Today on the merch visitor podcast episode number 29, do you have a strategy to improve your sales volume? Sorry. This is not to do how loud your events are during registration. Century Link Field in Washington State, home in the CLC Ox, they already have that record. And trust me, take some of your plugs when you go see a game there. Now this volume has to do with the number of races you need to produce a year to stay in business. In particular, this is the volume of races you need to host a year to be a profitable business. Are you a 1 and done promoter? Maybe you bust out 3 or 4 races in a series and then call it a year If this sounds like you, you have a hobby called racing. But if you see the connection between how much you put into building races is exactly how much you get out of it, then you're running a racing business. And when it comes to the business of racing, you need volume. In this episode, I'm gonna describe an approach that will allow you to turn that volume all the way up.
Greetings. I'm the Rechinir Kyle Bondo, your professional business coach for race promoters who didn't major in business. And today I wanna talk to you about building volume. This is the number of races you host in the season. It's not very difficult. Volume has to do with everything that you produce throughout the year. It is your totality
of all the races you put together. Now if you're into 1 discipline or into multiple disciplines. It's the total number of races you put together, including every discipline and every event that you actually orchestrate. That is your racing portfolio. That is the volume of races you do in a year. Now in considering your racing volume, you have to also think about this as the essential part this new approach that I wanna teach you today, and it's called ABR.
In the simple terms, ABR means always be racing. And has a lot to do with how racing businesses can become profitable by increasing the number of races they actually produce in a year seems like a pretty simple concept. So we'll dig into what that exactly means. But before we get into that, let me tell you about today's sponsor, Rechinir.
Do you want to build your 1st race or need help making your races better? Not sure where to start, then Rechinir is for you. Rechinir is the number 1 resource for race promoters who didn't major in business. And the result is over a 100 free lesson strategies and tools that they give you a better way to build off road endurance races.
Enjoy my best lessons learned in event design, race management, and race promotion that will help you grow your racing business or give you a place to start on the path to becoming a successful off road race promoter. Rechinir can also partner with you. They help you get your race off the ground. So go to rechinir.com/start to learn more about Rechinir and what they can do what Rechinir can do for you to build better races. That's rechinir.com/star.
And right now, I have a new process diagram up on the site called the go loop, and the go loop gives you a high level understanding of how the business of racing works throughout a cycle that is easy to follow with some descriptive points.
Where you can go along the way and ask yourself some very important questions that you need to have built into your business. Now the goal loop is absolutely free. There's you don't even have to put your email in there if you don't want to. Just go on the site, find the button, click and download it. It's a PDF. Really simple. And use this go loop to kind of evaluate
how your business is doing when it comes to putting races on. It asks you some very particular questions and try to answer those questions. You know, it's your business. So as honestly as possible, look at those questions and say, do I have an answer for that? Do I have a plan for that? Have I even considered that? Is that even part of my racing? Is that even part of my racing business? And if it's not, you may need to start looking into what you need to do to establish that to see if answering that question gives you the resources or gives you a perspective you didn't have before to help you build better races. It could be anything from customer service to the way you do planning to the way you do execution the way you're directing to even collecting metrics at the end of the year or even through the experimentation
loop, understanding how to add new races to your events. All for free. So go to rickinger.com, download it for free. Now you're also fine by going to the go loop page that I've hand selected some of the podcast episodes that talk about the very first early parts of the go loop. So I've picked not only just the episodes in which I've explained how those things work, I've have the articles from rickinear.com
that explains those as well. So you can read it, you can listen to it, you can examine the loop, everything there for free to get you kind of started along the way to building better races. Reach promotion is a tough business designed to make you money. You're not running a charity or practicing a hobby. When you decide to make race promotion, you're full time gig. You're in for all the marbles. But you are not going to get all the marbles without a fight.
No matter what kind of racing company you build, you're gonna have competitors. Most of these competitors are not going to be happy about you starting up in their market. In fact, some might go as far as to actively sabotage your efforts. Double me. Go talk to some. Especially some of your friends. They'll tell you about how some race promoters don't exactly
help you out in the beginning. Do you think they are going to be willingly allow you to take their best race day or take their dates, their customers, Are there a choice of parks and courses without a fight? Well, they're not. That's why it's called competition. However, you're in luck. When it comes to racing, many of your competitors
are lazy. What do I mean by lazy? What I mean is that they don't change their strategies all that often, especially when challengers show up. They're used to seeing new promoters show up all the time and see these new promoters get frustrated, especially when they can't get the parks or the dates they want. And then these promoters turn out to not be anything of any kind of challenges, whatever. They quit long before they need to actually do anything to be serious
about a competitor coming in the market. And if a race promoter does manage to get up and running in their area, they have ways of minimizing that threat. I know that sounds pretty sinister, doesn't it? 1 other way is to use the relationships with the park managers to get the choice dates Well, without having to submit permits or proposals in advance, that doesn't seem very fair, does it? This makes your planning and scheduling efforts very difficult. Additionally,
there's a good chance that they already know all the local club presidents and maybe even the local outdoor retail shops and their owners on a first name basis. They probably all ride and run together. They probably all drink beer together. They probably all hang out. This is something that you could have a tough time breaking through. They could even go as far as to poison racers against you. I mean, I could jam up your strategy to use local clubs or trail maintenance or even finding relevant sponsors for your races. When the racers themselves
are hearing bad things about your your races and your race company. I mean, rather than improve the quality of their race, they might slander your reputation. And block your efforts or make finding customers very difficult on you. And 1 of this is, of course, social media. Social media is a perfect example of how a race promoter or an organization
can slander you by making comments about your race direction or the way you conducted yourself at a race. Without some of these people even being there, they just I mean, people on social media can say anything. So you have to be very aware that some people behave this way Instead of making a better product, many competitors go to great lengths to rip yours apart. Unfortunately,
if you're new race Broder, you might not see this coming. You might think that everyone in off road racing appear super nice to each other, even when you're at each other's races, no 1 is really tearing each other's apart. Right in front of your face. You may even believe that everyone is supposed to help each other out. You know, that big Kumbaya off road racing community they volunteer for each other, or you take active part in building the community.
On the surface, it may appear that way. But when you decide act on your vision to create a new racing company. That is when you see just how friendly doing my air quotes here. The other race promoters are to you. Some might even say these tactics are just business and it's nothing personal. Well, it sure feels personal, and that's just my opinion. Unfortunately, when you start to hear bad things about your races from other promoters, especially those you respect,
it really starts to feel personal. So how do you pass this? Well, first off, you have to go back to thinking that you're an MAA fighter that mixed martial arts type combatant and that your business is the ring. Take that mental image first. Think about the octagon full of chain link fences people cheering on and making bets and you're walking in the ring and your competitors across the other side. And as an MAA fighter, you're you need to think your biggest competitor is your next fight.
Now, with that mental image in mind, do you want that fight to include the best fighter there ever was The guy who's been working out every single day, course not. You wanna compete against that sickly ill prepared, underserved, undercoach fighter. When you get in the ring, you wanna beat that fighter to a bloody pulp, take away all of his customers,
all of his marbles, and go home with his lunch money as a nice benefit. Wouldn't that be nice? Remember when I said your competitors are lazy? Fortunately for you, Many race businesses have been sitting on their backside of shipping Cheetos into their face and not training. They're that MAA fighter you've been looking for. Especially if their own competitors are 1 offs or hobby races, they really don't hold a candle
to you as the hungry race broker that actual business skills in your back pocket. That is your advantage. As a fighter that is new to the ring, your business is leaner than and meaner than your competitors will ever be because they've been resting on their laurels for far too long. They'll never see it coming. But you have to treat your entry into the market that way. You can't go into the market thinking that all these people are gonna be your friends because they're not.
Okay. Now that we've established the environment, of how you need to treat your entry in the market. Now you need to think about how you plan on building your racing volume as you enter that market to establish yourself as a real race promoter. I mean, do you have a stat a strategy
to improve your sales volume? No. This has nothing to do with how loud your events are during ratio. Now this volume that I'm talking about has to do with the number of raises you need to produce a year to stay in business. Remember, we're talking about a full time gig. You're not talking about like a 1 off or a couple races or something you just do for fun. We're talking about your full time gig.
You can't go into this and feed your family and pay your mortgage off of 3 races. Not gonna happen unless those 3 races are all like the New York, the Boston, the Chicago marathons. That you might be able to feed your family on. But as an offer eraser,
you're not gonna be near that many numbers. So you're gonna be thinking about how you do volume because the volume is where it's at. Volume is how you build a profitable business. So in particular, the volume of races you need to host a year is how you become profitable. So do you know what that number is? Different for everyone. And it has a lot to do with knowing how much you need to make. I mean, what does all your bills together and food on the table actually gonna require you to produce
as a salary for you, not just what your business needs to make, but what you need to make as well. So how many races do you need to hold in a year to make, let's say, I like round numbers. So let's just say a $100,000.
Okay? For the sake of the example, Let's say it's a $100,000 a year to build your races, pay your salary, and make a small profit. That's not a that's not a very difficult number to hit. I mean, mom, pop stores can hit this. The modern, small business within the United States is somewhere around $250,000
a year. I mean, politicians will consider you rich with that kind of money. So let's say you're hitting a 100,000. That's a pretty modest number. Give or take, especially for for some areas of the country, a $100,000 is is actually your poor. So let's say you're in a you're in a robust metro metro area that has a lot of people in and out, and you can produce
the kind of races you wanna produce to hit that number. So do you know how much it costs to build a race? Yep. You're gonna need to know that number. So for the sake of this conversation, we'll say that number is $25100. That's 2500.
So what are your per race overhead costs? This is the cost that you that all your fixed and variable costs is your permits, your salaries, or supplies, your officials, your profit. Would cost per race. Do you know what that number is? Now if you've never heard these numbers before or heard these terms before, you may need to go back to some other episodes, merge in the dirt. And listen to especially fundamentals of race
money and, of course, profits are evil and those kind of things. But let's say that that fixed and variable cost, that's $25100 still well as well. Okay? So this is this is all your overhead. Right? This is all your your permits, your salaries, or supplies, all the money you're gonna need to build. And the end of course, you're you're building your races like that. Right? So that's $25100 as well. So to to run your business and build a race is $5.
Nice easy numbers. K? So $5000. Right? You with me so far? Okay. So how many races do you need to hold to make a $100,000? Now remember, built into that price, of course, is your salary, how much you make per race, pay your staff, if you have a staff or a small team, You're gonna hit that $100,000 mark. Well, let's do some simple division that tells us if we divide, what, a 100000 by 20, we get 5000. Right? To 20 races. K? We're assuming we're gonna make 5000 per race 20 times.
What happens if we don't? Well, panic would be your first option, but panic is not productive. Strategizing. Now that's productive. What is a good to consider when thinking about the possibility that some of your races will not hit that $5000 mark. Now that's an interesting thought to consider.
That you need to hit that $100,000 mark in order to pay your bills, pay your mortgage, pay your staff, hold races. You need to have that that number. There's all sorts of breakdowns in there, how many people need to show up, how much the pricing of each of your registration needs to be, or tickets, you could probably call it. You need to have all that kind of built in. But you need to hit $5000 per race. And if you wanna hit the $100,000 mark, and $5000
is what you're working with, that's 20 races. Needs to hit that number. So you need to do that 20 times. That's a repeatable business model. So how do you do that? How do you maximize your profits in order to hit those numbers. Well, 1 strategy I want you to consider today is the strategy of encores and playoffs.
Anything in Encore's and playoffs, what does that have to do with the offer racing? Well, offer a race promotion is the close cousin to event management and sport management. Now you think about event management that's at conferences and and collections of people to come, like, a learning event, those kind of things. Sports management is all the skills involved with, you know, like football stadiums and professional teams.
Baseball, basketball, those kind of things. Well, offer a racing sits in that as a sub as a niche off of all those. So it is both of these things. And it's neither of these things. It's a combination of all that. So how are they the same? Well, both concerts and races have spectators. Me the main event, they have that too. Right? You have the race itself. They have injuries. Remember going to an aerosmith concert? Or
Steve Tyler started doing dude looks like a lady, and someone hit him in the back of the head with a shoe. And he stopped the concert and pointed the audience and says, I won't play anymore till someone kicks that guy is, but there's a scuffle and a hand of that guy forward all beat up to the security people. Now that's that's intense power. Person, you're 16 at a time. You're like, Steve Tyler is all awesome, but I digress.
So they have injuries that we know of. Just get standing remotely. I don't even know they have that anymore. Standing remotely if accounts are, you know, getting pushed up and squished between people. That's definitely something to injury. But how are they different? Okay. So we know are the same. How are they different? Well, trail runners and mountain bikers are not drafted out of college,
at least not for the most part. 99% of them aren't. And they're also not given $4,000,000 contracts with a 3 year, you know, 3 year rookie deal. That's not happening. I mean, that would be cool, but trail runners and mountain bikers aren't aren't sought after commodities. Most Americans aren't exactly
1 or biker type people, unfortunately. So that being said, you can learn a ton by observing other industries. I've said this in the past. So think about your business and the business that rock bands and football teams are in. Just like race promotion, And in race promoters
make money by putting on races. The real money in performing music and playing sports is in putting on rock concerts and football games. Makes sense. Right? Okay. They're similar so far. Follow me so far. Okay. And just like in race promotion, it is the volume of concerts and games that make the business a profit. Now think about that. When's the last time you looked at your favorite rock band
or your alt indie band or, you know, with your rap band, whatever your flavor of music is you love. If you look at their concert schedule, do they do 3 concerts and then say, thanks and go build another record? No. They're hitting a new city and sometimes multiple
multiple events in 1 city every single weekend. Their concert tour. I mean, you eat their concert shirt. The concert shirt has all the cities on the back of every place they go. Now, I'm a Seattle Seahawk fan. So as a Seattle Seahawk, fan. I have, of course, their schedule. I know the 4 preseason games are gonna play and the 16 other games are gonna play throughout the year. I'm keeping scores, and I'm tracking their schedule. And I know exactly which cities are gonna be in, especially living on the East Coast. You don't get the c c, galaxy ox games very often. So You're looking for the places that are really close that maybe you can go pick up a nosebleed section seat and see your team play over now and then. Do football teams only play 2 games? And then call it a call it a year? No. So taking those 2 kind of concepts in mind, think about the way you can apply that to your racing business. So let's look at rock conference first. Nobody comes to the band show. Think about that. No 1 comes to the band show. Does the band make any money? No. If no 1 shows up, the band
is hurting because some bands Ticket sales are important because they gotta pay for the venue. And merch you know, I have some merch t shirts and that kind of thing. Tickets. Tickets sales. That's where the money's made. However, if only a few people come to the show, they still don't make any the money they needed to make and meet their expenses.
So what does a rock band do? Well, if they have a shoe that doesn't doesn't pan out, sometimes they'll stick around and they'll do what's called it encore. Now bands can be associated with Encore all the time. That's where you, like, cheer your brains out, and then the band comes back out and plays a couple more songs. They were always going to do that anyway. But it's always cool than think about that your band is like, you know, hey. Thank you.
Thank you. Washington D. C. Goodbye. And they walk off the stage. You're like, oh, come back. Come back. 5 minutes later, they both come out and they're like, why don't I play a couple more songs? Because you guys are so great. Yeah. It's it's all showmanship. Right? But when it comes to venues which make good money where they sell the tickets out super fast, where they have a lot of fans. They do encores. They have multiple
multiple nights in which they'll stay in that city and clean up. Makes sense. Right? And, of course, define, you know, if you think about dictionary.com,
refines as a repeated or additional performance of an item at the end of a concert as called for by the audience. So we've all been to a concert where the fans just go nuts, what looks like the end of the show, they want more. And if the band smart, they come out and play a few more songs. And if the band's really smart, they come out and play a few more songs after the first encore. All the repeat encoder. Right? The idea is to always do a little extra. Now give your eraser something more than what they expected. If you're going to hold 20 races, find out which races are the most popular, and hold it again.
Make that race your encore. Help alleviate the dress of low turnout by giving yourself a buffer. A little extra race that your audience will love. That's the kind of applying that logic to your races. Now, Saint Louis are football and with football leagues, the number of tickets sold is just as important to the team as it is the stadium and hosts the team. Butts and seats are how football leagues pay for their teams.
It's not t shirts. It's not, you know, stickers in the back of your car. It's tickets.
Who in turn pays for their players and the staff and all their expenses? Ticket sales. That's where they make their money. If people stop coming to football games, The industry of football would crumble in a matter of weeks, butts and seats. That's what pays for football teams. Fans support via ticket sales is how they make their money. How many games do you see that have numerous open seats? Leagues don't make money when only a few people come to see a regular game. What's a football league to do?
Tinnitus is down. People aren't coming. What do we do? Well, naturally, they do something that generates excitement. They have a playoff.
The playoffs, of course, defined online again, as a series of contests played to determine the winner of a championship as between the leading teams of different divisions or leagues. The football concept. We all love a good football playoff game. Unlike regular season games, playoff games have more attendance, higher ticket sales, and better action. They're essentially the same product,
same stadium, same field, names Eats. But what's different? Well, it's the way people think about the way the playoff game is done. You're not getting jump change at the playoff game, are you? You're getting some excitement going on because there's risk now involved. And people still think that the higher price of a playoff game is worth it because they get to see their favorite teams win big, the championship.
I mean, race promoters, can have their own version of a playoff. With 20 races in our imaginary season, you have you're you're bound to have a repeat customers in many of those races. Take advantage of the repeat business by awarding points based on who shows up and how they perform. Now the series concept,
like football teams earning wins throughout the year to determine who they play in the playoffs, your racers can earn points to see who's the champion at the end of the year. You can further divide and group your races into a set of races called series. That's like a play office. Series is a playoff in racing. This is that mini championship concept where you hold, like, 3 or 4 events and the first 3 being the regular races that lead up to the 4th winners at the championship race. Earnings points along the way. Championships
can also be where you put the most effort in in awards into quality prizes. This is where the bigger sponsors of donations come from, maybe even cash purses. So think about that. Think about Encore's, but giving them giving your racers something extra in playoffs, to wear their efforts into races that
all add up into a championship game so that they're working towards something. And when they're working towards something, and they see the big, the bigger prize, the bigger payoff, they're gonna want to participate. Now let's take the champions concept. We just we just derive by looking at encores and playoffs and apply it to your race promotion business. And we're gonna do this in a very special way. We're gonna do this by implementing the concept called always be erasing. Or ABR.
Now, always be racing is a is a concept. It's just like it sounds. The goal is to maximize your promotion efforts by producing a multiple of each of your race products over the entire season. Instead of hosting only a few races a year, the ABR concept focuses on producing groups of race disciplines over the entire year. This way you quickly go from from 1 offs
or start up status, you know, where you're in that MAA cage match to full production before your competitors have a chance or the ability to respond. You're basically going to come at them with a very mature product, very mature understanding of how you're going to enter the market. Initially, you produce more value by offering a series or a championship at the end of each group of races you produce. For example,
if your competitor offers offers an annual trail run, Let's say that's 1 of the things in their portfolio. They have a trail run. Well, you offer 3 trail runs in your series. With the last trail run being a series championship,
Now how much better is that? Where your competitor has a trail run, and then a couple months go by, another trail run, a couple months go by, another trail run. That's what they do throughout the year. They do a couple trail runs, and that's that's what they're that's their thing. Instead, you offer a 3 run series
with a championship at the end and points are earned during each 1 of those races. I mean, this connects all 3 races to something that can be marketed together. That includes more opportunities for races to participate in and adds value to those that race to become the series champion. When compared to a single event, the series packs a much bigger punch. Plus think about some of the money you'll save because you can brand them together.
So as a promoter, you can spread those expenses around, giving discounts and prizes along all 3 races as well. Plus, you got the opportunity of all the people to show it up in race 1 to market races 2 and 3 a part of the series. And that's really the concept. Of all these boys be racing. So let's let's take that to the next level. Let's add the growth model to this. So how do you grow something like this? Well, the ABR concept uses the race promotion growth sequence.
This is this is a slow growth to build growth over a 5 year cycle. You might be thinking, okay, Kyle. You told me MAA fighter to come in, punch him in the face, hit him before they have a chance to react. True. But as a race promoter, you need to do smart growth,
not come at them of the 20 race series right off the bat. So this is an idea of growth does not happen overnight. But instead uses stages to build momentum over time period. But this is the concept that that I think works best for race promoters, especially just starting out. So you're not gonna like tomorrow go. That's it. I'm done. Quit my job and go start doing races full time. You could. I wouldn't recommend it. I would recommend that you learn this business, build your business system, build your race promotion company, using a growth model, and do it over time until that that business is
self functioning, self sustaining. And then reaches that point where you can say, you know what? I'm not doing that full time gig anymore. You know, I'm not hitting the clock and going to the cubicle. I'm doing race promotion full time. So let's break that year up into 5 into 5 chunks or 5 stages. To think about in year 1, this is where you come at the slow lazy competitors. And you promote 2 races in 1 year using your validated racing system. This is your experimentation
gear. This is where you come out and you you promote 2 races in 1 year. That's it. That's the goal. 2 races in 1 year to kind of learn the system, get your get yourself introduced to scheduling and permits and understanding how your competitors are functioning and understand your markets and your customers and get your name out there. So use that. Use those 2 races as your experiments
to validate your racing system. Then you go into tier 2. This is where you start promoting multi race series of championships.
So how do you do that? So if you think about rate about year 1, you're you promote 2 races to validate your system. Remember we're talking about competitors? They're waiting for you to just quit. They're waiting for you to just fail. They're waiting for you to be a 1 off. They come out and you just promote 2 races. They're not guys considering you a threat at all. Unless they come to your race and they're awesome and they go, oh, chances are they're not, but you're not a threat yet. You're not a threat until you can compete with them. So couple of races being experimental,
kind of low key. They're not gonna even consider you a threat, not at all. Gear 2, however, is where you promote a multi race series of the championship as a 3rd or 4th race, now you might be considered a threat. Depends on the discipline. Maybe they're mountain bikers. You do trail running. Maybe they're mount maybe they're trail runners. You do event racing. They might not see you as a threat because they're not looking at those verticals
as taking away from the customers. They don't understand how customers work and how endurance athletes move around between different different challenges. To try to experiment with their own racing. I mean, sometimes doing mountain biking over and over and over and over again. Sorry. You get boring. Right? Do a trail run, do a triathlon, do a duathlon. Throw something in there. Venture racing. I mean, orienteering's crate, but let's just run around looking for controls.
The venture racing. Well, now I'm looking for the control of my mountain bike or in a canoe. Now I just added a whole another element to that. So that's what you do for year 2. Alright. Year 3. This is where we're really start getting interesting. We're gonna promote 8 races in 1 year. And what that is, is 2 sets.
We're gonna do a 34 race series in the beginning of the year and a 34 race series in the year. And if you do a 3 race series, that's fine. And you pick a couple experimental races that do inside there, or you do a 4 race series, that's fine too. But the idea is to do 2 championship series within 1 year. Okay? So your 1st year experimenting, 2nd year, you do your 1st series, 3rd year, you do 2 series up to about 8 races. Year 4, magic number 13.
In year 4, is when you do 3 ray series in a row. And we'll get into what these include, but just kinda keep the concept in mind. Right? You went from experimentation, to a series, to 2 series, to 3 series, of 3 or 4 races each. You encapsulate them in 3 for races. You don't go blockers, like the Virginia off road series and, like, 18 races in it. No. Simple. Small. Small batches. 3 or 4 races.
You do experiments, you're 1, you do 1 series, you're 2, you do 2 series, you're 3, you do 3 series, you're 4, and then we hit your 5. What happens? Year 5? Year 5, we hit that magic number 21. Remember, we talked about the the 20 number. Okay. We're going magic number 21, blackjack. This would include 21 races in 1 year. Give them a little extra. That includes 3 series. So you're gonna be doing other kind of races in between there. With 3 races, 3 race series
packed in. That is the fighter concept. 21 is the magic number that you're aiming for. When you're implementing this always be racing or your ABR concept. And we think it's a y 21. Well, the first reason is based on typical calendar, mean, the mono calendars broke them to 12 months that make a year, divide into 52 weeks or 26 2 week segments.
So if you promote 21 races in a year, That's roughly 1 race every 2 weeks. Doesn't have to mean doesn't mean that you have to promote a race every 2 weeks. It's just kind of thinking about this. There's just a concept. Right? Just a model. To kind of base your volume of races on. So if you think about that 20, the 21 races, it becomes your seasonal schedule for races that could kinda look like. You know, January February's drop season. That's redoing your planning and strategizing.
You put your permits in. You've picked out your schedule and your parks. You know what you want. And then you do your 1st March becomes your 1st series. You do 3 races in March. Maybe you do 3 races in April.
Within the series 1 finale is in there somewhere. You do 2 races in May, and then June schools out. You throw a race in there. Parents get the kids head home for the 1st week. Give something for the 1 to do. Right? You can kinda work that in July. You do 2 races. That's a nice big summer month. Maybe you do some
bigger races there, 1 offs in there. Then August becomes the finale for your series number 2. And the school's back in in in August, September. So you're doing a race there, a couple races in October, couple races. Start doing start working in the next series, and you use series finale number 3 in December. That's it. April series finale 1. August is serious, Natalie, number 2, December is serious, Natalie, number 3. That's a 21 race system. You could build your schedule to host races every weekend during a particular good month or stagger it out over a year to build in time to rest and recover. And remember in some areas, climates, weather,
snow rain can screw all sorts of things up. So this helps you kind of break out what are the good months and what are the bad months. So looking another way, 21 weekends where the racing leaves you 31 weekends of no racing. That's family time. That's holidays.
It's vacation time. It's time to enjoy the reason you're building a race promotion business to take every family and take every family needs. Well, you need to actually have family time build in. So 21 is a good number to hit, but it's a good number to stay at or or work within without going over. You don't wanna go over that. If you go over that, you're gonna be doing racing full time.
That's not gonna that's not gonna leave you a lot of time to do other things. So 21 is a nice number because if you can plan all your races at once and build your races and be repeatable, then you're really only working roughly 50% of the year. And that's not a bad way to make a living. The key is the bill is is building a portfolio to reach that 21 race number in 1 season.
That's the challenge. Another reason 21 works is that it fits well within that 3 race series model, implementing a b art does not mean you only build multiples of series. Make sure you could technically develop 7 series events of 3 races each and each series. Sure, you could do that. However, you might not it might not work for all your potential customers. Might not work for all your available venues or your own need to stay invested in race promotion. This is why the
the ABR growth model only focuses on building out 3, 3 or 4 race series is in 1 season. If the goal is 21, race is in a season. Your portfolio will only include 9 to 12 races as series of events. Well, what does that mean? Well, that leaves the other 9 11 races For 1 offs, experiments, sanctioned events could even include regional and national level qualifiers.
So this opens up this opportunity that you have these kind of core series that you hold every year, your kind of bread and butter systematic approach to a certain discipline that this is what you do this every single year becomes staples, especially in racing industries, racing communities.
You establish yourself, you plant the flag that Kyle's race series happens the beginning of September, it ends in October. If you wanna challenge me, go right ahead. But I'm an MAA fighter in the race ring, and I will punch you in the face because I know you've been eating Cheetos. No Cheeto eating here. Even though Cheetos are awesome. But that's the idea.
You establish those kind of core places as, oh, trail running? Oh, yeah. You wanna go see Kyle. He's got all the trail running. Mount biking? Yeah. That's that's that's wrecking here. That's what you wanna go do. They have a best mountain biking event here. They're they're having every year. They're awesome. So that's that's how that concept works.
So let's take this to kind of the always be racing that diversified approach. Let's look at that this let's take it to take it to the next level. Okay? So breaking your season up and the segments will allow you to appeal to a ray of different types of racers. It also allows you to manage your environment by hosting race disciplines during parts of the season that makes other Difficult disciplines restrictive.
This means you'll be you'll be able to promote races long after your single disciplined competitor is done for the season. Now think about that for a minute. How many race burners do you know do like a spring or fall? And that's it? That's all I do. Summer, they're they're vacant. I know orienteering for some reason does this. I haven't quite understood why, but maybe it's to travel to other places to bigger events, but it seems like orienteering
stops racing in, like, in June. And then they picked back up in the fall. Maybe the kids are out. I don't know. I always thought that was strange. So a diversified season can allow you to save your bigger races for when most of your customers are out of school, vacationing, or looking for a good reason to be outside. We do not need to be focused on racing only when that disciplines racing season underway. And you think about an offer of racing? Yeah. I mean, are there seasons?
Well, if you think about cycling, road season usually is the spring. Summer starts to be mountain biking, which kind of bleeds over collegiate until, like, September, October. And then over the fall, cycle crosses kind of taken over that that area. But do mountain bike races need to be not happening in spring. No. Oh, mountain bike races in the fall. No. Can you compete a mountain bike race against a cyclic or cyclic cross race? Yeah.
Why is that? Well, sorry to break it to you. Cycle Cross friends, but a lot of you guys are roadies who, you know, put knobby tires on your 10 speed and call yourself you know, off road. Okay. That was a that was a cheap shot. But if you're listening this far into the podcast and you're interested in this concept, so you know what I'm talking about. You can hold mountain bike races anytime of the year. Trail running the same way. Anytime of year event erasing.
Hey. Sometimes, the worst, the weather, the better the event erase. Which is just a sick thing to think about, mentally disturbed ventricers we are. But you have to think about that. Is that there's gonna be some race promoters out there who only work certain times of the year. Maybe that's all their job allows that maybe they're built their season out that way because that's all the time they have. You can take advantage of that. So diversification allows you to switch
to another advantage from 1 kind of decimal to another and maintain your racing momentum without losing profit or disappearing until next year. I mean, when only 2 or 3 months out of the year are technically your off season, you can increase your overall demand by always offering something new and different to try. So think about that concept for a minute. Think about the build up to getting a race underway. Give numbers and insurance and permits and planning and scheduling and volunteers,
and all the stuff it takes to get a race into the works. Then the race happens. And every race is great. You have results. You have awards. People go home. You clean up. You what? You sit on your hands for 11 months. All that racing equipment goes into your garage, nothing happens for 11 months. Think about what those customers are doing. They're off looking for the next race. Well, when you have the next race, you now have the ability
to give them some place to go. You can start directing them to hey, and here comes race number 2. And hey, here comes race number 3. And hey, have you also looked at my other races? You can start diversifying yourself to capture different markets and different groups of people. So let's look back to that that that kind of example season. So let's let's look at that your season revised. But let's look at through the the lens of always be racing, the volume kind of thinking. What does a profitable
ABR racing season look like? So you reach your 5th year racing, your 21 race season, you could potentially look like this. 6 races in the spring. You have. Let's say you have 1 spring event or race,
You have 4 trail run races, and you have 1 mountain bike endurance race. That's spring. It's March to May. That's 6 races in a box right there. Okay. In that 4 race season, my trail running season. That's what I have in the spring. And in the summer, you have 1 summer adventure race. You have a 4 race mountain bike series. So use that 1 mountain bike race in the spring to tier
to tease them into the the mountain bike racing series you have over the summer. And then say, maybe you have, like, 1 summer off road toathlon or triathlon. K? So you're experimenting, you're stretching out. You have people who go to the these off road, these titties, these events. You can lead them into other racing. You can promote your other races during these events. And capture cross market customers. And then in the fall, the fall we go big because it cools off,
get people who get the malaise of kids going back to school, then blogs. I need something to just get me out. The sun, the sun's gone down more. It's not so sunny anymore. It's kinda everyone's kinda bummed out. Wanna do some racing and kinda get the energy back. So what do you do there? Well, you could you could start experimenting with trail runs. I mean, you have a trail half arathon, you do a fall mountain bike series. To keep that summer mountain bike series going, you capture off that, and then you do a fall adventure race. So you have 3 eventual races. Mix through your season. Maybe they're 1 offs. Maybe that's a series all by itself. Just spread out over the whole year. And then you go into trail running because When the trails are wet and you can't ride your mountain bikes there anymore, you can always run them. There are a lot of parks that will let you run trails, but won't let you ride a bike there. So that's how you work that in. So that's that's what 6, 6, and 9. Let's do the quick math on that. That's 12 plus 9 is
I do that. 21, blackjack. Hit me. So they'll always be racing. The point is not to only have 21 races. Having 21 exact copies does not get people excited. Having 21 mountain bike races or 21 trail runs 21 event races. Wow. You mean, if you could pull off 21 event races, more power to you. But 21 exact copies is not getting even excited. Instead,
The ABR concept focuses on having the playoffs at the end of each set of races by holding a series championships 3 or 4 times a year. And just like the encore given by the band, giving your races something giving your racers something more than they want than they expected, produces demand, dissipation, friendly race competition, and drama. All things that create customers for life. I mean being interested by being interesting
by itself can increase your potential value. Like, remember like I said before, is your races become those marketing platforms where you sell your other races The advantage of being a volume, race promoter, and having a continuous set of races over a full year is you have a captive audience. Where you can be promoting your value in your races to other people who may be interested in cross training or cross racing.
It also makes achieving that $5000 number, the imaginary number, much easier when you're constantly in people's face, with other races. And if you give enough encores and hold enough playoffs, you might find that 20 races a year is just enough to build a very successful business on. And just for some final thoughts on the always be racing concept. It's kind of thinking about the challenges you're going to have by looking at your race promotion business through the lens of
of volume, of always be racing. And 1 of the main challenges created by having a diversified racing portfolio is keeping your audience engaged when you're constantly shifting from 1 sport to another. This can be this can be an issue. Switching back and forth between your target customers can make communications difficult. This is why you need to have a good marketing and outreach, orchestration in place. Without this, your single disciplined competitors can take advantage of when your attention moves away to a different sport altogether. Just like we talked about taking advantage of competitors who don't hold races throughout the whole year or only hold a certain type of race, only a certain type of year. They can take advantage of you too. Now they're gonna be lazy. They're not gonna be reacting. You're gonna catch something to do with that guard. But some of them might respond.
They might respond by taking advantage of when you shift. So without this, the single disciplined competitors
are going to be looking at when you do those changes, and you can and they can claim that you're not really part of race this link community and only need it for the money. This is another 1 of those this kind of strategies they're gonna hit you with, is they might say, you know, oh, yeah. Well, that guy, he he does He has trail running in the spring and the fall, but he's not really a trail runner. He's really a mountain biker. I try to get make, you know, slander you or make you look like you're not really invested in the community. However, producing a quality product and showing your value easily removes these claims from your customers' minds. And by carefully managing and teasing each of your audiences,
with events throughout the year or breaking your events into both the spring or fall series, your customers will see why 6 to 8 races worth of values better than 1 or 2. And that's really that's really the way to get past all that stuff. You're not gonna be able to stop competitors from bad mouth in your races. They're gonna be jealous of your momentum. Remember, they sat on the couch, and they're all squishy, and they entered the red MMA fighter ring, not realizing that you've been training
hard for 2 years. And they're gonna be caught completely off guard, and they're gonna wanna know why people aren't coming to the races anymore. And it's gonna be something as simple as the value that you produce in your race. Because you're going to have already thought through
not only what kind of races and how many races went every year, but some of the other aspects that we've talked in past episodes of how you bring value and how you do just that 1% more than every other race member out there and people come back in droves because they want that. They want that extra special ability, their extra special feeling. They wanna be treated with some respect. They wanna distribute with some kindness. They want to come to those events where people are nice and smiling. They don't want the grumpy person at the registration desk. They want the smiles. They want the you did a great job. They want the people cheering them in with a cowbell even if they're coming in last. They want that. They want that value. And if you can give them that, it won't matter if you switch back and forth, they're gonna come. And some people will come to everything you do. It won't matter. Whatever you produce, because they're coming for you and your process and your system and your company and the way your events are done. That's what they're coming for. And now you know.
Thank you so much for listening to the Merchants River podcast. I'd love to hear from you. If you have some comments about this episode or or you wanna see something in a or you wanna see something? Here's something in another episode. Please reach out to me via email at [email protected], or you can find me on Twitter at merchantsadirt.
Either way, send me a send me something. Let me know you're out there, and let me know what you're thinking about, and what kind of problems and concerns you have in the racing offer a racing business that you would like me maybe to discuss. If you're not as a subscriber, please go to emergencyadirt.comorreckonier.com.
And I got all sorts of ways this is arrive on there. And I know that that took a little bit of a took a little break. You know, the family family comes first. Especially in your racing business, you have to you have to plan this in. Mister Murphy, loves to to hit you when you're down. So I'm I've got I'm not gone. I'm still kind of dumb still getting my energy back. And in the families getting their energy back and getting back into the groove of Merchant Center Podcast. And also be
I have the the 2nd podcast going too called Get Lost Racing. And we go over there and listen to some of those too. Those are quick little 7 or 10 minute episodes on a particular race discipline. Because I've been exploring this. What is the depth of off road racing, not only in in how to build a racing business or be successful in building better races,
but get lost racing goes into Now, what does it take to get into this this race? What's this race? What's this kind of race discipline all about? Because just like we talked about in the always be racing concept, the diversification. You can be doing like 9 to 11 races on the side. That are your series, but you have the experimentation.
So get lost racing. That podcast is all about What kind of other races could you throw in there that maybe people would like to to to be in? Because trail rainbow trail running is fun, Sorta, for a while. But maybe you do you do something different. Just like bike mountain bike racing is fun for a while. Maybe it isn't doing it. Maybe do it on mountain bike or in touring. Or maybe you wanna do like do dual relays or marathons
or ultra running. Use some crazy 50 hundred mile stuff. Or some of these adventure races. So this is what this is what the concept of gate loss racing is. I'm here. I haven't gone away. I haven't pond faded as they say. So please continue to listen and give me some feedback if you have it. Meanwhile, while you're you're kind of rethinking how you plan on
establishing your volume race business, and always be racing. I'll see you on the next episode at The Merchants River podcast. Until then, go build better races. Take care of them.