdrew from the firm for personal reasons, leaving Taub to run the venture alone.
After struggling to find advertising revenue, last year Taub brought in two partners, Global E-Network, a technology company, and Mediarun, an online ad agency, which between them pledged to invest £80,000 over two years in return for a 25% stake each.
He was also on the verge of launching Sports Impact, a service that will enable sports clubs to offer members free calls and texts in return for a monthly subscription.
Now: Unfortunately things have not gone according to plan. The launch of Sports Impact has been delayed by six months until now because of technical difficulties, leaving Taub and his partners in frustrated limbo. In addition, visitors to the original Sportsbase site have fallen off. With virtually no advertising revenue coming in and Taub’s two investor partners unwilling to commit more money, Taub has had to ask his family to invest £10,000 — in return for a 5% stake in the business — to pay for revamping the website.
Taub said: “It has been a bit frustrating. We’ve had a lack of revenue so it has been hard to market and develop the site. With this £10,000 we’ll be able to make it a lot more user-friendly and hopefully make it a lot more sticky so people will come back and use it again.”
He now plans to offer Sports Impact to clubs around the country for a one-off membership joining fee, with the first few clubs invited to join for free. All clubs joining the scheme will receive a share of any revenue generated from calls and advertising.
Taub, 25, remains optimistic that it will all come right eventually, and said: “I’m still really positive and enthusiastic about the project and I’m confident I can make something special out of it. The potential is massive.”
However, realistically, said Taub, if the business does not take off in the next year or so then it will be time to reassess the situation.
“By then Sports Impact will have been up and running for a while and we’ll have done everything we can do with the website. So if it hasn’t worked by then and is going as slow as it is now, then I don’t think it will ever take off.”