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The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. What do David Beckham, Shaquille O’Neal, and Serena Williams have in commonaside from their standout sports careers? Theyve all built thriving businesses. Sure, having capital and global name recognition helps. But reducing their business success to just fame only tells half the story. The other half is that top athletes spend years honing discipline, resilience, and the ability to think strategically under pressure. Those same qualities happen to make great entrepreneurs. Sports have been a big part of my life for over a decade, and my favorite workout is the one I havent tried before. The more I move, the more I see how it shapes the way I work and think in business. What entrepreneurs can learn from elite athletes Here are six things you, as an entrepreneur or business leader, can take from top athletes. 1. Break down goals like a training plan No Olympic athlete trains at full intensity and on the same goal every single day. Instead, they follow a long-term training cyclepreparation, pre-competition, performance, and recovery. Applying this structured approach to business helps ramp up to peak performance gradually and sustainably. Try this: Break down big goals into smaller, doable milestones. Track what works and what doesnt: The strategy that got your startup off the ground wont be enough when its time to scale. Show up every day with small actions. 2. Design a pre-game routine for peak performance Every athlete follows a routine to get in the right headspace and physical shape before game day. I like to treat each workday like a game day. A morning routine gives me a sense of control and sets the tone for a productive day ahead. Rather than rolling out of bed and headfirst into work mode, I make time for things that fill my energy tank. That might be: A glass of water and a nutrient-rich breakfast A quick mindfulness practice, like mantra chanting or Pranayama breathwork Writing down 13 priorities for the day to stay intentional 1-hour workout A walk outdoors with an audiobook 3. Dont be afraid to fall Athletes fall. A lot. And then they get back up. When I tried skiing for the first time, I quickly realized that falling is part of learning. The more I feared making mistakes, the worse my performance became. Navigating life as an entrepreneur is not like riding down a well-groomed, Aspen-style slope. Its more like skiing at your local city parkice and grass patches, hidden stones, and annoyed pedestrians getting in the way. Falls are inevitable. Instead of hesitating to take risks or avoiding failure, focus on learning to recover quickly. 4. Develop a growth-oriented mindset This quote often pops up in motivational posts attributed to everyone from the Italian football player and manager Gianluca Vialli to Nelson Mandela: You win or you learnyou never lose. Cheesy, but true. Top athletes treat losses as data. Every game teaches them something new about their strengths and weaknesses. Entrepreneurs can benefit from the same mentality. See setbacks as learning experiencesanalyze what went wrong, make adjustments, and move forward. Compete with yourself first, your rivals second. The point of analyzing your performance is to make sure youre better than you were in the last game. 5. Stand on the shoulders of your support network Entrepreneurs often try to do everything solo, inspired by self-made success stories from books and podcasts. But very few things in life are a one-person endeavor. Even in individual Olympic events, there is a team behind every gold medalcoaches, nutritionists, mentors, and teammates. I started BetterMe in 2017 with a handful of people, and most of them are still with me today in C-level positions. From the very beginning, I focused on surrounding myself with people who guided and challenged me, held me accountable, and pushed me to grow. The strongest players in the boardroom and on the field are the ones who know how to buildand lean ona great team. 6. The biggest lesson: prioritize recovery LeBron James never confirmed the rumor that he spends $1.5 million a year on recovery. But the fact that such numbers even circulate shows that rest goes hand in hand with peak performance. Yet, in business, we glorify constant hustle. We wear our bloodshot eyes from late nights at the screen like a badge of honor and exhaustion as a testament to success. Our bodies are excellent communicators and usually find a way to let us know when it’s time to slow down. Instead of dismissing sore muscles or sluggish thoughts as a sign of weakness, listen and integrate sustainable rest into your routine. Schedule recovery like work, blocking time in your calendar for exercise, meditation, or simply relaxing with a book. Fill the time between high-priority tasks with active breaks like short walks, quick workouts, or any movement to reset your brain. Protect your sleep. I stick to a 10 p.m. bedtime and aim for 78 hours of sleep because I know a well-rested mind is a high-performing one. The final thought: Move your body to fuel your mind If you shoot for big goals, thinking like a pro athlete can help open the right doors. But theres more to take from their playbook: a love for sports. And unlike athletes, who dedicate their lives to one discipline, we have the luxury of exploring. In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein talks about how some of the most groundbreaking leaders pulled ideas from different fields, experimented, and innovated because of their broad experiences. Broad exposure makes you more creative, agile, and able to make connections others miss. So grab a tennis racket or skiing poles. Step onto a Reformer or sign up for a 5K. Be adventurous. Try new things. The more you explore, the more skills, insights, and connections you’ll gain. Victoria Repa is the founder and CEO of BetterMe.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Regardless of whether your company has a strict in-office policy or supports a flexible schedule, the reality is that office attendance is at its highest levels in five years, according to Bisnow. Nobody would argue the need for a healthy office, especially one with more people in it. And if you ask what makes a healthy office, most would say it is one that supports physical health and safety, well-being, collaboration, productivity, and social connection. This is why so many businesses focus on factors such as air quality, ventilation, security, and employee wellness programs, for example. While these environmental and social indicators of health are important, they overlook one critical element: the ways that humans interact in a space and use the office. Dont make assumptions about in-office productivity Employers make a lot of assumptions about how productive employees are in the office. Anecdotally, many employees say they look forward to spending time in the office to collaborate with colleagues. Yet top organizations want more than opinions and anecdotes. They want data showing the frequency of casual, impromptu brainstorming in the office and aligning that with productivity and efficiency. Data on how teams collaborate is crucial in improving organizational productivity, as Ive seen through numerous conversations with workplace leaders at Fortune 1000 companies. With the opportunity for more in-person collaboration, decision makers want to measure and understand the frequency of casual, impromptu discussions and brainstorming and how to foster more of it by creating the right office environment. Not long ago, meeting and huddle data was based on how much time employees spent using online collaboration tools and video platforms. Today, with employees spending more time in physical spaces, understanding how and where employees collaborate is critical to improving the experience and eliminating silos. For example, compare the needs of an ad agency with a research think tank. We assume the agency needs more space for collaboration and client meetings, setting up the office layout to feature open desks, soft seating, and large, impressive conference rooms with high-end audio-visual capabilities. At the think tank, we assume their employees need dedicated areas for individual, focused work. As a result, the office layout consists of rows of gray cubicles and a handful of different sized conference rooms. Over time, an interesting shift happens at both companies. The ad agency employees come into the office in the morning, meet with their teams or participate in a larger company meeting, eat lunch in the break room, and then leave for the day. The think tank employees squat in a conference room by themselves or in small clusters, participating in video conferences with colleagues and clients, spending little time at their desks. After a while, fewer employees come into the office, citing the ability to be more productive working remotely. Business as usual, right? Yes, except for the long-term issues of these work arrangements. Along with having to heat and cool unoccupied spaces, negatively impacting the buildings carbon footprint, there is also the cost of cleaning areas based on scheduling, not usage. Safety also plays a factor should an emergency occur in the office, and nobody is available to respond. Add to this the expense of office leasing and the potential of squandered investments in an office redesign. Not to mention the critical, yet less measurable, missed opportunities of face-to-face interactions. Healthy buildings should encompass the entire human experience When we think of healthy buildings, we should consider the entire human experience in them. Instead of making assumptions of how employees want to work, employers are starting to look more closely at how the office plays a role in the health, well-being, and productivity of employees. Consider the idea that every business is a system unto itself, designed to produce outcomes. In that system, the office can be viewed as a product, one that is continuously refined to meet the needs of its customers. In this instance, customers are the people using the office. Today, that product is improved by using AI in the digital space; the next era is improving it in the physical space by combining infrastructure data and intelligence on real-world spaces. Through a combination of AI and body heat sensing technology that ensures privacy, you can get a better sense of how the workforce uses the office. It is like having a touchscreen interface on a digital app, except in this instance, the office is the product. For example, a sensor that understands movement in a space can lead to insight about one-on-one and group interactions, frequency of impromptu meetings, and if large spaces are being used by an individual. This can show the subsequent impact on energy efficiency. This isnt about tracking attendance or keystrokes. Instead, by ensuring privacy and understanding how the workforce naturally moves throughout the office, employers can make better decisions about how to make the most of an employees time in the office. They may learn that the best open desks are quickly taken, forcing most employees to work in darker spaces, and that the volume of chatter makes it difficult to be productive. This is why conference rooms are being squatted, and employees are working remotely. These insights can lead to better management decisions about in-office work policies, layouts, leases, and even cleaning contracts. Employers that have amassed insights about office usage are feeding the data into GPTs to come up with office layouts and designs that more closely reflect their corporate cultures. Instead of having employees conform to the office, there is a way to have the office conform to the needs of employees. As a result, the office can become a place, or product, employees look forward to going to, providing a healthy work environment. Honghao Deng is CEO and cofounder of Butlr.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership opportunities, events and more. Here’s a question for business leaders: When was the last time you or someone on your team had a frustrating experience as a customer? Perhaps you were shuffled between departments, asked to repeat information multiple times, left feeling like no one grasped your specific needs, or that the information changed depending on who you talked to. Now flip the scenario. How many of your customers might be experiencing that same frustration with your company right now? Most well-intended, talented teams can have blind spots with their own customer service. Its like sleeping in the guest room at your house to truly understand what your visitors experience. Even the most gracious hosts might not realize just how lumpy that mattress is, or how loud the dining room chairs are overhead. The truth is that delivering a seamless customer experience is one of the most significant challenges for B2B companies. Despite our obsession with customer satisfaction metrics, most organizations still prioritize internal structures over customer needs. I see it constantlythe customer lifecycle journey fractured across marketing, sales, customer success, and renewals, with each department guarding its own territory and creating an inconsistent customer experience. The hidden cost of fragmentation This fragmentation is more than a customer annoyance. Its also a business liability. When departments operate in isolation, several things happennone of them good: Decision making becomes slower and more reactive Customers waste countless hours repeating themselves to different teams Valuable context gets lost in departmental handoffs Inconsistent messaging and experiences create confusion and erode trust Opportunities to anticipate customer needs vanish into the gaps between teams When departments operate in silos, the silos have a real and substantial impact on customer trust and loyalty. By flipping the traditional marketing structure on its head, youll gain a new and valuable perspective. You and your team will have the advantage of seeing things from the outside-in, and reap the benefit of turning customers into partners and champions. Lets discuss how to do it. Build bridges, not silos The shift toward a unified customer lifecycle cant be done at a surface, optics-only level. A cross-department meeting or two to share ideas isnt going to cut it here. True unification means ripping off the Band-Aid and totally rethinking how we structure, measure, and reward our organizations. It sounds intimidating, but its possible. Ive lived this shift. Ive spearheaded this shift. And it is so, so worth it. Here are three key practices that make the biggest difference: 1. Establish cross-functional ownership Breaking down silos starts with shared accountability. Consider experimenting with creating cross-functional teams responsible for specific segments of the customer base. These teams might include representatives from marketing, sales, customer success, and technical support who each own a specific part of the customer experience. This approach ensures no customer falls through the cracks during handoffs between departments. It also creates natural collaboration points where team members develop a deeper understanding of the entire customer journey and can identify common pain points more quickly. 2. Align metrics that matter Disconnected metrics breed disconnected experiences. Marketing teams traditionally focus on lead volume and pipeline contribution, while customer success teams track retention rates and satisfaction scores. These separate scorecards create invisible walls. The shift requires developing shared, customer-centric metrics that every department contributes to. Net retention rates, customer satisfaction scores, and customer lifetime value provide more holistic views of success than departmental vanity metrics. This enhances accuracy and reduces overlap and rework, while eliminating dangerous knowledge gaps. 3. Leverage integrated technology Metrics are critical, but you also have to inform those metrics with the right data. This might sound like the same thing as number two, but metrics are about asking the right questions, and data is about getting the right answers. A unified customer experience requires unified data. Without a single source of truth about customer interactions, teams operate with incomplete information and fail to make data-driven decisions. This doesnt have to be done manually, and probably shouldnt be. Integrated technology with a high-powered platform is critical to making this unification streamlined and accurate. If you continue using individual, specialized tools, they must share data seamlessly. When marketing automation, CRM, support ticketing, and product usage analytics feed into a comprehensive customer database, everyone gains visibility into the complete customer picture. Make the change real I know the kinds of results that can happen when an organization commits to unifying the customer experience: Reduced time-to-resolution for customer issues Increased customer retention rates and enhance customer trust Higher expansion revenue from existing accounts More accurate prediction of renewal outcomes Improved employee satisfaction across customer-facing teams By breaking down silos and ensuring smooth handoffs between departments, unification can eliminate friction points that often lead to customer frustration and attrition. Who doesnt want to see positive results in key performance indicators like these? Lead the change This wont happen on its own. As executives, we must champion this approach from the top. The process starts with: Modeling collaborative behaviors across your leadership team Creating clear customer journey maps that span departmental boundaries Redesigning incentive structures to reward collaboration Investing in technologies that enable seamless information sharing Measuring success through the customer’s eyes, not internal metrics The first step is often the hardestacknowledging that our existing structures may be optimized for our convenience rather than our customers’ success. The competitive advantage Ready to figure this out? Ready to spot opportunities earlier, solve problems faster, and build deeper customer relationships that competitors struggle to displace? One of th biggest reasons for making this shift is creating an environment where employees can focus on delivering value rather than navigating internal complexity. Teams become energized when they see the direct impact of their work on customer success. And happy employees = happy customers. The trust and loyalty you cultivate with your teams has a direct impact on the trust and loyalty your organization benefits from with your customers. When customers trust their vendors, they become more aligned, viewing you as a partner, not an adversary. I believe the business landscape is quickly moving toward prioritizing unified customer experiences. Clinging to fragmented approaches will put organizations at a disadvantage as customer expectations continue to rise. Why not start now? Melissa Puls is chief marketing officer and SVP of customer success at Ivanti.
Category:
E-Commerce
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