Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Ric Elias, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So I can see myself just being a part of that and helping people that need either courage or capital or conviction to go do something bigger. And it's this beautiful movement called Forward 787 that we just are all a part of and it's authorless and all of that. Well, as part of that, now that's preamble to this thing. [00:00:00] S0: I love all that.
· Ric Elias
[00:00:00] S1: All my high school buddies and we all, we still all get together and we're that age again and we all loved hoops. And the inside story is I always loved hoops more than it loved me. I was too gentle. I'm super tall. I really almost never made any good team. I was always in the B team. I sometimes made the C team. I was really horrendous. But as I grew into my teen age, I got better and I started working at it and became like one of those things where I recognized effort to growth and reward, and I got better and better and better. And I literally was the last cut of a semipro team my senior year in high school. And the assistant coach was my high school coach, so maybe that's why I was the last cut and not the first cut. But I was there and I belonged and then I was getting paid like $100 a week. I was a professional. And I loved them. By the way, it was the best thing to happen to me because then I went and studied and that's when I left for the U.S. But I've always loved the game, and I love it here, sitting next to the Hornets bench. I'm good friends with like five coaches in the NBA that I talk to all the time. I know -- oh, I know everybody. It is a language for me. It's one of the most beautiful languages, college basketball, I know all these guys and I love it, and there's no currency other than love. And so my buddies were like, "Man, the league in Puerto Rico is so good. We should buy a team." I'm like, "I need one more thing, like I need a root canal, 0.0 chance." And they're like, "Come on, man, we can afford it." "We can afford it? Come on. We'll do all the work. And we will go drinking like, all right, go look if there's a team we can buy, like Bad Bunny owns a team, Ozuna owns a team and Javier Molina owns a team. And it's like -- it's really good basketball but super competitive. And I'm like chief in there and then all of a sudden, like we found a team. And then all of a sudden, the team is too far and I'm like, "I'm not driving 1.5 hours for a game. It has to be in San Juan." I'm like setting the most incredible boundaries. So they found a team that we can move to San Juan and we could play at a little volleyball court for three years. Well, they build it a court, and it's the worst team, has never made the playoffs, decent enough guy, but he couldn't afford the team. So we ended up buying the team. We bought it a year ago.
· Ric Elias
And I'm like, I have no time. I'm not doing anything. It's been the greatest voyage. Fast forward, tomorrow. So that team has never made the playoffs. There were three polls at the beginning of the season. We were ranked 12, 11 and 12. There's 12 teams. We were the easy game in everybody's schedule. Fast forward, we are playing game seven of the finals tomorrow night. And it's been the craziest, most fun ride. And you know what I realized, Patrick? I had never owned a toy as an adult. A toy where you literally do it for the pleasure of it and the connections, the ability to bring a philosophical approach to this, the relationships, running it in a very different way, investing differently. The biggest compliment is our best players all came through. This was in the middle of the season. Now we're in the finals. Say -- this is my favorite team I've ever been a part of. And it's all culture. At the end of the day, Patrick, we all want to belong to places that we feel connected to. And the magic of organizations is understanding that. And in this world, we are so disconnected from so many things. People no longer belong to civic groups or churches or all of this. And the ability to create connections -- look, this town is going crazy. Win or loss, if we lose, it doesn't matter. It's so good. If you go through the year, go back to your calendar and say, what are the things that I'm going to remember 10 years from now? You'll be shocked how few they are. If you're lucky, you have six, seven usually experiences, usually things that are either surprising, and it involves different things. And it's a really good exercise to do because you're like, "Okay, how do I do more of those?" I need to design that into my calendar. I'd tell you, I have three of them that are going to show up at the end of the year, including two nights ago when we're down 10 with 2.5 minutes, game six on the road, we send it to overtime. We go to double overtime and we win. I can't sleep the whole night. I have a leadership meeting yesterday, which I am completely exhausted for, and it was the greatest thing ever. So it's been awesome.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: So tell me what you did. How did the culture change? What is the culture of the team? I went and asked everybody. And don't change yourself. Someone told me that you called and were talking in the locker room to every player one-on-one. You're involved. This is not something that you're just phoning in.
· Ric Elias
[00:00:00] S1: I've been in Puerto Rico nine times, and I literally go all down for two games and run back. So I just get so much joy out of it. This is uncomfortable to talk about. But okay, I'll give you a little bit. The first practice we show up, all these players are looking at like, okay, new owner. Players don't trust owners. They get treated like merchandise. They get lied to. They get all this stuff. They're very skeptical. So you can't show up and say, hey, we're going to build a culture of this and that and the other. So I showed up and said, "Look, there's literally three rules here. We are going to invest in you so that you can make more money out of your career here or anywhere." And here's what that means. We put in a full weight room. We put in a bunch of staff. They're looking at us like a little bit incredulous, it's like we're going to do this. Number two is we're actually not going to care about the goal. Teams have goals. This is someone saying, franchises have systems. We're going to build a system, and we're going to play in a certain way, and we're going to do certain things. And then there's nobody that is above the team. So this is a team first and all of that, and we've extrapolated a lot of this. And we signed a big free agent. I think it was two or three days later, we fired him because he was a jerk. Culture is what you tolerate. It's not what you preach. Our best player, we suspended and never told anybody because he was not behaving in a way that was culture for us. He begged to come back. He's the most amazing teammate. This guy says, I've never been part of a team. These kids get treated like whatever. So great teams and anything in life, it is team first because most places are player first. Exceptional teams that where they exceed their expectations from where we are, we are the eighth best team, not the second or first best team, is when there's teammates first. These guys, the love that they feel for each other is beautiful. And the great thing about teams, back to community, is once you are part of an experience like that, the team will end, you will be teammates for life. And that to me is the beautiful part of all of this. Regardless how the story ends, and this may have been our lucky season, we may never make it again, it does not matter.
· Ric Elias, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
No one -- there's a saying in Spanish, nadie te quita lo bailado, you can never take away the songs I've danced. We go to the games. All my friends are sitting in the friends row. It is literally a reunion of high school there, and it's just beautiful. It's just beautiful. Towns are so passionate. It's crazy the love that they have for the game. There's a parade on Saturday to celebrate our championship. I hope we win. [00:00:00] S0: How can I watch this game? [00:00:00] S1: It's on YouTube actually. [00:00:00] S0: Okay. I'll watch it. [00:00:00] S1: There were like 50,000 people on YouTube in the U.S. watching the last one. [00:00:00] S0: Incredible. Man, I hope you win, but it doesn't matter like you said. [00:00:00] S1: It doesn't matter. It's a game. There's no winning. We won already. [00:00:00] S0: It lets me jump back to our list, 39 to 57, on leadership. And I was thinking about this as you were talking about Sully and how to characterize him. And he seems like an incredibly quiet, humble professional. I don't know if he would call himself a leader. I don't know what that means. Lots of good sounding definitions about it. But rather than ask you to define it or versions of it that you've seen, I'm actually more curious on how you think it's changed for you in that 18-year period.