‘Career Conversations’ Podcast: Andrew Messick, CEO of IRONMAN Group, with Reeve Harde ’20

Excerpts
 

Andrew Messick: (28:50) Everything comes down to the same things, which is perseverance and effort and a willingness to work—that’s what you need to get an MBA, that’s what you need to complete any type of really meaningful endurance event like an Ironman. These are all things that reinforce fundamental behaviors that are important to be successful, and it’s the kind of stuff we want to teach our children. Effort’s the thing that matters, and commitment and perseverance, and over the course of time if you do those things you succeed.  Even if you lose a hockey game, if you continue to work and persevere over time, you do prevail. So those are the meta lessons for our kids. Again, that’s a rewarding part of the job I’m in.

Andrew Messick: (31:33): What you do at the races is only a relatively small part of your job, or at least a small part of my job; the core of what I do is I run an organization that has 26 offices in 16 countries around the world. We have close to 250 events every year in more than 50 countries around the world, and there’s a lot of basic blocking and tackling around working with the people on your team. We’ve got—depending on how you measure employees—we’ve got between 600 and 1,300 full-time employees that work for us at these 26 offices, and we are always focused on growth, so we’re adding new events, we’re adding new businesses, we’re trying to expand the scale and scope of what we do, and so a lot of what I spend my time doing and to the extent there is a typical day, it’s interacting with my operating team, my financial team, my sales and marketing group, and we’re addressing opportunities and trying to solve problems and really thinking about how do we continue the momentum and the growth of the major brands that we manage, because we manage the Ironman brand, but we also own and manage the Rock and Roll Marathon series.

Andrew Messick: (38:40) I came to SOM because I wanted to be in an environment that’s challenged me. I wanted to be with smart and capable people who were different from me and, as I said earlier, who viewed the world through a different lens. I wish I’d done more of that and I think that a lot of us, you get into a rhythm and the rhythm arcs you toward the familiar, and as I think of my time at SOM and many of the decisions that I made over the course of my career, I think that I wish I’d done more that was a little off the beaten path and had spent more time with people whose worldview is different from me because, as I reflect back over a career of what is now decades, those were the interactions that were most significant and influential, that changed me the most, that opened my eyes to different things, and if I had to do it again maybe I’d do a little bit more of that.