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FEN-PHEN FEVER

When I was a professional ballet dancer in the late 90s, a miracle weight-loss drug was whispered about in the dance circles. That drug was Fen-Phen. It was heavily marketed in the 90s, much like Ozempic is today. I had colleagues who took it and achieved extremely svelte figures, but speed was never my thing, and diet pills have always freaked me out. But the era of Fen-Phen reminds me of our current era of Ozempic, medically necessary for some, cosmetically desirable for others. Both might be considered magic bullets. But usually, magic bullets have detrimental effects, like when Fen-Phen was discovered to cause severe cardiac problems. (Too early to tell what the long-term risks of Ozempic will be.) Those I knew who stopped taking it reverted pretty quickly—the magic went poof. 

I've often been thinking about magic bullets as I talk to more entrepreneurs about their marketing and business development strategies. While reviewing a specific plan with a client who was coming to terms with the fact that a recently popular marketing effort was no longer the magic bullet it used to be, they lamented the realization that there really are no shortcuts. And it's been a common sentiment whether adjusting online marketing or putting in the effort to build business development relationships one interaction at a time.

THERE'S A TRADITION IN TOURNAMENT PLAY

Which naturally brings us to March Madness🤔. March Madness is a nice bridge between the Super Bowl in February and the NBA Playoffs in April. (Probably lost a lot of subscribers by just writing that sentence.) I'm rooting for Kansas for the Men and Iowa for the Women this year. I love basketball and wrote about triangle offense as it relates to leadership here.

But this March, I'm thinking about one of my all-time favorite basketball movies, Hoosiers. This movie really tugs at my heartstrings; I can probably recite it from start to finish at this point in my life. Maybe it's the corn-laden midwestern setting, the beloved drunk played by Dennis Hopper that could have been based on my own father, who also played in the 60s version of March Madness, or just the fact that the boys in the film were so cute🥰. Hoosiers to March Madness isn't a 1:1 comparison because it's based on High School basketball and not college. But the intensity and the storyline are still the same. It's a David and Goliath story with the Hickory Huskers making an impossible ascent to the Indiana state championship in 1952. It is loosely based on the Milan basketball team that won the championship in 1954. 


Coach Norman Dale isn't liked when he arrives and has a questionable past. He structures practices that aren't popular with some of the team or the local townspeople. But it's towards the end of the movie, when the team arrives for the Regional Finals, that Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) delivers one of the best speeches of the movie. At the core of the speech, he says,

"Forget about the crowds, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals that we've gone over time and time again."
 

I think about that phrase often in business—focus on the fundamentals. Go over them time and time again. After 10 years of this and seeing all the latest and greatest fads in business growth come and go, I'm more convinced than ever that it's just about the fundaments. That era of magical thinking has gone poof

CIRCLING THE DRAIN

And now we're left with residual efforts that, as The Editors of The Drift described in their most recent issue, are circling the drain. So how do we get back to the fundamentals? And what are they? They exist in each aspect of our business: our financial, marketing, sales, and operating systems. We tend to skip our financial systems and want to go straight for marketing without a clear goal. We tend to skip our marketing and sales systems, hoping that the latest and greatest "hack" will increase sales. And at the foundation of it all, we tend to skip our operating systems, leaving gaping holes in our daily interactions.

Returning to the fundamentals usually starts by admitting that there are no magic bullets - in marketing, hiring, team management, and financial gains. It's a reorientation to the basics and a recognition that without prioritizing those practices, we'll just revert back to who we were when we believed the magic bullets could save us. 


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