Skinny IT RoughRiders Video

Situation

After owning and operating Farstar for fifteen years, Kevin was interested in something new. Something that didn’t involve the sphincter-tightening responsibility of meeting payroll every two weeks. And yet, still something almost as stressful since he wasn’t about the leave the marketing industry. HP was one of Farstar’s clients, and they had run a joint lead generation campaign with their partner Compucom. One of Compucom’s sales leaders that had called on the leads Farstar created had since founded his own company, Skinny IT. (Got that?) He and his co-founders reached out to Kevin about being their CMO at the same time Kevin was looking to sunset Farstar and the rest is history. Literal history, as Skinny IT ceased to be in 2019.

Why are we calling them a “client?” Because how Kevin acted for them is the same way Kevin acts for his current fCMO clients. (And having a category on this website called “Past Employer” would be even more confusing than this explanation.) That is, Kevin leveraged the exact same relationships with writers, designers, and developers that he uses now with his Fractional CMO clients. And also, Kevin’s time as CMO was split between three different companies (Skinny IT and two offshoots), so he was literally a fractional CMO for each one of them. See how that works? Good. Because that’s pretty much exactly how it works today.

Skinny IT was based in Frisco, Texas, which was (and is) also home the Texas Rangers’ minor league baseball team, the Frisco RoughRiders. The RoughRiders are not your typical minor league baseball team, nor do they play in your typical minor league baseball park. They pride themselves on providing their fans a major-league experience minus the major-league $20 parking fees and $800 beers. They have a club to occupy the adults and playgrounds to occupy the kids, they have excellent dining options and they have ballpark hot dogs. They even have a lazy river in the outfield that you can float in during the game.

Video

Kevin negotiated a sponsorship deal for Skinny IT with the Frisco RoughRiders minor league baseball team. What struck him as an opportunity was that the team – who played in a relatively new, modern facility – didn’t provide WiFi for their fans. They had it for their offices on-site, but the fans had no access. So, we entered a five-year sponsorship deal that included Skinny IT and Fireracker (a sister company) that offered the companies a very visible, very strong presence throughout the ballpark in exchange for us creating a WiFi network for them that was robust, secure and broad.

Of course, since this was the first outdoor, public WiFi Skinny IT had ever engineered for a ballpark, Kevin was highly keen on the idea of promoting the project to other, similar installation opportunities. And it just so happened that Ruckus, the manufacturer of the wireless hardware we implemented (they have since rebranded to Commscope, FYI) wanted a case study too. So, we worked with the Frisco RoughRiders, Ruckus and Skinny IT to create a joint case study that all three entities could use for their various purposes. The RoughRiders provided us with access to their ballpark and let us interview the personnel associated with the project. Ruckus brought their camera crew in to capture the interviews and some of the in-game footage. We brought in our own drone camera guy to capture the Skinny IT-specific ads throughout the ballpark. We then catalogued all the footage, had our A-list writer craft a script for it, hired a video editor/fx artist to finish it, and ended up with this: