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Defying The Odds: From NFL Player To Entrepreneur

YEC
POST WRITTEN BY
Chris Gronkowski

I went to college never expecting to make it to the NFL. It was a miracle when I received a late, full scholarship offer to college to replace players with low high school GPAs and test scores. After my junior year, I was told I was on the radar for a few NFL teams. But when draft day came, I was not drafted.

I signed a rookie free agent minimum contract with the Dallas Cowboys. My signing bonus was a whopping $12,000. I was on a short leash and had to prove quickly that I was worth keeping around. After watching my three other brothers get drafted, I had all the motivation in the world to make the team. No undrafted free agent rookie had made the Dallas Cowboys roster in 10 years. But that year, I was on the roster on opening day. I ended up starting as a fullback for three different teams over the next four years.

I was able to leave the game with a 401K, pension, annuity and plenty more benefits that the NFL now provides for players who do get vested after three seasons. It was a great start for me, but the real world was approaching quickly. According to a 2009 Sports Illustrated article, 78 percent of National Football League (NFL) players are either bankrupt or are under financial stress within two years of retirement. I was not going to be part of that statistic.

Since my career in the NFL has ended, I have been able to make more money in my first four years outside the NFL than I did playing four years in the NFL. I continued to beat the odds again with a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work. My NFL career started in Dallas and took me to Indianapolis, Denver and San Diego. After our third move, my wife was fed up with looking for new jobs. She opened a company selling hand-painted wine glasses. She was able to use the Etsy platform and its customer base to get sales. This was great, but the orders were not frequent enough to make a steady income. We figured out how to increase her visibility on the Etsy search pages by using the most popular search terms for the products she was selling, and looking at what other sellers were doing to rank first for those search terms. Once we figured out how to get on the first page, the shop exploded. The only thing left to do was to find a way to scale the business -- hand-painting the glasses took way too long.

My NFL career was ending around this time. I was hurt in camp with the Chargers and they released me with an injury settlement. While I was rehabbing, I was able to look into different ways to scale the company. First, we priced out different products that we considered selling. Then we had to figure out how much to sell each personalized product for online and which products had the best profit margins. We decided that the wedding industry was the best market for us. We invested in industrial laser engravers and were able to launch in the personalized gift market, mostly targeting weddings on Etsy.

One thing that I have learned about using a marketplace like Etsy, eBay or Amazon is that you have to find a way to branch out and not be fully dependent on other companys' customer bases and their rules. We learned this the hard when Etsy went public. It changed its rules about having duplicate shops. We had multiple shops set up to help with search rankings, and we were told we had to completely shut down any duplicate setups. We had put a ton of time into the second shop and were forced to either completely redesign it or take it down. This is when we started building our network outside of Etsy. If I could do it again, I would have branched out earlier.

My true passion has always been in sports, nutrition and working out. In the summer of 2016, I was pumping iron in the gym and my shaker bottle was warm and smelly. I went home that day and looked for an insulated shaker bottle but couldn't find any. I immediately saw an opportunity in the market and decided to create the best shaker bottle that I could. At the end of December 2016, I launched Ice Shaker, a kitchen-grade stainless steel shaker bottle that does not absorb odor and will hold ice for over 30 hours in a 75-degree room.

The hardest part of getting the company off the ground was finding a supplier we could trust. We were sent about 20 before we decided that we had the right manufacturer. It took us another month before we received a perfect prototype, and then another couple months to make and ship the product. When waiting for the product to arrive, I wish we had gotten the product to influencers in the industry to review. When we first launched, it was not what I expected. Sales weren't strong. It was a brand new product with absolutely no reviews or articles. It took a few weeks before we got our first review, and that really helped us gain trust with our audience. Sales picked up.

Only half of all businesses survive their first five years, but I have a good feeling that Ice Shaker is going to defy the odds again.