This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Welcome to Set us Full School. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday, our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're out there. Thanks for tuning in wherever you are in the world. Now, last week we heard from the founder of Local Artists and Foods, offering delicious French toast bites in Philadelphia and beyond.
I believe they were on the road to Coachella, which is pretty cool. Today in our latest feature, we're going to hear from Mike Grady. Mike is a teacher by day and also the founder of a baseball training academy. That training academy is known as Grady's Pitching School. And during the pandemic, as you're going to hear, he opened an additional business selling training gear on Amazon.
So let's hear directly from Mike about those things, as well as his current challenge. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up. My name is Mike Grady and located out of Canton, Ohio. We were featured on episode 1005 and my business is Grady's Pitching School and Velocity Sports and we focus on baseball and softball training and instruction. So my business, my side hustle is a baseball training academy.
It's actually in the form of two separate businesses now. So Grady's Pitching School is the training side of that. We offer off season pitching training programs and the program that is the most popular is called VIP. Stands for velocity improvement program because all pitchers want to throw harder. We also offer individual training sessions and we actually now have five separate baseball training products for sale on Amazon.
The other business is close to that, it's velocity sports, that's our building. So that's our training academy and I'm actually a 50/50 partner in that business. And so we operate right now 1 4,500 square foot facility. We opened that in 2016. We have 10 instructors and we actually offer both baseball and softball.
Our customers have the ability to become members. We offer team rentals and we even do birthday parties. Our project right now is we're opening a second location which will serve as our new headquarters and that will be a 10,000 square foot facility that we're going to open in September. So I got started actually back in 2006. So it's been a while, started off with one customer.
And at the time, I was the pitching coach at a local university. And a parent called and asked if, left a message, asked if the pitching coach offered baseball pitching lessons. And that pitching coach was me and at the time I had never done that before. And the parent had a son who was eight years old, he was just learning to pitch. And so I decided to do it and realized that the athlete, the eight year old got a lot better, a lot very quickly.
After that one lesson and they came back and I started by simply posting flyers at the facility that I was working at at the time. I later made up business cards and got the chance to build my first, I think it was three pages at the time website. And so the goal started to be, okay, how in 2006 can we figure out how to get ranked on Google? Because the phone book was something that was becoming something that people didn't use, and so it just kind of steadily grew from that small start. So my main hustle up to this point is a teacher.
I've been a high school teacher for the last 13 years. However, I am taking a year off this year to focus on the growth of the business. So after a year, I'll have an opportunity to go back to teaching. But for this school year, I'm gonna be able to focus specifically on our new building project and getting that online. We had to close in the spring of 2020, and so that was really hard.
So our physical location, Velocity Sports, was closed for about two months. And when we reopened, we obviously had to have different protocols and athletes wearing masks and all of those things. But what was interesting about when we reopened, we had more demand than we had previously, because baseball players and athletes, that's not something you can just quit and pick back up. And a lot of people realized how important their training was. So when they didn't have that available to them, I think they realized how important it was.
And so demand actually picked up surprisingly really quickly after we reopened, but on the training side of that, on the grades fishing school side, that was actually what launched Amazon into something that is pretty big now. Because at the time, I had received a really large shipment for what I was doing cuz I wanted to load up on inventory. And the product was basically different weighted balls that pitchers could use at home to enhance their training. So when the pandemic hit and everybody had to go home, everybody went on Amazon and bought this product from everybody that was selling them, fortunately for me, I had just gotten a shipment and everybody else had sold out. So I quadrupled my sales in a month during that time.
So I was actually really busy working on that, even though we were closed and then trying to figure out how to get more supply, which I did eventually sell out. But it was just a crazy time during the pandemic of the physical location shut down, but the online business just went crazy. So the biggest challenge when it comes to the products we're selling is the supply chain, the shipping costs are through the roof right now. I'm paying about three times as much now for shipping and we source our products from China than I was two years ago. And so that just has been relentless in terms of the increase in prices on that side.
So just having the capital put aside to be able to pay that bill when it comes through is a challenge. As far as personally, my biggest challenge is time, is having the time to manage all of this. Obviously when I'm teaching during the day and not able to return calls from customers or females and having to do that at nights and weekends while having a family on top of that. That became the biggest challenge, there just was so much going on. And if you love doing something and have a goal, yeah, it's work, but it doesn't feel like it, it just feels like you're putting one foot in front of the other.
So that's my advice for people, work hard at something, don't rush it. You'll know when you're ready to take that next step and grow and move forward with the business. Awesome, thanks so much, Mike, really appreciate you sharing those updates. I think it's interesting how demand picked up for the training academy after they were forced to close. They had to close for a bit, and then once they reopened, it's like everybody's like, we gotta get back, we gotta get back to it.
And then of course he was able to then open a second business as well. Really smart to just kind of pay attention to what the needs are, and then find a way to meet them. So good work. Listeners, check out gradyspitchingschool.com, gradyspitchingschool.com. His Amazon products are linked from there or also in an Amazon store.
You can find just by going to Amazon, how about that, and searching gradyspitchingschool. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories, 2,000 plus episodes so far. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for tuning in today. Hope you take care of yourself.
Do something to get closer to a goal you believe in. And of course, subscribe, follow, come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
