Slackers

Doing Things Other People Don't Do: Building 5ive Tool Baseball with Jared Eichelberger

Episode Summary

“You get to do things other people don’t do by doing things people don’t do.” In this Season 1 bonus episode — and a preview of what’s coming in Season 2 — Jaime and Jonathan sit down with Jared Eichelberger, former MLB pitcher and founder of 5ive Tool Baseball Academy in San Diego. Twenty years into building a business rooted in youth baseball, culture, and life skills, Jared opens the books — literally — on what it takes to turn a passion into a real operation. We hope you enjoy this behind-the-curtain founder conversation, and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss all the new insider conversations coming your way in Season 2.

Episode Notes

We wrapped 20 episodes. And the feedback that kept coming back wasn’t “give us more frameworks.”It was: “What does this actually look like when I’m sitting at my desk, trying to figure out what to do next?”That question is what Season 2 is all about. Consider this bonus episode a preview: real founders, real operators, and the actual guts of what they’re building.

In this episode of Slackers, Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse roll up their sleeves with Jared Eichelberger — former professional pitcher in the Mets and Mariners organizations, son of MLB pitcher Juan Eichelberger, and founder of 5ive Tool Baseball Academy, San Diego’s premier youth baseball training organization. Twenty years in, Jared runs a real operation: dozens of coaches, roughly 40 league partnerships, camps from San Diego to Scottsdale to Chicago to Austria, and a business at a genuine inflection point.

Key themes include:

“Carry your own bag” — why life skills taught in a hurry are the real product
Uniformity as trust-building: how looking the part became a brand system
Every yes is a no: the deliberate decision to serve rec leagues, not travel ball
From 80 lessons a week to a team that runs without you — breaking the founder bottleneck
The ownership flywheel: what happens when coaches feel empowered to improve the business
Ears open for opportunity: how one parent conversation became the Scottsdale expansion
Radical financial transparency — why Jared tells his team exactly what he pays himself
Expensive hobby or business? Tracking every event against the P&L
Management Mondays, top-three task lists, and auditing where your energy actually goes
Why strategic empathy — knowing your customer’s schedule better than they do — is a business asset

Jared’s story runs from a single pitching clinic at his high school alma mater to a half-million-dollar operation built almost entirely on organic reach, league relationships, and a 1.5-million-view video about how to size a bat. Along the way he unpacks the systems that made scale possible — from Google Voice and a wall calendar to 41 managed schedules — and the harder work of finding people who share the vision and giving them real ownership of it.

Consider this a preview of many insights we unpack in Season 2: a founder who talks for nearly two hours and barely mentions the business — because the culture, the customers, and the craft are the business. The things Jared over-indexes on are the hardest things for any organization to build. He just built them first.

Season 2 is coming: more builders, more operators, more behind-the-curtain conversations — in real time, with real stakes. This is what better work looks like up close.