Episode 16: “Changing the Direction of Your Business"

A Transcript for the Readers:

Marshall Atkinson:

Welcome to Success Stories brought to you by S&S Activewear, I’m your host Marshall Atkinson, and this is the podcast that focuses on what’s working so you can have success too.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many small businesses to their knees, or frankly, completely out of business.

One Michigan business, Sandlot Sports, made a dramatic shift in their business from athletic and sports event-based apparel and merchandise to more of a B2B focus.  On today’s Success Stories podcast, we’ll be chatting with Ryan Dost and Adam McCauley about their business, the shift in a new direction, and their plans for the future in 2021 and beyond.

If you have been trying to move your business in a different direction, this is one episode you don’t want to miss.

So Ryan and Adam, welcome to the Success Stories podcast!

Adam McCauley:

Well, thanks, Marshall. Thanks for having us.

Ryan Dost:

Thanks, Marshall. I appreciate you having us on.

Marshall Atkinson:

Great. No problem. So, uh, Ryan, you ready to take the first question?

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 customers?

Ryan Dost:

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 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 want the University of Michigan, Adam went to Northern Michigan University and Saginaw Valley got a degree in education.

He was a teacher. 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 really started after college and our idea of our business, I would say started when we painted a house, we call 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 really got 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. I 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, uh, 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, uh, that did not go up 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, uh, I moved back home and I think March and June 28th of 2008, we opened our doors. But to help a family, we’ve got a $15,000 loan. Um, cause the bank 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, we would sit out front 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. Uh, it was fun. We kind of did everything. Everybody told us not to do 2008.

Things were not going well. People said, do not quit your real jobs. And, 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 2009, things started taking off for us. We moved locations that year. I’ll always remember kind of the base of our business.

There were five weeks, we worked a hundred or more hours in that year. We worked all the time and our take-home that year was just over $9,000. Which I think we figured out one time and with overtime and all that stuff, it would have paid us probably right around $3 or just under $3 an hour.

2011, we bought Sports Junction.

The company acts soon. Actually the company Adam worked at when he was in high school, took us from there. Three of us to nine people, 2014, about CJ. So simple, a local company, 2015, we got kind of in the real estate business and bought our production building we’re in now on Universal Drive in Saginaw, Michigan, 2018.

We bought, uh, one of our retail locations in Bay City, Michigan. Um, and today we sit at three locations, two retail, one production, 22 staff members, two autos, two manuals, 17 heads of embroidery, a DTG machine, and a Versacamm to do banners and stickers and all that. Good. So the second part of that, about our what’s our business market focused.

We actually have our target market as K-12 schools, businesses with 50 or more employees, teams and organizations, and event coordinators in Michigan who expect quality, ease of experience and are not price-focused. We do not want to be the, uh, the least expensive place in the world. And for the part about who are your customers?

Our current customers are schools, clubs, and travel teams. That’s still a focus of our business. Uh, we’ve switched that a little bit with the pandemic, everything else. We do have great clientele, corporate customers to the top five of our largest customers are all businesses.

Adam McCauley:

No, I had, you know, I had worked in high school at Sports Junction, and then I worked through college every once in a while and learned that they did online events and, you know, everything I learned, I learned from them.

And then when Ryan and I kind of started, we learned that they were not the most efficient way that you were doing screen printing. So we just wanted, we knew this was going to be a professional. So we jumped into doing trade shows and I mean, we were on top of learning everything we could possibly learn.

That’s I mean, part of that’s how we met you guys, Marshall, and some other people in the industry and we just begged and, and bothered people enough to let them know like, “Hey, we want to learn how to do this and do this and do this.” And, um, we’d have this constant knowledge or this idea that we want to just keep growing, growing, growing.

So we’re always in the mood to learn, learn, learn, learn. It’s been a weird experience. I mean, we started with really, absolutely nothing in, in kind of coming to where we’re at 12 years later. Um, it’s a significant jump, and, um, I’m glad we’re where we’re at. Um, but I don’t think either one of us would have expected us to be doing as well as we have.

Marshall Atkinson:

And weren’t you named Small Business of the Year for Michigan?

Adam McCauley:

That’s a nice little nugget to leave out of there. Isn’t it? Um, so the SBDC, the SBDC we had worked with, you know, part of growing our businesses, kind of reaching out to different organizations and, and, and looking at leadership roles and things like that.

And the SBDC. Um, we, we teamed up with them and they kind of helped us get on track and work towards building our company culture. And, and with that, they had seen the growth that we were making the last few years. And, uh, we didn’t even know they applied our, put our name in this, uh, application. Um, For that award.

And there were 12 different recipients, uh, in the state of Michigan by, uh, divided up by different regions. And, uh, so we had one in our region. And then what we had found out a few months later is that we actually were the overall winner for the state of Michigan as the best small business in the state of Michigan.

So that was a really significant, uh, fun thing for us to kind of put a nice little feather in our cap. And, uh, we got the tutor on horns for a little bit. Um, Yeah, real fancy gala down in Lansing and, uh, around some, some pretty significant businesses. So it was kind of neat to rub shoulders and elbows with those types of people, which was, which was kind of fun.

Marshall Atkinson:

And after that award, did you see, “Oh, you’re the best small business I need to send you my work”  

Did that happen?

Adam McCauley:

Um, sadly not as much as we would’ve liked or would have liked, but I mean, it really did open some doors when you had those conversations when your name is Sandlot Sports. So everyone thinks sports, sports, sports.

Um, but when we were down there and networking with the people that we had met, you know, and let them, when we told them what we do, they were like, Oh wait, we could. You know, maybe this is something we can partner up or get together and do some work, um, with you guys. So it did open some doors for us a little bit and they can, it continues to open doors.

I mean, it’s always kind of a topic of conversation. When, when people kind of say like, wait, my business has nothing to do with sports. How can you help us? And then we explain, Hey, this is exactly what Sandlot Sports does. It does open those doors for us to touch.

Marshall Atkinson:

So Adam, after the pandemic hit, you decided that obviously, you had to make some changes.

Walk everyone through the process and the steps that you took. Cause that’s what this episode is. focused on.

Adam McCauley:

Yeah, so Ryan and I early on realized that we need to invest in our business. So this in 2019, we spent a few months kind of looking for the best kind of consulting firm that we could find.

And we put together a leadership team of staff members on here. And so at the end of 2019, we were geared up for a big push of St. Sports. And in January and February, we were rocking and rolling. Um, and then the pandemic hit. So. Well, we did is, is as a team is kind of broke it down and said, all right, what does our business look like?

If we lose 10% of our orders or 20% of our orders or 50% of our orders? Like what, what are the scenarios that could happen to sandblast sports that can put us out of business or it could, or we could Excel and, um, and jump forward. So that was a big focus for us early on is to say, what are all these scenarios that could possibly happen?

We wanted to know what our staff looks like. Um, we kind of have this accountability chart of what our staff is doing and who they are. We want to make sure that if this scenario happens, where do these people go? And this staff, if this happens, what does our production do? So that was our first thing. And then we ended up taking a big look at our sports and our school market was a hundred percent disappeared.

So what could we do to the little corporate business that we did have? And it has been slowly growing our corporate business, but it wasn’t our main focus. We wanted to grow a little bit every year, but with this, it really kind of forced us to jump ahead. So we said, okay, what can we do? Everyone needs PPS.

That’s that was the big thing for everybody. We reached out to the customers that we had a relationship with. And just kind of found out, one how they’re doing, uh, because everyone is in a small business, they were all kind of in a mess. You know, there, they didn’t know if their staff was going to be there.

They had people leaving and coming and going. So we thought, what do they need that we could provide for them that they may not have known? We could provide for them. And so that was a big step for us to, to help, like, Hey, we can do these fundraising stores for us. We’ve had so many online stores for our fan gear and spirit wear and everything else.

Like it also translates for business. And at a time where your company culture was taken, such a huge hit the online store for us. It really, it really got business owners excited to say, okay, I can just get my staff on the site to buy a bunch of stuff with our company logos on it. And just built that comradery for the people that were working in the staff, our event coordinator, you know, with events completely gone.

Our event coordinator kind of became an inside salesperson for us. And she reached out to local businesses to find out, could we do a, um, uh, an apparel store for them and their staff? Um, we had other people kind of reaching out. We didn’t have the foot traffic like we used to have. So we had our inside sales or our customer service people reaching out to other people and just seeing what, like what can say a lot of sports do.

I mean, we were doing anything to kind of keep. In the forefront of everybody’s mind, even though this pandemic was kind of hitting people, our corporate stores, I mean, we are corporate customers, you know, we just, we wanted to sell them more. Like what more can we give you? Is there more promotional stuff that we weren’t offering before we were doing it now?

So, I mean, those are a couple of things that we did. I think Marshall, Ron, you want to jump in and anything.

Ryan Dost:

So right after the pandemic, like Adam kinda mentioned our leadership team, we went through different scenarios of like the percentage percentages down, but we also had calls with our leadership team twice a week, and sometimes they were five minutes.

Sometimes they were 20 minutes, but it just kind of kept everybody the pulse, I guess, on the business, even though we weren’t able to be here every day, our outside salesperson that was focusing on the schools and selling the uniforms and the hard goods and all that immediately switched to the businesses, we kind of focused on areas.

We already were having successes like credit unions and banks and the manner in the manufacturing world. Um, we just kind of kept expanding on them. Uh, we sold our existing customers, our top customers, even more in 2020, our top two customers are both businesses. One’s a survey engineering company and another one’s a hospital and both of them were up over 20% in 2020.

So even in a year when. Things were down for a lot of people. We were able to sell them more by just kind of offering them more as more promotional things, more like pre-made hats, things overseas, just different things. We were not already selling them. So I think that was a big thing. Um, and then it was just all hands on deck.

Like Adam said, we had customer service people that we just kind of usually have people that take care of the people that walk in the door. They were making phone calls and doing whatever everybody kind of bought into this. Like we have to keep the ship afloat and we did a good job of it.

Marshall Atkinson:

And didn’t you start selling promotional items that you normally, you know, you’ve only concentrated on apparel, but now you’re doing water bottles and whatever, right?

Adam McCauley:

No, we always, we, we dabbled in a lot of that stuff. I mean, we’ve done promotional products for probably the last seven or eight years, but on this time, you know, this time it just felt like it was a focus and that could be a driving revenue stream for us to say, Hey, you guys are buying that stuff on some random place online, like just.

You know, we’ve already done these little apparel pieces for us. We can also do all that promo stuff for you. So it did let people see like there’s more to Sandlot Sports than just sports. So as an example, we did a wine order for a celebration. It was a pretty significant order for us. Um, and it just kind of came out of the blue, but it came out of asking, what more can we do?

They were already a client with us. We’d already done a ton of apparel orders with them in the past. And they really had no idea. That we did promotionals to the level that we do. So just by asking and saying, Hey, what more can we say a lot of sports do for you in this, in this crunch of a pandemic time? You know, they said, Hey, we’ve got this celebration coming up.

We’re looking for this candidate. Can we do it here in Saginaw? And I said, absolutely. And so that was a pretty significant order. What was the order? Oh, I’m sorry. So it was 2,500, uh, wine glasses, um, for a corporate customer.

Marshall Atkinson:

Okay. And as an apparel sports store, A sports apparel company, selling wine glasses is something that’s like on your webpage banner.

Right? Right.

Adam McCauley:

I said right next to the baseball bats. That’s right…

Marshall Atkinson:

And then also I should mention is that you’re not just selling during, we’ll call it normal times with air quotes here during normal times. You’re not just selling t-shirts and stuff for sports. You’re also selling sports equipment.

Correct?

Adam McCauley:

Yeah, we are, we, we did that about three or four, four years ago. We decided to get into the sports equipment side of things. And it was, it was drawn out because of finding different ways to have our customers buy more from us. We were already addressing the athletic directors. We were talking with coaches.

We were already handling a lot of that business for the apparel side, but we figured. The low-hanging fruit here would be the add-on batting helmets or basketball hoops or our types of things like that. So we did that and we kind of went all-in on that, which was great. But then when the pandemic hit, all of that just froze athletic budgets stopped, you know, they weren’t allowed to buy anything anymore.

You know, we were selling a lot of sports equipment along with our apparel. Um, but with that pandemic, it just froze to zero.

Marshall Atkinson:

And are you seeing, because it’s now spring, right? Are you seeing…potentially that coming back for you?

Adam McCauley:

We, the way that our team has kind of thought this through is we really don’t feel as though we’re going to see normalcy until next fall.

I think this spring is going to be a little bit of a question mark for everybody and. We hope that we’re wrong, but we don’t really anticipate a lot of the sports in the school stuff, going back to normal until the fall with them.

Marshall Atkinson:

That comes with all the planning that you’ve guys been doing, where you’re thinking, Hey, we’re not going to be doing a lot of this stuff in these market segments.

So changing and pivoting to a new direction has really allowed you to keep your sales going and everything moves. Correct.

Ryan Dost:

Right. The pandemics actually opened our eyes a little bit. To maybe changing the direction of our company a little bit. Uh, as Adam mentioned earlier, we were already trying to focus on getting more corporate business pandemic, which forced us to go more corporate business.

And actually, when we sat down and put out like one and three kinds of plans in place, we have a three-year target to increase our corporate, I guess, piece of the pie up to 50% of our business. Um, and we actually one of your goals to hit a million dollars in corporate sales this year. So. The pandemics actually almost be directed us a little bit towards a different area.

Just like Adam was saying that the heart goes, we went all in. Uh, and it’s a good thing. It’s low-hanging fruit, but it’s so it’s just such a low margin and not easy. One of our target markets is the not price-conscious consumer that’s all that is like a dozen of the high school baseballs. It’s all about who’s the lowest price and who has them in stock?

And that’s just kind of, not our core focus. So if anything, the pandemics opened our eyes a little…

Marshall Atkinson:

Okay, so Ryan, so how are the changes going? Right? What, what are you going to be doing as this year progresses to make all this stuff stick?  

Ryan Dost:

So changes, uh, are going good. Uh, and we’re actually going to expand on them. Uh, when we came back in May, uh, when we came back in May, our sales were down 22% year over year from 2019.

And with all the changes we made and all the momentum, we kind of got going again, we got that down to only being down 2%, uh, in mid-November, then our state decided to go on another pause and. It kind of shut down the schools and restaurants and everything like that. And we just weren’t able to keep that momentum going and ended up down a little bit more than that.

We’ve just realized that the corporate world in some aspects is actually easier for us. Uh, usually a company has one logo and they just put it on different things. There’s not a lot of variances, the sports world when we do the fan apparel, different things like that. Every year, it’s a new kid.

That’s usually the new captain. They want different apparel, different logos. Dealing with like grandparents, families, things like that. Usually, in the corporate world, we’re dealing with like one or two key people that are ordering things and we’re actually, it’s easier for us. And I think we’re making a better margin and we’re actually, I guess, taking the ship a little bit in that direction.

I mentioned we have a goal. We have a 20, 21 to have our business to business sales up, hit a million dollars, uh, and a goal for the end of 2023 to have our business to business sales, be 50% of our business. So. It’s kind of opened our eyes. We’re also looking to hire inside sales staff and our dedicated staff to build our online stores.

Um, the online stores are kind of going hand in hand with our growth in the corporate world, by offering up the ability for them to open up a store for other than their customers or their employees. So that’s kind of our plan to make things stick. And if anything grow a little bit.

Marshall Atkinson:

Yeah. And let me tell you, I’ve done tons of corporate work over the years.

And even though that corporate logo is, you know, it’s the official, it’s this blue or this red or whatever, a lot of times they want a tonal variation for like a dress shirt or they want the pink thing for breast cancer awareness, or they’re going to do a big promotion for St. Patty’s day and everything has to be in green.

So there’s a lot, or, you know, 4th of July, it’s all stars and stripes and stuff. Right.

And so there’s a lot of room for this where you’re not just doing. The normal logo all the time. There’s a lot of variations. Of course, you’re working with their brand guidelines and stuff, but are you guys developing?

This type of mentality. When you go more corporate and words, rec are you looking at doing it and stuff like that?

Adam McCauley:

Yeah. And I think we get that from seeing what the fan base in the sports world has kind of transferred over into the corporate world. Like you said, stars and stripes. They it’s the 4th of July apparel.

So they have a new special event for that particular, um, A company or they have whatever, uh, the, uh, breast cancer awareness. So it’s, it’s still fandom and it’s, and it’s a fandom based around a different thing instead of their sports team. It’s fandom around this one event at this corporation. So with that being said, you, you it’s still the same.

Um, it’s still the same, uh, fandom and company culture that you would see on the baseball field or the basketball court. It’s just translated over to the, to the, um, corporate world a little bit. Okay.

Ryan Dost:

Good, good, good. I see it this year, Michigan hunting, the big thing still up here, outdoors, fishing, hunting, things like that.

Some of them actually in the world, we got into, I see it big time in the camo hats and things of that sort. Some of our big manufacturing customers. They were doing the tone on tone of their logo on different camo hats. And then that kind of expanded into once the one company got it. I think we had three others from that order wanting to do the same thing.

So it wasn’t always just the white logo on everything. They were getting specific, like the green and black camel hat and putting like a lighter green on it. And then like almost a tannish camo and changing that and little subtle things. So I think. Kind of time and maybe the 4th of July, but up here in Michigan, the same time really kind of made that business goes for us.

Right. Right.

Marshall Atkinson:

Good. So Adam, as the economy opens up and things are getting back to normal, how do you feel that your new direction is going to affect your business? What infrastructure or processes do you have in place to make sure that the growth that you’re now kind of getting right. Deploys smoothly and really kinda hits the target.

Adam McCauley:

So I had talked about it, our leadership team, and we still have that team in place now. And I think that that’s a huge change from us these last couple of years because we’ve better communicated with our staff, like what our goal and our plan is. So not only is it’s not just Adam and Ryan know what our plan is.

It’s our staff knows what our plan is. They know that. Hey, the, we have sports we’re high into sports. Sports are fun, but, um, we’re, we’re gonna switch into some corporate stuff. So we’ve got processes in place. Um, we’ve got new procedures that we’re working on. Ryan had mentioned, uh, staffing changes and rearranging some things, our vent quarter coordinator right now, before that pause, we had some events we were able to do online only.

So they would allow for. Athletes to, to be in the gym and do some things. Um, and we sold online events and some of those events did more successful than us actually going to the onsite spot. So there are some changes. So that was a big plus for us that we, we took a flyer on. In fact, we actually had, at some of those events, Marshall, we.

Uh, created posters for the event with a QR code on it. So those parents that could go, they shot the QR code, and then it went right to the online store, which was kind of cool. If, if we can continue to grow our corporate side of things, knowing that sports are always going to be are not always, but sports is going to be our backbone and we can continue to grow the corporate stuff.

And the sports finally come back. We just think it’s going to be a huge spike for us to know that we reached out to our corporate clients. We’re growing that business. And then the sports should be a big boom for us. Uh, when things finally do come back, which we think is going to be in the fall, of 2021.

Yeah.

Marshall Atkinson:

And so, Ryan, how do you feel like the online store. Part of this is going to help you with the sales. What are you doing about it?

Ryan Dost:

We actually see our business grow big time in the online store. It’s just a tool as we went into the corporate world, that a lot of the people that we’re reaching out to haven’t really seen, or they’ve seen like the land’s end one, or they see maybe a different variant of that.

But to have the local company be able to offer something that they’re easily used. Everything comes, backed up everything like that. That’s where we’re really seeing our ability to kind of get inroads with these corporations. Um, they have their promotional product place. We made competing against other people, but we’re, we’re really getting in the door easy are with these online stores.

And I don’t right now is dealing with one of our local colleges and they’re actually having us build a permanent open 24 seven store for them. Um, it’s, it’s a big undertaking for Adam. But it’s kind of almost like intertwined. It is intertwining us with them to where it’s going to be harder for them to even almost leave us because we’re going to be so connected to them.

So we see the corporate, I mean the online stores being the future of everything. And we actually have goals for that to be a certain level of growth for the next three years. Um, and it’s just the path we go and that’s why we see. Adding dedicated people to build those stores is where we need to go.

Marshall Atkinson:

Okay. That’s great. And do you feel, uh, the, like the university online store that you’re building, is it difficult to set that up? Do you use the same, uh, you know, the same blanks that you might use for another? Uh, clients, are you trying to standardize that process? Kind of walk us through that because you’re the one building that right now.

Adam McCauley:

So we try to stay with a standard, you know, the worst thing you can do is give them a really cool product that you can’t possibly order. Cause it’s never in stock or anything. We still don’t, you know, stock a ton of pieces in the store. So we’re relying on our, um, SNS is of the world and places like that to keep us, um, uh, keep our apparel here.

But. Uh, we try to have it standard, but. The part that people really like is that they have their, their human resource department or one of their marketing people. They have some, some, um, play in what goes in their store, so they can almost build it themselves to an extent. Now it’s our job to kind of guide them into things that make it easier for us.

But we want them to have a little bit of power to say like, Hey, I really want that piece in that store where if it’s just a cookie-cutter, cookie cutters are great because it makes a real, real easy for us. So make them feel warm and fuzzy. You almost want to give them that option to say, here are your cookie cutters, but here’s a couple of highlight pieces you can throw in there.

You know, right now we do a pretty good mix of letting people pick and choose what they want to, to a certain level.

Marshall Atkinson:

Hey, so let’s wrap up here and I want to ask you both. Or each, I guess, uh, what’s the most exciting thing that you’re really wanting 20 21 just to really deliver on this year?

Ryan Dost:

My biggest thing I’m on in 2021 is to get back to our sense of normalcy.

What we were used to, as Adam said, we were, we kind of had our leadership team and we had built all these plans and our target markets. And we actually had a plan last year. We ended up being down about 8%. But we have to plan for growth last year, 35%. And when the governor of Michigan shut us down in March, we were at 34%.

So we were on the path for that. We were doing all these things to build the groundwork, and we really had momentum going and, and when everything got shut down, we kept the boat afloat, but it kind of stopped her momentum for that. So I’m excited to get back, to get our processes in place. Get things moving in the right direction.

So Adam and I can even get back to focus on growing the business, even more laying that groundwork in trying to get back to doing the things that are going to get us to where we want to be in 10 years. Uh, we’re both in low forties right now. And we have plans. I mean, to do this till we retire and maybe turn it over to kids or do what we’re going to do with it.

And we’ve taken a last, a big step in the last year and a half to realize. For growth and to have to do certain things. And I just want to get back to doing the things we need to do to work on the business, not in the book as much.

Marshall Atkinson:

What about you, Adam?

Adam McCauley:

So the touch on a little bit of what Ryan had said, we’ve joked a little bit that this year was almost like a trial year.

It’s almost like. So year resets and we go right back to 2019 and it shoots, we have a whole year worth of experience in the company. Um, and then we went back in time and now we get to do that 2020 all over again, but we do it in 2021. So we had more experience in our planning. We had more experience in our, um, and scenarios that could possibly affect Sandlot sports.

And it was like, Almost a trial of a year. And, and, and I think all of our staff handled it well. I think that our community handled it well. So now it’s fun to say, all right, this year, let’s try to get back to being as normal as possible. Let’s keep our plans that we had to tweak them and then move forward and just, and try one, try new things, but let’s try to get back to that normal and make Sandlot sports, a good growing company again.

Marshall Atkinson:

Awesome. I love it. I love it. All right. Hey, thank you both for sharing your story of success with us today. If someone wants to learn more about Sandlot Sports and what you do or how you guys can help them, what’s the best way to contact you?

Ryan Dost:

Probably either of our emails. ryan@sjss301.com or adam@sjss301.com.  When you are going out on the web http://www.sandlotsports301.com

Marshall Atkinson:

Awesome. Hey, thanks Ryan, Adam. I really appreciate you guys.

Adam McCauley:

Thanks, Marshall. We appreciate you reaching out.

Ryan Dost:

Thank you, Marshall. We appreciate it. And thank you for doing this podcast and helping the industry get some education and we just appreciate everything you do for us.

Marshall Atkinson:

Great. Well, that’s our show today. Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to subscribe so you can stay up to date on the latest Success Stories, episodes.  Have any suggestions for future guests or topics send them my way at marshall@marshallatkinson.com.

And we’ll see you next time…

‍