365 Days of Sonic Endurance

As we make our way from December to January, Sonic Endurance is celebrating its first birthday (or is it anniversary, I'm a little unsure on this one).  To me Sonic Endurance is more than a company, its doing what I love.



Back in 2006, I founded and race directed my very first race -- the Solstice Sprint 5K.  The next year I added the Greater Hartford 1/4 Marathon.  In addition to race directing, I also started to get serious about running and triathlon, which led me to mentor several other athletes.  That mentoring relationship turned into a coaching relationship and in February of 2012, I was certified by USAT as a triathlon coach.  In 2012, I also took over race directing the Hogsback Half Marathon. 

By the end of last year I had my hands full, in addition to being a lawyer, I was a race director and a coach and I wanted to be really good at all of these things.  As with most things I do, I had a very specific vision about who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do as a coach and race director, but I also knew I could not do it all by myself.  That's where Stacey, Scott, Shaun and Sonic Endurance came into play (yes, they are all Ss and I am the only non-S in the bunch).



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Late last year Stacey, who was running several group training programs out of the North Wales Fleet Feet and coaching a few runners, and I began talking about working together.  At the same I time I brought Scott into the conversation because I knew he wanted to begin coaching.  Finally we added Shaun as none of us had solid technical experience and we needed someone to be our Chief Information/Technical Officer.  In late 2012, the four of us joined together as members of a LLC and we officially launched on January 1, 2013.  Over the first year we have grown to about 20 one-on-one coached athletes and many more "friends of Sonic Endurance."

While we have grown immensely (our receivables have steadily increased every month of the year), our profits for 2013 are zero (we'll actually end the year in a negative position).  This is not a bad thing but shows how much of an investment starting a business really is.  For a triathlon coaching and race directing business lots of the initial costs involve marketing, including design work, gear and clothing, training and certifications, business documents such as LLC incorporation and D/B/A filings, technology such as domain names, hosting sites and on-line training accounts e.g. Training Peaks, sponsorships of local triathlon clubs and races and equipment such as Go Pro cameras.   As a group we consider all of this to be an investment in our business, not wasted funds.  Our financial projections for 2014 look solid, so we should get to point of being able to "pay" ourselves, which is really exciting. 

 
I've learned a lot from Sonic Endurance over the past year.  First and foremost I've learned that running a business is hard work and takes lots of time and effort outside of the actual coaching and race directing.  Lots of time needs to be spent marketing (I am a huge fan of social media marketing and feel that there are lots of interesting, helpful and fun things that can be done to promote a business and engage athletes via social media) plus there is time on administrative tasks (Stacey keeps the books, which is HUGE because I'm useless at that kind of thing). 

There's also a lot of thought put into "brand."  I care immensely about my athletes and races and I know its a privilege to be part of their lives.  In 2013 I had five athletes complete their first 140.6 distance race, several more complete their first 70.3 race, I had an athlete complete his debut 70.3 in 5:18 and another athlete PR at the 140.6 distance by almost two hours.  These are all HUGE accomplishments and I am honored to be part of these incredible athlete's lives.  I want the fact that we care about our athletes both as athletes and people and that we understand how lucky we are to be working with them to come out in how people view Sonic Endurance.  As much as we are a business we are also a team and Sonic the team always comes before Sonic the business. 

While I am very proud of the year we had in 2013, there are things I want to get better at in 2014.  First and foremost I want to continue focusing on building Sonic as a team and I want to be able to offer our athletes a fantastic team experience (training and racing is hard enough so its really nice to have support teammates to help you along the way).  I also want to further professionalize what I do as a coach.  There is no real standard for claiming that you are a coach, in reality anyone can adopt the moniker.  I want to keep pushing myself to learn more and apply that to my athletes.  Coaching is both an art and science and I have room to grow in both aspects -- first step to reaching this goal in 2014 will getting certified as both a RRCA race director and RRCA run coach.  Finally I want to keep helping Scott and Stacey grow as coaching.  Both Scott and Stacey are fantastic people who incredibly dedicated and smart.  If all three of us are running at full capacity by thte end of 2014, we may be in the enviable position of being able to hire additoinal help in 2015.  Regardless, 2014 is going to be a great year for Sonic Endurance and I can't wait for it to get started.