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"We are trying to win the Olympics of business. So apply the same mindset you had as an athlete and do it here. That way you do not need to change who you are. You have a new mission now. And you get to be exactly who you have become."
Jeff Adamson, Co-Founder of Skip the Dishes and Neo Financial
Jeff Adamson started wrestling when he was six years old. He spent a decade on the Canadian National Wrestling team, competed at the Pan Am Games and World Championships, and built a relationship with competition that shaped everything that came after.
What came after was Skip the Dishes, one of Canada's most successful tech startups, eventually acquired in a deal that valued the company at over $200 million. And then Neo Financial, a challenger bank taking on Canada's legacy banking system with a mission to save Canadians tens of billions of dollars annually.
Two companies. One playbook. And at the center of both of them, a deliberate decision to build with athletes.
The Playbook He Took From Sport Into Business
Jeff did not leave wrestling behind when he entered the business world. He carried it with him and built around it. Every co-founder at Skip the Dishes was a former university-level athlete. The early team they assembled included cross-country runners, track and field athletes, wrestlers, and gymnasts. That was not a coincidence.
"All of our co-founders at Skip were former university level athletes. And then we hired a whole bunch of athletes at Skip. That competitive drive, that desire to win, that unstoppable work ethic was critical to building Skip into what it was."
Jeff Adamson
The pattern Jeff describes is one that shows up consistently across the most successful companies in North America. A Cornell University study found that 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives played college sports. An Ernst and Young survey showed that 96 percent of women in C-suite positions were former athletes. The data has been pointing to the same conclusion for years. Jeff just acted on it early and built it into his hiring philosophy from day one.
When he started Neo Financial, the playbook was the same. Find great athletes. Build a team that knows how to compete. Apply the same relentless drive that built Skip to one of the biggest problems in Canadian financial services.
The Mission as the New Arena
One of the most important things Jeff says in this interview is also the simplest. He is not asking athletes to become different people when they enter the business world. He is asking them to be exactly who they already are, just pointed at a new problem.
"How about you just apply the same mindset that you had as an athlete and do it here. You do not need to change who you are. You have a new mission now. And you get to be exactly who you have become."
Jeff Adamson
This is a reframe that matters. Most career transition advice tells athletes to adapt. To soften. To learn the corporate vocabulary and fit into the existing structure. Jeff's message is the opposite. The competitive identity that sport built is not something to manage or moderate in a business context. It is the asset. The job is to find the right arena for it.
For Jeff that arena is banking. Neo Financial is going after one of the most entrenched industries in Canada, a market worth over half a trillion dollars in market cap where he believes Canadians have fallen decades behind the rest of the developed world in technology, customer experience, and affordability. That is not a problem for someone who learned to compete carefully. It is a problem for someone who learned to compete at the highest level and never stopped.
What Athlete Identity Actually Means in Business
Jeff's framing of athlete identity is worth sitting with. He does not talk about it as a past version of yourself that you carry forward nostalgically. He talks about it as an active operating system. One that needs to be channeled correctly rather than suppressed or left behind.
"It is about letting athletes be who they really are. Maintain that identity as a high performer. And do it in a way that is a healthy way to channel that competitive instinct and that will to win."
Jeff Adamson
That distinction between channeling and suppressing competitive identity is something many athletes get wrong in their first corporate role. They enter environments that were not built for the way they operate and they spend energy trying to fit in rather than finding contexts where the way they operate is exactly what is needed.
Jeff built those contexts deliberately. At Skip and at Neo, the competitive drive that most corporate environments try to moderate is the thing that gets celebrated and rewarded. The athletes he hired did not need to become different people. They needed to find an environment where who they already were was a competitive advantage.
That is the Free Agent thesis in a sentence. Not a platform that helps athletes become corporate professionals. A platform that connects athletes with the companies and opportunities where being an athlete is exactly the qualification needed.
What This Means for Athletes and the Companies Hiring Them
Jeff Adamson's story carries a message for both sides of the Free Agent platform.
For athletes, it is evidence that the competitive identity sport built is not a liability in business. It is the foundation that the best companies are actively looking for. Jeff did not build two iconic companies despite his wrestling background. He built them because of it. The decade on the national team, the Pan Am Games, the World Championships, none of that was prologue. It was training.
For companies and founders, it is a sourcing strategy with a track record. If the co-founders and early team at Skip the Dishes were former university athletes, and that team built one of the most successful Canadian tech startups in history, the question is not whether athletes can perform in business environments. The question is why you would build any other way.
"So to me, when you are starting another company, it was like, okay, here guys, this is the playbook. We are going to find great athletes. We are trying to win the Olympics of business here."
Jeff Adamson
Free Agent is where that playbook gets executed. Verified athletes across every sport, actively looking for the companies where their competitive wiring is an asset rather than something to manage. And companies like Neo Financial, built by founders who already know what athletes bring, looking for the next generation of people who want to compete at the highest level of business.
If you are an athlete ready to apply your competitive identity to a new mission, or a founder who wants to build the way Jeff built, Free Agent is where that starts.
Join Free Agent at gofreeagent.com