The Winners Circle – Limelight Sports

With entries now open for the 2012 Sport Industry Awards, past winners share their memories in The Winners Circle. Craig Dews’ Limelight Sports won Agency of the Year in 2011.

Following our successful management buy-out of Limelight Sports in 2008, the new Board set about identifying a core internal business goal that would enable the team to get behind one easy-to-communicate message that demonstrated our aspirations for the future growth of the company.

The goal needed to:

• Reflect our strategy to significantly grow the business in terms of clients, client sectors, turnover and profitability by 20%+ per annum.
• Demonstrate our desire to change the industry’s perceptions of Limelight from being a niche major event deliverer to being an innovative sports  agency.
• Help us to promote the importance of participation and grassroots events and campaigns in the future development of the sports industry.

The goal that we selected to communicate to the team was: ‘to be shortlisted for the Agency of the Year category at the Sport Industry Awards by 2012’. 

The goal was simple and tangible and to achieve it we knew that we would have to hit all of our business targets in order to meet the judging criteria for the award.

We also felt that it was an incredibly aspirational target. The Sport Industry Awards were already established as the blue riband event for the industry and our perception was that the agencies shortlisted for ‘Agency of the Year’ were top quality, established industry leaders traditionally working in the high profile, elite end of the industry.

In 2010 we were delighted that the SIA added the ‘Sport Participation Event of the Year’ category to the awards. We felt this showed that the industry was acknowledging the rising importance of participation, and it was fantastic when our submission for Skyride on behalf of our client, Sky, won the award that year.

The following autumn, after an amazing year of growth for the business, we submitted our application for Agency of the Year. When we subsequently heard the news that the panel had shortlisted us the whole team were ecstatic. We were also bombarded with congratulatory messages from clients, former employees and our friends within the industry who knew what a huge achievement getting shortlisted for a Sport Industry Award was.

After the daunting presentation to the judges, the day of the event finally arrived and we were able to invite some very high-profile clients and a large percentage of the team to share the moment when our show reel was played to a who’s who of the UK sports industry. Given the fantastic companies we were up against in our category, and despite how far we had come as a company in such a short space in time, I honestly did not think that we would win the award.

On a personal level going up to collect the trophy from Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and Linford Christie is by some distance the highlight of my professional career and for the company it represented a real acknowledgement by our peers that the work we are doing to engage brands and the not for profit sector in sport participation projects is rising in importance and credibility within our industry.

Winning the award has helped Limelight in so many ways; internally it has brought the team even closer together, with an enhanced confidence in our strategy and beliefs, we are also finding it easier to attract some incredible new talent into the business  and from a business development perspective it has definitely made getting meetings with prospective brand clients easier. 

We hope to be able to continue to benefit as a business from winning the award until next May and we also hope to build a compelling case for the judges to once again bestow on us the honour of being SIA Agency of the Year in 2012! 

In the meantime we have some new internal goal setting to do…

Entries for the Sport Industry Awards 2012 are open now – click here for more information.

By Craig Dews, Chief Executive, Limelight Sports Group