Jake Plummer Carries Quarterback Lessons into the Startup World

Photo Courtesy: ReadyList Sports

Jake Plummer isn’t ashamed to admit it: The former Pro Bowl quarterback had no idea what he was getting into when he agreed to co-found a startup. He’s just glad his wife gave him a push.

He had been out of the NFL for nine years in 2015, and none of his post-retirement projects had stuck. None of them necessarily had to, either, with the windfall he accrued over 10 NFL seasons. He briefly took up coaching. He dabbled in real estate. He advocated for Charlotte’s Web CBD, a hemp oil. A stint on television with the Pac-12 proved to be short-lived. “That got old pretty quick,” he says.

But he had no clear direction until Chad Friehauf, a friend and former teammate on the Denver Broncos, showed him with a 300-slide PowerPoint presentation at a Boulder, Colorado, coffee shop. The subject was a business venture called ReadyList Sports, a product that digitizes football playbooks and makes them interactive. Plummer returned home and went about his week until his wife, Kollette, urged him to call follow up with Friehauf.

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“’Did you look into that? It looked like a pretty cool idea. If it was to work, it would be a pretty awesome deal,’” Plummer recalls Kollette telling him. “Some men are afraid to admit it, but I’m not: My wife is usually right.”

Plummer signed on, and the two former quarterbacks got to work. As CEO, Friehauf handles the technical aspects. Plummer’s strength, meanwhile, is thinking ahead, not only to where the company is going but who it can partner with to get there.

“He’s definitely a big door-opener for us, whether it’s teams, coaches, investors, front office people, just his network now that his teammates are coaching high school or his teammates have kids in youth sports,” Friehauf says. “He’s great at seeing the big picture of where we want to take this thing.”

For Plummer, that means as high as possible. The product is tailored for all levels of competition, and Friehauf says ReadyList has clients ranging from youth flag football to the collegiate level via the University of Louisville. But its crown jewel is a longstanding relationship with current New York Jets and former Miami Dolphins head coach Adam Gase, who used the system in Miami after Plummer originally approached him during Gase’s time as the Broncos’ offensive coordinator. The next step is to add more clients like him.

“The pro level is where we feel we can validate this,” Plummer says. “Once you can convince a couple of coaches who are influential – and not just influential by making people do stuff, but if they do something, everyone is like, ‘Oh, we better check this out’ – that’s what we’re pursuing.”

Plummer says he’s encountered his fair share of pain points in his first-ever business venture. Among them: business terminology, the ever-changing timetables and updates associated with ReadyList’s technology, and, of course, work-life balance.

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“You learn through business and starting this up that the work’s really never done,” he says. “There’s always somebody I haven’t called or emailed or told about this, so it can be tiresome if you don’t say ‘Alright, it’s 5 o’clock, I’m done. I won’t make any more calls, won’t answer any more emails.'”

Perhaps the greatest challenge of all, however, lies in persuading the often-close-minded world of football to think differently. That was never a problem for Plummer, who famously left the NFL to pursue a career in handball. It can be another matter entirely for coaches who are sometimes used to teaching players in a certain way for decades.

“We’re hoping that this tool can convince coaches, ‘Hey, there’s a better way to teach and there’s a more efficient way to run practices and everything,’” he says. “Kind of streamline that so time can be spent strategizing how to beat an opponent, not just getting kids lined up right.”

But four years of startup life have taught Plummer something valuable. After years on the sidelines following his retirement, he now realizes was more ready to take on a large-scale venture than he ever knew.

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“Being a quarterback, I realize I was already so immersed in business, but I didn’t know it,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to really play a lot of different roles. So as the business side of things has come around, I’ve learned a lot about it. It’s really been an easier transition than I thought, just because, as a QB, you’ve got to know your personnel, right?

“You’ve got to know your guys, how they respond when you push them, how you respond when they’re praising them, and the same goes with business. You’ve got to know when to put the pedal to the metal and when to lay off a little bit.”

Plummer is well aware that the work is only beginning. ReadyList intends to launch a new high school-specific product within the month, while the football offseason represents a prime sales opportunity for teams eager to get their selections in this month’s NFL draft up to speed as soon as possible once they’re signed. It’s been more than two decades since Plummer was in that situation as a first-round pick out of Arizona State. He’s learning to reacclimate to the learning curve.

“As a businessman now, to correlate to playing ball, you have failures,” he says. “You lose games, but you’ve just got to back to the drawing board and figure out what you can do better next time.”