You Never Make It

Dana White has run the UFC since he and his partners Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta bought it for $2 million roughly 25 years ago. He walked out of a hotel bellman job at 19, with a 401k and full benefits, to get into the fight business, and was running a boxing gym when he ran into the Fertittas at a high school friend's wedding. At 57 he runs three companies at once: the UFC, Power Slap and Zuffa Boxing, which holds a global television deal with Paramount. He quit drinking at 21, credits health coach Gary Brecka with fixing his sleep apnea, and says he doesn't look back. These signals are from Dana White's interview with Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

1. The $2 Million Bet. White says the UFC sold for $2 million because almost nobody believed in it, and networks thought the sport was too barbaric to air. His math on its value today: if the Lakers sold for $12.5 billion, the UFC is worth $50 billion. The early hiring problem was geography, since production and sponsorship talent wanted New York or LA, and Las Vegas 25 years ago was a hard sell. His head of production, Craig Borsari, was a rising star at Fox who left because he believed in the vision. White calls him "the best in the business."
2. Trust as the Moat. When White bought the UFC 25 years ago, the conventional view was that nobody could compete with boxing. White says boxing then turned into "a going out of business sale," with promoters grabbing as much money as they could from each fight and running. That behavior chased television networks and sponsors out of the sport. The UFC spent 25 years building a brand that consumers, sponsors and networks all trust, and that trust is why White's new boxing venture now holds the sport's only global television deal, on Paramount.
3. The Formula. White names three things the UFC couldn't have gotten wrong: matchmaking, live event production and television production. He obsesses over the live crowd because people who buy tickets spend far more than TV viewers once you add flights, rooms and dinners, and he wants every one of them walking out saying they'd do it again. He points to a long list of rich, smart people who tried to break into the fight business and failed. "There is a formula," he says. "And guess who has it?"
4. You Never Make It. When people congratulate White on the $7.7 billion Paramount deal (he also calls it $8 billion), he tells them nobody ever makes it. Paramount paid because it believes the UFC can move its business, so his job over the next 5 years is to prove that, because he wants $10 billion on the renewal. He applies the same rule to sponsors: "I'm not a logo slap guy," and he wants every sponsor saying "thank God I spent my money on the UFC." He now names the NFL, MLB, NHL and NBA as his competitors, and is sure the NFL reacted to the deal by asking how it missed $8 billion.
5. Picking People. White says his one superpower over 25 years has been choosing the people around him. He started as "the everything guy" with one other employee, then had to learn fast who fits and who doesn't. After the company's sale, he could tell right away which incoming people didn't fit, and he fired them. His bar is talent plus work ethic plus full buy-in on the vision. The payoff now is that when his production team shows him spots and vignettes, he asks for very few changes.
6. The Red Phone. At every event White sits next to a red phone wired straight to the production truck. Zach, the producer who runs the shows, has freedom to try things, and White calls in real time: "Yeah, let's never do that again. Okay, bye." Or he calls to say a segment was incredible. White credits the lack of hurt feelings to how far the team has come, and he doesn't make a move without his head of PR. He describes himself as a fight fan to the core who is still the customer, which is how he knows when the team has nailed something.
7. No COVID Layoffs. When COVID hit, White refused to lay anyone off: "I will never pick money over people ever." On the first day of shutdowns he gathered every employee and said anyone who felt unsafe could go home. Nobody walked out. He ran weekly FaceTime calls with all staff, told them to call him first if they needed groceries or a relative got sick, and had everyone back at work within a couple of weeks. His view is that a CEO's job in hard times is to keep the business running and take care of the people who missed their kids' first steps to build it.
8. Killers Up Close. "You can't be within a mile of me if you're not a killer," White says, naming people like Craig Borsari and Hunter Campbell. He doesn't need all 650 employees to work that way, and he says plenty of people want a 9-to-5 with weekends off, which is fine. The inner circle has to keep up, though. He once went through about 10 assistants in 2 years, and this year he was home 4 days in 2 months while running three companies.
9. Build It in the Office. White says this generation's belief that you can build a successful business from home is wrong: "It's impossible." He's at the office from 8:30 a.m. until 7, 8, 9 or 10 p.m. Good ideas, he says, come from people popping into his office and conversations going places nobody planned. His advice to anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur so they can set their own schedule: get a 9-to-5, because founders get no days off, birthdays or Thanksgivings.
10. Guard the Three Things. White says there are three things he focuses on every day, and he refused to tell Bartlett what they are because "it's part of the formula." The threat he names is distraction: movie offers and side projects around the brand that feed a leader's ego while a rival eats your lunch. He blocks every journalist who covers the sport from his feed, calling them wrong about everything. He keeps listening to hardcore fans and even the haters, who he says keep him on his game.
11. No Is Banned. At UFC headquarters, White says, the only thing you can't say is no. After Tom Brady took him to the Sphere in Las Vegas, he called Borsari the same night and told him to cancel his plans and bring the crew to see it so the UFC could stage a show there. When the president suggested a fight at the White House, White agreed on the spot. He has a 7-year goal, matching the Paramount deal, to build a combat sports brand nobody can replicate, and says Zuffa Boxing is already 2 years ahead of plan because rival promoters are "so bad at doing it."
12. Worst Case: Back to Work. White's test for any risk is the worst case, and for him it's going back to a job. As a 19-year-old bellman he worked alongside a 45-year-old making the same pay with the same schedule, so failing would only have put him back there. "If the money was the deciding factor, I'm still standing in the lobby of the hotel." He makes decisions on gut over focus groups, as with Power Slap, which critics said would destroy his legacy. The outcome he fears is lying on his deathbed saying "I wish I would have."

Watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-DFC0AnbY4.