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Hi, I'm Jason Kelly. I'm Alex Rodriguez, and on this episode of The Deal, George Pine. So George Pine, Alex. He is the former CEO of NASCAR, former president of IMG, now the founder of Bruin Capital. This is a guy that if you are in the sports world, you are one degree from him because he's everywhere. He's got a speed dial like no one else, has been involved in major deals and is looking around the corner constantly for what's happening next in sports.
Yeah.
I think in many ways, Jason, guys like you and I we looked up to Warren Buffett and other great CEOs. I think this is a guy that if you're a young entrepreneur you should study.
Yeah.
And the reason why he has a perfect trifecta, I mean, you said it best. He's a wonderful family man. He's built an incredible business in Bruin Capital, and he's got old class relationships with an amazing culture.
Here's George Pine. All right, George. Should we start the show always by having people introduce themselves, their names and what they do.
George Pine, founder and CEO Brewin Capital, now I could use the Boston accent. George Pine, I.
Realized, listen, when you use a Boston accent, it gives this guy PTSD.
So your audience.
Yeah, so use that, use that to your advantage. I mean, if you don't like it, question, if you don't like a question you asked, just answered, and the boss, you know, we're wondering how to start the conversation with you, you know, looking at all the stuff you've done for your career, what would you say so far? Is your signature deal?
Signature deal? You know, I do? You know, I don't really look in terms of that. I think the thing probably if you ask you what am I most proud of? Maybe you know deal. Earnhardt passed away on the last lap of the Daytona five hundred weeks before I was promoted to run the company. Having to lead the safety initiatives at NASCAR through a very difficult period, it's probably the thing I'm most proud of. And then, of course
that had two avenues. One was actually putting in safety policies and procedures and creating an R and D center, the first of its kind in the world, and then also too navigating the communications challenges of that because overnight NASCAR became so much more popular at that time. So that of all the things I'm most proud of, I think it is that error and dealing with that challenge, and luckily they've had almost perfect safety record since then.
What was that moment, like, I mean, that was a I mean that was a similar moment in the sport.
It was to lose your greatest driver of all time, and we had lost three other guys in last eighteen months, and then when the greatest of all time passes away, it just it shook the whole industry right to the core. And of course we were leading the nightly news three nights in a row and we are The scrutiny on the sport was off the charts, So that rattled you.
It really rattled you to your course. So having to kind of stabilize and kind of like sports getting out, you got to go back and play the next day and dig in there and find your way through it. It was really probably one of the most challenging things, but we came out the other end and made great strides and had a real impact over a long period of time. So if you look at ask me what I'm most proud of. It's that effort.
Let's talk about that, George, Because obviously, when the returns are great and you're returning capital to investors and all, that is all wonderful, But in a very very difficult moment leadership wise, what were some of the things that you did over those three days to thirty days to make everybody feel better about themselves?
Wow? I think you have to lead by example and taking tough positions. I mean, we installed hans device, which was very unpopular at the time. We put data recorders in the cars, which was also controversial. So pushing through a number of changes that culturally and for other reasons the organization had never done before. But you had to do it right. So what was your option? So having the courage to push through change at a difficult moment and sticking with it and believing it and standing up
was really what I took away from that. So I think a leader has to take a stand, do things that are uncomfortable, and be thoughtful at that is, you don't really want to go against the grand to go against the grain, but you know, you to lead, you've got to take a stand and do what you believe in.
So over the course of this conversation, we're going to talk a lot about your leadership and candidly like your operational expertise and your operating experience and how that translates into your investment world. But I feel like I have to go all the way back. And Alex knows this because I've known you for a long time. I mentioned when I was basically a kid in Atlanta for our mutual friend Billy, and right, he started out in the
real estate where you come out of Brown. What's the quick story of how you get from there me meeting you and Helene, like on club Drive in Atlanta to today.
As I tell everyone, there's no way to replicate my journey. Right, I moved to Atlanta, I had five thousand dollars. My wife had a car with ninety thousand miles in no air conditioning. My car had one hundred and seventy thousand miles and only two of the four doors worked right, and we literally had to use our credit credit cards to pay the bills we had. Our friend Billy came over to our apartment and said, I feel like I'm
in a college JOm. I said, yeah, this is all my stuff for my college JOm So it was a journey, but again I come from a family of athletes and didn't want to fail. Like I never really cared about winning, but I never wanted to lose, right, And so I moved away went to this new place, Atlanta. Atlanta was great. It was having the Olympics in the Super Bowl, and I worked in a big real estate company and had built twenty seven buildings in downtown Atlanta. And I was like, hey,
we should get in the sports business. And my boss thought I was crazy. But on the side, I built a little sports business, signed up NASCAR in nineteen ninety five, and people forget today. When I went to NASCAR, it was called Winston Cup. Sixteen races were on the Nashville Network and the company had one office and it was very small. You know, when we left here on Fox. At NBC we had nine offices.
Hold on, I want to stop you there. It was not called NASCAR.
It was Winston Cup Racing right as a tobacco sponsor, and people referred to Winston Cup. The NASCAR brand at that point didn't really exist, and NASCAR at the time when I went there was a company that sanctioned the races and administered the races. It wasn't supposed to be in the commercial side, and so they let myself and Brian France were anointed to go try and develop a commercial business. And man, we took off. You hit it hard. I knew we had a big opportunity and it worked out,
and so it was an amazing run. The industry was great, but I wasn't a car give so, you know, I was forty years old. It had a little itching me and I want to do something else. And so I had a frantic oldman Sacks and said, hey, you know you should go see this guy Ted Forceman, he just bought IMG. And I was like, all right, I didn't know who Ted was, and I thought I went by I saw Ted. I thought it was go me thirty minutes. It was two hours. And Ted, when he wanted something
was pretty compelling. And the notion of good IMG worked for a guy who is a leader in private equity to me was legend in private He said he invented it. I'm not sure that too, but I felt like working for him I could learn a lot, which I did. And obviously IMG was in thirty countries and so running a company that operated in thirty countries that was in wide array of sports. Working for a guy like Ted, for me was like, all right, that sounds good.
So I like when you mentioned Ted force me because the first time I heard of him was when he bought twenty four hour Fitness from my partner, Mark Mastrow, and I think they did that deal for about a billion eight marchers loved working with him.
But tell us a little bit about Ted.
Our listeners, probably a little bit younger, don't know much about Ted, but he's a legend. Tell us what he meant to you and what were some of the attributes unless as you learned from him.
I had really three great mentors. And Atlanta, a guy named John Portman who was one of the great American architects at twenty five million square feet of real estate, and I work with him through a financial restructuring, and then working at NASCAR for Bill France. Bill France was another billionaire, very successful guy, and then working for Ted Forsman. So I learned different things from different people. Ted what I really learned was he was very conservative and a
little bit negative. But boy, if he was able through structure to come up with an idea to minimize the risk. Like the guy was all in right away. And so what I really learned from him was, and I tell my kids, the risk reward ratio, what's the upside, what's the downside? Is it worth it? And if it's worth it, you go for it. That's what I took away from Ted. The other thing from these three guys all highly successful,
they all worked, they worked hard, They're smart. I'll tell you one of the funny one is, so my last day at NASCAR, I'm going to lunch with Bill France and Jim France, two billionaires. Where do we go? We go to stake and shit, and they're wearing like short sleeves and we're driving home and I said, I go, guys, can you give me one piece of advice? It's great advice.
They said, no, when to squeeze and no when not to squeeze, And that was it, right, But that was kind of having the judgment of knowing when to push and when not to push. So like watching these guys Dan and Dale for me was a great, great learning experience.
I mean, what's the transition like from what I mean you go from these two like iconic people in American business and finance. Was there any sort of transition from working for the Frances, you know, you know pretty well codified family business to Ted Force, I mean barbarians at the gate. How do you sort of adjust mentally like what are you going home and saying to Helene of like, okay, this is this is a different world.
Yeah. So NASCAR was because it was a family business. Really all you had to do was convince the family of the right thing to do, and you're doing immediately no politics, which I love, and there was no kind of political maneuvering and so that was great for me. And I was kind of a guy that went out there in the fields and did the work and you know, brought the goods home and did it again and did it again. And when you went to Ted, Ted was
an investor, not an operator. And investors sometimes when they don't know a business, there there are a lot of different inputs, and when you're running a global company, there's a lot more politics. And I was not When I first went to I'MGA i was forty years old. I was like, hey, if you're doing a good job and you're driving results, that should be good enough. And what I learned in that environment was that may not be
the case. So it's you know, I tell people, you know, you need good style, but also up in substance, and I was more substantive I think at NASCAR, and I needed to work on the style kind of the presenting and being a little more political, which I didn't like quite honestly, and we don't have it brewin today. But that was if you said to me, what was different?
You know, working for a global financier who has a lot of inputs, you've got to be a different set of management skills working for a family business and delivering results.
And so what was the like you get to IMG and what's the biggest challenge that you took on there?
Well, the biggest challenge is trying to reinvent and grow the company, which you know, one of the things with Ted, which was great training for me and I knew it when I took the job, was all right, you know, my job is to grow earnings. Right, Scale doesn't matter, profitless, volume doesn't matter, growing earnings.
Because he's an investor.
He's an investor, and so how to grow ibadah is was the thing that you know, we got trained in and measured, but ironically, you know the one thing that I learned a long time although I going back to Portman when I made a huge mistake, I used to criticize people for not having a plan. When I went ran my first business, I didn't have a plan. I got really taken to the woodshed on that. I said,
I'll never run a business without a plan. And so how's a guy that you know his wife taught him how to drive a six shift, run NASCAR and set rules and so forth. Because that I was a very big three year plan guy. So we had to write a business plan and you checked in on a business plan a month on strategy and numbers. And when what happened NASCAR, Bill Frantz is like, you know what, it's
working pretty good on the commercial side. Why don't we take this discipline and put it over to the core business. And that's what got me on the racing side from just the commercial side, and that has served me well. It served me really well working for TED because I have a very diligent planning strategy. It's not I look at it this way like numbers are like your blood pressure, cholesterol or whatever. They'll tell you what's right or wrong
with the business, but they're not going to solve it. It's the strategy drives the numbers. The numbers can firm the strategy. I always been a big believer in that. Even yesterday I was in a staff meeting. I'm like, hey, guys, you know, let's make sure we have a collaborative approach with our companies and just someone doesn't show up in December and presents me a business plan. Let's start now digging in with people and let's go through the drafting
of it. So I found that working with people, developing a strategy and then having the numbers check the strategy has really worked well for me for thirty years. I learned that at Portman. Actually, so I.
Specifically on IMG you said one of the things you were looking to do from Teddy's kind of from the top.
Is grow ibadat right.
Maybe one or two examples of what strategy did you take and how did you move that number in the right direction.
Well, you know, one of the ones I'm really happy about is IMG Academy. When you take about IMG Academy was they were really great at training athletes, the lead athletes, you know, Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams, Maria shrup of a really great athletes had been through there, but for thirty years it had never been profitable. Right, So I put in a guy today who's at the Barclay Center and running the Nets. Sam's ustman. He was well educated, he
went to Stanford Business School, Tel Aviv Law School. Sam came in as my chief of staff and I put him in to run IMS Academy. And Sam's a brilliant guy, but he had worked at McKinsey in yield management and running a sports academy is like running a hotel or in Sam's case, understanding the yield management in the airline industry.
So we took IMG from not being very profitable too profitable in a very short amount of time, turning it into more of a place where you could go to go to college versus where we're going to get the next Maria Sharapova. And I was really proud of that. We bought this amazing IMG Academy just SILD for I think roughly one point two billion dollars, like ten or eleven years ago. We bought forty percent. We only owned
sixty percent of it when I got there. We bought forty percent of IMG Academy for six million dollars and a two year payment plan. And it was hard because we did it during like nine and you know, cash we were managing cash tight. I had to go to the wall. That was like moving a mountain to get six million dollars to buy forty percent of the academy. They never been profitable for but you know, recently just SILD for like one point two billion dollars. So anyway,
so that's one. And then you know, we had a lot of fun building the college business. We'd never been in college. And one thing I learned from Ted which served me well today, was we had to go around and find places to grow earnings that didn't exist. And so we did this. We looked, I looked at everything. We looked at all these different sports. And I had one of my buddies who used to be my CMO at NASCAR. I started getting these numbers on college sports.
It was like one hundred and ninety million fans number one with young people, ethnically diverse, a wealthier audience than golf. Right, think about most CEOs went to college, right and gender neutral. I call my guy, I said, his name's Roger Vandersink, he's at the colts now, I said, Roger, I go,
where did these numbers come from? He goes, oh, George, we never compared ourselves to college sports, and so we made investments in college sports and it turned out to be a real at IMG, I'm a real growth engine for us, and that was probably in two thousand and ten, and we were the first really guys that got the ball moving there.
What does that look like when you're investing into college sports, Like so many things that you've done, they seem so obvious now, but they were not obvious at the time. So how did you invest in college Well, so the idea was I took a look at those numbers. I was a gas, right, and then you start looking at our Take Atlanta. You have the Atlanta Falcons and the
Georgia Bulldogs. Now we lived in Atlanta, so you know, like, who's more popular, truthfully the Georgia Bulldogs, it's not really, it's not close.
And so like when you look at all, right, what revenue does the Falcons generate and what revenue does the Bulldogs? And all of a sudden, the Falcon's away up here and the Bulldogs are down there. So I'm not the smartest guy, but I was like, you know what I want to do, I'm going with those guys and we should be and try to sell sell like the like the Falcons, And so we had. It was a big restructuring.
I mean we I think we had. Unfortunately, we had a reploy had four hundred salespeople replaced three hundred and eighteen months, and so you had it was you had to replace people because you were selling differently. We wanted to sell like the Falcons, not like the Bulldogs, and we had to go out and get guys from the other leagues to come in and help us.
You know, Georgia, I'm sorry you lost me a little bit. Take me step back. So you're invested in to the Bulldogs, the Georgia Bulldogs, But what does that mean. I mean that you're managing sponsorships or you're investing into the university walking through that.
So there were companies, small companies at the time that had the marketing rights to these companies, and what we did is we rolled them up and when we left were representing eighty five universities WOW on sponsorship and local media rights, and then two hundred universities in licensing.
So you were repping the schools and essentially replacing an infrastructure that was probably like local or regional right like.
We were trying to That was kind of the whole, ye whole, So your point makes sense now, But transformation at that time, Oh yeah, go ahead of the cur that was the big driver of growth during the IMG time.
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think about that sort of trifectave experiences. But what were you seeing in the business of sports that you found so compelling as you moved along.
Well, when you think about sports anywhere in the world, it's the only thing that aggregates hundreds of millions of people together around something as a statement of who you are and what you stand for. So that connection, which at NASCAR, those fans were loyal in college is you're loyal Yankees fan, very loyal, and so what you really want to do is try and tap into that loyalty
that's unmatched. And you know, in this world now where media consumption is fragmented, there are very few things that pull people together, right, And then when you think about all these new devices that can deliver content, you're really tapping into the consumer. I look at sports today like
in a fragmented world, sports become more valuable. And where I think sports is going is this whole concept of the lifetime value of the consumer, right, because really it's a one to one relationship and I'm going to you know, I'm a Yankees fan. I want Yankees content. I want to know everything about the New York Yankees. And having that one to one relationship might give me permission to suggest products and services that are relevant, you know, to the Yankees. And by the way, you can take that
to Europe. It's the same thing in any of those football clubs or leagues. It's the passion of sports and that one to one connection that's unlike anything else and will become more valuable because the media and the way we communicate so much more fragmented today than it was ten years ago.
So take us through, you know, arguably the biggest sort of personal deal you make, which is you've been working for these like big companies. You've had these incredible, like iconic business figures you've worked for, and then you decide like, I'm going to do my own thing, and not just I'm going to do my own thing, but I'm going to move from being an operator to being an investor. Like what's that thought process?
Like the thought process was you had success in growing earnings and I could now apply this to a different area for myself. And I think we had talked a little bit about you know, the transitions. You know, when you're in a company, it's political, and I wanted to have a more horizontal, entrepreneur, results oriented kind of situation.
So that was appealing to me. And you know, I was forty eight years old, and I was like, hey, if i'm forty years old, i fail, you know, I'll be fifty two or fifty three and I'll come back and take a job. Right But I said, you know what, I'm going to wait till i'm sixty to take my shot. I was like, it's the age always meant a lot to me. You know, I was forty years old at NASCAR. I'm like, yeah, do I see myself here? Twenty years old? I want to take a shot at something else. You know,
I'm forty eight years old. You know, now's the time to take a shot. I'm twenty five, I'm going to move away from home. I have no money, so what if I feel like can always move back home again? Right, So like I'm forty years old, it's time to take a shot now. It was a big difference. You know, I'm in the one hundred and eighty eight dollars a square foot forty fourth floor of the GM building with all the great trappings, and you know, I'm in white
planes at the Regis temporary office. I didn't even have a secretary. I mean I had, I didn't everyone to answer the phone. So really, literally was that journey. And I have to say, forty years old, it was nice to know that I was still that scrappy, you know that I still I still could get in there and go. And we built this thing from nothing, right, and we built it up, and yeah we're you look at Bruin today. We operate in seventy one countries. We have people on
the ground in twenty countries. You know, we work with every major League of federation in the world. And you know, I literally started from regis temporary office in White Plans, New York.
So, George, let's go back to when you were forty eight you said you want to take your shot. Now you talked about a three year plan. Walk us through your three year plan. How much are you raising, what are you trying to invest in? And there's for in laymans terms for viewers and listeners who don't know much about brow and walk us through that a little bit.
Yeah, So what the idea was was to invest in things that were very similar to the businesses that we built. You know, NASCAR, we came in, there were four people in the commercial division. When we left, there were hundreds. I don't know how many, but a lot of people, right, And so we built a media capability, We built a pure capability under scrutiny, you know, we built a sponsorship capability,
a licensing capability, of marketing capability. Right then and then at IMG we're in thirty countries or in wide ranges of sports. We had to do a lot of restructuring, which I hadn't done a lot of NASCAR was more organic growth, and IMG was restructuring and then investing right working for a demanding guy who was really quite bright. So the idea was I did good at that for other people. You know. I had a friend of mine and said, hey, why don't you do it for yourself
and your partners? I said, well, how do you do that? He goes, I'll help you do it, and you know, here we are.
Can you tell us who that friend was?
Cave Cars thro Shi at Allen Company. Cave was like, in the day that it was announced that Endeavor was buying IMG, called me up. He said that you're ready to go yet, And of course I wasn't ready at the time, but he you know, I had been I knew IMG was going to sell, and so I had to think about, like what do I want to do? What's the next step for me? And so I had been thinking about this probably two years prior to the sale, and Cavet was like, hey, man, you got to do it.
And I was, you know, first of all, when you were at least I and I work, I loved the company. So it's always hard to lead like when I left NASCAR, I cried right, and it's like it's hard leaving these places when you give everything you have. But it was just an itch I needed to scratch. Whatever that was saying is.
So, George, I want to go back to when you were forty eight. I'm forty nine, so I'm obsessed to this time of your time.
There.
There's nothing harder than raising a first time fund.
You're an entrepreneur, you're an operator, but you haven't really raised a lot of capital at that point.
A how scary is it?
How big of a fund were you trying to raise, and how difficult was it for you or how easy was it for you to raise that money?
Well, by the way, it was a lot harder. It's a lot harder than I realized when I started. I was lucky that my friend Cave essentially went to his clients and said, believe in this guy. And if it wasn't for Cave, I would not have I wouldn't be sitting here right now. And if I knew how hard it was to raise money, I think stupidity in this case was a real asset for me. And if I knew how hard it was, I probably wouldn't have done it, but uh, but having surrounding myself with good people and
uh and people that believed in me. You know, Cave really delivered. And I have to think you know Martin Cerell too. Martin Crell is the CEO of w PP, and he came up to me and said, hey, I'm in for a third of the raise as w PP, no matter what the amount of money. Wow, you raised it. And of course, of course for me that was helpful in the race. So between you know, Martin Cerell and Cave,
those two guys really, you know, meaningful. And you can hear my voice, I'm very appreciative of those two people, you know, to this very day.
How much was it I'm going to take here.
It didn't take very long. It was like six or nine months and we raised two hundred and fifty million. Nice, Holy, so amazing. Well, you know, Alex, you transitioned from you know, really probably as well as anyone. I know. What was it like transitioning from being a successful athlete to being a successful entrepreneur? And how are you able to Why do you think you're able to do that? Because you've done amazing?
Thank you, George.
You know, First of all, I think I've had some incredible mentors, you know, starting with George Steinbrener. So watching George Steinbrenner execute what I call VCP that he had the vision hit the capitol and he has great people, and those people have been there for north of twenty five years, so continuity was really important. I saw there was a great arbitrage in people and duration of those people.
When I thought about my career, I said, well, if I can surround myself with the best people and take a forty or fifty year outlook in my business versus my competition was about the next five months or the next year, more transactional, I felt that was something that
was really good. And then kind of staying in my circle of competence sports and real estate is what I know best, and I'm pretty dangerous in those spots, and I'm pretty like I don't know much about much else after that, and I just try to stay in those two places, bring in the best people, and just you know, run the heck out of these companies and do the best I could.
Well it's amazing. I think it's amazing what we did in baseball, obviously, but I think the real estate, and yeah, what you've done in business is more amazing because there are a lot of amazing baseball players and athletes out there, but there aren't people that were the best at the athlete and being able to transition and do what you've done in business. So congrats man, thank you. Because I've been around this thing a long time.
Yeah, you've seen it not go that way. And so one of the things that's so interesting, and we sort of alluded to this at the top, is you're getting into the sports ecosystem, which again seems so obvious now. And listen, we look around. We see all these funds that have been created. We see your friend Roger Goodell at the NFL like embracing private equity, which we never thought might happen. But you clearly saw something from an
investment perspective in the broader ecosystem early. What was it, Well.
You know what I saw with TED and IMG. Ted was early an early adapter. Maybe there's one or two others where he invested. He was a private equity guy that invested in IMG. Yeah, which at the time was unheard of and somewhat controversial. And what I saw was if you could deploy capital against good ideas and sports you could get great results. And so the idea was, Okay, we've done that a few times at IMG ted deployed capital.
We deployed capital and got great results. You know, now we can do you can do this on your own.
And you're thinking of like IMG Academy, like specific initiative.
IMG College or other businesses that we bought along the way and saying, hey, we had a lot of success with that. You know, there's more opportunity here. And of course, you know when you kind of look back on me, now, what was unique was IMG was in thirty countries, and so we have a globe at Bruin, we have a global network. You know, we have fourteen Bruined advisors, many guys who had work with me at IMG, some people who compete with me at im G or now brew
an advisor. So we have a global network. And sports there are investment opportunities literally in sports all around, all around the world. So when you look at it from a global standpoint or international and so there's a there's a big world out there.
And what's interesting is you're not buying teams, or at least not yet. You have you know, really invested it again, I'm over using this, but like in the in the ecosystem, in some of the adjacencies. So what's the underlying theory there.
Well, I think when you look at lower middle market, private equity traditionally has huge growth potential and you can take these businesses and really grow them. And so when we come in there, we're able to We've been through this now, we've we've experienced growing companies now brewing a
fair amount. So we go into these middle market companies at you know, one stage and can add a lot of operational expertise and then obviously with our network now we open up markets and we can take these companies around the world that you know, quite honestly, they couldn't do it on their own. An example would be Delta Trade. When we acquired Delta Tree and had no US business. When we sold Delta Tree, half the business was was us.
What does that company? They do? Webs apps and streaming and so you know, when you look at you look at us, we're able to open up new markets, whether it be you know, I said, we do business in seventy one countries, but we're big in Europe, we're big in the United States, and we have a big presence in Australia and we're able to cross sell, so that's
a real value add on opening markets. And then you know, we have a team of people that really work in operations and I'm an operator, right, so like, you know, we're still I'm still pretty hands on, you know, I was. I was talking to a CEO yesterday. We had a problem, and I'm a little I'm a little more polished than they used to be. But h we had a pretty substantial problem, and I, you know, knowld ME might have been a little more progressive. I was like, look, you know,
you got a great business and doing great things. And then I said, look, I've made a lot of mistakes and here's a list of all my mistakes. So let's be honest with one another. Let's work to figure it out. Our guys like that. So if you talk to our CEOs, we do because they're our best sales. When we buy a company, like, they're happy. And it's quite different than other forms of private equity because typically because the people that lead the deals or deal guys, they're not subject
matter experts. So like when you do something with us, there are no boards, there are no committees, Like, we actually know what we're doing now. I have it the advisors and experts, but we have people that actually have done it, right, not somebody like I know two people that used to do it. So they're gonna whisper in my ear and I'm gonna they're gonna tell me what to do. Like, we know what we're doing, and we're not.
We're not doing healthcare, we're not doing these that we're doing sports and media and entertainment.
So George talking about Brun, if Jason was selling you on a pitch, right, walk us through what is the perfect what I call the two oh fastball right down the meadow for Brun meaning here's a space and we can make it up. Here's the earnings, here's the ibadah, and walk us to what excites you about that and how you think about growing and helping Jason as a found.
Yeah, so it would be if somebody earning ten or twenty million of EBITDA right that you know we've invested mostly in technology, not always well why technology, because the growth fundamentals are in technologies. Right. So occasionally we'll see things on location proof in the putting, we'll see a few things along the way where we think through our expertise we can add a lot but most of its technology.
So it would be probably a check or data related company that had on its own great growth fundamentals and really you really like the CEO. And what the lens I always look through is can this company grow or not on its own? And if I don't believe in the growth, we can't touch it. Then the other lens we look at is through our network, can we add value? And it's important because if you have a great investment,
then we can make it even better. And if, by chance, which happens, we're wrong, we can prop it up.
Okay, So in this case, Jason's company is throwing off ten minutes dollars of ibadah most of a free cash flow.
He wants ten times, you want five times. How do you land on?
Like?
Is it seven and a half?
Is it six?
Obviously depends on the growth trajectory. Walk us a little bit through how you think about it? Yeah, well I like this company.
This is great.
You're just doing the number. Yeah, exactly. Well, usually there's a there's a margin of what what the multiple is. Now I will say for us, like, we don't want to be with someone who if it's all about I want to get the last nickel. Ironically and thankfully most a lot. I think you know, more than half our deals are one on one deals where people have just
sought us out. There's not really a process because if you think about it, if you do your diligence on us, and you're a founder, like we're quite compelling if who you sell to matters, right, because like I've worked my whole life, I've built this company up, and now you know, I want to take a little cash off the table and I'm probably going to take more risk because we'll deploy CAW to do acquisitions, we'll open up markets, and
of course we're going to be pushing for growth. So then if you're a founder like, well, who do I want to do that with the guy who said listed all his mistakes when someoneent wrong before we get into what went wrong, or somebody who's highly educated wagging their finger at you that's never run a business, And that's really where So that with our discussions not so much about the multiples, it's about hey, do we culturally agree?
And I always tell the guys because I am a bit of a salesman like, I'm not and I don't want to sell it. I'm not selling anything. Like once we acquire your company, we can never part ways, so I don't want to convince you to do something you're going to do. So I'm always like, hey, if we buy a company, these are the expectations. Are you comfortable with it? And if you're comfortable with it, this is how we roll. And you know that's kind of how it works. So we don't the price thing. You know
that there's a range of the price. We're going to pay a fair value whatever that might be. But if you're about the last nickel, it's probably not a guy that I want to spend the next X amount of years with.
I'm not about the last night. I'm not about it the last night.
I'm Mike.
I'm gonna give it back to you. But it sounds a lot like the Berkshire Hathaway. Yeah, Charlie Munger Wander.
One of the areas obviously very near and dear to us is the media world. You know, we're sitting here on our podcast. You invested in Box to Box, I believe not too long ago, which we I mean everyone, I'm guessing listening to or watching this show has consumed something that Box to Box made, especially Drive to Survive, which I feel like revolutionized the way we think about sports and sports media. Talk to us about that deal, how it came about.
What you saw at this moment with that deal, Well, a couple of things. I see two great CEOs, James and Paul are very talented people. I have a good friend of mine, David Hill, who used to run Fox Sports, and I called Dave and he raved about them. It meant a lot to me. And then their product is really good. They do drives in full swing. They do kind of the behind the scenes for sports, you know, around the world. They're a market leader, and they fit
well with us because they're they're global, right. We're helping, you know, we've been able to add some relationships and contacts with them as well. But I felt like I always wanted to get in media if I could find a smart way to do it, and where we see growth for them. You know, they podcast short form media. They haven't really done they haven't invested capital, they've never
taken risk on the deal, they've never done acquisitions. I think there's opportunities for branding content so we saw four or five things that we think we could add, but again we were it was guys we believed in and guys we felt like we could add add something to In terms of a few client doors for them. They don't need too many because they're very global themselves. But they're great at what they do. And I love being with them because you get on a phone with them
and like zoom, and they want to be great. I mean, I'll give you a little example. So one of the things, you know, my companies are very under leveraged. It's good in one way, but we have to be a little better at that. And so we put brought all our companies together in London, and I brought in an expert on debt because I'll never I don't I learned a long time ago making adults do things they don't want to do probably not going to work out too good
for you. So I brought in this expert on capital markets and had them talk to the companies and these guys like embrace it and we just got our first credit facility for the company. But it was because they were interested and as I say, the guys, look, we're not going to lever it up will below lower leverage than everybody else, but let's be the best we can be, and they want to be the best they can be.
And it was kind of a new area. So like, that's somebody that wants to be great at everything they do. They want to embrace new things and they're just hungry and they're really are and creative. So I'm really happy with those guys.
And so what is it So when you're assessing when you're getting to know as CEO or a founder, like, what's that process like? Because I know you to be like incredibly personable, very humble, great family man. What's your vibe? Like, how are you getting.
To know someone? Well? You got to often you go to dinner with them and try to socialize. And what I'm really trying to decide is is the person driven? What's the team?
Like?
Do I believe in the growth fundamentals of that business? And if I believe the growth fundamentals of the business and I really believe in the CEO, then it's you know, it feels good? And can I add value? Can we can we add value? If we don't? If we can't add value, then all we are is placing a bet on something and I'm not. I'm not a better I got to know, like I can add value to something great or if it goes wrong, can I add value?
I want to go back to college sports if we can. Because one of the really interesting things about you I'm totally like taking advantage of, like knowing a lot about you I'm here is that you obviously you know, have been involved with college sports from a business perspective, but also as a dad. Your son Drew is a very successful quarterback on the college level. I do wonder like
being able to wear those different hats. What's your perspective on sort of college sports at this moment, because it feels like such a revolutionary and kindidly like sort of fraught moment for college sports. How does it feel to you?
Well, I think it's going through change, right, it's going through change because it's very successful, and it's so successful that the money became so significant that you know you have to share it with the players. I mean, you know, when you think about the college football playoff game, one game eighty four million dollars in meteorites before all the other things. If you have eighty thousand people paying one hundred bucks a ticket and all the concessions.
Yeah, so one game is worth eighty four million million dollars.
Do you think for two or three hour game? Three hour game, If that game's generating over one hundred million dollars for three hours, don't you think the guys on the field should participate? I estimated to be six to eight billion dollars a year generating college sports. Shouldn't the play people that are on the field at play. And so what's happened is the courts used to be deferential to the college model, but in this amount of revenue, the courts have now sided with the players. And so
you're going to have to change. And by the way, change isn't easy, and it's hard in college because nobody's in charge. There's you know, everyone's their own independent person. If you know, USC and UCLA were part of a conference till they weren't right, right, So you have a bunch of competitors that work for their self interest. And so with no one in charge in a highly successful industry, you're going to have a little bit of turbulence. But I think at the end of the day, it'll all
work itself out. You know, we went through all this with the Olympics, right, Oh, we shouldn't play the athletes, So we shouldn't play the athletes. Boy, I thought the Paris Olympics were amazing, unbelieva right, So like, and those are everyone's making money, No, nobody cares. In five or ten years from now, this thing will you know, make
its way through. And you know, I have a little bit of laughter about this because I you know, semi knowledgele on football and my family's been playing college football for over one hundred years. You know, those playoff games last year Michigan and Alabama, you know it went down to the last play. Yeah, right, Like the product on the field pretty good. Yeah, So all this talk about yeah you're gonna blow it's the Florida State game was a blowout and then whatever bullet was. But so what
there are always blows but those playoffs yeah amazing. So like the off field stuff of how what the player movement is, do the players get paid? It'll get figured out and it won't be easy.
I mean. One of the things that I know, Alex and I both admire about you and have watched over the years in various venues, some of which you've been you know, the convenor of you know everyone, I mean, you really have like cultivated and unbelievable that there's no one that I talked to in sports who's more than like two degrees and often one degree away from you. Is that purposeful? Like, what's the what's the method to that?
Well? I think a couple of things. There's a little bit of a track record, right, NASCAR was a good job, right, and then at IMG a lot of people we were their clients. But I think truthfully, you know, like an old shoe, you know, if you're around long enough and you're a good person and you deliver results and you do what you say you're going to do, you know,
it pays out for you. Now everyone's got their angle, right, that's my angle, you know if I tell you, and I learned it from Bill Bill Frantz when he hired me, because I got three things where you said, tell the truth, work hard, don't embarrass the company. I'm still quoting it today, right, Yeah, And I knew that if I told somebody and ask her, we were going to do it. We were going to do it. And so like that had an influence on me.
And even Ted was honorable and so to me. It's like, hey, you know, tell someone you're going to do something, you do it. Yeah, you try and do it in a nice way. I try to emulate Roger Penske. I told Roger I was with them this summer. I'm like, you know, some of these guys had impact on me. You know, So I think that is the basis from which you build out trust and respect over decades, right, And that's
what you're seeing in the benefit. That's my stick. Doesn't mean it's everybody's stick, but that's my stick.
And so, you know, one of the things that's fascinating about you, George too, is that, like you're so tight at the highest levels of all the major sports in the US and abroad. You're one of the only people I know who I feel like can call every commissioner of every league and like, get on the phone. What do you hear from those folks these days about sort
of the state of the sports leagues? Because obviously that has a big direction in terms of your own investment thesis of where things are going, Like take us inside, some of those conversations.
Really have to be kind of bullish right now, because when you look at the NBA to get two and a half times on their media deal is really amazing. Adam did an amazing job there. When you look at the NFL with all the contracted television revenue, they have really strong. NHL's got a long term deal, strong, Baseball's doing well. Everyone seems to be doing I mean, NASCAR did a great TV deal. Like all this stuff about how the media is changing and the fragmentation, nevertheless, the
sports have held up really strong. So I don't know. I think I think the big issue in sports today is that you do see institutional investors coming into sports. Capital is going to change the game. And so my advice to someone is, hey, if I'm running a sports team, I'm running a league in an organization, I need a capital plan to differentiate myself from my competitor number one,
number two, I need a defensive capital plan. So whether I want to act on it, I need I need a phone call like, hey, if I'm if something's coming in with capital is going to disrupt my sport, what am I going to do about it? So I don't think you can just sit back, maybe like you used to, and say, well that's not for us. You have to have a capital plan and look at golf. I mean, I'm not going to make any commentary on what's good or bad. But look, somebody with capital showed up and
the game changed. The other guy, I do he had to go out and raise capital, right, and a lot of it and a lot of it, and so like, if you're in sports, whoever you are, you better have a capital plan to go on offense and defense.
Yeah, that's an interesting but I hadn't thought about it exactly that way. But you know, you think about the NFL. If private equity is going to come into you know, even a half a dozen franchises, that doesn't just change those franchises, It changes the other twenty six is what like in terms of them, you know, having to figure out what their plans are going to be in terms of they're spending or.
Well, it's going to change it, right, So you're you know, I think they've done a really good job of limiting it right and making sure that you know that the investors have really no say right, right, and so they're not their life's not really changing for the NFL, but they're benefiting from an influx of institutional capital into the industry.
That money is going to go to provide liquidity for limited partners that might have had a hard time getting liquidity, might solve some family issues on some of these teams that are family owned. And it's going to provide capital perhaps for real estate investment and reinvent in the franchise. In lastly, it's going to increase the value of the
franchises because you have more bidders. So again, the institutional capital, well controlled in this case, is changing the game, right and so, and probably over time will change it more. As you know better than I that other sports, the number is higher than ten percent. And in order for these franchises to keep growing and growing in value, you're going to have to look at different outlets for capital. I mean, to buy an NFL team, now you need
two three billion dollars. Ear gets a little thin, and think about what rights you get. You know, if you're one of the guys in the Commanders that put four or five hundred million year for no rights, right, so that's getting harder and harder.
That's a pretty expensive season ticket and it's a nice.
Problem to have, but you're the victim of your own success. So you're going to have to understand the capital markets and have a long term capital plan. But again, it's all against the backdrop of success, right, everybody would love to have these problems.
I think, all right, so let's do a quick rapid fire around. So this is the only thing I'll say is like, keep it tight. We'll bounce it back and forth. What's one word to describe your deal making style?
Decisive?
What's more important to you your instant gut or data instant gut.
Who's your dream deal making partner?
Someone's well capitalized and smart.
What's the best piece of advice you've received on deal making or business? No?
Whe to squeeze and when no, not to squeeze.
What's the worst piece of advice you ever received?
I don't know. I didn't pay attention.
Do you have a hype song before you go into a big meeting or negotiation?
No? But a good work. It's a good substitution.
If you can only watch one sport for the rest of your.
Life, what's sport?
What it be football? Football? American football?
And what's your favorite team?
Uh? Patriots? My dad play for the Patriots. I have to go for Patriots.
What team do you want to see win a championship more than any?
Missouri tires.
There you go, go for your son answer.
One fun fact about George Pine that if your colleague chart about it, they would be shocked.
They're surprised I played the veal. O. Wow. Listen, this was really, really fun. I feel like it's decades in the making. So thank you so much for doing this. It's great to see you and great to be with you, guys. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thanks, thanks, sure, thanks so much for listening to the Deal. If you never want to miss a story, become a Bloomberg dot com subscriber today. Check out our special intro offer right now at Bloomberg dot com Slash Podcast Offer or click
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The Deal is a production from Bloomberg Podcasts and Bloomberg Originals. The Deal is hosted by Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly. Our producers are Anamazarakis, Stacey y Wong, Lizzie Phillip, and Victory Veyees. Original music and engineering by Blake Maples. Our managing editor is David E. Ravella. Our executive producers are Jason Kelly Brendan, Francis Newnham, Jordan Opplinger, Trey Shallowhorn, Kyle Kramer,
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