Diary of a Business Owner: Turning my passion for sports into a profitable business
Diary of a Business Owner is a collaborative blog series sharing the inside stories, thoughts, and experiences of other business owners. Owning a business is hard. There’s no manual or secret handbook to success. Diary of a Business Owner is here to help you gain an insight into life as a business owner and to remind you that you are not alone on this journey.
Oli is the founder of The Sporting Blog and CMO at Championship Horse Racing. With a love of Sports, he’s turned that passion into profit.
Business: The Sporting Blog/ Racing League
Location: England
Business Owner Since: 2017
Go-to Coffee Shop Order: At the moment something stronger!
Where you can find me: You can find me over on LinkedIn
We’ve all heard a million times about how if you enjoy your work, you won’t work a day in your life. Well, this I can tell you is not quite the case! But, it does go a long way. For 10 years I worked in the City, in a job I didn’t enjoy, but I did enjoy the company of people in an office, in a vibrant city etc.
Leaving the job I hate to start a new career
Some years later, having left that world to start a new career, I decided that my experiences were worth more than my skills. Perhaps you could argue that those experiences became skills or helped me upskill, but my point is that the soft skills you gather through experience are worth more (IMO) than the hard skills you learn when you are 18-21.
My experiences outside of my day-to-day work were numerous, but by and large, sport had always played a part in my daily life.
Whether watching, playing or visiting, I had engaged with sports all over the world and had a useful list of contacts in the industry in a broad sense. My enthusiasm for all sports, therefore, led me towards creating a website, as a hobby, which could indulge my passions, whilst using my experiences to make it a useful resource for others.
Turning my passion into a profitable business
So I started The Sporting Blog, and for a year or so I was into it, the grind that every website creator knows, yet it was fun.
The Sporting Blog however led to one thing and another. Including interviewing someone about football, who then pitched to me about working with him on a new project in horse racing. We quickly set up a new business with two other partners, raised investment and 3 years later in July 2021 we are on the verge of launching the Racing League.
This has been totally all-consuming, and growing the blog took a backstep, although COVID-19 meant a bit more time at home to indulge myself, so the site is growing month on month and one day may well become a business that can sustain itself entirely.
For now, the moral or point of the story is that passion can certainly take you further than you originally think.
Working in an area you love opens doors as you are more likely to go and find them to step through. The grind of a day to day is one thing, but if you are grinding because you really want to make an impact in an industry that is another. I really believe that enthusiasm and ambition are great bedfellows, and with a good dose of both, you never know what can happen.