I love Formula 1 racing. The speed, technology and competition is something to behold. I had an opportunity last week to go to Monza, Italy to see the latest F1 race (see video after the link).  In the end my team didn’t win but that’s ok because it was a great day.  While I was watching the race I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between the race and being an entrepreneur.

1) Speed wins but they are all fast.  The difference in lap times of these cars is 1/100th of a second. They are all very fast.  So is you competition.   Whether it’s creating a product, offering information or taking care of the customer, speed is one of the key differentiators of your success.  You have to do everything faster than your competition focusing on every little detail.

2) Strategy makes you faster.  Brawn, the winning team, didn’t have the fastest lap times, but they did have the fastest strategy.  While all the other teams decided to increase speed by running their cars with less fuel, resulting in the need to pit twice, Brawn decided to go with more fuel and pit only once.  This strategy prevailed in the end, allowing them to beat out some faster cars.  In you business what steps can you take completely out of the process that would allow you to beat your competition?  Is there anything that you can remove, shorten up, delete, reduce that would make the end product better, faster, quicker, cheaper for your customer?

3) Focus all the way until the end.  On the last lap of the race one of the drives, Lewis Hamilton, crashed.  He was in 3rd place when he went slightly wide on a routine corner which caused his car to loose control and crash into the wall.  He had raced a nearly flawless race up until that point.  But after 50+ laps of doing everything right, he lost his focus for a split second which ended in his team not finishing. In your business are you doing everything right up until that last point.  Is your design perfect, quality great, marketing exceptional, only to get to the transaction and you loose the sale?  You have to focus all the way through your business process, top to bottom, making it to the finish line.