Founder of Athlinks, Troy Busot on "Launching a Successful Business, Health and Chasing 50"

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast EPISODE #113, with Troy Busot, the Founder of Athlinks[i], the world’s largest racing database with a mission of making it easier for people to race more often and have more fun in the process. Watch this interview on YouTube here. With this episode, you will learn: How Troy Busot, the founder of Athlinks.com helped Andrea to launch her business 10 years ago. How Troy took an idea, and created the world's largest racing database. The Secret to launching a business, or any idea. The importance of failing fast, identifying and fixing deficiencies. Hello and Welcome back! I’m Andrea Samadi, a former educator who has been fascinated with learning the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports and the workplace, for the past 20 plus years.  Our initial goal with this podcast was to close the gap recent surveys show exists in our workforce where 58 percent of employers say college graduates aren’t adequately prepared for today’s workforce, with a particular gap in social and emotional skills. Research shows that social-emotional skills like social awareness, self-regulation, and growth mindset (the skills that we covered early in the podcast episodes) are crucial to college and career readiness. The outcomes of developing these intelligences are vast as they impact our performance, leadership, personal excellence, time management, and decision-making. And if you have been listening to our podcast for some time, you will know that we’ve uncovered that if we want to improve our social and emotional skills, and experience success in our work and personal lives, it all begins with putting our brain health first. We’ve mentioned that daily exercise is one of the top 5 health staples that’s a known brain-health and Alzheimer’s prevention strategy, from our episode #87[ii]  helping us to take our results, productivity and health to these higher levels. Our guest today, Troy Busot, has always impressed me by the way that he and his family took their health and fitness seriously, and his dedication to his health, spilled over into his work life, as a successful entrepreneur. He’s my old neighbor—his family used to live directly across the street from me, but they moved to another state, and now like many of us, we stay in touch via social media where we recently connected on some of his latest missions and to brainstorm ideas with our podcasts. Not only is Troy the CEO of Athlinks.com, but he also runs the Athlinks Podcast, a high-quality podcast that features interviews with athletes around the world as they prepare for events.  I will tell you more about Troy, the company he founded, his podcast, and how he gave me that push that I needed to launch my business, achieveit360.com over 10 years ago, but first, let me tell you about what he invented. He’s the founder of Athlinks--the best way to track all of your race results in one place. Basically it’s a Results Database for those who compete in races. Each year, over 40 million athletes in the U.S. cross a finish line at an endurance event, but with the recent Pandemic, these numbers have been reduced to under 10 million, but you get the picture. There’s a lot of people who train long and hard, pushing themselves to these higher limits. For most people, it's not about the medals. It's about the results. It's about getting better each race - going faster, going farther, beating a rival, or lifting up a loved one. It’s about the hours, minutes, and seconds scribbled on the back of a race bib or on a row in a spreadsheet. Athlinks (or my old neighbor Troy) set out to make capturing those rewards as simple as typing your name into a search box. This was his idea, and he’s the mastermind behind this company, who pulls in times for running races, triathlon, swimming, cycling, mountain biking ... pretty much any timed endurance sport that you can think of - if they can find the results, they