By Luke Melms
One of the greatest lessons baseball teaches is how to start at the bottom but not stay there.
Ultimately, each player’s goal is to reach the big leagues individually but that is just the starting line. The ultimate pinnacle is winning a World Series.
This journey to #1 most recently demonstrated by the Astros and Cubs was in large part the result of a core group of minor leaguers who made the climb through the minors together. They stayed at it with consistency despite having to experience bumps and bruises along the way with some tough seasons.
I am proud to share that because of the consistency of sharing a story each week BaseballandBusiness.com indexes as #1 on Google when you type in baseball and business or “baseball and business” out of 25 million search results.
However, this is far from where we started.
Exactly one year ago, I went into the hospital for what was the beginning of a three day stay after an unexpected twist to being diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease the week prior. The pain I was in was higher than anything I’d ever experienced before.
Athlete Web Design had just finished designing the new logo and was working on the new website. There was no way this punch to the gut was going to stop the vision from becoming a reality.
The picture below was taken just after getting home from the hospital stay. I was in rough shape to say the least. While Crohn’s had taken much physically away from me including about 20% of my weight at this bottom point, I remember thinking to myself about how this was simply serving as a test and to keep the mission behind Baseball and Business at the front of my mind.
We stayed full steam ahead with the whole project and by the end of May launched the redesigned and custom version of BaseballandBusiness.com showcasing the new logo.
If you Googled Baseball and Business then, you would have had to dig through a couple of pages before finding it. Becoming #1 could not have happened without the great contributions by all of the current and former college, minor league and big league players telling their story through the platform.
I write this story to encourage everyone wherever they may be at in their journey especially if the top seems far off. Large media sites such as Business Insider and Fast Company have written about baseball and business which rank just below us. However, these are simply articles. No one else is solely dedicated to these two topics and focused on being a leading resource to current and former players.
There have been no insider SEO secrets along the way. We just published really good content for the last year about baseball and business and nothing else.
Life is not about where or how you start but rather how you run the race that defines your legacy. The key is taking risks and going for it despite when it may seem all uphill. This is what baseball players understand so well.
The timing will never be perfect. Distractions will never completely fade away. The decision to move forward is all that can be controlled.
Last year at this time, this is what the original logo looked like on the template website.
