Jean Charles Perrin: The Architect

This soft-spoken Frenchman has two talents: he makes things happen, and he makes them grow globally. From selling Evian water bottles at the Winter Olympics 1992 and the FIFA World Cup 1998 to heading the Ultra Trail World Tour, he’s one of our most prominent business development visionaries. This is a wild man who admits he learned to tie his laces when he registered for the UTMB in 2006, at age 40.

By Gaël Couturier in Paris – Cover image © Pascal Tournaire

Fit Wild: Before you got involved in the running business, how much of a runner were you?

Jean-Charles Perrin: I was raised with the idea that sport couldn’t be a serious matter or even a business. Like all lucky western kids growing up, I played a lot of sports, from field hockey to basketball to volleyball to soccer. Being a Frenchman, I played a lot of soccer. Because I had so much energy, my parents sent me to play outside as much as they could in order to wear me out, so I would keep relatively quiet at home in the evening. Running was not at all in the picture for me at that time. It came much later, when I was in the military they trained me like a madman with 18 miles a day and all kinds of other crazy fun stuff.

Fit Wild: Then how did you get into the sports?

Jean-Charles Perrin: After college, I joined Danone as a sales manager and started to manage the Olympic games sponsorship for their Evian brand. We were in 1992. Within a year window, I must have spent more or less 6 month working in Courchevel and Meribel, two of most beautiful ski resorts of Les 3 Vallées, the world’s largest ski area located in the Alps. Once the Olympics were over, I went back to my regular sales routine. Six years later, for the soccer World Cup in 1998, which was also happening in France, Danone was looking for a marketing manager for the 10 cities hosting matches. I volunteered and got the job. And there I was again, dealing with huge sponsorship budgets on the second most important sport event in the world after the Olympics. France won the Word Cup over Brazil that year if you remember, with Zinedine Zidane as the team’s captain.

Fit Wild: Sponsorship director on a major global mass retail brand and operating on the two most important sports events in the word must have been a great way to gain experience in the sports business.

Jean-Charles Perrin: I know right?! I had to be creative and endure because even if Danone is a major industrial food company, we were much, much smaller players than others. I remember Coca Cola had 40 guys brainstorming on the same problems that me and my single colleague worked on. I loved it though. We had to be fast. We had to be creative. We had to be efficient. It was a great deal of pressure, but I learned a lot. I was in a new corporate environment, discovering a new world, and I remember thinking that I was touched by the way sport can bring people together.

My clients were not my clients anymore, boring guys I had nothing in common with. They were men, watching sports and, just like me, they were getting crazy about it, drinking beer, cheering and all. That’s when I decided that working in or around the sport industry was what I wanted to do from now on. I almost signed up with Reebok a few months later because I had made up my mind on leaving Danone. Those experiences helped me realize I actually didn’t get along with my boss. After two years on working side-by-side with him, I suddenly couldn’t stand the guy anymore. Unfortunately, that’s also when my mother died. I was hurt and suddenly felt emotionally defenseless. I decided to stay at Danone where the job was solid and the pay was good. I didn’t need another revolution in my life, so I kind of waited for the pain to ease. Then, one day, years later, a client asked me for a favor. He wanted me to meet a young fellow, a friend of his who was editing an ultra running magazine and wanted me to buy him ad space. I knew I would not buy ad space in an ultra running magazine, but I liked my client so I agreed to give the kid a meeting. At the end of the meeting, when he was leaving, he accidentally told me about an innovative event taking place in the Alps.

“What is it?” I asked him

“It’s a running event where guys tour the entire Mont-Blanc Mountain, it’s called the Ultra Trail du Mont-Blanc,” he answered.

“What?! That’s nuts. You’re kidding me ?!”

Since Evian’s advertising was showcasing the beauty of its water bottle with an image of the Alps and the Mont-Blanc mountain on their bottles, the kid suddenly got my attention. A few days later I followed him to a PR event held by The North Face in Paris, where I met Catherine and Michel Poletti, the owner of the crazy race, soon to be the most popular of all ultra trail races. They said they needed water for their aid stations. Again, they reminded me of the kind of people I used to meet during the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, so I was both seduced and intrigued. I decided to engage my brand, Evian, in a partnership and delivered three huge trucks full of Evian water in Chamonix for their upcoming event, in the summer of 2005, which was the third edition of the race.

They also insisted on coming to watch the race. So I went to Chamonix, and I remember precisely the moment where a shift happened in my mind. It was between 12 and 12:05 p.m. in the last few hundred meters of the race, when runners are back in Chamonix, ready to cross the finish line. The guy was in his 50s. He stopped, got a flag out of his backpack, put it on his poles, left his arms and like a Roman emperor, he jogged to the last stretch of the race, under the avid cheer of the crowd. I was so moved by this experience that took place on the 29th of August 2005 that on September 2 I entered a running store in Paris and bought a pair of running shoes. I had committed to trail running and could not stop but think about crossing the finish line of UTMB with my two daughters the next summer.

Fit Wild: We know the feeling. We saw the race in 2003 for the very first edition and registered for the second edition immediately.

Jean-Charles Perrin: Welcome to the club! I remember I ran a 10K in December 2005, the Paris Marathon in April 2006, and the UTMB in the following months. In the meantime I went to train in the mountains, following every piece of advice Michel Poletti and Vincent Delebarre—and army mountain trainer and UTMB winner—could give me. Also, in the meantime, back in December 2005, I really clashed with my boss at Danone. The HR people there were very understanding, and since I had been a good soldier for the past 15 years, they helped me out by financing a consultant to look into my profile and help me out rerouting my career.

Fit Wild: UTMB seriously messed you up!

Jean-Charles Perrin: You know, you have time to think about stuff when you run, whether it’s personal stuff or professional stuff, whatever it is. Running can be quite introspective. Since I was now running three times a week, it meant my mind had three times more time to think about different things. That consultant told me something I’ll never forget. She claimed that I had always gone to where I had been told to go by others people, bosses or parents mainly. My career was a successful one, but it lacked a more personal path. It kind of lacked heart. I was stunned. Wow, really? That was not easy to hear. But she was—mostly—right. I always was a good pupil listening to my parents, my bosses. Watching UTMB rocked my world. I was still not a finisher but I was hooked. My vision was clear.

Fit Wild: Looks like it all worked up pretty well in terms of timing for you.

Jean-Charles Perrin: Precisely. The Poletti were at the start of their UTMB adventure, three editions had been held and it was definitely growing, getting lots of attention from everywhere, important sponsors, big media, international athletes. They needed help on the sports marketing side. It was perfect. I started my company, Run for You, and they became my first clients. Because of my training for the upcoming gigantic race, I was now doing much longer runs. I had no GPS, no map, nothing. I lived in a close suburb of Paris, something similar to what Brooklyn is to Manhattan. Quickly, I was in the woods, on the trails. One Sunday, I ran for hours, using 75-80 percent of trails. I ended up 70K away from my home and had to call my wife to pick me up, but it struck me that I had so much greenery around me without really knowing it. Later, a friend of mine, Antoine Furno, the owner of the running store Endurance Shop was bitching about the fact there was not a single trail race around Paris. The first valid trail race was indeed 50K away from Paris. He had thought about a route too, but when we sat down to talk about it and exchange ideas, he said he was considering $110,000 for a total budget. And he sure didn’t have that kind of money. I told him he was wrong. What we needed was more $550,000. He told me I was crazy. But that’s basically how we started the Eco Trail race.

Fit Wild: We’ll get there. Hang on. Can you tell us more specifically how did selling Evian water bottles helped you in what you do today?

Jean-Charles Perrin: I remember that HR consultant I was mentioning before telling me that most people make a 180° change in their career, but that mine was more like 720° freestyle snowboarding move! To tell you the truth, I didn’t mind it. I’m a Danone product, I’ll always be a Danone product. I am adapting my expertise to another segment, that’s it, with new constraints and new opportunities. When I left Danone, my first challenge was to build my network because I had none. One of my first inputs was to make sure the event I was working on had a secure and systematic investment return, not only for myself or my clients like UTMB, but also for our partners. In the area of endurance outdoor sports, it was a new concept, totally revolutionizing a system made out of approximations and bad amateur habits. I remember when I started talking about UTMB being a “product” a lot of people looked at me weird. For the local organizers, the mountaineering community, it was their baby. It was a beautiful race. It was almost art. To me, as awesome and moving as it was, it was nonetheless a product. They had no marketing strategies, no merchandising strategies, no potential license strategy, no real partnership deal and follow-up with balance-sheets. From a marketing and commercial point of view it was a mess. Aside from ASO probably, the organizers of Le Tour de France and Dakar rally, I don’t think anybody was working like with an industrial approach.

Fit Wild: What’s your business model at Run For You?

Jean-Charles Perrin: My business model is that I’m creating enough value on the events itself to pay for my consultancy. When you have a marketing service company offering to work for you, to make a better job than the one you could do, to make you gain time and money, and to redistribute itself from the revenue it will generate, how can you not be interested? I don’t have that many clients, you know. First, it’s because I don’t have enough time to do it right, but also because I learned from Danone that it’s better to work with people you like. UTMB is still one of my clients today. I’m in charge of their development and making sure they have the means to develop their brand. Along with Catherine Poletti, I’ve worked on tools to convince new partners and assure them the best return possible on their investment. When I joined they had 52 sponsors, but only four were giving real money. That was catastrophic. I’ve been an event consumer with Danone, an event partner with the UTMB and an event director with the Eco Trail de Paris. This last race is being developed internationally now. My job is to optimize the sponsors’ money. I’m offering control over their investment in order to make it more profitable. And since it’s more profitable, they are more often than not keen on spending more money the year after. It’s a pure industrial logical process. It make serious sense and it works for everybody involve in the deal.

Fit Wild: Funny, I can’t decide whether you’re a creative or a very structure-oriented person.

Jean-Charles Perrin: I think I’m both. When Danone hired me they had me pass all kinds of personality tests. Strangely enough, they concluded that I wasn’t creative. It’s true that I’m a Cartesian person. I like frameworks. The army suited me. I focused on the physical and mental transcendence, and I was basically fine with all the rest. But I also need diversity. I need to work on different projects otherwise I’m bored. And I’m done being bored. Life is short and I’m in my 50s. Now that I’m my own boss I am not only applying the sales methods I have practiced for years, but I can also unleash my creativity that was restrained for so long. At Danone they called me “zero stress, zero limits.” I think my love for systems in place are the base for my creativity.

Fit Wild: La Verticale La Tour Effeil (verticaletoureiffel.fr), which runs from bottom to top of the famous monument, is something that had never been done before. How did you achieve that?

Jean-Charles Perrin: I hate limits. When I’m working on a project of an event, I’m always thinking about its true sense. And if the DNA of this event is to bring trail running to one of the most visited cities in the world, then I immediately think that the Eiffel Tower should hold the center stage. In my former business life I was managing budgets of $500 million per brand. After this, it’s just hard to aim small.

Fit Wild: What’s the Eco Trail de Paris concept?

Jean-Charles Perrin: We offer a trail race to the Parisians and suburban crowd that did not exist before. Nine years ago, when we created the Eco Trail race, there were about 1,300 trail races in France. None were close to Paris, which is crazy because the city is filled with both runners and huge sets of forests. My priority with this race is not to convince small and core running French running magazines to write a story about us. I’m happy when they do, but that’s not the point. The Eiffel Tower allows me to bring in bigger media. I’m talking television networks. I’m talking to Runner’s World, which has 20 editions all around the planet. Look, this event has no competitor in the world. And on top of that, we’re doing it before the trail running season in the mountains. Summer time attracts lot of participants here in Europe.

Fit Wild:Why the name “Eco trail?”

Jean-Charles Perrin: Because we spend between 15-20 percent of our total budget to protect our environment, which is our playground. We not only pick up all the trash, we also pay train tickets to the participants from downtown Paris to go to the starting point 80 kilometers from there, or we give them a portable pouch for their trash. I’m talking about important costs here, budgeting $21,000 for the train tickets, and $13,000 for the portable pouches. It matters. But what matters most is that we’re bringing road runners, city runners, to trail running, and we’re educating them in the process. Look at road running—runners trash the place every single time. It’s bad. I don’t know how much the NYC Marathon spends to clean the streets and avenues post race, but it must be a huge cost to them. We’re offering different distances at Eco Trail, and in the 30K distance, where 40 percent of the participants have never run a trail race before, there’s not one single trash that we have to pick up. Can you imagine? And why is that? Because we told them so. We educate them, and it’s working.

Fit Wild: Where are you at regarding the internationalization of the Eco Trail?

Jean-Charles Perrin: In 2007, when I created this race I already had in mind that the concept had a universal nature. Since I went to the UTMB in the Alps, I’m interested in promoting trail running. That’s what gets me going. But I’m also aware that in people’s lives today, diversity is the rule. You don’t change, you die. No one stays within the same company for 45 years like our parents anymore. My kids can look at three to four screens at the same time, TV, iPad, iPhone; you name it, and they can follow everything, trust me. This is just how the world runs and how people are these days. Consequently, what I wanted to do with the Eco Trail—which concept is to promote trail running in or close by a city—was to offer local diversity to those same people and the possibility to go race a great concept a different location. It’s the same race, but with a different culture attached to it, different décor, views, terrain, and monuments. With my partners from Oslo, Brussel and Funchal, in Madeira Island, we wish to offer alternatives to trail runners. Oslo terrain is for example much more technical than the Paris one and the Funchal one has much more elevation gain. How do we work it out? Simple: we use local trail runners to come up with the perfect route. We rely on localism. Only a surfer knows the feeling right? Well, only a local trail runners knows the right trails.

Fit Wild: A creative person, an industrial methodist, and a man of challenges. Correct?

Jean-Charles Perrin: Ha ha, yeah, I guess. When someone says to me, “Oh no, wait that’s not possible,” generally it drives me crazy and I can’t help but to show that it is possible. I think a lot of people kill their own project because they are afraid to make it happen. I’ve seen a lot people come up with great ideas and projects, but when the time comes to make a presentation they suck. They’re either tired, or they dress badly or whatever. But there’s always something wrong. At Danone, I’ve learned how to pitch and sell. It’s true. Convincing the Eiffel Tower main boss to let us have this vertical race on his baby was really hard. I felt like Mr. Gustave Eiffel, the man who built the tower. He had a concept, he loved challenges and he made it happen, even though a vast majority of Parisians thought it was plain stupid and a pretty ugly monument. Just like that. Boom. Eighteen month later this 324 meter-high tower was built. Amazing.

Fit Wild: Last but not least, how did you convince the Western States board to come under the banner of The Ultra Trail World Tour. What about a culture clash?

Jean-Charles Perrin: In 2007, I started with the idea of licensing the “Ultra Trail” name. It was much easier to bring in existing major events into our brand than launching new ones on the scale of a UTMB or a Western States. So we went to San Francisco to meet with the WS board. We landed from Paris the day before the meeting and left on the evening of the meeting. We flew only to meet with them. That board was pretty divided about the matter. The old fashioned guys thought they just didn’t need us. But the younger generation was more appealed. I don’t want to sound too cocky here, but I believe we managed to show them that within our two very different races, we had a lot of common values.

I spoke for two hours. They took one month to think about it and then said it was a great idea. We contacted 13 races worldwide. Ten came in, three said “no.” I had never met most of those people before, but they understood that in order to exist in a world ruled by NBA, NFL and other FIFA lives on television every week, sometimes several times a week globally, we needed to bring more recurrence to our sport. Of course some of them, like the Marathon Des Sables or WS didn’t need us to exist. They had enough money or fame, but the World Tour brings something else, it allows them to get out of their isolation. In the case of smaller events, is a radical and positive change. Let me add that we praise for gender diversity on every one of our events. Either there’s no prize money or the same amount is given to both genders. We never saw any reason to do it differently.