What Does It Mean to Have a Positive Online Presence as an Athlete?
Sports Marketing and Business Development for the Organizations and Athletes of Professional Sports
The Dines Group specializes in business development and sports marketing for professional, retired, and collegiate athletes in their quest to develop business opportunities outside of the playing field, as well as the management and marketing of the different aspects of their professional lives and their personal brand. We work with future, current, and former professional athletes to maximize the potential opportunities afforded to those who have success in sports, from social media management to business ownership to sponsorships and everything in-between.
We help individual athletes to accomplish more with their hard-earned success. We understand that the quest to the professional spotlight requires a significant level of continual hard work, and staying in the professional leagues requires twice as much. We manage both the career-related, personal brand aspects and off-field business interests of athletes during their playing time, as well as the post-career phase that places former athletes in the right scenarios to capitalize on their professional careers.
The Best Way to Insulate Your Future
PROTECT YOU AND YOUR FAMILY FROM THE TEMPORARY NATURE OF PROFESSIONAL SPORTS
Here at the Dines Group, we truly respect the work and dedication that goes into any professional sports career, and we embody the same dedication and work ethic here at our agency. To be considered one of the top 2,000 (or fewer) athletes in any given sport is an accomplishment the likes of which most people on Earth will never know. It’s a lifelong promise one makes himself or herself to be the first to practice and the last one to leave. The work is incredible, and the results are what dreams are made of.
What’s difficult, however, is that not all careers in professional sports end with a 20-year history in the league and a trip to the Hall of Fame. What’s more likely, statistically speaking, is a few years at the professional level. Here are the averages by league of careers in professional sports:
- NFL = 3.3 years
- NBA = 4.8 years
- MLB = 5.6 years
- NHL = 5.5 years
- MLS = 3.2 years
With the possibilities of injury and other outside challenges faced by professional athletes, careers can end too soon. Even when they go the distance, there are a lot of athletes who retire and ask, “What now?” Here at the Dines Group, we encourage our athletic clients to diversify their success and engage in business opportunities. We plan, create, and establish businesses with athletes (and groups of athletes) to provide additional sources of income, excitement, goodwill, challenges, and a sense of belonging when a playing career is over. For professional athletes, the possibilities are endless–non-profits, bars and restaurants, nutrition-based retail, nightclubs, toy companies, pizza shops, community centers, real estate businesses, solar companies, insurance companies, bowling alleys, beach resorts, and so on. The truth is that for athletes who have given their lives to achievement on the field, it’s takes a different skill set required to plan, start, and manage a business. That’s where the Dines Group is able to make the difference–let our endless dedication to sports marketing and the business world match your dedication to your sport and allow us to help you achieve your dreams off the field, too.
A New Type of Professional Icon
INSPIRE A NEW GENERATION OF BUSINESS OWNERS AND TEACH CHILDREN THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION
It’s tremendously difficult to make it to a professional level in sports. If you are a professional athlete, consider yourself very blessed. While it makes for a great first chapter in a biography, using sports to “get out of a bad neighborhood” is much less practical for most of our country than movies and television would have us believe. Our vision here at the Dines Group is to create multi-faceted athletes that children can look up to in more ways that just their on-field performance. Not every child is genetically designed to succeed in sports. By owning businesses, professional athletes can inspire more than just future athletes–they can show the world how education and starting a business can also be a way to succeed in the world.
We encourage you to speak with us about the possibilities of becoming a role model both on and off the field. For all you inspire with your athletic accomplishments, you can also inspire as a business owner. Furthermore, by exploring business opporutnities, you continue to build your legacy as more than just an athlete and a cherished member of your community. With our sports marketing teams, we can help you accomplish this while your attention remains on the upcoming season, perfectly blending your athletic career with your businesses.
A FULL-CIRCLE APPROACH FOR PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES
“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you ever have time to do it over?”
-John Wooden
Our Sports Marketing and Advertising Services for Professional Athletes
PROFESSIONAL BUSINESS, MARKETING, AND FINANCIAL SERVICES FROM THE DINES GROUP
Public Relations
We'll help you share your professional brand with the world.
Our public relations specialists support our professional athletes’ personal brands and their companies. For our clients, we provide direct communications with the media, press release services, social media and interview coaching, and more. We also identify opportunities for off-the-field financial success, from speaking engagements to sponsorships to personal brand placement. Our PR specialists help our clients to use the best features of their personality and professional success to drive personal and professional brand development. We take our clients from professional athlete to household name, in addition to uncovering the financial opportunities that are available to the athletes who compete at the professional level in today’s sports.
Professional Brand Development
Tell your story in powerful tones.
Our sports marketing specialists help you or your organization develop a brand that captures the very essence of the best of you who are. The Dines Group will develop ways to take the metaphysical elements of you and your professional organizations and communicate such in both tangible and non-tangible ways. We’ll work with you to create real-world elements such as logos, color schemes, and font selection, as well as help you design your corporate communications to align with your brand messages and identity. We’ll help you create content, identify opportunity through multiple marketing channels, and make your brand presence felt throughout the nation.
Crisis Communications
Communications management during times of crisis, trades, retirement, and more.
On a long enough timeline, we all put our foot in our mouth at some point. Most of the time, it’s an accident or something taken out of context, but in today’s age of camera phones and the Internet, our smallest mistakes are amplified and permanent. In addition to moments of misunderstanding, professional athletes are likely to fall prey to negative press in regard to work ethic, bad plays, disagreements with coaches, and so on. In our private lives, we can all get away with having a disagreement on how dishes should be washed or which car to buy—but in professional sports situations, athletes can’t even practice or “hit the locker room” without a media presence waiting to find the next negative headline.
The Dines Group’s sports marketing teams can help professional athletes and entire sports organizations manage the bad press that inevitably arrives in today’s “if it bleeds, it leads” media world. We pride ourselves in protecting and managing our clients’ images in the press and in public. By using a wide variety of public relations tools and supplying expert client training, we are always two steps ahead of the latest drama to hit the media and ready to guide any ship through troubled waters.
Social Media Management
We'll help you navigate and dominate the social media channels.
We’re passionate about the opportunities available to athletes via social media. While independent social media posts are often the cause of hundreds of internal PR-department panic attacks each year, we believe that teaching, managing, and even ghostwriting social media for professional athletes and sports organizations is the key to maximizing opportunity and reducing risk for a brand. Our services range from teaching and coaching social media application to actual ghostwriting and management of professional accounts. Social media is a wonderful way to create conversations and inspire action in others—but without proper management and understanding, it can be a career-damaging tool. Let the Dines Group help you and/or your business communicate effective messages that improve the standing of your brand and the revenue of your companies through the execution of proper social media strategies.
Website Development and Online Marketing
We create beautiful and engaging online properties for your personal or professional brands.
We develop websites and online marketing strategies for each client’s personal brand, as well as any businesses, non-profits, or foundations in which he/she is involved. While being a professional athlete can bring public name recognition, the online world lives and breathes SEO-minded website design that is both effective and user-friendly. Our work includes capturing and representing the client’s brand, delivering a user-friendly site, and making sure that site ranks well in search engine results. It’s important to have a great website behind your brand and businesses, and it’s equally important that people are able to find that site and take action. We deliver online properties that are extensions of our client’s personal brand to tell a story that inspires a user to take action.
We’ll also integrate your brand into all your online social media properties—Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, local directories, and more. A solid branding only works if it’s consistent, and we’ll be sure to help you find that sweet spot of design and beauty that best represents exactly who you are.
Data Analytics and SEO
Measure the impact of your brand(s) and make adjustments to always stay on top.
We’re glad to offer SEO and data analytic services. Monitoring your personal brand or your business ventures’ online marketing strategies successes or failures is key to modifying your game plan to maximize your opportunities. Just like on the field, we’re able to use data analytics to learn about your online properties (websites, social media) and adjust to create the most opportunities for you as a brand. From identifying the best time to “tweet” to recognizing where your online traffic is coming from, we’re able to help you make the moves that gain the most online visibility. With the trend of sports analytics so prominent these days, don’t you think it’s good for your brand to use analytics, too?
From an SEO perspective, our specialists have spent years helping major brands throughout the US better rank in online search results. By having your personal site or your company rank well, you’re able to gain more attention, create more revenue, and better inspire others to take action.
Simply put, if you dress up for a party, you want to make sure people see you. If you design a website and work on your social media properties, you want to make sure those are found by millions of fans. By using measurable data and applying that to our search engine optimization (SEO) marketing efforts, the Dines Group will help you find the best opportunities and increase fan awareness (and revenue) for yourself and/or your companies.
Financial Planning, Auditing, Bookkeeping, and Tax Filing
Our CPA will work with you to ensure your investments are legit, your taxes are filed correctly, and your financial future is secure.
If you feel it’s very difficult to know who to trust in the world of finance, so do we. So we brought in a CPA who just so happened to be almost family. Now, our financial division is run by a very smart and talented CPA who was the college roommate of the CEO of the Dines Group. We need to make sure we’re delivering the best to our clients.
We have a certified financial planner in-house to deliver the right financial advice to today’s professional athletes. From income taxes to business investments, we provide our clients either direct management or outside consultation on all things financial—ensuring that today’s top athletic talent is able to secure their earnings to last throughout their lifetimes and identifying new opportunities for clients to use their earnings to see additional returns outside of their sports-based income.
We offer tax services for current and retired professional athletes. We also offer bookkeeping for clients and their businesses.
We don’t manage client investments portfolios or help/encourage/influence clients to invest money in anything except their own businesses. Our CFP will be glad to review outside investments on behalf of our clients, however, to help our clients gauge the legitimacy of a potential investment or to better understand the investments they have made through another company or representative.
Post-career Services and Support for Athletes
We'll help you find new opportunities as you transition from or enjoy a post-career lifestyle.
After the lights have gone out and the adrenaline rush has died down, life begins. No longer are you required to report for practice twice a day. No one is going to check what time you go to bed. You can eat whatever you want. You can sleep in. It’s different from what you’re used to, for sure, but there are so many things possible.
When your career is over, there is a transition phase as you explore how you are going to spend the rest of your life. Some stay with sports, some try something new, and others are unfortunately forced to find something just to keep a roof over their heads. As you start to explore what opportunities are waiting for you, the Dines Group is a perfect place to start.
We’ll help you identify speaking and sponsorship opportunities that will help keep your professional image alive and well, in addition to generating income. We’ll help you manage your social media in ways that allow you to continue to command an audience and remain an influencer of public opinion. We’ll help you keep your hard-earned public voice. We’ll also help you explore the things that you love–whether you and some friends are interested in opening a restaurant together or if you’d like to start a program to help kids in your hometown, we’ll go there with you. We’ll help you set up and plan your business ventures, and we’ll continue to help craft your brand year after year. We’ll draw upon our integrated marketing services and specialists to create your brand, design your website, build powerful social media channels, speak to the world through public relations and print work, manage your finances and handle your tax returns and bookkeeping, and so on.
Let us help you secure powerful post-career opportunities according to your interests.
Business Development
Go beyond your athletic success with your own business ventures.
We’re very aware of the opportunities that come with a professional sports career. These wonderful chances are delicately balanced with the risks inherent in all professional sports—one injury can mean a very abrupt end to all of someone’s lifetime of work. It’s of great importance to us that we help professional athletes develop a multifaceted revenue stream—so if there is an injury or other abrupt end to a career, or even just a simple retirement from sports, a professional athlete has something in the business world to keep them passionate and active when not on the field.
We feel that the best time to do this is during professional careers, when name recognition and investment money is at its peak. With that said, we’re also interested in helping both athletes transitioning from professional sports into the business world and those who have left the game long ago, too. We also encourage groups of professional athletes to work together to start businesses—restaurants, real estate, energy sector businesses, hospitality, non-profits, foundations, charities, and everything in-between. With additional revenue opportunities, professional athletes can be more insulated from a career-ending injury or retirement. When done in groups or among friends, there is the love that comes from being a part of a team–just this time it’s a business team.
We also truly respect the time and energy that goes into a professional sports career, and we understand that our clients cannot win a Super Bowl one week and then know everything about how to code responsive, mobile-friendly websites the next. That’s why we’re more than happy to partner with athletes or groups of athletes to establish and launch businesses, charities, and non-profits. We’ll manage every stage of the establishment and marketing of a business for our clients, or we’ll partner with additional agencies, agents, financial teams, and more to help ensure that our client’s businesses are launched into greatness. We feel exploring business opportunities is vital to today’s athlete—not only does it establish a professional athlete as a role model outside of the field of play, but it helps to make the eventual transition to civilian life simple and fulfilling.
Sponsorship Opportunities
Let us find, engage with, and deliver win-win sponsorship opportunities for you.
One of the best ways to capitalize on your on-field hard work and success is to acquire sponsorships with major and even minor brands. We’ll help identify, engage, and secure sponsorships for you that are in alignment with your interests and personal values. Let us take care of the work involved and enjoy the chance to create win-win partnerships with businesses and your image due to your hard work and dedication to your sport.
Nutritional Consultations and Personal Training
Your health is vital to your personal and professional brands.
While we don’t have in-house nutritionists, we do provide our clients introductions and access to some of the best nutritionists and trainers in the industry today. We feel that for our post-career clients, maintaining a perfect mix of nutrition and exercise is important as part of that post-career lifestyle that is really more a “phase two” of a career surrounding one’s professional athletic successes in life. Maintaining good health and performance is very helpful and important after retirement.
You Don’t Have To Take Our Word For It
Thanks, LeVar
Jackie Robinson said that athletes die twice. You know, when that first career is gone, that's a death. I think that (retirement) was the more difficult adjustment because you don't know what to do.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Former NBA Center for Bucks/Lakers
It's not easy to retire at 31. In one respect I was glad I was done. But after a few years of having fun, I got a little restless. When you're 33, 34, and you don't have a focus, you can get kind of lost. As a man, you feel a little bit unfulfilled.
Pete Sampras
Retired Tennis Player
Very few professional athletes want to think about coming to the end of their careers while they're still playing. As a consequence, very few of them are prepared for that next chapter.
Jack Llewellyn
Sports Psychologist
Being on the inside and being part of a team is something that you really do value and you really do miss.
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Retired Baltimore MLB player
Play a new game when you get older. Find another sport that you can really improve at, that you can get excited about, and have fun.
Martina Navratilova
Retired Tennis Player
Recent Posts
0
0
Why You Should NOT Advertise Your Restoration Business on YELP