The How of How To…
So….how do we get this shit show going? A lot of grit, a lot of ‘no’s’, and a lot of wine.
The How
Neither of us had ever ‘started’ a business before. Sure…I worked for other companies for 20 years now, Aaron has been in the Navy nearly 23 years. We could figure this out…..right?
Well, I had no clue but I knew I needed some of the basics:
Email
Website
Form the organization legally, otherwise known as an LLC
Get a name, a logo, a culture, a look.
I ran our name past some of the hockey family to mixed reviews. The logo was generally loved. But BOOM - the decision was made to GO! Eastern Virginia Hockey Club, or EVHC for short, was born.
With all the fabulous tools today and my past experience with other companies, setting up my list took a couple of hours. We had our Google Account and Domain. I had my SquareSpace website built (roughly), and I had my LegalZoom LLC started. My logo was built. I had Canva and Adobe Photoshop subscriptions. What was next?
Well, what were we going to have? Who makes this stuff? How do we achieve what we want?
The first thing was to figure out the range of services. Ice is too expensive and being direct competition to other rinks was not the goal. I wanted to help serve underserved sports. The most effective way to do this was to build a training facility away from the ice, the fields, the pitch, that could accommodate everyone. And everyone has the same foundational need - Strength, Conditioning, and Skill Attainment.
The focus was narrowed down. But how to we attain results? As an athlete, I can’t stand when someone tells me to ‘turn this more like this.’ What? How do we know that is going to work? We wanted quantitative results that we were achieving the goal in the correct form. This is where we knew we needed technology and AI to map our athletes and measure our results to prove we were mastering skills. Boom. Another focus narrowed down. We would deliver training with results.
We found a couple of solutions for off-ice materials and skatemills, but we fell in love with a company from Slovakia called Hockey Development Training Systems. The team there was informative, open to what we were looking for, and helpful when it came to pricing and design. Oh man….pricing. This shit is not cheap. Not only did we have expensive stuff, but how do we scale the size of the facility so that we aren’t past capacity in 6 months and having to turn away customers? HDTS was here again, helping us find the right size to grow to, knowing we were going to be doing this for 10 years at a location (or longer). So they had the product, the technology to help us give the measured results we wanted, and they went further and helped us with the regular full-scale gym equipment with their partnerships with HammerStrength. It was a one-stop package of purchase, installation, maintenance, and partnership. We lucked out!
Well great, we had the concept down, the services we wanted to deliver down, the competitive edge down…so what was next?
How are we going to price this to people in an affordable manner?