We've got a story today of a side hustle - an idea, a hobby that's turned into a full time endeavor.

The protagonist is a recreational endurance athlete. Seven years ago, he came up with an idea. A spark that ultimately turned into much, much more.

How did it come to be?

Meet Patrick Stark. He is the co-founder of Endurance Tap - digesting gel for athletes.

A purpose-driven entrepreneur, born and raised in Toronto, Canada. Before taking the leap into full time entrepreneurship, Patrick Stark was in industrial design, specializing in architectural lighting he was VP of engineering and product strategy for an architectural lighting manufacturer in Toronto.

Very different from sports nutrition!

Using his background in product, and complemented by his co-founder Matt's background in marketing, they went all in on entrepreneurship.

But first: what is endurance/sports nutrition?

Not everybody takes endurance or sports nutrition products. So it’s worth understanding what they are first. These are energy gels that are consumed by endurance athletes while they're doing some form of exercise. Maybe a run or a ride. (If you’re a regular reader or listener, you know I am a runner. And that is my form of mind-body-spirit self-care!)

There’s also non-traditional endurance athletes - like hockey players or even golfers. Patrick says, “Energy gels are usually made with some form of sugar. Most of them are made with maltodextrin, which is a low cost food additive. Which means essentially, you're taking junk food while you're trying to live a healthy lifestyle. Endurance Tap uses Canadian maple syrup as the source of sugar. We have maple syrup, sea salt, and ginger - three ingredients only in our flagship product, and we add some green coffee bean extract in our caffeinated product. It is super tasty. People actually look forward to taking it. So it's a real game changer for folks out there who struggled with these products.”

What turned an industrial designer into a nutritional product creator?

“Seven years ago, I had surgery on my right knee. And it was supposed to be very minor. It turned out not to be minor. I woke up with a cast from my hip to my ankle, and couldn't touch my foot to the ground for six weeks. I had to go through months of rehab with braces. As a runner, as someone who's addicted to running, when you can't run, all you can think about is running. I further started thinking about nutrition. Maple syrup came to my mind as a solution. And I thought ‘there must be someone out there who was doing this. If there's a company out there who makes a product that uses honey, there's got to be somebody out there using maple syrup’. So I did some research. There wasn't anyone making a product with maple syrup. I sent an email to Matt, who at that time was doing some consulting with startups, and laid out this idea. We literally started in his kitchen, trying to figure out recipes. We added all sorts of things until we came up with the idea of removing absolutely everything we could, making it as simple as we possibly could. And that's how we ended up with the three ingredients. We use maple syrup for the calories. So it's 100 calories. We use sea salt from Vancouver Island for the sodium so it's 50 milligrams of sodium. And then we have real dry ginger. Ginger is a digestive aid, and that's the only reason it's in there - to help your stomach. It's everything you need, nothing you don't. And that was the beginning of it.”

Purpose and profit - a fresher business ethos

Business owners often think it's a choice between growth and profit, versus social or environmental responsibility. Patrick believes you really can do it all. “I think there's a model that does that. It also resonates with our customers. Our customers are people who spend a lot of time outside, they appreciate the environment. We support initiatives to clean up trails and that’s where many of them spend their time. I think, not only is it the right way to run a business, it's a smart way to run a business in the long term. It would be great to see more people doing it.”

The importance of investing time and energy into creating strong systems and processes to scale

“There's a cartoon, I like to reference it, it shows these two people pulling a cart. The cart has square wheels, and there's a person standing behind the cart, holding up a round wheel and trying to show it to the two. And the two people pulling the cart are saying no, we don't have time. We can't look at it right now. That analogy to me is what was happening with us with Endurance Tap as a side hustle. We just didn't have time to put all the systems in place that we needed to have in place to allow for sustainable, long-term growth. What I've been focusing on a lot are automations - like within accounting. It can be simple things like setting up automatic reminders so you don't have to chase them yourself. We have set up integrated systems with Xero for accounting so we can just take pictures of receipts, throw them out - you don't have to enter expense reports at all. It pulls all the characters out and enters it. It's an ongoing challenge, but it's getting better and better.”

To bootstrap or not to bootstrap

Endurance Tap is self-funded, with a little bit of debt financing. They moved slowly at the beginning. A key challenge for any product-related business is the fact that it’s incredibly cashflow intensive. “As you grow, there’s a cycle of needing more and more cash, but you can grow at a certain rate where that is not as much of an issue. At the beginning we all have different types of leverage - you can use capital as leverage, you can use time as leverage. And in the beginning, your time is actually well-spent on all the nitty-gritty, unless you have a big stack of cash to throw at the problem. If you want to bootstrap a company you should be willing to pack the boxes yourself at the beginning! We did everything ourselves for a couple years. We used to have hand stamped labels on each pouch, which we stamped. Then fast forward from sitting around someone's dining room table stamping these pouches to ordering by the hundreds of 1000s in a couple of years.”

Fun, frank advice from Patrick Stark!

“If you want to do something in life, just start. Even if it ‘fails’, you're still going to have learned so much that it's not a failure. The mistake that's often made is that we're just very bad at understanding risk. People think, ‘Well, I'm in a full time job with a salary, it's so incredibly risky to go do something else.’ It isn't, really. You could go into work the next day and get laid off - you don't really know. So put that aside. Be confident. Jump into it. And if you aren't in a position to jump into it full-time, put in a couple hours every night - start something and see what happens.”