Just Show Up by Cal Ripken Jr

Author:Cal Ripken Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

Getting the right players for your team

When we started Ripken Baseball, I had a group of successful businesspeople as advisors. I knew baseball, but I needed to learn about business, too, so we set out to find an experienced executive to run the new company. There were candidates with impressive résumés in business, finance, and entertainment, and they all seemed to want the title of president. After we struck out a couple of times, we took a step back and realized we were looking at candidates with good credentials but not the right credentials for our situation (like knowing which pitcher to put in against which kind of hitter.) Just because you’ve run a large company doesn’t mean you know how to talk to kids, or find coaches who understand young athletes, or make parents feel your program is right for their child. We needed someone with business expertise along with an understanding of youth sports, someone who “got” youth sports, so his or her priorities were right from the start.

After a lot more searching, we found our guy. His business background was with a major national youth camp and academic baseball showcase, and he had his own consulting business for high-school students in college admissions and recruiting. (And he didn’t seem hung up about the title, only the job.) Unfortunately, he was so good, he was later wooed away! But now we have a much better sense of whom we need in our lineup, and we fill positions with that combination of understanding youth sports and business always in mind.

In our early days, we outsourced our food and beverage operations, but when we determined that the quality wasn’t as good as it should be, we decided to run it ourselves. We needed to choose a leader for the operation, so our folks reviewed more than ninety applicants and narrowed the list down to two finalists for me to meet and make the pick. The problem was, one was clearly the winner, and the other didn’t measure up. There weren’t really two finalists; the decision was pretty much made, but I wasn’t satisfied that we were getting the best we could find. So I asked the team to go back to the applicant pool and come up with a better set of people to choose from, and if they weren’t the best candidates after all, I wanted them to reopen the process until we found the right person to lead the team. Finally, after all those interviews, we did find the right person, not the winner from the first round but someone who impressed all of us even more. The important thing was the process. We were thorough, and we took our time. We needed change, and yes, maybe it would be uncomfortable for the people who had been there already to work for the new person, but we were confident we’d gotten the right candidate after taking all that time to comb through all those people.

We learned an important

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