Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kevin Iwanusa. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Kevin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I have been coaching lacrosse a long time and watched the parents get worse and worse and they literally drove me out of coaching at one point. As I began coaching again, I saw how some of the best programs and teams managed the difficult parents and realized there was a need for something standardized in the sport for all teams. I really wanted a common sense way to help. About 2 years ago, I was coming home from family vacation after hearing how my little niece was playing travel lacrosse up in Maryland and her team was having all kinds of problems with opposing parents, one specific knucklehead I knew of. My wife and I talked thinking there has to be a solution and this idea came to me for a class. At that point I started research and development.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

So I’m a lacrosse guy, picked up the sport when I was 13 years old and it has been my passion ever since. Approaching 50 now I have coached for some 30 years and still play when I can as well. Once I had kids and started seeing what my future looked like as a sideline parent and not a coach I realized something needed to be done. So the business we launched in October is called Certified Lacrosse Parent. It is an online, lacrosse specific parenting course teaching appropriate sideline etiquette and positive behaviors for parents to allow the sport to stay solely about the kids having fun. Ultimately youth sports in America have a real problem with parents taking things far too seriously and ruining the experience for the kids. And while I think our curse solves the issue for all sports, we were only focused on lacrosse. A few reasons, 1) while lacrosse is North Americas oldest sport, the parents and kids who play it represent probably the least background and knowledge of any of the youth sports growing in popularity today. So our sport doesn’t have as far to go to level set the parents on expectations as say baseball or basketball where everyone has some basic understanding of those sports and could be an armchair coach. 2) I am trying to improve the game I love so much. This wasn’t about money or building an empire, it’s about a sport that has given me my entire life. I have traveled and seen the world through the sport. I met my wife through lacrosse, and have my children as a result, My many teammates, players and their parents are long time friends today all over the world. My professional jobs have all come through connections I made in lacrosse, the list goes on. I share the sport through continuing to coach but felt this venture was a way to give back and do my part to try and improve the game for our children. What we’ve seen is a movement to clean up the sidelines and give sports back to our children. As things have taken off after launch we have started partnering with programs to do in person education, the online course, worked with tournaments to set up tents and provide support and governance at their fall events. We have been extremely encouraged by the interest level and need that our movement is filling. Our apparel is in demand and keeps us busy backfilling and shipping orders.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I was fresh out of college with my undergraduate degree, I had no idea what I wanted to do. But I landed a nice internship with a local arena and parlayed that into a full time job at the Convention Ctr. I think back to how young I was, I had no idea what I wanted but my number 1 focus was definitely fun, closely behind that was enough money to afford having fun. 6 months of that cycle, and realizing I was fighting a losing battle and doing something I absolutely hated I took some advice from my father and found a way to go back to school and get another degree. The way I did that was by becoming a graduate assistant lacrosse coach at Wingate University. Turns out to be one of the best moves of my life, earned an MBA, spent some of my happiest years coaching college lacrosse and ultimately landed a much better job to actually be able to afford some fun!

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Yes so our social media has been quite the lesson learned since launch, but a crucial piece of the strategy. We had no idea what to expect from an interest level of the course, but put a soft launch out earlier in the year on Instagram and put the website out. Teased our brand and logos and so on but hardly any push. Pretty limited followers from that(45 at most), and we were fine with it as we had put no effort in yet. All of the research and development was in the course and getting it right. But come launch time we had a plan to push pretty hard in October on social media. We did, and were thrilled with the uptake on Instagram where followers grew fast, lots of engagement. We were at 1000 followers by mid October and good interaction but we didn’t have a lot of translation to the website. A personal post I put out about our new launch, which also went to Facebook, a place I don’t personally go much, apparently got some good traction from many of my personal connections. But I hadn’t even noticed since I don’t check there. As a few weeks went by the analytics on our website was telling a fascinating story that helped us pivot to where more of our target market was. We saw more than 60% of our website conversion and class sign ups were coming from Facebook. A little more research’s into the data was telling us the people most interested in our class, were more frequent on FB than IG. We didn’t even have a Facebook account for the business! Clearly that was a mistake but we corrected it immediately and have now made a pivot to focus equally and in some case more on our FB content and growing engagement there. It’s a valuable lesson we learned and used to adjust our sails. I’m sure there will be many more.

Contact Info:

• Website: Certifiedlacrosseparent.com
• Instagram: @certifiedlaxparent
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CertifiedLacrosseParent?mibextid=JRoKGi