Paintball World
I was a professional paintball player. Although, I started in the early 90s, I'm retired now. Back then it was a relatively new sport, played with little skill and with equipment that generally fell apart as you used it. Anyone who's ever played the game, however, knows it's as addictive as any drug. The adrenaline rush is simply incredible.
The more I played, the more I wanted to play. My friend Bill formed a ten-man and a 5-man team, and embarked on a training program at the same time as the sport was gaining popularity around the world and professional leagues were forming.
Over the next few years we would travel the world competing in tournaments. For a time I was ranked as one of the top players in the world by my peers. Our team won international tournaments and ultimately won the World Cup, European Cup and every other major cup event held in the world. It was an exciting time.
What an opportunity! To travel the world and make money doing it, while playing a sport you love. From a business perspective, there is a reason they say war is the ultimate instructor. I would say paintball comes in second. You get all of the benefits, without the risks to your life (as a tremendously patriotic American, I don't say that in jest). Here's what paintball teaches you:
- The right people, in the right positions, are critical to success. You don't want your best shooter crashing through the woods. You want him strategically positioned to pick off the other team's key guys and tip the balance in your favor and then push on to exploit their weakness and win.
In paintball, as in business, you must know your equipment. We knew our equipment so well we figured out how to improve it and offer paintball players better products. - Have a good strategy in the beginning, but adjust your game or business according to what is happening in real time. Be prepared to change tactics mid-game because nobody knows who is going to get eliminated next. Change brings opportunity.
- Know your competition as well as you know yourself. At the level we played, if we walked in cold on a team, that meant we were getting over-confident. Over-confidence leads to laziness. When you are winning, it's easy to believe you will always be that good. Suddenly you don't practice as hard, or your desire to win dulls because you've been there already. It's tough to keep your whole team at 100% year after year. How many teams have won the Super Bowl three years in a row? Stay humble and work hard.
- Practice, Practice, Practice. You can't train enough and training only counts when you do it right. Perfect Practice, Perfect Practice, Perfect Practice is a better way than just going to practice.
- New and improved products give you an advantage-as long as they work as planned. Moving new products from testing to public consumption can be dangerous. I pushed my one paintball invention to the limit before rollout, and even then there were problems.
- When you launch an innovation, be ready to act. You never know what the competition is going to do. Pay attention, listen and learn quickly so the innovation adapts if need be.