Five Lessons Every Small Business Can Learn from The Ultimate Fighting Championship

In the past several years, public interest in mixed martial arts (MMA) along with its biggest and best league, the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC) has grown exponentially. In 2009, six of the top ten pay per view events were UFC fights, and rumour has it that boxing fans are defecting to the UFC in droves. With that fact in mind, we offer the five business lessons that can be learned from MMA. 

In MMA, fighters who are only good at one skill are quickly exposed. If you are just good at striking, you get wrestled to death for three five-minute rounds. A lack of diverse skills can be equally devastating to your career aspirations. Good marketing managers have some finance skills to add credibility to their decisions. Entrepreneurs should be trained in a diverse skill set in order to avoid being beaten up in the business world.

MMA events are full of athletic men taking big hits and persevering. Every sector of industry has examples of people and companies who took punches in stride. In 2005, Delta Airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. After restructuring through labor agreements and fuel negotiations, Delta emerged from bankruptcy in 2007. The airline’s come-back was completed with the merger with Northwest in 2008.

Ultimate Fighting Champion, Georges St. Pierre has been beaten twice in 22 fights. His opponents for those bouts went on to become UFC Welterweight champion. But after both losses, St. Pierre remained focused, came back stronger and reclaimed his title. As a rookie chemical engineer at General Electric, Jack Welch made a mistake. He blew a hole in the roof of the plant and nearly got himself fired. Twenty years later, Welch was named Chairman and CEO. For 21 years, he guided GE through internal restructuring and turned the company into the most valuable and largest company in the world. Annual revenues increased by more than $100 billion under his management.

A big part of the UFC’s rise to riches has been President Dana White. He has an uncanny way of making every fight seem like the most interesting event since the invention of the telephone. In order to grow your business, you need to be a hype machine as well. Firms are using Facebook, Twitter, and Company.com to send out information to consumers, shining a light on the strategic advantages or working with them, and finding new ways to make money in the new media environment.

In MMA, a fighter can “tap out” in order to submit and get out of a dangerous hold. The best fighters know how (and when) to apply these holds, but they also how to maneuver out of dangerous positions. In 2008, Citibank was in a painful financial choke hold and Wall Street was looking to see if the bank would tap out like Washington Mutual and Wachovia. Citibank refused to quit, in spite of the grim outlook and is now on the road to recovery. While it's true that Citi took TARP funds to stay on its feet during the financial turmoil of the last couple of years, it has agreed a repayment schedule with the federal government, and will be repaying that taxpayer loan with interest. During the worst part of the crisis, Citibank was trading at $0.99 per share, but after fighting for its survival, Citi shares are changing hands for more than three times that amount.

 

If success is measured in growth, then the success of MMA and the UFC is beyond question. Founded in 1993, UFC pay-per-view events now routinely attract more than 500,000 buyers, with UFC 100 earning 1.6 million PPV buys. There are DVDs of bouts available to buy, and action figures of the sport's heroes have replaced WWE action figures, which in turn replaced Star Wars and GI Joe.

 

And have you ever seen kids playing with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs action figures?  

 

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