Ryan Dost I am. Marshall Atkinson As this episode is focused on making changes, let's set the stage and talk about the Sandlot Sports origin story. How'd you get started? What is your business market focus? And exactly who are your Okay. I'll give you a little bit of a background of where the heck we came from. Both of us grew up here in Saginaw. Michigan and went to the same high school. We're one year apart, I graduated '96, Adam graduated in 1997. Adam's kind of the one that had the direction to go into the screen print and embroidery world. He worked at a screen print company, Sports Junction in high school. So he was the one that was kind of in this world. We both went away to college, I went the University of Michigan, Adam went to Northern Michigan University at Saginaw Valley to get a degree in Education, he was a teacher. customers? Ryan Dost I got an education in Organizational Studies, which is a nice way to say general studies with a little bit of business orientation. Our friendship started after college and our idea of our business, I would say, started when we painted a house, we called it the Michigan House here in Saginaw. Back in the summer of 2001, so I was done with college. We got kind of picked to paint this house through somebody Adam knew where we got paid cash under the table. During the summer, being just out of college and Adam's still in college, we would work till 1:00 AM listening to Tigers, listening to Ernie Harwell. Talk about the Tigers when they're on the West Coast, we would work at random times when we had openings and we thought to know each other, and learn a lot more about each other and our work ethic and knew that we had a lot in common. The next year we, ended up coaching little league together. We were like 21, 22-year-olds, coaches, and little league. We went our separate ways. I went to Chicago, went to Boston for a while. He came back and taught here in 2007. Adam tried to convince me to move back to start a business. He, he saw the business... he is working in the screen print business and thought it'd be something good for us to do. He knew I always wanted to own my own business. I thought it was gonna be a hardware business, but he convinced me to just try to start this one. So 2007, I came home, we wrote up a business plan, went to three banks, and, that did not go well for us through all three banks kind of laughed us out the door. So I went back to Chicago, back to my salary, my insurance, my 401k, a year later though, things had changed. And, I moved back home and I think March, and June 28th of 2008, we opened our doors. With the help of family we've got a $15,000 loan, cause the banks still was not going to help us with anything. Got the most basic equipment we could... bought an embroidery machine, a single head embroidery machine, which was probably the worst decision we had ever made. We would sell for that first year waiting for the phone to ring. Throwing the football with a phone in our pocket. We would maybe grab some money out of the seal on a Friday night, go grab some beers, it was an interesting time. It was fun, we kind of did everything everybody told us not to do. In 2008, things were not going well. People said, "Do not quit your real jobs and do this. Kind of keep your real jobs and do this on the side." And we said, "We're going all in. It's either gonna work or not work." and, we went all in.
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