Sweating details

Back when I worked in investment banking, we would build elaborate pitch decks with 100 slides. We presented many beautiful charts, market analyses and hot graphs to make a company look awesome.

When pitching a company to work with us, we always included a photo of a quarterback throwing a pass while standing behind his offensive line. The point of the slide was to explain that we, as the company’s investment bankers, would be the offensive line while the company’s management team would be the quarterback. Instead of protecting them from 350 pound defensive linemen so they could throw a pass, we would protect them from investor requests so they could run their business.

Not only would we put the football photo in our materials, we would research the owner’s favorite football team and use a photo of that team’s quarterback and o-line.

I did not think much of this technique until one day when I was talking to someone who had received our team’s pitch. Unprompted, he commented how he absolutely loved the football slide. By including a photo of the owner’s favorite team, he said it showed how we “sweat the details.”

While Run The Day is a much different organization than an investment bank, we work hard to do something similar - protect people’s time. Race directors are busy people. By making race organization “simple” and “easy” we not only help race directors to solve problems, we prevent issues from ever arising.

As a result, race directors get more time for their families, full- time jobs and life in general. Because dealing with annoying race headaches (and the stress they produce) is probably not what anybody wants to do.

-Ian

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