2024 Year in Review: "this isn't easy but it's always worth it"

from our founder Dr. Allen Lim

"I’ve never written a retrospective during my time helping to build Skratch Labs..."

But it feels important to do now because this year was filled with so much change. A change that ironically brings us much closer to where Skratch was when we first started almost thirteen years ago - a place that we didn’t know was exactly where we were always meant to be.

Skratch began because of two dear friends - Aaron Foster and Ian MacGregor. We had all found ourselves at a time in our lives where we were literally starting from scratch. Aaron was transitioning from building a successful art business to the seemingly inaccessible dream of acting. Ian was back in school after having to leave the Pro Cycling Tour due to a career ending injury. And I could no longer manage the complexity and conditionality of professional cycling, struggling to balance my desire to coach at the highest level with the loneliness of living abroad away from friends and family.

"go to where the help is needed and help with what you have"

While we all had our own reasons for starting from scratch, I saw the business as a way to redefine my relationship with sport. Since seeing the Los Angeles Olympics as a kid in 1984, all I ever really wanted was to be part of the Olympic Movement. The pull was so strong that before finding work on the Pro Cycling Tour, I took every coaching opportunity I could find - mostly as a volunteer, never being able to make ends meet. Eventually, I would become one of the highest paid cycling coaches in the world. But I was unwell and miserable. I wanted the freedom of being a volunteer again. I wanted to be able to live by this philosophical ideal called the “prima facie” - the notion that some things are self-evident. If we all have an unalienable right for the pursuit of happiness, then cycling, learning, and teaching were my self-evident truth. Within that was another translation of the prima facie which holds that if one has the ability to help, then one has an immediately apparent or moral obligation to do so. My interpretation - go to where the help is needed and help with what you have. For me, that’s coaching and solving problems.

There was logic to the idea that if we could have a financially successful business that I could do what I wanted, which was indulging in the niche of coaching elite cyclists. So quite illogically, I put the cart before the horse and began running training camps for my friends. Drawn to a field of dreams, athletes like David Zabriskie, Christian VandeVelde, Taylor Phinney, Tim Johnson, and Evelyn Stevens - my friends - came to Boulder to prepare for races like the Tour de France and the Olympics. It was 2012 - our first year and I relied heavily on Ian and Aaron to grow and manage Skratch as I got to live out what felt like a fantasy. Perhaps there was a case that the training camps gave Skratch credibility, a unique brand identity, and marketing content as well as the constant stimulus for innovation. But it didn’t always feel that way. Sometimes I felt ashamed. I felt guilty for all the “real” work that Ian and Aaron were having to do. I felt inadequate for not applying myself towards learning business processes. I was a bug drawn to the light intentionally ignorant of what it took to keep the lights on.

Despite these feelings, I also felt so compelled to have cycling in my life that I knew I would coach with or without permission. It was a “can’t not do.” Unfortunately, I could never admit to Ian or Aaron that this is just what I wanted to do, which also reflected my own doubt and ignorance about whether the niche of endurance athletes we served was enough to sustain our long term growth. For a time, I thought that Skratch had to be a commodity product with broad mass market distribution because I wasn’t brave enough to tell myself or others that what we had was enough. Constantly tempted but never really willing to take outside capital towards a more “corporate” direction, the Skratch brand grappled with an identity crisis - admittedly, mostly my own. Torn, neither I nor the team was ever clear about my own roles and responsibilities as I followed the next shiny thing in sport and performance. It created a lot of uncertainty while making my love for cycling and coaching feel like a compulsion and addiction, rather than something helpful to the world.

"the biggest little company in America"

Ever persistent, it was Ian who never gave up on pushing me to reconcile my angst and to find the candor and humility to be myself. In 2018, he literally locked us in my apartment for three months so we could actually write a vision for the company. While it did not fully resolve all of our issues, it did make some things clear. We were not for sale. Growth from our own profit investment. Our people came first. Connection and community was at our core. We were to be a small but secure company - “the biggest little company in America” as we phrased it. It was a ten year vision cast to 2028.

2032 Vision

With that vision in hand, we reached the destination way ahead of schedule and by mid summer of 2023, it was clear that we had to recast a new vision. What’s vexing is that as one gets closer and closer to a big goal, things don’t get easier. If anything, things get harder because the world closes in again. We got too close to the North Star that was guiding us to actually see what direction we needed to go.

It’s with this background that the story of this last year really began in the Fall of 2023 when Ian and I began working on our 2032 Vision. Like our 2028 Vision, we used the chapter in the Zingerman’s Guide to Building a Great Business titled, “How to Write a Great Vision” as our template. We painted a picture of where we wanted to go, not of how we were going to get there. And while there are a lot of details that go into a vision like our mission, team, customers, financials, and product, what was most important was the opportunity to reevaluate who we were as people and by proxy better define the identity of Skratch.

So at the beginning of 2024 Ian and I stood in front of the company and cast a new vision for 2032. Central to that vision was an explicit stand for athletes and the Olympic Movement. Using the Olympic Values Education program as our guide, our vision has at its core the pursuit of excellence. Within that pursuit is the explicit idea that our goals are never more important than the way we pursue them - that being an athlete is about how and why we participate, not simply about winning. In the same way that the challenge of sport can bring us a greater understanding of ourselves and others, which in turn serves peace and human dignity, a business can also have a vision to serve with unrivaled hospitality. We can help to put athletes on podiums by putting process and care ahead of the podium. More importantly, helping people to be better by serving an athletic drive is important not just because it happens to be my passion but also because it’s a passion that is shared by so many. Enough to keep us growing, innovating, and learning far beyond 2032.

With this vision in place, I finally said out loud that my work coaching and solving problems for athletes has value. Rather than simply feeling like it was an indulgence, I finally admitted and made it clear that it would be a key part of my role with the company. While it helped me personally, it also helped us all to get better aligned professionally which began a series of small but impactful changes.

This included redirecting our marketing efforts putting brand and event activation at the forefront as we unleashed our event team to countless events across the country that ranged the gamut from Mid South Gravel to Sea Otter, Leadville, and The Rut to name just a handful. At the same time, we increased our own event calendar and hospitality through the Skratch Labs Cafe, fueling well over our goal of 60,000 adventures in our local community. We also began holding formal training camps again in places like Los Angeles, Girona, and Boulder with athletes like Ruth Edwards, Caroline Wreszin, and Ashlin Barry, which inspired us to begin laying the foundation for a revamped athlete sponsorship program in 2025. We expanded our athlete care team, hiring two new full time registered dietitians to provide free help to our customers. We simplified our product line by adding our Everyday Drink Mix - an unsweetened and sugar-free electrolyte + fruit only mix that can be used alone or added to our Sports Drink Mix or Super High Carb Drink Mix to customize the sodium level of our drinks. And we finally began distributing in Europe (https://www.skratchlabs.eu/) increasing our reach and ability to help.

But the highlight of all of these small changes was the massive undertaking of bringing members of the Skratch Labs Cafe culinary team and Chef Biju Thomas to Paris for the Olympic Games to feed and nourish the US Olympic Cycling Team. It was the largest nutrition team we’ve ever had at an event and while it was an extraordinary amount of work, the impact was equal to the effort as USA Cycling won a record setting 6 Olympic medals while fueled by Skratch.

"this isn't easy but it's always worth it"

As I look back upon this year and the many years before, one thing is for certain - this isn’t easy but it’s always worth it, even if that value is sometimes hard to say out loud to others or comes in hindsight. But I think that’s the beauty of all of this - the fact that we’ve never really known what we’re doing. We’ve never really had a business case for anything beyond what our gut told us was right and the “can’t not do’s” that innately called to us. Our history is marked with getting ahead of ourselves, following our ignorant bliss, launching and then learning from countless mistakes. Ultimately, I think that’s where innovation comes from because if there was a business case, then that probably means it’s already been done. More important, however, than innovation is just getting to be who you actually are. It’s with that perspective that I look back at this year and feel so grateful for the opportunity I got to start from scratch - the chance, each year, to be me again - the same person I’ve always been at the same biggest little company we’ve always been.

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