Starting from nothing
Early in 2014 I had the privilege of evaluating an athlete that lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. At this time I lived in Indianapolis, Indiana and worked for a health system’s sports performance company. Little did I know that this evaluation was about to be a life changing opportunity. At the end of the evaluation the dad and athlete mentioned how excited they were start training with us even if it was on a remote/long distance basis because of the innovative training methods we were utilizing.
I had spent the previous two years researching and trying to find a formula that would allow us to use an athletic evaluation to individualize and pinpoint an athlete’s needs for training. I literally spent every hour of my free time at work and home reading research article after research article and developing an evaluation model based on what I was learning.
As many business owners know: when you find a problem people are having and solve it, you have a great business idea to form a plan around and start a company. Little did I know that by creating this robust evaluation process I was solving a program that consumers were wanting solved.
Flipping back to that fateful Saturday in Indianapolis where I was evaluating and creating a program for an out-of-town client from Cincinnati: The dad looked at me and said “we have trained everywhere in Cincinnati and no one has ever done anything like what you just did.” I then proceeded to ask “really, where have you trained?" thinking he wouldn’t list any of the places I considered the industry leaders in the Cincinnati area. But, sure enough, he listed all of them! We concluded our meeting and I remember making a mental note of what he had said. I was on to something – no one was creating custom programs for athletes using data gathered from a robust evaluation tailored to the individual athlete and based on their sport.
I put this encounter “on the back burner” for a few months. Then I had the call that started it all… I had a call with one of my mentors who asked me straight up what I wanted my life’s work to be. After about 30 minutes it came out that while my wife and I had everything we could want (a house, cars, jobs that had benefits, etc), none of that was actually what I wanted professionally. I wanted to train baseball players and be known for my work in strength and conditioning. While I loved my job and the people I worked with, it became clear that it was not going to allow me to do what I wanted.
During this call I also remembered what my encounter with the father and son from Cincinnati and from that moment on I had my business idea! Start a training company that would evaluate ALL of its clients with sport-specific evaluations and then train them individually with custom-tailored programs in a group setting. And, I wanted to do it in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I was born and raised and where I knew the need existed for this type of program.
But wait, we have a problem: I had no money (plenty of student loan debt) and I had been away from Cincinnati for so long I really didn’t have any connections. I also had no company name, nowhere to train, and all the reasons in the world not to start a business even though my idea was solid.
To be continued…..