By: Juan Carlos Lascurain
CEO/Founder
LASCURAIN-GROSVENOR AND GROSVENOR SQUARE CONSULTING GROUP
We often find ourselves daydreaming about projects, projects that often could be deemed impossible. Even since I was young I was intrigued by the way sports organizations (especially football and motorsports) were run and would spend hours thinking about how I would get to run a sports organization. From then on, I have been daydreaming and obsessing over my goals. I always felt the need to change the things I thought were wrong and so my journey to change the way the sports industry works, started.
When I was in Highschool I started to get involved in the motorsport business.
I saw how F4, Rally and tourism races were organized and decided to make a project to attract foreign investment into the sport while involving college students in the teams, to also attract more viewers, live spectators and involvement within the community to boost sales. My ideas were rejected by several executives that organized races and some directors of the boards of many colleges, as they told me that I was very young and that my ideas would not work. Despite rejection, I continued pushing on, as this was my dream. From 2014 to 2017, I made approximately 20 pitches to different organizations for them to invest on a racing team that were rejected.
On December 2017 I started my own racing team, we were going to race in the most famous Rally in Latin America. I was a 20-year-old “entrepreneur” trying to run a racing team on my own. Back then I realized that in order to succeed in business you need to dedicate a sufficient amount of time to your projects for them to be complete and attractive to potential clients. I also confirmed that you need to be prepared to accept that there will face rejection, but have to continue pursuing your dream.
On February 2018 two of the most important companies in the world, one, a company that sold energy drinks, and the other an oil giant, decided to trust in me, however they had one condition, they would invest in my team only if both brands were involved, if by any chance one of them pulled back from the team, the other one would automatically withdraw their investment as well. I had everything ready, but I had an issue, that year Mexico (where my team was based) was holding presidential elections, and the front runner was an extremist who promised to back down from privatizing the oil industry and that foreign investment would not be welcomed as warmly as it had been welcomed by previous governments. This posed a big threat to our organization, as the oil company that would invest in our racing team was now the target of the candidate leading the polls, and him winning represented a setback for the oil giant and their operations in Mexico would stop, along with our investment deal.
That summer, our worst nightmares came true. The extremist candidate won, the oil company got in touch with us and let us know that they would not be investing in our team, as a result, the other company withdrew their investment as well and I was left with nothing.
I was all alone and with another project that had almost came to fruition, destroyed. That summer, after closing my racing team, I decided that I would not stop and would fulfill my dream to work in sports organizations while also preparing myself by getting several diplomas in sports business and basic economics. After graduating I started to look for opportunities with soccer player agencies and Sports Brokerage firms. I developed several systems that helped teams to make the right decisions when they were building their squads, match predictors, player transfer predictors, and a Moneyball type of system to find the best players for the best price possible, meanwhile I also developed several business models for those club. Many agencies contacted me and offered me to work for them thinking I was way older than I really was.
With them I developed expansion plans to reach markets in South America, the United States and Europe. I also learned how the sports industry in North America works. As my interest started to grow more and more, I started to study different courses on management while expanding my network.
Once the top executives of those agencies saw me in person, they grew worried about my youth and told me that my systems and business models wouldn’t work, despite them using my systems to expand their businesses to South America and previously offering me to be a senior partner at their firms.
Again, a door was closed right in my face when I thought I was about to achieve a great feat. That didn’t affect me, as the next day I started to better prepare myself and pursue other diplomas to further improve my knowledge in economy and finance.
Once I got my diplomas, and tired of the way the sports industry worked, I decided to start my own sports brokerage firm. Many people doubted I had the experience or the knowledge to start a business on my own, after all I was just 23 years old, but once again I didn’t let those comments affect me.
I decided that in order to be successful as an entrepreneur I had to change my daily routine, as I believe that a daily routine that includes reading and constant exercise is essential to grow on a personal level no matter what career path you follow. Some books will help you grow as an entrepreneur as they will expand your vision on the way the business world works and show you the most important skill a successful leader has, and the exercise will make you more disciplined and healthier. Then you should change your mind set by identifying what your main goal is and what the secondary goals are. That main goal, will be for the long term, and the secondary goals must be goals aimed to be completed in a short time frame, that will help you get closer to achieving that main goal. The goals have to be backed by your talent and not just on your desire of having success. As you go on you will face rejection from potential clients, friends, family and employers but no matter what happens you have to keep going. If you do things with passion, dedication and knowledge, the opportunity will come to you, you just have to keep on going.
Once I had adopted this mindset and routine on a daily basis, I started developing a business plan for sports organizations to attract foreign investment. I decided to pitch this model to several companies, sports management firms, sports clubs, and even government officials, always looking to aim for the highest contact I could get. This led me to contact several important businessmen from all around the world, specially investors from the Middle East, Asia and the US who were very interested in this model and soon started to look for investment opportunities in the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico. After creating this network of investors, I contacted several governments in Africa and South East Asia to manage their bids to host the FIFA World Cup and several other sports events, and after that I started to help teams in Europe, Asia and North America with their sports models.
That’s when I noticed how far I had gotten since I first started at 17, and that I was now doing the thing I loved most, just as I had planned all those years ago.
As I mentioned before, my first business idea was to have a Racing team. On 2015 I started to contact potential sponsors. It was until 2016 that I got in touch with the manufacturer of the racing cars and I got involved in the industry. And now 5 years later, after several failures, I realized that throughout the journey I had met a lot of wonderful people that showed me how the sports industry worked, how teams were managed and the interaction between politics and sports, I was able to establish my own firm and to finally address the problems with the industry in the region. I could never had gotten this far if it wasn’t for not giving up. I never gave up despite the challenge.
Now, after a couple of years of building of running my own company, I have decided to start my own consulting firm, with the mission of helping entrepreneurs in their journeys and to aid them in their fight against selfdoubt, lack of support and the many challenges they will face.
As I look back at my journey to get where I am today, I think that the most important things were to prepare myself, always aim for the top, have ambitious goals, have a plan and to always stick to it, despite of the challenges and the rejections.
If you are convinced of your plan, your goals and your dreams, you need to keep going no matter what.
As Winston Churchill once said “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
