On The Pegs June 2020 - Volume 5 - Issue 6 | Page 149

On The Pegs VOL. 4 ISSUE 7 - July 2020 149
was the starting point.
“So Dougie was our first client in 1998 and he remains a client today. He’s been
really important for us over the years. Financially for sure, but also in terms of
credibility and opening doors. He’s what I call our bill-board.”
Since then G2F has gone on to steer the careers of some of the biggest names
in two-wheel sport including multi-time World and AMA enduro champion Paul
Edmondson, GP motocross racers and multiple British champions Gordon Crockard,
Shaun Simpson and Elliott Banks-Browne and road racers Tom Sykes and Neil
Hodgson. Jake is at pains to point out, however, that there was never any conflict
of interest and he only ever managed a single rider in each discipline at any one
time.
As G2F has diversified and grown, athlete management has become less essential
to the business.
“Managing athletes is a very specialist thing and it is about trust and loyalty and
values. Ultimately, we have other facets to the business now – it is not all about
rider management. We have diversified because rider management was, ultimately,
too dependent on me and also it has become more difficult trying to get
value out of sponsors for riders.
“We know there are two levels of sponsorship. There are purely commercial
arrangements where a brand is looking for exposure and return for their money
and there are those relationships where people just want to be personally involved.
The purely commercial relationships in terms of return on investment
have become harder and harder. We had to step back from that – instead of
spending X-amount of hours recruiting sponsorship we could be doing something
else and bringing in double the income in the same time.
“We used to write press releases every day. We now put content out on social
media on a daily basis. The business has had to diversify.”
Developing and using cutting-edge technology has always been a big part of
G2F’s operations and that was never more apparent than during sister company
Sport7’s two seasons at the helm of the FIM Trial World Championship.
“As much as I love motorbikes riding over rocks and up muddy hills, the TrialGP
project was also about the social media output, TV production, live results and
creating content. That was probably the biggest motivation for me – to bring that
to a sport that was one hundred years old and had never had live results. It was a
massive challenge and one of the things I’m immensely proud of today.
“We are currently working on a rail project that’s using the technology we developed
for TrialGP to be able to communicate from remote locations where