Mid Year Confessions
We're halfway through the year, and I've hit a little slump, but its time to get back on the horse.
6/26/20253 min read
I've been slacking on this platform recently.
I built a plan to do this email newsletter every week for the first quarter of the year, and then aim to actually get my athletes a bit more involved in helping drive the second quarter. We're at the halfway mark, and I have definitely dropped off the radar. Part of that was the engagement with the content, part of that was how busy everything else was, and part of it was feeling like it wasn't accomplishing anything.
So I wanted to write a bit about those three challenges, why I let them affect this consistency, and then reflect a little bit, as we hit the turn of the year and its a chance for a fresh start in the back half of the year.
Lack of Engagement
Now, don't get me wrong - I wasn't expecting to go viral overnight (as much as I would have loved that), but the engagement rate had started to drop off, despite me writing about things that I thought were interesting in sport and related to athletes each week. Immediately, the concern wasn't that I was talking to the walls, it was that I was not bringing things that were relevant or interesting to people. I know that most people who read this aren't sports professionals, but I had assumed that most people on the list were sports fans to some extent, or they had a business/commercial interest in athletes.
So as it dwindled, so too did the concern that I wasn't providing value to people, and that made it harder to write each week. I spent more time thinking and worrying about whether the thoughts that I was writing were going to be worth reading. I know that some of that is actually as much about the heading in the email and making it attention-grabbing, but its more than clickbait too.
Being Busy
The year had exploded. Between business development (recruiting athletes), building athletes (brand building, sponsorship planning and negotiation, career and post-career support, contract planning) and my day-job (that takes up a fair whack of time - all day basically), it was hard to find the time to sit and write, and to spend the time to think beforehand to work out what to write.
I know this is unavoidable, but given that I didn't want to use GenAI as part of this (you can read the AI blog about why), it meant that it was a struggle between writing and planning. I struggled between the decision to write late at night in bed (which is when I usually sit down and flesh out these insights), spending that time scheduling outreach emails or getting that valuable shut-eye to reload for the next day and the rest of the week.
While the plan had been to get athletes and others involved, I hadn't got it to materialise in time to actually be real, I was still stuck with the nose to the grindstone, and unfortunately, this was the thing that had to give, among all the other things. But I am going to try to be better and more consistent in the back half of the year. I can't guarantee a newsletter every single week (there are definitely going to be weeks I miss), but I am going to aim not to drop off the radar too much.
Lack of Progress
The other big demon I was wrestling with was a lack of progress - feeling like the newsletter wasn't achieving anything, and therefore it wasn't worth the time (and brain-space) effort it required. When I was juggling so many other things, and so many of them felt like they were bringing more reward in the short and long term, and so I committed to those.
So before we go through the full run of the second half of the year, its a simple one from me. What do you want from this? Are you looking for insights about sports business, relevant or not to the athletes I actually work with? Do you want updates on how these athletes are going and what is changing in their world? Are you looking for opportunities to use the athletes I work with in sponsorship & promotional opportunities? What is it that you are looking for when you open this email each week?
Ultimately, I want to make sure that the time you spend reading this each week is valuable - and so I want to write about the things that you want to read about. So let me know, and let's get going on a cracking second half of the year.
And thanks for reading this far.
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About - Coppel Sports
ABN 89 351 198 453
Bondi NSW
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dan@coppelsports.com.au
+61 439 263 221
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