Elevation

After many of Oregon’s finest brews in some of the best pubs in the greater parts of Portland, Elevation has found what we feel is a perfect candidate to complete our initial executive and development team.  Last week Elevation was elated to announce that Charlie Schluting will be joining the team as a friend, co-worker, and business partner.  While Charlie, from an outward appearance, presents himself in a very conventional and modest fashion, the inner Charlie that our team has come to admire is one that is highly intelligent, of a high degree of moral and ethical character, and ”Walks Softly and Carries a Big Stick.”  (This was the slogan describing U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.)

With his computer science eduction, work experience with LINBIT-USA as the VP of Strategic Alliances and neurotic drive for progress, Charlie was a needed and very much welcomed addition to our tight-knit team.  His forward thinking and analytical attitude will most certainly help propel this organization to the levels that we all aspire to achieve.  As our Chief Operations Officer, Charlie’s initial focus will be to re-direct and then driving the tactical direction of our public web site and marketing efforts.  This includes not only a complete graphical design overhaul, but also a holistic content revamp that will entirely change our marketing message.  Basically he is tasked with making sure our public site and it’s content is easily understood and focused on attracting our target market.  We have realize over the past months that our current market message is convoluted and difficult to understand, so stay tuned for some changes here very soon.

While part of Charlie’s initial duties and responsibilities fall into a tactical and “getting to market” category, he has ultimately been brought onboard to take rule over the strategical dominions of application development, marketing, and customer relationship management.

Charlie, as your new friend and co-worker I want to thank you for taking this leap of faith and joining our team.  This not only means a great deal to me personally to have you aboard, but to the rest of the team as well.  I look forward to our future with this company, and may our successes number far greater than our failures.

A long time ago, I made the lifestyle choice to continuously maintaining my personal health and fitness.  While my exercise routines have varied over the years from an emphasis on running, cycling, boxing, kickboxing, weight training, and/or swimming, being active has been the common denominator of my life.  Looking back on these years of activity though, I feel somewhat frustrated that I have nothing more to show for these efforts than the man that looks back at me in the mirror every morning.  Historical health and personal achievements with regards to items like my resting heart rate, bench press, mile time, and/or chest size are nothing more than a vague recollection of times past.  To me there is something fundamentally wrong with this, and that after all these years of maintaining dedication to a healthy lifestyle choice I should be able to look back and see not only the exercise programs & meal plans that helped guide me to where I am today, but also the personal goals that achieved along the way.  While I feel very strongly that we as individuals who have made this life choice should have these capabilities, I have found no application on the market today that really allows us to holistically look back to our past and see the fruits of our efforts.

When building Elevation, our team targeted this shortcoming of the Health & Wellness industry and decided to help facilitate a change in the way we view our health history from one that is fragmented by the natural course of time, eg graduating high school and moving to college, and from college to the workforce, to one that is more holistic and provides a true and accurate view of one’s health history.  To do this, we have:

• Elected to give away application use to individuals, K-12 Primary Education Facilities & Non-Profits
• Developed the functionality to easily export information in public accounts to corporate accounts and import information in corporate accounts to a public account
• Created a personal history record viewing and reporting section

Over the past two years of application development, we have seen technology drastically alter our world and create new avenues for our company to purse.  One new avenue that Elevation has elected to move forward with, provides Fitness Professionals and Allied Health Professionals with the capabilities to take their practices, regardless of size, completely paperless.  With the help of smart phones like the iPhone, blackberry and blackjack, we are now able to create a mobile portion of our application that allows professionals and their clients to seamlessly work in the field while still maintaining the quality and integrity of their data.  While there are applications that focus on meeting consumer/clients needs, our application is unique and truly is the first of its kind because it was developed to meet the informational management needs of the professionals as well as their clients.  Our application not only allows the professionals to manage their entire portfolio of clients from the smart phone, but also it allows clients to access and manage their own profile from a smart phone as well.  Some of the key feature sets developed enable users to:

• Update physical body attributes
• Track progress toward goals
• View the entire database of exercises
• Log the performed sets, reps, duration, time, and rest for each exercise
• Leave notes associated to each exercises performed

So what does this mean:

• No more filling out weight cards during training sessions
• No more worries about lost records
• No more double entry of performance data
• No more worries about forgetting how to perform an exercise

To give you all an idea of where we are headed with our application, here is a short list of additions that we will be making to our application in the near future:

• Nutrition tracking
• Allowing users to associate pictures and videos to performed exercises.  (A trainer could take a picture or video of their client performing an exercise and associate it to a tracked exercise so that the client could see it later.)
• Associating workouts to an iTunes play list. (GroupX, yoga, and bootcamp instructors will never have to worry about loosing their workout specific music again.)

Realizing that our team cannot think of all the functionality needed, we would love to hear some feedback from the industry professionals on what feature sets would be the most useful in making their jobs more efficient.

Application Development and Design done by Code-Monkeys

Yesterday while reading October’s issue of Success Magazine, I ran across an article written by Darren Hardy entitled Accomplish More by Doing Less, 7 Productivity Strategies of the Superachiever.  In the first strategy, Mr. Hardy discusses the Pareto Principle, or more commonly known as the 80/20 rule.  This principle states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  Mr. Hardy uses the principle to reinforce his position of focusing one’s time on increasing the effective and efficient utilization of the 20%, thus resulting in greater increases in results and ultimately revenues.  Reflecting upon this concept, I questioned if our application really does increase the utilization of the critical 20% for Fitness Professionals and Allied Health Care Professionals. While last weeks review with Greg Sparks does give me comfort in the fact that he found the hotbuttons identified by our team to be the correct ones, this question ultimately cannot be answered until the professionals in the field have used and reviewed it.  For now we can just hope that the development of the feature sets chosen will ultimately result in efficiency increases.

To give a little insight into the method behind our madness when developing the application, we emphasized on product development in the following areas because they were identified as prime candidates for increases in efficiency and effectiveness:

1. Creation, modification, preservation of workouts & programs
2. Tracking, reporting, & retention of client information and progress
3. Channels of trainer to client communication
4. Portfolio client & trainer management

Coming from an engineering and project management background, I have always been great at getting straight to the point and minimizing the time spent chatting at work.  This has always proven very useful in running meetings, for my meetings start on time and, whether or not I am finished with my agenda, end on time.  Yesterday’s meeting with Greg Sparks though was a pleasant exception to my somewhat pragmatic mode of operation.  Greg, a caring, knowledgeable and energetic professional who exudes pride and passion for the health and wellness of not only his clients but himself as well, is a full-time Fitness Professional at the 24Hour Fitness in Tigard Oregon, a student of a distance learning MBA program, and a father to suit.  As I look back on the meeting I somewhat laugh because while the meeting was scheduled so that I could impress him with our application, I really think that it was he who impressed me with his abilities to do so much with so little time.

The meeting itself lasted a full 2 and a half hours, and covered everything in the application from how we build, shoot, and publish the exercises in our database to our newly developed iPhone application that enables him to go completely paperless in his training of clients.  While I do not want to put words in Greg’s mouth by saying that he thought the application was world class or the best that he had ever seen, I will say that the words flexibility, efficiency, and transparency continually resurface in the conversation.  For me this was a very good sign that our efforts have not been misguided over the last 2 years, and that we truly have developed an application that is of value to the professional world.

Our next planned meeting with the Fitness Professionals at 24hour Fitness is currently on hold until Elevation receives the 3rd revision of the iPhone application from Code-Monkeys.  We anticipate to see this revision within the next day or two.  When we do get this revision, it is our intention to meet with Greg and some his coworkers to give them all an iTouch with the application on it to use and test.  Once this last field test is complete, we are confident that we will be able to submit a final revision to the iTunes store that is spot on!