Sponsorship in northamerican rally is such a funny topic to me. I wonder how we got so fixsated on sponsorship in the rally comunity?
Let us take a fairly sucessful, from the spinsorship angle, club rally team and examen it a bit.
Subie Gal racing has managed to raise a fair bit of money and or parts from her efforts in club/pro rally. I do not belive she has gotten to the point of braking even but non the less it is a good example program. What is important here to learn is that it is not having the car drive in front of a few hundred people in the woods that have broght value to the sponsors, it is Jamie Subie Gal Thomas' endless and long hard efforts at promoting her sponsors to local press, parades and so forth that have broght vaule to her sponsors.
Effort sounds a lot like work to me. If I take my weekend time to go to a parade, or meet with a reporter, or produce press releases I am working and I need to vaule that against other things I can do with my time in fact I need to look at how much am I getting paid for that time vs other things I can do to earn money.
So if a team raises $5,000 in cash or directly needed parts how much time did they put into getting, maintainting, and reporting for the sponsor? What eles could I do to get $5,000? Would it be more or less effort? I could paint two houses to earn $5,000. I could paint the two houses in one month on the side while keeping my real job. I wonder witch works out to more $'s per hour for my time?
Well I know the answer in my case, I earn a lot more per hour doing work than I am likely to earn trying to get a sponser, thus I have no sponsors, everyone will need to do the math for them selves but everyone should remember that sonsorship is work/time and that work/time needs to be valued against other things you can do with that workeffort and time.
I am certanly not envious of those with sponsorship, they have worked for that money and in most cases got paid very little per hour for their time.
Derek Bottles