Not much new to report this week. In fact, it's sorta been like Groundhog Day, where I've been stuck in a loop of painting black trim. It's weird, it's like I dream of a regular life with people and places in it, but I always seem to wake up and find myself with a brush in hand and I think, “How am I here again?” However, the end is nigh. No it's not over, but except for some gray paint on the exterior wall, the construction phase of this project is. Then I'll be working to making the space useful. I have mirrors and hooks to install, but aside from that I could use input. I foresee something to sit on like a stool, and shelves. Anything else you'd like to see?
The end of this project is going to leave a void in my life. I mean, we started construction a month ago and although I was able to rely on competent people, I was still overseeing things, fielding questions, and trying to stay ahead of their needs, and then of course the hours of manual labor (Leon did a lot of manual work too, but I was lead on the project so it filled my mind). Prior to that, getting showers was absolutely top of my priority list for the new space. Sort of like how if you had no roof on your house, you wouldn't think of anything else until you got that taken care of. Sure you can get by for a short time, but you can't rest easy.
One silver lining is that during my hours of slinging a paint brush or cutting tile, I've been able to listen to a lot of great lectures in a series called Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Something I learned this week is that in the last 100 years we've added 30 years to average life expectancy, a large part of which was accomplished by improving survival of mothers and babies during childbirth. Since women so often died young, a man could have 3 to 4 wives in a lifetime, but now that they were staying alive, marriages started lasting longer than ever before. Subsequently divorce rates rose. Divorce became a substitute for death. Anyway, I highly recommend the series.
Along the way somewhere I managed to make progress on my goal of systematizing the marketing report. I'll save you the inane drama, but basically our ability to pull specific and consistent data from our membership software is not as good as we'd like. This boggles me. All I really want to know is conversions, new sign-ups, and quits. This is fundamental data, right? Well not all of it is available or it takes several extra steps to refine it. Before anyone out there is tempted to remind me that this is bollux, I already know. Let me clarify, we're collecting this data now but it's time-intensive and you have to have some good Excel kung fu. I'm of the opinion this data should be easy and simple to get. Am I right or am I right? I'm right, right? Right? Also, this is my 4th membership software I've used since opening 5+ years ago. They're all bad like this.
Tuesday we had a website update meeting. Most of the work has already been done on the new site. I'll have to rewrite some pages but that's no biggie. This project hasn't been all-consuming, but I'm looking forward to roll-out because it'll be awesome.
We also had a Throwdown meeting. For those of you relatively new to Tacoma Strength, the T-Town Throwdown is our annual competition we host at the end of the summer. I'm working with the Tacoma- Piece County Sports Commission (hereafter: TSC) to prepare our documentation and proposal for permitting and venue rental. (I feel like I've written of this before.) I've got my stuff pushed out to them and am awaiting a response. In the meantime, we're working on putting together a media kit (which is just a cool way of saying “stuff to hype your event to businesses so they'll pay money to be there”) for vendors. And we'll be setting up a new independent website for the Throwdown which will be TacomaThrowdown.com. There's nothing there yet, but I'll begin writing content for it starting next week.
Along the way I coached 15 classes, ran a 3-session private beginner series (welcome to new member Tommy B, he comes to the 3:30 or 4:30 classes so say hi if you meet him), and met with Jared every day to test and practice the workouts for two weeks from now. Lastly, I finally set up a mentorship/workgroup thing with a group of teens from our late night training group. I'll explain about them in the next newsletter. They deserve their own article. They're amazing, have been with us for a long time, and I've done nothing to tell you about this cool group that comes to train with us after the gym closes up.
And that, dear readers, is that.
By Morgan on Tuesday, April, 01, 2014