Well I’ve now been in the Triangle are for almost 2 weeks and I’ve been in my new apartment for about 7 days. I came here not fully knowing what to expect and I left my family and all my stuff back in OH, where we’d been living for the past 6 months. It’s going to be another 2 weeks before my wife, daughter and all my stuff come down to NC. I’m going up to get them on the 27th. I came here with a lightly packed car and now have a decent size apartment. I’m living like a college sophomore….I’ve got 1 fork, 1 spoon, an air mattress, 2 plates, 2 bowls, 1 wooden chair, a small foldout dinner table, and some toilet paper. It’s almost like I’m camping out. No tv and what’s worse, no one around. The apartment is empty. Three quarters of the rooms have NOTHING in them. I set up my bed in the dining room because the natural light is better and it’s warmer at night. Kinda strange to not hear the pitter-patter of my daughter’s feet on the ground. Strange to see a shell of a home. Can’t wait for Cate and Eva to get down here.

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As I’ve mentioned in the past couple days, I’ve moved to Cary, NC to pursue my business full time. One of the things I need to take the next step however is a facility. Up til this point HPC has been largely run without a facility. We’ve had an office in Cali, and some agreements with several universities to allow us to use their athletic facilities but we’ve never had a centralized training facility to call our own. Having no facility was largely a by-product of none of the partners in HPC working on the company full-time, and thus not being able to generate the revenue to justify it. Also, a very large chunk of our revenue comes from services that do not require a facility at all. For instance, our sport science consultation with National Governing Bodies doesn’t require us to have a facility at all. In fact, it’s completely unnecessary for this service. Not having a facility has brought limitations though. One, it makes it hard to train athletes with optimal efficiency and effectiveness.  Second, it has the potential to cost us clients who are fooled by the fancy equipment smoke screens that other businesses in the athletic performance field use to cover up their incompetencies. With the move to NC I’m hoping to put an end to these issues. I’m pretty close to finalizing a great opportunity at a HUGE facility that is very nice. With that said, I was by no means expecting this and I really don’t NEED anything fancy. In fact, before this recent opportunity presented itself only a week ago today, I had kind of thought that it would be nice to start with a plain warehouse, forgo any semblance of style and flash and make up for it with substance and the best, most comprehensive approach to training possible. This may still be the route we go but even if it is there are still some minimum facility standards though. I NEED at least 1000 sqft of training space, some minimal office space, high ceilings, an open floor plan, a bathroom, and a building structure and / or neighbors that permit me to have athletes dropping heavy weights on a regular basis.

I’d like to have more space (~3,000 to 5,000 sqft), enough area to set up a short straightaway for running, 3-5 office spaces, room for a movement analysis lab (probably about 1,000 sqft), locker and shower rooms for both genders, medical areas where therapy could be performed, and enough room outside that we could do training on a grass field when we wanted. Right now I’ve got several plans in place that encompass both ends of this spectrum. Obviously I’d prefer the bigger and better place, especially if the terms are right; but I’m not above moving in to a warehouse and just getting things done. I’m ready to roll.

For some reason I save and published this but it got lost or over-written. Oh well. Let me try to replicate…

Unless you’ve been in a hole for the past week you know that the economy is in a terrible place and people are losing their jobs left and right. Some of the numbers that President Obama gave in his address last night were just mind blogging. Check out this graph as an example:
The numbers are staggering. Unemployment rates are near all time high. It makes me glad to be self-empl0yed. I kinda feel like I’m above the fray a bit. Sure, I can fail but if I do it’s my doing. And it’s not like I’m gonna fire myself or anything!

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Yesterday I had my second meeting with the GM of Impact Athletic Center. It went extremely well. Today I signed a lease for my apartment and moved in. I’ve even gotten half way through changing all my billing and contact info to my new address. What does this all mean? It means I’m ‘all in’ as they say in Poker. I’m fully committed. There’s no turning back. Any more cliches I can use? There are still some uncertainties as a deal with Impact is pending the results of a meeting with some investors today. They want me to commit to a long term partnership that rebrands the facility as a center of athletic excellence rather than just a fitness center. The general terms of the agreement have been laid out though and we really just need to get it on paper and then put a pen to that paper. I’ve been close to landing what I thought were major deals before from venture capitalist investors, shoe company sponsorships, and the like…but every time they’ve seemed to fall through. Sometimes because I cut it off to preserve the integrity of my vision for the company, other times because they cut it off, and more recently because of the failing economy. The lesson I’ve learned is not to count my chickens until they’re hatched. This one feels different though. It’s close. Very close. In fact, I’ve been told HPC could be in within a week. I’m ready for it and extremely excited.
I’m also planning for the worst though. If it doesn’t pan out for some reason, then I’ve got a plan B and C (the current deal with Impact is actually a plan B that turned in to a plan A). If need be I may sublease a portion of the warehouse that was the original plan. Or maybe, just lease a small warehouse and build from the ground up.

Whatever the case, I’m ready for it. I’ve had over a year to mentally prepare for this to happen and I’m willing to take whatever calculated risk is necessary to make it happen.

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• MSNBC says North Carolina is the best place to start a business in 2008
• Money Magazine says Cary, NC is the 16th best small city in the U.S.
• Relocate America says Cary is in the top 100 places to live in America
• Kiplinger’s says Raleigh, NC is the 2nd best place in the U.S. to Live, Work & Play
• Forbes says Raleigh was ranked as the top place in the U.S. for jobs in 2006 & 2007 (9th in 2008)
• Forbes says Raleigh is the best place for businesses and careers in 2007 & 2008
• CNN Money says Raleigh is the 20th best place to live and launch a business in 2008

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been actively looking for a place to live in the Triangle area. Somehwhere that was nice, reasonably priced and close to any of the number of places it looked like I may be establishing HPC in the Raleigh / Cary / Apex areas. I’d been checking out all the major apartment listing sites including Craigslist to find an apartment that would work. Well, last week I happened to be looking at Craigslist and a new ad popped up for what appeared to be a great property. It was a new townhouse that was going for about $150-300 cheaper than all the other properties of similar size, quality, and area. Obviously I got excited and quickly shot off an email to the poster stating that I was interested. Not too long after a woman writes back in broken English answering my questions about lease deposit and other fees but ignoring my questions about the area and the square fooage. She also stated she was out of the country on a missionary trip and that I should contact her husband (using a Nigerian number). I wrote her back and asked when I could take a look and she said that because she and her husband were in Nigeria they were leasing the property at a discounted rate and wanted to find someone who’d take good care of there home. She said they had left in such a rush that they weren’t able to find an agent to take care of the rental. Hmmm….I thought, this was getting more than a little suspicious. I thought I’d play along though so I offered to give her references so she could know I could be ‘trusted.’ She emailed back stating that she didn’t need any of that, that she believed me and that we’d need to find some way to get the deposit and first months rent to her and then she could mail the keys. By this point in time I knew where this was going.  So I googled the address of the property and sure enough the house showed up on Trulia for sale. The pictures and the description had been lifted EXACTLY from the ad. Armed with this info, I emailed ‘her’ back again with the following:

You’re not going to believe this! I just googled the property and it came back on some real estate site for sale. It looks like someone is trying to sell your house while you’re gone. They must be posing as the real owners while you were away. I can’t believe they’d take advantage of such a nice Christian couple. I’ve already contacted Craigslist to make sure they know and have turned the real estate agent’s name in to the local police. I also gave them your contact information and they said they’ll be in touch with you since misrepresentation about ownership of a property is a Federal offense and a cyber crime that is recognized around the world. I’d really like to move in to this house and there’s no way I’m going to let those scam artists try to sell it.

Needless to say, they never contacted me back even when I offered to make my payment. Maybe it’s because I also mentioned that the internet crimes division of the FBI needed their address in Nigeria to send them some paperwork.

2 days ago I took another trip to Raleigh. The goal was to check out some plan B options in the event that my original partnership didn’t work out and find a place to live so I could fully relocate. Yesterday morning I had a meeting with the general manager of Impact Athletic & Fitness Center in Cary, NC. The meeting went great. The company is mainly a health club right now but wants to really get in to sports performance. They have the facility to do it: 70,000 sqft in total, a full gymnastics arena (where they also pole vault), a basketball court, small soccer field, 2 weight rooms, a spinning room, pool, and much more. I contacted the company 3 days ago thinking that they may have some space to lease. The general manager contacted me back pretty quickly and we set up a meeting. It seems that HPC may be able to fill there needs of running a high level athletic development center. We’re in the process of brainstorming possible ways to make this work…possibly leasing a small portion of the facility, possibly a lease with some profit sharing, or maybe a complete collaboration. They are open to anything and are ready to act fast. I’d like to get rocking and rolling pretty quick and we may be able to get something knocked out in 1-2 weeks. I also had the chance to look at 4 apartments. 3 of them were pretty nice. I’m checking out 4 more tomorrow. These ones will be a little closer to the Impact facility and actually still equally close should I end up working out of the facility in Apex.

Tomorrow I’m heading back to North Carolina. This time however may be more than the visit that I took 3 weeks ago to check out a facility and discuss a potential partnership. When I left 3 weeks ago, it seemed like things were finally moving along and I’d be setup ‘any day now.’ I had looked up the facility on google maps and couldn’t stop thinking about what I wanted to do with it.

But as I’ve mentioned a couple times in my previous entries, I’ve kinda been in a holding pattern since that visit. The property that I had originally looked at was in the process of changing hands as I understand it, and a lease contract restructuring was being worked out with the new owner and my potential partner / colleague. The problem was, so much time was passing that I was getting antsy and kinda worried that I wasn’t going to be able to get in the facility at all. So I started looking at Plan Bs. I checked out other properties that might work. While they were no where near the bargain that the original place was they would still work as a startup location. I’m confident people will come regardless of what it looks like. I also started thinking about more creative alternative options, some of which didn’t even involve having a facility to start off with.

Then last night I spoke with Dan (the potential partner) and he mentioned that the plans for the facility and our partnership may have changed such that we wouldn’t be fully partnering and I would actually be sub-leasing from him rather than co-leasing as a single entity or directly leasing from the owner. While, I’m actually perfectly ok with both of these options the change in plans with the facility and the newly confirmed uncertainty of the situation gave me the extra nudge to act on some of the alternative options that I had thought up while I was in the holding pattern.

So last night at 2am, I contacted two major sports / fitness facilities in the triangle area. I had done a lot of research and these facilities were specifically selected because they weren’t globo-gym-esque and they were both huge facilities that might be ameniable to what I wanted to do. I was really just seeing if they’d be interested in leasing a small part (1,200-2,000 sqft) of their monstrous facilities out to me and potentially using HPC as a 3rd party provider of training services. This isn’t unprecedented as another prominent athletic development company has been doing this at the Home Depot center in L.A. for some time.

Within 7 hours, the manager of the bigger and better of the 2 facilities had emailed and called 3 times interested in some type of partnership.  What’s more exciting than the opportunity to use this potential facility is just how enthusiastic the general manager was. We spoke for about a half hour and we are on the same page with what we want to do. In fact, he is in the process of rebranding the facility and they have a large infusion of money for expansion to make it a premiere athletic development, medical, and sport science center.

So tomorrow, I head back down to North Carolina, this time a little less certain what the future holds but a little more excited about how many options are on the table. I’m packed and mentally prepared to stay for a couple weeks to get things situated enough to where I can get an apartment to live in and bring my wife and daughter down when things get settled. Thursday morning I have a meeting with the general manager of the big facility and we’re going to have some meetings with some of his investors. On Friday, I’m meeting with the owner of the other facility. I don’t know what’s in store but this should be interesting. Six months ago, I resigned from coaching at West Point to finish writing my dissertation and pursue development of my company full time. At the time I thought that my resignation was the blind “leap” in to the deepend that entrepreneurs mention as an all-important threshold.  Now I realize that that was just putting on my swim trunks. Tomorrow I take the leap and hope that there’s water in the pool.

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