Part 1 with Mike West of Lirio

**Mike West** (0:05)
My first year, the team I was on finished number two in the country, you know, won the NCC, it was a great football team.
And yet, what I observed is that there was a couple things that were just pervasive. Number one, there was always somebody that was better at something. And the second thing is that it was okay to accept failure, because the best players failed a lot.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
From the IT Company, it's Made Right Here, the stories of East Tennessee founders, creators and builders. From the idea behind it, to the impact it had on the community, their employees, and their personal lives. We're taking you behind the scenes of the movements they built.
Hey, on today's episode, we have got Mike West with Lirio. I loved talking to Mike. This is part one of two, by the way.
And just the initial part of like his life story, and really like the outsized influence, sports played, and then kind of how you get to see a little of the influences of his parents and which one he's more like. So just love talking to Mike. You're going to love the episode, and you're going to love learning about Lirio over these two episodes.

**Mike West** (1:24)
I was born in, I was born in Knoxville. Lived the first seven or eight years of my life on Windsor Avenue, which is close to West High School. My dad had a pretty rough upbringing, raised by his grandmother, essentially, and moved all over the place. He joined the Army right out of high school, and met my mom. They met really quickly, and I think within a month or so, they were engaged.
When they got married, my dad, over the years, was always in some sort of sales kind of position. He worked in different kinds of companies, so furniture, worked in different things like that. My mom was always more in the administrative kind of roles. My dad never really aspired to do anything else. My mom always wanted to go to college. She passed away when she was 53 I was in my early 30s. Even then, she was trying to get a degree. She was always trying to do that. She was a product of an environment, in a time and in a place where maybe that wasn't... My dad didn't place a lot of importance on that, so I'm not sure he was very supportive of it. And I always found it sad that she never really got to sort of be who she wanted to be.
I was very much more like my mother than my dad.
There's a lot of things that I see in her, saw in her, that now find their way to me.

**Paul** (3:08)
Did you have brothers or sisters, or you have siblings?

**Mike West** (3:11)
I had a brother. I wasn't as close to my brother as siblings might tend to be. My childhood, everything revolved around Tennessee football, Tennessee basketball, and playing sports. So you played baseball, basketball, football, sort of a year-round kind of thing to do.
My parents didn't go to college.
So I don't, frankly, remember education being a big part of focus. It was far more about sports. It's funny because I was a lot like probably a lot of kids. I loved playing, but it had an outsized influence, and sometimes it wasn't fun because it was so competitive and so intense and so defining in who you are. When you're 10 years old, you just want to play, right? You just want to play. You don't need the screaming. You don't need the hollering. And yet, back then and I think even today with AAU and things like that, it's such a tough thing sometimes. So I think back on my childhood and I think about decisions or things that I did. And I'm not sure I always did what I was passionate and what I wanted to do. I think sports is a double-edged sword. And what I mean by that is, especially when you're young, your coaches can positively or negatively influence you in ways that are lasting.
And so in some respects, it's the luck of the draw as to whether or not you get somebody who you remember for all the right reasons, or you get somebody you remember for some of the wrong reasons. And I think I had a little bit of both.
I don't think of my coaches as having particularly positive impact on me until I got to college, actually. Sports really does have the ability to teach you how to be a part of something bigger, teach you how to lead.

**Paul** (5:28)