A-Star Sports features again in the Guardian’s Best Practice Exchange

Following a win in January 2013 in the ‘Starting Up’ category, A-Star Sports’ entry to the Guardian’s Best Practice Exchange ‘Efficiency’ category has also met all the entry criteria and been published on the Guardian website today.

As before, independent judges will choose 10 entries to be developed further and the top three from those will have 1,000 words of editorial online and feature in the business section of the Guardian.

The A-Star Sports ‘Efficiency’ entry:

A-Star Sports is a fun-filled multi-sports experience for children aged two to 10 years, delivering fundamental activities and 10 core sports through weekly classes, holiday clubs, parties and events. Established in October 2011, we’re built from decades of experience in sports coaching, child development and business.

Our core strategy for growth was to develop a franchise model. For franchising, everything we do has to be highly scalable, affordable and as easy as possible to set up and maintain.

Efficiency is a theme that runs throughout these priorities with cloud computing and technical solutions at the core. In the past year we have moved all of our support resources online – accessible for our franchisees to work anywhere with the most up-to-date manuals, policies, guidelines and templates. We have opened up new marketing options through an outsourced web-to-print system offering franchisees editable materials, flexibility and reduced costs. We have considerably developed the brand through timely core content on our website that we (and our franchisees) can manage via a user-friendly CMS; and offer core recruitment and business training options anywhere in the UK with online meetings software.

The cost of these areas and the time traditionally taken to manage them has been significantly reduced, giving us the opportunity to embrace exciting new developments and invest more time and creativity in taking our franchisees’ businesses to the next level.

We have successfully launched 12 UK franchise territories (already meeting our 2013 target, with more to come) and the network currently employs 20 people.