Joshua Kennon

There’s some exciting news coming out of headquarters in the next few days regarding the expansion of our flagship custom apparel company.  We’re going to aggressively go after a new market that has seen its primary players devastated by the credit crisis and, like any good American, we are going to use the situation to our advantage.

MOA Team Supply Screenshot

We are working until about 4 in the morning to launch the new team supply business, which will be a division of Mount Olympus Awards ™, the successful custom letterman jacket business we launched several years ago. Due to our low-cost expense structure, we can get brutal on pricing, provide great customer service, and still generate higher profit margins than our competitors despite charging as much as 70% off their traditional prices. It’s a great system that lets us leverage our existing client relationships and, I hope, add a few million dollars in revenue to the company’s tax returns each year.  The product lineup that we hope to have in place by the fourth quarter will include team uniforms including baseball, softball, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, cheerleading, soccer, football, and track, just to name a few.

What will be interesting is that we are building this business on a scalable platform that has a far more flexible coding properties than the Yahoo merchant solutions site we use at some of our other stores.  This means that we can enter hundreds of products per day by working in CSV-formatted excel sheets, uploaded en masse in a few seconds. This should let us eventually reach a productivity metric of several million dollars in sales per employee, a figure that most people can’t even dream about, let alone believe is possible.

The specific nature of the team market makes me optimistic on our prospects.  We are going to be absolutely ruthless.  In less than one year, we are going to build one of the largest online team sporting goods dealers in the country.  If there is one thing our business model has mastered, it’s the ability to serve customers better, deliver goods in a fraction of the time, and generate profit margins in excess of Microsoft’s despite selling at huge discounts off our rivals.  There’s no way the competitors can keep up because this is what we think about every day when we wake up, at night when we are lying in bed, during the holidays as we wrap gifts, in the summer as we spend an afternoon in the pool … this market is one that is entered by those who simply wanted to find a way to make money and enjoy a decent life with their family.  How can they possibly compete with an investor who reverse-engineered the business and built it from the ground up for one purpose, and one purpose only: To generate ever-increasing torrents of free cash flow to be redeployed into other opportunities? They cannot win.