View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Coaching industry veteran and Training Peaks’ co-founder Dirk Friel takes over the KoopCast to discuss the business of ultramarathon coaching. The panel of coaches and coaching business owners includes Jason Koop, Heather Hart, owner/founder of Hart Strength and Endurance Coaching, and Jeff Browning, who owns his own coaching company.
Episode highlights:
(13:50) Jeff and Heather’s startup experience: technology and marketing background, taking baby steps, making the move to full-time coaching, transitioning from flexible gig jobs
(57:44) Heather on recruiting assistant coaches: Heather’s experience, admitting assistant coaches, your reputation is on the line, UESCA certification, networking but not actively recruiting
(1:50:23) Jason on coach-athlete ratios: athletes require roughly 1 hour per week, 40 athletes for a 40 hour work week, most CTS coaches are full time, Jason is able to take ~1 new athlete per year
Additional resources:
Heather’s coaching website
Jeff’s coaching website
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Become a certified ultramarathon coach
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon and Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
View all show notes and timestamps on the KoopCast website.
Episode overview:
Coaching industry veteran and Training Peaks’ co-founder Dirk Friel takes over the KoopCast to discuss the business of ultramarathon coaching. The panel of coaches and coaching business owners includes Jason Koop, Heather Hart, owner/founder of Hart Strength and Endurance Coaching, and Jeff Browning, who owns his own coaching company.
Episode highlights:
(13:50) Jeff and Heather’s startup experience: technology and marketing background, taking baby steps, making the move to full-time coaching, transitioning from flexible gig jobs
(57:44) Heather on recruiting assistant coaches: Heather’s experience, admitting assistant coaches, your reputation is on the line, UESCA certification, networking but not actively recruiting
(1:50:23) Jason on coach-athlete ratios: athletes require roughly 1 hour per week, 40 athletes for a 40 hour work week, most CTS coaches are full time, Jason is able to take ~1 new athlete per year
Additional resources:
Heather’s coaching website
Jeff’s coaching website
SUBSCRIBE to Research Essentials for Ultrarunning
Become a certified ultramarathon coach
Buy Training Essentials for Ultrarunning on Amazon and Audible.
Information on coaching-https://www.trainright.com
Koop’s Social Media
Twitter/Instagram- @jasonkoop
Trail and Ultra Runners. What is going on? What's happening? Welcome to another episode of the Coupecast. As always, I am Coach Jason Coop.
Speaker 1:In this episode of the podcast, I am turning the tables a bit and I will not be your humble host. But don't worry, I'm not doing a sponsored content takeover. Y'all know I would never do that to you. This week I'm giving up the reins and I'm letting coaching industry veteran and the co-founder of Training Peaks, dirk Freel, host the show today, and the reason for that is that this week we are going to discuss the business of coaching, which is a topic that I have wanted to cover for a very long time and one that I feel I could provide some insight on, having been a professional coach for nearly 25 years and operated in nearly every capacity of both business and coaching possible during that timeframe. And in true ultra marathon style, we have a banger of a show lined up for you that is two and a half hours in length. So y'all buckle up and get ready.
Speaker 1:On the podcast today, we have a panel of coaches and business owners to give us some insight into how the industry works. Y'all join me in welcoming Heather Hart, who is the owner and founder of Heart Endurance and Strength, as well as two time Coupe cast offender, jeff Browning, aka Bronco Billy. My goal with this podcast is to peel the curtain back on how coaching works, and in doing so, the entire panel and myself are obnoxiously transparent about how our revenue, our income, expenses, headcounts, coach to athlete ratio and really our entire businesses work. Now, before we get into the dialogue, I'd like to express my personal gratitude for both Heather and Jeff for coming on the show and being so open about how their businesses operate, as y'all are about to find out, we really don't duck or dodge any of the questions posed by Dirk. That takes some humility as well as a willingness to be an open book about sensitive topics like your income and how your business operates.
Speaker 1:The second thing I'd like to mention is that this is not a bigger is better or a better structure battle royale. I hope the content in this podcast inspires new and existing coaches alike, as well as athletes who are navigating the coaching landscape. There are many ways to deliver coaching orchestrate coach to athlete ratios that are appropriate for the service delivered, and design pricing structures that are commiserate with all of the above, and although we do have a fair amount of comparing contrast throughout the podcast. Coming up with one best format was not an end goal. Second, although this is a business of coaching podcast, right from the onset I want to make it crystal clear that our customers are athletes. So, while some of the dialogue might seem a bit cold and even impersonal, make no mistake that the reason we have the structure in place that we do is in order to put the needs of our athletes first. That structure that each of us has is very much a reflection of the successes and mistakes we've each made in this arena. Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention some of the background on how this podcast starts.
Speaker 1:When I first originated this idea, I knew that gathering a panel together to divulge our various business models was going to be met with some resistance. Now, let's face it, we're talking about how much money we make, how our businesses operate and the like, so I get some of the hesitation. I even had to work with one of the companies that I work with, cts, to get permission to put this podcast on. So in order to soften this aspect up a bit, I enlisted the help of Dirk to come in and serve as a neutral moderator. I then formulated a list of potential guests and gave them all the same deal. Here's what you can expect to discuss. Dirk will come up with the final list of questions and moderate the discussion.
Speaker 1:Everyone has to be transparent, and the transparency includes me, and, if anything, I have to be the most transparent of all, as it's my podcast, after all. Now, I did expect to get some nose from my initial list of panelists, but if I'm being honest and you guys know that I always am I was a bit perplexed at the sheer number of declines and non-responses, as well as the I'm not even give it a second thought type of nose. I did reach out to Megan and Dave and Roche, who declined on account that they don't focus on their business operations, ian Sharman, who declined, shall we say rather bluntly. The evoke coaching group declined on account of their business being new, and there were a similar number of non-responses from other sole proprietors and coaches and coaching companies. Now, for those of you that are saying that I'm just being mean or whatever, that's not the point and I want you to listen very closely to this next part.
Speaker 1:Each one of these individuals has their own reasons, and a simple decline of a podcast request should not be an indictment of anything. I decline interview requests and podcast requests all the time for various reasons. However, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention this aspect, because I do think that it is part of the dialogue and that's exactly what we are going to lead it with. So sit back, buckle up, strap in for a good one here. This is our business of ultramarathon coaching roundtable, hosted by Dirk Freel, with myself, jeff Browning and Heather Hart.
Speaker 2:Jason Heather. Jeff, thanks for joining me. This is a unique position for me to be in to actually take over the Coupe cast. I feel very honored. Thank you, jason, for inviting me to play a part and kind of be the ringleader.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I might regret that decision, but thank you for agreeing to do it.
Speaker 2:I can mess up as much as I want on yours, you're done. That's true, that's true, that's true. Yeah, and I haven't met Heather and Jeff before, so really nice to meet you two. Going to be a really good conversation around business of coaching.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:There's all over other podcasts that I guess runners or coaches listen to. Really have, you know, to focus more on the technical side of intervals and heart rate zones, all that stuff. So this is going to be fresh, great new content for folks, very valuable obviously for coaches but also for athletes. You know each coach is different. Investments they make in their business are different. Their backgrounds or education, how they run their business that can play a part in you know how you go about maybe choosing a coach. So we're going to kind of lift the veil here on some not really secrets, but things people don't normally talk about in the running community or coaching community. So, having said that, jason, you had a difficult time kind of getting this crew together, I heard, and I don't know a little bit hard to recruit. What are your thoughts on why that was?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's something that both you and I have seen throughout all of our coaching experience, because you can remember, you know, when training peaks first started and then CTS first started, kind of in the late nineties and early 2000s, and remote based endurance coaching became a thing, everybody was really guarded about what they were doing and I kind of forgive the industry because it was novel at the time, like there was a brand new thing that internet could barely support it, to be honest with you, just with the dial up speeds and the technology that existed, with how we could transfer files from the athlete to the coach and all those things, and I kind of get that guarded approach. But I do think that one of the big, one of the big turning points in turning it into an actual profession where a large contingency of people can make a good full time living at remote based endurance coaching, which is what we do, was the fact that we did pull the veil back and we, being a collection of coaches not just people at CTS but also other coaches in the industry, and you're a part of that pulled the curtain back and said hey, listen, this is what we're learning. This is where we screwed up. This is where we've done very well. This is how we should price ourselves in the marketplace and this is you know what commands this and all that other stuff. I do think that that was a big, a big turning point, but it was not always that case and it's so. It's been interesting to me when I was trying to set this podcast up that I found a little bit of that initial a little bit of that initial resistance to actually coming on and pulling the veil back. And I get it. Not everybody wants to talk about what they make and you know their business structure and things like that. I told I kind of totally get that.
Speaker 1:But I do firmly believe that good coaching is not just good for the athletes. Obviously it's good for coaches. Good coaching is good for coaches, and the opposite is also true. Poor coaching, poor business structure, poor orchestration of the things that go underneath the hood, is bad for the coaches as a, as a business. So I take an. I take opportunities like this very seriously because you know I've earned my full time living in being a full time professional coach for the last 25 years and I can and I and I intend to do that for the remainder of my career. So I view it as something as where, if I can add to the whole ecosystem and help people kind of understand what I at least have found has worked and doesn't work, and you know, you know, pop the hood open a little bit, I think that everybody is better, is better off, and also I'm better off because you know I can learn from a lot of people as well, as I've done in, you know, many different coaching conferences and things like that that we've all been a part of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely legitimizing this career path. You know it. You sort of have to get standards out there right, and the only way to do that is to share, and then the tide lifts all boats. You know if we can like share more of this Heather any, any thoughts, and you know your experience of when you were asked to to come on board and maybe where have you learned about other coaching businesses.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, taking a broader step back, just in our society as a whole, talking about money is often taboo. You know, talking about our income and how much money we're making it makes people nervous. So it doesn't surprise me that there was a, you know, a little pushback on people wanting to participate. But when we started I didn't. It was so hard to even think where do we price ourselves? Where there was nothing out there. I mean, it's still to this day. You can look at people's coaching websites and there's no pricing info. It's, you know, contact me for details. So yeah, there's. There's certainly, I'm sure, many reasons why people are secretive about it. I'm I'm an open book, so I'm happy to talk about it.
Speaker 2:And Jeff you, you were in a different industry prior to coming to coaching. You had experiences already from another industry that maybe helped you kickstart this business. But then what were your experiences when you entered this career as a as a coach?
Speaker 4:I had some of the similar issues that Heather had is where to price. Where I should start. You know I came from, you know, graphic design and art direction and marketing and branding, and had my own consulting firm for 17 years and so I'd run my own business. I'd worn all the hats for a long, long time and I already had a business structure. You know, I was already an S corp at the time or an LLC S corp, and so I just kind of did a DBA at first and then I've evolved that with my, you know, because I use a bookkeeper, I use a full accounting service, like full service, all in house. So I pull from all that already and they give me, you know, consulting and I have my own business lawyer and all that kind of stuff. So that was already in place.
Speaker 4:So for me I just needed to figure out where to price, what services to offer and what the industry standard was. So for me, I'd always come from a background of internet startups and that kind of stuff, so it was always like what's best practices, right? So immediately I'm looking at people like Coop and because he was an industry standard, and then, you know, and then also looking at other businesses, like Ian Sharman. Sharman and I trained together, you know. You know Sharman Ultra coaching, so he and I had chatted a lot. He's really the one responsible for kind of giving me that nudge into coaching and you know, being a student of the sport for so long and being in the sport deeply as a competitive athlete, I really was interested in that side of the sport and so that's kind of how I got into it. But you know, I think the hardest part was just getting information. You know, at the beginning for me, like that, I just wanted information.
Speaker 1:I, you know, a podcast like this would have been awesome, you know but it wasn't around there, sorry, sorry, we're like seven years too late on this one. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but you know what, like I, really, for me it was easy because I already had a, I was already working from home, I was already had a full, you know, you know command station. I already had all the infrastructure in place. All I needed to do was figure out my services, build a website, which I did for a living, and so I'm really come from the tech, ui, ux, user experience, you know, user interface. So technology is kind of my background, and branding and marketing. So for me that was really easy to just kind of those other pieces were easy to put in place. Now I can see how that would be really challenging for some people if they don't have that background, but for me it was easy and I just needed to do that.
Speaker 4:And the first year was really, you know, kind of me ramping up like small steps. I took, you know, little baby steps the first first year and and and it became like okay, 20% of my business, then 30% of that business, then 50% of my business, and I'm like for a while I was like, oh my gosh, I'm doing design projects and I'm coaching and I and I was like really juggling for about you know, six or eight months till I finally was like you know what I just got to make? You know, at some point you got to make the move and I just made the move to full time, you know, in 2017.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's. I mean that's. That's a great kind of scenario to have, where you kind of ramp into one over time when you have this other job that's supporting along the way, and then you make that decision to just take the leap, take the risk. I was absolutely there with you in the year 2000, 2002, with training peaks, you know, heather, any kind of what, how, where did you come to coaching from?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I had a similar experience in that I was initially personal training, teaching group fitness and also blogging, you know, on the side, and so I was making an income from all of those things, which are all pretty flexible, which gave me the opportunity to mix the coaching and slowly, slowly, slowly. And then, you know, like Jeff said, there came a point when I was like, okay, I need to either go all in and do this full time or or not, and so it certainly was a lot easier for me to do that than if I was working a traditional nine to five, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, jason, aren't you get into all this many years?
Speaker 1:ago, kind of serendipitously. I mean it was a very opposite story, which I think is interesting for a lot of, for a lot of people with this compare and contrast. You know, I had a biochemistry and genetics degree and kind of fell out of love with my job prospects, kind of just before graduating. I didn't want to be a bench-live scientist and sit behind test tubes and graduated cylinders and beakers and stuff and stuff like that, yeah. But I knew I loved coaching and there was not a really there weren't any really good outlets for it and I just happened to stumble upon a very poorly paid internship over at CTS in 2000 and just kind of fell in love with the coaching process then. So I've been doing it, you know, full time ever since that at kind of ever since that point. So I didn't have any of these like transition points that you know Heather and Jeff had kind of early on in their career.
Speaker 1:I jumped into it kind of right there and that's a lot of luck.
Speaker 1:To be honest with you, I was kind of right person, right time, right environment, right environment around me, right people around me to where I could kind of, where I could definitely kind of grow into it and a lot of these things, a lot of these initial stumbling blocks that Jeff and Heather mentioned, that happen on the business side but also on the coaching side we're not going to talk about that a lot like the coaching, mentorship piece, like how to actually learn to become a coach, those two aspects the business and the mentorship side were kind of taken care of for me because I had an environment around me where that was partially influenced by the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and also influenced by CTS.
Speaker 1:Being a business a for-profit business at the time, so I can't take credit for trying to figure out all of those things that Jeff and Heather have tried to figure out. As entrepreneurs, I had it kind of like served up to me on a platter and I really didn't appreciate it, to be honest with you, until about a decade later in my career and like looking back and seeing people like Heather and Jeff try to start these things up, I'm like, oh shit, they had a way more difficult road than I did, just kind of like walking into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's a good point, though you don't have to dive in and start your own business. There are more opportunities now. There are larger coaching businesses there. If you're a growing business, you are looking for interns or assistant coaches, and so there are those opportunities.
Speaker 2:You don't have to build from scratch or bootstrap, but certainly a lot of what we'll talk about today has to do with that. There's a book that I highly recommend to new entrepreneurs called the EMIF, and the EMIF states that most small businesses start by technicians. You love the act of coaching, working with somebody. Or you are a plumber, you just love working in plumbing, right, and that's what a coach is. They're a technician, they're in the weeds, assigning, planning, analyzing workouts, what, why? You get involved and you're like okay, I can make a business out of this. Well, how much do you know about entrepreneurship? How much do you know about being a manager? Just because you're the world's best coach does not mean you will have a business that will survive at all right, and it might be the complete opposite.
Speaker 3:So if we think through the lens of technician, entrepreneur, manager.
Speaker 2:What were your own personal gaps? And, jeff, you might go back, or Heather, you might go back to your previous work even before starting the coaching business, because you started businesses prior to endurance coaching. But what were your own personal gaps that you had to learn along the way and make up for? In terms of being an entrepreneur and or manager.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I'll start by telling you my strengths. We're certainly that I came from a background with a degree in exercise science. I had been working with clients and coaching them in person and training them in person, so I was super comfortable with that piece of it. From the blogging side, I knew how to market myself. I knew how to, you know, put myself out there, which is a huge piece as well. My gap was the business side. We've been my husband and I, you know, own the business together and we've been an official business since 2017. I think my CPA is still like fixing things we did wrong all the way back. Then, you know, and she, she earns every penny we pay her because we're always like can we do this, can we do that, what? We have no idea what we're doing on the business side of it. So that's been a very big learning process, really learning how to balance everything that needs to happen on the business side to keep the business running, to keep our coaches getting their paychecks and keep everything afloat in addition to coaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome Jeff.
Speaker 4:Mine was, you know, I already had the design, branding, marketing, you know, stuff down. That was my. You know, I worked for advertising agencies and design firms before I went out on my own. And so when I went out on my own in 01, my biggest pain points were the bookkeeping side of things. I tried to do it myself for four or five years. Oh my gosh. I think I can't remember how much I paid the first time I went to a bookkeeping service that needed to fix my books because they were so bad. I mean, it's just not.
Speaker 4:You got to accept what your, if you're an entrepreneur, you need to accept what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are, and then you need to leverage. At some point I started putting hourly you know hourly numbers around. Okay, how much time am I spending in my books? I'm not doing them right. I'm doing it about 20% efficiency, you know, or something. And then finally it's like, well, I could pay someone to do this and they'll knock it out in like two hours a month or four hours a month, and then I'm only paying them an hourly for four hours a month and I'm, and they're getting done right, and then I just hand it to my. You know, I hand it to my accountant when it comes tax season.
Speaker 4:It was, it was the most beautiful like a-ha moment in business, and so that that one was one of the biggest ones probably was the bookkeeping and like the planning side of things. So I started leveraging other people. And then the other thing I came from was the technology background, so I was really comfortable with technology, websites, software so, like you know, I knew how to demo software. I knew how to do a bunch of studies. That's how I came to training peaks when I, you know, sat down I demoed everything that was out there and and training peaks when I started in 2016, you know, was the obvious choice, and it still is. I've even demoed other stuff along the way and still stuck with training peaks because of that. So kudos to that dirt.
Speaker 2:You didn't build it from within. Cgs did yeah, and so.
Speaker 4:I didn't have to man, I get to leverage it because I started later when technology is really kind of more dialed. It really, you know that helped me a lot as a business because that was already set up. So you know that was a, that was a big one. You know the training side of things and, like coaching side of things was a natural for me. I was very crucial. You know I have no problem talking as Jason does, but I also, you know, I can connect with a lot of different kinds of personalities.
Speaker 4:I've worked in tons of different business settings where anywhere from small internet startups to gigantic ones that grew like crazy. You know two 300 employees and you have to deal with every personality and I was in a management position. So you know, like knowing how to like motivate different personalities, that was already like ingrained in me. So by the time I started coaching, so that just plays into like your skill set in coaching and and so a lot of mine. And I'd been a student of the sport as far as endurance training, you know, because I was competing for so long. I've been in the sport 23 years and then I was in endurance cycling for a decade before that. So I've always been like you know, and that's always been my passion and hobby, on the side of having this entrepreneurial graphic design background and running my own business. So I was always any spare time I actually was spending in endurance the endurance world, you know it versus like, how do I make my graphic design business better? You know.
Speaker 3:I was like sick of graphic design and branding.
Speaker 4:By the time, you know I turned off. You know that part of me that I was like all in the endurance space and so you know I came to coaching with, like all self taught, 20 some years of reading everything out there. I've read every book on endurance training multiple times, reread them, highlighted them, earmarked pages, you know so. So for me, like that was a natural progression and it was an easy progression because I was jaded by the time I'm 25 years in to art. You know art direction and marketing. Sometimes you're branding products and services that you don't care about and it's kind of soul sucking. And so to step into the endurance, you know where this passion is that I have on the side.
Speaker 4:You know my wife used to, before I got paid for to run a little bit as an athlete. You know, in the early days you know Jason could attest to this there was no money in ultra running at all and you know you got some free shoes and some a kit and that's about it. And but, like in the early days, like you know, my wife would be like, why are you taking so much time to do this stupid sport? You know it's a hobby. She just kept reminding me it's a hobby and I'd be like you know, when I got that first little tiny paycheck I was like it's no longer a hobby.
Speaker 4:You know, so to justify training. But you know, that whole time that was like my passion project on the side that I wasn't getting paid for but I loved it. I was reading a consuming books. I'm a voracious reader, so I was like reading books constantly, you know, applying it to my own training get anyone who had listened.
Speaker 4:You know, at Foot Zone and Bend, oregon, for example, which was at the time, was a big ultra running hub and training.
Speaker 4:You know, max King was there and and Ian Sharman, and so we were all like trading notes and we were like talking about training and philosophy and so it was a really cool time and in the early days of ultra running, kind of it was blossoming right, so to speak, in the late 2000s, early 2008 through like 2014,.
Speaker 4:That whole time was just like, you know, I was getting bombarded, we were all talking about this stuff, and so it was really a cool time and for me that was kind of like those were my weaknesses were definitely like the business management side and I had to. You know, I had to suck it up and learn what. You know, one of the things in ultra running is, you know, embrace the suck. And so I had to embrace the suck, you know, when it came to the business side of things, the things I was, I wasn't very good at, and so I just leveraged other people and people who were special, specialized in that, at that side of things, whether it was a web developer, whether it was accounting or bookkeeping, or or and then I've used business coaches over the years to. So I've leveraged business coaching relationships as well to get mentored, you know, and how to be better at a better entrepreneur, a better business person, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:Jason, you didn't start the business but you've certainly had to be an entrepreneurial. Like minds. Have an entrepreneurial mindset. Obviously, be a manager. You know hiring, firing staff, but opening up new markets. You know how do we attack this new ultra running market, for example. That's very entrepreneurial. So, where were your gaps and where did you maybe learn along the way to fill those gaps?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, a lot of people don't realize that, like I first started as a full time employee, right, and so, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't have a lot of the. I didn't really have a need for the business side of it, like Heather and Jeff had mentioned earlier. And I kind of look at this along this question of where my gaps are along the timeline of my career, which just kind of had three distinct phases to it. So the first phase, when I first started coaching, I needed to learn how to coach, like period, like period, right, I knew I liked it. You know, I had every certification under the sun USA track and field, usa triathlon, usa cycling, nasm, you kind of name it. I had all those things but I did not know how to coach and just, very fortunately, I had very good coaching mentors and good coaching framework that were very good at telling me everything I was, the few things I was doing correctly and all of the things that I was doing incorrectly. And through that kind of like constant reinforcement, you know, for 10 years or so I feel like I became a fairly competent coach, but it wasn't because of, you know, going out and getting this education or kind of like doing that or, yes, I did a lot of self study and things like that. It was really just the group of people that I was that just happened to kind of be around.
Speaker 1:And then when I started managing other coaches, I got a promotional opportunity and kind of was given reign over the entire coaching department. As, dirk, you mentioned hiring coaches, firing coaches, mentoring them hiring firing is way different than mentoring, by the way hiring coaches, firing coaches, mentoring them, looking for the right talent that's out there, and things like that. I then had to learn how to become a manager and once again, I just happened to have very good people to lean on and namely JT Kearney and Chris Carmichael, who were very influential and very good at managing coaches and managing people and being that arena and showing me a little bit of the kind of the blueprint for how to kind of orient and act within that arena and be effective in it. And then I became the vice president of operations, where I had kind of pervaded over an entire coaching business and we were big coaching business at the time. We still are big coaching business, and that both has to do with the development of new markets, as you mentioned, dirk, and then also kind of the umbrella underneath the current operations. And once again I just happened to have somebody who showed me the way and that was John Frothingham and people who are in the industry will instantly recognize that name, people who are not in the industry. He is the former chief operating officer of USADA, so he worked with me for a long period of time. I was his kind of director port. We booted up regional locations and satellite offices and came up with the coaching quality assurance program and all of these different things I kind of did underneath, underneath his guidance.
Speaker 1:But really the thread that kind of follows all of those different inflection points is I had people kind of show me the way that we're extremely successful in actually doing that and I can't take a lick of credit for that environment. I will take a lick of credit for listening to them and taking that advice and kind of absorbing it all and then coming up with all of the different tentacles that can come out of all of that different advice. But I'm just very fortunate that I've had people there kind of along the way to show me the way, and that's something that I've tried to always pass forward with our coaching department and even with people like this podcast, right, people have kind of come up to me and kind of asked me where in the business of coaching is? I realize that I'm kind of in the position that I am not solely as a byproduct of what I've been able to do, but the influence that other people have had on me and if I can pass or if I can pay that forward a little bit, I can kind of repay that debt.
Speaker 1:So those have been my gaps and it's been kind of in sequence of that. First I needed to learn how to coach and then I need to learn how to manage coaches and then I needed to learn how to operate a business. And then you fast forward a few years later and I became an independent contractor and started up my own not my own coaching business, but my own business that has coaching as a product of it. That's really an amalgamation of all of those different experiences being a coach, managing a coach, managing a coaching business and all the different services that can fall underneath that coaching business. I don't think I would have had the confidence, or certainly the wherewithal, to take that leap and become sole proprietor and an independent contractor, as I am right now, without having that 15 or 18 years of experience with wearing all of those different hats and kind of doing them with the supervision that I had.
Speaker 2:Can you go more into that independent contractor relationship with CTS? Are you exclusive to CTS running a division? They pay you a flat rate. You take any profit above that. Like how does this work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I function as an independent contractor and I take in terms of the individual coaching that I do. I take a cut of that, cts takes a cut of that and then I also get a cut of the whole part of the running part of the division. So for the people that are unfamiliar, cts has a footprint in the cycling world. Cts has a small footprint in the triathlon world and a relatively robust footprint in the ultra running space as well. Anything that falls underneath the ultra running space I take a small commission from and then I act as both a figurehead and primary mentor of the coaches that are underneath that ultra running umbrella. I don't do any of the hiring and firing and direct management anymore.
Speaker 1:I did that for many, many years but when I became an independent contractor, I agreed to continue to have a footprint in the mentorship side of things.
Speaker 1:Cause here's the weird deal like, even though, like CTS is like a bigger company within the ultra running sphere, it's still my face and I very much realized that, just because of the presence that I've built up, if one of our coaches does a great job, I might take a little bit of credit for that, or I might get a little bit of credit for that.
Speaker 1:If they screw up, I screwed up and that comes back on me and my reputation and I'm very cognizant of that and I want to maintain and continue to have some sort of influence within our kind of within our coaching department and so I've orchestrated my independent contract relationship with CTS to very much reflect that. All of the other things that we might get into later in this podcast that are kind of a part of my business or the book is probably gonna be the most prevalent of one, or even this podcast right as part of my business those are things that I do independently. Those are part of. Those can kind of exist in their own silo. Nobody else has kind of tentacles on them or anything like that. I don't have investors or partners in any of those, in any of those pieces. But certainly the individual coaching side of things, my one-on-one coaching, is all channeled through through CTS or we have a very typical independent contractor agreement where I take a piece and then they take a piece.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you're an LLC. What are you? S Corp, S Corp.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was initially an LLC, but I switched to an S Corp about 12 months ago.
Speaker 2:Okay, and Heather. I think, Jeff, you already mentioned S Corp. Is that correct?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm LLC, file as an S Corp. Basically, I'm licensed as an LLC but file as an S Corp. I've had different designations over the years. My graphic design business was a full S Corp.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're also an S Corp.
Speaker 2:Okay and any investors or you own 100%. How does that work for you, heather and Jeff?
Speaker 3:So for me personally, my husband and I we own the business together, so we're the two under the S Corp, Similar to what Jason was mentioning. I do have my website separately, which it is still in the running sphere, and that is a huge part of how we market our business and how we attract business essentially, but that is completely separate from our coaching business.
Speaker 4:We're organized as my wife and I share the business we have forever, since the beginning, cause she comes from a marketing, writing, research and communications background, so she's always been, you know, kind of an taken on like kind of an administrative assistant kind of role in our business. So I'm but I'm the primary so and it's all owned by us. You know it's all grassroots bootstrapped, no investors.
Speaker 2:By the way, what is CTS? Do you happen to know, jason? It's a C Corp.
Speaker 1:Okay, and they have investors and a board of directors and kind of a more of a prototypical small business corporate governance. Once again, I had to manage this, so I know about it. We're the prototypical small business corporate government governance that has received multiple rounds of funding.
Speaker 2:Okay, Cool. How about total business revenue? Getting into the meat and potatoes of the conversation, Heather, do you want to start out with, like you know and maybe how you know, total revenue, but then how do you pay yourself out of that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, good question. Okay, so our total revenue, business revenue for last year was our ballpark figure, about 97,000. We pay ourselves as if we're employees. So you know, the money goes into the business account. We get our paychecks, and as do our other coaches as well. They get paid based upon how many clients we're each coaching, same for my husband and I. You know, at the end of the day, once all the business bills are paid, that's whatever's leftover still belongs to us. So we will occasionally, you know, take from that as well. But just the straightforward answer is that we do pay ourselves as we pay our other coaches, based on the number of clients we're working with at that any given time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome, and Jeff.
Speaker 4:So I thought it would be kind of cool to see a four year average.
Speaker 3:So I figured up Olympic cycle. I love it. Well, I've been growing, I've been growing and I'll dig it, I'll dig it and I also wanted.
Speaker 4:I thought it would be appropriate to kind of talk about each of those kind of because this year I'm going to make less overall than I did last year, because last year was like that peak of like oh my gosh, this business. I got to hire coaches, you know. So I'm in the early, early stage. This year was the first year to 2023. I hired coaches and I brought coaches on. So I have three coaches under me now as assistant coaches that are taking on athletes and I'm full and I've been full for like three years but but really like in little windows. So sometimes I would say I've not taken anybody, and sometimes I'd be like taking people right around the beginning of the year when there's, you know, all the lotteries are happening and and people have taken a break. So you know where you have kind of that ebb and flow of of an athlete roster. So my four year average is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Last year was one hundred and eighty two thousand dollars, but it was a crazy year and I was super hectic last year and it was one of those like it happened before I was ready for it. You know, it's one of those small business issues where you're like, oh my God, you know, you get all these clients like after the lottery, and I didn't have a sign up on my website that said I'm not taking athletes, and I got this huge influx. You know, I got ultra runner, I've got in the top 10 ultra runner year, again over 50, one of the first guys to do it. So I don't know whether that was it, but it was right around that time and all of a sudden I just got slammed and it was like, oh my gosh, how am I going to handle this, you know? So I basically had to cut back on training, had to cut back, you know, on like family time, and so I and I had to like kind of kind of tread water for a year to get go OK, I got to get this going.
Speaker 4:I've been talking about for three years of bringing on coaches. I've got to like I actually got to execute on this. So I kind of waited till the business was, like you know, bulging at the seams to go, oh crap. So so what I've done is this year I'm making less, I'm investing more in the company and I'm investing in my assistant coaches. So so now my income has gone down this year as far as like, the overall revenue of the business because of that, because they're they're at a less, they're their monthly is less than mine. So I'm not going to make as much on paper this year, right. But I do the same as Heather. I do payroll. I pay myself a salary, a set salary. I take a salary of 40,000 a year Plus I take a monthly owner draw and I pay my wife $10,000 a year for the admin stuff and social media and everything else she helps with all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of general of what what I've been dealing with. So that kind of gives you guys a good feel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cool man, y'all mixing in your spouses with your business. I applaud that. That's dangerous. Those are dangerous waters to tread in.
Speaker 4:Well, you know what man. I've been married 26 years. I've been with her for 30 years We've been together since 18 and 21. So if we can't get along, we got some problems. So and she's opposite personality Me so she's a great like. She's not an endurance athlete, right? She comes from an athletic background so for her, and she comes from this communication background so she's my great sounding board and and helps with writing and like that kind of stuff and messaging. So you know, from the marketing side, Jason, the size, revenue and any staff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let me start with the big picture side first. So I'll carve out CTS ultra running right, which is the window that I kind of currently compare through right now. So that's about one point two million dollars, one point one million dollars in annual revenue, about three hundred and eighty current athletes underneath it, and that is coaching subscription revenue. We have a small footprint in like camps and physiological testing and things like that, but most people are going to identify with the one on one coaching. So that's representative of that number. And then when you back it out to just my just my business, which consists of one on one individual coaching coaching commission that I get from CTS, some of the US products that I'm involved in the book, my research newsletter, research essentials for ultra running, and then some ad hoc consulting things like that that I get every so often. That's 330 K annual and revenue every single year like Jeff and like Heather. That's revenue, not net income. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Go get that, let's make that, that's, that's that's. I wanted to clarify that before people start.
Speaker 1:I don't know, taking it out of context or whatever, but like you know, I'm not going to say that. But like, like Heather and like Jeff, I just take a, I take a salary plus owner draw very, very simple kind of setup that I, that I set up with my account. That amounts to like 15 K a month between those two.
Speaker 2:And are you? You're leaving some back in the business for future investment when you find out? Yeah, I have.
Speaker 1:So I don't have personal coaching contractors underneath me. Those are underneath CTS. I do have contractors that fulfill various parts of the business, so I have accounting and billing and things like that. I get that. I get that done externally. I have people help me with my social media. I get that done externally. Podcast as a post production editor I get that done externally.
Speaker 1:I pay people for technical consulting for the research essentials for ultra running newsletter, so that has a cost associated with it. And then when I produce the book, I own the book, I own the rights to the book and so obviously I have to pay technical editors and copy editors and stylists and for the actual physical production of the book and things like that. So there are expenses that that go into that. I also invest a lot in travel. I travel out to a lot of races. Much to the chagrin of my account, I spend about four between four or five grand a month just in travel expenses Going out to races. It's been a way that I've been able to simultaneously market myself and become a better coach through it, as well as just deliver a high quality service to the athletes, kind of help them almost from an organic standpoint being out at races and things like that. So I do invest a lot kind of back into it, mainly through the travel budget that I've kind of created for myself over the years.
Speaker 2:Any other investments like Heather or Jeff Jason mentioned travel and you kind of areas and, jeff, you mentioned just investing in bringing on new assistance any kind of future thoughts of where you might see opportunity to invest in the business for growth?
Speaker 4:I mean for me, I'm also a little balancing. I'm still a sponsored athlete, so I'm still getting an income for running as well, so it all filters through the business as well. So when I'm telling you those numbers, that's it reflecting those that revenue as well. So there are other buckets that have nothing to do with coaching and some and and I'm also doing other things like motivational speaking, writing other stuff like that that's getting buckets and occasionally a design consult or something that gets a little bit income. It's not very much. I think last year was like seven grand or something worth of income. It wasn't very much, but so I'm still doing that kind of stuff. And then I'm also investing back in the business.
Speaker 4:Especially this year I'm doing a full new website platform, leveraging some of my contacts in the tech industry that I've worked with for 20 plus years to build me a custom platform for my website instead of using something like Squarespace or some generic. I wanted I wanted specific onboarding and, like I wanted the experience to be really good and I had some ideas for some technology behind the scenes, some heavier lifting technology, some entrepreneurial ideas that I wanted to have as like, say, a phase two, phase three business plan down the road, you know, because I write out my five year and my all that kind of stuff that you do as an entrepreneur and like where you want to be in five, where do you want to be in 10, I kind of go through that process myself. So I have some kind of planning ahead and I can start thinking about well, I need to implement one of these things. And so that's one of the things I'm really been spending a ton of time and money on this year is investing back in the business for that technology and the website, which could become an app down the road, and it's going to do a bunch of heavy lifting on onboarding and automating onboarding more, so I don't have to do as much manual stuff on the onboarding side of things when new athletes come on, because now I have assistance and we have a whole whole. We're trying to normalize our onboarding process and so forth. And then the social aspect, so like a social app and all that kind of stuff that we've been working on.
Speaker 4:So so, yeah, I'm really investing back in the business, especially this year, especially after revenue was good last year and I was overwhelmed and I took this year when I brought the assistance on. I let my roster get a lot smaller and which Jason and I have talked about this over the years, like what? What's the ideal number? And and you know I right now have in the mid 30s is about what I carry as far as coaching load on my own personal roster and then I'm mentoring my, my, my coach, my coaches, and I'm investing back in my coaches with time right now with just mentorship and that kind of stuff. So I think that answers the question right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Heather any areas you would like to see investing within your business or that you currently are investing in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so investing continuing education is a huge one. That's I think that should be on every coach's investment list is is investing in continuing education, whether it's going to conferences like the ultra running coach conference we just had, adding new credentials, or just investing in paying for subscriptions for journal articles and things like that, so you're staying on top of it. So that's, that's a big thing. We spend a lot of money on personally and we encourage our coaches to do as well. And then, like Jeff said, time time is money and we spend a lot of time brainstorming how can we help grow our coaches, how can we mentor them, how can we market ourselves? Whether it's going to to races to crew for our clients or just volunteering or helping out, we do.
Speaker 3:We also invest a good chunk of money every year to local races as sponsors. I guess that would be kind of considered marketing as well, but we just feel it's important for our business to support the local grassroots running community and, in turn, that helps us as well. So, yeah, that's, I would say, as far as investments, that's, continuing education is our big one. Something that hasn't been mentioned yet, that we spend a ton of money on every year is our coaching platform, so we actually use final surge I apologize, not training peaks. Training is awesome.
Speaker 2:It's good to have competition. Yeah, yeah, we started there. Everybody better.
Speaker 4:All right.
Speaker 3:We've just invested so much time building our personal and coaching library there that that's where we are right now, but that's that's a big business expense that I think a lot of new coaches don't consider, even if it's just you and you don't have other coaches to pay that expense for as well. You know you need something more than just a Google spreadsheet and it does add up your internet costs, your phone costs, all these things. So, yeah, it's, I would say, the technical side of the business. You know all of the equipment that you use it adds up. So that would be our biggest expense.
Speaker 2:Do you?
Speaker 4:pay.
Speaker 2:Sorry Go ahead.
Speaker 4:No, no, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. You mentioned ongoing education for assistance. Do you pay any of that on their behalf?
Speaker 3:Not currently, but that's something that we've we've definitely explored, that we want to do. That's that's a meeting we've been meaning to have with our CPA. She's a little she's a little tough on us on what we get to spend money on.
Speaker 1:We do that, by the way, Heather. We do that at CTS. We have a small. It doesn't cover everything, but we kind of have to fight to the nail and provide our coaches. You get, we have 50 coaches underneath our whole umbrella and out of those 50, 15 or ultra running specific, we carve out a little bit, a little bit of budget so that they can use that in a almost kind of an ad hoc way and it's I've always felt it's good money spent.
Speaker 3:That's good to hear. I'm going to, I'm going to cite you then when I'm, when I'm arguing.
Speaker 4:Jeff, what Well I just want to add three things. You know, continuing education I think is really important. I've had, I've struggled with that personally I have to do my own kind of just here. You know I do a lot of podcast like I listen to probably six to ten hours worth of health, longevity, nutrition and ultra running podcasts, which is mainly the Coupecast. So just because it's so good, dude, you have the best subjects, I have to say.
Speaker 1:Like it is great. Thanks, man, I appreciate I really appreciate that.
Speaker 4:I mean it's great. So you know, and I and I share those with my coaches If I come across a really good one on strength training or if I come across a good one on nutrition or I come across a good one on ultra running. You know, you know the protein one and the ketone one you know from the Coupecast gets shared a lot but. But but you know, just like that's, one is using like just normal every day week a little two or three hours to research during the week as well. I set aside but but also you know I have, I have a like hey, I need to get to this at some point list as well, and one of them is the is. One of them is is the US ultra running certification. I just think that's great that you guys are the Coupe, you guys are driving that. I think that's something we need in the industry.
Speaker 4:I feel kind of sheepishly embarrassed that I haven't taken it yet, but part of it is for me personally. I'm still like running my butt off. You know, and you know I ran eight ultras this year and I'm I'm always training my rear off, so like that takes up a lot of time that I could be doing some of this stuff, but I just always like I'm going to go run and listen to podcasts, so so I can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and the other one, you know, or two other ones covering education for my, my coaches. It's funny this, just this idea of this podcast.
Speaker 4:When Coupe approached me, I was like it made me start my, you know, my brain starts going like how can I improve my business, how can I do this, how can I do that? And that was one of the things that came out of that. That kind of thought process was like I need to cover like a percentage of, like certifications. I'd like to have every one of my athletes have the USCA certification, older running certification. I've got one that has it, but another one's got a ton of other certifications as a PT and other things, and another one has all the all the normal. What's the NAA?
Speaker 3:Sorry In the NAA yeah, and so.
Speaker 4:So I would really like to all of them have that and I was thinking, well, maybe I could just I'll reinvest and give them, like you know, 200, pay half or something you know for them to go get that certification. So you know, that was something that came out of the brainstorm of just this idea of this podcast. And then the other for me is I do very similar to what another investment piece in mine is. My marketing kind of strategy is to help my athletes on the ground with whether it's crewing or pacing or just going like I, just out of my own, you know out of the out of my own pocket. You know the business.
Speaker 4:We went to Moab 240, I had three athletes in it and I had a buddy running it who won it Jesse Haynes.
Speaker 4:So like we went there and we helped, we, we paced, I paced, I crude, I hardly any sleep, but you come out of that with that, that hands on experience like that you come out of, like Jason was saying earlier, you come out of that with, like I mean I had, I probably had 20 bullet points from that week.
Speaker 4:You know of like new things I want to implement in, like coaching 200s, for example. So like you get so much education from just being boots on the ground, so especially in the role of support, because you know, as an athlete, I'm always pulling from other people to support me, but as a coach, you want to be on that other side of the thing. So you see, like, ok, what's this guy who's running his wife dealing with? You know, like she's getting no sleep. His organization and tech, you know his, his, his organization might be poor on little things, and then that shows that that's a reflection on me as a coach, going, wow, I should have emphasized that. You know, I know I told him that, but I should have emphasized that's really important, you know, and so then that helps me be a better coach.
Speaker 1:So yeah, every, every, every single minute and every single dollar that I've ever spent going to races in some capacity for an athlete, and whether that's just to give him a hug at the finish line or to crew them right, that whole spectrum that has come back and paid its weight in gold, five or tenfold every single time Like 100 percent agree.
Speaker 1:I've never. I've never, and my time is limited, just like everybody else's, and you know my capital is limited, just like everybody else's. I have never regretted one single minute or one single dime that I've ever spent in those endeavors, just for all the reasons that you guys just mentioned.
Speaker 4:Well, I think what I think what's interesting is I don't know whether that's where this podcast came from, but this idea. But you and I were talking, waiting for two of our athletes, were close together and we were waiting at the finish line at Hard Rock this year and we were talking about coaching in the dark.
Speaker 1:I don't know what time it was the middle of the night, two in the morning.
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly, but I had run too, so I was like on, like fumes, but I was out there to see my athlete finish and Coop and I happened to be standing next to each other and we strike, stroke up a conversation like we normally do, and we started talking about the business of coaching and the frustrations that we've had, and so I'm glad we're talking about this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. You go to. You go to the race, not only support the athlete, but you do meet other coaches and you really can really open up when you're in person with another coach over, you know, hopefully over a beer, not just two in the morning, right Trying to stay warm, but anyways, yeah, it's great connecting you know with with other like minded folks and sharing your pains, right, and how you go about building the business.
Speaker 4:I don't know the vibe of the rock might be yeah.
Speaker 3:You're standing right next to the rock man, so, like the, rock, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the truth.
Speaker 4:And it's actually what's an interesting like side note, that's how Coop and I met is hard rock.
Speaker 2:So that's, right 2007,.
Speaker 4:We got introduced by Garot Grubbins and he paced me for a section at my first hard rock.
Speaker 3:Man, I learned a lot on that first hard rock.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was a long time ago, me too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, staying on the topic of assistance, how about recruiting? You know, is it? You know that. Can I imagine that's got to be tough. It's so much trust that you have to have in them that they're going to represent your brand and, as Coop said, they mess up on you. How do we go about recruiting, finding good quality assistant coaches and then onboarding them? What does that process look like within your three businesses?
Speaker 3:So when we started I always said I will never. I don't want assistant coaches, because this is my baby and it's my reputation. I don't. I don't trust anybody. After, I want to say maybe three years in, one of our very close friends got his USCA certification and came to us and said I want to coach, like can I coach for you? And we really thought about it and we're like okay, well, we trust him, we'll let you in, and it was a great experience for us.
Speaker 3:And so fast forward another two years when we got to the point where we just could not. We were turning away clients left and right because we were full and it wasn't responsible to have a huge roster. We had to sit down and really have that conversation. Are we gonna bring on more coaches? And so it's a hard thing to do and I tell people this all the time. Like Jason mentioned, you have it's a reflection of you, so you really have to think hard about it.
Speaker 3:But what we do is immediately we go to USCA. That's where we like to kind of pull coaches from, because we know if they've gone through that ultra running coach certification, we at least know they've got that level of understanding of the science behind coaching and everything taught in that course. So that's where we recruit from. To answer that question. But I will tell you it's not something we actively do all the time. We're not personally looking to continue growing our business into this massive conglomerate. We're kind of like where we're comfortable right now. So we're never really actively coaching, but we do network all the time with other coaches to kind of keep people I don't wanna say in my back pocket, but to have these relationships with other coaches that you trust and maybe agree with their coaching philosophies and methodologies. And so if that time ever does come that we need to bring on more coaches, we'd probably pull from these people.
Speaker 2:And I wanna continue with you, Heather Was that onboarding look like in terms of compensation split? Do they earn more or more percentages. Are they full-time now or would you consider them part-time?
Speaker 3:We have everything we have. The majority of our coaches do have full-time jobs or part-time jobs outside of coaching.
Speaker 3:So, it's not something that they intend to do full-time. And so for those coaches we do a 70-30 split. They get 70%, we take 30, unless they bring clients to our coaching umbrella themselves, in which case we do 95-5. We just take a tiny cut to cover the cost of paying for final surge and other things. But yeah, and that's because, quite honestly, a lot of people who come to work under our umbrella they don't wanna market, they don't wanna go get their own clients, because if they did they'd have their own business, they'd do all of this. So we definitely encourage them to bring in their own, but usually it's 70-30. And as far as onboarding goes, it kind of depends on their experience.
Speaker 3:We've had coaches who have come to us already coaching. They've been doing it for years. They just didn't want to do it on their own, they wanted to work for someone else, in which case we meet with them a few times, we talk about our coaching philosophy, the things we expect from them and what they can expect from us, and kind of let them get to it. On the other hand, we have mentored brand new coaches who have said I really wanna do this. I've coached for fun, like some friends, for free. I'm not sure what to do those coaches. Their onboarding process is a little different. We'll often encourage them to find a friend that they don't mind coaching for free, just for like a week or two, just so they can practice, get some practice with the platforms and how everything works, and we'll go from there. And I'm actually super stoked to say that every time we've done that, those practice clients have always come on as paid clients almost immediately, so it's worked pretty well for us.
Speaker 2:All right, jeff recruiting. Where do you look for recruiting? How's that. I'm fine.
Speaker 4:Well, being a branding person, I see myself as a specific niche brand in ultroning, like as far as what I offer, I'm very like Koot knows this I'm very opinionated about nutrition and my angle of nutrition ancestral nutrition and so and strength training, mobility and all the other things that go into longevity, and so that's another piece. Since I'm 52 and still competing, longevity is still part of my brand story. That is not only me as an athlete but as a coaching brand, and so that was the biggest struggle probably. You know we talked about like I've been thinking about bringing a coaches on for three years, but people, my coaching clients, seek me out and my philosophy, and so I was like how do I, you know, how do I like? For years, the question was how do I meet that need that people are coming for my philosophy specifically? Right, but I'm full, so how do I meet that need?
Speaker 4:Well, when it finally ended up, it just organically kind of happened with a couple of my athletes that I've been coaching for like five years. One's a current coach already, he's got all the certifications and the US stuff, and so he was a natural person we'd been talking, he'd been asking me coaching even our coaching calls for his training. He was asking me coaching questions for years and we would always have like a percentage of our call of our coaching call would be dedicated to coaching specifically. So he was a natural. He was my first coach and I brought him on and we agree on all things and so that drove who I recruit. So from that point forward I was like, who do I? It's gotta be someone who either I've mentored already and I've spent a ton of time speaking into their life and we agree on life philosophy in general. And so that's where I found Trish, my female coach. She's great. We all we agree on all that stuff. So everyone I brought on I've coached, two of them I've coached for almost five years and another one I've coached for two years and then he's local the two year and we meet for coffee every two weeks. So we I'm speaking into them, still doing, I'm doing coaching calls with them and talking to them about coaching and mentoring and they kind of have an I have an open door policy as far as, like you know, get hold of me anytime you have a question.
Speaker 4:So that's kind of where mine's organically kind of grassroots, grown by people in my inner circle already that I trust and that's and I've and after doing that, I've decided that's the only way I'm gonna do it. So if I'm gonna grow, it's gonna. You gotta be in my inner circle where you're gonna be assistant coach for me. I'm not just gonna hire anybody. So and that's that was part of that process I was talking about with a business coach I worked with before I expanded this year. Last year I worked with a business coach in planning for this season of like launching the assistant coaches. That was part of that process and that's where I defined, like you know what I really need to stick to, my brand and who I am and my philosophy. And then every coach I hire is under that umbrella philosophy. And so you know, if you come to my coaching business, you're gonna get my coaching philosophy, even if you're hired, even if you're working with one of my assistant coaches.
Speaker 2:What about compensation? They earn out 70, 30 split.
Speaker 4:So that's across the board 70, 30 split. I have a little different organization with my group, my group coaching offering, because I'm involved more in that one, because I run group video calls every two weeks for the group but I have an assistant that's writing their plans. So we do a 50, 50 split right now because I'm handing all the onboarding and I'm handling, like, some of the communications in the social app that we use and that kind of stuff. So I'm spending more time than I am with my individual custom coaches that are taking on their own clients. So that's a different split. Now, if he gets to the point where you know he takes it, grows enough and he takes on more responsibility, then we can renegotiate like a 70, 30 split. And that's my vision for him is to be a 70, 30 split eventually, cause he's handling onboarding, but right now he's not. So since I'm spending more time, I'm getting more of the cut. But that's kind of how it works.
Speaker 2:All right, coop. How's it go? How's it?
Speaker 1:This is gonna be such a cool compare and contrast. So on the recruitment side, I've always said if I'm a domain expert in anything, it's recruiting and training coaches. I mean, I spent over a decade of my career not exclusively doing that, but that was a really big part of it. We'd hire 10 to 15 coaches every single year. Every year, during that 10 to whatever year process, I've hired and mentored and screened and trained, hired and fired over a hundred coaches during that tenure and a lot of the themes that Jeff mentioned maybe not so much like the personalization side of things A lot of those themes that Jeff mentioned really permeate the way, really permeate through the way that I think about hiring and hiring, screening, developing and ongoingly training coaches. Except I had to do it at scale. I had to kind of institutionalize it, so to speak. I couldn't just one off things. I had to do it two to three times a year and have 60 applications in and whittle those 60 applications down to 10 people that we would actually interview and whittle down those 10 people that we actually interview into, two or three people that we actually hired, and then do the balancing of everything as well. I remember a long time ago, chris put me in charge of evening out our female to male split within our coaching department which, as you guys realize, it's a heavily male dominated industry, and we followed suit with that, where 80% of our coaches were males at one point, and he put me in charge of simply going out and hiring more female coaching. That was a huge effort. It was a lot of literally kind of like hand to hand combat and recruiting and stuff like that. I couldn't institutionalize that part, I just had to spend more time finding female coaches. So, anyway, my point with that is is I have this, both this appreciation for what Jeff and Heather are trying to do, but then also appreciation for how we try to essentially scale it up, and so we have a two phase process. So the initial phase is who gets into the pool? Right? So we recruit everywhere. We'll do a public recruiting piece, we'll post it on all the job boards and the industry specific things and things like that. But then we'll also network. We'll network with our different service providers. We'll network with our partners. I'll network with everybody that I've pulled onto the podcast, you know, including the people who have actually been on the podcast. Some of them have actually become coaches for us more recently.
Speaker 1:But it really isn't all of the above approach. We try to kind of scour the earth, so to speak, for good coaches and then, based on that, in every hiring round we'll get, you know, between 40 and 70 resumes or something like that, and we've got to wheel them down to 10. The way we whittle it down to 10 is across three basic points. The first one is they have to have a bachelor's level understanding of exercise science. That's the minimum. Like, people come in with master's degrees and PhDs and things like that, but at minimum we're not set up to be an exercise science university, we just can't do it, and so they have to understand that at the bare minimum just to kind of get an interview. The second piece of that the second piece of this is they have to be a good communicator. So we'll look at their written communication. We might do a really quick phone interview just to see if they have, you know, some type of interpersonal skills. We might even look out to their references really quickly just to check on that interpersonal skill piece of it. But they have to have reasonable interpersonal skills. We're all in the people business here as coaches.
Speaker 1:That's the second piece and the third piece is they have to have interest in the sport that they were coaching. So you got to remember I was hiring for cycling coaches, triathlon coaches and running an ultra marathon coaches kind of all at the same time. And that personal interest in the sport having people that personally do it, that like it, that are kind of in the scene, so to speak, especially in a niche sport like ultra running, is extremely important. You cannot and I learned this the hard way where I tried to bring in our triathlon coaches and make them ultra marathon coaches and although they would be fantastic, fantastic coaches, they didn't have the initial spot of credibility because they weren't an ultra runner. So from the consumer side of things, it was a non-starter. From my side of things, I would have complete confidence in them.
Speaker 1:I'll tell the story really briefly to kind of illustrate this point. Many years ago, when I first started taking on a lot of the elite ultra runners and my roster filled up very quickly, I had a few elite ultra runners contact me about for coaching. I'm like, listen, I can't. I can't coach you, but I have the perfect coach for you. His name is Nick White, who coached Craig Alexander to not one, but two Ironman World Championships two, two of them.
Speaker 1:That is not easy, and you could say that that is a greater athletic accomplishment than anything that exists in ultra running because of the competitiveness of that sport. With all due respect to the people that are there in the sport, not only was it a no, it was a hard no and non-starter across several elite athletes, and so it demonstrated to me that I needed this third piece as well. They had to have some sort of personal connection and personal interest into the sport. So that's initially how we would create our like big pool to the smaller pool. Once we get down to the smaller pool, we would have a much more intimate screening process, which we dubbed the coaching college, which is really just false advertising. It was really just a series of intimate like case studies that we would put these coaches through to see a little bit of how they would kind of program in a realistic perspective, like also taking into the context of their new and all this other kind of stuff, but also see more of how they reacted to the mentorship, because we do have a very involved coach mentorship process.
Speaker 1:That is, let's just put it bluntly, it's not easy.
Speaker 1:It's definitely driven from a lot of the influence of the training center, where it's very high performance oriented and we don't coddle people a lot.
Speaker 1:They better get their shit together and have their shit together and know their shit and all the things that are related to that and there's only a certain from a cultural perspective.
Speaker 1:We wanna make sure that we're hiring the right people and so we put them in this kind of like pressure cooker coaching college type of environment where they're producing real case scenarios and getting scrutinized by our kind of master mentor coaches at the same intensity that they would get scrutinized once they are actually hired. And the people who survive that process essentially, who can kind of like they can kind of like handle the mentorship, essentially because we have very high standards I'm not gonna beat around the bush around that the people who can kind of survive that scrutiny are the people who ultimately kind of make it through those series of filters. But it's definitely that this two step process where we initially have to whittle it down of the people who have just an initial core competency set across education, communication and involvement in the sport, and then we try to fit them for culture more than anything else on this second step.
Speaker 2:What about compensation? Wise for those new coaches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, our compensation model is actually a lot different than both Heather's and Jeff's and it favors the company more. So we have a little bit more of a convoluted model that I'm gonna try to kind of simplify. So the reason that it's convoluted is kind of across convoluted is this kind of overplaying how complicated it is. It's really not that complicated. There's kind of two flavors of splits. First flavor is does the coach recruit the athlete or does the CTS recruit the athlete? So we have a big coaching pipeline that comes in anywhere between 50 and 70 athletes a month across all sports Coming in this pipeline where we have a centralized athlete services team that kind of pairs up the incoming athletes with the correct coaches. So a lot of the onboarding that Jeff mentioned earlier is kind of institutionalized from the top down.
Speaker 1:So one flavor of our splits is does that wholly exist through CTS? So the coach essentially receives the athlete. Having that athlete paired with them through some series of this is the right athlete for Jeff or for Dirk or for Heather. The other side of that split is if the coach goes out and recruits that athlete, which obviously the coach receives a little bit more of a favorable compensation. So if it comes through CTS and then we have a bonus model based on retention, essentially. So the athlete goes through a certain kind of length of their contract. They get, the coach gets kicked back a certain percentage of that contract value after that period of time.
Speaker 1:But once you alchemize all of those on the CTS recruited side, it works out to be about 60, 40. So the coach gets about 60%, the company gets about 40% and then if the coach actually recruits it, it's 75, 25, which is a little bit more akin to what Jeff and Heather do. But that only kind of works out if the, if the renewal model starts to see several cycles. So if you get it, we, the way that we've favored our compensation model, is based off of a little bit more of a long-term lens versus a short-term lens. So it's much more favorable if you have an athlete that's underneath your like your purvey, for 18 months or 24 months or 36 months, versus just six months that's gonna be. It's not an unfavorable model to the coach but it's certainly less favorable because of the not only the initial labor that's involved but just the split doesn't work out with the kind of with the renewal bonuses.
Speaker 2:So it's nice. So a coach could receive a once a year bonus, if you will, for previous for clients that they've had on previous 12, 18, 36 months.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's once a year, once every six months, just putting upon the kind of contract type.
Speaker 2:essentially, yeah, I haven't heard of that. That's a cool way of doing it. I like that idea too cool idea.
Speaker 4:I was just gonna say I kind of agree with that. That's cool idea to have a bonus for retention. From a business perspective, you're always trying to keep your retention's an important piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That. So if you guys, you guys can steal this from me as well, it's totally okay. Part of our coaching quality assurance model the lynch pin of this Jeff, you and I talked about this the lynch pin of that quality assurance model is coach retention. So I can look at a coach's retention rate and kind of rack and stack this coach is doing a great job, this coach is doing a bad job and it really is that easy.
Speaker 1:And when I instituted that, this was a big project that I headed up over. It might've taken me 12 months to actually figure out and it was kind of a profit sharing model that we had with our full-time employees. The gateway into that was their retention rate. So did they meet a certain retention threshold? And if they did, those full-time employees could participate in a profit sharing program, and if they didn't, they couldn't participate in this profit sharing program. And when I did that, I got so much heat from our staff about why can't I use functional threshold power or improvement in whatever gold medals in the world championships or whatever is like? Inclusion in this model is like nope, it's gonna be based on retention, but like it took a little while to flush out. Once it actually flushed out. It ended up being okay. Now we can kind of see why you're actually using that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, exactly, business 101 is retention. Can you get paid? But also it's the better coaches, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's the better coaches, though. The better coaches had the higher retention rates. It's just that they wanted to be compensated on something that they knew better, right, and so they know coaching, they know how to improve athletes' functional threshold, pace and VO2 maxes and stuff like that, and they wanted their compensation to kind of be reflective of what they knew. It was getting past that initial knowing point. That was the stumbling block, and once it all was all said and done, you could look at all of our great coaches the ones with the world championships and the Olympic medals and kind of things like that and they were always the ones with the highest retention rates.
Speaker 2:Yeah, awesome. Do any of you have like non-solicitation or NDA type agreements? You know help protect against coach leaving?
Speaker 3:That was something that was again when we decided to bring on coaches. I struggled with whether or not we should do that and ultimately we decided not to do an NDA or a non-compete because we realized that at the end of the day, people are coming to our business for us and our coaching style and what we do, and that simply can't be replicated. I mean, you know, the coaching itself is not rocket science. We, hopefully, are all doing very similar things, so what brings those clients to us? It's our. You know more of our coaching philosophy and the community we build, and so if another coach wants to try and replicate that, I mean cool, good for them. But they're never gonna be me, right? You know, they're never gonna be that other person. So we decided not to do that and so far it has been okay.
Speaker 3:We have not had any issues with coaches trying to. You know, come in and take clients and then leave. We have had a coach. Actually, very recently a coach did decide to leave and go off on his own, and it was the first time we have had to face the issue of what do we do? Do we do his clients stay with us or do they go with him Because we didn't have any sort of contract with that and ultimately I felt that the coach-client relationship is the most important thing and if they have a great relationship with him as a coach, I don't wanna stand in the way of that. So we told them you know you're welcome to stay with us. We'll assign you a new coach, but we also fully respect if you have a great working relationship with that coach. We want you to continue with that coach and we wish you well and go for it. And it was a good split. You know Some people stayed, some people left and you know more people will fill those spaces.
Speaker 2:So you know? Yeah, I've also heard of like a buyout clauses. You know you can leave if you take certain athletes with you. There's this compensation, jeff. Any experience there?
Speaker 4:You know, since I just lost it this year, I don't have one right now, but I have had one drafted by my lawyer.
Speaker 1:But it hasn't been implemented.
Speaker 4:So, you know, I'm always like I'm always working and planning ahead and that was one of the things on my list of things. But it's like for me, I'm like I don't know what I should do as the draft, you know. So I'm still like you know, do I, is it? You know they? You know I liked I'd actually just jotted down the note buyout clause, like hey, that's a good idea, yeah.
Speaker 4:So you know I'm looking at you guys in this podcast to help me, like, define that part, because that's this is an early part of my business, right?
Speaker 4:It's just got launched at the beginning of this year. So you know, right now my coaches don't have my assistant coaches don't have enough athletes for that really to be a big deal, but I do need it in place. I feel like that is a you should always cover your bases as a business owner and if you're running the business and you're paying most all the taxes and you know all that kind of stuff and all the expenses, you know all the technology, all the subscriptions, all the you know, so like you need that just should be in place and I think it's a great idea. I just haven't, I haven't got to that point where I'm like I'm comfortable with this one, with this draft. So it's still in draft phase from my lawyer and I probably saw him like V3 right now and I'm still like I was like, well, oh wait, maybe I'll, something will come out of this podcast and give me a better idea.
Speaker 2:So I'm looking to do you guys, it probably will never feel comfortable. It'll probably never feel comfortable implementing it. You know, it's like thinking of the worst case scenario, type stuff. But yeah, but yeah, jason, what are you seeing?
Speaker 4:I've seen real in business over the years, especially like internet startups and entrepreneurial settings. It gets really, really messy and so you kind of it's better just to have it on paper and say this is what we agree on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, jeff, get your pen out.
Speaker 4:I've got it man right here.
Speaker 1:dude, I'm gonna take you to school on this one because, either fortunately or unfortunately, I have a lot of experience in this.
Speaker 4:Oh, I'm sure, man with a size business you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let me kind of clarify things. First off, I work as an independent contractor right now and everything that I'm just about to mention I am subject to as an independent contractor for CTS and I'm gonna talk about it from the perspective of how it's currently orchestrated, although I'm not at the helm of that. I put all of this stuff in place when I was coaching director and I was vice president of operations. Although I no longer manage it now, I am now the recipient of it. So keep that in mind as I kind of go through that dialogue. So this is not anything that I have with any of the contractors in my current business, because they're not really related to coaching. I pay my social media manager. I don't have her under a non-compete clause or kind of anything like that. This is stuff that CTS has with their coaches, which I think is the most relevant here. So we have all of the above non-disclosures, non-compete and non-solicitation agreements and I think the first orientation point to kind of pick up on some of the theme that Dirk just mentioned is these are things that you don't wanna deal with, but you should absolutely deal with them Because if you're growing your business, you are going to get to the point where people are going to use your business to grow their business. There's just no other way around it. As much as you want to think that, jeff, you're hiring your buddies and Heather, you have a perfect screening process and I have my little screening process that I just kind of went through. You're gonna have people that, either from the onset or at a certain point in your employment relationship with them, they are gonna look at the situation and say I'm gonna start my own business, I'm gonna use this infrastructure that already exists to grow my business up and then I'm gonna intentionally split that off. That is just going to. If you don't have that happen to you, you're really lucky and fortunate and everybody should take business advice from you. But that is absolutely going to happen. Nobody wants these things in place and they all look super nasty, but you've gotta have them in place.
Speaker 1:That being said, I think the first thing to think about is when I've looked at this, when I've looked at how to orient this within our coaching department is there are things that you have to throw the switch on when they are the most dire, and I've only had, out of those 100 coaches that I have that I've hired. I've only had like two where I've really had to throw all the legal resources at them and so, and so I use that as a point of caution to say most of the time you're using these things as points of negotiation and leverage for when you do have those employee splits, that happens. You hire people, they go off and they wanna play in the industry. That absolutely happens. They can go off and become a baker or a bus driver or a surgeon or kind of whatever, and then you don't have to worry about any of these things. But a lot of times they're gonna kind of come back into the industry because for us I hired people that want to be in the industry, right. So I also had to realize that some of those people were going to leave and I need both reasonable protections within the business because it's a lot to hire people and train them. I just went through all the stuff that I go through to help constantly mentor our athletes and then also be fair at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:So it's only in the most extreme circumstances that we deploy those NDAs, non-competes and non-solicitation pieces of the two the non-solicitation and the non-competes are usually the biggest kind of sticking points because, as you guys mentioned earlier and I know this are really doing anything all that special. I kind of don't care if somebody knows who I'm charging and what I'm charging for and any of that other stuff. I'm obviously very transparent about that as a byproduct of this podcast. But people just don't like telling them hey, listen, you can't solicit these clients. Or hey, listen, you got to sit in the penalty box for six months or 12 months or however, you drop your non-compete clause. I will relay, though that from experience.
Speaker 1:Whatever we've had these splits, as long as everybody does what they say that they're going to do, all the parties sit down. Hey, this is what we're going to do with the athletes, just like Heather mentioned earlier. Right, these athletes are going to go here, these athletes are going to go there. This is the best solution for them. We're going to take an athlete first approach. As long as everybody does that, this is still small business. All that stuff just generally just kind of like works out, because when people act nefariously, where we've got to spend money on legal resources and everybody gets butt hurt over trying to enforce a non-compete or non-solicitation or whatever my encouragement to small business owners out there are, put these in place, realize that their failsafe switches for nefarious actors and people who were intentionally trying to poach things from you. In most situations, that is not going to happen. You're just using these either as kind of an initial starting point or a negotiation point for whenever you do have to negotiate those releases.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks, I agree. That's why I have a draft. Being an entrepreneur long enough and having employment contracts and contractors you're managing and everything else, at some point there's always someone who, well, a lot of times thinks they're more arrived than they really are and they end up becoming that nefarious actor. That's really what that agreement's about. It's for that specific person, and sometimes you don't know who that is. Even if you know them really well, they may become that person. You need it in place as a safety net. I agree with that. That's why I've had it drafted, but I just haven't implemented yet. I just don't. I don't know. Is it six months? Yeah, all that kind of stuff I got to figure that out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that stuff. I'll offer two kinds of points of commentary on that. First off, it'll absolutely be people that you don't. You can never forecast people's career trajectories, can't go. No, I mean, it's all nice and fuzzy and all that stuff when they first start working for you. But then, after they've worked for you for three or four years, we look at these things that we just talked about earlier the 70, 30 splits and, oh man, I can make 30% more if I do this, that or the other, and that happens quite often.
Speaker 1:My encouragement is to get these things put in place initially, if you don't know what the right answer is. Six months, 12 months, buyout agreements and things like that. Pick the most reasonable, but run and realize that that is also going to serve as a little bit of a screening tool for you from the onset. I did not mention this in the hiring part of it, but when I would hire coaches, when I personally would hire coaches of which I've done many of them I would bring this up and I would make it a point to run them through our whole independent contract agreement, which most people would pencil whip. Most people could get those big legal documents and they're like I just show me where to sign. I would take them through each one of the three non-disclosure, non-complete, non-compete and non-solicitation and then tell them what that practically means, just so that they know what they're getting themselves into. I viewed it as another part, or a final part, of the entire screening tool and I only had one candidate who actually really wanted to hire that backed out of it because of that.
Speaker 1:That being said, you're also going to have different permutations of this. The common one that happens with us when we hire new coaches is they have an existing business. What do they do with that? We've taken it from the standpoint of if that existing business is like our subscription based coaching model. We don't want to cannibalize that. We don't want to have a growth by acquisition business where we're looking at other coaches and we're trying to build up our profit by siphoning off other or to bring in other coaches. We want to want their payments and we usually bake in an exception to the non-complete, non-solicitation for the business that they've actually brought in.
Speaker 1:Jeff, we want to hire you as a coach. We'd say okay, jeff, what are you making? You're making XYZ a year. Okay, we're going to pay you XYZ a year. We're not going to cut out 5% or 10% or 30% or whatever On top of that. If there ever is a split, jeff, you have an exclusion to the business that you brought into CTS in the first place. We've always set that up. I think that that's fair. When you're thinking about doing this, jeff, and whoever else is listening to this thinking about this, I think that that's a fair way to actually look at it.
Speaker 1:The other permutation of this is for strength training businesses and things that are kind of like coaching and may or may not fit into it. Whenever I've had to discern that if it's sort of a fit, it's not a fit. People's strength training businesses you can have it. I don't want to touch it. People's personal training businesses you can have it, I don't want to touch it. You have a consulting business on the side that you talk about wearables or you give people advice on shoes or whatever it is I don't want to touch it. That's not part of our core business. Let's not try to muddy the waters and things like that, because when you're hiring these independent contractors, they're going to have their fingers in a lot of different pies, naturally, unless it's a perfect one-to-one match of your current business model. I don't want to kind of convolut the relationship with trying to shoehorn things in that aren't part of the core business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cool. If you had to make sure coaches have left with a clean slate from their past coaching business, they would.
Speaker 1:I don't, I don't, I mean, yeah, I mean everybody comes in with baggage. So we've had a lot of coaches that have come in from the training center, from high-performance jobs over there. We always find a way to kind of incorporate those athletes. I've never said, hey, listen, you've got to wipe out your entire business and come on board here. We always find a reasonable way to work it out. The centerpiece of that is we want to keep the coach whole with their current income, whatever they're generating from these athletes. That's whether we have brought them in as an independent contractor or as a full-time employee. You can imagine that looks different in both of those cases. We want to keep you whole there and then we want to keep the athletes whole. So everybody has different pricing models, right, and we have a pricing model. We won't absorb those athletes into our pricing model from the onset. We're not going to either upgrade or downgrade.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Can I ask a clarifying question? Are you so say they're bringing in on their own pricing model and they've had their own contracting business or own consulting coaching business? Are you, is CTS absorbing those athletes that they're bringing to you and then you're just passing that as a one-to-one on to them and then they're under the CTS model under a different pricing, or they're staying separate under that person's old business?
Speaker 1:So the answer is yes, CTS is absorbing it, but we do it in kind of a logical format along break points.
Speaker 4:Yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So if they have contracts that are coming up for renewal, we'll do it on that point, because we have to do like a lock, stock and barrel like, hey, listen, all of your athletes are paying 200 bucks a month. You were going to start running all those payments through CTS at XYZ date, but most of the time you know you got to think about it we can hand, we can really craft. We're not talking about massive scales of widgets that we're kind of moving around. We're talking about 20, 30, 40 individual contracts. But for any one coach we can look at that and say, okay, well, you know, dirk's, you know, coming up with this raise will transition his payment from you to CTS at that point in time. Jeff, there's a logical point here. We'll transition this from there to there. So we try to take it as logical, logically as possible.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3:I'll add to that. We learned that we made a mistake and learned the hard way in letting coaches keep their clients separate, and it was not what we anticipated early, that they were going to be poaching, you know, clients or anything like that. It was rather that, by keeping their clients under their own business, we really had no idea what kind of load, what kind of roster that coach actually had. And the problem came in that, you know we knew how many clients we had given them, but they were way in over their head and that affected the quality of service our clients were getting and that affects our business and that wasn't okay. So that was something we learned the hard way. So, yeah, if we're ever in that situation again going forward, we'll do the same and that you know we're going to absorb those clients. That's a good point.
Speaker 1:It's tricky, it adds another layer of complication, but I think there's a whole other host of business reasons why you would want to do that and go through that extra burden. But I think it's worth it, because your product is kind of a little bit more. You have more confidence in it. I don't want to say homogenize, it just sounds like cold but you just have more confidence in it, right when you kind of know everything that's going on within that channel.
Speaker 4:Yeah, cool yeah.
Speaker 2:This leads into, I guess, coach athlete ratios. You know what are you looking for for yourself, but maybe more importantly for your assistance what kind of client numbers you're looking at. That also relates to pricing. You know higher pricing means maybe lower volume. The spread of services that your assistance are actually offering plays into this as well. So you know what are you looking for in terms of coach athlete number of ratios. Heather, can we kick it off?
Speaker 3:Well, this has been a learning lesson. This is so right from the get go, you know, and it was just my husband and I. We had no idea. You know how much do we charge, how many? Again, business is not our background. We have no business training. So I'll be completely transparent. When we started, we charged $45 a month. That's it.
Speaker 4:Oh, 1980. I know, I know you started 1980? Yeah, I know, and you have a lot to say oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:We. You know that was clearly just a lack of confidence on our part, and so, you know, that has certainly risen over time and even now we're in the position where we charge $197 a month and I truly struggle, you know. I think that what we provide is worth a lot more than that. However, you know, looking at the market and trying to yeah, it's just, it's a really tough thing, you know, especially when you're trying to cater to maybe non-alites and people who don't have a ton of money but want to have that experience put you in a weird position where you're like I know we're worth more and we should charge more, but do we really want to? Yeah, as far as that goes, we have definitely, over the years, just kept increasing, increasing, increasing. But the funny story was just last year we finally had to tell some of our original clients who were still with us all these years later, like, hey, you got to pay us more than $45 a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point. Heather, that's a really really good point. Yeah, you need to you know, because they could be grandfathered in.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, Exactly, and they were all like we've been telling you that for years, like let us pay you more money. That worked out well, yeah so. But as far as the piece on ratios, that varies from coach to coach Newer coaches we start them very small, you know, whether it's like three or five clients and that's it, and we see how well they can do with everything. And we're constantly, my husband and I, reaching out to clients just to get feedback like how's everything going with your coach, are you feeling good? And our coaches know we do this. So you know, just to kind of keep that line of communication open with those coaches who are coaching part-time, usually they'll be pretty pretty upfront with hey, like five to 10 is my number, I don't want any more than that, and we totally respect that. We're not going to push them to do more, because we'd rather have quality, you know service. We'd rather have them do a really good job than just bring us in more money or bring themselves in more money. On the other hand, with the coaches who do want to coach full-time, we kind of take that step-by-step as well. There's no set number. Some people just do a better job with more clients. Some do a better job with less.
Speaker 3:Personally I've had to feel it out over the years. I've gone as high as I think the most I ever had at one time was like 45 clients. That was way too many for me, especially with everything else I do. And I've gone all the way down to the other end where I've worked with only five at a time and that worked well for a while For me. My happy spot with everything else I do with the writing and just running the business, 10 is my happy place. I know that's not a lot for a lot of people. My husband, on the other hand, is in the 30 range and I would say with our coaches it's anywhere. It's kind of in between that. But we do try to limit those part-time coaches to, I would say, 10 clients because with the rest of life we feel like that's a safe area where no one's going to get left behind or forgotten about.
Speaker 2:Is it the same pricing for your assistants as for?
Speaker 3:you, yeah, yeah, we do the same pricing across the board. We've definitely talked about charging more for certain coaches who have a lot more experience or a lot more credentials, which I know a lot of people do, especially coaching businesses that have elite athletes who work for them. They may charge a lot more to work with that person and then a newer coach. We currently don't do that, simply because, being a smaller business, it's just often hard to say at any given time who's going to have room for another client, and we just feel it creates less confusion on our end. So that's just a decision we've made and we offer only one service. Another thing we've done simply because it's easier on our end running the business. It's just one-on-one monthly coaching, as much communication as you need as a client. That's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's service.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we tried for a while to do oh, I take that back. Let me back up. We do have a multi-sport option. We do not market ourselves as triathlon coaches, even though we do have two coaches who are triathlon coaching certified both through USA Triathlon and USCA, and we do work with a lot of adventure racers. So that does cost more money per month, but for our ultra runners it's just here it is. You want strength training? We're going to put that in there. You want to talk about race day planning? That's included too. It's just one price across the board.
Speaker 2:All right, jeff. What are you looking at in terms of coach-client ratio numbers?
Speaker 4:Well. So my assistant coaches are building still, so they all have pretty small loads. Right now six to 10 athletes and I carry in the 30s usually I think I have 34 right now. I have been as high. In the last seven years I've been as high as 60.
Speaker 4:And that was insane and I have to say I wasn't giving good service because this is too many. And that's when I realized that I can't do this like this and that was where some of the catalyst for figuring out how do I bring assistance on and that kind of thing and that came to a head and I would never have that many athletes again ever. I learned really quickly that's not a way to run a business, because then you provide poor customer service. Even if they don't see it, you're still providing poor customer service. Even if you can act like you have all the balls in the air, no problem, you're dropping balls whether you like it or not. So that was a good learning experience for me personally as a coach in a new industry. I used to juggle 30 projects in graphic design at times, and so that was good to understand where my ceiling is. So I'm a premium being the head coach. So if you're going to and I've increased my prices this year. They had been the same for years, five years I hadn't increased my prices and I finally I started out low prices in the beginning and then I slowly, kind of slowly, up them over the years, the first like three years, and then I kind of stayed in the same place for like four or five years and so I decided that I would I become a premium. I've been full and I actually, like sent out an email and gave all my clients, my current clients, on that pricing model and I gave them a deadline and said, hey, on this date we're going to increase pricing and I'm going to give you an intro pricing for six months, meaning I'm going to increase it but not increase it to the full for six months and then it's going to increase to the full. So that, and I had I only had one person leave, so it was not a problem, and you know I was.
Speaker 4:I have to say I was stressing about it, you know. You know when you say, hey, I want more money, but you know I hadn't. Like I said, you know we we've got all this stuff going on with like inflation and everything else, and I was like you know what? I have the same prices as I've had forever. So that was one. And then my, my coaches are a little less. I'm three 47 a month. My coaches are two 47,. My assistant coaches are two 47 a month. And we have one coach under a two 17 a month. And so what else? Oh, and then we also have a one 57 a month group coaching option. So it's it's more of like the budget option. Limited touch points still get a custom plan, but you're not getting like as much one on one or there's no one on one. It's a group setting like group video calls so that I run. So you still get access, limited access to me as the head coach, but I have an assistant coach writing plans and that and that option.
Speaker 2:So then that's kind of where we yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you mentioned wrapping. They're wrapping up and they have six to 10 now. There's like this sweet spot. Well, I think, I think, I have?
Speaker 4:I have. I have three coaches right now that would like to be full time, like that's their goal. They understand, they're all you know. One's a PT and she has a consulting PT, business and and and so she's got some other buckets of income coming in. So she's great, she's in a good place. She's just like I'm re. I just want to grow it organically. I'm ready to, you know, anytime I get more, I'm fine with more, you know.
Speaker 4:So I kind of feel at each coach, like what are you comfortable with? And each and I have another one who has a has a full time job. My sit, my, the one, that's the least amount and he and so he's. He doesn't have as much time but he wants to be, he wants to transition into being a coach full time. So and we've all talked about this, this, you know, this is an organic process, right? We're not just going to like slam you. You know, overnight you're going to grow like one, just like I did. You're going to grow one person at a time and you're going to take care of them and then you're going to grow another one, and then you know what I mean. And so that's really where we, where we kind of are right now. Everyone would I mean.
Speaker 4:Ideally, I'd love for each of my coaches to have 20 or 30 athletes, you know, down the road, but I'm fine with it organically growing too, because that's how you're one, you learn and you get more experience as you coach more people and have to balance it right. You have to figure out how do I balance you know this, many coaches and and like you know, I'm big on touch points too, like communication, talking to the athletes. I'm not a big fan of not talking to an athlete or just giving feedback in a little form, like like spreadsheet style, like that drives me. That's kind of a pet peeve of mine. Like we're, we are going to talk to our athletes, you know, every three weeks, bare minimum, and then they have, they have access to their coaches. You know text and email in between those calls, as you know as much as needed.
Speaker 4:I think we give them a. You know ballpark hay, three, three a week. So you don't you're not just being that squeaky wheel like actually organize your thoughts and put it in an email or a text. But you know, so I'm driving, trying to drive those athletes to be organized as well to my coaches, but but it's not a hard fast rule, right Of like that. You know, if you give me four texts a week, I'm not going to be like, hey, you can't do that. Um, but but I but we are communicating with our athletes. Because how do you get to know your athletes without talking to them? I I don't even understand how coaching businesses work if you're just doing spreadsheets like and not talking to them.
Speaker 2:So that's a big part of our business is touch points. That nightmare snarling you just talked about. If I have no idea how, like I saw that in my family business starting in the eighties, my father started coaching in the eighties Heather, I joked about eighties pricing, yeah. But my dad started out as saying to himself well, there's like three coaches in the entire U? S to do this and uh, he figured he could charge $75 a month because that was the membership at the local health club.
Speaker 1:That's that was our pricing model too. I love it so it was like he anchored it.
Speaker 2:He anchored it to the health club pricing and people are paying that today, so I'll charge $75, but he needed a hundred plus athletes, right yeah, and it wasn't even in Google spreadsheets back then, like it wasn't even Excel spreadsheets, it was the fax machine. So under the fax machine every day paper was just piling up all day long, like blogs are coming in via paper and we were sending out, but there's a lot of phone calls obviously as well. Um, jason, uh, what do you guys target? Cts coach athlete ratios.
Speaker 1:I mean it's really similar to to what both Heather and Jeff has mentioned. I kind of anchor it a little bit differently as I just look at the time allocation that each athlete needs and it's about one athlete, one hour per athlete per week. When you look at all the things a coach does, which is prescribe the training, analyze the training and communicate communicate via phone or text or email or whatever you're in the training log or all three you look across all three of those things and it takes about an hour per athlete per week over long periods of time, not every single week with every single athlete, but when you average it out over long periods of time, over many coaches, over many athletes. That's about how it roughly depend, depending upon what your service model actually is, roughly what it works out to. Yeah, you can have super efficient coaches and I know coaches that that can squeeze and deliver great service, have super high retention rates. That can, you know, maybe do it on 45 minutes or 50 minutes or something like that. When they look at it over long periods of time, I know super detailed coaches that might spend an hour and a half or something like that.
Speaker 1:But really that that range when we're talking about the service delivery model that that Heather and Jeff and I all use. It's kind of a tight little bubble there and really there's not a lot of the kind of differences around that. So it starts out with that and if you extrapolate that to a normal 40 hour work week, it's a cap of 40 athletes. Most of our coaches are 75% or 100% full time coaches. Irrespective of whether they're an independent contractor, their employment class is an independent contractor or they are or they are actually a full time employee. So if you can, you know, run the quick math on that, most coaches are handling between 30 and 40 athletes. Sure, there are people at the edges of the bell curve that are that are a little bit different. But for the mo, for most of our coaching group there in that 30 to 40 athlete range the entire time, as am I, I set a cap at 40.
Speaker 1:I might drift one above that every every so often, but between 37 and 40 athletes is really, really consistent for me. I only take on one new athlete pretty much every 12 months, so, just like Jeff and Heather, I'm pretty much always full. I don't carry a wait list. You know, I have kind of a built in wait list with the rest of our coaching group. But fundamentally I don't think that that's a good business model to keep an athlete kind of like in the wings or on the hook or whatever for some sort of indefinite amount of time. So I don't touch that piece of it with a nine foot pole. I would rather just say listen, I have other coaching options for you, here's who might be good for you and I in. Just like these coaches are building up their businesses as well. We've got we kind of have that pipeline as well.
Speaker 1:We do have the added wrinkle that I think is a little bit of a of a difference here to where, when we bring on our independent contract coaches, we insist that they be able to handle a minimum of 10 to 12 athletes. And the reason for that is kind of twofold. This is one we don't want hundreds of independent contractors out there that are all managing three or four athletes. It's kind of unsustainable from a management perspective. It's just too many people to to to manage. But the second thing is and this is something I kind of instituted with when I was coaching director is that there's a certain frequency that a coach needs in order to become proficient where they're coaching at a certain rate every week or with a kind of a certain volume every week, to which I'm more comfortable with their end product, and if they're spending 25 to 30, at least 25 to 33% of their total work time within coaching, I think that that commands enough of their attention to focus on it.
Speaker 1:I would like it to be more, and certainly our full-time coaches. They develop at a faster rate than our half-time coaches. I mean I, whenever I look at a coach's experience, I combine the number of years that they've been coaching with the, the percentage of time that they've been coaching for, and that tells me their total, their total coaching experience, not just their total amount of years coaching. So I would like that number. In an ideal world Everybody's a full-time employee, everybody coaches 35 athletes. I think that creates a really good product and a really good system. But just the business conditions that that exists today just makes it pragmatically not very. It's just not very practical to to, to, to kind of implement. So on the pricing side, I'll start from a global side as well.
Speaker 1:All of this is publicly available. You guys can, you know, go and find it. But we have three fundamental like levels of coaching packages that are delineated by the coach. So the coach is delineated by their experience and their the basically their tenure and the results that they've achieved. So you can imagine me 25 years experience.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of at the top end of that spectrum.
Speaker 1:Somebody that we hired six months ago is going to be one of what we call our select level of coaching, but so those three levels are between 207 and 225 a month for the what we call select level coaching. For premium level coaching is about 390 a month and then the ultimate level coaching, which is where I'm at, is between $600 and $700 a month depending upon the kind of the length of the contract. So all that kind of like some totals is, we've got kind of all these different options for athletes to kind of come into the system based on kind of who they want as a coach, how much experience that coach actually has. But fundamentally, even with me, I still spend one hour per athlete per week coaching athletes and I've done that for my entire almost my entire coaching career, even though I've built different models and things like that which are outside the scope of this conversation. But that time commitment is not really any different between me and somebody who coaches at one of those other levels. It's kind of the experience that delineates the price points essentially.
Speaker 2:How about other services that you might offer? Camps consulting, jeff, you mentioned group, this lower price group one. You already mentioned that. Have you doubled in any other service offerings and stuck with any of them?
Speaker 4:I have personally. Well, I've messed around with some like kind of like leveraging a technology that delivers a video to a text message once a week for like a weekly tip. But it was like the return on investment wasn't that great after two years and it was one of those. When I analyzed it I was like you know what, I'm phasing this out, so I phased that out. That was in the early, first, probably four years of doing it. You know me being an entrepreneur I was thinking of trying to think outside the box of like new cool ways to like leverage technology. It didn't pan out quite the way I envisioned it, so I let that one go. It was just like a weekly tips thing. I've played around like I'm currently been doing some motivational speaking just for me.
Speaker 4:Personally, I do consulting calls so you can sign up for one time consulting calls on my website. I have, you know, I have canned plans on training peaks, right, just one time plans for sale. So that's a piece of revenue that comes in every month, and then let's see what else. I had a list here. I wanted to make sure.
Speaker 2:I had there are no camps.
Speaker 4:I have done camps in the past with like Chrissy Mail and that was through Colorado Running Ranch but that kind of fell apart after COVID. I've talked about doing camps again but you know it's part of its bandwidth of organization.
Speaker 1:It's a hard business model. It's a really hard business model.
Speaker 4:It is really hard to make money on the camps, you know, because there's a lot of expenses in camps. So you really the profit margin is like tiny and you have to nail it, or you don't make any money or you even end up spending money, right? So I mean I have tons of athletes who would love me to do camps again. Because I had multiple, we did like three years of a camp every year in Colorado, which I loved it, and Chrissy Mail and I used to do one in Mount Hood when I lived in Oregon and they were great and lots of good feedback from them. But they just aren't that profitable. In both those scenarios we were just paid as independent contractors to come in and coach. So for us it was great because we just kind of slide in and hang out and get paid and then the person organizing it was dealing with all the logistics. But as I've looked into it on my own personal and I start running numbers in a spreadsheet, I'm like this doesn't pencil out very well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, trust me, man, I did that for years. It's a hard business model.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a hard business model. So I've been doing motivational speaking, I've been doing. I'm also doing like just a really simple like OFM coaching, so like optimized fat metabolism kind of eight week course that people can sign up for like one time course. I also have one of my athletes who's a PT and she does a bunch of movement stuff and kin stretch certified and movement certified and so she's doing a movement assessment coaching like a remote thing through video for people to sign up for if they're, especially if we get some.
Speaker 4:We are median age for our coaching roster is 45 years old, so, and so that's a good one to look at Like what's your core demographic? And so a lot of times we have people that are running ultras and they're in the middle, the back of the packers, and they just want to just be, they just want longevity and they want to keep running and they don't want to hurt, and so we're helping them with nutrition, we're helping them with movement and like diagnosing a long time imbalance that they've been dealing with. One of the reasons that I was super stoked to have Trish come on as a PT because she's a built-in PT in our business from a consultant perspective. We leverage that knowledge a lot, especially if we have a hard case where it's like chronic, something just keeps popping up and you're like it's like four weeks of training and then six weeks off and four weeks of training and you're like, ah, you know, and that's the.
Speaker 4:That is the challenge of remote coaching, right? Because you're not, you can't go physically to that person they might be in. Like I have someone in Poland Like I can't just physically go to Poland and watch them run right and so and hang out with them. So, like those kinds of things, we've got to leverage other subcontractors in our sphere of people we know to like, try to get them to get an assessment, and then that means they have to fork out more money for someone else's service and we have to. You know they have to see the benefit in it. So there's a lot of like, but that usually they trust us by that time and we're trying to get them through that hard time of like. Whether it's an injury or some kind, usually it's some kind of weird imbalance you know that they've had for years but it just has never been diagnosed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Heather, have you done any other service offerings?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we do write one time training plans on demand, occasionally it depends on the situation. I won't take that on with every person who requests it. You know definitely have to meet certain parameters, but we do offer that occasional consulting. But I will say that for me personally, outside of our coaching business and the numbers mentioned, I would say about half of our household income does come from my writing, whether it's, you know, ad revenue on my website or just freelance writing for other publications, and that again is all within the same sphere of talking about ultra running, running things like that. So that is definitely a big part of what we do. Just again, not in the same business structure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Jason, you wrote the book, so that's an additional kind of service, if you will. Revenue stream was your experience and the lessons learned from that.
Speaker 1:The book is great. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, it was kind of the it's almost the origin story of how we got a footprint into ultra running. Is we kind of simultaneously started working with some elite athletes and produced a book, and that provided this initial platform to kind of build up a kind of a silo of the business on it. Because before and I've told the story many times, including on your podcast, dirk I tried to get, I tried to offer up coaching to ultra runners in the early 2000s and mid 2000s and it was a resounding no. I got laughed at a lot of different meetings with a lot of different companies and a lot of different elite athletes many, many, many times over and I didn't think that there was a marketplace for it and somehow that changed and I think a combination of the book and some of the elite athlete success kind of coming together at the same time was a big part of that. So that's a big part of it. I also produce educational materials through USCA. We've mentioned that a few times. So both their certification and then conferences and things like that, those have been both ridiculously well received in the market and something that I wholly underappreciated the need for when I first started doing it I did not think that there was a big marketplace for it. But every single month when Rick and I kind of go over the numbers, I'm floored at how much interest we continue to receive in those products I then have. I also have a new product in the marketplace. It's currently a loss leader for me right now, so I'm not generating profit on it, it's generating a loss. And that's the research essentials for ultra running product. I'm super bullish on it and I'm gonna continue to run that frickin' thing into the ground and invest in it because I just really like the product. I think it's very high quality and in a sphere and a time where so much content is just garbage and watered down and misinterpreted and kind of lay publications, I think this can kind of stand on its own two legs. But it's gonna need that cake's gonna need a few more months to actually get baked. So that's another service offering that I do.
Speaker 1:And then I also do some, I would say, more like kind of like bigger consulting projects or bigger service and support projects. So like when I supported Timothy Olson on the Pacific Crest Trail, that was 50 days of my time that I was out there in disposed traveling around in obscure places in California, oregon, washington. That was a paid for support activity and I've done that in a couple of different flavors over the course of my career. I will take those on as special kind of consulting projects, but they kind of have to. I'm kind of at the point where they have to meet a minimum threshold. So I don't really get into like the hourly consulting or anything like that. I think that there's room for that in the marketplace, absolutely from a business perspective, but it's not something that I really get involved in.
Speaker 1:Similar to Jeff, I've had a lot of experiences in camps. You know we had a $2 million a year camp product that I managed for years and it is a really hard business model. It's a fantastic business because you get like physical touch points with the athletes. You get to bring in your athletes and create better connections with them as well as use it as a recruiting model. So there's pin action outside of the penciled in spreadsheet that Jeff was trying to wrestle with earlier that you need to take into consideration with those businesses. I did that pre COVID, both with CTS and then underneath my own umbrella, and COVID kind of wiped those out and I honestly haven't had the interest to bring it back up. Cts is bringing back up the ultra running camps as of 2024 and kind of a limited capacity. I don't do anything outside of that, so static programs I don't touch with a nine foot pole.
Speaker 1:I realize that, dirk, you've tried to convince me and CTS to do that for years and we've always kind of shied away from it. I don't. Once again, I think that there's a place in the marketplace for it. I just don't want to serve that place. That's the way that I've put it. I realize that there's value in it for certain people. I just don't want to play ball in that ecosystem.
Speaker 1:I'd be remiss to mention and this might dovetail into your next topic, dirk that I've made a lot of mistakes and part of my role as vice president of operations, as in director of coaching, is to try to come up with different coaching products.
Speaker 1:Just like Jeff mentioned right, we're trying to be entrepreneurial and come up with different coaching products and things like that.
Speaker 1:And I'm not gonna go every single through every single one of those and their different failure points, save for the common thread that has woven between all of those, and that is whenever I have tried to extract more leverage out of our coaching staff.
Speaker 1:So what I mean by that is more athletes that they can handle, either through technology or skimping out on the services, limiting the calls or limiting the turnaround frequency or limiting the communication or starting out with stock programs right, and a way to make the build process more efficient. Whenever I have tried to do that and have had one coach have 100 athletes, 200 athletes, 300 athletes, of which I have personally done, I've had 300 athletes underneath my umbrella at one point, underneath a completely different service delivery model. Those models have always failed and there's a reason that we resort to $200 price points and $300 price points and $500 price points. Where we have right now, it's because I've made I personally and from a business perspective, have made those mistakes, of which there are many, but the common theme is trying to get too much leverage out of a service delivery model.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And that's where the hour per athlete per week it really just it holds up, that's.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's where I you can't get around it.
Speaker 2:No, you can't.
Speaker 4:And that's what I've come to too. You know, in my own organic path the same exact one. You know, even with all the years of production and technology background and all this stuff I can leverage it's still really an hour per athlete per week and you can't get. You can't really get, not if you're gonna provide good custom service to that athlete. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Like I said, I know that there are permutations of that of like group coaching and all these other things that you can deploy, but if you're using a one-to-one service delivery model, there's kind of no other way around it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like you can fake it with copy and paste programming and once again I've done that like literally copied and pasted from Word documents and spreadsheets and things like that to come up with coaching.
Speaker 1:This was 20 years ago, so it's not anything that's all that recent, and I've also helped software engineers build technology that would somehow improve that service delivery, right? So in some form or fashion, either you're helping the build process or you're helping the onboarding process, or you're helping the analysis process, or you're helping the feedback loop or something you know any of those touch points that take human time. I've tried to work with software engineers to smooth it out, and you can only do it to a certain degree. I'm not saying that you can't use technology to be more efficient. You can, yeah, but there's a cap on that leverage, yeah, and I just found that cap within the service delivery that I use to be about one hour per athlete per week. I'm not. I'm still kind of holding out, though, if I'm being honest, like I still think that there might be some AI or machine learning type of technology that might change the landscape, but that's another conversation.
Speaker 4:That's a whole another podcast, dude.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get down to that later.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, you guys are all pioneers in this space, you know. I mean Jason said no one wanted coaching back in the early 2000s and that wasn't that long ago you know?
Speaker 2:No, you know, my father owned a running store in the 80s and I was a 10 year old doing the stocking in the back of the running store and you know he gravitated towards coaching triathletes because they were the ones that would plot their wallets and pay right. We sort of built the business starting out around triathlon and training peaks and then cycling are now equal. You know cycling triathlon, in terms of our overall business revenue, is more equal. Running is definitely a distant third, but yet the fastest growing and primarily because of ultra running. You know, not marathoning. I still feel like marathon running folks are still about the Timex watch. They're at the track. They know a 400 meter track. They know their pace. You know ultra running. You get into GPS. You know VAM. You know how many feet did I run today vertically. It's not a simple pace mathematical model. You know you can back into Train is way different.
Speaker 4:It muddies the algorithm.
Speaker 2:Temperature, eat cold, transitions and nutrition and everything else right. So, yeah, I really want to, like you know, you guys are definitely pioneers. This is the beginning, if you will, of this kind of career path within this sport. Jason said some of his mistakes. Been doing this for two hours. Maybe we'll start to think about wrapping it up, any kind of opening up in terms of how you know what are some big mistakes you've made along the way. Jeff.
Speaker 4:Big mistakes At first. I think just at first, like kind of putting everyone in kind of their own, like in kind of a general umbrella of like hey, I could just kind of write this plan with these kind of key days each week. But what you realize is that you know like my onboarding questionnaire has gotten way bigger. You know, with just like history and sports history and running history and like injury history and all those other things, that I think in the early days I didn't appreciate that individual background or history of the athlete as much as I do now. I still kind of dabbled in it and asked some questions, but I probe way deeper now than I used to. So I think that's probably the biggest mistake I made in the early days. And then also understanding you know their age and what their goals are.
Speaker 4:Too right Like is your? You know how competitive are you? Right Like I have everything from front of the pack to the very back of the pack. You know so as far as coaching, and so I have competitive athletes and I have non-competitive athletes and they don't care about competing, they just care about, like, beating the cutoffs. You know they might be 61 years old and trying to beat a cutoff and they just don't want to get timed out. So you know, or whether it's, you know, fixing a stomach or something like that, there's so many puzzle pieces in ultra running and I think you have to have a very broad base knowledge for our sport of a lot of stuff, not just like, oh, training, you know it has to be nutrition and it has to be hydration and electrolyte balance and, like you know, and they're, you know, all the other like background of, like you know, injury risk, so what each athlete individually can handle when you're coaching, and so that's probably my biggest mistake was generalizing that at the beginning more than I do now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and making assumptions around what you think their definition of success should be. But like actually asking them, like yeah exactly Probing Like oh yeah, what do you really want from me, you know? Oh, that's what you want. Oh, I thought you wanted this. You know? Right, heather, mistakes along the way, business or coaching.
Speaker 3:I've got three big ones I'll tell you about. So first of all is gonna be just if you don't come from a business background like me, I would have gone back and hired somebody like a business coach. I mean our approach was throwing spaghetti at the wall. See what sticks $45 a month. I mean we were winging it. So that was a huge mistake and again, I'm not joking when I say we're still fixing things, but we made mistakes all those years ago. Next big mistake was initially trying to be everything to everyone. Like any potential client that would come to us. I so desperately wanted them to work with us that I would make you know these great promises.
Speaker 3:I think we've done a great job as a community, as a coaching community, in getting coaches to understand scope of practice, with maintaining your scope of practice. But what we don't talk about as much as scope of knowledge, you know, just because you're qualified to maybe help somebody with a specific goal doesn't necessarily mean you're the best person for it, and by taking on that client you might be selling them short and selling yourself short. You know, like an example, what we'll go back to when Jason was talking about the three things he looks for when hiring new coaches is that personal experience. Something that was very important to us when we're bringing on new coaches is that they have done these big distances. We mainly, you know, get a lot of people who want to run their first 100-miler and while we know coaches could adequately help somebody get to a finish line of 100-miler, if they've never done it themselves, that doesn't always equate to a good client experience, because, you know, a client can be like well, what do I do at 3 am when I'm exhausted and I'm crying and I want to quit?
Speaker 3:And, you know, if the coach is like, I don't know, I've never been there, we're not providing such a great experience. And I did that myself with. You know. I'm trying to think of some examples early on, like trying to help people who wanted to qualify for a Boston Marathon and, you know, run 100-miler and do all of these things at one time when what I should have told them was, no, we're not gonna do that, or if you really want to do it, you can go to somebody else. So, anyway, that's my second one, and what was my third one? Oh, it's oh gosh, here we go.
Speaker 4:This is what happens when I talk to you Well, I'll come in, I'll fill in the space while you're standing. Yeah, please move, please move. I think number two is a really good one learning to tell your athlete no Cause we want I mean sometimes we're not hiring someone you know if they're not the right fit, right yeah.
Speaker 2:Or you don't hire someone. You're not the right fit.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, that's been one. So now I interview. So sometimes, and I'm very honest up front. If someone's interviewing me as a coach, I'm honest in my philosophy and if it doesn't really line up, I'm very honest with them. And I've had people go yeah, yeah, I don't think it's a good fit and I'm fine with that. I'm totally fine with that. I'd rather work with someone I'm really gonna click with on their philosophy and their whole life philosophy even. And then, you know, just learning to tell.
Speaker 4:Sometimes as a coach, we can fall into the and I'm gonna call it a trap. We fall into the trap of being a yes person and because you don't want to disappoint the person. But in Ultra running we have Taipei addictive personalities and sometimes they want to shine a sign up for an Ultra every three, four weeks, and sometimes you just gotta be like you know what? That 50K, two weeks out from your 100, is not a good idea, right, yeah? And so just learning to explain to them why let them down easy but say you know what? That is not a good idea. Now, if they still sign up for it, there's nothing you can do about it. They are an adult and they can make their own decisions. But as a coach, you need to be honest with them and learn to be brutally honest at times, but in a soft, caring way, right?
Speaker 3:right, okay, I remembered the third one.
Speaker 1:It's a big one.
Speaker 3:Awesome. Work-life balance and boundaries Huge. That was a big mistake I made in the beginning. You know, we see it all the time. People are like I love to run, I wanna quit my job so I can run all the time. I'll be a coach. We work seven days a week sometimes. You know we're working ridiculous hours sometimes because it's our business. So we've really had to learn how to set those.
Speaker 3:You know, work-life boundaries but also work-life balance, but also setting boundaries with clients. Going back to what you were just saying, jeff, you wanna be a yes man, you wanna be a people pleaser. Sometimes, and that can go too far You've got clients texting you at all hours and asking questions that are not that important or for that moment, like nobody needs to know at 2 am about what pace they should be running three Saturdays from now, things like that. I've had issues where clients would hop on a Zoom call with me and we'd start talking about coaching and then they'd go off on a tangent about their personal life and just you know it gets a little tricky there. And so learning to really set those boundaries both for yourself as a business person and yourself as a coach Huge mistake. Took me years to learn, but it's great when you get there.
Speaker 4:And from a personal standpoint, those boundaries are important, especially if you have a wife and kids.
Speaker 4:You know there's been times, you know, cause, as you guys know, it never shuts off as a coach, like especially on the weekends, because that's when everyone's training and they're like they're not on their work clock, so there's like, oh, it's a weekend and they're thinking about ultra running, it's their hobby. So they're like, ah, texting their coach. And there's times when I'm like I have to sometimes either turn my phone on airplane mode when I go to dinner or leave it in the car, like I've, you know, and I don't always do that. Sometimes I'm really bad at it and I'll get caught up in like, oh, I'm working, you know I'm over here, like, and while my whole family's having a conversation and I'm in my own little coaching world, which and I shouldn't be that's very inappropriate behavior at that moment. Right? So, learning those boundaries as a coach too, to be like, if you do have a family or significant other that you probably shouldn't be coaching when you're at dinner with them, you know, learn to shut it off.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. It's tough when you're a business owner or you're 24, seven, you know, and learning to you know when to turn it off definitely is the hard decision. Jason, anything we left out or anything you wanna hit upon here.
Speaker 1:If we have the time I do. I know this podcast is running a little bit long, but I do wanna get into some future trends. Maybe we can wrap that up really quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna expand upon what Heather and Jeff just went over, other than to say you know, one of the other constant mistakes that I've made has been especially in ultra running has had to do with underestimating the marketplace when it's an exponentially growing market. And I have this very unique experience to where I was managing products in the cycling market, the triathlon market and the ultra running market and they were all doing different things from a growth perspective, dirk is you're very aware of. The cycling market has been kind of crap over the past eight or 10 years or something like that, and on the flip side, the ultra running market has been growing exponentially. And whenever I've applied the same mindset across business development in those two areas, I've constantly kind of gotten it wrong and I've constantly underestimated the marketplace.
Speaker 1:From a running perspective. I should have come out with a book two years before I did it. It took, you know, my good friend Jim Ruppberg, two years, two years to gajole me into writing that because I didn't think that the market would be receptive to it. Same thing with the USCA certification. It took Rick and a number of months to gajole me into like, creating that product because I didn't think that there was a marketplace for it.
Speaker 4:It's such a needed product, dude, I'm glad you did.
Speaker 1:I know, I know, but I will take it I promise, I promise.
Speaker 1:No, it's good, it's good. I'd like to get your feedback from it too, because I'm working on version 2.0. But I guess my point is is it's a growing marketplace and when you're in a growing marketplace you don't underestimate the market, the market forces as a whole. When you're growing that quickly, kind of take care of a lot of the flaws and the things that you don't think will work and stuff like that, because you have this tailwind that you can take advantage of to put things out in the marketplace that you can't do when a market's declining or flat. I wouldn't take that approach within other marketplaces because you don't have those same tailwinds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's about taking some risk. You know, on the upside, when you can, potentially. Yeah, how about some future trends or thoughts of where we might, where might we be in 10 years from now? I know that seems really far out, five years, you know, like, can we even think that far out? But like in terms of wherever you wanna go with it, you know coaching within.
Speaker 4:I hope spreadsheets go away. You're here.
Speaker 2:That's my business model. That's my business model.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have noticed such a great trend in coaches stepping up their game with education. It's no longer like, well, this is what's always worked for me, or this is what people have been doing for years. You know that's no longer the case, and so the coaches who are not keeping up with the science and keeping up with you know, current literature, they're gonna fall behind, and that's a great thing, in my opinion. I think we should all be staying on top of that. Yeah, so that's certainly one big trend, in my opinion.
Speaker 2:Well, that's kind of the downside to a down economy is you get rid of, like you know, folks that aren't prepared or well-prepared and to maintain their business through the down times. That's the true kind of like definition of success. If you will, you gotta see some down times come out of that stronger right, so absolutely.
Speaker 1:That is gonna happen in ultra running. Once everything cools off, you're gonna see a lot of people, not just coaches, but other components of the marketplace as well, whether it's race management or equipment, or whatever you're looking at, you're gonna see a lot of those components that are taking advantage of favorable tailwinds. They're gonna struggle and or go out of business. Unfortunately so, but that's just what happens when you go from an expanding marketplace to a flat marketplace, is a lot of those companies just end up going out of business Right.
Speaker 2:Every market as it matures will go through ups and downs. If it's gonna last at all, right.
Speaker 4:I'll jump in real quick on my trends. I think AI is gonna be a trend we're gonna see and it'll be more of the budget coaching option for people. It's not gonna replace our business, you know, because it's all about relationships and social and custom and hearing and caring and really speaking into someone's life and then it's half psychology and psychiatry to sometimes you know, a coaching business and being a coach and so I think you're not gonna be able to replace that with AI. But I think AI will give people who want some level of coaching or plan a option for a budget. I think we're gonna see that trend in the next five years big time.
Speaker 2:But naturally, when you start in any new endeavor, you're not gonna say, oh, I need to spend $500 a month on my new endeavor. It's like, no, I'm gonna dabble in this.
Speaker 4:Like 10 bucks a month, or 30 bucks a month, you know, or 45 bucks a month. Yeah, I'll try to zap for 30.
Speaker 2:45.
Speaker 4:You wanna get?
Speaker 2:you a year, 18 months into it and you didn't really hit your goal or your plateaued and you know like, oh, to get to the next level, like I really need. You know there's nothing like a human experience coach. So, absolutely, ai will help that kind of entry level. If you will, ai will help the coach as well. You know it's gonna help the coach make faster, better decisions in the moment for a better quality service. Jason thoughts.
Speaker 1:I'll wrap it up here. I've got two that I'm actually working on, so once again I promise.
Speaker 3:I promise full trades.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know I promise full trades. It's gonna be quicker than 10 years. I hope for that. I promise full transparency. So you know I'm gonna deliver on that one.
Speaker 1:The first one is ping it off of Jeff is I am working on AI coaching product. I don't know, like, how it's gonna get shaped quite yet. You know it's very early stages, but it's something that then I'm gonna invest time and resources in to kind of make happen, because I do wholehearted believe that that's a transformational technology that will serve some part of the marketplace and I wanna be there when it happens and be a big part of that. The second thing is something that I kind of wanna turn on its head. You know I currently work with a number of elite trail and ultra runners and my setup with them is quite simple I will coach you for free and I don't expect anything in return. I'm very, very clear about that. Whenever I work with athletes, this is something that I take on. I spend out of the 40 athletes that I coach maybe it comprises, you know, 10 or 12 athletes worth of free coaching that I deliver every single month. That I could very easily fill with a paid coaching spot, but I just like doing it. I think it's good for you know, marketing and good for the entire ecosystem. But I do think that we're getting to a point within the elite and the professional athletes that they're gonna have to start paying for coaching and the thing that I'm working on and this is not tomorrow so for anybody who's like freaking out about their athlete sponsorship contracts, we're about to get into that season right now and just starting to think about this. I don't think it happens tomorrow, but I do think it happens within the next few years, where the elite athletes can kind of command enough from their sponsorship obligations and that the ecosystem is kind of robust enough to where the coaches can start to they can kind of charge what they're worth for it. So in my case it would go from something or from nothing to something. But I'm gonna take a new twist on it as I'm trying to work on a high performance coaching model specifically within the sport of trail and ultra running.
Speaker 1:I've talked about this in my podcast before. Solomon's got this set up with their athletes, but in essence it wraps all of the services that an athlete, and especially an elite athlete, might need into one cohesive system. So right now it's up to the athletes to say I need a coach and I need a physical therapist, and maybe I need a nutritionist and maybe I need a sports psychologist and there's no coordination or very little coordination amongst all those individuals unless the athlete kind of forces it. And I'm in this situation right now with a lot of the elite athletes that I work with, where they have all of these different service providers and trying to you know, trying to herd all of those cats, which I try to do as a head coach is very problematic.
Speaker 1:But when you can do it right underneath a high performance coaching model, where it's kind of systematized and the athlete has access to all of these different things orthopedics, sports psychology, nutrition, physical therapy and coaching is just one of them and that team can act cohesively in the best interest of the athletes, I think that that puts those elite athletes at a tremendous advantage as compared to people who don't have that type of service lined up for them. So that's the second piece that I think is like a future part of coaching, and it's all a byproduct of the development of the elite athlete ecosystem right now, where everything's kind of coming together, where the competitive nature of the races are becoming tighter and tighter every year. The contracts are coming around so that they're just more high value and the athletes have to, kind of like, reinvest in themselves. So I'm looking forward to trying to figure that piece out over the course of the next several months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's exciting to kind of see the fruition of the sport, if you will, growth and get to that next stage of growth right. So it's really exciting to see where that might end up and hopefully we do see that actually happen. Wow, that was great, that was in depth.
Speaker 2:We made it to the end of this and if you still want more, you can go to my podcast, the Training Peaks Coachcast. I stole this from Jason. I did it first. I got it out live, Did it with the triathlon cycling coach and yeah, so you see different perspective from three other coaches. You can go to that coachcast. So thanks, guys, great to work with you. It was awesome. I'm sure we helped a lot of folks out a lot of new businesses out there, so let's lift the tide for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you. Thanks, Derek, thank you and thanks to you, heather. Yeah, thanks to you, heather and Jeff. A lot, as I've expressed in email beforehand. I know it's not the most comfortable thing to pop the hood up and, as the many knows that I got would kind of indicate a lot of other people are kind of feeling that. So I'm very appreciative of you guys being transparent in this, because I do think it's good for everybody.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thanks, guys oh thank you.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks, and I am incredibly grateful for Dirk Viel for coming on the podcast to serve as host today for Jeff Browning and Heather Hart for being so open, honest and transparent about how your businesses work. I realize that at times some of this stuff is uncomfortable to talk about, but hopefully by bringing it out all out in the open, we can all become better coaches, better business owners, better sole proprietors, whatever you're kind of like.
Speaker 1:A lot in life is if you are a coach or an athlete and you found this information interesting and you think that one of your training partners or friends would find this information interesting, or if they just happen to have a long run and need to fill their ears with something, hit the share button on your podcast player of choice. Share this with your training partners and anybody that you might find it interesting. That is the only way that we get this word out. As you guys all know, this podcast is not monetized in any way, shape or form with advertisers. The only way that it gets monetized is just the sheer proliferation of all of the information out there. So I'm very much appreciative of you. The audience wanna hear this type of feedback and when you guys share it with your training partners and your running buddies.
Speaker 1:I have links in the show notes to both Heather's coaching website as well as Jeff's coaching website, as well as the rest of the links that I always include in the show notes. You'll go and check that out if you are ever curious about either one of those two individuals. That is it for today, folks, and as always, we will see you out on the trails.
Speaker 3:We'll see you guys next time.