What is meant for you will not miss you.
I can tell you that with a lot more certainty at this point in my life than I could have ten years ago. The funny thing is that what is meant for you does not always arrive wrapped in a nice little bow. Sometimes it shows up disguised as something you would have preferred not to deal with at all.
That is exactly what happened to me recently.
I have been dealing with a hip issue for months. At one point, I was worried I might need a much bigger surgery than the minor procedure I ultimately ended up having. In the process of trying to avoid that surgery, I started physical therapy.
My body was tight, irritated, and very ready to remind me that sitting at a desk all day before expecting it to magically cooperate with everything else I wanted to do was maybe not my most brilliant life strategy.
But that physical therapy appointment ended up opening a door I never would have thought to knock on.
The Question I Wasn’t Expecting
One day during PT, my therapist was trying to distract me so I would relax while she worked on my hip.
Apparently, tensing every muscle in your body while someone is trying to help one very specific area is not ideal. Who knew?
She asked me about Strike Sports.
At the time, Brian and I were working through our direct-mail campaign, so I started telling her about that. Then, as usually happens when someone gives me even the slightest invitation to talk about this project, I told her about the bigger vision.
The facility.
The community.
The kind of baseball development we want to create.
The fact that eventually we need funding to lease or buy a property and actually build the thing we have spent years dreaming about.
She listened for a while and then casually told me about the bank she uses for her own small business.
She described how they had been the partner that helped her and her husband to get into the very location we were in.
What was just a casual share from one business owner to another could potentially change the trajectory of this project.
I have probably driven past KeyBank a thousand times over the nearly seven years we have lived here and never once thought, “That could be part of the Strike Sports story.”
But after our chat, I went home and scheduled a meeting.
The Meeting I Didn’t Know I Needed
That meeting ended up being one of the most encouraging conversations I have had since we started seriously building Strike Sports.
I sat down with two women who understood small businesses and, more importantly, treated me like someone building a real one.
We talked about our business model, our fundraising program, where we are today, and what we are trying to become.
They asked thoughtful questions. They had ideas I had not considered. They understood the things I was worried about.
And then they started making connections.
“You need to talk to this person.”
“We can connect you with this person.”
“You should know about this resource.”
Suddenly, our tiny husband-and-wife LLC started feeling connected to a much larger small-business ecosystem.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I realized something else.
I felt like I was being mentored.
It was not a meeting where someone shoved a bunch of information across the table and sent me home to figure it out. It was a real conversation. A back-and-forth. I left with more things to think about, certainly, but I also left feeling much more capable of figuring them out.
That distinction matters.
Building for the Company We Want to Become
Some of what we discussed felt hilariously premature.
Right now, Strike Sports is still the two of us.
We are not sitting around debating executive compensation packages. We are not even taking owner draws yet.
But if we build what we are planning to build, we will have employees.
And employees mean payroll, onboarding, taxes, benefits, insurance, HR.
All of the things you don’t even think about when building a baseball facility.
One of the referrals put Paychex on my radar for many of those pieces. Their small-business services cover areas like payroll, HR, benefits, onboarding, and business insurance, exactly the kinds of systems I had not needed to think deeply about yet.
I found myself sitting there thinking, “We don’t need all of this yet.”
And then almost immediately realizing that yet was the important word.
Before we hire someone, I need to understand what that employee actually costs us.
Not just their wage.
The whole person. The systems around them, the benefits we want to offer, the infrastructure required to take care of them well.
If we want Strike Sports to be the kind of place where families feel cared for, where coaches feel supported, and where employees actually want to work, we have to build those values into the business itself.
Not bolt them on later when we are already overwhelmed.
Small Business Support Should Actually Feel Supportive
There is a lot about entrepreneurship that gets romanticized.
Freedom!
Build your dream!
Be your own boss!
And yes, those things can be wonderful.
People talk less about the evening when you suddenly realize you need to understand commercial insurance, payroll taxes, employee benefits, lending, real estate, and seventeen acronyms you swear did not exist yesterday.
When you have never built a brick-and-mortar business before, the list of things you do not know can feel enormous.
But sitting in that meeting reminded me that I do not have to know everything myself.
That is something we talk about constantly when it comes to baseball.
Players need coaches.
Coaches need tools.
Parents need resources.
Founders need support too.
None of us become stronger because we insist on reinventing every wheel ourselves.
Sometimes the smartest thing we can do is find the people who already know the part we are trying to learn and ask them to help us understand and execute it.
The Detour Was Part of the Route
So, if you are building something too, keep talking about it.
Tell the physical therapist, the parent standing next to you at practice, the person at the bank.
Tell the people who ask what you are working on and genuinely want to know.
You never know who is holding the next connection, question, resource, or doorway you need.
What is meant for you will not miss you.
Sometimes it just takes a really weird route to find you.
Onward and upward.
