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IndyCar
INDYCAR: Q&A With Mark Miles
Marshall Pruett speaks with new Hulman & Co. CEO Mark Miles who says he expects to take a direct role to improve the IndyCar Series.
Mark Miles is the new top executive for the Hulman George family, and expects to play a central role in improving IndyCar's business plan, fan base, ratings and other major issues. (Photo: IMS Photo)
Mark Miles started his new job on Monday, Dec. 17th, as CEO of Hulman & Company, the parent business that owns and controls two properties that are dear to open-wheel fans: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the IndyCar Series.
After serving as a member of the H&C board, Miles was hired to replace IMS CEO Jeff Belskus as the senior executive for the Hulman George family, and in that role, or at least as we’ve seen in the past, that person’s activities and influence at IMS and IndyCar has been hidden from sight.
Based on a frank and rather informal interview with Miles earlier this month, the sports business veteran reveals his intentions to bring serious changes to the position, and if those plans go forward, could end up being one of the busiest people directly involved with open-wheel racing.
Rather than sit at the top of the organizational chart and watch as others make critical decisions about IMS and IndyCar, Miles expects to roll up his sleeves and use his business knowledge and influence to turn the beleaguered institution around.
Here’s the bulk of a flowing 45-minute discussion as it evolved (with a few notes in the margins).
Pruett: You have a lot to do once you begin your new job—where do you start?
Miles: The first thing for me is when I start is to really understand the people inside the businesses, much of which is about motorsport, but not all, to get a much better feeling for the businesses, to understand our customers, in the case of motorsports that means the various stakeholders. And to really focus joining myself from the hip so to speak with this Boston Consulting Group process, which I'm happy to talk about.
The board decided that with running the business today, motorsport business in particular, we have become more reactive than we ought to be. We’ve got to have clarity about what's important to us and what our strategy is for growing these businesses. And there's so much going on. And I think in some ways it’s so thinly staffed in terms of management that we needed to bring in outside help.
So we interviewed McKinsey and I think the Top-6 of the best known strategic consulting firms and selected Boston Consulting Group and we've been at it now for maybe two months, but not more than eight weeks. I did something like this in tennis with McKinsey and I was pretty disappointed with the outcomes. So I think in this case it provides us a whole lot of more resources. They ask all the questions that have to be asked, assess where we are, think about the key components for growth going forward. They started that by talking to well over a hundred key stake holders, including team owners and broadcasters and all the obvious cast of characters. And I called a couple of them behind those interviews to ask them if they thought it was real or superficial. I want them to know it's meaningful opportunities for them as our surrogates to hear what you think is most important to say.
And then they do these deep data dives on top of the interviewing. I'll give you an example. So what moves the needle on television ratings? They can look at all the broadcasts, all the ratings and they can try to identify and rank all the variables. Is it oval or street or road? Is it the competitive programming? What else is on television at the same time? Is it related to kind of the history of that track? Does it have say, historical relevant significance? Is it a night or day event? Will that help or hurt? Is racing under the lights good or bad? So this is one little example where they're trying to isolate the variables and it's not that much science, there's a lot of art, but really helpful with a couple hundred questions to try to get some outside people to try to really think about those things so that you can begin to put together what you think is important to you.
(Miles strikes me as a genuine business-first executive who relishes in the task of improving the IndyCar Series. His honest, no-nonsense demeanor is refreshing and could be a great fit for what the series needs today. Plus, the days of the HG family burning untold millions to keep the series afloat are long gone, making Miles a true growth-through-fiscal-responsibility appointee. To get a handle on IndyCar’s ills, grasping how the series goes about its business and quantifying the positives and negatives was an obvious starting point.)
Pruett: It seems like looking to the past—trying to take a page from when Indy car racing was its most popular—is part of IndyCar’s approach to business, but the world has changed a lot since then. What worked in 1993 probably won’t work in 2013. Is that specifically what you’re trying to get away from, starting with this independent research project, and a general change in approach you’ll be implementing?
Miles: Certainly, it’s the perspective of the board and where I'm coming from. The Boston people are telling us their report will be complete at the end of January, I think that's a little naïve. Somewhere before the end of the first quarter and that's what I want to start thinking about, okay, so how do we staff for those results? I then also have a pretty good handle on the staff we've got. So for somebody to say Miles is urgently looking to replace Randy [Bernard] and here's his finalist list, it is just rubbish. It's not the approach at all. The teams’ die is pretty much cast. Jeff [Belskus] is there and he's there to make the trains run on time and make the various decisions that still have to be made for 2013. From my perspective it gives me this luxury to think beyond that. It frees him up to try to do both. Not that he's banned from the thinking, the strategic process.
So that's meant to be as honest and straightforward a look at what we’re up to. I've got four installments of 100 pages of [the Boston group’s] work so far but I'll be a whole lot more into it once I start. And then I think I would say to you, having done this, they seldom reveal completely original thought for a brave new world. They help you figure out what's most important, to separate legend from data. You spend enough money on these things, and you get committed to paying attention to what they produced for you and getting to the collisions so you can articulate your strategy.
I really am going to try as best I can to not look backwards except to understand our history. The doubleheader idea…let's do just doubleheaders because there's more racing that way and we did a long time ago…
(As one of the smarter members of the paddock reminded me about the data and research generated by a consulting group of this nature, it will contain miles of information, but knowing what to do with that data is an entirely different affair. Turning it into actionable items—the right actions—to improve the series will only come from Miles and his staff parsing through it and drawing their own conclusions.)
After serving as a member of the H&C board, Miles was hired to replace IMS CEO Jeff Belskus as the senior executive for the Hulman George family, and in that role, or at least as we’ve seen in the past, that person’s activities and influence at IMS and IndyCar has been hidden from sight.
Based on a frank and rather informal interview with Miles earlier this month, the sports business veteran reveals his intentions to bring serious changes to the position, and if those plans go forward, could end up being one of the busiest people directly involved with open-wheel racing.
Rather than sit at the top of the organizational chart and watch as others make critical decisions about IMS and IndyCar, Miles expects to roll up his sleeves and use his business knowledge and influence to turn the beleaguered institution around.
Here’s the bulk of a flowing 45-minute discussion as it evolved (with a few notes in the margins).
Pruett: You have a lot to do once you begin your new job—where do you start?
Miles: The first thing for me is when I start is to really understand the people inside the businesses, much of which is about motorsport, but not all, to get a much better feeling for the businesses, to understand our customers, in the case of motorsports that means the various stakeholders. And to really focus joining myself from the hip so to speak with this Boston Consulting Group process, which I'm happy to talk about.
The board decided that with running the business today, motorsport business in particular, we have become more reactive than we ought to be. We’ve got to have clarity about what's important to us and what our strategy is for growing these businesses. And there's so much going on. And I think in some ways it’s so thinly staffed in terms of management that we needed to bring in outside help.
So we interviewed McKinsey and I think the Top-6 of the best known strategic consulting firms and selected Boston Consulting Group and we've been at it now for maybe two months, but not more than eight weeks. I did something like this in tennis with McKinsey and I was pretty disappointed with the outcomes. So I think in this case it provides us a whole lot of more resources. They ask all the questions that have to be asked, assess where we are, think about the key components for growth going forward. They started that by talking to well over a hundred key stake holders, including team owners and broadcasters and all the obvious cast of characters. And I called a couple of them behind those interviews to ask them if they thought it was real or superficial. I want them to know it's meaningful opportunities for them as our surrogates to hear what you think is most important to say.
And then they do these deep data dives on top of the interviewing. I'll give you an example. So what moves the needle on television ratings? They can look at all the broadcasts, all the ratings and they can try to identify and rank all the variables. Is it oval or street or road? Is it the competitive programming? What else is on television at the same time? Is it related to kind of the history of that track? Does it have say, historical relevant significance? Is it a night or day event? Will that help or hurt? Is racing under the lights good or bad? So this is one little example where they're trying to isolate the variables and it's not that much science, there's a lot of art, but really helpful with a couple hundred questions to try to get some outside people to try to really think about those things so that you can begin to put together what you think is important to you.
(Miles strikes me as a genuine business-first executive who relishes in the task of improving the IndyCar Series. His honest, no-nonsense demeanor is refreshing and could be a great fit for what the series needs today. Plus, the days of the HG family burning untold millions to keep the series afloat are long gone, making Miles a true growth-through-fiscal-responsibility appointee. To get a handle on IndyCar’s ills, grasping how the series goes about its business and quantifying the positives and negatives was an obvious starting point.)
Pruett: It seems like looking to the past—trying to take a page from when Indy car racing was its most popular—is part of IndyCar’s approach to business, but the world has changed a lot since then. What worked in 1993 probably won’t work in 2013. Is that specifically what you’re trying to get away from, starting with this independent research project, and a general change in approach you’ll be implementing?
Miles: Certainly, it’s the perspective of the board and where I'm coming from. The Boston people are telling us their report will be complete at the end of January, I think that's a little naïve. Somewhere before the end of the first quarter and that's what I want to start thinking about, okay, so how do we staff for those results? I then also have a pretty good handle on the staff we've got. So for somebody to say Miles is urgently looking to replace Randy [Bernard] and here's his finalist list, it is just rubbish. It's not the approach at all. The teams’ die is pretty much cast. Jeff [Belskus] is there and he's there to make the trains run on time and make the various decisions that still have to be made for 2013. From my perspective it gives me this luxury to think beyond that. It frees him up to try to do both. Not that he's banned from the thinking, the strategic process.
So that's meant to be as honest and straightforward a look at what we’re up to. I've got four installments of 100 pages of [the Boston group’s] work so far but I'll be a whole lot more into it once I start. And then I think I would say to you, having done this, they seldom reveal completely original thought for a brave new world. They help you figure out what's most important, to separate legend from data. You spend enough money on these things, and you get committed to paying attention to what they produced for you and getting to the collisions so you can articulate your strategy.
I really am going to try as best I can to not look backwards except to understand our history. The doubleheader idea…let's do just doubleheaders because there's more racing that way and we did a long time ago…
(As one of the smarter members of the paddock reminded me about the data and research generated by a consulting group of this nature, it will contain miles of information, but knowing what to do with that data is an entirely different affair. Turning it into actionable items—the right actions—to improve the series will only come from Miles and his staff parsing through it and drawing their own conclusions.)
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