Mike Buckley: I Don’t Know Which Is Harder, Running A Business Or Sailing!
U.S. SailGP Team CEO, Co-Owner and Strategist Mike Buckley talks business, sailing and management
Published 04/9/2025
U.S. SailGP Team CEO, Co-Owner and Strategist Mike Buckley says sailing has provided the best-possible grounding for his business career, since putting together a group to purchase the team in late 2023.
Speaking on the
Sports Management Podcast
, Mike discussed a wide-ranging selection of topics including how he came to be involved in SailGP, his aspirations growing up and his role in setting and maintaining a healthy team culture.Discussing similarities between being a business owner and an athlete, Mike said: “The reality is when you own your own business, you’re getting punched every single day with a new problem. I think sailing is the same thing, you can’t control mother nature. She will always beat you. The best you can do is tie and if you tie with her you’ve probably won the race.
“For us, when we’re racing, the wind is constantly changing. The other boats you’re racing against are always doing something that’s a bit unpredictable and you’ve got to make real-time decisions at 50-60 mph. In business there’s really no better lesson than what we learn on the water.
“When I come into the office on a Monday morning and your email is full of challenges and you’ve got to solve them - and you’ve got to solve them quickly - sailing is one of the few sports where the crossover with leadership and decision making is directly applicable to the real world.
“I don’t know which is harder, running a business or sailing. I guess it’s a tie!”
For Mike, the ambition on and off the water is always to win, but that means different things in the short and long-term.
“In the next few years we also want to win off the water and that’s something that we think we can do more immediately, inspiring people to chase their dreams, opening doors to new people in our sport and introducing new people to the ocean and mother nature,” he explained.
“There’s millions of people in the world that have never actually even seen the ocean, so that’s something that is not lost on us. We want to be top of the list commercially; we want to have the best partners, the most partners, so those are our goals over the next few years.”
SailGP continues to go from strength-to-strength in Season Five, with the recent KPMG Australian Sail Grand Prix becoming the most-watched event in the league’s history with a total global audience of more than 21 million people. Mike has been impressed by the rapid growth of the competition.
He said: “I think the growth of the league has been well beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Obviously the founders are incredibly ambitious people than have huge goals and they’re dreamers, they’re do-ers and they’re boundary breakers.
“But I think if you asked them five years ago if there’d be 12 teams and valuation soaring through the roof and 19 million viewers on TV, I think they probably would have said, ‘Not yet’ but that’s where we are and that’s due to a lot of great people working really hard for our team.”
Looking to the future, Mike acknowledges that he is coming toward the end of his sailing career but he has far loftier ambitions for the team and SailGP as a whole than could ever be achieved on the water alone.
WATCH: Mike & Taylor's F50 Tour
He explained: “I’ve sort of made peace with the fact that I really never - maybe I did at first - I used to think a lot about trophies but for me now the real trophy isn’t something that sits on your shelf and collects dust. The real trophy is can we inspire a country to get behind what we’re doing and open new doors to sailing?
“I think it goes back to, if you love what you do, then it's not really work.”
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