Ready for the First Pitch

My four-year-old son stepped into the batter’s box last week. He likes baseball, mostly. His one complaint is that the games are long, and in fairness, he’s right. Baseball is a lot of standing around, waiting for something to happen.

Then the first pitch came in, and he hit it.

That one swing gave him more confidence than a season of pep talks ever could, and watching it land on his face made me happier than I know how to explain.

I’ve thought about that swing all week, because business works the same way. Most of it is waiting. What matters is whether you’re ready when the pitch finally comes.

Last Thursday we opened our third art exhibition at The Nexus Community. The next night, we held our second Night Market in Tyrone. Both came in smaller than I’d hoped.

If you’ve ever hosted anything, you know the spiral. Did we promote it enough? Was it the timing? Will the vendors feel like they wasted a Friday night? Will they ever come back?

That last question is the one I carry home. I don’t measure an event by the size of the crowd. I measure it by whether the people who took a chance on it felt it was worth showing up.

Then the answers started coming in. The art show covered every expense, and the room actually felt better at that size. The artists had space to talk about their work, and people had space to listen.

In Tyrone, we surveyed our vendors afterward. Most of the vendors who answered our survey more than covered their booth fee, and the typical vendor sold about five times what their booth cost. One sold ten times.

I’d been counting heads. My vendors were counting sales.

Then a city councilman walked the mayor over to say hello. The town manager and a member of the development authority stopped by, too. They all said they appreciated what we’d built and asked whether we’d do one more in December.

My first reaction was honest: another one? My second was a picture I’ve carried in my head for a long time. Firepits. Hot chocolate. Neighbors lingering on a chilly night.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to write. For a while now, I’ve been tempted by bigger: bigger space, bigger events, bigger everything. The first reason I didn’t chase it was simple. I couldn’t afford to. But somewhere along the way, that constraint turned into a conviction.

Expansion says, “You need more before you can do more.” Lean says, “Use what you have well, and be ready when the moment comes.”

Smaller operators have always had one advantage over bigger ones: we can move faster. We can’t outspend anyone, so we have to outplan and outwork them. That means picking the battles we can actually win and owning something no one else can copy. The harder you work, the luckier you get.

At our Roundtable Tuesday gathering at The Nexus this week, someone put it even more simply: luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation.

I’ve watched that play out lately in ways that feel almost uncanny. I mentioned we still needed to sell art show tickets, and within minutes an email arrived saying two had sold. After a quiet stretch in new business, two prospects showed up having already done much of the legwork. They’d worked through their project with ChatGPT before our first conversation, they knew what they wanted, and our pricing landed right where they expected it. As much as I love the branding side of what we do, it felt a little like an answered prayer.

But notice why it worked. Those clients were ready because they had done the thinking. And we could say yes quickly because we weren’t stretched too thin to catch it.

If there’s a lesson here for other business owners, it’s that the crowd isn’t always the scoreboard. Staying lean meant I could read the numbers honestly instead of worrying about overhead. It also reminded me how much a clear message matters. The easiest yeses this week came from people who already understood what they were getting. As StoryBrand’s Donald Miller puts it, “If customers can’t repeat your message, they can’t spread it.”

Tyrone didn’t need a bigger market. It needed its own.

And maybe most of all, find your people. Whether it’s a Roundtable Tuesday, a Thought Lab Thursday, or 1 Million Cups on a Wednesday morning, The Nexus exists so no founder has to stand in the batter’s box alone.

Most of the game is waiting. The pitch always comes.

The only question is whether you’ve kept your hands free enough to swing.