As a kid there was nothing more I loved than playing sports and competing. Now, as an adult and father of two, there is not much more I enjoy in my life than coaching. Initially, I was thrilled introducing my kids to the sports that brought me so much joy child and about teaching the basic skills of each sport. As my son has grown older and the skills and competition become more advanced new elements to coaching youth sports start to emerge.
While the most important thing in youth sports is that the kids are having fun, a coach’s job also now includes finding ways for the kids to be successful when it comes to wins and losses. I admit though, I love that part. We as coaches try to find chemistry among the players and put the best line combinations together, we work to close the gap on skill deficiencies we see, and we try to strategize on the best tactics for beating our next opponent.
This year I am fortunate enough to be the head coach of my son’s squirt A team. A few weeks ago, we were in the championship game of a tournament and we fell behind early. It wasn’t looking like our day.
After the first period our coaching staff told the kids some very important things that are relevant to business challenges many organizations face as well. First, we told the team that while we were down 2-0 after one period that we were lucky to have a time to regroup and assess the situation. We decided as a team to ignore the past period and if we were to win the second and third period, worst case scenario we would be tied with our opponent. The same thing is true for business in the sense that if a company has a down period, one of the most important things you can do is take a pause, assess the situation and perhaps develop new goals that will make up for the down time. Many businesses already break down their financial years into quarters. However, if a business unit or employee is struggling, I suggest finding a shorter timeline and create newly defined goals that can combine to lead to a more desired long-term outcome.
Down by two goals after one period had us coaches worried, but another area we were confident in was our team’s depth. We had more skaters and felt that if we kept the score close, we would be the energetic team late in the third period. This turned out to be the case. Our two-goal deficit continued late into the third period when the hard work and persistence finally allowed us to score two goals and tie the game. In overtime we were the team with the energy and momentum, and we won the championship. By focusing in on our strength over our opponent which was our depth, we were able to make decisions to utilize our advantage to give us the edge.
In business there is not a definitive clock that determines the outcome of the game so there aren’t winners and losers per se, but at Cyber Advisors we define winning as gaining customers and continued customer retention. Our advantage over other companies in our industry is the reason we gain and retain clients. Our advantage is quite simply our people and the robust services we provide.
We have a talented service desk that can resolve client issues rapidly, a Network Operations Center team watching over our clients’ network and senior level network engineers in the field and onsite at our customers locations. Finally, the services edge that we have over other managed services practices is that above and beyond all the teams already mentioned we have a project team loaded with talented professionals in the cyber security, networking, data storage, cloud and all the Microsoft practices including SharePoint, SCCM, Office 365 etc. We have built a services practice and continue to work and grow so that when companies decide who to work with our advantages are clear and we continue to win.