Self-discipline, drive, ambition and focus. Taking risks, putting yourself on the line and building a team around you that you can trust to plan your short- and long-term future. These are traits often associated with successful entrepreneurs. These traits are also the key qualities of successful boxers, who served as important role models for me in founding and taking on the responsibility of being president of Managed Maintenance Inc., a software-as-a-service company.

Before my exposure to the world of boxing, I believed it was a world of brute force vs. brute force. This perception could not be further from the truth. Watching Floyd Mayweather on a cold Michigan winter's day for the first time--a 14-year-old weaving grace, power, strategy and athleticism--is all I had to see to understand that there is far more to boxing as a sport and philosophy. While I couldn't have known it then, many of the traits of the elite boxers that I came to admire would be the traits that I would develop over my years of growth as a professional and entrepreneur.

I was a Jayhawk long before I entered the University of Kansas in 1983. My family, including my mother, her sisters and my uncles, and a myriad of cousins and friends celebrated every Kansas football game and basketball game as an event unto itself.

To no one's surprise, I became involved in the Kansas men's basketball and football programs while attending the University of Kansas. As an administrator for the head trainer, I was fortunate enough to be a part of the hoopla surrounding the 1988 championship team under Larry Brown, a team led to victory by Danny Manning.

Soon after graduating from college, I became the director of sports programming and development for the National Police Athletic League. As director, I built a variety of sports programs, many for inner-city youth, under the NPAL banner. My responsibilities included organizing and running five areas of sports competition for the NPAL, one of which was boxing. Of the five sports areas, boxing held the least interest for me initially, since I had had little or no exposure to boxing growing up. But my appreciation for boxing didn't grow slowly; I embraced boxing as soon as I witnessed it.

These kids put everything on the line, including their physical well-being, each time they enter the ring. Boxing demands great self-discipline, focus and training. And behind it all, there was something courageous about it. The sport drew me in so much that I became an amateur boxing referee.

As I later discovered in the business world, in boxing there is a funneling process to success based on a number of factors. Boxers, like companies, need the right management. This management is not limited to the next fight or the next quarter, but there needs to be a long-term strategy to nurture the boxer and build his assets, skills and techniques to maximize his potential.

Like a champion boxer, a successful entrepreneur must hone her skills, be focused, harness her ambition, build a trusted team of professionals around her, and be willing to put herself on the line. Most boxers, like most people, do not put all of these elements together; as a result, they fail to become top contenders. Some boxers may be more athletic or more powerful than other boxers and still be defeated and surpassed by a boxer who did put all the right elements together.

My path to entrepreneurship accelerated at Champion Solutions Group, where I first took an administrative position. Within two years, I became the director of maintenance service and was later named vice president. I assembled a team that built a business for CSG that became the company's largest and most profitable business division, Managed Maintenance Services. There were companies with greater revenues, larger staffs and more resources--yet, Champion's MMS division became one of IBM's largest partners in the maintenance business.

After that success, I became part of a small group that created Managed Maintenance Inc. As president, I have had the honor to preside over a team that has helped our company become a leader in the SAAS maintenance development and asset management market places.

What does it take? Like boxing, and sports in general, it takes self-discipline, drive, ambition, focus, building a team around you that you can trust to plan your short- and long-term future--and putting yourself on the line.

Tina M. Lux Boim is the president and co-founder of Managed Maintenance Inc., a software-as-a-service company. With nearly 20 years of experience in the technology sector, she is an expert in optimizing and streamlining contract management processes.