What Entrepreneurs and Small Business Leaders Can Learn from the Demise of Sports Illustrated
What went wrong at Sports Illustrated?
Last week it was announced that the publishing licensee of Sports Illustrated (SI) had missed a payment to their licensor resulting in termination of the agreement and ultimately laying off the entire Sports Illustrated staff. What happened?
For decades, sports stars and youth dreamed of the day they would end up in SI. It was the gold standard of sports reporting, and the coveted cover of the annual swimsuit issue was anticipated by millions.
But like so many other iconic brands and publications, SI may now be on the scrap heap for many reasons.
We can speculate the impact of attempts to conform to new social norms and thereby alienation of the avid SI reader. But that would only be minimal. The real target of any magazine is not the reader, but the aggregation of a group of target clients for the advertisers.
SI’s failure to embrace new media, their sluggish response to create a compelling website, their failure to focus more on reporting in depth stories that couldn’t be covered in a 24-hour news cycle, coupled with a declining interest in print media all led to this result.
Ultimately, Sports Illustrated failed to react quickly to changes in the market and how information was delivered. Any other reason is merely additional fuel to the fire that already existed.
Some will say they lost their way. From the first swimsuit issue through transgender cover models, the common complaint would be, “What did any of that have to do with sports?”
All these apparent deviations from sports reporting are merely symptoms of a brand that failed to recognize that in the span of 70 years of the publication, interest in sports and more specifically the lives sportsmen and sportswomen have changed.
And so has the way the reader consumes it and the advertisers targeting those readers.
Entrepreneurs and small business owners can learn a great deal from this demise if they’ll focus on the overall cause and not the symptoms that resulted.
This is a common failure of small business: We tend to look at symptoms and fail to trace the cause. We believe slow sales are caused by lack of selling, only to ignore the shift in our market that we’ve yet to react to.
So, here are a few take aways from the demise of Sports Illustrated.
- If you find yourself saying, “That’s the way we’ve always done it”, it’s time to make some changes.
- If you find you team not seeking new ways to do their work, it’s time to hire new people.
- If you find declining sales, don’t react radically, but react.
- If you find you’re not attracting new clients, it’s time to change your marketing.
- If you notice new clients aren’t like the old ones, you need to survey your new and old clients to find out why.
- If you don’t find yourself stunned by changes in your market, you need to pay more attention to your market.
- If you find yourself making changes that may alienate your core client, you need to determine if the change is proactive or reactive.
- If a change you are making is reactive, you need to focus more on the future of your market and company.
- If you see changes happening and find yourself saying, “That’s not going to last”, consider changing your mind.
- If you find yourself blaming the situation, you need to find your company a new leader.
Change is happening all the time. It’s the leader’s job to watch for it, anticipate it, and react to it before change forces a reaction.
Be Excellent At This For Small Business Success
I like to think of myself as capable of most any task I take on. No doubt you do as well. Given enough time and resources, we can obtain the necessary knowledge and skill to do most anything.
Which is exactly why we shouldn’t do some things.
Some time ago I took on the job of remodeling our bathroom. We had purchased an older home and the décor was dated. My wife wanted (among other things) to have the 60’s vanity removed and to install a porcelain pedestal sink.
Removal was a breeze. Breaking things is in my skill set. Once removed I placed the pedestal sink in place and began the installation process. A few hours and a lot of water later I sat on the floor, surrounded by hoses, gaskets, and various tools. I was dumbfounded as to why I could not successfully install this sink.
Just then my wife came in and asked, “Is there anything I can get you?”
“The only thing I need right now is a plumber” was my reply.
What seemed to be a straight-forward, simple yet not easy task had turned into an epic challenge that I could not solve. And this is often what happens in our work lives as well.
No one wants to be incompetent. But admitting one’s incompetence is often the first step in moving forward with a project. How much revenue has been sacrificed, how many clients have not been served, how many opportunities have been lost because we feel the need to do a task ourselves rather than delegate it to someone who already possesses skill and knowledge we do not?
This is most common in small business. To compete we need to be experts in accounts payable, receivable, human resources, payroll, tax compliance and strategy, marketing, advertising, sales, retention, and now social media too. It can overwhelm the most competent person just as I was overwhelmed by the seemingly simple task of installing a sink.
Each task can be mastered individually. But when it comes to the pace of running a small business, trying to master any one task on the fly is insurmountable. You’re better off admitting you are incompetent and hiring someone who is. That way you can focus on what parts of the business you do well and get better results.
If you are good at selling but poor at bookkeeping, hire someone to do the bookkeeping and do more selling. You’ll make more money because you’ll be doing what you do well and outsourcing what you don’t do well.
All the time you spend learning a new task and doing it poorly is lost opportunity time (not to mention poor execution which leads to higher costs as well).
And here’s the real risk in not taking this approach; eventually you will grow tired of doing the tasks you don’t do well and you’ll start to avoid doing it at all. And when things don’t get done they create bigger problems that must be done. This will undoubtedly call for hiring an expert.
To be successful in business today you must comply with regulation, compete with the competition, and communicate to your target clients why they should do business with you. Then you must close the sale and do everything necessary to retain the client. No one person can do this well for very long. Soon you’ll have more to do than you personally can.
If you intend to grow you will be best-served to learn this now: The best business people are very good at one or two things and excellent at delegating or outsourcing the rest.