How Heilman's Performance has gone from Dream to Reality.

The last few months for me have been an absolute whirlwind.  Do you remember that feeling you have, either in high school or college during finals week? The one where every morning you wake up you know you have important tasks to complete. You’re just not entirely sure what they all are, where exactly to start and in the back of your mind you know as soon as you do, something else will likely come up. That’s kind of how I’ve felt since January. Now, don’t get me wrong, this was all self induced. Starting your own small business can be an exciting thing, but there are definitely a few things you can line up first to make it easier on yourself. One of my favorite strength and conditioning coaches, (and certainly one of the most respected in the world) Eric Cressey, wrote an article once upon a time entitled “The smart things I did starting my business” (Cressey Performance). I got about half way through his write up and realized “I’ve done none of this.” So that was reassuring. Trying to get past the comparison of myself to Eric was a difficult one, but once I understood that my path to the profession and current circumstances were utterly different, I nutted up and got the ball rolling. So here is my own spin on the “Smart  (Mostly Crazy) things I did to get Heilman’s Performance off the ground.”

1.    I made a structured business plan.

One afternoon I just sat down at the kitchen table and stayed there. I don’t have some highly touted business degree so needless to say; I had no idea what I was doing. I asked myself though, “If I were going to help support something monetarily, what questions would I want answered first?” I then put together my business plan trying to answer every single question I thought might be thrown my direction. “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” seemed like the most reasonable to answer first.

2.    I knew I needed help and wasn’t afraid to ask for it.

One of Cressey’s bullet points in his article was: “I had three months of operating expenses in pocket.” Well I probably had about three minutes of operating expenses in pocket. So I started asking around. There are few things that will humble a man faster than asking people with disposable income to share it with you because you don’t have any yourself. Lucky for me, there are still a lot of good people in this world. I offered an interest rate I thought correlated with the lender’s risk and accumulated what I needed from some people that believed in me. Unfortunately the big boys (The Bank) don’t care how much money you have, if technically, none of it is yours. So I had more convincing to do.

3.    I was relentless.

Piggy backing off of the end of my second bullet point, my relentless attempt to persuade financial institutions may have been the most frustrating part of the entire process. I was turned away by 4 commercial lenders (3 of who I know didn’t even look at my business plan and 1 who treated me like a 9 year old opening a lemonade stand) before I finally found someone with enough faith and compassion to see and feel the passion in my pitch and work along with me. There used to be a time, from what my father tells me, that a lender/borrower relationship was based on trust, work ethic and a mutual cooperation to make things work. Those days are long gone. Today it’s based on a few numbers, and none of those numbers include the amount of hours someone is willing to put into something in order to make it work. There was one lender in town that was willing to revert, if you will, to the old school methodology, and for that I will be forever grateful.

This post might be slightly premature. I firmly understand that I haven’t accomplished anything yet. If I don’t run a successful business none of this will matter. The last three months of grinding out hours at a job I couldn’t stand, convincing people to take a risk on me, filling out endless paperwork and asking people to volunteer their free time for my benefit will be nothing but a valuable learning experience. In the event, however, that it does succeed. If people start to see the different approach, scientific and biological application, work ethic and personalities my colleagues and I will offer at Heilman’s Performance and things take off, there will be no greater reward than knowing that our “something” was started from absolutely nothing. I’ll tell you this; few things will drive me more to succeed than proving to one particular person I’m selling the best god damned lemonade on the block.

Caleb Heilman

“The only thing I know is I’ll never know everything.” – Jason Green