MeDirected » marketing

Reluctant Marketing

mike — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:32:32 +0000

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, web designer, salesman, delivery man, and chief executive officer all rolled in to one. Many people who do freelance work find themselves in a similar position in that they wear many hats. Among the things that required the biggest adjustment for me in this setup was marketing. Because we don’t have a 10 million dollar training facility, a reality TV show, or a big time sneaker deal, the company brand is essentially me. My business partner (who is more of sales and marketing guy) stressed this from the very beginning of our relationship – “our brand is your professional expertise. That is what will distinguish us from competitors.” The reason this was difficult for me is because I’m not really self-promotional by nature. In fact, I disdain salesmen and the many posers in the athletic performance industry who are 90% flash and 10% substance. Some call these guys internet gurus because they look like geniuses on the net but have never actually coached anyone. But the reality is, that now that my family and I depend solely on the success of my business, and the business is essentially just me and the services I provide; it means that I NEED to do some marketing to pay the bills and keep food on the table. That’s one of the reasons why I have a very active twitter personna that compliments my business brand, why I have a youtube channel that highlights the athletes I’ve coached and some of the lectures I’ve given, and why I make sure I let the world know when and where I’m doing my next speaking engagement. This type of self-promotion isn’t something I’m totally comfortable with but it’s definitely easier when you look at yourself as the business being sold rather than the person you see in the mirror; and recognize that to get to the point where the brand is bigger than myself will require that I highlight what I have to offer and how my services are superior so that we can continue to grow long enough that we can shift the emphasis to the company.

Do What You Love, Love What You Do

mike — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:54:36 +0000

A simple phrase but one that’s really rung true for me. Right now I’m working around 80-90 hours a week off getting my training center, Athletic Lab, off the ground. So far things are going well and we’re meeting early revenue predictions even if the revenue isn’t coming from the exact places we expected. My days now start at 7 to be training or doing administrative work by 8. Training adult fitness and then the elite group takes me up until noon. Then I have the luxury of an hour and a half to 2 hour lunch break when I can go home, see the fam, and take a short nap. Then back to Athletic Lab for more training, emails and phone calls that typically don’t stop until 7. On Wednesday’s they go all the way until 10 PM because of a late night pole vault session. Somewhere in that mix I try to throw in a couple mini-workouts (I do own a gym…no excuse to be out of shape!). I try to not do any work between 7 and 10 PM but then after that I’m back at it handling correspondence trained athletes, managing marketing / social media strategy, placing inventory orders, shipping customs, answering emails, etc until 2 or 3 AM. I train people both Saturday and Sunday morning and also spend much of the weekend doing the ongoing improvements to Athletic Lab that my OCD brain requires to stay sane. By most counts that would be an excessively long work week but I love it. I get to spend more time with my family than I have in the past 3 years because I see them for lunch, they’re often in at Athletic Lab with me during the day and although I work on weekends now I have a lot more flexibility and control over my time and there’s a lot more to do in the Triangle than the last couple places we’ve lived. Also, knowing that you’re working for something you truly love to do makes the work a lot less like work and a lot more like play. Have you found that thing you love to do?

Property Hunting Update

mike — Sun, 10 May 2009 06:00:25 +0000

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 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 2 dozen property tours. I have a definite price point I need to hit and specific requirements both for the property itself and to a lesser extent the specific location. After much looking I think I’ve finally found the right spot. It’s 2,500 sqft and was formerly a kids gym. It’s located in a high-end part of Cary (officially one of the best places in the world to live and work). The best part is that because the previous tenant ditched their lease, the property needs no up-fit because it was previously set up as a gym, and the fact that the economy is still in the toilet means if I go forward and take the property it will be a very good value. It literally will just need some paint and it’ll be ready to go. It’s on a road that gets great traffic counts and the property is only a couple years old so everything is in great condition. On top of that, it’s only about a half mile away from where I live in Cary and it’s about 2 miles away from the track that I think we’ll be training at. The only negatives is that I was hoping to find an area where I could set up a 70-80m track to do some sprinting on-site but this probably won’t be possible at this place. There is a nice paved hill with a really mild incline though, and that will allow us to do lots of uphill and downhill sprint work. The other drawback is that it’s a little more than I wanted to spend. I addressed this though by proposing an increasing lease payment that started VERY low and went up incrementally each month over the first 13 months and then 3% per year over the next 2 years. Even by the 3rd year it is less than they had asked for. This type of plan allows me to get in to a nice training facility and build a client base without worrying about getting swamped by huge up front lease payments when I don’t have a client base to support it. My first year’s lease rate actually averages out to a little less than what I was actually budgeting for a facility. The last 3 months of that first year are above my initial budget but the average is still lower. For years 2 and 3, the lease payment is slightly higher than I was wanting but the property and location is MUCH nicer than I was thinking I could afford. And as Seth Godin points out, value (benefit / price) is more often a better indicator than pricepoint alone. I’m taking the weekend to think about it but I’m leaning toward signing the lease early next week. If and when I do, it will be a nice relief because I’ll be able to finally have a place to call home for the business and can actually get down to day to day operations. For the last couple months I’ve basically been operating a virtual business but now all my training equipment is ordered and either here, on its way or being custom made I’m excited to get rockin and rollin’.

A Great Day

mike — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:50:51 +0000

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!

The Role of Social Sites for Marketing

mike — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:39:59 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

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.

Moving

mike — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:12:57 +0000

Well, as I mentioned in my previous post, I switched hosting companies. I wanted to transfer all of my domains to the new host 2 nights ago but as fate would have it, a storm took out the internet. Aah, the joys of living in the country (more on that later…). In any case, I spent most of yesterday moving all my sites over to the new server. It took quite a while since 2 of the 5 sites are pretty huge and I had some problems with the databases. ELITETRACK has about 7 years of articles, blog postings, and forum discussion and HPCsport has an almost 700 video training inventory library for clients. Well, it took a while but everything is now up and running…kinda. On the two main sites, which are based on the Expression Engine CMS platform, I have something wrong with the paths or something because only the main page of both sites is displaying. I’ve been working on figuring out what the problem is this morning but haven’t had any luck so far. My other 3 sites (medirected, lamontdagen, and the soon to be public athleticlab) are powered by wordpress and seem to be working just fine. The crappy part of the move was that yesterday was the quarterly application day for acceptance in to the 9rules blogging community. This is essentially a club of the best blogging sites on the web and it’s pretty exclusive. I was really hoping to get ELITETRACK accepted but unfortunately, the site was down for most of the day. Getting the site on there would help to broaden the audience of the site and increase overall exposure. Also, it would give a little bit of recognition to the great bloggers / writers we have on the site. Ultimately, both of these are good for HPC because one of the primary reasons I try to stay active with the site (in addition to it being my baby) is that it’s been one of the primary means people hear about my consulting business and private coaching business and a decent percentage of my clients are actually from the site. With that said, I have some big plans and big goals for ELITETRACK. Stay tuned.

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