Good Idea! Now find a better one.

A typical Pro sports stadium is a rigid environment. Events occur in specific time windows scheduled far in advance.

Visitors must obtain prior permission to be onsite at certain times, must enter and exit within a specific time window, and must stay within designated areas at all times.

Vendors can only sell their wares during scheduled events to authorized visitors from their designated vending stations.

For catered events, only certified caterers are allowed to provide services onsite.

And all of these restrictions combined with high demand creates, surprise, high prices!

Control. You know you want it.

Why so rigid? Better Security? More revenue? Better customer experience?

Or is it our natural human tendency to desire control?

An inflexible system, a rigid business is easily controlled. And if we control it, we can plan its use in detail.

Is this bad? Well, it depends on whether you recognize that all plans must change. Not simply because assumptions about the future prove to be false, but because the world around you is constantly changing.

If you aren’t constantly adapting to the realities that surround you, you’re drifting towards failure.

Consider all the football stadiums that are torn down and rebuilt. How many other structures with 100-300 million dollar replacement costs are torn down and rebuilt?

How many 70 story towers are razed to build a new…70 story tower?

It Sounds crazy but if your head is stuck in the rigid “plan”, then ripping everything down is the perfectly logical path to take.

McDonalds - Only open on Sundays!

There are restaurants that are open most hours of every day - they do quite well.

There are venues for watching live sporting events that are open all hours of the day and night - they also do well.

So why in the name of all this rigidity do stadiums restrict their use
to such narrow slices of time?

Would you go to a restaurant with a view of an empty stadium? Would you stop in for lunch while overlooking the construction for Saturday’s big concert? Would you pay extra to watch during rehersals?

Would you watch your teams away games on the jumbo-tron from the arena seating? (There are permissions issues here but that’s another story)

The greatest feature of the entrepreneurship culture in this country is the constant push forward for new, better and improved services and products. This push creates a constant stream of opportunity.

The rigid naval gazing of the stadium business is the antithesis of that push.

What about Technology?

We talked here and here about Cisco’s Stadium of the Future and its technological wizardry.

Technology and the internet have doused fuel on the fires of entrepreneurship. Bringing technology to a stadium won’t necessarily have a similar effect. The management of the stadium must look up from their plans and be more than a quasi-governmental obstacle.