Roosevelt Colvin is 34 years old, soon to be 35, and he’s as busy now as he
was during his 10-year career as an outside linebacker.
He is busier, to tell the truth.
“I don’t get a lot of sleep,” Colvin said from his home in Indianapolis.
“I go to bed around 12:30, 1 a.m. and get up at 6 to get the kids on the bus
and start the day all over again. It’s a joy. To have to work out 15 years,
go to meetings…”
Colvin, an Indy native and Purdue graduate, played 10 seasons in the NFL with the
Bears, Patriots and Texans, winning two Super Bowl titles with the Patriots and
becoming the first Bears player to record double-digit sacks since Richard Dent
accomplished it during the Bears’ Super Bowl heyday.
For all that success on the football field, Colvin these days is an entrepreneur,
father and husband, and that’s just fine with him.
“Football was very good to me, but I always looked at it as a transition to
what I was going to do after I was done playing,” Colvin said. “I kind
of got an early start on that transition in my free agent year, when I signed my
big free-agent deal with the Patriots. I broke my hip the second game of the season.
I didn’t know if I was ever going to be able to come back, because it was
the same injury that Bo Jackson had.”
That was a scary time for Colvin. Jackson never returned from that injury, so Colvin
figured he needed to get on with preparing for life after football.
“In my mind, preparing for the future was right now, because I was down and
didn’t know what was going to happen rehab-wise,” he said. “ I
came back to play five more years after that, but at that point, my wife and I started
to think about what was next. We decided to get into the franchise business.”
Colvin and his wife, Tiffany, made a list. “We applied to be part of the UPS
Store, Maggie Moo’s, an ice-cream place, and Chick-Fil-A. We were denied by
Chick-Fil-A initially, but were accepted by Maggie Moo’s and The UPS Store.”
In 2005, Colvin opened the first of two UPS Store franchises, at 71st St. and Shadeland
Ave. His mother ran the business while he was playing, and a year later, the opportunity
came for another store, this one across the street from Broad Ripple High School,
where he and Tiffany had both graduated.
“It was in a place called Broad Ripple Village,” Colvin said.
“I couldn’t pass on that opportunity, across from my high school and
in a great neighborhood, a good place to be. We opened that one a year later, and
we were in it until I retired.”
That’s when things got difficult.
“The big reason I retired was because of my mom,” Colvin said. “Both
my parents were, in 2008, diagnosed with cancer. Health issues caused me to reconsider
my priorities in life. Football was no longer No. 1.
“Being with my parents, giving my kids the opportunity to be with their grandparents
without knowing how long or what the situation was going to be…I felt like
it was time to move on from football. I felt like I could still play, I knew I could,
but my priorities were shifted a little bit and I decided to move on.”
As his parents went through treatments and recovered, Colvin started taking care
of business.
Literally.
“I took a lot of the lessons that I learned from Mr. Kraft [Patriots owner
Robert Kraft], Bill Belichick, Scott Pioli, the whole Patriots organization, and
began to implement them into being a small-business owner,” he said.
That included acting as a human resources manager.
“ I had to fire my mom, so to speak,” he said with a grin. “Not
many people have the opportunity to tell their parents that they’re fired.
She had to step away from it because of the cancer, but it opened my eyes
to how she was doing things and how things ran, and I said to myself, ‘this
is not how it should be.’
“You open a business to make a profit, and I was not profitable. My last game
was Dec. 30, 2008, with the Patriots. We didn’t make the playoffs and I returned
home that night. For the next two years, roughly, I was in my store every single
day, opening the store, figuring out the nuances, knowing who my customer base was,
and eventually I began to be profitable. Common-sense knowledge and being a salesman,
trying to grow who I was and marketing myself, that year-and-a-half I spent at the
front of the counter was very beneficial for me, to learn my business, because it
allowed me to train my employees and staff and associates to do exactly as I needed
them to so we could continue to grow.”
Selling the first UPS Store location came next, and it was time to diversify, Colvin
said.
“My beautiful wife, her mother is a baker and a food connoisseur by desire,
and she [Tiffany] takes after her,” Colvin said. “All during my playing
career, my wife and her mom would come up and they’d bake 50 to 100 pies,
cakes, cookies, you name it, for all my teammates and coaches.
“When I was released from the Patriots in 2007, that was when the whole cupcake
craze was hitting the country. My mother-in-law catered for weddings, did wedding
cakes—she did our wedding—for numerous people in the city. Did it for
years, but she never had a storefront. My wife started to thinking about putting
her own little twist on down-home favorites, cookies and brownies and stuff. For
18 months, she was trying to develop her own recipes, talked to her mom about recipes.
In the middle of 2009, we committed to opening another small business called SweeTies
Gourmet Treats.”
In October of 2009, the Colvins sold the first UPS Store and, as luck would have
it, opened up the bakery.
“By the grace of God, a retail space in the same mall my other UPS Store was
in opened up,” Colvin said. “We took over that place on Oct. 21, and
we’ve been here a little more than two years, and now we are small-business
owners in The UPS Store franchise as well as the baking industry.”
The Super Bowl in Indy was a great opportunity, Colvin said. “The Super Bowl,
which was a great opportunity and experience, exposed us to a lot of different people
and venues. The product is great and we’ve been shipping these things out
to people, more so now after the Super Bowl. It’s been stressful at times,
but my wife is learning to do different things, and I’m trying to help her
in her dream and her mom’s dream of being successful bakers and doing the
things they love and have a passion for has been a joy.”
The shipping, incidentally, takes place at the local UPS Store, just down the way.
So why is Roosevelt Colvin having such success in small business when the rest of
the country—and a lot of NFL alumni, have had much tougher times at it?
It’s called delayed gratification.
“I was very fortunate that I was frugal with my finances when I played, and
it’s given me the opportunity to live as I need to live, not necessarily the
way I want to live now, and not have to stress and strain about my kids having clothes
or a roof over their head,” Colvin said. “I’ve had a great opportunity
to retain some of that income, which I’m using to fuel the situations I’m
involved in with my businesses.”
Recently, the Colvins moved back into the city from Fishers, and to build the house
they’ve always wanted. ”I didn’t want to buy a massive home or
build a massive home when I was playing, because I didn’t feel like I’d
get the value out of it. This is the house I waited to build until after I retired.
“We have officially moved back into Indianapolis and we’re enjoying
life. I can’t complain.”
With four children—boys aged 15 and 6, girls aged 12 and 8—and a growing
empire, the man who played to the cheers of thousands every week is living his own
version of the American Dream.
“I stay humble and on the grind,” he said.
He and fellow Indy native Courtney Roby [NFL free agent] have Roosevelt Colvin and
Courtney Roby’s All Pro Flag and Cheer Football League, designed to get kids
out of the house and onto the field of play while learning the game.
His sons play in the league, he coaches, and he does other work as a speaker, consultant
and as an analyst for The Big Ten network.
Judging by his story, he has a future as a presenter at the NFL Rookie Symposium
one day, too.
“If they would like me to, I wouldn’t object,” Colvin said. “I
think I have a lot of insight that I could give to a lot of these young kids. I
did a program with St. Vincent’s Sports Medicine where the agents send in
their top collegiate talent. I did a lot of consulting work for them. A lot of those
kids are misdirected, and these are kids just coming out of college. They just don’t
understand. Look at Allen Iverson and the stories you hear on TV, like Latrell Sprewell.
They’re horror stories. A lot of that is because they’re not educated
and don’t understand.”
Colvin offers some straight-up solid advice to those coming into the league this
year and in the future: take care of your money.
“No. 1, know it’s not going to last,” he advised.” Make
sure you live beneath your means as a player so that when you are a former player,
a retired player, you can live within your means. If you live above your means as
a player, you’re going to be broke. If you live within your means as a player,
when you retire, you’re not going to be able to spend the same way you did
when you were an active player. The culture shock is going to be tougher to deal
with.
“Don’t go buy the biggest car or have five best cars, buy one nice car.
Don’t go buy the biggest or have to have the biggest house. Based on what
you’re making, live like you were making one tenth of that and that allows
you to save enough so that when you do retire, you can build a nice home, pay for
it cash or fund it without crippling your finances. When you get to the age when
you receive your pension, those funds will allow you to continue the lifestyle you
stepped up to when it comes to having children, providing for those children when
they go to college, etc.”
In the meantime, Colvin is living the life he started planning while wondering if
he’d ever play football again. He runs his businesses, takes joy in being
a father and tries to keep up.
“I just do that and just try to fiddle-faddle around and keep up with my kids
and all that they have going on.”
It’s a great thing when a man follows his own advice.