Duke Baxter: Turning a Lifelong Baseball Career Into a 7-Figure Business

Meet Duke Baxter, a professional baseball player turned creator. Duke is the founder of Zoned Sports Academy, a brick-and-mortar baseball and softball training facility, and Dominate the Diamond, an online coaching platform. After spending his career playing baseball and training athletes, Duke discovered a niche and passion for training other baseball coaches, which is how Dominate the Diamond was born. 

Here’s a snapshot of his business success:

• Earned over $3M on Kajabi 
• Grew social audiences to over 275K 
• Has been in the baseball business for over 22 years 

The Challenge: Monetizing a Talent and Passion

After his professional playing time came to an end, Duke opened his brick-and-mortar indoor baseball training facility in 2002 as a way to teach kids of all ages and skill levels how to play baseball. 

In addition to training kids, the facility would also run coaches clinics once a year. These training sessions were designed to teach coaches how to teach kids basic baseball skills like throwing and catching. It wasn’t long before he realized that youth coaches desired even more training opportunities. 

“We realized how many coaches actually needed help,” Duke recalls. “Every year coaches would be like, ‘man, I consume so much in that two hour clinic, I want more.’” 

Duke started Dominate the Diamond in 2017 as a way to train coaches beyond live coaching clinics at his facility. He created training videos based on his unique teaching approach, and turned them into online courses for coaches. 

“The way I teach drills, it's like I can teach a 6-year-old how to play baseball or I can teach a 16-year-old how to make it as a college athlete, and I make it simple and fun,” he says. “To be able to take those videos and create courses and create something that I already loved, it was like putting a piece of a puzzle together.”

Duke has used Kajabi for his online course business from the beginning, but it wasn’t until 2020 when he really focused on building an audience. He posted a video on Facebook every single day and eventually grew his audience to 175K followers in one year. After friends started asking him how he was monetizing that audience, he realized he needed to invest more in his training platform.

The Solution: Growing a Business Using a Seamless Online Platform

Duke started using Kajabi after learning about it from motivational speaker, Brendon Burchard. He switched to ClickFunnels after a year because he sought certain checkout features. But after Kajabi upgraded the payments features — making it seamless to process transactions, collect sales tax, handle payouts, and manage subscriptions in one place — Duke switched back and has been using the platform ever since. 

Duke takes advantage of nearly all of Kajabi’s all-in-one business features including payments, emails, automations, and the branded mobile app. But the products he uses most are the courses. Dominate the Diamond has 21 baseball and softball courses, individual one-off courses, and also has a membership. 

“We started taking all of our drills and created a membership so that everybody can get everything that we have,” explains Duke. “Not only does this help the one-off coaches, but it also helps an entire organization of coaches and athletes of all ages and skill levels to be able to utilize our products and resources.”

Results: Building Two 7-Figure Businesses

Duke’s passion for baseball helped him transform from an athlete to a business owner and creator. He’s now the owner of two 7-figure businesses, ones that build off each other and allow Duke to help people all around the world learn baseball. 

“Kajabi has allowed me not only to stay within Somerset County in Bridgewater, New Jersey, but it's allowed me to reach global coaches all over the world in baseball and softball,” he says. “Dominate the Diamond has allowed us to travel the entire country and the world, putting on coaching clinics. People even ask us to go out to their locations to train their coaches.”

Duke uses the branded mobile app which he says has “helped bridge the gap for Dominate the Diamond as a company.” 

He also recently got 675 Little League Baseball coaches to beta test the Dominate the Diamond coaching app within their organizations, a major step for his creator business. 

“With that, Dominate the Diamond is no longer a small fish, it’s now a big fish.”

Looking Ahead: Maintaining His Impact In Person and Online 

Duke has built not one, but two successful businesses out of his passion for baseball — which is a feat on its own. He’s proud that he’s been able to build a local business while also helping coaches and players around the world through his online platform. 

But his greatest success is seeing the impact he’s made through his training content. 

“When I got my first Facebook message and the comment from a dad was, ‘thank you so much for sharing that video. It really helped me connect with my son and understand how to teach him baseball.’ That was the game changer for me,” says Duke. “I'm investing in the youth coaches at the grassroots level to help them be the best coach they can be.”

If you’re ready to turn your passion into a 7-figure business like Duke, see how Kajabi’s all-in-one solution can help.