For our small team, some of the most fascinating media you find on TV are series documenting the work going on behind the scenes. This can be behind the scenes of a pro hockey team like Road to the Winter Classic or behind the scenes of a business like Duck Dynasty. These shows give you insight you wouldn't get unless you worked inside the operation, but of course they can't give us all the details of running an operation (i.e. financials, marketing, personnel, etc.). We can get similar insight from financial disclosures of public companies, but rarely does a business truly open the doors and show us how things operate.

One can understand the rationale for not wanting to give away “trade secrets”, but there's still plenty of information to be shared without jeopardizing the business. Not only is it interesting to share, but hopefully some of the insights can spark ideas for others hoping to take off with their own business ideas one day. Given this, in the past we’ve tried to share more behind the scenes of Third Assist: through “Year in Review” posts, BTS post social media posts, and more. 

And going forward we're going to be sharing more in this vein. Today we're sharing a new topic, because it's relevant well beyond just our small business: 

Where is the pond hockey community? Where is the Third Assist community? These two questions aren't 1 for 1, but they fall closely in line.

According to our data our community is here:

Darkest red represents over 10% of our community, and states which aren’t outlined represent under 2%.

But this isn’t all of our community. This is just the sales data direct from our website over the last few years. It doesn’t include other platforms, direct sales, social media, or our mailing list. We like to think our community extends well beyond just those geographies we sell to.

Market is much different from community. You don’t need to buy our products to be a part of our community. We appreciate interacting with anyone who loves playing outdoors or following the roots of the sport.

Furthermore, there’s a number of factors that go into the map above:

• Where are the prime geographies for our products? i.e. colder hockey states
• Where do we have region specific products? i.e. State Sweaters
• Where do we do limited paid ads? i.e. Facebook or Google ads
• Where does our team have direct connections? Places we’ve lived like Alaska and Maine.

So while this might give us a decent picture of where a lot of our market resides, it is not our entire community.

For reference, how does our information compare to the top ten hockey states? By 2021-2022 USA Hockey Registration numbers our nation’s top ten hockey states are: Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, California, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Florida. And of course this doesn’t touch on our Canadian neighbors, but we’ll save that for another post.

So what do you think? About what you'd expect for our outdoor hockey community? USA Hockey community? 

Hopefully you enjoy this insight behind the doors of our small operation. Let us know if we’re missing out on your region or another hidden hockey hotbed- like that pond hockey festival in the Everglades..