Endurance Nation is just over two years old, the product of much coffee and discussion between Rich and Patrick at IMCDA ‘07. What started as two coaches with zero athletes between them is now a truly global Team of over 400 members…in less than two years. The Endurance Nation you see today is MUCH different from what we envisioned…and that’s a good thing.
As we prepare to re-open the Team in Fall of 2009 (you should join the waitlist here) with a whole new host of resources and infrastructure to enhance our work, we are conducting an internal review – where we are, how got here, and where to go now. Making this public is not only true to how we work, but might even prove interesting / useful to some of you.
As a business, Endurance Nation is centered on five basic principles:
- Know what you are good at…and do more of that.
- Know what you are not good at…and don’t do that.
- Listen to your customers.
- Don’t just give your customers what they want, give them what they need.
- Build a business that supports your desired lifestyle.
After a great deal of self-assessment, we determined that:
- We are both good communicators and teachers. Comfortable with writing and speaking on a broad range of topics.
- We are comfortable with technology: podcasting, video creation, social networking platforms, etc.
- We spend most of our time building as we go, preferring to run now with an 80% plan than wait for the 100% plan to develop, confident we can tweak and fix problems on the fly.
- We both prefer to manage a very, very small number of very high quality relationships. When we move away from this, our potential for making mistakes increases.
- We have a great deal of experience with leading and fostering communities.
- Neither one of us is willing to compromise our preferred lifestyle. For Patrick, this means spending tons of quality time with his two young daughters. For Rich, this means leveraging his flexibility to work and travel anywhere, anytime.
We applied these items to an analysis of the common coaching models in the triathlon space. Our assessment:
One-on-one Coaching Model: One coach with a small number of clients paying a high monthly fee.
- Not scaleable; there is only so much of you to go around and so much space you can rent out in your head.
- High risk, as a significant percentage of your income is dependent on the training, racing, lifestyle, and family budget whims of a small number of people.
- Very little opportunity for individual growth / development.
Cloning Yourself: Recruiting and training additional coaches to work within your brand.
- More scalable but inefficient. In our experience, it takes a lot of work to put a new coach in front of enough people whereby they and YOU make enough money to make it worth your while.
- Risky, as someone else is on the street representing your brand.
- You spend less and less time coaching, more time managing others.
Selling Your Time: Testing, opening a physical location, running local coached workouts, etc.
- Unacceptably high fixed and lifestyle costs: facilities/overhead, insurance, time, etc.
- Not enough scalability, only so many places you can physically be.
Selling training plans: Generic training solutions delivered electronically via the web.
- Excellent scalability.
- The creation of supporting materials is very easy for us, given our communication skills.
Our respective models, over coffee at IMCDA in 2007, was a combination of the 1:1 coaching and training plans models above. We recognized that we had each taken it about as far as it could go, working solo, and had reached a significant fork in the road. By combining our efforts and strengths, we could carve out a new road and go in a completely new and unexplored direction. The resultant business model would:
- Leverage our significant 1:1 long course triathlon coaching and training plan experience to create the most effective and detailed training plans on the market. Our goal was to create affordable solutions that worked for 95% of the people, 95% of the time.
- Leverage our communication skills, our relative comfort with technology, and community-building expertise to solve the remaining 5%.
With a whole lot less than the above written on a few napkins at a local coffee shop, Rich and Patrick returned to their respective Coasts to begin cutting ties with the old model and building the new one. We quickly settled on the name Endurance Nation as being representative of the larger movement we were trying to create. At the end of the day, thousands of triathletes across the US wake up stoopid early in the morning to train solo and live vicariously during the work day by surfing tri forums. It was – and is – our mission to unite these self-coached athletes through world class training protocols and an online community that fosters learning, encouragement, and athletic development.
We are excited to share our coaching and business development story with you. Stay tuned for our next installment in the coming weeks.
Got questions or feedback? Post away in the comments, we read’em all!
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