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Traction Business Accelerator works with you to Assess Opportunity, Shift Strategy, Launch with Momentum, and Scale Faster.

TRACTION WINS

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TRACTION WINS >

  • An online school for elite athletes, USPA was a for-profit, privately owned school that had been in business for 10 years and was successful in providing freedom and flexibility young athletes need to train, travel, and compete while providing a rigorous and excellent education. Enjoying a strong reputation, USPA students were thriving at the Olympic, collegiate, and professional levels, while also gaining admission to top universities. The product clearly worked, and the incremental growth USPA enjoyed was almost completely based on word of mouth. This is a good thing, but a slow strategy and time was running out; the company was losing money every year.

  • Engaged to increase revenues, achieve profitability, and guide the company through an acquisition, TBA started by simplifying USPA’s scaling problem: Despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on digital marketing every year, almost no one knew about the school. Since no one had heard of USPA, no one trusted it. And the school was asking for the privilege of educating people’s children. Traction proposed shifting every aspect of the business—marketing, sales, price point, processes, and reporting—by focusing on one simple question: Does this strategy and technique increase or decrease trust?

    Working closely with USPA’S strong in-house director of marketing, Megan Burch, TBA brought in the multi-talented Casey Christian and Hodag Creations. With this team, we created a new brand identity, refreshed every aspect of public-facing collateral, and deployed the GoUSPA advertising campaign.

    We hired and installed a team of Trusted Family Advisors—respected individuals in their sports communities—who focused on the sports where USPA students were already enjoying Olympic, professional, and collegiate success.

    By brokering partnerships with National Governing Bodies (NGBs), leagues, and competitive series in sports where USPA students excelled (skiing, snowboarding, golf, ice hockey, cycling), we secured partnerships with over 20 high-quality, trusted organizations. 

    Recognizing that the value of USPA’s educational offering did not sync with its tuition of $8,900, we nearly doubled tuition to $16,000, reinforcing the message that quality education for elite athletes is a worthy investment. 

    We built the CRM to create a reliable sales pipeline and helped select an outsourced CFO solution.

  • Partner-based marketing, coupled with a reliable sales pipeline, led to deal growth of 332% in year one and another 160% growth in year two.

    Enrollment revenue increased 100% year over year for two years in a row and the company achieved profitability for the first time.

    In year three, TBA empowered an acquisition by the Inspired Education Group, a leading global firm of premium schools with more than 90,000 students in 119 schools across 27 countries. The eight-figure purchase price was based on a healthy multiple of EBITDA that TBA’s efforts created.

    Through an additional six-month consulting term, TBA helped guide the company through the transition.

  • In 2012, the Aspen Institute reported that kids were being forced to quit playing sports at an alarming rate due to a pay-to-play model that excluded millions of families from the myriad benefits that sports provide to young people.

    At the time, TBA founder Bill Kerig, who was also coaching youth hockey and seeing the problem firsthand, had just funded one of his films by creating a very simple homegrown crowdfunding platform. Noting that the amount of money needed to keep a kid in sports was often quite small, he envisioned a solution.

  • Architecting a rudimentary crowdfunding platform dedicated to youth and amateur sports, Kerig re-enlisted the key members of his film production team (marketing savant Whitney Childers and film-producing partner and lawyer, Scott Zeller) and added former Kickstarter developer Tim Ruppert (whom he’d met while playing beer league hockey).

    Positioning: The team set out to create the world’s best crowdfunding platform for youth and amateur sports athletes. Although potential investors and advisors urged the team to expand into other areas of fundraising—such as charities, politics, and disasters—they maintained a disciplined focus on youth and amateur sports.

    Branding: The team built RallyMe around empowerment and passion, and drew on the nostalgia of classic sports brands. The brand bible was thorough and straightforward, with every choice focusing on trust and teamwork.

    Product: A classic marketplace, RallyMe provided a platform to display and explain each campaign, collect money from Boosters, and distribute it to Ralliers. RallyMe also offered step-by-step in-person and online guidance to help athletes craft compelling fundraising campaigns. Unlike the general crowdfunding platforms that would come later, RallyMe was tailored specifically to the sports community, ensuring features and taxonomy aligned with the unique needs of athletes.

    Process: Adhering to a nail-it-then-scale ethos, the team capitalized on Kerig’s ski background and kicked off by raising $23,000 for world champion ski jumper Lindsey Van. A well-publicized proof of concept, this led to a partnership with U.S. Ski & Snowboard (which was then called USSA).

    As dozens of skiers and their families began rallies on RallyMe, the team focused on creating win-win partnerships with other national governing bodies (USA Hockey, USA Cycling, US Rowing, etc.), as well as registration platforms such as SportsEngine (which was then called SportsNgin). Rounding out its partnerships with alliances with clubs, leagues, and teams, RallyMe became the go-to solution for sports-based crowdfunding.

  • In its first year, with a single partnership, RallyMe raised over $1 million for athletes and their families. By the end of year two, the company had established 17 partnerships and raised over $5 million for athletes. Experiencing 100% year-over-year growth, the company continued to create more flywheels of scale by forming additional partnerships. Athletes received the money they needed, organizations benefited from the goodwill of providing an invaluable tool to their athletes (and allowing them to use their trademarks in fundraising campaigns), and RallyMe was thriving. Platform fees provided the main revenue stream for RallyMe, and the company garnered multiple media stories (USA Today, NY Times, and the Associated Press). The company even got an unexpected plug on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

    In 2016, four years after starting the company, RallyMe had formed multi-year partnerships with 37 national governing bodies, was supporting thousands of athletes across multiple disciplines, and had become the world’s leading sports crowdfunding platform.

    In late 2016, RallyMe was acquired by NBC Universal and became part of the NBC-owned SportsEngine platform.

How it works

  • Our team will meet with you to understand your business and its challenges. This may be one meeting, or multiple meetings. If there seems to be a fit, we will ask you for accompanying documents.

  • Engaging Traction Business Accelerator involves as many as six steps (yep, like gears on a bike with wide-range transmission). First Gear will get us rolling and working for a short period of time for a set fee (which depends on scope). At the end of this period we will come together to evaluate process and product. At which time, we will re-engage, if it’s working, or dis-engage if it’s not. This is meant to save both parties a lot of time and money. Each successive upshift will come with clearly stated and memorialized tasks, time frames, and compensation schedules.

  • Taking an iterative approach, the Traction team works side-by-side, in the trenches and on track with you to implement, manage, and measure your agreed-upon strategies.

  • Whether you're seeking an exit or a profitable, sustainable business, we will work to help you get there.

Traction Services

  • We’ll look at where you’ve been and what’s working in order to plot a course for your desired destination.

  • TBA will help you find, hire, train, and manage the sales professionals that can take your business to the next level.

  • The marketing strategies that got your company rolling sometimes lack the horsepower to cover the next stage of its journey. TBA specializes in incorporating your core values and mission into new and targeted campaigns to drive you toward your destination.

  • TBA will help you find the right strategic partners, structure agreements, and execute partnerships that benefit all parties involved.

  • Structured one-on-one coaching with executive leadership.

  • In some circumstances, TBA will take an active role in fundraising.

Let’s get moving