“I’ve tended to fall into things.”
Those are the words of Steve Rowbotham, former Olympic rower (a highly decorated one, too) and founder of Navigator, a fast-scaling travel audience marketing platform with a 75%+ client retention rate and global clients including L’Oréal.
In all, it sounds like a little more than falling into things…
With his surname, it seemed his Olympian life was predestined for Rowbotham. It all started at Durham university, where he first picked up an oar.
Rowbotham the Olympian
Within three years of his rowing journey, he was due to compete at the 2004 Athens Olympics but then a major setback threatened everything, he was let go from the team. “Our boat was rubbish, really slow,” he recalls. “The way they kicked me out of that boat was horrendous and that was a real pivotal moment in my life because that wasn’t the dream that I thought.”
By 2006, he met fellow rower Matthew Wells, whom Rowbotham describes as “technically better” than he was at rowing, while describing himself as “resourceful.”
“We’re asking people to get in a lane because we think that’s the lane they need. Whereas if we enable people’s brilliance and bring out the best in them, that’s what true high performance looks like.”
The pair became a dream team. Out of the twenty-five races they competed in together, they won twenty-three medals: “In terms of my performance, I was at my best during those three years.” Today, Rowbotham is a fan of the high-performance concept in business, although he thinks many leaders fail to bridge the concept to action. “Very few I have met actually understand what that looks like.” He explains how high performance is a natural thing in competitive sport: “In any kind of elite sport you have a group of individuals who want to be the best at what they’re doing in the world; and will do whatever it takes to get there. So you can start throwing stuff like words in like discipline and drive and all that kind stuff. That’s just natural. Every single person has got that. Everyone wants it as much.”
Rowbotham learned about the high performance mindset with his rowing partner. “By bringing the best out of ourselves and bringing that brilliance out, we were able to maximise each other’s performance in that environment.” He sees roadblocks in business where people tend to inhibit performance, rather than facilitating it. “I see that in business all the time,” he confirms. “We’re asking people to get in a lane because we think that’s the lane they need. Whereas if we enable people’s brilliance and bring out the best in them, that’s what true high performance looks like.”
The former Olympian brings another transferable learning from his pre-business life, having an end game plan. He calls it his “north star” which looks like a “clear, ambitious, and bold vision.”
You’d think most people running a business have one, but in his experience, it’s not been the case. “They can’t answer me,” he says of several entrepreneurs he has met.
Rowbotham the businessman
The idea that a business leader’s direction for the business should trickle down the organisation is a nice one, but it’s not always implemented. Rowbotham agrees. “I’ve been into multiple businesses where you ask the team what their north star is and they don’t know. It’s not even communicated out. Not everyone knows or is aligned around that common goal.”
When Rowbotham competed, his north star, he says, was clear. “It’s an Olympic gold medal. It happens every four years, whether you’re there or not, right?”
“I was used to sitting in a boat and going backwards and being the master of my own destiny and then suddenly I was in an office environment staring at the windows going, what the hell has just happened?”
Arguably, competitive sport is about potential and realising it as much as natural talent. In this regard, Rowbotham has taken something else from his rowing days into business. “I don’t hire on experience,” he shares. “What’s more important to me is the kind of human being you are, because I’ve seen the power of the mind in unlocking potential. When you have a group of individuals who are willing to learn and grow and fail and the more you can replicate that across a group of individuals, the more you can achieve.” The Navigator founder is critical of some elements of competitive sport however, and has left behind the less savoury elements that don’t work in business. “In sport, life’s binary,” he states. “You either cross the line first or you fail; and there were ways I was treated in that high performance environment, like the ruthlessness, that went too far. I’m never going to allow people to feel the way I felt.”
By 2012, Rowbotham’s Olympic career was coming to an end. The London Olympics was an appropriate concluding games for the GB rower: “It felt a natural end point to my career. I’d had a son a year before that. There was other stuff in my life that I wanted to do.”
From sport to searching for meaning
Just weeks after finishing the London Olympics, Rowbotham found himself in an intern position at an asset management firm. The transition from river-bound rower to desk-based corporate worker, was unsurprisingly, a stark one. “I was used to sitting in a boat and going backwards and being the master of my own destiny and then suddenly I was in an office environment staring at the windows going, what the hell has just happened?”
Thereafter followed a job putting up wind farms for a global renewable energy firm, but Rowbotham wasn’t fulfilled. “I was a deeply unhappy person,” he admits of that time.
Then a call from a recruiter changed everything. He was put in touch with Simon Leslie, head of travel media brand giant, Ink. Leslie, the recruiter told him, was keen to hire former sportspeople into his business. “That was the tonic that I needed,” he reflects.
Ink and the route to entrepreneurship
Rowbotham made his intentions clear to Leslie from the outset, he wanted to grow in his job, and he ultimately wanted Leslie’s. The north star was set and in just over two years, he went from selling advertising in Ryanair’s inflight magazine to becoming Ink’s CCO, quite the career progression: “I shadowed him around the world for the first year to learn as much as I could, because that’s just inherent in me. When I have a goal, I don’t limit myself in terms of how quickly I need to take to learn that thing. I’m a very, very quick learner.”
“It’s funny because the first ever client that we had as a business was a covid kit and now we’re working with the biggest brands that you could ever imagine; it’s really cool, the journey through to that.”
In 2020, the ex-rower left Ink to start Navigator, a travel ad tech business. He explains how his experience at Ink paved the way for his entrepreneurial venture. “We’re in the same sector and I observed the business and functionally how businesses are run. They went through various buyouts and some acquisitions. So I was able to learn a lot from that. I came back to that resourcefulness, to getting all the information and resources I needed before I embarked on my own journey.”
Like many early stage ventures, Rowbotham admits taking money from any client to “keep the lights on.” Then he moved to creating value for clients, and this approach, he believes, has led to its 75% retention rate and a list of bigger clients including L’Oreal, Estée Lauder and Diageo. “It’s funny because the first ever client that we had as a business was a covid kit and now we’re working with the biggest brands that you could ever imagine; it’s really cool, the journey through to that.”
Rowbotham understands pivots, he’s made a few before and he’s doing one again with Navigator. “I’ve got this north star of what I want to achieve and this will enable it to happen quicker,” he shares. This includes moving from being a performance agency for beauty brands targeting travellers to understanding travellers as consumers: “The obvious example I give is Mercedes. Mercedes is for affluent, aspirational people. Well, that’s travellers, right? I know that you flew business class last month as a solo traveler, but I know that next month you’re going as a family to Greece and you’ve got two children. Well, Mercedes should show you an SUV, not a two-seater sports car. That’s a really obvious example. Now we’re starting to play into impacting brands outside of the travel space, which gives us more exponential growth within the sector versus just being a performance agency for travel brands.”
In six short years, Navigator has gone places, working with global brands and a high client retention rate. But the goals aren’t yet completed.
Ever the athlete, Rowbotham has another target, to achieve a £300m exit within three to five years: “It’s very, very ambitious and requires us to do a lot of things in a short space of time, but that’s what I love doing.”
As I say, ever the athlete.
