There’s a term in baseball called “Around the Horn”. This is the practice of throwing the ball from one in-fielder to the other after a strike out with no base runners. I’m not 100% sure of how they started this tradition but it does serve to keep the infielders “in the game” and I suppose it keeps their arms loose. The phrase Around the Horn has also started to mean, going from person to person or topic to topic in a meeting. So with that as context, here’s Coeur’s “Around the Horn” blog.
Ironman Canada & Ironman Lake Placid: We’ve got an incredibly busy (and beautiful) weekend of triathlon racing coming up and we’re trying to get as much work done before the weekend as possible since we’ll be glued to the live feeds. Coeur Pro Kim Schwabenbauer will be racing Placid and ambassadors Andrea Astudillo and Katie Morse are up in Canada. Gooo Kim, Andrea and Katie!!! We’ve asked Kim and Andrea to provide updates from the race venues and we will share those as they come in.
Ironman Canada is beautiful....Eh?
Another year better: We’ve got a birthday to celebrate in the Coeur family. Actually, we have two. The first is for Coeur co-Founder Hailey Manning. For those of you who don’t know Hailey, we have to brag about her for a moment. She’s one of the most “genuine” individuals you could ever meet. She’s kind, funny and incredibly hard working. She’s gearing up for her annual trip to Kona but we hope she’ll take a break from training and celebrate her birthday!
The second birthday is for Coeur itself! The idea for Coeur was hatched in mid-2013 over some vino but since the exact date is a bit…shall we say…”fuzzy”, we’ll go with August 15th as our official birthdate.
Happy Birthday to an amazing person
And I suppose we should also say Happy Birthday to ourselves. Is that weird?
Pro Pay: If you’ve followed our blog, you may have picked up on the fact that we feel (in our humble opinion) that it would be in the best interest of pretty much every constituent if professionals in endurance sports made more money. Now, not to be total "tools" (is that still a term of non-endearment?) and try to make sound like we’re “know it alls” but we like to think we’ve got a degree of business experience on the Coeur team. So, to the extent anyone is interested, we’ll briefly re-share our thoughts on this topic.
First, we know that many would argue that market forces will in theory determine the “Market Clearing Price” for professional athletes. Yay economics 101! This is logical and works well….in theory. In world run by Vulcan businessmen who are devoid of human compassion and who make perfect, fact driven, non-emotional decisions, our debate would be over quickly. But, given our lack of pointy ears and our inability to make that “V” symbol with our fingers (it just looks like a hand with the fingers spread apart in some weird wave), we’ll be so bold as to suggest that the theory falls apart when humans are involved.
Along those same lines, you may aware of Milton Friedman’s idea that the sole purpose of a business is to create value for its shareholders. Consequently, if that business does anything with its money like..giving a percentage to the Challenged Athlete’s Foundation or paying its Pros when it doesn’t have to, it is in effect, “wasting” the customer’s and the shareholder’s money. The donation to CAF should have been saved and the $$’s used to either lower prices or give more profit to the owners.
It’s hard to argue the theory but reality seems to tell a different story. According to the Conscious Capitalism Institute, “In addition to creating social, cultural, intellectual, physical, ecological, emotional and spiritual value for all stakeholders, conscious businesses also excel at creating financial wealth. Research has found that conscious firms outperformed the overall stock market by a ratio of 10.5-to-1 over a 15-year period, delivering over 1,600% total returns when the market was up just over 150%.”
In other words, human beings are complex and simple economic theories can break down when you start factoring in things like compassion, loyalty and other “pesky” emotions.
So with respect to Pro Pay, we are of the opinion that, if compensation goes up, more pros will be able to afford to train and race full time, the fields will get deeper, the races will become even more exciting and as a consequence, more people will be drawn into the sport. One of our favorite sayings is that “A rising tide lifts all boats” and we hope that applies here. So we’re trying to do our part by:
- Including guaranteed cash in all of our Pro Contracts
- Promising to increase that cash amount every year with our Pros
- Prattling away every chance we get to see if we can convince other sponsors to follow suit.
On that last point, we’re trying to test the waters to see if something like a Fair Trade Coffee seal of approval might make sense. If you’re not familiar, companies with the Fair Trade Coffee seal commit to paying a fair (sometimes above market) wage to growers. If you buy Fair Trade Coffee, you can rest assured that you’re not drinking the equivalent of sweat shop coffee.
In any event, the reason we’re even bringing this up is because 1. We’re starting our process of looking for our 2015 Pro Team and 2. We’ve seen some great blog posts recently from Doug and Kelly. Here are their links. We think they are well worth reading:
http://dmactri.com/2014/07/23/thoughts-on-the-pro-triathlon-market/
Coeur Photo Contest: We’re still planning on giving away an Argon bike but before we did that, we wanted to test the app that helps administer the giveaway. We’re using something called woobox and we’ve launched a photo contest to learn how to use it. The contest closes on Friday, so if you get a chance, check it out on our Facebook page. Click “Vote” to see and vote for the entries and “Enter” if you want to get in on the action yourself.
Our current 1st place picture
The 2nd place challenger
Fashion Week. In case you missed it, Coeur was honored to be featured in the Witsup.com Fashion Week review.
We loved some of our company as the article also mentioned a few other women’s apparel providers that we really respect including Brand Betty (the every impressive Kristin) and Smashfest Queen (the also incredibly impressive Hillary).
If you get a chance, check out the article here:
http://www.witsup.com/coeur-stylish-speed-from-the-heart/
So there you have it. That’s our quick trip “Around the Horn”. Hope you have a great weekend of training and racing.
Your friends at Coeur!