Today in the emergency room podcast episode number 35, what happens when your race falls apart? I mean, when the park manager, your support staff, even nature all tell you no. And you're trying to do that new thing. Your race course has been the same day in and day out every year. And now you wanna do something new. Only everybody says no. It's not going to happen. Do you make compromises to your plan? Remember, your plan only survives until you get your first permit, then it only survives until the morning of your race. And then it only survives until the 1st start. And then only after the last eraser goes home. So let's talk about what plans really are. And what they are is guesses.
You have to make a lot of guesses about the things you have. No control over. How do you make those guesses without being wrong all the time? Well, experience is 1 way, but without any experience, making a guess is really hard. So today, I'm gonna teach you another way. And has everything to do with surviving, what I call, the 4 horsemen of the race plan apocalypse. And I looked and behold, the action horse for he who sat upon it was named cancellation and bad weather followed behind him.
It's gonna be spooky. Thank you for joining me for the Burgess of our podcast. I am Kyle Bondo, your recreational engineer here, your merchant of dirt, and your coach to help you learn and build a race from start to finish. That's my goal. My goal is to teach you all the art and science behind race production, race promotion, race direction.
And the idea is really simple. It's so that you can earn money building better races. Does that sound great? And if you're new to the mergers or dirt podcast,
welcome aboard. Alongside me, of course, is my cohost, Mister Murphy. And if you're not familiar with Mister Murphy, you know, he's like, oh, we We like to punch around all the time because if you can figure out how to defeat him, your race will be so much better. But he's the master of calamity, and he's always there to wreck your race. So Mercer Podcast is designed to defeat Mister Murphy. And we keep him here because we like to hear we had to say.
Every time Mister Murphy talks, we go, oh, I should probably plan to avoid that. So that's why we talk about Mister Murphy. He's that mythical creature out there. Who's always there to recur race whenever possible, the worst possible time, the worst possible moment. And today, he's really, really excited. Which is always a bad thing for us. And he's really excited about this episode because I'm about to introduce you to 4 of Mister Furr Murphy's best friends.
If you heard the intro, his best friends, of course, are the 4 horsemen of the Race pad Landing apocalypse. Right? So who are they? Well, we have horsemen number 1 on the white horse. This is the guy who's who's races are always planned on the same day you wanna have a race. And, of course, that horsemen is called competition. We don't like them.
The second 1 on the red horse is that that permit to use the trails, you know, that permit that allows you to use some trails and the others. Yeah. That's permission. No. Permission. Next is the black horse. The black horse. These are the the people you want to pay early, who never do. That's right. We're talking about registration, registration,
that legal force. And then like we talked about in the intro. They'll pale horse. This is nature impacting your race day, and, of course, that horseman is called cancellation. So what Mister Murphy doesn't know is that this is not an interview show. Now today, I'm gonna teach you step by step
how to Murphy proof your race. He's not paying attention. Why are we gonna do it? Okay. So hopefully, if you're ready because each 1 of these strategies that I'm gonna talk to you today, about each 1 of these horsemen is gonna save your race day. So listen up because the 4 horsemen of the race planning apocalypse are riding every single time you plan a race. So learn these strategies. If you want to survive them, repel them, and maybe even defeat them. Are you with me? Let's do this.
The first horse of race planning, if there's a horse competition. Competition is that white horse. The everyone's friendly. Everyone is part of the racing community. But realistically competition is never a good thing. And why is that? Well, they're gonna take your customers away, especially if they do that on the same day that you want to do your event. They're doing their event.
This is the combination of having to fight over what people you want and a lot of times based upon what kind of price and total service you can provide, Now, of course, monopoly is ultimately what you want. That would be the ideal business solution. Now a lot of people say, oh, monopolies, or monopolies are bad. So you don't wanna have a you don't wanna have a monopoly. Actually, you do wanna have a monopoly.
The monopoly is where you own the area, you own the market, you own the date. You want a monopoly on that date, you don't want any kind of competition. So when it comes, to the horsemen of competition. You have to protect your top dates and locations. You have to be hard to kill. And in that sense, you have to stop your competitors from being the masters of, you know, quote, stealing your best dates, your best venues, and ultimately your customers.
So to survive this horsemen, you have to do some things to prevent competition from taking away your best dates, taking away your best venues, and ultimately stealing your customers. And how you need to do that is first, you need a plan way in advance. This is the the concept of looking forward and taking that off season time period usually between October December to figure out what races you plan on having in the following year.
Now You may not know what races you wanna do, but it's better to have a permit in place or an idea about how many races you want. Going on to the future, then to come up with the idea 3 weeks before the day you want it. So this is where you go into that planning mode. Of making sure you know what dates that you want and you want to target those dates Ideally,
long before the season is ever over. I mean, you wanna have already scattered out, possible courses, scattered out the places you wanna put your events. Because the if you get your permits early, you get your nose early. You can schedule your park manager meetings early you can do a lot of things in advance.
Even before your competition has a chance to get their their schedules and their permits in, Because what happens is when you start looking at certain parks or certain certain venues and start working at certain park managers, and you get permits in in a reasonable time period. I mean, I've I've talked about this in the past where you can't be too early.
And too early is like you know, October of this year to for permits for next year. That's too early. Park management, but, like, whatever. They're gonna sit on those and maybe forget to even have them. Now you need to submit probably December, January time frame. Probably most likely January is the key time to put your your permit in. The idea is to to maybe judge how your competition is going to do this as well.
So ultimately, you may find that your competition is gonna see what you're doing and then change their plans. They may not want to fight you on a certain venue. They may change their dates based upon what you did. Because you you do not want to fight over dates and venues.
This is where that friendly competition thing comes into, but you need to stand your ground. You again be hard to kill. This horseman will take you out. And the bigger companies or the more established companies or the companies that have an event in that area all the time every year
are going to be hard to take down if you plan your event around that. So having a historical understanding on that, on who is and where and who has established what territory gives you an advantage of where to fight and where not to fight. So you wanna focus only on the parks that you need you absolutely have to have for your race. And then you need to have backups in case those change. This is how you survive the horsemen of competition.
If the company comes in that wants that date from you is 5 times the size of you, and can bring, you know, 10 x, the number of racers to that event. Chances are regardless of how good your argument is, the park manager is going to see the revenue stream from that comp that competitor far exceeds what you can bring in. And now there are laws and there are competition, exclusion things for who gets permitted and where. And your relationship with the park manager is definitely essential in this.
But you have to take reality into check. To know that a bigger company is gonna be harder to deal with. So only focus on the parks you need. Focus on backups. So when you're told no, you know where to go. And know that you're gonna have to figure out some negotiation techniques of where you wanna go and when you wanna do it. This is because a big company had a race there last week. Doesn't mean you can't erase it there this week.
And parks love to have weekends booked. They love to have venues packed. They love to have pavilions rented. They're all about being very open to moving around dates so that they can have their entire season full of things that are happening that will help generate revenue because they use that money to do maintenance, to do pay staff, to fix facilities, So they're all about having that revenue generation show up. So use that to your advantage. Think about your dates and your venues.
So that your customers are not deciding on who to go to on that day. Think about those kind of things. That is the survival technique for the horsemen of competition. And I have an article on Rechinir called strategies for picking a race dates that I'll put in the show notes. Which goes much more in the depth on this topic. But those are the survival techniques of surviving the horse in a competition. Now going off, the horseman competition, we go into the horseman of permission,
the red horse. The horseman of permission is Being actively engaged in your venue, especially if you want park approval from a venue that might not always be friendly to racing. This is the always be present. And you have to understand that park managers are very risk adverse. They are the masters of no, no new trails, no temporary trails, no using old trails that would they would like to forget that even existed there. I mean, there are sometimes
where you go, why can't I use that trail? I see it there. Every time I come out here, I ride or run on it all the time. Why can't I use an erase? And you may find that those trails technically don't exist. Because there is official trails And then there are unofficial trails. There are trails that are support access or maybe it's emergency access for in case someone gets hurt back there. Or it could be some sort of access for maybe water or even a power company, some sort of easement.
But the part necessarily doesn't have control over. Easements are a weird weird animal. So it might be the park says no because they can't say yes. A a perfect example in a an area near near me is a place called Lake Acetic. Now Lake Acetic has this amazing network of mountain bike and running trails that sit in the back. But if you ask the park, if you can use mountain biking trails, They'll tell you the mountain bike trails don't exist. They
officially don't have any mountain biking trails back there. And at first you kinda scratch your head and go, that doesn't make any sense. I mean, I I'm I'm just looking at them. I see people from the neighborhood all over them. The the mid Atlantic offer enthusiasts, the more folks who do trail maintenance that are the IMBA chapter, who do trail maintenance out there, are out there fixing them. They have names.
There's a trail called the boy they don't Boy Scout. There's a couple trails. One's called the the the Kessel Run. There's a couple different trails back there that that you know exists, and then you go and and put in a permit, and the park manager tells you, well, technically, we don't have mountain bike trails. Yes. Scratch your head. Why? Well, there's a lot of legal reasons behind that. 1 is if they acknowledge their their trails back there, then they have to maintain them.
They have to put park resources in maintaining them. That's 1 reason. Second reason, there is a a Virginia rail express and Amtrak train line that goes right along the edge of the park. Some of that property belongs to the rail company, not the park. And there's a strange easement there where trails kind of zigzag in and out of the park property and into the rail park property and back. So in order to avoid any conflicts, the rail company doesn't necessarily acknowledge they're there.
Doesn't want people on their property, of course. And the park doesn't really acknowledge it there, and they really don't permit anybody to use those areas. Because of these kind of these kind of conflicts. So these legal kind of strange places where park trails don't aren't really there, They mean you see them, but they're not there is weird. And to only the way you can understand that is to go and talk to these park officials to find out the reason behind not using that park. Now you may find
that it's not even on park property, that this particular trail goes off park park park property. And the reason they can't authorize that is because they don't have the authority to authorize that. And you won't know that unless you talk to them. So understanding these part departments first being risk averse because they don't wanna change the trail topography. Because any trail, new trails they add, they have to maintain.
So there's a certain level of of understanding that they wanna make sure that you're not just a 1 hit pony. 1 hit pony. You're not a 1 trick pony. There you go. You're not just a 1 trick they're a big 1 trick pony. I guess we're doing horses. Right? So you're not a 1 trick horse. There we go. Anyway, you have to understand also that park management thinks in years, not months.
They wanna know that you're gonna be around for the next year And if they put a park trail in and you claim, oh, yeah. I'll be out there to help you maintain it. And then you disappear, and that will just ruin your reputation.
You have to understand that you kinda have to think about this wish list. You have to understand that your first reaction to this wish list of things you would like to change maybe add a connector to make a loop that would help you to make a better circuit for the the course you wanna do. The first reaction is always gonna be no.
Every single time is gonna be no. It's gonna be no until you meet these people and see it look them in their their their eyes. Shake their hands, understand what their their reservations are for wanting to give you a permit. Mean, this is a a very sound and and simple strategy that a lot of race promoters
don't do. They put the permit in. They get did they go, oh, whatever, and they go on to the next park. But it's finding out the real reason why they're saying no and talk to no, why and why why they say no on what you want to do in that course, you may you may find out that it's not really no. It's Well, I thought those rocks would be bad for mountain bikes, or I don't own that property, or
Well, every time we do a trail in the field, it overgrows so fast that we have to mow it all the time. We put a new trail there. We found out that the maintenance is just dream, and we don't wanna do that anymore.
That's your first strategy. It's just talking to people, talking to the people who run those brothers' properties. The second 1 is earn that favor with Trail Days. If you say you're gonna come out to a park and help fix a park, then do what you say. Even if you only show up with 4 people, go out there and do the hard labor to fix the park. And don't make it Like, again,
your 1 trick show, your 1 trick horse, don't make it your only time you go out there to fix the park. Make it a quarterly thing. If you're gonna plan on having an event of that park, maybe year in and year out, then plan a quarterly trail day of some kind. And ask the park manager what he can he or she needs fixed. Erosion is usually the biggest thing. You're looking at trails that are are water damage. That that could be a big thing. Weed cutting, simple just cutting back some of the weeds.
That could be something that you do. It could be something as simple as cleaning sticks out of the way. Now some parks won't allow you these chainsaws or anything like that, but you can definitely go in there and be the manual labor that helps pull away all the trees when the 1 parked person comes out there with the chainsaw. I mean, except that you're gonna have to take this this challenge of putting
what is it? Putting your money where your mouth is to go there and actually do work before you get the yes. And you may not ever get the yes. You have to accept the possibility that you may have to compromise on your plans. Make sure you can plan for next year, but you have to accept your fate for this year. That the no might come or come at you, and it may come at you for multiple times.
But if you work with park property and they believe that when you say you're going to be there, that you show up, and that you actually are a steward of the park, you'd be surprised what things on your wish list can suddenly become true. But in order to be the horsemen of permission, you have to do those kind of tactics. And I get into that in the wrecking your article, get your next race permit approved, and I'll put the link in the show notes to get more depth and depth in the strategy.
But that is that is the ideal of how to get things done at a park that normally either isn't race friendly, or always says no no matter what you ask for. Okay. The 3rd horse on our list is the horsemen of registration. Of course, this is the black horse. This is the the horse that constantly is difficult to deal with. The I like it being referred to as the black horse.
Because it's always the the rare thing that you have to deal with because it's the thing that most race promoters and race directors are the worst at and it's selling your race. Good at course design. They're good at creating an exciting event They're good at the venue production. They're good at even creating the the things that take place with the process of registration and getting all the paperwork taken care of. When it comes to selling their race, they're horrible at it.
And I know because this is the challenge for me as well that all the instrumentations and all the different processes involved in marketing, and getting your race sold, and getting customers to your venue, They're hard. They're scary. It takes a lot of people out of their comfort zones. So you have to remember that you have to always be Keep feeding your customers your marketing right up until your race day. This is the concept of always be selling. Because they're the masters of shiny objects.
I mean, they want to do it, then they forget to do it. Then they wish they'd known about it. And that's usually what happens after your races happened. Oh, I wish I'd known. Oh, that sounded so awesome. I heard about all the people that went there. I wish I'd note next year, all race. All that race sounds awesome. I will come to it next year. Oh, yeah. Well, I decided to go to a different race. I forgot all about that 1. Why do they forget? Shiny objects.
Customers are easily distracted. Think about think about your own inbox. Email by itself. Your own inbox. How many emails do you go through a day? That you just throw away. All this noise is static coming at you constantly. Same with social media. How many posts do you see day in and day out? All this stuff that, you know, it's cat videos or it's people smashing themselves on a skateboard.
Or it's some sort of heart jerking thing that you have to just weed through all this stuff, plus it's all your friends and all their posts and everything they like. To go through all this stuff. Now, put your race in the middle of that giant pile of static. How is it gonna stand out? That's difficult to do. It's difficult for race promoters to understand that it's it's like selling a product, like a book, just like any kind of a toy or a piece of equipment
or even selling a house, it's a thing. Your event is a thing. And in order to get past the shiny objects syndrome of your customers, you have to constantly be trying to get it in front of them. They say once upon a time, it used to be like 7 impressions before a customer would make a decision about whether or not they're gonna buy something. In this day and age, so much clutter and static. It's like 20
20 impressions. And this is on whatever channel you try to use. You could be multiple channels. Still have a difficulty finding them. Head tip to Sisack for a ventureace hub at a ventureace hub.com, who shared the tips that Mark Venturgan from the Venture Michigan Adventure Racing in an article titled marketing for Venture Racing. Now, it's a Venture Racing specific. But it carries with it a lot of the techniques that racers need to use in marketing.
So this is an article that I'll put a link to and show in those. That I think that anyone who's doing any kind of race promotion needs to read. And really, it comes down to the same fundamentals that are true with anything else. You need to have a plan, and your plan needs to be designed around making good and frequent impressions. Because repetition is required to accomplish the kind of conversation you'd have with your customers.
I mean, sales is really 3 things. It's persistence, persistence, and persistence. Like I said, that 20 impression thing to get through all the static requires you to be constantly getting in front of their face. You have to be you have to have something to sell first. You can't just have to put a race out there that doesn't exist. Right? And you have to be kind of on multiple channels to sell it on, which means that
You need to have all your kind of the the mechanics of your race done. You need to have the website done early. You need to open preregistration early. You need to probably share on social media, like every 4 to 8 weeks before your race. And you should be sharing at least on your email list. Every every time you have a race, you should be collecting emails. Email addresses,
at least you should be doing certain times, telling them about your race, telling them what's upcoming telling them the registration pricing is about to change. You don't wanna spam them by doing too many too many emails at once. But this is this concept of trying to get your race in front of your key customers and hopefully new customers as well, as many times as possible up to and including your race day.
And this is really the core to how you beat the horsemen registration because we all know as as race promoters that pre reg money helps immensely in getting a lot of the things taken care of for your race. Some people build their race completely off preregistration. If no 1 preregisters, they're what? They're pulling money out of their own bank account. They're they're borrowing money. Their cutting services or cutting things out of their race, which may or may not be a bad thing,
based upon how much money they have at the time. It also could include having to cut out things like officials, maybe you don't sanction anymore, maybe you cut back on insurance, maybe just skimping on emergency resources, like having an EMT available or maybe having, you know, communications, like, walkie talkie, things available. Maybe you have to cut back on that because you don't prepare registration. That would be bad.
So as you prioritize your list of things you need for your race, preregistration money is very handy. So you wanna be getting that race out there in front of people as much as possible, as soon as possible, as early as possible. But in a in a planned approach, In a previous article, I talked about shotgunning. You wanna just shotgunning your stuff out there. It's Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Right? You don't be doing that all the time. You wanna be consistently
telling them new things about your race. Not just coming to a race. Coming to a race. Coming to a race. Coming to a race. I mean, that's the persistence thing. You wanna be persistent. But you're gonna be telling them things about the race. Like, hey. The race is gonna be sponsored by this this company. And, hey. We just got a whole new sponsor. It's gonna be that company. Hey, we got the new course for this year. Here's the new course map. And hey, the registration price is about to change. That's 4 topics right there that you could have 4 different type of communications and different channels to do.
So think about that as you're doing that. To beat the horsemen of registration,
Go read Seismax article marketing for Eventbracers. Link is in the show notes. And then I have a a link also for a article I did at Rechinair, called how not to suffer preregistration woes, which goes into much more detail on the same things by having some of the the infrastructure put in place. Of the things you need to have to you have to send somebody somewhere. If you don't have a website, where you can't send to a website, send it into a bike reg or 2, to active.com
or to USA Cycling's registration site, that's kind of okay, but you need a website for this race. You need to find organic traffic. You need to find this site finding this race as well. You need to have a home, and a website is definitely a home for this race. So this is the strategy for how to beat that horsemen of registration. Last but not least is the horsemen of cancellation. This is the horsemen I led the show with, either 1 on the pale horse.
And in common, and come in the theology, its death rides on the pale horse. So cancellation is seriously, the death of your event. Because a cancellation, I mean, it could be, you know, you don't get a permit or you don't get enough people to come. Sure. I mean, you could still have a race. If you don't get a permit for 1 parking, you get a permit somewhere else. So it's not really the death of your event.
None of people register. You can still have a race with none of people register. It might not be big race. It might not gonna get a ton of money on it. You can still have it though. But if you have bad weather hit your event or worse, destroy your venue, you're done. Cancellation is going to happen because if it destroys 1 venue, it's probably gonna destroy all the other venues you wanted to go to too. So you have this this kind of concept that you have to understand you have no control
over this horseman. This horseman is probably the most powerful of them all. And it's rolling with the punches is really kind of a concept you have to you have to adopt with this level of of ambiguity because they're the masters of wrecking stuff. You can't control it. All you could do is adapt to it.
So you need to understand you can't stress over it. If nature happens, if the race happens, you gotta cancel stuff, you're just gonna have to accept the fact that a race gets canceled. These things happen. This is the nature of the business you're in when you're doing race promotion, race direction, that there is going to be a certain percentage of races that you do will get canceled, or be delayed, or
have some sort of of catastrophe take place, you know, nature related that will have to change your course to something you didn't really think was ideal. I mean, in a recent event that I've been I've been building, had a road washout. And it was a freak thing where the storms came rolling in, there was enough water pushing down this creek bed, it blew this road out that was almost a central archery to the race course. So when that happens, what do you do?
You can't. I can't magically come up with $30,000 to give the park service to fix a road. That's not gonna happen. Their engineers are still trying to figure out, well, how do we rebuild it? Because it washed out, I guess, back in 2011. So here's a road that constantly gets washed out anytime this major storm takes place.
So how do you fix a piece of road? Well, if it's not gonna happen, any time in the next couple of weeks and the race is in a couple of weeks. Guess what? You're not gonna be able to use the road. The park sure is not gonna allow you to kind of, like, just, you know, have people around an area that got blown out with collapsing dirt and debris and, you know, surprising things that are underneath the ground. Especially in this venue.
So you have to really kind of accept this this horseman cancellation as a the possible entity that will be always in the back of your mind as you're doing this. So how do you strategize to get past this guy. Well, you have to first know your seasons. You have to understand what the weather is like in your area at certain times, and then you're gonna have to then apply some risk management kind of kind of fundamentals.
To these are days that I know that probably not gonna have a whole lot of weather related incidents. And these are the days that I'm gonna have some maybe And if I have some maybes, then I need to think about, okay, I need to have rain dates. I need to think about different venues. I need to think about some of my policy control. So that's understanding your risk and then building a policy and put it in place. So you have something in writing.
So even if you've never canceled a race, you've never given a refund, you've never had a rain date before, you still should have a policy in place, for just in case that happens because it will happen to you. It's not an if it's a win. So knowing your seasons and then building your policies based upon that, are key to getting past this cancellation horsemen because this is the key thing is is How do you deal with cancellations? How do you tell people cancellations? Do you give people refunds?
Do you tell people at a certain time you can't get a refund? Do you have rain dates? There's a lot of reputation and policy that goes with this that you have to adhere to
because you can't just wing it. When it comes to cancellations, you just can't just wing it. You need to be prepared for this. And reindades is a good way to be prepared because that way you can offer another venue or another time to have this race where you don't have to give massive refunds. Chances are you're gonna have to get a few. So you can't blow all that money. You've gotten preregistration right away.
Save some of it because if things don't go the way you plan, you're gonna have to get that money back. Now there are some race directors out there who say no refunds ever. And guess what? A lot of those guys are out of business because no ranged refunds ever if you have a rain date or a race, it only happens once, and it didn't happen because the weather oops. Sorry. You lost all your money. That's kinda shady.
Now I understand that you're paying a lot of that money when you pay for race planning and race development and venue setting and permitting, something like that. But even a partial refund is better than no refund at all. When you have a cancellation that wipes the event out completely and you can't you can't have the race at all.
You should be thinking about your contingency plans, your backup course designs, and be thinking about the flexibility you have to just be okay with having to change it to something that is not ideal. In the case of the example I gave you the road washout, the course change took us onto unfortunately, some it's not really sidewalk. I guess you call it, it's kinda like the the the fat sidewalk. It's really a a cross county trail that's also sidewalk that they built
drive a car down this sidewalk. It's so wide. But it's got little handrails and all that stuff, that kind of thing. And it's it's we're talking about mountain biking. So you have to go up on paves, grounds halfway through the course, and go around a corner and then back on the course. It's not ideal. It's not perfect. But it works. You have to be okay with it. You have to be okay with that change to understand that sometimes it's just not gonna happen the way you dreamed it envisioned it.
Because if you're a perfectionist, the horsemen of cancellation is going to crush you. It's going to find a way to make you stress out so much that you're gonna have health problems yourself. You're gonna have anxiety issues. You're not gonna be able to sleep. You can't live life that way. And you're definitely not gonna be a fun person to be around on race day if you're constantly stressed out about all these tiny little things you have no control over.
So there's always next year to do something awesome. There's always next year to find that perfect venue and have that perfect vision of a race. But sometimes, you just kinda have to, you know, you just have to deliver the mail. You just have to you have to shut up in color. This is what this is what the horseman of cancellation forces you to do, which is not a bad thing, which is help you deal with some of these uncertainties in a healthy way.
Because if you think about them, I remember there's a I think Seth Godin talks about a that anxiety or or fear or fear of failure. No. Yeah. That's what it is. Anxiety is experiencing the the failure in in advance. That's what it is. So you're when you're stressing out about something, they have no control over stressing out. The what ifs? You're experiencing failure in advance.
That does that sound silly that you're thinking about something that hasn't happened yet, and you're worried about something that hasn't happened yet, and it might not ever but you're still worried about it. I know it's it's easier said than done, and I understand totally understand that when you go to Think about, you know, these kind of anxiety issues. You worry about certain things. It's kind of the nature of the beast of being an event manager.
And doing race direction and doing race promotion. You kinda have to be worried about all this while little details because the little details matter. Especially in in this kind of business, the details matter. But you have to be flexible and you have to understand, There are things you do not have control over, and that you can always do awesome next year and have to be okay with that. Otherwise, the horse in the cancellation will run you down.
So don't let it. Don't let the horsemen cancellation run you down. Be prepared. No. You can't control it. Plan your risk. Know what seasons work for you. Have a policy in place. And build some contingencies in there because the minute you get contingency plans in place, you'll feel so much better because you'll already know what to do when the, you know, the the the thing that will never you know, it never rains here when it rains for the first time.
And if you think it never rains in places, I've lived in Phoenix, Arizona where rain waiting raindrops the size of my fist, and it was 3 inches of standing water in 5 minutes. I mean, think about all the hurricanes happening right now. Some of those places don't don't don't see hurricanes very often and something hurricanes all the time. But you know when those are, a lot of times the seasons dictate your actions.
So plan accordingly and have a policy in place so you can plan for those type eventualities. And then you'd plan for awesome next year and do awesome next year because when everything is in place, and you can relax. You're a better designer, you're a better course director, you're a better event director, you're better race director. You're very promoter when you have systems in place and you know what order they go in when things happen. It's like following a diagram.
If you wanna learn more that I wrote a article of Rechinir called check your venue before race day or else, that's 1 of the key ones. The other 1 is how to bounce back when everything goes wrong. And this is gonna walks you through that risk management type of thinking so that you don't go off the rails when the horseman cancellation comes galloping over the horizon. And he doesn't stop until he's put his hoof prints across your back.
So do yourself a favor. Help yourself sleep better at night by doing some risk management. By building in the policies for dealing with cancellations, refunds, and rain dates. And understand there are things you can't control. And beat the horsemen of cancellation at his own game by being prepared for things that most people are not prepared for. These are just some of the key strategies to help you survive the 4 horsemen of the race planning apocalypse.
If you think back to some of the key takeaways, the horsemen of competition, that's the races on the same day, to think about the strategy is to protect the top dates and locations that you need for your race. Not just what you want, but you need.
You have the horsemen of permission that's getting permission to use the trails. You'll have to actively be engaged in your venue and get that Parks approval by engaging with the park manager and maybe even being present as far as trail days and doing maintenance and being someone who actually cares about the being this good steward of the park. You think about the horsemen of registration, This is wanting people to pay early. You have to keep feeding your customers.
You're marketing right up until race day. That's that persistence. That's those the impressions is constantly be selling. Always be selling. But do it with a purpose. Don't spam. And then you have to think about the horsemen of cancellation. This is nature impacting your race day. This is where you have to accept you have no control over the weather. And by doing risk mitigation strategies, you can plan
for the things that can that may not ever happen, but if they do, you'll be ready for them. And you won't stress over them because you'll know what to do if something bad happens. So these are the things you'll always be thinking about. If you wanna save your races from these forces. It's always expected at least 1 of these horsemen's gonna show up because these are the 4 things that that can go wrong or will go wrong at the worst possible time and the worst possible sequence to your race
and usually in the worst possible order on top of that. Now hopefully not all 4 show up at the same time. That would be horrible. But if they did and you expected them to show up, then you can build in contingencies to mitigate
what happens when each 1 of these horsemen start to rear their ugly heads. And chances are, if you start planning with those 4 horsemen in mind, Do you put those 4 horsemen as the top of your list of things you need to be focused on? You'd be surprised how quickly you will murphy proof your race. This is kind of the key to thinking of these peep these these forces as the horsemen of the race planning apocalypse. Because planning for them, you'd be surprised
how well your race will go when you already think that these guys are gonna show up. And then they don't show up. And what happens when they don't show up, you will have an amazing event. And now you know. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Merchants of Your Podcast. If you've had an experience with 1 of these horsemen or maybe 2 of them or God forbid, all 4.
Reach out to me, let me know. I'd love to hear your story about how you dealt with 1 of these horsemen brewing in your race or how you you were able to get yourself out from the horseman's hooves. So reach out to me at [email protected] or on Twitter at mergersadirk.com. And I'd love to hear your story. And if you haven't if you haven't seen it yet, we've done some changes behind the scenes and the merchantsadrip.com. I've updated the website, got a little more user friendly,
added all the episode notes, all the show notes were in there with with players connected to it, all the subscription buttons are in there now. So if you can go to birchazer.com
and check it out, let me know what you think. Let me just think of them on. It's very, very bare bones, mostly based upon the the survey data that they've done in recent years of podcasting sense that not many people go to the website, a lot of people do podcasting or look at the notes on their apps or within their players like iTunes.
But the website is designed for mobile friendly. So let me know what you think. Let me know if I need to make any changes for pick. Let me know if I broke anything. It was just getting off an an old host and an old website that wasn't really working for me anymore. So the new design hopefully is better. And I did the same thing with getlossracing.com
as well. So if you haven't heard get lost racing, get lost racing podcast where I go through 1 endurance event every episode to kind of talk about how it works and how you get into racing. So go check that out too. Meanwhile, I hope to see you on the next episode of the merch store podcast. Until then, go start better races. Take care. No Mister Murfrees were harmed during the making of this podcast.