You’re looking for a new challenge: how about jumping into an ice pool, crawling through electrified wires, and dragging yourself up a steep incline in a muddy field?

Not tempted? Tough Mudder – an extreme assault course – might not be for everyone, but it has pulled in 2.5 million participants since launching in New York in 2010. In 2015, it made $100m (£79m) in global revenue. Those taking part can choose to raise money for charity, or simply get involved for personal achievement.

The business has evolved into a lesson in savvy branding. Co-founder Will Dean, alongside his partner Guy Livingstone, has struck up sponsor partnerships with a number of companies such as Merrell, Jeep, Volvic and Virgin Active as well as Help for Heroes (the official UK charity partner).

The brand has also secured two US television series. The first of these is with CBS sports and follows a select few taking part in Tough Mudder’s most extreme event: The World’s Toughest Mudder. Dean says: “CBS has been approaching me for about six years. When they [initially] got in touch we weren’t sophisticated enough.” But last year Tough Mudder and the network settled on an idea.

Taking place annually in Nevada, the Toughest Mudder event runs for 24-hours. Participants do as many laps as possible to vie for a $100,000 prize. The winners cover more than 100 miles of mud and obstacles, although they can choose to take rest breaks. “You get these crazy characters who appear to only sleep for an hour or two,” says Dean.

In the UK, the three-part series aired on Sky Sports in January. Sky and Tough Mudder are working on another series that will focus on participants in UK races.

Meanwhile, a different series was made with the US-based CW channel, which is due to air later in 2017 on Sky Sports Mix. This consists of five shorts followed by a one-hour special and focuses on the stories of participants in the usual Tough Mudder events. People featured in this include a female Iraq war veteran who has post-traumatic stress disorder and a man living with multiple sclerosis.

All of these shows play on Tough Mudder’s camaraderie. Dean claims 10,000 people have been tattooed with the Tough Mudder logo. “It’s a tribe, as a [business] we think about tribal values and what it means to be a tribe.”

Dean dreamt up Tough Mudder while completing an MBA at Harvard Business School and launched it a year afterwards. In his 20s, he started taking part in marathons. He found that when he told someone he’d ran one, the first question was always: what was your time? “Then they’d always reply with something like ‘Oh, my brother in law did it 10 minutes quicker’,” he says. “You’d feel like saying ‘I know I didn’t win’.” This piqued his interest in starting a physical event that wasn’t all about speed.

The Iron Man brand, which puts on a range of triathlons and runs, offered Dean a proven business model. “I didn’t even know Iron Man was a company, it kind of seems dumb looking back, but I thought maybe it was a not-for-profit or just enthusiasts putting things on. Then to find out it was owned by a private equity group I thought ‘Oh wow’.

“I started thinking ‘I wonder if I could take the Iron Man model and apply it to something different’.”

Hitting on an idea he could get behind Dean set to work testing it out. “When we first started it was pretty amateur. Finding a venue was hard enough. I had this beat up 15-year-old car and I’d drive around fields in New York [looking for a venue]. I eventually found this ski hill – it was literally one lift on the side of a hill – in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“Back then it was just Guy and I. The night before the event we had headlamps on and were banging signs into the ground. With hindsight, we were so disorganised.”

Building the brand hasn’t been straightforward, or without controversies. The earliest of these saw Dean accused of stealing the idea by the founder of another assault course brand called Tough Guy, which Dean reviewed as part of his MBA. Dean has always denied this. However, the dispute was settled out of court in 2011 with money paid to Billy Wilson, founder of Tough Guy.

Dean says: “When you start a business, it genuinely feels like the world is against you, like people are out to get you.”

But now the business, which is completely self-funded, is a sophisticated machine running events across the world including the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. There is a team of four engineers in New York that design Tough Mudder obstacles. The business then works with design company IDEO to test them. Dean says: “They do anthropological design, so they see how people interact with things, how they use space.”

Tough Mudder aims to make each obstacle physically and mentally challenging and to require an element of teamwork. It has warehouses in Southampton in the UK and the US Midwest. “For a big event we have four trucks and trailers, they come in and it’s basically a travelling circus,” says Dean.

Taking the brand across borders has required minor tweaks, says Dean, such as the music played and food served. However, he does note a difference in customer behaviour. “Germans buy their tickets a year in advance. They then ask lots of customer service questions, six times more than the Australians ... Australians sign up really late. Americans buy everything [in terms of kit] for Tough Mudder. They’ll spend like $1,000. Whereas the English spend like £20 and they’ll turn up in their old PE kit.”

Since 2010, the Tough Mudder community has raised more than $12m (£9.5m) for charities, including more than £2.5m for Help For Heroes. Dean, who lives in the US, was awarded an MBE for services to charitable giving through sport in the New Year’s honours list. Was this his proudest moment? “It’s nice to get recognised in the honours,” he says. “My parents were very happy to go to Buckingham Palace.” But, he adds, what gives him a real boost are the stories of Tough Mudder “heroes” who’ve faced adversity and can gain a sense of achievement from taking part.

One example he gives is of a group of fathers of the children who were killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut in 2012. He saw one of the fathers speak about taking part. “By no means am I suggesting that they did a Tough Mudder and everything was fine, clearly things will never be fine again; but we offer something that people can focus on, can train for, they can some gain confidence knowing that they’ve done that.”

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