Last Saturday, I was watching the UFC main event.

Third round. The fight is live. And the screen just goes black.

My first thought? My daughter sat on the remote.

Nope. It was a full blackout. The UFC — on Paramount+, which paid $7.7 billion for those rights — went dark in the middle of their main event.

$7.7 billion. And the stream died.

Here's the thing. That's actually the best news you'll hear all week.

If the UFC can have technical disasters, so can you.

And that's not an excuse. That's a permission slip.

We're living in the AI era. Everyone's talking about how technology is going to solve everything. But we're still human. Shit still goes sideways. It always will.

The weekend before the UFC blackout, I was in Liverpool for the Total Kombat event. Great turnout. Fantastic fights. And also — plenty of mistakes, plenty of challenges, things that didn't go as planned.

That's the reality of putting on live events. It's messy. Always has been.

The question is never whether things will go wrong. They will.

The question is: how do you react? How fast do you learn? And do you actually fix it?

Here's what I tell my team: mistakes from three months ago shouldn't show up again today. If they are, we're not learning. We're not doing 10% better each time. And 10% compounded? That's everything.

There's a quote I kept going back to — and people attribute it to Elon Musk in different forms:

"Failure is irrelevant unless it's catastrophic."

The actual philosophy: mistakes are acceptable, even necessary for innovation, as long as they don't destroy the project or the company.

Another version: "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

That hits different when you're a founder running events on thin margins, trying to build something from scratch.

Nobody expects perfection. They expect progress.

When I was building my grappling superfight series, OnTheGround, and Karate Combat, we made mistakes constantly. Same with Dirty Boxing. Same with everything I've ever touched. The difference between promotions that scale and ones that die is not whether they screw up — it's whether they learn, adapt, and come back sharper.

So if you're a founder or promoter anxious about your next event going sideways — good. That means you care.

Just don't make the same mistake twice.

The UFC will fix their stream issue. They'll have a post-mortem, heads will roll somewhere, and it won't happen the same way again.

What about you?

What's the mistake from your last event that you still haven't fully addressed?

Think about it.

Best, Adam

PS: At SKOVAX Entertainment, we work with founders, investors, and promoters at every stage — from first events to scaling operations. If you're building something in the fight business and want to talk through what's holding you back, reach out or apply HERE.

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