Renae Oswald

Stop Expecting Formula 1 Results from a Soccer System

Renae Oswald · RizeCon 2026 · Pocatello

When Renae and Kevin Oswald opened a second location for their automotive repair business, they found out fast what kind of system they’d been running for decades. Kevin left for Rexburg. Idaho Falls started sliding. He came back to fix it. Rexburg started sliding. He ran back. It was a rescue loop with no exit — because the system depended entirely on him. The business wasn’t broken. It was fragile by design.

Renae’s session used three sports — soccer, the NFL, and Formula 1 — as a framework for diagnosing how your organization actually runs, and what it costs you when the system is the leader rather than the design.

What she covered

Three systems, three outcomes. Soccer is the world’s largest sport by revenue and fan base — massive, global, chaotic. There is no single rule book, no single governing structure, no one place you can go for clarity. The system is fragmented by design, which means leaders compensate. They run in, rescue, fix, and save. The outcome is dependent on whoever is willing to carry the load. Scale is possible, but it’s not sustainable — because bandwidth, not opportunity, is the constraint. The NFL sits a level above. One commissioner, one rule book, clear boundaries within which all 32 organizations must function. Constraints create discipline, and discipline generates innovation. When the salary cap forced the Raiders to get creative this year, they found answers they wouldn’t have looked for otherwise. When the system has clear structure, it can carry itself. The leader doesn’t have to be the system.

Formula 1 is the third level. Ten teams, two drivers per team. A pit crew of 20 people who each know their exact role, execute it with zero overlap in a matter of seconds, and produce immediate, visible consequences when anything goes wrong. There’s no place to hide. No diffusing blame. If you make a mistake, you lose position. That precision and clarity is not incidental — it’s the design. High performance requires high intensity, high expectations, and yes, high burnout and turnover. That’s not a flaw. That’s a feature of the system you’ve chosen.

Which system are you running? Renae asked the room to be honest. Three symptoms of the soccer system: lack of clarity in roles and meetings (people leave without knowing what they’re supposed to do, so they do nothing), diffused ownership (plenty of “we should” with nobody attached, because a we unowned never gets done), and inconsistent consequences (expectations that function as suggestions, especially in family businesses where relationships override accountability). When those conditions exist, the leader becomes the system. And when the leader is the system, the system is fragile.

What clarity actually is — and isn’t. Renae is clear that she’d had a mission statement before. She didn’t know what it said. Somebody told her to write one, she wrote it, and it lived somewhere in a drawer. That’s not clarity. What’s different about The Oswald Way — the 10-point mission, vision, and values framework Renae and Kevin built — is that everything in the business was built around it. Job descriptions, policies and procedures, the employee handbook: all of it references back to The Oswald Way. When a leader has to make a decision and there’s no specific policy that covers the situation, they can ask one question: does this align with who we say we are? That question is sufficient. Kevin and Renae now leave their locations for months at a time. Things still function — well.

Designed accountability vs. managed accountability. Most leaders manage results. That’s management. The goal is to design a system that produces the results you want without requiring you to be present for every decision. When you have that level of clarity in your structure, you don’t have to hold people accountable. Accountability is built into the design. The system does the work. Clarity creates ownership. Ownership creates follow-through. Follow-through produces results.

Growth exposes, it doesn’t create. The problems that showed up when Oswald Service and Repair expanded to Rexburg were not caused by expansion. They were exposed by it. The business had been running a soccer system and expecting Formula 1 results — lying to themselves about the gap because success had been good enough. Expanding into a second location made the fragility visible. That’s what growth does. It doesn’t create problems. It shows you what was already there.

What attendees got

Renae’s website includes a quiz that diagnoses where your organization is on personal and team accountability, provides a results summary, and offers specific recommendations. She also offers tools around clarity and helping teams get there — she was available at the conference for one-on-one conversation and offered to connect with anyone who needed support.

The Oswald Way is publicly available on the Oswald Service and Repair website for anyone who wants to see what a working example looks like.

One story that landed

Kevin and Renae had been running a successful third-generation automotive repair business since 1939. When they opened their second location in Rexburg, Kevin went to work on standing it up. Idaho Falls immediately started slipping. He came back to stabilize Idaho Falls. Rexburg started sliding. He ran back to Rexburg. He came back to Idaho Falls. This is the loop that never resolves when the system is a person. Everything was dependent on one leader being present — which meant the moment that leader was somewhere else, the system stopped functioning. It wasn’t a people problem. It wasn’t a talent problem. It was a design problem. Fixing it meant facing the truth: they had been running a soccer system and expecting Formula 1 results.

“When you have a system designed with this level of clarity, you don’t have to hold people accountable. It’s designed in the system.” — Renae Oswald

“Stop expecting Formula 1 results from your system if you’re running a soccer system.” — Renae Oswald

About the speaker

Renae Oswald co-owns Oswald Service and Repair with her husband Kevin — a third-generation automotive repair business founded in 1939, with locations in Idaho Falls and Rexburg and a third currently under construction. She works with business owners on systems, clarity, and accountability by design, and speaks and consults on why some organizations scale and others stall. Her work centers on the practical question of how to build a business that functions without requiring the owner to be present for every decision.