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When he's not skydiving with his daughter,
Cicero enjoys running to as a way to unwind |
Name: Vince Cicero
Position: ATP/WTA Western & Southern Open Tournament Dir & COO
Age: 50
Where I’m from: Milwaukee
Where I call home: Mason, Ohio
Focusing on right now: Final details for the arrival of players today and fans this weekend.
Best advice: Focus on doing the job at hand. People are watching their career, looking ahead seeing what other opportunities there could be. But if you do a really good job, those opportunities are going to generate for yourself.
A must for a new hire: Interpersonal skills. It’s such a people business. The interaction from fans to players to partners, all the way though. In all the positions, they need to be extremely attentive to detail.
Exec I admire most: One of my very first bosses, when I was at Marquette at a very young age, the athletic director at that time, BILL CORDS. He entrusted me with a lot of responsibility, allowed me to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them. What I found was that ended up being a good road map for a lot of people that I then worked with, just to entrust them to make decisions, support them, help give some correction along the way and allow them to grow.
Best book I’ve read this year: When I’m trying to get completely out of the sports and entertainment world, I'll go with fiction and grab a JOHN GRISHAM-type book. I’m usually either dialed in work-related or trying to get completely away from it.
First thing in the morning: The alarm goes off at 5:00am every day. I'm old-school in that I grab an actual printed newspaper. I’ll be reading that and my iPad with a cup of coffee and some yogurt and granola. I’ll try to knock out as much as I can in about 45 minutes before heading to the office.
Talking tech: We’ve got a consumer base that is so diverse in use, both demographically and the volume that they’re using, that we have to play in all of that space, and we have to play in it appropriately. So what you do on Snapchat and how you use Twitter are very different from one another. We’ve got to be natural in all of those spaces. What we do when the event’s going on is a lot different than in November or December. We’re trying to capture the visibility the event has without overuse and trying to stay relevant at key times throughout the year, so fans have an interest in engaging us 12 months a year.
Must have music: I will let Pandora carry me through most of the day. So there’s quite a variety within it. I’ve got some particular favorites, whether it’s some old-school rock and listening to BOSTON, or bands such as TRAIN. But I’ve got Pandora so well-trained on my likes and dislikes now that I’ll have that on throughout the morning and as a background throughout a good portion of the workday.
Food for thought: We’ve got great local cuisine, including Graeter's ice cream. If I can get a double chocolate chip ice cream from Graeter’s, I’m going to be pretty happy. Or if I can get some ribs from Montgomery Inn -- another Cincinnati favorite -- I’m going to be pretty good.
How I unwind: There’s nothing better than going on a long run. Being a former cross-country runner, just getting out on a soccer field with music going and running in some nice, warm weather, that’s a great stress relief for me.
Day in the life: Our draw is from 50 states and 30 countries, but there’s some particular focus within the region, and I think we’ve had a heavier emphasis on our digital marketing efforts to draw from the surrounding cities -- from Indy, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, down to Nashville. Within that region, we’ve had a lot of growth. We now have Chicago as our number two market after Cincinnati.
