Yesterday was a great day, personally and professionally. I spent the morning playing with my daughter while I waited for videos to upload, rip, convert, etc for use on the web. Then in the afternoon, I got an email granting my dissertation extension request, and finally Axel and I had a major conference call with a supplement company that we’re about to collaborate with. This company is very like minded with HPC and has already established themselves as leaders in the field of sport nutrition. This is exciting not just because we’ll be able to provide supplements to our HPC Elite team athletes but also for the collaborative marketing and comprehensive athletic development plans that it looks like we’re going to be doing together. I can’t say too much at this point but this is one of the bigger steps that we’ll take as a company if things pan out as we all discussed yesterday. We have another call today with the company to mull over what was discussed yesterday and see if anyone has any new ideas to bring to the table. They are ready to move on this and so are we. Giddyup!

Well, as I posted on the blog about a month ago I pretty much finished my dissertation. I was originally planning on defending during the last week of the semester (last week) but a variety of factors conspired against me – my advisor was in China and quite busy, I couldn’t afford the plane tickets to get him round trip to America and back, I had a stats issue that needed some clearing up, and oh yeah, my dog ate my homework. So while I could have finished up, my advisor and I decided it would be best for all parties to just defend the dissertation next semester. The only holdup is that this would require an extension on the statute of limitations on my doctoral degree. No problem we thought. Well, I waited weeks to hear back and the semester actually came to a close last Friday with no news from LSU. I was uncharacteristically worried that I wasn’t going to get a chance to defend (at least at LSU…I would have just enrolled elsewhere).  In the meantime, the waiting kinda put everything concerning my dissertation on hold. I didn’t get any drafts back from my advisor which in turn meant that I didn’t really have anything to work on and I had basically just spent the last month doing (instead of being) ABD.  The fatally optimistic side of me pushed me on to continue on with the plans of moving and setting up a facility though. Today I received word from LSU that the extension had been….

[tune in tomorrow for answers to this and other cliffhangers]

A couple days ago we released the new DVD set from the clinic that my company put on at the 2008 Olympic Trials. The speakers and the information from this clinic were top notch so I’m glad to get this out on DVD. And while I actually haven’t had the time to watch all 8 hours of presentations on DVD I know from watching it live that the talks were very good. So far sales of the DVD have been quite good also. This alone added 9 new DVDs to our store making us a little more well-rounded and bringing us up to 20 products in total. I’m looking for ways to keep this number growing as it’s a good stream of relatively passive income. There’s quite a bit of up-front work but after organization, editing, etc are done then you can just sit back on the products and let them sell. As I’ve mentioned before this will be critical to the first year of taking my business full-time because it provides a somewhat steady stream of income to support any highs and lows in client, consulting, and speaking engagement income. With that said, take a look at the topic talks and if you like what you see buy a copy today. You can use coupon code elitetrack until December 23rd for a 10% discount.

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Well, this doesn’t have much to do with my business, completing my doctorate, or anything else I normally right about around these parts but since this is my blog and since blog posting seems to be the best means of consumer empowerment in today’s day and age of immediate communication and google searching I figured I’d write about my nightmare experience with MacMall. MacMall is one of the biggest online vendors of Apple merchandise. In fact, I’d imagine they’re probably the most popular Apple reseller on the web. Last Friday (Black Friday!!) I purchased a new macbook to replace my year old MacBook. I didn’t really need an upgrade but with the Black Friday distounts and other discounts I receive and the fact that I’ve had a lot of luck selling my previous MacBooks for a profit (since I buy them with large discounts) I figured I’d upgrade again. In the past I’ve always bought direct from Apple. I almost did this time but MacMall had some slightly better deals and I figured they’d be able to get me the order sooner than a potentially overloaded Apple. Boy did I make a mistake. I ordered the MacBook with some extra goodies and requested they be shipped to my house in Ohio. After 3 days of checking the status of the order on the website, I saw that the order had not shipped. I called them on three occasions to see what the holdup was and each time I was put on hold for at least an hour and ended up hanging up. I even emailed customer service but didn’t receive a response. When I finally did get through I was told that I had to call their credit card services to confirm my order. The rep said that I should have received an email telling me to do so. I hadn’t. And I even checked my bulk and junk mail too just to make sure. In any case, I called the credit card service rep and confirmed my order. The problem was, it had taken so long for them to process the order that I now wasn’t going to be in the location of the shipment since I was going to be on the road for 2 weeks. I wanted to have the new lappy for some graphics intensive work (since the new MacBook has a dedicated graphics card) I had to do while I was going to be on the road so I asked that they ship it to my hotel in Reno. They agreed but actually placed a second order which for a span of a couple days actually stretched my credit card to its limit since it had double the charge on hold. That was December 2nd. According to their website, the product shipped the next day. “Great” I thought to myself, “with the 2 day shipping I should easily get it before I leave Reno on the 10th”. That was wishful thinking. Yesterday was Saturday the 8th and I didn’t receive the order. Today is Sunday which means no mail is coming in, and I leave early in the morning tomorrow to go to Vegas which means I won’t be around when and if the order arrives. I say “IF” because the shipment tracking number that MacMall gave me doesn’t work. In fact, it doesn’t even work for them. You see yesterday I called MacMall again to tell them about the scenario. After another ridiculously long hold I was connected to a customer service rep who just put me on hold again and made me wait for another rep. When I finally did get to speak to someone, they actually blamed me because I had shipped the order via 2 day USPS shipping option. They said that I shouldn’t have been able to do that. Isn’t that a problem with their website then? In any case, I won’t be receiving my order because I’ll be in Vegas and I’ve requested a full refund. So now, I’ve wasted about 6 hours of my life emailing and on hold with MacMall customer service, I won’t be receiving the order I placed, and I’ve missed out on the Black Friday deals. That’ll be the last time I order from MacMall.

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I’m in Reno now.  Las Vegas next week. All told I’ll be away for 10 days. It’s kind of bittersweet.
I’m in Reno for the USATF Annual meeting and Vegas National Podium Project. I really like traveling and I’m going to get the chance to see some of my good friends and visit one of my favorite places (Vegas). All the while, it’s been a long time since I’ve hit the road and after a jet-setting spring and summer I was enjoying being a homebody. In fact, until today it had been about 4 months since I’d gotten on to a plane. That’s easily the longest I’d gone in the past 5 years. My last year at West Point, it seemed like I was gone every weekend. If it wasn’t a track meet where we travelled by bus (or sometimes plane) and were gone for 3 days, it was a business trip for consulting, coaching, or research. Many times it was both in the same weekend – catching a redeye from whatever city our meet was in to the West Coast for HPC work and then catching a redeye back to NY so I could be in on time for work on Monday. This meant that I was away from my wife and daughter a lot. A LOT. In fact, I missed about 1 month of the first 3 months of my daughter’s life because I was on the road. That was an eye-opener…especially when I was often too busy with business obligations even when I was at home to spend much time with the fam. I was often coming home from work at USMA late in the evening only to eat dinner and then do HPC business work for 4-6 hours a night.

It made me think that I needed to make a career change- either stick with collegiate coaching or focus on HPC. While both had pluses and minuses one of the many factors that pushed me towards pursuing HPC full-time was that it would allow me to spend more time with Cate and Eva. It’s worked. Now that I’m self-employed I’ve gotten to see my family every day for the last 4 months and spend a lot more time with my daughter.  Even though I’m not making as much as I was while I was working at West Point and doing HPC, I’m making enough to ‘get by’ and have made a tradeoff that I have yet to regret.

So while it’s nice to leave the rural country abode I currently call home, this extended trip is a nice reminder of one of the many reasons pursuing HPC full time was the right move at the right time.

Long time since my last post. Been very busy writing my dissertation as well as making some changes to ELITETRACK and totally redoing the store and services section of the HPC site. I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of web work lately on my various sites. With the HPC site the changes were business motivated. Our store is getting enough business now where I thought it would be worthwhile to improve the shopping environment and make the site more secure. It took quite a bit of meddling but I think I’m done now. It took quite a bit of time and diverted me from some other things that I like but don’t need to do (i.e. blogging). All that to say, that as a small business owner, I often find myself having to wear many hats- web developer, marketer, coach, sport technologist, researcher, salesman, etc. Because I’m just trying to get this business up and running I don’t have the means to pay others to do things that might otherwise be delegated to specialists. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but it definitely places a high demand on time management and prioritization of tasks. I’ve found that becoming competent at a variety of tasks can save a lot of money but cost you a lot of time. It then becomes a question of prioritizing tasks so that you can figure out what you’d be better off outsourcing and what you should handle yourself.

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