Small Business Pivots From NFL to CEO: How Rick Elmore Built Simply Noted with Systems, CRM, and Handwritten Notes
In this episode of Small Business Pivots, host Michael D. Morrison sits down with former NFL linebacker and now founder & CEO of Simply Noted, Rick Elmore. Rick went from growing up in a lower-middle-class family, to leading the Pac-10 in sacks, to a short NFL career, to top-1% medical sales rep…and then pivoted again into building a software, automation, and robotics company that sends genuine handwritten notes at scale.
Rick shares how a throwaway comment in an MBA marketing class about handwritten notes getting sky-high open rates sparked the idea for Simply Noted, and how he validated the concept by sending 500 letters that produced nearly six figures in additional sales in just a few weeks. Industry data backs him up: personalized handwritten mail is reported to reach open rates as high as 90–99%, dramatically outperforming typical email campaigns.
From there, Rick walks through the unglamorous middle: eight years of grinding, building custom handwriting robots, securing patents, hiring and training a lean team, and learning to run a data-driven business using CRMs, automations, and—more recently—AI agents that now work 24/7 on his laptop.
If you’ve ever compared yourself to other founders, battled imposter syndrome, or wondered why your business still hasn’t passed that elusive million-dollar mark (less than ~10% of small businesses ever do), this conversation will feel like oxygen.
You’ll hear:
- How Rick turned grief, sports, and “chip-on-the-shoulder” energy into fuel to keep going in business
- What really happens after the NFL and why his first “real money” came from corporate sales, not football
- The exact experiment that proved handwritten notes could outperform every other sales activity he tried
- Why a CRM is non-negotiable if you want to grow, and how to start using automations even as a small team
- How he used 14 “phase zero” proposals to de-risk a huge engineering investment and avoid emotional decisions
- The mental game of entrepreneurship: imposter syndrome, comparison, and choosing not to quit
- How Rick uses AI agents today to take repetitive work off his plate—and what that means for small business owners in the next 3–5 years
Whether you’re in Oklahoma City or halfway across the world, if you’re a small business owner stuck working in your business instead of on it, this episode will help you rethink systems, leverage technology, and rediscover your “why” so you can keep climbing your own mountain.
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