WHEN I WAS FIRST hired as president of Verity Records, there was a major new talent I wanted to sign, a gospel singer with huge promise both musically and commercially. So for the first time, I asked my boss to write a check that was much bigger than he expected. He didn’t want to do it. He had made a career out of not overpaying artists and he guarded his reputation for knowing the value of a dollar. As he peppered me with questions and doubts, I could feel that to him I was still an outsider to the music business—I had come up as a lawyer representing artists, not as an executive in record companies. Would he trust my judgment on this big negotiation?
I figured I had two things going for me in his eyes. One was that I had a track record of recognizing musical talent. I had signed some great musicians as an agent, and that gave me credibility as I argued for signing this artist to a record deal. The other was that I spoke the language my boss understood, the language of business. I showed him my analysis of the demographics of the Christian market, making clear how we were going to reach deep into that market to sell enough albums to recoup our investment in this new singer. I didn’t try to talk to him about the good that gospel music could do because I knew that wasn’t his concern. He wanted to sell records, so I worked to show him with facts and figures why we could do just that.
Finally, my boss agreed to write the check. We were going to sign this great, as-yet-unknown artist for a million dollars and everyone in the company was feeling: Let’s go! Let’s get this popping! We contacted the artist and told him we could give him everything he wanted to support his next album. Did we have a deal?
The artist said, “I’ll let you know in a few days. I have to pray on it.”
My boss was furious. All the good feeling that we had in the room went sour. As soon as he got me alone, he asked, “What the——does this guy mean? We got him his money. Now it’s business!” I suppose he felt the artist was disrespecting the very serious offer we had just made. My boss wanted me to go straight back and deliver an ultimatum: sign our contract or stop wasting our time.
I admit I felt pressure to do it his way. I was new at Verity Records, and as I’ve said, I had an unusual background compared to others in record company management. I worried that this breakdown in the negotiations would give my boss new doubts about whether I fit in. Should I show him I could act like an insider and do it his way?
As I say, I understood where my boss was coming from, but the trouble was that I knew the artist saw it differently. It wasn’t a question of right and wrong; they were just very different men. The focus of my boss’s life was business and he had been very, very successful. (Later he would go on to sell his company for three billion dollars.) But the artist, who was African-American, hadn’t had financial success. He was a Southern minister used to making ten thousand dollars for an album. Now we had offered him a million. I didn’t understand every last difference in their backgrounds, but I knew the two men saw the world differently, and that the only person in the middle of this endangered negotiation was me. I could see my boss’s point of view, but could I see the artist’s?
I wasn’t all that churchy, but I had grown up close enough to the spiritual community to know something about how its members operate. Before a big decision, they seek personal confirmation from God. If that was what the artist was doing, I didn’t see how delivering any ultimatum would move things forward—from what I had heard, God was not known for keeping anyone else’s schedule but His own. So instead of acting like a record company insider and delivering my boss’s ultimatum, I decided to get back to basics: what made this artist tick?
I went to talk to him, but instead of demands, I brought questions. Was he unhappy with our offer? Did he feel we weren’t meeting his needs? He said no, he thought it was a very generous offer—but exactly because the money was so good, he was worried it was influencing him too much. Was signing with a big commercial company going to be true to the integrity of his ministry? Was this business deal in harmony with the vision God had given him?
Listening, I began to recognize the problem. For my boss, the size of the check should have answered all the artist’s questions. But for the artist, it raised new ones. A big check wasn’t going to speed up his decision making; it was actually going to slow him down. He told me again that he needed some time to pray.
What could I say to that? I said, okay, fine, but could he get back to us in three days? Meanwhile, I had to explain to my boss and the whole company finance committee that we didn’t have a deal after all, because this person was off somewhere praying. What did I do? I told them the truth, but I told it in the language I thought they could understand. “He’s considering our offer,” I said, “and I think everything’s going to be cool. He just needs to examine all the ramifications of the deal.”
I had a few nervous days of waiting, but in the end, maybe because we hadn’t rushed him or lectured him about how great the money was and how that should have been all he needed, the artist felt comfortable enough with us to sign. And I realized that as much as anything in my resume, what I brought my company was my outsider advantage: my ability to listen to what people unlike me said, to draw on my own experiences and imagination to understand what made them tick, and to help interpret those people for each other so they could work together. It was as if my boss and the artist were two foreign countries, and I had gone back and forth between them like an ambassador, helping them agree to a peace treaty.
To work that way, I had to find a new model of success. The old model of success that I saw around me was based on fitting in. We were all expected to adapt ourselves to the insider culture if we wanted to make it into the “club.” And if we had elements in our backgrounds that didn’t fit, or personal shortcomings or setbacks in our past, we hid them. Fitting in was how you got the insider advantage. But all this striving to fit in can cost us something even more important to our success, what I think of as the outsider advantage. In fact, if I hadn’t turned away from fitting in and embraced my outsider advantage, I would have blown that million-dollar deal, one of the biggest deals of my career.
In the global business environment, where technology has now made it possible to do business with almost anyone, anywhere, we’re all outsiders to some of the people we meet, at least some of the time. Every company that’s looking ahead wants employees who can help diverse groups to relate and connect across their differences.
What differences am I talking about? Some may be obvious, like the physical differences of race or sex, or the speech differences of people who come from different places. Others are more hidden, like differences of childhood wealth or poverty, your hometown, religion, political party, cultural heritage, hobbies—even where you went to school or your previous line of work. In the new model of success, you don’t bury all that, you bring it to the table. That’s the outsider advantage—realizing that instead of working to hide or change what sets you apart, you can use it to understand and connect with coworkers, clients, or customers—and motivate them to work with you.
WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT BEING AN OUTSIDER?
I WANT TO MAKE sure that this valuable truth doesn’t get lost, because it isn’t necessarily what people are expecting to hear. I know that some might read that story of working as an ambassador between my boss and our promising gospel artist and think: Well, sure, this all sounds very nice for you Max, seeing as you’re biracial and you grew up with gospel music and secular music. You had a foot in each camp, so didn’t that make you the ultimate insider?
Using my outsider advantage has been key to most of my successes, but I’ve learned that it’s not always clear to people why. The benefits of being an insider seem obvious, but it’s only when you start looking for the advantages in being an outsider that they start to jump out at you. What are they?
I benefited from all three of these advantages when I became president of DEI and started to work on the company’s relationships with its corporate sponsors. As I discovered right away, there was one set way of doing things across the industry. Why were they set in their ways? NASCAR had enjoyed a tremendous amount of growth in commercial support over the years, which had been a great thing for the sport and for the fans, but exactly because they were used to success, there weren’t a lot of people thinking about new approaches. When I arrived, growth in the industry had leveled off, and it was time for some fresh ideas, but the requests for proposals that I was seeing were still all very similar.
The idea of how a sponsor could benefit from supporting a team was that the team would put the sponsor’s logo on the race car and then do their best to win or run at the front of the pack. That way people would see that logo on television and in publicity photos of the car. That’s a great model, but it was pretty much the only model at the time, which meant that every team was competing to give their sponsor the same thing: a winning car that would spend a lot of time up front, where the television cameras would see it.
But I wasn’t in the habit of working that way, and I wasn’t emotionally committed to doing things how they were “always” done. I felt freer to ask each sponsor or potential sponsor: What are your specific objectives? What kind of return would you most like to see on your investment in my company, and how could we help you get that? I didn’t feel so attached to the way things had been done before, so I could see it a little differently and I could feel comfortable trying something new.
Plus, when I started taking some new approaches, neither my company nor our sponsors could tune me out because they had heard it all from me before. They actually had to listen to me to find out who they were dealing with. And once we asked our new questions, we found that our different sponsors actually had very different goals. Sure, some wanted their logos seen on television to make their brands look bigger. But others wanted to increase foot traffic to their stores. The U.S. Army, which was a DEI sponsor, wanted to encourage people to consider the armed services as an alternative career. There was a wide range of goals.
For one sponsor, I said, “Forget putting logos on winning cars for a minute. Have you ever thought about the fact that we have a database of five million race fans, and that you might get more bang for your buck by marketing directly to our fan list? What if we sent text messages to fans with coupons they could bring to the store for team-themed products?” Now, if you come from an industry that already markets in this way, that idea was hardly rocket science. But it took an outsider’s fresh perspective to see that opportunity in racing.
With gospel artists, too, I’ve been able to help them succeed because I wasn’t loyal to the established way of doing things. Not having to do things the old way or kiss anyone’s ring freed me to do something people in the faith-based community tended not to do: talk about business. Now, if you’re not from the church community, you may not realize what a foreign idea worldly business can be. So let me tell you, I can’t count all the times gospel people have said to me that “business concerns have no place in spiritual life or spiritual work.” Our industry might be the “Christian music business,” but many people lose sight of the fact that it is, after all, business. Of course, gospel people need money like anyone else, but when they run short they’re liable to say, “It doesn’t matter. I can pray through it.” Now, that’s a powerful attitude, a lifesaver sometimes. But other times it’s just too limiting. I know that when a singer or a minister can keep a roof over his head and feed his family, he or she has more time and focus for God’s work, not less. And as they say, faith without works is dead. So instead of seeing the music business and church business as irreconcilable opposites, I see them as opposites that attract, and I try to help them settle down together and get married. That has been the intention of “About My Father’s Business,” the conference I helped create to bring the best of the gospel world together in Indianapolis so we can meet, reenergize, learn from each other, and lift each other up.
WHAT ABOUT INSIDER ADVANTAGE?
BUT WAIT. ISN’T THERE an advantage to being an insider? Of course there is, some of the time, but in the global business environment, playing the insider is limiting both for individuals and for organizations. Let me explain. I remember attending a dinner once and hearing a corporate representative talk about his company’s commitment to diversity. He said that his company “understood that people feel more comfortable doing business with people who look like them.” For that reason, he said, when his company opened a new office, they made it their policy to hire people from the local community. Now, that’s all fine as far as it goes—I’m always happy to hear that companies are looking for talent in the local communities where they operate. But what happens when some of those “people who look like the local community” turn out to be good at their jobs and worthy of promotion? What happens when some of them turn out to have skills and ideas that could benefit other parts of the company, in other parts of town or of the country or the world where people look a little different? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if those people could go as far as their talents and skills could take them, rather than remaining limited to the places where they “look like the local community”?
That’s the problem with the insider approach: it shuts you in. But I’ve learned that in some situations where I don’t look like I fit in, where I’m obviously an outsider, I can be comfortable and content. When I showed up for work the first day at Dale Earnhardt Inc., there were four hundred employees in the company and not a single one besides me was African-American. So there I was, the one black face in the entire company, but after a few weeks my wife said to me: “You know, Max, you’re happier here than you’ve been in a lot of places.”
Why was that? It comes down to the values and the lifestyle of the people I found at DEI and in racing overall. First, racing people are there because they love it. They’ve built their lives and their work around their passion, which is what I have always tried to do, too. Their commitment and their enthusiasm came through to me in the way they did their jobs, and that made me feel at home. Second, racing people are family people. They travel from track to track together with their families and often nurture their children in the family business. That’s a way of life very close to mine. Third, I felt at home with the Christian values of the people I met. Racing is the only major sport where there is an official prayer before the start of competition, and you can feel the influence of the church in the way people conduct themselves. Finally, when it came to all my practical questions as I got started in a new job in a new part of the country, I found that the people I met were open with me and willing to share information. I could ask them, What do I need to know? And when they saw that I shared their feeling for racing, they opened up to me and told me. It’s hard to imagine how I could have felt more welcome than I did.
WE ARE ALL OUTSIDERS SOME OF THE TIME
IN THE RANGE OF experiences different people have, from feeling more often the insider to more often the outsider, I suppose I’m pretty close to the extreme. I’ve been an outsider most of my life. For me, always being the outsider meant that I needed to learn to sense when the people around me had also experienced life as the outsider, because that might be all I could find that would let me connect with them. As I got better at connecting with people based on their outsider experiences, I discovered something I hadn’t known. There is so much variety in America, so many different groups each with their own ways, that at some point everyone feels like the outsider. The day comes when you feel you’re too fat or too skinny; you went to public or private school when it should have been the other way around; you’re too much of a nerd or too much of a jock; your politics are too this or too that. It happens to everyone, that moment when you feel in the pit of your stomach that you’ve been pushed to the outside, alone, set apart as if we weren’t all made in God’s image.
If that doesn’t sound like an advantage, you’re right. It isn’t. But that unhappy experience is an opportunity to develop a very powerful perspective, which is to recognize that as an outsider you can do what I described above: see a situation differently from the way insiders are used to seeing it, require people’s attention because they don’t know what to make of you, and act with greater freedom because you’re not beholden to the powers that be. I remember one evening after my son, who was seven at the time, came home from a golf lesson. He said he hated golf. What was wrong? He was ugly, he told Jennifer and me. And he hated his feet.
What was going on?
It turned out some other kids at the golf lesson had been making remarks about his color. You might think that in the era of Tiger Woods this sort of thing wouldn’t happen anymore, but indeed someone had called him “chocolate.” Then someone told him that his feet looked like poop. And on it went. He came home and said he hated the color of his feet and he never wanted to go outside again.
Well. It wasn’t as if this was the first time someone ever made remarks about color. I asked my son, “Tell me something. Do you think your mom is beautiful?”
He didn’t really feel like talking, but I pushed him: “Do you?”
He said yeah, Mom was beautiful.
“What about your dad? Is he a handsome man?”
He said yes.
I said, “We’re brown, too, right?”
And so we talked and he found his way back to seeing with his own eyes and making his own judgments. It was a chance to discover how being made to feel like you are the outsider was a lesson in learning to follow your own compass, to trust in your own perspective. I’ve found that the people who move forward and excel are the ones who’ve taken in those lessons, who move to the beat of their own drum and let their own light shine.
Not long after, I told the story of these other children’s slurs to an adult friend, the mother of a child we know. They’re a white family, Catholic. She told me, “Kids can be mean sometimes. It’s just kids being kids.” She was trying to be empathetic, I knew, but she was minimizing what had happened. “It was just teasing,” she said. “It didn’t mean anything.” She said we shouldn’t let it bother us.
Then a few weeks later she called me up, practically in tears. It turned out that her son, who attended an expensive private school, was being excluded by the other boys who used to be his friends. They were all white and they were all affluent, but her son was the only Catholic, and the other boys had told him that he wasn’t a real Christian because he wasn’t born again. Now he couldn’t be part of their clique. When she called me, she nearly had a meltdown apologizing. She said she hadn’t known what a parent goes through until their own child is the one excluded. And so there it was: maybe for the first time, she was in an environment where she expected to fit in, but now she and her son were the outsiders.
When I talk about the outsider advantage, I don’t mean that I think these experiences are all for the best. And let’s be honest: having the experience of being an outsider, whether once or many times, guarantees nothing—not understanding, not success, not becoming a nicer person. But while it’s no guarantee, it is an opportunity to develop the skill set I’m describing in this chapter, which might be the most vital skill set there is for the twenty-first century. Let me describe for you now how to build these skills.
DON’T TRY TO BE A CHAMELEON
THE FIRST STEP, IN my experience, is to stop trying to fit in by copying the people you’re trying to succeed with and passing yourself off as one of them. For a lot of people, fitting in is habit—they’ve spent a lot of time trying to be successful chameleons. I understand that pressure because I’ve felt it almost everywhere I’ve been, even when I’ve been the person in charge. When I became chief of global operations for DEI, I came down from Indiana to North Carolina and joined the company as the only person of color in an industry with the reputation of being Southern and white. That was intimidating in itself, but in addition I was coming from the music industry, so racing people kept asking me, in more and less subtle ways, “Do you really know what you’re getting yourself into?” Now, I didn’t share their skepticism, but I understood it. If I wasn’t one of them and I didn’t know racing, which was the very center of their lives, how could I know what mattered most to them? How could I take care of them?
In those first days down in Charlotte, I remember thinking back to my neighborhood as a teenager, after I had promised myself I would make a better life by working with anyone around me who could help. Back then, I knew that before I could do anything else, I would have to have the respect of a crew—not really a gang, but a group of serious troublemakers. To get that respect—what we now call street cred—I thought at first that I would have to blend in like a chameleon, looking and acting just like the rest of the crew, staying out all night with my wild cousin and his boys, doing the kind of crazy, stupid things that got young men hurt or jailed. And yet I also knew that wasn’t for me. How could I get the respect of this crew without getting drawn into self-destructive foolishness that could keep me from ever reaching my goals?
All I could do to begin was to get to know what made them tick. And as I did, I realized they didn’t need me to do everything just like they did. They only needed me to show my respect for what they felt and who they were. So I stayed out late with my wild cousin and his troublemaking friends, but before I slipped out to meet them, I would finish my homework. And though I stayed out very late, I would get home while my mother was still asleep—not two days later, when she would have been frantic. I still had some time for baseball and wrestling and playing the drums, and for school work, too.
Of course, pretty soon some of my new “troublemaking” friends started to notice that I was still going to school and getting good grades. And here was what surprised me: it turned out I wasn’t the only one with multiple interests. I wasn’t the only one hoping to fit in some achievement at school or on the wrestling mat along with the wild nights. It turned out that others in the group saw the benefit in having me live this compromise. Some of them started doing it as well. That was when I realized it might be possible to have street cred and academic cred and on-the-job cred—and most important, how to exist in all of these worlds simultaneously: not by imitating the others, but by showing respect for what mattered to them while interesting them in what mattered to me.
That was the insight I brought with me when I started to work at DEI. I knew the team was never going to think I was Southern or white. There was no trick to make them believe I had spent my whole life in racing. But that was all right, because I wasn’t trying to be a chameleon; I was trying to show my respect for what mattered to them. The only way to do that was to put in the time to listen. So when I joined DEI and started traveling on the road from race to race, even though there was a space for me on the owner’s Lear jet, I flew with the team on the team plane. Every day when I went to the track, I didn’t wear a three-piece suit; I wore the team competition uniform. I wanted the whole company to see I wasn’t just the “suit” from management; I was part of the team. I spent a lot of my down time with them, eating and drinking and talking, hearing their concerns and finding out what was really going on with the company. And by spending my time with them, I was letting them know that while I might have a different background and a different job than they had, I didn’t think I was any greater than they were. I was showing them that I wanted to help them do their jobs better.
After a while, someone passed on a compliment that made me know I was getting through. It was something one of the mechanics had told him: “You know, Max isn’t one of us—but he’s one of us.” That’s when I knew I could make it in racing.
BECOME AN AMBASSADOR
IT’S ONLY WHEN YOU stop trying to blend in that you can make use of the advantages of being an outsider. When you can present yourself by saying, honestly, yes, I’m not from here, I’m not just like you, and I may not yet understand what you need, so tell me. Tell me everything I need to know. We’re different, but we can find a way to understand each other and work together. When you take that stance, presenting yourself openly as the outsider, then differences and even “problems” can turn out to be unexpected resources. When I first met Dale Junior, we had a legal negotiation to resolve, but what helped us to connect as people, and to establish the basic trust that let us work together, was sharing our experiences as kids of divorce, and our relationships with our stepmothers. When I met Tony Gwynn, he needed new representation, but everyone knew that. What let us connect was that I found the experience we had in common: we had both been betrayed by people close to us, and lived through times when it was hard for either of us to trust anyone. These disadvantages, these hard times in our past, became the resource we drew on to connect and succeed together.
I’M MENTIONING THESE EXAMPLES again to make clear what they all have in common: they were all challenging experiences from my past that had nothing to do with the “official” business I was working on. But they had everything to do with showing the person I wanted to work with that, although I might be an outsider in some ways, I could understand the things that concerned them most.
You get the outsider advantage, in other words, by doing two things. First, as I’ve said, you resist the pressure to try to blend in like a chameleon, and instead you present yourself frankly as an outsider. That positions you to make your best use of the first four rules in this book.
But while getting the outsider advantage is a continuation of my principles, it’s also an expansion of those principles to a bigger stage, where the number of people you can help to connect and succeed grows exponentially. Now you go beyond connecting with others one-on-one. You offer yourself as an ambassador, a go-between who helps two or more other people or groups to find the common ground where they can work together profitably in ways they couldn’t without you.
Your Mission as Ambassador: Seven Steps to Mutual Benefit
THE OUTSIDER ADVANTAGE IN A CONFLICT
OFFERING YOURSELF AS AMBASSADOR works in formal business situations, informal personal situations, and everything in between. It has made my career, and more than once it has saved my hide. I remember one incident in southern California. It was six in the morning on race day, and it felt like it was two hundred degrees already at the track. We had a little time, so my public relations guy at DEI, Blair, said we should go get a cup of coffee. We drove to a Starbucks forty miles away from the track and got in line. That’s when I noticed a bunch of men all dressed in red, pointing me out to each other and looking me over. These looks were not friendly. The whole situation felt like some gang thing on the street, but these were white guys dressed head-to-toe in red, Budweiser-logo racing apparel. They had the t-shirts and the polo shirts, the bank cap and the pit hat—one of them was even wearing the red leather uniform jacket, though it was already very, very hot there in Southern California. I couldn’t see how that was going to be good for his mood.
Before I knew it one of the guys in red is in front of me and he’s angry. He says, “You don’t know what the——you’re doing, keeping the eight! You’re screwing up the legacy!” I felt like telling him, “Dude, lighten up. It’s not even seven in the morning. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.” But he was too angry; a joke might only have made him angrier. He was going off, right in my face, and he had five of his friends coming toward us now. They were all wearing their red Budweiser clothes with Junior’s old number eight, the number Junior had worn when he raced with DEI, the number that DEI hadn’t let him take with him to his new team.
Blair was getting nervous. He leaned in and said to me, quietly, “We’ve got to go.” But this man wearing the number eight was still yelling. And the worst part of all of this was, I had been warned. The fans loved Junior so much, and they have such strong feelings about the Earnhardt family, that when he left the team and we kept the rights to the number eight, NASCAR sent a representative to tell me to get executive protection. I remember at the time I said, essentially, “Huh? What is ‘executive protection?’” A bodyguard, it turned out.
The concern was that some fans might want to do me harm because we kept the rights to the number eight car, and so all the Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan merchandise which bore his number was no longer accurate. That was when I hired Sarge. But I hadn’t wanted to bother Sarge over a cup of coffee at six in the morning, so he was still back at the track, forty miles away. Blair and I were on our own.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” the first guy in red yelled. “I’ve got $50,000 worth of…do you have any idea?”
It seemed the more he realized that he was actually talking to someone responsible, the madder he got. He wanted to do something with all that disappointment, all that frustration that had been festering over the past months. He wanted a fight.
“Listen!” I told him. “I love Junior. I wish he hadn’t left.”
That seemed to get his attention.
“I’m telling you, I feel the same way as you,” I said. If I had anything going for me at that moment, it was that I was an outsider. He didn’t know what to expect of me. That meant there was a chance some part of his mind was still open, and he might notice what I actually said and did, not just whatever he expected of the man who let Junior go.
“I totally respect the legacy,” I told him. “Believe me, I appreciate what you lost. I wish he had stayed, too.”
I was trying to show him that I understood his feelings. How sacred it was to him. How passionate he felt. And now, instead of yelling some more, he looked at me again. They all looked at me. I hoped they were trying out the idea that maybe we weren’t enemies.
He said, “I even got the new train! Have you got the new train?”
“I don’t have the train,” I said. “You have the train?”
“Man I wish he could have kept the eight. My wife…hey, can she have your autograph?”
And then I knew it was all right. We could do something else with all that frustration and disappointment that he had wanted to take out on me. We could share it. We all missed Junior. We all wished it could have gone another way. I signed the autograph for this fan’s wife. Once again, I wasn’t one of them—but I was one of them.
What made these guys tick was their racing way of life. The benefit to them was to keep that way of life going, and though it had seemed like I was a threat to it, I was able to change the direction so that our conversation helped nurture that way of life. The autograph did the same thing. I realized that although they weren’t a gang, still, like gang members they wanted respect; they wanted their concerns understood; they wanted to be taken seriously. And although there may have been six of them facing me and Blair, they must have felt powerless—they had lost Junior and their clothes were out of date and they must have been afraid the thing they loved and invested in was being taken away.
I got back to the track and everything was okay, except that I had to face Sarge and tell him that I sneaked off without him. He looked down at me and said, “Come on! My first time to shine on the job and you leave me?” I told him I had learned my lesson.
HOW THE OUTSIDER ADVANTAGE BUILT NASCAR
THE POWER OF THE outsider advantage brings success not just to individuals, but to organizations and even whole industries. In fact, I would say it built NASCAR. Of course, by now stock car racing is a national phenomenon. It has grown to become the second most popular professional sport after football, as measured by television ratings. Of the top-twenty-attended sporting events in the United States, NASCAR holds seventeen. The seventy five million fans spend over three billion dollars a year on sales of NASCAR-licensed products. More Fortune 500 companies sponsor it than any other sport. And yet what people don’t realize, when they contemplate all this success, is that it all began with local get-togethers where people would show up to race their own cars. Even as it grew, the team owners who built the sport into a phenomenon didn’t have a formal background in either business administration or competitive sports. Not at all. For the most part they were, and still are, business outsiders. What they had going for them was their passion for racing and their understanding of the audience, which they knew because they were part of it themselves. That connection to the fans led them to do things much differently from other sports.
For example, when people who are only familiar with other professional sports come to their first race, they’re often surprised to realize that we’re not selling hot dogs or beer. In fact, not only are the food and beverage concessions very limited (mostly to things that cool you off on a hot day), we also let people bring in all the coolers that they want. That’s because someone who understood what matters to the fans realized a long time ago that if you let folks bring in their own food and drink, they’ll stay longer.
Unlike other sports, NASCAR comes to town like a traveling circus—it only happens once a year, so fans don’t want to miss any of it. Most make it a family vacation. The race is part of a whole week of activities; the week is part of an ongoing way of life. So fans come for a week, visit the track every day, and all week long they’re buying merchandise they’ll use all year. With fans coming for the week, we couldn’t even keep up with the beer demand if we tried. It’s good for them and it’s good for business—the average fan spends nearly a thousand dollars, and that doesn’t include hotel or travel.
Another surprise is that you can meet every single driver. The garages and haulers where the crews and drivers work, and where they wait before the race begins, are open to the fans. It’s as if you went to a ball game and found Michael Jordan walking around in the crowd before the game. Visiting the haulers is like being able to walk into the locker room. The press, too, has a huge amount of access, and so there is far more unfiltered information available than in other sports. In all these ways, racing is unusually open to its fans. They wait for drivers to walk by on the way to the garage or to the prerace meeting with the officials, and call out questions or take their pictures. The drivers expect this, and they respond.
As NASCAR continued to grow, it was necessary to institute some “back to basics” initiatives to make sure the expansion of the sport wasn’t interfering with that core lifestyle on which the whole sport and its success was built. One element is Christian worship. As I’ve mentioned, racing is the only sport where you see a prayer on television before the race starts. Historically, fans woke up on Sunday morning, went to church, ate their after-church meal, and then settled in to watch a race. But as the sport spread across the country, the scheduled start times for races out west got out of sync with people’s schedules for church and their Sunday meal. In time, the governing body recognized the problem and changed California start time so most people across the country could experience the race in the way they preferred. They understood that the drivers and crews and fans are the real insiders of NASCAR, the ones to whom the NASCAR owners and governing body must listen to understand, so the sport can continue its amazing success. It’s success that came from a group of outsiders who weren’t worried about how a professional sport was run in other places; they were just concerned with respecting their audience and speaking their language. That was NASCAR’s outsider advantage.