It Takes a Tribe

by Will Dean

  Again, a representative example sticks in my mind. I’ve mentioned how we have spent a lot of time getting the names and branding language right to emphasize an irreverent attitude. It’s a tone of voice (never quite in earnest, “I do not whine—kids whine”) that the tribe knows well and understands. In 2014, we were developing the idea that gave special privileges to our returning Mudders. One was an exclusive obstacle that would allow them to bypass the Electroshock Therapy if they chose to. I wanted to signify this by calling the returning Mudders “Repeat Offenders.” In a meeting, one of our recently hired chiefs on the marketing team told me extremely bluntly: no way.

  I wondered why?

  “You are making a bad joke out of domestic violence,” she said.

  I am?

  “Can’t you see that calling people ‘repeat offenders’ makes you sound like you sympathize with violent criminals and wife-beaters? You can’t do that.”

  I didn’t know whether to be more surprised by the fact of this heartfelt outburst of political correctness or its implications for what my colleague appeared to think about my character. In the large company she had come from, she had learned, I guess, to be hyperaware that a significant marketing priority was to avoid any potential for causing offense. That was undoubtedly useful when you were dealing with the broadest possible global demographic and needed a tone that traded in simplistic family values. But we were in a business that prided itself on understanding exactly how our Tough Mudder tribe spoke, and how it expected to be spoken to. Nothing about our messaging was to be taken quite in earnest. I had no doubt they would take the (small) joke in the spirit it was intended.

  Still, I compromised. We eventually settled on a different formula, one that I also liked (and that the marketing chief also disliked because of its “mercenary subtext”), which became the beginning of our Legionnaire program. At the same time, I made a mental note that we were in danger of drifting badly off message in our marketing department. We wanted people who spoke their minds. I was more than happy to have strong debates about small details; but I also needed to feel that there were certain shared assumptions of what we were about. I felt that if this highly qualified person could be so wrong about my intentions in the tone of that small thing, she would likely be slightly wrong about the tone of everything.

  There were a hundred other similar issues that collectively began to change how we operated. As we scaled up we needed to become more “professional” by necessity, but that couldn’t be at the expense of our values. When we were a smaller company there was no room for us to get attached to different pieces of work or systems or obstacles. The idea was that you produced something as good as you could make it and then it belonged to everybody and could be refined and reexamined by whoever had the best ideas.

  Now, though, people were saying, “I have designed this system and it works; let’s not change it.” Or new projects—from changes in event formats to new media opportunities—were blocked internally because they were “too much of a risk,” words that I didn’t want to hear. “Give me an exact idea of that risk,” I would say, “or tell me how the risk can be decreased and how much that will cost, but don’t shut things down because they don’t conform to ways that we are already doing things.”

  We had also stopped paying enough attention to a few of the things that had got us to where we were. The pressure simply to deliver the growing number of events left us little time for broader personal development; the case study events were more sporadic. We got together less as a team. And there was, because of all these habits, something of a minor breakdown in that collaborative spirit that had fueled our early I’ve-got-your-back ethos. The original team grew a little disillusioned by the fact that more recent arrivals didn’t seem to buy into the collective spirit. That breakdown was compounded by a sense of panic in some quarters about the sudden decline in bookings.

  In a “tribal” business, such changes in tone and practice are quickly felt beyond the office. One of the advantages about having a committed Mudder community that talks among itself nonstop is that we soon get to know of small changes in collective mood. Some of the Mudder community leaders picked up on the problems we were starting to have. They saw it out on the course itself. Jim Campbell, who recently became the first Mudder to complete a hundred events, recalls how in 2014 the company that he had come to know and love from the beginning seemed to be losing a bit of its mojo for the first time.

  “It had a stumbling year,” Campbell says now. “The obstacles themselves seemed for the first time a bit predictable. And people started to talk; they’d say, ‘Yeah, they are cutting corners.’ It started to look more like a commercial thing and therefore a lot less like Tough Mudder. The company had done more than enough up to that point for people like me to keep the faith, though,” Campbell argues, “so I responded to this criticism in the community: ‘Hey you know it is just a bad year. And they are going to get it back up.’ But people were saying, ‘Screw this, there are plenty of other events to choose from. Tough Mudder has to worry about keeping my attention here.’”

  It was as much a coincidence of timing as anything, but I couldn’t help thinking that part of this perceived loss of purpose and authenticity had to do with the physical relocation of the office. In 2013, we moved from our rough-and-ready start-up space in DUMBO, which had been divided between two sites, to seventy thousand square feet of prime office space in the commercial heart of Brooklyn’s MetroTech. As a business, we were probably ready for the upshift, but I couldn’t help feeling it had added a bit more of a corporate edge to how some people started to carry themselves. We took over the new office in November 2013, in high Mudder excitement, seventy of us donning headbands and charging in through the lobby en masse, somewhat to the alarm of security. But I feared that attitude had started to wane not long after we arrived.

  I was reminded of a scene in the film Wayne’s World, in which Wayne and Garth hit the big time with the TV show they have been making in Wayne’s basement. To make themselves feel comfortable in the new professional studio they are given, they try to re-create an exact replica of that basement, just as it was—but a little bit of the old pioneer spirit is inevitably lost. I think all start-ups that are successful experience some of that loss-of-innocence feeling when the need to scale means that things begin to become more routine.

  This feeling was compounded by the fact that by the time we relocated, I was leading the company without my cofounder, my old friend from school, Guy Livingstone. Guy agreeing to join was the first step in my believing that the company was for real and our adventures at Tough Mudder were nearly all shared.

  Guy had a manic work ethic and for two and a half years at Tough Mudder he was, like me, a man possessed. His energy and range of abilities was exactly what Tough Mudder needed: he was equally at home in a formal meeting one minute, terrier-like in negotiations with suppliers the next, and then happy to be putting up obstacles at three in the morning in muddy fields. He was a close confidant for me and a source of good sense. I doubt, for example, that we would have got through the lawsuit with Mr. Mouse had it not been for Guy helping to manage that and keep a sense of perspective.

  That intense start-up energy does not suit itself to the longer haul. As the company grew, Guy’s role became necessarily less hands on, and he seemed to miss some of the former intensity. Both of us could see this happening, and we discussed how we should address it. Reluctantly, given what we had been through together, we agreed that Guy should leave his day-to-day involvement in Tough Mudder, while retaining his significant shareholding. We parted company amicably in the summer of 2013.

  Guy’s departure was inevitable in hindsight, but in the short term it meant that I had lost a partner. We had shared some of the duties of communicating with the Tough Mudder tribe and the TMHQ team. By the beginning of 2014, when more numbers were coming in and still not quite adding up, that communication seemed to
have narrowed to answering a single question, one that suddenly followed me around every media interview and crept into every company meeting. It was a version of the same question that had been asked of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Phil Knight and every other entrepreneur at some point. “What if Tough Mudder is a fad, Will? What if it’s already had its moment?”

  The persistence of that question—and its subtext, “What if you’ve failed, Will?”—consumed my thinking. I’d studied the experiences of enough entrepreneurs to know that how you reacted after the first spike of growth determined whether you would sink or swim for the wider ocean. I certainly wasn’t about to give up on what we had built, so I took a breath and started swimming.

  When you think about it, I told myself and those around me, every single business idea is a fad. Nothing stays the same, as the market and the environment in which you operate are always shifting. The priorities you face at the beginning are not those you will face after three years, let alone five or ten. I was anxious about how best to change, but confident that we would.

  That confidence was heartfelt. However much I interrogated it, my central belief remained secure that the things Tough Mudder was offering—a fitness goal, a tribal community, a real-life challenge—were not going to lose their appeal anytime soon. But what was increasingly clear was that we had to find some new ways of offering them. We couldn’t simply rely on adding more events.

  I knew I needed some help in giving the company a broader base and more diversified revenue—an executive team that could help shape where we were going and give me more time and space to make the transformation. But I also knew that I couldn’t simply repeat the error of hiring people with quite similar corporate experience who did not share all our values. A friend and mentor, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of the games publisher Take-Two Interactive (which owns Grand Theft Auto among others) suggested that perhaps one thing I needed was someone who had learned this price of experience himself and lived to tell the tale. He introduced me to Adam Slutsky. Adam had been a great success in the 1990s dot-com years. He had been instrumental in creating Moviefone, the original online movie ticketing service, which he took from start-up to IPO to an eventual $550 million takeover by AOL. When he first came on board at the end of 2013 he was leaving a CEO role at Mimeo.com.

  Adam and I are very different. His instinct is to go first for detail and short-term issues, mine to see bigger pictures. He likes to talk his way to solutions; I like some time to analyze options. But we are similarly driven by an entrepreneurial personality—a determination to keep getting over one obstacle and then the next. The timing was also good—Adam didn’t want to start again from scratch, but to employ some of the lessons he had learned. I needed a reliable day-to-day handle on the business while I worked out the coordinates of where Tough Mudder was heading next.

  In the first instance, we separated out the problems. Adam examined our costs, identified some areas for immediate savings, and worked—with some trial and error—to make our “back office” less top-heavy. He relied enormously on one of the chiefs I had brought in, Don Baxter, who had been a wise and hugely positive COO and now CFO, but otherwise we agreed that we had “too many chiefs,” so we made the never-easy decision of removing most of that layer of strategic management that was proving so hard to integrate into the culture. This involved most of the repeat-offending marketing department, and eventually the entire layer of PowerPoint-ing chiefs.

  Determined not to make the same mistakes, we hired a new marketing director, Jerome Hiquet, who was working with a different tribe at the tourism giant Club Med. I had always tried to put candidates through some hard interviews, but given our recent success rate, I was more paranoid than usual about getting this wrong. Jerome still reminds me how we put him through eleven interviews—the last one over a Tough Mudder course, in some hastily borrowed and ill-fitting gear—before he got the job. Once in place, though, he hit the ground running. Jerome helped me to implement what I could already see: that we needed to think of Tough Mudder as much as a media company as an events company. That our great strength lay in the tribe itself, the faith it showed in us, and the loyalty it demonstrated to the Tough Mudder spirit. We went back to our mission statement and worked on ways to deepen and extend our relationship with the tribe by making the experience ever more available to them, talking to them in different ways and over different channels.

  To this end, we started to live stream the event from the course (and overnight millions of Mudders old and new were tuning in). We had long thought about how to do TV without compromising the authenticity of Tough Mudder. Jerome helped us to develop a relationship with CBS that involved two strands—a documentary-style series about World’s Toughest Mudder, presenting it as the ultimate physical challenge, and a series (on the CW network) that depicted some of the superhuman stories of everyday Mudder legends. We have subsequently deepened that relationship by creating TMX, a one mile Tough Mudder that pits speed against strength, and will be televised on Saturday afternoons in 2017.

  While we were working on this shift to other media, the key problem we needed to address was the falloff in repeat business: the fact that Mudders were doing one event and then not coming back. The blip in fortunes I had identified in October 2013 had become a trend by early 2014, and one that, at the time, offered an existential threat to the business if not quickly reversed.

  We created a double strategy to keep Mudders coming back. It was clear that we needed to streamline our operations to focus a lot more of our resources on obstacle innovation—our unique selling point. With Nolan Kombol’s expanded team we created what was effectively a whole new event in 2014, updating and replacing obstacles, ready to roll out in 2015. We celebrated by making the launch of the new obstacles themselves an annual landmark.

  To reinforce that innovative spirit and to extend the reach of Tough Mudder we also developed a series of formats that would appeal to other demographics without diluting the authenticity of the original—Tough Mudder Half (without ice or electricity), TM5K, Toughest Mudder. And we worked to try to enhance the experience for returning Mudders. In thinking about how to reward this ongoing loyalty I had what I believed to be a simple but effective idea, which I planned to announce at our annual retreat at the beginning of 2014.

  My thought was just this: returning Mudders, though running alongside first timers, would be rewarded for their loyalty with some special features (exclusive obstacles, early booking discounts, and so on) and also, at different milestones of Tough Mudder events completed, be awarded a different color of headband as a recognition of their new status. From the beginning our legionnaires had sewn their orange headbands together to make hats—until there were too many to make that practical (or a very good look). The new headband colors—a green headband for two-time Mudders, blue for three, yellow for four to six, black for ten, and so on—would create a hierarchy of Mudders, much like the belt system in martial arts. It wasn’t a particularly subtle strategy, but I had no doubt it would be welcomed by the tribe. Any rite of passage demands a badge of recognition. There was something extra special about the people who took on our challenge more than once, and that needed acknowledgment. I thought that the idea was a no-brainer, but in terms of its reception within TMHQ I could hardly have been more wrong.

  For our weekend away at the retreat, we always take over the same hotel in Upstate New York. It has a kind of faded sixties charm, slightly reminiscent of The Shining. There is a big cavernous ballroom where we do presentations and speeches and give out jokey awards. I stood up in this ballroom and made my speech, which set out some of the issues around return business, and some of the proposed solutions, climaxing in this revolutionary announcement:

  “We’re not just going to have orange headbands. We’re going to have other colors!”

  Silence.

  I looked around the room and there were mainly blank—or slightly pained-looking—faces. I made t
he case in a bit more detail. More silence. So I invited comments. Almost everyone said the same thing.

  “Will, you know we only have orange headbands!”

  “Orange is our brand; you’d just be diluting it!”

  I was stunned. In some ways those responses might have sounded like a good thing: they showed how passionate the team was about preserving the authenticity of our trademarks. But I also was sure they were shortsighted. I was angry with myself for not having gauged this mood in advance and as a result had a sense of personal failure that my thinking was not more closely attuned to that of the team. Since the beginning, I had not only tried to drill into the company the importance of pride in things like our headband, but moreover, I believed, the idea that changing realities always required changing responses. Innovation was not an option for us. It was a given. Nothing could ever be set in stone. The attitude toward the headbands demonstrated exactly the dangers in a business of an ingrained determination to do the same thing even if the same thing is not proving enough. For a moment, standing in that room, being told that I could not alter what I had created, I glimpsed how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt.

  The other reason that this came as a surprise to me was that I am generally the first to veto ideas that go against our core values. There was, at one point, for example, much enthusiasm for a Tough Mudder video game, which I rejected because it sent a directly contrary message to the one we were trying to promote: of switching off phones for an afternoon and committing to getting involved in real-world challenges. There was a big difference between a TV show that tells the stories of Tough Mudder and communicates our mission and values and a computer game that promotes inactivity, disconnection, and living by proxy. Again, the headbands were a different matter. They did nothing that compromised our culture—in fact they enhanced it by offering a further reward for the doggedness and keep-on-keeping-on grit of the tribe.