Perfect is a myth. I will say to my credit perfection the whole perfectionist thing has never been a Limiting factor for me because I just never saw it as attainable. It's like hey, let's keep making progress so you try to learn from some of those things and Move on to the next opportunity or the next task keep moving ahead and hopefully you end up achieving some things and having an impact and being a good role model for the people who are important to you. That's probably as big a win as we can have in all the professional stuff here. Hey friend, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to another episode of Becoming Undone, the podcast for those who dare bravely, risk mightily, and grow relentlessly. Join me, Toby Brooks, as I invite a new guest each week to examine how high achievers can transform from falling apart to falling into place. For Louisville, Kentucky native Pat Rigsby, early dreams of Major League Baseball turned into real-world experience as the youngest manager of a collegiate team in America, where he led Shawnee State University to a massive turnaround from a program on the chopping block by college administrators one year to an NAIA College World Series appearance in less than five seasons. However, a yearning for larger purpose led to a massive career pivot when he left the grind of collegiate coaching for the possibilities of work, life, and entrepreneurship. Owning zero businesses at the age of 28, 20 years later he's managed to grow, scale, and leverage one business success after another. And today, he boasts nearly 40 startups to his credit with multiple multi-million dollar businesses. Now widely recognized as one of the brightest business minds in the country, today Pat spends his days helping others grow their businesses and finds himself back on the diamond on his own terms, coaching his kids teams. Listen in to Episode 52, Blueprint, with Pat Rigsby. This week, we're fortunate enough to have a friend of, I was trying to do the math. It's been over a decade that our paths crossed initially with the International Youth Conditioning Association. Pat Rigsby is the owner and founder of patrigsby.com. He's known primarily in the fitness space, but certainly beyond. And we'll get into some of that as a systems guy and a culture guy, and just an individual that can really help you grow your business kind of from the inside out. So Pat, love that you're here today. Welcome to the show. Wow. I am thrilled, excited, honored, you know, every descriptor we could figure out to say to be here and yeah, it's a, it's probably 15 years now, so I'm glad we get to share some time together. Yeah. And honestly, I didn't realize this until last week. Like we've known each other all this time and I did not realize that you actually had a short stint in professional baseball. I knew you had coached. I knew in recent years, you've gone into youth coaching with your own son and such. So I always start at the beginning, wherever that was for you. You know, I think I wanted to be involved in baseball. I was a baseball guy growing up. Played various sports, but definitely gravitated more to baseball. Halloween costumes would have probably been baseball-oriented type stuff, right? Grew up a big Cincinnati Reds fan growing up in Ohio. I think as I got into middle school and high school, I probably was self-aware enough to know that I wasn't destined to be the next Johnny Bench or Tom Sievert. So I, man, I really kind of thought, man, I'd like to be a general manager for a major league team. I mean, I can remember doing some of that stuff in seventh grade, kind of not paying attention in math class and organizing what I'd want my roster to be with draft players, me and another friend. And so that was the direction I thought I wanted to go. And then I think when I finished high school, I was still, I was, I think I still liked it, but didn't really understand a path to get there and start to look at more traditional career. I guess fumbled around a little bit in college and changed majors a couple of times, trying to figure out what I wanted to be. And lo and behold, not so long later, I was the youngest head college baseball coach in the country. So, and it came full circle in some ways. Yeah. So you obviously came up as a player, probably played youth ball, and this was in a pre travel ball era. I don't, did you play Legion ball or? Yeah. You know, more localized summer ball. And I was an above average player. I certainly was never the best player among my friend group even, let alone in the city or something like that. But we had a good region where I was from. I'm from Portsmouth, Ohio. And the interesting thing about it is there were always people when I was young, like elementary school age, whatever, there were multiple guys in the major leagues from my town. And not just journeyman players, like Major League All-Star. And so baseball was a big thing in our community and there were a lot of really good players. And so, like I said, I was a decent player, but there were a lot of good players. And so it was probably a really fun environment to grow up in because you always had people to play ball with. You always had people that brought out the best in you, so that kind of competitive environment. So a lot of fun and a lot of people are friends to this day. That's cool. So you mentioned you were one of the youngest college coaches. So you made that transition from player to coach really kind of quickly or abruptly. And last week when we kind of made that connection that you had played some frontier league, did you know then that the playing days were coming to an end? Did you have a sense that your days on the diamond contributing as a player were numbered? Yeah, I was definitely, Frontier League had a lot of turnover, a lot of players in and out. And I was a guy who was actually a coach on the staff. I had already moved into my one full year of college coaching as an assistant coach and then was activated as a player. And they had told me that at the beginning of the year, saying, hey, this is kind of part of the deal. We may need to activate you as a player. So part of me was really anxious about that idea. And then part of me thought, well, this would be a cool culmination to my baseball journey. So I thought, well, maybe I'll get in it bad or two or whatever and ease into it. And I got activated for a game and I was a catcher. I was like, I'll go catch in the bullpen and kind of ease my way into it. They're like, no, you're starting tonight. Our catcher had torn his ACL the night before and the other catcher had just left and signed with affiliated ball. And so they're like, no, you're it. So after not playing for about two seasons, jumped in and played that first night. And ironically enough, we'd been on a five game losing streak and I was player of the game. We won the game, went three for five with a double and the game-winning heart B.I. and it was probably downhill from there, but it's a pretty exciting beginning. Yeah, for a lot of folks, sport becomes part of our identity early on and whether that's youth, high school, college and beyond and when that's taken from us or when we choose out of it, either way. Sometimes it's injury, sometimes we just see the handwriting on the wall, there's nowhere else to go. But for you, you transitioned into coaching. So in a lot of ways, you kind of medicated that void in your spirit by, you're still involved in the game, but what was that first season like where you had kind of hung your glove up for the last time? Well, so, you know, I think I probably kind of got the stair step my way out of it because I think like a lot of high school players, you have these grandiose visions of what your next step in the journey is going to be. And mine was very unfulfilling. I was hurt a lot. I ended up transitioning to student assistant coach before my eligibility was even up. I mean, we got a new head coach at the university. He said, well, I'll give you two options. I said, you know what? I already see this as where I'm headed and I kind of knew where I'd have fallen on the depth chart at that point and the opportunity to kind of come back and say, okay, I'm going to compete, kind of check this box of, hey, I got to play professional baseball briefly, was a fun kind of turnaround. And, you know, I, and I was invited back for the next season, but kind of knew that that window was closed and even if I could have gone back and hung around as a backup catcher or whatever else. I mean, again, I think I was self-aware enough to know in my younger days, I wasn't going to be Johnny Bench or Pudge Rodriguez or whoever. And so it's like, well, you know, this gives me some, some closure and it springboard to the next thing that I was excited about. And I think typically I am one of those folks who spends a lot of time kind of looking forward and being excited about what's next. And, you know, maybe I'm a little nostalgic about what's happened, but I'm not always clawing back to it. I think that's a healthy perspective for sure. So you take over coaching, you're barely older than your players. It's not necessarily a high-paying, high-prestige position, but you inherit a team that had not had a lot of success, and you turned it around in really short order. So talk me through your career coaching at the college level. Well, we were an NAI program, right? So a four-year school, but not a strong program, not a program with any sort of history or track record. We didn't own our own field, used a city-owned facility, had a low budget, all those things that you would expect if they're going to give the job to a 23-year-old, right? And that's kind of why I got the job. It was a tough job, and the university, for those who aren't familiar with the different divisions of collegiate sport, well, NAI actually is a scholarship division that is very competitive, but the university was wanting to transition to non-scholarship and use those funds to add football as a way to grow the enrollment in the university. And so we were going to be competing for the next handful of years at the non-scholarship level against scholarship opponent. And so needless to say, the coach who had been there, who hadn't had a lot of success with scholarships, was not optimistic. So I took the job thinking, well, hey, maybe this will be a way for me to kind of bluster my resume. And, you know, it's just not an opportunity a lot of people get. And so took it over. We had never really had any success. My first season, we had the most successful season to date in school history, which was just like two games above 500. So it wasn't exactly world beaters, but it was progress. And the next year we got better. And at that point, though, I kind of recognized, I'm like, you know, I can't really do what everybody else is doing and ever get to that next level, that nationally competitive level or whatever, because I've got less experience than all the other folks that I'm competing against. We don't have the financial resources. We're in a rural area, so recruiting was a little bit harder. So I just kind of blew everything up and changed my focus and said, okay, we're going to do things differently. And I researched all these programs in baseball and other sports that had just done things differently than everybody else, whether it's talking about the old Loyal Marymount basketball or run and shoot football or when Lavelle Edwards took over BYU and started passing the ball around or Princeton basketball or whatever. Just how did people approach solving problems differently? I came up with what my game plan was, and it was everything from learning to be a better marketer to help with recruiting, all the way down to every facet of how we develop players and culture and everything. Little did Pat realize that while those efforts were certainly bound to pay off in the short run, the true impact for him would be much later down the road in a completely different context. Even though he still had some life left as a college coach and he enjoyed the job, the right opportunity to move onward and upward never really materialized. But along the way he became an expert on things like building a winning culture, recruiting, and leadership. All things that would be easily pivoted to that next career as an entrepreneur. But he wasn't ready for that just yet. And that year we started out like 18 and 1. And it just kind of snowballed from there. And by my fifth year, we finished fifth at the World Series and we had 1.7 scholarships and everybody else had 12. And, you know, I think it was fun and maybe I was young enough and naive enough to not know any better. that I probably at that age also, I didn't have family, very much tunnel vision. Like I was very focused on being better at this one thing. So it was a fun experience and frankly, an experience that I think has helped me literally in every facet, every day since from a business perspective. That was going to be my next question. Certainly you honed skills during that time that you still use today. What do you think were some of the most important lessons you learned during those five years as a college baseball coach? The first was being willing to deviate from the norm. Not necessarily solving challenges the same way everybody else does or approaching things the same way that everybody else is. But if not, then probably going to run into a pretty low ceiling. The second was just understanding marketing and selling, right? Recruiting is marketing and selling, but my approach to marketing and selling has always been a very follow-up focused approach rather than some of the immediate gratification marketing and selling that you see touted in ads on the internet or whatever, but recruiting is not really that way. I mean, there's a sales cycle that you go through in recruiting and learning that and optimizing that and then immersing myself in things like direct response marketing to help me maybe stand out. That was another piece of the puzzle. I think that being willing to be very relationship focused because maybe, and some of that was maybe I was younger and didn't have a family. And so having a very open door approach, I think that's been one of those things that has stood out. It's been a lot of years since then. year coaching was 2002 and there's not a week that has gone by in the 20 plus years since that I've not had at least one but usually several text or phone conversations with former players and over 20 years but I think that comes from just being relationship focused and not necessarily transactional in my interactions with other people. So I think those things and then the bootstrap mentality, not really being worried about what resources you don't have, just saying, okay, how do we make the most of the resources we do have? As many businesses as I've owned or co-owned, almost all of them, I think at this point, 34 out of 36 were bootstrapped. At this point, it's weird. I mean, I prefer that way. Yeah. It's interesting because certainly you've got this school and they're fielding a team, but they're not necessarily resourcing it like an SEC or a Big Ten school. And so a lot of people would view that as a limitation or they've hamstrung you. You don't have the scholarships that other programs have. You had to develop systems. You didn't have a massive staff to handle all of the relational things. And so you hone those skills then. What do you think is the biggest lesson in terms of systems that you gained there that you now apply or next level teach others now where you're working with small business owners who are kind of in a similar situation? I think the biggest lesson that I have, and yeah, I did learn systems there. I mean, we had 136 page playbook. And it wasn't necessarily like plays, so to speak. It was, I had a $2,000 assistive coaching budget, so there was going to be turnover every year from staff and just helping other people come on and be successful. So I guess my perspective of a system is simply a blueprint that sets somebody else up to succeed. I think sometimes people get overwhelmed with the idea of systems thinking about this McDonald's-esque operations manual that is phone book thick for those people who remember phone books. And instead it's like, okay, here are the things that we do. How do I set you up to be successful in the things that you're specifically going to be responsible for. And I want to give you a blueprint, a checklist, some sort of framework that allows you to be good or hopefully great at what you do. Because if you're great at what you do, then it's more likely that we can achieve our vision, that you're happy, that you have a good experience, that I get what I want out of hiring an employee or bringing on a team member. So I think understanding the importance of systems, but I think maybe the unique part of it from my perspective was seeing it as a way to help somebody else succeed rather than just documenting a process or something like that. Right. Well, if my math is right, before the age of 30, you still don't own one business. Is that correct? And you just said you've owned 36. And so talk me through that massive pivot from college coaching, which if you have success like you do, opportunities avail themselves. SEC, Big Ten jobs, pay pretty well. You could do all right with that. Doesn't always fit with the family life, but you made the switch. You went a different direction. The college coaching environment was an interesting one for me, right? Because I had an athletic director that gave me a lot of autonomy. I had a vice president of student affairs who didn't like that I had autonomy and didn't necessarily enjoy me in particular. That created a little bit of friction and eventually it just came to a head and clearly if you're the lowly baseball coach and the vice president and you don't see eye to eye, I ended out resigning and I just, you know, I wasn't sure. The environment that I was working in, I had had some job opportunities but they all felt very, the the head coaching jobs felt very lateral in many ways. Even if they paid better or something like that, it was like, okay, well, this school is not all that interested in winning. We were winning. I mean, there were just any number of reasons that somebody might take a job or might not. And then the assistant coaching positions were either pretty far down the totem pole at the better schools, like volunteer assistant at the more prestigious programs. And then the programs that were, maybe it was recruiting coordinator or something like that, it was always jobs where I felt like, okay, I'm not sure this head coach is on solid footing. So am I really going to leave and attach myself to them and bet my livelihood on them? And so all of this, it kind of got me thinking like, hey, I want to be more in control of my own destiny. I feel like I've done well enough that I can go back and get a job like the one I have, but I want to go try my hand at something else. And I knew I wanted to get into the business world, but didn't really know where to start. So I took a job running a baseball academy and kind of figured, okay, this'll be my way to cut my teeth in a private sector landscape. Did that for a little bit, took over running all the personal training and all the Gold's gyms in Kentucky. At the time, the gentleman who owned those was the largest franchisee of Gold's gyms in the country. So I thought, well, okay, this is my fast track. I'm willing to put two years into working for somebody to learn to not work for somebody. And I just, I didn't do well with bureaucracy at the university setting, or at least what I had been exposed to. Probably not fair to generalize that. I'm sure there are plenty of universities that would have been an awesome environment, but that one at the time wasn't great. So at 32, got my first opportunity to open a training business, a fitness business, and that one went really well really quickly. And as I had alluded to before, a lot of it was just straight out of the baseball coaching playbook, being willing to do stuff differently than everybody else had, being very intentional about the sales, the marketing, building, knowing that I didn't want to paint myself into a corner and be the only trainer. So hiring people before I even had clients on the books. And then, you know, I also mentioned that we bootstrap everything. That first business started with about $2,500. So that one grew pretty quickly. A second business came about 18 months later, opened a health club. That was one of the two where I had to take out a loan. I had two business partners in the beginning. Took out a loan to pay for the equipment and all that stuff. And that one didn't go quite as quickly because obviously there was, there's more overhead and everything, but it, it grew and became successful in a relatively short period of time. And those two things opened the door to maybe an avenue I hadn't thought a lot about. It was teaching other people to be pretty decent at this stuff. Making that jump takes a lot of courage. I've talked to hundreds of people who they've got day jobs, they got benefits and they got a salary and they can count on that, whether it's every other week or every month, whatever. And the thought of being in business for themselves is intriguing, but they just can't stop that steady known quantity, whatever that entity is, what did you tell yourself in order to have the courage to dive in? The first thing I would say is I think your risk tolerance is much higher when you don't have dependence. So when I did that, I didn't have dependence. So when somebody tells me they want to be entrepreneurial and they've got a job that provides their family security or whatever else. I'm like, and you don't need to feel bad about that for a minute because I mean, these are comparing apples and oranges here, right? So that's the first piece. The second was I always felt very confident that if I went and did this other thing and it didn't work, I could always go back and do what I've done. I built up a good enough resume. I had had enough opportunities at that level. Not necessarily the SEC type level or whatever else, but those, you know, the small school stuff. But, you know, I can always go back and do that. Between those two things, it didn't take a whole lot of courage to do it. It was more like jumping over a puddle, not jumping off a cliff here, you know? So you're in business, you start right out of the gate with two pretty quickly and that continues to kind of scale. At any point in that process, did you have regret or did you second guess your decision to make that jump or was it all kind of straight ahead? I don't know that regret would be the way that I would think about it. I mean, you know, you always think about, man, there are all these different paths that you could take. But I will say that every time that I've taken some sort of jump or made a change of direction that may even potentially look like a setback, within a year, it always ended up looking like, man, this was the right move. And I enjoyed coaching college baseball, but I mean, it's like a lot of things, right? Like there are a lot of phases of life that I'm grateful for the experience and the relationships, but it's OK to graduate from that phase of life. And there are times that I'll watch some of that or, you know, I have former players who are involved in college baseball as head coaches or assistant coaches now. And part of me will think, well, hey, I could, you know, I could probably go do this thing. But it's just, you know, it's not the best move for me and where I'm at in my life and the things that are important to me now. Understood. So when we met, you had really made your name in the fitness space. You alluded to the fact you had some real-world experience as a personal trainer and then kind of flipped and parlayed that over into systems success in the fitness industry. So you and a business partner purchased the International Youth Conditioning Association, which was kind of a great idea, but a little soft on execution. It was certainly an idea that this early sports specialization for young athletes had gotten out of hand. We needed some wisdom. Basically, we wanted to bring some normalcy back to this idea of training young kids. And so you and a business partner purchased this entity. At that point, how many different fitness related organizations were you working with? It seemed like there were a bunch. Well, so that was actually pretty early on. That was probably the third, like if I were to delineate between the two, there'd be like local and non-local businesses. I hesitate to call them online businesses only because, I mean, we do live events and you try to be in person. You have organizations that maybe transcend geography. And I think that was the third one. But really what had happened was, you know, the success with the local business in Kentucky, so not exactly in what we would have called a fitness mecca, it allowed for some opportunities to go out there and share the things that had worked there outside of Kentucky with other people, and so it created some products and coaching programs. And I think what I noticed very early on in non-local fitness world was very much the wild west at that point. It was very, very young and there were a lot of people in it who were in it because they liked being in the gym or they liked the idea of continuing to train after not playing sports. a whole lot of the business or leadership or organizational experience that I had had. So I noticed very quickly that I could fill a void with a lot of those folks. And to some of their credit, a lot of them probably saw that too. They said, well, wait a minute. This guy kind of gets me because he's been a coach, he's been a college baseball coach, he's been a college strength coach, he's owned his own business, but he's got some of these other things we can adopt in our business to help. And so it just opened a lot of doors. And so what happened was a lot of the people that would meet, and like you mentioned, I had a business partner, and I was kind of the face of the business, and he did a lot of the behind the scenes, the operational stuff. And we'd interact with people, we'd run coaching groups and people would join. And with people who had a business that there was some alignment, the vision, something that we bought into. Sometimes we'd get the opportunity to come in as an equity partner, sometimes even a majority shareholder or whatever. And it just was an interesting window of time because we could add a lot of value and take something that might be a really good idea, like you alluded to at the IYCA, and hopefully turn it into a really good business or a really good organization. And I think that's kind of where we went with the IYC. I think we got involved and there were about 50 people who had been certified, but it just didn't really have a whole lot of strategy. There was a vision, but maybe not a whole lot of strategy and boots on the ground execution. And, you know, we were able to kind of bolt that on and eventually get to the point where we had certified about 5,000 people. I thought it was interesting when that transition took place, there were a lot of great ideas just right out of the gate, like almost shovel-ready systems, if you will. And that was kind of the blueprint that you used as you acquired additional entities or started new entities. A lot of what made a given organization successful was pretty easily translated over. It was just contextual, right? You just took IYCA's core business model and you used it for resistance band training or for, I mean, fill in the blank. And so it wasn't long before these three or four fitness businesses became this pretty substantial, I think the way it was described at the time, like a battleship. It was this multifaceted, multidisciplinary, lots of employees, lots of moving parts. And you were there from inception to growth. And then one day I got an email that said, hey, I'm going to go do my own thing. And it absolutely blew me away because to me, if you weren't all of it, you were at least half of it. And now all of a sudden you're not in it. And different from your college coaching days, you did have a family at this point. And so your risk tolerance changed. So talk me through the idea to sprout off and start what you're doing today? So the way you described it, I think is pretty accurate. There are a lot of things that got either acquired or started based on opportunities or needs in the industry. All kind of under this umbrella serving fitness business owners, sports performance business owners. And it all happened in, man, probably, I would say the most everything happened in about a seven year span. I mean, it was amazing. We had a franchise organization that had two different brands with almost 300 franchisees. I mean that all happened in like 36 months. And there were a few things that I noticed from my viewpoint. The first was I just wasn't having any fun. And you know I mean I don't want to be frivolous and you know throw fun around like, Hey, I've got responsibilities and everything else. But part of the reason those businesses grew that quickly is I really was enjoying the role that I played. I was definitely the marketing strategy, sales, coaching guy, the face of a lot of it. There are a lot of people involved that didn't even know my primary business partner because he was a little more behind the scenes on a lot of stuff. And so, as this thing grew, my role kept kind of evolving and changing. I think that as we got into it, my business partner had a different vision for what his role should be and what the organization should look like. And eventually it just got to a point where we were probably going to be pulling the rope in different directions. And it was clear we weren't going to work together well for the next decade like that. So I was like, okay, this probably isn't gonna work. I felt at that point, hey, if I can build something big, I can build something well, I can build something better that works for me. And so all of that coupled with the fact that at the time I had a 12 year old and a three year old, and I realized how quickly three turned into 12. And I said, you know, I want a business that's a little more lifestyle friendly. This had me running around the country every month, hosting events and speaking and all that stuff. And I said, if I were going to have a regret, that was going to be it. Like I just wasn't present. And even when I was physically present, I don't know that I was mentally or emotionally present as much as I should have been. And so just decided to make a change and just said, okay, I'm going to make it work. Here are the reasons why I'm going to make it work. Here's the evidence that I have that I can make it work. to execute a sale of my stake of all the stuff that we built. Yeah. I think you mentioned to me once that you recognize that you were going in different directions and it was hard, but you realized that. The next year it would be harder. And the year after that, it was going to be harder still as this thing continued to blossom and your role and the lines of reporting got more convoluted and interconnected, it was going to be harder and harder to disentangle this thing. Yes. A lot of ways, going into business, whether it's family or friend or just investor, it's like a marriage, like you're trusting someone with a critical part of who you are. When that gets pulled apart in a lot of ways, it's kind of like a divorce. And so you've experienced both sides of that as a critical partner. And now kind of what you do is a little more closely held. You've got direct control over everything that you do, outsource a lot of things as opposed to a big payroll. So talk me through kind of the pros and cons of those two models. Well, with the first model, like I said, it all grew so fast and it was kind of my first go around doing that stuff. I was a little bit older than my business partner at the time and so he was kind of growing into it too. And frankly, when we started the beginning business, you know, you don't know what it's going to turn into. I don't think you could have the foresight to say, hey, before long, you're going to have one of the bigger brands in the personal training side of the fitness industry when you're starting out with something in a little town as a single site location. Right. So ideally that second time around, you should be a little wiser. You should say, well, okay, I know some things now that I didn't know then. So for me, a lot of it was personal preference. I like having people who have a vested interest in what's going on, like business owners who, almost like fractional COOs or CMOs or whatever. I like people who are entrepreneurial. Those are the people I enjoy surrounding myself with professionally. So I wanted to be able to do that. I wanted to surround myself with more people like that. I wanted to coach business owners because I kind of gravitated to that. I'm not somebody who enjoys a ton of meetings. I'm definitely more of a managed by walking around or if you're doing it virtually managed by hopping on a phone call and So I think that smaller, more nimble, probably a little more informal businesses fit my personality a little bit better. And I don't necessarily know that bigger is better. I think better is better. And so I think for me, building something that was leaner, more profitable, built around my personal preferences, which aren't necessarily anybody else's personal preferences. Those all made it a better endeavor for me because the smaller business, I think you can be really adaptable. Like when the pandemic hit, I was able to make a lot of moves pretty quickly that I felt like put my business and the people we serve as businesses in a better spot. If it would have been as big as it was previously, I don't know that I would have had that ability to be that quick to respond or that adaptable. So as you're talking, I'm just thinking here from the outsider's perspective, you've been a pro athlete, you've been a successful college coach, you've founded and built and grown. I mean, it's success after success after success. Where did failure factor into this equation? Oh, like, I don't know, like every other day somewhere. So let's see. I mean, essentially, if I wouldn't have resigned, I would have been fired without question as a baseball coach, which that was me probably not being sensitive to a chain of command at a stage in life. And at that point, 20-something, ego, everything else, right? Frankly, I didn't, I applied for almost a hundred GA spots to go to grad school. I got one response and no offers. And so frankly, I kind of lucked out like the baseball coaching job came that same summer that I had applied for all those spots. That first business, well, that first organization, I guess you could call it. There are plenty of ways somebody could look at that as a failure from a dozen different perspectives, right? Like I could have ridden out and continued to grow the franchise stuff to a point that an exit would have been far more lucrative. Along the way, my inability to say no to a lot of things meant we ended up being pretty good at a lot of things and not great at enough things. There are a number of places that in hindsight you could probably say, man, I dropped the ball on this or struggled with that. As a fellow parent, there's probably not a day it goes by that I don't think I screw something up there I can itemize this and I don't know that we'd have to do three more episodes go through everywhere that I've failed or maybe fallen short on potential of this or whatever else but perfect is a myth. And I will say to my credit, perfection, the whole perfectionist thing has never been a limiting factor for me. Cause I just never saw it as attainable as like, Hey, let's keep making progress. So you try to learn from some of those things and move on to the next opportunity or the next task, keep moving ahead. And hopefully you end up achieving some things and having an impact and being a good role model for the people who are important to you. And that's probably as big a win as we can have in all the professional stuff here, right? Right. So you play a key role in building this award-winning business, multiple franchise entities and staff and all these things, and you remove yourself and you start your own thing. You gamble on you, right? So without going into the financial details, what gave you the courage to be able to pull out of that, in many ways, entrepreneurship had turned into a job for you? Kind of that safety and that security that starting your own thing from scratch is a much riskier proposition. So what gave you the courage to make that jump? You know, in hindsight, it's funny you phrased it that way because that's probably the only time that I can recall through all of this that I questioned myself a little. And when I say a little, again, I'm not a whole lot for dwelling on problems and seeking solutions, but because of the responsibilities I had and the people that I had to take care of and that sort of stuff, I would ask myself periodically, like, hey, is this the right move? Should I just kind of just suck it up, whatever? But I think what I tend to do well, and I recommend this to so many other people that I'm around, is I look back at all the evidence as to why something would succeed. I think so many people get caught up in why they can't do something, or all the problems, And if you look back, I mean, you have been incredibly gracious in talking about this resume of things that I've been a part of or done or whatever. And most people tend to minimize that. I try to go back and pull as much value from that as I possibly can and say, okay, why will, you know, why can I do this? What can I draw from these previous experiences that will help me do this next thing? What kind of relationships do I have that will help me in this next step? And I see it almost like as this vault of intangible assets that I've spent my life kind of pouring into. I think that's usually where I go, anytime I run into an obstacle is I go back and look at that and it's usually what gives me enough for the impetus to proceed in spite of any sort of questions or concerns I might have. Yeah. So, talk me through what your days look like today. So I work from home. I have a wonderful office that kind of sits on the back corner of the house so I get to look at the backyard and during the right times of day or right times of year I see a bunch of kids playing out in the field here. And it varies based on the time of year again as a fellow parent you get the school year versus not school year There's usually some workout sometime in the morning and some writing and strategy and creative work. The afternoons are usually the interactive stuff, coaching, Zooms, that sort of thing. I don't travel for business as much as I used to. I'll still go speak a few things here and there. We host some mastermind, kind of coaching-oriented meetings. Some of them are here in Louisville, some of them are in Florida when it's cold here, and occasionally we'll do them in other spots. We just did one in Kennebunk, Maine, and I had never been to Maine before, so it was awesome. How structured the mornings are, how much I get done probably varies between school year stuff and getting somebody on the bus versus not. I think that I tend to do better. I do a lot of writing. I send a daily email newsletter to the business owners that our current clients or a community of potential clients have sent that for now 18 years. And so I do a lot of writing, do that kind of strategy stuff. Sometimes it's 45 minutes, sometimes it's two hours worth of stuff that way in the mornings. The average workday is probably six hours, seven hours, I don't know. It's just flexible, right? So I'm probably not as sensitive to the end of the workday. When my younger son was in elementary school, I tried to end the workday before he got home because there's a lot of, hey, he wants to hang out with me, so I'm involved now. He's a middle schooler, so I'm not nearly as interesting. So some of that stuff can kind of bleed a little bit later if I wanted to. And then coach's youth baseball team, and so that ends up taking up a lot of evenings. And my wife, who's been involved in the business in various ways and having her own business that was kind of interrelated, is very involved in what we do now and handles certain pieces of the coaching as kind of a lead in some of it, like the accountability and that some of that. So we'll talk about stuff throughout the day, but it's definitely way more in line with what I had hoped for when I started the current iteration of business back in 2015. And, you know, it's, I think I call it your ideal business. That gives me the opportunity to have the impact I want to have on the people I want to serve. It provides financial security and opportunity for my family, but it's also really lifestyle friendly. I mean, I can go coach baseball, we can take vacations, I can travel around. If I need to do some work from the road, I can. So, yeah, it's a pretty good spot. For sure. What do you think failure has taught you that success wouldn't have along the way? What has failure taught me that success wouldn't have along the way? Gratitude would be one. Being a baseball guy, I think baseball kind of hardwires you to just expect that failing is part of the deal, right? So being appreciative of successes, being able to understand that overreacting to failure sets you up for more failure. Understanding that every failure I've experienced to this point has been either a springboard to something better or nothing more than a temporary setback that kind of detoured me to a different solution. That's a great way to look at it. I love music and the emotions that it can represent. I don't know if it was your walk up or what you would use, but if you had to pick a song to represent your life, what would it be and why? I am the most unprepared person to answer this question that it could be, though I will say, people would know it as the barbecue stain shirt by Tim McGraw. It is the one that I enjoy the most. A gentleman I grew up with wrote it. If you were to see the interviews about it, his name's Rick Farrell, and he talks about it being inspired by his hometown. And so when I think of it, when I hear that song, it kind of reminds me of like, man, this whole business thing has been wonderful to me. And it's allowed me to do so many things that I've wanted to do and meet wonderful people who've become friends like you. But you know, my legacy is gonna be the relationships, not a brand that I created or something like that. The impact I've had on other people. And so, if you think back to childhood or whatever else and friends and relationships, and so when I think about that, there's a little bit of nostalgia. Probably the one that evokes that kind of emotion, maybe. Yeah. Well, I hesitate to even ask this one. Usually when I ask the music question, people either have it right there or they don't know it at all. And so, you're kind of toward the ladder on that one. But when I ask the question of what for you is left undone, it's like you probably have a list of a thousand things. So, what for Pat Rigsby is left undone? Left undone. I would say, I don't know professionally if there's any one single thing that would merit, hey, that's left undone. I mean, I just, you know, I want to keep getting better. I would say personally, you know, it's just a lot of paying it forward, right? Like there's so many people that have been wonderful to me along the way, and I really relish the opportunity to pay it forward and help other people, and try to do that as much as I can, but I mean, that's work that doesn't have a finish line, right? For sure. Well, last question. You are a great follow on social media, always positive, never controversial. A lesson I've tried to learn from you over the years. How can listeners connect with you and follow your work? Man, the easiest places are just, patrigsby.com kind of links out to all of it. So that's the website. You know, I was pretty early on most of this stuff. So it's like backslash Pat Rigsby for Facebook or at Pat Rigsby for Twitter. And yeah, you're right. Like I, I mean, I make a daily post. It's just kind of something that I'm thinking about. That's usually in many ways designed to help me kind of focus on the day ahead. So I share it with other people. But yeah, I'm not wanting to use social media for a diary as much as I use it to connect with people I care about. So. Well, Pat, you've definitely been an inspiration for me. It's been a fantastic journey. And I was thinking about this, like I got involved in the IYCA. I had done some things with them, but there was a person who had been tasked with a pretty big job and for whatever reason didn't happen. And one of my favorite patisms is you only get paid for done. And, you know, this project had been just kind of floating in space in some semblance of undone. And I got tagged in on it. I'm like, I'm going to impress this guy. And I wanted to get that knocked out as well and as quickly as I could. And I remember you saying like, you only get paid for done. Sometimes things can be left unfinished for a while. So I certainly appreciate the speed of entrepreneurship that you taught me. Well, it's my pleasure. And you are the quintessential doer, man. That's always one of my favorite things is like seeing what you're up to from cars to books to podcasts and the modern day renaissance man. Hey, I'll take that compliment. I'm trying to be better at it. Thanks for joining us. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. For Pat, he's been brave enough to course correct when he felt the demands or the enjoyment of a job conflict with his expectations for himself. Whether that's been professional baseball, college coaching, manning the helm of a massive multi-franchise operation, or today, in his more closely held consulting and business coaching business, he's found a way to define success on his own terms and in his own way. And he's not done yet. For more info on today's episode, be sure to check it out on the web. Simply go to undonepodcast.com backslash ep52 to see the notes, links, and images related to today's guest, Pat Rigsby. I know there are great stories out there to be told and I'm always on the lookout. So if you or someone you know has a story that we can all be inspired by, share it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com, click that connect tab in the top menu, and drop me a note. Coming up, I've got Shelby Perry, CEO and founder of iHESA, followed by former Texas Tech basketball player, Texas Tech ambassador of culture, and certified DAWG Norence Odiase on deck, followed up by the unbelievably powerful story of former college football player turned motivational speaker Fletcher Cleaves. So stay tuned. This and more coming up on Becoming Undone. Becoming Undone is a NitroHype Creative Production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. 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