Meet Nick Hiter

Hi Nick, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I am a professional athlete-turned-businessman.  I am a Nashville native. I grew up in a very happy middle-class home in Nashville, TN. I am a graduate of both Hillsboro High School and Trevecca Nazarene University. At Trevecca, I was on both a music and baseball scholarship. Both institutions are in my hometown of Nashville. After college, I played five seasons of professional baseball and retired to pursue a career in the hospitality industry as an owner/operator.

After a successful run from 2007-2011, I exited the hospitality industry to pursue a career in real estate. After losing everything over the next two years, in 2013 I borrowed $300 from my parents to pay for my state insurance licenses and started my insurance agency. This was an important milestone because my parents told me that this was the last time I could come to them for financial help and that I needed to get my act together and begin to provide for my family. This is where the growth and success I have today truly began.  I learned that I could not lead my family if I could not lead myself.

After three years of running a successful insurance agency, I brought on my wife and rockstar business partner, Rhiannon. From there, we began recruiting others and launching other insurance agencies under the Team Hiter umbrella. At the end of 2022, after ten years in the insurance industry, we decided to exit launching new insurance agencies with new agency owners and we parted ways with the 150+ insurance agencies to focus on the agency that started it all, and pursue other career interests.

In December of 2022, along with a newly formed company dubbed Hitlab Creative Studios and a thriving podcast, I was named the EVP of RAC Financial. In May of 2023, I was named the voice of SiriusXM’s Y’allternative radio station. I also served as the youngest President in the historic Nashville Old Timers Baseball Association’s almost 100-year-long history.

My rebranding efforts are now fully underway. I am known now by many as a professional athlete-turned-businessman, coach, keynote speaker, and host of the top-rated podcast, The Hitstreak.

As a Nashville-based business with expertise, production, and distribution in healthcare, small business ops, brand development marketing, media production, and nonprofit organizations, our influence does not stop and start in the business development world.

It’s our mission to cultivate a great place for young entrepreneurs to learn, develop, and scale their own dreams and aspirations. Our extensive network allows us to fully help our clients, whether that be through the initial concept development or the official deployment of the brand. We are there, supporting our clients every step of the way.

I have been featured on CBS, NBC, FOX, Yahoo News, The Tennessean, The New York Times, Disrupt Magazine, Yahoo Finance, and USA Wire, just to name a few, for my work as a philanthropist and businessman.

At the same time as the new EVP of RAC Financial announcement, Hitlab Creative Studios was featured as a company that is ‘changing the game creating podcasts space’ while Team Hiter won another Stellar Award, its 19th business award since 2016.

We believe every entrepreneur is capable of creating a multi-passionate empire if they double down on their vision and what lights their soul on fire. We are always excited about what the future will bring.

My podcast, The Hitstreak, was featured in Disrupt Magazine as a ‘Must-Listen To’ podcast.

Beyond business, I am a husband to Rhiannon and father to Ethan and Ansleigh. Rhiannon and I give back regularly to local philanthropic organizations in the Nashville area.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Like most, my story has had plenty of bumps along the way. I am no stranger to failure. Regardless of the fact that at startup in 2007, we were inexperienced and underfunded, we had great relationships and great people as a foundation to build upon. We have been pushed by some amazing and fierce competition, learning fast and sometimes hard lessons along the way.

The biggest lesson I learned was back in 2011. I sold my equity in my hospitality management group after a successful five-year run, only to lose everything in a large real estate deal. From there, I was back at startup and once again underfunded. The difference is this time, I had the success of our management group and the momentum I had gained from it to lean on. This was the point in my life when I truly learned to turn my experiences and failures as a catalyst to grow. In growing our insurance agency, we had to learn how to scale literally everything to maintain the growth that our growing market needed.

We understand that learning the value of leadership in a business, learning the need to establish great relationships with our community, learning to measure everything in our business, learning how to find ways so that our future clients could not just find us but connect with us is a necessity and we are still learning more and more each day.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Team Hiter is a business enterprise focused on helping entrepreneurs drive growth, as well as a health insurance agency.

In my role as the Executive Vice President at RAC Financial, I oversee strategic partnerships and lead the fast growing sales force for an industry leading payment processing company. My work supports a network of 100+ strategic partners supporting major brands such as Planet Hollywood, Brio, and Buca di Beppo, to name a few.

As a thought leader on entrepreneurship, my insights have been featured in multiple major media outlets. In addition, as the host of The Hitstreak podcast, I talk weekly with top performers to break down their playbook to success so my audience of over 200 thousand can get to that next level too. My podcast also opened the door for me to become the voice of SiriusXM’s “Y’allternative” radio station!

In my prior company, we launched over 150 insurance agencies that generated over 100 million dollars in just over five years. Our latest venture, dubbed “The Hitlab,” is focused on creating a physical space for thought leaders to come together, share, and distribute breakthrough ideas at scale.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Taking risks is absolutely necessary to grow. Literally, every time you get in a car, you risk getting into an accident or even loss of life. In business, these risks do not have to be so risky that they make you uncomfortable. The level of risk attached to anything you do in business is unknown. The less unknown there is, the less risk there is. Since no human is perfect, I’ve learned that if the majority of my risk is linked to human error rather than the unknown, the better things turn out for me. I do believe, however, that there is a certain level of risk that comes along with anything new that you do, and there is so much knowledge gained from taking educated risks.

Remind yourself of these things while on your journey. There are three key ingredients to all success: Mindset, Skillset, and Habits.  Always count what counts and measure what matters. No one in business is undefeated. The losses are lessons and opportunities to be better at your craft. You can not promote yourself or your business too much. It’s not that you have to find your customers…they have to find you. Feel the feeling, but don’t become the emotion. Remember that the little things ARE the big things and that the expert in anything was once a beginner.