JOHN LOPES and STARKE TAYLOR are the CEO and president of LST Marketing, respectively. The Indianapolis-based agency on Tuesday began operation under its new name after the acquisition of Andretti Sports Marketing by its principals earlier this month. LST Marketing also added former Entergy Nuclear CEO & President JOHN HERRON to its ownership. Lopes and Starke talked to SBD Global about their new venture, including client acquisition, revenue expectations and the split with racing team Andretti Autosport.
On LST Marketing's core businesses ...
Starke Taylor: Experiential Marketing; Event Management and Event Production; and Sports & Entertainment Consultancy. These verticals necessarily include the businesses of sponsorship, music and sports. We’ve grown beyond our racing roots. We are supporting those business verticals with an expanded creative staff and in-house analytics staff, which are new to LST Marketing’s capabilities. LST will operate both domestically and internationally. In the past, when we were Andretti Sports Marketing, we developed a nice operational business where we provided event production services for international venues in Brazil, Germany and Spain. We will continue this business and we’ve got staff heading to China and Malaysia later this year to manage hospitality events for clients.
On retaining Andretti Sports Marketing's clients ...
John Lopes: The short answer is, yes, we retained all the clients of the purchased company. We had no real issues in transitioning those clients and all of them were very supportive during the process. We suspect this was due in large part to our very talented staff remaining intact. The discussions have been about growth and we are optimistic that we have the ability and the opportunity to grow business with our current clients. As a matter of confidentiality we don’t discuss the business of our clients and our prospects but I can tell you we are about to announce new business in the amateur athletics space, particularly a new program that includes special events for soccer.
On new hirings, clients and revenue expectations ...
Taylor: In terms of staffing, we have hired three new personnel for our experiential team in the past week and we’ve beefed-up our creative team to three very talented staff members. We kept hearing from our clients that they wanted expanded creative offerings and we’ve been fortunate to recruit Greg Smith, who formerly ran Honda’s advertising business for RPA in Santa Monica. Greg is now leading our creative staff and splitting his time between Indianapolis and Santa Monica. He has made an immediate impact in our ability to provide the highest quality service to our existing client base. In terms of revenue, we’ve been fortunate from '12-15 to have run a profitable company. We are focused on growth but more specifically we are focused on diversified growth. We are going to keep our business development efforts focused across multiple industry platforms and we are going to maintain discipline to accept projects distinctly within our business verticals. We need to remain focused and not gravitate to the familiar. Which means we are branching beyond auto racing even though auto racing business is in our DNA and we certainly remain committed to the sport. Our goal is to be a $20 million gross revenue company within 18 months and that’s a realistic objective.
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On LST Marketing's competitve advantage ...
Lopes: Our competitive advantage in the market is our people and their experience. We can handle lots of different project scenarios because someone on our senior staff has likely been there, done that. Our people have tackled experiential for multiple auto manufacturers, packaged sponsorships in NFL, NBA, NASCAR, Global RallyCross, IndyCar. Our folks have worked on brands such as Honda, Cadillac, Corona, ESPN, GoDaddy, Phillips Van-Heusen and many more. We’ve worked with municipalities around the world. What we offer compared to others is the ability to bring experience to most any side of the table. Our staff has worked on and for sports teams, sports sanctioning bodies, entertainment companies, global brands, international venues and even for athletes in sports such as the NFL, NBA, NASCAR, IndyCar, volleyball and others. It’s about people, experience, quality of service and elbow grease.
On the biggest obstacle for the new agency ...
Taylor: Time is at a premium. There doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day right now. It’s an exciting time. That’s our biggest obstacle … time to focus on important revenue generating projects. I might add all the while balancing family life for most of us has been both a challenge and a focus.
On the rift with Andretti Autosport ...
Lopes: We are not at liberty to discuss the split. What we can say is that we’ve got many friends at Andretti Autosport and we remain big fans of the team. We also represent some of their sponsors so we are vested in their future success. Thus far LST Marketing has been growing, even in its early days, so it’s all good on our end.
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