Every once in a while, I still have one of those moments where I wonder how in the hell a guy from Dalzell, South Carolina ended up in this room. I’ve been a sports fan my entire life, so there is still a part of me that gets a kick out of sitting across from athletes I’ve watched for years or talking strategy around some of the most recognizable players in the world.
And it’s not just basketball anymore. It might be soccer. It might be a brand, an investor, a league executive or even a sovereign fund. I still appreciate how crazy some of that is. But once the conversation starts, the sports fan in me usually disappears pretty quickly.
I go to work.
A lot of those conversations happen because of my friend and business partner Sumair Khan. Sumair has spent years building an incredible amount of trust across sports. He’s an attorney, spent part of his career at CAA and has negotiated with some of the biggest brands in the world on behalf of athletes. I’ve sat beside him while people at the highest levels of sports have called to ask what he thinks about a player, an opportunity or something happening in their business.
His reach is incredible, but the more time I’ve spent working alongside him, the more I’ve realized something about access. Everybody wants to get into the room. We spend a lot less time talking about what happens after you get there.
Access isn’t the advantage. Knowing what to do with it is.
Sumair and I talk pretty much every day. Somewhere along the way, we went from doing business together to becoming close friends, and a lot of those conversations now revolve around opportunities sitting in front of athletes. It could be an endorsement, a contract, an investment, a business idea or something that hasn’t really been defined yet.
The opportunity changes. Our conversation usually ends up in the same place.
What else is here?
That’s probably the simplest way to explain what we do. An athlete’s platform is almost always bigger than the individual opportunity sitting in front of them. Obviously money matters. Equity matters. But so does time. So does ownership. So does control. So does intellectual property. So does the audience the athlete is building and whether they actually own a relationship with that audience.
I’ve actually come to believe that for superstar athletes, time may be one of their most valuable assets. They’re constantly traveling, training, playing, recovering, shooting content and making appearances, often while spending enormous amounts of time away from their families. So getting an athlete another check while giving away more and more of their time isn’t necessarily maximizing value.
Maybe the better deal protects more of their time. Maybe there is equity. Maybe they should retain the IP. Maybe this should be a long-term relationship instead of a transaction. Maybe the opportunity can help them build an audience they actually own instead of continually renting access to one from somebody else.
Or maybe they should just take the check.
That’s important too. We aren’t trying to turn every endorsement into a company or make every opportunity more complicated than it needs to be. We’re trying to make sure somebody has looked at the whole thing and asked whether there is more value sitting there before the athlete signs their name.
That’s where Sumair and I work well together, because we don’t necessarily look at the same opportunity the same way. Sumair has seen an enormous number of agreements and negotiations during his career. He understands every line of those contracts, but what I think makes him particularly good is the experience behind it. He’s seen the patterns before.
He can identify something that might become a sticking point before it ever becomes one. He understands where brands tend to push, where athletes tend to give and where value can disappear because everybody assumes something is simply “standard.” I’ve watched him identify things in contracts that I completely missed because he had seen some version of it years earlier.
I remember one of the first times it happened thinking, Damn, this motherfucker is good.
My brain tends to attack the opportunity differently. I want to pull it apart until I understand what we’re actually trying to accomplish. What does the athlete value? What does the other side value? Why does each side want what they’re asking for? Where are the hurdles? What assumptions are we making? What don’t we know?
Most importantly, what questions haven’t been asked yet?
That’s where my background starts to become useful. I’ve spent most of my career solving business problems, studying consumer behavior, building companies, negotiating and trying to understand why people make the decisions they make. Over time I’ve learned that one of the most valuable things I can do is remove myself from the outcome as much as possible.
Strip away the ego. Strip away the bias. Stop trying to prove that your original idea was right and look at what’s actually sitting in front of you.
Then start asking questions.
I’ve spent 17 years in market research, so data is obviously one of the tools I use. But I’ve never thought of myself as the data guy. Data is useful when data helps answer the question. Other times the answer comes from psychology, consumer behavior, competitive intelligence, contract precedent, experience or simply understanding the people sitting across the table.
I’ve built entire playbooks for Sumair before meetings I wasn’t even going to attend. Who are the people on the other side? What’s their background? What matters to them? How are they likely to process what we’re proposing? What language will resonate with them? What should we emphasize?
That’s not research for the sake of research. It’s preparation. I want us walking into the room understanding as much of the board as we possibly can.
Everybody has an opinion. I want evidence.
That evidence doesn’t mean I’m always right, and it definitely doesn’t mean Sumair and I always agree. We disagree all the time. Sometimes I think his idea is dumb. Sometimes he thinks mine is dumb. Neither one of us gets particularly offended because we both know the other one isn’t dumb.
So we talk it out.
His experience has changed my mind plenty of times. I’ve brought him information or a completely different way of looking at something that changed his. I think that’s one of the reasons the partnership works. Neither one of us needs to win the argument. We need to get to the best answer.
I’ve described the difference between us before by saying that Sumair will sometimes go from A to B to C to D. He wants to examine every sentence, every implication and every potential consequence along the way. My brain sometimes wants to go directly from A to D.
I want to find the most logical path. I want to understand the psychology on both sides. I want to know what’s actually preventing us from getting where we’re trying to go and whether that obstacle is even real.
Neither approach is better. Together, we cover a lot of ground.
He catches things I don’t. I question things he might not. His legal and agency experience gives him pattern recognition I don’t have, and my background sometimes causes me to question the premise of the opportunity altogether. Then we beat it up until we’re comfortable that we’ve looked at it from enough angles.
That ability to remove ego becomes particularly important when money is involved. People get obsessed with winning negotiations. They want the other side to give in. They want to be able to say they got the better deal.
I’ve never understood that.
If I’m representing an athlete’s interests, I don’t care if the other side walks away thinking they won too. I actually hope they do. I care whether we understood what the athlete valued, protected it and extracted as much value as reasonably possible from the opportunity. If both sides are excited about what they built, there is probably a better chance that relationship creates something else later anyway.
One thing that has surprised me as I’ve gotten deeper into the business of sports is how often the answer to “Why?” is basically, “Because this is how it’s always been done.”
That’s not a criticism of agents or managers. Good agents and managers do an incredibly difficult job, including a lot of things Sumair and I have absolutely no interest in doing. I think about what we do as another layer that can bolt onto that infrastructure and help the athlete see the entire board.
Sometimes that simply means being willing to question the premise.
Maybe an athlete has five million followers. Everybody understands that’s valuable. But what if that athlete also owns a direct relationship with 500,000 people? Now we’re having a different conversation with a brand. What if the athlete owns the IP? What if there is an equity component? What if their role can go beyond endorsement? What if this relationship can help build a platform the athlete controls?
Not every opportunity supports those things.
But we’re not going to know if nobody asks.
That’s also why I think athletes often have more power than they realize. A company may have the contract and the infrastructure, but the athlete is frequently the reason everybody is sitting at the table in the first place. Part of our job is making sure the athlete understands that without allowing ego to distort it.
Power isn’t valuable because you can pound your fist on the table. It’s valuable because it gives you options.
And yes, every once in a while I still look around one of these rooms and think about Dalzell. If you had told me years ago that I would someday be thinking through business and platform strategy around some of the most sought-after athletes in the world, I probably would have laughed. If you had told me some of them would be soccer players, I probably would have first asked you who they were.
Now I can find myself looking at the platform around a young international athlete who isn’t even old enough to legally drink in the United States and thinking about how decisions being made around him today could affect what he owns 20 or 30 years from now.
That’s usually when the “How the hell did I get here?” feeling goes away.
Because I know why I belong there. I can help.
For all the talk about maximizing value, that’s ultimately what matters most to me. When an athlete walks away from something Sumair and I have been involved in, I want them to feel protected. I want them to know we thought about their money, their time, their ownership, their brand, their family, their future or whatever mattered most to them in that particular situation.
And I want them to trust that, good, bad or indifferent, we exhausted everything we knew how to do to make sure they understood the opportunity and made the right decision for themselves.
Sumair’s relationships have given us access to some extraordinary rooms. I’m grateful for every one of them.
But the more rooms I sit in, the more convinced I become that access itself isn’t the advantage.
Knowing what to do once you’re there is.
