We work in the space between industries. Partnership development, market expansion, and the creative work that makes an unlikely fit look obvious.
About us
Café Escalon brings companies, industries, and communities together, often in places they wouldn’t otherwise meet.
Rooted in motorsport and built for business beyond it, we create unlikely connections around shared opportunity. Our work is relationship-first, grounded in real environments, and built to create value for everyone involved.
In practice that means two things. We represent a small number of teams, venues and events, and we go and find them partners. And we work with companies looking for an audience they cannot reach through their own category. Being on both sides is why the matches tend to hold.
We are not a consultancy that hands you a deck and wishes you luck. We make the introductions ourselves, build what the programme needs, and turn up at every event to run it. Strategy without execution is just a document.
Founded and led by Brian Goodhue. Based in Oakland, California.
The idea
Outside the box matchmaking, built for impact.
Non-endemic means partnering outside your own industry category. Most companies never look there. We work almost nowhere else.
Industries we have worked across
Two programs we built
Six partner brands in one activation and not one of them sells car parts. A national tourism board, a dive centre, two dive equipment brands, a beverage company, and a smart-glasses manufacturer, held together by a driver who is also a certified diver.
The prize is a dive trip to Grenada, drawn live at the final round. Six brands, one idea, and an audience that took part rather than scrolled past. That is what a story-forward, non-endemic program looks like when it is built properly.
The collision repair industry, like many in the USA, is facing a skilled labor shortage. Drift's unique setting and hands-on fan community presented an exciting opportunity to directly engage the next generation workforce in a way job fairs and efforts in other motorsports didn't access.
Across all four event weekends of the 2025 season we created the Drift Lounge for I-CAR educators, students, and alumni. It became a direct engagement space where technicians in training and career changers could talk to folks already in the industry, in a setting where curiosity was already there. Educators got conversations with the demographic they struggle to reach. No discount code, no giveaway, no product to move.
The partnership existed because the audience and the need genuinely lined up. Which is the whole test.
Partner brands
Brands we have built partnerships with. Most had no presence in motorsport before we started.
Outside the automotive world 11 brands
Pure Grenada
Aquanauts Grenada
SSI
Head Watersports
Day Trip
Wild Bill’s
TOZO
CN-Seamless
HydroSoul
Wet Sounds
New Creation Soda Works
Automotive and motorsport 4 brands
Who we represent · 2026 – 2027
Partnerships · Outreach · Brand strategy
Three Formula Drift teams and a West Coast track day series, represented through the 2026 and 2027 seasons. Each has an audience that turns up, a story worth attaching to, and space still open for the right partner. If you have been looking for a way in, it starts here.
Professional motorsport
Mspek Performance
Full-season partnership management and the home of the Race to Reef campaign.
Professional motorsport
Stuart Fam Drifting
Partnership development and season-long program delivery.
Race team
Nasty Habit Motorsports
Partnership development and executed agreements across the program.
Event series
OnGrid Track
Partner development for a Pacific Coast track day series.
Representation current for the 2026 – 2027 seasons
In focus
Business development
Opening eyes to new and creative opportunities.Agency & consultancy
Representation, strategy, and the work that follows.Organization-forward representation
Sponsorship advice is everywhere. Templates, courses, frameworks, an endless feed of accounts explaining how to write a better deck. Very little of it puts anyone beside you at the event.
We are a representation agency. We speak motorsport natively, we work rooms your organization would not otherwise get into, and we hold the relationship from the first introduction through the season that follows. Race teams, track series, and organizations well outside either.
Some of what we do for the organizations we represent is below. Full service retention is reserved for the fits where it genuinely makes sense, and we will say which one you are looking at before anyone signs anything.
01 · Find
We go looking outside your obvious partner profile for companies with a real reason to be involved with you. Most of them have never considered motorsport. That is the point, and it is why the conversation is not a bidding war against three other teams.
02 · Value
We help you work out what you are genuinely capable of offering and value it honestly. We develop the activation and hospitality ecosystem around your organization’s capabilities, and we manage the execution ourselves. That allows our clients to focus on their race, their event management, or whatever else needs them, while the deliverables are met.
03 · Keep
Signing a partner is the easy part. We host the technology behind conversion tracking, so adjustments happen collaboratively between events and a partner gets a report rather than a guess. That is what gets them back next season.
04 · Expand
We get you onto trade show floors you could not justify on your own, and we work the room once you are there. Canvassing, outreach, comms and logistics included.
Services offered to clients
Design and print produced in house
Networking on your behalf
Twelve industries. More than half a million people through the doors. Only two were motorsport. Across the other ten, we were there building relationships and opening new markets for the organizations we represent.
Common questions
Café Escalon identifies business opportunities between entities, develops a shared voice for success between them, and produces the experience that supports that voice.
Endemic partners already belong to a category. In motorsport that means tyres, oil, suspension and parts. Non-endemic partners come from outside it: a tourism board, a dive brand, a beverage company. The audience is the reason they are there, not the product category, which usually means a bigger idea and less direct competition.
Both, and each side makes the other work better. We represent a small number of teams, venues and event series, and we work with the companies looking for a way in. Being on both sides is why the matches we propose tend to hold.
It is where most of our clients are, and it is usually how we get a company in front of a new audience. The way we work is not limited to it. The same applies to venues, event series, and founders looking to reach people outside their own category.
Communication first, metrics close behind. Deliverables are agreed in plain language before anything is signed, then reported against with real numbers after each event. Neither works alone: a report nobody discusses is noise, and a conversation with nothing behind it is a guess.
It depends on the engagement, and we will tell you before you commit to anything. Partnership work is largely performance based, from first connection through to executed contract, and scales with the value of what gets signed, so you are not carrying a retainer while we go looking.
The usual objection to that model is that nobody has skin in the game. Ours is that we are at every event running the programme we sold you. If it does not work, we are standing in it. Trade show representation runs on a shared cost basis, which is how clients get onto floors they could not justify alone. Scoped consults are quoted up front.
It depends on the scope. An organization taking full agency representation across a season and the trade show circuit has us on hand around the clock, with updates as things move. A scaled back consult is exactly that, and we will tell you which one you actually need before you commit to either.
Interested in finding your fit? Company, team, venue or founder. Tell us who you are trying to reach and we will tell you honestly whether this is the right move.
Contact usor write to hi [at] cafeescalon [dot] com
Last updated 19 August 2026
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