Antonio Bolaños Lopez
ABOUT ME

Antonio Bolaños has been Chief Financial Office and Managing Director at The Volvo Ocean Race during the last 9 years, which is a major international sport event based in Spain. He started his career in PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was 8 years an Auditor within TICE sector (Technology, Information, Communications and Entertainment). After that, he accumulated further experience in other financial positions in Spain and The United States. Up to the time when he arrived at The Volvo Ocean Race, where he has been fully involved in the last three editions (three-year cycles); he was passionate about sport events and had a strong previous background on financial control, planning and strategy, so he could not have found a better project merging all of them.

Although if there is a professional passion that Antonio has, that is Training. During his time in PricewaterhouseCoopers he was combining his tasks in auditing and consulting projects with his role initially as Trainer and later as Responsible of Training for New Auditors -in an induction programme called Go Audit-.

One of the basic principles that Antonio is declaring and strongly supporting is that professional experience is key on the training job; one of his slogans is that: “we have trainers and not subjects to learn from”. Due to that reason, after 20 years of corporate experience, his goal is now to dedicate extensive time to training in order for it to become a key pillar of his future, both on the academic and corporate learning fields.

Everything started at CEU San Pablo (1992-1997) completing a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics. During that period Antonio received an Award (1994) from ESIC on the research project “Ethics, the master key for the good Marketing”. Antonio continued his education with a Master in Auditing (Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1997-1998) and an Executive Master e-Business (Instituto de Empresa, 2001-2002).

Antonio has just finalised a great project (the third Volvo Ocean Race!). After a very successful edition of the race and finishing a process with Volvo to sell the race to new owners, the Antonio’s dream is to be able to share and spread the cumulative knowledge during these years, participating in training programmes. In addition to the general career background, managing an international sport event like The Volvo Ocean Race (defined by close people as “beautifully complex”) is a great source of job experiences in different areas which are so applicable to the corporate world, both on marketing and leadership, for example:
Building the brand image using sport events.
This event has been a marketing tool for many companies and also has generated high economic and media impact to promote tourism in cities.
How to manage a crisis: operations and communications.
In this type of events the level of risk is high and you have to go through difficult situations; preparing and managing them is key in all companies.

And so many others: Sponsorship, Events, Planning, Media, Digital Transformation, Finance, Operations, Marketing, Strategy, Protocol, … How many common links and attractive practical areas could we find in an sport event that are fully applicable to businesses?

Antonio has continuously participated and collaborated during the last years in workshops, conferences, speeches, forums, congresses and seminars and he is nowadays an MBA and University professor in Leadership and Event Organisation.

Email:
[email protected]
Linkedin:
www.linkedin.com/in/antoniobolaños