(This is Installment #4 of Lessons From The Passionist: How To Turn Passion Into Purpose To Create Greater Meaning and Joy in Your Life. This week, I continue to tell the story of my passion guided journey from a brief career as a fledgling pro tennis player to a marketing industry pioneer and leader. I hope you enjoy, and please continue to send your comments and stories. I love the feedback and hearing from all of you.)
Chapter 1 (continued) – A Journey, Not a Destination: My Personal Passion Journey
Steven Roberts is a gritty entrepreneur who literally throws himself into everything he does until he achieves his goal. He was always creating some kind of business as a kid, and even made enough money stringing tennis racquets at sixteen to buy himself his first car, a convertible MG. Playing tennis, he would often dive for balls and come off the court bleeding. It was a badge of honor for Steven, a sign that he put out the required effort to win or die trying. He still plays the same way.
I thought Steven would be the ideal business partner for a pioneering marketing company, so I called him (he was living in California at the time, and I was in Northern Virginia, near Washington, DC, one of the hubs of the early sports marketing industry) and shared my ideas. I told him that I was considering taking a sports marketing job, but was hesitant because I felt strongly that there was an opportunity to create a company to change the way sports marketing was done, to make it more strategic and marketing driven. “Why not us,” I said, “Let’s create our own company.” We also wanted to get rich, so working for someone else, and making them rich, didn’t seem like the right path. As often happens with close friends, he was thinking similar thoughts, and had already created a company that was doing some tennis related promotions. We were young and had little to lose by launching our own business rather than working for someone else, so after a few hours of discussion, we decided to become partners and go for it.
Two months after that phone conversation, I convinced Steven to move from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., where we could be closer to the center of the industry, and closer to New York City, where many of the headquarters of our potential clients were located. Within a week of his arrival in D.C., Pinnacle Promotions was born. Founded by two twenty-somethings with a passion to make a difference, street smarts, newly minted college degrees (neither in marketing), some still open wounds form being brutally spit out by the pro tennis tour and not much else (we didn’t have two pennies between us when we started), Pinnacle Promotions set out to make its mark on the fast-growing sports and event marketing industry. Without a doubt, a high degree of passion and persistence would be required to make this venture successful.
Steven and I developed a strategic framework for how we thought companies should approach sports and event sponsorships. Today, the practice is called sponsorship activation and experiential marketing, and many companies do it intelligently with great results. But in 1987, few brands executed strategically effective sponsorship programs, or even thought a strategy was needed to optimize their sponsorship investments. Sponsors were still busy shaking hands and taking photos with celebrities in the VIP tents, and calling it marketing. We knew this was an unsustainable model, and that boards and investors would eventually start to demand more accountability from sponsorships.
A good example of scant accountability was Team Nabisco. For those of you unfamiliar with Team Nabisco, it was the pet project in 1987 of Nabisco CEO, F. Ross Johnson. Johnson assembled a private team of hall-of-fame athletes that included Bobby Orr, O.J. Simpson, Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and other sports luminaries. He spent millions of Nabisco’s dollars flying these former superstars around the country on the corporate fleet of jets to play golf with him and, presumable, his customers. Google it or read Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco – it was the biggest sports marketing related boondoggle ever dreamed up. Pinnacle Promotions mission was to prevent these types of crazy deals from happening. It was also our passion.
Night and day, I set out to learn everything I could about advertising and marketing, trying to figure out how sponsorship really fit into the picture to help build brands. I must have read hundreds of books on the subject in the first year we were in business. I needed to make sure I understood what our prospective clients, mostly brand managers then, were talking about, especially when they used industry jargon. Clients would often use terms and acronyms we’d never heard before in meetings, and Steven and I would just nod, not knowing what the hell they were talking about. After the meeting, I would run off to the library (no Internet back then) to figure out what they had said and why it was important. Sometimes the acronyms were only internal abbreviations that they failed to explain, and assumed we understood (not sure why they would have assumed that, but they never explained them unless we asked). We were challenged and learning every day.
We had no fear. We were complete novices when we started the company, and we made lots of mistakes in the beginning, both strategically and in program execution. While preparing for our second big event, a beach volleyball tournament for Coors Light, we stupidly printed the posters before getting the signed contract back from the event venue in Ocean City, MD. They had told us we had a deal, and we believed them. The day we showed up to pick up the contract and begin event preparations, we learned that the owner had changed his mind about hosting our event. They didn’t bother to call us and let us know. I’ll never forget the shocked look on Steven’s face as he was interrupted while trying to reason with owner, saying we had already printed the posters as he held one up for emphasis. Lenny Berger, owner of the hotel, just blurted out at Steven, “Get out of my office!” And we did. We left with our tails between our legs wondering what we were going to do to solve this problem.
The event was only a few weeks away and we had already been paid half of our fee by the client. We had dinner planned with him that night to give a progress report on the event. What were we going to do? Definitely not panic. At dinner, we calmly told him that we had lost our venue for the event. “But,” I said. “It’s no problem. We’ll have a new one by the end of day tomorrow.” For reasons I still can’t explain (but really appreciate now, because we would have been out of business that day if he didn’t), he gave us twenty-four hours to fix the problem. Maybe he sensed our passion and unwillingness to fail. Who knows?
We weren’t planning to spend the night in Ocean City. Steven and I didn’t have money for a hotel, so I slept on the beach and Steven slept in his red VW Scirocco with his girlfriend (now wife), Maryam. We didn’t sleep much, and I was jolted awake at dawn by the noise of a truck about to dump a load of garbage on me in the sand crater I thought would be good shelter for the night (it turned out to be an empty garbage pit). I’ll never forget having to jump out of the way before getting tons of garbage dumped on me. Entrepreneurship is not always as glamorous as it seems. We showered at an outdoor pool shower at the Holiday Inn, put on our suits and hit the streets, going up and down the beach trying to find a hotel that would host our volleyball event. As I remember, we were never really worried about finding a new venue, we were just determined to get it done. By the end of the day, we had signed a deal with The Carousel Hotel & Resort. Crisis averted. That would be the first of many near disasters we would face during our early years in business.
We were so driven to succeed at building our company, and so broke when we started, that we even agreed to lease office space with no heat and no air conditioning for our first year. The space was over a dry cleaners’ shop in Old Town Alexandria, VA. We paid $300 a month rent and had to paint the place and get new carpets before we could use it. It was a funny scene, Steven and I working in that office. In the winter, our hands often got too cold for us to type and we would huddle at our desks in coats and scarves, our breath visible as we spoke. In the summer, we would strip down to our underwear, and sweat would drip onto our desks and our work, and our heads would stick to the phone. Yes, making this business work required a high degree of passion to help us the through hardships and missteps. In retrospect, those were some of the most enjoyable and satisfying moments of my professional life, fighting battle-by-battle and surviving to fight another day.
After a roller-coaster start and too many near-bankruptcy moments (nine in the first three years), Pinnacle Promotions survived and eventually succeeded in its mission to raise the strategic bar for its sports and event sponsorship clients, and our efforts were rewarded by loyal and appreciative clients who then offered us other, non-sponsorship related, marketing work. This allowed us to expand our scope of services, and become what is now called an integrated marketing agency. Many of our initial client contacts came from our tennis experiences and from our ability to play tennis with prospective clients as part of the sales pitch process (it seems that many club players were anxious to hit a few balls with some ex-pros, even if we weren’t household names). But eventually, Pinnacle Promotions began to grow for different reasons. Mainly, we got better at creating marketing programs that worked, and new business started coming in because we were good. The company that was created out of passion and belief had grown into a legitimate business that helped big brands solve tricky marketing problems.
My transition from tennis player to expert marketing practitioner was a multi-year journey. Passion was the bridge from tennis to marketing. Six years after creating Pinnacle Promotions, we sold it. Steven moved back to California and continued a successful career in marketing and media. I followed my passion for marketing and was hired by global advertising giant Bates Worldwide (then owned by Saatchi & Saatchi Holdings, one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world in 1993). Off to NYC I went to make my name on Madison Avenue, where I would eventually work in my favorite building in the world, The Chrysler Building.
My first job at Bates was in their newly formed sales promotion company, BSB Dryden & Petisi. Bob Petisi, the guy who found and recruited me to Bates, and Tom Dryden were sales promotion veterans who had sold their small agency to Bates in an effort to provide services to Bates’ large client base. They were ten years older than me. Tom was a copywriter and drove the creative product for the agency. Bob was an expert schmoozer, a quintessential people person who made sure the clients were happy and stayed at the agency. They were a good team and would give me an excellent opportunity to learn and improve my skills.
In September of 1993, I became an account director at BSB Dryden & Petisi, and for four months ran the work for Miller Genuine Draft, RC Cola, Perrier, The New York Racing Association (which comprised the horse tracks Belmont, Aqueduct and Saratoga) and CBS, along with chasing new business. I was enjoying the job immensely, shuttling between our offices in Westport, CT and New York City on Metro North Railroad. I worked closely with Bob and Tom, but also with our counterparts at Bates in NYC with whom I shared a few clients. Miller Genuine Draft was one of Bates largest clients, so I worked closely with the account team on the advertising side, and coordinated our promotional work with their campaigns. Since the CEO of Bates USA, Frank Assumma, had come from the Miller account and had actually approved my hiring, I also had a good relationship with the most senior managers of the company. I felt at that time that I was in the game, a “Mad Man” , and I loved it.
1993 was also the year my daughter, Ariana, was born. If you want to ignite passion in your life, become a parent. Nothing anyone could have told me would have prepared me for being a father. I never imagined how much love I could have for a person or how much fun it could be to just watch a baby grow. The birth of my daughter was far and away the greatest moment of my life. No passion will ever compare to the passion I have for being Ariana’s dad (my daughter is in her twenties now and busy exploring her own passions in life). I enjoyed every aspect of being a father when she was young. Changing diapers. No problem. Waking up early (fortunately, Ariana liked to sleep, so I didn’t lose too many nights sleep). No problem. Birthday parties. Sports practices. You name it. I wanted to experience everything with her. I was happy to do it all and wanted to spend as much time being a dad as I could, especially since my work and travel schedule kept me away often. Even now, as she gets older, and is beginning her own career, I still feel my day is incomplete if I don’t talk to her.
A year after joining BSB Dryden & Petisi, Bob and Tom confided in me that they were having second thoughts about their deal with Bates. They did not think the costs of being part of the global advertising giant were worth the benefits they were getting. In short, they felt they were spending too much money on needless Bates corporate overhead expenses, and that it negatively effected how much they could pay themselves. They were going to leave Bates.
I, on the other hand, loved being at Bates. It wasn’t about the money for me, I loved being around the advertising business. I loved the creativity. I loved the global nature of the company (Bates had 112 offices around the world). At this stage in my career, I saw much more upside being at Bates, and Saatchi & Saatchi Holdings, than BSB Dryden & Petisi. I did not want BSB Dryden & Petisi to separate from Bates because I would likely end up going with them. So, I did what any good entrepreneur would do. I created an opportunity and a win-win-win deal.
I went to Bob and Tom and told them I had a solution to their problem with Bates. I would go to Frank Assumma and Art D’Angelo, the Bates CFO, and suggest that I create a new promotion company in the New York City office serving a few key clients, Miller Genuine Draft, CBS and Perrier. Bob and Tom would be released from their contracts, and take some of the BSB Dryden & Petisi clients that were not also Bates clients and start a new agency on their own. Everyone would win and get what they wanted. I would get to stay at Bates. Bates would get a promotion capability to service its advertising clients. And Bob and Tom were free from the deal they no longer wanted. I pitched the idea to the Bates executives and they agreed. In January of 1994, I would become President of the newly formed Bates Promotion Group. Bob and Tom would go on their merry way. Everyone was happy.
I arrived at The Chrysler Building for my first official day of my new job and walked through the incredible art deco marble lobby toward the elevators. I looked around and marveled at the beauty of the building. I’m not sure I had dreamt of working in this building specifically, but from where I started in an office over a dry cleaner with no heat and air conditioning, this would have been an ambitious dream for sure. Yet here I was. As I approached the unique, wood-veneered and art-deco metal designed elevator doors, I stopped to look at the building directory (not electronic then, but white plastic letters pressed into a black background). It was framed by artfully crafted metal replica of the building’s famous spire. As I scanned the company names, I saw Bates Promotion Group on the seventeenth floor. Under the company name, it said “Robert Mazzucchelli, President”. I was thirty-two, my name was on the directory in the lobby of The Chrysler Building as president of a major division of one of the largest advertising agencies ever created, an agency famous for iconic campaigns for Coca Cola and Miller Lite Beer. I had made it to the big time. Maybe not in tennis, but in advertising.
I was on quite a ride. Following my passions had already brought me through a remarkable journey, from the smallest state in the U.S. to a career as a professional tennis player; from owning my own small marketing company to landing a job as president of a major division of one of the biggest global advertising agencies in the world. All just eight years after graduating from college. What awesome power passion has to transform our lives.
I stayed at Bates for about six years, enjoying every minute of working with some of the smartest and craziest people I had ever met. Mad Men (and women) for sure. I didn’t enjoy the bureaucracy and politics of such a big company, but the people and the work made up for the headaches. While at Bates, I helped start a global marketing agency called 141 Worldwide and traveled the world to open new offices and meet with clients in cities I’d heard about, but never imagined I would visit so frequently. I went to Bogota, Warsaw, Tokyo, Oslo, Hamburg, Paris, London, Lima, Buenos Aires, and dozens of cities. This frequent travel, while hard on my personal life at times, ultimately fueled my lifelong passion for travel, meeting new people from different cultures and trying different cuisines.
By the ripe old age of thirty-eight, following my passions had already yielded two careers, a few trips around the world and enough adventures to last several lifetimes. What would be next?
I took some time off after leaving Bates to pursue another passion, one I shared with my Dad until his death: golf. My golfing experiences with my father are some of the best memories of my life. He was a golfing fanatic who, when diagnosed with cancer in 1991, said to me while considering his treatment options, “I just want to be able to play golf.” He loved golf that much and survived to play countless more rounds for twenty years after beating his cancer.
One of the most memorable rounds of golf I played with my dad was during the summer of 1984. I was teaching tennis at The Beacon Hill Country Club in Atlantic Highlands, NJ, while preparing for my last year of college. I was miserable in New Jersey. I was lonely, hated teaching spoiled little kids and housewives all day and was anxious about getting my tennis game back into shape for my senior year. The coach had recruited several new hotshots, and the competition to make it into the starting singles line-up was getting intense. Anyway, my parents came to New Jersey to cheer me up, and I took my dad out for a round of golf at my club.
When we started our round, it was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining, the fairways looked lush and green, and there was a light breeze making the temperature and the playing conditions perfect. We were both playing well that day, and laughing a lot as usual as we approached the 17th tee. We both hit pretty good tee shots that left us within striking distance of the green, which we both reached on our second shot. As we drove up to the green, it looked like we both had about twenty-five foot putts on either side of the hole.
As we parked the cart, we noticed that the green’s sprinkler was on, showering water along the manicured putting surface. Normally, golf courses have a clearly marked valve near the green, that allows you to turn off the sprinkler while you putt. We couldn’t find it. So one at a time, we waited until the sprinkler passed our ball, and then ran on to the green to make our putts. I went first, and ran onto the green with no time to line up the putt or do the usual pre-putt ritual. I just gave it a quick look, hit the putt and ran of the green watching the ball snake around the hole, and…plop, right into the cup. “Nice putt,” my dad said as he waited for the sprinkler to pass his ball and prepared to run onto the green. He ran up to his ball, looked quickly at the line and knocked it toward the hole. As he ran off the green to avoid the returning sprinkler’s shower, I remember screaming, “It’s going in, it’s going in.” And sure enough, it went in. We both made our massively long putts and avoided getting wet. We had beaten the sprinkler and the golf course, or so we thought. Then, out of nowhere, as we stood laughing hysterically at what had just happened (it’s unlikely that one of us would have made our putts without the sprinkler’s interference, let alone both of us rushing the way we did), the skies opened up and a torrential downpour ensued. There we were, laughing at not having gotten drenched by the sprinkler, now being showered on by the rainstorm. We got soaked to the skin and laughed our heads off as we jumped into the cart and drove back to the clubhouse, leaving our golf balls in the hole.
I had shared many fun golfing moments with my dad, since the day he first took me to the driving range as a five year-old. As I got older and moved from Rhode Island, we played golf whenever I would visit, or we would go on vacations to play. We would talk about golf on the phone, and keep up with who was winning in the major professional tournaments. So, when I left Bates and had the luxury of taking some time off work to consider what I wanted to do next in life, I took the opportunity to indulge my passion for golf. With an eighteen handicap, I was a decent golfer. As a kid, I spent all my time in the summer playing tennis, and golf was just something I would do with my dad for fun. But now that I had time to get serious about it, I wanted to be good. Really good.
When the golf bug bites, it bites hard. Small improvements, or even one great shot, can bring you back to the course day-after-day, hoping for a little more improvement, and another great shot. It’s a vicious cycle. Having a passion for golf is a curse and a blessing, but for many just a curse because getting better gets harder once you’ve reached a certain level. The small adjustments it takes to improve your game after you’ve reached about a ten handicap get more difficult to perfect. The margin for improvement gets smaller, and shaving shots off your score harder. Your mental game often determines how well you will play on a given day. Some days you are great and others you are terrible. Consistency is often elusive. But when it is good, it’s as good as it gets.
While on my sabbatical from work, I played golf every day. My goal was to become a scratch golfer (that’s a golfer who shoots even par and has no handicap). I was obsessed, and would drive from my home in Connecticut, two hours to my golf course in Rhode Island (my dad was also a member there) a few times a week to practice. I would hit practice shots, play eighteen holes with my dad, have lunch, play another eighteen holes alone and drive back to Connecticut. I did this for months, until my handicap came down to eight. I was on the way to scratch, or so I thought. After lowering to eight, my handicap would not budge. It stayed at eight for months. So I practiced and practiced more. Nothing. Eight. And then it finally moved, but the wrong way. Ten. I became a decent ten handicap golfer that year, and stayed at that handicap until I quit playing golf with any seriousness or regularity six years ago.
Golf was a great passion journey for me, but one that ended when my dad died and I decided that I no longer wanted to spend the many hours required to maintain a consistent playing level. It brought me many moments of joy, many more of frustration, was the catalyst for many business deals, and the source of many new friends, acquaintances and business associates. It also brought me to some amazing cities and resorts around the world. And it’s a sport I can still enjoy recreationally for the rest of my life.
After six months of golfing and working in my garden (another passion I developed during that same work sabbatical), I was getting itchy for my next career adventure. While picking tomatoes one morning, I got a call from a head hunter. He said he had a job I should consider. It was at a relatively new, but very large publicly-traded entertainment company that was looking for someone with global marketing experience.
After a few interviews, I took a position as Executive Vice President with SFX Entertainment (now known as Live Nation). While the job offered the opportunity to implement, in a massive way, the sponsorship strategies and activation ideas I had spent years developing at Pinnacle Promotions and Bates, I was not that excited about working for another giant company. As I suspected during the interview process, SFX – which was cobbled together by the acquisition of hundreds of small, local and regional concert promoters, sports agents and entertainment venues – turned out to be a gigantic political nightmare.
Politics often took precedence over all else in absurd ways at SFX. The music industry entrepreneurs, broadway producers and sports promoters, all with giant egos and used to getting their way, who made millions of dollars when their companies were acquired during the SFX roll-up process, would frequently flex those egos in the newly created company. They would actually argue over things like who’s jet we should take to a meeting. It was insane. It made the Mad Men of advertising look not so mad. But after several months of not working, the idea of a healthy paycheck outweighed my apprehension of working in this crazy culture.
Immediately after accepting my position, SFX got gobbled up by radio giant Clear Channel Communications, and the global initiatives I was hired to lead were abandoned in favor of local, city-by-city initiatives that served Clear Channel’s domestic radio market footprint. I sucked it up and dove into the job anyway, but never really accomplished what I had hoped. We did get one big deal done in England with Carling Brewery, which closed after I left the company thanks to a talented guy on my team named Michael Rapino. And I did get to live and work in Brazil while furthering the companies entertainment efforts in South America. So, the job did have some lasting rewards.
But after eighteen months, I was done with SFX and ready for the next passion chapter of my life. In a footnote, four years after I left the company, it imploded (my leaving had no bearing on this). The company split into a few smaller pieces, the largest being Live Nation and iHeart Radio. Most of the sports agencies were sold back to their original owners at deeply discounted prices. Some of the owners who had made millions selling those companies to SFX would make millions more selling them again to new buyers. It was a fitting end to the insanity.
Live Nation has been run since its spinoff in 2005 from SFX by none other than Michael Rapino. He was a smart, ambitious guy, who approached me after a company presentation at The Loews Hotel in Miami Beach entitled “Revolution” — the presentation was my plan for globalizing live entertainment sponsorship activation at SFX, a plan that the Clear Channel CEO, sitting in the back row, scowling, would kill within months of my presentation. Michael liked my ideas and vision and wanted to work on my team. He probably really wanted my job instead, and as it turned out, he became the king of live entertainment. He was passionate about the live music business then, and his passion has clearly worked wonders for the Live Nation and its stockholders. Today, Live Nation dominates the live music industry, and with its merger with Ticketmaster, has boosted its size and clout. No competitor even comes close to their influence in the live music business. Well done, Mike!
(come back next week when my journey takes an unexpected twist into an unfamiliar industry that will consume my passion for seven years…)
Until then, Let Your Passion Create Your World!
Robert (aka The Passionist)
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