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I recently wrote an article about collaboration to help win market share in a downturn economy and one of my Twitter friends John Fair sales and marketing manager of Mondello Park race track mentioned to me that he had been exploring this.

Mondello Park is Ireland’s only permanent International motorsport venue located in County Kildare just 40km from Dublin and celebrated it’s 40th birthday in 2008 growing from 1.28km (0.8 mile) circuit to a 3.5km (2.4 mile) International race track.

Note – you can see my original article here.

I am delighted that John was happy to share his own case study which you can read below. I think it is really inspiring given that we know that the leisure and entertainment industry is one of the sectors really challenged in the current economy. (Though I also have declare I am a closet wannabe rally driver, and used to marshal on the RAC rally’s when at university.)

“Collaboration is a concept I have been warming to over quite awhile and I have always had the mindset for open dialogue when talking to event management companies or what might be construed as competitors over my past five years with Mondello Park.

In fact, quite a lot of excellent business comes my way from these very quarters. A key element to doing business successfully is ensuring your client gets what they want when they want it and that the experience is delivered to the best of your ability. Competition is a good thing in driving reasonable costs and quality of service for the end user and in fact when you scratch the surface you very often find your clients are also clients of your competitor.

After all, your client makes choices and looks for variety when searching for services and product.

Mondello Park has run a successful Motor Racing School experience in various forms since its inception forty years ago. This is a product that is core to the entertainment packages we deliver to the corporate community for team-building and client entertainment solutions. We have recently reached new heights securing a five year sponsorship deal with Mazda Motors Ireland and have installed solid state camera recording equipment into all of our cars allowing our guests to take their experience away recorded to a USB memory stick, see movie clip on  www.mondello.ie/corporate.

Having identified the need to offer our clients a more scalable portfolio with a tiered pricing schedule we introduced additional activities such as Autotester, Reverse Steer, Blindfold driving and a 4×4 driving experiences thus spreading our wings to utilise more of our 110 acre facility and not relying totally on track experiences. This move opened up more calendar time for us, no longer competing internally for track time with testing and race events thereby allowing us to grow our corporate entertainment business. What was lacking, were more activities but we were beginning to exhaust our pool of equipment and resources.

To my mind, this highlighted the need to look outside the business for strategic partners. My first step, bearing in mind the move towards a more off-road oriented product in our new ‘Adventure’ offering, was to enhance that offering.

I approached the Irish Federation of Field Archery which in turn led us to the Leixlip Archers. A partnership began and exposed us to Team Ireland and Olympic Ireland Instructors who now regularly impart real archery skills to our guests in what has been an 18 month relationship and is growing from strength to strength.

Soon after, I approached the Irish Clay Pigeon Shooting Association and a similar partnership developed seeing us partnered with a medal and an award winning International Instructor. Where Archery and Clay shooting would have been seen as competition to us we gladly embraced the idea of offering our clients a one stop solution for entertainment by forming the right partnerships to ensure we delivered professionally and safely these exciting new disciplines.

Another recent development is collaboration with Lisa Byrne in Top Gifts. Top Gifts provide entertainment and activities packages to individuals and corporate clients and could be deemed as a competitor of ours in many ways however I am delighted to say that Lisa and I have the same approach to business and a partnership has just been formed whereby Top Gifts are providing our Adventure course to their clients with the product details and photos positioned on their web site. This is working out very well with many Top Gifts corporate clients having experienced Mondello over the past few months and 2009 bookings well under way.

The Top Gifts story doesn’t stop there, we are now exploring other opportunities with Top Gifts hopefully bringing a third partner into the equation to provided their activity at some of our larger race events and I hope they may well even rent space from us. I am not saying just who and what yet as negotiations are in hand but I can assure you it will be another activity that’s exhilarating!

I am now exploring the idea of a channel partnership platform. Let the collaborations begin…”

If you want to connect with John direct you will find him at Twitter @john_mondello or by email jfair(at) mondellopark.ie.

I highly recommend checking out Mondello Park – perhaps for a late Valentines gift, and early Easter gift, or if my daughters read this, mummy would be happy with a trip around Mondello Park for Mothers Day in a few weeks time!

And if you have a case study about how you are collaborating with business you might have considered as competitors as a strategy for marketing in a recession, be sure to let me know as I’d be delighted to share your story here too.