What is CAAM Events? Florida Cyclists or Those that Travel to Florida to Ride Should Find Out More

Jim Dodson: Good morning, so what is CAAM Events and how do they promote safety and a great quality experience when you ride at an event that they're involved in? I'm Jim Dodson, the Florida Bike Guy, and my guest this morning is Paul Ricci who is the founder and president of CAAM Events and we're gonna learn exactly what they do in terms of their involvement in over 40 of the major rides throughout Florida. And what you're going to see when you're involved in one of their rides about how they make that such a high quality event. Good morning, Paul.

Paul Ricci: Good morning, Jim, how are you?

Jim Dodson: I'm great, Paul is coming to us from Orlando where he lives and operates CAAM Events. So, tell us something about CAAM Events, Paul.

Paul Ricci: Well, I mean there's so many different things I can talk about but from the consumer's side what we've done is we try to keep a calendar of events throughout the state of Florida nationally, so that we simplify the process for cyclists to find the next event to participate in.

Jim Dodson: Okay, so let me see here. Tell me what role you play in the events that you're involved in? How does that work from the consumer's standpoint? What are they gonna see?

Paul Ricci: Well, the first thing is, I'm an active cyclist myself so I participate in a lot of these events and I get to see a lot of things that work and some of the things that don't work. I listen to the chatter among the cyclists, because if you'd ridden with me I kind of get out there and kind of talk a little bit with you and so forth. And I try and identify the things that are working. And the things that are working for some events, with all the events I'm participating with, I try to take that information and spread it so that we have a more consistent product. I'm gonna take a little turn here and talk about CAAM Events itself and what we have is what we call a CAAM tour series, which I've found the simplest way to explain it is like a sports league. So, as an example, if you take the NFL where they have 32 individually owned teams but they all fall under the umbrella of the NFL so there's a lot of things that are consistent. So, they retain the personality of the event by the owner, and the couches, and so forth, but they follow the same course or field markings, the registration process is the same, the apparel, a lot of consistencies there. So, what I've done is I've paired up with a lot of these events throughout the state and actually we're expanding to other southeastern markets such as Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina. And kind of simplifying the registration process, we're all using the same registration platform, and so that the customers when they register they understand what they're gonna do and once they register for the first time a lot of their personal data is already stored, with the exception of the credit card information for safety purposes, and what we want is a more consistent product across the board. Because, in essence, I'm vetting these different events for the customers or I'm identifying certain elements that make these smaller events better and more competitive as far as competing with the bigger events. And I know that I'm probably rattling off a little bit here but there's really, behind the scenes, there's a lot of things and these events will kind of delegate the registration platform. We do number bibs, t-shirts, course markings, finisher medals, finisher pins, a lot of little things.

Jim Dodson: Let me interrupt, you're talking. So, there's two sides of this. You've got the rider side and you've got the event organizer side.

Paul Ricci: Yes.

Jim Dodson: So you take an event that's been going on for a number of years perhaps with a private organization that's running it. They've got volunteers that are running the registration and what have you, but CAAM Events, what I understand you do is you charge the event a flat fee and then you handle all the registration requirements. Why don't you just talk about that for a minute?

Paul Ricci: Yeah, so with the registration we use a platform called Race Roster. It's a third party, I don't have any ownership in the company at all, but I've found that that's probably for what we're looking to do, it's very user friendly. It's probably one of the fastest growing registration platforms in the nation right now and they actually listen to a lot of the ideas that I have and they've actually implemented some of the things. And what I do is I set up the registration pages and they're pretty consistent so there is a lot of elements between the imaging, the coding, the registration questions, the pricing strategies. One thing that we've done, and this was kind of a pet peeve of mine, we make sure that there's no processing fee that's passed on to the consumer when you register.