A Sports Metaphor for Business: Defense Wins Championships
There nothing like a good sports metaphor for business. In fact, I have another fun one that I want to riff on today:
Offense Wins Games, Defense Wins Championships
I’m sure you would agree that this is a great sports metaphor for business on so many levels. If not, I hope you will after reading this.
First off, in sports there is a reoccurring theme year after year, especially in basketball and football (and sometimes in baseball). The theme is that great offensive teams typically do their best work in the regular season. However, when the playoffs come around great defensive teams beat great offensive teams in clutch games.
Reasons for this vary. But my favorite explanation uses another clichéd sports adage: Defense travels. This means that an away team with a great defense will still show up with a great defense. The reason for this is because defense is about hustle and effort.
In contrast, a great offense playing on the road often stumbles. This is because offense is typically dependent on tempo and rhythm. The environment of a game can easily disrupt tempo and rhythm, but not hustle and effort.
Breaking Down This Sports Metaphor for Business
With that said, in order to apply this sports metaphor for business we need to define what’s offense and what’s defense. In business, the offense is customer acquisition and the defense is customer service and retention.
There are many startups stories of companies gaining tons of press by creating hokey stick like growth through skilled viral customer acquisition strategies. However, these same companies crashed and burned because they had what’s referred to as a leaky bucket. When you have a leaky bucket, everything is dependent on the fact that you can keep acquiring customers at break neck speeds.
Customer acquisition is highly dependent on rhythm and timing, just like an offense in sports. If the environment of one of your customer acquisition channels changes, your rhythm and timing is negatively impacted.
For example:
- Google changing their rules for SEO
- Ad prices increase suddenly
- Facebook or Twitter changing third-party API rules.
- The government changes their email laws
- Email service providers change their filter rules
On the other had, there are less well known stories of startups with fairly slow growth. These companies did not have a viral customer acquisition plan. What they did have is amazing customer service and retention strategies. There was no leaky bucket. Every new customer became a lifetime customer. It didn’t matter as much if the cost of Google or Facebook Ads suddenly changed or SEO rules changed. Their defense traveled to these new environments.
Obviously, offense vs defense is not a zero sum game. However, as an entrepreneur, you typically have limited resources. You must make a choice. Will you focus your resources on offense or defense?