Today on the merch editor podcast episode number 42, Merry Christmas. This is the last episode of 2017. And today we're gonna answer some listener mail and get some insight into what other people are thinking about when it comes to outdoor business. Ready for it? Let's roll. Welcome to the Merchant of DIRTT pod cast, recreational engineering for a better outdoor life. And now your host, Kyle Bondo.
Welcome to the merchandiser podcast. I am Kyle Bondo. You're a wrecking here. You're a merchant of dirt. Here to make the art and science of outdoor business easy and understandable. And today, we're gonna do some listener mail. I have a couple emails that I've selected that I wanna talk about that
get into the way other people are thinking about their events, worried about outreach and marketing, and the kind of things that are are struggle for race directors who are trying to make a life building outdoor events or even better trying to use outdoor events to help build their other outdoor business, using it as a marketing tool for getting people to visit their store or visit their camp or buy their products. Let's get into to 3 particular ones I've picked out that I think you will find very interesting.
Okay. Our first our first email is from Paul. Paul writes, he's got an upcoming ride. And at this point, he doesn't think that going to the event may be worth it. And the problem is is he is considering all the issues that come into play when it comes to paying for the event. It doesn't think that's gonna be feasible able to have everything in place because of 1 special consideration is his event is in 4 weeks, and he only has 4 people signed up under preregistration. And 1 of those people is
who signed up of those 4 people as someone who's gonna be a volunteer at the event. So really, they're not they're gonna be free. So at this rate, it might be costly to be worth maybe cutting at this point or considering canceling,
thinking about all those people who already registered, you're really, you know, refunding at this point with 4 people. So that's that's Paul's question. You know, what do I do? It's 4 weeks to the event only 4 people signed up, but what do I do? Well, thinking about this, Paul, is that sometimes when it comes to events,
a lot of people wait to the last minute. Now regardless on how you price what happens at the little the the early bird versus the regular price versus the the last minute pricing, it's surprising the number of people that that sign up last minute pre register. If you're from a community where people who show up on race day is a common factor, then you come to find out that you possibly get another percentage of people to show up.
So here's what I recommend, especially for an event, is for an event like like the 1 you're talking about here. It's a small event. Think about what your breakeven point is. You need to think about how many people you need to make your event worthwhile. Now if it's a small event and you're thinking about small event numbers, 4 people might not cut it, but can you get 6 more?
So you're talking about a ride. Well, there's probably local bike shops all over the area. Think about going to those local bike shops and asking to put flyers on the desk. You have 4 weeks to go. That's a lot of time. It's a lot of time to put on to to to your event. Now if you're worried about whether or not, you know, the investment in in your permit or the investment in the resources you need to put on the event, again, that you go back to what is it gonna cost you to actually
pay for this event. If you could only pay for the event and you made no money whatsoever, what is that number? And then figure out how many tickets or how many registrations you need to sell
to make that number. That's your breakeven point. That's the goal. That's your sales goal number 1. And if you can find out that, now think about this, is at the price point, you'll have it 4 weeks out, and then the price point you'll have it maybe last minute or race day. Think about it in the in terms of what does the race cost right now? How many people would you need to sign up right now for that to work? And if that the case, then if you are thinking about it that way, then you know how many registrations you need to sell. Go to those bike shops. Go to the hobby shops. Like hobby shops. And I mean, like like rei or the outfitters or any of the places that might have interest in people who are doing your event. Think about
where riders are riding, what trails are going to, what what kind of of outreach can you do as far as going to for meetup rides or going to parks and seeing people in the parking lot. Now, I don't recommend going and papering the parking lot with flyers, although that is something you could do. You could go and find everybody with a bike rack in the parking lot and put a piece of paper for your event on their windshield. I find that that has a a very minimal impact on registration. But
if you lurk with purpose and this is kinda getting to the into the Stalker world, you gotta be careful with this. But if you kinda hang around in your kit, ride the park a little bit, and every time come just, like, make big circles, take a mile or 2 course, and come back to the parking lot, and see if anybody has returned to their car to unload, to load, or would do whatever for. And if that's the case, come roll up to them and say, hey, do you guys ride or race all year a lot? And if they do,
give them a flyer. That's a way to kinda help you generate. Now, think about the number of registrations you need. Now, if that target number is 20, then you have 4 people signed up, You'll need 16 more. Grab the other people that are in your in your group and and, you know, divide and conquer. So that's bike shops,
the hobby or retail shops, Outrigo, the endurance shops and the park themselves. If you can get those 3 things just as a minimum to get 16 people to show up, then I think you have the makings for what you need in order to make this happen. So I hope that helps. So our next email comes from Brian. Now Brian is interested in adventure racing, and there's a new organization standing up called the adventure racing cooperative. And
Brian asked the question, kind of was the position that I would take if I were to be placed on the board. In full disclosure, I did I was nominated to be on the board for Outreach. I didn't win, but that's okay. And he asked, what would be your platform if you ran for Outreach? And I started to think about that. I said, what would my platform be for Outreach? I think this is this is my Outreach.
Platform, I think, for Venture Racing. And hopefully, the new person who who did make it on the board, the outreach for the arc or the Venture Racing Cooperative. I think it has some very big things to accomplish in its 1st year in 2018.
Right now, I think the adventure racing cooperative has some big shoes to fill and some some big agenda items they need to take care of. And for I'm talking about for outreach or thinking about how do you get people in adventure racing. And I think the 1st order business would be You have the North America Adventure Racing Association, which is kind of this fledgling little new group, this kind of the little rebel group that started up, and you have the United States Adventure Racing Association,
the USAA. That is kind of neglected adventure racing, especially the the smaller local and regional adventure racing, they've only stuck to to national world championships. So there's these 2 groups that don't like each other that have been very vocal on Facebook, and there are groups of venture racers that are gonna split between who they support, and the arc is popping up in the middle of all this. And,
you know, is this gonna be a good thing or bad thing or venture racing? So I think the first thing that needs to happen, Brian, when it comes to to a platform for Outreach
is it's time to bury the Tomahawk. These 2 organizations need to find some common ground with regard to at least national AR standards for competition. That would probably be the first thing that Outreach can happen is is a lot of different organizations are good for this for sports, but AR is just so small. I mean, really, can you can you afford to divide up? I always look at it this way, is it's really interesting if you go back
to to presidential elections. I don't know politics is a is a very sensitive topic. But it's really interesting to find out, you know, kind of the the the way history works and the way that organizations are are created where things rise up that you never would expect that the possibility of them ever happening would ever happen. Think about the election of President Lincoln, is there were 4 people running that election in 18 60, and if there wasn't 3 other people running, President Lincoln would never have won. If the South had been divided, even the North American divided, Lincoln would never become president of the United States. I know that's kind of like, you know, think about war and politics in the United States and manifest destiny, that kind of thing. But think about divided organizations.
What happens when you divide an organization? Will USAA kind of in neglect? Caused the n a r a to pop up. And the a a r a has not really had the traction, at least in the West Coast, as it has on the East Coast, which has now caused the arc to pop up. So these organizations starting to pop up because of the influence of other of other groups either being not strong enough or being
kinda absent minded. So I think having those groups kinda kinda bringing of integration together that has to be the number 1 platform thing. I think next, you have to start working with some of the fringey groups like orienteering USA. And orienteering USA, which once upon a time, thought about of interracing possibly or even mountain bike orienteering being possibly part of their their organization, really has not done either 1 of those groups any any favors.
They haven't reached out to event erasing. They haven't become part of the event erasing community. In fact, if you were to ask event erasers, some of them don't even know what the orangiosa is. Again, the fringe groups, I would also say that the obstacle course racing, and I know this is a huge point. And there are a lot of people that go, oh my gosh, optical course racing. He's not a venture racing. It's up. But hear me out.
Optical course racing is kind of the the cookie cutter version of a venture racing. It is groups of people, team events going through obstacles, going through challenges, and learning how to do this over a long distance environment. Of course, you know, you know, the ice buckets and mud flows, and Bob wire, and climbs. Okay. Some of that stuff obviously isn't the style of edge racing. But in a way, it kinda is. Endurance sports is, you know, is a weird multifaceted type of of culture and OCR
fits in there. Do disagree or not. The people who do OCR enough come to a point where they go, what else is there? What's a bigger challenge than this? What can I expand to? And I think that's a huge opportunity for venture racing. It has just never been leveraged. Never. So if OCR can be kind of a feeder, kind of a farm league for a venture racing, and a orienteering USA can be kind of the intellectual arm of a venture race sing. Now why can't
the new arc be reaching out to them? So that's my idea for for the 2nd platform island. And then finally, I think that there is a huge opportunity that's been way overlooked in event racing for collegiate and youth development. Most of event racing tends to be people over the over 40. Go to event racing, event, and start looking around and start asking how people old people are. I'm 45. I'm gonna do an adventure racing for, what, 10, 12 years.
How many people in adventure racing are under 30? How many people are under 25? How many people are teenagers? How many teenagers do you see an adventure racing event? Maybe some of the smaller ones. What a 12 hour or 24 hour? How many people do you see there? You don't. Now, not all of the interraces are created equal, created. Right? But I would say that there's a huge opportunity between between collegiate
which gives you an advantage within college racing. Well, if orienteering USA can get orienteers to be collegiate people, why can't a venture racing? And youth development, why can't there be a venture racing or during the events for kids in their teens? Or incurring USA has a youth development, you know the USA cycling has youth development, USA triathlon has youth development, where's the youth development for Venturizing?
So I'd say that would be off the top of my head, to get the arc in the right space for outreach, that's the focus I would go on. I would go on bearing the hat no. Bearing the Tomahawk or bearing the hatchet between the NARA and USAA.
Gotta be some patching done there. I would say that Orington USA and the OCR groups because there's several of them that are not really organized and 1 big big bucket. You need to get them to cooperate or you need to reach out to them and start cultivating some relationships there. And then you need to work on collegiate and youth development
because the sport ain't getting any younger. And if the sport doesn't get any younger, the sport's gonna die when all these people get too old to a venture race. So think about that. Think about those things, Brian. So that's what I think. That that's hopefully, that that gives you some insight to to what I think about those things. Thank you very much for the question.
And our final question comes from Sam. Sam writes about starting a race for the first time. He's been dreaming of doing trail racing for 3 years, and he wants to use it to help fund some of his he's got a he's got some summer camps, and he wants to use trail running as a a feeder for supplying some re revenue for his camp scholarship program. So he's got a camp. He's running a camp for a youth camp in I think it's Oklahoma.
And he wants to use the trail running experience as a way to build a scholarship, which was if I read this correctly, to help pay for some kids whom maybe we can't pay to come to the camp. That sounds about it. Hope hope I got that right, Sam. So
what he's done is he's he's read a bunch of stuff online. He's got wrecking gear.com. He's got a dedicated on some of the the dos and don'ts for for for racing and knows how to put together. But now he's kind of in that in that, what do I do next? What's the kind of What What do I start building my my momentum to get a race off the ground?
So in talking with Sam, he told me that he had a teaser video that he'd released, which was really cool. So he's already thinking about video. He's thinking about Outreach. He's thinking about marketing in a venture race
and or not a venture race. He's a trail run. And he's thinking about the things that that will have to come next to con to kind of understand how am I gonna get people to come to my race? So that's kind of his question. So we'll get into that. Okay? Alright, Sam. So the idea that I had thinking about this is that said that your trail run was in December of 2018. So this gives you a lot of time to prepare.
And 1 thing that you could do to prepare for this kind of trail race is 6 months out, is the summertime. And if you think about the 6th month of the summertime, kind of July August time frame, maybe this is the perfect time to do a trial run. And so if the big race, if you wanna have, you know, a 100 or 200 or 300 people at the trail race, you're worried about? How do I get people to how do we get volunteers? How do we set up the trail? How do I how do I get or how do I get
people to understand that the race is happening and marketing and and do enough time to to get enough people to come to buy enough tickets? And it's kind of the same question like Paul has. Only Paul was, you know, in the 4 weeks before his race. You have 12 months. And coming to 12 months, I would say at that 6 month mark because right now, it's what? December. So think about that 6 months mark out. You know, the same of July, it gives you 6 months, 7 months or so. Think about
planning the mini race. And this is the race where if you just stick to the bare bones, if you stick to the bare bones, you don't need 15 tables, you just need 1 table, you need a couple pop up tens. You have a just 1 pop up tent. You don't need, what, RFID timing and chip timing. You just need paper and clipboards. You don't need hardcore communications.
You have you have enough people set up to where you can run this kind of mini trail run. The advantage this gives you by doing a small event where the breakeven point is really small that you can practice
and make mistakes and learn how to do an event before you do the big 1. Now the idea is is you market it kind of the same way you do with the big 1 is you do the same kind of outreach, and you're gonna do you're gonna do your online. You're gonna build a website. So your website's gonna have the event. You're gonna have the the the promo, the the video you have, Neil, maybe it's not done by then. But you could. You can do a little promo video. You could
go around your local area and think about some of the think about your current sponsors and suppliers now for your camp of the way you market your camp now. You could also market this on those same channels. So reuse those again. There's no reason you can't. I mean, you own those channels. You've already have those relationships. Fosters more relationships
for your trail run based on the same ones you have as your suppliers and your people who help you with your camp. That would be the the first thing you would do. You're gonna build a website. You're gonna go and register by by using something cheap and free, I would say, you know, like like a bike ridge or [email protected]
are pretty good. Nice, simple, you know, low impact, not no frills type of type of setups to set up your registration. I mean, you could even do it through, you know, something simple. It could be PayPal or something even even simpler than that. You don't even really have to get really complicated. But the idea is, is start experimenting and start cultivating relationships now with maybe some of the vendors and sponsors
and places to market that that you don't have right now. Think of the the places that sell shoes, places that do have running clubs, think about the trail maintenance people, and think about outreach to other things because trail runners are a weird group of people, just like a venture racers and mountain bikers. Trail runners don't just trail run, not all of them. Some of them only stick to running. Some of them are road runners coming, you know, coming coming coming over.
But sometimes, you're gonna find that marketing to other groups, mountain bikers, adventure racers, triathletes, marathon runners, you're gonna find that those people are going to be interested in a trail run too because they're looking for training opportunities. They're looking for the opportunity to run-in something new. Some maybe some environments have never been offered before. You're gonna be looking for those groups of people, and you're gonna find those people with
events that are going on in your area or local area or maybe even some of the the outlying cities. Think about marathons and half marathons that are out there that you could go and and and ask get a table. Maybe there are some, you know, because if you're looking at local community areas for clubs that do running events. Think about
local high schools and track coaches. Think about cross country coach at your local high schools. Think about cultivating the relationships with the runners of those groups with the kids. Now think of a a camp is probably
if I if I remember right, you know, you're you're doing youth events. You can also think about you because youth groups and youth education. There are churches involved in that too. So cultivate these relationships by letting everybody know about your little run, letting them know about about what you're gonna have going on in that 1st 6 month mark, and then learn from that environment.
Learn about setting up the course in time. Learn about registration and how you have to paperwork in time. Learn about results and how you have to have timing and the way you have to have timing. Learn about the things you're missing for the bigger event. Because the bigger event, if it grows to the size in what you want it to, is gonna require a they want 2 the 2 x or 3 x expansion of your race, but the mechanics are all the same.
I mean, you can't rule out the power of the quick win by having a little group a little event and build, dig your core team and give them the experience of running this race because now you all have something to base off of when you guys have the conversation for the big race and you will cultivate relationships and you can leverage for the big race coming up and you create your own marketing event that you control
that becomes the feeder for the big event. In fact, you could even go as far as offer lottery tickets for the big event or even give away a event registration for some of the top riders and then start to go out bigger. A good way to go out bigger is every year a trail runner magazine puts out the calendar of the year of all their trail events.
Go put in your your big event into that race and throw in the little 1 too. You never know. So think about the expansion in that way of if you're gonna do a big event that having little events lead up to that big event builds you the momentum that you need. And having 12 months to work and then 6 months to kind of work out the the kinks in the middle will give you a huge advantage when you your big event. And I hope I hope your big event is awesome. Oklahoma is a little far for me, but man, if I'm in the area, I would definitely come check you out. Anyway, I hope that helps out, Sam.
And now it's time to pack it up with some final thoughts.
So I hope you found listening to what other race directors and event managers are talking about and thinking about and kind of the the thought process that goes in answering their questions. I hope you found that interesting. And maybe you can apply it to your own outdoor business. This is the the kind of thing that if you go to emergency journalists in the past the past episodes or go to wrecking her.com and read some of the articles there. This is the kind of advice, this kind of coaching advice that will give you the strategies and tactics that you need to build better outdoor events. So I hope you go there and and and and peruse
Jesus. Dozens and dozens of articles
read this as episode 42 with the virtues of dirt So, you know, there is a whole back catalog of merged into episodes to take a listen to. And as we roll into the new year, now is the time to start thinking about not only your dates for the for what races and what venues you want for the coming year, but start thinking about some of your goals, some of the things you need to be looking forward to. And this goes this goes to into the final thought of thinking about what do you want to achieve in 2018?
If 2017 taught you anything of your failures or even your successes,
you know, take credit for your successes, that you did well and did things well, and build upon the great things that you did that maybe you didn't think you could do. And think about the things that didn't work, the failures that that that happened, the races you had to cancel the events that just weren't up to par and why they weren't up to par, the things that went wrong, and think how you can use those to build your better events for 2018.
As we come to the end of the year, everyone always gets into this mode of thinking about what I could do better. What's the things I wanna do better? And I think that if you do 3 things, do 3 things for me as you're coming into after the Christmas into the New Year's season, I want you to think about 3 ways you can improve your business.
Just 3. It's a pretty pretty easy thing you can do. Think of 3 things you can do. Maybe it's better gear. Maybe it's volunteer outreach getting more volunteers to come. Maybe it's a better venue selection.
Maybe it's better emergency response. Or communications on the field. Maybe you need to buy some radios. Maybe you think about your emergency plans that need to be better than they were last year, newer than 2017, for 2018. How would you think about those 3 goals? Think about 3 goals that will help you improve your events going in 2018.
Second thing I want you to do, I want you to write those goals down. Write them down. There's a lot of evidence out there. You could go. There's a lot of go. Gurus out there. It'll tell you about what to do. But writing them down, physically writing them down, not typing, physically write them down on a 3 f5 index card. Write those goals down. Achievable. You think those achievable goals down on on those cards. Think about the things you can improve. And the third thing I want you to do is
every day you get out, do you get up, get out of bed? I want you to look at those goals. Every time you go to a plan a race or plan an event, I want you to look at those goals and see if where you can make those goals fit into what you're doing right now. So if it's better communications, where in the event that you're planning right now, better communications will fit in. Do those 3 things.
3 goals, write them down, read them every day so that you're thinking about them as you plan your events, and you'd be surprised what you would accomplish 2018. It might even be your best year ever, and now you know. Thank you so much for listening to the Berkshire podcast, and I wish you a very merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and happy holidays for all the listeners
who who come and and listen to me talk and rant and and save all my weird stuff and talk about it racing and just get in deep into this into this topic. I hope that that your family is together and that you have good tidings going into the new year. I hope that 2018 is the year where you have some of your best events ever. So I going into 2018,
the next episode, we're gonna go off Yeah. I won't Roy won't be expert episode 43 will probably come out till probably the 2nd week in January. We're gonna take 2 weeks off. The little vacation has been some family time. And when we come back, we're gonna come back hard. We're gonna talk about some some new changes to the merchandiser podcast. Some of the new things are coming out. Got get lost racing coming out. The new season of that. I'm going to premier believe on January, January 8, that'll be coming out. If you wanna go to get lost racing .com and look at the 12 episodes out for that, I'm gonna have 12 new episodes coming out for get lost racing, which would be kinda cool, and a few cool new things, some pivots, some thinking about how to really dig deep into outdoor
outdoor business, and we're gonna make 2018 a great year. I really wanna thank you for being a listener. Thank you for coming and listening to me talk about these things. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you guys reaching out. And again, if you want, you have a question over the over the holiday that you want answered or something that you want me to talk about, [email protected],
or hit me up on Twitter at merchandisingdirt. If you have a question, let me know. I would love to help you make your events better and here's a 2018, and we'll we'll talk to you next year. Until then, take care, and thank you for listening to the merchandiser podcast. I love it when my kids were growing up when I used to live in Hawaii when I was in the US Navy. It used to be this Christmas Carol 12 days of Christmas. And instead of 5 golden rings, it was £5 of Apu.
That's the tuna. I still remember that to this day, and that was, wow, over 20 years ago. So find your £5 of Apu because that's the tuna, and that's what you need to have to make a Christmas great, especially if you live in Hawaii. Take care.