Marc Nudelberg with On the Ball Ventures

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this morning. You guys are in for a real treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast coach, author, entrepreneur and president with On the Ball Ventures Mr. Marc Nudelberg. Good morning, Coach.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:00:38] Good morning. Stone Thank you so much for the opportunity to join you on this fantastically named show.

Stone Payton: [00:00:44] Well, thank you for that. No, we’re delighted to have you on the program. You’ve got a new book out, Family, Football and Failure, and I want to talk all about that in just a moment. But I was thinking maybe first you could share with me in the listening audience. Mission, purpose. What are you and your team out there every day Really, really trying to do for folks?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:01:06] Sure. So I think, you know, to sum it all up, it comes down to helping everybody adapt the 1% better mindset. And I think when most people read into that or they think about it, James Clear did a great job of publishing a book called Atomic Habits, which talked about our habits making us who we are and the 0.01% that you could accumulate over a year, ultimately getting you to 36% better a year. But when I think about the mindset, to me it’s about accepting the challenge of trying to get better, right? I was fortunate to grow up in an entrepreneurial family, was fortunate to have a 14 year career in college football, and ultimately what entrepreneurship and sports have in common is the willingness to get up and accept the challenge of going out and trying to do your best every day and trying to be better. So that to me is how we help organizations, help individuals, whether you be in the C-suite, whether you be a middle manager, or you be some sales associate responsible for a quota at the end of the month, it’s all about how do I develop the right processes for myself, How do I develop all of the right mental gymnastics that I have to do every day in order to accept the challenge of getting 1% better?

Stone Payton: [00:02:27] So when you’re bringing this to the market, the work itself is a is it coaching, training, speaking consulting, or is it span the gamut? A little bit of all of.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:02:36] That, All of the above? All of the above. So so so for me, the biggest difference that I saw when I left the athletic arena and moved into the business arena was that training was something that only got done in the first two weeks of you being hired or it happened once a quarter when they would bring in a keynote speaker and try to motivate everybody to go move the needle. Or maybe it was only once a year. So coming out of sport where training was something that you did year round, right? It didn’t matter whether we were in season or out of season. We as coaches were watching the film and training ourselves on how to create better schemes, teach better, become better, recruit better and bring in more talent to the organization, or whether it be the athlete. They were working in the weight room, they were doing extra reps, one on one with each other out on the field, and they were doing training year round in order to offer them the opportunity to become a high performer. So I think helping organizations develop a year round training for their people and helping them invest more in their people to keep them on their game, keep them growing and ultimately create a better engaged workforce is a mission that I have.

Stone Payton: [00:03:56] What a fantastic way to frame it and a marvelous perspective to offer to training year round. I really like that. So was there a specific catalyst or a catalytic moment that compelled you to transition from the athletic arena to the business world?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:04:17] Sure. You know, I was I was fortunate to to spend my career at five different schools across the United States, got to work with some of the best coaches and some of the worst coaches in college football. And ultimately, to me, I’ve always been under I always believed that whatever you wanted you could attain as long as you were willing to sacrifice whatever it took. And so after ten years of being a special teams coordinator, moving around the country and working at five different schools, I really was unsure that I was willing to continue to sacrifice what I knew was necessary in order to continue to operate at a high level in a college football environment. So for most people they think, Oh, you’re a college football coach, you work. You know, August to December, and that’s it. The lifestyle of a college football coach is 24 seven, almost 365. Essentially, you’re working 16 hours a day for 340 days a year. And I was unsure that I was willing to devote that for the rest of my life. So that offered me the opportunity to take a step back and reassess what I was going to do with my life. And that was the entry point into the corporate America and business world that I work in today.

Stone Payton: [00:05:35] Did you have the benefit? Have you had the benefit of one or more mentors as you try to navigate this this new landscape, this this business arena?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:05:45] Oh, absolutely. You know, I’m fortunate to work in a family business. And so my entire life and my entire career, I’ve looked at my father, Steve Noodle Burg, as one of my mentors. He’s he’s been always been there for me to not only support me, but also challenge me and challenge me on my thoughts and challenge me on on what I was really trying to do and what my visions were. And so when I told him that I was having second thoughts about whether or not I was willing to devote what was necessary to be successful, he was like, Come on home. He’s like, Come on back here. I got a bunch of people that I’d like to introduce you to that can help offer you perspective and help you make a decision. And that wasn’t the moment that led me to working with him, but that was the moment that started the journey that led me working with him.

Stone Payton: [00:06:35] Well, I can hear it in your voice. I know our listeners can hear it over the airwaves. You clearly are enjoying the work, the the passion, the enthusiasm comes through. What are you what are you finding the most rewarding? What are you enjoying the most at this point about the work?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:06:52] The same thing that I’ve always found the most rewarding, which is helping people get better. You know, I was fortunate to, at a very young age, be able to find my passion, which was coaching. Right? It wasn’t necessarily about being in football, It wasn’t necessarily about being in athletics. Yes, I love the game and yes, I love learning it. But the thing I was passionate about was being able to help the players be the best they could be, whether that be in the classroom, whether that be on the field, whether that be just as a young man growing up. So it’s that same philosophy that I take to working with individuals in the business world or organizations in the business world is I get to watch my impact, help an individual get better, both personally and professionally, whether that leads to more money for them or a promotion for them. And then I get to watch that impact take effect on the business and watch people’s businesses grow because of the growth of their people. And that’s the thing that’s always excited me is the growth of people.

Stone Payton: [00:07:54] All right. Let’s talk about this book. How is it structured? How can we get the most out of it? Tell us a little bit about this book.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:08:02] Sure. So so I when it was about a year and a half being removed from football and being into the business world, my dad pushed me, as he always does, and said, Hey, I think it’s time for you to write a book like you’ve got unbelievable stories, you’re doing unbelievable things, impacting people. Now in the 2.0 version of your career, he’s like, You have to encapsulate all that and be able to share it before you forget it. And so that started the process of me writing the book, which is titled Family Football and Failure, which is truly the roadmap to success that I learned from growing up in an entrepreneurial family, having a career in athletics and then ultimately becoming an entrepreneur. All of the parallels, all of the individual lessons through stories that I learned about leadership, about developing championship mindset and championship behavior. Because when I say that to me, what makes Mark Cuban successful as an entrepreneur is the same thing that made Kobe Bryant or any of the great athletes that I worked with. Successful starts in the mindset, moves towards a process and ultimately ends in the discipline of that process. So I live and then I try to teach this acronym, which is RPD, which is relationships, process and discipline. If you feed those three factors in your life daily, you’re going to find success.

Stone Payton: [00:09:34] So the way this thing is set up is, is it a story based thing? Is it a is it a process? How did you choose to to lay out this content in the book through stories?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:09:44] Right. Because I believe that that’s the best way that people learn. And I’ve found that that’s the way people receive information. Best. So by the chapters, it’s kind of taking you through the journey of how I learned all of these lessons. There’s the stories that are that are built into that are that come from the lessons. And then at the end of every chapter, there are key takeaways which synthesize the stories for everybody to say, Hey, here are the blocking and tackling, or Here’s the fundamentals of what I just talked about and what you need to take away to go apply for yourself.

Stone Payton: [00:10:18] So as a trainer, consultant, facilitator in a former life, what you’re describing strikes me as a great tool to utilize in a team environment as well. Is that accurate? Can a team inside a company use this book, go read pieces of it, come back and talk through their perspective on what they read, that kind of thing?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:10:39] 1,000%. And what I hope people are able to do with it, with or without my assistance, is to take those principles, apply them into their organization, and say, Hey, here’s the core philosophy of what he was talking about. How do we develop a leadership development strategy around this? Or how do we how do we find a way to create some of these behaviors for our self within our business? How do we adopt these principles that he’s talking about into our own culture, into our own strategy to help us be successful?

Stone Payton: [00:11:13] Well, I’m so glad that you brought up culture, because I got to confess to you and gotten everybody as much time as I spent in the training and development arena, man, I never could really get my arms around that. The whole idea of culture and I don’t feel like I was ever particularly effective at helping a leader genuinely impact, let alone shift or create a culture. Can can you offer some insight on that front?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:11:41] I think culture comes down to very simply the way your people live day in and day out. So in order for them to have a structure or a guardrail, for them to live within or the way you want them to live, you have to have core values. So if you were if I were to define for you your culture, number one, everybody says they have core values because they’re written on a wall or they’re in a playbook somewhere. But if you ask the people walking down the hallway, Hey, what are our core values? Most of them would struggle to tell you. Even one of them you get the Oh, I’m pretty sure that accountability is one of them. Right? And so so in order to develop culture, you, number one, have to have core values that speak to the behaviors that you want people to be living. And then number two, it’s a very simple three step process. You need to have people know them, you need to have people live them, and you need to have people get held accountable to them, both from leadership and from their peers. And so the highest performing cultures are not a top down hierarchy of accountability, but it’s actually an accountability at every level through every peer and through every individual, because everybody is well aware of what the core values are and what’s expected and everybody is living them. So the ones who do not tend to stick out like a sore thumb and because everybody understands the importance of them, they’re willing to hold each other accountable to them.

Stone Payton: [00:13:09] So what’s the day to day application of this 1% better mindset idea? Like how do I apply that in my day to day life?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:13:20] Well, so for me it comes down to understanding what are your priorities? So everybody has goals. Most people do a poor job of breaking down their goals into milestone objectives. And so I liken that to football for people. The goal was to win a national championship at the end of the year, but in order to win a national championship, we had to make the playoff. And in order to make the playoff, you had to win the conference. In order to win the conference, you had to go undefeated at home. And in order to go undefeated at home, you had to practice a certain way. In order to practice a certain way, you had to train a certain way. Similarly, for business, your goal may be to break $1,000,000,000 in revenue this year, but in order to break $1,000,000,000 in revenue this year, you need to have a certain number of sales. And in order to make a certain number of sales, you need to be creating a certain number of conversations in order to be able to creating a certain number of conversations, you need to create a certain amount of interest. And how you go about doing all of those things ultimately is the effect on the goal. So most people set the goal and then stare at the goal all year long, understanding that if I’m going to have a 1% better mentality, I need to understand what are the behaviors and what are the activities that I need to be responsible for in order to reach my goals. And if I can define those behaviors and activities, then I just have to develop a process that is repeatable because most people have a process. But that process is based on what the weather is and how they feel every day. So if I can develop a process that regardless of circumstance and regardless of the way I feel, I’m able to execute that process, then it becomes down to disciplining myself, to showing up day in and day out, doing the things I need to do in order to give myself the opportunity to reach my goal.

Stone Payton: [00:15:16] I know you help clients sell more effectively. How does the whole sales and marketing thing work for you? How do you and your team get the new business?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:15:29] Sure. So. So I was I was raised in a retail family. My grandfather owned a designer women’s shoe store. My father started his career in that business and then moved his way through retail to clothing and ultimately to cellular phones when they were first happening down here in South Florida. And that understanding of the retail experience and what it meant to have a loyal customer and what it meant to create customers and the relationship building side of it. While buyer behavior has changed over the decades because of the access to information and the education level of the buyer and who’s holding information. The thing that hasn’t changed is that people still want relationship. People still want to know the people that they’re buying from. And so ultimately, the game really changed because those tactics of cold calling, cold knocking became or the interrupting strategy that that had become of sales really turn people off. And so how do you as an individual, stay responsible for creating awareness for yourself and ultimately creating conversations for yourself, but do it in a way that’s warm, that’s engaging, that’s relationship development driven, and that offers you the best opportunity to get time with someone. So leveraging tools like social media, leveraging tools like video in the best ways possible in order to create new opportunities for yourself is the ways that we monetize the sales process.

Stone Payton: [00:17:04] And to your point, it’s so important that, yes, we take full advantage of those tools, those resources, but don’t get away from from the fundamentals, like still respect and deploy the fundamentals. Yeah.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:17:18] Amen. Like, to me, it always comes back to the fundamentals. It always comes back to the basics. And so if you are taking that interrupt mentality in that cold pitch mentality and showing up in your content that way and showing up in direct messages that way, then you’re just doing you’re just taking a new tool and using an old school philosophy, and that doesn’t work that way. So if you change your thought process to it’s not about me selling all the time, but it’s about me figuring out a way how to market myself to people in order to create relationships and create new conversations and drive new opportunities, then that changes the way you operate inside of these platforms. So a lot of people don’t like social media. A lot of people are like, Oh, I don’t want to put myself out there or It’s not for business. All social media is. Is is the largest relationship development tool in the history of the world. So whether you look at LinkedIn, whether you look at Facebook, Instagram, I don’t care what it is, those are all opportunities to engage with individuals and create new relationships. And if you look at it that way and that informs the behavior in which you operate, it can change the way you take advantage of them.

Stone Payton: [00:18:31] So after 15 minutes with you, I’m not at all sure this ever happens to you, but I’m going to ask anyway if and when you do kind of run out of gas, the batteries get low. How do you recharge? How do you kind of rekindle the flame? What do you do?

Marc Nudelberg: [00:18:49] So I believe that we are all a product of our inputs. So for me, if I feel like I’m running on E, like if I’ve maxed myself, I’ve kind of put myself into too many situations back to back or I’m not taking care of myself nutritionally or I’m not getting the workout, or maybe I’m listening and reading and watching things that aren’t feeding my mindset. I go back and I look and I say, Where? Where did I get away from giving myself the things I need in order to be able to perform my best? Now I’ve looked at it for myself. I know that working out early in the morning is really important to me. Being energized throughout the day. I know that the way I eat over the weekend has a significant effect Monday through Wednesday. So all of the things that are important to me help feed my fuel and my fire. And so if I feel like I’m running low on those, I go back and look at them and say, well, where have I gone wrong? Or have it gotten away from these things? And what do I need to get back to in order to feel the way I need to feel?

Stone Payton: [00:19:54] Just before we wrap, let’s leave our listeners with a couple of, I don’t know, RPD Pro Tips or maybe a couple of actionable things from the from the book, from the work. Just something that we can we can start to be thinking about reading about doing, not doing.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:20:10] So I would say the easiest things to put into practice if you’re not sure on where to get started. On accepting the challenge to get 1% better every day is to just start paying attention to what you do. Right. I think when it when it comes down to time management and understanding that there’s nothing more valuable than our time and how we spend it, then if we’re just become aware. And the easiest thing to do is at the end of every day, just write a log. Think about from the time you got up to the time you’re going to bed. What are all the things I did today, right? And keep track of those things so that at the end of a week you’re able to go back and review and say, I say that these things are my priorities. Yet when I look back at my activities, not a lot of what I’m actually doing feeds those priorities. So if I don’t feel like I’m making movement, if I don’t feel like I’m making progress, if I don’t feel like I’m growing, what can I take away? What are the things that I’m doing that I know aren’t feeding my priorities in order to replace those things with the things I know I need to do in order to get better.

Stone Payton: [00:21:17] Where can our listeners get their hands on this book? Let’s leave them with some contact info. I want them to have a really easy path to connect with. You have a conversation with you or someone on your team. I want to make sure they can get their hands on this book, maybe begin to learn a little bit more about social selling, video, selling, so whatever you feel like is appropriate. Linkedin Websites.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:21:37] The two best places to find me are on LinkedIn and on Instagram. My Instagram handle is at Coach Noodle and UDL. Those are the two best places to get me in to get my book. If you don’t go there, go to our website. Ww on the ball ventures dot com almost any of the links on that page will bring you to a member of our team and offer you the opportunity to engage with us, have a virtual coffee as we would like to to do with everybody because that’s the best way to start a relationship and have a virtual coffee with us, ask questions and allow us to help direct you and where you need to go.

Stone Payton: [00:22:15] Well, Coach, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show today. Thank you for investing the time and energy with us to share your perspective and your experience. Thank you for the work you’re doing, man. It’s important work and we we sure appreciate you.

Marc Nudelberg: [00:22:31] Thank you. Stone This was an absolute fantastic opportunity and I appreciate you so much.

Stone Payton: [00:22:36] All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Coach Mark Noodle Burg, president of On the Ball Ventures, and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.