Sporting heroes deliver the `wow' factor at conferences

Sportsmen and women now outrank both politicians and business gurus on the lucrative speaking circuit, accounting for a third of all engagements at a wide range of business gatherings, according to the latest estimates from the Institute of Sports Sponsorship. Only 10 years ago, says the ISS, sports people at business conferences were a "distinct rarity".

Firms have long played on the theme of sporting success in marketing campaigns. Now athletes - with the surprising exception of footballers - are becoming the first choice in the fast-growing motivational and team-building arena.

For athletes past and present - including Tracy Edwards, the yachtswoman, David Gower, the former England cricket captain, and Matthew Pinsent, the Olympic gold medallist - the rewards are great. Fees tend to start at about £2,000 sterling (#3,158) a day for a run-of-the-mill sporting "name" and reach £10,000 for a genuine sporting hero. This is almost twice as expensive as the average business "guru". They command such sums because of the supposed parallels between achievement in business and achievement in athletics, cricket and rugby union.

"Sports people such as Tracy Edwards and Kriss Akabusi [the athlete] are not only good presenters and speakers in their own right but they also know where to draw the line between sharing their own leadership or team-building tips with an audience and straying into business areas in which they have no direct experience," says Mr Jeremy Lee, founder of JLA, Britain's leading speaker bureau, which arranges 1,200 speaking engagements each year. "Those who try to tell Grandmother how to suck eggs don't tend to be invited back a second time."

JLA has more than 200 speakers to draw on for business gatherings, among them Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Russian president, and Mr Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who recently addressed a motivational session in London held by an international bank. Yet Mr Lee thinks that the name of Ellen MacArthur, the yachtswoman, with whom the company is currently in negotiations, will potentially be an even bigger draw than either of those two. "I don't know if it's because politicians are too dicey because of their private lives and business gurus are simply two a penny nowadays, but the `wow' factor tends to be far and away the most powerful when a sporting hero comes on the platform," he says. "While people like the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes are extremely adept at reinventing themselves for a younger audience, a new name like MacArthur, who has achieved her ambition at a young age, will be even more exciting for the average 30-something business audience."

Although former athletes are understandably keen to cast themselves in the role of business mentors, at least one conference organiser is honest enough to say that "most of the sports people on the circuit at the moment speak to a formula that inevitably comes down to cliches about running the extra mile for your company or winning through against the odds".

But in the view of Mr Lee, hiring a sports star to address a leadership seminar is about far more than adding glamour to an otherwise mundane occasion. "Some of it is simply about flattery, of course - you, the delegate, feel flattered that the firm has got such a great name to address you and the chairman is pleased because he can boast about it to his friends. But there is also the fact that sportsmen and women have a genuinely fresh angle on what makes or breaks a great team and how you can outflank the opposition."

While a growing number of ex-athletes such as Ms Edwards and Mr Akabusi have now set up their own motivational companies aimed at exploiting the business community's deepening interest in sport, football is conspicuously the only significant sport to remain unrepresented on the speaking circuit.

"Although a business audience is impressed to see a top sports name address his firm's conference, people turn off quite quickly if the star in question is unable to speak intelligently about his or her experiences," says Mr Paul Ashford, managing director of Apex, a full-service conference organiser that uses a sporting theme at more than a third of the 50 or so events it stages each year.

"In our experience, some sports breed articulate individuals who can hold an audience's attention and some sports breed great athletes who can't string a sentence together. Some of the best footballers in the country are notably ill-equipped to address any sort of gathering, particularly a business one, in spite of being very glamorous names in their own right."