Marc Nudelberg is a coach, author, and entrepreneur. He leverages his experiences as a Division I football coach and President of On the Ball Ventures to help individuals and their teams adopt the 1 percent better mindset. Marc delivers energy, passion, and competitive drive while focusing on the details and developing processes that produce results.
- CEO Story: Marc was fortunate enough to grow up in an entrepreneurial family. While in graduate school, he joined the college football organization for a span of ten years. After that, he stepped into the business world and partnered with his father to build a training and development agency that focuses primarily on mindset training people to think like high performers which then translates into modernizing the sales process and developing leadership in individuals.
- Business Service: Coaching individuals. Working on processes with the organization to attain success. Identify problems and create solutions.
- Secret Sauce: Create a competitive culture. Create processes and disciplines to routines.
- CEO Hack: 24-hour rule – figure out what went wrong, and figure out where you went wrong. To overcome those obstacles in the future.
- CEO Nugget: RPD – Relationships, Processes, and Discipline. How are you investing in relationships? Update your processes as they serve you better. Discipline – staying true to what you learn, putting in the work day in and day out.
- CEO Defined: Having ownership and radically candid – the willingness to step into the group whether it's good or bad, and being transparent to people.
Website: www.ontheballventures.com
LinkedIn: marcnudelberg
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Transcription
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00:25 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:53 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresham from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Marc Nudelberg of On The Ball Ventures. Marc, super excited to have you on the show.
01:02 – Marc Nudelberg
Excited to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to get with you, Gresham, and with your with your audience.
01:08 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. So before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Marc so you can hear about some of the awesome things that he's working on. Marc is the president of On The Ball Ventures. Marc is a coach, author, and entrepreneur. He leverages his experience as a Division 1 football coach and president of the
On The Ball Ventures to help individuals and their teams adopt the 1% better mindset. Marc delivers energy, passion, and competitive drive while focusing on the details and developing processes that produce. Marc, again, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:39 – Marc Nudelberg
Ready to go, man. Let's do this.
01:41 – Gresham Harkless
Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your CEO story.
01:48 – Marc Nudelberg
Yeah. So you could probably take it all the way back to my childhood. I was fortunate to grow up in an entrepreneurial family. Then as I grew up I played football as a youth and then was not good enough to play football at a high level. In college, I was afforded the opportunity to enter Florida State University's football program as an equipment manager. Was the bottom of the organization. And during my undergrad I worked my way up through the organization to become a student assistant coach, eventually getting hired as the assistant special teams coach when I graduated.
That launched a 10-year coaching career that took me all over the country. Took me from Florida State to Cincinnati To Florida, to Nevada, back across the country to Lafayette. And then I eventually stepped away from college football and stepped into the business world and partnered with my father to build a training and development agency that focuses primarily first on mindset, training people to think like high performers, which then translates into modernizing the sales process and developing leadership in individuals.
02:58 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love that, especially to hear the experience that you've had and being able to kind of translate each of that information, all that information, so that people can kind of be those high performers. So I know you touched a little bit upon how you work with and serve your clients. I wanted to just check and see if there's anything additional that you want to mention there. And then too, what you consider to be your secret sauce, which is the thing for yourself, the organization, or a combination of both. Incessant apartment makes it unique.
03:22 – Marc Nudelberg
Yeah, sure. So the way we work with individuals is, or really in organizations there's a lot of different ways to be coached. And I'm a firm believer, coming from my athletic background, that coaching or training is something that you do year-round. It's not something that happens when you first get hired and onboarded into an organization. It's something that's constant and continual.
And so taking that mindset of understanding. Okay, well, if we have to coach individuals, let's first work with the organization to understand what are your processes, what are the things that are in place that allow your people to create repeatable success or sustained success if worse, if there are holes in that for them, we're happy to identify where gaps are and help them solve those problems and create those solutions. Once the proper organizational structure is set in place, then we love to work with individuals to help them adopt that 1% better mentality, which to me means accepting the challenge of trying to get better.
I think most people hear 1% better every day, and they're like, that means I have to be improving every single day. That's not a reality. Right. All, champions, all people who are high performers understand that there are setbacks that happen all the time. Accepting the challenge of improving every day begins with your mindset. It involves examining your routines at home, your morning habits, and how you prepare yourself for success through the content you consume and the people you surround yourself with.
Additionally, it’s important to consider the processes and routines that contribute to your individual success and that of your organization. So helping people understand that, develop a mindset, put into practice some of those routines Whether it be time management or just looking at what they're doing on a daily basis to help them find ways to get better.
05:18 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I appreciate you breaking down the whole kind of 1% because I think if you think in 100 days you're 100% better, but in reality, things don't necessarily work like that. But I think it's something that I always heard you can control what you can control and to be able to work on those things that you can control, like you mentioned, your mindset, things you're listening to, putting into your mind, whatever that is, to help you feel like you're better than what you were.
05:39 – Marc Nudelberg
So I recently wrote about that in my book, which is Family, Football, and failure. And it's basically a roadmap. And the principles of all the lessons I learned from growing up in an entrepreneurial family, working inside of college football and developing successful organizations and teams and then transferring out of that, building our own coaching or coaching agency and helping organizations create a competitive culture, create processes and disciplines to routines, all of the same things that made us successful in sports, transferring them over.
And the reality is that if you think you're going to get better every day or that this road to success is this constant, you know, straight climb upward, you're setting yourself up for success. So the reason I put the word failure in the title of the book is because I learned how to deal with failure, significant failure, and a lot of failure through sport, right? When you think about what failure really means, it's just the absence of whatever the expected outcome was. So in sports, you expect to win every single Saturday.
In college football, for us, that wasn't a reality. Didn't happen every single time. So understanding that you had to have a process on how to acknowledge it, right? How to analyze it and then how to act on that information and create a plan for yourself to have success. After I called that the 24-hour rule, right, I didn't have time to waste wallowing in the failure or allowing the missed opportunities to affect something else down the road. I had to get real tight on, yeah, this sucks. Yeah, this hurts.
But we gotta look at it. We gotta look at it with a fine tooth comb and figure out where we went wrong in order to develop, you know, new strategies, new processes, new routines that are going to allow us to overcome those obstacles in the future so that we never allowed one mistake to become two. Whether you're in sales or whether you're in business and you have a bad day, a Bad week, a bad month, a bad quarter, a bad year. You have to have a process for understanding how to deal with failure in order to turn it into an opportunity and not allow it to hurt you again.
07:57 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I almost think that could be like a CEO hack, which is kind of those things that can make you more effective and efficient. So I love that 24-hour rule and how that lets you first reframe but also sounds like redirecting whenever those things could definitely happen. So what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it's something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
08:23 – Marc Nudelberg
So I think, and I talk about this with a lot of people, but when I look back at my success, I look at one acronym and it's RPD and its relationships, processes, and discipline. I don't care what success, I don't care what opportunity. When I look at all of the good things that have come to my life, it's come from one of those three things. It's been introduced to me through a relationship, or it was because I had developed a great process, or it was because I was disciplined in that process. RPD to me is the ultimate acronym and the simplification of how to define success for yourself in your life.
How are you investing in relationships? How are you building relationships? How are you cultivating relationships that not only help you personally but help you as a business, help you as an organization? What alliances are you creating with other major organizations within your industry that are strategic partnerships that help both of you guys become successful? And then how are you constantly evaluating what you're doing to ensure that it's still serving you? I don't care whether you talk about sports or whether you talk about business. Life evolves. And life evolves very fast in today's day and age with the amount of information that we're getting, with the amount of technology that we have.
So if you aren't constantly looking back at your processes to say, are these things still serving me? Are they still serving us in the way that we design them to? And if they're not willing to make the necessary adjustments and changes to continue to improve? Because that to me is discipline, right? It's the discipline to make the hard decision. It's the discipline to stay true to what you know and put in the Work day in and day out, regardless of what the weather is, regardless of how you feel, regardless of how many people are watching you or how many people aren't watching you. The discipline to do what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, and how it's supposed to be done.
10:27 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And a lot of times what you focus on grows. So to make sure that you're measuring and making sure those three legs of the stool I'll call them, or the rpd, are in place, allows you to make sure that you're seeing your success as much as possible. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote, unquote, CEOs on the show. So, Marc, what does being a CEO mean to you?
10:50 – Marc Nudelberg
To me, it means having ownership and having radical candor. And so it's not about just setting the direction. It's not about being a visionary. It's about taking responsibility not only for the business but for the people within the business and in the organization and making decisions based on what's good for the whole and not just what's good for you. The other important aspect is exhibiting radical candor and being willing to take responsibility in front of the group, whether the situation is positive or negative.
This means owning outcomes that may not be ideal and being able to honestly discuss what is happening. Transparency is key, as it helps people understand that you are genuinely supportive of them. Because I don't care if you have an organization of three people or 300 people if you're willing to take responsibility for them in the business and you're willing to be radically candid with them about what's happening and where the. What the vision is and where they are. Where do you guys want to go together? You'll create, buy-in, and you'll have success.
11:59 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I love how both of those are kind of strongly intertwined and at the end of the day, helping you to get to the mission that you ultimately hope to have. So definitely appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time, even more, Marc. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best people get a hold of you, get a copy of your book, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on. Sure.
12:22 – Marc Nudelberg
So my book is available on Amazon so you can find it there. It's family, Football, and failure, obviously. Reach out to me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. You can find me at Marc Noodleberg. My email is Marc@ontheballventures.com don't hesitate to reach out to me there. But I'll tell you this, if you choose to reach out to me, you better lead with that first letter in the in the acronym, which is relationship. I can't stand it when somebody reaches out to me and tries to cold-pitch me. Right? I'm putting myself out there daily with content. Find something that resonates with you. Start to build a relationship with me. And I promise you that we will find a way to help each other somehow, some way.
13:05 – Gresham Harkless
There you go. Well, truly appreciate that. And to make it that even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes too so that everybody can reach out with that pearl of wisdom and that nugget that you've been given in so many different ways. But thank you so much for taking time out. I appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
13:20 – Marc Nudelberg
Thank you guys. Appreciate it.
13:21 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:25 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:53 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresham from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Marc Nudelberg of On The Ball Ventures. Marc, super excited to have you on the show.
01:02 - Marc Nudelberg
Excited to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to get with you, Gresham, and with your with your audience.
01:08 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. So before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Marc so you can hear about some of the awesome things that he's working on. Marc is the president of On The Ball Ventures. Marc is a coach, author, and entrepreneur. He leverages his experience as a Division 1 football coach and president of the
On The Ball Ventures to help individuals and their teams adopt the 1% better mindset. Marc delivers energy, passion, and competitive drive while focusing on the details and developing processes that produce. Marc, again, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:39 - Marc Nudelberg
Ready to go, man. Let's do this.
01:41 - Gresham Harkless
Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your CEO story.
01:48 - Marc Nudelberg
Yeah. So you could probably take it all the way back to my childhood. I was fortunate to grow up in an entrepreneurial family. Then as I grew up I played football as a youth and then was not good enough to play football at a high level. In college, I was afforded the opportunity to enter Florida State University's football program as an equipment manager. Was the bottom of the organization. And during my undergrad I worked my way up through the organization to become a student assistant coach, eventually getting hired as the assistant special teams coach when I graduated.
That launched a 10-year coaching career that took me all over the country. Took me from Florida State to Cincinnati To Florida, to Nevada, back across the country to Lafayette. And then I eventually stepped away from college football and stepped into the business world and partnered with my father to build a training and development agency that focuses primarily first on mindset, training people to think like high performers, which then translates into modernizing the sales process and developing leadership in individuals.
02:58 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love that, especially to hear the experience that you've had and being able to kind of translate each of that information, all that information, so that people can kind of be those high performers. So I know you touched a little bit upon how you work with and serve your clients. I wanted to just check and see if there's anything additional that you want to mention there. And then too, what you consider to be your secret sauce, which is the thing for yourself, the organization, or a combination of both. Incessant apartment makes it unique.
03:22 - Marc Nudelberg
Yeah, sure. So the way we work with individuals is, or really in organizations there's a lot of different ways to be coached. And I'm a firm believer, coming from my athletic background, that coaching or training is something that you do year-round. It's not something that happens when you first get hired and onboarded into an organization. It's something that's constant and continual.
And so taking that mindset of understanding. Okay, well, if we have to coach individuals, let's first work with the organization to understand what are your processes, what are the things that are in place that allow your people to create repeatable success or sustained success if worse, if there are holes in that for them, we're happy to identify where gaps are and help them solve those problems and create those solutions. Once the proper organizational structure is set in place, then we love to work with individuals to help them adopt that 1% better mentality, which to me means accepting the challenge of trying to get better.
I think most people hear 1% better every day, and they're like, that means I have to be improving every single day. That's not a reality. Right. All, champions, all people who are high performers understand that there are setbacks that happen all the time. Accepting the challenge of improving every day begins with your mindset. It involves examining your routines at home, your morning habits, and how you prepare yourself for success through the content you consume and the people you surround yourself with.
Additionally, it’s important to consider the processes and routines that contribute to your individual success and that of your organization. So helping people understand that, develop a mindset, put into practice some of those routines Whether it be time management or just looking at what they're doing on a daily basis to help them find ways to get better.
05:18 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I appreciate you breaking down the whole kind of 1% because I think if you think in 100 days you're 100% better, but in reality, things don't necessarily work like that. But I think it's something that I always heard you can control what you can control and to be able to work on those things that you can control, like you mentioned, your mindset, things you're listening to, putting into your mind, whatever that is, to help you feel like you're better than what you were.
05:39 - Marc Nudelberg
So I recently wrote about that in my book, which is Family, Football, and failure. And it's basically a roadmap. And the principles of all the lessons I learned from growing up in an entrepreneurial family, working inside of college football and developing successful organizations and teams and then transferring out of that, building our own coaching or coaching agency and helping organizations create a competitive culture, create processes and disciplines to routines, all of the same things that made us successful in sports, transferring them over.
And the reality is that if you think you're going to get better every day or that this road to success is this constant, you know, straight climb upward, you're setting yourself up for success. So the reason I put the word failure in the title of the book is because I learned how to deal with failure, significant failure, and a lot of failure through sport, right? When you think about what failure really means, it's just the absence of whatever the expected outcome was. So in sports, you expect to win every single Saturday.
In college football, for us, that wasn't a reality. Didn't happen every single time. So understanding that you had to have a process on how to acknowledge it, right? How to analyze it and then how to act on that information and create a plan for yourself to have success. After I called that the 24-hour rule, right, I didn't have time to waste wallowing in the failure or allowing the missed opportunities to affect something else down the road. I had to get real tight on, yeah, this sucks. Yeah, this hurts.
But we gotta look at it. We gotta look at it with a fine tooth comb and figure out where we went wrong in order to develop, you know, new strategies, new processes, new routines that are going to allow us to overcome those obstacles in the future so that we never allowed one mistake to become two. Whether you're in sales or whether you're in business and you have a bad day, a Bad week, a bad month, a bad quarter, a bad year. You have to have a process for understanding how to deal with failure in order to turn it into an opportunity and not allow it to hurt you again.
07:57 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I almost think that could be like a CEO hack, which is kind of those things that can make you more effective and efficient. So I love that 24-hour rule and how that lets you first reframe but also sounds like redirecting whenever those things could definitely happen. So what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it's something you would tell your favorite client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
08:23 - Marc Nudelberg
So I think, and I talk about this with a lot of people, but when I look back at my success, I look at one acronym and it's RPD and its relationships, processes, and discipline. I don't care what success, I don't care what opportunity. When I look at all of the good things that have come to my life, it's come from one of those three things. It's been introduced to me through a relationship, or it was because I had developed a great process, or it was because I was disciplined in that process. RPD to me is the ultimate acronym and the simplification of how to define success for yourself in your life.
How are you investing in relationships? How are you building relationships? How are you cultivating relationships that not only help you personally but help you as a business, help you as an organization? What alliances are you creating with other major organizations within your industry that are strategic partnerships that help both of you guys become successful? And then how are you constantly evaluating what you're doing to ensure that it's still serving you? I don't care whether you talk about sports or whether you talk about business. Life evolves. And life evolves very fast in today's day and age with the amount of information that we're getting, with the amount of technology that we have.
So if you aren't constantly looking back at your processes to say, are these things still serving me? Are they still serving us in the way that we design them to? And if they're not willing to make the necessary adjustments and changes to continue to improve? Because that to me is discipline, right? It's the discipline to make the hard decision. It's the discipline to stay true to what you know and put in the Work day in and day out, regardless of what the weather is, regardless of how you feel, regardless of how many people are watching you or how many people aren't watching you. The discipline to do what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, and how it's supposed to be done.
10:27 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And a lot of times what you focus on grows. So to make sure that you're measuring and making sure those three legs of the stool I'll call them, or the rpd, are in place, allows you to make sure that you're seeing your success as much as possible. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote, unquote, CEOs on the show. So, Marc, what does being a CEO mean to you?
10:50 - Marc Nudelberg
To me, it means having ownership and having radical candor. And so it's not about just setting the direction. It's not about being a visionary. It's about taking responsibility not only for the business but for the people within the business and in the organization and making decisions based on what's good for the whole and not just what's good for you. The other important aspect is exhibiting radical candor and being willing to take responsibility in front of the group, whether the situation is positive or negative.
This means owning outcomes that may not be ideal and being able to honestly discuss what is happening. Transparency is key, as it helps people understand that you are genuinely supportive of them. Because I don't care if you have an organization of three people or 300 people if you're willing to take responsibility for them in the business and you're willing to be radically candid with them about what's happening and where the. What the vision is and where they are. Where do you guys want to go together? You'll create, buy-in, and you'll have success.
11:59 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I love how both of those are kind of strongly intertwined and at the end of the day, helping you to get to the mission that you ultimately hope to have. So definitely appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time, even more, Marc. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best people get a hold of you, get a copy of your book, find out about all the awesome things that you're working on. Sure.
12:22 - Marc Nudelberg
So my book is available on Amazon so you can find it there. It's family, Football, and failure, obviously. Reach out to me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. You can find me at Marc Noodleberg. My email is Marc@ontheballventures.com don't hesitate to reach out to me there. But I'll tell you this, if you choose to reach out to me, you better lead with that first letter in the in the acronym, which is relationship. I can't stand it when somebody reaches out to me and tries to cold-pitch me. Right? I'm putting myself out there daily with content. Find something that resonates with you. Start to build a relationship with me. And I promise you that we will find a way to help each other somehow, some way.
13:05 - Gresham Harkless
There you go. Well, truly appreciate that. And to make it that even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes too so that everybody can reach out with that pearl of wisdom and that nugget that you've been given in so many different ways. But thank you so much for taking time out. I appreciate you and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
13:20 - Marc Nudelberg
Thank you guys. Appreciate it.
13:21 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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