Inspiring the Next Generation: Jordan Baltimore’s Vision for RISE

Michael Burcham: Welcome to Microcap Moments, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the stories of founders, investors, and leaders who have taken on the challenge of transforming ideas and small companies into high growth organizations. The journey of building and scaling a business takes one down many unexpected paths. It’s a journey where we learn from our mistakes, fall down often, but have the entrepreneurial grid to pick ourselves up and persevere.

Within this series, we will share these stories of success and failure, of the challenges and the rewards faced by those who dare to dream big. And through their lessons learned, we hope to inspire others who are on a similar journey of becoming, growing and leading.

Anderson Williams: In this episode, I talk with Jordan Baltimore, the founder and CEO of New York Empire Baseball, and now CEO of RISE, Relentlessly Inspiring Sports Experiences. Jordan already had a career. He wasn’t looking for a job. He just wanted to rake a baseball field, and maybe he could even umpire a couple times a week.

Jordan wanted to be around baseball to connect with community. What he didn’t know at the time is that his asking to rake a baseball field changed his life. And over the last 17 years has changed the lives of thousands of young baseball players and families. Jordan’s passion for baseball and kids compelled him to want to offer something better than what he saw in youth sports.

He wanted better coaching. He wanted better training. He wanted more science. He wanted more engagement. He wanted kids to feel special and to feel a part of something that would provide a lasting impact and lifelong lessons and relationships.

Core to achieving his vision. Jordan describes the criticality of the role of the coach to his model and how he has transformed that role of coach in his organization from a gig role to a profession and a career.

He shares how Shore Capital Partners was the only investor of numerous and over many years of inbound interest who wanted to talk to him about scaling his culture, not just his business. He describes how and why this was his deciding factor in the partnership with Shore. Jordan also talks about why it’s also the deciding factor for him and finding the right partnerships to build RISE.

Jordan, will you just start by introducing yourself, tell us your name, what you do, and where you do it.

Jordan Baltimore : Jordan Baltimore, Founder, CEO, Director of Research and Training at New York Empire Baseball. Also now the CEO of Relentlessly Inspiring Sports Experiences.

Anderson Williams: So tell us what New York Empire Baseball is.

Jordan Baltimore : Today, it’s a primarily youth baseball organization. Players are anywhere from 18 months all the way up to pros, but the bulk of our ball players are ages 4 to 14. We have teams, travel teams, classes after school programs, camps, lessons and training programs for athletes of every age and skill level.

Anderson Williams: And how did you get into this? What is your background? How did this get started for you?

Jordan Baltimore : So things get interesting here. It began with an email to a local youth organization, while I had a slightly more normal career, that said “I’d like to come rake your baseball fields as a way of giving back to the community.” Because at the time, typical baseball field in New York City was not in great shape.

It was also a very selfish approach for me to go and get a meaningful workout and just be around a baseball field. A few days later, I get an email that says, can you send us your resume? I thought my career. In baseball was over because I didn’t have raking on my resume. All, it was really was just an effort to be, uh, really a great member of the community, particularly since my dad helped build the baseball fields that I played on back in Brooklyn.

And I sent back my resume and was told, can you please come in for an interview? And I have no understanding of what or why or how this was playing out, and I responded by saying, I can’t believe this is more than 17 years ago now. And I remember it like it was this morning. I sent back a note saying, I don’t have any raking or field maintenance experience, but if that’s not useful, I’ve never been an umpire.

I’d be happy on my own dime to go get trained or certified or whatever you need, and I’ll volunteer for a couple of hours every week as an umpire. But I’d really love to get out in the community and just be helpful around youth baseball. So that all sounds great. Come on in for an interview. And I really thought this was the end of my dream of being involved in youth baseball.

Little did I know it was the beginning and after about a two hour interview with some folks in this community organization, they looked at me and said, you’d be perfect to manage our 8U travel team and I sighed and shrugged. I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I said I was a junior counselor in a summer camp once. I’m not a babysitter. I don’t think that’s right. And I just quite frankly, don’t have the time that I imagine would be required to do something that I just wanna rake baseball fields. And like I said, an hour or two of umpiring every week, you don’t need to pay me i’d, I’d love to just do that.

And they said, trust us. We know this and you’d be perfect to manage the 8U travel team. I said, okay. I think this is now a compliment and I really appreciate it. I’m not exactly sure, but trust me, I know me and I think you’ve got the wrong guy. And they said, you know what? We hear you. So why don’t you go up to a, a gym up in East Harlem on hundred and 17th Street this weekend with this other coach and you help him out.

And on Monday you call us and let us know. Would you like to be an assistant coach? Would you like to coach a team? If you still want to rake baseball fields, have at it. We’ll let you rake the baseball fields.

Anderson Williams: So they saw right through you is what you’re telling me. They.

Jordan Baltimore : That’s a pretty fair assessment because I obvious they knew me better than I knew myself, apparently.

Yeah. And knew it would play out the way that it did and has, and two weeks later, I was the manager of their 8U travel team. Two months later, I was running their travel baseball program because I was just so excited to bring a different level of emotion and excitement and even discipline and structure to something that just seemed very unstructured and messy and, and almost ad hoc.

And the parents of the children kept asking all these questions that were never getting resolved. There were no processes built in their organization to deal with just a higher level of interactivity and service. And I, I, I hadn’t thought then of building a business around it. But long story short, two years later, New York Empire Baseball was born and it was two coaches, one duffel bag, a couple of batting tees, and one team of 12 children.

Anderson Williams: It’s an amazing story, and I love that they sort of saw your passion and interest and love and possibility before you kind of did. What was it that you mentioned giving back and connecting and volunteering, but you also mentioned that your dad had built those fields. What was it that drew you to want to just be in that space, right? I mean, raking fields, but clearly you just wanted to be in that environment.

Jordan Baltimore : You know, it’s funny you asked that question because for years during my more normal career. People ask me all the time, if you could do anything right, just in conversation, if you could do anything, what would it be? Right? It’s just a fun thing to talk about amongst friends.

And I always said I would do something in baseball, and I remember this very clearly. It went on for years of my life where I said I would do something in baseball. And they said, oh, you mean like be a GM and be in the front office, you know, or are you in fantasy baseball? And I said, no, no and no. To this day, I’ve still never been in a fantasy baseball league.

That wasn’t the piece of baseball that excited me. There was something about human performance and living out your dream, right? As a kid, it was always a three, two count. And you were in the World Series game seven, and with your friends, you hit seven foul balls and you just kept saying, do over, or you struck out and you said, no, no, no, no, let’s do it again until you hit the home run or walked it off.

And there was something so magical about that for me in life. You know, people always talk about how baseball’s a metaphor for life and it is in far more ways than even I realized. So there was something that has always attracted me to baseball, as, whether you say a metaphor for life or just something that so many of my emotions and, and my beliefs in the spirit of children and man just are brought out.

Anderson Williams: So the passion for baseball obviously is foundational, but what made you think even a couple years in when you launched Empire, that you knew how to build this into a business? How did you shift or how did you know you were ready to then turn that into something that was more of an entrepreneurial venture?

Jordan Baltimore : I didn’t, I didn’t write a business plan. I didn’t raise money and look, I had a business background, went to business school, you know, had an MBA before I was 26 years old, and I didn’t know that I was ready to build a business, but I did realize that the way that teams and children were being treated was either A) less than professional, or B) lacked any science or structure or process that was going to yield success and people define success differently.

It wasn’t about the wins and losses for me. It was how do you inspire and just have a great time on the field? Because I was having all these wonderful emotions, coaching and watching these children that I wanted to be able to do more. I wanted to be able to answer questions for myself as to how to better train them or manage. A team and in reality, the entirety of my career across a number of different industries had been built on how do you build experiences that just make it fun to be a part of something? And it wasn’t necessarily team-based sports.

It was absolutely, every industry I’ve ever been in was what some people would call a hospitality approach. For me, it wasn’t this, let me go back to the manual of hospitality. It was how do you treat people? How do you inspire people? How do you just have a great time doing whatever it is you’re doing and make it so that you can say yes to everything?

There was no dollar sign attached to it. There was no financial statement attached to my thinking. It was, well, if I’m going to do this, I might as well have a great time doing it. But I did realize while I was coaching, you know, at this youth organization, that it was sort of disjointed, lacking process. It was again, unprofessional, people didn’t answer the phones. They were handing out uniforms in garbage bags.

I’ll never forget that. That was a seminal moment for me. I still remember it. They handed out children’s uniforms in garbage bags, and when I saw that, I took all the uniforms outta the garbage bags and spent my own money to go buy nice shopping bags and put a little label on them.

Not because I wanted to sell them for more money, but because if I were a child, if you handed me a uniform in a garbage bag and maybe I’m overstating here and reading into things and projecting, what you were handing me was garbage. They didn’t deserve that. They deserved better than that. And in my mind, I wanted to make every aspect and every facet and every detail something that was special, for lack of a better word.

And there was one other piece of baseball that had interested me from the time I was a child, which was, and I, I remember my second book around baseball was, uh, Robert Adairs, the Physics of Baseball. So from a young age, aside from the fact that I am a tried and true dork, just being honest here, although a dork who could play third base at a young age couldn’t hit my way out of a paper bag by the time I was 18 years old, but could still play the field, I was obsessed with the science of baseball.

And obviously now fast forward 17 years, every screen you watch is filled with data and analytics and all this information. We in, in many ways were pioneers of that nearly two decades ago, and we were one of the first users of, you know, the baseball simulator hit tracks. I went and bought that because it brought a level of reality and validity to the things that I thought were true about hitting.

And in reality when I first started, I went and tried to learn everything I could, so I could be a better instructor and answer questions meaningfully and teach meaningfully that children would be healthy athletes and well performing athletes, and could be better than even they thought they can be. And as I’m watching all of these videos from the greats of baseball, things didn’t make sense.

Swing down at a baseball as a physics junkie, I said, that can’t possibly be true, you know, and throw over the top, and we can get into the details and the mechanics, but there were things that were being taught that made no sense to me. And I sought out, you know, Dr. Tom House, who at the time was called “the father of modern pitching mechanics.”

And to this day there are things that Tom and I don’t agree on mechanically because I do think that technology has given us a better view as to how to teach and what to teach and how things work and how the body works. But Tom did teach me how to teach and you know, he has a mantra of inform, instruct, inspire, and our entire organization lives by that along with many other frameworks and approaches.

But Tom and and his organization didn’t only meet my need at that time, 14 or 15 years ago for information and science, but also for how to connect with and inspire children and athletes, again of all ages and skill levels. So a business was born because I thought there was a need for structure, organization and just better content.

And that has now turned into our framework, which has lived for 15 years in the organization, which is culture, content, and coaching. And that’s the way I look at the entire world of sports and certainly youth sports. Not limited to baseball, but all sports.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. I think there’s an important message there. So I grew up playing baseball in the inner city in the eighties and early nineties. When I was growing up, you just went to a field. You grabbed a bat out of a shared bat bag, and you walked up to the plate and swung. There just wasn’t that much information. Had great coaches, great community, but some of the things that you’re describing, you helped innovate to improve what that even means.

Can you talk a little bit about some of those key shifts in what has happened over that 17 years in youth baseball that’s really important to keep up with and continue to push.

Jordan Baltimore : Sure. Let’s think about this. The ubiquity and availability and price of technology has come so far down that the data, the analytics, all of this information is more available to more people than ever before, but that hasn’t changed the importance of community around baseball.

The energy and passion that coaches and players have to have, it has allowed us to measure things better and be better teachers. But the truth is the heart and the passion and the soul of baseball and coaching baseball and other youth sports are what will continue to drive community and engagement and competitiveness and life lessons in and out of the sport, and certainly on and off of the field.

So in the absence of technology, can there still be a great baseball experience? The answer is yes. Uh, can there still be a great youth sports experience? The answer is yes. The dollars are not needed to be spent on technology for the sake thereof. Does it make it more engaging? Maybe? Does it make it more fun? Maybe? Does it make the teaching happen and the development happen faster and better? Yes, if it’s used correctly, but it can also be a distraction.

All of those things that have evolved over the last 15, 17, 20 years have not changed the game of baseball and what’s needed to enjoy it. So the reality is those things can also be a distraction. And if you error on the side of let’s spend money on technology and fancy things and bats and all these other things, and you lose sight of the core and soul of what youth sports brings to the children, to the families, to the community, and to the future professionally, because most children are not becoming professional athletes.

But the life lessons they learn as children will drive them and guide them for the rest of their career in and out of their office or wherever they head. So the reality is, passionate coaches, trained coaches who understand one thing, and we learned this better than ever from John Daniels, who was obviously the president, baseball opposite at the Rangers, went to my high school a year after I did.

I actually never spoke to him when we were in high school together, but caught up with him years later and he explained the role of a major league coach and I think he was concerned and curious why I would ask, what’s the job of a major league manager? And he distilled something so meaningfully and crystallized something so meaningfully for us that the number one job of a major league manager was to motivate 25 unique professionals for 250 consecutive days to go out and do their best.

And I realized that our job as youth coaches was to motivate, train, prepare, and inspire unique and now thousands of unique young athletes of all ages and all skill levels to learn, to learn how to learn, to train to practice and be able to recover from failure and continue going out and doing their best.

So the reality is, to your question, how has this evolved and will it continue to evolve? The focus needs to be on passion and dedication to inspiring young athletes with or without technology.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, and say more about that because I think it’s really important, something you’re very committed to and dedicated to is the coaching side of this. How central a good coach is. Will you talk a little bit about your approach in kind of professionalizing and finding and creating a career for coaches within what you’re building?

Jordan Baltimore : Sure. I realized early on that if we were going to build an organization that delivered consistently, uniformly, and forever.

An experience that I believe children and families deserved, that it wouldn’t come by the hands of gig workers, which is what coaching has historically been, particularly at the youth level. There’s not enough money to pay them. It’s not a viable profession and as I went further and further down the road with New York Empire Baseball as we grew, it could no longer be a show built around me and one or two other coaches who were dedicated and were willing to engage in a labor of love.

A labor of love can only last so long if you can’t pay your rent or your mortage. So I realized that if we were going to sustain and grow and scale our organization and reach as many children, and I never dreamed we’d be where we are today, but in order to reach as many children and continue to grow and scale, we were going to need to build an organization of dedicated professional coaches who didn’t show up looking for a dollar sign, but knew that if they were great at what they did, they could get paid.

It didn’t exist and in many ways throughout the country and throughout the world and throughout the industry, it still doesn’t exist. Health insurance is not something that’s readily available to youth sports coaches because most organizations either don’t make enough money or haven’t figured out how to set it up.

And it’s challenging, don’t get me wrong. Even at this point in our life cycle, it’s still a challenge. It’s something that our organization focuses on every day. How do we make this an incredible experience for the coaches? Because in the absence of an incredible experience for the coaches, an inspiring one, how do we expect coaches to go out and inspire children?

So, what we did early on and continue to do every day is focus on how do we build a professional organization that makes a long-term home for a career for talented passionate coaches who are inspired by coaching and are inspiring the children and others in their circle. So for us, it has become a never ending process of building an organization that can sustain itself by developing coaches, both professionally, personally, and also the content in which they coach.

We train our coach. Just year round. Some people say, Hey, we have one day or week or manual for training. It’s every day in our organization, bar none. Somebody came to me recently and said, even when we’re in camp and we have a nine to three day, we need to find ways that our coaching staff can continue training and developing.

So that’s something that’s integral to our organization. It always has been. It always will be.

Anderson Williams: So when you think about this idea of building a career path for coaches, it sounds great. What does that look like in practice? You mentioned the constraints. It’s expensive. It’s different than what other people are doing in the market? Are there any stories that you have already that gives a little bit of color to that investment?

Jordan Baltimore : I’m glad you asked, one of our coaches, and look, we look for people who are educated. We’re looking in schools for people who are passionate, not only about sports, but about teaching and about teaching sports.

And we came across a potential employee who applied with us and it was clear that he was gonna be a great fit for the organization and he came to work for us. We made the offer and within just a few months. We knew that his parents weren’t thrilled. They said it sounded like a great organization, but it was time to grow up.

He certainly couldn’t because I think he had, uh, family plans. He was going to get engaged pretty soon, and he had gone to school and they had paid for school and he had school loans, and they said it was time to grow up and go get a real job. He went back to them and I certainly had said to him, tell your mom and dad and I’m glad they really appreciate who we are and what we do, but tell them they won’t need to worry.

And within a few months, because he was doing so well at the job, he got his first raise, he took on much more responsibility in the organization. He’s now a manager of the largest part of New York Empire Baseball. He runs the entire developmental baseball program for our organization. And it was incredible because at his wedding, his uncle and his dad came over to me and gave me the hug, of course, and his uncle said, thank you for changing his life.

I said, what do you mean? I said, he’s terrific. He said, no, this is something he always wanted to do, only never dreamed it was really possible, and New York Empire Baseball have turned this into a career and maybe a lifelong career for him.

Anderson Williams: So let’s talk a little bit about where New York Empire Baseball is as a business.

You’ve been doing this for about 17 years. Give us a sense of just scope and scale of where the business is now so that we have a little bit of context for the kind of footprint and breadth of work.

Jordan Baltimore : Sure. What started out in a dirt patch in Central Park with one team and two coaches is now, I think this season we have 64 teams, over a thousand ball players will walk through the doors this year across all of our programs and teams and classes and camps.

One facility on the upper west side of Manhattan that when we first identified it and saw it because we had 500 players and we’d been renting gyms and basements and you name it, just to house what we were doing. And that became no longer tenable and scalable for us as an organization. So we came across a property and, and we bought it.

And at the time when we bought it, we said we’d never fill it. And now, yeah, there’s a wait list and we’re, we’re working on, uh, number two in New York, another one in Long Island, and then a few others actually in planning and actually even in testing in other parts of the country.

Anderson Williams: You recently partnered with Shore Capital Partners, so you’re planning kind of the next phase of growth for what this work means to you.

Will you talk a little bit about why you started considering a financial partner and what were you looking for, and maybe a little bit about what that process looked like and how you got down to Shore being the right match for you.

Jordan Baltimore : Years ago, we were approached by a private equity firm. Look, I had a financial background. We were approached by a private equity firm, so I had a good sense of what that might mean. It was relatively early on, but we were, I guess at the time, larger than a small organization, probably a quarter of the size that we are today. But we had built a good reputation. We were approached and they made an offer, and the offer almost made sense, but the future didn’t.

And we walked away from that as friends and shook hands, and to this day, still have a relationship there. But it didn’t make sense to us because the conversation was built around, here’s your financial performance, here’s what we think you could do and deliver financially. And you see where this is going.

And the consistent talk around the model was how are we going to grow profits and grow revenue? And there’s nothing wrong with that. A business can’t continue in the absence of profits. You can’t pay people. You can’t open up every day. Over the course of the next few years, we had been approached by six or seven more companies who, look, I, I think we’ve built a special brand and we have a, a nice reputation in the industry and the community.

And we’d been approached by six or seven more companies since then, and most of them had the same approach. And again, nothing wrong with it, it was. You’re doing well. Your financial performance is exceptional in this industry. How do you do it? And what are you doing? Can we learn more and help you expand?

And I said, sure, let’s learn more together. And one of them who was very talented internally, they had terrific resources, terrific track record. We went down the road and late in the process, said, we love this. Do you think you can reduce the levels of service so we can grow you faster? The conversation ended there and I still admire them and their team for what they do.

Their approach was how do we franchise this and build out hundreds of New York Empire baseballs, but hey, service isn’t scalable, so can we cut back on the service? And my answer was, thank you. I appreciate it. And I, I really did. I was blown away by how much they appreciated and admired who we were, but they didn’t appreciate and admire our culture.

It wasn’t important to them. They didn’t understand that, and they came back to us over and over and said that our performance was truly exceptional in the industry. And I didn’t know that. I had never compared us to anyone. We were very inward focused and facing, and they told us just how incredible a business we had built and we, we weren’t very big.

They thought that the key to success in the future was going to be to eliminate or certainly reduce the level of service and commitment we had to children and their families on an individual basis. And I said we couldn’t do that, and they may have been right that that would’ve led to a 100, 200, 300 New York Empire facilities all over the country and great. I can’t be a part of a business that is not obsessed with the experience that every child and certainly family has with us. So even if it meant growing bigger, faster, that wasn’t for me. And we said thank you, but no thank you.

Fast forward another year or two and another couple of companies were introduced to us ’cause we weren’t actively looking, but certainly the environment has become an active one for consolidation and acquisition, and a couple of companies came, and Shore was one of them. And once again, the focus was on financial performance and smarts and the brand and the, the reputation only Shore’s obsession with our culture dominated every conversation. And I was very, very attracted to that.

And it wasn’t, you know, I, I’ll be honest, I was worried that it was the courting process and it was words and the shoe was going to drop. I don’t remember conversations around financial performance. The conversations were built around, what are the things you find challenging that are keeping you from growing what you do and how you do it without losing who you are?

I’ll never forget that. And it drove us to make a decision very easily that Shore was going to be an incredible partner in our future. Because look, we were at what it genuinely is called an inflection point. We were growing, we were sold out quickly. And look, we had exceptional performance over the course of more than 15 years.

So we didn’t need cash, we needed resources. We hadn’t scaled the business. We grew a business and there was a big difference. Most operators in the youth sports industry can’t leave the turf, can’t leave the field. Partially because they love it. There’s nothing wrong with that. I feel the same way, but they can’t go on vacation with their family without wondering how many lessons am I missing? How many practices am I missing? How is it negatively impacting today in my organization and the future of my organization?

And I don’t think that’s a successful business. I think successful business, again, is shepherd and stewarded by itself and by the people within, and it doesn’t require that. One person is there every minute of every day, you know, picking up every piece of paper.

So, it became very clear in the process when Shore, they didn’t only say it, they demonstrated it. That what they cared about most was removing the roadblocks to future success and scalability and how we expand our culture and the words, and, and they’ve stayed true to it. Were we never wanna change what you do, how you do it, or who you are.

We want to enable you to do more of it. And conceptually and effectively, that’s where we are today. And Shore is the perfect partner for that.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, I, I mean, I think it’s great to hear as someone who works at Shore, I think a lot of times people have misperceptions or at least perceptions of a slice of the private equity market, and when they hear private equity, they think, okay, this is gonna be growth at all costs. And what you’re describing is actually almost the exact opposite. And your selection process and finding Shore and Shore finding you was sort of the opposite.

So talk a little bit about what you see as if I’m listening to this podcast and I run a youth organization, a youth sports organization, and I’ve never really thought about this, but I hear private equity and I get a little anxious about that or think, or even worse, think, oh, no way.

What’s your message in terms of the unique partnership you have with Shore and where you see that enabling empire to move forward? What’s your message to somebody who might be having those concerns about private equity?

Jordan Baltimore : I mean, let’s start with the concerns and they’re out there in the popular press and it’s almost become a caricature of what people think private equity is.

Cut costs, raise prices, who cares about quality ruin, youth sports, and I’m reading this in the popular press every week, and I don’t see why that’s a necessity in investment. If there’s a need for a higher quality solution and a sole practitioner or a smaller organization can’t get there and deliver that need by themselves and recognizes that, wow, if I could scale my business, not just grow it, meaning if I had other resources that allow me to grow without being in every facet of the business, every minute of every day, my organization would be better. And the children and the families who appreciate what we do and hopefully love what we do, will love it even more.

Let me go outside for those resources. Does that mean that every private equity company is out here, sitting here beating the drum of how do we develop a culture and take care of families? No, they’re not. I went through it. One out of eight companies with whom we spoke became our partner and some of them very talented and great at what they do.

They have terrific financial track records, not one of them until Shore, obsessed the way we do over our culture. You know what? There’s something else to be said for Shore. That made it easy for me to make a decision. I went to Chicago to visit a number of times, not only for the so-called dog and pony show of what private equity wants you to see, but I wanted to learn more and I didn’t even call that many of the people that they said here call the people who have already partnered with us, because who knows if they’re gonna give the complete review.

Not to say that people are are looking to be deceptive, but are you really gonna find the one person who wasn’t happy in the last 15 years and have me talk to them? Probably not. So I focused on what Shore did and how Shore did it. As fascinated and appreciative of what my team has built at New York Empire Baseball Shore operates better than we do, and it’s even more obsessed with culture and the concept of process over outcome than we are.

And that’s when I knew this was, in some ways it was too good to be true. So for somebody who’s thinking about this and is worried about it, you don’t have to jump in. You can go learn more and look, we did this process over and over and over and learn through it and knew what we wanted and what we didn’t.

It was a dating process and it went on for years. And through those years, we continued to grow our organization to the point where I finally said, okay, a capital partner does make sense, but not in the absence of culture or what I like to call intellectual horsepower and resources. Shore brought all those things and it became very, very clear that our future was brighter, not just bigger, but brighter with Shore as a partner.

So you know the name actually for me is not the exciting part, Shore Capital Partners. What was exciting about Shore for me was the culture. Somebody said to me along the way, that Shore isn’t a typical private equity firm. They’re business builders and for some people that’s also scary. How could you build my business?

I’ve been doing it for 15 years, and you are a financial services firm. What could you possibly know? Shore’s dedication and focus on small business and growing small business is unique in the world. Not one other firm that we spoke to focused on how are we going to support and build your small business, and how are we going to share and maintain a culture while we grow, not in spite of our growth.

So the decision to partner was made easy by having learned more.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. And when you think about that and in the partnership, how do you continue to cultivate and build and expand that culture. As you find new partners and as you grow the company through acquisition, how do you continue to protect that culture and not become one of the sort of stereotypical kind of consolidator stories?

Jordan Baltimore : I’m glad you asked that because as I’m thinking about acquisitions and partnerships, and we’re already pretty far down the road with a few, what made them easy is what we’ve already talked about, a shared culture. There are plenty of good businesses and good operators in the world of youth sports. I’ll give you an example of one.

I came across, uh, an organization in Florida and it sounded like they had a bunch of teams and they were growing and they were involved in technology. It sounded good until I clicked on the about us page of their website and the first page I went to described how they have no refunds at any time for any reason, and went on and on about how the experience requires that they don’t give refunds, and they were adamant about that.

I never made the phone call. If their focus on you learning more about their company is how they’re going to keep your money, whether you’re happy or not, they can’t be a part of our organization because we’re not focused on the dollars. Somebody could wear a sweatshirt or a uniform in our organization, they decide it doesn’t fit, and we give them a new one.

Not because we’re flush with cash, but because hey, don’t worry about uniforms, don’t worry about mistakes. Let’s handle them together. So for us, partnership again, and this will come as no surprise to you. Partnerships and acquisitions are driven by culture, not by business and financial statements. Don’t get me wrong, do they have to be running a good business?

They do, but for us, running a good business means you’ve built a tremendous culture. You don’t worry about retention. Retention takes care of itself because people are happy, right? So, that’s going to drive and continue to drive. That obsession with the experience, with inspiration and with culture and with developing coaches and staff is what drives our interest in partnerships.

Anderson Williams: I wanna flip the script a little bit and ask you if I were sitting on the other side of a potential partnership conversation with you all. What questions would you advise me given all you’ve learned through your own process to ask you, if I am running that sports league in Florida or in Tennessee or or wherever and this, I’m exploring this opportunity, what should I ask you about this partnership and what it’s gonna look like in the future as a fellow founder?

What should I ask you?

Jordan Baltimore : I’ll tell you right outta the gate. The most important thing is be specific in what Shore can do for me and my future. I’m selfish. I need to know because I already run a good business. I don’t even know what great is, but I’ve run a good business. I don’t need anyone. Right? I’ve done this for 10 or 15 years, right?

I’m speaking in the voice of the operator. I already run a good business. You’re telling me you have resources. What resources, and specifically how will those resources benefit me and my organization and my family and the families in my organization now and in the future? Be specific, right? Every company that came to us, we have resources.

What does that mean if you don’t understand me, my culture, what we do and what growth looks like for us and what the challenges we face are, the word resources doesn’t have much meaning. It’s very superficial. Everybody has capital. That’s easy. And the numbers to use a hackneyed term, the numbers are what they are, right?

So that’s not a differentiator. There are plenty of sources of capital for anyone that’s running a profitable business. There are even sources of capital for people who aren’t running profitable businesses. Or running fairly unprofitable businesses. The differentiator is gonna be, what are you going to do to understand my organization today, my vision for tomorrow? Help me shape that and get there specifically. That’s number one.

Number two is probably what is the vision for the future? And why do you think that that’s going to be a reality? Because everybody can dream and talk about, oh, in 5 years or 10 years, this is where you’ll be. That’s very easy to say. It’s very easy to promise. And then of course, 5 years later, 7 years later, 10 years later, backtrack and say, well, things happened.

Well, I never looked at the world that way. For me, building was brick by brick. And I want to know where are we headed knowing that that’s going to change over time. Are you here to help me build brick by brick? And what exactly does that mean? I think those are probably the two top of mind questions.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, and when you think about sitting down with that potential partner, what do you say about the opportunities for them in terms of resources, in terms of vision, in terms of their impact and aspirations as a business leader that this partnership can bring that maybe they might not be able to get just by running their own business on their own or where they might cap out in their own sort of growth and experiences or access to resources? How do you respond? I’ve asked you to ask those questions now. How do you respond to particularly the resources conversation and the vision conversation?

Jordan Baltimore : I’ll tell you, I’ll start with vision because I think it all begins there, right? What’s the strategy? Where are we headed? And when I think about what we’ve developed as a part of this platform, it’s a vision for being the highest quality experience, the most inspiring experience in youth sports, regardless of sport, regardless of age, regardless of skill.

Knowing that when people think about youth sports organizations, the one that comes to mind when they think about quality will be our platform. And once we’ve approached an operator where we think there’s a good cultural fit, knowing that they will fit in in two ways.

One, we’re going to bring, I said that word resources. We’re going to bring world class talent in every discipline of a business. HR, marketing, anything you can think of that’s a need. Because there were plenty of other firms that out, and we didn’t touch on this much. There were plenty of other firms that said, we’re going to take over your back office and we’ll own a piece of your business.

I could buy accounting software, hire an accountant, hire a lawyer, and buy a point of sale system. That’s not worth selling my business or giving an equity stake. It may be a pain point for many operators, particularly if business acumen is not as high as they’d like it to be internally, but not enough of a pain point to give away half or more of your business.

Instead, our platform looks to understand what are the challenges that you’re facing. It’s not, let’s change your business so that it’s a perfect fit for what we did yesterday. What are the challenges and opportunities that you have in your organization? And we’re going to take the Shore Centers of Excellence and resources and apply them to your business when they’re needed and continue to build over time. So you become a part of really an ecosystem and a community and a platform that’s delivering the best experience for children and their families in any sport, and really even outside of sports.

Something that people are going to talk about and consider the standard for the way people should be treated and how they can be inspired in anything that they do. You know, one of the things that Shore. Already, I mean, within the first, before we even closed, we had built a world class board that wasn’t a series of names on a piece of paper that people were going to ooh and awe about. The former CEO of SoulCycle is one of our board members and not just in name.

She’s already been very active and helpful to our entire team. She already understands our business because of the conversations we’ve had and they’ve been meaningful conversations and she’s been active about wanting to be more active. And if anybody has scaled a brand of love, a brand of culture, certainly within athletics and sports, nobody has done it better than Melanie Whelan and now she’s a part of our team, meaningfully.

The Chief Strategy officer of Major League Baseball thought highly enough of our vision to say, I’d like to be a part of it. Number one, we’re flattered and honored, but two, after sitting down and speaking with him over and over, we’re now excited about what he brings thoughtfully to our future. Few people have executed the way that he has and can help us think about how baseball and youth sports will grow and continue to grow strategically.

So the board construction and the resources that Shore has brought have already had an immediate impact. It’s again, I couldn’t have imagined even during our process that we would be moving in the right direction as quickly as we are.

We have another board member, it’s Nikki Haley, and where some people think about, oh, she’s got this incredible career in politics. In our first conversation, all that Nikki focused on was her obsession with building extraordinary experiences for young athletes, for girls, for boys, and what those experiences need to be throughout the country and certainly in every community, regardless of, again, age, skill, or access to quality coaching and programming.

So those are the things that’ll be brought to any member, you know, any partner of the platform. Another thing to think about when it comes to resources is probably the biggest challenge operationally that growing youth sports operators face, which is supply. And what do I mean by that? Fields and facilities.

The other piece is something that I knew Shore was going to be focused on and I was excited about, which is the people. How do we continue to train our coaches and grow our coaching staff and build out an incredible career path, which has now grown thanks to the relationship with Shore, but how do we deal with fields and facilities and many of the other private equity firms with whom we spoke?

For them that was in the weeds. For Shore, there’s an entire real estate team that has already engaged with me to help focus on how we build out the platform by building out the supply, which is where are we going to play? Where are we going to train? How can we be better at building out fields and facilities that will enable us to grow and scale and be active with more children and families to do what we do on the field or in the facility.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, it’s incredible. One thing I do want to to hit on is we’ve obviously started with New York Empire Baseball, and we’ve talked a lot about the heart of baseball and how you started your business, but we’ve also talked more broadly about youth sports and in partnering with Shore and building this larger platform, you’re expanding beyond baseball and looking at those things.

Will you just talk a little bit about. Partners in other spaces, other things you’re exploring in the broader realm of youth sports beyond baseball?

Jordan Baltimore : Sure. I think some people look at youth sports and say, Hey, they’re all the same. You know, if we can do it in one, we could do it in any. New York Empire Baseball stayed in baseball because I made a promise to myself and to our organization and to our families that we wouldn’t just pretend to do in another sport because we already have your credit card number and a point of sale platform and a phone, and people pushed back and actually told us, well, no, you guys can do this.

I never felt that we had the technical expertise to coach another sport, and I promised that we would not coach another sport or grow into another sport unless we had the same expertise and intellectual capabilities that we do in baseball. And the reality is we won’t just grow into another sport with someone absent those capabilities and that passion and certainly the culture.

That being said, there are some folks out there who do have that same approach to culture, content, and coaching. Where they’re a perfect fit for our platform. So the ability to bring expertise along with the passion and the inspiration and the culture is what’s important to us in finding partners in other sports.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, it’s the model and the values and those things that match not so much whether it’s one sport or the other.

One of the things that we talked about that I just want to make sure we capture is you see this in really the biggest possible picture, that this is about youth sports, that it’s about community, it’s about changing lives, it’s about lasting memories, it’s about learning life lessons.

And I know that your team recently did some work internationally just to draw the picture that this is deeply rooted in values that sort of transcend. Will you talk a little bit about your work in Poland and just share a little bit of that story?

Jordan Baltimore : I will, and you’ll have to forgive me if I get a little emotional. When the war broke out in Ukraine, and lemme backtrack.

We’ve never been a politicized or political organization. We don’t go on social media and shout about things that are outside of who we are and what we do. It’s not relevant. To how we go out and coach and play baseball with children. So we’ve always stayed away from politics intentionally. I’ll give you one example.

We’re open on virtually every holiday because we’re not trying to make any statement at all. We don’t close. We’re here for people whenever they want us to be there. And when the war broke out in Ukraine, we heard that there were issues with children in hospitals and children being orphaned because their parents were being killed in a war.

And we saw that one of the families in our program was the Seinfeld family. And Jerry and Jessica were overseas doing some great humanitarian work, and we wanted to be supportive of what they were doing because it was impacting children. And we reached out to one of the organizations that they were supporting who was taking in orphan refugee children and just caring for them.

They were putting them up in a makeshift school and feeding them, and we wanted to be involved in some way more than writing a check. That’s just not where we live. We thought we could do more, and my initial inclination was to get on a plane and I figured it out. I can be on a plane, be in Warsaw, play with a small group of children, teach them baseball in a different language.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I was somehow going to teach and play with children a sport that they had never played in a language they couldn’t speak. And I reached out to the organization, they said, that’s lovely, but that’s a lot of heavy lifting. I said, don’t worry, it’s 11 hours to get there.

I’ll be there, I’ll play ball for a couple of hours. I’ll get on a plane and I’ll go home. And they said, why don’t we come up with something a little broader that might be more helpful and easier to accomplish? And what it evolved into was six children in our organization and their parents going with me to Warsaw just a couple of months after the war began. And we had the opportunity and the joy and the emotion of teaching and coaching and playing baseball with about 650 Ukrainian orphan refugees.

And if that didn’t put things into perspective, I’m not sure what could, knowing that they’d never played baseball, they didn’t speak English, some of them didn’t have shoes. And we partnered with a number of organizations to bring them clothes, to bring them sports equipment so that they could continue playing. After we had gone and we stayed in touch with one of the orphanages and one of the organizations there, and then two years later we went back and this time it was with some support from, uh, Ambassador Brzezinski, who himself is a baseball fan.

So that certainly made it a wonderful project. And he assigned some people from the, the embassy to help us have a soft landing and, and build a terrific experience on the ground. He himself came to, uh, a turf field in Warsaw and helped coach baseball. So having gone back the second time, and again, hundreds of children now, not only from Ukraine but from other countries, and getting to play baseball with them and bringing more of our children to help coach them.

I mean, it’s unforgettable. So when we built our foundation, we wanted to support children and families through baseball, and we realized that could stretch far outside of New York City. And when the opportunity arose, it, it was a calling for us.

Anderson Williams: I can’t help Jordan, but go back to something that you were describing to start this whole conversation of your initiation into this whole journey was just let me come rake the field.

I can’t help but draw the parallel to your drive to say, just let me come and do something. And that’s really powerful. What continues to drive you at this stage in your career? What motivates you? What drives you as a leader? As that same person who wanted to pick up a rake and the same person wanted to fly all the way to Poland,

Jordan Baltimore : I don’t just love what we do. I don’t just love who we are. I’m in love with it. And that hasn’t waned. It’s only gotten stronger. I’m fascinated by what our team does and the experiences that we share with each other and with children, with their families.

The feedback that we get from people isn’t, my son just pitched a great game. It’s, you’ve inspired my child. It’s not just that, building these experiences and realizing that we inspire each other. The children have inspired each other, the children inspire us. Every experience we build together has created memories that will last forever, and it’s not unique to me by any stretch.

I think that’s so exciting for me, 17 years later, knowing that the coaches in our organization, they’re not only here because I, I mean I certainly hope they have a wonderful job and career. Now they’re here because they get to share in what I got to feel many, many years ago and continue to feel these overwhelmingly inspiring experiences day in and day out.

And it’s in everything that we do and it’s shared. It’s in every direction. So sharing in these experiences that are building relationships and memories that last a lifetime through baseball and sports, it’s a dream come true.

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, check out our other Microcap Moments episodes at www.shocp.university/podcast or anywhere you get your podcasts. Here, you’ll also find our Bigger. Stronger. Faster. and Everyday Heroes series, each highlighting the people and stories that make investing in the lower middle market unique. This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone podcast studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams. Recording by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Jordan Baltimore.

This podcast is the Property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.