Today on the merch is a dirt podcast episode number 49. If you're a race director, you do everything. You are the talent. You are the organization. You are the management. You are the garbage collector. You're everything. What if you don't want to be everything? What if you want to actually do some things and not do other things? Can that be done? We're gonna find out.
Thank you for joining me for the Merchant of DIRTT podcast. I am Kyle Bondo, and I take the mystery out of outdoor race direction. Alongside me, as always, is my fictional cohost, mister Murphy, who helps me see the things that can go wrong and will go wrong in your race strategy. And together, we help you build better races. And today, we're gonna talk about race support services.
This is an industry that exists to make racing easier for you. You might think of this as outsourcing or as hiring a vendor or a contract support. But how whatever you call it, what it really is is relief. It is a race director's way of saying, I don't have to do that thing. So what are the race support services that exist for racing? What is the industry that sprung up? It's really kind of a support services
industry all to its own. Sure, you've got races and race directors and the people involved in actually production of the race. But there's all these other companies that help a race director become successful. What are those? We're gonna talk about 7 of those today. These are 7 different race support services that are important to getting races done. Now, this also includes
the ability to pay for these kind of services. Are they worth the cost? By spending that kind of money, do you get a a return on investment, an ROI back that makes it worthwhile to do these do these kind of, you know, these extracurricular or extra business expenses and allow another company to take some of the burden off you in your race production.
Is it worth it? And that's really kind of the core question to ask yourself, when you're thinking about race support services, is it worth spending that money? Well, if you think about what is it that you're actually getting the value from? Now, the first resource you have to consider is, of course, time. If you have a race support service, do something that saves you time. That could be a huge value. That could be a huge asset to your race production efforts. Nothing is better than having
some time back that you don't have to worry about something that's being taken care by someone else. That's probably the first thing to consider. The second thing you have to consider is quality.
Just because you can hire somebody else to do the work, is it worth it? Is the quality of the product they're gonna produce something that will work for you? Now we'll get into this a little bit later on some of these other services on how quality really matters. There are certain things that you do and you do very well that maybe you shouldn't hire out. And maybe it's something that's quality where if this goes wrong, your whole race is in trouble.
You don't wanna, of course, hire somebody that you don't have a you don't have a relationship with, that you don't have the they don't have a reputation for being a quality service. But even if they do and they go wrong, how is that gonna impact your entire race? So there's that whole vetting process of understanding the quality. There's no Angie's list for race direction or for race
support services. You can't just go online and find out whether or not these companies are good or not good because it doesn't really exist. And if I wanna hire a plumber or I wanna hire a carpenter or an electrician, have those things exist. Long care people, those things exist. Cleaners or even food, I can go and see ratings for those services. But some of these services that are particularly geared towards racing that rating system doesn't exist. There is no Hengji's list. There is no Yelp
for getting some of these services in place. And that's a huge problem when you're thinking about hiring some of these these services. And you're gonna have to really do your homework. Is the quality up to your standards? That's a key question to ask. And finally, is cost. Can you afford to actually outsource this? Does it actually make you money? Does hiring on a service make you look more professional and in turn bring in more people, more customers to your event.
And if that's the case, then maybe hiring out certain aspects of your race saves you money. And when we say saving money, we're talking about race business sense, we're talking about making profit. If I can hire out an existing service, I don't have to worry about, that I don't have to staff, that I don't have to to be concerned about all the the small minutiae little details in the gear and poweros. I think they come self contained in the service. Maybe
that makes a level of professionalism for my race that brings people to my race. And we'll get into some of those services are even for particular. We're talking, of course, timing has a big part of that, but there are a couple others too. That's a key 1. And finally, you think about time, quality, money. The final 1, of course, is people. Now sometimes, you can't hire a staff. Sometimes,
volunteers don't show up or do what they need to do or what you want them to do. Sometimes, you need some hired guns in We call this, you need some mercenaries, you need some hired guns, you need some talent that just shows up for this particular event and this particular event only. This is hired hired staff, and maybe you don't want to deal with payroll expenses and employment
tax and health care and benefits and those kind of things. You wanna hire a contractor to bring his own or her own staff in and do some of the heavy lifting and some of the manpower and woman power stuff themselves that all you have to do is just direct them in the right place. They take care of everything else and you have a nicely run race based off higher help that you don't actually have a staff
you're kind of the prime, if you would. The prime contractor. You're the the client that needs the service done of strictly speaking human bodies doing things that you need done without worrying about all the other administ trivia that it comes with having employments or employers. You could be a you could be a a vendor of 1. It could be your whole job to set up races, to think about races, to plan races, and then you outsource all the manpower to someone else.
That could be that could be done too. So think about when we go through these these 7 industries that I wanna talk about today, think about each 1 of those whether or not they're worth your time, they have a quality that you can control, it's worth your cost, the expense that you can actually justify, and whether or not it's something that you really should have staff for, or it's okay to hire out. So let's let's get into race support services.
Okay. The first industry you really have to think about when you're outsourcing race support services is marketing. Now, what can marketers do for you? Well, there's a very there's a whole bunch of different levels of marketing that you could really consider. Now, let's think about the what's the lowest point of entry for marketing that you can think of. And of course, it has to do with signage.
These are people that can create posters and signs and arrows and maybe even flags and teardrop flags and banner ad flags these are the kind of people that can produce those vinyl plastic. They're kind of plastic. I don't know if they're they're plastic or they're kind of vinally looking things. This is stuff that's it's it's it's like a an advertisement
that has eyelets in the corners and this big rectangular thing that you can put your your company logo across the front, or maybe it says starch or finish or and register here, and then you could hang it over a table. Some of the people call it bunting, some people call it banners. It's this is signage in general. So think about that as your marketing efforts is at some point in your race business, you're gonna have to start buying some signs and you have to buy some signs that aren't
the though, you know, something you created in PowerPoint or Word and print it off in your printer. And they went down to Kinko's and print it off a whole bunch on cardboard. The things that you do for every race that's kind of expendable. Like arrows. Arrows is a perfect example. Course marking stuff. Chances are you don't create those that are reusable.
Because why? Well, because mister Murphy loves to go through your go through your cores and pull them down. It would really suck to have 3 or 400 of those made that are reusable, that he just destroys and gets rid of. But you could do that. You could make them plastic. They could be easily renewable. Think about the kind of things you could do. Maybe if you have a a park or you want to really kind of establish a principle within your racing business as being environmentally friendly.
Now, what do I mean by that? Well, chances are if you've ever hung arrows on a course, especially a forcing course, you use 1 or 2 different methods of playing in the hanging that arrow. Either you put it on a stake and you attach the arrow to stake and hammer into the ground. That's usually method number 1.
But you can't do that for every aspect of the course. Essentially, if you're riding a mountain bike, it's hard to see arrows way down low. And you don't wanna be, you know, kind of, pulling around hundreds of wooden stakes. Why? Well, first off, they're bulky. Second off, they're really heavy. You're gonna need a truck or a trailer to do all that. If you're bootstrapping this or maybe your truck and trailer's already full of old bunch of other stuff, packet around steaks
is really not something you wanna be doing. Now, granted you get some plastic ones, you can work with those. But you're gonna have to have a lot of steaks. So what's the second way? Well, the second way is what most people do is they have a staple gun or they have a set of, you know, some small tack nails. Let's tack into a tree. Now some people be like, oh my gosh, the tree. Oh, he pillows paint.
Their trees. Basically, they're they're they're grass with bark that grows really high. They can take it. They grow the the the hole that arrows go into. It grows right back. It's not that the tree can take it. It's not gonna hurt them. But let's say you think it's gonna hurt them. Okay. And there's some people out there that think that put in tax in staple military is horrific. I get that. I get understand. Okay? Not judging anybody.
So what if you caught Velcro straps or bungees, and you created a whole set of arrows that you wanted to to build reusable arrow system that you could wrap around a tree that didn't hurt the tree at all. Now, some parks might not let you race if you're gonna tack stuff up, but if you had reusable arrows might, so there might be some strategic value in that. Another strategic value could be is that you don't have to print arrows every single year.
Know unless you've got a mister Murphy. And hopefully, if mister Murphy sees something like that, maybe he'll be able he'll think twice. Because maybe the whole reason he pulls your arrows down is because you staple them into the tree. So consider these kind of options. That signage is the marketing level. The marketing base level kind of thing. The second thing up from in marketing was websites. Now if I am an IT guy, building websites is a piece of cake, WordPress installation, no problem.
Implying a theme, front end, back end, PHP, coding, not a problem. Content, contribute you'll contribute in content to a website, adding photos, all that kind of thing, can do that in my sleep. However, there are a few people like me. So websites are a challenge, especially when you start considering things like Squarespace
or WordPress engine or some of the other, you know, pre made out of the box type environments that go daddy and some of the other Bluehost and those kind of people. Start to pitch you, that they can get really expensive, really fast. So a marketing firm or a marketing group or even just a small time, you know, ad ad service can create tiny websites
for an additional cost, and we're talking we're at the mid level now. Normally a website that you get that's kinda custom, that's sort of works, will cost you about about $3. That's a pretty decent price out of the box for something very plain Jane vanilla race website. Now, of course, you could go on to Squarespace or something like that and pay what is it? 25 or $35 a month.
If you think about that, you add all that up, that comes out to be about 200 or something whatever a year, if you had that website up. Okay, sure. And you can add some stuff to it. But say, you wanna expand it, you wanna take it somewhere else, you want a domain name change, you wanna you wanna move around, you grow your company, you can't really take that stuff off Squarespace or even that theme off Squarespace and put it someplace else. So you're limited.
Having out of the box cookie cutter stuff like Squarespace or Webex or Wix or something like that, works. If you're first starting out, you just need something up and quick and dirty. But eventually, your business has to grow up. And the maturity of that business requires a website that isn't something like a cookie cutter out of the box, something a little more custom and something that you can control a lot better. And that will require an expense.
So websites become a huge marketing thing that you need to worry about when you're you're thinking about races because you want to have some place where the results can be every year you want some place where you can start posting photos, you want something something centralized that people can come back to all the time. That is a service that you can buy to help your company look more professional. So what's the final? What's the highest tier of marketing? Well, of course that's ad campaigns.
Now, this is like a strategic marketing company. Now, let me explain if some people who don't maybe not understand how a strategic marketing company works. I think this is, you know, Kyle's former life, I worked for a company that did things just like this. And what it is is you walk in and you say I want to sell x. What do I do?
And the strategic marketers sit around, you have designers, you have web developers, you have ad writers, copy writers, you have all sorts of creatives in the room, and they start considering what kind of marketing campaign they can build for you. Now, at the low end, we're talking on a race versus a Super Bowl ad. You're talking about things like, gotta have a website.
You're gonna need a logo. You're gonna need some branding around that logo. There's a color palette that goes with that. You need some copy written about that logo, what the venue, about the experience people are gonna have. It's all sales. They're trying to build a campaign
around what it is you need is a centralized place, a place you want. What's the thing you want someone to do? Which, of course, is sign up for your race and attend it. And have a great time and come back. Right? That's kind of the thing you want to do. So you need to start funneling This is where the ad campaign people come into. Funnel people into that final sale. Well, how do you capture those people?
Well, there's a social media aspect to that. Ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. You're starting to get people on social media. There is print advertisement where you start working with magazines and you start working with newspapers to try to get people local in that area or depending on the demographic you're looking for, maybe there's some targeted
style of magazines and stuff you're trying to get into. So you want to sort of bring in people in that way. And of course, there's a street campaign going on as well.
This is where you are advertising at other races, at places, at activities, and fitness events at rec centers, you're even hitting local businesses, coffee shops, gyms, you start to start to go out to the trail, you start to the street campaign, partnered with your print campaign, partnered with your social media campaign, and it could even be radio, it could even be TV, it can get really big. Heck, you could even have If you've been to the movie theater lately, you'll notice,
wow, I went and saw Solo a Star Wars story, and let me tell you. The 15 commercials that I see on my local TV were on my movie screen I watched commercials for car companies and, you know, 15 minutes will save you 15% and all that other garbage. On my movie screen, well, I'm enjoying my popcorn. Whatever happened to that, you know, like, show me behind the scenes and actors talking things like that. Well, that's the other theater. You're at the commercial theater.
Right? Well, go to the theater lately and you'll see that some of those ads, if you're sitting in the theater, boom, someone will pop up and will say, you know, run the The rabbit run 5 k next week. Go to this website. That's part of an ad campaign. If you open a magazine, a trail runner is perfect example of this trail runner magazine. Usually once a year, twice a year, has a huge calendar events of all the trail runs are gonna happen with The United States.
You want to be in that calendar. Well, campaigns require timing, which means you are trying to target particular types of people, get particular demographics of people, who do certain things that also associate with what your race is about.
And you have to do that in a timely manner because as they say, they used to say 7 to 9 impressions if someone actually makes a sale, Now it's like because of the static and there was this amount of campaigning out there, the advertisement stuff is just bananas. It's like 17 to 20. They get people do that. That's all part of a campaign. And they're not cheap. They're not $3,000 websites or a couple $100 for signage. You're talking
a campaign can really start to run you $5 up. And $5 is for like the bare bones. You might get some stuff you might not. Some of these ad campaigns are huge. Super Bowl. Think about the Super Bowl ad kind of thing. It's kinda like I mean, that's like reaching the top. Of course, Super Bowl ads are retarded. But they're I love watching them, but as a as a actual marketing strategy, they're horrible. Anyway, that's the outsourcing of marketing. That's the huge
stuff a bunch of stuff that exists inside marketing that isn't racing. All it is is getting people to your race. Or maybe under some elements within the race itself. So that's marketing. What's the second 1? The second 1, online registration. And this is different than websites. And I wanna make that delineation very clear. Is it online online registration? Is taking money over the Internet. That's really all it is. And what does that involve?
Well, there are all sorts of sites out there and there are lots of companies out there now that all the whole job is to help you get an event set up so that people can pay money to you, get a ticket and show up. Now, it spans all sorts of things. There's like brown bag tickets. There's event bright. Those are kind of like ticketing, just a ticketing, generalized ticketing for just about any kind of event possible. Then you have very race specific. You have active and you have
bike reg or athlete reg or ski reg. There's the whole athlete reg type system and there's several others that you could go on Google, type in online registration, bang, they pop up. So I don't need to go into a huge detail on all those things. Let's just give you the idea of what it is. I have an event and I want people to pay me money before they show up and I wanna do it over the Internet because that's the easiest way. And I don't wanna take just cash
I don't wanna take checks ever. Don't ever take checks. But I want another way. People are using plastic all the time and I can't necessarily take a credit card or a debit card while I'm out on the course. Now, if I'm in a location that allows me to use something like square or swipe or something like that out there, and maybe that's a possibility, but let's say for the sake of argument, you're in a remote area where you have no internet connectivity. So basically, you're taking cash.
That is the reality of your race efforts. It's cash only business at at the race on race day. Now, before race day, you want to give every opportunity for them to pay you. And not just credit card or debit card, but PayPal and some of the other elements that they can use in order to protect their transaction and provide a race entry pay for race entry without having to worry about it getting kind of, you know, worrying about race day or day of type payments.
That is the whole point of these systems. Now some can integrate into your website itself. You can actually put in modules where when you want these, they hit registration, it looks like they're still on your website, and they pay for their race registration right there. However, those are expensive. Those are not cheap.
Some of them require a fee. There's a plug in cost. There's all sorts of other up up themselves. But what's the advantage of the online registration? Well, the first off is you don't need a merchant account. You don't need to to worry about collecting Visa or Mastercard or Discover Card or any of those kind of of hackable things. It's not your concern. You don't collect credit card information at all. All you could collect is the final dollars.
That's it. That's the advantage. It gets you completely out of the banking problem. You'll let someone else handle the banking. That is really it. Additionally, those kind of services can help you sell other things. What kind of other things are that? Hats, t shirts, extra maps, donations, maybe you're doing charity event and they want them to donate things to that race, maybe you're selling 1 day licenses.
Some events like USA Cycling or some of the event you're racing events that require licenses in order to participate, you don't want them to show up on race day and you tell them, oh, the race is $30. Like, oh, okay. Cool. And an additional $10 for the license. Yeah. That's the worst thing to find out because they saw the race registration. They took $30 out of the ATM. They showed up with their $30. Oh, by the way, there's this extra 1 day license thing. It's an extra $10.
Oh, I didn't bring $10. Well, then you can't race. Now, if I ever if I ever had that happen? Yeah. It happens all the time. A lot of times, it's on our system. You know, just go you know, hit me up after the race, just bring it back over, or sometimes you just wave it. Some people are just like, oh, right? And you don't want them to go away. So you'll just let them go in. Right? You basically pay for it out of your own pocket. That happens. That's just part of racing. Sometimes
that happens. Now if it happens too much, then you have to, like, you know, like, okay. Wait. Whoa. Whoa. We gotta take care of this. But that is what online registration stuff can do for you is it can take care of all that extra minutia that you wanna deal with. And on top of that collect a bunch of money for you before the race starts that you get distributions from. This is the advantage of online registration. Now, what are some of the disadvantages of online registration?
They come with fees. They're not cheap. Some of them are free to use by you, the race director, because they want to advertise your race on there to get people to use their software. But then they turn around and charge the racer a fee for using the online service and like a convenience fee. This can be a problem for you. I'm talking about that quality of service is when it's $30, well, no, not really. It's $33.95.
And then some services on top of just adding that extra little bit, they want you to be a member of their little race registration click. So they can send you a bunch of advertisements via email. They want you to sign up for their magazine subscription they're running on the side and their webinars and all the other junk they have.
That comes with all this onerous stuff that your customer now just got penalized with almost to the point where people see which online registration service you're using and then don't wanna come to your race just because of that quality. Quality can hurt you. If you don't understand how the service works, if you've never used the service before, You should, by all means,
use this service in conjunction with another race. Sign up for another race. Find something cheap, 20 to 5 k or a little mountain bike ride or something on a trail run. And use this service to see what it's like. What's the customer experience like to go through the online registration to get to the other end?
Is it a bunch of upsell? And afterwards, did you get spam your inbox of all this other stuff? You know, sign up for a club, come to, you know, here's a bunch of other races they want you to go to that aren't even in your state. Things like that can really repel people quality.
So think about that. When you're thinking about online registration, yes. It's convenient. Yes. It helps you collect money early. Yes. You can take care of some of them initially. You don't wanna take care of that on race day would be a surprise to people. But there is a dark side to it that you have to really put into your equation if you decide to use 1 of these things. So what's the third 1? Well, the third 1 is your venue equipment.
Now, most racers, if you're like me, you have a garage full of odds and ends. I have pop up tents and I have tables and I have folding camp chairs and I have tripods for the sound system and stakes and a ton of other things.
That go into racing. Wheelbarrels and shovels and axes and those kind of things because, you know, tree always seems to fall, you know, does a tree fall in the woods? Is it wreck your race? Yes. Absolutely, it does. You need to have the ability to react to all that stuff. So you sometimes you have to carry a bunch of what ifs or just in cases
which can really bog down the amount of equipment you can you can load. Now I have an SUV, but my SUV is not like an SUV. It's like an SUV. Right? It doesn't carry as much equipment as I would like it to.
Which in case limits the amount of stuff I can take out to the venue. Now if you listened to this past episode where I talked about some venue areas that you can consider or even in the wreckinggear.com, there's some articles talking about, you know, you could, you know, put your own little boxes out there, buy a trailer, things like that. Sure. But sometimes, venue equipment is just too much. You have a venue. It's just so big. You cannot possibly bring enough equipment for it.
Case in point, if you're running any kind of a venture race or triathlon, a lot of these more professional races have bike racks. And this is kind of like a You think of it as kind of a style, what do you call it a hurdle? Like a really long hurdle. It's like a bar with a 2 lay with some legs on either end, where if you take your bike, you can hang it on your seat. I recently did the Quantico 50.
A 50 mile course out at Quantico Marine Corps Base. And they have these all over the place, which are these pipes that sit on these little tripod or these little bipods and either end to, like, either the stands. And you can hang, I don't know, 6 to 10 bikes off this. They're really kind of they're they're not complicated, but they're made of steel. They're incredibly heavy.
Now how do you get a whole bunch of those out to a venue? Well, you might be able to rent a new haul or maybe have a big truck that you could do all this in. But if the vent gets really big, how are you gonna deal with this? How about venue size for tents? Pop up tents are great, but they're made of metal, you know, usually aluminum. And they take up a lot of space and they're not light.
And enough of these can really weigh down a vehicle, especially if all the other stuff in there and you get coolers and water and all that stuff, you know, you really don't have no room for all this stuff. So what am I getting at here? Well, you could really start outsourcing your venue equipment. Tents and tables are probably something that are the easiest to get from. Now think of, think of services. You know, we're talking about the generalization of services. Think of weddings.
How many wedding and wedding planners and wedding equipment places do you know of that have tents and tables and chairs that they use for all sorts of weddings? How about even those those like bouncy castles or the rock climbing people? Usually, those rental companies have a ton of equipment just laying around.
Because they're doing a wedding here this day, wedding that day, but there's stuff in the middle, and they're always looking for group deals, group discounts, they're they're trying to 1 up each other because there's a bunch of different rental places out there offering different different types of services and different, you know, different quality of event, you know, I want a 10 by 10 tent, or do I want a 100 by a 100 tent?
You know, like a circus tent kind of thing. Those are the kind of things you're looking for. You can outsource all your tents, all your tables. You could set it up like a wedding in a sense, but really it's a race where you just have tables lined up because these people are event planners or event equipment providers.
So tents and tables and chairs are probably the easiest. So think about what you could do with this. Is rather than just have like your registration tent and maybe your tent for where you keep the water and then that's it. Maybe the outsourcing then becomes, now you have your cooling tip. Maybe you have a venue that's really super hot. I have 1 of those, which in August and September with the wolf bouncer, is out at Laurel Hill Park in Northern Virginia.
And for some reason, it seems like every time that race happens, the sun and it's probably because it used to be a farm. Actually used to be a prison with a prison farm on it, but the farm part is where the mountain bike trails are at. And because it's the farm part, you understand why that was a really great place for a farm because the sun rises in the old, rises in the East and sets in the West. That how that works? Bing. Bing. Yeah. And cooks that pork like a piece of bacon and a frying pan.
It is that's probably the biggest challenge in that park. The trails aren't tough. It's not super technical. There are some hills and some climbs, and it's gas, it's kinda grabbyly. It's that sun. Because you're in the woods, you're nice and cool, but most of that course is out in this rolling prairie land that just cooks you. It cooks you like a piece of bacon. So just thawed off top my head. Maybe it's this is the year to find a rental company that can provide tents and tables.
I think it's about a cooling area. That might be a cool thing. And if the price is right, it might be something worthwhile that I could get a lot of value out of because it's a place where people can just relax. Oh, you know, not so hot. Now, what's the disadvantage of that? Well, some of these tens and tables are huge.
So you're gonna need some spots to set that up in, and that, of course, requires you to have space in your venue. Now a lot of times, the only space you really have in a venue is parking. You have to worry about where you're gonna put this thing. So you really have to understand the dynamics of it might not be so economical to buy a tent that is small. You may have to get a really big 1. If you get a really big 1, you're gonna need some space. That's the first part of it. What about power?
Now, you can go down to Home Depot or Lowe's and rent generators. And some of these generators are nice. They're the quiet ones that purr in the distance and you don't really hear them and they're the big metal rack ones. They use for, like, disaster relief or, you know, they're they're using as a sub pump to pump out water in a flood zone. They're surrounded in a roll cage. And then there's, like, oh, they're so loud. But It's power.
Now, what if you don't have a generator? Or, you know, mister Murphy comes along and, you know, helps himself to your generator? Now, power
definitely is an advantage when you're out there, especially with computers and timing, things like that. You're gonna need some power. You can rent power. You can even rent the cables that go with the power. All the plugs and extension cords that you need to power everything up, you can rent that too. It comes as almost you start as like a a a a la carte grab bag of rental equipment that you can have. Something even better is there are some places that will wrench you. Start and finish arches.
The big huge gangplank kind of the, you know, the balloon thing that says, you know, start or finish, if you have 1 of those kind of races where you need a big starting line or a big finish line, you can rent those things. They're inflatable. They're huge. Now,
go back to the marketing thing. You can buy your own and put your own signage and your own logo and branding on it and that would be your own. They're expensive but you could do that or you could rent 1 and who cares if it's a start and nothing else and it's just green and it's just gonna
It's still if that's the ambiance you want for your starter finish, you can go rent those things. And you could even the more you get and the more venue equipment you can have starts to become a bundle where these companies because they're gonna haul all that stuff in the first place, they would love to only barc the price up a little bit more if they're hauling more stuff out there. Because they might they might charge you a $100 for a tent, but they'll charge you a $100 and plus a $150
to bring on a start and finish, where individually those things might be way more than that. As a package, you might be able to get a deal. And even better, if you start to use them as a, you know, as a favorite vendor, if you start to consider them, it's like, you know what? I've got 5. I've got 10 events. I've got 20 events. I'd like you to be my key event. Then you can start doing something that businesses business to business can do, that individual of business really can't.
And that's get group discounts or get vendor specific contracts. This is where they know that they're going to be a part of your event for the next 20 events and you're going to use them and them alone exclusively for that event. And maybe if you hire them only 1 offs for 20 events. It would cost you, let's say, $10
because you use them and then you take your stuff back and you call them back, you get another reservation, you use them again, take their stuff back. It's only individual contracts that you're doing with 1 offs. So If you added all that up, maybe that's $10. But if you tell them, I want you to be my exclusive exclusive vendor, give me a bid for how much you would charge me for 20 events. They might come back at 7000 dollars or $8,000 to do all your events.
Because you're using them exclusively, now you just saved yourself a bunch of money. And maybe you do the 1 offs find that quality. Maybe you find that quality. But what happens when you discover that you find a company that is not only their their quality is a impeccable, but their timing is impeccable too. They show up early. They set up a day before. They bring their own people to tear down a setup, you're gonna have to do that yourself.
Now you start to see the advantages of having a bunch of gear that you don't even own, that you don't have to worry about, that you have to haul, You tell them the date and the venue, they show up, they set it up, you use it, they come back, they tear it down, off they go. You've probably already done this before and didn't even realize you did it. You've probably done this with porta potties. Porta Potties are probably the number 1 venue equipment rental that you use at an event.
You call them up, you tell them you have an event, you say say how many and what you need? I need to. They bring them out to your event for like a 170, $200.
You get 2 porta potties at your event. They people use them because man, people really appreciate porta potties. Trust me. That is key. And then they come and pick them up. You don't have to worry about cleaning them. You don't have to worry about all your news. Just keep them safe. That's it. To make sure no 1 vandalizes them. But even then, a lot of times, it's usually insured. I mean, they're plastic boxes with with, you know, poo in them. They're really not really that sophisticated.
Unfortunately, at 1 of the parks last year, some vandals lit 1 on fire. You know what a porta potty looks like after it's burned? It looks like a slag of molten plastic with a metal cage. That's it. There's nothing to them. They can build a porta potty in like 20 minutes. It's really not that difficult to build 1. So a lot of times they're insured. So you have those kind of advantages
of a little bit insurance to cover a porta potty. Okay? So you get mister Murphy out there wanting to burn your porta potties down. But you can do that with your porta potties. If you have a whole group of events, you can start getting Seasonal contracts. You can start getting better rates business to business rates. You can start getting preferred customer rates where you use them and no 1 else. And then you can go and can remember it's business, not personal, it's business.
You can then go and find out other places to see whether or not they can beat that price. Because now you have something to work with. Now you know vendor a is gonna give it to you for 7,000, but vendor b's gonna give you for 6,500. Is that extra $500 off worth it? You know the reputation of vendor a? Not sure about vendor b. Sometimes under pricing the competition doesn't really guarantee you good quality. So think about that as you put that in your equation.
Alright. What's our next 1? Let's go to number 4. On-site chip timing. This is a biggie. Timing is a huge element of your race. It requires you to have your game face on when it comes to timing. Because the last thing you want is this to go wrong. A race without timing or timing that's working correctly can ruin your event. However, having precision timing is priceless.
Now let's talk about chip timing really quick. There's a couple of different companies that are around in the Mid Atlantic area that do this, where there's a lot of moving parts and timing. It's not just kind of a 1 and done thing. Where if you want a timing company to come, it's not going to be cheap. Let's consider what goes into the timing. If you think about it, first off, you've got chips.
They come somewhere between a dollar 50 to about $3 a chip, depending on where they're coming from, the quality of that chip. They then have to be adhered to a bib number. So there's a couple different variations of this where you can buy them already on the bibs, or if you have your own bibs, then they have to be connected to the bib. That takes time.
Then you have a registration element of this because then you have to make sure that you have the chips on the bib numbers that are connected to your data, your computer, So they understand which chip is on which bib so that when they rank it and actually go through and the sensor detects the the chip that you get a good read and you know which person actually crossed the finish line, that's key.
Then on top of all that, you need the finish line, which is usually a whole group of sensors, the whole gantry of sensors. And you're talking about radio frequency identification that has all this electromagnetic stuff going on, or near field communications, another way you could put this. Where the chip has to be usually
impacted by electromagnetic activity. That's usually how they work. They're passive chips. There really is nothing to them. There's a bunch of wires that it can control a number, a sequence of numbers. And what happens is when they get into this electromagnetic field, there are some some electrons get that chip and it gets all excited enough enough juice to go, I'm 1 1 3 1 3. And the computer goes, oh, I read that. And now I know 11313 is Kyle. And he just crossed at 31 25.
That's really how it works. Really that simple. Now, what's the advantages of that? Well, I don't need a timing team. I don't really need paper backup, although I should have them because, you know, 2 is 1 1 is done. Right? And what's a worse than 1 thing that could possibly go wrong at a race. When you're out in the middle of nowhere, it's gonna be electronics. Mister Murphy loves smashing your electronic sweat sweet.
So that's gonna be a really big problem. You have to worry about whether or not your systems go stays up. Right? But let's say let's say it's for the sake of argument, it stays up. You get all these reads happening. You get all these people coming through. You need this minimal staff. Or even better, the timing will come with their own staff.
They do all your timing. You don't worry about. They worry about the backups that's a heap of paper. They're using the camera to watch the bibs. They're recording it all. And then 5 seconds later, they're pumping it out as a result on a big screen TV that they also brought. And then they're giving you paper copies. You have all of that done
for you. You don't have to worry about a thing. They show up with their trailer. They show up their equipment. They have their own generator. They have their own people. They have their own system. As long as you get the registration squared away, and everyone gets a chip correctly on a Bib number, Bob's your uncle. That's the advantage to having precision timing, a chip timing at your event. Huge huge advantage
makes you look like a pro. It makes you look like the Boston marathon in the woods. It really does. When you show up to an event and you see chip timing and you see a big screen TV with with rankings and you see your name on that screen, the quality of that event just went up 2 points. I guarantee you. Every event I've been at that has a chip timing system that shows chip timing and it's working correctly and you get to see your results live seconds after you cross the finish line,
that is a huge advantage. You cannot underestimate the ROI of that kind of thing. Now, what's the dark side of timing they don't tell you about? Well, I already told you about the quirks that happened in registration. What about the quirks that happened at the finish line? Now, again, mister Murphy loves the mash with all sorts of cool stuff. He loves to wreck things. And the number of thing he likes to wreck is that electromagnetic activity on that chip.
Because some chips, they're broken. Maybe you fell and you smashed it. And you broke some of the little connectors in there, and it doesn't actually send off a signal. Or it's covered with gunk and the electromagnetic doesn't electromagnetic sensitivity doesn't go through it. And a lot of chip people say, well, you couldn't do that. Well, yeah, you can.
Because in some parks that used to be pirate minds or used to have iron ore everywhere, you can really start screwing stuff up or maybe they set up the finish line right there under an iron plate and nothing reads right all day long and it's total chaos or better yet. About when it's a 120 degrees outside and their fan system isn't keeping things cool and the computers keep crashing. That's happened too. These are all from experience, not from it could happen. These are experience.
We've I've been in races and I have worked with crews and on teams and with companies that have had these problems. This is the downside of the chip timing as chips fail, reads fail, chips fail, electromagnetic activity fails, sunspots, weird stuff with the environment, rain, sun, all of that plays a factor. If you have a perfect day with a perfect system and a perfect location, you can have a really good race. But
How often do we have those even without chip timing? So put that into your equations. There is a dark side to this. There is a risk involved with precision timing like this, which is usually why they have backups because the last thing they wanna do is come out there, charge you a bunch of money, and then not be able to give you results.
So you put the onus, you put that risk, you mitigate that by making them responsible for it. And you can just tell racers, oh, no, racing people, they screwed it up. Well, is that really an excuse? That goes to that that quality again. How much quality are you getting out of a race timing service that has this problem? Because it really only takes 1 mess up like that to wreck your reputation. You could really hurt yourself, you know, your business reputation
by hiring a company that doesn't perform like they said they were gonna perform. So just remember all that. K? And in understanding that, the 1 thing you also have to consider that's really kind of an important thing when it comes to race timing, is cost. They're not cheap. Like I said, how many people are gonna have your race? Let's say it's 200. You chips are $2 a pop. How much money is that?
Now you have the timing equipment. They have a charge. Usually they charge you for the using the software. Like $600. Right? So that's a thousand dollars. Plus on top of that, yeah, how many how many that 200? What if you what if you just spend a bunch of money and you only have a 100 razors show up? Now you have a bunch of chips you never used. Guess who gets to pay for all that? They don't pay for the chips that they got used. You you have to actually pay for all this stuff.
The cost of the service itself, they're hiring staff and bring people out and their trailer and their equipment, that comes with a cost. They're setting up their gantry and putting all that stuff out there. All of that is expensive. You can be looking at somewhere between $2,000 to $3,000 to have a group come out and do a timing for a very small event. And if you don't have the number of people show up for that event, that could be your entire profit margin. Go on.
Simply to have precision. Now your reputation wise, if it all goes well, might be awesome. It might work out. But consider the value you're getting out of that. The ROI of having timing there really depends on the size of your event. And whether or not they perform the way they're supposed to perform. Now again, business business relationship, you could work a contract out to do all this. But then again, you could also go buy your own stuff and do it yourself. What's the expense of that?
Sometimes, having the company come out will help you understand how it works, so then you can market test what they're doing and what they're not doing, and then maybe go back and buy your own thing later on. That's a live heard a lot of people do that. They'll hire a race company or a timing company that's using this particular type of software. They're using, like, ITS drag, eggwire, or championship, or something like that. And they'll watch it done, they'll see how it's performing,
and then they'll go buy their own system. That way, they buy all the chips. And if they own people show up, they have just chips for the next race. They buy the software? They own the software. They buy the equipment. They don't need to hire out anymore. So that gives you a lot to consider when you think about buying or renting a a timing service. Now let's go to number 5, on-site media. This has a lot to do with capturing the event as it's happening.
Now you could and you could and your staff or your volunteers can break out everyone's cell phone and just start taking pictures all over the place as as much as you can. But chances are you're going to be involved in the race production, the orchestration so much you're gonna have a hard press to take pictures.
And these are pictures like the start or an exciting event that he takes place in the middle or getting erasers as they're coming through the woods or different angles or shots or even creative shots, artistic shots, of different racers that you could then turn around using your marketing. What kind of things would you think of that you could be doing with your cell phone?
While you're running the race, that's not gonna work out. It hardly ever works out or even worse. By time you think of it, that event has already passed. And you've been so focused on the race, you're not focused on the photography of the race. So what is a race support service that comes out from this? What's your hire photographer?
Get a photographer to come out. Now, this is definitely something that the price wise and the quality wise is something you just have to gauge. Not all photographers are created equal and not all prices are the same. Some photographers are incredibly expensive. Some are really cheap. There are photographers looking for an advantage to take pictures in an action environment. They wanna be sports photographers. They wanna see you wanna have pictures they can use for per your other portfolio.
And some photographers you'll even find will show up to your race, uninvited, take a bunch of pictures, give you their card, and share those pictures with other people. Yeah. It can kind of work. You know, if you're doing it in a low key backyard stuff, I mean, it's not gonna hurt you. Take pictures of all you want. You wanna sell them to my people? No problem. I got no problem with that. $10 a shot if that's what they want. So I've heard for some photographers
that maybe 10 people at the end of a race that had 200 people in it will buy 1 of those photos. Even if they're like 9 or $10,
That's it. So they're out making a ton of money. People think it's like, oh, they come out there. They take those photos and they sell them. They're really overpriced. I don't I don't have that. Right? Or even worse, because they figure out a way to, like, screenshot it, throw it on their Facebook feed, and don't pay the photographer that happens all the time too. So think about the advantage of having a photographer your race, where you can pay them a decent amount and maybe the photos are free
as a gift to the racers. Maybe that's how you work it out or maybe you hire a photographer that comes out and maybe because you have a photographer there, you have better shots at a discount rate.
Because a lot of times, the reason why people aren't buying their race photos, because photos just not that good, or it's at an angle they don't want, or it's, you know, someone else in front of them, it's not a really great shot because the photographer didn't take a whole bunch. You hire a photographer, now that photographer has a mission to take quality photos. And that's really got the advantage of having this kind of thing plus on top of that, that backfills your marketing
because now you have imagery of your event. You have stuff you can use for Instagram, stuff you can use for Facebook, stuff you can use on your website, you have a ton of imagery that you can use for all sorts of marketing. You don't have that if you don't think this through and hire those kind of media people to be at your event to record this stuff.
With some other stuff. Well, lately, it's drone video. How many times have you seen a race suddenly just take off? And you could get it for this shot. Almost looks like they've got a helicopter
flying overhead and following the race. Or they're watching someone fly around on a trail and jump into the woods. From an angle it's impossible they could ever be at or move as fast as the bike is moving or move as fast as the runner's moving or move as fast as the team is doing on a paddle or out in the water where you can't possibly be. Drone footage is now very, very popular. So think about that because drone pilots and getting a photographer understands drone, you
know, usage and using that drone. It's not cheap. You're gonna pay for it. And sometimes, You have people who are doing drone photography that don't even consider that races could be a place that they could generate extra revenue. There's a whole support group of people who are doing drone footage for real estate people and landscapers and ranchers and movie studios. Don't even realize they could be even racing.
That that that they sold their footage or they even just packaged it as if photographers drone footage? That could be a thing. I don't know, just an idea. There you go. I'm trademarking in public, and I was told never to do that, but there you go. Free idea from Kyle. Take it away. You got it? Go do it. What else? Video interviews. How many times you thought about when you've talked to racers that coming off the field? Their experience.
And they give you this excited story about they were here and they did that. And this thing, this guy got ahead and then they really kind of pushed it, they'll fight it to finish, the enjoyment of their event, the things that they liked about it, a really good time they had. Have you ever recorded any of that stuff? No. Probably on your phone maybe once or twice. A lot of little races like that. No. That's not happening. You have time for that stuff.
So maybe you're hiring someone whose whole job is to be the documentarian that, you know, that you're gonna film a did they we're gonna film a documentary about your race? Kyle at Wolf Bauser, you know, this is the Lindsay's at Wakefield. You know, the backyard event culminating. You want something that goes to the movie theater. You want something that's gonna go down at the Arlian Drafthouse. You want something really kinda cool
that's showing video of you work in an action that you didn't even realize as people were taking of you. You hit the start line, go and go and everyone watches. You shouting cowbells, everyone cheering on. You can turn that into a video. And that video then becomes Yeah. You guessed it. Marketing.
Now you have stuff you can actually put in that you can see. That's not just the the GoPro of someone's riding the trail from their front tire, which is sometimes kinda cool, but that gets old after about 30 seconds of that. Now you want the action. You want to document the event. You want video. You want them interviewing people, talking to people. You want them to basically film a 5 minute documentary about your race because you can use that for marketing.
That's amazing marketing because it makes you look professional.
It makes you look very intentional when you're doing this. Well, how do you do this? Well, you can hire videographers to come on do this. A lot of times the photographer and the videographers they just all you just throw the drone in there, man, they would have a business idea. It's just oh, it's awesome. But think about video. And maybe it's you're, you know, outsourcing this video. Maybe it's something that you outsource to. You got you got a university near you. Are there video students? Are there are there film study students within those universities that are looking for a portfolio piece or a project to work on? You might be able to do this on the cheap if you kind of outsource to students who are looking to do this as part of their profession.
You might be able to work that kind of angle. But if not, there's plenty of people out there who are video recording professionals that you can hire to come out and do this kind of thing for you and make you look very professional with your logo and music that they all have license and access access to access to. They have their own cameras. They have their own editing and production quality equipment. Let them come out. Hire them to be your video people. That is how you outsource
on-site media. As you capture that stuff and remember it's event only happens once. So sometimes you need to be thinking about this because your staff and your volunteers and you are not gonna have time to do this. What's number 6? Event data collection. This is a weird 1 that I don't think a lot of race directors really put in give a lot of stock to. And this 1, I like to shout out to SciShow, who is the adventure racing data big data scientist.
Talking about post race surveys and participation analysis. Who's coming to your event? How is that data collection happening? Is there someone walking around interviewing people and doing a survey on-site during the event?
And are they crunching the numbers of your race data? Now as a race director, you could do this yourself. You could do demographics. And a lot of the different graphics type things you can do for your event, you can kind of figure out, you know, age groups and sex and quality of life and, you know, amount of income versus where they live and the number of races they've done and experience levels and all that kind of stuff,
sure you could crunch all that stuff. But after the race has happened, a lot of this stuff is hard to do. Especially if you're doing more than 1 event, you may just not have time to go back and look at what the data look like from the year before last or have any kind of histograms of understanding what took place last year versus this year and what's changed and what worked last year that maybe you're not doing this year that you should have.
What are those lessons learned? Are you even you even know what the lessons learned are? Are you collecting? Are you measuring yourself from last year? What are you using to measure yourself? Well, there are people out there who love crunching data. They love looking at this stuff. They love going through survey results. They love going through your race results. Your participation,
they wanna go and dig into that. They wanna understand what people are thinking about when they actually say they wanna race. Because then you can use that information again for I know. Drumbeat, boom, boom, marketing.
Because when you understand what happened last year, what happened in multiple years, what trends are happening? What type of racing you're doing? You can understand maybe you have categories that are messed up. Maybe you need to start putting more effort into women friendly events. Maybe you don't have enough juniors and you're not doing any junior type of outreach.
Maybe a venue is burned out. You need to move on. You've got a venue you fatigue. Maybe it's the kind of event, the size of event. Maybe it's the time of year, maybe it's the time of day. Maybe it's your price. Maybe people don't care about things that you think they care about. Maybe they don't care about the price of the venue. Maybe it's about socializing and maybe you're not providing enough social, you know, lubricant for that area.
Think about those kind of things. The event data collection people are out there. Sure they can be college students, they can mathematicians, there's data people, there's people there's even marketing people that do this stuff.
And a lot of times, they can be connected to accounting because then you can start getting your bean counters and your number of crunchers involved in this and understanding what profitability happen based upon the the data, you're starting to now use that analysis to connect how much money you made versus who showed up. You're starting to connect those 2 things and it's something that's actually usable that you can use to inform yourself to make better decisions.
That's the idea behind this. And there are people out there that do this. It's kind of new. It's kind of different. It's kind of strange. But there are people that would love to dig into your data and come up with answers and results.
And it may cost you. You may have to go out and find some people and hire somebody who just does data analytics. They're not a racer, they know they're not interested in outdoor sports, maybe they're just interested in data. And you can provide them a a a cut of your company, not a cut as in giving some money, you know, as a percentage. I'm talking about a viewpoint of your company.
They can cross section the company and find out what's going on inside it. How are these numbers crunching together to make an actual decision about what to do next? This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about. So that's definitely something you could outsource. And finally, number 7. What's the 1 thing you could outsource? You could outsource
and you don't get ahead of me. A bitch you already know. But I'm gonna say it, here it comes. You could outsource the whole dang thing, the whole enchilada. Now, this is something that I've seen in other industries that when it comes to racing, I'm kind of scratching my head, not understanding why it doesn't happen more in racing. What is that? What do I mean by outsourcing tire enchilada?
You can be the guy or the gal whose whole job is to bring this together. Think of it as a wedding planner for races. That as a race promoter or as a a race planner. Your whole job could be to bring together all these divergent little pieces. You know, the timing, the staffing, the media, the marketing, all the online stuff, you could do that all as your company. Your company could actually not actually do anything but bring the people together, kind of a general contractor.
You know, he's not the guy who builds the house. He's the guy who brings all the people or the gal, brings all the people together. Actually build a house. And she's the 1 going out there and finding the electrician and finding the plumber and finding the foundation guy and the cement people and the landscapers and the roofers, not actually doing the building, just maintaining the quality of the final product.
That's what a general contractor does. And understands the racing so much, so that they know what quality is when they see it. That's really kind of the understanding of this. It's really contract race planning. You're doing race day direction orchestration, is all outsourced to someone else. You run a company that does races. You know the races, you know the venues, you know the parks, you know the locations,
and you just outsource everything. You outsource your marketing, your campaign, you outsource your timing and staffing, you can outsource your race direction. Don't even have to be the race director if you don't want to be. You can hire a race director. You can create an entire company. And if you go to regular.com and read some of the stuff I've written there, I even talk about, are you a race director? Are you a race promoter?
Because you get into the business side of this, if you're running a business, are you the guy on the or the gal on the factory floor, or are you the person who's strategically looking at what's the next thing to build? This is kind of the the idea behind outsourcing in the sense that you can build a company where all the things you do
are either outsourced to other companies to help put this together. Or even maybe outsource internally to your own company where everything is done by other people internally, almost as subcontractors. You hire them when you need them. You've built relationships. You have built service level agreements. With the tent people and table people. You've built these these type of relationships with park managers. You've understood how all this comes together.
And all you're looking for in a sense of this kind of business model, is a financier. So think about this and this kind of framework is I am let's see. I'm IT company x. I'm a ManTech. I'm a Hewlett Packard. I'm a Lockheed Martin. And I want to do some sort of race, some sort of event. And what do they do? They go and look for somebody to build this event for them. They hire a company that does events. And say, they hire you. They wanna do a trail run, and they hire you to do the trail run.
And you tell them it's gonna cost them x. They stroke you a check for x. And all you do is turn around and as almost as a pass through, hire the people that bring the race together. And if you hire the right kind of people, the right price, and put together the race together and orchestrate the race in a certain way that produces a quality event, then whatever's left over from that check is what you get paid. That's how it works. That is outsourcing race management in its entirety.
Is you act as the person who understands racing, understands the racing industry, and all the different elements and pieces that go in there, the planning, the timing, and the execution. And people hire you to put on races. That's kind of the idea of outsourcing racing. Now you as a race promoter or a race director can then turn around and build your own races this way, or you're the financier, all the money comes to you.
The you decide who you hire, and then you outsource in that way in a smaller venue like that. That is the idea behind outsourcing or outsource races where you have big companies that want to sponsor. So it turns the sponsorship model around, rather than being the race director out looking for sponsor to sponsor your race to be, you know, be part of the race. You're looking for someone who's looking for racing
and you go and become the subject matter expert for racing. You become the go between the general contractor for building that race. They're hiring a professional, like hiring a wedding planner. 2 people wanna get married. They hire a wedding planner to plan their wedding event. They provide their input of what they're looking for. The wedding planner puts it all together, orchestrates all the different aspects of that, and executes on the day of the event.
It is the racing version of a wedding planner. That's all it is. That can be completely outsourced. You can become a person or a business, a race director a race management or race per motor based upon entirely that business model. The goal would then be to find clients. You know? In basically promote your entire portfolio of what they could they could build for events. Now a lot of times all these companies do 5 k's or they're doing some of these kind of like team building events,
And maybe that's what you do. As you do team building events for big time companies, and you help orchestrate that by understanding all of it, all the little tiny details that go into it. And you use that as they help them promote whatever it is. They're trying to promote healthy lifestyle, collaboration of their team members. They're trying to to build, you know, camaraderie among people by doing an event like this. Or maybe They're a product company. They wanna sell some product.
Maybe they're a bike company. They wanna sell some bikes. Maybe they're a shoe company. They wanna sell some shoes. It could be completely very weird model. Again, could it it's possible? Yeah. There's people out there doing this. There's people out there who don't actually direct any races. They get sponsored or they get hired by a company that wants to put on an event and they go on orchestrate it all and make sure it all happens. But they don't do the timing.
They don't pack the tables to the event. They don't mark the course. They get everyone else to do that for them. Interesting idea. If you think about it. So that's the idea. That's the 7. That's the 7 kind of outsourcing things that you could do is you can outsource your marketing. You can do an ad campaign or just just science. You could do online registration. You can get people to to take the money online about you having to develop software.
Or have a bank account or not a bank account or a merchant account for processing visas, you can rent venue equipment. And then what races you do, the better the contracts can be for renting the venue equipment. You can have on-site chip timing. You can have precision timers show up. And time your race and bring their own staff people to run the finish line that you don't have to worry about. You can hire on-site media. You can hit photographers that come. You can have drones flying around.
You can build documentaries you can do event data collection. You can have people crunch the numbers for you to find out what your trends are without having to a need to understand big data or analytics or even even business management. You can have people doing that for you. And finally, you can outsource the entire thing. You can be
kind of the the Charlie from Charlie's angels. You can be the voice on the the box. You can be the 1 that just orchestrates the whole thing. Let other people run these events hire the right people to do these kind of events or hire the right companies that you trust, that provide that time, provide you that quality, provide you that value, and give you good people.
So think through those things. The next time you're building a race, Is there something some sort of commercial entity out there that you could hire that would alleviate the stress of having to do a certain thing? And is hiring that certain thing, that service of value to you. Well, save you time. Is it gonna save you and it might not save you any money? But then again, how much is your time worth? So think that through. So like a professional without any staff,
you can hire your this you can hire this entire crew to rent an entire crew, really, for your entire race day and not really have to stress out about the things that are responsible you're responsible for in doing a race. Think about that. Put that into your into your your business strategy hat, that there are things of a race that you don't necessarily have to run all by yourself. You don't have to have complete control over it. You can do business to business relationships
and build a race company based upon those relationships. It also becomes a coalition, a partnership. As you bring these other different groups together, all you do is just orchestrate them to show up on the same day. They perform their service, you use their service, they take care of the cleanup. It's really kind of that simple. And now you know.
Thank you so much for listening to this presentation of The Merchants of DIRTT. I would love to hear from you. Please reach out to me via email, merch as [email protected] or on Twitter at mergers a dirt. And of course, visit the website for show notes and links, how to subscribe, all that great stuff at mergersadirt.com.
If you'd love to support the show, Patreon. There's a huge button on the website. Click that button Yeah. Send me some money. I love some everyone loves some money. Outsource your strategy by listening to this show and support me with that. I mean, I mean, I could be a contractor too. Right? You need me to come help you with your race? Just let me know. Click on those buttons. Send me an email. Hey,
I'm I'm I'm a mercenary too. Right? I'm a hired gun. I'll come to your race and help you out. You bet you. Meanwhile, when you're figuring out what kind of things you wanna actually outsource, I'll see you on the next episode of The Merchinder Podcast. Until then, I hope you learn today helps you build better races. Merchant's inert is brought to you by Gagopod. For storytellers that need a strategy, a platform, and a chance to be heard, learn how to create your next podcast at gagopod.com.