When I was in college at Bowling Green, we had a head football coach by the name of Moe Ankney. Moe took over a team that had gone 11-1 the year before he arrived and proceeded to go five seasons without a winning record.
Moe’s coaching philosophy can be summed up with one particular moment I remember. BG had marched the ball down the field and was set up with first and goal from their opponent’s one-yard line. The conventional call from there would have been to use at least one of the downs to simply plow the ball forward with a quarterback sneak or a running back diving into the line. That’s not how Moe operated though.
Moe knew the defense would be crowding the line of scrimmage to try to prevent such a dive, so he reacted to their strategy by twice passing and twice running wide. The Falcons didn’t score a single point on that possession. I remember shouting from the stands after the failed fourth down play, “Just run the damn ball!”
That play was a microcosm of Moe’s BG career, and maybe why he only lasted five seasons and never again was a head coach. While some consider bucking the conventional wisdom to be chic, if that response is merely a reaction to what others are doing and not part of your overall strategy, that’s no strategy at all. That’s being reactive, a tack that usually loses.
Being reactive shifts the focus from what’s easier to what’s harder. In Moe Ankney’s case, he only had to gain three feet of field to score. The easiest way to do that was to run a basic play that any pee-wee football team learns to execute. Odds are, with players who were over six feet tall, at least one of the four times would have resulted in a player falling forward for the score.
When you choose to react to what others are doing instead of moving forward with your plan, it’s easy to lose sight of the easy solution. You get caught up in “outsmarting” the opposition and make things more complicated than they need to be.
Being reactive shifts the focus from confidence to avoidance. That BG team had just dominated the opposing defense all the way down the field. They ran and passed with purpose and success. Then, just a yard from their goal, the mindset changed. They stopped attacking based on their confidence in their ability to execute and became more concerned with avoiding what the opponent was trying to do.
When you choose to react, you’re confessing, “My best isn’t good enough to beat their best.” If that’s your mindset as a small business owner, sell now. Get out while you’ve still got some money left. You’re going to fail. You’ll never achieve your goals if you don’t believe your best efforts can win.
Being reactive shifts the focus from achieving goals to avoiding defeat. Obviously, Moe was concerned about the opposition’s goal line defense. As pointed out above, he lacked confidence in his own team’s ability. Because of that, he may have thought, “What if we run it four straight times and don’t get a yard?” That would have certainly been demoralizing, but no more demoralizing than the four methods of failure he chose.
In business, there will be times of fear, times of doubt in your ability to succeed. Don’t let those times tempt you away from “keeping the main thing the main thing.” When you start reacting and trying to run away from defeat, you ensure it will happen. Like the running back in football, no matter how far you run, the defense is likely to catch you. Your best bet is to keep running forward. You’ll absorb some hits and get tackled, but you’ll also be advancing the ball toward your goal in the process.
This reactive mindset is why many small business owners won’t engage in social media. They’ve got a great product or service and a smart business plan that’s identified a core audience who’ll respond. If business was football, they’d have first and goal at the one-yard line.
But they’re intimidated by social media.
Maybe they don’t understand how it works from a marketing perspective. Maybe they think it will take too much time to create content and monitor all those channels. Whatever the reason, a lot of SBOs, rather than take the smart, direct approach social media and content marketing provides, choose to try to run around end instead…and they get tackled.
Don’t be a Moe Ankney small business owner. You’ve got everything you need to succeed. Now run the damn ball!
If you want to put your small business or nonprofit over the top, contact Knuckleball Digital. We'll help you play to your strengths and get your message out to the people who need to hear it.