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The CEO's Journal- Entry 13: A Great Week
March 14, 2019
Today was a GREAT day! I unboxed two incredible sample items this morning and posted them on my Instagram story (@DedicatedAustin). Everyone LOVED them! I’m super excited to get the items in and I’m thankful everyone is equally excited to receive them. Besides that I also had a really great training session with a young basketball player named Brooke Barnes. Brooke has come such a long way since I began working with her in September. It really is amazing to see and I’m just thankful that I’ve played a role in her development. Today we made some adjustments to her shooting form which paid off almost instantly. Keep up the great work Brooke! After my session with Brooke I began preparing for a speech I’m going to be giving at Holy Heart tomorrow. I’m naturally a pretty shy person so I’m definitely nervous about it. But with that said, getting out of your comfort zone is what ELEVATE is all about. Wish me luck!
March 15, 2019
What an AMAZING day! I’m having such a great week so far.
This morning thought, I’ll admit that when I woke up, I really did not want to get out of bed. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a naturally shy person and speaking infront of a group of people is not something that is within my comfort zone at all. But I had a choice that morning. I could do what I knew was right or I could do what I knew was easy (and wrong). I could choose to face my fears and share my knowledge with the students at Holy Heart or I could lay in my bed and hide. It was close, but ultimately I decided to do the right thing. So I forced myself out of bed and headed to Holy Heart High School with my good friend Taylor (@tldoylee).
Once we arrived, I was a bit nervous. Having Taylor there helped a lot and she really did a great job of keeping my mind off of how I was feeling (Thanks Taylor!). And once I began my presentation, it was smooth sailing. I told the students about my story as a basketball player and how that led to the creation of Elevate. I told them about my successes, downfalls, challenges and triumphs and made sure to let them know about many of the lessons I learned along the way. They loved it and I am extremely proud of myself for choosing to face my fears and doing what I knew in my heart was right.
After that presentation I headed to a meeting I had with a very experienced accountant and entrepreneur. He gave me a LOT of great advice and I am truly thankful to have met such a great person. I often look to my uncle for advice as he has a lot of business experience and now I am fortunate enough to have yet another wise and experienced person that I can turn to for help. Once that meeting was over I met with Chris Coady (our Talent Manager), trained a couple of young and talented basketball players (Ethan Vey and Matt Pennell) and then had a nice workout before heading home to complete my usual day to day tasks.
It was a busy and fantastic day!
March 16, 2019
Pop up shop day! Today we had a pop up shop at O’Donel High School for their boys basketball tournament. I’m not going to lie it’s been a pretty slow day so far and we haven’t gotten many sales. BUT I fully expected this. We’ve been doing pop up shops at basketball tournaments all year and at a certain point you start seeing the same faces over and over and over again. The majority of these guys already own something from ELEVATE so it should be expected that sales will slow down as the season goes on. This year we’ve seen SO much progress and I’ve been learning through every challenge along the way. I’ll have a plan for how to counter this in the future for sure so no worries on my end!
Today I also made a BIG announcement to many of the coaches and players here in NL: We are going to be hosting two ALL STAR GAMES! I sent out emails and messages to many of the coaches and players asking them to vote for this year’s top players. On May 11th at Holy Heart of Mary High School we will be putting all of the top male and female players on the court to display their skills. We’ll also be having a 3-point shootout to crown the province’s top shooter. It’s going to be a WICKED event!
Anyways, today is St Paddy’s day weekend so I’m actually going to go out with some friends for once lol.
Peace!
March 17, 2019
Our pop up shop was pretty slow today as well. Better than yesterday. But still slow. Either way, it was absolutely worth it and I would gladly do it all over again if given the chance. I want to say thank you to Robin and everyone else at O’Donel for inviting us and also to everyone who came out to support us and the competing players. It was a great tournament. Besides the pop up shop, I don’t have much else to report today. I did a lot of non-ELEVATE related things which was nice. But it is 12:22am now and I have a lot to catch up on. So sorry for the short entry but I have a lot to do! Thanks for reading! Austin Chambers
Founder & CEO
@DedicatedAustin