There are as many stories of funding as there are pros doing the races. My advice is for you to find races with money that you can drive to. The ones where you might actually make some money too. Going to races where you really dont have much chance at $$, well that just ends up being a race for your head, and not your pocket book. I mean this race you just did, probably 3rd didnt even pay expenses, so until you are ready to fight for the podiums, maybe stay local while you continue to improve.

That's what we did back in the olden days, slept on friends couches, drove 1000's of miles, until then time when all those other avenues for making money started to kick in. Maybe tell us a little about you and how the race you just did went? Perhaps time to come out of the shadows and enlist the ST collective in your journey...

https://www.codybeals.com/2015/02/my-rookie-pro-triathlon-budge/

Do big city races and 1 week before after do food delivery via bike. Get paid to train :)

You aren't really missing anything. Some pro's have family money. Some make really stupid financial decisions and end up out of the sport within 3 years. Some try to make it by being really cheap (couch surfing, used equipment, self coached, etc). And then there are some pro's who actually have full time jobs and aren't necessarily trying to become a full time pro that provides a constant income.

If you are trying to become pro that generates constant revenue, you need to treat everything you do like a business. It's no longer a hobby. Every decision and purchase matters. You should be asking yourself, what's the ROI on this purchase/investment? Look at Oceanside 70.3 as what not to do as an up and coming pro. I think that start list had 50+ guys yet only 8 get paid. Why do half of those guys do that race where they know its going to be a financial loss?

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blog

This is interesting, thanks for sharing! If I could get my rent down to 8k a year I would have no problems! Everything Cody says does make sense here. There are some good takeaways and some obvious ones about ballin on a budget, but ultimately it sounds like my starting point should probably be to start aggressively reaching out to sponsors and see if anything sticks if I want it to be sustainable. Also, I have no idea how homestays work? For example, looking at racing Augusta, what would I do there?

Thank you again

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Homestays used to be organized by the race directors or pro liaison for each race. These days you can just try your luck by posting on local triathlon club Facebook pages or the individual event Facebook page and ask if there is anyone interested in putting you up. It is exactly what Josh Amberger did for IMC last week. He messaged the Penticton Tri Club who then shared it on the IMC FB page and there you go,a few minutes later,he was sorted with a homestay.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Of that list, I am the “have a full-time job” pro, self coached, second-hand bike, budget wheels, 1 race kit, eats fig newtons instead of gels when training lol…

like my starting point should probably be to start aggressively reaching out to sponsors and see if anything sticks if I want it to be sustainable.


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Just a word of advice on the sponsorship front. Approach sponsors in a way that talks about what YOU will do for the company and how you and the sponsor align, etc and not a simply aviewpoint of "what will i get out of it" from a sponsor...especially when it's a low level pro wanting to get sponsorship.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

i work with many professional athletes and many of them winning the 70.3 or full ironman. Everyone but 1 of them had another job on the side to help with expense so that says a lot about how to manage the financial part.

Same for me as a professional athlete in my past...i always work on the side other jobs to make it viable financially. unless you are winning the big A races or placing on the podium at those tier 1 events, it will be difficlute to make it your main source of income and be sustainable.

you do it for the love of the sport, not for the financial part!


as for Travel, i rarely ever paid for accomodation, i always had homestay or stayed with other athelte on a couch. I drove or get ride with other athletes to races so no airplane if possible etc. You live on the bare minimum and make it as cheap as it can be. The best and happiest years of my life by far!!!!

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Jonathan Caron / Professional Coach / ironman champions / age group world champions
Jonnyo Coaching
Instargram

Aside from emailing the contacts of the tri clubs in the areas you will be racing, you might also try posting here. And, take up Monty's offer to tell us more about yourself.

I used to run the pro homestay program for Alcatraz and Treasure Island years ago and we always had lots of people offer to host.

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clm
Nashville, TN
https://twitter.com/ironclm | http://ironclm.typepad.com

Thank you for that, the homestay program does sounds like a great opportunity to practically cut my travel expenses in half. I will certainly post here and elsewhere as I gear up for the potential of Michigan and Augusta.

Me: I never turned “pro” to make money. I just love to race and only did 3 races on a road bike before I realized I could potentially qualify as Pro with points after winning Arizona AG. I perused it strictly to get into Oceanside after it sold out since it is the closest race to home. Racing as a pro has made me love the sport even more because it’s made racing that much easier with no sellouts, cheaper registration fees, and way simpler race weekend logistics. I have no coach, no training plan, and have been learning on the fly about the intricacies to the sport, always very hesitant to ever overly commit financially to any additional expenses. My dream is to not make money, but just get to the point where racing 7 or 8 times a year is sustainable and it would be a huge bonus to potentially promote something positive along the way and make some new connections/friendships. Pretty simple!

Look up the app Saturday

Will save you even more in race fueling, training fuel etc

Game changer for many here on ST


pennies for fuel that many, myself included, believe is better than even the expensive gels, drinks and blocs

What’s your name if you don’t mind me asking. Would be nice to follow your journey. If you don’t have a big social media presence you need to start because most sponsors are going to look at that.

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Let food be thy medicine...

If you end up going to MI, reach out. I may be able to accommodate.

I think that there are decissions to take like where do you want to live?

You need to live in a place when you can balance your cost with the money. In a área where you can get sponsors which made training and material Almost for free, and where you can have enought races in short distance that allow you to survive, and allow you to sale for the big races.

There are pros which could "support you" if you work for him as caddy or sparring. There are clubs which can provide you sponsors and material.

Triathlon is a minority sport. It is not easy to be professional anywhere. It is like to start as actor, you should go to Hollywood.

Whatever you do, maybe dont try the gofundme route....

Very much this ^^^^. Years back, I had a meeting with a big company as a potential sponsor for a team that I ran (tri/running) and knew someone else (we shared a common sponsor) who was making a pitch for his cycling team. He went in talking about all of the races their money would help him get to, and his meeting lasted less than 5min. I talked about some of the obvious things we could do for them, and then asked them what they accepted the meeting, and what they hoped that they could get from us. My meeting went on for 25min and got very positive feedback. In the end, neither of us got the deal, because within a week of the meeting, the parent company for that company announced major restructuring and layoffs, and weren't in a position to sponsor anyone, but had they been in position to, I am positive my odds were much better... If you're not sure what the answer to that question is, you need to figure that out before reaching out to companies, because they are usually looking at how they can get ROI for the dollars they give out in terms of sponsorship beyond just the warm and fuzzies about an athlete getting to 2-3 extra races for the season. And for that reason, reaching out to local businesses is a good starting point (you can still reach out to others as well), since you might be able to offer appearances, visibility in their local market, clinics, coaching, workshops, etc. that might be harder to offer to companies based far away.

the OG gofundme pro just won oregon 70.3

Thank you I will certainly take you up on that! I was just looking at flights this morning into Detroit potentially hitchhiking from there lol

Thank you for this advice! Makes complete sense. I’ll start working on my race recap YouTube video now! In terms of “offerings” to companies, I know you listed a few, but could you expand on that? Say you contact a local bike shop or businesses, beyond social media what do you think would be best in terms of “value” you bring? This is obvious much easier with tangent industries vrs something not sport related

Are you Emmett Gross? One thing I got for a pro I was working with in the past. They had a sponsor that was a nutrition company the company was based in a city with a 70.3 and so offered to pay for travel and accommodation to the race.

There’s a lot you may be able to offer, just think outside the box a bit in terms of what you have and what the company may be looking for. The big thing a few years ago was helping to get more people involved in corporate fitness programs for the big companies.

Another thing to note about social media is that unless you’re one of maybe four or five folks your social media presence wouldn’t be of value. There may be some, but not a lot of value of them posting about you on their social media though.

Spitballing here, purely for you to have a look inside the 'mind' of a small company that might be interested in sponsoring athletes like you. We're a company looking to sponsor athlete affiliates. What we'd want to hear is how many people listen to you as a resource for information in the market that our company operates in, and how many subscriptions to our app are you going to drive.

We have zero marketing budget so we can't afford to pay you until you've produced income for us. If you're already an avid user of our product, we're very likely to want to pay you to promote it, and we'll want to measure what you're bringing in for us. We'll have a system that measures exactly how many new app subscribers you drive to us and compensation may be on a per-subscription basis with bonuses at various checkpoints.

Just throwing this out as a big FYI, so you can know what organizations might be thinking like. We genuinely would LOVE to sponsor a ton of up and coming pro athletes, but at the end of the day, it costs us money to do that, and you have to make us at least as much as we're paying you, or you have to be so big of a name that our alignment with you alone gains us notoriety. You're a little small for that and we're a little small to think about affording you even if you were big enough for that!

One automated way to earn revenue from us would be to post your affiliate link on every ride on Strava, and in every instagram post, and any other social media you maintain. Basically become a walking advertisement for our company, and the pain points that we solve for our customers. The more you can tell our story as a company, the more likely we are to think that you will be able to drive revenue to us. Think of yourself like an employee of the company. You're a salesperson. Knowing our product inside and out is a powerful marketing tool. I suspect that this will be true for any sponsorship deal you strike up. Knowing the company really really well is worthwhile. Knowing their values, their products, and more than at a cursory website review, is a good idea. Use their products.

Whatever you do, don't suggest product changes! We genuinely do love feedback from all our users, and our pro users no less, but if you're navigating towards a sponsorship with us, and you spend more time telling us what we ought to change, than asking questions about how the existing product works, and what's coming next so that you can relay that information to your audience, it's a red flag that you're more in this for you, than you are for us. We do want to reward you, but we'll go broke and out of business if we reward you more than you grow us.

For sure we throw a few hundred dollars at high-level amateurs we want to support out of the kindness of our hearts, and low-level newbie pros like you are near and dear to our hearts, but at the end of the day, we'll go bankrupt if we do that for too many pros that aren't producing results (app subscriptions).

One common pathway for some lower-level pro's are nutrition sponsorships because margins are relatively high on carb powders and the like. We play nicely with any nutrition sponsorships because our app can recommend those products and teach folks exactly how to optimize them.

Hope that was insightful!

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Dr. Alex Harrison | Founder & CEO | Sport Physiology & Performance PhD
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📱 Check out our app → Saturday: Pro Fuel & Hydration, a performance nutrition coach in your pocket.
Join us on YouTube → Saturday Morning | Ride & Run Faster and our growing Saturday User Hub

Starts post with “Spitballing” only to give the most thorough and detailed response I could’ve imaged! Thanks for that!

Totally understand that if you’re not getting results from an athlete then it’s “charity” not sponsorship. Really interesting to hear about performance-based sponsorship, I wasn’t really thinking about measurable ways to deliver value so that makes a lot of sense and ultimately is understandable why a small company would have no budget for this and a larger company isn’t going to care unless you’re actually impact sales/revenue significantly.

Long story shot, it sounds like there are specific strategies to navigating the “game” of sponsorship and no one is going to give handouts without expected results. As I reflect, it sounds like to even get to the point we’re racing expenses could be covered a mid level pro will have to either dramatically increase performance and/or invest some effort in expanding their social media presence as a valuable marketing channel to leverage. I’ll use an example of Ari Klau. Seems like a really nice guy btw, he finished 30seconds and 60secs in front of me in the last few races but he is potentially actually sustaining himself through his YouTube content and bringing a platform to market brands regardless of his performance.

Also - never heard of Saturday and checked it out last week and it looks pretty awesome. Love how customizable each piece is. New user!