DAN SCHMALZ
Dan Schmalz grew up in a light industrial part of Iowa in the city of Dubuque, 250 yards from the Mississippi River, in a house that fit itself into a slice of abandoned limestone quarry.
During Dan’s childhood he and his brothers would walk out their back door every day and into the manufacturing areas of his family’s precast concrete business, to help out with the work chores. His grandfather owned a nearby dairy.
“My Grandpa, my Dad, even my Uncle, they all said the same thing. ‘Why would you ever go and work for someone else?’, and, ‘If all you need is money, just go shovel sand, there’s always money in concrete.”
Dan and his brother Mike own a design agency and marketing firm from their home studio offices in New Jersey and Iowa. None of the family work ethic has been lost on either of them.
“My grandfather was the milkman, I mean THE Milkman,” says Dan.
“In the time when milkmen were a thing. He worked for himself every day of his life and so did my dad.”
From a young age Dan helped his brothers shoveling truckloads of graded sand, throwing bladefuls into the hopper. By the time Dan was 10, and Mike 12, evening routines included brushing on a finish coat to the day’s concrete as it sat curing in its precast forms.
“The question growing up in our house wasn’t ever about getting an education just so you could get out into the world and get a job. The conversation in our house was always about ‘making a job’.”
“‘Don’t wait to be hired’, they’d say. ‘Go to work. Don’t wait around!’”
BURIAL VAULTS
While his Dad would walk back and pour out the slurry from the mixer, the brothers would lean down into the silent, unmoving barrel and reach across to sweep out the uncastable mess.
“The automatic mixer, when we upgraded, made things a whole lot easier, and we had our biggest and most reliable business with burial vaults because of it.”
To protect caskets from crushing under the wheels of a passing tractor, the Schmalzes perfected a process to make commonly purchased burial vaults made from precast concrete.
Before a funeral ceremony a Schmalz PreCast Concrete fleet vehicle would deliver the vault to a cemetery, where an industrial backhoe had earlier cleared a neat plot, and then a lowering device would inter the decedent into its allotment.
Dan, Mike and Uncle Carl had prepared the funeral site, flattening a graveside floor of brown dirt covered beneath a shiny putting green colored industrial mat of astro turf around the edges of the grave. They would set up a mourners’ tent in case of rain.
“But burial vaults also exist because in modern embalming there are a lot of chemicals that can flush out over time and leak into a local watershed or a well. A precast concrete burial vault contains those flushes,” Dan said.
Dan credits the hundreds of funerals he attended and worked at together with his family as the great open air bazaar of fundamental life lessons that he grew up with and traded in during a late 1970s childhood.
“Life at that time was all about showing up at a hole and putting things in the ground.”
APPLE II
The Schmalz family nevertheless placed a significant importance on education, and on weekends in elementary school, when they weren’t working at a funeral, Dan and Mike with the help of a computer teacher would spend whole days at the keyboard of the era’s most sophisticated 8-bit BASIC programmable machine, the user-friendly Apple II, with its 280×192 four-color graphics monitor and eight slots of expandable memory for a grand total of 48K bits of personal computing power.
“For four or five hours Mike and I would sit there and code the color matrix on a piece of quarter inch graph paper with the logos for our favorite football and baseball teams. Then on the Apple II you select a color code number, track down the corresponding square from the graph paper, and you enter that box’s corresponding code. Then you go to the keyboard and you enter a line of programming value for each unit on the monitor. 800 times.”
With no printers working yet in color, at least not in the elementary school computer room, the logos remained encoded on audio cassettes, or later, floppy discs that the family dog sought out for bite practice. Weekends at school came to an end when the Schmalz family purchased an Apple II for themselves, as the family’s first personal computer.
Then came high school, and despite strong academics and a healthy intellectual curiosity, Dan found himself contemplating a career based on what he had in fact studied in high school, and not, as so many guidance counselors and college recruiters are trained to think, based on what kind of job he could possibly get with his education after graduation.
Remember the men in his family, asking why on Earth would he want to work for somebody else? Make a job, don’t wait for one.
“My senior year I concluded that no amount of advanced placement anything, English, Math, History, Biology was exactly right for me – But AP Art, that was what I really felt most engaged by. That was it. I liked the ambiguity of knowledge that in English and Art there was no final answer, while in Science and Math if you get the wrong number, something blows up.
KCAI
How to continue in pursuit of a higher education in the arts? For Dan that was not something that ever came up in college preparatory courses.
But in high school art class Dan learned hands-on printmaking, acquainting himself with the chemical processes behind the emulsion acid wash of a carved out lithograph, a process as ancient as the Gutenberg Bible.
In high school art class Dan ran a printing press, he rubbed ink on paper and ran it over two drums and produced multiple copies of the designed prints he had created.
He tried to make it work on the Apple II, but the monitors in school were by this time only in green, and you can’t do very much in high school art if your only available color is green.
“The computer revolution was coming along, but you still couldn’t make anything with it, it was still only just a word processor, or for games. 8-bit Dr J VS. 8-bit Larry Bird in one-on-one basketball.”
Dan did learn along the way that art schools exist. Higher education institutions that prepare young minds to begin a career in the arts, with a full spectrum of practical experience. Dan applied to the Kansas City Art Institute on the far western side of Missouri, filling his high school art portfolio with the accumulated years of his AP Art and other project work, showing things he had made, how he had been taught, what he could already see and do.
“Art school?? Portfolio?? Schools look at this stuff? KCAI accepted my application and it was the full art experience – practical study in Ceramics, Painting, Fiber, Photography and Design. It was there that I came to point myself towards a career as a graphic designer – what we joked about at the time as ‘the only viable living in the arts.’
Dan said Art School was like VoTech College, but with better drugs and a lot more Rembrandts.
Making art school projects costs money, however, and students pay for their own supplies. Paint, sandpaper, brushes, film, clay, everything that an art student at KCAI wanted to do in pursuit of his education taught him a practical lesson first and foremost – that to endeavor to try is to incur cost – or put otherwise, making stuff is expensive.
And so Dan, as well as brother Mike and longtime friend and colleague Dale Frommelt, all attended KCAI in the same span of years. And with dorm living soon giving way to apartments and even houses in Kansas City’s art school neighborhoods – the ones that art students could afford to live in – Dan, Mike and Dale all found jobs outside of school to pay their project fees.
Money made under protest, working for somebody else, perhaps to suspiciously raised eyebrows from the Schmalz paterfamilias, but set aside with understated midwestern empathy at the need to earn money from the sand the boys were even now, metaphorically at least, still shoveling. There’s always money in concrete.
“I always had jobs – I worked at bars, worked as a doorman. I had to get jobs to pay for projects, you have to buy supplies to complete courses. I did consumer printing, silkscreening t-shirts. Graphic design is expensive, and projects can cost $200, which is a lot for a broke college student,” Dan says.
“In my Junior year I worked 7 days a week.”
CELESTE BIANCHI
Money isn’t just for graphic design projects, however, and Dan has always harbored a boy’s fanaticism for bicycles, buying his first for $80 from the Sears & Roebuck catalog that brought so much goal-setting family joy in the 1970s. In his sophomore year at KCAI, with money and budgets still a new and kind of shaky concept, Dan bought a real racing bike for the unholy sum of $600 – a pale blue 10-speed and black scripted Italian Bianchi.
Within a summer of riding that Bianchi, chasing up on the hills that bound the Missouri river’s eastward flow, Dan found the cost of school, and its importance, coming to outweigh the Bianchi’s resale value. And so he sold it, the iconic Bianchi, the Italian bike that literally came to represent a whole exotic world of European bike racing in places like Lugano and Val d’Isere, to Dale Frommelt, who added it to his eclectic basement collection of over thirty various types of perfectly functional bikes.
“I sold Dale that Celeste Bianchi to cover my semester fees and I told him I was going to buy it back and he absolutely refused to sell it back to me. Under no circumstances and for no ready sum was I to ever get it back. It came to be like a running joke ‘Hey Dale, I got lunch today, you want to sell me back the Bianchi?’ ‘Forget it Dan, I’ll never part with it. It’s mine now.’ We just laughed.”
Dale gave Dan the Bianchi back as a gift recently at his 50th birthday party. Dan, for once, was held grinning and speechless at the sight of his first real bike in return. The bike is now his long, slow restoration project.
AMBASSADOR HALLMARK
After graduating KCAI, Dan interned for two years at the nearby Hallmark Company headquarters, joining more than a thousand artists across the company, every day, to work in a selection of divisions within the design department. It was a paid internship that his brother Mike had won the year before. An internship Dan calls ‘my grad school’.
“Hallmark possessed, and still possesses, the largest creative studios in one place in the world. I worked in the Ambassador Division, designing and creating the card collection marketing display backings. And everything we did was computer stuff! For the first time I really got to see hundreds of networked computers all with printers that worked and it just blew away everything I had seen before that.”
In addition to Hallmark’s many, many charms, including and among which: an intern’s salary, an advantage in future placements, a generous profit sharing agreement with the staff, all made Hallmark a hard place to not see the logic in working for for life.
In the giant cafeteria every day at lunch thousands would take their food and a copy of the daily intra-company newsletter, with its sometimes absurdly long listings for workers celebrating their 25-year work anniversary. Every day.
HAT CITY
Instead Dan pointed himself in the wake of a product design manager he worked under during the internship, who left Hallmark to run a small packaging design firm in Danbury, Connecticut, a few hours north of New York and once known across America as Hat City.
The proximity to energy from nearby New York did not quite reach out into the Hat City nights, but Dan, ever making his own jobs, found that a recurring visit down to early Williamsburg gallery nights in Brooklyn was a mid-90s inspiration for putting on similar events up north.
Using a monthly alternative tabloid-sized give-away newspaper that he himself published, Dan and his partner Dan Bishop put out ‘Lit’ around Danbury, with its reliable 12 pages of art, music and scene information, as a community enhancement for their own ‘Sauce’ gallery and studio spaces.
By day, Dan designed packaging for Fortune 500 companies. By night Dan and his partners hosted gallery shows for artists who also had to work for a living. He pitched in to put on a late-summer street and music festival in town at the end of the Nirvana era. ‘The Gasball’, as it came to be known, drew around 30 bands over a 3-day a weekend for six consecutive years.
Knowing that the art world is a tough nut to crack into, Dan says the self-sustaining nature of his Danbury ventures was aimed at broadening communication in the pre-internet 1990s world of what we have lately come to understand as the ‘immediate everything now’.
“The day job paid the bills, but the other stuff was what really floats my boat. With the magazine we were doing the print, the layouts, interviewing the bands, previewing shows for the artists. It was never our goal to conquer publishing with the magazine. It was something that went hand-in-hand with the gallery, and it was self-sustaining. And to make it self-sustaining was always the only goal.”
Dan would also in this era try his hand at music, picking up the kinetic centrality of making the rhythm on drums. He was an enthusiastic if self-described talent-challenged player. But he still managed to play the legendary CBCG club with his Spork bandmates on one of the venue’s “bring your own crowd” Tuesday nights. And break even by the end of it.
FLOYD BENNETT
In time Dan and Mike opened Refinery, the home business they run together from homes a 3-hour flight apart. Concentrating on a few clients and partnering for the long term, Refinery came to be in a corner of Dan’s living room, even as he met and married his wife and began a family from atop Van Cortlandt Park and the Bronx neighborhoods that stand across from Westchester.
“After growing up playing in septic tanks, New York City offered a lot of creativity and fully matched my speed. Moving here I finally found a place where I enjoyed the level of activity on par with my own. It’s full of people always on the move, there’s a real hustle and bustle.”
In his day, to manage the isolation of working from home and to burn energy, Dan found himself again decked out in cycling gear, astride a technically marvelous self-propelled pedal machine, experiencing in his 30s a resurgent desire for racing and competitive training.
“There were simple logistical reasons why I could bike race. It was something that happened early, early mornings and didn’t take away from my family time, and there was no travel. On Tuesdays I later took to driving because it was 25 miles out there to the end of Brooklyn and Floyd Bennett Field, then a 25-mile race, then 25 miles back. I would be getting home at 10pm in the pitch black dark. It was fun to get out there, but 75 miles in a day makes you tired.”
Dan’s mid-life sporting resurgence, as it were, coincided with, in layman’s terms, what came to be known as ‘The Lance Era’ in the sport’s collective history, something that required a talent and strength well above what Dan and his similarly-attired buddies could stroke out together in collective wattage and accomplish once or twice a week in groups of sometimes sixty to a hundred.
JOHN TESH
The passion for bikes in his youth extended into Dan’s college years until his heart was broken and his beloved Celeste-colored Bianchi found itself sold to pay for x-acto knives and contact paper. In his senior year at KCAI he got back on a white Cannondale and rode around Missouri’s river valleys.
“Track racing was actually what I first did. Sometimes back in Wisconsin, and sometimes at a velodrome in Blaine, Minnesota. An outdoor velodrome made out of wood that has held up quite well for years In spite of the seasons.”
America’s relative unfamiliarity with any kind of bike racing was at least uncovered, if not irreparably punctured, in the summer of 1986, when a Minnesota boy named Greg Lemond won the sport’s top competition at the 3-week Tour de France.
Not only did Dan watch as much of it as he could on the satellite-delayed broadcasts on NBC, but by his own recollection it was as much the iconic, if not ironic, counterpunch improvised synthesizer soundtrack to the race composed and recorded by Entertainment Tonight host John Tesh that swept him up into the heroic overtones of the mind-boggling strategic and tactical complexity, not to mention athleticism, that it took to win this race.
And Dan’s hobby, something he jokes about constantly, taking the pomposity and air out of a truly serious amateur pursuit that is sometimes fueled by spandex machismo and a no-gifts competitive nature that can quite often end up with amateurs fully enraged in the middle of a race, and all their anger finally focused for the first time in weeks.
It is a reason a lot of men, especially men, pursue some things with such verve. It is because it is a release valve for the stress of modern living.
“I knew all along I was never gonna be a pro,” Dan says. “But I am proud to have stuck with it all these years. Racing a bike year after year is like being in a tribute band, or on a bowling team. You do it because you love it, not because it’s going to pay your bills and make you famous.”
COMPLICATED PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT
There’s one point Dan makes repeatedly about pro cycling to anybody who asks what he finds so compelling about the sport. It’s that for cycling fans, just like for so many other niche interests, hobbies and vocations, the internet fundamentally changed access to knowledge.
As Dan puts it, it became easier to become an insider quicker.
Intergenerational fans of alternative music can likely still recall a time when you might have heard a song on a college radio station and caught the band’s name after 20 minutes when the DJ came back on air, but never even known what the musicians looked like until a year and a half later on a trip to a record store on a school trip to some big city.
An era when access to broadly available information was scarce and the technology to process any of it anyway remained out of reach for the average guy, and mostly just concentrated in a few cities, in a few hands, or rather did not even exist yet. You gossiped a lot about things you didn’t know and you tried not to sound overcommitted to solutions you didn’t fully understand.
“A lot of people don’t know that cycling is a team sport. Or that it’s only in pro cycling and on the TV show Survivor that you can actively collaborate with your opponents until some later point in the competition. Like in football if the linebacker could make a deal with the running back to block everybody else so that those two alone could fight it out for a tackle or a touchdown at the goal line.”
Cycling, Dan says, is thus made interesting by how competitors can breakaway together, work together in tight and mutually dependent cooperation to the very end, and then put strategy and strength up against tactics and skills against to contest openly for the finish.
“Bike racing is a complicated psychological experiment in cycling shorts. It’s a sport where you don’t necessarily have to be the fastest or the strongest. You just have to be the smartest. The smartest always wins.”
SALVATORE COMMESSO
As Dan’s family grew, soon into a house across the Hudson in a family-sized neighborhood for a family of four, his ever-propellant need to keep creatively occupied crept its way into his cycling,
With so much local road racing, and so many creative and sometimes idle amateur racers at T3 wired fiber optic desk jobs all across the Tri-State area, Dan offered sardonic internet critiques of cyclist sartorial choices, posting up kit and jersey comments on the forum message board on the website of the Century Road Club Association, the CRCA, the top organizer for bike races in Central Park and a sort of ‘web salon’ at the time.
Dan’s humor hit a responsive nerve, and so he joined forces with Andy Shen and Alex Ostroy on a new regional cycling website, NYVelocity, that sought to deflate some of the hot air out around the sport’s new hype, and also as a place for unmanaged anonymous comments to take hold of users and compel them to return quickly from their idle desk time at work to surf on over to this wild internet bike racing corner.
“NYVelocity was the Waldorf and Stadler of cycling muppets. Smart alecks sitting in the wings of the theater and throwing jibes at whatever we saw that looked bad. We didn’t like something or somebody? We said so. We were opinionated and people were drawn to that. We’re also not journalists, and there’s no sheen of objectivity. We also didn’t have to rely on access to the athletes for our jobs. The site itself, in spite of its popularity and influence, never made any money.”
That content, taken together with Shen’s highly popular Central Park race action photos and Ostroy’s generally high tolerance for shenanigans, NYVelocity soon began publishing a baroquely rotoscoped webcomic called ‘As The Toto Turns,’ a six-panel color layout with piercing, Doonesbury layers of dry humor and insiderish relevance underneath the sternum cartilage flexing to protect a freshly beating heart that genuinely loved the sport.
So popular was Toto, in fact, that in the early and mid 2000s, before smart phones or social media had really taken hold of the population already and then gone on to enslave it with thumb straining swipe down notifications and a never-ending crush of ceaseless headline anxiety, that the website’s article comments drove most of the return traffic. Satire about pro cycling was into hipsters before being into hipsters was cool.
And all of a sudden because of the internet, cycling fans outside the Tri-State area began to take notice of what three amateur bike racing professional graphic designers in the Big Apple were squawking about.
The content didn’t so much go viral as it instead proceeded to inseminate its vocabulary into willing ovum, chipping out a lingo from calcified agar agar, a series of meme-able likenesses done in red and blue rotoscope artistry, colors and shadows chosen like a Kabuki comic strip, and it deified an otherwise unknown Bluto-from-Animal-House bike racer with an apocryphal laundry list of terrible things done in Philadelphia hotels, whose nickname was Toto, and turned him into a hipster Zelig for the Era of Lance.
“Salvatore Commesso, noted cycling scumbag. That’s his nickname, Toto, that we used in the comic. And that’s when people started finding us on the internet. That’s when the revelations started coming out, too. That Lance was a terrible person to be around all the time, a real jerk. That was our first real sniff.”
THAT WILDEBEEST
So Dan Schmalz, KCAI graduate, teenage grave-digger, alt-monthly publisher and amateur bike racer, without much fanfare, found himself under the shadow of the colossus in the time before we knew that Lance Armstrong was cheating to win the Tour de France and hypocriticizing himself as a caring cancer survivor and inspirational paradox.
“The comments section on NYVelocity was anonymous and most of it was trolling. Amateur bike racers get mad after a race and go online and accuse one or another guy who did better last week of taking drugs. That’s normal,” Dan said.
“But then we get comments from people who sign their name, who tell us who they are. They would tell us things about Lance that weren’t sunny or positive at all, and we kind of took over this role of being the nexus of info about Lance. We got ourselves involved in the Lance Armstrong world. It was surprising how easy it was to find out what he was doing.”
While this happened, Armstrong retired after he won the Tour de France seven years in a row, and established himself as a top-earning global celebrity athlete. He played himself in a Ben Stiller comedy about dodge ball. A man with nearly unmatchable fame, wealth and resources, Armstrong then brought giant American retail speaker cable store Radio Shack in for millions on a vehicle leasing and sport management operation he co-owned that failed to produce much more than VIP car rides for CEOs on Saturdays in July in France as he mounted an unsuccessful comeback after two seasons away.
In 2007 NYVelocity published an interview with Michael Ashenden, an Australian blood doping expert and the same scientist who developed the World Anti-Doping Agency’s first test to detect the presence of the banned oxygen booster EPO in an athlete’s blood.
During the interview Andy Shen asked about the published results of leaked blood tests for Lance Armstrong from the 1999 Tour de France, Armstrong’s first victory in his string of seven, and really the rocketship to fame that his star was attached to from the very beginning.
Ashenden said that based on six examples from 99, there was no doubt that Armstrong had taken EPO. He backed it up with the smart bits from statistical science and the answer stuck. NYVelocity published the article and bombshells began to explode.
“Legit journos started contacting us. A lot of them had a depth of knowledge in the sport that was not as obsessive as ours, and so we briefed them. We in turn became sources for journalists who could not risk losing their own sources inside the wire.”
Articles followed, journalists who smelled a story called up, did their work, uncovered more information and eventually brought the once mighty and terrifying Lance Armstrong to a humiliating standstill in the center of the arena.
A giant in modern sport, a marketable legend from the cycling world, a human face for cancer survival, decapitated in the sand dunes, all because a web comic by three chuckleheads with strong computer design software had dared to laugh at the naked emperor.
“Before the Ashenden interview, we asked ourselves and some lawyers who we knew through racing ‘Are we gonna get sued?’. They all came back with the same advice: The best defense against libel is if it’s true.”
Lance never sued NYVelocity, and in fact has never acknowledged the website’s existence. But Dan says in any case it’s improbable that ‘As The Toto Turns’ deserves solo credit for engineering Armstrong’s fall.
“Oh there were lots of lions taking down that wildebeest. We definitely weren’t the only ones.”
Like nearly all comment-based, pre social media websites, NYVelocity stopped putting out new content in 2019. Dan cranked out content and material to the end, and he continues weighing in on pro cycling via twitter for 10K of cycling’s most-connected insiders. Occasionally the New York Times asks him to write about pro bike racing for the editorial page. Other publications bug him regularly for commentary and he obliges with a lifelong fan’s sense of irrepressible humor and duty.
POLICE AND PORTA-POTTIES
Clients at Refinery have come to stay for decades, to rely on Dan and Mike after years away in times of sudden need, or otherwise collaborate in pursuit of design continuity as a project evolves. Dan works out of a series of computers in a dedicated office at the back of his house.
He says he couldn’t tell you which computer is the best to get. Ask yourself instead, he says, is this a comfortable drill press?
Because what Dan believes that work tools are for is that, if you are going to be making holes in the wall as quickly as you can with it, you had better get whatever hardware is the fastest and fits into a steady work rhythm with how you like to work.
Otherwise, Dan says, worktime is being wasted.
“Tools are always evolving. I’m on computers all day, every day. People ask me which computer to buy and I have no idea. I say ‘Buy the fastest, and when it starts to get slow, get a different one.’
“And literally everybody asks out loud almost immediately – ‘Fastest at what?’”
Dan says his design computers are as useful as a drill press making holes in a wall, but in fact his list of desired traits is always the same: It’s best if it’s a fast software runner. If the fans don’t falter, if the processor keeps cool. That in the parts of the body of the machine where the electricity is moving itself around and you need to air it out, it gets aired out.
But the fact is sometimes you don’t need a drill press just to put a screw in the wall, is what Dan says he means. The only reason that it’s worth pursuing is for the technology, the most powerful drill press itself, just for making holes in a wall as quickly as you can – with whatever hardware is fastest.
Otherwise, Dan says, it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
BEFORE GRAVEL WAS COOL
Where Dan’s technological noodlings have also led him are into the organizing and preparing for hosting a weekend destination bike event, in no less than his homeland of Iowa, for a pre-gravel boom Dubuque city riverfront four-city Gran Fondo.
On whiteball roads in places where stock cars used to smuggle hooch.
“It was something new, something different,” Dan says. “It’s a sight to behold, before its time and started organically out of the need for an organizational design challenge, a chance to shuffle and reload a stack of skills doing something that’s a lot of fun on top,”
Iowa gains in its national reputation as a cycling destination, offering in places a partial Mississippi riverfront gravel road Dubuque Gran Fondo in the best place to do it. Dan says the Gravel Gran Fondo cycling challenges with road closure and rest stops will only continue to grow.
“There’s lots of boots on the ground out here, and the East Coast calendar is already full of destination events every weekend in every reachable part that you can get to by car or train. So really the best place to design and do this was Iowa, because it’s quite something to organize police in four cities, coordinate parks, city administrations and lots and lots of porta-potties.”
Dan said the highlight of organizing the Gran Fondos in Dubuque was inviting old friend and racing hero Greg LeMond to come down from Minnesota and take part.
“A gravel hill ride in 2014 was something pretty out there, pretty unheard of in the world. But you see how quickly the industry has embraced the gravel sentiment, the wider tires, the more comfortable and upright positions.”
Original American Tour de France winner and global cycling luminary, LeMond rode the Gran Fondo with the gathered destination event participants along the Mississippi and around Dubuque.
“We learned that what it takes to put on a successful gravel Gran Fondo are two things: Police and Porta-Potties. Make sure both are counted, transported, checked, cleaned, resupplied and hosed down the morning of. Take care of them both really good and all of your problems will be solved immediately.”
Still riding into his 50s, Dan endures his continuation with the sport through all its popular ups and downs, across as many eras of rider and style dominance as there are plots and subplots in some of professional wrestling’s finest adversarial story lines. Dan rolls with it, checks his bike’s brakes and notes the hydraulic lever’s smooth return.
“Bikes are something that I’ve come to see as a chance to adapt technology for the given challenge, and bike racing has taught me that it’s better to go at a given scenario with a flow chart for decisions to be taken according to what happens – Something so that you’re prepared for what Mike Tyson means when he says ‘Everybody has a plan until he gets punched in the face’.”
NICHE STRATEGY
Unimarketa evolves out of Refinery, and there’s more info on that elsewhere. What Dan is here to say today is plain spoken based on the transparency of his career.
He describes the things the new firm can and will do. Used to do and in fact also still does do. But used to do, too. He describes himself and this company by the motivations of the clients that employ his design and marketing services.
“Who are we in our firm? We are our clients’ motivations, that’s who we are. And when they come to us and we get the data out of them and figure out what their true business motivations in fact are, we always find them following the singular point of advice that if you aren’t the biggest player in your niche, then you need a strategy to beat the biggest player in your niche.”
Dan says the advantages of enlisting the services of a smaller firm by smaller businesses in turn are that by discovering together, through data, what a business is in fact doing in its website infrastructure, then changing strategy in only a day is entirely possible, whereas larger firms that have to relay operational messages might take multiple blocks of hours, days, whole cycles longer just to tweak a few lines of code and straighten the metaphorical website infrastructure bedsheets.
“Being small has certain advantages. Pivots can be made quickly, we aren’t stuck on a big ocean liner trying to turn itself around. We can switch sail, take a different tack with a brand new business strategy based on the advantages of our talents, with the flexibility you need to get past your opponents.”
DIFFERENT PATH
Adjust strategy, cooperate, succeed together or fail apart. Those were the things Dan learned outright from a lifetime of bike racing, both in participation and in observation.
Dan’s business, career and the occasional job shoveling sand have maintained their hold on his work ethic. His successful tools and methods used have nevertheless only just kept pace with the speed of the future. Because they’ve only ever had to. That’s all anybody can do. Keep up with the future.
The need for a flexible, adjustable strategy remains as true as the tricycle a toddler learns to traverse the kitchen in. The need to ask yourself ahead of the doing of it: What then is the best outcome given all our circumstances in a bike race? What is going to happen if it rains? What if the leader falls over? Is there a plan B? What if that fails, what is plan C?
“Most of the time when we are faced with decisions to adjust the original plan we become reluctant or hesitant to act, because it might mean the end of winning. But that’s not true, not anywhere near the truth. In fact it’s not even the end of having any chances for success, just a different path to the goal.”
Dan remembers the Apple II he spent hours coding, all to make a blocky purple Vikings helmet, and how the thrill was in the doing of it. Back then there was no way to bring it into the world, the end result existed only on those tapes, only on that screen.
“That’s the hammer you swing, the tools are only the means to the goal,” Dan says. “But you can’t become so attached that you don’t evolve. You have to keep creating, because the whole purpose found in the exercise of creativity is the transfer of an idea out of the brain and into the world.”