9 Lessons Vince McMahon Should Have Learned From Ted Turner

8. Take Small Steps To Reach A Giant Goal

While never averse to making an impulsive statement or a grand gesture, Turner would take incremental steps to achieving many of his goals. It was smart business, not just grandstanding, that built his empire - the super station concept was built over years, not just via a single huge venture overnight. When McMahon started the World Bodybuilding Federation in 1990, he was building something huge from scratch in a field that already had a large, incumbent organisation in that position (the International Federation of Bodybuilders), run by the Weider brothers. He was using the massive influx of cash from his successful boom period in the eighties to fund a whole new business, a new entertainment concept and a hostile takeover of the IFBB€™s market share. His money wasn€™t enough, his concept stank to high heaven, and the IFBB proved more intractable than he€™d expected. The WBF folded after two events in two years. Similarly, when McMahon started the XFL in 1999 in partnership with NBC, he was building something else huge from scratch that, while not specifically competing with the NFL, was competing with their brand in the public eye. Just as he had a decade earlier, he funnelled the massive income from his second successful boom period (the Attitude Era) to fund his portion of the enterprise. Well, the football was terrible, the trappings of the XFL whiffed of the WWF, and once again, the whole horribly expensive affair tanked after two years. Vince McMahon sometimes forgets that life isn't a wrestling angle. Large, exaggerated pantomime gestures and actions don't have the same meaning in real life that they do in the ring, and wickedly charismatic schemers like J.R. Ewing or his own Mr. McMahon character don€™t work in real life for a reason. That's not how successful business is conducted. Perhaps thrown off by the glitzy success of WrestleMania (precisely the huge, showboating gamble that the Mr. McMahon character would risk everything to pull off), Vince seemed to think that success in business required nothing more than a big idea, lots of money and willpower. While all of those things have value, patience, strategy and good relationships in the industry are vital cogs in the machine as well.