The Hitstreak
Three Generations of Baseball: Taking the Family Business Into Media
This week Nick lays out the thing he's been sitting on for a year and a half: a baseball media network, built on a name his family has owned the whole time. Episode in a Glance: In this episode of The Nick Hiter Show, I walk through the night it all clicked. The goal has always been a baseball media network, and it had been slowed down by things outside our control, so two weeks ago I decided wait is a four letter word I don't use anymore. On the way to the batting cages with my son I went looking for a name, found that the good ones were taken, and then it dawned on me that we already own it. The Sandlotter started as a newspaper for the local baseball leagues here, founded by the late Farrell Owens, my dad's college teammate at Lipscomb and his business partner, and it became the official publication of Sandlot Baseball. I can't think of a better way to honor Farrell than to take a publication that lived on paper and scale it with what we have now. We get into what the network looks like, a flagship show with two guys I've handpicked, content from the youth fields to the big leagues, and why it sits somewhere between Barstool, Jomboy and MLB Network. Then I talk about the complex my dad has spent years working to bring to Nashville, why finding the land has been harder than finding the money, why the moment you can stream a game everybody becomes a gate fee, and what is broken about travel ball for the families paying for it. This is how my generation connects to the previous two. Key Points: - Wait is a four letter word. Opportunities expire, so move. - Everybody has an hour or two they can invest into building something. - Sometimes the name you need is already in your own backyard. - The best way to honor what someone built is to scale it with what you have now. - You need a flagship show to launch a network, and the right people around the table. - A media network should enhance what its personalities already do, not compete with it. - When a deal falls through, give it time. You usually end up grateful it didn't happen with those people or in that place. - Media is what connects everybody: the customer to the supplier, the player to the parent and the grandparent. - The moment you can stream it, everybody can be a gate fee. - Get in where you fit in. The family business can go another generation without looking the same. About Nick: Nick Hiter is the host of The Nick Hiter Show and The Hitstreak, the founder of HitLab, and Senior Vice President and COO of Real Financial, where he sits between the field and corporate and turns the vision into execution. Subscribe to Nick's top-rated podcast The Hitstreak on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/NickHiter Follow and Rate us on Spotify: https://spotify.com/NickHiter Follow and Rate us on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/NickHiter Follow and Rate us on iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/NickHiter
