Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Coleman Ayers. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Coleman, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?

As with most ambitious business owners, I’m inspired to leave a multifaceted legacy — one that resonates with a wide variety of people and demographics.

I have always viewed basketball as a truly special vehicle to connect people. As something that goes way beyond a game or a sport. Whether it’s two young players building an interpersonal connection for life in their local area, or now through social media, connecting with people thousands of miles away strictly through hoops, it is the medium through which millions of people meet. Not only that, but it can provide opportunities to change lives.

I want to leave a legacy that demonstrates and amplifies this effect. To be someone who connected millions of people across the world through the sport of basketball, and built out opportunities for countless people in the meantime.

And despite the selfless desire to serve people, I also believe there’s a quite realistic opportunity to build out an enormous business behind it and leave a legacy as someone who used basketball–something they’ve always loved and been attached to–to establish an unbelievably successful venture. I truly believe this will inspire many others to do the same in fields that are born out of passion, even if they’re not known for the big money involved.

Coleman, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started By Any Means Basketball in 2016 as a high school athlete, training my friends and teammates to get experience. Although to me, this wasn’t a hobby, but more so a full obsession: reading journal articles, talking to every professional I could, driving crazy lengths to train people for free. So, simultaneously, I started to produce content online to share what I was learning and break down the game of basketball and its training to a new level. Suddenly, it started to get some traction on YouTube and elsewhere, although I was still a baby-faced (and voiced) 17-year-old with limited experience. This fire kept me motivated to learn everything I could during this time, to ensure the attention I received would be ahead of my expertise. One year later, I had a tough choice between playing college basketball and continuing my passion of training, and although it hurt to the core to put a halt in my basketball dreams, I decided to attend school in Miami for exercise science and chase my real passion: helping OTHERS become better athletes. Since then, which was about six years ago now, I’ve worked daily to grow my base of knowledge, the By Any Means brand, and business.

Since then, we’ve garnered an audience of over 500,000 followers across platforms, traveled to 9 countries and 17 cities to host basketball camps, hosted two coaches’ education conferences, opened our first gym DETAIL Miami, have over 10,000 athletes on our online programs, and have grown the business to a team of five people. And all of us are age 24 or under.

What separates us is the detail and creativity in not only the training side of things, but all facets of the business. We are consistently researching and experimenting to form new methods that breed better athletes, but also work on the brand-building front. We’re also extremely willing to sacrifice, get outside of our local market, and give everything we have to reach and educate athletes and coaches worldwide. We’re looking to grow the game across the world, and although we have our brick and mortar location in Miami, By Any Means is truly becoming a globally known brand.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

At first, the growth on social media was almost an accident. As I’ve mentioned, the entire journey started off as me just looking to learn everything I possibly could, and because of that, I just wanted to share every cool finding that I was taking in. So, every time I would learn something, I would get excited, I would apply it, and then from there, I would share it with others so they can test it out, give me feedback, and use it themselves. Yet during this time. the social media grew to an unbelievable extent. I wasn’t too actively trying to grow it, yet it had a crazy growth rate. So once I made this a full-time commitment to chase this journey of sharing information and scale the social media, I essentially reversed engineered that process, and made sure that I continued that spirit moving forward.

Since then, all of my content has been centered around what I have learned in my studies, and then making sure to apply it and share it in the most digestible way possible. Every time I post a video, I want to ensure it is unique enough to the point where people have either never seen something like it, or have never heard in such a digestible way. This ensures that people cannot only consume the content, but also apply it and put it to work it in a very practical sense. This has allowed us to reach a much more broad audience where we can literally take scientific research and apply it into something that is very simple and practical on the basketball court.

A lot of it has also been being able to share stories, whether it’s ours –being a young group of entrepreneurs–some of our players who have amazing stories, or just overall creating narratives that people love to keep up with on social media, whether that’s following the attention to detail that we consistently preach, taking risks, being creative–the list goes on here. But we continue to identify themes that people resonate with, and enjoy sharing them. I believe that helps many of our followers identify with our content more than just seeing a cool basketball drill on their feed.

Any advice for managing a team?

Since I’m still new to managing a team (the business hsa only really expanded to five people in the last eight or nine months) I can’t act like I’m an expert on this topic, but I do feel like I have some very valuable findings, failures, and successes for other young entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their team.

Number one is maintaining a collaborative or more parallel environment where, yes, the person who is the founder or the “boss” has power and is managing the team, but we also want to ensure that the team is working together collaboratively rather than me handing down commands to everyone else. I am constantly empowering them to give me input, to give each other input, and even to make some decisions without coming to me about it first.

I also think playing into the end goal is key in daily communication. Sometimes the work can become a grind. It can become very monotonous to persevere through the daily tasks at hand, especially when you’re working 12 to 14 hour days every single day at 23 or 24 years old. But we continue to put in perspective the end goals that we have, all of which are extremely exciting and we are all very passionate about, but also have some serious incentives for us in terms of financially and accomplishing some of the missions that we have on a personal level.

This continues to keep the work fresh in the minds of our employees and team members. When you’re working in a business like us where everyone’s very passionate about basketball and the missions we have, the seems to be very valuable tool to keep people motivated and ensure that they are always working in the right direction with a decently fresh mind despite how much work we put in.

The biggest thing I need to work on but I have seen amazing results with whenever I apply it is something that Gary Vee calls “kind candor.” Sometimes it can be tough to be extremely frank and brutally honest with people who are the same age as you and you work on a very parallel basis with, but delivering it in a very understanding way is absolutely vital to maintaining a good team environment and making sure that no one is slacking off while continuing to earn and maintain the trust of your team members. The better I and the team get at this, the more successful we will be as a whole moving forward!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.byanymeansbball.com
• Instagram: @byanymeansbasketball
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colemanayers/
• Twitter: @byanymeansbball
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/byanymeansbasketball