Business over NHL

While studying at an American high school, he became the best hockey player in the competition, and NHL scouts were circling around him, but Milan Kilík ultimately chose differently. He received a university degree, traveled the world and is engaged in business. It was the hockey booth that gave him the necessary skills in life, without which he would not have been able to do anything.

How did you start playing hockey?

I come from Třinec, from the Moravian-Silesian Region, and that has always determined the steps I have taken in life. I come from a mining family, where you had to move around even in your youth. After my mother divorced her boyfriend, she moved to Prague for work, and I went with them. I had a good relationship with sports, I followed the Třinec Steelworkers in hockey, so naturally I also wanted to choose a sports path. Right after moving to Prague, I started playing hockey. But I was already nine years old, and that is quite late for hockey. I started at Sparta and caught up with the same age boys, who were five years ahead of me. That's where I first started to build discipline and realized that hard work is important.

What were the next steps in hockey?

I transferred to Kobra Prague. I went to high school in Prague 4, studied public administration and profiled myself in this direction, social sciences, law and others. At that time, training was still relatively easy to combine with teaching, but even then I had an individual plan. After the first year, I decided to try school in America and flew to high school in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Why did you decide this way?

My friend's sister also flew to America to study. My stepfather had a business and was doing quite well, so when I told my family about it, they were excited about it and allowed me to do it, for which I am incredibly grateful. It was a total turning point in my life.

How was it for a young man to leave family and go abroad alone?

For a sixteen-year-old boy from Třinec, it was an unthinkable adventure. I was sixteen years old and it was the first time I had ever sat on a plane flying across the ocean. Back then, social networks didn't work, so we wrote emails to family and friends or communicated via Líbímseti.cz. Once I settled in and started looking around, you see the big world and its possibilities.

It must have been like a dream. Did it help you mature?

A lot. My friends told me after I returned that I had arrived as a grown man. There was no one to help me here and I was on my own, so one naturally has to grow up. Sport helped me a lot with that.

How was it with sport at high school?

I went there with the idea of ​​playing for the school hockey team. They introduced me to the captain right away and I knew I had to show up at the first training session. At that time, I was scoring quite a few goals in the Czech Republic, I was a strong player in front of goal. After our first training session together, the team immediately liked me, the guys said what a great shot I had and that they were looking forward to playing together in the matches. Then they even wrote about me as the X-factor in the local newspaper, because the three best players who had already finished school left the school before the season and I was supposed to be the key reinforcement for the team, which was of course nice. Any team sport creates a community and a kind of aura for the individuals. Hockey helped me to create that aura.

How did you like American high school?

I never had straight A's, but I kept a good average, and I did the same overseas. I didn't want to come home and tell my family that it cost them a lot of money and I was burned out or didn't try. English was difficult for me at the time, there was a lot of work with literature, and I sometimes felt the language barrier.

You studied one year there, did you ever regret that it was not longer?

I received an offer from the school to stay there for another year because I did really well in terms of hockey that year. I scored 53 points in eighteen games, which is completely unthinkable in today's hockey. I was voted the most valuable player in the entire league and obviously ended up fulfilling the role of a key reinforcement for the season. I didn't understand it, but I had a crazy attitude. The school offered me the opportunity to continue with a partial scholarship. At the same time, the agent of the then NHL club Atlanta Trashers contacted me. Looking back, I think there might have been a path to the world's elite. But I decided differently at the time. The costs for a year in America would have come to half a million crowns and I didn't want to do that to my family. So I returned to the Czech Republic.

Don't you regret it now?

I always blamed myself for that decision a bit, I won't lie, because sport is a true passion for me. But my goal was to get into Charles University, get a diploma and play sports, but not at the top level.

So what happened when you returned?

I played hockey at Kobra, but only for a while. I didn't get along with the coach, so I left for Nymburk.

What happened?

I didn't like his system of motivating players. He just yelled at us, there was no constructive criticism. That's probably common in the Czech hockey environment, but in contrast to what I saw in America, it seemed really backward to me. There, the coaches worked with us like psychologists, it was always a mutual debate. Some players needed a little emphasis from the coach, others praise or reassurance. They approached each player in a special and individual way. I also took a lot of that into my later work and I approach it similarly when I lead people on my team.

Were you accepted to Charles University?

Ultimately, I studied Bachelor's in Ústí nad Labem, political science and philosophy. During my studies, I took advantage of the Erasmus program and traveled to France for a semester, because I knew that studying abroad would give student a lot. I even studied in French to improve my other language. At the time, I thought that after graduating, I could focus on diplomacy, with two languages ​​it would be easier to get there. I then got into my master's degree at Charles U. And there, for a change, I went to Hong Kong for a semester.

Why there?

After America and France, I wanted to try something completely different, contrasting with these destinations, so I decided on Hong Kong.

How has your view of the Czech mentality or the common problems of a Czech boy from Třinec changed?

Wherever I am, I always feel at home. Of course, you absorb the local culture if you live in a given country for at least a few weeks and try to function like a normal person, i.e. study or work. Over time, you start to behave like a local, follow similar habits, and so on. But I've seen more and more how people actually live well in the Czech Republic. The problems that Czechs have are mostly solvable. Back then, we didn't have much money, but I was still able to graduate from college, I was able to travel. But it's about the strength and the awareness that a given person can gain from it. I didn't repeat a single exam during my bachelor's degree, and then I won a scholarship for my stay in Hong Kong at Charles University. So if you have the will, direction, and discipline, you can always do it. I don't recognize the frequent Czech whining at all, it's more like lack of desire and laziness.

What were your first career experiences?

Immediately after returning from Hong Kong, I started looking for work. The first job offer was in consulting. I started in the Research Team, supporting consultants in their projects, who advised company management on strategic projects. I immediately started to enjoy it, I abandoned the idea of ​​becoming a diplomat and started to gravitate towards business. Later, I moved to CzechInvest, where I stayed for three years and was in charge of business development in the engineering sector. I was looking for foreign investors who could, for example, build a factory here or invest in research.

Your stint at Sense Arena was an interesting stage in your life, how did that happen?

I returned to sports again, just in a roundabout way. I combined the startup environment with the sports one. Sense Arena developed a virtual trainer that can improve players' hockey thinking. I enjoyed the connection of business, technology and hockey, I combined everything I love there. That kind of work literally does itself. On top of all that, I then went to Boston for ten months to open a local branch of this company.

How was the return overseas for you?

Great! We have been in contact for a long time with David Pastrňák, who plays for the local NHL Bruins in Boston. He is a very nice guy, he even took us to games. As for work, I felt a certain barrier. As a Czech, I was selling a Czech company on the American market and over time it turned out that the market is a bit discriminatory in such cases. So after a while, local people took over the sales.

So after ten months you returned back to Czech?

I lacked business experience, so I decided to accept the offer in the Rekola project. I was in charge of developing the business towards foreign markets. We managed to get Slovakia off the ground, but then Covid came, so I left the project and moved to managing the coworking space HubHub.

Why did the project impress you?

It was an opportunity to try something completely different. I've always tried to work in companies that have the ambition to be the best in the world, do something unique, have a certain overlap and are sexy in their own way. It is this uniqueness that allows a person to really immerse themselves in it and put a piece of themselves there. In my opinion, just going to work is not enough, or at least it never was enough for me - I was looking for a connection of ideas and values. Similar to sports, when I put on a jersey, I was part of something bigger and it was extra motivation for me to represent that particular team and do my best for it.

What do you do today?

I was given the chance to lead a team at Office Agency JLL, which is in charge of consulting activities related to the rental of office and warehouse space or commercial real estate in general. I lead a team of five people and I am very satisfied and grateful.

So today you work with people, you lead your team, you compete with the competition. How did what you learned in the hockey locker room help you with that?

The first theme that crosses over from sports into everyday life is definitely rejection or defeat. Both come up on a daily basis. The hardest defeat for me in sports was when we were eliminated in the playoffs in Greenfield. It was my last game in an American high school. We played great, won 4-3 at home and went to the away field excited to grab the promotion. But we lost 0-8. I also had a great chance at the beginning of the game, if I had converted it, we would have been leading 1-0 and the game could have turned out completely differently. It was a big lesson to learn to swallow that loss, accept it and move on. It was these sports losses that taught me to accept ordinary defeats, no matter what everyone imagines as that, as part of a long journey. I always tell myself that I put one hundred percent of myself into a given thing, or the maximum that I could at that given moment. If I didn't succeed in something, I accept it with the understanding that I couldn't have done more for it. Defeats are not final and I take each one as a lesson that will move me forward in life. I hold to that philosophy and I am convinced that hockey taught me this.

How long have you been building this philosophy within yourself?

It was definitely a longer process. I'm glad I was able to adjust my mind so that I don't worry about the past anymore. If something doesn't work out, I'll approach it the same way as if we conceded a goal in the match after a mistake. I won't get that goal back, I won't change it, but I can spend the rest of the match working on not repeating that mistake, on not conceding another goal and on the contrary, on scoring some. Sport has made defeat so commonplace for me that I'm not afraid of it and I take it as part of the game.

We talked about team work, that's definitely another sports-business topic. How do you perceive it?

I have met a lot of different people at work and I notice the differences between those who have been involved in team sports, individual sports, or have not played sports at all in the past. I do not want to disparage the second and third categories, but the differences are noticeable. Individual athletes often cannot rely on other members of the work team, they do not like to delegate work, but they also solve problems themselves. It is not necessarily bad, it certainly is not, but it can be much more mentally demanding. In team sports, one must take into account that their role in the team may change over time, for example with age, current form. When I ran HubHub, I approached each team member individually and tried to understand their perspective on the matter, their understanding of the role they had in the team. During interviews, I ask each applicant if they did any sports in their youth. Among other things, the issue of discipline goes hand in hand with this, which is why I highly respect such people and surround myself with them.

And what about working with and under pressure?

Of course, when you have a huge chance in a match with a minute to go that can decide the outcome of the match, it's a huge pressure. The whole team, the fans and the public are counting on you. I've experienced both situations in sports where I made a decision in such a situation and when I disappointed. In my opinion, it's about constantly trying to expose yourself to that pressure and learning to work with it. That way, you basically become more polished and less pressure will be on you. This applies to sports and business.

What else did hockey give you?

Certainly a bunch of great friends with whom we have experienced a lot in common and our paths cross even after the end of our hockey careers. With some former teammates, we founded the Super Boys and Customizee project, which addresses the aesthetics of the sports environment, connecting technology and hockey. Sport has definitely also given me humility and an understanding of the simple equation - what you put in, you get back. And of course, this also applies to business.