Founders Keepers: Two Circles’ Gareth Balch

Leaders Sport Business Podcast

Two Circles co-founder Gareth Balch and his entrepreneurial journey.

Welcome to Founders Keepers, the podcast series about entrepreneurship and business building from the Leaders Sport Business podcast.

Two Circle co-founder Gareth Balch is the featured guest on this episode.

Balch represented Great Britain as an 800 metre runner before moving into the world of sports business, first with Goodform, and then in the commercial strategy team at Manchester City.

In 2011, at the age of 28, Balch founded Two Circles alongside Matt and Claire Rogan.

Conceived as a digital agency focused on helping sports rights holders develop direct relationships with fans, Two Circles’ marketing mandate matched its business plan perfectly, and it very quickly established itself as the data driven agency in sport. It’s gone on to hoover up business across the UK and Europe – and latterly in the US and internationally too – and is a serial winner of the Agency of the Year gong at the Sport Industry Awards.

Since inception, Two Circles has generated annual revenue and profit growth of 54% and 42% per year on average. It was also named as one of the fastest growing companies in The Sunday Times 100 for two years in a row, and its global footprint has expanded to 500 ‘Two Circlers’ across six cities.

Two Circles was acquired first by WPP in 2015; and then by Bruin Sports Capital – which took a majority stake for $42m in December 2019 - and since then has made four significant acquisitions to strengthen its rights and sponsorship sales, and marketing offerings: sports rights-sales agency TRM Partners, ticket strategy and sales company Sports Ink, award-winning sports content agency LiveWire Sport, and the Australian digital transformation company Codeware, in a deal that was announced just days before this interview took place in January this year.

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