Time is of the essence

The 2024 Vendée Globe Race will start in 30 weeks time. That is 210 days or if you want to feel a little more urgent, just 5,036 hours at the time of writing.

Gulp….

We have reached the point in our three-and-a-half-year campaign where we can make no more huge leaps forward, our options have been set out and decided, we must now double down and work on perfecting what we have, to ensure we, as a team, have every chance of realising the potential we have worked so hard to create over our first full time campaign.

It’s a change in pace, and in attitude. As the team’s skipper I am tangled deep in the detail; I have been reflecting on my 2020 race, I can see every day the things that might challenge my performance or hold me back. I am fighting time and circumstance desperate to accumulate time on the water, to learn, to test, to prove and to record. I am looking forward to the race, it has been my sole focus for the past 3.5 years, and yet I wish we had more time to prepare, I still feel the boat is new to me with its big foils and I have some envy of those other skippers who have been in Vendée configuration for two or three years now. If I zoom out to my position as team leader and CEO of Pip Hare Ocean Racing, I can acknowledge and take pride in how much we have achieved. A fledgling team with a tired small foil boat in 2021, we have grown, developed and driven forwards on every level of performance; building a team, bringing our boat up to 2024 performance standards and biting at the heels of the top ten in the fastest ocean racing monohulls in the world.

As a sailor, I recognise my role is to consolidate what we have, to perfect and engrain the settings, configurations and strategies that will allow me to maintain a high average performance over the 12 weeks it will take me to race around the world in November. As the CEO of the team, I know we have a hard deadline coming at us, we can no longer push work down the line we need to focus hard resources on making our boat strong and fast and short cuts will risk performance, either by compromising my training time on the water, or compromising on the preparation of the boat. These compromises will be hard and come at a price.

I have always found it uncomfortable to talk about our funding. It’s not a very British thing to do, and yet when I step back it is a pretty straight forward scenario. We run an elite international sports team, we have a staff of between seven and fourteen depending on what work we are carrying out. We run, maintain, develop one of the most complicated and high-performance ocean race yachts in the world – these boats are an incredible feat of engineering and technology, designed to interact with both the water and the air, to maintain performance in extreme conditions, even while the skipper onboard is asleep. We travel around the globe to International racing events, we fly the flag as a British team, I fly the flag as a female athlete and a female CEO. This elite sport is only possible through the sponsorship funding model and through the generosity of individual donors and supporters. In return we deliver high performance sport, we share the stories good and bad of race preparation, training and competition while afloat. We work with commercial partners to deliver demonstrable returns in the form of Global brand visibility, Business Growth, Shared Values and company cohesion.

When I started out on my journey as a solo sailor, I really was alone and I was prepared to, and indeed had to, take on every role in the team myself to make things happen. I know that has held me back as an athlete. I have not had the luxury of investing all my time in to my own sporting development. But having been in the position of having to understand and manage the delivery of returns on sponsorship contracts myself, with no experience in the game I have had to listen to what partners want, to understand what represents real value, and then work with them to ensure we are both happy at the end. I am not working alone anymore, but this ethos has been embedded in our team. It doesn’t matter how big or small our partners are, we listen to what they want, not just from a relationship with us, but from the next few years of their own growth, and I am proud to say we have been able to deliver some excellent working partnerships from this approach.

There will be 40 skippers who eventually line up for the 2024 Vendée Globe Race. Each team has a different approach and a different level of funding. Some skippers are hired guns, they are salaried to sail and train, the funding is all in place, there is a management team who run the campaign and the day-to-day business is not something they will need to worry about. Some are like my campaign in 2020, working hard to make it to the start line, pulling together whatever cash they can find and accepting the compromise because it gets them a race around the world – finishing is their goal. We at Pip Hare Ocean Racing aspire to a top ten position in the next race, we are in the ring with the big teams, we have a boat that is showing its mettle and despite taking 6 months off for a huge refit in 2023 still managed to finish just outside the top ten in the last two races of the year. But we have always had to work hard at finding funding, as well as driving performance and cashflow has always been our enemy.

Now with 30 weeks to go we are at a crunch point. It’s not without some irony that I look back and realise I was at a similar point in almost the same month just before the 2020 Vendée Globe race.

When we started this program, our funding was built on the fairly standard model of a family of sponsors. Medallia are our title sponsor and provided the back bone of the funding to get us underway. We as a team needed to raise the rest of that funding which would drive performance. We did this through podium, Gold, Silver, Bronze main sponsors as well as smaller partnerships. When we made the decision to make the leap to big foils, our funding model was almost complete with a Silver and a Bronze level sponsor who were committed to coming through to the next race. But as we all know, the world changes every day, as does its economy and so in the middle of last year, we lost one of those sponsors and at the end of last year we lost the other. It is sad that they have helped us through the interim years and will not get to finish the race with us, and I will always be grateful for their partnerships and what we have accomplished together. By the time these sponsors made the decision not to sign for our final year, we had already delivered our foil program. We are not a company that makes profit, there are no reserves and we could not go back. Over the past six months we have been close to signing deals with a couple of potential sponsors but not managed to get them over the line, and now time is closing in on us and I have made the tough decision to openly talk about our financial situation.

I don’t regret in anyway how we have pushed forwards on performance. The work my team have done to develop our IMOCA is incredible. The boat is strong, it’s fast and it is well capable of a top ten performance in the Vendée Globe Race, but we have to finish off our preparations well, we need to ensure the boat is strong and reliable, we need to test every aspect with hours on the water, we need to replace the sails that have already done the equivalent of one race around the world, we need to bolster our team with extra manpower and experience to get this work done in a timely manner and allow me to focus on being a sailor rather than fundraising and then arrive at the race well rested, with every chance of success. But we cannot do this without bringing extra funding in to the campaign, so we are launching a huge drive to recruit sponsors.

We have so much to offer at this stage in the game, the Vendée Globe race is about to be run, we have 40% of all the branding space on the boat available, opportunities for hospitality, a wealth of content and creativity that would dovetail in to existing marketing plans and we work hard for our partners. I could not perform without the financial investment from commercial companies, and I expect to deliver them genuine commercial value in return. We have so much potential on so many levels and I am so worried we won’t get to deliver against it. This is not a benevolent action to help one woman achieve her dreams, working with Pip Hare Ocean Racing is working with a professional race team, with credibility on the international stage, a proven track record and a desire to perform both on the water and in business.

You, our community have already done so much to help us get where we are today. Support in every way moves us along and I would like to thank every person that likes, shares, follows, donates, buys merchandise or attends one of my talks. I have more to ask of you all and that is to share the message that Pip Hare Ocean Racing has a great sponsorship opportunity there for the taking and we will deliver an incredible campaign.

If you know anyone who is a decision maker within a business that might benefit from an exciting partnership with a high performing, female led, sports team then please show them our latest partnership video – found here, share our social media or get them to contact us for a meeting.

Thank you all for your continued support. The Vendée Globe Race is going to be incredible whatever the rest of our journey looks like and we have so much more to share before these 30 weeks are done.

Pip x

Nine Short Months