How to turn obstacles into opportunities

Dynamic power couple, Jim and Dannii Mee, share how they harnessed their love for travel and transformed their passion into a thriving international events business, propelling Rat Race Adventure Sports to new heights.

Starting out by organising obstacle races, they have now expanded their offering and curate exhilarating expeditions in once-in-a-lifetime destinations across all 7 continents, from the Namib Desert to the Panamanian jungle.

But being a travel and events company means they got hit hard by the pandemic and had to navigate the challenge of all their events being cancelled practically overnight.

Luckily, their creative thinking and remarkable ability to adapt saw them hosting virtual events and staying connected with their customers until the world opened back up again.

With a mile long to-do-list, they also have to juggle worldwide travel with raising a young family, so join us as we explore how the unbreakable foundation of their marriage and teamwork, fuels their adventure sports empire.

Here’s their unfiltered advice below:

• Infusing your passions into a business
• The obstacle racing boom
• What is an obstacle race?
• Use new players in the market to your advantage
• Making the pivot from a sponsorship model to ticket sale revenue
• Channelling new customers and turning them into repeats
• Finding creative ways to survive, thrive, and dream big during the pandemic
• Prioritise working with local communities and travelling responsibly
• Juggling work trips with looking after a young family
• An event that ‘blew up’ in the media—but for all the wrong reasons
• Key learnings to take away from a failed event
• What are the future ambitions for Rat Race Adventure Sports?
• How does your role change in a physically demanding business as you get older
• Your customers want to see the shiny promotion videos but also the nitty gritty stuff
• Always carve out time to interact and engage with your customers on social media

Infusing your passions into a business

Bex Burn-Callander:

So I have to know, Jim, when you started this business, was this just an excuse to visit some of the most exotic and fantastic places, or was there something else going on when you thought, right, this is the business for me?

Jim Mee:

Well, I have to say, that pretty much was the plan.

I mean, there wasn’t much of a plan, and when I started out in 2004, the plan very much was that I wanted to climb Everest and I needed some cash to do that because quite an expensive thing to do.

Therefore, I’ll set up a business. And that was it.

And it was kind of simple in its naivete. It didn’t quite pan out the way that I ever thought it would, and 20 years later, obviously I’ve been on trips of a lifetime. It’s been amazing.

I never did go up Everest, but that’s absolutely fine because in the interim we’ve gone to absolutely amazing places all over the world.

So yeah, there wasn’t much of a business plan, I have to say at the beginning. And I guess in the sort of naivety of youth and bravado, I just kind of forged ahead.

I’d been working in the events’ industry, I had a background in events, so it was a trade, it was a professional calling that I had experience in and I was into the outdoors, and that’s how it came about really.

Bex Burn-Callander:

But the first iteration of the business was quite different to how it looks today. It was more obstacle courses.

Tell us about that and why, as you say in your naivety, but that was obviously the route that you chose. So why was it that specific kind of travel that you focused on at the beginning?

Jim Mee:

Yeah, I mean right back at the beginning I was living in Scotland. I was living in Edinburgh, and I’d been working for a number of years for Red Bull.

And Red Bull was a fantastic sort of crucible of creativity. I mean the can-do attitude was off the chart. It taught me a lot about what can be done.

But it didn’t teach me a lot about business. It was very much a marketing job, so it was kind of spending money, not the commercial side, but it was a fantastic ground for concepts.

And when I left Red Bull and I did some mountaineering and went on lots of different trips, I kind of used that background to sort of engineer what I thought would be a really media worthy and interesting concept.

And at the time, there weren’t many people doing this kind of activity, in terms of participants. I mean, even 10K runs and marathons weren’t hugely popular with the general public. It was still quite a specialist thing.

So that first event was called the Rat Race Urban Adventure. And the idea was to sort of take people out of the wild places, and actually put them on the streets of the city and have an adventure in the city, abseiling off buildings and kayaking down waterways and navigating through shopping centres with an A-to-Z map and all that kind of thing.

It was very exciting, but it was kind of sponsor based. We needed sponsors to fund that original concept. So the model was quite different behind the scenes, the commercial model.

And yeah, I guess to answer your question, why did I do that? I guess my background from Red Bull was this sort of wacky, let’s do something because it’s audacious. I was into the outdoors. I was living in Scotland, and Edinburgh was a fantastic city, so I thought I’d kind of flip adventure on its head a little bit and have a bit of fun with it.

We were in the city sort of play on words. We called it the Rat Race.

The obstacle racing boom

Bex Burn-Callander:

And then, so Dannii, how did you come into the picture? Because you guys met through the business, is that right? Tell me a bit about that.

Dannii Mee:

So I joined in 2012. It feels a lot longer. And I came into the marketing team. My background was in marketing, but in a very different niche.

I came from an engineering background, but I had a keen interest in the outdoors. I was a big rock climber and a really keen hiker.

So when this job came up, I was like, that is perfect for me. I applied, got the job, and then obviously met Jim through the job.

But when I entered the business, so that history, those kind of urban adventure city-based events were still very much the portfolio.

We had an obstacle series with Men’s Health magazine that we partnered with. We had another 10K woodland race with Runner’s World. So they were all kind of very, what I would call standard events.

So I came in and that was what I was thrown into marketing, and that’s what we marketed for ages and that’s what the business used to be.

And at that time, obstacle racing was in its boom, 2012 was when Tough Mudder and Spartan came to the UK from the US. We’d ran the Men’s Health series in 2011 and then obstacle racing just got all of this marketing thrown at it by those really big companies and it was everywhere.

And then we saw that growth and we rode that wave for a really long time. But all trends, they kind of come and they go. And that’s what happened to obstacle racing.

So we rode it while it was really high and we did lots of obstacle races. We did the World’s Biggest Obstacle Race, which was down in Stanford. And that’s a much-loved event with our customers and they still ask for it to come back.

But once you see the market change, that’s when we started to pivot away from obstacle racing. And that’s a key bit of my job, keeping track of what people want to do with their spare time.

So that’s kind of where the obstacle race background is.

What is an obstacle race?

Bex Burn-Callander:

Can you explain for our listeners who might not know obstacle race kind of terminology, what exactly does that mean if people who are listening haven’t heard of Tough Mudder or haven’t used, haven’t looked at your website, what is it?

Dannii Mee:

Obstacle racing is running with activities in the way, that’s how I always describe it.

So 5K, 10K, is the run, but then you have a challenge that you come across, and it could be monkey bars, it could be tyre jumps, it can be massive.

At Dirty Weekend, we had huge water jumps that were 20 foot into a pool, huge, massive structures you can climb. It’s running with obstacles in the way. They’re designed to be fun.

And the thing about it is it kind of means you don’t have to be an amazing runner because you are getting a break every so often.

So it’s meant to be an accessible activity in that way.

So it’s not like, “Oh, I can’t run 10K, but I probably could if there were 20 obstacles in the way and gave me little breathers.”

But it’s fun. That’s what it’s meant to be. It’s a fun thing to do.

Bex Burn-Callander:

It sounds amazing and terrifying in equal measure. You said monkey bars, and I’ve just picturing myself in the playground trying to beat, my son is 5 and can do it, and I was there hanging off one rung like, “Help.”

Dannii Mee:

It is hard.

Bex Burn-Callander:

No upper body strength.

Use new players in the market to your advantage

Bex Burn-Callander:

And what you were saying about all the new entrants into obstacle racing like Tough Mudder, so that must’ve made kind of a lot of noise, but increased competition can be a bad thing as well.

So did that mean that it was more of a struggle to get people to come to your events?

Dannii Mee:

It kind of worked both ways.

So our obstacle races started the year before those big US brands came to the UK, but with that, came their enormous marketing spend.

I cannot tell you how many times I got asked the question, “Is it like Tough Mudder?” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s like Tough Mudder.” And you use that.

You use that to your advantage. If they’re pouring hundreds of thousands of pounds into marketing, they’re bringing people to the market who are interested in the next obstacle race, which is how we decided to build the world’s biggest.

So when we put Dirty Weekend together, it was like, this is the obstacle race to end all obstacle races. And it was known that anybody who was at that race, had done Tough Mudder, they had done Spartan, they were looking for the big thing, and this was bigger.

So we capitalised on it in that way, but at the same time, it meant a lot of what I call, ‘let’s have a go’ companies, came to the market and were like, “Oh yeah, this looks easy. They’re raking the money in.”

Because you can charge more for an obstacle race than a 10K. There’s obviously more in it, but it meant the market suddenly got flooded and it felt like you could do an obstacle race every day of the week.

I remember counting at one time, and I think it must’ve been around 2017, that there were 300 races you could have chosen from in one year and that was just obstacles before you even got into standard racing.

And to go from, at the beginning there was 5, there was us, Tough Mudder, Spartan, another event company called Total Warrior, and another called Nuclear Races.

They were the big players and all of us still exist, but a lot of the others have fallen by the wayside because they’ve come too late into the market and flooded it.

There’s only so many people who want to do that sort of activity and they’ve dispersed into all these different events. And then commercially it’s difficult.

Obstacles are expensive to build, especially correctly and safely. Insurance is high to get them insured.

So yeah, we had that flood and then actually after that is when we felt the market start to go downhill, which is when we decided we probably need to look at bringing some more events into our portfolio that aren’t obstacle based.

Making the pivot from a sponsorship model to ticket sale revenue

Bex Burn-Callander:

And Jim, tell me about that.

So the pivot, you moved away from the sort of sponsorship model. I mean I think people were still buying tickets, whatever, but you were fueling the business with the sponsorship.

So tell me about how the business model shifted, so how you make money today and also what’s different about the events that you offer.

Jim Mee:

Yeah, I mean, right in the beginning it was sponsor led. That was the way that we commercially made a profit.

We had small numbers of people, we had TV exposure, et cetera. We then transitioned into the period that Dannii was describing there, which is almost like the big obstacle race period where the numbers of participants grew.

The price point was such, and the number of participants was such, that you really didn’t need sponsorship anymore.

And that kind of grew in tandem with mass participation sport in general, more people running 5K, people doing park run, people transitioning to 10K to half-marathon, getting on their bikes, doing triathlons. There’s been an explosion in mass participation sport.

And as Dannii said, that’s led to a certain level of saturation, but it’s also led to opportunity to change the model away from sponsorship and to go to ticket revenue.

So that’s where we were at, let’s say 10 years ago. And as that kind of market got more saturated and wanes, we’ve always kind of had an eye for a new concept.

We’ve always innovated over our 20 years of existence, we’ve operated over 500 events.

But in terms of the genres, we’ve always been Adventure Sport, but we’ve kind of always wanted to just keep pushing it a little bit with the concepts.

And I think we saw with the large body of people that have done a Rat Race event and trusted us as a brand, there was an opportunity to say to these guys, “Well look, we’re now going to travel the world. You trust us as an organisation. You trust us for a weekend in the UK to come and do something, swing off some monkey bars and do a massive assault course or something adventurous in the UK.”

“Why don’t you come with us to Mongolia? Why don’t you come with us to Panama and trek across the jungle with us? We’re still going to be audacious. We’re still going to keep the concept uniquely Rat Race, but we’re going to go everywhere.”

And that was the pivot really.

And I guess almost unwittingly we became a travel company. We kind of evolved into doing events on the world stage in a small group expeditionary format, but very much with the Rat Race brand and quirkiness at the centre of it.

So it was a conscious move into becoming a global event product, but less a conscious move to say, “Right, we’re going to be a travel company now.”

That is just an evolution that has happened because of the product that we’ve ended up innovating really.

Channelling new customers and turning them into repeats

Bex Burn-Callander:

And do you rely on, as you say, your existing customer base coming back again and again thinking, right, this is the next thing, or do you rely on winning new customers for new adventures?

And if so, how do you do that? How do you get people to find out about you and click that they want to come?

Jim Mee:

I mean, it’s a bit of both. We do have a very loyal customer base. And I think because we’ve been in the market for a long time, because we’ve been through a number of different iterations, there is an inherent level of trust.

And we saw that hugely through COVID, which was a key moment for us as well.

But I don’t know if you want to talk about the repeat customers Dannii, but yeah, there’s definitely people meeting us for the first time. But the base is really, really strong.

Dannii Mee:

So we almost have 2 sides of the business. So we have what we call our UK base events, which are the heritage events. Some of them have ran for like 12, 13, 14 years, and they bring us in the numbers, so concepts like ultra marathons.

We have an adventure event up in Scotland that’s 16 years old now, I think. And they bring in the thousands. So those events range from 300 to about 1,500 people depending on what the event is.

A lot of our new customers come in through that channel. So it’s that we call them the feeder events.

So they come in, they spend a weekend with us, they have an amazing time, and then they look for what’s next and that’s when they tend to cross over into the international portfolio.

And then once we have a customer on an international event, our rebooking rate is 80%. So that’s where you bring the new customers in through the UK.

We do get new customers come in just off the bat through the big international events, but the channel is through the UK, they cross over to international and then they repeat in the international, but that’s just growing the whole time.

So the UK events this year have actually had amazing growth and we’re seeing that translate into the international events as well as they move over, as they look for something bigger.

Finding creative ways to survive, thrive, and dream big during the pandemic

Bex Burn-Callander:

And you mentioned a moment ago, Jim, the pandemic, and obviously that must’ve had a massive impact on the business.

What did you guys have to do to survive and how did it change, I suppose, fundamentally how you run the business going forward? Were there any lessons that you are taking forward from that time?

Jim Mee:

Oh yeah, massively. I mean, it was a shocker.

Dannii Mee:

I’m still traumatised.

Jim Mee:

We were obviously in mass participation force and at that point we had just become a travel business as well. So 2 of the hardest industries hit really.

But absolutely, it was almost a defining time. I mean, I think I would say the first 6 months were absolutely horrific and it was just about surviving and finding our feet and just understanding what we were going to do.

But of course, everyone was in the same boat. We certainly don’t have the monopoly on hardship as a business in COVID, but what it did do, and I think it was an absolutely classic case of, if your back’s against the wall, you’ve got to box clever, you’ve got to think smart, you’ve got to think your way out of this.

And that’s what we did. Our back was against the wall. We had a lot of events that clearly couldn’t take place.

Money had been spent on promoting and on funding events that just would not take place. We were holding a lot of customer money.

And frankly had our customers not stayed with us in that period and backed us, we would’ve gone bust. It’s as simple as that.

And what we decided to do, and I guess the way that we found our feet, I mean we did lots of things, but one of the key things that we did is that we used the time to do the R&D on these new projects.

And I guess we effectively sold, not to be too cliché, but we sold hope, we sold a dream. We said, “Look,” in the end it wasn’t 2021, ’22, ’23, “We’re going to go to all these places and we’re going to do these amazing events. Come with us.” And people bought into that.

Dannii Mee:

They did.

Jim Mee:

They trusted us, didn’t they? And they entered.

Dannii Mee:

COVID for us was the lowest lows and the highest highs for different reasons.

I mean, like Jim said, we’re suddenly being told your business is illegal. You can’t have people gathering in the same place. Knowing that we’d spent huge 6 figure sums on events that weren’t going to be able to take place, like Dirty Weekend which I just mentioned, it’s at the beginning of May.

So when lockdown was announced at the end of March, we had hundreds of thousands of pounds in that event. And at the time we were like, “Well, maybe that’ll still happen.”

But when it was obvious we were going to have to start cancelling, and we pretty much begged customers, we were like, “Please just stay with us. We will bring it back in 2021.”

And they did. They all did. And we definitely would not have got through that if everyone hadn’t just rallied around us.

And what we did different I think, is we stayed active, whereas we furloughed our staff. Jim and I kept running the business.

We were at the end of the emails for people asking what was going on. I run the socials with help from my team, and when my team were furloughed, I ran them all and I just engaged with anyone who would talk to us.

And of course everyone was at home. So online communication boomed didn’t it. You were only on your computer. I mean you could only go outside for an hour.

What I had done that year, which I still kick myself for, is I normally order the event medals in quarterly chunks, but to be economic on the shipping. I did them all for 2020 at the beginning of the year.

So the only year I’ve ever ordered like 25,000 medals in one go was in 2020.

And they were all sat in the warehouse, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’ve got £30,000 worth of medals here.”

Bex Burn-Callander:

Do they all say 2020 on them?

Dannii Mee:

And they all say 2020 on them.

Bex Burn-Callander:

No.

Dannii Mee:

Totally unusable. And I was like, “What can I do?”

And we had that 1 hour of being outdoors a day and we had all these medals, and I was like, “I’m going to turn every event into a virtual event.”

So the date it would have ran, I flipped it into a concept where you could earn the medal by doing it in that time you had outside.

So over the week that the wall would’ve ran, you had to run or walk 70 miles and you would get the medal.

There was a time when we were sat in our living room with medals everywhere, with people’s addresses, and our son was putting the stamps on the envelopes, but people loved it.

And I’ve met people, I met someone in Mongolia this year and I always ask, “How did you hear about us?”

And she was like, “Oh, I did one of your virtuals in Australia.”

Like we posted her a medal from here to Australia for an event she had done virtually in 2020, but even that had led to her booking the Mongol 100.

So what was so important is that we didn’t lose connection with any of our customers.

And for Dirty Weekend, we made people build the obstacle courses in their garden and they filmed it and sent it in. We just made a really huge social media activity around it.

And since then, social media is obviously so important for us anyway, but that level engagement with customers is so key to building that trust and making them feel like you genuinely care about them.

And that’s kind of what we do.

And through COVID, that was a lot more poignant because the support messages that came in were phenomenal from people.

But then, so when we launched the events Jim’s talking about, the high highs that I’m referring to is we would launch events that were just ideas.

It’s Jim and Google Maps under line basically. And some of them sold out.

Jim Mee:

It’s a little bit more than that.

Dannii Mee:

It’s more technical than that in the end, but that’s how they start.

But some of those events sold out in an hour. We would open it and they’d go, the places would go immediately and it was a stock photo, a line on a map, and people were like, “Yeah, I’m going to come.”

Everyone just wanted something to look forward to. So that’s what we gave them. We gave them all of these adventures to look forward to.

And that’s really where the portfolio came from, is that sort of COVID book of dreams where it was like, “Where can we go when we’re allowed to go out again?” And that’s what we created.

Prioritise working with local communities and travelling responsibly

Bex Burn-Callander:

So have you had a massive resurgence then since the pandemic? Because I totally understand what you’re saying.

I do feel like people just were like, “Get me out,” basically when everything reopened, and people wanted to travel.

But it feels like then we were landed with a sort of cost-of-living crisis. Then there was the war in Ukraine.

And then there’s also other stuff bubbling around the travel industry like this stuff about responsible travel, like the ecological impacts, what are you doing to the local communities?

All this stuff presumably is stuff that you are dealing with day-to-day.

So how are you dealing with those pressures now and are you still riding high or do you feel that these challenges are sort of weighing you down a little bit?

Jim Mee:

Yeah, so I think in terms of responsible travel and in terms of dealing with people on the ground, we have a really, really strong network of people that we deal with worldwide.

And we just physically couldn’t do this activity without good local operators working with us. It’s almost impossible for us not to engage with the local community in what we do.

So sort of knocking on the door somewhere in Panama and saying, “Look, I need some maps. I need an operator to work with. I’ve got this idea. Who can help?” That’s genuinely the way that we go about this.

So the engagement with local communities is absolutely real. It’s rock solid. It has to be for us to deliver these concepts.

And I think there’s a couple of other things to say as well. Flying people to places like, Argentina Patagonia or the Namib Desert, or Northwestern Mongolia and then seeing it and then engaging with national parks and places that are protected that are wilderness areas, I find that very positive.

It means that these places are more likely to be protected. They’re less likely to be mined, they’re less likely to be planted for palm oil.

And I think for us, I take great pride in the fact that we’re showing people almost the fragility of this world.

You go to Greenland and you see how glaciers are receding, et cetera. It’s pretty humbling and it’s a big thing for people to see that sort of thing.

And I think we are providing those opportunities really a little crucible, a kind of snapshot into the world stage and what’s going on around the world.

Juggling work trips with looking after a young family

Bex Burn-Callander:

And do you guys always go on these trips, or do you take turns and what happens? You’ve got children between you, so how do you balance the travel aspect of life with schools and kids and family life?

Dannii Mee:

Yeah, I mean that has changed as the kids have got older. So when they were much younger, they’re 10 and 7 now.

So when they were littler, I didn’t travel very much at all. I probably went on 1 or 2 trips a year. I would choose my favourites and go there.

Jim’s role in the company is to travel. That’s his job is to, he has to put these events on the ground. He has a team, but no one can do it quite like he can, or no one can see things the way he does sometimes.

So that’s just his role. So he does travel a lot more than me. He is operations based and I’m marketing and commercials, but since they’ve got older, we actually made the decision to retire my mum and it was actually after COVID, she was a carer and she really struggled with that work as she got a bit older.

So we made the decision to retire her and she actually now lives with us and helps us with the kids quite a lot. And I know how lucky we are to have that sort of family help right here.

And Jim’s parents when we’re both away, which isn’t very often, Jim’s parents will then also come up and they’ll help. And sometimes my sister comes down from Newcastle and she’ll help.

So we have a lot of family support to help make this work.

And I probably travel 7 or 8 times a year now, but we don’t actually cross over that much. So normally one of us is at home and on the off chance we’re not, which are big trips.

So next year we’re going to Antarctica, we’re both going there, and the family will rally around the kids.

But yeah, they’ve grown up with Jim travelling quite a lot. They’re quite resilient to it and they’re excited about it and they love telling people what we do for work.

It’s an interesting thing for them to talk about.

Bex Burn-Callander:

Are they at an age as well where you could start taking them on certain expeditions?

Dannii Mee:

I am desperate to put them to work. Let me tell you. Joseph, our oldest, he’s getting there definitely.

Jim Mee:

He is. Yeah.

Dannii Mee:

I think in the next couple years, maybe about 12, I’ll stick them on a pit stop and make them cut up oranges. But yeah, they’re desperate too, they keep asking.

Jim Mee:

They do. They love doing their jobs.

Dannii Mee:

I’m like, “You’re just too little right now.” It’s long days.

But yeah, as soon as it’s practical, I will definitely be bringing them along for sure.

Jim Mee:

That’s the amazing thing that we have for this company. The whole world’s kind of open to us and our kids hopefully can experience some of that as well.

And of course, there’s practical challenges in them being with us on an event that we’re operating for paying customers, and we would never jeopardise that, but for them to come and perhaps join us afterwards or to come with us and tag a family holiday onto a trip, et cetera, that’s absolute gold.

And I think we’re very lucky to have that opportunity for them.

Bex Burn-Callander:

But Dannii, you also seem very chilled out about the fact that Jim is away for a lot of the time, but that must be quite hard, especially when your children were a bit younger, and you are left to hold the fort with the business.

I mean, obviously you know that that’s part of the job, part of the deal, but has it been hard to cope sometimes if he’s been away for a week at a time or whatever?

Dannii Mee:

Yeah, it definitely was. So all of that family help that I’m talking about wasn’t as prevalent back when the kids were 2 and 4 or lockdown was 3 and 5, so everyone was here.

But when they were little, I definitely, when I was working full-time as well, the kids were in nursery. It was a lot of admin to manage.

And I did struggle at times, and I think if you talk about working with your partner, that was probably the most contentious issue at times was like, “Oh, well you are doing all this really great stuff for the company and I am running the day-to-day, but also managing the kids.” That was difficult.

And I think that was probably the hardest time actually. But I think life with little kids is the hardest time anyway. That’s the most challenging time.

I mean that’s what I think. I mean, people with teenagers tell me different, but I think that those little kids, they take up so much of you and when you are running a business as well and working full time, it was a lot to juggle.

And I think the thing when Jim was back, he would always make such a conscious effort to take the children off me in that sort of, he’d come in and he’d have them, and it wasn’t like me just throwing them at him as soon as he walked through the door, but he understood that it was a lot while he was away.

So he really overcompensated for that. When he came back, he’d take them out for the whole day and I would just sit in the house. That was such a joy.

So yeah, that was the most difficult thing I think about having children and running your own business with a partner who travels a lot.

Jim Mee:

And I guess I was, and am, very mindful of that. As Dannii says, we are lucky enough sometimes to be able to go on trips together because her mum lives with us. That’s an unbelievable gift just in terms of the way that our family can operate.

But yeah, going on a trip, having these kind of amazing experiences, high fiving with customers, just being in these places and being mindful that I’m not there with Dannii, I’m not there with the family.

And there is a little pang of guilt sometimes with that. And I think that’s why we know that as the kids get older, we want them to be involved in is we have an obligation to show them what we are seeing and have those family experiences together.

We had a wonderful holiday this year, actually earlier on this year in Costa Rica together. It was brilliant to show them a little bit of the jungle.

We weren’t doing an event, we were there on our own terms, but what we’ve learned of these places and what we can show them together is brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant.

An event that ‘blew up’ in the media—but for all the wrong reasons

Bex Burn-Callander:

And have you ever had an event that flopped, like something that you thought was going to be really good and then people were like, “No.”

And then tell me about that and how you recovered, how you got your confidence back after having a flop.

Jim Mee:

Oh man, Gunpowder Plod.

Dannii Mee:

Well, that was successful in terms of numbers.

Jim Mee:

Qualified, quantified success. What were you going to say?

Dannii Mee:

I mean, that’s the one that immediately springs to mind, which is an event that isn’t really our kind of event. It was called the Gunpowder Plod, and it was in York.

And we had this idea that York didn’t really, and York was where we were based at the time, didn’t really have a amazing fireworks night.

So Jim was like, “Well, why don’t we do a 5K run to fireworks? That would be really cool and different. People would come and do that on the 5th of November.”

And we were like, “Yeah, that sounds great, but if we do normal fireworks on the back of it, we will get more people there.”

So we used the Knavesmire in York, which is where park runners go. So we knew the 5K route would work and everyone was totally on board.

And in typical British weather, we got apocalyptic rain. So immediately the event village was a swamp, it was muddy. Mums were pulling kids out of bogs. It was just chaos. Everything was muddy. I just remember all this mud.

And we had this fireworks operator and the Knavesmire obviously open to the public around the back and we had 12,000 people there.

It was enormous and probably a thousand people were doing the run. The run was meant to be 45 minutes, then do the fireworks after. It was all set to be child-friendly, family friendly time in.

But the fireworks’ company couldn’t start the run because teenagers had got onto the firing area, and they wouldn’t leave.

We had to call the police to come and remove the teenagers. Because they were in the firing area.

The pyrotechnic guys were like, “We can’t fire anything, you’re going to have to move them.” So we’re like, half of us are running around trying to find them. We’ve called the police, they’ve got to come and the delay is building, so it’s now 45 minutes.

So instead of a 6pm, we’re at 6:45pm, which is when the fireworks were supposed to start.

We eventually got that run to start at 7pm, which meant the fireworks got pushed back to 8pm, which is just a bit late when you’ve got 2-year olds, 3-year olds, 4-year olds and it’s a school night. I remember it was a Sunday evening.

Jim Mee:

In November. Very cold.

Dannii Mee:

And it was freezing. Everyone’s covered in mud. It was just like chaos. You were literally watching the event disintegrate before your eyes.

The fireworks went off. The fireworks were fantastic.

Jim Mee:

The fireworks were amazing, they were amazing.

Dannii Mee:

They were amazing, but it was so frustrating, weather notwithstanding, that event and the fallback and the local press was next level.

But that event, you could see it falling apart in front of you because of some teenagers on a field. Do you know what I mean? Something that you could never have planned for.

The Knavesmire is massive. You couldn’t possibly have fenced it in. And it was just so frustrating and there was nothing we could do, nothing we could do to stop it apart from find them and get them off the field.

Jim Mee:

And I think there was nothing wrong with the event itself, it was just so late. And we were dealing with an audience we weren’t used to. They say never work with children or animals.

But yeah, so it was a learning because public opinion turned. It was like, well, these fireworks were so late, you kept people waiting so long.

And we got hammered in the local press for that reason.

Dannii Mee:

Absolutely hammered.

Jim Mee:

But I guess it was probably fate from the start, because of course, Guy Fawkes is from York, so we should have known.

Bex Burn-Callander:

That your plot would be foiled.

Dannii Mee:

We never did another firework show after that ever again.

And even now, if you suggest fireworks in an event, I’m like, “Absolutely not. I’m scarred.”

Bex Burn-Callander:

Oh, my goodness. I feel for you, I’m based in York.

Jim Mee:

Oh, wow. Were you there?

Bex Burn-Callander:

I wasn’t there, but I was thinking, “That sounds like a great idea. I’d book a ticket to that.”

And then the story unravels and you’re like, “Actually that sounds pretty bad.”

Key learnings to take away from a failed event

Bex Burn-Callander:

So you said you didn’t do it, you basically were like, “No, never touch fireworks.”

So in terms of regaining your confidence, did that give you a knock about trying new things? Were you like, “Right, let’s stick to our knitting from now on.”

Jim Mee:

It probably didn’t give us a knock in terms of trying new things. I think we knew that it was a little bit outside of our general domain, and I think that was what it really taught us.

It was sort of stick to what you know, be adventurous with the concept, but our market was very much a kind of challenge-based customer, not members of the public doing something that was bolted on in a massive way to the core endurance challenge.

So I think had we just stuck with the run and done that, that was more us. So that was definitely the learning. It didn’t knock us off the horse did it?

Dannii Mee:

No.

Jim Mee:

But we were definitely, we definitely did learn from it. Absolutely.

What are the future ambitions for Rat Race Adventure Sports?

Bex Burn-Callander:

What about the future? What are your big ambitions either for the kinds of events you’d like to put on or new areas of growth? Can you share anything in terms of your strategy or your plans?

Jim Mee:

Yeah, I think right now we’re in a really strong position.

As Dannii mentioned before, these 2 kinds of strands that we have, the core UK event properties, some of which we’ve run forever and some of which are new.

They’re doing really well and they’re introducing us to lots of new customers who again are joining those very loyal customers in doing these fantastic global bucket list challenges.

And I think because of that sort of bang, crash, wallop that we all felt out the back of COVID, it is very much a time of consolidation.

It’s like we’ve expanded rapidly in terms of locations, the world literally is our oyster. We are dealing with events in 35 countries on all 7 continents.

And I don’t think anybody’s doing that really, certainly in terms of our genre. So we’ve kind of reached that point where we could bring on new events and we are.

We’re always looking, we are always searching, scratching the surface for new concepts, but right now we are kind of enjoying the fact that things are pretty stable.

And I think any business that can sort of come out COVID, wrestle the storm that happened thereafter and be here 3, 4 years later saying, “Actually, things are okay.”

I think we’ll enjoy a bit of that stability while we can and just take a deep breath, think on a bit before we go for the next grand, grand strategic move.

Dannii Mee:

Global domination.

How does your role change in a physically demanding business as you get older

Bex Burn-Callander:

Is this the kind of job that you feel that you could do forever? I mean, can you imagine yourself being big white beard still climbing mountains?

Jim Mee:

A few grey hairs there already.

Bex Burn-Callander:

Not you there, Dannii.

Jim Mee:

I wasn’t pointing at Dannii when I said that.

I think from my point of view, yes and no. I mean I think what we do, so a lot of our events, the international events are fairly expeditionary in nature, which is fantastic.

Kind of leading from the front and leading groups into places like the jungle or the desert or the frozen cold places of the world is brilliant, and there is a shelf life on being able to do that physically.

Now that shelf life is way in the future, I would like to think. And it does make you quite conscious of your health and health and fitness in general, both body and mind.

Even though we run an adventure sports company, we’re still busy living life and looking after the kids and all of those pressures of life. So we’ve got to be mindful of our health and fitness in that.

So for that reason, probably on a practical and logistical level, there are people that will definitely be able to do what I currently do better than me sooner rather than later.

There already is, our team are absolutely fantastic.

And I think sitting back and looking at the train set and moving the pieces around the board a little bit more, is probably what I should be doing more of, as managing director and sort of growing the business strategically.

And that time will come where I am doing more and more of that. And I think in general, this chapter of being able to involve the kids and bringing them on board, that’s coming and we’re excited for that. We’ve got to be here for that.

Dannii Mee:

My daughter keeps telling me she’s going to run the company one day.

Jim Mee:

I don’t doubt it.

Dannii Mee:

She’s waiting in the wing. She’s already the boss of the house, so she might as well be boss of the company as well.

Bex Burn-Callander:

It’s funny that there’s always this tension isn’t there, that the more successful you become in a business, the further you get away from doing the thing that you loved doing and the reason why you set up the business.

It’s just like the natural evolution. You end up managing more people and you get off the tools and you’re more on the strategic bird’s eye view, managing, moving all the pieces around the board, but that is almost the price of success.

Jim Mee:

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I think I’ve kind of learned that it doesn’t have to be binary like that.

When I first set Rat Race up, I think I went from having done a lot of my own personal adventures. I lived in the alps for a year, I climbed some really big mountains, did some amazing swashbuckling stuff, and then I literally worked nonstop for 10 years.

I moved to London for a while, didn’t leave the M25 for a long, long time, kind nose to the grindstone and put my head up 10 years later and thought, “Well, actually, hang on. That’s not quite the right balance.”

So to be in a place where we do have some balance, we can go on trips together, can involve our team, we can do some fun stuff together, we can hopefully involve the family as we go on.

For me personally, it’s as important to keep the hands on the tools, as you say, to kind of enjoy almost the fruits of the labour to have these adventures or else why are we doing it?

Success is fantastic, but success is measured in many different ways and lifestyle and the ability to enjoy what you’re doing in the here and now. I’ve learned that that is really important.

Your customers want to see the shiny promotion videos but also the nitty gritty stuff

Bex Burn-Callander:

Can you tell us a bit about your social media strategy? So which platforms are the most important? What’s the kind of content?

I mean, I imagine just showing pictures of these amazing is just like, bing, dopamine hit for your followers.

But is there a specific sort of tactic that you use to get people excited about these adventures? Can you reveal anything?

Dannii Mee:

Yeah, so for us, our demographic is a bit older, so older in terms of the spectrum of ages. So it tends to be 35 to 55 is our demographic.

And in terms of their social media use, that is primarily actually Facebook still. And that’s where we see big numbers come.

And second to that is Instagram. We’re not on TikTok because that’s just below that age range that I’ve just talked about. It’s kind of a younger market.

So we have a team who run the social media. I actually run the Instagram account myself because I really enjoy that creative outlet.

So I create all the content that’s on there, I engage with the customers on there. And that is in my world of commercials and budgets and managing the team. That’s almost my little escape on Instagram.

And it’s actually a way that I stay in touch with trends that are happening or what people are looking for. Ultra runners are actually really booming at the moment.

So we’ve created ultras, new ultras in the market, and they’re selling so well because running is a trend right now. And you see that on Instagram.

Facebook, in terms of content, it’s those videos, which I’m sure you’ve seen if you’ve been on our social media. We invest heavily in photography and videography.

We know if you don’t know what something looks like, why would you go? If you’re looking for a holiday, you want those amazing pictures of the hotel, the beach. That’s what sells the place to you.

And it’s the same for events. Where are the people stood? What are they looking at? What’s the vista? What’s the challenge? What’s it like in the nitty-gritty?

And we have this balance of the shiny promo videos you see, which I’ll put together based on what the challenge is.

And we have a couple of freelancers that we use a lot, who are excellent, but then we also have that kind of raw footage that we ourselves capture on our phones.

And there’s a balance.

So you’ve got the shininess of this is amazing, this is what it looks like. And then that really personal touch of this is actually what it looks like in the moment.

Jim Mee:

What it feels like.

Dannii Mee:

Yeah. So in Panama, the bits of when people are knee-deep in mud and they’re struggling or they’re crying. And that’s our hardest event and it’s marketed as such.

But the people who do that event want to see that. They want to see what it’s really like.

Or if you’re in Croatia and you’re paddling into Dubrovnik, that POV, point of view footage, is as engaging and sometimes more so than the shiny promo.

So it’s having that balance of that real touchpoint of real people experiences alongside the big, shiny, expensive video that sells the event online.

Always carve out time to interact and engage with your customers on social media

Bex Burn-Callander:

That’s really interesting. That makes sense to me when you’re saying it that you want the authentic experience, you want to see the real thing.

Because otherwise you would just have everything be shiny and pretty and then la, la, la, la, la, it’s going to be great, but you want to know that it’ll be a challenge because that is what people are going for, the challenge.

Dannii Mee:

And the engagement with people on social media, not just in the run-up to the event.

So the way we normally launch an event is we’ll announce it, we’ll build the hype around it, so you get people really excited to tease the information, tell them how amazing it’s going to be, and then open it and people will enter.

And then at the event, we always have live kind of coverage. So it’s really important we show what the event is as it’s happening.

So we’ll have live coverage through the day on Instagram stories, then the roundup post. But once people have done it’s so important to then engage with them on their own social media platforms.

So if we’ve been tagged, we’ll always like your posts and comment, we’ll always engage with you because you are essentially then marketing us to other people. And we appreciate that so much.

When someone takes the time to tag us in something, I’ll always go through and read it. I’ll watch your reel. If you send me a story, I’m going to reply. That kind of thing. I think that’s so important.

And even as we grow and we’ve grown quite rapidly on Instagram this year, I will never lose that bit of it, because I understand.

I would never want to get so busy that I wasn’t able to give that engagement back, because I think that’s really important.

Inspired by this business story?

Wherever you’re listening or watching, subscribe to Sound Advice on Apple iTunes here.

We are also on Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Join our community to share your insights and stories on X @SageUK using the hashtag #SoundAdvicePodcast, on Instagram @SageOfficial or in the comments below!

Want to know more about Jim and Dannii and Rat Race Adventure Sports?

You can find out more about Jim, Dannii and Rat Race Adventure Sports on their website or Instagram.