Controlling the Controllables: What a Utility Infielder Taught Me About Running a Business

Randy Johnson threw a perfect game on May 18, 2004, and Matt Kata spent the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth innings trying not to think about it.

Kata was playing second base for the Arizona Diamondbacks that day. By the sixth inning, nobody in the dugout was saying a word, which is how baseball players silently agree not to jinx a no-hitter. Kata’s mind did what every mind does when you tell it not to think about something. It went straight to the worst case. What if I’m the guy who costs him the perfect game? So he gave himself four words and refused to think anything else for three innings: hit it to me. He said it while he was on defense. He said it while he was at the plate, where it made no logical sense at all. He said it, by his own count, close to a million times. When the game ended, he genuinely could not remember what he’d done on defense. He had to watch the tape to find out he’d made three assists in the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings, the exact stretch where most players start playing scared instead of playing the position in front of them.

I’ve known Matt Kata for 14 years, since he ran a baseball camp for my son Sammy. Matt is now VP, Commercial Lender at R Bank in Georgetown, and on August 14, 2026, he becomes the 11th member of the Round Rock Express Hall of Fame. We talked about all of that on the latest episode of Rock Solid, but the part that stuck with me wasn’t the highlight reel. It was that mantra, and the three-letter word Matt has been carrying around in the brim of his hat since high school: ACE.

Attitude, Concentration, Effort. That’s the Whole List.

Matt didn’t invent ACE. He’ll tell you that himself. But he’s carried it since high school, first written under the brim of his game hat, and now it’s on his son’s hat, in his son’s own handwriting. Attitude. Concentration. Effort. Three things. Not a longer list dressed up to look thorough. Three, because those are the only three things a person actually controls, whether you’re standing at second base during a perfect game or running a business that just lost its biggest client.

I talk to business owners every week who are white-knuckling their way through a list of things they cannot control. The algorithm changed. A competitor undercut them. A client ghosted. The economy is doing whatever the economy is doing this month. None of that is nothing, but none of it is yours to fix by staring at it harder. What Matt figured out on a baseball field, and what I’ve spent thirty years figuring out in conversion work, in Persuasion Architecture, in Buyer Legends, is that the businesses and the people who last are the ones who get relentless about the three things that are actually theirs. Show up with the right attitude. Concentrate on the customer, the play, the task in front of you, not the outcome six steps away. Put in the effort. Everything else is noise you don’t have a seat to vote on.

Matt talked about watching talented players wash out of professional baseball, not because they lacked ability, but because they spent their energy playing general manager in their own head. Worrying about when they’d get called up. Resenting who got promoted instead of them. Meanwhile the guys who stuck around, the journeymen, the utility players, were the ones who kept their attention on the only three things that were ever theirs to control. Swap “get called up to the majors” for “land the next big client” or “get featured in that publication” and you’ve just described half the founders I’ve worked with.

The Significant Other

Here’s the part of Matt’s story that maps directly onto how I think about building a business. Matt played seven different positions for the Round Rock Express, every spot on the field except pitcher and catcher, and even filled in as an emergency catcher warming up bullpens when nobody asked him to. One of his Diamondbacks teammates, Tony Clark, had a name for players like Matt: “the significant others.” Not the stars. Not expendable. Just essential, wherever the lineup card needed a hole filled that day.

Matt told me some players resent that role. Ego gets in the way of being the guy who plays wherever he’s needed instead of the guy with his name in the headline. He went the other direction. He leaned into being useful from every angle, because that versatility was what kept a jersey on his back long after guys with more raw talent had been let go.

I’ve built my career the same way, just without the batting average. I coined the term conversion rate optimization before it had a name, because I was standing in the gap between marketing and psychology and nobody else was covering that position. I’ve been a keynote speaker, an author, a co-owner of a home care franchise with A Place At Home – North Austin, and now I host a podcast interviewing the people who actually build things in this town I call home. None of that happened because I picked one lane and specialized until I couldn’t see anything outside it. It happened because I kept playing wherever the business needed me to play, which is the only way you ever actually understand a customer. You cannot architect persuasion, you cannot build a Buyer Legend, you cannot answer WIIFM for a single person if you’ve only ever stood in one position and looked at the game from one angle. The founders who see their business the way a utility player sees a baseball field, from every position, at every moment, are the ones who catch the thing a specialist would have missed entirely.

Character Is Still the First C

Matt’s second career gave me one more thing worth stealing. As a commercial lender, he evaluates businesses using the five C’s of credit, and he told me character sits at the top of that list, above collateral, above capacity, above everything else that’s easier to put a number on. It’s the same thing he was actually evaluating as a teammate for fourteen years. Would I want this person on my roster when things get hard? Would I want to grab a beer with this guy? That’s not a soft question. It’s the only question that predicts whether someone shows up with the right attitude when the game, or the quarter, gets difficult.

Here’s my question for you, and it’s the same one I’d ask a founder sitting across from me at A Place At Home or in a Core Story Intensive session. Where are you still spending your attention on the scoreboard instead of the pitch in front of you? Where have you let yourself believe you need to be the star instead of the significant other your business actually needs right now? You cannot control whether the market moves your way this quarter. You cannot control who your competitor hires or what a customer decides to do with information you gave them in good faith. You can control your attitude walking into the next conversation, where you put your concentration for the next hour, and whether you gave this the effort you’re actually capable of. That’s the whole list.

Hear the whole conversation with Matt, including how a case of food poisoning on his first trip to Round Rock turned into the place he’d meet his wife and build his home, on this week’s episode of Rock Solid. Matt Kata built a fourteen-year career and a Hall of Fame plaque on three words. I’d bet your business could use the same discipline.