The Tri Town Times: 7/29/24

• Posted on 30 July 2024
• By Antonio Gonzalez
• Posted in the tri town times
• 0

Thoughts on feedback and conflict.

Hi all,

Here is your weekly Tri Town Times newsletter:

Last week's highlights:

- Both American women crashed during a rain-soaked Olympic Time Trial. Chloe Dyert was able to recover and secure the Bronze medal, but professional triathlete and two-time 70.3 World Champion Taylor Knibb crashed four times and finished 19th out of 35.

- Prior world road and time trial champion Remco Evenepoel won the men's Olympic time trial. He has had a record-breaking season, having taken third overall in this year's Tour de France while also winning the Stage 7 individual time trial.

- Haley Batten won the silver medal in the women's cross-country mountain bike race, which is the highest finish ever for an American in the event. The men's event is live as of this morning.

- Ashleigh Gentle and Sam Laidlow won the T100 London event.

- Over 2,000 regional athletes competed in smokey conditions at the Burley Spudman triathlon. Results here.

Events I'm looking forward to:

- The Olympic triathlon starts July 30th with the men's race. There are rumors of the swim being canceled due to poor water quality in the Seine river. A decision on water quality is made just hours before the event begins.

Thought that struck a chord:

Conflict can bring out the best in us or the worst. The choice is yours. 

Sport and business share many similarities, which is why we often see athletes drawn to business after a successful sporting career. At their core, both are about problem-solving.

The best athletes excel at solving the intricate problems of their sport. They master getting the ball in the net, crossing the finish line first, or jumping the highest. Like in business, they face many competitors and sometimes great rivals, motivating them to leave no stone unturned to gain an advantage.

All great athletes seek to win, but it is often in failure that they make the changes necessary to succeed in the future. The best athletes I've met were masters at failing—they failed often and fast and rebounded from failures faster than their competitors. Most importantly, they did not shy away from feedback. They wanted to hear what they were doing wrong almost more than they wanted to hear praise because addressing their weaknesses offered the greatest opportunity for improvement.

Similarly, the primary goal of any business is to solve problems, but for a business, it is about solving problems for their clients. In the bike industry, people either want a bike, and we provide it, or they have a bike that isn't working correctly, and we fix it.

For the most part, Tri Town has been successful at creating a business that solves bicycle-related problems for people. Yet, as good as we are at solving bike problems, we sometimes miss the mark; we fail; we lose the race. That happened earlier this month, and the mistake was shared by the client in a public review on Google.

Receiving negative feedback can be as hard for a business as it is for an athlete, yet it is equally critical for development. For a business, a negative review is one of the biggest gifts an upset client can give. The client has to be brave enough to share a painful experience without any guarantee that anyone will listen or care. I get truly excited when these (albeit painful) moments happen because they provide clarity on where we need to focus our attention. Somehow, in some way, we have let a client down, and this person is brave enough to let us know about it.

Like a basketball team reviewing game tape, our team sat down and reviewed, discussed, and debated what went wrong. Most importantly, our team embraced the negative feedback and did not hide behind excuses. We reached out to the client, acknowledged that we could have done better, and discussed the changes we've made to ensure it doesn't happen again.

In the end, the client was grateful that we acknowledged the mistake and ended up taking the review down, which I advised against. I believe it is important for people to see that mistakes can happen. What matters most is not that we never make mistakes but how we respond to them.

Have a great week!

Antonio Gonzalez

Tri Town Bicycles

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