The 157 Things I Learned In SaaS, Sports, Tech & Live Events in 2023
What we learned in a year where we survived a natural disaster on Maui, went with two partners to the Super Bowl and World Series, saw loved ones get hitched and much more
What A Year.
We traveled to Arizona for an all-time Super Bowl
Saw teammates and good friends married in Mexico
Watched our son win a Bronze medal in the Junior Nationals as a major underdog
Found ourselves in the heart of tragedy in one of the worst fires in our nation's history
Navigated a challenging year in SaaS with flying colors
And completed year 16 of this TicketManager journey.
The purpose of the Three Things was force me to record the journey for my kids by doing it in public. The support and interaction have exceeded my admittedly low expectations.
So, here they are: The 157 things I learned in 2023:
"You want it one way. But it's the other way" - Marlo Stanfield's chilling scene with a convenience store security guard in HBO's hit "The Wire" is unraveling, analogously, in the business world.
The game has changed out there for everyone and some are not handling it all so well. It doesn't matter if a mortgage could be had at 3% in 2021- if the trigger wasn't pulled, we're paying more than double that now. It doesn't matter you had five job offers from WFH a year ago and can't find anything comparable now. And it doesn't matter that house we passed on has gone up 50%. We all want it one way. Sometimes, life tells us it's the "other way," and making demands against that reality could get someone "buried" in a vacant building. We can change our position, we just have to be smart about when/how. Read the room and strategize from there.
Find your remora fish - and let them do what they do. A remora fish follows sharks around. They eat the scraps, and, importantly for the shark, they eat what the shark doesn't/shouldn't eat. Your business is the shark. If successful, you'll have imitators following you around, trying to eat what you're killing. That's ok. Let them and use them to your advantage. Focus on building at all times.
"Is it wrong when I say in an interview that money is what drives me? I didn't have it growing up and it motivates me now." Some honesty from a lifelong salesperson I sat next to on the plane home from vacation last week. No. It's not wrong at all. In fact, we usually hire people who are so honest in their answers. If we can know exactly what a person's motivation is, it makes it easier for us to keep them engaged, fulfilled, and happy. As we've shared here in the past, people do things for one of five reasons: Money, Power, Sex, Fame, or Love. Pretty much everything can be boiled down those. Too often, people want to hide that money matters to them. But Jason Lemkin correctly points out: "You want your top rep to be coin operated (and drive an expensive car)." Ain't nothing wrong with wanting to get paid and pursuing that industry if that's for you.
Jason Lemkin's advice on the top 10 things to do in your start-up in the first quarter needs no more build-up. Sage advice. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jasonmlemkin_2023-will-be-different-once-again-the-activity-7015388363851517953-7b1A?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
The CFP National Championship ticket market cratered this week. Always does when Cinderella crashes the party. Why? Cinderella, by definition, doesn't have the resources and history to compete with the blue bloods (the sisters). She's great for storytelling but bad for business. Sorry TCU. Pretty much all involved on the business side of sports, from the broadcasters to the CFP to the city of LA itself, was pulling for Michigan. Now go put on that glass slipper and make for some good TV!
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The Labor Market is always tight for superstars with experience. But markets like this one are terrific for entry-level future stars. In boom times, like the past ten years, hiring stars is expensive and competitive as everyone has money sloshing around, and they need to make a big splash for attention. It gets expensive to pull in top performers. In recessive times, companies will do anything to keep their top performers. Also expensive. But there is one hole: In times like these, many companies will pull back on entry-level hires. Future stars are more available than ever, and you can build your business on them. The hires we made in the post-2008 meltdown have become the bedrock of our business. It's hard to swim against the current - but from our experience, it is very worth it.
"Great people follow great leaders." Maybe. But not right away. There's an ongoing debate on SaaS LinkedIn that a new VP of Sales needs to hire a number of former reps who will follow them right away (as in within 90 days). Not true. A really great leader will bring people into an environment they love, can thrive in, and will grow in - regardless of whether the manager stays or not. If they do their job right and honestly care about their team and their company, the team shouldn't follow them right away. So many beat the drum that there need to be insta-hires from the VPS network. It's pretty simple to me: If someone would leave a company and then raid the talent, they don't have the ethical makeup needed to build a longstanding and fulfilled team. Nick Saban agrees when discussing this trend with Bill Belichick in their HBO special. If a VPS built a great team at their last company, they can do it again - if they are the right hire - without pillaging their last employer.
Sponsorship quotas, like all quotas, go up…not down. For years, we've seen new categories with wild spenders in crypto, gaming, NFTs, and the like, feeding growth not only in the team's bottom line but also in the salespeople. They're gone. But that sponsorship team's quota? It didn't change. And the lifestyle that the sponsorship seller built around that income? Also the same. It's a buyer's market for big brands.
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The last time a Super Bowl went bonkers? 2015 in Phoenix. We wrote about it for USA Today here: https://ticketmanager.com/super-bowl-fraud/. It went so crazy SeatGeek and Vivid Seats made the decision to break orders and leave customers out of the game, while StubHub took the hit and filled their orders for customers.It's a crazy weekend every time in the desert, with the Waste Management Phoenix Open and the Super Bowl in one place. In 2015, the market exploded when two ticket brokerages colluded to keep inventory off the market to break the smaller brokers who had sold tickets "on spec" (which means they sold tickets they didn't yet have for a price they thought they could beat as the game got closer). Eight years later, the market is much more consolidated, with Endeavor's On Location Experiences (OLE) owning a sizable chunk of the market. OLE didn't get a ton of blockbuster match-ups in great locales under previous ownership, but this game is sizing up to be quite different. All four NFC teams remaining are very big draws and two of the AFC teams are as well. We'll see some bonkers pricing, and if any of the six marquee teams get in, we'll see some brokers lose their businesses (again.)
Events don't always get cheaper as they get closer as re-sellers don't care what you think about their math- trust me, the "snake pit" at the 2007 BCS Championship game in Phoenix taught me as much. In Arizona, scalping tickets at the game is not illegal; it is simply confined to a fenced-off area called "the snake pit," where brokers stay inside the circle, and consumers can enter to buy tickets. Police are there, with scanners, to make sure the crowd doesn't get unruly and to scan and verify tickets (this is back in '07 before tickets were all-digital). As the highly anticipated match-up between Urban Meyer's Florida Gators and Jim Tressell's Ohio State Buckeyes kicked off, fans crowded the pit, waiting for prices to fall. "Get-ins," the cheapest tickets, were going for $1300 dollars at kick-off. They didn't drop. We stayed and watched the action at the pit through the end of the first quarter. Fans grew unruly, yelling at the scalpers they were "going to eat their tickets." They didn't care, they'd made their money. After the hundreds of buyers started chanting "Bring it down," as if they were entitled to a lower price, the police had seen enough. They shut down the snake pit, and all those fans who had traveled hundreds or thousands of miles were left out of the game.
"It's only reckless if you don't see it through" - John Dutton. Yup, that's entrepreneurship in a sentence. If it didn't appear risky and costly, someone would have done it by now. Train up, get prepped, then see it through. You'll be surprised what can happen.
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Ticketmaster was back in Washington DC answering for a rocky Taylor Swift on-sale and the news of Barclays Center switching from SeatGeek to Ticketmaster just one year into a seven-year dealFor all the pomp, circumstance, and punditry, the hearings are much ado about nothing for three practical reasons.
Correlation and causation. As Dave Brooks points out, the UBS Arena, an Oak View Group venue, debuted right around the time of Barclay’s switch to TM. TM holds a board seat at OVG. New venues get lots of shows in the first two years, especially when the promoter has an ownership interest in the venue (before we all claim this makes the monopoly claim stronger, the venue business is plenty competitive with others, like AEG, owning and operating a healthy number of venues.) The new arena opening coupled with Covid, remember - we were in the throws of Omicron hysteria just one year ago, so much so we had to cancel our company all-staff last January, caused a similar drop in activity at MSG, maybe the most famously Live Nation/Ticketmaster friendly venue, as well as neighboring venues. It may look and smell bad for Barclays to leave so fast, but these data points offer all the air cover TM will end up needing on the consent decree. Judges aren’t all that interested in public sentiment when there are questions of law.
As for canceling one year in? A new CEO took over at Barclays. He has zero affinity for what his predecessor did. Most new execs don't. Happens in software (and business) all the time. Some people want change for change’s sake, some want to put their fingerprints on a deal, and some just need to make it look like they're contributing value right away. When the decision maker changes, contracts can be up for grabs as they'll generally make their decision and then work backward to justify it. We've won a lot of deals in similar situations. It makes for an unenviable situation for SeatGeek. Barclays has to push the envelope to get out of the contract, meaning they need to try and prove breach. That can lead to trumped-up accusations and unrealistic characterizations of what actually occurred vs what could be reasonably expected in a commercial agreement. SeatGeek needs to defend its brand and its technology while eating a massive churn number, which it'll be taking questions about for years (as an example, we lost a big customer in 2017 who returned in 2022. Their experience dominated diligence for us the years they were gone). The fallout from this quick switch will last for years, even with SeatGeek announcing the Tennessee Titans as a new customer taking their NFL client roster to six (Cardinals, Saints, Cowboys, Commanders, Titans, and Ravens) ((Yes, those numbers were incorrectly cited multiple times in the hearings))
And for Taylor Swift, it was simple: the ticketing companies didn't want to go on sale to all 53 cities at once. Taylor's team wanted to make a splash, so they demanded it. Theoretically, the tech should have held up. But in tech, you never know until it is out in the wild. Turns out Tay Tay overwhelmed all systems with the demand she drives. If TM couldn’t do it….nobody could. (Insert witty Taylor Swift lyric here).
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7028387813469421568/ Careful of how you treat customers when you're on top. The Disney-owned Anaheim Mighty Ducks were the hottest thing in town in mid-90s Southern California. Tickets were impossible to get, the waitlist was enormous and the Arrowhead Pond was rocking. The mid 10's Seattle Seahawks had a similar run. Long waiting lists, huge sellouts, and no end in sight. Until the end came. Both franchises are still quite healthy, no doubt, but the Ducks have never come close to recovering those highs while the Seahawks had to resort to selling tickets for $25 recently. Have had two high flying NHL teams making threats to customers just in the past two weeks for really minor issues (they sold tickets they shouldn't have per the contract- which they shouldn't have- they were unclear). That's all well and good when the team is on top of the world, as they are today, but the mess left for who is next when it falls down? Well, we covered that here: https://tonyknopp.substack.com/p/whats-actually-happening-in-premium
"It's much worse than many think." A very close friend is a prominent headhunter for tech businesses. High VIP top-level openings, $100k plus per placement. Last year, they were turning away business daily. Today? "We'll take anything we can get these days, even your CS openings in AZ." It's not just layoffs. It's no new hiring for a while. Takes a minute for this all to trickle into the economies impacted, but it looks like it's going to (again.)
"He's so transparent in his self-interest that I actually kind of respect him." One of the single best movie scenes about business and people. Anyone who's done deals with us knows how much I love this scene, as it is key to deal-making. Transparency can lead to the best partnerships and cuts through quite a bit of politics. Incredibly well-acted scene by all involved (cut to the 8:02 mark for the line)
Apologies for no video and audio this week. Had grandiose plans of filming a fun video while in San Jose Del Cabo, and, well, time got away from me (or maybe it was the tequila)
Promise to do better from Phoenix next week!
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Super Bowl LVII Phoenix 2023 Edition
Phoenix delivered a fantastic Super Bowl experience, from social events to the game itself. One of the best I've been to. It's a great blessing we get to go for work.
Here's what we learned, and were reminded of, in working the 2023 Super Bowl.Favors are quickly forgotten. Yet, at the big game, some of the suckers learn that lesson the hard way. The Super Bowl, for many, is a status game. Who has access to what? Who is/was where? And what's the hot party this year? As people scramble for access, they begin to throw around promises/positions in exchange for a favor. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "We should give tickets to X person and we'll get a meeting for sure" when referring to someone who has been blowing them off for years. Tickets to events, parties and the game itself are very expensive, yet so many newbies get taken advantage of year after year. If they haven't been responsive and respectful to you before this weekend, nothing you give them will change your relationship for the better. Save your powder for better times.
Avoid the tourists, the blowhards, and "everyone's +1." An extension of #1, there is a well-known group of company brand execs and team execs who are "everyone's guests." They make a lot of promises and can smile with the best of them, but don’t spend any time there. Remember, you're there to make money. They're at all the parties, all the events, all the houses.
Times have changed - yet so many haven't figured it out. I had a humorous exchange with a top-level executive at a major brand who was bragging about how terrific their "exclusive" party was the night before. Why humorous? Just ten minutes earlier, in a large group, we were getting reviews of how the party was "all men" and "felt like a frat party - just the frat boys were in custom suits." I'm not sure who needs to read this these days, but if your "exclusive party" has zero diversity (all dudes who look the same), it's a really bad look.
Sometimes when you get what you want, GOD shows you there's more. Had a good laugh when talking to an NFL contact who was skipping the Super Bowl this year for the first time in a long time- yet was pulled in and "had" to go when a co-worker got sick. We laughed as we had shared one week prior our kids had sporting events we'd rather be at - and that sounded terrible. Enjoy where you are. Sometimes it's better than "behind the doors"
Make sure you find time to see the fans and get the full experience. Speaking just for me on this one: Life behind the doors isn't what I thought it'd be. In the early part of my career, I thought it was so "cool" to be at all the hyper-exclusive events. Now that I'm there, I see it for what it is. We're so blessed to have great friends and we've found them to spend time with at these events. However, to me, behind the gates is full of insufferable and self-important jerks. There's so much good to the Super Bowl. Find it. And don't worry about what's behind the door. If they're too important for you where you are, you don't want to be there- trust me.
And a bonus one: Joy is still free. The Super Bowl is incredible. It is so much fun. We love it and made memories for life. The excitement, the people, the crowds - all of it. I'm a week late to this writing (busy times at TicketManager). The most joy of the last week? I teach Sunday school for the elementary school kids at the local church. One of the best parts is when the special needs ministry joins us for worship. Everyone sings, dances, and lets loose. But when they join? They really get after it. It hit me as I was watching: This is free. And everyone is welcome. No lists. No bottle service charge. No cover. All are welcome. As all the best things in life are.
See everyone in Las Vegas for the 2024 Super Bowl!
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Spent a fruitful week at the Kayne Partner Summit where experts discussed the present and future of private equity. Three things I learned (keeping a few to myself for our own use). Be wary of taking advice from those with skin in the game - especially in bubbles. With SVB going under, it seems like another great time to reference "The Big Short": When Mark Baum's team is evaluating if there is a bubble in real estate, they take a tour with a real estate agent in Florida who tells them inventory is sitting on the market due to "an itsy bitsy little gully right now." Of course she'd say that - as would any realtor today and any day -it doesn’t matter the market conditions. Or banker. Or investment banker. On a panel talking about funding, we heard bankers and investment bankers tell stories about how "Q2 is going to be on fire." They all agreed that "A" level companies - those above the rule of 40 - will have a market. I'm not an expert, and I'm wrong all the time, but it feels like "gully" talk to me. Sure there may be a little bounce back, but not anywhere close to what we were seeing. And that was just one week before Silicon Valley Bank failed. "On fire" they say…..Spending other people's money to get rich got way too easy. The reality, for most of history, is risk - and lots of it - for the entrepreneur willing to take the leap. For every Schwarzman bragging in "What It Takes" or Benioff claiming the cowboy in "Behind the Cloud" - you know, people who were already exceedingly wealthy when they started their businesses, or had $2m in backing from Uncle Larry before starting the company, there are thousands of Sam Waltons and Phil Knights - entrepreneurs who had to toe the tightrope without a safety net for years. Same goes for us. I made $16k in 2008. Not much more in 2009. We're going back there. And that's a great thing for everyone in the market looking to build a company that will last as opposed to trying to build the next big exit - health or purpose be damned.
We are all closer to zero at any given time than we think. Always. The bravado, bragging, and pride seem compelling - but they're empty smoke signals. A lot of people's near-term dreams and livelihoods came to an end on Friday when they woke up to the news that SVB could be gone (update Monday: it's not, but many involved with the bank have gone to zero). We're so much less responsible for all we think we're achieving and building. Thankful GOD's on the throne.
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The job market has swung significantly. For the past decade, many of the most prominent recruiters wouldn't work on certain jobs we had open. Now? They'll take anything. And it's getting harder for applicants to stand out. As an example: We are always hiring SDRs. We grow from within and move them around into openings as they come up within our company. Historically, we feel great when we have between 4 and 8 qualified SDRs in our pipeline. We currently have 32. All ready to work from the office. The pendulum has swung and we all need to adapt.Choose your tech accelerator very carefully. Getting into the start-up accelerator business has been a sexy proposition lately. We've seen just about everyone jump into the game: The MLS, NBA, Minnesota Twins, LA Dodgers, FC Barcelona and on and on. Here are three examples:
It's enticing to try to "win" a spot in an accelerator, but make sure they can add very significant value to your business. Sat with a friend who raised $30m after going through a prominent team’s accelerator. His feedback? "I wasted 5% and I got nothing out of the process." There's going to be a lot of that. Being successful climbing the ladder a pro team may have nothing to do with your business. Make sure they can add value before you give away any of yours. You are much better off finding an accelerator with professionals who have experience building a business similar to yours.
Hold on to your equity, and partner with the teams and leagues later. We’ve had everyone try to get on our cap table and it isn’t easy to say no - especially in the beginning."If you pray for patience, do you think God gives you patience? Or does He give you the opportunity to be patient? If you pray for courage, do you think He just gives you courage? Or do you think He puts you in a position to learn to be courageous and then put it to the test?" I won't spoil it by stating the source, but some terrific insight from an otherwise pretty crummy movie.
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"It's only when you don't want to sell your company that you'll have the chance to." It seems so obvious but it is lost on far too many early entrepreneurs. Myself included. When we started, building a great company and then taking it public or selling it to new investors was a big-time dream. But once you're sitting on something really great, something you really enjoy and where you have massive upside if you continue on your own, the investors and buyers all of a sudden show up. Everyone dreams of the exit. The day you sell out and sit on the beach. It turns out it doesn't work that way b/c if you're selling something great….you're selling something great that you love and enjoy!Stick with it. Things change and so do you. When I was in junior high school, we had an all-school one-on-one basketball tournament. It was awesome. I wish more schools did so. I wasn't much of an athlete, but I was good enough (on the team, played but didn't start - that kind of thing), and I hadn't grown yet. Somehow, I made the semi-finals - and it was a pretty big school with ~300 kids per class. I played our starting point guard, Jon, in front of the whole school. It was a public murder. I lost 11-3. Embarrassing. If Jon and I played senior year in high school, I would have won 11-0. He didn't grow. I did. A lot. Things change. Stick with it. And don't get desperate and start heaving up threes when you get down early. It doesn't work =)
Buckle in sports teams - it is rough and you're going to feel it. I've been doing this job for 15 years. We talk to companies about their plans for the upcoming years when it comes to live events. "Cut everything we can" is a mandate just about everywhere. The big companies will keep investing, but selling to them is the easy part of a sports property’s job. The middle market and smaller businesses are what fill up stadiums and get revenue teams to quota. One account after another has a mandate from execs to cut costs not just in sports but with all vendors. Ticket renewals and new sales are a trailing indicator as companies have to wait until their renewal comes up. Just know the decisions have been made. Adjust your new sales and renewal forecasts appropriately and take nothing for granted. Everyone thinks they're immune. They're not. Winter is here.
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It's rough out there. Feels a bit like 2001/2. There are a lot more people unemployed in white-collar jobs - especially higher up - than I've seen. And much more than media is letting on.
Four things I learned over the past month as we're hiring and seeing candidates along with what's changing. All true experiences.A Tale of Two Candidates: Had one of the strangest calls I've had with a candidate. We were hiring for our team and had three finalists for an important position. Two of them were terrific. Exactly where we want to be with two fantastic options. We chose Candidate A and offered them the position.
Candidate A did not accept and informed us they had another final interview later in the week and they would get back to us.
So we moved on to our long list of qualified candidates.
We informed Candidate A of our decision and they asked for a call. I know it's normal not to take those calls, but we do. We have five rounds of interviews and appreciate their time. We really do want to help. When I informed Candidate A what had happened, the response was anger and resentment.
There's an entire generation who hasn't had to look for jobs in a downturn. This is new to them. Just a heads up, there are lots of qualified great people out there. We're going to do what's best for us and expect others to do the same.The Upset Recruiters: For a long time, recruiting was easier than it has been historically. Venture-funded start-ups lowered the bar and hired like crazy. Do you have a pulse? You're hired! Four jobs in three years? That's the new normal!
WFH and a four-day workweek? Done!
Recruiters flocked to fill these roles. And of course they would. They get paid on volume and success. Why try to put a candidate into the company with a detailed process when WeWork will hire them in 48 hours, and the recruiter makes more money doing it?
That gravy train is over. Companies who followed each other down those rabbit holes are either gone or laying off staff in droves. Who's left? Companies particular about the privilege we believe it is to work where we do (and I'm one of those. I have bosses who can fire me too).Shoot your shot, but get open first. There's an old saying, “Get the job, then negotiate." Just make sure when you shoot your shot, it's within reason. Many candidates believe they're due a massive increase to leave a position to join another team. And they're right! That's part of the game. But we've twice now had candidates come to the finish line and try to ask for such a large increase we just couldn't continue - only to have them come back at a much more realistic number after we'd passed. Starting with expectations that are far removed from one another leads to a crappy long-term relationship.
And most importantly:HE is Risen! Happy Easter to you and yours!
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Fate and a George Foreman grill. Did you know Hulk Hogan was offered what would eventually become the George Foreman grill? Hogan had the first choice between the grill and a mixing device. Only problem was, he wasn't by the phone for the call. George Foreman was. He picked the grill. A $100m mistake by Hogan.
Work/life balance matters. A lot. But the best ability is still availability (thanks to Danny Ainge for that one). The world doesn't wait for us. The sooner we learn, the better off we are in this dog-eat-dog world. Sometimes, you just have to take the call.
As my co-founder would say, "If you can't reach me, you're not trying." A big part of our early success. We are available to our customers and partners at all times."They only show the golfers who are winning." We're in a recession right now, and even the NBA feels the pain (so do the other leagues not-named-NFL, they just haven't had that story told….yet) Sports have exploded and seem to have had no signs of slowing down.
Well, kinda. The NBA announced this week there would be hiring freezes and cutbacks on expenses in fear of a coming recession (it’s not coming, it’s already here). Fact is the league is talking to the same sponsors we are, and the lagging numbers don’t look good. In honesty, numbers really haven’t looked good for a while and were just artificially inflated by the inflow of new categories of gambling, crypto, and VC-funded company deals - two of the three of which were never real deals in the first place. That money is gone, and there isn't anything new to take its place.
Sponsorship goals are usually lagging indicators, which means a whole lot of teams are missing a whole lot of numbers this year. The reason it doesn't seem that way? We pay all our attention to the winning outliers. The NFL. The Taylor Swift's. The F1 races. The Masters. Meanwhile, the middle-of-the-road teams are drowning. And we need more than just the Washington Generals to play against.Boxing, Horse Racing, Baseball, and Blockbuster Video. Nothing is disruption proof no matter how it feels in the moment.
Many years ago, I sat in a keynote with Bob Bowman, then the top person at MLBAM. He espoused baseball’s success in staying relevant by citing, “The three top sports in 1955 were baseball, boxing, and horse racing.” Each sport is still plenty lucrative, but boxing and horse racing don’t have the same place in the zeitgeist or anywhere near it. His boast was baseball still does.
Nobody saw the NFL coming. Nobody believed in the UFC. This excellent quote from Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph this week "If you are unwilling to disrupt your business, there will always be someone willing to do it for you." So who's next? PLL? Pickleball? LIV? Maybe. But it's likely something we're not even considering right now. Kudos to baseball for disrupting themselves with widely loved rule changes. Easy to overlook how big a risk they took now that it worked out.It's great to be a vampire in a bloodbath. But you gotta stick to your vampire roots.
Applications at TicketManager are up 10x. Our business is doing great. But it was last year too. The difference? It's a bloodbath out there.
And that means now, as in right now, is the time to hire stars away. Yes, it's scary to swim against the grain, but it is the only time stars will leave. They're stars - they're well taken care of and often difficult to poach. But when their peers are getting cut in droves? They'll take the phone call.
Even the so-called "contrarians" are afraid these days. Talking to investors in venture and PE, they're all trying to win bargains citing "the current landscape." An easy translation of what they're actually saying is they were either: a) stupid and overpaying before or b) actually don't believe in their thesis. There was a lot of whining about dry powder and overpriced deals due to too much competition in the market.
Well? Deals are down huge. Those who were whining need to be doing deals.
Be bold and move now. Talent is out there.Deceit always finds a way.
Had drinks with a buddy the other day and his 18-year-old daughter. At a bar. Where we were all ID'd. (which, btw I'm fine with - the drinking age should be 18 anyways, but I digress).
Her fake ID was immaculate. The technology states are using to create IDs is a quantum leap from the days when I paraded around as 'Thomas James,' a 26-year-old from Virginia.
And yet, here she was. With an ID so good, it actually scanned as 21 years old on the card readers.
This is why ticket brokers will always be around. Their incentives are more powerful to them than the incentives of those trying to stop them. Same goes for the bars and fake IDs"Who are we to decide what's best for us in our lives?" Golf's world #2, Scottie Scheffler, remembering the advice his wife gave him as he was heading out to the final round to win the Masters.
We can only do so much. We can prepare for the moment, do the work, put ourselves in a position to win, and then know the outcome isn't in our hands - and that's okay.
Nice to know in our 26-27 overtime loss last Thursday =). We'll be back.
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"Do not let yourself be deceitful, arrogant, or resentful." We don't get anywhere tearing people down. In fact, what we'll get are friends and a community who agrees with tearing others down as a normal thing to do. So what will they do to us when we stand out? Sat at a youth sports event with a friend I admire. They were bought into a match their kid was playing in- moreso than usual, and I asked why? “That boy won’t play with my son so we (notice he said "we" not "he" - making it clear this was a household belief and not the child's) need to beat him.” I asked why the other kid wouldn't play with their son and they didn't know. Never asked. Never wanted to understand others. Just immediately went to tearing others down for not doing what they wanted. It happens in our business every day- we've even shared in a past three things how many will make competition into bad people so they can self-justify crummy behavior. Stay away from people who quickly move to tearing others down. It's lazy. As Tony Robbins says: "If we see a big beautiful building, we have two choices: 1) Build our own. That's really hard. Or 2) Tear theirs down. Much easier." Find the builders. Spend time with them. Join a company that views the world through the building and understanding lens. Life's better there. For more, check out Chapter 11 in "Beyond Order" by Jordan Peterson. Terrific reading.
"I love you enough to allow you to fail." South Carolina Women's Basketball super coach Dawn Staley offered a terrific piece of advice/constructive criticism to parents of the next generation. And just about every psychology book reaffirms her position. When I was 21 years old, I fell ass-backward into a job with a phenomenal boss - my now friend Roger Stewart. Everyone was gone one day and I had to enter the specs for a newspaper print ad in the northeast (I realize how old I am as I type this). I made a big mistake. It cost the company over $100k. For reference, I was being paid $36k/year. I was mortified. When Roger returned, he walked into my cubicle. I froze. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me it was an honest mistake, I clearly cared and had learned from it, and we were never going to talk about it again. We didn't. I've employed the same approach on a number of occasions here at TicketManager. What terrific wisdom from a perennial winner in Staley.
"Winners are never judged by how. They save that for the losers" - Beth Dutton. We've had GOD teach us quite a lot of lessons here over time. One of them: You have to learn how to lose and what it feels like before you can win well. By well, we mean with humility, grace, and gratitude, knowing those wins are much less about what we did and much more about the circumstances and people around us. Dutton's claim is too common in today's world, where winning, wealth, power, and the like are once again conflated with favor. It's the opposite. Winning can be the ultimate tool to erode a soul. Winning at all costs comes at a tremendous cost.
The LeBron Swift effect. Years ago, Bill Simmons penned an argument for why LeBron James was worth 10x what he was paid due to the impact he had on the economy around him. Think Deloris Jordan saying "The NBA isn't going advertise Michael Jordan, it's going to be the other way around." Earnings coming out the past month for the major public ticketing players show just how much impact Taylor had on the primary and secondary markets. She's the biggest live event money-maker of our lifetime. What she does in driving commerce changes the market by staggering numbers. Just go have a look.
"People usually relax when you tell them to." A good laugh.
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Don't do bad deals. I know, I know, it sounds so simple - as most advice is. But it's one of the hardest disciplines to stay true to - as Learfield and many others are learning firsthand. When things are good and booming, growth needs to come at all costs. Companies compete to "grab land" - buying up other companies, merging, and doing deals with big goals tied to them. On the other extreme, companies in down times, give up on their cost discipline and start doing shorter-term deals at lower prices - as Jason Lemkin points out here. Like anything else in business, avoid the extremes. Let your competition overpay for deals or undercut themselves. Some losses are good ones, as Learfield's competition is finding. Patience is the hardest part - when you know the math doesn't work but have to wait for competitors to learn it the hard way. We've had three competitors go bankrupt or change hands in distress just in the past five years, and that cycle will continuously repeat.Budget for crooks. Even when it's your own mistake. Back when I was at StubHub in the mid-00s, we used to use discount codes we called "fan codes." It was the early days and a customer would get a discount code to save money on a purchase - the most common being $25, $50, and $100 discount codes. Only one problem: whoever was responsible for the codes didn't put any restrictions on them. So what happened? A less-than-honest ticket broker got ahold of one of the fan codes, started buying baseball tickets for free (using fan codes) then re-selling the same ticket on the site. I don't know the exact number they got away with, but it was big. We've had multiple customers cross the FBI at TicketManager and when that happens, you don't get paid. We've seen Ponzi schemes, employees stealing from their companies, and outright fraud. When you're early, vet your customers and budget for the crooks.
"I must study politics and war so that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams. When talking to people my age (old - mid-40s), there is more regret in the conversations than before. People wearing fuzzy handcuffs do a job they don't love to make opportunities for their offspring. Adam's quote is a great one: We do what we do, or our parents did what they did, so the next generation could explore their passion. I love my job.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7069328901453328384/
High school's coming to an end for a lot of our friend’s kids.
I spend a lot of time with junior high and high school students as I've been volunteering with them through the church and sports for the past 24 years. It's only four years and yet so over-indexed by some that multiple people sat outside our 25-year reunion dealing with the anxiety of seeing everyone again.
So, in the spirit of the season, here are the 6 most important things I learned in business as an also-ran in high schoolDance. I. In the early years of high school, I was not particularly good at anything and easily ignored. Back in those days, school dances were still a thing (they've changed quite a bit). There were four basic groups of people when it came to the big dances: A) The No-Shows. The ones who didn't go - either they weren't interested or were too uncomfortable B) The wallflowers. The people who wanted to be a part of "it," but weren't. We were too scared. This was me - for years. C) The hyenas. They'd go, not dance, and make fun of anyone who did. D) The dancers. The ones who just let it go and had fun. They accepted their fear, ignored the hyenas, and looked like they were having so much fun. Eventually, I risked the embarrassment, which didn't exist, and danced.
The world has been so much better ever since. A career is full of "dances." Some no-show. Others stay on the sidelines. The hyenas tear everyone down and play politics. And the dancers take the chance. As covered in a previous Three Things: TicketManager was started out of fear of regret. What if I never tried? What if I never asked the pretty girl to dance? Would I be able to live with that twenty years from now? Absolutely not. If I failed, at least I tried. Then I'll go find another dance and try again.Clout is bankrupt. Sophomore year, one of the popular pretty girls took an interest in me. (Still don't know why, I wasn't a good person back then.) A real-life Can't Buy Me Love followed where I was introduced to the trappings of social structure (popularity). The "famous" were now around. Those with power to make or break a reputation in a schoolyard where reputation was currency.
I clout chased. It was empty. I've seen so many friends in the real world get rich and famous, only to watch them spiral into unhappiness.
For example, years ago, I joined YPO, a group for young entrepreneurs that has quite the vetting and recruiting process. Once a member, you're placed in "forum" with a group of ten other CEO/Managing Partner/Founder/Owners to talk about life. I made some great friends there, but I had to quit. Why? Half the group was miserable.
They'd come to the group, cry about how their wives hated them (it was an all-male group), their kids hated them, their life was empty, or whatever. Then they'd all get in their ostentatious sports cars, we'd drive to dinner, and they'd brag about sleeping with the secretary. Clout doesn't matter. What does…..Ride or Dies are everything.
The same pattern plays out every year with the kids in schools these days as it did with me. That pretty girl who was ride-or-die? There was more clout to chase. Those friends who were not seen "on the level" of the popular class? We see them less and prioritize others - not because we like them more, but because the world does.
That cycle never stops and continues into the adult years. Even today, I see people I know shed their friends to chase clout. Don't. The world doesn't have many people who care about what's best for you. When you find them, keep them your priority - no matter if they fit into the country club, the social club, the part or whatever. Keep them as close as you can. Every career goes through ups and downs. When we started this company, nearly everyone disappeared, with very few exceptions. We didn't matter. People I thought were friends never even called to ask how it was going, let alone offer any help. Funny how so many showed up as we started to succeed.
The ones who were there at the bottom? They'll always come first. And thank God I learned that lesson in time for meeting my lifetime ride-or-die. Put a ring on that one as soon as I could.Nobody knows anything. The people who appear to have it figured out - the popular kids in high school and the successful business icons in life - don't. You're just as capable as they are - and possibly happier and more full. I spent too much of my life giving others too much respect, leading to self-doubt (more on that in a second). They're as lost as we all are. Most of em anyways.
Believe. It sounds so easy and so rah-rah (thanks, Ted Lasso). It's not. You see, we can force ourselves to dance, even if we're terrified and miserable doing it. We can easily prioritize who we spend time with and can fake-it-till-we-make-it in most things. Not belief though. That can't be faked. It has to be genuine.
The hyenas are everywhere. And while some are drawn to confidence, many have vitriolic responses to it. As we've discussed in the past, the one who wants to stand out is always chopped down by their own.
I played volleyball in college. And was pretty good at it. Even got selected to the U20 USA National Team and played for the U19 team one summer. Why U20 and not U16? I didn't believe in myself. I listened to everyone else when they told me I wasn’t any good. Then, one day, at a gym in Southern California against a team from Orange County, something snapped. And it all changed.Work and Luck.
I am not smart. I'm not particularly athletic, either. Going into the second semester of my Sophomore year, I was on the bench of the JV basketball team, on the also-ran 16s club volleyball team, and was sporting a whopping 2.2 GPA. I was going nowhere. The bigger problem - I was trying.
Everyone around me thought I was just lazy. My teachers, my coaches, and even my parents would tell anyone I wasn't trying due to some test scores from early on in life. The problem was: I really was trying. I just couldn't pick up new concepts like the people around me could in a number of classes.
My older sister started visiting colleges and my new (aforementioned) girlfriend got great grades. After seeing the colleges, I decided I wanted to try but I knew I was way behind. So I decided I was just going to have to double everyone else. If homework took others 2 hours, I had to do 4. If practice was 90 minutes with an hour of weights three days a week, I'd do 180 minutes and go to the gym six days a week. Still do. It didn't start fast at all, and nobody noticed at first, but all that work slowly compounded. My grades improved. I got better at sports. After a year, people started to call me smart. They even called me athletic. I'm neither.
Never was. I had just read someone else's ideas on the subject, which seemed good. It was, and still is, all manufactured. My teammates at USC could work half as hard as me and were still better than me. I was the #1 sales rep at AEG, then again at StubHub….except I worked nearly twice the hours of everyone else to get there b/c I just don't have the talent some do. Many of my friends still work half as hard as I do now, and they look better, do better, and are more successful than I am. And that's fine. That's their journey, not mine. I couldn't be happier with the results now, given where I was.
It's amazing how lucky we get when we work hard.
Life can be hard, mean, and scary at times. Especially for high school kids. It's complicated, it moves fast, and the ups and downs can be overwhelming. And it doesn't get better. But we can.No matter where we are - business, school, social functions - just remember to Dance. Forget about clout. Invest in your ride or dies. Believe. And truly outwork everyone else. If we do, we can go to sleep without any regrets. And regret is far worse than failure or embarrassment.
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LinkedIn has gotten (always been?) as the kids would say: cringy. And I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Somehow, shameless self-promotion and advice have become the norm- and I bit on the trend too and let it influence me. The whole point of doing three things is to share experiences in the first person and what I learned this week in a journal format. Not as advice or anything, but as a diary to the kids and my loved ones. That morphed into “we” and a tone of advice on occasion. I’ll do my best not to do so anymore. I can’t promise no cringe, though; I’m a boring dad and as far away from being a trendsetter as there is.
I’m at a volleyball tournament today, on a work day. When we started the company, there were a lot of stereotypes about different groups as we started hiring (Those with Kids, Moms and dads, Remote, Millennials, X, part-time students, etc). The one I wasn't warned of, which seems to erode productivity the most, is youth sports dads. (Moms too, but dads, IME, are the most consistently absent).
I have three kids. They play sports. Usually, their practices are late afternoon and still during work hours - or early enough that getting the kid to the practice is eating into work hours. I have a job, so if I’m called on to take someone to practice, I’ll drop them off and hit the local Starbucks to plug in. Been doing it for years. The vast majority of dads? They watch practice. The whole thing. No computer in sight. At 4 pm, which means they left work much earlier.
I understand some work early hours and have real flexibility, but most don’t. Once they cut out, they're done for the day the majority of the time. Youth sports are vital. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience I'd like to enjoy as much as possible. But little Sally/Johnny are unlikely to play professionally. And this job is professional. There have been so many things which cause dips in productivity for our team. I didn’t know the biggest culprit would be youth sports practice. Games, I get it. But "we talkin bout practice?"“The average person is betrayed three times in their lifetime. However, the average leader is betrayed seven times each year.” I heard this in a sermon by Ricky Jenkins, and it has been true in my experience running a company and helping others. I still haven’t gotten used to it, but have learned to expect it. Everyone has different interpretations of what a job is, what loyalty is, etc. It’s happened to me quite a bit, though, and it hardens people.
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Selling out is bad advice.
There are a number of gurus out there, led recently by one I admire a lot, Scott Galloway, offering the advice that chasing your passion is an outlier game for billionaires which means we're better off pursuing what we're good at. It is an important topic for me as I once had to make the decision to keep doing what I was good at and safe in at a big stable company (News Corp), or jump ship to take a big risk on a short-term job in sports (thanks Jerry Maguire for debuting at just the right time in my life).
As I've gotten more blessings and 'things of this world,' I've had the chance to spend time with very "successful" people. Too many are miserable and stuck in the fuzzy handcuffs. They 'did what they were supposed to', and once they caught the rabbit, they realized they didn't want the rabbit.
Scott is so impressive. I really admire his content. Personally, I think he's very wrong on this one. I really do love my job. A lot. If he had put that content out and I had come across it in my 20's, I may not be here. I only get to go around this carousel once and I'm glad I'm doing it on the pony I chose and not the path of least resistance. Work is so much of our lives - I'd like to spend it on something I really care about - and by that, I mean something I'll do for the rest of my life even when it's not for money.
We all missed the point in the Karate Kid (At least Mr. Miyagi didn't). "Beating" someone proves nothing, changes nothing, and actually makes us all worse. Talking to some parents this week gave me a revelation I'm ashamed I didn't see earlier. We were discussing when a kid talks crap or tears down our boys and both dads advice to their sons in that situation was "well then go beat them and shut them up." Advice I've heard a lot and seems common. Heck, that's the entire premise of the movie (You're alright LaRusso!- forget how we've tortured you for months let's just move on). But what does that achieve? So we beat them in sports or business. Does that make us right? Better? Does it justify anything? Does that make us loving or help change the world for the better like I assume we want? Or does it just make us feel better personally while the vanquished change nothing about what they're doing? Michael Jordan beat everyone. Does that make him better? I watched his documentary and I can say with certainty I don't want to be 'like mike' at all. Or like Steve Jobs. Or, or, or. All it does is take us from "asshole" to "asshole who won at X." Trust me, I know. I won a lot when I was an asshole as a kid - and I'm very ashamed of all of it.
I've never once seen someone change their feelings about someone or their actions after they lost to them. IME, when the 'good guy' beats the 'bad' guy, the 'bad' guy just comes back more intense. Try spending time with high schoolers these days - they ramp up the venom in ways that would make William Golding blush. Winning is great. I really like it. But not at all costs and it improves just about nothing. Just about everyone who change the world for Christ was murdered. 10 of the disciples, Paul, and on and on. The world "beat" them. But who changed it more? Work in progress for me.SaaS is hurting and the buyers are flexing. We do multi-year deals for our software. We do this because, like most SaaS orgs, we lose quite a bit of money on a new customer for quite awhile before we get paid back and turn a profit (GMPP = X). Never before has there been more insistence on 1-year deals.
I believe there are two reasons: 1) SaaS is hurting so badly, that many of these smaller/newer firms will cede and do the one year deal - which is bad for everyone and 2) As vendors get more desperate in the face of heavy churn, they'll do just about anything. The SaaS crunch hasn't hit us (thank you Lord), but we are seeing a change out there. Don't do bad deals. They're worse than no deals.Self-promotion is necessary. Last week I shared that LinkedIn has gotten pretty cringy. In reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, the author highlights a number of super impressive people who didn't get accolades due to a total lack of self-promotion. Isaac Newton sat on breakthroughs for 20+ years. Reminds me of Jeff Clark finding, and surfing, Mavericks for 10 years before telling anyone else. It may be cringy, but there seems to be a need for it to a certain extent.
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Spent last week at my son's Junior National Volleyball tournament in Orlando where our kid’s local team pulled an upset and left with a third place medal.
What I learned about business (and life) from 5 days in Florida:
A loss can be a win more often than we think - part six.
In 2011, we thought we'd hooked a whale for TicketManager.
FedEx was doing an RFP to replace their internally built ticket management system, which was actually a pretty good system, as the owners of the project were retiring. We drove the RFP, had a number of meetings, and the big pitch felt like a formality.
It wasn't. We lost. And it was crushing. The biggest opportunity to date and we lost it to a competitor, strengthening them. I remember the drink at the bar on Beale Street after the meeting like it was yesterday.
On day 2 of Junior Nationals, our son's team got upset and lost to a team from Ohio. A few really tough calls made what should have been a blow out a too-close game and the boys lost. The path to a medal would go through the #1 team in the country - and that was only if they could get through another top five team in a sudden death crossover match.
We stayed in touch with FedEx and kept competing. Just over a year later, a phone call came. The vendor they’d chosen had dropped the ball. They wanted to make a switch. We've been proud to be their vendor ever since.
Turns out, the #1 team in the country was a good match-up for our boys in the quarterfinals. They won.
If the boys hadn't lost those two close heartbreakers on day 2 and day 3, they would have drawn the eventual winner in the single elimination round instead. Those losses turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
The “we’ll see” scene from "Charlie Wilson's War" continues to amaze me, in life and business.Matthew 7 and I'm asking.
Prior to the quarterfinal match-up with the top team, I was talking to a friend who happens to be a Pastor. I told him "It's Matthew 7, and I'm asking." I have a hard time praying for wins. We're so blessed in so much I feel guilty and often sell GOD short. Matthew 7 is where we’re encouraged to ask GOD. What Dave said to me blew my mind: "Ask. And let's be honest, HE already knows!"
In 2016, right after we raised our B round, we were given a mandate by our new investors: hire a COO. We searched for awhile and didn't have any luck. Finally, we found one. The perfect person. But, we couldn't afford him and just couldn’t talk him into joining our team.
We weren't having any luck in talent, so I called a dear friend I knew from Church who was a hitter in talent at Workday for advice- did he know anyone who we could call. "I'll call you back in five minutes" was the response. He called and asked me why I didn't ask him to join our team? Truth is, I didn't think he'd leave his big time gig to join our shop.
So I asked.
He joined us.
Then he called the COO we’d wanted and asked him.
And he joined us too.
Our business was changed forever.
SC Legends 2 - MVVC 1.
The boys did it.
Ask. It's okay.Everybody happy leaves nobody happy.
In the world of youth sports, everyone wants their shine. Business is no different, and it’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way over and over at TicketManager.
The coaches select the All-Tournament players at the big tourneys after the medal rounds. To many adults, All-Tournament awards in 13u sports aren't a big deal. As they shouldn’t be.
But the awards are a huge deal to the kids.
One coach I spoke with wanted to spread the love around by giving all tournament to kids who hadn’t won it before. And that seems like a great idea. Jim Halpert had the same idea when trying to blend birthdays in “The Office.”
I’ve tried it too at work with just about everything: food, awards, social events, where we’ve done everything we couldpossible to make everyone happy. And why not? Shouldn’t we all be happy for one another and willing to sacrifice for the team’s good?
Doesn’t work that way. I’ve learned to give the accolades to those who are earning them. Otherwise, I’ve just created a mess of sore feelings and resentment. The team knows who the deserving players are - in business and sports.
In talking to one of his star players’ parents after the tournament, that player was furious and "wouldn't come back next year." We’ll see if that happens, but that clearly wasn’t the response the coach sought.
It was reinforced what I've learned too many times: Be fair. Be transparent. And be as just as I can be. Otherwise, nobody is happy.See everyone next week, and GO SC LEGENDS!
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Kiss a lot of frogs.
It's summertime, which means a lot of time on the road for our team. We've gotten better at identifying where to put our time, but that wasn't always the case. There were so many wasted meetings and wasted trips early on.
Like the time we flew to NYC to have MSG cancel our meeting as we were walking into the building - with no reason given. Or when we flew to Charlotte to have the Hornets cancel a meeting at "the Hilton Downtown" b/c we went to a different Hilton - there are two downtown - and they wouldn't wait the ten minutes.
In those times, those cancellations made it so I would question going to the next meeting. Especially when we had a limited budget and travel is expensive.But we wouldn’t have gotten the good ones if we didn't take the bad ones.
Facebook recently reminded me of a trip I took with a low likelihood of success in 2010. I had been on the road at a conference in New York City, and a venture capital firm in Boston wanted us to add to the trip.
We went. They are our investors to this day.
Have you lost your mind? It ain't 'just business' to us.
Starting TicketManager is the hardest thing I've ever done. The memories of months 13 to 25 feel shrouded in darkness as the economy imploded and our first investor left us.
As we grew, every new customer and partner mattered. A lot. It was personal for us. And, as businesses do, we lost sometimes.
People like to be friendly to those they do business with. So, the few customers we did lose would sometimes act as references for our competition. They'd tell teams and other customers about their experience. And that's fine.
But sometimes, they'd tell them things that weren't true and were hurtful to us.
Both professionally and personally.
So imagine our surprise when they call us asking for a job or help finding their next move.
One example: I ran into a team executive at a conference in 2011 who had chosen a competitor and had been very vocal about us afterward. He was surprisingly friendly, so I tried to speak to him about some things he was saying about us and how they weren't true - and that it was okay that he would continue to help his friends. All seemed fine.
No more than 15 minutes later, I heard him, with my ears, in the same bar, repeating the same things about how "we were broke" (we weren't) and how unhappy one of our partners was (they're still happy partners today). Lesson learned.
That same person has applied for several jobs with us.So have many others who have done hurtful and dishonest things to us.
It is personal for entrepreneurs. It always will be.
I learned it's okay to help friends and be a reference. Just be honest. Always.
I learned to try to find gifts others aren't sending. I have way too many Yetis.
The Three Sales Laws https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7088208264999419904/
Last week I found myself entangled, against my better judgment, discussing sales tactics on LinkedIn.
There are so many wrinkles to a really tough (and rewarding) career, yet so much terrible advice. Usually, the worst advice is the loudest. I've been in sales 20+ years and have seen quite a bit.
Here are the three most important laws I’ve learned in selling:
Sell something great
Be yourself
Do no harm
They seem so simple, but that’s the point.
Easy is easy, but simple is hard.
These three simple laws will help eliminate nearly all the bad habits, bad advice, and harmful tactics from our careers.
A few examples of how these laws are applicable to all-too-common terrible advice:
* Gimmicks. They're everywhere. Silly dog pics. Breakup emails. “Give me 27 seconds of your time," gift cards, paying for meetings and tricks to get people on the phone.
* Pestering. I've seen posts that encouraged '16 touches in 15 days' and 'three LinkedIn touches three days in a row.'
* Bragging and hubris. Social networks are full of salespeople talking about how great they are, their product is, or their new 'silver bullet.'
Law #1: Sell Something Great:
If I'm selling something great I don't need a gimmick. My product/services offer real value which people need.
If I need to pester someone to get attention, my offering isn't great.
And if I need to tell someone how great it is myself - is it really great?
Law #2: Be Yourself
I don't use gimmicks in my personal life with my friends/loved ones to get their attention. So I don't do it selling.
Pestering others makes me feel uncomfortable - which means they're uncomfortable.
Personally, I think bragging is gross. So I don't want to do it.
Law #3: Do No Harm
Using gimmicks cheapens my time, my product, and me. I'd like them to believe my time is valuable.
Pestering people pushes them away. I want them to like me and my offering.
And bragging isn't an endearing quality to most people. I'd like others to share how good a team/product we have.
I've found these laws work. I sell more. I can sleep at night knowing they can help me have a positive impact on the world instead of clogging up inboxes and social networks.
Most advice has a purpose. It is to sell us something or someone. Especially in the days of everyone trying to be an influencer.
I hope my experiences can help some younger salespeople find success in a career path I've grown to love.https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7090745668780113920/
World Ticket Conference Edition
The Empire Strikes Back
Just a few years ago, the Viagogo purchase of StubHub was publicly flogged as "The Worst Deal Ever." Covid caused cost cuts and the orgs weren't allowed to operate together as they worked their way through government approval.
At WTC, word was StubHub has reclaimed their market share, is, reportedly, doing big CAGR numbers, and the investors are "very happy with Eric."Ya'll know how much I love the Charlie Wilson's War "We'll See" scene. Applicable, again, here.
Boom times in the secondary market
The public may hate brokers, but they're cleaning up right now. The feel of the conference was of fat and happy players doing great margins. Many expected these kinds of numbers were going to hit as we came out of Covid. It took longer than many thought, but it looks like they're here now. Taylor Swift, F1 and other 'new' popular events are driving the big dollars.
Is the MLB Deal Working?
So far, market share numbers haven't changed too much post SeatGeek's MLB deal (rumored at ~$75m). We'll be curious to see how the market share wars play out through the year as there may be some noise in the signal. SeatGeek's integration wasn't ready for Opening Day and rolled out mid Q2 so that may be a reason there wasn't a big shift in the attached numbers.Bots, Pricing, Distribution and Money
There was much more private money interest at the show than in years past. Ticketing has long been something to be "disrupted" and there are generally a few investors who trickle in and out. That noise has gotten louder as private equity and VC dollars circle the live events and ticketing markets, yet again.
The hot topics this year for investors: distribution tools, pricing tools, and "browser tools" (read: bots. Nobody knows what a bot actually is. There are a number of 'automation tools' which are really just bots but being packaged as something else). In fairness, it isn't really clear in the law what a bot is and does, so the opportunists will push that envelope as far as they can.The Lahaina Fires. Our experience through the tragedy on West Maui. How it went so bad, so fast, for so many: https://tonyknopp.substack.com/p/the-lahaina-fires
Sports Tech Start-Up Week:
Spent the week at the One-Zero Tech Stars Sports conference learning and hearing all things start-up. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7100839905903210496/
"Oh, that's your guy?" - The worst thing you can hear in the industry, according to NBA Champion turned investor Brandon Williams. Williams espoused the importance of taking time to nurse relationships and fight off the urge to move too quickly in our careers and in deals. When we rush towards our goals and bring below par people to the table, our judgement of character will be questioned and that's not easily earned back.
Up and coming conferences have enormous ROI. We built our business on the IEG conference. It was small and easy to get access to decision makers who mattered for us. I went every year and we sponsored it for the final few. The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was the same for us in the early 10's. I never missed it. Take chances on smaller conferences, like One-Zero, which are well-run, and you'll get incredible access to network with hard-to-meet influencers in your industry. Big and well known conferences can be good too but in a far different way as access is difficult to the network we're hoping to meet.
You're getting married, so forget the games. There is so much advice on how to raise capital. Much of it is terrific advice similar to terrific sales advice. Just remember, you're getting work-married. If they don't want to invest in you or your idea and cite a small reason, like 'losing momentum in the process' or maybe not having the best deck, then you dodged a bullet. The interest has to go both ways. Yes, a small percentage of companies move really fast. But most great companies, and some exceptional ones, take years and years.
Is there value behind the numbers? Everyone wants to talk about vanity metrics like % growth or top-line numbers, but real investors will see right through those. Yes, you may have a competitor doing "$100m at 50%" and that sounds scary, but what is the margin? Is there a path to actually making money? Spent a lot of time with investors this week and there is fatigue around companies overselling their position. If you're good, just tell the truth. It works.
If you know it all, don't get offended when people question it. Had a heated (on their side) exchange with a founder. They're 50-50 founders who "will split everything equally and come to an agreement over all differences of opinions." We tried that. It didn't work and cost me friendships which are still mending. I politely pointed out what they're attempting is the exception, not the rule, and I really do hope it works out for them. The vitriol I was met (by one of them) makes it clear they've heard this before. I'm all for swimming against the grain. Yelling at the fish on the way by is a waste of time.
"Riches in the Niches" - Andrea Pagnanelli of National Cycling League discussing LAFC's approach to partners as they built a billion dollar team. That kind of laser focus on a market leads to big outcomes.
"I need to get up earlier" - Every time we travel east it takes only one or two days to realize….I need to get up even earlier when at home. East coast bias is real in enterprise/smb.
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Trey Lance and the cold business of business
My hometown 49ers traded away their former #1 pick, who cost three #1 picks, after a rocky and short-lived tenure with the team. A brutal finish to a once-promising union.
There are so many questions about whether Trey got a fair chance, whether he was done wrong, or whether the 49ers are “to blame.” Reading the pundits, there are so many lessons about business and our careers in the cauldron that is the NFL.
A few of my favorites from the mountain of coverage:
"Succeeding when life is unfair is what the money is for" - Bay Area sports writer Tim Kawakami.
10 months into our business we had the rug pulled on us. We had an investor who owned a good chunk of our company.* It wasn't fair and we were set up to fail.
What happened to Lance isn't fair. He lost his senior season to Covid, got drafted in the first round, got hurt twice, and lost his job to Brock Purdy, the up-and-coming rookie.
But was what happened to Purdy fair? Did he really get a fair shake going into that fateful Dolphins game? Not really, no. He capitalized on his opportunity and succeeded when it was unfair.
As Papa Knopp says "Fare is what you pay to ride the bus."Purdy succeeded when it was unfair. Lance didn't. It sucks. But, as Don Draper said, "That’s what the money is for"
"The more time you spend behind the scenes of an industry, the more you realize that guys who didn't come through usually can't come through." - Former Warriors beat writer Ethan Strauss
There are so many people who seem like they have it all. Yet they just can't seem to catch a break. It's a lesson we've learned over and over. They just don't quite close business / hire the right team / build the best product.
Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power includes a hard one to swallow for anyone with human empathy: "Stay away from losers." Ouch.The 49ers were rooting for Trey Lance. Just like employers root for the success of the people they hire.
"Opportunity is fleeting and it's your responsibility to be of use to somebody. You don’t have a "timeline." You have a job." - Ethan Strauss
When I left AEG I was replaced in seconds. I was an arrogant kid who thought I was the man. Boy, I'll show them.Nobody cared.
Strauss' line is a cold reminder of our responsibility to constantly compete and make ourselves irreplaceable. The outcomes matter most.
The NFL is a microcosm of the business world. It can be cold, lonely and unfair.
When we lost our investor, nobody cared. If we'd had blown the opportunity at Centerpoint Energy, the deal that kept us alive in the earliest days, the company wouldn't be here.
Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders said it bluntly: “In this business, you’re elevated or executed.”
That’s how all growth businesses operate.
In the words of Brian Flanagan at the end of "Cocktail": “It’s the only way I want it”https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7105930982968463360/
The SaaS cloud came together in the Bay Area and we spent the week at the US Open in New York City. What we learned.
SaaStr experts online proved, yet again, that nobody knows sh-t. And the most sure of themselves experts? Tune them out the fastest. Remember when there was only one way to do things in SaaS? When being responsible with money and growing a great business wasn't good enough if it wasn't "doubling year-over-year no matter what?"
That was one year ago.
Now, all of the sudden, FCF, burn-rate multiplier, and (gasp) bootstrapping are the sexy presenters and investors are telling us 20-30% growth is "outstanding."
Comparing the online experts from two years ago to the experts this year watches like a comedy. If they actually believed anything they were saying two years ago, there would be a lot more aggressive players out there at 10x ARR.
Build a great business that can stand up in all markets. Forget the fads.
Live events have never been more expensive and the US Open is no different.
Markets mature as sellers better understand buyers. Basic capitalism. The live events industry has been very slow to evolve, but they are evolving thanks to private equity and venture investment driving providers to better segment inventory/offerings. The most popular events are setting records with the USTA, and their partner Elevate, on pace to shatter previous hospitality revenue records - even when inflation adjusted.
CNBC discussed "Funflation" and the rising costs of live events - in the comments
Liberty Media buying hospitality provider Quint Events (congrats to our friends and partners at Quint), is the latest domino to fall as private investment continues to flow into hospitality. Sixth Street bought into Legends. Atairos bought into Learfield. Silverlake bought into Oak View Group. WME bought into On-Location. And on and on.
Eventually, the market will be squeezed of every penny and the game will go south. But, for now, these investments have been winners.
Be irreplaceable. Private money is looking for efficiencies everywhere now. If our job can be done cheaper and just as well from elsewhere or by someone else, we're at risk. An example: We have salespeople in New York, Chicago, and LA. These are expensive places to have offices and hire salespeople. But it is worth it to be in front of customers. If we're not in front of customers, however, what are we paying for? We can hire salespeople in Boise for half the price to do Zoom calls. Same with CS, which we do from a center in Arizona.
I've had too many friends who thought they were irreplaceable get replaced - and now they're struggling to find what's next.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7108516150719782913/
Never make it an argument.
Everybody loses and nobody will cede defeat no matter how silly. An example: When we first started the company, we had an investor who was connected to a major brand, AT&T. He was invited to the Final Four in San Antonio in 2008 and I went with him. We had incredible seats. Second row center court for the semifinals. Less than a year later, we had a chance to pitch AT&T, who eventually became a customer- though all the people involved have long since moved on.
We do ticket management so we thought it’d be fun to ask who was in those killer seats a few months earlier- remember: it was us- and we wanted to show there were a lot better people to give those tickets to. But when we asked the question, a stubborn coordinator on the other side of the table told us “we know exactly who was in those seats and we can’t tell you. It’s for their privacy.” Remember, it was me and I had pictures teed up for a laugh.
They dug into their position. Now this is usually the part where I want to show them the picture and be right. We all do. Especially in today's combative "us/them" online culture. But that doesn’t end in a sale. Too often people want to be right at all costs. I had to eat it and skip the slide. It stinks when we come across actions like that but I've learned to just let it go. The short term hit doesn’t help. In the end, I’d rather have happy customers our team can support than be right.
Some people just hate you. Use it.
Around 2016, I somehow found myself at a dinner table with Tuukka Rask, Chandler Jones and Shane Battier at a tech event in Boston.
Shane told a phenomenal story about the greatest game LeBron ever played. The night before game 6 of the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals the super-team Miami HEAT traveled to Boston. The HEAT had lost the finals to the Mavericks the year prior and there was a belief the team would be broken up if they lost to the Celtics. Battier was seen as a veteran presence for the younger star LeBron who hadn't yet shown he could win a championship.
The team arrived at their hotel at 1am and there was a man sweeping the sidewalk who stopped what he was doing to shout "Hey Lebron, F--K YOU!" (yep….Boston).
Battier laughed and didn't think twice about it. Until LeBron showed up at his hotel door at 3am. Shane said LeBron seemed shaken by this man. Why did he hate him so much? They talked for an hour.
The next day, at warm-ups, Shane said he noticed a "different look in LeBron's eyes." Like he realized what the world is and that some people are just going to be mean and evil to you.
LeBron had 45 points and 15 rebounds in an iconic performance. Just watch his face in the opener. That was a LeBron we hadn't seen at that point.https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7110986125552361472/
There's no food at the food pantry.We volunteer at the local food pantry in the valley every two weeks and have since late 2018. I've never seen less food than there is there right now. Donations are way down from historical levels. It's a national problem with some press blaming inflation.
It's budget season for corporations. They're cutting costs like I haven't seen since 2010 and looking for ways to make money (for us, that's re-sale). The amount of tickets they're dropping is already hard on teams and getting worse. Feels different. Like we're in the middle of a cycle, not near the end.
There's always a "canary in the coal mine" moment. Maybe the food pantry today is mine.Our career and La Catedral
Pablo Escobar built his own prison, a five-star resort he named "La Catedral" in a shrewd settlement with the Colombian government. Not much of a punishment for a man who bombed the Colombian Senate.
For most of us, our career is where we're going to spend most of our waking hours. Yet when we interview people, the vast majority have put almost no thought into what they want to spend their lives doing and will settle for what
looks great in the moment.I'm 25 years in. Take it from me - best to build something you like. The stakes go way up as time passes.
BTW - Escobar "escaped" from his own prison only 13 months into his 5 year sentence. History is as entertaining as anything.
I aim to have a healthy enough fear of GOD that there isn't room for any other fears.
A throw-away line used in a different context in SG Gwynne's "Empire of the Summer Moon" stopped me in my tracks on Monday.
The more I think about it, the more profound it is.
We had several final interviews this week.
Some went well, some didn't. What I learned from getting denied, after getting an offer, for my first job out of college and how it has helped us build a business:
For a myriad of silly kid reasons, I was unemployed when I graduated school in June of 2001. I had what was in my bank account and nothing more if I wanted to stay in Los Angeles.
After 50+ interviews, I narrowed down to my final gigs as a buyer at PacSun, in sales at ADP in Long Beach, or at News Corp.
ADP was first up.
ADP had a terrific interview process—phone interview, in-person, ride-along, and another in-person. The process took about a month.
After the final interview, the hiring manager, Vince, emailed me the job.
This was terrific news! The worst case was a good one.
I e-mailed Vince a very thoughtful "thank you" and said I had "one more interview at another place I'd like to see through next week if that's okay with you."
It wasn't okay with him. He pulled the job. "We're not second to anyone."I was astonished and angry. What a jerk! All my friends and family felt the same - all saying something like, "If they really wanted you, they'd wait while you see through your other offer."
I learned lesson 102: Only hire those who absolutely have to be here.
All our greatest success stories have one thing in common: they wouldn't take no for an answer. They didn't need "time to consider" after a month-long interview process.
Vince wasn't a jerk…he was right. I should have been ready to accept right there.
And if I wasn't, how much did I want it or appreciate what he loved?
In "Swamp Kings," the Netflix documentary on the Florida Gators, Urban Meyer calmly states "Our job is to figure out who wants to be here. If there's a sliver of doubt, this isn't for them."
I finished the process at PacSun and took the job at News Corp due to how much
I liked and admired my manager (and still do).
But I didn't care about the industry. I needed a job. And it was the best of what I'd seen.
Six months later, I left for the Dodgers after News Corp invested in me and treated me so well.I learned lesson 103: Never hire anyone just looking for a job right now. Even though they'll say whatever they think it takes to get the job.
Growing a team we care about is expensive. It takes us time, money, and emotional buy-in. News Corp was great to me, but it wasn't my passion. And I screwed them.
As we've implemented these lessons into our business - to fantastic results - we've drawn a lot of ire. People angrily respond to me like I did with Vince. Which I understand - I lived it!
But I don’t care because I learned Lesson #95 long ago from defending National Champion Kirby Smart: "We're looking for exceptional, not exceptions."We don't have unlimited time and resources. I've learned that the hard way.
Vince was right. I owe him a Thank You.
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The curve has dropped. A Lot.
We're a middle-market enterprise SaaS. We have healthy growth every year and we have suitors calling us often to try and invest in or acquire our company. A normal occurrence for a business doing well.
We've been in business awhile now. The first acquisition calls started in 2012. These days, there are a few every week. Occasionally I'll take one to get a feel for the market.
It's hard to get real data, but talk to enough people and we can conclude what market is. The curve has dropped significantly. What was once a B- is now an A.
All the SMB "high growth" businesses that weren't making any profit are dying fast. They're all for sale. They all call us, all the time, trying to sell off their customers, but they can't. All the contracts are short-term, they all have cancel for convenience in them, and none of them scale. I've personally seen dozens of them just this month. They can't get money and the way they built their business is likely never coming back.
We've always been able to get money, but now it's easier than ever.
Funny how, in the end, discipline always pays off. What was once a growth rate nobody would touch is now in-demand. And what was "good" is now exceptional.
An acquaintance just sold a company at $20m ARR growing at ~20% YoY. They were asking for a 5.5x multiple. They got 24 offers. Two years ago they wouldn't have gotten anything.
Titles only matter to people who don't- but my goodness are there are more than we thought.
Business is going great for us and we are hiring.
A role we have been staffing up for is our "Customer Success Associate." It's a great job working with our customers in a support role for the customer, the sales lead, the implementation team and the Customer Success team.
This past week, we changed the title of the job to "Account Manager" for a number of relatively benign reasons (Mostly so people aren't confused by CSA, CSR, CSM which are three of our abbreviations.)
We changed the title on the job posting, which is the same job posting which has been up for two years.
We got 10x the applicants.
Some people would say that's a good thing. More to choose from!
I don’t agree.
What it signals to me is we're getting a bunch of applicants who never bothered to click on the CSA posting to see what the job was. Had they, they would have applied, like they did for Account Manager. What's more likely is a spray-and-pray approach to any semi-decent Account Manager posting there is (sort by title). I'm confident in that assumption for another reason: the gig very clearly says it is in the office five days per week - no exceptions - and more than half the applicants share they're only open to remote work.
Tell me you didn't read the job req without telling me you didn't read the job req.Dad he has more followers than you
Out of curiosity, I logged how many LinkedIn connection requests came in the last two weeks and how many of them were just sales people and recruiters looking to sales bomb me.
186 connection requests.21 accepted
7 dropped within a day after a sales bomb
1 out of every 13 people actually want to connect/follow.
Extrapolate that out over an entire year, that's 4,576 junk requests per year to the CEO of a not-very-well-known small business with ~150 employees.Two learnings and one question:
Number of LinkedIn followers is meaningless (I already knew that as many are purchased but even organically it's meaningless)
If we believe someone is ignoring our connection request, they may be, but we also may be lost in an inbox of thousands
How do people in glamorous jobs even use LinkedIn? I assume they get 100x this traffic!
How I met my co-founder
StubHub was a wild ride. And one I'll detail after we're done with our very public court case with them. But for today, we'll talk about how I met my co-founder while working there and what I learned about hiring a team in the process.
In 2006, Corporate Sales at StubHub was booming. I'd been in charge of the southwest market - basically everything Southern California, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico while working from an office in downtown LA.
We had created an algorithm to pull hot leads from the customer database and were introducing StubHub to companies everywhere. I'll go into a lot more detail of how this all happened in the near future.. It's a unique story of luck and divine help.
At the time:
I had way too many leads to call
I was making a lot of money for a 25 year old kid
I couldn't keep up- even working a minimum of 7am to 7pm every day
StubHub was small. It was the mid-2000s, so tickets were not electronic yet.
Which meant anyone buying tickets to an event within two days of a game would have to go to a StubHub office in downtown Los Angeles. There were a handful of people working out of the office, most of which worked later hours to support game days (11am to 9pm).
I was lonely working at home so Gary, the regional lead in charge of the office, gave me an office which I'd go to quite often.
One of the team members, Aric Haut, would come in early sometimes. He'd ask questions about my job and was interested in sales due in part to how much money I was making - much more than a 26 year old should have been making (there's a why behind it, which I'll share another time.)
One day, Aric asked if there was a chance he could get a job in sales. It was a great idea. I needed someone inexpensive to call all the good leads I had.
I had been obliterating my quotas and setting new sales records daily so I felt I had the political capital to ask the boss if I could hire him.
Nope. No budget and he's too valuable to last minute services, which was already short-staffed.
I broke the news to Aric.
He suggested something else.
His hours were 11am to 9pm. What if he came in early, really early, and made calls. He could work from 6 to 11am calling all the leads in Texas and the Midwest and I would give him half the commission on any deal. No salary or anything. Just commissions from me.
We spent the first few months getting up really early, cranking crappy music and slamming caffeine. I would sell from 6am to 7pm and was wiped. He would stay at least two hours more. We sat at the same desk in the little office with no windows.
By month three, he was the number two sales rep in the company. Only he wasn’t even really a rep.
When I laid out what we were doing to my boss Colin, he started and moved a quick process to get Aric to sales, where we worked together until late 2007 when we decided to break off and start TicketManager
Three lessons I learned from the experience:
The best partners I've had really will do whatever it takes when they get a chance.
I’m at a wedding today in Denver of one of our long time team members, Peter.
When I met Peter, we were interviewing him for an entry level sales job. Only he had no sales experience and was working as a bar back at Barney’s Beanery. At the end of the interview, I’ll never forget the way he said to me. “Just give me a chance.” he meant it.
He was going to do whatever it took. Like Aric. We hired him and it’s been a wildly successful partnership.The best partners I've had are self motivated to do all the small things right - even the little things I don’t see.
We’ve got a teammate here at TicketManager who ascribes to the “lights” mentality. Has since the day he got here. Meaning he turns them in when he gets to the office and turns them off when he leaves. First one in, last one out.
Aric was the same way. He was self motivated.
All the best ones have been. Lights has jumped the line and is leading a rather large and important team for us.The best partners I've worked with don't wait for their chance, they make it.
Aric saw something he wanted and he went and did it. He didn’t wait for anyone else and he didn’t accept no when Colin told me I couldn't hire him.Our executive team is full of stories like Aric’s. My journey at StubHub was the same way.
I learned that when I see something, it’s best to move fast and commit. Aric did when he was 21 years old and jumped the line by ten years. I had the same experience at StubHub. Texas wasn’t even my region and we were trying to hire someone there. But nobody was calling it so I came in early and called it for months before Aric joined. It got me promoted multiple times.
Our head of people opps created the job. She didn't wait for anyone else, just took the responsibility on and is the heart and soul of our company now.If I come across great people at work, I'm going to try to get them on my team wherever I go. Whether they're co-workers, vendors, or customers.
Work friends and life friends are different. We all have personal friends we love but we’d never hire.
Finding a co-founder we were already working closely with made the transition really easy.
Aric and I then recruited Joe, who we’d also worked with, which was helpful through the early years.
We have multiple vendors, former customers, and people we’ve done business with working on our team in important roles. Working with someone has been a terrific window into finding great teammates for us.
One day we sat down at a desk at 6am and tried something. What happened next changed a lot of lives.
What a ride."The market is the market"
Saquon Barkley, Goldman Sachs Elevator and the market economies of 2023
In his book "Straight To Hell," John LeFevre (Goldman Sachs Elevator author) talks about dealmaking over the decades in Asia. As customers are eventually disappointed with outcomes on some of his bank's deals, he responds with the same line: "the market is the market." Nothing can be done.
We've seen that in action over the past few months in sports business.
Josh Harris, though paying a mint, was the only real bidder for the Commanders. I'm friends with people on the deal team and they confirmed Bezos was never serious nor made any offer.
Endeavor can't get traction in the public markets, even after a 25% bump on the news Silver Lake would take them back private, they're still down' 20+% while the market overall is flat (down with inflation adjustment)
Vivid Seats is down over >50% since going public.SeatGeek had to cancel their SPAC. They filed to IPO in April. No news since.
StubHub filed as well. No news since.
The NBA is going to market for rights fees - their incumbents didn't jump at the opportunity to pay more, as Ethan Strauss details here:
For all the talk of record sales and deals, the overall market isn't reflecting the hype. On that note:
Haves, have nots, and the corporate recession.
Had an in-depth chat with a partnerships exec at an NBA team the other day (a contender on the rise). The NBA is a collaborative league. The teams talk and share a lot. They told us sponsorships are "down pretty bad" and that the tech category is "an anvil." My guess, we don't see that money come back until 2025 at the earliest for the mid-tier teams. Sponsorship teams have to get creative as they've thrived off of new categories in Tech, Betting, Marijuana and Seltzers. Those categories are commoditized now. That cash grab is over. And there don't seem to be many new ones popping up while the legacy sponsors spent 2023 going through layoffs and cutting costs. Of course things are rosy in public, they have to sell more. Behind closed doors, there's a lot of concern.Be a fan.
I've been working in sports for 24 years. I've heard, and read, so many give the advice to "not be a superfan" in the interview process.I totally disagree. Superfans make the best team mates and partners.
On a plane to Texas now to see our partners the Rangers play our partners the Dbacks.
The CRO, VP of Sponsorships and our partnerships contact are all born-and-raised Rangers fans.
Same thing with our partners at the Philadelphia Eagles.
What do they have in common: Both those deals have been fantastic for us. The service has been phenomenal and their passion for their teams is infectious.
We had a team pull out of a deal with us years ago when I, as a fan, posted something about a player leaving them for my hometown team. We were all being fans. We're partners now. And they're great.
When I worked at the LA King in 2002, my hometown SF Giants went on a World Series run. I was watching game 5 of the NLCS in the office (the Kenny Lofton game) when my boss, Chris, walked by and said "How come you don't root for the Kings like that?" He was right. I didn't care about the Kings. It wasn't the place for me.
We're in the business of fun. So make it fun.Be great and get left alone.
A personal preference here but: I like being left alone to do my job.
Now don't get me wrong, I love learning from those around, ahead, and behind me in their careers and seek those people out. But I don't like someone asking me what I'm doing, having regular check-in meetings, and micro-managing me. I don't believe most people do.
When I got to StubHub at 25, I was a pretty green sales kid. I had a Director and a VP I reported to. When I started, I had weekly 1x1s with them where we'd discuss what I was doing, my pipeline, my opps and discuss best practices alongside some check-in calls after big meetings and near the end of quarters.
I was blessed to have a lot of success at StubHub and quickly became the #1 rep in the standings. Something I'm still proud of.
As time went on, fewer people were checking in on me. I rarely had 1x1s. Nobody called to ask how a meeting went. Nobody ran my activities reports. I had no activities or meetings quotas. It was great. Our top reps at TicketManager are
having the same experience.
At TicketManager, we've raised three rounds of financing. Everyone asks me what it's like to have people "up in my business - especially private equity." I wouldn't know. They're not "up my business" at all. They're terrific. If I need them or want their help, they're immediately there. But they're never "pestering" for anything and we don't have regular meetings.
Three things I've learned to get people to trust you enough leave you alone. They sound so simple, and that's why they're so important.
Overcommunicate.
We all have three choices: A) under-communicate B) Over-communicate C)
Thread the needle.
Threading the needle is too hard to worry about. So do this:
Share an easy to consume summary at least every-other-week. I include the 5-5-3,
something taught to me by a mentor much smarter than I. I do these with 2 minute videos.5 things that are working well
5 things that we need to focus on/improve
3 most important events of the next 90 days
Every month I send numbers with a commentary
Once a quarter I provide a more detailed breakdown of what we're doing.
These are useful in any position in a business. If your supervisor wants them, they can read them. If not, they don't.Bad news rides the express train
All bad news needs to travel within 24 hours - and likely faster. Only most people do it backwards.
I've been running teams for nearly twenty years. Everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to be the messenger of good news. The minute we close a new deal, I have nine people telling me about it through different mediums.
But bad news? I have to hunt it down. Even then, people hide it.
Don't.
Share bad news right away. Most people will hope to better it first. That's not helpful. Share it and let everyone know you're taking steps to resolve it.Hit your numbers.
The single most important part. Hit your numbers. I've shared the "scoreboard" story numerous times.
If you deliver, you will not only be left alone, but you'll be given more. Be at the top and everyone will leave you alone.
And a fourth just for good measure:When you find the stars, leave them alone. Let them do what they do as long as they keep delivering.
The sky isn't falling; it's been falling for a while.
I’ve been a start-up and growth CEO through two downturns, here are five things I learned this week:I can't live up to that promise for the first time in ten years.
We're a unique place to work. We focus on attempting to hire people who have goals that align with what we do here - as outlined in our 11 interview questions.
It's a simple pitch: Come join us, and if you achieve your goals, we'll both be successful. And if your goals change, come tell me, and I'll get you another job.
It's been true for a decade plus. We have great people, and companies are always hiring great people. I know plenty of CEOs/owners/decision makers looking for good people I can call anytime.
For the first time in a long time, I can't make that promise. They're not hiring. In fact, they're calling me.Sponsorships employment is bad and getting worse
I've been in live events for twenty-four years. I've seen more high-level sponsorship and events execs laid off in the past six months than I saw in the past ten years combined. Just got word today from two more big company customers that layoffs are coming.
One good friend introduced the idea of re-selling her company's unused tickets to recoup lost costs. She saved her company north of a million dollars. They laid her off. If you're those impacted, it's not just you; it's everywhere.There's no food for the needy
Twice a month, every month since late 2018, a handful of us have been working in this room. The amount of food fluctuates throughout the year. In the summer, it usually looks pretty empty, like this photo. The problem: I took this photo last week.
November is usually overflowing. We call it "food mountain" when we get so much food we can't store it all in this single room. The volume has been so consistent the church has approval to build a warehouse.
Donations are down 70%. We keep waiting for them to recover - and they aren't. Most of the food you see here was purchased by the food bank as opposed to donated. It's dire. And it's not just our food bank.Keep it quiet or don’t?
We're doing good as a company. That's hard and dangerous to write in a post highlighting how bad it is out there. We're feeling it, too, as it's harder than ever for us to keep growing, but we do. It’s a conversation often if we continue to share our adventures and the truth, that we are growing and hiring, or do we cut it off to be sympathetic and empathetic to those who are hurting.
We’re really proud of our hard work. The blessings aren’t lost on us. We share it. Building this company almost killed me. Most people are happy to share and celebrate what we're doing.
But
I've learned that when you share you are doing good when others aren't, you put a target on your back. Even if there is no validity. When people get desperate, they'll justify just about anything. We learned that during Covid and the lessons are useful now.Now is the time to build a great company.
It's easy to lament hard times. But if you have a great and necessary product, now is the time to lean in. The field is frozen. Talent can be shaken loose. There isn’t fake money sloshing around driving up your CAC. Expectations are realistic.
Now is the time. Get to it.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7131382373337747456/
Chicago > Milwaukee > Denver > Las Vegas this week. At F1 now and will have a full report next week. Who was it successful for?
2017-2021 were crazy times. Valuations exploded and investors went on a buying spree. Companies were selling and raising money like crazy.
We didn’t sell. We had offers, but we didn't pull the trigger.
We “missed it” in the eyes of many.
But did we?
Have a good friend who sold their business at the highest valuation possible in Q4 '21. His early investors cashed out big time. He took some money too, selling about a third of his holdings. Everyone wins right?
Wrong. He's miserable and full of regret.
The multiples have crashed. Leverage has gotten too expensive. And now he, his staff, and his new investors are underwater. The plan was two years until the next deal. That seems very unlikely now.
His seed and A investors? They won. They got paid and made theirs.
His team that actually does the work and the new investors? They wish they didn’t do the deal.
Nobody is in the wrong here. This is the game.
I've learned not to lose sight of the game the hard way. We had an investor I talked to every other week for years. I didn’t just consider him a friend, I considered him a close friend.
He moved onto the next thing years ago. I’ve heard from him one time. And it was when we did a secondary round where he was asking if he should sell or not. Still hurts my feelings. I thought we were friends. But, lesson learned.I've learned by watching him that I'm the only person looking out for the people I serve. And never to forget it.
Successful at what? Being the biggest devil in hell? What good is that? - Jordan Peterson with a good reminder to keep my sights set on what matters. Winning matters. What and how we're winning, matters more.
Was in Chicago for a big national youth sports tournament. I've been around the game a long time and saw something I've never seen: A team kept their best player in the front row for all of overtime. This would be like having your clean-up hitter bat every inning (everyone has to rotate meaning he is only eligible to be up front for half the game at most).
The tournament director called for a forfeit. Only they had no real way to enforce the forfeit. There was no punishment, and the cheating team won by two in overtime then took to social media to boast about it. The coach admitted as much, but wouldn't even forfeit the points.There are so many public cheaters I could fill up all the allotted space with them.
None of them regret it - they just regret getting caught.If I want to win the right way, it's going to be harder. Challenge accepted.
We lost. Complaining changes nothing, so we won't do it. We'll see them again next time.Salary is death in sales.
Had a candidate comment on one of our sales job postings "the salary range isn't enough for me to move to NY or LA, can I work remote"Good. I hope it's not. That's by design.
Any great sales person will want upside and plan their lives on upside. So much so, that's where they'll spend the majority of their time negotiating. Is the commission attainable and, if so, can I beat the big OTE? Great salespeople bet on themselves.
Anyone in sales who can live comfortably on their salary is both overpaid and in the wrong job.Do NOT hire anyone who focuses on salary into your sales team.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7134921161888432128/
Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix
Last week I had the chance to catch F1 Vegas. We were very well set up by our friends and partners at Resorts World Las Vegas and Quint Events (F1 Experiences). A major Thank You.
Here's what I learned and saw:
There really are narratives around events. Some are true. Many are not. Ignore the noise.
I arrived in Las Vegas on Thursday and attended the now infamous practice round which lasted eight minutes. I work in sports and my job is to keep up with the press around events. It was all negative and it had shaped how I was welcomed to Vegas.
Media hit after media hit highlighted how empty Vegas was, how much of a nuisance it was to get around and how everything was blocked. This was going to be "one of the biggest flops in sports history"- this was actually written, by a friend no less.
When I got the airport, everyone was parroting the same thing: Hotel room prices were plummeting and so were tickets. It was a disaster.
Only it wasn't. And it never was.
It was easy to get around. I had no trouble going from RWLV to the MGM to the Flamingo to the Cromwell and then to our hospitality and back to RWLV the first night. And every one of them was packed. On a Thursday night in late November.
I live in Southern California and travel to Vegas often during down seasons (more on that in a bit). We work with nearly all the major casinos and teams in town. I'm there ALL the time. I've seen it empty. I've seen it packed. The casinos in and around action? They were packed.
Since the event, most of the detractors have walked back their analysis to the truth: the high end events and casinos were full, the locals were kept away and their hangouts were empty.
Our VP of Sales had a meeting at the Wynn on Saturday before the races. He tried to get a table at every bar/restaurant in the resort - even the small ones we mostly walk by - and the shortest wait was over an hour. It was slammed.The bones are there for a phenomenal event.
I've been to a lot of "firsts" events. I thought of one in particular all weekend: The first Stagecoach Music Festival.
Stagecoach was Empty. Capital E. We showed up after the gates were already opened, parked right in front of the entrance, walked in and set up our chairs about 50 yards from the main stage. We had plenty of room. We could walk back and forth to the food vendors and there were no lines.
Now look at Stagecoach.
What happened?
The bones were there. The time of year was great. The location, in the desert, even better. Stagecoach had some things to figure out, as all events do, but they were minor. We left knowing our days there were likely numbered as the word would get out.
Vegas looked great. It was easy to get around- especially during the day. There are plenty of VIP options. The paddock was a huge win and many of the learnings there will be applied to other offerings.This event is going to be a monster.
The time of year actually makes sense.
I have a tight group of friends who travel together to sporting events. We mostly go to UFC fights, but many of them are big F1 fans. The day F1 announced they were going to Vegas, the texts started flying: "we're going."
Except that didn't happen. Once the date was announced, the group fell off quickly. The weekend before Thanksgiving? That's a terrible time, especially for those of us with families. I thought the same.
Until I saw what happened. The weekend before Thanksgiving is notoriously slow in Las Vegas. As is much of December - we attend the December UFC card most years.
F1 changed that.
The weekend was a massive win for the resorts. You know, the ones who were so put out by all the construction and trouble? They're gushing with praise for the event.
Did it sell out the smaller fringe resorts? No.
But it sold out the big resorts. And they loved it.The event part of live events matters the most
The most nerve racking aspect of taking customers to an event is the event itself.
The pomp and circumstance can be second-to-none, but if the event stinks or the weather sucks, it doesn't matter.
And my goodness did the race deliver!
The track looked like a Mario Kart level on television. The race featured more exciting passes than I can remember.
Firsts make properties.
F1 Vegas couldn't have drawn up a better first than this race.
Vegas knows how to put on a show. And they will iterate on this year's event to make next year even better by making it more accessible to locals, moving the start times to prime time, and leveraging the wins in the Paddock to build out the experience for the rest of the track.https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7138907266891620353/
What I learned in business from playing sports in college.
I played volleyball at USC. Not exactly the big time - but a fun time and the top of the mountain (at the time) for a small sport.*
What was it like?
I graduated high school in June. In July, I got a list of classes for the upcoming semester. As an athlete, I got to register first! Seems like a bonus, yes?
No. It's for a reason. Practice was from 2-6 pm each day with occasional weight training, which would go until 7. Be there, dressed and ready, at 1:45. So I had to cross off 60% of the available classes.
My day was simple during my freshman year:
8 am to 1 pm: To take a full load, I'd have classes until 1 pm every day. That left me 45 minutes to eat lunch, get to the locker room, get dressed, get taped, and get to practice.
2 pm to 6 pm: Practice. Competing hard with the best in the country to try and get on the court.
6 pm Shower up, change, get to the cafeteria, and eat dinner.
7 pm-9 pm: Mandatory study hours. Each athlete had to do ten supervised hours each week. If we wanted free time on the weekends, we had to get it done during the week
9 pm: Back to the dorm for the first time since 8 am - if only just to drop off a backpack.
That's 13 hours. If we had a group project with non-athletes, this was the only time we could meet - and they weren't keen on it as it was party time for most.
Every. Single. Day. There were no days off. The football player’s schedule was worse.
Ten players were in my freshman class - ranked second in the country. One of them played all four years at USC. Four played for the USA and one, who didn’t finish, was an All-American.
What I learned from playing sports in college:
Hire college athletes. Having the physical ability to play sports has nearly zero to do with succeeding in most workplaces. Getting buckets on the hardwood or running fast won't help someone sell more insurance or write better code. But the discipline to get good grades while playing a college sport? That's miles ahead of most. The same goes for those who held down a job and got good marks in school.
There's always someone trying to take my spot. The sooner we learn how to use that competition and fear, the better. I played a lot and even started a few times as a true freshman. The next year, the #1 recruit at the position chose USC. And then again the next. That's life. College athletes know that better than most.
You better love what you do. I only played for two years at USC. When I got there, I loved volleyball. I played year-round and spent the summer after high school playing for Team USA. The following summer, I was burned out and, though selected to the U20 USA National Team, I declined and went home to Cupertino. One year later, I was done with the game - even though I started 10 of my last 11 matches and finished the 11th. My career path hasn't been much different. The more I've risen, the less balance there is. I learned early, I needed to love what I do. And I'm so grateful that I do.
Shortcuts only hurt me. Nobody else. The cheating at USC was rampant. Thanks to friends on the football team, I got copies of tests in advance, had tutors try to do my homework for me, and even had my midterm essay swapped out with the starting running backs. I played volleyball. I needed to get an education. There were so many chances to take shortcuts. I learned not to
Never underestimate what I’m capable of. Volleyball is a spring sport, so the first practices are in small groups. I was paired with a setter, Caleb, and a fifth-year senior, Trent, who played my position. He absolutely humiliated me. As one-sided a beating as one could endure. I called my dad after practice near tears to tell him I couldn’t do this. The game is so much faster so much higher off the ground. He reassured me that they wouldn’t have brought me there if they didn’t think I could do it. Stick with it.
I was seventh out of seven on the middle blocker depth chart at our first full-squad practice. I barely got to play. Only the top two started.
I started my first match four months later. That felt like an impossible outcome after that first small group practice.A bonus non-work related one: Share this experience with the overeager youth sports parents. Too many push their kids toward this life without knowing what it really is. The glitz is nice, but there is a LOT of grit behind it.
College sports aren't for everyone. It turns out they weren't really for me - though I had some great times and learned many life lessons.
Go Trojans =)
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7141460221729603584/
What I learned from "Wrestlers"
"Wrestlers" - The Netflix Documentary on Al Snow's Ohio Valley Wrestling could be taught as a full semester course in business school. The show chronicles the plight of a small wrestling business that has been around for decades but is struggling to adapt to the ever-changing environment around them (spoiler: the Netflix exposure gave them a huge bounce after the show).
What I learned:
Very few things are as poisonous as "How we've always done it." Those sinking the ship often stubbornly kill their own business and will fight any change. OVW was once a prominent player in wrestling. Back in the day, there were wrestling territories. These were smaller outfits that would act as a feeder system to the bigger businesses - WWE, WCW (now owned by WWE), and AEW. In the past decade, the WWE has bought up territories and created their own minor league where they develop talent. At the same time, cable TV, especially regional cable, has fallen off a cliff. OVW was on a fast track to bankruptcy until two new investors bought in.
It's a fascinating watch to see how stuck in the past the wrestlers and Al Snow are when discussing what to do next. An example: The new investors wanted to tour more and partner with local venues - which seemed successful. Al wanted to build towards a big Pay-per-view at the end of the year with the goal of 500 buys. They got 70. Yes, 70. At $15 a piece, that's a whopping $1,050. That market opp had passed, and Al wouldn't adapt.
It will happen to you, too. How we do things in our business today is so different than five years ago. And when you're trying to implement change in your org or a customer? You'll get the same pushback. It isn't nefarious; it's human nature.
Never act impulsively in the moment. There are multiple blow-ups between managers, investors, and the "talent." People get heated. It happens. That's not the time to do anything. This isn't a Morgan Wallen tune. Get out of there before you damage your culture.
Wanting something isn't enough. A harsh reality in life is watching someone who really wants something, works hard for it, and doesn't get it. The show is full of people who won't let go of a dream that just won't happen - both in the "talent" and on the business side. And they're stuck because of it.
I wanted to play in the NBA. Good thing I gave that up as I love what I'm doing now. We can get stuck rooting for people, but, in the end, this is a business. We have to love them enough to help them move on. The show provided a bump for the stars. Had it not come to town, they were all reduced to wrestling in parks in front of hands full of people while working the night shift at the Holiday Inn to make ends meet.
I only get to watch a little TV, but The Wrestlers was worth my time if you're looking for something to watch.
And a new one:
I believe in the power of prayer. I don’t ask others to, and if you don’t, that’s okay. A loved one has been diagnosed with blood cancer and is going through chemo. Whether you believe or you don’t, I would very much appreciate your prayers for them.
Happy New Year to all and here’s to another adventurous journey around the sun!