The Business Lessons We Can Learn from Pro Football

The Super Bowl is just around the corner and so it’s time for the world’s biggest brands to bring their A-game to their commercial slots on primetime TV. But aside from how to market to a football-loving audience, is there anything else a business owner can learn from watching pro football? You better believe it.

It’s all in the playbook

Planning, planning, and yes, that’s right, more planning. Listen to any NFL coach talk about his team and the upcoming games, and you’ll get a sense for the amount of time and preparation that goes into the game plan.

And just like coaches have their playbooks, so too must a business owner have a clear plan for the future. A good football coach will analyze the opponents in order to determine their strengths and weaknesses. If you’ve got what it takes to be an entrepreneur, then the chances are this sounds all too familiar.

There’s no such thing as a sure thing

Let’s take this season for example. The Patriots were favorites early on in the season while the Titans were nowhere to be seen on early lists of Super Bowl odds. Although they remain rank outsiders with most bookmakers, at least they’re still in the mix which is more than can be said for the Tom Brady ‘sure-thing’. 

What we can learn from this is that there are no guarantees of success in the world of business. You can have everything in place to achieve your goals but if the competition wants it more than you, then you might have to work a lot harder than you first assumed.

Winning isn’t everything but losing is a bad habit

Every football coach knows that the team will hit the odd bump along the way but that’s okay. They know that losing doesn’t necessarily mean the end. However, they also know that when one approach obviously doesn’t work, it’s time to make a change.

A loss in business could be a missed opportunity or a bad purchasing decision that you need to write off. But, as in football, the most important thing is to ensure that those same mistakes don’t happen again.

So as you can see, it’s not all sweat and tackles in the world of pro football. These days, football coaches, like entrepreneurs, need to have an astute mind and a head for the business side of coaching. Think about that when you settle down to watch the Super Bowl next month.