Football Vs Startups: Common Dilemmas

Flag on the Play: How Business and Football Intertwine and What You Can Learn from the Pros to Run a Better Company

With the 2024 NFL season underway, here’s a few things you can take from the gridiron and apply to your entrepreneurial journey, in order to be the best you can possibly be.  

Penalties:  Nothing kills a drive faster than silly little mistakes.  It sucks the air out of team and the stadium, and also makes the coaches lose their mind.  Penalties kill drives, and in business this is true as well.  

If you cannot do the little things great, it’s very tough to be great.  Brady didn’t make many little mistakes, and certainly made a lot less than his competition.  If he did, he wouldn’t be the Brady we know, he’d be just another run of the mill quarterback.  

Nothing takes a great project and turns it into an average one faster than stupid, silly mistakes. It slows down the momentum, its embarrassing to the general market and it will make the client (the coach) lose their minds.  

There’s a unique scenario that occurs with clients when you make stupid little mistakes… Clients start to wonder “well, what else is wrong here?”, and proceed to start picking things apart.  Much like a referee always has their eyes on a player who can’t stop committing penalties.  

Error machines are liabilities, both in sports and life.  We all make them, but the best realize that in order to be truly great, a strong focus on the little details of execution are an ABSOLUTE MUST. 

Turnovers:  While committing errors is something that CAN be overcome and is somewhat expected, turnovers lose games.  They destroy team morale and next thing you know, you’re out of the playoffs and a laughing stock.  The coach is most likely getting fired for incompetence, and the bottom of the barrel is where you sit. 

In business, this is what we consider the “catastrophic mistake’.  Examples of these are losing your cool, blowing off appointments,  partying too much to the point you’re a potato the next day, etc.  These types of mistakes are absolutely devastating to becoming great, as they sting harder and the effects last longer.  

In sports, once you’re labeled as turnover-prone, its a near impossible label to shake.  Not impossible, but extremely challenging.  

An ironic aspect of turnovers is that once they start, they place you in a bad spot.  So you start reaching.  You’re flustered and not focused, and guess what… because of that, you TURN IT OVER AGAIN. 

This is true in business as well.  Momentum plays a HUGE ROLE in business, just like it does in football.  And when your own mistakes start to pile up and you’re feeling that pressure, BOOM!  Another mistake.  

It’s a vicious cycle that needs to never happen to begin with.  The only way to avoid these is to further develop the skill set and make sure you’re better prepared. 

Which leads us to our third analogy. 

Study the Tape:  How many times do we hear in sports “when they’re looking at the tape tomorrow, they’re really going to be shaking their heads at this one”.  

The film room is a place where players study themselves, and also study the competition.  They learn what everyone else is doing and also learn more about who they are as players. 

In business, this practice is not only not common, but it’s many times disavowed altogether.  “Never worry about what your competition is doing, just go forward!”  And we all know that “report review’ is really low on most leader’s list of “fun things to do today”. 

This is so utterly stupid in the grand scheme of things that it’s almost sad.  How could anyone have a great understanding of whether they are excelling or falling behind without understanding where they are currently fitting in the broader market? 

So there we have it.  Three things to consider for your startup or business, related to the NFL.  

Go Bucs!

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