There are three keys to operating a successful business, said Dana White, who built a fledgling sports franchise into a multi-billion-dollar company that spans the world in less than a decade.
First, you have to love what you do.
Second, you have to have a product people want.
Third, you have to work your a** off.
Except White, the president Ultimate Fighting Championship, known worldwide simply as UFC, doesn’t speak in asterisks. The opposite, really. He dishes out blunt truth like your grandma dishes out just one more helping on Thanksgiving.
“When you’re in business,” White told a group of CSN business students on Tuesday, “You don’t ever take no for an answer. Ever.”
He glared at the students. He told them how, under his leadership, a sports franchise that he and his partners bought for $2 million is now worth almost two-thousand times that much, somewhere between $3 and $4 billion.
“We are the most valuable sports franchise on Earth,” he said. “And growing.”
White spoke on CSN’s West Charleston campus Tuesday as part of the college’s Elite Business Series, which invites influential local business leaders to tell their stories of success to business students.
Spearheaded by Arista Wealth Management President & Managing Member Paul L. Moffat, a local advocate of higher education, the series aims to provide future business leaders with local role models.
White, who grew up partially in Las Vegas and lives here, said he always wanted to be involved in fighting in some form. He told a story of how when he was 19 years old, working at a hotel in Boston, his only transportation a bicycle, he hated his job.
He had no college education, and said he barely graduated high school, but he was ambitious. So he quit that job. He told a buddy he was going to get involved in fighting.
His buddy told him that was “the stupidest idea ever.”
Not so much, it turned out.
Back in Las Vegas, White partnered with Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, owners of Station Casinos, to buy the fledgling UFC. It was virtually worthless at the time, he said.
But White was following his passion, and he said he knew other people would, too.
“We’re all human beings. Fighting’s in our DNA. We get it, and we like it,” he said.
So, they worked. They worked on venues, and on TV networks, and on the pay-per-view market, which turned out to be a chore.
He said the one person who essentially held the key to all of pay-per-view wouldn’t even take his phone calls. So, White said, he found the guy, worked it out so he’d run into him in person, and made his pitch on the fly.
“That guy,” he said with a smile, “works for me now.”
And work it is. White said he didn’t just luck out. He didn’t just ride somebody’s coattails.
He put in the hours.
“Even though it sounds really easy,” he said, “I worked my a** off my whole life. And I still do.”
So that’s it. Find something you love, pitch a product with universal appeal, and work really hard.
That was White’s message to the college students, essentially. You can do it, too. Almost anybody can, especially if they’re getting a head-start by going to college.
“You’re already ahead of me,” he told the students.
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The next speaker in CSN’s Elite Business Series is scheduled to be Maurice Gallagher, CEO of Allegiant Travel Company. Join us from 11 a.m. to noon April 8 on the West Charleston campus, Building I, room 108.