Customer Snapshot
- Bell Tower Events: 7
- Events in 2025: 26
- Platforms: RunSignup & TicketSignup
Apex Promoz & the Bell Tower Shops
About Apex Promoz
The story of Apex Promoz starts in 2017 with John Bodner hosting races as part of Horry County Parks and Recreation, where he was the Director of Strategy and Performance and was assigned the job of helping Parks and Rec fix some revenue shortfalls. The solution was to create races that highlighted the parks and increased community awareness of lesser known parks, as well as creating an employee wellness program where all employees could participate for free. The Wellness Committee paid parks and rec on behalf of employees, creating a cycle of keeping money in the organization, providing a benefit to employees, and allowing the Parks department to be more profitable.
Fast forward a couple of years, and John moved to Florida and decided to start his own company. Apex officially started in November of 2022 with the Titletown Turkey Trot in John’s hometown of Danville, KY with their first Florida race in April of 2023.
Working with Bell Tower Shops
Nowadays, John comes from a government day job that focuses on economic development events. This story is about a unique way he was able to provide economic benefit to the Bell Tower Shops with a series of events.
Bell Tower Shops is an outdoor shopping mall in Ft. Myers that is a dining hub/dining center with 7 or 8 restaurants. Apex hosted an event at the shops in 2023 because they have are festively decorated for Christmas and it was a nice draw to have people running through decorated and lit up trees.
John met one of the restaurant owners (Tom McGregor of McGregor’s Pub), which blossomed into a St. Patrick’s Day (2024) version of the race as a way to get people hanging out around the pub earlier in the day – by 8am the Pub was packed. Tom McGregor himself ran the race, and walked back into the bar at 8:25 to find it was packed – it stayed that way the rest of the day with folks still wearing bibs and medals around when John came back at noon.
Apex has also worked with Cantina Laredo for a Cinco de Mayo race, and partnered with a local Fleet Feet location at the mall where they host the Packet Pickups for these races. This has an added impact for Fleet Feet by getting foot traffic from day-of participants in addition to the Packet Pickups on Friday nights.
The races are centered around keeping a local mindset and a fun, festive atmosphere. For St. Patrick’s Day silver coins were “hidden” around the course that runners could return to Fleet Feet for a free pair of sunglasses (paid for by Apex); for Cinco de Mayo it was plastic margarita glasses, and for another race it was inner tubes. The whole concept is to stay within the Bell Tower Shops with Feet Feet merch and Bell Tower restaurant gift cards as prizes. This has resulted in a huge spike in foot traffic on the mornings of these races.
For these events, Apex is in the background – this is more about highlighting the shopping center and the locations within it – to quote John “a 5K does not create an economic impact in the community, but it can create a single-day impact for a restaurant”, and from a branding/marketing perspective the restaurants that are hosting/sponsoring these races are getting a lot of repeat and residual business as a result of the races Apex is partnering with them on.
Recently, Apex has added in a new event: a pub crawl through the Bell Tower Shops, which uses TicketSignup. Apex has done a great job of getting people out to the Bell Tower Shops, but they wanted to do something that tied all of the restaurants together. Next year there is talk of making a full Pub Crawl series designed around getting people to the restaurants and generating traffic in the slowest economic times (summer being the off-season in Ft. Myers) through fun, enjoyable experiences – restaurants, for their part, were able to do things at-cost to make it reasonable like offering a free slider (instead of the normal 3-slider platter) as part of the crawl.
John on RunSignup
John first started using RunSignup at Horry County in 2018, as they had found a noticeable decrease in registration when they tried a different platform. He loves the ease of use of RunSignup and it has always made life easier – for someone with a different focus for most of the day, this has been critical.
John on TicketSignup
“TicketSignUp was great. Like anything there were some differences I needed to figure out but for the most part having the same look and feel made it quick to get up to speed on. I think it makes it nice for the participants as well, having a similar product makes life easier. I did use the Checkin App and that was great! Just like the RSU checkin and we hosted the pub crawl checkin at Fleet Feet just like a race PPU. This was a really good thing for Fleet Feet because it was a completely new customer group than the races.”