Mike Nemeth
MEMBER NAME
Mike Nemeth
West Point ‘04
COMPANY
Emblem Athletic
INDUSTRY
Custom Apparel
Mike Nemeth, CEO Emblem Athletic
THE CHALLENGE
Mike hails from a family of entrepreneurs who taught him to “do safe things” in lieu of the startup journey. After spending years seeking corporate career fits and never feeling at home, Mike diverged from his parents’ advice and started his own company, which later failed.
With his back against the wall and no other solutions in sight, he learned the first lesson of a serial entrepreneur—if at first you don’t succeed, do it better the next time. Thus came the launch of Emblem Athletic, a custom apparel company that made it easy for sports teams to find, design, and order custom uniforms.
While a great idea, Emblem Athletic struggled to find its feet. When Bill Watkins sat down to dinner with Mike in May of 2018, the company was on the verge of going under, Mike was enslaved to its survival, and his family of four was stretched taut and ready to snap.
THE JOURNEY TO tHE 0.01%
According to Mike Nemeth
DEFINING THE CORE
This happened as I completed the first column of the One Page Business Plan. Defining your core values and core purpose seems irrelevant for smaller companies starting out. I remember thinking, “We don’t need to do this stuff, we just need to make it to the next month.” But that’s where so many of us smaller companies are wrong.
Nailing our core: we were able to launch so quickly during COVID because of all the systems I learned at TLP and I’ve put in place.
Just knowing what our core values are and staying true to them has been a game-changer. Narrowing down who we are is not limiting at all—we’ve been able to expand to new products and audiences because we have guardrails in place. In fact, that’s how our our Emblem Shield was born.
MEETING RHYTHM
TLP has converted me from an anti-meetings person to a meetings-that-don’t-suck advocate. Having a meeting structure, understanding how to run a meeting, understanding WHY we have meetings—and how to improve them—has changed the way we act and react as a company.
FASCINATION ADVANTAGE / SELF-AWARENESS
Awareness of how I best operate and acknowledging and accepting where other people can do it better has shown me that I don’t have to do it all. The self-awareness piece creates better contributors and better teams—and it’s making me a better husband and father.
Live Event, July 2019, Watkins Ranch
WHY I CHOSE THE COHORT
To be very clear: I was anti-coaching. I didn’t want someone who had simply been a coach all their life. I wanted someone with real experience. Who IS this Bill Watkins guy and what does he really know?
I saw that fellow West Point grad Jed Richards (RichardGroup) was a member of The Lions Pride, so I reached out and told him I was considering it. His words: “Best decision you’ll ever make in your life.” That sealed the deal for me and I immediately signed up and joined the Cohort in January 2019.
Watch Mike Nemeth's full an interview with Bill Watkins.
“Everyone knows how to get fit and be healthy. It’s no mystery. But nobody is doing it alone for a lot of reasons. It’s not as easy as it looks. It’s the same with launching and sustaining your business.”
“The secret sauce are the Cohort members and the exponential learning that happens when we walk through these courses and tools together.”
