Bottom Line Up Front: Williams grew revenue by 41.6% during a season where they finished worse than the year before, not by improving the car but by making the transformation visible and credible enough that top talent wanted to join. When a race winner signs with the team in last place, that's a better commercial asset than any marketing campaign.

Williams finished 7th in 2023. Revenue: £127 million. Then in 2024, they finished 9th, two places worse. Revenue jumped to £179.8 million.

The 2024 season was, by their own admission, "significantly hampered by an unusually high number of crashes which restricted scoring opportunities and increased costs." They went backwards on track, spent more fixing broken cars, and still convinced six major brands to join: Komatsu, Mercado Libre, Globant, Keeper Security, Vast Data, and Zoox.

Then in January 2025, Atlassian came in as title partner in what Williams described as "the biggest partnership deal" in their 48-year history. While sitting in 9th place.

Most properties talk about 'premium partnerships' the way politicians talk about 'working families' - it's a phrase that gets thrown around constantly but rarely means anything concrete. But Atlassian actually put money behind the claim, and they did it while Williams was sitting in 9th place with a car that kept ending up in barriers.

James Vowles joined Williams as Team Principal in January 2023 after two decades at Mercedes. The standard playbook is: invest in car development, wait for results, then use those results to attract sponsors. Vowles didn't wait. He started talking about the transformation immediately, with a level of candour most team principals would consider commercially suicidal.

He talks about Williams having "a really open, honest culture" where there's "no bullshit" and where he explicitly backs failure because "when you fail, you learn more than anything else you've done prior to that point, because it hurts."

The team had 700 employees when he arrived. By 2024, they had 1,100—a 57% increase in headcount while burning cash, needing shareholder support, and finishing worse in the championship. Most teams in that position would be cutting costs. Williams was hiring like they were already winning.

In 2024, Carlos Sainz—a race winner with options—signed a multi-year deal with Williams while they sat in 9th place. When asked about the decision, Sainz said: "I like JV because he has a plan and he will commit 100% to it. He trusts his feeling, his plan, his project, and I back him."

That quote is worth more to Williams' commercial operation than any sponsorship deck they could create. It's not coming from Williams trying to sell themselves - it's coming from someone who had better options and chose them anyway. That's external validation you genuinely cannot manufacture.

When Oliver Howard, Vice President of Motorsport Rights Sales at Wasserman, described how the Atlassian partnership came together, he was explicit: "James Vowles was instrumental in making the Atlassian partnership happen. Throughout the negotiation process, both Mike Cannon-Brookes and the wider Atlassian team were genuinely impressed by his leadership and his clear vision for the team's future. They had the option to partner with any team on the grid - but it was Williams' trajectory under James' leadership that helped them stand out."

Notice he didn't say "impressed by their lap times." He said leadership and vision. And trajectory, which means the direction they're moving, not where they currently are.

Ann Perrins, Williams' Chief Human Resources Officer, made the connection explicit when she noted that "the same leadership and principles" that are attracting commercial partners are also "helping us to attract the best talent and build the best team from the inside too."

This is the loop that most properties never close. Vowles sells the vision internally. Top talent joins because the plan is credible. That talent joining becomes external proof the transformation is real. Partners see that proof and invest based on trajectory, not current results. Partnership money funds more investment. More investment attracts more talent. The cycle continues.

It's a commercial flywheel that starts with having someone who can credibly sell the transformation story to people who have other options, and then making sure everyone can see that those people are actually joining.

Now, before we dig into exactly how Vowles translated that internal belief into specific partnership structures, it's time for the news...

Lulu Cheng Meservey, former executive at Substack, broke down how messaging actually works into three components: Message, Medium, and Messenger. Williams' commercial resurgence maps almost perfectly to this framework, and understanding how each piece works is the difference between talking about transformation and actually selling it.

The message is the actual product you're building - the thing itself has to be right before you think about getting on podcasts or chasing media coverage. It should have familiar shape so people recognize what category you're in, but a novel way of describing it that makes it distinctive.

Williams' "product" was the transformation itself, and they got it right before talking about it. The familiar shape: team rebuilding, which everyone in F1 understands. The novel framing: radical transparency about being 9th place while publicly targeting 2026, openly backing failure as a learning mechanism, hiring 400 people while losing money and needing shareholder support.

Most teams would frame rebuilding as "we're improving" or "progress takes time" - safe, vague, forgettable. Williams framed it as "we're 9th, we're investing heavily despite losses, we're not celebrating fifth place finishes because the goal is championships, and here's exactly when we expect this to pay off." Same category, completely different framing.

The product had to be real first. Actual hires with names and backgrounds. Actual facility investments with completion dates. Actual process changes with measurable impacts. You can't message your way around a product that doesn't exist yet. Williams spent 18 months building the actual transformation before Atlassian signed, because partners needed to see the product was real.

The medium is about attaching your message to what people are already thinking about - existing cultural interests and conversations - and showing up in places where they actually consume information.

Williams attached to receptors that already existed in the market. F1's commercial growth and rising partnership values. The narrative of historic teams trying to return to competitiveness. The conversation about whether mid-pack teams can actually transform or if the financial gap is too large. The question of whether leadership changes matter more than budget size.

They showed up where stakeholders actually consume information: F1 media covering races and team decisions, race weekend debriefs where technical choices get explained, industry channels where commercial directors are already paying attention. They went where the specific audience they needed - potential partners evaluating F1 teams - was already looking.

This is why the Carlos Sainz signing mattered so much as medium. It attached to an existing conversation people were already having: "Where will Sainz go and why?" When he chose Williams, that became a receptor for the transformation message because people were already paying attention to that decision.

Here's the part that's genuinely difficult to replicate, and it's probably why most teams can't just copy what Williams did even if they understand the framework.

The messenger is the person with the authority and credibility to deliver this specific message. The only person who makes sense to say this particular thing.

James Vowles was the only person who could credibly say, "We're going to transform Williams from 9th to championship contention," and have partners believe the timeline. His two decades at Mercedes, including the period of complete dominance, gave him the authority to explain what championship-level operations actually require. When he said "we need 400 more people, these specific facility upgrades, and this organisational structure," he'd seen it work at Mercedes.

If Williams had hired a team principal without that track record and they'd said identical things about the transformation plan, would Atlassian have signed? Almost certainly not. The message and the medium would be the same, but the messenger wouldn't have the credibility to make partners believe it.

This is the hardest part to replicate because you can't manufacture messenger credibility. You either have the track record that makes you the right person to deliver this specific message, or you need to build enough early proof that your lack of track record stops mattering. Vowles had the track record. Most team principals don't.

Williams got all three elements aligned at the same time, in the right sequence.

Message first: They built the actual transformation for 18 months. Hired 400 people. Invested in facilities. Changed processes. The product was real before they tried to sell it.

Medium second: They attached that real transformation to conversations already happening in F1 - about team rebuilding, about whether leadership matters, about commercial growth despite mid-pack results. They showed up where stakeholders already consumed information about F1 teams.

Messenger throughout: Vowles was the consistent voice with the credibility to make all of it believable. When he explained the plan, partners could see he knew how to execute it from his time at Mercedes.

This is exactly the kind of framework I work through with properties when they're trying to rebuild commercial trust while results aren't there yet. Most teams come to me with the same problem: they know they need to attract partners, they know the transformation is real internally, but they can't figure out how to make that transformation visible and credible to external partners who are evaluating multiple opportunities.

The issue is almost never the quality of the transformation work itself. It's that leadership hasn't figured out how to communicate it effectively, or they're communicating inconsistently, or the person doing the communicating doesn't have the credibility to make partners believe the timeline. When I'm working with a commercial team on this, we start by auditing all three elements - message clarity, medium consistency, and messenger credibility - because if any one of those three is weak, the entire framework fails.

If this sounds familiar, let's have a conversation about your specific situation.

For Properties and Commercial Teams:

Stop hiding the gap between where you are and where you need to be. Williams didn't pretend they were close to competing for championships. They were completely explicit about the transformation timeline, with Vowles publicly targeting 2026 as when the actual competitive comeback would begin.

When I'm helping properties rebuild their commercial operation during transformation, we start by creating what I call a "transformation map" - specific milestones with tangible proof points that partners can evaluate independently. Williams did this through visible talent hires and facility investments. You need equivalent proof points for your property.

Here's what that looks like tactically: Document every major talent hire and make sure the market knows about them within 48 hours through channels where your potential partners are actually paying attention. Share decision-making frameworks and operational changes so partners can see how the organization actually works. Show specifically how resources are being allocated and why those allocations support the stated strategy.

Your job isn't creating better sponsorship decks or finding new ways to package logo placement. Your job is creating proof that the transformation you're describing is actually happening and is credible enough that talented people with other options are choosing to join. If you can't point to credible individuals betting their careers on what you're building, you don't have a compelling story yet.

For Leadership:

The Guardian noted that Vowles has "an engineer's bent for breaking down questions to ensure they have been comprehensively examined." That precision matters enormously when you're trying to sell transformation to skeptical partners.

Vague statements about "getting better" or "building for the future" don't work. Specific detail about "we've added 400 employees across these specific departments, we've invested this amount in these particular facilities, we've restructured the decision-making process in these ways" actually does work because it gives partners concrete evidence of commitment rather than aspirational statements.

The Message-Medium-Messenger framework only functions properly when all three elements are genuinely aligned. You can't have a transformation message while simultaneously avoiding difficult conversations about the current state. You can't show up inconsistently and expect to build trust over time. You can't be an effective messenger if you lack the credibility that comes from either direct experience or clear evidence of early success.

Need help building that story?
Work with me 1-on-1 or email me “COMMERCIAL”

Williams had significant advantages. Dorilton Capital has funded losses for four years. Vowles arrived with a network built over two decades at Mercedes. And Williams was rebuilding during a period when Formula 1's overall commercial growth lifted every team.

But here's what's replicable: commercial value flows from organisational momentum, not just competitive results. Williams proved you can grow partnerships substantially while going backwards in the championship by selling the transformation credibly enough that partners believe the future trajectory is more valuable than the current position.

This Week:

This Month:

This Quarter:

Most teams spend enormous energy trying to make current results look acceptable. Williams spent that energy making the plan to get out of 9th place credible and visible instead. That's what actually matters to partners.

If you're trying to figure out how to do this for your property specifically - how to audit your message-medium-messenger alignment, how to create proof that partners will actually believe, how to restructure partnership conversations around transformation rather than current results - that's exactly what I work on with commercial teams. We start with an honest assessment of where the gaps are, then build the specific frameworks and proof points that make your transformation credible to partners who have other options.

Most properties know what they need to build. Very few know how to make that building process commercially valuable before the results appear. That's the gap Williams closed, and that's the gap that determines whether transformation attracts partners or just burns cash.