IAM531- Founder Helps Create and Build Organizations of Value

Robert Kinsler is the founder and CEO of United Fray and serves as Publisher of On Tap Magazine. As a lifestyle media & services company, Fray is on a mission to Make Fun Possible.

Servicing over 400,000 event and sports participants since its inception, Fray has been recognized as an INC 5,000 fastest-growing company for the last four years. (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

Kinsler was named the Small Business Person of the Year by the DC Chamber of Commerce in 2017 and currently serves on the executive board of the Sport and Social Industry Association (SSIA). Kinsler previously served as Finance and Membership chair for the executive board of the Baltimore Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization and served on the board of the DC-based nonprofit, CRYSP DC.

Kinsler is a husband and a father of three amazing children under the age of 5 and has (mostly) kept his sanity thanks to his amazing wife Victoria, his incredible team at the office, his mentors, and his mastermind group (ask him about Netcito).

Robert has a passion for creating and helping to build organizations of value. Some of his past experiences include earning his SAG card, serving in the Army National Guard, living in the Virgin Islands, and lending his voice to a McDonald's radio commercial. You can join Kinsler on Twitter or Instagram @RAKinsler for snippets of the journey.

• CEO Hack: Listening to audiobooks during my commute
• CEO Nugget: All revolves around the desire to make people happy
• CEO Defined: Responsibility for my development and for other people

Website: http://www.dcfray.com/

https://www.mypurposecards.com/

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Transcription:

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:30

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Robert Kinsler of United Fray and On Tap Magazine. Robert, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Robert Kinsler 0:39

Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 0:41

Yeah, no problem. Super excited to have you on and what I want to do is just read a little bit more about Robert so you hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Robert is the founder and CEO of United Fray and serves as Publisher of On Tap Magazine. As a lifestyle media & services company, Fray is on a mission to Make Fun Possible.

Servicing over 400,000 event and sports participants since its inception, Fray has been recognized as an INC 5,000 fastest-growing company for the last four years. (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019)

Kinsler was named the Small Business Person of the Year by the DC Chamber of Commerce in 2017 and currently serves on the executive board of the Sport and Social Industry Association (SSIA). Kinsler previously served as Finance and Membership chair for the executive board of the Baltimore Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization and served on the board of the DC-based nonprofit, CRYSP DC.

Kinsler is a husband and a father of three amazing children under the age of 5 and has (mostly) kept his sanity thanks to his amazing wife Victoria, his incredible team at the office, his mentors, and his mastermind group (ask him about Netcito).

Robert has a passion for creating and helping to build organizations of value. Some of his past experiences include earning his SAG card, serving in the Army National Guard, living in the Virgin Islands, and lending his voice to a McDonald's radio commercial. Robert, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Robert Kinsler 1:51

I'm ready.

Gresham Harkless 1:52

Let's do it. So I wanted to kick everything off and hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to get started with your business.

Robert Kinsler 1:58

Sure. So my CEO story, beyond having a foundation of being relatively entrepreneurial my whole life, doing freelance style work from an early age. The story that kicks off this experience here as CEO and founder of United Fray is unfortunately in some ways, not the bright story starts with a great friendship that I developed with the founder of a local kickball league here in DC called Naked Kickball. It's different no adult kickball is not dumb. A really charming, charismatic, great guy started that league. I had the fortunate pleasure of becoming friends with him through playing and participating. Along the way, he unfortunately had a health incident that took him out of the game and put them on the sidelines of his company. When that happened, I took a step back, it was a pretty dramatic experience.

I have the unfortunate honor of being the gentleman who had to call 911 for him. I share that because what happened was it caused me to step back and reevaluate things. I was in the military at the time, I was in an officer candidate school, going through the process, and doing pretty well, woke up on my 25th birthday and that program, having just experienced this happening to a good friend of mine, and just was what's going on? What do I really want here? With that, I made the decision to leave the National Guard and the officer candidate program, I had a pretty good job, I was the webmaster for the DC National Guard. Being enlisted and leaving the officer program, and I also had to leave that job.

Leaving that led me to go into real estate for the time being and somewhere along the way, five, or six months later, I was starting to come out of my fog and needed to re-engage with the social world. I remembered my days and my kickball League and how much fun I had. A friend and I had read an article about skee ball leads up in New York City being this new fun thing that was happening. I read the article and I thought they were way too serious and way too intense about it and benefit from bringing the kickball experience that I knew to bear, which was more about the social experience and it was about the actual game. So a friend and I launched the skee ball league just for fun on the side, in the fall of 2009.

I built the website and figured out how to get T-shirts ordered. I hosted each night of the game and used some of my past acting experience to put on a show for everybody. Next rollers step on up and legends are born on the second roll like that and so, yeah, we expected to have about 60 people in the first season. We said, hey, look, you can't be on my team, because then we won't have anybody, you have to start your own team. So we're hoping to have six teams of 10 people and we ended up having 12 teams of 15 people. 200 players that first season, the back of the shirts that asked me about my real estate insider that's doing that was how I was making money, the league was just a side thing to have fun with my friends.

After a successful first season, I decided, hey, it seems like there's something there. There's something here, let me jump in and test it out. In 2010, jumped in with both feet, launched a couple of second seasons, that winter season or a couple of second league nights, and ended up having, I don't know, four or five 600 players that second season, it was off to the races. From there it was, where else can we expand this model of bringing people together to have fun? We added more sports leagues we added, started to bring events on very early into the process. All of that has grown now and evolved into the United Fray.

As you said, we've got a mission to make fun possible and we do that by creating and sharing fun things to do. An events and media company focused on recreation, fun activity play, specifically for adults, and play so often gets forgotten about for adults. There's just so much science that backs up the power and positive impact it can have on all of us. We're very fortunate enough to be able to eke out, and carve out a living here and in the small business world as a business focused on fun and play.

Gresham Harkless 6:19
Absolutely, no, I love that story. Obviously sorry to hear about your friend, but I appreciate you hearing the process is, I think so many times, some of the best things are created. So side hustles, they're things that we just want to do for as an outlet, and then all of a sudden, there's this big knee that starts to build from it, and then all of a sudden, you have something you have to kind of jump on it.

Robert Kinsler 6:38

I think that's a great reflection. I mean, and what it makes me think about is those side hustles or their side things, they tend to take effort, and they tend to be in direct response to a need. We're serving a need for ourselves by doing this side hustle, and then we realize, wow, other people have this need too. The value proposition that got you to be motivated enough to do it in the first place and helps to be that incubator for okay, there's something that this isn't just an idea.

But it's something I'm willing to do myself, even maybe at a loss or at an investment because there's value to me, and then wow, other people find value in it, too. There's something here, let's build it. Let's grow it. Yeah, definitely. It's interesting that it started off as a side hustle in that way, I've never really thought about that. But yeah, that's a totally accurate description.

Gresham Harkless 7:32

Yeah, it makes so much sense that a lot of times, I say the phrase, scratch your own itch. A lot of times it's along those lines, where you find something that you're looking for and doesn't exist, so you decide to create it, not looking to take to the Inc 5000 or anything like that.

Robert Kinsler 7:45

That was not even on my radar. It just wasn't. I think actually, we probably missed a year that we could have applied because I just wasn't even thinking about that. But 100 is your own, it's the mother of necessity, or is the mother of invention. All of the cliches are cliches because they're accurate and they're different ways of looking at it. The more and further I go into this entrepreneurial journey, the more I'm starting to see some of the patterns and excitement when the same principles pop up over and over and it helps you realize it's not just random happenstance, right there are bowls that you can apply and work on learning and understanding and the value of just being on a podcast like this and jamming with you today.

I'm talking while I'm actually taking this call from a meeting I'm taking with an online sports and equipment retailer and thinking about their partnership here and, um, you know, what can we do together? So it's, it's an exciting journey, and I really do enjoy what I do. So it makes it just a little bit easier to push through the hard days.

Gresham Harkless 8:50

Yeah, absolutely. I think especially I always say a lot of times when you're going on your right path, a lot of other doors will start to open up as you're talking about having those meetings and those different opportunities that start to present themselves. So I know you touched on a little bit and I know I've participated I've been on a flag football team in the DC Maryland Virginia area so yeah, absolutely. We didn't win but we did have fun. I wanted to hear a little bit more about United Frank, take us through a little bit more about what we can expect with the different locations, and then also what you feel is either your personal secret sauce or maybe what you feel kind of sets Frey apart from all the other organizations.

Robert Kinsler 9:25

Yeah. So United Fray is in four markets DC Jacksonville, Phoenix, and Arizona. We take the name of the community we're in, so it's DC Fray, Jacks Fray, Phoenix Fray, and Nola Fray, which our company values as a community. We will be a reflection of that local community. We want to imbibe a bit of that feel as well as bring our standard secret sauce so to speak. So it's really important that we are local, we feel connected, it is all about building communities. It started with our sports leagues 10 years ago and quickly advanced into events. Now here in the last couple of years, both events have been growing. We've launched a newer endeavor, which is the media side of things.

That's everything from our digital content that we write about the cool things happening in the city, the restaurants, you got to check out the new plays, openings, the local music scene, what concerts are coming to town, is Axe Throwing really fun, let me know, let me read aside, if I'm gonna go do that crazy thing. We started that about two and a half years ago, digitally, and now here this year in 2019, we've expanded it into print here in the DC market. We made an acquisition of a legacy local entertainment magazine called On Tap Magazine, they've been around for about 20 years. We've been partners with them, actually, for about 10. That's one of the first places we spent some of our local advertising dollars.

That opportunity came about we've jumped in and that's really an extension of our value proposition, an extension of how we deliver value. It's a pretty exciting space in terms of where local media is going and how it's evolving. A lot of people think that prints, the tagline in the news is that print is dead, but the reality is print is thriving in some key areas and one of them is local print around entertainment and lifestyle. So the regional magazine Washingtonian is doing well. Pennsylvania Yankee Candle is doing well or not Yankee Candle, but Yankees magazine up there, the magazines that imbibe a sense of identity, that have a sense of local purpose are doing well.

We weave that needle with on tap, and we're working to grow and build a publishing business as part of our larger ecosystem to drive value for our members to drive value for our other business partners, to be more efficient, and to build value for ourselves over time. So yeah, we're excited about it. It all comes around, and it all works, because it's focused on the same common mission of making fun possible, right, our hedgehog is more of a process hedgehog, than a product hedgehog, it's the idea of delivering fun, and how people are looking for it. So we're all in on it.

It's got the challenges like any other small business, you got good days, you got bad days, you've got competition, you've got legislative things, you've got losing contracts for random, crazy reasons that have nothing to do with you and you just got to figure out how to push on. We're based in DC, right? So we've got a very interesting workforce to pull from, from the perspective that we're competing with Lloyds and nonprofits that have this other aspirational calling for people and banks that can just pay through the nose. We're eking out our existence, and it's been a ride, we're coming up on 10 years we'll take it.

Gresham Harkless 12:48

I appreciate you, obviously, for writing that for people, but also for the community as a whole in many different ways. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Robert Kinsler 13:03

So I recently relocated a little further from the office, and I'm using my commute in the morning and at home to just slam the audiobooks to just build in that time for reading and learning. I mean, it's no secret that almost every successful and wildly successful Banner leader you see out there talks about the importance of continual learning, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Gary Vee, I mean, just all of them, right? It's super important.

Gresham Harkless 13:32

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. This is kind of us, I guess, entering into your mastermind. So if there was a word of wisdom or piece of advice that you would even tell us or tell your younger business self, what would that be?

Robert Kinsler 13:43

Would definitely be something along the lines of the importance of confidence. But probably, in my 30s, the most important lesson I've learned is, or revolves around the idea of making other people happy, and the desire to try to make everyone happy.

Gresham Harkless 14:00

Now, I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO and we're hoping to have different clinical CEOs on the show. So Robert, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Robert Kinsler 14:09

The CEO means to me that I've taken responsibility for the development of myself as a leader and the development of the company.

Gresham Harkless 14:18

Love that definition. Appreciate it, appreciate your time, even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and listeners know. Then of course, how best they can get a hold of you find out about all the awesome things you're working on and you're doing.

Robert Kinsler 14:30

Yeah, sure. So making fun possible over here. We're excited for 2020 we're building out more and more on our b2b services side, which is really awesome. We've got two major lines there any company that has an employee engagement initiative, we can do some pretty awesome things in that space. Then on the flip side, companies that are looking to reach their 21 to 35, 40 year old community with Event Marketing. That is really our wheelhouse. We know how to leverage Event Marketing. We've got a really great debt, a bit of production staff marketing, understanding of what resonates and how to create a great authentic experience.

We're going to be driving that initiative for we're going to be driving the publishing and the media initiative for which is very exciting sports continue to grow and thrive, sports events and media. We don't fit into any one box. People can find us online at dcfray.com, jacksarray.com, phoenixgrey.com, and nolafray.com, and pretty soon actually, we'll be launching a more corporate site that encompasses everything it is that we do. But for the consumer side of things, those are the websites and you can follow us online.

I personally am online as well. Twitter and Instagram RA Kinsler and yeah, just wishing everybody that's out there success in their day, and that they're pushing forward, and if this launches in January I will have another side hustle live called Purpose Cards, look it up on Kickstarter, something I'm doing with a buddy of mine. But yeah, I appreciate the time today and all the work that you're doing to spread the word and put that much more value out into the community, and appreciate the hustle you've got going on as well.

Gresham Harkless 16:04

Definitely. I appreciate that. You'll have information about Purpose Cards and any other projects on your personal.

Robert Kinsler 16:10

I will yeah absolutely.

Gresham Harkless 16:11

Okay, perfect. We will have all the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can click through and follow up with you. But again, thank you for your time. Thank you for everything you're doing in all these different communities and I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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