EP.61 Chris Robb on Crisis Management, Unashamed Giving, and The Secret to Managing Large Teams

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On today’s Dent Podcast we were lucky enough to sit down with Chris Robb. Chris is the author of the book ‘Mass Participation Sports Events’, a highly sought after international speaker, a high impact consultant and the CEO of Mass Participation Asia. Chris has run huge events all over the world and raised millions of dollars for charity. Needless to say, he’s someone whose brain we were excited to pick.

Chris is an expert in making big event happen — from the marketing to logistics to security to public relations — his work has brought him varied experience and many lessons. In our conversation, we unpack some of Chris’s experience from a childhood growing up in Zimbabwe to running events that over 1 million people have participated in.

In this episode, we really dug into things like…

How Chris sold his business to Ironman
Trends in mass participation events, growth areas, etc
A specific breakdown of Chris’s revenue model
How security costs are affecting the P&L of many big events
Chris’s worst day, how he handled it and what he learned as a result
Why problem solving is a such a critical (yet undervalued) skill
Chris’s keys to disaster mitigation communication
How to deal with the complexity of managing large, diverse, and distributed staff
The fallacy of the ‘free’ volunteer
How Chris has developed best practices in his business
Thoughts on ‘effective’ giving practices
The power of unashamed sharing