How Jeremy Capo Mastered The Pivot
The Story
Eight months before he lost his job, Jeremy was standing in a room being recognized as NACDA’s Athletic Director of the Year, one of the highest honors in collegiate athletics. He’d built a career around showing up for student-athletes and coaches, the kind of job where your phone rings at 2 a.m., and you answer it anyway. Then, on March 19, 2020, he walked into his president’s office and found a severance package waiting on the desk. No warning. No chance to fight for it. However, looking back on it, Jeremy doesn’t call it a loss.
“It happened for me,” Jeremy said, “not to me.”
That reframe is the engine behind his new book, Mastering the Pivot: 5 Steps for an Epic Comeback. His story is a pivot after job loss, told by someone who lived every uncomfortable stage of it: the shock, the identity crisis, the career shifts, and eventually, the friendship that gave him language for all of it. Through it all, Jeremy’s core belief is simple: you don’t need to have your life figured out to take your next best step. You just need to show up for it.
The Curiosity
Ask Jeremy if writing a book was ever a goal, and he’ll laugh. “Writing a book was never on my bingo card,” he says. It wasn’t a dream he’d been quietly chasing, and there was no manuscript waiting in a drawer. If anything, he spent those years trying to get through the transition himself, with little thought of ever putting it into words for someone else.
What changed was a friend who’d been watching Jeremy find his way through it. One day, Jeremy got a text from that friend. “I watched you go through some life transitions,” the message said. “Life is heavy for me right now.”
So Jeremy picked up the phone and called.
That one phone call cracked something open. He realized the story he’d been carrying, the firing, the grief, the framework he’d built to survive it, wasn’t just his to keep. Other people were standing in their own version of transition, unsure of what came next. That’s when he saw the hole in the conversation. Nobody was talking about what it felt like to lose the job that defined you and have to build something new out of it.
The Effort
After losing his athletic director position, Jeremy spent the next three months stocking shelves at a grocery store, calling them “the most rewarding three months of my life.” As an athletic director, initiatives got handed off, projects changed course, and closure was rare.
That stretch of quiet gave him room to think, and it planted the seed for the framework that would eventually become the core of his book. The framework, PIVOT, stands for pausing to find purpose, identifying what actually matters, validating your own voice instead of letting self-doubt run the show, owning the shift instead of resisting it, and taking the brave next step.
A huge reason Jeremy made it through the pivot was his friend, Kevin Vest. “Everybody in the world deserves a Kevin Vest in their life,” Jeremy says. Kevin was a junior college athletic director, a former baseball coach, and, in Jeremy’s telling, a master connector who never let a person he cared about go unintroduced to someone who could help them. On August 7, 2024, Kevin died after a battle with melanoma.
Through his last year of life, one line from their daily texts became their anthem: “Today is the most important day.” It’s the phrase that closes his book’s dedication.
The Solution
The same friend who reached out with “life is heavy for me right now” is the one who put Jeremy on the phone with ShareYourStory. It happened almost like a chain reaction, one call leading to another, and within a matter of moments, he found himself talking with a team built to help people turn a lived story into a real book. On their very first call, the team simply asked him, “What do you want out of this?”
His answer wasn’t about achievement or credentials. He wanted one person, just one, to read the book in their own worst moment and believe they could figure it out. From there, Jeremy’s manuscript landed with Streamline Books, ShareYourStory’s publishing arm, where the team helped shape his framework and his story into the finished book now ready for readers’ hands.
The Journey
Once Jeremy committed, the process became less about crafting a perfect narrative and more about validating the voice he’d spent years second-guessing. He talks about how easily self-talk turns cruel after a loss. “You would never let people talk to those people the way you talk to yourself,” he says. Writing forced him to catch the self-doubting pattern and rewrite it, chapter by chapter.
The value hierarchy he lays out in the book–connection, purpose, service, and growth–grew out of his own hardest years in collegiate athletics, where he watched firsthand how success can quietly cover up misalignment. Jeremy noticed that when those four things are aligned in someone’s life, winning and achievement tend to take care of themselves. When they’re out of alignment, people start ignoring red flags just because the scoreboard looks fine.
The ROI
The effects of the book have shown up fastest on LinkedIn, where Jeremy hears from readers almost daily. Messages come in from people telling him the book gave them exactly the push or perspective they needed, some sharing their own version of the story back to him. Orders keep coming in too, steadily, day after day, proof that the momentum hasn’t slowed since launch.
For Jeremy, finishing the book changed how he shows up in the rest of his life. He’s more present as a colleague in his current sales role, more open as a friend, and more willing to talk honestly about grief instead of tucking it away. “There’s power in showing up,” he says. It’s become the line he repeats most often when people ask him what the book is really about. To Jeremy, that’s what a real comeback comes down to: not a perfect plan, just the next honest step.
What People Are Saying
- “Mastering the PIVOT is especially powerful for anyone going through a season of trying to figure out who they are, what’s next, or how to redefine their identity when life changes. It’s real, practical, & easy to connect with because it comes from someone who has actually lived through the process of adapting, rebuilding, & moving forward!”
- “PIVOT was an extremely well-written book that shares a leadership vision to help you become a better leader at any level. The writer’s personal experience shows what a leadership mindset is all about and how you can rebound regardless of the setbacks in your career. YOU control your PIVOT!”
- “Get your highlighter ready because there are so many pearls of wisdom in this book! From Athletic Director of the Year to stocking shelves at Hy-Vee, Jeremy Capo shows how every part of our journey can be used for growth and transformation.”
What’s Next for Jeremy Capo?
Mastering the Pivot: 5 Steps for an Epic Comeback is now available on Amazon, five years after the meeting that started the pivot in the first place. Today, Jeremy works in sales, a role he chose in part because it gives him something collegiate athletics never could: a schedule that bends around his family instead of the other way around. That flexibility is why he was able to be home for his daughter’s first day of her junior year, an ordinary moment his old job would have made impossible.
He’s active on LinkedIn, X, and Instagram, where he keeps the conversation about the book going one post at a time. But what he’s really building, more than a following, is the kind of friendship he writes about in its pages. What he wants people to remember, more than any framework or five-step plan, is that they’re not alone in whatever they’re carrying. As he puts it, everyone walking through the gym today is carrying something no one else knows about. His pivot after job loss started with a severance package on a desk, but it didn’t end there. And he’d tell you, neither does yours.
Our team had the chance to sit down with Jeremy to talk about his new book, Mastering the Pivot: 5 Steps for an Epic Comeback. Watch his full story below.
