British & Irish Lions CEO Ben Calveley: the art and science of incentivizing stakeholders

27:29But these amazing and amazingly dedicated and let's face it, sort of wealthy people who in some cases do save up their money to go on the trip of a lifetime. They're with the touring party essentially at arm's length for weeks often. In sports marketing terms, when you think about that unique aspect of a Lions tour, this lure that you have for tens of thousands of people, the fact that they want to be engaging with the Lions, you know, in the lead up to a tour through a significant period of a tour, it's not just coming to a game, it's being part of all sorts of stuff that's going on across the period that you're wherever you are.

28:10How do you take advantage of that and keep it going? Yeah. So there's an awful lot to talk about now, James. So one thing we do is we try to extend the life of a Lions tour, right? So yes, you've got the six, eight week period in the summer when the games are happening, but we try to make each tour just under two years in length. All right. And we do that by starting with, let's say you're announcing the schedule just under two years out from the tour there or thereabouts. You're then announcing your head coach. So when we announced Andy Farrell that was about 18 months out from the tour you're then announcing or releasing sorry the jersey so everybody can see what the lines are going to look like you'll announce your assistant coaches you'll do the squad announcement the captain and then you're in your pre-tour fixture and you're on tour so there's a real opportunity for us to try and create these high points over a two-year period and that's great for our partners who want to engage and activate and so forth it's also great for the fans because there is this real appetite for consuming as much as they possibly can about the Lions.

29:09So we're extending things as far as we possibly can. Beyond that, we recognize there are all sorts of different ways that we have to build a relationship with our fans. So reality is fewer than 1 % will actually go on the tour, right? Because it's quite a significant commitment financially and in terms of time. Now that's wonderful for those that are on tour. For those that can't come on the tour, that's why we have invested heavily in our pre-tour fixtures. So we played against Argentina in Dublin before the Australia tour. And that was a wonderful event, 50 or thousand seat venue. We could have sold that out five times over, right?

29:46The demand was 250 ,000, I think within the first 24 hours after the ballot went on release. And the reason for that is to try and expose those people that can't go on the tour to these wonderful players in the flesh. But also we're packaging up things through membership programs and different forms of content that we can give to those individuals. They might be in a completely different part of the world that aren't able to come to our pre-tour fixture or go on the tour. Now, when you are in country, we think that, you know, let's say, and again, an example I've used in the past, let's say it's like a 40-day long tour and you've got 10 matches, which is not exactly right.

30:21So a quarter of the time is being spent on a match day. That means 75 % of the time is not spent on match day. And what we want to do is provide as many opportunities for those fans to be involved in Lions organized activities throughout that period so we can really curate an experience for them that is as valuable as it possibly can be. So we do things like, you'll have heard of our Lions Den, right? So the Lions Den is, I mean, it's basically a huge airport hangar that we convert, you know, Lions branding everywhere. And you end up with 7 ,000 or 8 ,000 people, all of them, it seems, wearing the jersey, coming in and engaging in the build-up to a match.

30:58And there's lots of activations, and as you would expect that they can get involved in. A couple of additional things we did this time around were we had something called our Lions Theatre. So this happens in the evening, in the nights building up to the test matches. It's in a theatre venue, so, you know, 5 ,000, 6 ,000 people, whatever it might be. And we're doing interviews with Lions Legends. There's sort of game show type activity, just interesting events for these people to come and engage with. and we have something called lion's adventures so because we're touring countries where you know there are great things that you can do outside of match day you might want to go and visit ularoo or you might want to go to a vineyard or the coast or whatever it might be then we provide those opportunities for the fans so match day of course is central and everything kind of flows from that but there are so many different opportunities for us to provide interesting content either live and on the ground or in this country before we leave or virtual for those that aren't able to engage in the live experience.

31:53How much of a USP is that for you when you're having partnership conversations? The fact that you have this amazing relationship, you're essentially like a sort of holiday tour operator for a really interesting demographic of people for lots of organizations. Yeah. How much does that feature in? Yeah. So in a sponsorship conversation, for example, that's an important point that we would talk about. Every one of our sponsorship deals is unique and it's built up based on what the brand that we're partnering with is trying to deliver. And of course, what you're seeing more and more is maybe in the past you had sort of, I don't know, deals that were done based on how much exposure are we going to get for our brand.

32:32And let's not pretend that that's not important any longer. Of course it is, but much, much more we're seeing people want to build a relationship with your community of fans. So being able to give an example of when that community comes together and how they come together is important, but maybe more important is being able to demonstrate that we actually know an awful lot about these fans. They're not just people that come to a lion's den or a lion's theater. They're people that are on our database that we know an awful lot about with whom we can have a direct conversation. And we can therefore help you as a brand to have a conversation with those fans and hopefully convert them from our fans into your customers.

33:07And that more and more is what the conversation with the brand is about. Yeah. Technical point. But obviously the Lions as an entity is owned by for representative unions. With the sort of first-party data that you have, all of these people that you know more and more about, are you obliged to share that with individual unions? No, only with an opt-in from the fan. So if the fan is prepared to opt-in, then you would share that information. But data protection and so forth means it doesn't automatically flow in between. But we do work hard to try to encourage fans to sign up and give us permission, as it were, to share data.

33:42And we're trying to signpost the fans that are interested in Lions rugby to the unions, to the countries that they're from, but also to go a step further and to say, okay, you're in the Northampton area, let's see if we can get you along to a Saints game and benefit the club game as well. So the whole of the rugby ecosystem is much better now than it was however many years ago at trying to work together in a marketing sense to understand our fans and to communicate with those fans directly. You talked earlier about extending the relevance of Alliance Tour, you know, after two years, having these sort of milestone storytelling moments leading up to the tour and then the tour itself.

34:21And clearly the new event that you had at the O2 in this past tour to announce the playing squad was kind of a key bit for that. I wonder though about the content, again, thinking about this sort of eight-week period where you've got everyone together in such a unique way. What content comes out of Alliance Tour now? Obviously, the live games, etc. Yeah, there is so much of it. Yeah, there is so much of it. And what we've done differently, certainly on this tour and a little bit on the South Africa Tour as well, is we produce much of that content ourselves. What you had in the past, of course, you've got the broadcasters producing really high quality content.

35:01You've got multiple partners producing their own content and so forth. And you ended up with all sorts of different crews, all sorts of different agencies coming into the camp, right? And it's cluttered and the players don't know them. So the quality of content that they give is maybe not as rich as it could be. So we created our own production company, Lions Productions. It's in partnership with Whisper. And we now deliver for as many partners as we possibly can. And so there would be a brief, depending on what they're trying to deliver. Lions Productions would put together that content for them and send it out.

35:35What we're seeing more and more... Was that new for this tour? We had to do it for South Africa because of COVID meant you couldn't have lots of people coming in. So there wasn't a sort of strategic decision to do that. But what we learned from South Africa was actually the content was much richer as a result because the relationship between the production crew and the players was so much more trusting. So we did it on purpose this time around. And what we're seeing is, of course, people are interested in match day. Of course, they are and the results of the games but and this is not unique to the Lions this is just a trend across the whole of sport there's a real thirst for understanding what goes on behind the scenes so that might be training content people want to understand what are the players eating you know what does nutrition look like what's their training what's their recovery and just as importantly what are they doing on the social side how are they just interacting on a Lions tour with each other and with the fans so we did something called the ultimate test so it was a weekly episode that went out on on our youtube channel numbers of people that were engaging that content was incredibly high and it's basically they'll have two fellas sat like we are you know they might be sharing sharing a room two prop forwards just shooting the breeze right and the traction that that gets is absolutely extraordinary because people want to understand what makes these players tick yeah absolutely the authenticity there is uh is clear what's the latest on the women's team and tour again and this uh i've seen you say publicly that it's shaping up to be profitable first time out which is fantastic news yeah so that's still the case yes uh so we're now what 18 months or so away from the away from the tour we've already done an awful lot of work so we've got the schedule pretty much lined up and that will be announced in the next couple of weeks the deal with new zealand rugby has been done as as i described we've done a couple of commercial deals already So we have Royal London on the front of the jersey.

37:22We have Howden, our series title partner. We announced Nike just yesterday as apparel partner, bringing them back into the lines for the first time since 93, which I think is a great statement. And I've said this publicly, but yes, we do anticipate that the tour will at least break even if not make a profit. and you know the level of engagement that we're seeing is really encouraging whether it's from commercial partners and all of the deals that we've done are higher at higher value than we anticipated when we we put the feasibility study p &l together so shows that we are tracking towards profit engagement from the fans really high now if you think about the fact that we don't have any players we don't have a head coach we've never played a game we've still got hundreds of thousands of fans who have signed up to the women's segment of our database.

38:11Now, we hope everybody who is a supporter of the Lions, the Lions men's team, will be a supporter of the Lions women's team. But we also believe there's a whole cohort of potential Lions fans out there that will be attracted by the Lions women's team that aren't currently involved with us. And to have about 300 ,000 signed up already without any assets is really positive. And the players are all very enthusiastic as well we have something called an engagement day that we do once a year this is for 40 players 10 from each of the four countries uh we bring them together and we talk with them about all sorts of things about how we can make sure this tour is unique to the women's uh women's rugby and is not just a sort of copy and paste version of the of the men's and the level of engagement the enthusiasm uh from those those players is really high right so when you think that partners uh fans players all really encouraged all really positive tracking financially well then i think we're in we're in a good place um and we will start to think in the not too distant future in fact we've got a meeting on this next week about who the head coach will be for the for the tour you start then to build out the backroom team the management team and before you know it we'll be right at the sharp end where we're we're delivering the matches and we're trying to win on the field of play.

39:27Who picks the coach? So the way that we did it for Australia and the way that we'll do it for New Zealand is we bring together a panel of people who have real expertise for 25 in the men's game, for 27 in the women's game. That's a mixture of people who have played the game at a very high level, who have coached the game, who have appointed coaches. I would chair that panel. That group would come up with a recommendation and they'll think, you know, that group meets next week and we'll think about the process, you know, is it interview? What what does that involve? And then ultimately, there will be a recommendation that I would take that would be approved by the board.

40:02What's going to make or break the women's tour in terms of whether it's profitable? Well, like I said before, in terms of whether it's profitable, all of the feasibility study P &L showed that we are likely to deliver at least a break-even position. What do we need to happen for that to be the case? So we want to play in markets where the rugby is likely to be competitive because competitiveness drives uncertainty of outcome, which drives interest and so on. Of course, the Black Ferns, Red Roses did a wonderful job winning the World Cup in 25. Black Ferns before that, back-to-back world champions.

40:34So that's going to be about as competitive as it possibly can be. So the level of interest in the matches themselves will be really high. That leads to high numbers of fans coming into the stadium. So we want to be playing in front of full houses, and we're anticipating that we will. We also want there to be a high media footprint, right? We want people to engage not just live in venue, but through broadcast and elsewhere. So there are lots of different ingredients that will make it successful, but we are really positive that the numbers we're seeing come through now are, like I said before, better than were anticipated when we started to plan this thing.

41:10So we're encouraged and we're confident that we are in a profitable position. You talk about some of the recent-ish partnership signings that you've done ahead of this tour, Royal London, Nike, Houghton signing on in a different way. Is it a bundled proposition or are the women's rights completely unbundled from the men's? They're completely unbundled in the sense that we don't go to market with both. I mean, if you think about it, the women's store can go wherever it likes. So it doesn't follow the location of the men. It just so happens that 27 is New Zealand because we believe that best versus best is the right place to start.

41:4431 could be in a completely different part of the world. So you wouldn't necessarily be bundling because you're in different sort of territories and you've actually got different owners of the rights because of the JV structure that we put together. However, if you're a brand and you're really interested in taking both, then of course we can have a conversation about that. And so that's what we did with Howden back in, you know, as we were leading into the 25 tour and they ended up on the front of the jersey for 25 and as title partner for 27 so those opportunities exist but that but they're not bundled what's the latest thinking on i mean traditionally and historically the men's lions tours have gone to new zealand south africa australia i know there's been talk about expanding that out to include argentina at some point potentially what's the latest on lions touring elsewhere so we are in discussion with new zealand for 29 as we talked about previously and we're thinking very carefully about the period beyond that so look we're not wedded to just following the rotation forevermore and you sort of rinse and rinse and repeat the reason there are reasons why we play in the countries that we play and it's because you know you're there are fabulous places to visit um they're huge big rugby playing nations they have a history of being really competitive there's great stories that can be told the fans and the players like to go there but that doesn't mean it will always be the case and if you look back across history of the Lions, we've played against, I think, something like 11 different nations.

43:09Now, we're really interested in building relationships with new countries, right? A relationship with the French would be interesting to us. A relationship with North America or the Americas as a whole is interesting to us. We played against Japan in 21. That was an interesting move. So what we're thinking about is if you look at a Lions tour, you've got three elements. You've got the pre-tour fixtures, you've got the tour matches, so against the franchises, and then you've got the test matches. And what we're thinking about is how can you involve different nations in those different elements?

43:39Correct. So can you expand the pre-tour period? You might play more than one game and involve different countries. Can you play test matches offshore? Do you take them into different locations? Can you bring nations into the tour matches and add them to the inventory? So we're thinking about that. And we are thinking about as well, what are the right locations for the tour as a whole in the future? No decisions on any of this made at this point, but it's really important that we just have to remain relevant think innovatively think creatively and make sure we are on the one hand protecting everything that has made the lines special but thinking about how we can make sure that it is is relevant in a modern environment in a modern professional rugby world thinking at a much more macro level about rugby rugby union in general and you mentioned there the sort of creative thinking that you're doing uh about what future lines tours could look Like clearly Japan has now hosted a World Cup.

44:33People are invested in the idea of Japan becoming an established and powerful rugby nation. It's the dream to have the US obviously being a powerful nation in any sport really, but, you know, making moves in rugby at the moment. But there's also, it seems, lots of change being attempted in rugby at the moment. You've got the Ultimate Sevens competition. and you've got noise around this R360 innovation, you're rolling out the women's Lions tour. What is it about Rugby Union at the moment that means that the power brokers within it are ready to disrupt it? So I think part of the reason for that is the, to use your expression, the power brokers now are very much more aligned than they might have been.

45:22If you go back sort of 10 years or whatever, maybe a little bit longer than that, where you would have had different players, frankly, you've got their elbows out and they're vying with each other for access to space in the calendar and players and competing with each other for partners and so on. There is no doubt the game has recognised and that, you know, this is world rugby, this is the unions, the Lions, Six Nations, Sanzar, all the different constituent parts, the leagues, the clubs, that we are much better off working together. Okay, the reality is, you know, you flip that piece of paper over and on the back of it, which is blank, you can write down all of the names that you need to have a relationship with to get your arms around this game.

46:00And so it shouldn't be beyond the wit of that game to be able to join forces and figure out how do we collectively create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. And that is exactly what's happened. So stakeholders that might not have been maybe, you know, huge partners years ago, they are now and they're figuring out collectively, how can we work together to improve things and to move things on? And that's why you see things such as the nation's championship being introduced. So a reconfiguration of the old July and November tours at international level into a really meaningful competition with a winner at the end, that would have been very difficult to get over the line, you know, many years ago.

46:37But now the stakeholders come together and delivering something that adds value for the game. We're in extra time now, Ben. So I won't take too much of your time, but I just want to talk about you for a bit, if that's okay. How and when did you get into sport? how and when so I got into sport over 20 years ago started out in a very different industry mergers and acquisitions yeah could have stayed there but back then I was more of a back page of the paper guy than I was a front page of the paper wanted to get into sport didn't think you could make the leap from one to the other so I did an MBA that specialized in sport and then I jumped into the industry and I've done a number of different things so yeah that was that was over 20 years ago now okay and in terms of the job that you do now clearly involves lots of different bits.

47:20There's talking to the media, obviously doing this sort of thing. Yeah, stakeholder management, day-to-day team management structure, negotiation, all sorts, right? What do you like? What are you most passionate about? When you look at what's ahead in any given day and you see some particular task, what makes you sort of rub your hands together and go, yes, fantastic? Loads of it, to be fair. I mean, I'm fortunate to be in a position that I'm really passionate about and I enjoy and I believe it to be worthwhile and so on. So even the days that are a little bit tough, you're always able to recognize that this is a meaningful role that you're performing and there's a reason why you want to do it.

47:56But if you look at everything, all of those things that you talked about, James, about what a chief exec does, whether it's helping develop the purpose or the strategy or the organizational structure or engaging with stakeholders and what have you, then the bits that I really enjoy, I'm very engaged in long-term strategy. So I really enjoy thinking about how can you re-engineer an ecosystem in the way that works for the objectives that you're trying to deliver. And I really enjoy trying to figure out how to make sure you don't just have good ideas, but you're able to land them within the ecosystem that you're a part of, right?

48:29So how can you engage your stakeholders? How can you communicate your ideas? How can you build allegiances? How can you build support behind what you're trying to achieve? You joined the British and Irish Lions organization in 2018, but you're initially managing director and you were promoted in 2022 is that right yes promotion makes it sound very grand it was a title change effectively the same role okay title change from md to ceo in 20 just after the 21 tour so if it was effectively just a title change it didn't substantially change the nuts and bolts of the role that you were doing why was it important to you presumably it was important to you to be the chief executive rather than the managing director so that was a decision come to not by me actually that was that was an approach made by the board to me with that suggestion and it's a recognition that the organization was growing and and so on if you look at just the the size of the revenue now compared to when i started it's much higher size of the profit is three times greater than the next biggest profit the lions has ever developed you look at the size of the team much much bigger relationships with the ecosystem are sort of much more integrated we now have two tours every four years men and women rather than four so i think it's probably a recognition that the role is bigger, more complex than it was in the past, rather than anything else.

49:45What have you learned about being a CEO over the time that you have been in that position? An awful lot, right? But if you want to try and condense it down - What mistakes have you made that you've really - I haven't got enough time for those. So learnings would be, number one is in the roles that I had before. So I would have worked very, very closely with chief exec and chair in my previous organization. So I would have been their advisor, right? And then you come into this role and you're coming up with ideas and decisions have to be made and you're looking around to see who do I need to advise so they could make this decision.

50:22And of course you realize on day one, it's actually you. And that's a very different mindset being the advisor versus actually making the call. So I've learned that you've got to get comfortable making decisions, right? Related to that is this point, and this is definitely something I got wrong in the early days in the role. As CEO, you are not the aggregator of everybody else's views, right? So yes, you have to speak to lots of different people and you have to take lots of different inputs, but ultimately you don't fall into the trap of trying to come up with a solution that is the average of what everybody has told you.

50:57You have to decide what you believe to be right. And sometimes that can be uncomfortable, but you have to take a position. And the third piece for me is around, I spoke about this a little earlier, understanding what I would describe as the relationship between policy and politics. So you can have the best ideas in the world, but if you can't persuade the stakeholders or whoever it is to come along with you, you won't get very far. So spend a lot of time thinking about the what, but spend an equal time thinking about how do I communicate this? How do I persuade people that this is the right thing to do.

51:32And the final point I would make, James, is that, you know, as CEO, you can go into any of the different areas. You can get more involved in performance, marketing, commercial, whatever it might be. You've got to choose where you can have your impact. Pick two, three, four, whatever it is, but not too many areas that you want to be a priority for you because only you as chief exec can make a real difference there. Focus your energies there and allow others with skills that are beyond yours in their functional areas to run their own portfolios. Fascinating what you said there about being conscious not to be the aggregator of other people's opinions.

52:06Because some CEOs would describe themselves as consultative leaders, consensus builders. And it strikes me that you can be a consensus builder without necessarily having to go with the mean of what other people think. But I wonder what your approach is, given that you have that as a principle of yours, to having challenging conversations, because there are going to be times internally where you're going to have to thank someone for their view and do pretty much the opposite of what they've suggested. Yeah. So look, just to be clear, you would always want a consensus. If you can find consensus, then you should be driving for it.

52:39And you should allow everybody to have a voice. That's not the same as saying everybody has a vote, right? And that's where you sometimes go wrong. But in terms of having challenging conversations, look, I mean, there are plenty of them, aren't there? probably never as bad as you expect them to be. So important to recognize that the sort of anticipation of a difficult situation is often worse than the situation itself. I also think it's fine to disagree with people. What's important to me is that when you do disagree, you're doing it agreeably. So there's a phrase, isn't there, disagree agreeably.

53:10I think that's a principle that you should take into any of these situations. And the third thing I'd say is just try and focus on finding a solution, not trying to win the argument. So we've both been involved in situations where you're sort of arguing for something and you end up just digging your heels in because you want to win that debate, that argument, probably the wrong approach. And if you can just pull yourself back a bit and say, there's a challenge, there's a problem that we're focused on. Let's just try and get to the solution, whether it's your one or my one, it doesn't really matter.

53:41That's what we should be driving for. You were head of corporate and international relations at UK Sport. You were head of strategy and corporate relations at the RFU. And then you moved into more sort of super senior management positions and moved to the British and Irish Lions. How deliberate have you been in your career progression? Did you twig at some point that you would like to take on leadership? And how did you get there? Yeah, so I would have been interested in taking on leadership in the years before I got to this role, but it certainly wouldn't have been a conscious plan to move in the way that I did into the roles that I did at the time that I did.

54:21I think if I go back to where I first started, so I was with Arthur Anderson, who were then big five, it's now big four, of course. And if you want to, you can build a 25 plus year career in one organization and you'll get different opportunities and different geographies and different functional areas. You come into sport and you can't do that, right? There aren't organizations that have tens of thousands of employees with offices in a hundred cities around the world. It doesn't really exist. So my approach has always been to look at the industry in the way that I would have looked at the organization I worked in back when I was in mergers and acquisitions.

54:55And you say, okay, I might have to do three, four, five years in one particular role. But then it's not the case that I can just jump up in that same organization. So you've got to take a move into a different organization. So you might go from a rights holder to a brand or to an agency or from a club and a team, to a league. You've just got to look at the industry as a whole. My approach has always been just do the best that you can, right? Just hustle, work hard, add value in whatever way you possibly can, build good relationships with people, and generally, generally, the opportunities emerge.

55:31That does mean you have to be patient, right? You can't just decide, I know in three years, I'm going to become whatever it might be. You've got to be a bit patient and wait for the opportunities to emerge and be flexible and be ready to move and to jump when those situations do arise. Yeah. What's your approach to dealing with the media? Clearly, you're a comfortable and compelling communicator, but I do find that CEOs, certainly in sports rights holder bodies, can often be conflicted about dealing with the media because of the potential impact on performance and what they say having a not necessarily deliberate consequence on the rest of the organization yeah so media is such a broad term now isn't it where there are so many different entities organizations platforms that you can engage with right whether it's your own native social channels or whether it's long-form podcasting like this or traditional print and broadcast media.

56:29And I think the approach to all of them is different in certain ways. But what's constant is you've got to prepare, right? I wouldn't just rock up to something like this, having not thought about what you might be asking and what points I might want to make that hopefully would be a value to an audience. So you've got to prepare. But I would always think whichever of those situations you're in, you want to be transparent, you want to be open, you want to try and be engaging. There's no huge secrets here, right? Unless something is genuinely commercially confidential, and often it is, then I would err towards sharing rather than hiding, because otherwise there's a part of me that thinks like, what's the point, right?

57:10What's the point? So try and be open. I actually think that the challenge that comes from media is a good one, right? You should be prepared, shouldn't you, to put yourself out there and have your ideas tested and questioned and challenged. And again, I go back to it. You don't have to agree with the challenge that's coming your way, but you should be able to defend your own position and you should be able to articulate why you hold a particular position. Yeah. And finally, what are your New Year's resolutions, Ben? This is such a boring answer. So do you know what I don't... Is it do more exercise?

57:46No, it's not. I actually don't have... I don't remember a time where I ever set a New Year's resolution. So I'm afraid I sit here not having any New Year's resolutions. But if I were to set them, my advice would be, to me, would be don't make them about something you want to stop, right? I want to stop doing X or Y. For me, it should be a positive. What is it that I want to do that will kind of add value to me? So, I mean, you sort of laugh about doing more exercise. That would absolutely be a positive thing that I would encourage people to do more of. But no, James, I'm not here having multiple New Year's resolutions that I would ultimately likely fail to achieve.

58:21No, that's fine. I'll take that. Ben Cavalli, thank you very much indeed. Thank you for your time.