Lesson #4: Keep Your Pulse on the Market

“No one is as sensitive to public taste as us,” says McMahon. “We have our own focus group 200 times a year. We're about what people want.”

Indeed, at the very heart of all the WWF’s activities are the fans – the people who keep coming back for more. McMahon has built his business based around those fans, determined to understand their wants – often, before they themselves even know what they want – and meet their demands. “Giving it to the audience is probably the easiest thing,” he says. “Finding out what they truly want is probably the most difficult.”

McMahon uses every wrestling match as a gauge to see how the public is reacting and to look for which direction to take the business in down the road. “You just don't know in this business,” he says. “You don't know who the fans will push and who they want.” But, what McMahon does know for sure, is that if he doesn’t listen to the fans, he won’t be around in business much longer. “We do have our finger on the pulse of the marketplace, if for no other reasons than having all these live events and listening to our audience all the time,” he says. “We love our fans, so there's nothing we wouldn't do for them, and we go directly to them.”

McMahon was not just a brilliant promoter – he was an innovator. He came up with ideas for his own business that would come to revolutionize the industry. And, he did it all through trying to understand what people would want to see. He didn’t create characters such as Stone Cold Steve Austin and Chyna, and involve them in exciting storylines just because he wanted to. Instead, McMahon understood that everyone likes a good story. If there were only a good story behind a wrestling match, then perhaps everyone would also come to like a good fight.

“I understand the common man because I understand me in that regard at least,” says McMahon, who would take his business cues from the daily reactions of fans. “The nice part about it is that we listen to our fans, and they're the ones who really decide who is ready to break through into that top echelon,” he says. “The worst sound in our business is silence. That means they don't care.”

McMahon knows that in running a billion dollar corporation, it is often easy for corporate executives to get lost in the offices and the boardrooms and lose that connection with the people. “When I see the lack of interaction and the egos of a lot of corporate executives, I want to break them down,” says McMahon. “That's a wrestling term for getting down to the ground. I want to bring them down to the ground and make them be with the people, so they're a foot from the sewer. I'd like to hold them there for a day or two, to be of the street. Keeping our nose to the ground is what we're about.”

Lesson #4: Keep Your Pulse on the Market

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