Allow Racecheck to use cookies on this browser?

Alexander Tanti: Let’s jump right into it. I’d love to hear more about your background. What did you do before, and how did you end up in the position that you are?

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, so before joining Threshold, which was 12 years ago, I had no background in events at all. No experience or anything like that. My first proper job was working in marketing at Diageo, a big drinks company, where I was an assistant brand manager and brand manager for Pimm’s and Gordon’s Gin. I had a few years there, which was great to get a grounding in solid marketing principles. I then took some time out to travel, so I went around the world without flying for about 20 months with a mix of cycling, hiking, sailing boats, trains, and hitch-hiking, and then worked for a year at a small agency doing strategy consultancy. But then an old Diageo colleague, Penny, tapped me on the shoulder and said there’s a marketing job going at Threshold. I ended up having a pint with the founders around the corner from their office in Covent Garden and haven’t really looked back. I didn’t plan to work at Threshold, hadn’t been looking for a role in events or anything like that, and certainly hadn’t expected to be in a position of leading a business. But it was one of those things where I got a foot in the door, I love the outdoors and adventures, and I took it from there.

Alexander Tanti: And what made you quit your previous career and go travelling?

Nick Tuppen: It was influenced by many people, older and wiser than me, saying they wished they had done a big trip before the restrictions of kids, mortgages etc. And once you’ve heard enough people say that you think, “Well, maybe this is as good a time as any.”

Alexander Tanti: From the nature of your travels, you sound pretty active and adventurous, so the world of experiences did attract you in some ways. But what I’m more interested in when speaking to organisers, especially highly successful ones, is that everyone tends to have a very strong why or reason driving them forward. Obviously, there’s a monetary aspect to it, but it’s seldom the main reason, especially so when the organisation is successful. Some other key ingredients and drivers really manifest in these incredible experiences for people, so I’m interested in knowing what that is for you.

Nick Tuppen: When I joined Threshold I liked events, and I liked adventure. It was something I was passionate about. That was a good baseline. The thing that’s kept me in the industry and kept me excited and motivated every year for the last 12 years is being around the people and the culture. The culture of the industry to an extent, but also the culture which I walked into when I went to my first Threshold event.

Personally, I believe working for people you respect is fundamental. I want to work hard. I’m not looking necessarily for the easy path. But I want to be working for people I can learn from, people I respect, and who, in turn, are kind and keen to support your development.

My first experience of a Threshold event was the Ride Across Britain. It is a beast of an event; ten days on the road, 800 cyclists, a couple of hundred crew, and I joined for the last couple of days when they were riding toward the end. I had just joined and saw a team of people operating to a really high standard. There was amazing attention to detail and customer service, looking after those people on this amazing, physically exhausting journey. But, there was also a really healthy respect between the participants and the crew. You could tell that everyone was working hard for everyone else. That’s the culture that I like being a part of. A high-performance, high-support culture.

Alexander Tanti: And it feels like that culture remains in place today. Congratulations on the Racecheck award that your team won for Endure24 — Reading. What was very interesting and quite impressive, reading through those reviews, is the personal impact the marshals and event directors had on participants. They had created this very intimate relationship with the people running the event, which is very rare. And there were endless mentions about marshal supervision and just the care and atmosphere that has been created in the event, so it certainly feels like this is your brand’s superpower as it seems. I guess that culture that you landed in, you’ve managed to bring forward and distribute to the rest of the organisation.

Nick Tuppen: Yeah. It’s fundamental to what we do. We talk about being a service business. The brands of the events are important, but ultimately, we are in the service of participants. We’re in the service of clients, sponsors, and partners. And the root of all that, the mantra and purpose of the business, is using these events to unlock potential in people. It’s built around a belief that more is in you. If you are inspired to take something on you will often be able to achieve something beyond what seems possible when you first consider it. But this is all reliant on providing amazing support for those people who sign up to do an event with you.

We love longer events. So we don’t really do 5Ks, 10Ks, but rather 100ks where you’re with people for 24, 36, 48 hours. Ride Across Britain, you’re with people for nine days, and you build relationships with your participants on those events. All those touchpoints from a well-drilled team who buy into the culture of support means that everyone at those events, or a large number of those people, will have had interactions which help them through difficult spots. And these participants always talk about the role of the crew in helping them complete the challenge they’ve potentially trained for years to do. It’s a people’s business at the end of the day.

Alexander Tanti: I love the tagline “More Is In You.” Have you also participated in events where you experienced that feeling after finishing a very difficult challenge, where you thought, “ Wow, this has just taken me to a whole new level?”

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, I used to do a lot of rowing back in the day going up to Junior World Championships and a high standard at University. That involved training six days a week, twice a day for seven months. That’s probably as hard as I’ve been pushed, as hard as I’ve pushed myself, and that was all building up to one race a year where it’s a binary win or loss at the end of it. There’s an enormous amount of pressure in terms of preparation, selection, ongoing training, cumulative fatigue. Since then, there have been moments where I’ve done challenges and events where you find yourself in a similar position. However, I don’t seek it out as much anymore. There’s less of an urge to really go deep into that kind of dark place. It’s not really what I’m looking for in my life at the moment.

I’d say I spend a lot of time dancing around that edge of physical endurance and exploring all of those emotional states. There are still bits of me that are tempted every now and then. One of our clients is Vodafone, and they just had some teams row around the Atlantic, which has a certain appeal to it. But as I’ve got two young kids, aged eight and ten, there’s a big sacrifice. What I choose to do now affects many more people around me than it did back in the day. So, while I’m sure there are some opportunities on the horizon which could take me back to that place, I’m not courting them at the moment.

Alexander Tanti: Understood. I’ve got a two-year-old and another one on the way, so I know what you mean. But running a business can also stretch your mental, emotional and sometimes even physical capabilities in many ways.

Nick Tuppen: I never expected to be in a position of having responsibility for a business like Threshold. I joined as a junior marketing manager and kept putting my hand up to pick stuff up. If I look at what events represent to some people, it’s filling a gap to where they are pushed to their limit. There will be some people whose job is very much within their capability, and they don’t get that sense of stretch. But personally, the combination of having kids, navigating Threshold through COVID, and even post-COVID with the events industry still experiencing aftershocks is another way of being stretched and challenged in a way that I’ve never had in the past. It’s a hard game out there, and some events made it through each year, but after a while they just say, “Look, I’ve taken enough of a beating. I love it, but it’s not worth the emotional rollercoaster.” That “More is in You” piece doesn’t have to reference feats of physical endurance, necessarily. There are loads of different ways of being challenged to that degree, whether that’s getting up at three in the morning to look after a kid who’s feeling ill or dealing with a work emergency.

Alexander Tanti: Indeed, it can apply to any sort of life situation, just going beyond what you think is possible. The first triathlon I finished was a life-transforming experience for me. I was always active but not to the extent that I thought I could finish a triathlon. But, speaking about experiences and extraordinary challenges, etc., Threshold does feel more like an “experience” provider rather than a more traditional race organiser. You don’t see much language or branding throughout the website about performance, PBs, or fast courses. It’s more about spectacular landscapes, challenges, and more importantly, impact on health and well-being. Do you see a general shift towards these kinds of adventure and experience-themed events versus the more traditional performance-driven events in the past?

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, that’s certainly the case in certain areas. If you take the example of cycling in the UK, in 2012 with Wiggins and the Olympics, we saw a big boom in road cycling. But that was very much road biking. That then went through a cycle where the dynamics changed, and road cycling almost became a victim of its own success. You end up with these ultra-fit and fast stereotypes surrounding these sports, which can be off-putting for normal people to get into. You tend to see that if you have a really passionate group of people at the heart of it, then anyone who’s coming to the sport just looks at that group, and if you don’t fit in with that, it can feel elitist. You then saw people going into mountain biking, which has always been around, but this kind of hybrid gravel biking and bike adventuring felt very different. It took away some of that competitive piece, and people participate on their own terms again. You got away from busy roads, you got to explore new landscapes. It’s been matched in road running with trail running. People pull different threads as to why. There is a piece where finish times become less important. When you’ve been trail running, or have finished a trail half marathon, no one asks you what your time was because it’s irrelevant. So you’ve seen the removal of that competitive and clearly ranked baseline competition for lots of people. It becomes more of a competition against yourself, on your own terms, where you can go to beautiful places which are less crowded. You see it in swimming, from pools out to open water swimming, cold water swimming. So there’s a general trend towards nature. Which may be reflected in climate awareness and the protection of beautiful places. It could be due to Instagram and photography of people in beautiful places that look more enticing, possibly, than someone on the road. So, there are a lot of themes that can be linked to that.

The competitive piece is still there. The top end of trail running is getting far more competitive. You’ve got more coverage of elite-level races for example. The fascination with competition and pushing your limits is still there. But I think the movement to natural environments probably holds a broader appeal. At the same time, you’re seeing a resurgence, despite the growth of trail running, of the big city centre marathons and half marathons post-COVID. I think people still love that big-day atmosphere. Closed roads in the middle of a city with many people cheering is unique. And also, it’s convenient. It is in a city.

So we’ve got this odd thing where I think more people are trail running, doing it in smaller groups and communities, but the overall growth of running from an events perspective is broad across all types.

Alexander Tanti: Many organisers do a really good job of creating a brand out of individual events, but not many of them do a very good job of creating a brand out of the organisation as a whole. I think Threshold has managed to do that very, very well. Was that a conscious effort, or was it just a byproduct of these great events gradually being associated with the name Threshold?

Nick Tuppen: I’d love to say it was brilliantly planned from the start, but that would be misleading. We’ve always felt that individual event brands are critical. There’s a temptation, as you grow, to feel like everybody wants to do a Threshold event because you have those loyalists who keep coming back. The reality is that the vast majority of people are not loyal to the company itself. They will choose one event over here, then another event in a different country, do this, do that. There are so many great events and so many great event organisers out there that people will pick and choose and move between them.

I think we’ve seen situations where companies believe their parent brand is strong enough to get everybody to come to them because they believe in the central event organizer brand. So we’ve grown the Threshold brand, I think, as a secondary priority behind trying to build event brands and getting them well-known. The reason it has gradually built awareness is probably because of the variety in the portfolio.

But the other part is the second half of our business, along with our public events, which are the events we deliver for other people. We deliver the Macmillan Mighty Hikes, we’re going to be delivering the British Heart Foundation London to Brighton ride along a lot of others so there’s a whole range of stuff we do for other corporates and charities. And I think from a B2B perspective and a partnership perspective, there’s an awareness which is driven for the Threshold parent brand across that side of the market, which if you’re outside of the industry you’re probably less aware of. The amount of time we’ve spent delivering events to the highest standard, plus that B2B part of the event business has been established over time.

Alexander Tanti: So for an organiser who has a portfolio of different events, you would say, especially if their angle is more B2C oriented, you would advise them to keep that focus on each individual event, and that brand identity will gradually come rather than the other way around?

Nick Tuppen: I think so. And there are some movements in the market at the moment where people like small independent brands. So, if you look at running brands, you’ve got your big established players, but we’ve partnered with brands who are based out of specific regions and are amazing for specific products. Their advocates wear that brand with far more pride than they wear the big-name brands because that feels like a brand they’ve discovered.

So similarly with events, if people can feel like they’ve discovered something, or they were there at the beginning, or they can build a personal relationship with an event, they feel loyal and supportive of that.

With consolidation happening with larger event series and companies at the moment, it will be interesting to see if leveraging central parent brands works for or against them from a brand affinity perspective.

For example, if I’m going to do a ride in Italy, which is based around a local town, I want that to feel connected with that community, the identity of that event to be really specific to the area, the local community, the local organizers, because that will be a differentiated, memorable experience. So, for all of those reasons, I look at the Threshold brand as being like a stamp of quality. But if we’re doing an event based in Cornwall, I want it to be as Cornish as you can make it and use local suppliers and all that local insight and flavour, because otherwise, it just feels like you’re bulldozing in with a one-size-fits-all approach.

Alexander Tanti: Too much dependence on the brand can also be a huge risk factor. I remember from personal experience that I once did a triathlon with a very big brand name, and it was a great experience. But then I chose to do another one of their branded events in Rome, which was an absolute disaster that completely put me off the brand. I could no longer trust that the same quality could be maintained across all events.

Nick Tuppen: I think it varies depending on the IP and the structure of the event. So, in the case of Tough Mudder where you are creating something unique, it makes sense to have a parent brand because the location doesn’t matter. They effectively drop in their event concept into a space, and they can do that anywhere in the world. But running and cycling and all those where you’re outdoors, then the route itself or the landscapes play a role. I think those brands are much harder to centralise in that way.

Alexander Tanti: Your organisation has a B2B angle and a B2C angle, and you seem to do both very well. A lot of organisers try to do a little bit of everything, and they end up being quite average in both. How do you manage to do that so well?

Nick Tuppen: Probably learning from mistakes. It’s not like we haven’t made plenty of mistakes. So, you know, don’t always trust what you see on LinkedIn. It’s not always reflective of what’s going on in the background. A lot of it comes back to culture and good people. The principles that we apply to our client event portfolio, working with our clients, and delivering for clients aren’t different from how we approach our own events. So, we are not operating two different organisations regarding culture, approach or delivery styles. We try and make everything as consistent as possible, from reporting through systems etc. So that allows us to move between one and the other (B2B <> B2C) more easily, which, from a business perspective, gives us a bit of protection. But the principles behind how we run events and what we think matters for events are the same across both. And I think that keeps things simple. We can bring someone into the business, and they hopefully pick that up quickly, allowing them to build momentum faster. But yeah, understanding your product and what you’re doing is important. I think it is good to have people who love the events, but it’s definitely not mandatory. You can have lots of people who can be brilliant at a range of things. They can be a brilliant account director who is fantastic at looking after clients, someone who’s a sponsorship expert, or someone brilliant at X, Y, and Z. You don’t have to have run a marathon to be able to understand what’s going to work well for a sponsor and a partner. We speak to quite a few events companies and they go, “Right, we need to hire runners if we want to be able to put on great running events,” which is true for that core product. But actually, to grow and be commercially sustainable, you need to develop your understanding of sponsorships, you then need to develop your understanding of marketing, and you need to understand good financial processes and systems.

There are many people who’ve entered this industry thinking they’re going to make money and got their fingers burnt. If you really think about it, it’s relatively easy to put on a great event for a participant. You get a great venue, good delivery, good suppliers and the basic operational delivery piece right and you can end up with a really good event. The hard bit is making that commercially sustainable. You know, it was hard pre-COVID. But it’s really tough post-COVID. When we talk to the team, we try and empower everyone to understand their individual impact on the commercial performance of an event. There may be a great purpose behind wanting to do more events. But if it’s not commercially sustainable, we’re we’re playing at running a business basically. So, that piece of what goes into making commercially sustainable events has always been right at the heart of how we approach the business. I think that allows us to then maintain that continuity and build year after year.

Alexander Tanti: I think that’s a huge learning, to be honest. It does not necessarily mean you need to look within a specific community related to your product to get the necessary talent. It may be out of necessity, that smaller organizers with fewer resources and capacity to recruit from a wider audience tend to rely on their community for support, which might maintain a sort of small-scale mindset. But from your perspective, it looks like an organization at your level differentiates by not being shy to bring in people from completely different backgrounds, as long as those core skills are exceptional.

Nick Tuppen: When we started, Threshold wasn’t a big company, and we did a lot ourselves, including in-housing a lot. We spent a lot of time learning how to do things ourselves. So, you don’t have to go out and find a six-figure CMO from some tech startup or something like that. Instead, learn as much as you can, go and talk to people, read blogs, read websites, follow marketing experts, and find people with a passionate interest in that topic. We’ve hired a lot of junior people who then come through and grow within the business. So, yes, certainly in the early days, we didn’t hire event experts or sponsors; we didn’t have a big team with all this expertise. We spent a lot of time going back to school, essentially teaching ourselves, and then pushing each other to figure out if it was working or not. And ditching things if they weren’t working.

Alexander Tanti: One thing that you guys stand out with is publicly celebrating your interns and junior roles, and I guess that speaks volumes to the importance you give to bringing in people who are willing to learn. You do need people who are very eager and driven to learn to be able to accomplish any sort of expertise, especially if you’re not necessarily looking to hire really expensive people. So that brings me to the next question, which is, what’s the common denominator across your team members? Would you say that eagerness to learn and humility?

Nick Tuppen: Yeah, we try to keep the egos out of it as much as possible. That is important. With our work placements students, they come in for their third year of university. It’s a sandwich year, combining work with studies, but quite a few people return after graduating. So, Brooke, who’s running our large community programs in our marketing team, came through the work placement program. It’s a real test of your culture, how someone can come in, and how far they can develop within a year. You get to see people who come in for work placement and the confidence they’ve built by the time they’re on their way out and the amount they’ve done is huge. You realise how green some of the team are when they come in and that also keeps the older members of the team, who’ve been around for a while, keeps them fresh. You’ve got some really engaged people who end up pushing the older team members to up their game and come up with new concepts and be innovative. So it works at both ends. Everyone’s performance is lifted when you get good young people coming in. They’ve got that curiosity and hunger and desire that is contagious.

Alexander Tanti: Are there any functions within the organization that you’re especially keen on maintaining in-house rather than outsourcing?

Nick Tuppen: It’s a very difficult question because, if I think of all the different teams there’s value within all of that, but it’s not very helpful as an answer. From a marketing perspective, staying close to your participants or consumers is really important. So if you are a small team making sure those people who are tasked with the operational delivery of the event have got their finger on the pulse of how the event is being talked about is really really important. Because if you understand participants well, you will naturally begin to meet their needs and spot opportunities. There are technical elements of marketing, such as creative asset development or running paid social media campaigns, where it’s a very technical skill and you might want to bring in freelancers for that. But to just outsource and say, “Can you recruit 1,000 people to my event?” and giving that to an external agency, I think there’s a lot of marketing agencies who will talk a big game on event recruitment, but then really struggle when it actually comes to it.

I think you must identify what your key relationships are for your organization. So if that is permissions in key venues, you wouldn’t want to outsource to a freelancer because they can come and go, and you feel like you’re losing that connection, or those key stakeholders don’t feel valued. You could probably look at it and go, “What are the elements where if we dropped the ball on this, it would be a fundamental issue for the business?” And you can then probably sketch out four or five things and go, “Well, how do we maintain a level of control over that?” So, yeah, venues, and permissions. It might be a key sponsor, it might be marketing… So take your pick of what those are, but elements that rely on ongoing relationships and deep understanding of stakeholders’ needs…I’d be nervous about outsourcing.

Alexander Tanti: Regarding sponsorship, if a smaller organizer came to you and said, we’re looking for sponsors. Is there any advice or suggestions you could make for reaching out successfully to sponsors and creating relationships?

Nick Tuppen: I mean, reach (how many people an event can reach with its communications) is a blunt tool, and it’s also something a lot of marketing brand managers and brand directors will look for straight away. It’s also one of the weaker cards that event organizers can play because if you’re looking at bought media, you can suddenly get lots of zeros on your reach. But in reality, there’s very little engagement with those numbers. So leading with the reach of an event is a hard sell. But we always look at it and go, “You have, depending on the event, a three month, six month, nine month, 12-month window to talk to participants, and for a brand to play a role within there.” So compared to something where you drop in, and you get one or two contact points, a brand can partner with your event, and then communicate with a participant all the way through. So I would be looking at what brands or categories the participants in your events use. There’s real value in there. It’s easier to sell, and you can add value for the participants.

So, we’re working with Harrier, who do a whole load of great stuff but particularly around trail running kit and equipment. Now they have a lot of really good content to prepare our participants for running a 100k or a 50k. So we have a credible way of integrating them into that journey, the same way with High5 sports nutrition. Done right, you can get the participants using the sports nutrition they’re going to have on a live event, you’ve got someone buying that all the way through for nine months building a good relationship with them. So, I would start with the depth of engagement rather than the reach. As you get a bit larger, or that reach of your events does extend, or you build out a marketing function, or a partnerships function, you can then begin to do more specific activation for a wider range of partners.

For example, we’re doing a whole campaign, Ultra 50:50, trying to level to get more women on the start lines of ultramarathons. That’s a big campaign we’re running with a purpose-led angle. However, it is something you can talk to brands about. We are using it to look for partners who want to partner with something bigger than just a race. By partnering with a campaign which resonates beyond trail running, you can talk to any brand championing diversity and inclusion. So, you start with what you do best, and then, as you grow, you can look to build out and take on potential media campaigns and challenges and causes, which can open up more doors.

Alexander Tanti: That’s very interesting, and it actually reminds me of something that Tom Kerry also said, that organizers do need to play the long game, and they need to bring in sponsors and activate them throughout the journey of their participants. It’s not just a banner on an email and feel that you’re adding value. You really need to know your participants, what their day-to-day is like and how you can bring in sponsors that can support them in that day-to-day all the way through to the event. So yeah, I think that’s super helpful.

I think I have time for one more quick question. How do you see the next 5–10 years in the industry in terms of consolidation? Do you think that there is room for smaller players to stay independent?

Nick Tuppen: It feels like the direction of travel is pretty one-sided at the moment. And again, I’m talking about the UK market more specifically here. I think there’s a few different things going on. We’ve had a good run with lots of people developing really good events in the run-up to COVID. They’ve grown them passionately, they’ve looked after them, then COVID just smashed that into pieces. So you’ve got a load of brilliant event organisers in the small to medium-sized space who are just going, “I loved it; but it’s not worth doing anymore. So I’m going to get out.” I think we will lose a chunk of good operators out of the market because it’s hard going, especially if you’re hands-on and on the ground at the events. It’s a hard, stressful, difficult job… it’s brilliant, but it’s not easy. So I think we’re going to lose a lot of people who underpinned small to medium-sized events previously. Then, I think a chunk will get swept up into large organisations, and the jury’s out on whether that’s in the interest of consumers or not. Usually, there’s a general rationale that good events, which are the ones that tend to get bought, are often run pretty efficiently and cleanly. Then they get bought, and the owners realise there’s not a lot of extra efficiency there, so they shut them down as they weren’t as profitable as they hoped.

You might get a chunk bought and then a chunk stripped out of that cohort. So that is all leading to a distilling down into fewer major events. The counter to that, though, is people still want to do events, and there’ll be a new crop of people coming through who love doing this stuff, who aren’t tired or exhausted, who haven’t built and developed complex events. The early indications point towards running communities that are popping up, effectively free-to-enter run clubs. They are linked to regions, running styles, and community interest groups, and you can go and find a run club to fit your requirements. They will put on social runs of fifty, a hundred or a couple hundred, getting up towards four or five hundred people for free. And they are part-funded by brands. So there’s a new group coming through who are social first event organisers who are learning the ropes around event delivery, because when you get up to 300, suddenly there’s another load of stuff you’ve got to work out. So I think there’s another crop of people coming through who will deliver good experiences.

There’s a limiting commercial model behind these that’s very much reliant on people’s volunteer time, but the good ones will develop into commercially viable communities. So, if I were going to say where I expected the industry to be in five years, I think you’ll have some significant consolidation, which I would be interested to see how that is managed and how participants respond to that. Do they see that as a good thing, or are they like, “Hold on, this doesn’t feel right. I don’t like big companies,” which we’ve seen elsewhere? But then for those people who don’t like big companies, there’s this emerging new style that is coming through. I think it’s going to be hard commercially for a lot of businesses in the way they did things beforehand. But I think there are opportunities for people who are either throwing a lot of money around or have deep pockets to potentially acquire stuff. And on the flip-side there are also opportunities for people who are just hungry, passionate, looking to get into this and who don’t have the baggage of doing it for 15 years. I’m excited to see where it goes.

Alexander Tanti: Absolutely, same here. Well, Nick, thank you so much for your time. This was a super insightful conversation. I really enjoyed it, and there are so many gems that I’m looking forward to sharing with our community of organisers.

Nick Tuppen: Likewise, thanks very much!

Connect with Nick via LinkedIn here

Connect with Threshold using the links below

Threshold Sports:

Instagram: @thresholdsports

LinkedIn: Threshold Sports

Threshold Trail Series:

Instagram: @thresholdtrailseries

Facebook: Threshold Trail Series

Endure24:

Instagram: @endure24uk

Facebook: Endure24

Ride Across Britain:

Instagram: @rideacrossbritain

Facebook: Ride Across Britain