It took a great deal of courage and preparation for Brad Pyatt to line up each snap in the NFL against the world’s best defensive players, many of whom weigh over 300 pounds of pure muscle and want nothing more than to introduce him to the turf. Courage on the gridiron prepares a professional athlete for a life of practice and playoffs, but once Brad Pyatt’s athletic career ended, he realized that he needed a different kind of courage and preparation to make it in the business world. Like many other former professional athletes, Brad Pyatt found himself in need of a new strategy to make it once he hung up the cleats and launched his health development company TruWomen.
One key strategy that requires changing in the business world is the fearlessness to ask why. When Brad Pyatt played for the Indianapolis Colts, his coach needed to do nothing more than diagram a play and he would follow it. Once it was time for him to launch his own brand, however, a great deal of intellectual curiosity was required to make certain that TruWomen got off the ground. Brad Pyatt needed to challenge the conventional thinking and, in the words of fellow pro-football player turned business guru Brian Saranovitz, not be satisfied with the answer “because” whenever he asked the question “why.”
On the football field and in the locker room, Brad Pyatt was constantly surrounded by leaders, by coachs, and by persons invested in his development. He himself was not a beneficiary of one-on-one mentoring during his time in the NFL, but as soon as he began to run a business, it became clear that he would need to impart ideas, motivation, and guidance for his employees. Brad Pyatt believes that he was able to leverage his knowledge of leadership as a way to get his sales and operations teams to achieve better performances, something that wasn’t even close to part of the job description during his time in the NFL.
While Brad Pyatt played professional football in the era before social media, at a time when players could only communicate with the world in a post-game interview, he quickly found out that business in the modern world cannot afford to look past this key component of marketing. That’s why TruWomen has one of the most successful social media marketing teams of any fitness start-up and has done better than much of the competition to raise awareness of its brand and its benefits.