Alumni & Friends : Alumni Profiles

Ahead of the Race

Seton Claggett
Associates in Entrepreneurship '98
BS Hydrology '97; MS Hydrology '01

Visitors to the Eller College McGuire Entrepreneurship Program’s offices see, emblazoned on the wall in big blue letters, a quote: “When you enter the entrepreneurship program, you want a piece of the pie. When you leave the program, you want to make the pie.”

The quote is attributed to Seton Claggett, who graduated from the program in 1998. But anecdotal evidence suggests that Seton’s pie-making ambitions surfaced much earlier in life.

“My brother was in karate, and they sold these Chinese stars,” Seton recalls, sharing how they charged neighborhood kids 25 cents to throw the stars at a board for a chance to win a dollar. “But the thing is, the Chinese stars weren’t sharp enough, so they’d never stick. We made about $5 off that venture!”

After his dip into gaming, Seton dabbled in food and beverage, selling shaved ice from his Snoopy Sno-Cone machine, and cultivated a niche in home improvement, recruiting his brothers as “slave labor” in a short-lived landscaping business.

All of these were mere tartlets compared to the pie Seton is baking today. His TriSports.com, and all-under-one-roof retailer for triathletes, projects sales of $5010 million in 2005. Not bad for a company launched in true garage fashion, with Seton ducking out of classes to scribble down orders when his cell phone rang, deep in the heart of the Harshbarger Building, where Seton took most of his graduate engineering classes.

Yes, that’s right, engineering. Seton is one of those crossover entrepreneurs. He earned a BS and MS in hydrology, completing his master’s in 2001. Along the way, an entrepreneurship recruiter sparked his interest, and initially he planned an award-winning business around environmental data. But in 1999 he was training for the Florida Ironman triathlon, his first, and that’s when the inspiration for TriSports.com hit.

“When you’re training for an Ironman, you train a lot.” Seton recalls, “mainly by yourself, and so you think about everything.” It was in one of those lonely training sessions—biking on Oracle Road—that he first sketched out the idea for his online retail business.

Seton put in a great race and returned to Tucson on cloud nine. Though just starting his master’s and teaching engineering classes, TriSports.com held his attention. Energized, and with an extra 20 hours a week that had been devoted to training, he dove into launching the online retailer with his wife, Debbie, and gave it his Ironman all. So much so, in fact, that in just over a year, when that cell phone rang in Harshbarger and a disapproving associate snidely asked him, “So, have you made your first million dollars yet?” Seton could look him in the eye, grin, and answer, “Almost!” Revenues had already climbed to $800,000.

It wasn’t easy. Start-up capital eluded him. SBA loan programs said the company would never fly, and TriSports.com was literally built on credit cards. But by focusing on personalized customer service – handwritten thank you notes with every order, or example – and keeping their website updated practically on the hour, the couple made the company that would never fly actually soar.

“That’s the beauty of owning your own business,” Seton says. “There’s no lid. The sky’s the limit.”

Today Seton’s a frequent guest speaker in Eller’s entrepreneurship classes, giving back to the program he says gave him the tools to launch TriSports.com and the faculty he still turns to for advice. “It’s nice to have other entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off of, even today,” Seton says. “The students and faculty are totally unbiased, and they’re really in your court.”