Todd Jackson couldn't wait to find how things turned out.
So rather than shepherd his company's growth one small step at a time, he amped it up in a hurry essentially tripling the number of outdoor adventure events overseen by Seventh Wave Productions this year.
"I want to find out whether this will work," he said a few days ago."And if it's not going to work, I want find it out sooner than later."
Seventh Wave, based at Kings Beach on Lake Tahoe's north shore, in recent years has produced events ranging from the Reno River Festival to the Big Blue Adventure Race at Lake Tahoe.
This year, Jackson is adding new events in Southern California and adding new layers to existing adventure races.
In all, the company will produce 14 races this year compared with four a year ago.
The key step in the company's giant step forward: A memory dump by Jackson, the company's sole full-time employee since he began organizing wind-surfing events at San Francisco Bay more than 20 years ago.
He's not adding any employees as the company continues to rely on a cadre of contractors to handle everything from public relations to management of the finish line of a race organized by Seventh Wave.
But the addition of new events meant Jackson needed to hire more contractors and those contractors would be handling nearly every aspect of the company's events.
They don't have Jackson's memory and knowledge of details, so he spent much of the winter spilling his memory into documents that became job descriptions for contractors.
At the same time, the rapid expansion pressured the tiny company's capital sometimes in surprising ways.
Creation of new events in California, for instance,meant that travel costs rose sharply and the pinch became all the more noticeable when gasoline prices spiked.
Working capital is a particularly troublesome issue in the events business, Jackson says, because many of the costs advertising, for instance are paid far in advance of the day that participants write a check to cover their entry.
Those headaches became all the more pronounced as Seventh Wave took on more events and more upfront costs this year.
Further aggravation: The company's events are clustered in the weeks of spring, summer and early autumn, adding to the crunch on working capital.
A bank line of credit helps smooth the peaks and valleys, but Jackson says the longterm answer continues to be development of corporate sponsors eager to provide some upfront cash in exchange for associating their brand with adventure races.
Even though Jackson is in a hurry to find out whether Seventh Wave will thrive as a larger company, he won't discover the answer for many months.
Only after the last bill is paid for the Tahoe Big Blue Adventure Race in late September, Jackson says,will he know for certain whether the expanded schedule was profitable.
