We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brendan Housler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brendan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Too often the media represents innovation as something magical that only high-flying tech billionaires and upstarts engage in – but the truth is almost every business owner has to regularly innovate in small and big ways in order for their businesses to survive and thrive. Can you share a story that highlights something innovative you’ve done over the course of your career?

It’s easy for us all to view someone like Elon Musk as “innovative”, but we all do something creative and new to develop our brand in order to engage with our potential customers and athletes.

At EVOQ.BIKE, we were one of the first training blogs even before it was called EVOQ.BIKE! I began blogging about cycling training and racing back in 2009, when there were not too many people talking about cycling training aside from the big players in the space. I was actually told that it was “uncool” to post power meter data online and that I should stop! Ha, I’m glad that I didn’t! I just loved writing and sharing my experience in this amazing endurance sport.

To delve deeper on that thread, we provide athletes with free power file analyses to help them better understand their training, and provide suggestions to help them along their way. This creative engagement tool really helped us to receive some recognition in the coaching space, and establish ourselves as coaches that not only wanted to help paying athletes, but the cycling community as a whole.

Today, we continue to provide free education on cycling training via blogs, videos and audio podcasts. This might not be new or innovative, but I do think our consistency is! Sometimes consistency in a small thing that can create something much bigger!

While innovation sounds like an overly ambitious word, we’re proud to put out some of the highest quantity and quality content to help athletes all over the globe.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

EVOQ.BIKE is a team of uplifting, authentic, and experienced athletes that offer high-end coaching services to cyclists around the world. We have a holistic approach combining data analytics, intensely personalized physical and mental training, and a genuine desire to help everyone be the best athlete they can be.

We all came into this industry as athletes first, and then became coaches, stemming from a love of sharing our successes and failures along the way.

EVOQ.BIKE has personalized coaching programs, free coaching tools in top ranked blog articles and videos, and other options in between!

We are amazed that the content we put out on the internet has reached millions of cyclists around the world. I never thought that we would get emails from halfway around the globe about our articles and videos, and we are most proud of the community that we are growing: excited and hard charging athletes that want to see improvement in themselves!

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

All of Gary Vaynerchuk’s books were incredibly inspiring and educational for me. I learned to not have paralysis from overanalysis, to take ACTION, and stay authentic to my self while still trying to grow the bottom line.

His books really helped us to establish and build a reputation in the coaching space as coaches that are always willing to share our “trade secrets” in order to help any athlete.

There is so much to become a better endurance athlete that there is no one magic bullet, but rather it the combination of so many small factors that need to be balanced out in order to reach an athlete’s peak. Therefore, I never hesitate to put out our “best stuff”….no one piece of content is going to give an edge to the non-paying athletes versus the ones that do pay us; we take them to the NEXT level!

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Gary’s books; I highly recommend them!

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

In the digital age, email and software platforms (like TrainingPeaks) make communication so much easier than using the telephone! While I do conduct Zoom meetings with certain athletes, using messaging services enables us to touch base with athletes multiple times per week, if not every other day!

This is key in order to stay on top of how the athlete is doing each week, being nimble to make changes to the training schedule and training load, and ensure that the training (breaking the body down) is followed by the proper recovery (where we build back up) so that they improve as an athlete and hit their goals.

Communication is paramount!

Brand loyalty is build through this as well; athletes know that we care about them and their progress, and they share their success and experience with others. For the cycling community as a whole, I hope they know we are loyal from all of the content that we put out to help them find their next level of performance!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.evoq.bike/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/evoq.bike
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/EVOQBIKE
• Check out our blog! https://www.evoq.bike/blog