Sports/Entertainment
Handing off
How Ted Phillips puts an emphasis on teamwork on the business end to help create success for the Chicago Bears
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business | November 2008
Page 1 of 4
It’s a cliché that runs deep in the sport:
Football is a team game.
But, really, it is. The truth of the matter is,
there’s a lot more teamwork that goes into
running the Chicago Bears Football Club
Inc. than the cohesion shown by the players on Sundays.
And that’s where Ted Phillips comes into
play. Phillips, the president and CEO, is in
charge of running the team’s business operations. From the time he was put into that
role in 1999, he’s been focused on getting
his roughly 130 employees to work as a
team.
In his years with the Bears, Phillips has
helped the organization push through to
become a financial success in the National
Football League by working with the city to
fund a large-scale, several-hundred-million-dollar renovation of Soldier Field, where
the team plays home games. He’s also positioned the team to have success on the
field, as the Bears made it to Super Bowl
XLI at the end of the 2006 season — their
first trip to the big game since the end of
the 1985 season.
In the mega-hype world of professional
football, where rookies are often given
endorsements and multimillion-dollar
contracts before they even set foot on the
field or take one snap, one might think
that Phillips’ success would be something
that would come up easily in conversation. That assumption, however, would be
off base.
“The biggest thing in terms of being able
to accomplish all of that was I had some
great people around me; I had a great team
of people,” he says.
And that team is what Phillips focuses
his leadership around. In order to do
great things, he believes you have to put
together a team of people who can work
together.
So while the Bears are privately owned,
and guard their financial numbers with a
few of their offensive linemen, Phillips’
team has earned some respect. Forbes put the team’s valuation at $1.1 billion, ranking
it ninth in the 2008 list of NFL teams — not
bad considering the Bears were purchased
for $100 in 1920.
Here are a few tips from Phillips on how
to get everyone to run the same play.
