Business and Sports have common values. One Equity Partners’Dick Cashin,Ernst & Young’s Beth Brooke-Marciniak, Matlin Patterson’s Mark Patterson and Safanad’s Kamal Bahamdan are notable examples that show, while sports might be a business, business is also a sport.
For a number of years, the public has gotten the message that sport is now big business. Private investors and public companies are investing significantly in sporting franchises or individual competitors. They are branding arenas and uniforms as well as deploying substantial sums of money into restructurings and player acquisitions, all the while creating goodwill and name recognition among fans.
In many ways, though, sport and business have always been not-so-strange bedfellows. On the field or in the boardroom, the qualities that win the game or seal the deal are often the same. High-level athletes and high-level investors display hardy resilience, revel in the spirit of competition, bask in the spotlight and possess the self-belief to get the job done.
Many Wall Street firms have realized the correlations and are starting to sift through resumes looking for former athletes to fill their high-level positions. One Equity Partners employs eight former Olympians, including managing partner Dick Cashin. An Olympic rower, Cashin told Bloomberg in 2013 that he hires former athletes not for their winning mentality but for their ability to rebound after a loss. “Everybody thinks sports is about winning,” Cashin said. “For me, it’s more about losing and then figuring out a way to win. It’s those things that make working with athletes and hiring former athletes a reasonable thing to consider.”
Everywhere you turn in the investing landscape today, we see athletes trading football cleats for penny loafers, or pencil skirts, as is the case with a growing female contingent of college athletes turned business executives. According to a recent study conducted by EY, of the 400 female executives from five different countries polled, 52 percent played a sport at the college or university level.
Beth Brooke-Marciniak, the woman who led the study, is global vice chair of public policy for Ernst & Young.
She was recently named one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women for a second consecutive year. However, Brooke-Marciniak was blazing trails long before her current work in the EY executive boardroom. During college, she was the first woman to receive a basketball scholarship to Purdue University.
In her decorated business career, Brooke-Marciniak has never strayed far from the job of empowering women, specifically former high-level athletes like herself. Most recently, Brooke-Marciniak served on the U.S. Delegation to the 53rd and 54th United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and Vital Voices.
While Brooke-Marciniak is still involved with sport at the advocacy level, there are also those professionals who still compete in sport at an elite level side-by-side with their business careers. The South African investor Mark Patterson, co-founder of Matlin Patterson Global Advisors and formerly of Credit Suisse, is also a professional racing driver. Though he came to the sport late in life, Patterson drives for Ram Racing and competed in the grueling Le Mans 24 Hours race in 2013 and 2014.
In an interview with Business Insider, Patterson said that he looked for the same qualities in his employees that he exhibits in his driving pursuits: endurance, resilience and the ability to conquer obstacles. “I have no interest in the hopper,” Patterson said. “On the positive side, especially for the young ones, I want to see where they suffered in their lives and how they overcame that. I’m looking for fortitude, I’m looking for an endurance capacity in the individual.”
For Patterson and other executives who continue to compete athletically, one pursuit doesn’t distract from the other, but in fact it informs and emboldens it. This is true for Kamal Bahamdan, the founder of Safanad Limited, a global principal investment firm headquartered out of New York and Dubai.
While studying at Boston University, from which he graduated with honors, Bahamdan emerged as a champion show jumper.
Since then, he has spent his adult life balancing business and sport. The financier runs Safanad as well as his family’s investment conglomerate, The Bahamdan Group, all while continuing to show jump competitively. At the 2012 London Olympics, he won a Bronze Medal with Team Saudi Arabia and came fourth in the individual event. London 2012 was his fifth Olympics, but the first in which Bahamdan decided to focus full-time on earning a medal. “The first four Olympic Games for me were a part-time commitment, where I used to commute between the office and the stables, work in the weekdays and train or compete on the weekends,” Bahamdan said in an interview with World of Show Jumping. “When I decided to prepare for the London Games on a full-time basis, I set the bar much higher and aimed to make it to the podium.”
This competitive spirit and all-consuming commitment are evident in Bahamdan’s business environment, as well. In both his show jumping and his investment interests, Bahamdan’s places a priority on building the right team. At the stables, this translates to the world-class coaches and trainers he employs and the champion horses he breeds and trains. In business, it means hiring the best executives and aligning himself with the best partners to successfully grow Safanad and his other businesses in smart, stable ways. Since Safanad’s establishment in 2009, he has grown the firm into one of the largest investors in the US senior healthcare and hospice segment as well as a substantial investor in global financial services, real estate and education companies.
Looking at these business leaders-athletes, it is evident that the qualities that produce champions on the field are the same that produce titans in the boardroom. Confidence, discipline, preparation, hard work and innovation are each essential to success — be it business or sport. It is no wonder that there is so much interaction between the two sectors, from businesses sponsoring professional teams to their establishment of foundations for youth sport and outreach.
Even more than sponsorships and philanthropy, though, Cashin, Brooke-Marciniak, Patterson and Bahamdan serve as examples of how these qualities can be exhibited in both arenas simultaneously, with professional athletes who are also leaders of business. More than anything, these men and women demonstrate that thanks to the mutual values and traits needed to advance to the highest levels in business and sport, that each can continue to fuel the growth of the other.