Industry Spotlight, Patrick Higgins, Connect Sports

What’s your current position?

Senior Vice President.

How long have you been in this position?

I have been with Connect for almost 11 years.

Please give us a brief overview of what you do in your work.

Like many others in our industry, there isn’t a short answer, but I’ll try. Every day, I wake up and head to my dream job. I work with the Connect and BizBash teams to design, plan, and execute our events and services that serve the sporting event industry.

What would you say most motivates you to do what you do?

Aside from my family, what motivates me is creating a meaningful impact. Everything we do at Connect Sports and BizBash Sports has a huge ripple effect. Here’s what I mean: At Connect Sports this August, a sporting event organizer will be surprised by what a city offers. They’ll start discussions and ultimately discover they’re a good fit for each other. Fast forward a little while, and now the hotel salesperson hits their sales goal and earns a bonus for their family. The server at the restaurant that helped feed the volleyball team makes an excellent tip that helps with college tuition. The athletes that visit the city form great memories that they’ll look back on for years. It goes on and on.

What are you most excited about or passionate about?

I’m excited and passionate about continuing to evolve the experience we offer our attendees and maximizing our impact. There are a lot of really great tools out there that we’re researching.

What are the goals you most want to accomplish in your work?

A few goals I’d like to accomplish most in my work are contributing to equality in the sports tourism industry – that’s very important to me. Connect Sports was the first sporting trade show to acknowledge the LGBTQ+ sports community and welcome them to join us. I’m also passionate about leveling the playing field for women to rise to the ranks. It’s been an honor and a privilege to get to know the individuals behind their sports communities, and it’s my goal to see our unique initiative continue to advance. Another goal is to see the Connect Sports trade show attendee experience reach new heights in 2024 by introducing new technology and experiences on the show floor. We will be incredibly ambitious in what we’ll be rolling out.

What led you to this job?

I was a Connect attendee before working here. I worked with Rick Hatcher and Christy Strong-Simmons when I attended the 2011 Connect Marketplace in New Orleans to find new locations for USA Fencing events. That’s where I met Chris Collinson, and we began exploring the concept of a sports-specific event. The people at Connect immediately attracted me to the position. They were enthusiastic, hilarious, ambitious, and unafraid to try new things and concepts. Connect is just as passionate about having fun while being the industry leader in getting business done now as they were 12 years ago.

Where did you grow up? What was it like to grow upthere? Did you go to college? Where did you go, and what was that like?

I grew up in South Jordan, Utah – about 20 minutes south of Salt Lake City. It’s hard to imagine a better place to grow up. We’d ride our bikes everywhere (usually farther than where our parents told us that we could) and play every form of basketball available, including 3-on-3, 5-on-5, and on trampolines. They never complained, but I’m sure that our neighbors didn’t like hearing basketballs bouncing well after everyone else had turned off their porch lights. After high school, I joined the US Navy to serve my country and earn money for school. After boot camp and additional training, I reported to the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center (TOPGUN). I was able to take some college courses on base, and after the Navy, I enrolled at Brigham Young University (BYU). BYU was great, and I loved it, although anyone who knows me knows I’m much more of a U of U fan…I love the Utes!

Did you have any key mentors or people who profoundly influenced who you are, what you believe in, and what you’re committed to in your work and life?

My first mentor is, without a doubt, my dad. He always treated everyone with respect and friendliness, would leave his job at the office, was always a husband and dad when he got home, and showed me what a meaningful work ethic looks like.

At TOPGUN, I worked for a naval aviator named Captain Brad Goetsch. As the only enlisted person in our department, part of my job was to go around each night and empty every garbage can in the offices and cubicles of the instructors (there were 25+ of them). Captain Goetsch, the highest-ranking person in our department, would empty his garbage can and walk out each night with a small trash bag in one hand and his flight bag in the other. That was just one of the ways that he showed me what it means to be a good leader.

Scott Beck and Mark White are mentors of mine from my time at Visit Salt Lake (Scott now leads Destination Toronto). They showed me what it means to work with a hospitality community and how to be a good partner, and they taught me a lot about how best to serve meeting planners and sporting event organizers. They both have great energy and made Visit Salt Lake a great workplace.

What projects are you working on now?

Project 1: Redesigning the Connect Sports attendee experience.

Project 2: BizBash Sports launch

Were there any key turning points in these projects?

Project 1: The most significant turning point of Connect Sports must be our industry’s evolution because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like so many of our industry colleagues, we made difficult decisions regarding our staff and team, and we also quickly realized that we needed to realign our event experience to meet the most urgent needs of our attendees – which was and still is getting sports business done.

Project 2: Late last year, we were researching the BizBash audience and subscribership, and we noticed that the number of professional and collegiate sports event professionals consuming BizBash content was growing substantially without any specific sports programming.

We formed the BizBash Sports Executive Advisory Board earlier this year to explore potential opportunities. We unanimously decided to launch the BizBash Sports Summit this November in Washington, DC.

Were there any surprises?

Project 1: When we shifted our resources from traditional conference-style programming, like breakout sessions, to improving internal systems like our 1-on-1 appointment technology, I was surprised at how quickly the volume of business getting done increased. The number of leads distributed by sports planners and received by suppliers increased by almost 35% this year.

I knew that number would go up, but I didn’t expect it to jump that much that quickly. There is a lot of sports business this year!

Project 2: With BizBash Sports, I’ve been surprised at how much the is to learn. I grew up watching the NBA All-Star games, reading Barstool Sports and Bleacher Report features, and watching the World Series. Watching and learning from the men & women behind designing the experiences around those events has been fascinating. It made me realize that after 20+ years in this industry, there is still so much out there to learn.

What were the key relationships that mattered most? What were the key sources of support or resistance you encountered?

It may sound cliché, but relationships are everything in our industry. I’ve been very fortunate to have leaned heavily on our executive advisory boards to hold us accountable, share their honest feedback, and provide support.

Outside of the workplace, the relationships that have mattered most to me are those with my family. Being able to design site selection resources for sports planners during the day, coach youth sports at night, and travel with my wife to tournaments on weekends allowed me to have an instant perspective on what Connect Sports has to offer.

What was most challenging? What did you do to deal with these challenges?

When I was in the Navy, once a year, the TOPGUN school would bring in pilots from the Air Force and Marine Corps. While there were some key differentiators between these types of fighter pilots, there are many similarities, and there was great value in bringing them together to share ideas, learn from one another, and build relationships. The Connect Marketplace is similar in that we bring together planners from different communities and allow them to learn from one another regarding site selection, negotiation, sponsorships, and contracting.

The challenge and opportunity for Connect Sports is ensuring that sports planners can access the other planners if they want it and creating a sports-only environment for those who don’t.

Did the work fail in some ways? How? What might you have done to prevent those areas of partial failure?

We’ve had years where feedback told us we offered too much cross-over between the Connect Sports audience and the meetings & conventions audience, and we’ve had years where feedback said we needed to provide more. This year, we’re working hard to allow Connect Sports attendees to “choose their own adventure” on the trade show floor.

What was most rewarding?

Hearing stories of events that contracted because of interaction at Connect Sports is always rewarding. Knowing that we play a small role with athletes, family members, coaches, and friends who create memories through sports is beautiful.

Patrick, it has become apparent that you are on a mission to re-invent all things Connect Sports. What gets you out of bed every day to continue this drive? What motivates your work ethic?

There are a few things. Every year, 17% of attendees indicate that ours is the first sports tourism trade show they’ve attended. This 17%, along with the other 83% of our attendees, look to us as partners to help them get sports business done.

They trust us with their time away from the office, their time away from their friends & family, and their resources. We take that very seriously and want to meet that trust with a great experience that helps them professionally and personally.

I also genuinely love the people that I get to work with each day. We hang out after work, our families are friends, and we care about one another.

What would you say are your best skills? What do you bring to the table that helps you rise above the rest? Where and how did you learn those skills?

That’s a tricky question for me to answer, so I decided to ask those who know me the best – my family. My kids (Jackson – 17, Crew – 15, and Jane – 11) said that I’m organized, I’m good at talking to all different kinds of people, I’m good at finding ways to help people, I absorb information, and that my “dad joke game is fire.”

Of everything that they mentioned, I take great pride in being able to help people. With Connect Sports and BizBash Sports, I’m very fortunate to work with a team as passionate about finding ways to help our community as I am. I always try to ask questions, listen, and then process what’s been shared to identify new tools and resources for Connect Sports to continue leading in getting sports business done.

What’s next for you in your work? What are you looking forward to down the road in your career?

Next up for me is our 2023 Connect Sports Marketplace next month in Minneapolis! I’m looking forward to seeing our community come together and experience some of the new things we’ve been creating. Beyond that, as many of you are aware, we were recently acquired by Informa. Informa is the world leader in events, digital products, and academy research, and their tagline is “championing the specialist”. Everyone that attends a Connect Sports event is, by definition, a specialist. Working with Informa will put Connect Sports on the fast track to event innovation, new experiences, and more. It’s been a fun, challenging, and rewarding first ten years for Connect Sports, and the next ten will be even bigger and better!