ENDURANCE
Entrepreneurial Capacity-building for Sport

Every enterprise starts from an interaction of the two main components – an individual and an idea. We are going to tackle both in this unit. If you are a sports person, you have an excellent starting position to become an entrepreneur. By improving your alertness to ideas and opportunities, this potential can be further leveraged.

Sports and entrepreneurship develop and cultivate similar individual characteristics. That’s why athletes and sports people are prone to entrepreneurship, exhibit higher entrepreneurial orientation, and are typically equipped with qualities that can be capitalized also on the entrepreneurial field. Moreover, a sports career also positively affects other individual-related aspects relevant for entrepreneurship, such as personal resources, social relationships and networks, as well as social, emotional and leadership abilities.

Through your engagement in systematic training and involvement in sports rivalry, you are prone to acquire numerous characteristics that are useful and typical for entrepreneurship. These include above-average discipline, persistence, internal locus of control, proactiveness, situational control, need for achievement, or resistance to stress. Also, you are fostering your personal resilience - the ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, difficulties or change. So, if you have cultivated these traits through engagement in sports, you are more likely to succeed in many other domains, including entrepreneurship.

Recognizing the commonalities between sport and entrepreneurship can play an important role when standing at the doorstep of your (next) professional career. If you are an athlete and your professional sporting days are at the end, the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities can lead to a successful after-sport lifestyle. If you are a sports professional, entrepreneurship offers an attractive option to align your sports passion, professional skill, and earning for a living. Finally, if you are an amateur sportsman or sportswoman, you have most likely gained valuable qualities that would accompany you when developing your own entrepreneurial project. So, in either case, if you are passionate about sport, entrepreneurship can become your new passion, too.

Entrepreneurship is a process in which an opportunity is identified, evaluated, and exploited. The ability to identify or create and exploit opportunities is an essential part of entrepreneurial behaviours.

It starts with a business idea - an initial of idea how to create something new, improve the existing, or better solve a problem or a need, in a way that will generate value for the users, which can lead to establishing an enterprise. Sources of potential business ideas are all around you, and most of them actually inherently depend on your personal and professional experiences and situations that you encounter, your social networks, places you have visited and things you have seen, your hobbies, education, or expertise. That’s why your sports experience serves as a valuable source of business ideas, too.

Every business idea is made up of the following key components:

• Problem (of your customer segment) - the most significant challenges that your customers face in relation to your business idea
• Solution - the solution you provide with your product or service
• Benefits - the value and advantages that your solution brings to the customers

The good news is that the ability to generate business ideas can be trained. Here are some hints:

• Never stop learning
• Be curious and empathetic
• Keep observing what’s going on around you
• Maintain and grow your network
• Practice new ways of thinking
• Use special ideation techniques

Many entrepreneurs and innovators execute their ideas prematurely even though they make excellent sense and look great on paper. Later they learn that in reality they might not be so great. That is why it is important to validate your business idea before you invest too much time and resources into its implementation.

Validation is a process of reducing the uncertainty of pursuing ideas that look great in theory but won´t work in reality.

Bland, D. J., Osterwalder, A., Smith, A., & Papadakos, T. (2020). Testing business ideas.

In the first phase, as seen in the figure above, you need to discover if your direction is right, test the basic assumptions, get insights and confirm with evidence that your business idea is very likely to work.

Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today's entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. Crown Business.

Build-Measure-Learn is a learning and feedback loop for establishing how effective a product, service, or idea is, and doing this as quickly and cheaply as possible. In the first “IDEAS” phase you are concerned with ideation and planning. You come up with ideas and plan what experiment or test you will conduct. In the “BUILD” phase you need to turn your idea into something tangible, which means you create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) - a product with basic features, but enough to get the attention of the consumers. Now you have your product (=”CODE”) and have to make sure whether the critical features are sufficiently finished. Then you plan how to “MEASURE” success. In the next phase, you need to analyse the “DATA”, be it either qualitative or quantitative. The last phase is critical, you need to get insights, based on those you “LEARN” and either change the direction completely or preserve and move on to the next stage.

Mindsets you need to adopt:

• Entrepreneurial

• Customer centric

• Iterative approach

• Question assumptions

• Experiment driven

• Data influenced

First of all, you need to follow up on these statements:

• I believe there is a problem!
• I believe someone has the problem!
• I believe THIS will solve the problem!
• I believe I can make it work like this!

Then, you develop a validation process:

• Assumptions and Hypotheses
• Test - decide methods & tools & MVP
• Data - how will you collect them
• Criteria - what are the criteria for success

What can you validate?

Customer / problem fit - do customers really have the problem you think they have, who they are, is it a problem worth solving, would they be willing to pay for solving it?

Problem / solution fit - does your solution really address your customers’ problem, does your solution work for your customers, did you identify solutions with higher chances of adoption?

Product / market fit - would the customers buy your product for a given prize, do they use it, is their number large enough to sustain products and companies growth and profitability?

When designing and developing your (sports) enterprise, you should have a good understanding of its overall concept and its key components. To define how your business shall create, deliver and capture value, you can use the powerful concept of business models. In simple words, a business model explains how your business will work. The concept of business models as we know it now (based on the work of Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) navigates you in a very intuitive way through all the important elements that ensure the delivery of your service or product. By drafting your business model you will define all key aspects of your future business in a systematic, coherent, and logical way. It will help you to reflect upon your thoughts about your future (sports) enterprise and fine-tune them. Also, as it became a common language for entrepreneurship practitioners, it’s a useful presentation tool, too.

Business model canvas (BMC) is a tool used to develop a visual representation of a business model. It is a brief, one-page blueprint with a pre-defined and easy-to-follow format. After being introduced by Alex Osterwalder, it became a “common language” used to define business models.

The BMC helps you to shortly and efficiently sketch and explain the main attributes of your business. Working with BMC is very intuitive and fast, you can draft your business model in around 20 minutes. After taking this exercise, where the learning process is much more important than its result, you will be able to see the main logic and the workflow of your business. While the BMC is simple and easy to understand, it requires some practice to master. Fortunately, as it is really a mainstream tool, there are plenty of freely available examples in various formats.

The BMC comprises of nine building blocks covering the main areas of a business: customers, offer, infrastructure, and financial viability.

1. You start by defining the groups of people or organizations you aim to reach and serve – your customer segments. The business model has to be built around a strong understanding of their specific needs.
2. Next, you define your value proposition – the value your product or service creates for your customers (e.g. by solving a problem or satisfying a need).
3. To reach towards your customers, you need to consider the appropriate communication, sales, and distribution channels.
4. Also, you need to consider the types of relationships that you will establish with your customers.
5. Revenue streams define the ways in which you will generate revenues from your customers. These should correspond with the value they are willing to pay for.
6. You need to understand your key assets – the most important assets needed to run your business.
7. Alike, you need to underline the key activities you must do to make your business model work.
8. Key partnerships refer to those suppliers and partners required to run a business, e.g. by providing access to important assets and activities, enabling savings and optimisation, or reducing risk and uncertainty.
9. Finally, after knowing the other building blocks, you can summarize the most important costs needed to operate your business model.