What Team Sports Taught Me About Building Businesses
A lot of what I believe about business started long before I ever ran one.
It started in team sports.
If you spend enough time on teams — playing, coaching, competing, losing, trying to improve — you start to understand a few things that transfer almost perfectly into business.
First, everybody has a role.
That doesn’t mean every role is equal in visibility. It means every role matters to the outcome. Good teams understand that a win is usually the product of people doing different jobs well, often without much attention or credit attached to them.
Business works the same way.
One of the most useful ideas I’ve carried with me is what some people call the “upside down pyramid.” In a lot of organizations, the org chart suggests that the most important people are at the top. In practice, I’ve found the opposite is often closer to the truth: the most important people are usually the ones closest to the customer.
They are the ones creating the experience.
They are the ones hearing what customers say, what they mean, what they repeat, and what they wish were different.
They are the ones shaping whether a customer leaves satisfied, frustrated, loyal, or never to return.
That’s one reason employee engagement and frontline execution matter so much. Gallup’s workplace research continues to show that more engaged teams produce better performance outcomes, while U.S. employee engagement recently fell to its lowest level in a decade — a warning sign for any operator who cares about customer experience.
That doesn’t mean leaders don’t matter. It means leaders have a different job than many of them assume.
The best coaches create conditions for individual players to excel.
The same is true in business. A leader’s job is not to sit farthest from the customer and pretend that distance equals strategic insight. It is to build the system, set the standard, remove obstacles, and support the people doing the work where the customer meets the business.
That mindset also affects hiring.
I’ve always believed it’s better to look for great players than to look for people who simply fit a box on paper. Some people know how to make a team better. They bring energy, adaptability, accountability, and awareness. You notice it in sports immediately, and you notice it in business over time.
I also think a lot of companies underestimate younger talent. People in the 18-to-35 range often have a more instinctive feel for media, behavior, data, and how people discover and talk about brands. That doesn’t mean experience stops mattering. It means curiosity and awareness matter too.
Another lesson sports taught me is that culture is not what’s written on the wall. Culture is how people treat one another when things are hard.
It’s easy to talk about values when business is going well. It’s harder to live them when the pressure is on, when a customer is unhappy, when margins are tight, or when someone on the team needs support.
That is when people find out what kind of organization they’re in.
I’ve learned that treating people well is not just a moral preference. It is operationally smart. If you are constantly churning people out, undercutting trust, or forcing teams to rebuild from scratch, you spend all your time reconstructing the same Lego set instead of getting better.
Strong teams are not built by accident. They are built through trust, clarity, repetition, and respect.
That is true in sports, and it is true in business.
The best businesses I’ve seen are not the ones with the flashiest strategy deck. They are the ones where people know their role, understand the mission, trust one another, and feel that what they do matters.
In my experience, that is what good teams do.
And in my experience, the businesses that last work the same.
— Ryan Tyrrell is a Nashville-based entrepreneur and operator with experience building businesses in consumer services, hospitality, digital products and community-focused ventures. Follow Ryan on Substack.
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