When British bookmakers post odds of 5,000 to 1 against the likelihood of a certain outcome, it is about as certain as certain can be that the outcome in question isn't going to happen.
A year ago you could have placed a bet with similar odds on, say, Elvis Presley being miraculously found alive, or the Leicester City soccer team winning the English Premier League championship–an equally miraculous event.
Well, miracles do happen, apparently: While Elvis hasn't shown up yet, earlier this month Leicester City pulled off what may have been the most amazing, against-all-odds sporting victory of all time by winning the Premier League championship. And, just to rub salt in oddsmakers' wounds, the team won the title with two games left to play.
To put this David vs Goliath achievement into perspective, consider the fact that assembling Leicester's team cost just �54 million, or about $78 million. Manchester City Football Club is known for paying that sum for a single player!
But this is much more than an extraordinary sporting yarn: It is also an incredibly inspiring business story for entrepreneurs. Leicester's success is a testament to the amazing accomplishments that can be realised when a group of like-minded individuals get together and decide their aspirations are not going to be impeded by conventional wisdom.
Successful teams take chances; they jointly determine that if an idea doesn't necessarily work in theory, it might just work in practice. And when these underdogs work together and have fun, they can run rings around the 800-pound gorillas that dominate industries.
Back in 1984, when a company by the name of Virgin Records decided to start a trans-Atlantic airline and take on Goliaths like Pan Am, TWA and British Airways, the pundits all thought we were insane and perhaps we were. I don't think any bookie ever laid odds on our chances of survival, but 5,000 to 1 would have sounded about right. And what odds might you have gotten against Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak turning a garage computer project into Apple, the world's most valuable company? Or against Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students with an idea for a search engine called Google, or Sara Blakely, who cut the legs off a pair of pantyhose and parlayed her US$10,000 life savings into Spanx, which is now a multibillion-dollar company?
These may be exceptional examples, but at thousands of smaller startups, the formula is similar: With little or no funding, every one of these entrepreneurs built their teams by finding and engaging other dreamers who brought energy and value to the group.
Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, the Thai businessman who owns Leicester City, was considered mad by many commentators when he spent �39 million in 2010 to acquire a lackluster, second-tier British soccer team. Six years later, the club's value is estimated to have increased at least tenfold. But if the team's success cannot be attributed to throwing money at it, how did it become such a winner?
One answer: the club treated its players like people, not expensive commodities. "We give our time to the staff, the players and to the manager," Srivaddhanaprabha's son Aiyawatt, the team's vice chairman, told The Telegraph newspaper recently. "We try to manage it like a family, to listen to the problems of every single member of staff."
In a sport that has become big business and tends to be dominated by brilliant, multimillionaire prima donnas and a compulsion to win no matter the cost, Leicester City's "one for all, all for one" spirit has been a refreshing change.
I have always believed that turning the traditional corporate pyramid on its head is the best path to success.
Rather than focusing solely on shareholder value, look after your people's interests, and keep them engaged and feeling appreciated. In turn, they will do a better job of taking care of your customers, and your shareholders, at the tip of the inverted triangle, will also be happy.
So congratulations to everyone at Leicester City from the board members to the ball boys. Now comes the hard part: doing it again. Next season the odds will be very different, but if they keep having fun, I am sure they will surprise everyone again.
(Richard Branson is the founder of the Virgin Group and companies such as Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, Virgin Mobile and Virgin Active. He maintains a blog at www.virgin.com/richard-branson/blog. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/richardbranson. To learn more about the Virgin Group: www.virgin.com.)
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