Relationships are key in any business, and Kevin Dawidowicz had built a good one.
The co-founder and president of CoachMePlus, a digital fitness- and health-tracking platform, was working with Doug McKenney, the longtime strength coach for the Buffalo Sabres, in 2002, building a CD-ROM program to track the players’ workouts.
When Terry and Kim Pegula purchased the team in 2010, Dawidowicz pitched moving the program to an online platform, where fitness and diet goals can be monitored remotely in real time by coaches and trainers. Today, the program, and ones similar to it, are used across high school, college, and professional teams. And the Buffalo-based company was a pioneer, with CoachMePlus launched in 2014.
It almost didn’t happen, at least not here.
In 2007, Dawidowicz was vulnerable, so to speak, searching for funding, seeking financial backing from out of state and reaching out to investors. He wanted the product to succeed here, but the network of support was thin. He was considering moving to California or New York City, greener pastures for tech and high-growth startups in the mid-2000s.
He’s glad he didn’t.
With the help of Z80 Labs, CoachMePlus became one of its earliest investments. Buffalo Angels, through the Western New York Venture Association, came in and soon Dawidowicz, with his brother Mike, had found financial backing and solid footing for the company.
“I am extremely excited that we have the startup community that we have now,” Dawidowicz said recently. “When we first started, there were very few startups. My brother and I, serial entrepreneurs, we keep trying new things. A lot of times it felt like you were out there on your own doing it.”
Dawidowicz played some high school hockey and football, and when he found time he would work out in a gym. He noticed a problem that athletes across the spectrum were having: bringing a notebook and pencil to the gym to track their fitness. Trainers, too, were using hand-written charts when they worked with clients.
CoachMePlus addresses that problem through a platform that can be used by strength and fitness coaches and specialists to track their athlete’s progress. Dawidowicz and his team market the product to both large and small gyms and teams at every level, and packages can be expanded or scaled back to meet the users’ needs.
“We’re at a place where we’re finally hitting all markets in the place we want to hit. In pro sports, everybody knows who we are. We don’t have to educate the market. They understand the value of product,” Dawidowicz said.
With support from Z80 Labs, 43North, and Buffalo Angels, among others, Dawidowicz compared Buffalo’s startup community to hitting a trampoline, where everything is bouncing up.
And CoachMePlus pulls its talent almost exclusively from local colleges when hiring programmers, marketers, and tech professionals. The company currently has 17 employees, 15 of them full time. The team includes co-founders Liz Young and Stephen Ostrow, and CEO Teo Balbach.
Business is cyclical for a company like CoachMePlus. At the start of 2018, there might be a surge of business from personal trainers and fitness coaches as gyms become busier and athletes look for new fitness plans. Then baseball and softball will gear up. Through the summer, it’s football, hockey, and basketball in preparation for the fall. CoachMePlus covers them all.
The biggest development for CoachMePlus may be just on the horizon. A new contract with the U.S. Navy, Dawidowicz said, has moved through its first phase. “It’s opened a whole new door for us,” he added.