Great Teams Don’t Rely on Heroes

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]I believe it's very simple for people to take a sports analogy and apply it to business. That sport is entertainment.

[00:00:06]Uh we can derive a lot of insights from it. We can derive how a team functions.

[00:00:11]We can derive a lot of things around that.

[00:00:15]Uh and then we can also then we have to also look at it and say "What do they do when there's an injury? What do we do when there's a change? If a business is hyper-dependent on a single player, very low likelihood of them being successful in that kind of environment."

[00:00:30]It's the same thing for for our business. I had a situation where we had a phenomenal project manager at running a program.

[00:00:38]And that person was phenomenal. So so I asked our team, "Hey, who thinks that we should have the best person run the program?" Everybody raised their hand.

[00:00:47]"Who thinks the client gets the best service if if only one person runs that program, right?"

[00:00:52]And then nobody raises their hand.

[00:00:54]"So if your logic is that well, why would I have somebody that doesn't that's not the best running it?" That's the way that we are. It's like you're awfully naive.

[00:01:03]Right? Like there's ebbs and flows in business. Things change. What happens during the downtime if that person gets placed on another project? And then how much is that person capable of running?

[00:01:13]And then you can kind of see like there's a breakdown in business. But what about the person? They're carrying that whole load that if they don't perform at a super high level, everything falls apart? How does that person take a day off if they're sick during that season? How does that person take a vacation? How so so as the employer, do you have any type of responsibility back to create a good environment for for your team?

[00:01:37]And and and so this is something that happens when businesses are smaller, uh they tend to put a person to fix the problem.

[00:01:45]But as a business scales, it has to shed that way and say I have to turn into a process where our process produces uh the ability to have the next man up. And that's a lot of where your sports really come in and saying, "Hey, here are the plays that we're going to run and we're going to re- recruit players that are similar in each of the positions with a little bit of an outlier in different areas so that we can run different packages." But the idea that if if I have all speedy defensive backs that are that are long and tall and they're speedy, our scheme that we can run for them, what we can teach them, what we can practice, and things can be pretty consistent if the next player is very similar in makeup. And so the idea is that they arm their team with this uh consistent set of skills so they can function with this next man up kind of mentality.