Garrett Gangarossa

Garrett Gangarossa runs an agency that teaches college athletes how to be a business while they are still on the field.

Gangarossa and SALTYmf were already working together before this episode. SALTYmf sponsored several of his athletes through its Player of the Week segment on Brinks TV and the NIL House show, which is how the brand fell into the NIL space at all rather than going looking for it. Brad Banyas brought him onto the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast for a conversation that would help both sides of that market understand what it actually involves.

X-Factor Consulting represents college athletes with two or three thousand followers alongside Brandon Armstrong, who does NBA impersonations under the name B Dot, has been on Jimmy Kimmel Live and gets the mannerisms and the shot down to the detail, and a former New York Giant who works autograph sessions and meet and greets. Gangarossa says the point of the window is the business education inside it. Athletes who have never done any of this end up on calls with CEOs and marketing directors and start working out what they want to do after the sport. He coaches the brands as hard as he coaches the athletes, because a deal that only works for one side does not get renewed. One of his Ohio State basketball players partnered with Charleys Cheesesteaks, the only place he could find a cheesesteak growing up in Houston.

Gangarossa keeps pointing at the athletes nobody is bidding on. Justin Dykesma pitches at the D2 level and has built a following on TikTok off coaching content rather than on field results. A baseball coach he works with went from 8,000 followers to north of 60,000 in a year by posting the same thing consistently. His answer to the athlete with 3,000 followers who is ready to stop trying is that the brand outlasts the sport, and that he learns something from his own clients every day.