Life after sports: Three industry veterans tell their tales of the road less travelled

Tomas Planken, as told to Callum McCarthy

I already had a share in a race-bike rental business when I started my role at IMG, but it was a very small side business, just to have fun and explore entrepreneurship. When I left IMG, I bought my partner out and started growing it. We had about 20 bikes and it was just for fun, but my partner had a different focus with a busy job and a third child, so the buyout was the only way to get things the way I wanted it.
I didn’t leave IMG because of the company itself, or the culture – it was just corporate life in general that was wearing me down. Such a culture is to stay at the office until at least six, show everybody that you’re working hard. I believe that if you’re done for the day at 4pm, go home, ride your bike, walk your dog, go to the pub!

I also found out that I’d rather rent my bikes out for 60 euros a day than sell sports rights for €60m. I just want to do my thing, work hard, but also go for a ride, pick and choose my meetings and go toward what I think is fun. That, for me, was the reason to go full-time with entrepreneurship.

I remember I did a good deal for some tennis rights once, and it was just the market forces pushing the price up. It wasn’t me, just the market! I got all the credit and that was good, but then sometimes it would be the other way around. I just started to get the feeling that none of this was my personal achievement, I was just part of some market dynamics.

The rental business started at 20 bikes – I now have over 60 bikes, two trailers, a huge storage facility, and the bikes are better and more expensive, so that’s cool! 

It’s just fun. Taking people for rides, getting them moving, teaching them how the bike works, entertaining them, helping them with punctures. It’s just super easy to make people smile and I found that that’s what really makes me happy.

After I left IMG, I also started Grinta, which is my sales coaching and motivational speaking business. Grinta is an Italian cycling term: it just means that whatever happens, you keep smiling, you keep pedalling; you’ll make it, mentally and physically. I use that as a metaphor for sales and business – have a big smile on your face, keep going and do what makes you happy.

I’ve never worked so hard and had so little money, but I’ve never been happier in my life. I ride to my office with a big smile, I ride home with an even bigger smile, I do things that I like and everything is fun – apart from the administration, new business, cold calls… I still have to do that myself. But you know, it’s my own business!

A lot of people overthink their own business too much. They go into their spreadsheets for hours in the evening instead of doing it. Just try some stuff, make some mistakes and learn. And if you’ve worked for a company like IMG, you should have some savings! Invest in a small project, a property, whatever you want. Do it and see what it brings you. 

As soon as you want to do that more than going to the office, it’s time to go. And sometimes, the best thing that can happen for someone is to get fired, Make sure you get fired, that’s my advice.

I’m very thankful to IMG – it just wasn’t my cup of tea any longer. And I’m very thankful they closed the Dutch office, otherwise I would still be wearing my golden handcuffs. 

I mean, yes, it would be nice to have a company car again instead of paying my own fuel. I also don’t have a pension, but still, I’m loving it.  

The easiest path after IMG would have been to take any role for the money, spend it on… I don’t know, whatever stupid things I can think of. But no, this is the best choice I ever made, for sure. 

Helen James, as told to Matthew Glendinning

I loved my job and I loved the industry I was in. I thought I would always stay in the sports industry. Everybody within the sports business always moves within it and doesn’t get out. The only people that I know who have left the business have left to stop work, retire or do their own thing. I don’t really know anyone who’s stopped and then gone for something else.

The main thing I miss are the people, going regularly to the television sports conferences and meeting up with the same people. It was a really nice industry to be in and I had a really good relationship with a lot of the buyers and a lot of the people within the sports industry.

I initially stayed working [in sports distribution] for three days a week, consulting Proactive Television, through my own company Prima Television International. It then went down to about three half-days per week because what I’m doing here takes a lot of time. If I’ve got to rush to a vet or something and then I’m worried about having to take a call, it didn’t really make sense. I couldn’t fully commit and when the pandemic hit, they lost some contracts, so that was that.

I didn’t plan to come and work on a dog sanctuary. I moved to Bulgaria and I was still working part-time in the industry. I had three dogs who came with me and the house I bought had a couple of dogs which had just been left in the garden and were in a terrible state. 

When I came here, I wanted to have a less stressful work life […] but the sanctuary is something deeper than me. I don’t even know where it came from. I just can’t see animals suffering. I can’t walk away from something and not help. It’s not a career, it’s a vocation. 

I named the one dog Hope and the other Faith, and called the sanctuary ‘Helen’s House of Hope’.  I then decided to look for a property close by where it was more feasible to have more dogs, because the problems with dog welfare here are just awful. 

The first box of puppies that got dumped on me had nine puppies in it! At the moment, I’ve got 65 dogs at the sanctuary and 13 in my home.

People said to me in the beginning that you’re going to have to toughen up – especially when puppies get parvovirus and die. It never ever gets any easier when you lose a dog or lose a puppy.  You see a lot of things you don’t want to see, but I just keep thinking about what would happen to these dogs without me?

I’ve been doing this for nearly nine years and I’ve had nearly 470 dogs adopted to the varying places in the UK and Europe. That’s a lot of dogs that have found really good homes, and that’s extremely satisfying.

Erika Ayers Badan, as told to Matthew Glendinning

When I took the Barstool Sports CEO job, most conventional wisdom and people thought that I was committing career suicide. The reality was that it was the single greatest thing I’d ever done in my career. It wasn’t corporate, it was kinda rowdy.

There’s nothing cooler than working in sports because on a Monday, you have no idea what’s going to happen for the rest of the week. It’s really exhilarating. I think there’s a rush and a relevance that comes with working in sports. There’s a reactiveness that keeps you very sharp and makes it a really fun profession.

I was finding that there was less scaring me in sports if it makes sense. I did college football in the US and as the season came back around, I wasn’t feeling the desire to go sit at live shows on college campuses. I was feeling a desire to find different types of communities – I didn’t want to stay too long, which I do think happens a lot in sports because it’s so great to work in. 

As far as I can tell, the business side of sports is mostly run by lawyers. It’s all about who has the right to what and how long the contract lasts. For me, that was one of my big learnings about sport and ultimately why I left. If I wasn’t going to go work somewhere else, I was really just going to work with a bunch of lawyers, which I didn’t want to do for the next 10 years of my life.

I think the shelf life for how long people stay is changing. I don’t think you see it that much anymore. And I also don’t think it is a very millennial or ‘Gen whatever’ idea that your career needs to look one way – it has kind of has gone away.

I had spent a decade talking to a male, 18-to-34 year old consumer and I wanted the challenge of thinking about a new consumer. That to me was the big motivating factor. I also wanted to and was motivated to try out a different type of business model; a different kind of ethos. 

I wanted to see if I could build a business with a female founder, for a female consumer. I was interested in that challenge.

I loved the sports life. I still use sports analogies incessantly at work, and I work in a home and lifestyle company, which is highly annoying to them. 

I always wanted to work as a team and kind of play and win as a team and now I’m just doing that in another category. So I actually think my orientation, which was I guess always kind of sporty, is still the same. And now I’m just applying it to a different category, if that makes sense.

Barstool was a unique experience for me because we built something almost from scratch. At Food 52, I’m really radically changing something, which was also a reason I wanted to do it. 

It was incredible to build Barstool Sports, and then I built it and I was like: I’m not really needed here because I already built the thing! It’s a really different challenge to take down something and change it. I’m finding that to be much harder.