Craig Waters
Name: Craig Waters
Current Job: CFO & CMO of TRAZER
Favorite restaurant in town? Flying Fig in Ohio City and Russo’s near Hudson.
Favorite thing about Cleveland? The underappreciated things that the city has are some of the best in America. The culinary diversity and excellence is unbelievable in the city and in the surrounding communities. The Theatre district is amazing. The Weather is awesome ¾ of the year. Our Metroparks, trails and outdoor activities and events are also top-notch.
Q: Craig, you are currently the CFO/CMO of Trazer, joining the company in 2017. How did you end up joining them after spending much of your career at large companies? My Evolution from big to small led me from Ernst & Young to Time Warner to a move to Ohio in 1993 when Time Warner bought a multi-channel marketing company called FitnessQuest in a pre-packaged bankruptcy. The new CEO we hired, asked me to come out and be part of the executive team to run it. We built that business from $0 to over $300M. It was there that I first met Barry, Sr (TRAZER founder) and his family, who were looking for someone to license or partner with them. The concept was 10-15 years ahead of its time and costly to develop and build. FitnessQuest couldn’t do the deal at that time, but I made a small seed investment in their financing round and always kept track of their progress. FitnessQuest was very entrepreneurial in that we licensed inventors products, produced spots and infomercials and built their brands and then sold the product in all channels. The roots for my joining TRAZER in 2017 started there building and scaling early-stage concepts into multi-million $ brands, like Total Gym (Chuck Norris), Gazelle Gliders (Tony Little), BOSU, Ab Lounge (over 7 million sold) and Sham-Wow. The experiences there in evaluation, development, building marketing and distribution plans are very similar to early-stage building and scaling growth. When I was networking looking for my next opportunity in 2017, I met with Barry, Jr. who was commercializing the TRAZER technology and he asked me to come on board. For me, it was the perfect alignment of experience, skillsets, my passion for the sports/healthcare tech space and opportunity.
Q: Can you share with the audience what Trazer does and the types of clients you serve? Whether it’s walking, talking, painting, or playing a sport – without our brain, our bodies don’t function. So why do we assess, train, and rehabilitate individuals in an isolated fashion only focusing on the musculoskeletal system? TRAZER is changing the game by integrating cognitive challenges with movement to holistically assess, train, and rehab individuals. When the brain and body work together individuals experience superior outcomes and are an overall healthier person. Our mission is to advance human health and performance through the objective quantification of the mind-body connection. Our ultimate audience is ages 4 to 104 across all demographics optimizing and measuring movement, but our focus today is Sports Medicine (Alabama, LSU, Clemson, Georgia and more), Physical Therapy (Ascension, Fyzical Therapy & Balance, MOTION PT, Select) and Senior Health (Holiday, Atria, Civitas). Everybody Moves but we don’t do a very good job of objectively measuring the movements or how the mind drives it. For example, with all the information we capture for healthcare (blood pressure, pulse, cholesterol, height, weight, EKG), we don’t measure what matters regarding mind-body movement. The cost of orthopedic, neuro disorder, TBI, falls is hundreds of billions, yet movement deficiencies which are pre-cursers to injury and disease are not captured until now with the TRAZER technology.
Q: Most of your background is in financial accounting at large companies, how did that background help serve you when joining a startup and what were some of the skillsets you had to learn that you didn't necessarily have when you joined? I’ve been fortunate to get experience in a multitude of areas including sales, marketing, business development in addition to finance. With an early-stage entity, being able to wear multiple hats is important, but the finance and business understanding is critical to understanding the cost structure, margins, costs per order necessary to making the business successful. I don’t believe you can make it up on volume and you have to target point where you turn a profit and are no longer dependent on your next capital raise to keep growing. It also helps with negotiating deals with banks, Venture Capital, Joint Ventures and working through the financial ramifications of each transaction. Finally with the incredible value of the data being built and delivered by our technology, my comfort with numbers, statistics and the algorithms we are building is another asset that I can bring to the table.
Q: We've seen a big trend in professional sports league's getting more and more serious about player's health. Is this reverberating across high school and college sports as well? What can leagues do to continue to decrease injuries statistics? The importance of data & analytics, sports science and health has become more and more important as we learn more, but we still have only scratched the surface of where we need to be. The athletes are getting stronger and faster every year, so the only real way to decrease injury statistics is to take a healthcare perspective instead of a sick-care perspective. What I mean is we typically treat the patient or athlete after they are injured and rehab them, and when we rehab them are we rehabbing them to get back in the game as soon as possible or for the lowest possible risk of re-injury? TRAZER quantifies what actually matters through the ability to see (vision), process (cognitive), and execute (motor/physicality). These are several other key points;
Tests the athlete in a sports specific analogous environment to the field of play using reactive based (not pre-planned) patterns measuring an athlete’s ability to stop, start and change direction.
TRAZER can quantify injury risk looking at an athlete’s movement asymmetry. When organizations are spending millions on an athlete, their risk of injury is significant in their decision making. The famous adage; “If we can’t measure, we can’t improve” has never been truer with TRAZER. By knowing the athlete’s risk on the front end, we can mitigate that risk and build a healthier, better performer.
Test/measure the athlete frequently to monitor progress or degradation over time, overtraining such that we can mitigate or use therapy to address an injury before it becomes major.
These key points are not just critical in sport, but in life. It allows TRAZER to continue to expand and grow into physical therapy, the senior market and more.
Q: What attributes drives your why and passion the most? Family and key core values, being a lifelong learner and the opportunity with something like TRAZER to help millions of people with our technology. Something very few people know about my wife and I is we adopted a 6-year-old boy from Russia 16 years ago after having 3 girls of our own. We can’t imagine today what life would be without him. The experience of bringing our son into our family and the support from the community in NE Ohio was unbelievable. From the 2 trips to Russia in the middle of winter, the 1st days together while waiting on his papers to finalize with the embassy, to the arrival home to his sisters and grandparents. We are so proud of everything he has accomplished against lottery-like odds from an orphanage across the globe to a family in NE Ohio.