Building Community and Connection in Business with Craig Moody

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:16)
Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with my co-host, Mike Liwski and our special guest. So nine in ten parents believe playing sports helps children build character and teaches essential life skills. And families are spending more time and money than ever on youth sports because they see it as a path to confidence, community, and developing grit. And what is often overlooked is that behind every great team environment is usually a very intentional system, culture, and sometimes even a business model, if you look close. The best programs are not just teaching skills on the court, but designing experiences that help people feel connected and supported in their growth. And today we are exploring what it looks like to build real community and connection in a modern business, drawing lessons from the world of high tech sports training and franchising. Mike, introduce our special guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:11)
Yeah, delighted to see you. It's going to be an exciting show. Our guest today is Craig Moody. He is the founder and president of Shoot 360, the world's premier high-tech basketball training, competition and entertainment platform. In fact, in 2012, Craig opened the very first Shoot 360 location in Beaverton, Oregon. And his passion, knowledge and experience in the game have really fueled Shoot 360's progress in developing one of the most technologically advanced and impressive basketball training experiences in the world.
Following Craig's leadership and vision, Shoot 360 continues to test really the limits of what technology and innovation can do in basketball. And Craig has been a successful business owner and entrepreneur as well as a head basketball coach and administrator at both the collegiate and the high school levels. So he brings a ton of unique experience and lenses to really create environments where people want to, and this is really important, learn, compete, and belong. And so Craig, we are so delighted to have you on our show today. Welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Craig Moody** (2:32)
Thanks, Michael and Stephen. It's great to be here and appreciate the opportunity to share about what we're doing.

**Mike Liwski** (2:39)
Excited to learn about it for sure. I know we're talking about connection and kind of the topic of community. So is there like a personal connection for you to the topic of community?

**Craig Moody** (2:51)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think a couple things. I think kind of growing up, I realized at a pretty young age that a big part of sports, and I call them the universal languages of sports and music, it's something that is really all universal to all of us, that sports was as much about relationships and connection as it was about the sport itself. We all end up retiring from sports at some point in our life, and what we're left with are the connections and the relationships. And so that's always been an important element to me. My grandfather shared that with me when I was young, and I think it just kind of stuck with me. You want to compete hard, but you got to remember that whether it's on your team or the teams you're playing against, those relationships can be lifelong.

**Mike Liwski** (3:44)
Yeah, very true.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:46)
Yeah, Craig, you know, when you're thinking about building community and connection in business through a platform like Shoot 360, what does that mean to you? And how does that come out in Shoot 360?

**Craig Moody** (4:01)
Yeah, so I think, again, kind of drawing on my sports background and the culture that I've always wanted to have in our businesses is, you know, there's an old saying that a person's name is the sweetest thing that they'll hear, right? So when you're known and you connect. And so what I've learned about kind of the environments that we want to create is the environment is as important as what you're actually doing in the facility. And so if I walk in and people care about me and I always tell our team when we run a facility, all the members are really part of our team. And we want them to have great connection with big hellos. We want to encourage them. We want to make sure that when they're leaving, they had a good workout and that they're off to the start of the rest of their week. So or their day. And so for us, environment matters. And it really, we always say that people come for the tech, they stay because of the people.