Zak Brown - Chapter Three
The ex-racing driver, founder of Just Marketing International (JMI), and currently the CEO of McLaren Racing (the successful Formula One racing team), shares his wisdom and most valuable advice.
Born in Los Angeles but now residing in the UK, Zak Brown’s career started at an early age as a professional racing driver, competing successfully in both the US and Europe.
After seeing an opportunity to create a business around helping other drivers and race teams to raise sponsorship, he founded Just Marketing International (or JMI), which was listed four times in the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies of the Year.
JMI would ultimately become the largest motor racing marketing agency worldwide, successfully attracting many of the world’s biggest brands into the world of motorsport.
In 2016, Zak took over as executive director for the McLaren Technology Group, becoming CEO of McLaren Racing in 2018, famous for its highly successful Formula One Racing Team.
”If you are fundamentally a good person with good intentions and high integrity, people will trust you and they’ll want to help you.”
“Being an entrepreneur is a huge challenge for anyone. If you want to start a business, you really need to know what you are in for. You have to be pretty honest with yourself, and make sure that you possess the core skills and attitude required to succeed – or else you won’t last very long.”
“You have to be motivated and you have to be prepared to work hard, really hard, in order to win and to succeed over the long term. If you work hard and you’re pushing all the time, you actually create the opportunities that help you to move forward”
”The most important thing that parents can provide their children is simply support and understanding. Parents need to appreciate how hard it can be to grow up and find your way as a young person today.”
On success . . .
People are naturally motivated by various things and will work for different reasons. How they measure success, though, will also vary – from fiscal, to emotional, to lifestyle or other yardsticks. Sometimes they will work for all of these things, sometimes one or two . . .
For me, success has always been about winning and then winning more. It’s about growing, because real success has to be viewed over the long term, not just seeing fleeting moments of success. It has to be based on continuous improvement, each and every day.
The journey . . .
Everyone starts their journey by figuring out what they may be good at, what they like doing and, ideally, discovering something that they can feel passionate about. But not everyone will find or have a real passion for their work. For many people, they’ll see their work as just ‘a job’. That will be good enough for them and they end up living perfectly happy, normal lives, while still doing something that’s actually not their dream job. For those that want to achieve more and who are especially driven, then it really helps for them to find something that they can become genuinely passionate about – because when they do, opportunities to find real success will naturally open up for them.
My own journey revolved almost entirely around motor racing – it seemed like I was born into it. I enjoyed competing as a driver from a young age, and this naturally led me to turn what was fun for me into a career. My passion was simply following my love. I never really viewed motor racing as a job; I was just pursuing something that I really loved doing and then figured out a way to turn it into a business.
Motor racing is expensive, so drivers and race teams need to find sponsors to support them. This is always a big challenge, but it is also something I became good at. It was when I saw the potential to help others find their own sponsors, rather than just do it for myself, that I visualised a great business opportunity. In 1995 I founded Just Marketing International, which I led and grew successfully for several years. JMI was to become a successful business, winning many awards and ultimately becoming the world’s largest marketing agency in motor sport.
When I think back over my journey, I have been consistently critical of myself, a bit of a pessimist and have always had a slight fear of failure. I certainly believe that when someone wants to start their own business, if they have a naively optimistic outlook, just kidding themselves all the time that everything is going to ‘turn out fine’, they’re more likely to go out of business in three months. I have always believed in anticipating and trying to solve those things that could go wrong, along the way, as opposed to just chasing what might feel like ‘victory’.
When JMI was eventually bought out, eighteen years after I had started it, part of the due diligence from the acquiring business was to subject me to psychological analysis – they wanted to understand the mindset of the CEO that they were buying! As it was explained to me then, there are two types of business leaders: those that want to win, and this is what motivates that type of individual, and those that don’t want to lose, and that’s what motivates them (they’ll probably both arrive at the same end point, but just get there in different ways).
So, I’m firmly in the ‘I don’t want to lose’ camp – very self-critical – and I believe that if you’re not going forwards then you’re going backwards. So I push very hard every single day, and have been doing so for twenty-five years.
My experience as a racing driver was to prove very helpful to me when I was building my business. When you are competing in a race car, you have to make critical decisions every second. You have to concentrate hard, while constantly evaluating the condition of your car and the track. You can’t sort of ‘waffle’ when making these decisions – when you see an opportunity to pass someone, you either go for it now or you don’t. You need to know exactly when to step it up, when to pull back, when to make a left and when to make a right. There’s a huge level of intensity involved when racing because if you get it wrong, the consequences can be fatal.
Teamwork is also critical – you’ve got to have great engineers and great mechanics. You really learn from motor sport just how important it is to build a good team and how much you end up relying on having good people around you. While running a business may not be quite as intense as racing a car, I have approached both challenges in a similar way, which has certainly proved very positive for me.
Preparing for success . . .
When you start up a business, the first few years are crucial and inevitably very difficult. In the early days you have no choice – you have got to wake up early and you’ve got to get out of the gate first, strong and fast. You have got to be prepared to work hard, very hard.
You will also have to face many issues early on. It’s never fun dealing with these, but you have to learn to tackle any problem head on, quickly and aggressively before it escalates, and you must be very critical of yourself if you fail to do that.