A fan with no football industry experience sent Manchester United's sporting director a detailed transformation plan with tactical ideas and player suggestions. The director responded in five days and offered him a chief transformation officer role. Nathan Barry argues that depth and polish beat casual cold emails when pitching to elite organizations.
I had another successful outreach, which was to my favorite club, Manchester United. Okay, yeah. I basically just emailed their sporting director, put together a document like, this is how I would transform the club, and like went into all the tactics and what kind of players to buy and everything without having any experience in that industry other than 20 years of watching them. And he responded in like 5 days and said, yeah, let's talk. Basically wanted to bring me on as like the chief transformation officer.
Whereas a lot of people would send off a casual email and be like, hey man, I got some ideas about how you could run Manchester United. Ping me if you want to chat. And everyone's like, no, delete. When you take the ideas and flush them out and then package them well, it gets this level of attention. I don't know how good these ideas are or whatever else, but someone clearly put a lot of thought and attention into it. And if it's good enough to get a multi-billion-dollar football club to pay attention, it'll probably get a Harvard professor or someone else to pay attention as well.
Yeah.
