From Pivots Come Great Returns

Welcome to another edition of the Fred & Dan Blog! Our mission with Fred&Dan Productions and this blog has always been to make people think in ways they’ve never done before - to spark creativity and facilitate conversation in unconventional ways. A place where you can open up your email and have a bit of creativity to take with you into your day or week! 

This is our first in what we hope to be a frequent interview series with fellow entrepreneurs and creatives! This week we talked to Bianca Turner, the CEO of UPBasketball, a basketball training facility located in the Bay Area. You can read a slightly condensed version of the interview below or you can go ahead and listen to it (we recommend the listen👂)!!

We are so excited for this series and are looking forward to bringing more interviews to you in the future. 

 “I was 38 weeks pregnant, a week away from giving birth, and our landlord called me and said, “we're selling the gym and you're gonna have to find a new spot.” And I was like, I'm going on maternity leave. I have no clue how I'm even gonna handle this.”

BIANCA: My name's Bianca Turner and I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of UPBasketball, a basketball training business in Burlingame, California. Our business is basketball skills training, and working with kids starting as young as three years old, all the way up through professional athletes.

Everything off court I'm responsible for. And then organizing programs on court, I'm responsible for overseeing as well. So those are no longer my day-to-day job, but I do oversee the people that are responsible for those daily responsibilities. 

FRED&DAN: Excellent. We'd love to know how this business started.

BIANCA: So the way this business started was my husband and I left our jobs and we started another business and we moved up to Northern California to run that business. I was working multiple jobs to have steady income while we tried to grow that business. Packie’s side jobs were coaching, and doing some private training. He had played basketball in college, so it was pretty easy for him.

He had grown up working kids clinics throughout his childhood, so he had a lot of experience working with kids. 

Then when we moved back to the Bay Area, we were still trying to make our other business work.  Packie started working with Steph Curry and was helping out with some of his training sessions in the Bay Area. That training took off and more people wanted to work with him, young kids specifically.

So I stepped in just trying to help him so we could make ends meet, and then it took off from there. He started working with Aaron Gordon and training young athletes. 

I was taking on everything from customer service to marketing to the financial side - as far as bookkeeping and figuring out payroll and taxes and hiring. I had no clue what I was doing but we had to pay rent and we had to make sure we were sustaining this business.

Packie was on court six, seven days a week, 12 hours a day. They were really long days, but it was extremely fulfilling because we were working with kids that were happy to be here. They were getting better, they were seeing a difference. 

F&D: And how does it feel now that you guys have, are a little bit more established?

BIANCA: We moved gyms, which it's always frightening when we come across these challenges. For example, I was 38 weeks pregnant, a week away from giving birth, and our landlord called me and said, we're selling the gym and you're gonna have to find a new spot. And I was like, I'm going on maternity leave, I have no clue how I'm even gonna handle this. 

And of course, that was in the fall of 2021. So we had just shut our business down for almost two years. We were not running half of our business. The majority of our business [before covid] was comprised of group training, half group training and half private training. And for almost two years we had no group training and that was actually the majority of our business before Covid hit.

So covid hitting forced us to pivot. We had to increase private training, something that brought in maybe 5% of revenue the year before was suddenly 100% of our revenue and sustaining our rent, our staff, and everything.  

They say that you have to make the best out of a bad situation, and I think if it weren't for Covid, maybe we wouldn't have pushed that side of our business. And now that we're at full capacity, we still have that and we know how to work that.

Moving was another big challenge, but it forced us to pivot again. We found a great spot that we had to build out.  We got a loan from the SBA, which I never wanted to do, because we always bootstrapped things. We just made it happen with the money that we had. But luckily we had this loan from covid and we were able to build out a brand new facility.

It was a great learning moment for me and a great challenge for me to come through and see that, “okay, this is a big scary number that we're gonna have to put into this business, but, we can make it through it.” 

Business is doing better than ever, even though we've had two of the most challenging obstacles come in the last three years. In Covid we shut down to zero. We were making zero for a couple months and now we are in the six digit range as far as revenue goes. 

F&D: It's so inspiring because a lot of the times people get scared to be an entrepreneur because there's these dark days and dark days are gonna happen. But it's so great for people to hear that after those dark days, the clouds do shift.

BIANCA: Yeah, the way the energy moves is you get challenged to see how far you can go. And if you don't give up and you meet the challenge and you get creative and you try things and you listen and you pay attention, that's where the leveling up happens and you can't level up without that apparently.

And it's really frustrating that is not easier, but that's just kind of what I have seen so far. 

F&D: I just wanna circle back because I do think it's like a really interesting topic about being a woman CEO at a basketball gym. What is your experience with that?

BIANCA: I think that being a CEO in a male dominated industry is really interesting. I think that I am very lucky, I have a business partner who believes in me, and doesn't care that I'm a woman and actually thinks it's best that there is female leadership in our business. 

We recently became an LLC and he happily agreed to a deal where I am the majority owner of the LLC because he sees the value in that. And I think without that support, I wouldn't be here. Being someone who's in charge of all these people in an industry that does not look this way, there's a lot of imposter syndrome that I encounter. But to my husband, to Packie, he doesn't even understand that for me because he sees the value that I bring as a leader.

I have seen the difference between people that respect that and that don't. There's an agent that we work with who's super respectful and understands more than most others how much I do bring to this business.

And every time he brings that up to Packie, it's very validating. And then you see there are some younger people out here that just don't get it and, and that's okay. 

We're here to set an example and to give other young women something to look up to.  

I did have an interesting experience when we were building out the gym. I set up a meeting with a contractor to look at one of our hoops and install it, and I was the one who set up the meeting. Packie went into the meeting before I did, and so I walked in and he's already talking to Packie. I asked a question and the guy looked directly at Packie and answered the question. I was really taken aback thinking, did he ignore me? 

In our culture here in our business, I think that people make it very clear it doesn't matter if you're a woman or not, you can be in charge.  We focus a lot on female training here or training young women in basketball.  Most of our classes are 90% little boys that come into our youth classes, and I don't think anyone else would've noticed as much as I did when I was setting up all those classes, checking all those kids in. I noticed because that's my perspective. So we've established all girls clinics and all girls free clinics as well, and really pushed that as one of our goals to get more women in the gym.

I know it's important to Packie as well, but I don't think it would've been as big of a priority if I wasn't in this role. 

F&D: Pivoting a little bit because, our blog is all about, along with being an entrepreneur, it's all about creativity, especially us as writers and filmmakers. So we'd love to know how creativity factors into your role as a CEO at a gym?

BIANCA: I never thought of myself as a creative person. I'm really a financial data driven person. But as I was thinking about this question, there is a lot of creativity that goes on - coming up with new programs is probably the main area.

Being able to listen to customers, watch what's going on in the gym, watch everyone's interactions from the trainers to the kids, look at the feedback and decide what is best and how to make adjustments based on that feedback and coming up with new ideas. And giving our team the space to come up with new ideas as well, and work on things that they're passionate about that could potentially snowball into something even bigger. I think it has been where I have been the most creative, and it's one of my favorite parts of my job.

What I'm always looking at is how can we provide people with value? I think that really goes back to understanding your why - why you got into business in the first place and for us, for me, really it was about helping young athletes build confidence. That's what worked for me and that's what I try to give space for. Every decision that I make, I have to think about, how is this going back to giving people a space to build confidence?

So that's where I have to get creative and figure out new ideas. And some of them work, some of them don't. And I have to look at it from a business perspective as well and make tweaks. But that's probably my favorite part of running this business. 

F&D: Where do you look for creativity? Where do you get inspiration? 

BIANCA: I love reading books, listening to podcasts - I listen to “How Built This.” My favorite book right now is Atomic Habits. I love Simon Sinek and listening to his TED Talk, and I've got a couple of his books on audible.

So definitely listening to those types of business leaders help spark ideas. And I try to think, okay, how can I incorporate that into my business? Whether it's sitting down with my staff and everybody coming up with some huge stretch goal, and then looking at it and saying, okay, how do we make that happen? And when? 

F&D: Love that. Do you have any advice you wish you had before becoming an entrepreneur?

BIANCA: So I left my job in 2015. And the advice I think I would've benefited from the most…I think part of it is that these big challenges that are thrown your way, you just have to learn how to pivot and from those pivots come great returns. That would be one. 

And then also I think hiring employees has been a huge journey for me. And I wish I would've understood better at a younger age, or when I first started that looking for people who are hungry, humble and smart is extremely important.

Also would've been good to be reminded that you have to make decisions that are best for the business. I get a little emotional sometimes, and I have to take a step back every time that happens and remember, I need to make decisions that are best for the business, otherwise there will be no business.

And sure, it requires a little bit of emotion so I make a well thought out decision. Things aren't black and white, just yes and no. You gotta navigate the gray, but I think that in the beginning, I did a really poor job of making decisions based on what's best for the business and that held us back for sure.

Bianca Turner CEO and Co-Founder of UPBasketball