We recently connected with Greg Mulamba and have shared our conversation below.

Greg, appreciate you joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.

Starting my own soccer development company during the pandemic is one of the biggest risks I’ve ever taken. Entrepreneurship in any form is something that can seem impossible from the outside. Going on your own journey and being your own boss is a dream to many people, but they have never taken the step to release themselves from their nine-to-five. Also knowing that 20% of small businesses fail within the 1st year and 30% by the end of the second year didn’t make things any easier. However, I had always had the dream and vision to start my own company and if all I focused on was obstacles thats all I’d see, instead I focused on my vision and decided to bet on myself.

What really sparked me to get the ball rolling was reading the book The Obstacle Is The Way by my favorite author Ryan Holiday, he has this concept of alive time and dead time. The whole world was going through this pandemic which was out of my control, but would I use that time I had as alive time and come out of it even better than i went into it or was I going to use it as dead time and come out of it the same or worse, i chose alive time.
With help from family and friends I started my business plan, registered FalseNin9 Soccer as an LLC in Austin Texas and a few months later hosted my first session with a few special player who’s parents believed in my vision. I’m now going into my 3rd year as a business owner the company is doing well and growing everyday, but if i had let my fear of failure get in the way of my beliefs I never would have taken the risk and been in the position i’m in right now.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Greg Mulamba I am the owner of FalseNin9 Soccer Development. We work with soccer players of all ages background and gender on improving their abilities both physically and mentally. At FalseNin9 Soccer Development we believe that soccer, and life, are separated into 2 parts: external and internal factors. External factors refer to the things a player cannot control. Internal factors are the individual choices that they can control.

We teach players to account for the external factors and tap into the possibilities within the internal factors. Once a player masters awareness of the external factors, and control over the internal factors they can make confident, creative, and high-level decisions in their play. This ability will translate into any level of soccer, to any formation, for any coach; but most importantly, this decision-making ability will translate into their everyday lives.

We have multiple athletes who have come through our program who have played at every level of the game, professional, College Division 1, 2 and 3, high school and youth academy. Our program is focused around the process not the outcome, if players can master the details in the process then the outcome will take care of itself. Seeing our players achieve their goals is an amazing feeling but more than that is seeing them grow along the way and trust the process.

We believe in having fun and enjoy the process but there is always high challenge and high support. If you’re looking for something easy then FalseNin9 is not for you, but if you’re looking to grow and push yourself to the max in an environment with great support and leadership from coaches then you’re in the right place.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I lost my job during the pandemic as many other did and it was during that tough time that I started building my business. There were a lot of sleepless nights not knowing wether or not what i was doing would work, I had many doubts and fears that I had to work through and believe in my vision. After a few month of being in business I wasn’t making much money and only had about 6 clients, then i got a phone call from my former employer offering me my old job back. This was a pivotal moment for me, I was being offered safety, security and stability again but at what cost? I knew that regardless of failure or success I would regret it for the rest of my life if i didn’t follow my vision & passion. I turned down the option to go back to my old job and instead poured myself into my own company, and eventually 6 clients turned into 10 and 10 into 20 and now we’ve had more than 100 players participate in our program from camps to group sessions & individual sessions. In order to get this stage i had to be resilient and push through the hard times, i had to adapt and be flexible and make hard decisions that seemed crazy at the time, but when you have a passion and vision for your life you have to be a little crazy.

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

Our main social media presence is on Instagram @FalseNin9Soccer it was actually my 2 younger brother that got the page up and running and just invited all their friends to follow the page. For the first few weeks we had no content only our logo was up, i didn’t want to put any content out that I didn’t feel comfortable with I wanted quality. I had a vision for the type of content I wanted to put out and I was going to stick to that, I wanted to put out great drills and have the audience not only come to my page to watch our drills but to connect with me and my players. Slowly but surely we started to grow and people liked our content and started asking about the drills and players and how they can be a part of it. Since then we’ve had a few of our videos go viral with over a million fews and we keep growing everyday. The main thing that worked for us was staying true to our vision, we got a lot of advice to do things differently on social media but it wasn’t the vision I had and at the end of the day its your company its good to take advice but you should be true to who you are and put out content you want to put out and the right audience will follow you.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.falsenin9.com
• Instagram: @FalseNin9Soccer

Image Credits
Common Culture Creative & Media Agency IG: @commonculturelab