What can the world’s top-performing athletes teach cannabis business leaders? Professor Chris Shambrook, a renowned Olympic coach and sports psychologist, suggests it could be more than you think.
In the latest edition of the Business of Cannabis Podcast, Shambrook shares the key lessons accrued over his multi-decade career as a performance coach to some of the world’s most successful athletes with Tim Kirby, CEO of the UK’s fastest growing medical cannabis clinic, Releaf.
His advice for cannabis entrepreneurs? Performance is less about the result and more about your repeated behaviour.
“If we only ever talk about the result… we fail to understand the inputs that increase the likelihood of making that result more likely,” he explained.
Putting this in the context of leading a business, he suggests that typically companies are run as though a football manager asks their team to ‘win four-nil at the weekend, and the board has asked to make sure you score a goal just before half time because people will spend more money’.
Kirby, who is no stranger to Shambrook’s methods, recounts how this philosophy has helped his company grow from six staff members at launch to 100 employees, serving 12,000 patients today.
“We onboard 1000 new patients each month, and we’ve got 12,000 patients served. We’ve written 45,000 prescriptions since the beginning of January this year. And what we talk about internally a lot is that we haven’t got 12,000 patients. We have one patient. We just happened to have 12,000 instances of that patient.”
As such, regardless of whether you’re an aspiring sports star or a fledgling cannabis entrepreneur, Shambrook says the commitment to behaviour is key to success.
Just as tennis champions drill their perfect serve day after day, cannabis business leaders must identify and drill the ‘brilliant basics’ consistently in order for their companies to perform at the highest level.
“Success isn’t very glamorous…,” Kirby concedes, “it’s the repetition and consistency of quite mundane behaviours.”
You can listen to the full conversation on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Simplecast now.
