Today, I'm Merchant of DIRT Podcast episode number 14. We're getting serious in our 2nd of 4 cautionary tales dedicated to my cohost, Mister Murphy. And learn why you need to take emergency response planning very seriously. Because when it comes to Mister Murphy, 911 will cut it. By the way, miss Murphy just called, a razor just hit a tree. What you learn next could save a life.
Thank you for joining me for the Merchant Center Podcast, find your professional recognier, your teacher, your merchant of dirt, your host, and the very model of a modernator general, Kyle Bondo. Oh, my military knowledge does make deep parking of entry too. If you get that 1, send me a tweet at merchants of dirt. Meanwhile, our website is merchandisinger.com.
And if you're new to the merchandisinger podcast, welcome aboard. This is your personal trail guide through the complex world of recreational engineering. I help you simplify the business of off road race promotion and make the art and science behind building, promoting, and directing off road races understandable.
Which is really important. Along with me is the man of the hour for who this whole month is dedicated to, the crusher of bikes, the skinder in knees, and the 1 who always make sure your racers are that the furthest most inaccessible point on the course before they get hurt, the cuddles that everyone loves to hate, Mister Murphy. And together, we're on a mission to teach you how to build better races.
And you're joining me for the second of our 4 cautionary tales, a whole month dedicated to topics Mister Murphy wants a talk about. Or in my case, he doesn't want us to talk about because when he spiel spins his wheel of woah, he tends to wreck everything you're trying to build. So this whole month is dedicated to the things Mister Murphy will do to you, your races, your race promotion business, and how to stop him. So we're gonna dive into another aspect of Rick's risk management
called your emergency response plan. Because remember at the opening, Mister Murphy, just push your razor to a tree. Now what? Well, how fast can you execute your response to that injury? This is a question that many race promoters don't like to talk about. Why? Because they don't know the answer to it. Think back to the last race you were in. Now think to that part of the course where you went, woah, that was close. You didn't fall or wreck, but if you had,
it would have been really bad. You know, that's that pointy stick being right at your head. Now think about that moment in the race from another angle, from the race directors of the race promoter's point of view. If you've been the race director, or the race program, how would you have been informed that a not so woah moment had just occurred? Would your course marshals have been notified about the incident?
Most racers are kind enough to pass along the message as someone has hurt on the trail to the first volunteers they see Others, especially those that take helping a fallen race more seriously than the race itself, will actually stop and literally be your first responders. Trained or not, racers will get to your injured personal law before your course marshals ever do. But once the course marshal is aware of the incident, and does arrive at the scene. Then what?
Walkie talkies, mobile phones, smoke signals? How does your course marshal inform you that you need to start your emergency response plan. You might be thinking, my what? Yeah. Your emergency response plan. The plan that every sanctioned association requires you to have before you get a permit. You know, that thing most race brokers claim they have for the sake of checking the box on the permit application. But don't really have any details.
Just like I said before, let's face it. Calling 911 is not an emergency response plan, especially in some of the parks, or 911 could be long ways away. Calling 911 is only just the detail within our burn's response plan. Okay. Anyway, back to our back to our thought exercise. Now, try to imagine that someone has seriously hurt on the trail, and the race director or race promoter is finally notified by the problem. How long does it take that person to notify fire rescue
or emergency medical technicians, you know, the EMTs that are needed? How long does it take for them to arrive from wherever they are? 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 90 minutes, When you add up all the time between the first report of injury, your notification to authorities, AMT arrival, And then EMT transitioned to the injured person, a ton of times passed.
The injury is serious. That amount of time could mean the difference between life and death. In the military, they call this the golden hour. This is the hour between an injury, gunshot wound, whatever. Usually, it's gunshot wound. Between the time of the injury before there's just nothing you can do. But in a race, you're not far away from stuff or are you? I wanna bring you back to that question we start in the beginning. How fast can you execute
your response to an injury? The only way you have a chance to answer this question with any certainty is the first thing about how you would responsiveness in the incident before you actually need to. In order to do this, you have to 1st war game your worst case scenario. Then think about all the ways you could get immediate care to an injured racer This is the basic thought process that goes into the initial emergency race plan, getting the right care to the right location in the right time.
What you say? It sounds This makes it intense. It's because it is. Emergency response should be taken seriously. Why? Because it'll eventually happen to 1 of your racers during 1 of your races. It's not a matter of if it's a matter of when. Injuries are not something you want to take lightly. Same goes for planning how you deal with those injuries when they happen. You make everything worse by not preparing for this event.
Take note that professional first responders are always minutes away when seconds matter. That means those that get their first, which is you and your team, could be the only emerge response that actually reaches the racers in time. Might be thinking in time for what? In time knowing the difference between life and death, Are you prepared for that day? How can you possibly prepare for that? Well, the answer is easy.
You build an emergency response plan that actually works. Remember we go back to getting the right care to the right location at the right time. Okay? But this is not something difficult. You can do this and it has 4 parts to it. So let's talk about those 4 parts. Every emergency response plan has 4 distinct parts. 1, Be prepared. 2. Be vigilant. 3. Be communicating. And 4. Be sure. If you work through each of the 4 parts in order, your ERP
will be prepared, effective, and useful when you actually need it. So here's how we're gonna approach this, the 4 parts. We're gonna go 1 at a time. You ready? Okay. Number 1, be prepared. You just think about how you can have medical skills on-site or nearby. There are real injuries that require in bird's response, and then there are those that you know, well, those injuries are trips, falls,
face plans. Although trips, falls, and face plans are painful, most are superficial, and not very life threatening. Some racers are wimps, and they cry wolf. Especially when they get a little scrape. Others will walk off the course with broken bones and never say a word to you. You will never know the difference between who's crying wolf and who's really hurt. Never. So you must react to every injury as if it's the real thing until you know the difference. How do you do this? Well, first,
there's a simple 1. Gagecated. As a race promoter and most likely, the race director you should have a decent amount of medical training yourself. Do you need to be a doctor? No. But you should certainly be a minimum 1st aid train, CPR certified, and if possible, will nurse medicine trained. Or can you get this training? The Red Cross provides 1st aid CPR certifications monthly. Sometimes you can get this for low cost or even free through your local volunteer fire department.
Then there's a wilderness first responders training. This is more advanced. There are places like the National Outdoor Leadership School are called Knowles. They provide nationwide courses on wilderness first response. Education. And I'll put a link to them in the show notes if you're interested in that. But additionally, companies like backcountry lifeline, or BCLL, are trying to change the way emergency response education is conducted by providing racers with medical training.
So there are all sorts of opportunities out there. The point is there's no excuse to not getting trained. This goes for your staff too. You set the emergency response training standard for everyone who works for your company. The second thing you do is have a designated 1st aid people at all your races and make sure everyone knows who and where they are. This could be volunteer, fire department, EMTs,
a staff member with 1st aid or seat belt training or volunteer doctor, nurse, or even athletic trainer. Whoever they are, point them out. Identify their purpose. And make it very obvious that they're there for. Next, you have everyone else working your race should know who to call and how far away help is to the venue. Miles and minutes minus prep time and traffic.
Become important when you need to make decisions about the severity of injury, you may need to make a terrible choice to move someone off the trail to save their life.
If you know that emergency response is still miles away before you can provide assistance, it will be up to you to make those very tough decisions. The more training support assistant you have on-site, the less pressure you have, especially who have on yourself, not just a group around you, when it comes to deciding how you actually respond. Finally, make your racers know that you care about their safety by identifying a location near the registration where you can provide help.
Some call this the Mid tent or the Audi and boo boo tent. With plenty of racers, with minor highways and booboo showing up for your for your care, this 10 is critical, especially for customer service. Don't want to admonish them for the miners' cuts and scrapes.
And do not did they say did some of the things like that's mountain biking or that's trail running or that's a venture racing. Those attitudes and statements do not support your Disney approach to customer service. Hopefully remember that from a couple episodes ago. Besides, being attentive and responsive to minor injuries is a is great training. Take advantage of the opportunity to practice her skills. Wow. Making your racers feel better in the process.
Okay. That's number 1. That is be prepared. Right? Okay. So what's number 2? Number 2 is be vigilant. You should be thinking about where to place course marshals so they can cover known danger areas, vantage points, and crossroads. Course marshals are your rulekeepers, your sentinels. They are your actual first responders. Pick them carefully.
Make sure they are prepared to assume the 1st responder role within your emergency response plan. Don't pick people that will not take this role seriously. We'll not pay attention. We'll not stay where you put them. Those people are useless to you. Additionally, course marshals should be armed with 3 items. They should have a clear course map. They should have a way to communicate other than a cell phone, and they should have a way to stop bleeding. Think about that.
K? The first item. A clear course map. Always allow course marshals to communicate using the correct names of locations. The map is critical to guiding professional emergency responders to injured racers. You should always share these maps early so that all course marshals understand
what each area is called, especially if they've never been there before, and where it is in real life. These are important. If everyone is calling parts of the trail, Different names, your response teams will quickly become lost on the way to delivering vital care. But if the trails you are working with do not have names, Then give them some names. We name everything, including the parking lot, registration area, even finish line, make it simple, so you don't have to complicate your efforts. However, if the trails called Billy Ghosnkruft
and the locals call it the blue lube, you're only gonna delay your emergency response to the right location if you call it Billy Goat's gruff. Your course map should also show high speed excess routes, cutoffs, and central locations that vehicles can get to. So if they have to get ATVs and their boats, be thinking like a first responder when you make your map, not a racer. Course, marshals might need to do the coordinating for you and have to be the 1 to guide responders to the engine eraser.
You have to give them all the information they will need before they need it, and before they go out to where their location is. The second item, the way to communicate is essential to a response effort. Let me cover this in more detail in the next section. But You must make sure that any communication gear you do use is fully charged and includes extra batteries. You can't stress that enough. I mean, electronic here with how power is useless. The final item of all course marshals
is a way to stop the bleeding, and this 1 is actually very important. Because I don't know how many course marshals I've seen and how many races. This is a t shirt. This is someone's coat. And this is not very effective at work, in a pinch, but it'd be great if course marshals were first aid trained, but there might be tough thing to arrange.
However, they could be equipped with enough first aid materials to keep bleeding at bay, 1 of the most common injuries in offered racing. And they could do this while they're coordinating the British response. Otherwise, they're gonna end up using, you know, like I said, your shirt, your jacket. What do they get their hands on to stop serious bleeding? In some cases, dirt,
Don't make them have to get creative in order to buy your Verint's response some time. Make it easy for them to provide assistance by making sure they leave For the quartz marks location with the basic items needed to save a life. Gauss is cheap. Life is not. Okay. That was that was some intense stuff. Right? Let's go on to our third 1. Be communicating.
This is this is a little more light and fluffy. Right? Should be thinking about having a network or a system for communicating across distances. And we're talking like around terrain and beyond beyond obstacles. Chases are, your course marshals are going to be the first to become aware of an incident, and they need a direct way to call for help. Notify the you, the race promoter and race director, and getting Burns' response initiated.
Make sure they're prepared to respond beyond just sounding the alarm. Mobile phones are good for areas that have decent mobile service. When they don't work, walkie talkies can be essential. Over long distances. Unfortunately, the very nature of off road racing is to use big terrain in course designs. While this makes for a great race, It has the unfortunate
side effect of disrupting communications, blocking signals, and preventing calls for help. This is why you need to conduct live experiments with your communications of choice. You need to know it works. You need to it's gonna be blocked. Right? You might need to put volunteers in key locations to relay messages to and from the restructure, but you won't know if you Don't go out to the venue and find out yourself before the race. Discover your walkie talkies don't work on race day.
And you have just spilled out the recipe for disaster. Or can't your communications plan prior to race, not during, and test it to make sure it works. You can notice that the theme forming here is everything beforehand, and you wanna do this stuff before you have to use it. And that takes us to number 4. Be sure.
You should be thinking about how you can conduct finish line headcount and course sleeves to account for everyone in your race. Timing can be a very passive way of keeping a full head count and knowing who's still in the course and who's not. It could be your first indication that someone's missing. Because timing is not always perfect. Race are the DNFs, and then dips out without telling anybody they lift the course.
I mean, you need to physically check the course with sweepers just because of that alone. Sweepers are those volunteers that slowly roll up the course behind the last racers. Pulling up arrows tapes and sides. And if you remember the the the episode about the Disney,
you wanna remember not to do that right behind those racers. Give them some room. Let them finish the race. Because there's also a great way to notify other volunteers that the race is over and find any racers that might have left the course You know, falling off the trail, maybe even overlooked by everyone else. They're kinda sitting to the side, you know, rubbing their foot or fixing their bike. Swoopers are incredibly important determining who's left in the course. Above me on what your timing can tell you. If you only use timing to clear the course, You won't discover this one's missing for a long time after the last tracer crosses the finish line. And that's if the timers are right.
You ever think about that? This means that an inter eraser could go unnoticed for hours, and it could be dark before your search parties organized enough to start looking for them. And sleepers help reduce this risk by being the eyes and ears of your race director. Plus, they assist in making sure the slowest racers actually make it back safely. Don't ignore the value of sweepers, impairs or groups either. Don't send them out just a loaner
because then you don't wanna have the sweeper fall out. And then have to send a sweeper for the sweeper. You see? If you have the numbers, 2 is always better than 1 when it comes to merge response. And never something completely different. The golden race promotion is to deliver races. So why is it so hard to set the price? That actually creates preregistration money. Setting your preregistration
price is supposed to be easy. Right? But even if you've been to other races, you don't know how they're making any money. And for your look, another race promoter is going out of business.
So when you decide to set your own prices, you're constantly reminded that you need to have a certain number of registrations just to break even, or you're gonna be 1 of those race promoters that goes out of business. I mean, breaking even is not running a business. That's a hobby. You won't run a business. That means you need to have a right price to get a right number of people in your race, so you can actually make a profit and grow your business. Only what happens is you set your price,
and then no 1 registers, and then you hesitate to increase the price because no one's registered. Then you offer discount, no one's registering, then you begin to panic. How many times does it make any money? If you're constantly chasing customers away with your high price, low price, who? How do you know? I mean, you've seen other people make a living in the business? So why does it feel like you should be coaching football instead? I've been there too.
I had a hard time setting prices in races. I still have a hard time. Why? Well, because setting a price isn't just a number. There's actually research analysis. There's some math. There's a lot of different parts that go into setting a price. And you'd be surprised It has little to do with what your competitors are charging. It has a lot to do with what you are delivering. And you need to understand what that what you were delivering and how your price will also keep your business open.
Because if you set your price too low, you're gonna run out of money and that's not a business. If you set your true price too high, no one's gonna show up. That's not a business either. So how do you solve this? How do you get past this conundrum of setting a price? Something that sounds so simple, but seems to be very complex. Well, I wrote a email course, and it's called the 7 port guide to setting the right registration price. And it's simple.
It's 7 parts of a lesson that teaches you the things you need to go through to set your registration price, and there is some complexity to it. But if you work through this course, give about 2 courses, 2 lessons a week for about 4 weeks. You will start to understand what goes into actually setting a price. And here's the best part about it. Absolutely free. I'm just looking to make you a better race promoter
And by signing up for this course, I send you all 7 parts over about a 4 week period and you'll learn how to tackle this problem and how do you wanna do this. Well, you're gonna go to wreckingear.com/pricing.
Nice easy link. It's gonna take you over to the registration page, put your email in, And within about a, you know, just a couple days, maybe even today, if you're registered today, depends on depends on when I receive your email. And I'll send you lesson number 1. That's simple. In fact, I have lesson number 1 on record not a comm right now. So if you wanna go over there, just read it, discover what it is, and see what it's like.
You can go over there right now and find out. But if you go to wreckingear.com/pricing, I'll send you this course, a 7 week 7 week course, 7 part course, 4 weeks. Right? And you're gonna learn some things about pricing. Maybe you didn't understand or didn't know. And the best part about an email course and the best part about it being free is if you don't like it, unsubscribe. That's simple. There's a link right at the bottom. If you don't like it, boom, you're out. Piece of cake. Right?
But if you do like it, this course will definitely provide you a little bit of education that you didn't know you needed. And it will help you be confident in setting pricing. From now into the future, you can go back to this and read it over and over and over again, and it will give you the tools the pieces of information you need to collect in order to understand how to set a good price.
So, enroll in my 7 part guide setting the right registration price. Absolutely free. Wreckingear.com/pricing, and learn how to price your races confidently. You're free for just being a listener to the Merchant Center podcast. And now for some final thoughts. Always build an emergency response plan that you will hopefully never have to use. However, if you do have to use it, your plan could mean the difference between rescuing a racer and covering a body. Way back in episode 6.
I talked to you about not being the single point of failure. If you don't remember, this is a perfect time to remind your you can bring yourself with a step that you need to take to not be that single point of failure. First, you need to go back to kindergarten and remember that sharing is good.
Sharing is the same as teaching, coaching, and mentoring. When it comes to merge response, sharing your plan is very good. Everyone needs to know what the plan is, and you need to practice it at least once. 2nd, learn to let go of some of that control. You need to allow your staff or maybe even some trusted volunteers to make the call, they may be there long before you are. And if they know that the way you want your emergency response plan to be used,
Release them from inaction and allow them to make the call. And third, this is really critical too, especially for leaders. Back them up. Back them up when they do make the call. Even if it's an overreaction and no 1 is truly hurt, never blame your staff or volunteers for calling Wolf. Or for initiating the emergency response plan without you. Even if it brings your race to a grinding halt, better safe than sorry.
You can always start a race over or find a way to declare a winner that's fair with what race did take place. When racers understand, If you just tell them what could have happened, they get it. Just be honest with them. But don't throw your staff under the bus in the process, tell your racers it came from you. Can you do that? Are you willing to let go of that control and learn how to share your plan and power your staff and volunteers to act because if you can, it can save a life.
Take this part of your planning very seriously and put some effort in getting it right. It's okay if you never use it. But the time you spend doing this kind of planning and practicing will always be worth it in the end, especially if it ends up saving life. And now you know.
Wow. That was some heavy dirt. Right? It was also the end of our 2nd of 4 Mister Murphy Cautionary Tales. This whole month is dedicated to learning about risk management, disaster recovery, and how to bounce back when everything goes wrong. Everything my cohost, Mister Murphy, love to see you ignored, just some everything goes wrong with your race. In our next episode, however, we're gonna cover our 3rd topic of the month focusing on risk risk management and why you need to create your own risk mitigation strategy before
bad things happen. Thank you so much for listening to the merchandiser podcast. Have any questions or comments, please reach out to me on Twitter at merchants of dirt. You wanna subscribe and make sure you never miss an episode, merchantsadirt.com is how you do it. 1 click gets you every single episode for free. And if you have an Android, iPhone, however to get your podcast,
1 click gets it for you. I've got a click for everything there. However, you could podcast, go there and find it, you will definitely be happy. I'll see you on the next episode of The Mergester Podcast. Until then, go take what you learned today, and build a better race.