When you watch a Major League Baseball game, it can seem like magic. The organ is playing, the crowds are madly cheering, the diamond is groomed just so, and the players are all in the zone. It seems impossible that they can miss a ball or not make it to the base on time to beat the throw from short.

What you don’t see is all the preparation that goes on behind the scenes. The steamy spring training scrimmages under the blistering Florida sun. The thousands of swings in the batting cages. The pulled muscles, the locker room pep talks, the sweaty socks. What you see is the best of the best – after all the hard work has gone in. The three hours of game time are really a drop in the bucket compared to what preceded it.

Business is the same. When you see someone’s “perfect” website, or watch their seamless launch, you aren’t witnessing the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it. You see the beautiful product displays, not the clogged toilets, piles of spreadsheets, and hours upon hours of hard labor.

Transfer this to your own endeavor: Any professional athlete will tell you that you’re only as good as your preparation. If you don’t practice hard, you can’t play hard. And if you don’t play hard, you can’t win.

How much effort you are willing to dedicate to the background work of your business will determine how far you will go. Everyone from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to David Ortiz to Alex Rodriguez knows that it’s the hours that you put in off the field that determine how far you go on the field.

To be a success in business, you have to be willing to:

·         Practice. Do dry-runs of your processes to make sure they work.
·         Listen to your coach. Accept feedback from your mentors and coaches without getting defensive. They’re just trying to make you the best you can be.
·         Try new things. Adjust your grip on the bat, try a new marketing angle, take a few risks in a practice game to see how it works.
·         Work with your teammates. Team spirit is built in the hours on the practice field, in the dugout, and in the locker room BETWEEN games. What can you do to create a spirit of teamwork with your employees before you’re under the gun?

While playing to a crowd can be invigorating, exciting, and motivating, the real motivation must come from within. Remember that character is how you act when no one is looking – and character is what makes a real winner.

Conclusion

Baseball is life – the rest is just details.

(t-shirt slogan)

While the above quote is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I hope by now I’ve convinced you that baseball holds a lot of wisdom that’s applicable to life in general, and to business in particular. From setting an example of how to handle adversity, to teaching us how important it is to take risks, baseball is full of wisdom.

I hope you will look at our nation’s favorite pastime with a different perspective, searching for more ways we can apply the lessons of the players to our everyday business and entrepreneurial challenges.

I truly believe that when you’re ready to learn, the teacher will appear – perhaps in the form of a uniform-clad second baseman.

To your success – and to a winning season!

In the classic baseball movie “Major League,” one of the players has taken to sacrificing chickens and rubbing mysterious voodoo tchotchkes on his bat in order to get a hit. Some of the other players belittle his efforts – until it appears to work. Superstitions aren’t just the stuff of Hollywood; Hall-of-Famer Kiki Cuyler refused to move to a different spot in the batting order; Dolf Camilli used to rub the batboy’s head before entering the batter’s box; and possibly one of the most famous that players of all levels have adopted: Tapping your bat on home plate before each at-bat.

The problem with superstitions like these is that they work… until they don’t. Eventually the slump happens, no matter how many chickens sacrificed or batboys rubbed. Sometimes, baseball slumps just happen. You’re on fire the entire season until one day you wake up, do everything you did the day before, and suddenly you can’t get a hit to save your life. You’re in a slump, and it hangs around until it breaks – or you do.

Businesspeople experience their share of seemingly inexplicable slumps, too. And just as in baseball, you have a choice: Through or out.

Top-notch marketing blogger and best-selling author Seth Godin based his book, “The Dip,” on this very principle. He says that dips – “slumps,” in baseball speak – will happen; it’s not a question of if, but when. And when it does happen, you have a choice to make. Are you going to give up, or are you going to barrel through?

If your reasons are strong enough, you will continue to get in that batter’s box, says Godin. You’ll put out products, talk with customers, market your wares. And you’ll also work behind the scenes to improve your chances of getting a hit. You’ll review your statistics (Lesson #8), you’ll work with a coach (Lesson #6) and you’ll keep refining your process. And then you’ll keep on swinging (Lesson #3). And eventually, the slump will end and you’ll get that hit.

Of course, giving up is always an option. More than one baseball player has let the slump get the best of them and quit without ever managing to make it back on base. The choice is yours. In the meantime, your competitors will be facing the same challenges at one time or another. The spoils will go to the one who can stick it out – and put their voodoo to work.

Hidden in the announcer’s box is someone charged with a very special job: Watching each and every pitch thrown, ball hit, and play made, and recording it all in the official scorebook. Each ball and strike, walk and steal, are all duly accounted for in the scorekeeper’s book. Then, after the game, the scorekeeper calculates statistics such as batting average, earned-run average, slugging percentage, and a host of other mind-numbingly-precise details.

Not only do these statistics give the announcers something to talk about during the inevitable lulls in the game (“This batter is 0-for-3 against left-handed pitchers with an “X” in their last name!”), they also provide invaluable information for the coaches and the players themselves. The stats are reviewed and rehashed, posted and celebrated (or moaned) over. Statistics matter in baseball.

They matter in business, too. Knowing that a certain affiliate is bringing in the bulk of your sales, or that a particular product’s appeal has dropped off significantly, or that one sales page is doing twice the business another is, are all valuable bits of information. Sure, you can get lost in the numbers, but there are a few basics online business owners must track on a regular basis:

1.    Site visits/page views/unique visitors. How many people come to your site? How many pages do they view? Do they come back?
2.    Conversions. When they visit, do they take the action you desire, whether it’s making a purchase or signing up for your mailing list?
3.    Total sales and total expenses. How much are you bringing in, and how much are you spending?
4.    Referring sites. Who is sending you traffic and why?

If you don’t do business online, the same general topics can be tracked for any businessperson. Instead of site visits, you can track number of people who come into your store or who call your (800) line, and what percentage of those actually order. You can track total sales and expenses, and what brought the visitor into the store (billboard, radio ad, referral from a friend, etc.).

But tracking these statistics isn’t enough, just as knowing that your clean-up batter always walks the first time up in a home game. You have to DO something with that knowledge, and review it again and again over time, looking for patterns and trends. You need to know as much about your business as those color announcers know about the home team.

Watch any sporting contest for long enough, and you’re sure to see at least one injury or near-injury. The runner stealing home collides with a  catcher blocking the plate; the pitcher gets mowed down by a line drive; the center fielder runs into the wall. It happens.

What is interesting to me is that the same tumble that might earn one player a few days on the DL (disabled list), is nothing more than a shake of the head from another player. What causes the difference?

What I’ve noticed is that if a player gets hurt sliding into home for the winning run, he’s more likely to leap to his feet and celebrate with his teammates, rather than having to be carried off the field on a stretcher. The simple fact: It hurts worse when you’re losing.

The same is true for business. If you pull an all-nighter to get your first product ready to launch and it’s a rousing success, earning you five figures in a matter of hours, you’re less likely to complain of sleep deprivation. The adrenaline of a great play carries you through the discomfort. But if that same person pulls an all-nighter for a product that flops, you’ll feel a lot more tired.

Here’s what to do when you experience your own jaw-clenching mess-up:

1.    Remind yourself that a setback is just that: A temporary obstacle, not a death sentence. Tomorrow is another day, another game, another chance to improve.
2.    Look for the lesson. Dig deep into a missed play or loss to find the nugget of wisdom you can use to improve your next go-round. Did you find a great new widget for your blog? Did you increase your traffic? Did you make any new contacts? These are all achievements that will outlive the pain of a bad tumble.
3.    Watch the instant replay. Replay that awful crash not to beat yourself up, but in order to avoid a similar pile-up in the future. Were there warning signs you missed? Did you know the outcome was inevitable? What can you do differently the next time around?

Losses hurt. But they don’t have to send you to the infirmary for the rest of the season. Remind yourself that there is a win hidden in defeat, and commit to finding and extracting the lessons. It’s all just part of the game. The only true failure is to fail to learn from your own mistakes.