What the Stormers Taught Me About Flow, Stakeholders, and Stadium Magic
- PG Geldenhuys
- 23 hours ago
- 3 min read
Last week, I stood pitch-side at DHL Stadium in Cape Town during the Stormers’ captain’s run. The team was going through their final drills before game day, but for those of us watching from the sidelines - a select group of YPO and EO members - this was no ordinary sporting moment. It was the opening act in what turned out to be a brilliantly orchestrated and highly gratifying sales pitch: to invest in sweet suite tickets for the season ahead.
But beneath the rugby banter and the behind-the-scenes access was something deeper - a masterclass in leadership, alignment, and the art of momentum. And it came from two unlikely but extraordinary architects of the Stormers’ renaissance: coach John Dobson and CEO Johan le Roux.
To truly understand the scale of their achievement, you have to go back just a few years. Western Province Rugby was, in polite terms, a mess. Financially distressed, plagued by administrative wrangling, and disconnected from its community, the franchise was staring down the barrel of irrelevance. Fast-forward to today, and the Stormers are among the most profitable and best-attended teams in the competition. They're not just competing - they’re performing, commercially and athletically. Game after game, week after week, they are filling stadiums like no one else.
That doesn’t happen by accident.
At the heart of the turnaround is an extraordinary partnership between Dobson and le Roux. What struck me most was how intentionally they’ve moved beyond their formal roles. Dobson, nominally “just the coach”, understood that building a competitive team required more than conditioning and tactics. It required belief. It required infrastructure. It required long-term capital. And so, with passion and vision, he reached out to the le Roux family - a group of stakeholders with the means and the heart to invest in something meaningful. Not just a team, but a cause.
That act - a coach engaging potential shareholders - is almost unheard of in modern professional sport. But that’s the Dobson effect: he’s not just leading athletes, he’s stewarding a movement.
Johan le Roux, for his part, didn’t just bring funding. He brought corporate discipline, a focus on operational excellence, and perhaps most importantly, a vision of how a rugby franchise could once again serve as a centre of community pride and regional identity. Together, they’ve created not just a winning team, but a story that resonates with fans, partners, and even sceptics.
There’s something else at play here, something harder to measure: flow.
The kind of flow that happens when you're so attuned to your environment - the past, the present, the possible - that you're able to both seize the immediate moment and set up the next play. It’s how the Stormers have been able to respond to crises with creativity, to leverage short-term wins into long-term partnerships, and to turn game day into something far larger than sport.
Standing in that stadium, watching Sasha Feinberg-Mngomezulu jog through his drills, chatting with Johan about commercial models, and laughing at Dobson’s dry wit, I felt it too. That subtle but unmistakable alignment between purpose, presence, and planning. They weren’t pitching to us as “sponsors” or “ticket buyers”. They were inviting us into something in motion. Something building.
And that’s the deeper leadership lesson.
Great organisations don’t just execute. They engage. They bring suppliers, clients, staff, regulators, and fans into the story. They turn stakeholders into co-authors. It’s a lesson we embedded into Boks to Business - the idea that the most successful teams (rugby or corporate) are those that understand the power of alignment and momentum. Just like the Boks stormed to success not through individual brilliance, but by deeply engaging everyone from sponsors to unions to referees to government.
The Stormers are writing a real-world version of that same playbook. And it’s working.
PG’s Pro Tip:
If you want to build a business that thrives - not just survives - ask yourself this:Who are the five stakeholders that have the most power to shape your momentum this year? Then ask: What’s one conversation I can have with each this month to build trust, clarity, and shared direction?
Because when you’re in flow, the future doesn’t feel far off. It feels like it’s already arriving.
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