259. Level Up Your Happiness and Success: Lessons from Nick Witherell's Journey

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness. Coach Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello everyone, and welcome to today's show. This is your host, Sandee Sgarlata, and I am so happy you're here. First of all, I want to thank each and every one of my listeners for all the five star reviews and I'm so proud to announce that because of you, happiness Solve podcast is now in the top 0.5% globally and growing. We just had our biggest month ever with over 85,000 downloads. So I have a question for you to ponder.

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Enjoy the show.

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Nick Witherill. So excited to be talking with you today. This is going to be such a fun conversation and I'm just beyond thrilled. How's it going? It's great.

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How are you? Fantastic. Fantastic. I love talking to fellow athletes because it's just kind of like I work with athletes as well as a Mindset coach or I call like Peak Performance Coach. And it's like the thing is, athletes, when you've got that grit and you develop that resilience to just keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing, they're the best leaders.

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They're the best leaders. Yes. Right there. Case in point.

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Let's see, you played college basketball and you were actually recruited by Tony Bennett, who's one of the top basketball coaches right now. I was Tony Bennett's first recruit. So at the end of my sophomore year of high school, his dad was coaching at Washington State University. His dad retired and Tony became head coach. So I committed to Washington State University for Tony after my sophomore year in the summer circuit of club basketball.

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Okay, so, yeah, I was his first commitment, his first recruit. But during my junior and senior years of high school, aka. His first two years of coaching Washington State, he took them from like, bottom of the Pac Ten to a powerhouse, a Sweet 16 team. So I got a little bit over recruited. I was the same recruiting class as Clay Thompson.

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Nice. Same position. So now it was tough. Okay, so from a mindset perspective, let me ask you this. I'm going to talk about him.

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What do you think set him apart and how he was able to take a team from, as you said, more on the bottom level all the way up? What made the difference in his coaching style or technique? What was his sweet sauce that helped propel that team up? That's a great question. So there's a multitude of things.

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From a discipline standpoint, he was one of the most disciplined people in general I've ever been around. So there was this one drill we did every day called three on three close out. You're basically left on an island to guard one on one versus the other guys at your position, but it was also team aspect mixed in. Anyways, he wouldn't let us move on to the next drill until he felt that was perfected every day. Okay.

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It was a sense of drill. So it wasn't a very sexy drill, if you will. It was all pure defense. Some days we'd be doing that for an hour and a half, and we'd have a two hour practice. So the discipline to the defensive end was phenomenal.

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And I'd say the second part is that he just absolutely knew his style, and he objectively recruited rather than relying on recruiting services or this or that. He didn't care what your ranking was. He didn't care about the politics. He would watch recruits and say, I like that guy. Even though he's a two star recruit, I think he's going to be great.

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And then next thing you know, he recruits the guy. Guy ends up know, ends up going playing pro overseas or in the NBA, and everyone's like, what? This guy was a doesn't. And then from a strategy perspective, in tactics on the floor, he had his ways, and he stuck to bought, and then he recruited good kids, so everyone bought in. So we just had that happen recently.

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The first brown pick for the NBA. I can't remember his name. I'm sure you know he's from France. Yeah. Victor Wemben.

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Yama. Yes. But he was recruited from college. His college went overseas, found him and brought him here, and he was the first round draft pick for the NBA. I mean, how amazing is that?

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Yeah. No, it doesn't hurt to be 75 also. Well, it doesn't hurt to be seven foot five. You're right. It's just that I think it just seems like when the colleges or whether you're looking for college recruits, professional recruits, what have you, I think that makes a big difference is the actual coach is really looking at them because coaches can see the potential in people that maybe the scouts may not.

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The scouts are going to know, yeah, they're good, but they're looking at stats. They're looking at statistics. Okay, how many points do they get? What are their average points per game, and all of those things. Whereas the coach is looking at talent, and it's like, oh, yeah, how are.

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You going to fit into the system?

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Are you going to be a good fit? How are you going to win? You so yeah, that's pretty awesome. That's really awesome. All right, well, we may come back to sports in a minute, but you are the CEO and founder of the Bino Board.

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Yep. Bino Board. I'm saying it correctly, right? I know. I practiced this a few times before I hit record.

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Pronunciation eno. Eno in Portuguese means like, little. So a lot of famous European football players will add email to the end of their name and keep it through their professional career. So basically, little soccer, that's what our game is. Or Little Sports, whatever you want to call it.

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Okay, so it is the newest and most viral finger flicking tabletop gang that you can bring anywhere. And you have expanded and you have licensing deals with some pretty big names. And it's in Dick Sporting Goods as well. Yeah. So Dicks, we're starting a trial with them this summer, so it's not officially in stores yet.

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Dicks will be so they're in the negotiation process. We're almost there. It's kind of been like they've been really busy. We've been really busy. And so we're back re engaged with them, talking about it.

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But we are signed from a licensing aspect. We're signed with Liverpool and Arsenal out of the Premier League in the UK. The USL here in America, Club America from Mexico City. The biggest Mexican team. And then we have some other deals in the works.

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But the licensing deals are pricey, and they add a lot of SKUs to the plate. So we're taking it slow, really going back to the approach of focusing on our main product and the game and the competition. Yeah. Okay, first of all, because I have a couple of questions I want to ask about this game, but how did you create this game? Was this off season?

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I'm just going to go on the assumption that you're not doing drinking games while you're playing basketball in college. Right. So when you're off season, you're playing around with your buddies, you come up with this game. How did that unfold? Yeah, I created the game maybe five years out of college.

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I had worked in some other jobs and to relative success, but didn't like any of them. And so through playing FIFA on Xbox, my friends and I got really into European soccer and started following it like crazy and saw games that were made by hand and made out of wood from Central and South America, where they were flicking a quarter into a little kind of goal area. Generally, same concept, but I was like, man, that'd be so cool if there was, like, a soccer version of this where you could try to score on a goal and play your pieces and you could shoot off the walls like Futsol. And so I just went to Home Depot because after going on amazon and Google, I saw there was nothing available online, anything relative to what I had in mind. And so I was like, well, I guess I got to make this myself.

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So I went to Home Depot, Michael's, some other places, got all these raw materials and with some turf and some wood, hammering nails, rubber bands, a couple of marbles from a toy shop, I basically came up with the first model, and my friends and I started posting it on Instagram all the time. And so within those next couple of months, I realized through back and forth conversations with a friend of mine who also was part of a retail startup, that we need to get this to. We need one main model to sell that's actually manufactured, not just made by hand, by me in my backyard. Right. Wow.

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So how did your competitive nature, basketball, college basketball career, how did that help in influencing you to really want to push this forward? Because it's another compete competition. It's another way to compete, right? Yes. I really like to think outside the box and from an abstract perspective.

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And to me, I was competing against the idea of what I wanted for my life. Okay, so I'd gone from job, I've been in the mortgage industry and didn't like it. Then I went and did some sales at a tech company, didn't like it. Then I started my own stuff where I started a basketball training business, and it was just physically exhausting. I'm like, man, I really have to make a new life.

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My back will give out in a couple of years if I do. And then I started selling life insurance, which was great because you worked from home. It was relatively easy. Money was good. But I'm like, is this really my legacy?

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Like, I'm just going to sell life insurance. I don't have any passion for it. It's kind of morbid, really. And so as soon as this idea came up, so basically I had eliminated through the competitive aspect of I don't want that. I don't want that.

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I'm going to compete towards what I want. I'm going to at least allow for that idea to come to me through knowing what I want, which maybe that's something that stems from what I learned from Tony Bennett, just knowing what you want or at least working towards that and sticking to it and without budging. And so when this idea came around, people thought I was crazy for quitting life insurance. The first day I conceived this, I didn't sell another deal after that because I didn't care if I was broke. I didn't care about any of that kind of stuff.

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I was just like, I want to do something I love, or I'll just go ahead and be homeless because I'm not working for anyone. And again, and I'm also not going to do something I don't love. Well, and it's interesting that you said you got to know what you want. But sometimes to figure out what you want, you have to figure out what you don't want. That's exactly.

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You need that contrast. You need that contrast. And if I didn't put myself out there and try random things like I worked at a mortgage company, then at Yelp, then started my own random businesses, if I didn't do those, I wouldn't have known. Hey, basketball training sounded so awesome. Like, you make good money per hour, but you don't think about at that age, sometimes you're not seeing stuff that you don't know that it exists yet.

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You don't know that it's going to be so exhausting. I was like, this is awesome. Training four kids an hour, $120 an hour is awesome. But then you start to realize, I'm glad I made it to here, though. I knew exactly what I didn't want.

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And that was the hard part about it, of course. And it is. And you're still young. And here's the thing. Life is so short, and it's that purpose and that passion.

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Selling life insurance can be a very lucrative, rewarding career for many, many people. And that's awesome, right? It just wasn't for you. And that's okay, and you recognize that, so why stay in the grind, right? And I think that's I'm hoping that at least in the United States, I've seen a lot of it more worldwide than I have so much in the United States, just because I talked to so many people, that there is a shift taking place where people aren't buying into the conditions that are placed on us through society.

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Right? Because our parents, our grandparents know if you go to college because it was a privilege for some. My mom and dad didn't go to college.

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But then you get your job and you grind and you put in your time. You put that time, you get that pension, you retire, and then you're 6ft under. It's that whole grind and that conditioning that this is what you're supposed to do. But that's not always what's best for you as a human being. And life is short.

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Why not go after it if that's what you want? And like you said, I met in the life insurance industry, I met people that truly did absolutely love it, and they came excited. And one of my mentors at one of the companies I work for was he just came in every day just so excited. He would just read life insurance books and tax books, but he loved it. But yeah, I'd love that.

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That's exactly the way I think about things. It's just from a completely objective perspective. And it's difficult because society some people allow the weight of society to impact their thought process, decision. But in my mind, I've really learned, especially through the last couple of years, that your gut feeling is often very much correct relative to yourself. And obviously there's an importance to adapting to society relatively speaking.

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Well, you know what? Now you've created this product, which gets into the next topic around this game, and that is your boy talk about being happy right when you're playing this game, any type of game, because it's one of those things that it doesn't have to be a drinking game kind of thing, right. I'm sure that it's very popular in colleges and things like that because people will turn almost anything into a drinking game. But let's forget about that aspect of it, because what I want to just remind people of is that to sit down and play a game, whether it's a game like yours or you're playing Monopoly or TicTacToe with a five year old or whatever, you're using a different part of your brain, number one. But it's that joy that you get.

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It's kind of like that innocent joy that we all maybe hopefully remember from when we were a kid and playing board games and things like that. Those are the simple things in life that people need to really start to wake up and say, you know what, let's take some time and play a game and have fun with it. Yes, absolutely. Having fun is the key phrase I take from all that, because whether you're working no matter what, having fun along the journey is so vital to remember. And our game is fun for literally everybody because five year olds, like even two year olds that can't even speak yet understand the concept of trying to score the ball into a goal area.

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But it's a great college drinking game. It's a great family game. We've sold to retirement homes. We've sold pretty much every demographic anybody. With fingers can play.

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Yes. And it's a challenging game. People will say, oh, that looks so easy. It's like when people say that on Instagram. Whatever.

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I'm like, all right, I'll play you, and I'll beat you 70 for the first ten times we play. It also keeps people coming back because it's not so easy to score. Right. But it's fun, fun challenge. And it's just a good, innocent play.

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It can get crazy, but yeah, it's great to see people having just an awesome time and connecting off of a digital device. Yeah, well, because that's just know, there's so much talk these and they were talking about how we have somewhat of a loneliness epidemic going on right now in the United States that's kind of lingering from COVID and so many people working remotely, and they're isolated and whatnot and what better way to find connection with other people than to have a game? Exactly. And I even accounted for that type of thinking in designing this game. Like, for instance, the turf slows the ball down so that actually makes the game play faster, because when I shoot, the ball will stop faster, meaning you get to shoot faster rather than if the ball was rolling on like a wood.

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Imagine how long it would take for that marble to stop rolling on wood compared to if it's rolling on a turf carpet type of. And so basically it keeps that 2023 attention span happy because our attention shortening. And so that was a big part of the design process. But yeah, the loneliness aspect is that something that we're trying to attack and just to connect people. And because it's so easy to just flick a ball, it lowers people's guards and they're able to connect.

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And so we've seen so many different dynamics of people connecting at different events we go and show up to, which is pretty awesome. Well, and you know what? It's a great team building event or team building game for businesses. So anybody listening out there in leadership roles, that is like the perfect type of team building event that you can have with your teams.

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It's limitless, really.

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There's a lot of different companies because we do custom boards, we will wholesale them ten or 20 boards, and they have company tournaments, company leagues, how certain. Companies are, because you can put their logo on it, because you're customizing it. You can customize it for any fraternity or corporation, or you can create your own league. Yeah, so you can do any customization. You can put the logo at center field, choose the turf, color the line, color the band, color the entire product, screws in and out.

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So you can customize player pieces, put new goals that we release on our website. So if you want the real netted goals or like chain link goals, different balls, basically you can customize everything on this little plane pitch.

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We have some pretty big partnerships that we're working on in addition to our licensed stuff, which we can't wait to share with everybody. That is so exciting. It's pretty awesome. All right, so we're going to talk about the entrepreneurial aspect. Before we hit record, I was telling you how I get a lot of business owners, and I love for the entrepreneurs that I talk with to give their advice because it's not easy.

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So what was the driving force for you? Like? We know it was your passion and your purpose, all of those things. However, when you're starting a company, it's so easy to just give up before because it can take time. Right?

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I also train people how to launch a podcast. Most podcasters give and after the first ten episodes, because they don't get results and they're not looking at it like a business. The thing is, you have to be in it for the long haul. So what advice can you give to entrepreneurs, somebody who's starting out that wants to follow their passion? What did you do to keep your eyes set on the golden nugget, if you will, at the end, to keep you going?

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I think referencing early in the conversation, I think once I knew what I wanted out of a career in terms of the parameters that really helped clarify that I was doing the right thing. So I had thought of all these different business ideas and none of them stuck. I had started different little businesses here and there and they would fade out real quick. Right. And that's just I didn't know what I wanted.

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I didn't know what I was looking for. But once you know what you're looking for, it really helps you have that fire underneath you when you come up with that business idea, that it helps you stick to an idea. Right. And so the grind doesn't really become a grind because you know it's exactly what you want and it's for you. You're doing it for yourself.

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And when you're doing it for yourself, you don't really worry about the outside world and any of that kind of stuff because you know you're going to be happy doing it. Whether you make an insane amount of money, an average amount, or not that much, you're doing it because you love it. And so it's going to bring you happiness. But usually when you're at your happiest, that's when you have the most success. So if you want financial success and happiness will help you get there at a higher probability than if you didn't.

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That's right. Yeah. So that helps with the grind. But everything turns, no matter what business it is, the more you grow, it pretty much all turns into the same thing. I got a certain size.

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Like in the beginning days, there wasn't much to do here at Beanio, so we just get the little couple of things we needed to get done, done, and then we would play Beanie the rest of the day or hang out. And now it's like now that we're a bigger know, it turns into all the headache work know, how do I get logged back into Facebook and get verified here? Know, task after task after, you know. But at the end of the day, we were making games and we make it fun no matter what. Awesome.

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Well, and that's really what it's all about. At the end of the day. That's it. Right. All right, so where can people find your game?

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And do you have a website and where people can follow you as well? Yes, so our website, Benoboard.com so B, as in Boy, inhoboard.com that'll have our entire full line collection of everything. We are also available in about 100 retail stores right now across the country, which on the bottom of Beanioboard.com you can find in the store locator. We're also available on a couple of online retailers as well in Canada and the States. So if you wanted to go into the route but we ship immediately from our website, so that's the best.

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Oh, my gosh, I love what you're doing. Talk about not only just living the American dream, but just you're such a great example of somebody who you have an idea, you have a passion. You followed your gut and you went for it, and now you're doing it. And there's nothing better than I like to highlight on my podcast our success stories like yours. So awesome.

00:26:02
I think my son, he responded, it's going to be maybe something for a birthday gift for him. He's got a birthday coming up, so I'll hop on your website and he can introduce it to the University of Louisville. Right. When he goes back to he'll be they'll be having tournaments before you know it. Exactly.

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Anyone that likes sports will absolutely love this game because it's designed by a non soccer player. I'm just an overall sports fan. Well, that's how my son is. My son loves FIFA, and he didn't like soccer. Okay, I'm going to tell a quick story about my son.

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I told you I wasn't going to spend my time talking about him, but when he played soccer, it was the only sport you can put a three year old in at the time. I don't know that there's many sports that takes three year olds, but soccer does. And he was running after the ball and somebody was running behind him and he ran off the field crying, thinking that this kid was chasing him. Oh, my. That's hilarious.

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What goes stopped his soccer career, but he loves playing FIFA and he's a huge soccer fan. 20 years later, probably. Exactly. That's right will get you once you understand the game, you're like, wait a second. This is amazing.

00:27:23
Well, Ted Lasso kind of helped a lot. Yeah, there's a great bridge for mean. I was mean, and I've never watched a soccer match in my was. I'm obsessed. I love next step.

00:27:37
Then it takes you to the Next Step. It's like the right. That's right. It's awesome. All right, Nick, thank you so much, and I wish you nothing but success moving forward.

00:27:46
It's awesome. Thank you.

00:27:55
You. I certainly hope that you enjoyed today's interview. Thank you so much for joining me. And as always, I hope that you and your family are healthy and safe and that your lives are filled with peace, joy, and happiness. Take care, everyone.