In 2008, Tony Gardea had an agency to grow and a reason to hesitate. Next Level Sports Management represented motorcycle racers and handled publicity accounts. More work was conceivable. More hours in the day were proving less accommodating. Taking on another rider would mean taking responsibility for another person’s career, with all the attention that required.
It is an unusually useful place to begin a founder’s story: at the point where opportunity becomes a question of capacity. A client list makes expansion look pleasantly administrative. Add a name, extend the page. The actual work has to fit somewhere, and the consequences land on people who expect you to be available.
Gardea’s answer was to think carefully about what he could do for a rider. He described different approaches for different personalities. His rule was plain: “You have to take different approaches with every guy.” That observation gives his career a human scale. Before the agency can communicate a story, someone has to understand the person in it.
A baseball beginning, a different kind of field
Gardea came to motorsports after a background in conventional ball sports. He had attended Chapman University in Orange, California, on a baseball scholarship and studied communications. The combination makes sense in retrospect: an interest in competition alongside an education concerned with how people convey information. At the time, it was the beginning of a working life.
In 1991, he joined Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group, the stadium off-road racing organizer. Racing became the setting for his public relations career. His work would extend across stadium off-road events, Supercross, motocross and personal watercraft. For someone whose earlier sporting frame of reference involved bats and balls, there was plenty of new vocabulary.
His company biography includes a modest technological confession. He once expected the fax machine to remain indispensable. The detail is endearing because it is so ordinary. Every working generation has a piece of equipment it mistakes for permanent furniture. Communications professionals simply have to make those predictions in an industry that keeps replacing the furniture.
An eighteen-year-old with a wider audience
Next Level Sports Management began in 2004. An early announcement made its ambitions concrete: the agency would represent James Stewart, then eighteen. The assignment concerned what a gifted motorcycle racer might do with the attention his racing attracted. Gardea saw the possibility of connections reaching beyond the sport’s established commercial circle.
That distinction matters. Winning attracts attention; turning attention into a suitable relationship requires another kind of work. The announcement described Stewart’s appeal to people beyond dedicated motocross followers. The commercial opportunity was tied to a recognizable person and an audience that could grow around him.
Gardea arrived with experience in Kawasaki motocross marketing and publicity, including work associated with its Chevy Trucks relationship. Stewart, meanwhile, expressed confidence in his knowledge of business outside the sport. The pairing put a specific proposition on the table: sporting expertise could help an athlete navigate a larger commercial world.
It also gave the new agency a demanding starting point. Representation is a promise made in the future tense. The introductions, negotiations and decisions still have to happen after the announcement has done its job. A press release is mercifully short. A career has considerably more moving parts.
Seventeen races and a wider brief
In November 2005, Clear Channel Entertainment’s Motor Sports division retained Next Level to assist with public relations and media coordination for the 2005-2006 Amp’d Supercross series. Gardea would work with media relations director Denny Hartwig across a seventeen-race schedule. The task was to help the competition reach more outlets and more audiences.
The appointment drew on several parts of his experience. He had worked in event publicity at Mickey Thompson Entertainment Group and handled Kawasaki’s professional motocross PR, including publicity involving Ricky Carmichael and Stewart. He understood the event and the competitors whose stories gave it human interest.
A racing series creates an editorial challenge that repeats without remaining identical. The calendar supplies the next venue. The competition supplies a different set of circumstances. Familiarity helps a publicist understand what has changed and why someone beyond the paddock might care.
The seventeen-race brief also shows the range taking shape around Gardea. An athlete needs an advocate. A promoter needs attention for an event. A manufacturer has its own commercial objectives. Working across those assignments means understanding where their interests meet, and where each conversation needs its own vocabulary.
One series-wide PR and media coordination brief, working alongside Clear Channel’s media relations team.
A fan wanted a day. Someone had to help make it happen.
One small episode captures a different side of those relationships. In Southwick, Massachusetts, a fan named Matt Loncrini wanted his town to recognize Ricky Carmichael. He had heard about honors being presented elsewhere and wanted something special when the racer came to Southwick.
Loncrini worked with Gardea, AMA Pro Racing, Team Suzuki, the people at Motocross 338 and local officials. The town’s Board of Selectmen issued a proclamation declaring Ricky Carmichael Day. The idea belonged to a fan. Bringing it into being involved a collection of people who could connect enthusiasm with the necessary arrangements.
There is a pleasing lack of abstraction here. No audience segment has to be invented. The audience is a person who loves racing enough to pursue a civic proclamation. The result gives the community a way to say something it already feels.
For a profile of Gardea, the anecdote earns its place because it shows the work at a different scale. His name appears among the collaborators behind someone else’s public moment. The machinery of sports publicity occasionally produces actual municipal paperwork. Even celebration has an administrative department.
The relationship that crossed the showroom
In October 2015, Kawasaki expanded Next Level’s responsibilities to cover all product and racing public relations. The assignment included motorcycles, side-by-sides, ATVs and personal watercraft. Work associated with the race program had grown into a brief stretching across the manufacturer’s product range.
Kawasaki pointed to the agency’s experience promoting its Monster Energy racing program, its industry knowledge and its contacts. Gardea described a relationship built over a decade. The appointment brought a broader set of responsibilities to people who already knew one another’s work.
“Kawasaki is like family to us.”
Tony Gardea, October 2015
The phrase is affectionate, but the appointment itself supplies the concrete detail. Next Level would work alongside Kawasaki staff on communications planning, events and outreach to both specialist and national media. The familiar relationship had acquired a larger practical purpose.
For Gardea’s business, this is a consequential kind of growth. An existing client has more to explain, and asks the agency to help explain it. Racing provides part of the experience. The wider product line requires that experience to travel. A longstanding relationship becomes a platform for another assignment, with the obligation to prove useful all over again.
The same question, on the water
Also in 2015, the World Wake Association enlisted Next Level for public relations and marketing. The remit covered the organization and series including the Wakeboard World Series, Nautique Wake Series and Malibu Evolution Pro Series. The agency’s work would include publicity, advertising, creative marketing and social media.
WWA president Shannon Starling described the appeal of an agency that understood action sports and could work with media outside the industry. Gardea, in turn, discussed helping the association grow its presence with both specialist and wider audiences. The central challenge sounded familiar even though the competitive setting had changed.
That combination is useful to watch. A specialist agency earns its place through knowledge of a particular world. Its client may then ask it to make that world legible to people arriving for the first time. The language has to carry enough detail for enthusiasts while leaving room for a newcomer.
A business with room for other people’s skills
Next Level’s published team biographies show how an agency acquires a wider range of experience. Its staff histories include racing, journalism, television, radio and communications work. Former racers and people with media backgrounds bring different ways of recognizing what matters in an assignment. The founder’s personal experience becomes one part of a larger working group.
The company’s Pirelli automotive design work makes that broader business visible. Its portfolio describes support for event backdrops, signage, print advertisements, digital campaigns and newsletter templates. The agency worked as an extension of an existing design team, providing additional production capacity across several formats.
A backdrop and a press release perform different jobs. Both have to reach the right people in a form they can use. The published design assignment shows how far the service can extend from its original racing publicity setting without requiring every task to sit on the founder’s own desk.
Today, Next Level presents services spanning media relations, social media, creative production, media buying, analytics and consulting. Gardea remains identified as its owner and CEO. The range is broader than the early rider-representation business. The question raised by his early account still fits: who can give this work the attention it deserves? An agency grows through the promises it makes. It has to grow enough room to keep them.