New Ironman CEO brings passion and business chops at a turbulent time for the company

Today Ironman Group announced that Scott DeRue would be taking over as CEO. The former president of luxury fitness brand Equinox brings the same kind of passion for endurance sports that the man he is replacing, Andrew Messick, displayed during his 12-year stint as the head of the company. Like Messick, DeRue arrives with lots of business experience, but offers the “ability to drive deeper into a bunch of areas that really matter,” Messick says.

Ironman Group announces new CEO

“I’ve dedicated the last two decades of my career to creating life-changing experiences … that help people realize their potential,” DeRue said in an interview earlier today. “I can think of no organization that is a better fit for my commitment and passion in life.”

While DeRue hasn’t done an Ironman, or a triathlon for that matter, the guy is no slouch when it comes to endurance activities. But for the fact that you haven’t been able to get a tourist visa to Papua, New Guinea since 2028, he’d have climbed all of the world’s “seven summits” – the highest mountains on each continent. He’s done six of the seven, including Everest, and last summer he completed the 250 km Gobi March Ultramarathon.

And he’s obviously excited about the new position – he’s already moved to the Ironman head office in Tampa.

Before he became CEO, Messick had completed a number of Ironman races. “I was an age group athlete years and years and years before I got this job, so I come by my passion for the sport honestly,” Messick told me in an interview for a feature we did in our November, 2023 issue of Triathlon Magazine (see below). A similar awareness of the endurance community was a critical part of the search for a new CEO.

Will Ironman CEO Andrew Messick be remembered for more than Nice and Kona? He should be

New perspective … but understands the stakes

It took about a year for Ironman to find Messick’s replacement and everything that we’d heard behind the scenes was that the company wanted someone who wasn’t part of the organization to take over. Messick was part of the team looking to find his replacement, and recognized that DeRue offered the best of both worlds – the understanding of just how passionate Ironman’s customers (be they triathletes, mountain or marathon runners or off-road cyclists taking on Cape Epic) are, but also having the skill set to help the company continue to grow, presumably with some different ideas and perspectives.

“He understands how important the races and the lifestyle are to our people,” Messick said. “(He) know(s) how much the races matter, the journey of every athlete, how important it is to them … Scott intuitively got that. That was important to me. You need somebody who understands the stakes.”

“While I don’t know all the details, I am an expert in knowing how much it matters,” DeRue said.

Athlete Experience/ Customer Service

When he became the president of Equinox, the company was in the midst of trying to rebuild itself after the COVID pandemic. DeRue and his team decided early on that it would require that members would have to be vaccinated.

“We took a bold leadership stance,” he said. “What we thought was right as a health and safety perspective.”

He remains proud of the “courage that our team showed in taking a principled stand for our community.”

That experience will be important as he takes the reins of a company that hit even harder by the COVID pandemic. For DeRue, the priorities for his new position include “investing and engaging in the community” and working to improve the athlete experience at Ironman Group events.

“We exist to serve our athletes,” DeRue said. “If we put athletes first, everything else takes car of itself.”

Everest vs Ironman … that’ll be the easy part

DeRue says it won’t be long before we see him out on an Ironman course, suggesting to the group of journalists on today’s call that we could do a story on which might be tougher – climbing Everest or finishing an Ironman. He’s determined to “engage and connect with our community,” and participating in events is certainly a great way to do that. That engagement is something he wants to do before he “presumes a path forward … I know that the answer to that is in our community.”

In selecting DeRue, Ironman has shown why it’s the big corporate player in our sport. Ever since it was sold to Providence Equity Partners in 2008, Ironman has very much been a corporation focussed on providing profits for its backers. As Messick pointed out in our profile last year, there’s hardly any reason to apologize for that fact. As other race series have come and gone over the years, Ironman, which in many ways got triathlon rolling in the first place, has thrived and has become the “largest operator of mass participation sports in the world.”

Investment companies like Advance and Orkila Capital (the latest owners of Ironman), look for people like Messick and DeRue to lead their businesses. Before he took the Ironman position, Messick served as the President of AEG Sports and was involved in the company’s sports properties including the Amgen Tour of California, Bay to Breakers foot race, Euroleague Basketball, and AEG China. Before that he was the Senior Vice President, International for the National Basketball Association (NBA).

DeRue arrives with a slew of business experience on top of his time at Equinox, including time as an analyst for Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and a long career at the University of Michigan including five years as the Dean of the Stephan M. Ross School of Business, and served on numerous boards, including Equinox and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

All of which shows that DeRue brings the kind of background that a company like Ironman would look for. While there may be lots of others with similar business acumen, not nearly as many have his passion for endurance sport. On paper, and when you talk to him, DeRue appears to be very much the kind of leader Ironman needs right now.

That’s at the end of Day 1. As he looks to navigate through the tricky times of continuing to build back participation after the pandemic, declining full-distance triathlon numbers, frustration by many in the community that the world championship has been split to two venues, a pro series with lots of money that’s trying to get into the age-group race scene (remember, the PTO announces its Tour tomorrow) and grumblings in the UTMB community as it grows its series, DeRue is facing some serious challenges.

He appears to be ready to take those on.

“My life has been deeply enriched by being part of the global endurance community and I feel incredibly fortunate to lead The Ironman Group in its mission to inspire people to be the best version of themselves through testing the limits of their physical and mental strength,” he said.