A Brand to Franchise?
Once a month from October to May, Uppercut hosts regional Golden Gloves tournaments, paying a sanctioning fee to Colorado-based USA Boxing, the sport’s governing authority, and charging a $12 admission price to spectators.
Bauch also rents out her gym for special events ranging from birthday parties to corporate meetings. Some event planners hire pro fighters to spar. Last January, she says, an opto-electronics company based in Germany, Carl Zeiss Group, flew in employees from around North America and Europe for some corporate rah-rah involving mock boxing matches with its business competitors. This summer, Minneapolis ad agency A/B Group rented the gym for a photo shoot for a vodka brand.
Bauch is happy to get such business. “It’s money coming in the door,” she says. “You wouldn’t believe what it costs to heat this monster in the winter.”
Ideally, she says, her next move would be to franchise Uppercut: “I’d like to see at least two more gyms go up, especially one south of here. There’s nothing in the Bloomington, Richfield, or Lakeville areas, so we could tap that market.”
Franchising is appealing in part because she would like to spend less time on day-to-day gym operations—currently a 12-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week demand on her schedule—and more on special projects, such as the first-ever Golden Gloves World Championship that she is helping to organize. Taking place November 16 and 17 at the Grand Casino in Hinckley, the tournament is expected to draw fighters from as far away as Puerto Rico and Ireland.
Franchising would also sidestep her chief obstacle to expansion: money. Bauch says she can’t afford to launch other gyms on her own, but she has yet to find qualified franchisees who would pay both up-front costs and then monthly fees to use Uppercut’s brand and learn its operating procedures.
Uppercut really is a brand, not just a trademarked name, says Sarah Mickelson, a certified coach and Golden Gloves boxer who has been a part-time trainer at the gym since its Lake Street days. “Lisa found a niche” that was missing in the boxing world, at least in the Midwest, Mickelson says. “She looked at it as a business, understanding how a business runs. Uppercut is open to everyone who wants to box. People of all ages can come in and try the sport. You can train as if you’re going to compete, but with the option of never competing. Nobody tries to rush you into sparring before you’re ready.” The upshot is that “people come in and have a good experience.”
Bauch knows she’s found a model that works. One of the best parts, she says, is when knowledgeable boxing people “come to the gym and say, ‘I love your place. I always wanted to do this.’” A colleague has franchised his for-profit Gleason’s Gym on the East Coast, and would like Bauch to become a franchisee. A couple on the West Coast is now franchising their co-owned Prime Time Boxing gym, Bauch says. In the Midwest, too, “I think somebody is going to end up franchising the idea. I just want it to be me.”
The Great Female Hope? Don’t hold your breath.
Last year, the team called it quits. Too frustrating, Bauch says. “Half the time, you can’t find matches for [female fighters] locally, so then you have to travel out of state. Well, do you have the time? Do you have the money? It’s just a constant battle. That’s where you lose your fighters.” One might expect a surge of interest in female boxing generated by Million Dollar Baby, which won 2005’s best-picture Oscar, or by the media attention paid to Muhammad Ali’s daughter Laila, a pro boxer. One’s expectation would be wrong, Bauch reports. For a time, she thought that women’s boxing might rise to a level at least comparable to that of, say, women’s basketball: the Minnesota Lynx in relation to the Minnesota Timberwolves. She no longer believes it. For one thing, she has accepted that “a lot of people just don’t want to see women get in the ring and get punched around.” What’s more, the sport in general has fallen on hard times. Men’s boxing is struggling, and “no one is going to pay attention to the women until they can get men’s boxing back up to where it needs to be,” Bauch says. “If you had asked me six years ago, ‘Do you think women’s boxing will ever get to a caliber somewhere close to what men’s boxing is?’ I would have said yes. Ask me that same question now, I’ll say no, it will never happen.” |
The fact that Lisa Bauch did not set out to run a females-only gym
doesn’t mean that she had no agenda concerning women in boxing. Golden Gloves
has a female division, and she has worked to promote and strengthen it. After
moving to Uppercut’s Northeast Minneapolis location in 2004, she organized a
team of five women from the gym who fought in tournaments as far away as Kansas
City.
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