Most athletes who read this will never raise a round of investment. Many of them could open a club, a studio or a workshop. The ENTREMIND training kit is built for that whole range. It brings together stories of athletes who built something beyond sport, courses for learning what they had to learn, and a directory of books, podcasts and talks.
Fourteen stories
The stories run from a rowing club in Bursa with 130 members to a women’s health company that was sold to an international buyer. All four partner countries are represented, with at least two stories each. Six of the athletes are women and two are para-athletes.
One pattern runs through many of them: the next career was already under way before the sporting one ended. The kit’s conclusion is blunt: if you are still competing and plan to start afterwards, you are choosing the harder version.
Every fact in the stories comes from a public source, listed at the end of each one. Each story follows the same twelve parts, so you can compare them: who the athlete was, what made them change course, what they built, the hard part, what carried over from sport, and three lessons.
The kit is also honest about what it cannot show. Failure rarely makes the news, so almost every public story is a success story. Only one athlete in the collection has written publicly about a first idea that did not work. If your first venture struggles, you are not the exception.
24 courses
The course catalogue lists 24 entries, most of them free online courses. They were chosen with athletes’ schedules in mind: self-paced where possible, with a preference for courses you can finish in under 20 hours. Nearly all are tagged to the parts of the entrepreneurial mindset that the assessment tool measures.
If you do not know where to begin, the kit suggests three routes. Explorer is for athletes who are curious but still competing. Side-Hustler is for those already earning something on the side. Launch-Ready is for those with an idea who need to make it happen. The kit’s advice is to take one route, not all three, and to plan on two to three hours a week during a competition block.
Books, podcasts and talks
The directory starts with five resources, each covering one of the things that most often stop a first venture: The Lean Startup, Business Model Generation, Profit First, Mindset, and your own country’s business portal. It then goes on to books, articles, podcasts and talks, with official resources for each partner country.
Where to start
If you have taken the assessment, each part of the kit has an index by mindset area, so start with the areas where you scored red or amber. If you have not, pick three or four stories that look like your own situation, your country, your sport and your stage of career, and read the hard part of each.
The training kit is a 70-page PDF, free to download. Open the training kit.
ENTREMIND is an Erasmus+ Sport partnership co-funded by the European Union (project 101229842).
