From Corporate Boardrooms to... Motorsport?

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
This is the Morning Drive, it's Mira Business FM. So what happens when CEOs follow their passion? There's a question. More and more senior executives are swapping boardrooms for bold entrepreneurial ventures, turning decades of corporate experience into businesses built around passion and purpose. And Dutch Brothers Racing is one of those stories. It's not just about motorsport, it is about leadership, it's about calculated risk, it's about building a brand from scratch and proving that it's never too late to learn and to start something new.
Dutch Brothers Racing co-founders Alan VanderMolen, a global corporate communications and business transformation leader, and Jon de Jager is a corporate finance and investment executive. He's advised businesses, investors, and governments across international markets. Join me now, Alan, Jon. It's good to have you both with us.

**Alan VanderMolen** (1:00)
Good morning. We're so happy to be here.

**Jon de Jager** (1:03)
And great to be with you.

**Tim Elliott** (1:05)
Question for both of you, but I actually know I'll start with Jon first of all. You've spent decades in, I guess, high pressure boardroom environments. You've managed global communications, multi-billion dollar finance strategies.
Lots of people dream about turning a passion into a business. What finally made you take the leap?

**Jon de Jager** (1:32)
So, I think there are two things, Tim. The first is Alan and I decided that we needed to have some purpose to what was a hobby originally.
And the second is that we wanted to put the same discipline that's applied in the boardroom to capital allocation and to how you invest with a view to long-term gains that we've been advising clients on in our current professional lives. So, it's a combination of making a hobby with some purpose and putting that same rigor and discipline around it to try to create a business.

**Tim Elliott** (2:09)
Alan, same question to you, I guess, but with a little addition. Why motorsport and also why now?

**Alan VanderMolen** (2:20)
Well, look, I'm 61, I proudly claim that age. And when this conflict started, we both wanted to look for things that were invigorating to us, that challenged us, that matched the resilience that we were seeing in the environment around us. And at the same time, gave us a real challenge late in our careers.
So, motorsport is something we both enjoy, we've never done. And we were talking about tracking cars, which a lot of people do, gentlemen racers as it were. And I was like, no, I reject that. If we're in, we're all in, let's start a racing team. And in order to do that, we need to turn it into a business. And that's where we are, competing with ourselves, competing with others, and proving ourselves every day that our experience in the work life translates into the racetrack, and vice versa.

**Tim Elliott** (3:13)
So this is much more than a mid-life crisis. This is a calculated business strategy.
Jon, when these decisions were being pre-discussed, as it were, a pre-decision time, why the business rather than both of you just... I mean, it's a great hobby. It's perfectly natural to move into a new hobby at this point in your career, your life, I suppose. But you took the plunge and you're jumping in feet first.

**Jon de Jager** (3:47)
So Tim, I think the point about that was what Alan said. We could have had a hobby. We could have had a photograph and a nice track day. But actually both of us decided that that would have lacked any purpose. What we're trying to build is a content-first platform.
And we're trying to build a business around the story of the two of us learning to race, going through the trials and the tribulations and what it means to race, and to share that with as many like-minded people as we can. But the real impact here is that at the end of the day, we'll be proven on the track and we'll prove that to ourselves and to our teammates. And hopefully it will be a successful enterprise.

**Tim Elliott** (4:29)
Alan, what's the biggest lesson or even shock perhaps you might have had moving from the climate controlled office in Abu Dhabi to the pit lane? What has racing been teaching you about risk that maybe, I suppose, a spreadsheet can't?

**Alan VanderMolen** (4:48)
Look, literally looking through corners and looking around corners. That's the biggest analogy for me. And the second thing is always stay in motion. You can be going slow braking, you can be accelerating, but always be in motion. And how making decisions under pressure is the same on a racetrack as it is, is it a business?