Ian MacGregor describes himself as “a coachable lover of feedback”. This has been a key ingredient to his recipe for success as a professional cyclist and entrepreneur. Seeking feedback and being flexible are central to the innovation process we teach and follow here at the McNeil Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
A Mines 2012 Mechanical Engineering graduate, MacGregor is co-founder and CEO of Skratch Labs (www.skratchlabs.com), a Boulder-based sports nutrition company that was on the Inc. 500 as the nation’s third fastest-growing food and beverage company and on Outside magazines’ lists of Best Places to Work.
A successful startup or innovation addresses a meaningful gap or problem. Ian and his co-founder have done just that. Skratch Labs founders MacGregor and Dr. Allen Lim recognized that the sports drinks and snacks provided by their corporate sponsors had too much sugar and too few electrolytes and nutrients.
Laser focused, they began experimenting with preparing their own training food and drinks with their kitchen mixers. They kept tweaking the recipe and listening to feedback until they got it right.
After MacGregor’s six-year professional cycling career ended due to a medical condition, former teammates and staff as well as competitors kept asking for the drinks.
“Word spread naturally and organically taking care of friends who kept asking for more,” he said. “It was difficult to keep up with the demand, so we hired others and a business happened.”
MacGregor credits Mines with giving him critical “re-thinking” skills and strong foundations in math and statistics.
“Having been coached since I was 9 or 10, I learned early in life to be comfortable making mistakes and to not take criticism personally but to use it to improve. That also was reinforced to me as a student at Mines,” MacGregor said.
A willingness to give and take feedback now lives at the core of the culture he has created at Skratch Labs.
“There’s a balance of being candid but empathetic and bringing candor with caring,” MacGregor said.
He is admittedly more engaged and happier as a business owner than he ever was as a professional athlete, which came with 200+ days a year on the road and the stress of single-year contracts, along with its share of loneliness, uncertainty, and a lack of control. He has found a supportive environment in the Boulder/Denver start up community, which stands in stark contrast to the cutthroat, often selfish world of professional sports.
His advice for budding entrepreneurs is to “be willing to try” and not to have such high expectations for success that you become paralyzed by the prospect of failure.
“Just start going and the path will be unveiled,” he said. “You must accept the uncertainty, be willing to try, and you’ll turn good to great eventually.”