The Talent Synergy between Business and Cycling

Recruiting and retaining the best talent is vital, both for an elite cycling team and a major business like Brother UK. My years in business have given me a keen appreciation of the importance of strategy, networking, culture and content in attracting committed people and ensuring that they remain within the organisation. There are a lot of parallels between business and the sport of cycling when considering the topic.

 The racing calendar makes it simple to identify the period in which a team will be most vulnerable to losing its key performers. Within the UK road scene, riders are typically signed to a one-year contract, which opens a predictable window of risk at the end of the season. While there is a strong element of seasonality in business too (pipelining orders and stock for Christmas, closing year-end accounts and much more), it’s much harder to identify when valued personnel might be approached by competitors.

Earlier in my career, a colleague left our business to join a competitor and began actively to recruit our top-performing sales staff. It taught me a valuable lesson about the value of staff retention and succession planning. Maintaining an honest, positive dialogue with your team, understanding their plans and ambitions and ensuring they are informed of the wider strategic direction of the business is critical. The best team managers constantly check in with riders to ensure that their shared image of the future is the same and how to close any gaps. 

A clear roadmap always creates clarity.

Content - I've found - is key when wanting to attract people to your cause in sport or business. Brother UK is constantly telling its story to interested parties that we might one day wish to call upon, for example in the posts I publish on LinkedIn. In a sense, we are doing our matchmaking in advance. We might not have a vacancy, but we are placing ourselves on the radar of talented operators who will contact us when considering their next move.

One of the aspects of our sports sponsorship programme is that teams value the content we produce about them. We help to raise their profile, tell their stories and celebrate their achievements. The in-depth feature articles on our Brother Spark website, the videos on our Brother UK Cycling Vimeo channel, and the daily coverage on our three social media platforms keeps our teams on the radar of talented riders they might wish to recruit.

Scouting is a term more readily identified with sport than business, but networking delivers the same outcomes. I know that the managers of our sponsored teams constantly have their ear to the ground for news of the next rising star, but even those without decades of experience can rely on the sport’s structures and mechanisms – British Cycling and the UCI’s websites, for example - to identify who is climbing the ranks. In an industry like ours, there is talent embedded in businesses all over the country and, to some degree, what we have to do is try to unsurface it without having access to data in the way a cycling team does.

Networking events are our equivalent of conversations in the pit area at a bike race. Networking strategist and author, Andy Lopata, coined an excellent phrase which has always stuck with me:

"It's not what you know and who you know, it's who knows you."

At a charity lunch a couple of years back, an individual approached me who had seen some of our content on Linkedin and was following me on Twitter. He was working for a reseller in a sales position but was keen to a join a vendor in a project management role. I gave him my card and told him to contact me when he was ready to move on. Inevitably, that call came, and it was exactly at a time when we needed someone in project management. We’ve saved on recruitment costs, while he’s happy and adding value. 

There is a very strong sense in which Brother UK is always recruiting, whether or not a vacancy exists. If key player one moves, who do we have ready to move into their shoes? And more importantly, where are we most vulnerable? Who are our key team players? Where is our top talent? And what are we doing to ensure that they have clarity about their importance to us and the direction in which we want to take them? This approach should not be limited to the most ambitious, but extended also to people who form the backbone of the team. In cycling terms, these are the mechanics, soigneurs and domestiques.

The best team managers do the same. Simon Howes, who founded and leads the Brother UK-Tifosi p/b OnForm set-up, has implemented an impressive structure with an in-built talent pipeline. The success of the Brother UK-Tifosi elite team inspires the young riders on the Cycle Team OnForm development programme.

Culture is another of our key reasons why people join us. We’re confident that when we’ve identified and recruited the right person, they’ll want to stay. Many of our people have been with us for 10, 15 or 20 years; our longest employee serving for 41 years. Our first recruit under the modern apprenticeship scheme has now been with us for six years, after joining the business as a 16-year-old school leaver.

Cycling teams with clear, definable values that extend far beyond what happens in a race tend to be those who keep their riders and who have the least difficulty in attracting fresh talent.

Many of the topics discussed here are encapsulated by the concept of active succession planning. Recruitment and retention are ongoing processes and not initiatives to begin only in the face of a staffing crisis. From outreach activities in local schools to apprenticeships, content creation and networking events, Brother UK has established a winning pattern for business. We've also seen how some of the most successful team managers do it, and there are a lot of synergies.