The Model is Somewhat Validated by the Tough Mudder

Good news, the model is kind of right.

I temporarily paused the drudgery of looking up each race alphabetically, made a list of races that I thought were the most successful based on personal knowledge and Google results (the qualitative challenge I mentioned in the last post), and went back to filling in the blanks of the database.

Of course the Tough Mudder was on the list of leaders. Tough Mudder was transparent enough to provide a couple of figures for the public on its hiring page. What did it say for 2013?

aaaand...

Show me $70M and 500,000 participants!!

$70 million right on the money! Neat. Buuuut we also see that I was off by about 77,500 runners or roughly 13%. Not terrible but not great. What can we learn from this number?

1) The number of runners is obviously too high. We know the number of locations for a fact so I will have to dig deeper on a few stats:

      -Hours of waves leaving

      -Waves per hour

      -Days per location

      -Runners/Wave

I can mathematically prove average number of hours and waves/hour by taking samples but I'm not sure how to figure out Runners/Wave without going to an event, expertly Googling or asking around. I pulled 350 out of thin air but based it on the 300 that Spartan (a high demand race) released + 50 based on the added length of the course. I will keep you posted on any refining I do to this number. 

2) TM is making more per runner than I estimated by about 13%. 

Either the average runner is paying more than my average price (which is weird given the number of discounts available) or roughly 13% of revenue is made from a combination of sponsors, merchandise, and other sales. I might be able to figure out spectator ticket sales but it will take some insider info to get at the remaining 13%. Maybe it's not that important to a company that is SLOWING to 100% growth each year. 

Either way, it seems to balance out in my model. Which is cool. Broken clocks are right twice a day but there is only a .14% chance of it happening on any random minute.