We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Greg Jursek. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Greg below.

Greg, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Risk taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

The biggest risk I took wasn’t starting my business, as it started as a side-hustle. The risk was finally leaving the full-time job with benefits at the most valuable company in the world.

Disc golf isn’t exactly a booming industry but I didn’t leave Apple for Disc Golf because of the money in the sport. I left because I didn’t have the passion anymore at Apple, and I was and still am incredibly passionate about disc golf.

For almost 2 years I worked on our business, Six Sided Discs, in my free time: nights, weekends, whatever I could find. But it wasn’t until I finally left my full-time job that I had time to commit to really pushing it forward.

I finally had time to produce, write and edit YouTube videos introducing obscure brands of discs, different plastics and conducting large-scale comparisons. I decided early on I wanted to release 1 video every week and over time, we’ve turned into more of a YouTube channel than a disc golf retailer. And I’m okay with that, because I’ve always enjoyed creative work, I went to college for graphic design, and for the first time in my life, am feeling really creatively fulfilled with the work I’m doing.

How its turned out? Well, again, don’t go into business in disc golf for the money, there isn’t that much to go around. Do the thing you love because you love it. I tell people I have better life advice than business advice, but our business supports me doing the things I love and for that, I love it!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Greg Jursek. My wife and I started Six Sided Discs, LLC, a disc-golf online retailer, mobile pop-up shop and YouTube channel.

We sell disc golf discs, accessories, bags, apparel and more all related to the sport I love.

I played disc golf briefly in high school, around 2004, but lost touch with it as college, marriage and kids had most of my focus. In early 2020, I rediscovered the sport and dove in head first, playing every morning before work for months and months.

After about 6 months, I knew I had to find a way to make disc golf part of my work, and my wife and I started brainstorming on how we could do that.

She had recently gotten a good job, which gave us breathing room and enabled us to do what we do now!

At this point in time, we release 1 YouTube video to our nearly 15k Subscribers every week, have over 1,000 disc golf discs, accessories and more available for sale online, and travel all over Ohio and across the country to tournaments and expos to meet our fans and sell our products.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Our business have been pivoting from almost day 1.

When we started the business, even in conceptualizing the name and branding, we sold mystery boxes.

We were all about it, but while we still offer mystery boxes, it is FAR from our top priority.

In the 5 years we’ve been in business, we’ve changed focus multiple times.

For the first year, we were just a small, online-only retailer of disc golf discs.

For the second and third year, we were a traveling pop-up shop and disc golf tournaments and events across Ohio, anywhere from 15 to 200 players per event, and that was our primary focus and source of revenue.

In the past 2 years, we’ve become much more focused on content creation. Our YouTube channel has grown significantly, we’ve been invited to Expo’s as a content creator to meet our fans and sell our branded products. But we still attend local events, both amateur and professional and have a more even split of revenue between those channels.

What we’ll be in 2 years is yet to be determined but I would be amazed if it didn’t change again.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I think a lot of people these days assume you can’t start a business without taking out a loan, finding investors, whatever.

My wife and I have been completely debt free (apart from our mortgage) for at least the last 10 years if I’m remembering correctly. (Full disclosure, she has an MBA in Finance, so let’s just say the financial side is her area of expertise, not mine!)

That being said, the approach we took was to invest our own money in ourselves. We put up the first few thousand dollars that got our business started and have snowballed that over and over and over again. On 2 seperate occasions we put a little more money into the business to give it a little boost for a particular project we were focused on, like switching to more branded merchandise and when we purchased our Sprinter Van to travel to events and transport or product.

If you’re willing to be more patient with your business, you can invest a small amount of money, something you can realistically save up over a year or two, maybe less, and just go from there. But I would recommend setting a limit and making sure you let the business show you whether it is sustainable or not before putting more money in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sixsideddiscs.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sixsideddiscs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SixSidedDiscs
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SixSidedDiscs