The Expensive Side of Change
Why the non financial costs are the greatest road block to working with pro sports teams
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One of the strange things about operating in a market with only thirty customers is we know every potential buyer. Similarly, all thirty know us.
If a team is not a partner, they have made the conscious decision not to be one.
And, while we are proud to have a group of MLB teams on board, our list is far from all encompassing. Some teams have said yes… but most have passed.
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In our Midyear Review, I mentioned the importance of dominating pro baseball. The business we can build with MLB partners alone is a great one, and we will learn a ton from the power users that exist throughout an organization.
But the market is small. So we need to be combat the limited customer base by maximizing our impact.
First, we need to consistently make our partners happier and happier. That is goal #1 and always will be.
After that, we need to look at why those who said no did so, and how they came to that decision.
Assuming the majority of organizations are rational (yes, that may be a big assumption), they are doing some sort of cost benefit analysis- even if it is an implicit one.
As teams weigh the pros and cons of working with Reboot, we should do our best to get in their head, analyzing:
The Benefits
The Financial Costs
The Non-Financial Costs
The Benefits
In pro sports, there are a few common problems:
First, every season is a zero sum game. One team will end up champion…and everyone else will fall short.
Second, organizational advantages are short lived. While this happens in every sport, nowhere is it more obvious than baseball.
Twenty years ago, the Oakland A’s figured out a better way to acquire talent. But over the course of the next two decades every other team copied them, with early imitators reaping the rewards.
Today, we are seeing the same story play out. Determining correlation has become table stakes.
In present day baseball, the best organizations- the ones the rest of the league continually looks up at in the standings- excel at analyzing How Data.
On the hardware side, not only have Edgertronic Cameras become a mainstay in just about every clubhouse, but many teams are equipping their stadiums with Hawk-Eye, KinaTrax, and Simi systems to procure motion capture data.
And on the software side, teams are bulking up their R&D teams and looking for outside services (like Reboot) to turn gigabytes of data into actionable insights…and ultimately wins.
The Costs
While every GM would agree better information is a benefit, teams must also look at the costs associated with any purchase or strategic hire.
When looking at hardware, teams have universally decided the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Financial costs
Edgertronic cameras come with a four figure price tag. This is not cheap for the everyday consumer, but for pro baseball teams this is no sweat.
On the other hand, markerless motion capture solutions like Hawk-Eye, KinaTrax, and Simi are much larger commitments, getting well into the six figures for installation and maintenance.
If someone wants to argue it’s expensive, I get it. 6 figures is 6 figures.
But I would argue it’s cheap, given most team’s 9 figure payrolls.
If I am spending over $100 million on talent, I will happily allocate what I need to on technology that maximizes that talent’s development, and therefore my investment.
So far, it looks like most of MLB agrees. One by one, teams are installing new systems. They realize the benefit- or at lest the perceived benefit- of better data is easily worth the financial investment.
And, importantly, there are few other costs.
Other costs
In the world of hardware, teams are given a simple proposition:
Chose your provider
Have that provider install the system
Begin receiving data files after every game
Logistically, it’s easy.
No one in the organization has to change how they work. No one has to implement new processes. And no one feels external pressure to do so.
The Costs of Reboot
Financially, we demand a similar premium price tag as many motion capture providers we complement. I am obviously biased, but I think the benefits far outweigh the price.
And if I had to guess, most front office executives would agree.
However, while we are no pricier than other avenues to an improved on field product, we are admittedly expensive in other ways. Most notably, we are expensive because we ask organizations to change:
We ask our partners to view biomechanics through a new lens- one where momentum is the key driver of performance.
And we ask for widespread adoption- with front offices, R&D departments, and coaches alike getting on board.
How we Deal with Hidden Costs
These are big costs that are on us to reduce- and we see two basic paths:
Reduce the friction
Look for teams who view change as a benefit
Option 1 is about simplification. If we want to reduce organizational friction, we could deliver a product that is easier to implement, and therefore represents less of a change.
We could turn our MLB product into something specifically for the front office, rather than the entire organization. We could analyze motion capture data and distill a player’s efficiency down to a single number and present only that to each team.
Even for the same price, this avenue would reduce the hidden costs of working with us. It would make saying yes easier.
But our goal is not easy yes’s. Our goal is long-term value. Our goal is delivering a platform that helps coaches coach, R&D staffs build incredible tools, and front offices create winning, player first organizations.
We do not like Option 1.
But Option 2 is not great either. If we exclude all the teams that are not actively looking for change, we are taking an already small market and shrinking it further.
So rather than choosing either of the options above, we look to combine them- merging the activeness of Option 1 with the end state of Option 2.
Rather than reducing friction, we reframe it as opportunity.
Reframing Friction
Fighting inertia is hard. In any organization, people at the top got there by doing things a certain way…and by those things working.
We are asking top people in multiple departments to view player development through a new lens.
We are asking elite coaches to use our reports- reports that are different from what they have seen- to weigh into their training decisions.
We are asking executives to look beyond Why Data and explore How Data to shape their key personnel decisions.
And we are asking R&D departments to move past joint angles and look holistically at momentum and other factors that directly impact efficiency.
We could argue these frictions are worth it. (We think they are.)
However, we’re better served to reframe change as an opportunity to improve.
We understand the best clubs have:
Coaches who crave high quality information to make better decisions.
Executives who explore new ways to find an edge.
R&D departments who innovate and build new models to give their team unique insights.
Framed this way- change is constant. Looking for the next new advantage is what winning organizations have always done. While momentum based biomechanics may represent something new, doing whatever is necessary to put the best product on the field is the only constant in sports.
Reducing Friction
Still, friction will always exist. Even for teams that share our vision and see high quality information and constant innovation as the best path forward, change is hard.
MLB teams are large organizations, and big ships turn slowly.
We need to be sensitive to this by 1) tackling the problem in real time today and 2) building towards a more intuitive product in the future.
Today’s solution is simple- it’s our time. We talk with our clubs as much as they need, explain how we view certain scenarios, and chat about action items they can take to the field.
We look to move our partners past “comfortable” and towards “mastery”. And we are happy to boast about many of our current teams now having multiple experts in their organization.
The Cost Benefit Analysis
Ultimately, we know every team (and every organization in a B2B transaction) is doing some sort of cost benefit analysis.
And most of the time, we focus on the benefit…because doing so is fun, easy, and intuitive.
We love talking about improving on field performance.
We love demonstrating the value of talent development.
And we love showing this slide:
Talking about product benefits, and comparing them to just the financial cost is easy.
But for any large organization, there are non-tangible costs. We need to give equal attention to reducing these costs to make the business decision a no-brainer.
For us, doing so comes in two forms: 1) reframing the friction when it is applicable and 2) reducing it otherwise.
In other words, we use this framework:
Maximize benefits
Reframe and reduce all non-financial costs
Keep financial costs far below the benefits provided