First and foremost a big thank you to all who answered my initial questions when I first joined the forums a few months ago as someone brand new to karting. I’m happy to say I will be racing this year, but in a manner that I hope benefits the karting and racing community as a whole.
In short, I’ll be running under the banner of my own business, Ikoniqa, and plan to run completely off of sponsorship from other businesses. Most importantly though, we’ll be documenting and making public the entire process of exactly how we do it such that others can learn from our results (Or maybe failure).
We figured that if we can teach and show real world examples of sponsorship working at the lowest levels of racing, we can help inspire others to both get into karting, as well as help young drivers who are climbing the ranks in other series.
As much as I would personally love for talent alone to get drivers to the top of motorsports, marketing skills are basically a must-have. And although there are some great resources out there, I’m not aware of anyone who’s showing the entire process from the cold email through to the signed deal and everything it entails. That’s what we’re setting out to shed some light on, and I hope we can provide some value to the Kart Pulse Forums with our efforts in the process.
Feel free to follow along, and look for our first blog entires over the next few weeks! And for anyone who races in GearUp, I hope to see you all on the grid in Pittsburgh!
Thanks, and will do. Also, if anyone has any particular questions on racing sponsorship (at any level), feel free to ask me anytime -would be happy to answer. I’ll do my best to check back here and answer often as I can.
Can you be more specific about how you are doing better than the top racers, how much funding you are receiving, and how much time you are putting into promo work?
Well most of them are just emails and im not getting into what I get specifically. But I will say if I didn’t think it was worth my time I wouldn’t do it. You’re not going to start off getting a big sponsorship. So your return might be negative based on what you value your time at. However, the key is as you get your first partnership you have actual analytics to relate to the next potential partnership and so on.
I’ll add to @highSRT’s point in noting that once you have just one solid relationship with a group/business, your perceived value to other business’s shoots up tremendously, and as a result, you’re able to secure more funding. It’s a catch22 in some ways, but for me personally, that first “solid relationship” was created by doing work for free. I wouldn’t normally recommend doing such, but this “I’ll prove to you what I’m worth at no risk to you” method has the potential to open up some really big doors.
