Legendary Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw called his own plays in the 1970s when no one else was doing it. He didn’t have an offensive coordinator or a quarterback coach, and Bradshaw won four Super Bowls doing it all. Now, he’s applying that same playbook to business. He is still the quarterback; everyone else just executes.

“I am the creator,” Bradshaw said on Sports Business Radio. “I’m the visionary guy. I’m the guy that has the ideas, but who doesn’t know how to make it happen.

“Let’s be serious. Someone has to be the idea guy. Then, you got to have the soldiers, and you got to have the management that comes in and says, ‘Okay, that’s a great idea. How are you going to make this work?’ I think a guy that has a successful company or a successful ranch with 11 employees here at Bradshaw Quarter Horses. I’m just the guy with the ideas.”

That’s the mindset Terry Bradshaw used throughout his football career. The Steelers’ dynasty ran through Bradshaw under center, making his own decisions, and he did so by involving everybody in the huddle in the plan. That’s something, as Bradshaw loves to remind us, even Tom Brady couldn’t do.

“I ended up calling my own plays in college,” Bradshaw had previously said in an interview with Julian Edelman in 2024. “I called all my plays in the pros, and not realizing that people don’t call their plays. That is one thing about my life, I get the biggest kick outta saying I call my own plays. Brady didn’t call his own plays. He flipped a card.”

So, when he founded the Terry Bradshaw Quarter Horses with a similar drive and leadership more than 25 years ago, he knew what he needed to do. Rooted in the love for horses his grandfather instilled in him, Bradshaw started breeding Halter horses with the help of a small team and drove the business from the ground up. And he even had to face some tough choices along the way.

Last year, appearing on To The Point – Home Services Podcast, he revealed that the first person he ever fired was his own uncle. Even then, he’d laid out his working standards plainly:

“You have to set down your values as a company, and whoever excels at that obviously will be treated a little differently than somebody else,” Bradshaw said. “But if they are not a good person, I don’t care how much money they’re making. I’m not going to put up with it. I can’t handle that.”

Bradshaw applied that same standard to his whiskey business when he launched Bradshaw Bourbon in 2020. The bourbon is made in Kentucky at Green River Distilling Co., which happens to be the tenth-oldest distillery in Kentucky.

The latest and most exclusive addition to this brand is the TB-12-Year, a limited 12-year cask strength single barrel priced at a whopping $249.99, with less than 25 barrels produced. The name is a tribute to the jersey number Bradshaw wore with the Steelers (12).

With his business ventures, Bradshaw has proven that the playbook he created for his brand of football has become his empire after football.