My business partner had a meeting with an international shoe company yesterday. It looks like somethings going to come of it. This company has a major international presence but is just starting to get in to the U.S. They want to use us for product testing

because they are getting in to a new market and would like to use my experience as a biomechanist and access to elite athletes as a way to create the best possible product. Right now they aren’t ready to rush a product out for commercial release and really want to do things right which is refreshing to know. I think this relationship will grow in to something very fruitful.

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I’m feeling the pressure of finishing my dissertation. I had a stats section mixup that I had to go back and fix and then had to rewrite quite a bit of the discussion. This took some time I didn’t feel like I had. I’ve been getting a ton of writing done but my mind is racing about it all day. I need to finish this thing so I can move on with my life but my OCD perfectionist traits are eating up some time. I think since I’ve started running more I’ve been able to focus much better than usual. I’ve had 2 nights this week with under 5 hours sleep. In both cases, I actually went to bed, found my mind still racing (at 4am!) so got up and started working again. Today I’m starting to feel it though. My brain is lagging and I’ve got a little bit of an aura coming on. I haven’t contributed much to elitetrack in the past couple days, haven’t blogged here, and have pretty much been isolated other than a couple hours of play time each day with my daughter. Sorry if that was a rambling post. Thought it would be good to update the site and do something other than my dissertation for a couple minutes.

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Last year I contacted most of the major shoe companies (Nike, Asics, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, etc) to see if they’d be interested in sponsoring my company and the HPC Elite team that I coach. I know I’m biased but I think we have a lot to offer (see letter below). Unfortunately, while we had meetings with several of the companies nothing ever came out of them. Undeterred by this rejection, I contacted 2 upstart athletic apparel / shoe companies about 10 days ago in hopes of getting a sponsorship deal for HPC.  Today I was contacted back by one of the companies and it seems they are very interested in working with us. If this works out it will be a MAJOR deal for the company because it allows us to provide more for our athletes and reduces our overhead since we have been paying for some equipment costs for the athletes on our HPC Elite Team. It also legitimizes what I’m trying to do with the company. I won’t disclose the company in question until something is finalized but if it works I think it will be a great match considering that the company is an upstart trying to make a big push in to the market.

Here’s part of the letter I’ve sent to some companies.

I work for a company called Human Performance Consulting. XYZ

gave me your contact information. The reason I’m writing is because I was

wondering if XXXX would be interested in either a sponsorship or

collaboration with my company. We are an athletic development company

that coaches athletes, educates coaches, and performs sport science research.

XYZ actually worked as a researcher for us before joining XXX.

We present an opportunity that I believe would be beneficial for both you and us. We can present you with the opportunity for some high profile exposure,especially within the running and track and field community. We are commissioned to work with USATF as it’s official sport science provider and as part of this we put a crew of 25+ employees on the field for the entire duration of the USATF National Championships and we have no restrictions on what we wear. If you were to be the company’s official sponsor you would have the opportunity to put your logo on our shirts / shoes / shorts as large as you’d like out on the field at what is the second biggest and best (to the Olympics and World Champioships) track meet in the world.
In addition to this, we also have a club of elite level athletes who have been very successful and are increasingly gaining both national and international exposure. Although our track club is only 15 months old, in 2008 we sent 3 athletes to the USATF Indoor national championships, our sprinter turned in the fastest time in the world in the 55m (and world ranked times in the 60m and 200m), and we sent 3 athletes to the USATF Olympic trials (2 made the finals in the Triple Jump), one athlete competed in the UK Olympic trials, and another athlete took second in the triple jump at the Estonian national championships. These athletes could wear your equipment to help increase exposure for your company both in the U.S. and internationally. We actively market these athletes on our youtube and vimeo channels (see http://youtube.com/hpcsport and http://vimeo.com/hpcsport).

They would also be willing to participate in product testing if that is

something that would interest you.

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If you’re a regular reader of my blog you know that I’ll be setting up my business somewhere in the next month or two. In my last blog entry I mentioned that Raleigh, NC may very well be the current front runner. I’ve done a lot of research on where to do it to have the best chance of success and also live somewhere I want to live. I’ve had quite a few emails asking about what cities are on my shortlist. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Raleigh, NC
2. Charlotte, NC
3. Atlanta, GA
4. Austin, TX
5. Jacksonville, FL
6. Tampa, FL
7. Irvine, CA (probably ruled out now)

I have some very specific criteria I am looking for when I chose these cities? Can you guess what they are?

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Had a great week. Got a lot of things done. Not as much dissertation writing as I would have liked but a lot of other “nearly as important” things. On top of that, this week has brought some interesting opportunities that should be unfold in the next month or so.

The first one came about as a result of a random email I received a while back. I get a lot of those. This one however was from a former attendee of the baseball clinic that my company put on in 2006 out in California. The guy is from around the Raleigh, NC area and has just started a performance training center that focuses on baseball. I remembered him from the clinic and I respect what he’s doing. He was looking for a person to replace his speed and strength coach who left for another job. Well, long story short is that Raleigh is one of the 6 cities on my short-list of places to set up shop with HPC when I’m done with my dissertation so I wrote him back interested in seeing if we could perhaps work together in some manner. We’d been playing phone tag for about 2 weeks but finally managed to talk this week. At the very least we will be working together on some collaborative projects and it looks like we may very well partner to work out of Raleigh. I’ll be taking a visit there in the next couple weeks to check out the scene and see if it meets what I’m looking for in a business location.

The second opportunity that came up this week was the potential to become a professor at my Alma Mater. I guest lectured 2 classes this week at Ohio University and my advisor for my MS said that I could be a faculty member for their online education classes as soon as I finish my dissertation. The attactive thing about this is that it allows me to stay connected within academia (although in a non-traditional manner), it provides me with tons of freedom (because I can actually live whereever I want), and it would provide a steady stream of income to supplement whatever I’m getting from my business.

Kinda funny how things can just fall in to your lap sometimes.

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Since leaving my ‘steady’ job about 4 months ago I’ve tried to become increasingly active on social sites like digg

, facebook, and twitter. Why? Anyone who knows me, knows that while I’m not introvert I’m certainly not an extrovert either. Is this a change of character? Heck no. I’ll be the first to say that I’m doing it for marketing my business. I have to. I don’t have a marketing budget and can’t really even afford to put much in to advertising beyond the occasional use of google ads. Using social sites like those in the right hand column help to increase your or your businesses exposure, enhance traffic to your main sites by increasing exposure and enhancing search engine strength (which is largely based on incoming links to a site), and even help to build your business network (using sites like linkedin). So far, I can say that it’s been worth the additional time for me.

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Sorry it’s been a while. I’ve been neglecting the blog (at least by my standards). The last 2 weeks have been very productive for me but I haven’t spent as much time here or blogging on ELITETRACK. I’ve made some great site updates (better article viewing, made the site SEO, improved tagging function, adding new affiliates) to ELITETRACK, wrote a Rhodes Scholar letter of recommendation for a friend, wrote an article for an Australian publication that’ll be e-published in a couple weeks, finished a section on my dissertation that had been taking me a long time, finished putting together all the info needed for production of my company’s Olympic trials clinic DVD series, finished my final edits on a monster shot put book I’m writing with Larry Judge, and started work on a new website experiment that should go ‘live’ within the next week. Tonight, I’m giving myself a little break to pat myself on the back for my unusual stretch of focus and catch up on updating my social profiles and blogs.

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The 2 minute rule is a self-imposed rule that I’ve found useful for increasing productivity. It works like this- if a new task comes up, I immediately ask myself if it can be finished in two minutes. If it can, I do it right then and there. On the spot so to speak. This strategy has worked well for emails (which can quickly pile up otherwise), phone calls, and even short blog posts such as this one. Not only does this get things off (or prevent them from ever going on) the ‘to do’ list but it also gets you on a ‘productivity role’ that makes handling bigger tasks easier and also places a loose but relatively easy-to-follow restriction on the time you devote to smaller tasks.

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This past week has been pretty tumultuous for the stock market. Unlucky for me, that’s where I have most of my business startup funds invested. I know. I know. I should have taken it out several months ago. I just figured things were heading up again. In any case, I ended up ‘losing’ almost $20,000 of my startup funds over the course of about 10 days. Am I suicidal? Nope. Depressed? Nope…at least not yet. Crazy? For sure.

Why am I not real worried? Because the way the stock market works, you really don’t lose money until you sell. And I’m not going to sell at a loss. Also, even with the huge dropoff, I’m remarkably still up on my intial investment.

So what does this mean for my goal to open a facility in a couple months? Not too much. I still plan on forging ahead. As I said, I should still be ok although things will certainly be tighter (as if they weren’t already!). I’ve done a ton of research on what I need to do and I think my plan is sound. What I’m sure will actually hurt more than any loss of my personal startup funds is the crunch that banks are under now. Because they’re going to be forced to be much tighter with loans, it could affect me should I choose to go the small business loan route. I’d love to get some angel investment or venture capital investment to give me a running start but there’s drawbacks to that as well. I might even look in to crowd sourcing the funding. We’ll see. The good news is that an excellent partnership opportunity may have presented itself. Stay tuned for more details…

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