Here's why money is the last thing you need to start a business

I won’t recount their honours in this post, you can check out Wikipediafor that. Suffice it to say however, that they have not exactly been setting the Premiership ablaze prior to this 2015/16 season neither have they returned from their few sojourns into Europe with cup glory.

From literally out of the blue, the Foxes merged as league leaders last season with 12 games to go and went on to lift the Premier league trophy as champions. They have played the Premierships’ oligarchs (Chelsea, the two Manchester clubs and Arsenal) 6 times this season and only lost twice.

The fairy-tale story of the ragtag bunch of players brought together from lower and non-league clubs to achieve this level of success is the theme of this post. The total transfer fees paid by the club at the beginning of the season were £18.8 million. The only player not included in this fee is Yohan Benalouane who joined from Atalanta for an undisclosed fee. Compare this spend with Chelsea’s £32.1 million, Manchester United’s £108 million and Manchester City’s whopping £153 million, it becomes clear that Leicester City, at least on paper anyway, have no business in the top half of the table let alone P1.

I’ll admit that I’m stretching the analogy here a bit, after all, Leicester did spend roughly £77m on transfer fees between the 2010 and 2016 transfer windows but what I am communicating however is essentially that when you compare Leicester City’s expense against that of larger clubs within the same time period, it shows that deeper pockets don’t always guarantee success.

There are other ingredients that are just as important if not more important than money. Similarly, when you are about to launch out as an entrepreneur, you don’t need to wait till you amass a bucket full of capital before you start. You can start where you are and be successful while you build your business.

Vision

The Leicester City success story truly started in 2010 when former club chairman Milan Mandarić sold the club to a consortium called Asian Football Investments (AFI) for £39 million. AFI in turn, is owned by the retail magnate and chairman of King Power Group, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha who is adjudged by Forbes to have a net worth over $2.8 billion.

Whether the purchase of the club was a savvy business move, a culmination of strenuous business planning and financial modelling or it was a case of Vichai looking for a new toy, the 9th richest man in Thailand joined a growing list of foreign nationals with multi-million pound investments in British football clubs.

At the time of the ownership change, the Foxes were spending their 7th year out of top flight football and in fact had just bounced back from League 1 into the Championship. In an address to the fans of the club in 2014, he asked for patience and declared that his vision for the club was to be a top 5 Premiership side within 3 years. Bordering on delusional, Vichai added, “It’s important we continue to improve everything about ourselves. So, we can challenge for the top five. But, of course, one step at the time.”

All efforts at the club were geared towards making this singular vision a reality. At the end of that season, Leicester City was promoted to the Premiership after their 7 year hiatus.

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Leadership

Now in the Premier division, Vichai set out in pursuit of his goal and at the start of the 2015/16 season, he sought out Claudio Ranieri who had recently endured a torrid time as the manager of the Greek national side and was unemployed.

At 64, Ranieri was no spring chicken. He had seen the highs and the lows of football, tasted the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat and not many will argue if you ranked him in the same calibre as other football managers such as Ferguson, Wenger, Capello or Ancelotti. Other managers on Vichai’s radar were Guss Hiddink and the enigmatic former Leicester manger Martin O’Neill who spearheaded their last upsurge in the Premiership.

In Ranieri, Vichai found arguably the best available football manager. He had the right combination of big club experience, BPL experience and he knew how to win.

Ranieri’s target, given the resources at his disposal was to have 40 points in the bag and safely from relegation by December. He would have been happy with that. Come December, not only were they safe from the drop, Leicester City was topping the league.

The choice of manager was a key factor in the success that Leicester City is enjoying today. Prior to engaging Ranieri, Vichai had engaged the services of foreign managers such as Paulo Sousa and former England coach Sven-Göran Eriksson even while in the Championship, thus demonstrating a clear grasp of the concept of and need for good leadership.

A Perfect Storm

By way of rationalizing Leicester City’s league position, much has been said about the relative poor performance of the top clubs this season. Others have said that Leicester City is only on top because they started the season with many easy games.

In football as well as in business, the competitive environment is fluid and the misfortune of others may just be the catalyst that sparks your growth. There are numerous examples I can call on from the business world, but I’ll start with banking.

A good example of a company benefiting from a flux in the competitive environment is GTBank. They were not initially built to be a retail bank in the real sense of the word. In 2004, GTBank didn’t even have up to 1 million personal accounts. It was in 2005 that they took concrete steps towards driving growth in the retail sector. Rebranding from Guaranty Trust Bank to the more retail aligned GTBank was a step in that process.

December 2005 was also the deadline set by the then CBN governor, Chukwuma Soludo, for banks to capitalise to a minimum of N25 billion. There were 89 banks in Nigeria at the time and there was a very potent risk of losing access to your account while banks scurried to merge or raise capital. There was inevitable a “flight to safety” for many Nigerian account holders and GTBank, perceived as a stable bank with good customer service, benefited immensely from that.

Whatever the speculations about the reason for Leicester City’s success, one can’t take away the fact that they lost only 3 of their 26 games and scored in every game they played. They worked hard and were rewarded accordingly.

Resourcefulness

Vichai and Ranieri went shopping for players in the summer of 2015. They needed a strong squad in order to mount a successful assault on the competition. Being a billionaire two times over, Vichai could have broken the bank anytime from 2010 and gone all out to sign the biggest stars in the world for exorbitant transfer fees (like Manchester City’s owners did). Rather, he and his back office team sought out bargain players, many of which were free transfers.

Of the 38 players bought by the club between 2012 and 2016, 18 (almost half) of them were with free transfers.

The Premiere league’s top scorer last season, Jamie Vardy, for example was signed from non-league side (at the time) Fleetwood Town. Top scorer for Leicester in the previous season was Leonardo Ulloa who was signed from Championship side Brighton & Hove Albion.

I cannot speak about resourcefulness in business without mentioning the inspirational story of the blogger Ladun Liadi. In 2010, she wanted to start a blog but had no tools or resources to do so. Possibly the most important resource a blogger would need, a laptop was beyond her reach also. She started out by borrowing laptops for friends and even when she had access, keeping the batteries charged was a problem because of power outages.

Today, she has one of the most influential blogs in Nigeria.

Enough Talk, Act Now

The key lesson we can learn from Leicester City is that we should start where we are! When building a business or enterprise, we shouldn’t wait till we have a pile of capital and we shouldn’t let that lack thereof be a deterrent or excuse for not starting.

We have seen football clubs spend obscene amounts of money and rack up huge weekly wage bills and still fail to qualify for European competitions. We have also seen small sides like Leicester City strive for the top with seemingly meager resources.

Is there an idea that you have been nursing and carrying around in your head? It may be a grand idea but if you don’t have the resources to start, start where you can!

This article was culled from .