In my previous blog post I mentioned some things I do to increase productivity. Of all of them the one that might be most easily picked up by others is making use of what might otherwise seem like wasted time. Just because you’re stuck in line at the DMV or airport, waiting to pick someone up or be picked up, or in grid locked traffic doesn’t mean the time has to be wasted. Find something productive to do. We’ve all got dozens of menial... 

About 10 months ago I moved from Ohio, where I had been living for a couple months to focus on finishing my doctoral dissertation to North Carolina to start on a new business venture. Before I could open my sport training facility there was much to be done with equipment, finding a location, waiting for lease agreements to process, etc. While doing all this I thought it would be wise to start building a client base by offering to train athletes... 

Ok…I know I’m a little late to be completely holiday appropriate. I figured I’d take Thanksgiving, my first free day in the last couple weeks, to spend some QT with the fam. But it’s never too late to say thanks and reflect on what you’re thankful for. With that said here are five (semi-business related) things I’m very thankful for as this Thanksgiving weekend comes to a close: The people who have helped... 

I’ve had an incredibly busy and exhausting past couple weeks. Especially the last 2 weeks or so. Don’t get me wrong though…I’m not complaining. I figure if a small business owner isn’t overworked at least some of the time during the start-up phase of a new venture then things probably aren’t going too well. All told, I went 23 straight days working at Athletic Lab with an average workday over this time... 

Over the past month one of the realizations I’ve made is that I’m spending too much time working IN my business and not enough time working ON my business. Part of this is to be expected being a small business owner on a new venture. I’ve had Athletic Lab open for 4 months now and in addition to the training, coaching and program design that is our core-business; I end up doing the majority of the menial tasks just to keep... 

As I’ve mentioned a couple times before in this blog I’m basically a do-it-myself startup. I have quite a few people around me who are very helpful (and I’m very grateful for their help!) but for the most part I’m like the Hedley’s from In Living Color. I am the accountant, travel agent, head coach, director of research, graphic designer, IT trouble shooter, marketer, secretary, janitor, facility serviceman,... 

Yes. You read that subject line correctly. I’m officially an idiot. There were suspicions before but now it’s official. Today, while doing some upfits to my soon-to-be opened training center I was removing various fixtures from the wall so that we could paint cleanly around them without masking them. In some cases, I was actually attempting to remove vestigial fixtures that were left behind from the previous tennant and would... 

About a year ago, at the onset of the biggest recession in 30 years, I left my secure job behind to run my own business. Since that time I’ve thrown a lot of my own money at my business development. More recently, my company ended a relationship with one of our biggest long-term (but pain in the ass) contract clients. Financially, both moves don’t make a heck of a lot of sense…especially when you put the second one in... 

Sorry it’s been a while. Infrequent blog posting on my part means that I’ve been overwhelmed with work. The good part is that it looks like things are all finally starting to fall in to place with HPC. I found a great facility that’s actually two to three times as large as I was originally looking for and it will accomodate sport science research, athlete training, offices, and storage of the training equipment and goods... 

The last 2 weeks I’ve devoted much of my time to nailing down a place to set up my training facility for my business. I’ve got about a 7 mile radius that I’m looking in that encompasses most of Cary, NC and some of Morrisville The Crooked Man ipod and Apex, NC. I’ve scoured craigslist, loopnet and all the individual commercial real estate web sites; done countless 3 hour long exploration drives, and taken about...