Today I took my daughter to ballet class and stayed through the entire hour long class. I did the same thing last week. Her class was at 11. There were a couple soccer moms there but I was the only dad. Am I a ballet fan? No, not at all. In fact I don’t know a thing about ballet (not that the class is really ballet…more like a girls-only PE class) but I’ve really enjoyed going. What I especially appreciate is that I’m actually able to go and don’t have to use an early lunch hour to do it. Because my training facility isn’t open and I’m primarily doing consulting, speaking engagements and correspondence training, my schedule is very flexible. Flexible enough that I can go to mid-day ballet if I want to. I can’t tell you how nice it is to have this kind of flexibility and any time I have any doubts about the uncertainty of my business pursuits I remember that it’s things like mid-day ballet with my daughter that easily outweigh any potential drawbacks.

Ok…picking up where I left off, when the opportunity to operate my business out of the Impact Athletics center fell through I was scrambling to find another place. Mind you, I had had back ups all the while

(tip 1). Number 1 backup, if you can even call it that, was the original warehouse I was going to move in to when I first checked out the triangle area. I’m not sure if this option was really fair to call a backup option since it was the original plan and I never let it slip off the radar even when it seemed as if the Impact facility partnership was a lock. The reason I kept pushing forward with this option even while it looked like the multi-million dollar opportunity at Impact was certain is because you NEVER know what’s going to happen (tip 2) and the time lines given by other people are almost always fatally optimistic (tip 3). The guy I’d be working with at this location would also be a good match for what I’m trying to do. I had also been looking for commercial real estate in the Cary area as a second backup. When Impact fell through, options 2 and 3 moved to the forefront. Temporarily. In no time at all though, the managing director from Impact who was going to bring me in (and was laid off when the new company bought operational rights) hustled his ass of to make things happen. He was on the phone, building connections, and exploring all possible alternative options. He wanted to act fast to keep our original plan intact. He was worried that I would go elsewhere and then he wouldn’t have the sports performance company he needs to create a combination medical and sports facility. He also had some other contractors from Impact who had been laid off who would be able to bring their client base with them if he acted fast to open a facility. We made Barnes & Nobles are new office, made up a new LLC, and visited every existing facility that might be interested in collaboration or sub-leasing for a temporary holdover. I appreciated working with him because he knew the business as well as I did, found a way to get things done, and had lots of connections. It really drove home the importance of surrounding yourself with people who complement what you do and do their job well (tip 4). We managed to get in to another facility but as I mentioned in a previous blog, the entire facility had already been leased and the leasors weren’t interested in sub-leasing. Seemingly bad. What happened though is that the owner of said facility tentatively agreed to build another facility from the ground up that would rival anything in the country as a comprehensive center for athletic excellence. Something like this obviously takes time though which means that I’m back to waiting for 6-9 months (also see tip 3 above). So I need a holdover facility. One that I can have for 6-12 months and get out of if necessary if and when the new facility is ready. So I went back to backup plans 1 & 2 from above. Last week I was scheduled to sign a lease and move in to a property but then I pulled the plug and decided to wait til June. Why did I do that after months of waiting to finally get going? Because I looked at my calendar for April, May and June and realized that between my graduation, teaching three USATF Level 1 schools, one USATF Level 2 school, coaching and providing sport science services at USATF National Championships and several other smaller domestic elite track and field meets, and lecturing in Beijing for a week, I would be out of town for 36 of the next 70 days….not exactly the best scenario to have when you want to put up a grand opening sign. In fact, it seemed like business suicide. With that is tip 5: know when to hold.

So that brings me to where I am now. For the first time since I’ve moved to the triangle, I actually have some sense of certainty. I’m not depending on anyone else’s time schedule or facility availability at this point. I’m looking to open doors to a training facility (either the original facility in Apex or another short term lease somewhere) in June once everything has died down enough to make it work. It might be June 1st, might be June 8th…it just depends how much I can get down between all my other commitments to prepare the facility for ‘doors open.’

So to wrap this up, business startups please take away the following:

1. Have backup plans
2. Recognize the certainty of uncertainty
3. Realize that you shouldn’t count on the time tables or promises of others
4. Surround yourself with good people
5. Know when to hold

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So to continue where I left off yesterday, much has happened in the last month or so. First the Impact facility opportunity fell through due to a complete staff overhaul from the ground up. Then things quickly picked up as the very people who had brought me in to that deal (only to later be laid off) partnered with me and we made a whirl wind tour of every possible option in the triangle area….leasing our own facility, having one built from scratch, or moving in to an existing sport or fitness facility. All scenarios had strengths and weaknesses but one particular opportunity clearly came to the fore. We had several meetings with another huge sports complex (to go unnamed by request) in the area and the owner was VERY interested in what we were trying to do. He has a pre-existing business operating that would be very complimentary to what I am already doing and that would benefit from a high-profile, high-end training center. The problem was that the facility that he owned was already spoken for….leased out for several years. The current leaseholder wasn’t interested in giving up space (we’d asked for 10k sqft) and losing what he had developed over the past couple years so it looked like it wasn’t going to work. Instead, it seems that it may work out better than any other possibility as the owner is so interested in what we have to offer that he is researching building a new neighboring facility from the ground up to house my training center along with some complimentary medical groups (massage, ART, chiro, orthos, etc). This means that it can be ‘built to order’ and made just how I like it. The drawback is that it will take some time to build and get the medical groups at the table. The estimated time that I’ve been given is 6-9 months. I would love for it to be that short but realistically, it’s probably more like 9-18 months. So in the meantime, I know I can’t sit around doing nothing in the HOPE that it panned out. I knew I needed to find a temporary facility which is another story altogether. Ont that I’ll discuss tomorrow.

Well, I’ve had a whirlwind couple weeks since my last post. In many ways it’s been painfully slow waiting to hear back on things. In other cases things have changed fast and furious. I’ll lay out the developments over a series of shorter posts. The quick low-down is that my situation with the Impact facility fell through a couple weeks ago when an outside company purchased operational rights to the facility and promptly dismissed the existing staff including the administrative staff who had been working with me. The good side is that I didn’t get involved before the new group came in because they don’t seem to be going the same route that I want to take my business. Additionally, I’m still working with the same people that had brought me in to Impact facility in the first place. One of them in particular is a real hustler. He gets things done, he has the same business vision as I do, and he’s well connected both locally and nationally. So in many ways, things aren’t going to plan…but they are still going very well. And to be quite honest, I was fully expecting things to not go to plan so these ups and downs are an exciting and expected part of this transition. More tomorrow…