Auto racing fans are passionate about the sport, and they tend to be a wealthier demographic favored by One Capital. So when magazine articles profiling CJ Wilson Racing and its cars appear in automotive and racing trade publications, or when pictures of the number 33 racing car plastered with the One Capital Management name flash across social media, it’s free marketing for the company. 

Plus, One Capital’s involvement in auto racing could potentially expand its existing sports clientele that’s focused largely on the National Hockey League and golf. 

Barrett says One Capital didn’t go into its sponsorship as a one-year deal. “Our thought was this is a team we want to be involved with long term—it’s really exhilarating, and this is coming from a guy with no racing background whatsoever.”

Pink Wheels

RiverPoint Capital Management in Cincinnati last year began sponsoring a sporting event involving different sorts of wheels—the Women’s Racing Project, which started in 2015 as the first Cincinnati-based women-only, USA Cycling-recognized cycling team and has since expanded to include women from other parts of the Midwest. 

Valerie Newell, RiverPoint’s chairman and managing director, says her firm likes its sponsorship of this team for two reasons. First, she notes, bicycle racing is a male-dominated sport, and her firm, where 40% of the wealth advisors are women, is also competing in what’s traditionally been a man’s world. 

“We decided we want to support women in our same situation in that they’re competing in a male-dominated situation—for them sports, for us the investment advisory business. We felt a kinship to them and wanted to support them,” Newell says.

Second, Newell says RiverPoint likes cycling from a demographic perspective in that it tends to attract higher-net-worth people. “It’s an audience we like to get in front of,” she notes. “Also, it’s a nice demographic from the standpoint of younger professionals such as millennials—as well as baby boomers. We like to get exposure to ambitious, highly driven millennials who are on their way to becoming successful people in our community.” 

Newell says RiverPoint’s financial contribution to the team is less than $5,000 a year for its one-year-at-a-time sponsorship. She adds that while she’s excited about the sponsorship, it’s hard to quantify how exactly her firm—which has roughly $2.1 billion in AUM—has benefited from the exposure.

“It’s rare when you participate in something like this that you can say ‘this involvement led to this exact client,’” she explains. “But the way we approach this isn’t ‘we’re going to get a client from this.’ We look at it as this feels good for us as a firm to be supporting something like this. It speaks to our culture of competition and our culture of supporting females in a male-dominated business, and giving back to the community is important to us as a firm.” 

Small-Scale Success

Rob Siegmann’s initial foray into sponsoring an event was, in his words, a big disappointment. 

Siegmann, a principal and chief operating officer at Total Wealth Planning in Cincinnati, a firm with about $360 million in AUM, says his company has a great partnership relationship with a community foundation located in one of Cincinnati’s affluent suburbs, which helps the firm meet its clients’ philanthropic needs by setting up vehicles such as scholarship funds and donor-advised funds.

The foundation helps donors and groups organize community events, including an annual 5K run. Total Wealth Planning this year paid $5,000 to be a headline sponsor of that run, but that fact seemed to be lost on the event’s organizers (who weren’t the foundation staff). “We hoped to get some publicity and name recognition for our $5,000 investment, and we haven’t seen anything,” Siegmann says. “They sent around social media and e-mail blasts about the event, but there was no mention at all that we were a headline sponsor.”

Siegmann realizes there’s always the unmeasurable impressions and name recognition that might pan out down the road, but that doesn’t ease his consternation about wasted money and wasted opportunity. “If I wasn’t the one writing the check, I wouldn’t have any idea that we were involved,” he says.

“Before you sponsor some event, make sure there’s a good, dedicated management team behind the event who knows what they’re doing and knows how to get good use of value for your sponsorship,” Siegmann advises.

On a happier note, his firm in May found more success sponsoring a low-key, yet important event—a shredding day held on a Friday at his company’s parking lot.

“We organized the event and paid for the shred truck and a guy serving shredded barbecue,” Siegmann says, adding that Total Wealth Planning reached out to the community newspaper and via newsletters and got good publicity for it. 

“This is our first year and had just under a hundred people come and recycle more than 10,000 pounds,” he says. “Maybe 10% to 15% of the people who came were clients. All in, it was about $1,500 [to sponsor]. When talking about getting bang for the buck, this was something we could control that was providing a valuable service for the community and it got us more publicity than a $5,000 check that we wrote.”

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