St. Louis, MO – July 5, 2021 - Right before I walked out of Bill DeWitt III’s office in Busch Stadium on my last day with the St. Louis Cardinals, he told me I would look back at leaving the team as the best thing I’d done in my career.

While I had my doubts at the time, I now know he was right.

It was three years ago today that I formed this company to help others own their story is the same way the Cardinals own theirs.

I am celebrating my #entrepreneurialindependence by sharing some of my business story.

On July 5, 2018, after 18 amazing seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, I dove into the deep waters of the St. Louis startup.

While I miss some of my baseball colleagues and will forever cherish my memories with the team, I wouldn’t want to go back to my old life. I wouldn’t trade the position I’m in now or the lessons I’ve learned over the last three years as a small business owner for my old job.

As time goes on such a trade would look even more lopsided than Brock for Broglio.

While I won’t predict that StorySMART LLC will end up in the Startup Hall of Fame, I am confident that we are on a trajectory that promises to revolutionize an industry while transforming how we connect with one another. Or at least we will die trying.

In the coming months, we will share details about how we will empower everyone to own their own story in ways they never imagined.

In the meantime, today I will share some reflections on our journey and details about what we are doing today.

They say that if you want to be success in business you need to be clear about your purpose.

That is crystal clear today: we believe everyone deserves to own their own story and have it told professionally because we should all be remembered.

StorySMART provides video storytelling as a service using a network of talented journalists. The reason we provide our service is because everyone matters and deserves to be remembered.

I will admit that three years ago I did not have that breviloquent mission fully formed in my sleep-deprived baseball-cluttered head. I was burnt out from working so hard for so long for someone else. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the extraordinary opportunity that the Cardinals provided me to essentially build an entire startup within the structure of a storied brand.

I am grateful to Mark Lamping for hiring and mentoring me. I am grateful to Bill and Mo for their faith in me to lead. While I instigated our team’s modernization efforts by providing the vision and roadmap, it wouldn’t have happened without the hard work and contributions of a lot of people. I worked with some very talented people along the way that put their mark on the department.

As I am building my company today, I reflect often on the startup path I took within the team. The parallels with my journey now are uncanny.

The lessons I learned about video production, good storytelling, and myself while with the Cardinals were invaluable. I learned a lot. And not just from the success. I learned just as much or more from our failures. My failures.

I could write a book about it. And will.

But not until the story I’m writing now with StorySMART is further along. Those lessons and insights from that experience inform my approach today.

I recognize I thrive on discovery, informed experimentation and being hands on with everything. It is both a gift and, at times, a curse. I really want to understand everything. Almost to a fault.

I am not the sell it and then figure it out kind of entrepreneur. I am the figure out, then sell it kind of entrepreneur.

Trust me when I tell that over the last three years, there have been days that I wished I was the swashbuckling sweet-talking sales guy that could sell a ton of snow to an Eskimo. But I am not. I won’t sell you something you don’t really need.

I am the tortoise not the hare. I am what Malcolm Gladwell describes as an outlier. I look at the world in a different way than most people. It is my superpower. It is what drives my success.

Looking at the world in a fresh way is what makes most entrepreneurs a success. I don’t lack vision. But vision isn’t worth anything unless you make it a reality. I’ve demonstrated that startup skill throughout my life – the ability to turn an idea on paper into reality.

My Cardinals accomplishments stand out the most to others. While securing approval to build a new ballpark, helping develop the Cardinals Authentics business, building a new communications department and producing a TV show sound impressive, it is what I accomplished before and after I joined the team that allow me to see the pattern in myself.

That is important because if you don’t believe in yourself on this journey, then no one else will. The one thing that has carried me through when no one else believed in me has been me believing in me. I know that probably sounds like some silly Stuart Smiley stuff, but it is true. When you are taking on a new challenge it is helpful to remind yourself what you have accomplished or overcome in life.

As I reflect on my life, I’ve consistently demonstrated a successful start-up skillset bringing a variety of creative ideas to life. These include writing plays in grade school, producing films in high school, starting a Soviet Exchange Program in college, as well as developing a youth corps program and helping open a domestic violence shelter early in my career. Most recently, as a civic volunteer I was successful in creating Project #LightMySTL to improve safety in downtown St. Louis. All those experiences inform my work today.

While I do have the skills to make it happen, I am often slow to get going. That has been the case with my business. The first part of my journey as a small business owner can be best described as wandering in the woods . I lacked focus and urgency when I started.

I also made a few mistakes along the way that taught me some good lessons. Get a deposit up front before starting work. Pay yourself. Say no to work. Walk away from clients that don’t share your values. Build a strong and diverse team. Work with cool people.

Along the way I did some work that paid the bills but wasn’t what I wanted to do. I own those decisions and learned from them. The pandemic helped me focus on what truly matters not just with my business, but in life.

I turned the corner with the business in 2019 as my purpose came into focus. I invested significant dollars in the business anticipating that 2020 would be a big year.

Going into 2020, I would have told you that it was going to a good year financially. Then the pandemic hit. We lost many of our clients. But we rebuilt, retooled and recruited new clients. We did the preverbal pandemic pivot. The 2020 business version of the Macarena.

While it was a challenging and turbulent year, in a strange way the pandemic allowed me to see a pathway I didn’t see before. It is a path that could profoundly change my life while helping so many others.

The pandemic allowed me to get past a bricks and mortar mindset that was holding me back. I had a vision in my head that was created by what I had done with the team.

The last project I completed before leaving the Cardinals was building a digital newsroom for our department, complete with fiber optics, connections for seven editing stations and a production suite. That capital investment had come on the heals of rapid growth in staffing and spending. That experience informed my thinking that the Cardinals Way had to be me my way too. I was so wrong.

There is a different way. One that doesn’t require an outlay of capital on buildings, gear and full-time staff. I’ve learned that there is a path that will allow you to scale your business nationally if you go about it differently.

When I left the Cardinals, I remember thinking if someone gave me a half a million dollars I’d buy a building in Grand Center or Downtown, invest in expensive production equipment and hire several of the best TV reporters in town. Then we would hang out our shingle to do video storytelling, disrupting the production paradigm in place today.

We are doing exactly that right now without all of that unnecessary infrastructure and expense.

Cameras and equipment are not as important as people. While the reporters themselves will worry a lot about what kind of camera they use on a story, it isn’t about the camera. It is about them. And the client. It is all about the story.

I am very grateful to all of the amazing reporters who have joined us on this journey.

Today, thanks to them, we help our clients own their story with a unique service that no one else offers. We help our clients tell their stories professionally, honestly and memorably by employing some of the best TV journalists in the business. While a trained professional TV reporter tells their story, our clients own the work – copyright and all – forever.

We are in the process of recruiting more reporters and expanding our client focus to help individuals and families. We are piloting that work in St. Louis now. We will be expanding it nationally soon.