Kitman Labs is a Dublin-based sports science company working to reduce the risk of injury within professional sports organisations. Established in 2012, it employs seven full-time and five part-time staff.
What distinguishes your business from competitors? Most athlete management software collects and stores data that can be used to track schedules and so on, but that's about it. We've collaborated with the School of Statistics at Trinity College Dublin to develop a solution that can help significantly reduce injuries.
Clubs can use our software to improve their athlete screening process, take regular musculoskeletal and wellbeing assessments, and collect workload and injury information. This helps identify current injury risks in their athletes just minutes after the data is collected. This is way ahead of where most similar software software solutions are.
What has been the biggest challenge you have had to face? Injuries cost professional clubs a lot of money. In baseball, some $490 million was paid out in wages to injured players last season, while in the Premier League, £190 million was paid out. Despite this, many clubs just accept the loss of availability of their most treasured assets to injury as an inevitable consequence of playing.
We believe an awful lot can be done to reduce injury risk and thereby save clubs money and improve their sporting chances. But convincing others that sports science research is accurate and that the process works isn’t easy, so that is by far and away our greatest challenge.
What is the biggest mistake you've made in business? I've been an entrepreneur my whole career and, in the past, the biggest mistakes I've made have been around selecting the people to be in business with. Whether it is partners or investors you really need to make sure your goals are the same to ensure that they can be achieved. If your goals aren't aligned,then things simply won't work. I wasn't so aware of that in the past but feel I have learned from it and this time around things are very different.
What was the best piece of business advice you've ever received? Being able to recognise your weaknesses is possibly even more important than knowing what you're good at. As chief executive, I think you take up the bits of the business that are leftover when everyone else is doing their job and so you need to hire people who are better than you at everything else. And your major success to date? Getting validation for what we do in the US has been our major success so far.
Obviously, Ireland is a small market and we've done well here,but in the end the professional game here is non-existent. It's also relatively limited in Britain, but in the US it's a different story.
Being able to go there and see our product being validated in major league soccer and baseball is encouraging and shows there are global opportunities for us.
Who do you most admire in business and why? I really admire the Irish entrepreneurs who have moved their businesses to Silicon Valley and gone up against the technology giants and are winning. Companies like Stripe, Intercom and Trustev are blazing a trail for more Irish businesses to compete at a global level and do amazing things.
Ireland has always been known for its creativity and punching above its weight. These days creativity is found in using technology to solve some of the world’s hardest problems, and any Irish entrepreneur who is walking that path is a massive inspiration to me.
Is enough being done to support Irish companies? It is only natural that Irish businesses are internationally-focused from day one and the government provides substantial support through Enterprise Ireland.
There's no such thing as Enterprise America or Enterprise France. It's something unique to us. The support offered by Enterprise Ireland at a pre-seed level really fills the gap that angel investors and venture capital funds fill in other countries.
Do you think the banks are open for business? They are. I've just had a very positive meeting with one this week. If they feel you have a scalable, tech-driven company with an international focus, there's an awful lot of support available.
What’s more, Irish banks are beginning to follow the model of the Silicon Valley Bank and are coming round to the idea of new services such as venture debt, which is a great option for financing start-ups, and this should be encouraged.
How do you see the short-term future for your business? We're in the Irish and British markets currently, but we clearly see opportunities in the US and we'll be focusing a lot of our investment and sales there. Our goal is to be the athlete management software platform for professional sports in the US.
What is your business worth and would you sell it? I can't tell you what it's worth but, if the right offer came in, I would sell it. Right now we're interested in building an iconic company, so there are no immediate plans, but at some point in the future, who knows?
Iafhlaith Kelly, founder/chief executive in conversation with Charlie Taylor
