New man at the top

We speak to GBR Challenge's new Team Principal, Gordon Moultrie

Gordon Moultrie is a name that may have registered in yacht racing circles as the public face of IT services company, EDS - as in the Open 60s' EDS Atlantic Challenge race in 2002. Having left his position as that company's Director of Marketing and Communications, at the beginning of March Moultrie took up a new position as Team Principal at GBR Challenge.

In the previous incarnation of the British America's Cup challenge this role was part filled by Peter Harrison and by General Manager David Barnes. This time around, with Peter Harrison stepping out of the hot seat and limelight slightly, GBR Challenge will have its own Michel Bonnefous figure in Moultrie.

Considering the present predicament of GBR Challenge where Peter Harrison has pledged half the budget for a 2007 challenge anticipating the remainder will come from sponsorship and commercial partners, Moultrie's credentials could not be better.

His CV includes time at advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather as well as 'industry' - BOC Group and Westland Helicopters, and the second half of his career to date has been spent in the IT and computer industry.

"For the last 15 years, I've been running marketing and communications departments in large corporations both in the UK and Europe," recounts Moultrie with a Scot accent indistinguishable (to our southern ear) to that of his great friend, Chay Blyth. "I was in Geneva for almost 10 years with Digital Equipment Corporation, then moved to the States and worked out of Boston managing the same organisation on a worldwide basis. So I think what I bring to the team is a broad view and set of experiences and an understanding of what large corporations are looking for. There is an organisational component to it, a management component, but also an understanding and experience in the business world."

Moultrie has sailed ever since he was 10, when his father bought him a Shearwater catamaran, which he used to sail out of Largs on the Clyde. Since returning to the UK to take up his post at EDS almost five years ago, he says he has done most of his sailing with Chay Blyth as a result of EDS' association with Challenge Business. "I got deeply involved in that," says Moultrie. "I’ve been interested in professional sailing, because it wasn’t seen as a viable platform for companies to piggyback on and when Chay came up with the idea of the Open 60s [and subsequently the EDS Atlantic Challenge] it seemed to me to so far ahead of its time. It was very very interesting and I learned a lot there. It was very similar to F1. You have all the same ingredients - these fantastic boats...almost freestyle, exciting, really fast, leading edge. You have the heroes you have in Formula One, which you don’t necessarily have in the America’s Cup. A lot of people remember who the owners are, but very few remember who the skippers were..."

Following the EDS Atlantic Challenge, the company were to going to be the sponsor of a Challenge Business-organised Round Britain Race for the Open 60s until the bottom fell out of their market. "EDS has gone through quite a dramatic change in the last two years," says Moultrie. "Fortunes have not been the best, and they have been cutting back on a lot of their marketing spend."

Ironically Moultrie's appointment came about when Leslie Ryan and GBR sponsor hunter Judith le Fleming of Apace Sports were talking to Moultrie about sponsorship and the conversation turned to the gap in GBR's management structure. "I had been in large corporations for a while and I felt I wanted to look at other activities," says Moultrie. "When they told me what they were looking for it was something I was very interested in. They were clearly after somebody to lead the team as this stage, to build the foundation that the team needs to go on for more than one campaign - a business foundation - and that is what really interested me."

From controlling the marketing spend at EDS, Moultrie is now trying to help Ryan and Fleming prise open the purse strings of other corporations - a case of poacher turned gamekeeper. "That is a big advantage for the team when the team looks in at itself - how it needs to be structured and how it needs to move forward. It is big advantage to the team when it is talking to commercial companies about relationships. The two roles are very simple - this team has to win on the water but it has to deliver value off the water. That is the new thing for this team and I think it is probably going to be the big challenge for teams going forward in America’s Cup over the next 8-10 years. You have to get a balance between the sailing side and the commercial side."

Under the new America's Cup Management the event is changing into something akin to other great sporting events like the Olympics, Formula One or the World Cup football. There will be greater value in the event for commercial partners to realise and the approach of America's Cup teams must follow suit.

Jumping back on to the other side of the fence momentarily Moultrie explains how he became interested in sailing at EDS. "We had a very poor performing set of sponsorship platforms, so we cleared away all the old ones and we identified three tiers of sponsorship we wanted to be involved with. Sailing kept coming up time and time again, particularly as it related our business in the financial services industry - there is a very close linkage between sailing and financial services. About the same time Chay and I started talking about the Open 60s and it fitted well with our business match. If you are a sponsor, a large organisation and you are looking at sponsorship platforms you are looking for five things:

"- you are looking for a brand you can associate your brand with. So sailing is fantastic because it is quality, it is innovative, fast, etc.

"- the second thing is a platform that gives the ability to improve and increase your name awareness. That will be one of the interesting things that will happen around the America’s Cup. You'll begin to see sailing and the America’s Cup in particular, because of its location, its time zone and the concentration of markets around it, will suddenly start to be one of the top four in terms of name awareness, but there with Formula 1 and Olympics. That becomes a big big plus.

"- then there are business to business oppotunities. We have been looking at some sort of business club. We’ve been discovering they [company executives] say ‘it’s not quite in my area, it’s not where I want to be, but I’m going to be down in Valencia anyway.” So we say we can create a networking opportunity. I thought Chay’s example was just ideal - everyone has emulated it. And that is important when you are in a business looking at the opportunity

"- the fourth thing is pure naked selling opportunities. 'What does this team, this platform give me in terms of numbers of opportunities to sell? I want to buy the commercial sponsorship and that is a contract, but then you have to go beyond that and work out how you can build around the hospitality program

"- and finally it is an opportunity that goes across country borders.

"If you take those five criteria and apply them to the America’s Cup, they’re not all there yet, but by the time it hits Valencia, they are going to be there, so sailing becomes a powerful marketing tool for large organisations and that is how this team has to set itself up. We have to make sure more than any other team that we are able to provide those benefits on the one hand – delivering value off the water – while not comprising the work which needs to go on with the design and build and sailing, so that we can be competitive and successfully challenge."

Aside from what happens on the water one of the interesting aspects of America's Cup campaigns is how their management side is set up. With a campaign war chest of anywhere between 50 and 150+ million Euros and 100 employees, an America's Cup campaign represents a medium-sized company. Usually there is a billionaire 'owner' figure involved and their relationship with the heads of the sailing, design and general management teams is often the key to the success of a campaign.

At this early stage Moultrie won't be specific about any other changes that are likely to be occuring with the management structure at GBR Challenge. "I personally favour a style which is much more flexible at this stage. We know how we are going to have to organise the support for commercial sponsors. I want to be in the position that when we come to contract stage we have some flexibility in the organisation and we don’t put too much emphasis on the business side versus the sailing side or the design and build side. It suits me and my style to be very leadership-orientated and very flexible. I would rather have people working in very flexible teams until we know exactly the detail of what we have to deal with. We know the big picture, but we need to be clear on the detail."

At present Moultrie's role is running the day to day business side at GBR Challenge but in the short term he says he has two main tasks - "spearheading the whole process that Judith [le Fleming] and Leslie [Ryan] and the team are already involved in and about accelerating that work - bringing some of these deals to closure quicker than they would have been done.

"The second thing is that I have clearly got quite a lot of work to do in terms of understanding the team, particularly looking at the reviews and appraisals of the past campaign." At the end of the last campaign everyone at GBR Challenge had to fill out an extensive questionaire summing up what they thought had gone well - and what hadn't. "They have done a lot of work in that space - I have been impressed by that," continues Moultrie. "They are very open to discussing it and trying to find a way of fixing some of those issues going forward. There is a lot of work to be done in understanding all of that which will take me another month or so."

One of the joys for GBR Challenge 2 is the time. It is easy to forget that for GBR Challenge v1 there were just 20 action-packed months between Peter Harrison's first announcement that he was challenging and the first day of the Louis Vuitton Cup. This time around the design team have not stopped work since GBR Challenge were knocked out of the Louis Vuitton series. This has given them much more time to look at the minutae of the ACC design as well as to develop specific items - be it the rig, sails, appendages, hardware, electronics. Even the tank test program has been upgraded. The design team will be back 'in the tank' during May and June this year and this time they will be working with 1:9 scale models rather than 1:25...

In the meantime the all important drive for the sponsorship team is to find the money. The deadlines they are working to have artificially been set by America's Cup Management in the cut-off dates by which challengers must enter - 17 December 2004. Even if that deadline is not reached there is the possibility of entering up until the end of April 2005, although then challenges will have to pay a late entry fee of 200,000 Euros.

We hope the canny Scot can pull it off...