Disruption

There are two major types of disruptions in the world. One is the one we see nearly every day. That one is where someone breaks the flow of things and bogs down the whole system. The second one is where a person or company sees the flow, and steps in to alter it in a positive way. The first one is negative, the second one can be very positive. These types of disturbances of the general order are what this week’s Monday Huddle Up is about.

This past Sunday at Costco we saw three examples of the first (negative) type of disruption in less than a half hour. One guy went against the right of way arrows in the parking lot causing a major back up. Another guy went “against the grain” at the front of the store, creating a major bottle neck as everyone had to wait for the ONE person going their own way. Then one last guy (I sense a theme here) kind of flung his cart at the cart return in the parking lot then ran away to jump in a car holding up traffic. That cart not only didn’t make it into the return as he ran away, it went back downhill and hit a parked car. No bother to that bad actor of course.  (Editor's Note: We LOVE Costco, this stuff isn't their fault).

A much better type of disruption, especially in the corporate world, is the second one noted above. Where someone or some entity steps in and changes the way things are done. Amazon in retail. Apple in tech. Netflix for streaming entertainment. There are numerous examples. Today we will talk about one we have been involved with, and the importance of the vision and follow-through versus just the initial concept.

As many of you know our team at Huddle Up built a digital platform for the sports tourism industry back in 2019. The Sports Tourism Index was built as a free tool to help benchmark host destinations throughout our industry. A few years later, we added a matchmaking tool (Scout), to supplement the Index and its data. The idea for the (free) Index was to help destinations see where they stood today, and where they could/should go tomorrow. The concept behind Scout was to offer a digital marketplace for destinations and event owners to find positive matches that each could do business with in the future.

The timing of both the Index and Scout were pretty good, some of that being just dumb luck honestly. However, a good amount of that “luck” was listening to the industry and putting a disruptive tool out there that could make the sports tourism space better. If a company offers a better mousetrap for biz dev in sports tourism marketing or whatever, a rising tides raises all boats, right?

Today’s message isn’t about just the launch of the tech, it is about what came after that. We realized that our “disruption” had a shelf life in its current state. So our team had to find ways to continue to improve it day after day. We knew competition would come and we didn’t want to become obsolete in short order (see Blockbuster video). We knew that there were people out there that had walked this tech pathway before us. As we explored those, one really stepped up – Tempest.

Not only did Tempest (aka iDSS) help build out a better and more customized version of the Index that lives today, they put their whole team behind making it a better place to do business today and in the future. One of the things they did originally was to engage a couple of vital advisory groups to the equation. Just last week we moderated a meeting of Tempest’s Consumer Advisory Board (CAB) for sports tourism. That room of people brought forth their opinions on how to make the marketplace better. Not just the Index, not just HUG, not just Tempest/iDSS, but the INDUSTRY as a whole. The feedback from this group’s meeting last week, and some takeaways from a sports tourism panel that followed it will be the subject of a future Huddle Up. Today’s big idea is this…..

It is one thing to introduce something totally cool that temporarily disrupts the marketplace. It is an entirely different thing to build on that early success and be relevant years later. The secret sauce to that last part it something that one of my mentors shared with me years ago (paraphrasing below)……

“If you want to build something great, you will likely need people outside of the current organization to get there. By including new people, you may not achieve everything that you think you want. You may not make as much money. You may not be the lead dog at the end. But do you want to be 100% of something average, or 10% of something great?”

We will take the latter. Partnership trumps individualism every time.

Go build something cool. Something disruptive. Then bring in people that can make it even more awesome.