Lisimba Patilla introduces himself with just one word: coach.
He answers the phone that way and signs his letters and emails with “Coach Patilla.” And, technically, he is one — a defensive backs coach for the Malone University football team.
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What to Ask
Do I have the time?
Running a business focused on one-on-one consulting services requires a tremendous amount of time, says Phil Bessler, director of the Business Clinic at Baldwin-Wallace College. “Can you ever have enough clients who are willing to pay you enough money to make it worthwhile?”
Am I prepared?
Lisimba Patilla, founder of Noblesteps, started planning his company a year before he was laid off from his regular job. “I was totally prepared,” he says. “I had already researched my business and was starting to get clients.”
Can I be available?
Relationships are the core of a business such as Patilla’s. That means being responsive and picking up the phone when it rings. “It’s important because parents want to know and feel that their children are just as important to you as they are to them,” Patilla explains.
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But with his new business, Noblesteps Management, Patilla is positioning himself as far more than an on-field adviser. He wants to coach young student-athletes and their parents about getting into and staying in college.
Patilla says that when he started researching this line of work, he found that most young student-athletes were prepared for just one thing when it came to college — playing sports.
“From the academic side of it, they didn’t know what they wanted to study,” he says.
Noblesteps, at its most basic element, is a marketing company that helps high school athletes get noticed by college athletic programs. For $58 a month or $695 a year, customers get Patilla’s e-marketing athletic recruitment system, which includes a personal student-athlete website, a professionally managed marketing campaign and an unlimited message system to college coaches around the country. They also get Patilla’s book, Guide to Athletic Recruiting & Career Education.
“I have a nice little system of marketing yourself,” Patilla says, “but just as well, the career coaching is just as important. It gives kids a vision beyond sports.”
He preaches to kids and parents that students need to be serious about academics and finding a career that’s right for them. And doing that involves talking to people in
all sorts of professions, well before they ever get to college.
Parents listen, he says, because college can be expensive, even with an athletic scholarship, and because he tells parents two things. The first is that 1 percent of college athletes go on to become professionals. “And of those that make it,” Patilla says, “80 percent leave professional sports broke.
“They lost an entire decade of their life,” he continues. “They didn’t take college seriously, they spent all their money trying to live up to a stereotype of being an athlete, and now the game is over, and they don’t have anything left.”
Patilla has been where many of these student-athletes are right now. He played NCAA Division II football at Northwood University in the early 1990s as a corner back.
While in college, he studied business administration and marketing, which helped get him a job with AC Delco on an executive track.
Patilla was a district manager for AC Delco and one of the top five sellers in Chicago. Then he moved to Cleveland and was one of the top two sellers here when, after a
bad year, he lost his job.
“We were not hitting as many of the sales targets they wanted us to meet,” Patilla says, “so they trimmed us. They got rid of that part of middle management.”
It just so happened that, at the time, Patilla was already laying the groundwork for Noblesteps, though he had planned it to be part time.
“I was totally prepared,” Patilla says. “I saw the writing on the wall, so about a year before that happened, I had already researched my business and was starting to get clients.”
So far, Patilla has signed 25 families. He’s worked with athletes whose potential ranges from NAIA to NCAA Division I. Most recently, Patilla worked with Jason Suggs, a running back from Medina High School who will be playing for Lehigh University, a Div. I-AA school in Pennsylvania, this year.
“My one hope,” Patilla says, “is that these young people believe they are better off as a result of our interaction.”
Plus: Four tips for working with student-athletes and their families.