We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jon J Franklin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jon thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
The mission of the World Pro Ski Tour has multiple facets. We strive to provide income opportunities for ski racers who have dedicated their lives to the sport yet may have been frustrated by the rigidity and structure of the existing World Cup and Olympic system. With that said, we are inclusive and open to all, welcoming Olympic, World Cup, NCAA and even journeymen ski racers. Our only qualification is if you can ski fast, there is a spot for you on the World Pro Ski Tour. Our goal is to have the racers succeed. Further, we endeavor to create great content for our corporate sponsors to enable them to partner with us and our racers to achieve their marketing and sales goals. All this through our various television offerings including live shows, network highlight shows, our syndicated docuseries along with our on-site race experience. All of which is supported by modern social media and press promotions.
Jon, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
The World Pro Ski Tour Brand is the modern iteration of head to head professional ski racing that began in the 1960’s. For us it is the purest form of ski racing. No politics, no National Team drama, no advantages to any racer based on prior results. Show up, race and if you are fast you can win significant prize money. And the prize money is equal for men and women racing on the same courses. Next, due to the head to head format, fans and followers can actually see who wins each heat. And who advances to the next round. It is opportunity for any racer to compete with the likes of two time Olympic Gold Medalist Ted Ligety and World and World Cup Champions who join the tour. Over the years most of the great racers of history have sealed their Olympic and World Cup legacy by racing and often winning on the World Pro Ski Tour. This includes Olympic Medalists Jean Claude Killy, Billy Kidd, Phil and Steve Mahre, Ted Ligety and more. In addition, the tour has created its own stars, racers who cut their teeth on the tour and ultimately showed they could race and often win against the stars mentioned above. Great racers such as Spider Sabich and Bernhard Knauss won millions of dollars of prize money racing and beating the Olympic stars of their time. We continue this legacy in the modern era pitting racers from many Nations against Olympic stars and World Cup champions such as Ted Ligety, Linus Strasser, Erin Mielzynski and others.
I followed this tour as a junior ski racer and am honored, following a successful career as a sports marketer to lead the charge to bring this format of racing to a new generation of ski racers, fans and followers. As a 13 year old, I read triple Olympic Gold Medalist Jean Claude Killy’s book “Comeback” about his year on the World Pro Ski Tour. I learned about his agent from IMG Mark McCormack and I was inspired to forge into ski racing to ultimately start my own a career as an athlete agent, representing Olympic and World Champions and finally even Killy himself for some USA contracts. Eventually after 15 years at IMG, I branched out into multiple sports including “extreme sports” producing Danny Way’s skateboard jump over the great wall of China, boxing with Mike Tyson, as President of Golden Gloves and finally as global CEO of a martial art league, Glory Kickboxing. Along the way I was fortunate enough to work with some of the most solid brands of sports marketing including Rolex, American Express, Chrysler, Monster and many more. Continuing this tradition, the World Pro Ski Tour is now partnered with great brands such as Mazda, Seiko, Celsius, Tito’s Vodka and a host of partners committed to ski racing and our mission. Personally it is satisfying to come full circle back to pro ski racing and to work hard to deliver for the racers and the ski racing community.
Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
My career has included jobs such as 15 years getting started and then running portions of the winter and Olympic sports business for behemoth sports agency “IMG” to creating my own start ups such as “SportsEntCo” which I ran for a dozen years. Over that amount of time, obviously not every day was going from strength to strength. We always had set backs, guarantees we could not cover and projects that did not succeed. Once on my own, the near misses and challenges became very real as there was no backstop of the big agency to move back to or the next project to back me up. Everything was personally at risk. I learned in these times, that you can never stop. My motto became, “if you don’t go, nothing happens” so it became crucial to make the presentations, travel to the trade shows, find the athletes, make the trips. Like the Micheal Jordan quote, you don’t score on 100% of the shots you don’t take. So we had to try a lot of things. It was just always not only to keep going, but also be open for a big pivot in plans, To learn to apply what you already know to new fields of business. For me that was to take the sales and operational experiences from one set of sports and apply the metrics to another, taking the sponsor, television and ticket sales experiences of winter sports and apply them to combat sports. Recreating what had been done in skiing and setting it all up in combat sports and in martial arts sales and promotions. Finally, and oddly enough, back to my roots, ultimately back around again to ski racing where I am now.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Delivery. Communication. Good humor. That despite the odds against success and all the roadblocks, perseverance has paid off and my projects and clients either got what they expected and bargained for or we were able to make good and keep them satisfied. Follow that up with working in fields of sports and entertainment, things were and are active and interesting enough to maintain a great network of partners, sponsors, broadcasters and media to keep everyone coming back for more. Not that everything went perfectly all the time but more like that the unpredictable disasters were met with good humor and creative solutions to deliver in a myriad of ways to keep it all going. Key to that is good communication with all the parties in the game to limit the downside surprises and focus on over delivery of assets.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.worldproskitour.com
- Instagram: worldproskitour
- Youtube: World Pro Ski Tour