The Spartan Way: How to Commit and Conquer with Matt Brooke

0:00Our brand globally is underpinned by community. It's underpinned by shared collective conscience, by shared collective movement, by passion, shared passion. It's about the sense of camaraderie and togetherness. You know, you can do it when the sum of one is made up of a lot. Matt Brooke, the operator behind two of the world's biggest participation brands, Tough Mudder and Spartan. The elation of physical accomplishment, of challenge, all these different things that combine to when you cross a finishing line. And if you're standing the opposite side to the person who's providing that moment, that medal or that headband or raising that arm because you've won, you can't beat that.

0:39I promise you. Welcome to this special bite-sized episode of Screw It, Just Do It from our back catalogue of over 550 past episodes. You obviously see a direct correlation between overcoming obstacles in an obstacle race and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at you as well. Yeah, so we, one of the biggest kind of, it sounded fairly cheesy at first, genuinely, which is unlike Spiderman Tough Mudder, but it was called Pick a Date. And I use this now whilst we moved on as a campaign because it's probably one of the most relevant campaigns to any walk of life. And we think about obstacle course racing, but picking a date.

1:14And picking a date is where, if you pick a date, everything gets meaning. Yeah. Because you're working towards something. So if you're in the boardroom and you have a date for an end of a campaign or a strategy or an execution plan or et cetera, bam, that's a date. If you are yourself, you've got your, think about coming parenthood or the cycle of pre-birth. You've got a nine-month cycle. It's a date. You work towards it. So what we kind of grasped, and then it's in effect through our races, is if you pick a date, put a mark on the calendar, I'm going to go and do this at this point. You give meaning.

1:51You have to train. You have to challenge yourself. You have to grow. You have to build a mindset. And what we then do through our races and through our obstacles, quite literally, obviously, overcoming obstacles, overcoming life's challenges, is you take everything that that person's been through in that cycle to that point of race day, and you allow them to test themselves. And it becomes then the playground of finding where they are. Nine times out of ten, that person's going to overcome those obstacles, and we're here to celebrate that. But also, if that person doesn't overcome the obstacles, we're here to support them.

2:25We're here to say, it's okay. Like, failure is okay. Because failure gives you growth. It makes you learn. It makes you adapt. And invariably, you only come back stronger. And again, that's a big part of not only through our races, but how we approach a lot of things in Spartan and Tough Mudder. Like, failure is okay. It's frustrating, especially on a business aspect. But we only grow from it. We only learn from it. And if we didn't have it, you also wouldn't necessarily be, you know, kind of true. It wouldn't necessarily be the authentic experience that we portray to our audiences that we're trying to elicit to come and test themselves, you know.

3:04Yeah, you don't want to make it easy at the end of the day, are you? It's the complete opposite of what you're trying to achieve. It's a challenge. It's a challenge for people. And part of the challenge is failure. But ultimately, failure is learning and going on to try it again. I mean, one for showing up, putting the work in and actually turning up in the first place. That was interesting. And also I think part of it, people want to find their tribe, right? Yes. A community. We've slightly erred away from that word given connotations it brings, but community. Community. So community, and it goes back to what we talked about, the first question you asked about the 20 to 30 minutes of activity.

3:46Well, that's one thing. But imagine if you did 20 to 30 minutes of activity as part of a community, how much more powerful, how much more meaningful that then becomes. And our brand globally is underpinned by community. It's underpinned by shared collective conscience, by shared collective movement, by passion, shared passion. Yes. Okay. Everybody wants to run and race and find a PB in our Spartan events. In our Tough Mudder events, it's very different. It's about the sense of camaraderie and togetherness. And, you know, you can do it when the sum of one is made up of a lot. And equally on the Spartan side, although it's about racing and, you know, finding your, chasing your PB, who's the first to the podium and, you know, the rewards that that brings.

4:34But it's also about, yeah, the recognition within a community and a community space that we're pushing boundaries and that we celebrate those who have pushed boundaries, who have achieved. And as much as, you know, we, I think it's one where that is 90 % of why everybody in our organization does what they do, is the community. And the stories that we're able to both see, elicit, generate, witnessing, you know, witnessing firsthand. Because it's that in itself is, you know, I'm right, I'm going on a tangent here, Alex. But I first got into our sector, mass participation sports, kind of by mistake.

5:13I was in a, I always wanted to work in sports. I always wanted to see, you know, I had no idea where. It's so vast, right? And I ended up joining this kind of boutique agency where it was about the show behind the show, sports presentation. So, you know, you're sitting in a, you're watching the football and then you see, you know, the halftime show and all the glitz and the glam or the pyrotechnics or whatever it might be. And that's, you know, sports presentation. Right. And we were in this office space and we had Victoria Pendleton and her agent, Chris. I've forgotten his surname now, embarrassingly.

5:44So forgive me, Chris. But and she was going out Olympic gold medalist, thinking about her next stage and the next chapter. She'd found a new boutique agency that was kind of a spin off of some old ex-IMG boat. And I knew that they had a, you know, not an opportunity. and I just thought, hey, why not I go and try it? It didn't take long after the first event and it was for Macmillan Cancer Support as well as this kind of women's only cycling ride called Cycletta. And it was from that moment, from that first event, standing on the finishing line, that I realised I was in what I was going to do probably for the rest of my life.

6:22Really? Genuinely. And that's not necessarily a by-product of, you know, the kind of a screw of mentality, etc. It was just, I'm in this moment and I'm seeing firsthand what this is meaning to people. I'm a 22, 23-year-old, still fairly fresh-faced. And I just knew that this type of sector, this type of space, what it provides people is just unrivaled. Very few, you know, yeah, going to the theatre is amazing. Yeah, going. But the elation of physical accomplishment, of challenge, be that fundraising money, and we'll come up, that's a whole other spin. Yeah, that's another challenge. All these different things that combine to when you cross a finishing line.

7:06And if you're standing on the opposite side to the person who's providing that moment, that medal or that headband or raising that arm because you've won, like you can't beat that, I promise you. And therefore, you know, name me many other jobs in the world in which, you know, you get to have that direct feedback, that real and powerful, impactful, powerful feedback. So yeah, anyway, sorry, that was a huge tangent. No, no, no. And I think going back to a previous point you made as well, you know, like picking a day, I literally hammer all of my friends, family with this point that, you know, if you put a date down, it's far more likely to actually happen.

7:47And even if you end up having to, you know, put the flag in the sand, this is what I'm going to do, this is what I stand for, et cetera, and then just break it down into chunks, reverse engineer the process and work towards that. If it's just that I'm going to do something in the spring, I might do a marathon this year, I guarantee you like 99.99 % of people would never get around to doing it. It's a mindset. Yes, it's a mindset. It's a mindset, right? And it's the mindset you can, as I said, you can apply to anywhere. even if you apply it to business, right? So many businesses either succeed or fail, and it's based on committing, right?

8:25And you've got the decision in which you make or don't make. And the more you push something down the line, it doesn't come to fruition, right? And that's why some of our pioneers in global business, your Elon Musk's or your Jeff Bursler's or whatever, they are divisive, but they're also very committal, right? They have a goal, they put their mind to it, and they say this is what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. And prioritizing. And prioritizing. And I think for us, it's exactly that same. Picking a date, actually, we just said it fairly easily. It comes and kind of rolls off the tongue, but actually that's an obstacle.

9:04That is the first obstacle. It's the first obstacle of a line of many that then come to wherever then you end up and you finish. and I think um it's one where the respect that picking a date has you know we talk about anybody but you know and our our journeys for our participants once they've signed up and how we galvanize them how we want to support them how we want to nurture them because actually they've already done the hard bit yes they've they've been on the website they've found their I'm going to use their poison and um and they've signed up for it and actually then it's up to us it's up to you know our business our spot brand and our you know tough mother brand and the house of hard that we have to then really get them to that moment and to guide them and to nurture them and to empower them and to instill you know that that sense of belief so matt's got some lessons for founders that you might have heard within that episode about building experiences that people feel not just by hiring for grit and not just titles and cvs Keeping the promise bigger than the logo.

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