Alabama football coach Nick Saban wins football games.

He also wins national championships…with regularity.

During the eleven years Saban has served as head football coach, Alabama has compiled an overall official record of 146-21, 14 bowl game appearances with 10 victories, seven SEC Western Division titles, six SEC championships, and FIVE national championships. Since 2008, Saban’s Alabama teams have spent all or part of each season ranked number one in national polls. In his entire 30+ year career as a college football coach, he’s only lost 63 times…

…and he doesn’t think about winning.

Winning is just a positive by-product of coach Saban’s philosophy of coaching that he simply calls, “The Process.”
He once said, “I was all about winning. There was pressure on me. I felt like I had to win, like I had to prove myself all the time. And sometimes I felt like I affected the team and made them feel that way. When I went to LSU, I adopted the philosophy that we’re going to play one play at a time, like it has a history and a life of its own, and we’re going to dominate the 3

© 2019 The 2nd Man Group
WWW.SMALLBIZPROFITBUILDERS.COM ISSUE #12 ~July 2019

competition. It was more fun for me, more fun for the players, and we got better results.”
One play at a time….

….as perfectly as is possible…
….over and over and over again.

Business is like that, isn’t it? I once had a new client that was super proud to show me his 25 “goals” that he wrote out twice-day from memory. They included things like, “We have bought ten businesses,” “We have a plane,” and “We own 2000 apartment units.” He told me that he had adopted this practice from master-businessman, master-marketer, and multi-millionaire, Grant Cardone over a year ago, and that it was the “secret to his success.” The only problem? He had made NO PROGRESS toward these goals over the past year….literally none. In fact, in many ways he way WORSE OFF than he was a year ago. So what happened?

You see, the brain is funny. One of the weird things about goal-setting is the fact that our brain can’t tell the difference between what we want and what we have. When we set a goal, it will act as if we already accomplished it. It is part of the condition that drives us. On the flip side, if we fail to achieve a goal, it reacts as if it is a loss of a valued possession, and that creates anxiety and fear. It will, however, seek to resolve the goal until the goal is achieved. My client could see the end goal, but that wasn’t enough. He wasn’t focused on doing the simple things consistently over time, that would help him reach those goals, and that was preventing him from achieving his larger objectives.

This makes goal-setting kind of tricky. If we set goals that are too big and too far away, our brain deceives us into believing that simply by virtue of creating the goal that we will achieve it. This false assurance takes away our will to do the day-to-day things that we must do to make sure that the goal is accomplished. Sure, it’s possible to get to the goal eventually, but without consistent, sustained performance on the simple tasks, we’ll never get there. The same thing happens if our goals are too small, too simple. Our brain tricks us into thinking that these simple goals have already been achieved…so why work on them? I’ve seen this cycle repeat itself over and over again with my clients to some version of the same result. Without CONSISTENT EFFORT OVER TIME most goals never become reality.

That’s why we need to focus on THE PROCESS significantly more than we focus on the product. Here are some lessons from Coach Saban’s process:

4

© 2019 The 2nd Man Group
WWW.SMALLBIZPROFITBUILDERS.COM ISSUE #12 ~July 2019

1. You cannot control the outcome. You can only control the input.

Business is complex. The sheer number of decisions that you will be forced to make in the course of any day, week, quarter, or year is immeasurable. There are so many variables that affect the outcome of business decisions that one person, or even a whole TEAM of people, can’t be expected to get them all right.

When Coach Saban realized that the average football play only lasts seven seconds, he understood that while it’s impossible to read and execute every play to perfection for the entire game, anyone can focus for 7 seconds. That was his focus: execute flawlessly for seven seconds at a time, then focus on the next seven seconds. By repeating this method consistently over time, eventually the game would always come to an end…generally with his team winning.

Business Application: Do ONE THING at a time, and do it flawlessly. It’s easy to get caught up thinking about the next thing, but by keeping your focus firmly on what’s directly in front of you, you significantly increase your odds of success.

2. Stop looking at the outer scoreboard. It’s the inner scoreboard that counts.

All of my clients work from an annual budget. It’s one of the “standard” practices that I require of them. We spend a good amount of time crafting these budgets and, once they are completed, we measure against them regularly. When we review the budget vs. actual results each month, oftentimes a line item will be off by just a few percentage points and a client will take a look and say something like “Well that’s pretty good,” to which I always reply, “No, it isn’t.”
5
© 2019 The 2nd Man Group
WWW.SMALLBIZPROFITBUILDERS.COM ISSUE #12 ~July 2019

While the overall result may be okay, it’s the individual line items that add up to create success.

Coach Saban is famously known for throwing ridiculous fits on the sidelines when one of his players doesn’t execute his job flawlessly. While this is not unusual for coaches at a high level, what makes Saban unique is that he continues these tirades even when his team is up by over 40 points in the closing minutes of a game! Why would he do this? Because he’s not focused on the outer scoreboard.

He’s focused on the inner scoreboard; the one that says, “You could have done better.” He knows that the little things snowball into the big things.

Business Application: Focus on FLAWLESS execution on the small things, not just “pretty good.” It’s so tempting to give ourselves a pass when the overall picture looks good, but if we get lazy on the little things, then they eventually always turn into big things.

3. Don’t get paralyzed by fear of failure. Keep moving forward, no matter what.

The emotional ups and downs of business can become overwhelming if we let them. Thinking about worst case scenarios and operating from a position of preservation or fear, can often stop us in our tracks and prevent us from focusing on the things that really matter. When we set a goal and fail to achieve it, we make that mean all sorts of things about our competence. This is not helpful.

Coach Saban hasn’t lost many games, but he has lost at least one game in every season he’s been at Alabama, except for 2009.

This loss each year serves as a handy reminder that the process isn’t a perfect system. It’s a system that WORKS TOWARD perfection.
Saban understands this, and that’s why he doesn’t dwell on those losses. In fact, after his 2018 BCS National Championship loss to
Clemson, he gave his team 24 hours off and then had them back in the team rooms working on the next thing immediately.

6
© 2019 The 2nd Man Group
WWW.SMALLBIZPROFITBUILDERS.COM ISSUE #12 ~July 2019

Business Application: Don’t let failure stop your process.

In fact, don’t even let it slow you down. The fastest way to recover from even a small failure is to take a short period of time to reflect, and then to get right back on track with your process.

The process is a philosophy that simplifies the complexities of life.

At its heart, it’s about learning to focus on the things that we can control. It’s also about realising that there are more things we can control than we realise. We can’t control every outcome — sometimes the scoreboard doesn’t reflect how good we are — but we determine where we’re headed in the long run.

And as we trust the process, we will gradually fall in love with it as well.