Baseball is Just a Game

- Jason Christiansen, I'm the president/CEO of Rigid Industries. My background is baseball. I'm a retired baseball player. I spent 11 years in the major leagues. I would do everything I possibly could to help our team win a game. In business it's very similar. You put the team together, they don't have to be best friends, they don't have to understand each other wholeheartedly but when it comes down to crunch time and you need to get stuff done, you have to be able to rely on each other. I put people in place that are much smarter than me, that knew how to do things better than I did, and honestly made my job a lot easier. That to me was the hardest thing to look in the mirror and say I'm not good enough to do this. There's no way I can possibly continue to grow this company and do everything I'm doing right now. As you continue to put those people in place you kind of pull back. That's probably the best move I ever made. Now was it hard? Of course it is, but that was a necessary thing for us to take that next leap, to continue that growth. Teamwork was what I did for 25 years of my life whether it was high school, college, minor league baseball, major league baseball. I was a pitcher. When you put me between the lines I was very confident. If you were a pitcher and you didn't think you could get every hitter that came up then you would get swallowed up very quickly and you wouldn't be in the big leagues for very long. Pitching in a major league baseball game was so much easier. I felt a calm I felt at home when I was on the mound. I was completely at home there. You put me in front of my 150 employees I get nervous. I look at it and go I am directly responsible for 150 plus families. And if we decide to do something off kilter it could affect how many people we have there. There is a sense of ownership within Rigid. People have stickers on their cars, they have lights on their vehicles, they wear the shirts when they're not workin', you know we give them t-shirts they get hats. There's a sense of pride and ownership because they've been a part of this. They expect me to make sure things go correctly and that we continue to grow so that they can be safe and secure in their job and know that we're gonna be around for a long time. I'm okay with that. I don't think it's gonna be easy for me to continue to do this, but I relish an opportunity to try and make it work. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished as a team. For me it'll always be nerve wracking to continue to grow this company and be successful and do what we can to make sure that our team is secure and safe. It's not like baseball, baseball is just a game.