Our Employee Owned company started in 2010. Our goal has always been to provide great technology and support to our event customers in a way that allowed us to feel good about our jobs and our company. We have made a conscious effort to implement a strategy and set of business practices that allow us to be a stable company. Ensuring our customers can count on us for the long run, and ensuring our team that this is a place they can have long and fulfilling careers.
Since we have been around so long, we have seen a number of companies struggle maintaining the right level of technology advancement and customer support. The list is long, but companies like SignMeUp, Race Partner, IMAthlete, Enmotive, RaceIt, Marathon Guide, Convio, The Driven, RaceMine, Crowdrise, Convio, ZapEvent and others are simply not around any more. And it seems that others will struggle now that there is very little Active.com market share to capture, and RunSignup continues to gain market share while building a significant technology advantage.
This means that more events will be looking for a long term, stable company. The blog recounts the key ways we ensure our long term stability.
Product Led Company
The core of what we offer customers is technology to improve their events. We do a deeper dive on what we are doing in this 2026 Strategy blog post. There are two key concepts:
- The most complete set of features events and timers (who we view as the key to the endurance business) need.
- Continuous Improvement. We do over 2,000 new releases each year, and our customers are getting upgraded for free every day.
Employee Stability
We have a long term employee base (over 500 total years of service!) that cares about our customers. The longevity makes us more efficient, and allows us to form a deeper understanding of what our customers want.
Our Customers Can Leave Whenever They Want – But They Stay
Our contract allows customers to leave whenever they want. We do not believe in long term lock-in contracts, especially for the fast paced world of technology. And even more important given the instability of many vendors in the registration market. Also, we simply do not want unhappy customers – life is too short.
It also turns out that our customers stick with us. Going all the way back to 2010, each yearly set of customers who became a RunSignup customer is now generating more registrations and transaction $ than their first year. This means that customers stay, and they grow.
We Treat All Customers Well and Consistently – We do NOT do “Deals”
We have a published price list, and a published volume revenue share schedule. This allows us to be fair and ensures that we are paid a fair price for the value we are delivering to our customers. This allows us to have a very stable business.
Customers and Participants Own Their Data – We do NOT resell Data
Some vendors have a marketplace style business model, where they use the contact info collected on one race to have another race pay for access to that data via email lists or other forms of advertising. Long term, this is not a way to develop mutual trust with customers.
Slow and Steady Approach
Bob’s Grandpa had a framed needlepoint in the kitchen of his cottage in Canada that read:
You’ve got to Be Patient
You’ve got to Be Ready
You’ve got to Fish
When the Fish are Ready
That is indeed the approach RunSignup takes with prospective customers. We want them to learn about how our product can help them improve and grow their events. This is why we have so much content in all forms, and make it simple for event directors to create test events and schedule calls with our team to learn what our product can do for them. We put out monthly product based newsletters, and our reps stay in touch, sometimes over years, to let event directors know the types of innovations we are bringing to market continuously.
This slow and steady approach is why we are happy being an employee owned company. We do not have corporate overlords, or private equity insisting on certain growth rates.
Bryan and Dan do a nice job in this video of explaining many of our approaches to how we work with customers.
We Invest in Secure, Stable Systems
We are technology nerds, and that is especially true when it comes to our infrastructure. We have had 6 minutes of downtime since 2015. And that includes over 2,000 releases of our software each year – the software is upgraded between user clicks. A couple of weeks ago when Amazon went down, and many registration vendors were down, we did not miss a transaction. That is because we have a redundant architecture and implementation with servers and services spread across the country with multiple AWS Availability Zones and Regions.
We are also PCI Level 1 Certified with an independent Audit done yearly, quarterly independent security scans, monthly internal scans and updates of all servers to deploy the latest security patches, and continuous scans. We do daily ModSecurity log analysis with humans. We have also built up an arsenal of tools and infrastructure to handle attacks of various types and things like credit card testing.
We are Profitable and do NOT use Customer Money as Float
After 16 years, and some trials and tribulations like a pandemic, we are now nicely profitable. We have zero debt. We have no outside investors. Bob was lucky to have enough money to fund the company during the startup years, and we have built a very stable business. Since registration companies move money, some have a habit of using customer funds for their operations – Race Partner was a big one that left many customers high and dry when they closed suddenly. Our current ratio is 1.91 at the end of September, and is always above 1. In fact, as a true Tier 1 Payment Facilitator, each customer has their own virtual bank account held by our public company payment processing vendor Adyen (who does $1.5 Trillion of transactions per year).
Employee Owned – No Outside Investors to Tell Us What to Do
We are totally Employee Owned and control our own destiny. Ownership makes us more accountable to each other and our customers.
Summary
If you are looking for a technology partner for the long run, we hope you choose us.