elitefts™ Sunday Edition
Changes we are making and the road ahead.
In today’s hypercompetitive strength and fitness industry, companies must evolve or die. To progress, three critical components are a must:
- You need to always grow.
- You must keep pace and stay responsive to consumer demand.
- You have to look down the road and anticipate what your customers will want in the future (and what resources you will need to meet those expectations).
In this vein, we are making a substantial investment in ourselves (and ultimately you). I want to explain in more detail what exactly this will mean.
First, you should know that we are heavily investing with our own money. We are betting on ourselves and the superior education, quality products, and exceptional services that we have become known for providing. Reinvesting in elitefts™ should indicate to you, the customer, that we wholeheartedly believe in our company’s business model and strategies, both short and long-term.
These investments, confidently growing the company with our own money, include the following enhancements of our business:
Technology Infrastructure
A company’s internal technology is a constantly evolving process that necessarily changes as you grow—especially when you’re adding more people and processes. We recently upgraded all of our internal technology with the goal of streamlining and enhancing our internal operations.
What this means for you: When we improve our internal efficiencies, the benefits are passed along to you, the customer, in the form of improved services, more competitive costs, faster fulfillment, and a vastly enhanced customer experience.
A Strengthened Partnership With Total Strength and Speed (Williams Strength)
Total Strength and Speed (a Williams Strength company), in partnership with elitefts™, designs and builds the best strength and conditioning equipment in the industry. These are completely customizable, American-made products that exceed customer demand with best-in-class quality, timely development, exceptional function, and longevity.
Earlier this year, our two organizations formalized a broad strategic partnership that combines the respective strengths of both companies and delivers both turnkey and customizable solutions for high school, collegiate and professional weight rooms. This strengthened partnership, which follows a successful multiple-year equipment design and manufacturing relationship between elitefts™ and Total Strength and Speed, increases our scale. This will result in significant benefits in terms of product choice, quality, service and support.
Total Strength and Speed has a history of innovation in platform and rack space, extensive supplier relationships, global material purchasing scale, and custom design creation. They are second to none. Together, elitefts™ and Williams Strength-TSS supply many of the industry’s most admired brands, including Everlast Flooring, Eleiko Sport, Ivanko Fitness, TRX, Concept 2, Jacob’s Ladder. Vertimax, Gill, PowerMaxx, Paramount, York, and Pit Shark.
From the Prowler®, Band Pegs, and Monkey Chin Bars, to Training Grenades and Rack Arch braces, we’ve brought countless innovations to market—products now used by virtually everyone in the industry. This new partnership promises an enhanced level of quality, service, and innovation.
What this means for you: Together, Total Strength and Speed and elitefts™ have a shared understanding of what it takes to lay out, design, and build a truly world class weight room. This includes the entire experience, from creating an institutional showcase, to the durability, quality, and overall functionality of the equipment itself.
This strengthened partnership represents a seven-figure investment in manufacturing technology that will yield lower prices and exciting new products, along with the exceptional quality and service you’ve come to expect over the years.
Supplier Network: A Collaborative Team
Much of our success can be attributed to our partnerships with suppliers. As we continue to re-imagine retail, we depend on our suppliers to help provide new, creative ideas and share their expertise with us. Our culture supports long-term, deep engagements with suppliers and we actively seek suppliers who share our values.
We want a fair and long-term customer-supplier relationship that ensures maximum success. Our customers—you, the readers—profit from quality, cost awareness, innovation and service. As such, we continue to invest in new relationships and strengthen the ones that we feel can help us deliver even greater value to customers.
Website Overhaul
Perhaps the most important thing a business can do in order to remain competitive pertains to its web presence. If your corporate website doesn’t reflect the most efficient and effective technologies available—particularly when you’re in e-commerce—you’ll soon fall behind and die. Here, we’ve already begun a high-six-figure redevelopment, beginning with the commerce and customer interface portions of our site.
What this means for you: This one is simple. You’ll have better information and ease of use. It’ll be easier to find the products and services you want, and those products and services will be far more seamless to order. Streamlining these processes will allow us continue adding even more content while making it intuitive and simple to find.
What we’ve come to realize over the past few years that this industry is much too competitive to remain flat. While we truly do believe that we have the best products and services in the world, there’s more to it than that. Technologies and systems must constantly be upgraded and improved so we can become even more efficient and effective. This will have a productive impact on our customer relationship management, supply chain management, enterprise resource management, product planning, and development.
Our goal is to provide you, the customer, with the best purchasing and educational experiences in the industry. And this recent wave of investment in will help serve to do exactly that.
Live, Learn, Pass On
Dave Tate , Founder Elitefts.com Inc