Q&A With TSE Founder

(ATR) Lausanne-based TSE Consulting celebrates 10 years in business this week. The firm advises cities and regions on bidding for sports events.

Company founder Lars Haue-Pedersen says TSE discovered this niche a few years after it opened for business. He talks more about this and the work of TSE in this Q&A with Around the Rings Editor Ed Hula.

Around the Rings: What has changed for your company in the past 10 years?

Lars Haue-Pederson: We started very small of course. It was basically only me and another guy in London and a part time assistant. That was basically all of TSE 10 years ago.

I think what changed, what kind of provided the breakthrough was in the beginning was we were advising in many different areas. But we realized where there is a big need for advice in sports within the public sector, cities. Like cities, regions, countries that would like to get involved in sport, mainly in sports events.

I used to say while many companies, IMG, Infront, what they all called Sport5, all these agencies they connect sport to the private sector. We connect sport to the public sector and that’s what we have been developing over the past 3-4, 5 years. We have used all our sports contacts from being in the middle of Lausanne, connecting them to cities these regions that would like to get involved in sport and hosting events. That made the big change; suddenly we saw we are the sports marketing company of the public sector if I may say so.

ATR: How many cities or governments would be among the group who you have consulted with, who you have advised?

LP: Most of them are still with us. I would say we are advising a core group of around 20 cities or regions.

ATR: For the cities, for the regions there’s more than just going after big prizes like the Olympics or World Cup, you’re able to get them thinking about other events besides these mega events?

LP: Exactly this is where we specialized because of our relations with the IOC and we say there are a lot of world championships and junior world championships in many sports that can be of interest to many cities.

So we are not looking into the World Cups of Football or Olympics. We are much more looking into European, Asian Championships in many other events and it has been very successful.

We are constantly involved in two three four different campaigns or advice on different events with our clients and it can be from big ones like the current European Football Championship with Ukraine/Poland, we did that for them, that’s one of the bigger ones outside the Olympic Games. But we have also been involved in advising events from table tennis, European championship of archery, handball, volleyball, rowing, lots of them.

And that’s where many cities, most cities cannot and should not think about hosting an Olympic Games so that’s where we come in and understand the value of many of the other events.

Our job is really to create a strategy for these cities, don’t go out there and just bid for these kind of things. Why are you doing it? What are you developing over the next couple of years? What are your long term plans? As you know they need to plan like 10 years ahead to get into this game, so that is what we have been doing very well, I will say.

ATR: It’s a marketplace that has room for smaller cities, so just say a few hundred thousand people as to ones with millions of people?

LP: Some of our clients have less than one hundred thousand inhabitants and they are still very active. It very much depends on what you are going for.

And some of them ensuring a lot of creativity, they may be bidding for some established events. But we always advise them to look into what can you create yourself, fully control.

So it is a much more diversified market and a much more sophisticated approach and the market is growing. As you know it used to be Europe and North America, now it is very much in the Middle East with Qatar and Dubai, it’s in South America, Asia, and very soon Africa.

We have plans there and are talking to different countries that you really have not heard so much about in terms of hosting events. I think that market is there, it’s a lot of room for development still.

ATR: And you began TSE 10 years ago with just 3 people, how many people are with the organization now?

LP: We are around 25 consultants and then there are some outsourced admin and finances but we are at 25

consultants.

Interview conducted by Ed Hula.

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