More Successful Than a Professional Athlete: The Numbers in Your Business

More Successful Than a Professional Athlete: The Numbers in Your Business

Frustration in business and sales is real. One of the most common sources of frustration is a lack of success—whether it’s not enough sales, a lead generation strategy converting at only 20%, or a sales funnel with a 33% conversion rate where only 1 in 3 prospects buys from you.

The key to overcoming this frustration? Knowing your numbers. Measure everything in your business. Why? Because you can’t improve what you don’t understand.

But there’s hope—a lot of it. Many of our clients are actually outperforming professional and Olympic athletes. Surprising? Not really. Once you look at the numbers, you’ll see that athletes are often highly paid to fail. In any given year, only one team wins the Stanley Cup, meaning 31 other teams “fail.” The same holds true for the NFL and MLB—only one team is crowned champion each year while the rest technically come up short.  Compare this to Erika, owner of Effortless Marketing, she was able to increase her sales by 92% in just one year, I think business owner should be winning all the time, there is no excuse for entrepreneurs to loose.

What does this mean for you, as an entrepreneur?
In business, everyone can win. Unlike sports, success in business isn’t mutually exclusive. An industry can have 100 businesses, and all of them can be profitable. There’s more than enough to go around. In fact, the better we all get at business, the better the world becomes. Look at Amazon—they’ve transformed global business standards, from free delivery to same-day shipping. While some may see that as competition, it actually pushes all of us to step up our game and improve customer service.

As an entrepreneur, you can succeed. Let’s explore the numbers. Recently, we’ve had conversations with clients who were frustrated by their sales results and hesitant to make follow-up calls, fearing failure. These discussions got me thinking about professional athletes and how often they fail. We rarely focus on their failures; instead, we get swept up in the success and the thrill of their wins.

Take baseball, for example. My son plays baseball, so I know firsthand how much the sport revolves around failure. A well-paid MLB player who bats .250 is considered successful. That means he only puts the ball in play once every four plate appearances. But that’s just part of the story. When you factor in swings and misses, foul balls, and other factors, the success rate is even lower. In the 2023 MLB season, the average player took 1.89 swings per plate appearance, meaning that the real success rate—putting the ball in play and reaching base—is around 13.2%.

How does this compare to your business?
Chances are, your business numbers are better than 1 in 8. Let’s look at another famous example: Michael Jordan. He once said:

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Your numbers should far exceed those of a professional athletes, I much prefer 1000%’s as performance numbers not portions.  Take for example 2 other local companies, who increased their revenues by 1500% and the other by 1000% in just under three years.

What about Olympians? We celebrate them all the time, but are you more successful than an Olympian? I’d argue that you are. Olympians compete once every four years, while you get the chance to win in your business every day. In the Tokyo Olympics, only 8.9% of athletes won a medal, and just 339 of the 11,319 athletes took home a gold medal.

Now let’s talk about hockey, specifically Alex Ovechkin—one of the greatest goal scorers in NHL history. He’s on track to break Wayne Gretzky’s all-time scoring record. Impressive, right? But when we dig into his stats, we find that Ovechkin has taken 10,993 shots in his career, with only 6,657 hitting the net (about 61%). Out of those, he has scored 853 goals, meaning he scores on just 7.8% of his total shots and 12.8% of the shots that actually reach the net.

How does the rest of the NHL compare? The top 10 goal scorers in the 2023-2024 season scored 511 goals on 3,139 shots—scoring 16% of the time.

What’s the takeaway for you?
As an entrepreneur, you get to compete every day and don’t have to win at the expense of your competition. If your business numbers are better than 16%, you’re already outperforming:

• Alex Ovechkin (7.8% overall, 12.8% of shots on net)
• The top 10 NHL goal scorers (16%)
• MLB players (13.2%)
• Tokyo Olympians (8.9% for medals, 2.9% for gold medals)

Know your numbers. Keep improving. And remember—you’re already more successful than a professional athlete.