During the day, I build design and build websites for non-profit clients. I like the process of building websites and if I was forced to do it every day, I wouldn’t mind. However, my passion is coaching. Fortunately, building websites and helping organizations with their systems/process gives me a leg up on an area that’s often difficult to navigate.
Like the non-profit world, coaching isn’t very sustainable by itself. A business needs to be set up to support the organizations goals. You’re not a coach so that you can be a better web developer. Your passion, like mine, is coaching. Your website is a necessary element of running your triathlon business. It’s one of the primary information sources for current and potential clients.
Someone focused on raising money to end hunger and poverty in South America shouldn’t have to worry too much about their site. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help the management of things a bit easier. Like a non-profit, a small triathlon business should be focusing on their athletes, their business and products and not their website.
My favorite part of my day job is helping clients improve their internal systems using plugins like Gravity Forms (a form plugin) and connecting with MailChimp (an email newsletter service) and showing them how to take payments on their personal websites.
A series about improving your triathlon business
I thought it would be a good idea to share a lot of things I’ve learned over the past 5 years helping non-profits grow and just translate it over to the context of a triathlon business. In non-profits, the founders and many staff members tend to wear a lot of hats in the company. Managing a website is generally one of them and is often done poorly. There are plenty of tools, if you know where to look, that can help take some of those hats off.
There are several tools out there that can drastically change how your business runs. Gravity Forms, mentioned earlier, is one example of this. Instead of just receiving an email, a contact form can help shape how quickly you respond and help your customers receive better service. Another example is Stripe, a payment processor that makes life so much easier.
Throughout this series about improving your triathlon business, we’ll go over using WordPress, setting up hosting, purchasing and securing domains as well as all the other tools out there that help small businesses run more efficiently.
Tell us some things you’ve learned running your own triathlon business.